Fr. Lucas masterfully restores the ontological depth of Patristic soteriology, exposing the historical fragility of reading modern penal substitution back into the early Church. This analysis successfully shifts the focus from a legal transaction to the transformative victory of life over death.
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Did The Early Church Teach PSA? | Tony Costa, Erick Ybarra Refuted | Q&AAdded:
Hello and welcome to Cleave to Antiquity. My name is Ben and today I'm joined by a very special guest, Father Joseph. Welcome to the show.
>> Thanks for having me.
>> Absolutely. So, we've got an exciting topic today. This is something that continues to come back into popular discourse time and time again, especially now uh that we have figures like David Wood that are trying to learn about orthodoxy. Granted, he's trying to learn so that he could try to debunk our claims. But this subject comes back time and time again. This subject of penal substitutionary atonement. Uh this is sometimes a subject of confusion for people looking from the outside and also from people on the inside. So uh any I guess open thoughts there? I know I want to look at a uh a clip of Tony Ka's claims on this subject, but I know you've done quite a lot of work in this area, so I'm excited to have you on and hear what you have to say about it.
Yeah. No, there's lots of different ways to approach it. Um, my doctoral thesis was actually on St. Sirill's approach to the St. Serial Alexandria. So, that's that's something I spent a lot of time working on, but I've I've looked at a lot of the other church fathers as well and on comparison and contrast with the Latin writers, things like that. So, so yeah, I can go into it whatever way you want to approach it, we can try to delve into it. I think uh an an interesting way would be to just play this little brief clip from Tony K's exper uh um appearance on David Wood's show. So this was the live stream before maybe this was two live streams ago but he brought Tony K on who does uh anti-Orthodox pmics and somebody sent in a question about the solas and penal substitutionary atonement. Tony Costa makes a couple of claims about that. So, I think addressing some of these claims may be a good way just to start this kickstart this conversation. So, let me go ahead and I'll play this clip and we can get into it.
>> For penal substitutionary atonement, you don't need to an expert, but no opinion makes you look unqualified with respect.
Yeah. I mean, even Yeah. So, uh if you don't know what the background here is, um Andrew, I was on another live stream and >> we have uh Father Timothy in the chat.
Good to see you, Father. thanks for joining us.
>> Uh Andrew called over and he's like, "Do you affirm the five soulless?" And I go, "No." And the reason there is I mean I I don't I don't deny them. Um I would regard that as like default default positions, but if you wanted to show me if you wanted to show me that I'm supposed to follow some tradition and you can make a a case from that and that would have to look like >> Somebody in the chat is saying your your mic was low, father. You might want to see if you can adjust it up maybe.
you know, a case from the Bible that I'm supposed to follow the tradition of, you know, uh, some future I'd be I'd be open to it. So, that's what I mean. I I I don't want to I don't want to and I haven't I haven't I haven't looked into your guys cases for these kinds of things. So, I don't know why it's bad that I don't that I say if you guys have a case, I'm open to it. Um >> yeah and PSA David of course stands for penal substitution penal substitutionary atonement. Um this is interesting because you know in the middle of the 20th century a lot of these liberal Protestant scholars attacking it. These orthops would be in line with these liberal Protestant guys uh who were basically attacking it and calling it cosmic child abuse and so on. But here's the irony. Um, Augustine taught it and so did John Chrysstm and Gregory of Nanzanis, two fathers of the East that are highly regarded in the Eastern Orthodox Church. They taught penal substitutionary atonement. And and this is where I find it ironic. They attack this doctrine that their own fathers believed in and taught. And so when when when the Protestants spoke about how Christ bore the wrath of God and and that he received the wrath of God on our behalf, they say, "You guys, you're following pagan ideas. This is what the pagans believed in." No, that's not only biblical. Your your own church fathers affirmed it. And that's where the Protestants got it from. The reformers got it from Chrysm and Gregory of Nanzenis. And so I think a lot of these Orthob bros I think what happens David is they join this movement and it's like they start thumping the chest. Yeah, we're part of the >> I'm going to keep playing this but I'm reading the chat here and people are lamenting the state of the chat in David Wood's live stream. I'll say this if you um it's it's good that he had Father Peter on. So I would I would recommend everybody in the chat say a prayer for David that his heart is softened so he can accept the truth of orthodoxy. I think that's the best use that's the best use of our faculties in this particular situation is to pray for David. Uh say the the acitus to the theotoko softener of evil hearts uh whatever prayers you know that would help him in his uh his journey because sometimes uh as you guys know uh sometimes the most ardent attackers of orthodoxy end up becoming the most ardent defenders of orthodoxy. So prayer is effective.
