Fr. Stephen De Young: We’ll go ahead and pick up in the book of Revelation, chapter three, verse one. “And to the angel of the church in Sardis, write: These things says he who has the seven spirits of God and the seven stars: I know your works, that you have a name, that you are alive, but you are dead.” At the beginning there, as we’ve seen, there was a description in chapter one, where St. John encountered the risen Christ in glory. There were these various descriptors of him, and we’ve seen how pieces of those descriptors get picked up at the beginning of each of these letters by way of his identification. In this case that’s the “he who has seven spirits of God and the seven stars.”

Then he begins this one even more negatively than the other ones that we heard before. Several of the ones we heard last time sort of started with, “Well, here’s all the good things, but—” or “Yet—” And then there would be: “Then there’s this other bad thing.” This one just starts out, right off the bat, “I know your works. You have a name that you are alive.” There’s: the church in Sardis. “But you’re dead.” Obviously, he doesn’t mean all of the individuals there are dead. He’s talking about, again, the organism of the community. There’s no life in the community.

Verse two: “Be watchful, and strengthen the things that remain, that are ready to die, for I have not found your works perfect before God.” [Laughter] He says that they’re dead. He says, “Now, be watchful.” Sort of: Wake up. “Strengthen the things that remain that are ready to die.” So apparently there are a few things there, there are a few elements of their life as a community that are not completely dead yet. There’s a Monty Python reference I want to make, but I’ll skip it. [Laughter] They’re almost dead. They’re dying. They’re about dead. So Christ is saying, “Those few things that still have life in them, you need to take hold of those and strengthen them, and try to resuscitate them, and maybe through them you can resuscitate the whole community.”

“Remember, therefore, how you have received and heard. Hold fast and repent. Therefore, if you will not watch, I will come upon you as a thief, and you will not know what hour I will come upon you.” “Received and heard”: that’s back when they were established. He’s saying, “It isn’t that you don’t know any better. You do know better. And so you need to go back to what you know, and you need to repent.” This isn’t a separate command. Remember, as we’ve said a lot of times, repentance is not just feeling guilty and feeling bad or saying, “I’m sorry,” or doing something to get off the hook for what you’ve done; it’s actually trying to repair what’s broken, trying to heal what’s wounded. Saying to them, “Repent,” and saying to them, “Strengthen the things that are still alive”: this is the same thing. This is what repentance means. It’s not just: You better apologize or I’m going to come… [Laughter] It’s: You need to do this. You need to turn back to those things. You need to strengthen them. You need to re-establish yourselves the way you were in the beginning.

Otherwise—and this is imagery that Christ uses several times in the gospels when he’s talking about his coming—he says he’s going to come like a thief in the night, meaning—and he explicitly says, I believe it’s in St. Matthew’s gospel—if the owner of the house knew when the thief was coming, the thief wouldn’t get very far, because the owner would be prepared and would stop the thief. But the point is, the thief shows up when everyone’s asleep, when nobody’s watching, and then does whatever he wants. This is— We talked before about that language of “visiting,” how for us it’s like: “Oh! The bishop’s going to come visit. That’s good.” Thankfully, it’s good when the bishop comes to visit us here. But this is more like “Wait till your dad gets home” kind of visit. He’s coming, and he’s going to sort some things out. Christ is not only saying, “I’m going to come and sort some things out, but if you don’t get on top of this, if you don’t begin to repent, if you don’t begin to watch and to change, then I’m going to show up to sort some things out, and you’re not going to see me coming, and you’re going to get caught and that’s not going to be good for you.”

Verse four: “You have a few names even in Sardis who have not defiled their garments, and they shall walk with me in white, for they are worthy.” Again, this is what I mean when I say make this distinction between talking to the church as a community, as this communal organism, and talking to the collection of individuals. Because he says right here, there are certain people who are going to those Eucharistic gatherings, who are part of that community, who are not dead, who are followers of Christ. And so Christ is making this statement. When he shows up to sort things out, it’s not like bad things are going to happen to them through guilt by association. [Laughter] But it’s going to be about those who are not watchful. The church is this communal organism, and then there are the people who make it up. Yes, sir.