>> True church. It's almost like cheerleaders. And and then I talk to Eastern Orthodox folks and they're like, "Well, I want to go to church at Christmas, uh, Easter, you know, celebrating the assumption of Mary and so on." Many of them don't even keep the fast. They're supposed to fast before.
>> Okay. So, I think he said what he was going to say about PSA there. So, he makes a couple of claims.
>> He says, "Penal substitutionary atonement is taught in the early church." What do you think about that claim, father?
>> Uh, well, first, how's my mic? I turned up the volume on the Does it sound a lot better or >> chat? Let me know. How is the How's the mic sound?
Somebody let me know in the chat.
>> Good.
>> Sounds okay to me, but so did Father Stephen D. Young's mic to me yesterday, and they said it was bad. So, >> let me know. Does father's mic sound good? Let me know, chat. They say good.
Okay.
>> Okay, good. Um, well, he's probably uh the only book that really addresses this is this one right here. Uh, Pierce for our transgressions.
Uh, Jeffrey Ovoy and Sack with a John Piper coming in for a little forward at the beginning there, which to the second half of that book tried to give a historical basis for for um for PSA and the quotes that everyone goes to the quote mine so to speak is in that book, right? It sounds like he was referencing that. Um, and yes, those first of all, those are kind of one-offs uh there.
They're certainly not the structure of PSA. If we want to break down the PDSCA, what each of those elements means, how it's understood, particularly in reformed tradition, which is kind of the the the fullest and, you know, most elaborate version of this of this idea.
uh you're not going to find that in the early fathers and you're going to find a lot of things that they say that directly contradict PSA. That's that's one thing. So, and that's just not how scholarship works. You know, scholarship doesn't work where you go into a text of the father, particularly an English translation of it, yank something out of its context and say, "Here's here it is.
Here's your gotcha moment where you got this quote uh that seems to say what you want because it has similar language to something that's said elsewhere." That's just not good scholarship. And this book is actually not that portion of that book and the people that refer to those particular quotes repeatedly. Um it's just not good scholarship and it's not it's not taking each of the church fathers at face value. What do they what do they say about salvation? How do they generally describe it? In what context do they use this particular language? So that's that's a that's a important note right up front that he's just laying fast and loose with uh without giving any direct quotes himself, but he's probably referring to those couple that are in the book that I see trotted out all the time and you know and referenced. Mhm. It's interesting to see because I've I've had a number of conversations with inquirers, catechumans, or people maybe who are I mean just starting to maybe just beginning their inquiry process and they reach out to ask questions or something and they're just like, "Hey, how did this go for you? How did your wife take this ABC123?" But sometimes I notice when I have conversations with people, the penal substitutionary atonement framework makes it very difficult for them to understand concepts that are easily understood with an actual orthodox framework. And uh what what do you think about this? What are some of the downward effects, some of the the downstream effects of accepting penal substitutionary atonement? Because when I when I look at them, they seem plentiful. this kind of black and white dialectic of salvation, >> right? Well, you know, my first introduction to it uh was in high school. I don't know if they still do, but in high school back in the 80s, they they always read uh Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God by Jonathan Edwards.