Q1: When you first said “dead,” I was picturing a church where— When we say a church is dead, nothing’s happening there, or if anyone’s there, nothing is going on. This sounds more like they are actively doing stuff that is…

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Yeah, so you’re right. Part of that is because we’re sort of modern capitalists. We judge whether a church is thriving by “Oh, they have a budget, and giving is high, and there’s lots of people in the seats on a Sunday morning.” [Laughter] And that’s a live, vibrant, successful church. And then another church that has fewer people and less money and everything, that’s a dying church, because we have a mixed-up standard. Of course, in the first century AD, none of these churches had a budget at all! [Laughter] And none of them had— And it wasn’t about trying to pack in all the people you could, trying to line up—“Oh, we had 73 baptisms this week,” trying to recruit everybody in that sense. In fact, it was difficult to enter one of these Christian communities, because a lot of them were under persecution, so you didn’t just accept anybody who walked in off the street. That’s where it comes from that we have sponsors when someone joins the Church. You had to have someone who was already a Christian at that time who could vouch for you, like: “Yeah, this isn’t a Roman spy. This isn’t somebody who’s coming in to do X, Y, Z.”

Q1: [Inaudible]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and we still have sponsors now, but now it’s a little more ceremonial than it was then, but then it was actually a person vouching for you. So, yeah, they weren’t trying to do that. This is about spiritual life and spiritual death. St. John of Damascus said that physical death is when the soul is separated from the body; the life of the body leaves the body. And spiritual death is when the soul is separated from God, meaning when our life is separated from the Source of life. We tend to think of: Well, physical death, that’s what death really is, and spiritual death, that’s sort of an analogy; that’s kind of a woo-woo spiritual analogy. But from the perspective of St. John, it’s the exact opposite: real life is being connected to God in Christ—he’s the Source of life—and biological life is sort of an image of that. So real death is being cut off from God, and physical death, for St. John is not only the image of that but is the result of that. Adam and Eve, when they’re expelled from paradise, are spiritually dead in that they’re cut off from the tree of life; they’re cut off from the Source of life—and then because of that, they physically die.

Q1: So you can be physically alive but spiritually dead.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, and so that— This may have been from the perspective of population, membership rolls or whatever, a thriving, physically alive, Christian community or church, but spiritually it’s dead. And that would be like most of Israel’s history, for example. Regardless of whether they were prospering economically and politically and in terms of expanding their territory in war, they were spiritually dead most of the time; they were cut off from God. Eventually, if we’re cut off from the Source of life long enough, even that physical stuff all collapses and falls apart, which is what will happen to the church at Sardis if they don’t now repent and turn back.

Verse five: “He who overcomes shall be clothed in white garments, and I will not blot out his name from the book of life, but I will confess his name before my Father and before his angels. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” So verse six there, we’ve seen; that’s at the end of every single letter. And verse five before that follows the format we’ve seen at the end of each letter, talking about the reward that will come to “he who overcomes, he who conquers, he who is victorious over this,” including those people who will be dressed in white. He makes that explicit. Those people who are living here in this spiritually dead community but who are still following Christ, they’ll be clothed with white garments, he says, and all those who overcome will be clothed with white garments.

Their name will not be blotted out from the book of life. So there’s this— In this letter, there’s these repeated references to “a name.” He says, “You have a name, but you’re dead.” What does that mean? That’s talking about the name in the book of life, and we’ll get to what the book of life is in a second. So there’s a name in the book of life for that church, but the church is dead, meaning it’s getting close to getting blotted out.

And then he says in verse four, “You have a few names, even in Sardis,” referring to people. Their names are still there in the book of life, and they’re still alive.

Q1: Is this the same name, like the name on the white stones?

Fr. Stephen: No, this is specifically a reference to the book of life. I’ll develop that now, actually. The book of life is— There are literally scattered references to it all through the Bible, because the first one’s in the Torah, and the last ones are here in Revelation, so it’s literally scattered all the way through. This is an instance of a very widespread Ancient Near Eastern tradition that pretty much everyone has. We’re not sure the Sumerians had it, although there’s some stuff that kind of looks like it, but there’s lots of tablets that haven’t been translated. If you want to go get into Greek and Sumerian theology, you can sit around and translate mostly grocery lists for the rest of your life and make a moderate lower middle class living. That’s just one avenue open to you. [Laughter] Yeah, not a lot of people want to do it; that’s why there’s so many openings.

But the Babylonians have it. There’s sort of a version of it—there’s an Indo-European version of it that the Greeks kind of have. The Egyptians have it. The Assyrians had it, etc., etc. The Assyrians, the Hittites. It usually takes the form of heavenly books or heavenly tablets, usually tablets if you go earlier. Whatever the writing method is at the time, they have those in some heavenly place, and there’s some kind of divine being or angels or some kind of beings. When you get to the Indo-European version it’s usually Fates. There are these divine beings called Fates who are in charge of this kind of thing. On which all the work, everything a person does is sort of recorded; everything that happens on earth is sort of recorded.

This is imagery to indicate that, depending on what culture we’re talking about, the divine is aware of everything that’s going on, and that people do. Yes, Santa would be the latest image of this! [Laughter]

Q2: Almost a computer, right?

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, now it would be a heavenly database, I guess, if we were to do it today. [Laughter] So all this information is taken down. And in particular— We’ve talked before about the idea of a person’s memory. When we’re talking about someone dies, in the Ancient Near East they go to Sheol, or Hades if you’re Greek. And that person sort of still exists, at least in some sort of shadowy form, as long as they’re remembered. Then they still have— Then as the memory fades, they sort of fade off. This is where us singing “Memory Eternal” comes from, this same idea, because the idea is if God remembers you, then that’s eternal.

So the idea is if who you are and your work— You notice how at the beginning of each of these letters, or somewhere early on in every one of them pretty much, Christ says, “I know your works.” He’s got the book. “I know your works. I know what you’re doing.” So if someone’s name is blotted out of there, that means they’re forgotten. For example, in Psalm 88 (or 87) that we read at matins, “Like the slain that lie in the grave, whom thou rememberest no more; they are cut off from thy hand,” talking to God. That’s the imagery of that, of like: you’re gone if you’re blotted out. But if you’re not blotted out, if God knows your name, like these names were clothed in white, the names of the churches, then that’s an image of eternal life, as God knows you eternally and you know God eternally. So that’s where this book of life and the name symbolism is coming from, and where the idea of the name being blotted out is sort of forgotten, and so you die and you’re gone.

That’s how that serves as a warning at the beginning of this letter. “You still have a name, but you’re dead. Unless you sort of revivify, unless you resuscitate, that name’s going to get wiped away.”

And then you notice, having your name recorded there, your name not being blotted out, then, is sort of paralleled with Christ’s confessing that person’s name before the Father and before his angels. This is imagery— This occurs in St. Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews, and we talked about it there, this imagery of when someone dies. The opposite of being forgotten is that you’re sort of welcomed into God’s presence. This is the imagery of God enthroned, with his angels and the saints, and Christ is coming and sort of introducing you, sort of vouching for you, that sponsors. “This is this person,” and you’re now welcomed into this group.

Interestingly, that letter to Sardis is one of the most negative, but also in terms of describing the hope of the people who remain faithful there is one of the most positive in terms of the promises.

Verse seven: “To the angel of the church in Philadelphia, write”—this is not Pennsylvania, just for the record—“These things says he who is holy, he who is true, he who has the key of David, he who opens and no one shuts, and shuts and no one opens.” So that’s Isaiah 22:22, for people keeping track. I’m always picking on our Protestant friends, especially our Calvinist friends, so I have to be equal opportunity, and point out to every Roman Catholic apologist who has said that St. Peter has the keys of the house of David which allow him to open and no one can close and close and no one can open, that Christ says that he has them, here in the book of Revelation. St. Peter’s dead at this point; he’s been martyred. So, sorry, Roman Catholics. [Laughter]

Q2: He only had them temporarily.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah! I guess. Maybe he had them for a minute, but he didn’t pass them on to his successors, I guess, because Christ has them here.

Q3: Tell my Catholic friends.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and let them know! I haven’t gotten to do a “Sorry, Roman Catholics” in a long time, so I had to get one in. Like I said, equal opportunity.

Q1: [Inaudible]

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Yeah! And in Isaiah, it’s talking about the steward of the house of David, which— I mean, I’ll hand it to our Roman Catholic friends, that is a clever thing, being like: “Oh, see. Christ is the son of David. He’s the king, and St. Peter’s the steward!” It falls apart here.