>> And we had to examine that as you know, a sort of standard approach in Puritan theology, sort of the Calvinistic approach. Um and and pretty much I remember my entire high school class was was horrified by thinking of an image of God like that. So I I think it it certainly if this is your image of God of a God who who's uh that the demands of justice are in some way above God or God is beholden to the to the standard of justice or you make it so much a part of his nature that it is greater than um an attribute for example mercy or love or something like that. it it doesn't make God someone that's appealing, right? Um it also creates uh trinitarian problems in the tridology.
Every one of the attributes have to be common to all three. You can't have a wrathful father unless you have a wrathful son, right? Uh unless you unless you're orthodox and you and you actually describe the wrath as an energy, which we would we would describe wrath as one of the energies or activities of God. It is his action of judgment upon sin or that which is the opposite of his holiness. Right?
>> So, so for us yes all three of them all three persons uh you know uh because the energies are of the nature right of the essence uh they come they are what proceed out or from the essence or or what is around the essence then uh then we can say that God's wrath is shared by all three because it's not some kind of an attribute that is over God. it's or God is beholden to. Now if you place the essence above the persons then maybe you could say you know you could u you know approach this a different way like they do sometimes in the west but but how you can have a wrathful father and a son who's not wrathful but but enduring the wrath in his person which is the same divine person right we uh are you know that third and fourth council make clear that it is the same son of god who is one with the father who is the lord Jesus Christ. Mhm.
>> And so, so, uh, just looking at it at a quick glance now, you're you're you're implying that the father can be in opposition to or forsake the son who, uh, is united with him like uh, in, you know, in perfect unity essentially.
>> And uh, so it creates lots of problems.
I think that that people question uh, the trinity. What is the trinity? If this if this is the trinity, I have a problem with that. or if the father uh is is beholden to this this justice and has to has to put his wrath somewhere, it seems like there's something greater than God. If God has to do something, if he's impelled to do something, like he has to direct this this wrath somewhere and somebody's got to take it, that implies that this this demand is greater than God himself, >> right? Um, so there's lots of issues there I think that would paint the picture of of a of a kind of foreign deity than what we we in the Orthodox church um familiar with.
>> Yeah, that's an interesting concept.
I've heard that articulated very similarly a number of times uh like to the pagan gods or like a slave to fate like fate is like the ultimate um uh thing that they're subject to. Now you mentioned this text centers in the hands of an angry god. I I quote this part quite often, but I think it's striking because I know we have some new viewers in the chat today. Um, it's really striking if you've never read this text to really understand what say like a reformed Protestant uh or you know the Puritans or somebody in the more Calvinist camp uh would think about God himself. This is one of the this is a classic um uh early American uh piece of literature here. Sinners in the hand of an angry god. I'm just going to read you a brief segment so you can understand what father's talking about.
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhores you, is dreadfully provoked. His wrath towards you burns like fire. He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire. He is of pure eyes than to bear to have you in his sight. You are 10,000 times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful, venomous serpent is in ours.
This is the way you appear before God.
You have offended him infinitely more than a stubborn rebel that is prince.
Yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing else that you didn't go to hell the last night. That you suffered to wake again in this world after you closed your eyes to sleep. There's no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in this morning but that God's hand held you up. So a couple of things here. I mean he's basically saying God looks at you with complete loathing. You are like a spider which he is holding above the fire seeming to taunt you taunt you with this fire. He's like oh oh it's it's only me if I let go. You know this is this is the concept. He views you in that way.
according to Edwards here. So, this is an interesting an interesting piece to note. If you haven't read this, this is extremely short. This is a text taken from a sermon uh called Sinners in the hands of an Angered God. So, uh yeah, it's a it's it's dark stuff. I mean, but this is how the early early reformed authors wrote about God's wrath. This is very common and >> it's and it's a development. I mean, you have to get there. It's it's you're not going to find something like that in the early church. They're not going to use these these descriptions. And historically, it had to develop. There's a whole bunch of historical happen stances to get to where that that is, right? Through through over thousand years of development. Um, and we just don't have that. The Orthodox church that those things never developed. They did not emerge. They're not intuitive in the scripture, right?