This is the same key language that Christ is referring to when he talks about giving the keys to St. Peter and when he talks about giving the keys to all of the apostles and when he talks about giving the keys in Matthew 18 to the whole Church, because the Church is Christ’s body. The apostles and bishops of the Church are the icon of Christ, but they don’t receive powers from Christ that Christ divests himself of that they can then wield unilaterally. The fact that this is used in this way by St. John here is sort of key to realizing that this power always remains with Christ. It’s not handed on to anyone else. And when the Church as a whole utilizes the forgiveness or binding of sins—which binding of sins is really sort of excommunication, that’s used to bring about repentance when it doesn’t exist, and forgiveness that extended when repentance does exist—when the Church does this, they’re doing it as the body of Christ. The Church acts as the body of Christ. Old heads can go back to where I covered Matthew 18 in these Bible studies, maybe seven or eight years ago, and hear me talking about that in that context more. But it’s important that it’s here.

Just to take an extra cheap shot at Rudolf Bultmann, who’s a 20th-century German… So there was and probably still is somewhere—in fact, I think I’ve seen… I won’t mention this any more. Anyway. [Laughter] There was a school of thought that tried to divide early Christianity into sort of these apostolic schools. This has mostly fallen out of favor now. There’s sort of a lite, l-i-t-e, version of it now, where you talk about sort of Pauline theology and Johannine theology as being subtly different or coming from different perspectives, but it used to be full-on, like there was this Johannine community that followed St. John, and there was this Petrine community that followed St. Peter, and there was this Pauline community that followed St. Paul, like these were separate Christianities that believed different things and had different practices. I mean, any number of things have destroyed that now from anybody realistically being able to hold it.

But this was one of those things that was used when they would try to pit sort of Johannine—Bultmann did this especially—Christianity against Petrine Christianity. And Johannine Christianity was never identified with any actual real-world group, conveniently, but Petrine Christianity was always somehow connected to Roman Catholicism in the first century. That’s another reason why it’s fallen apart; it’s sort of totally ahistorical. [Laughter] And this is one of the verses they used to do that. They said, “Ah! See? The Petrine Christianity believed he gave the keys to St. Peter, and the Johannine Christianity said that he kept them and didn’t give them to St. Peter. So, see, they’re butting heads.” That’s kind of ridiculous over-reading. [Laughter]

And over-reading and over-interpretation is a real problem. It’s not just a problem in the Bible. It’s a problem in pretty much all early Christian texts, because what people will do—and they do this with the Bible and they do this with those texts—is they’ll take some statement, somewhere, and, regardless of the context of the statement—doesn’t matter if the statement is a piece of theological poetry, it doesn’t matter if the statement is part of a historical narrative, it doesn’t matter if it’s in an epistle: it doesn’t matter what the context is—they’ll take that statement and treat it as if it is a philosophical definition. So they’ll take: “Oh, see, here Jesus talks about his Father and his Father’s angels, so St. John didn’t believe that Jesus was fully God.” And you go: “Wha— What?” [Laughter] And so they’re like: “Well, he didn’t say our angels.”

This is the kind of stuff you find in Bible commentaries, like, legit. People ask me all the time, “What Bible commentary should I read?” I’m like: Eeuuugh! This is what you get. Or they’ll take an early Church document that— What was the one I saw recently? Oh, Shepherd of Hermas, there’s a reference to Hermas seeing “the angel of the Holy Spirit.” And then, throwing even Greek grammar aside, they’re saying, “Oh! He’s saying the Holy Spirit is an angel, so he’s, like, an Arian.” It’s like: No, no, he didn’t. The Holy Spirit doesn’t have a form, so if he’s going to see the Holy Spirit, what’s he going to see? An angel representing the Holy Spirit.

So people take statements in isolation and then try to derive theology from them. They’ll take bits and pieces of… First of all, they’re going to say Revelation is written by somebody different [from] St. John’s gospel and epistles, just on principle for no good reason. And then they’ll go through Revelation and pick out—“Let’s find all the statements we can find about Jesus and then treat them like they’re definitional statements and say: Okay, this is the Christology of the book of Revelation.” And then they’ll do the same thing to the first seven of St. Paul’s epistles, because those are the only ones that they’ll acknowledge that St. Paul wrote. And they’ll say, “Oh, well, this is St. Paul’s Christology. Now, see, they’re different.” Do you see the problem with that?

Q1: So you focus on the theories?

Fr. Stephen: Right. So someone could take my book, The Religion of the Apostles, and say, “I’m going to go through here and find all the places where Fr. Stephen mentions the Holy Spirit, and then I’m going to do the same thing. I’m going to treat those as definitional. I’m going to construct: This is Fr. Stephen’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit.” And then probably accuse me of all kinds of heresies, because they’ve taken these partial statements in different contexts… That’s not how any of this works.