You have to take things from the scripture and interpret it to to make that system the mechanism that they use to describe salvation with. So it's not something where you just oh the the if you give the reader to some uh newly literate person on the other side of the world that's never heard of it he's not going to pick up the Bible read it and go aha and come to PSA right that's unless someone takes it and says this is how we understand it it's definitely a gloss right it's an interpretive gloss put over top of it and only when you start pointing to all the different pieces and pull them together in the way that they want you to and ignore other pieces that may be contradicted can you come to the final version of it So if someone were to ask maybe what would be a what would be a positive case for uh the way that the orthodox would view the atonement as opposed to this penal substitutionary model.
>> Yeah. Um so the the church fathers uh going you know starting with the apostolic fathers forward uh they don't have a problem per se with legal language the forensic language as metaphor right because you have to understand that that the Bible itself gives us numerous different images of salvation they're all analogical right they're metaphors and different images sometimes they kind of combine them together sometimes they're kept apart and all those different images are are telling us some aspect or trying to lead us a little deeper into understanding what God has done for us which is a mystery which is really hard for us to comprehend everything that God has done for us. Uh but there are there are certainly are forensic uh images in the Bible and the fathers don't shy away they don't ignore the forensic images they just don't add them all up into some bigger system. So for example um they will use the word penalty which essentially means like a sentence. Uh so that's that's criminal language right now in the Bible itself that's not really applied specifically to Adam.
They'll talk about the curse in the Old Testament and some of the fathers will say the curse is synonymous with like a judgment or a sentence. And they'll use the the Greek word um viki or vikas which means the penalty or the penalties. Sometimes they'll describe it as multiple penalties because they're describing the various effects of corruption that happen to us with the reasonable fall. They don't have a problem with that um with using that language. The penalty is death, right?
That that mankind by rebelling against God introduces death into his nature, which is not meant to be, right? We chose death over life.
Um and that's probably where the similarity really stops, right? at at the fact that we accept the idea that there is um a judgment that happens how that judgment relates to everyone after Adam that is is is uh quite different often times in the west. So for example, the idea that every single person has the culpability of this crime, right? Rather than just uh everyone inherits the effects of that initial crime, right? That's that differs. Uh even where um someone like St. Sir Alexandria uh would say that the initial curse was extended over all he's he makes it clear that not everyone is guilty for it per se. Right? There are the majority are sinners right there. Most people fall away from God and most people rebel against God. But he doesn't talk about some kind of legal culpability, some sort of uh like everyone um has in that sense um you know the uh the initial crime being transferred to them. They just have the effects of the crime because they come from Adam, right? They come from Adam. They inherit corruption.
They inherit death. Uh and so it's that way it's extended over all mankind. So, so we have no problem as orthodox saying that that there is a penalty of death and you could describe it in legal ways if you want like a judge has declared um you know guilty.
The problem with the idea thou now that that that becomes a divine um like uh imperative like justice and and God meeting out justice on mankind everyone Adam and everyone after him that is not in the fathers that's where the problem begins because for example uh when Christ comes uh and he is uh you know he's doing his his uh his public ministry, his three and a half year ministry, uh he just forgives people by fiat, right? He forgives you. All your sins are forgiven, right? And St. Aius makes clear if that was if it was only about forgiveness of sins, if it was about overturning sin itself, right? This is on in the inc um on the incarnation. God would have done the same thing, right?
He just would have declared by fiat.
He's a merciful God. He would have just said, "You're all forgiven."
There's two problems that St. Athanasius brings up there. Number one is that people keep sinning. So they need something to that's that's that's deeper than just uh forgiveness of sins. I mean God could just keep forgiving forgiving forgiving. Uh the greater issue was death, right? The penalty of death gets transferred to every person because we all descend from Adam. We all inherit death and and death is the real issue, right? So we have an ontological problem. That's the big that's the the general way that the fathers understand this. So even when they're using legal metaphors, they'll say, "Look, that sentence we're under, we're all under that sentence because we all descend from Adam." But but the problem is not how sin is forgiven because God can do that any way he wants. It's about the fact that God wants to overcome the thing that makes us or drives us into sin. So the passage that St. Athanasius quotes the most is Hebrews chapter 2.
It's the fear of death that's stoked up by the devil that pushes people to sin.
So by overcoming death, so that onlogical problem, our nature gets filled with life, with God's own life.
Then the devil's power is broken and we don't have to sin anymore. Right?
There's a real change. There's a real transformation. It's not just transactional. It's just not it's not just mechanical. It is ontological. It is regenerative or transformative. So I think that's where the big difference is using pointing to legal language of the fathers and saying aha I got you there's a legal metaphor there that doesn't say anything because when you read it in the context of their whole writing their overarching approach is always ontological and the legal metaphors they work them in there because that's scriptural language that St. Paul and St. Peter uses >> um and they don't they're not going to shy away from it. Right? So the penalty the P in the penalty uh in the penal substitution if you just mean that the fathers use some legal language. Okay, you got us. They use some legal language. Right.
>> Right.
>> But it's so much deeper than that. It's how you understand that and how they've extended that into um a culpability upon all and everyone has and how this divine justice has to be meed out on all and so forth. It does seem like it does seem like in these interactions with these individuals that are trying to push penal substitutionary atonement. I've noticed some in the Roman Catholic camps trying to push this now. Uh Eric Ibara wrote a book on this recently. Um and it seems like in these interactions, the goal when pressed on this is to water down penal substitutionary atonement to where it's basically like a nonsense term. It just means every substitutional model you could think of.
or maybe it's just satisfaction theory re rebranded. Um this is this is what it seems like to me.
>> Um because when you when you press people especially, you know, sometimes you'll have >> either uh their you know brand new or anonymous accounts that are trying to say that uh the Orthodox Church teaches penal substitutionary atonement, right?
And then they'll say things like >> um they'll try to shoehorn it in. My my thought process though is it almost seems like when you look at the logical entailment of PSA, one of the logical entailments of that would have to be some model of solid playing into the system there for it to even work. Mhm.
>> So it would almost be antithetical to somebody also trying to hold a model of fossis because as you said where's the onlogical change in this process if we're if we're talking penal substitutionary atonement black and white dialectic okay so uh here you are at one point in time here you are at another point in time that almost seems like you have to shoehorn I guess rather than saying solid just to be more precise uh imputed righteousness rather than infused produced. Does that make sense?
>> Yeah. And and again, those are uh those are ideas that that developed very late, right? They developed over time, centuries after the fact. These are not uh intuitive in the scripture itself, right? There's no there's no imputation in scripture. You can't really you can't find a Greek word that means uh imputation as this is this legal term.
You know, um the uh the word accredited to does not mean imputation. The Greek word luite Um so yeah so it's again it's not um it's not something that is is there in the text themselves. You have to you have to come with a presupposition, right? They have 2,000 years of evolution theologically, right? Or at least up through the reformation. So we'll say 16 centuries of evolution theologically to get there.