Things that people write reflect what they believe, but they aren’t definitional of what they believe. So when we’re comparing two texts of Scripture by two different authors, or we’re comparing two different Church Fathers and their writings—say they’re writing on the same topic, say they’re talking about the same person in the Bible—our very quick reaction is: “Well, he says this and he says this. And they’re both claiming this is what the verse means. How do we reconcile?” But again, it reflects what they believe about it. So for example, you could say: If someone believed in the doctrine of the Trinity the way it was set up by the Council of Nicaea, could they make this statement? Could someone who believed in the doctrine of the Trinity have Christ talking about his Father and his angels? Well, yeah.

Most of the things that are presented to us as contradictory by scholars—within the Scriptures, within the Fathers, between the Scriptures and the Fathers—are not actually contradictory. They’re different statements in different context from people who believed mostly the same thing. Now occasionally you’ll find a statement, like you could read something written by Arius, and say, “Could someone who believed in the doctrine of the Trinity say this?” and you’re going to say the answer is no. So, okay, well, this is clearly, then, different. [Laughter]

Q2: Some of them might be written by someone who didn’t believe in the doctrine of the Trinity…

Fr. Stephen: Well, yeah! [Laughter] But so the idea is you can’t sort of construct— You can’t work from: “Here’s what this person said in a few different contexts” to “This is the totality of what this person believed.” There’s not a way to bridge that. There’s not a way to bridge that, and so if we have a statement from St. Paul that seems to say one thing and one from St. John that seems to say another thing, it’s helpful to say, “Well, let’s imagine for the sake of argument that they believed the same thing. Could someone make both statements consistently?” And a lot of times the answer’s yes, the same person could make both statements without contradicting themselves, because it’s two different contexts; it’s two different positions.

I think in this Bible study this is the first time I’ve laid that out. I’ve made the comment, I know, several times, that if you understand the Fathers correctly they never contradict themselves, but this is what I’m talking about. This is what I’m talking about.

Rather than trying to find contradictions and problems when we read the Scriptures, and trying to extract beliefs based on statements and context, we need to look at the statements as proceeding from a person who has a whole bunch of beliefs. St. Paul believed a whole bunch of things that he never wrote about in the epistles that we have.

Q1: Is that an assumption, or do we know?

Fr. Stephen: Well, there’s a lot of topics he didn’t talk about!

Q1: Okay.

Fr. Stephen: You know what I mean? I mean, we don’t know exactly what he believed on certain issues.

Q1: Right.

Fr. Stephen: Like, did St. Paul think that 1 Maccabees was authoritative? We don’t know! He probably believed it was or it wasn’t! I’m sure he knew it existed, so he had a belief on it, but he never tells us.

Q3: It sounds like a symptom of our times, though? People take such extreme— It seems like you’re saying that contradictions— It seems like they just take a thing and because it’s slightly different, to pit them against each other.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. We tend to try to pit things against each other rather than reconcile them. We break down instead of synthesizing, and that’s partially our 18th-century and 19th-century German friends, of critical, pull-it-apart, look for the contradictions. That’s Hegel all over is look for the contradictions. And do those things. But the idea of reconstruction, the idea of treating a text, like the biblical text or an ancient patristic text or any ancient text, as a piece of historical evidence or archaeological even evidence from which we try to reconstruct the author and the world. And in most cases that’s not possible. In most cases what you get is a ton of guesswork. And when you read studies of the Ancient Near East, it’s amazing the level of guesswork. It’s amazing. You’ll even have periods where there’s completely scholarly agreement for something on which there’s almost no evidence; it’s just a reconstruction. And then at the end of that period, someone will come along and say, “Hey, you know what? This is not built on anything. Here’s a better explanation!” And then everybody’ll sign onto that even though there’s— He’s using the same evidence as the other guys! It’s just for whatever reason the new reconstruction is more appealing—maybe it’s more feminist or it’s more, you know, politically on one side or the other. [Laughter] More conservative, more whatever.