And then looking back through that lens on the early church, they can they they want to see it everywhere, right? Every there's a spectre PSA behind every bush, you know, because they they have the model already in their heads and they're they're projecting it acronistically back on on early church sources. Um the substitutionary part is also an issue. I used to years ago when I first started my um you know my my graduate work um I I would use the word substitution not realizing the full the full weight of what Protestants meant by it right or even Roman Catholics per se um and when I started to really understand um what they meant by it I stopped using it alto together uh because the problem is um is when you say substitution you really mean in the place of right the primary phrase in scripture that's that that the fathers repeat frequently is is just the phrase uh rimon like for us and they will translate to that sometimes on our behalf the the the the term in Greek though really just means um for us for our benefit right it benefits us in some way doesn't mean taking the place of per se >> right there's nothing that says that he takes our place per se you You have to read back into it. You have to read and you have to read into the the story of, you know, the um uh the Akida, which is the the offering of Isaac, you know, by his father and so forth. You know, you have to you have to read into these texts and and apply that as a um as some kind of like this for that because really what the fathers again with this sort of with this sort of onlogical model that seems to be undergirling all their their understanding of every different salvation image is the idea of what's called corporate personality, right? which is which we usually you might have heard that mostly in terms of recapitulation which is only used like maybe one time I think in the New Testament uh to recapitulate um and recapitulation people think you know okay you have the first Adam and we inherit death from the first Adam so the new Adam comes who's Christ and we inherit life if we're united to Christ and that's all correct but that but that is kind of uh seen as a a smitic mind right a smitic mindset sees this kind of corporate personality often times when it describes uh a tribe in the Old Testament it gives is it by the name of the original um you know one of the original founders of the tribe like Joseph was there really means the tribe of Joseph was there in battle you know you have this like in first kingdoms and other places um corporate personality is basically the idea of of consubstantiality this is just calcidan this is just the council of calcedan right all human nature is consubstantial with it with itself and Christ by entering into human existence by taking on by assuming human nature as Scosa makes very clear in its toone is him taking on all human nature and uniting it in himself. He doesn't become uh you know uh you know he doesn't he doesn't take on a man he takes on humanity in himself and makes it his own. And that is another way of speaking of of that the church is using more technical terminology to speak of corporate personality. It's so it's onlogical Christ does that and in offering himself up for so for example St. Cro again um who I've done the most work on St. Serial makes it very clear every time he mentions about he does this for our sakes or for us.
>> He goes off into something saying that all of us are present in him in the offering. That's not substitutionary. If we're in Christ when he's offering himself up, we're being offered up as well. And he says that multiple times that we are being offered up in Christ.
So it's not it's not in place of us. We are within him. And the the only the only extra uh key to this is that the real transformation that we can tap into is after we are sacramentally united to him and sort of you could say activate >> that potentiality of being in Christ, right? Um so it isn't really a true substitution. If you want to use the word substitution just to to mean um you know for us that very simple language of the Bible, well, you know, be my guest.
But but the fact of the matter is it means it's being done on be on our behalf uh in the sense of for our for our benefit and we are in him as he's offering himself up. Um and there's in his his ex Jesus or different commentaries St. um commenting on multiple different books on the on the Torah, the Pentatio, on the prophets, on the gospels like Luke and John. He says this repeatedly that that we all are being offered up in Christ when he offers himself on the cross. So, it's not a real substitution in that sense.
>> Absolutely. Can you elaborate on a on a concept that kind of shoehorns into that? Um I've heard this several times in multiple different Orthodox texts.
It's in some of our senates as well. But this concept of uh taking into account the entire economy of salvation uh and this ties in very directly especially if you to read the senate of black could you elaborate maybe on that concept for somebody who is either inquiring or they're a catechum and they're not familiar with this kind of broad scheme here.
>> Yeah. So so uh economy in Greek economia um sometimes gets translated dispensation but don't have problem with that. You might someone might misread that as dispensations in plural. It if you're going to use that translation, it's singular. It means the entire history of salvation from the from creation to judgment at the end of time.
Um and in particular, our understanding as orthodox is that Christ is working throughout the entire thing, right? He there create he's the the father creates through the sun, right? the the sun um is uh is appearing to um to the patriarchs and prophets and guiding them towards you know towards um you know um the this this um this future covenant this this new covenant uh he walks upon the earth and he doesn't just die on the cross right to kind of put all our emphasis on the cross as the as the sum total of his of his work right is so limiting because from the moment of his conception in the womb of the theotocos right the moment he's conceived the father say he's sanctifying human nature in himself right he he completely deifies human nature from the moment of his conception every stage of life even this even back to Stern of Leon right every stage of human life is being sanctified as he goes through it all the way up to the age of an elder um you know in uh in that time right what's considered the age of a of a grown adult and then uh all the things leading up to the cross right even like for St. serial the the the dialogue in Gethsemane Christ is healing all uh by accepting the blameless passions right by accepting the things that are uh that are natural to to a what's called a passable being in other words of being like all of us are in flux because we're created right we're changeable so he accepts the the the things that are called blameless passions because those are just the result of being in flux so hunger thirst weariness he accepts the fear of death regarding Gethsemane. St. Siro says we can even say that on the cross um although not being actually forsaken by the father St. Sir is clear that doesn't happen. There's actually a passage where he makes clear that the father does never turn away from his son that they're in complete unity while he's on the cross. So that just gets blown out of the water if if you know St. Charles says no that's not what the church believes. But but you could say that on the cross he does accept the human experience of suffering, right? Uh the blameless passion of of being dejected by by human beings. He's been rejected by all humanity, right? The Romans, the Jews have all come together, which is the you know the the Jews and the nations altogether against him, right?