Q1: When I was teaching ancient history, I got frustrated ultimately because I had read these authoritative scholars who said that this is what happened, and I’m not reading cuneiform: “Okay, this is what happened. I’ll teach it.” And then, ten years later, that’s not what happened at all! [Laughter] So I gradually withdrew from teaching ancient history, and tried to get out of the way.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, and whatever the politics going on at the time and fads…

Q2: Not that laziness is a defense, but really, I mean, there’s only so much you can manage to learn, and you take the authority’s word.

Fr. Stephen: When we’re talking about the scientific approach, it’s all based in the myth of objectivity. It’s all based in the myth that I can achieve the view from nowhere. I can look at things from no in-particular perspective, or from all the perspectives at once—and that’s not possible for any human.

Q2: See, I was just going to ask… [Inaudible] … Not quantum computers either. [Inaudible] ...just a few hours, not too long, but that’s— Is that God’s…? You know, this is not a biblical…

Fr. Stephen: I mean, you could even say God’s seeing it from God’s perspective, because he’s personal, but we can’t fathom what that would be, but we as humans are always looking at things from a perspective, of our own time and place, our own beliefs, our own values. That’s going to affect what we look at and what we see when we look at anything—the past, the present, everything—even science, I hate to tell scientists. Science is one place where the myth of objectivity is still around. But what gets studied, how much it gets studied, what experiments get repeated and which ones don’t, what gets investigated and what doesn’t get investigated, how results are interpreted and applied, how policy is made from those results—those are all completely subjective.

Q3: When we are specifically searching for modern cultural frameworks in the ancient past, like you’re already… That’s not the word. You don’t really need to kind of cast your own culture into the culture that you’re trying to study, as opposed to…

Fr. Stephen: Right, and that doesn’t mean we’re sort of doomed to post-modern subjectivity; it’s just you have to be aware. If you’re pretending you’re being objective, that means you’re not aware of all your biases and presuppositions.

Q2: But if you’re aware of your tendency to be subjective, I would say a history professor would just drill into us… I don’t know the answer, but it was like: “Complete objectivity is impossible—strive for it.” [Laughter]

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so you have to say, “I’m looking at this from my perspective now, and that’s how I am coming at it.” And the more aware we become of those things, the less bound by them that we are.

Q1: You reminded me, when you were talking about the contradictions, of Anselm’s Sic et Non, which is back into the twelfth century. I haven’t read it but—

Fr. Stephen: Are you think of Abelard?

Q1: Oh, yes, Abelard, that’s what I was trying to say. But as I understand from what I’ve read about it, he’s finding all the contradictions he can and putting those next to each other.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. Sic et Non is literally “Yes and No.” [Laughter]

Q1: Yeah.

Q2: And that’s what I was telling you earlier, that it’s so quantum. Yes and no, but… Anyway.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. All that is to say if we’re going to take seriously the idea that we’re dealing with the Scriptures in canon, which is something we’re free to do, because we’re Orthodox Christians—most of us here; don’t want to leave anybody out. In the Protestant world, if you’re going to adhere to sola scriptura, there’s other things in terms of the earliest texts, the most reliable texts, what version of the text. But for us as Orthodox Christians, the canonical version of the text is the text. The text as received by the Church is the text. So, for example, the Church received four gospels. They received four gospels at once. There is no period of time in the history of the Church where there’s one church using one of the four gospels and another one using a different one, and they all get together and it’s like peanut butter and chocolate in a Reece’s commercial, and they just throw it all together. It’s: they have all four. And you’ve probably noticed there’s differences in details between them. And the Church received all four of them any way, and especially early on did not seem to have a problem with that.

With the Orthodox view of Scripture, we’re dealing with Scripture in canon. The four gospels, with differences in the details, is how we’ve received Scripture. But that means the mind of the Church, the phronema of the Church, received those four as they are. So the phronema of the Church, that mind, was able to make and affirm all of the statements in all four of them. We can say that, yes, St. Paul has one mind and St. John has another mind, and you can use that to pit them against each other, but you also have the fact that the Church included all of these in the New Testament. So there is a mind, which we believe is essentially the Holy Spirit, who is able to affirm all of these things at once without contradiction.

And so when we read this here—man, I took a long way round to get to this!—we shouldn’t be trying to contrast it with the other places that the keys are mentioned. We should approach it with: How can someone affirm all of those statements and this one, too?

Q2: [Inaudible]

Fr. Stephen: And this one, too. How does this all fit together into one holistic—? What is the underlying idea that could express itself in this way, in these different ways and these different contexts?