So he experiences the fullness of all those things. All that's part of the economy and then it continues on, right?
The resurrection and the ascension, right? We just came through we're today is the feast of ascension and his economy continues on through the resurrection and ascension.
In fact, the epistle to the Hebrews says maybe this much about the cross and this much about the ascension right about him ascending into the heavens as our high priest making eternal intercession there being the one who is now the mediator between God and man because as St. And serial says he is God and man. He's the mediator in himself. Right? Uh and then and then setting the spirit on Pentecost in time. Right? All these are part of the economy. And now we live in uh you know we live in this age of the new covenant, the last age before the final judgment which is the completion of the economy. So so you can't take any of it out of context, right? If you just focus just on the cross and what he does on the cross, then you really uh not only do you do you isolate it, you distort the work of salvation, right? You distort it because and and what you result the resulting um uh product you have is just just a a mechanism, a transactional mechanism uh in place of the beautiful mystery of of salvation.
>> Yes, beautifully said. So, I think um I think that's a good overview of the subject. I do want to move into our Q&A section here. I know we have a couple of questions mounting up. So, chat, just to remind you, you could send in your questions. I will be starring them.
We'll be answering them in the order that they're received. Go ahead and send them in with a queue in front. I know a couple of you are already doing that because you're familiar with the format of the show. If you want to skip in line, feel free to send a super chat.
I'll bump you up to the front of the line. But you can ask anything orthodoxy related obviously. Um, keep your questions appropriate, but I'll I'll pull them up in the order that they're received. Um, Alex says, "Protestants not misrepresenting our father's challenge impossible." Talking about the uh the claims of the the fourth pastor there. Father Lucas, how would you interpret Isaiah 53:4-5?
>> I mean, we read it on Holy Friday in the Orthodox Church. I mean, it's an important passage for us. Um and yes it's it's it can very easily uh be read and it is read by people like St. Sir Alexandria as as ontological in the sense that uh you know by his stripes we are healed. In other words, he takes on suffering in himself in order to heal human nature. Again that's us being united to him. Doesn't it's not saying that he does it in our place. He does it for us. But for us means for our benefit, right? He does it to transform human nature. um you know modern saint St. uh Sophron of Essex uh makes he makes the statement that um I can't remember exactly the page at the moment but he makes the statement that that uh because Christ entered into our suffering he he did so to transform it now when we suffer the point is he doesn't just yank us out of suffering right if he did it in our place we shouldn't suffer now right if it was a true substitution we'd be yanked out of suffering we'd be free of suffering but we still suffer so that's not how it works He entered into suffering to heal our experience of it to make it salvific to make it an experience of God's grace that that when we suffer which is just part of life part of being in a universe in flux a universe that is um you know and especially one that is has been affected by corruption as a result of us um we are going to suffer in various ways physically um you know existentially etc. And by entering into the midst of that but being beyond sin as as St. Paul makes clear in Hebrews means that that our nature gets transformed through those experiences.
And the only thing he adds to that that's that's kind of common uh you know a common way of explaining it that early that early church fathers use as well from entering into our suffering. What St. Soon adds to it which I like is a nice twist is he says that that uh that prayer becomes the catalyst to turn that experience of suffering into the presence of Christ. Right? When we when we burn to Christ in the midst of our suffering whatever that is he we're united to him as his body and that prayer is the catalyst. Now we experience the grace of God uh that converts that into his own presence within us.
I went to a steakhouse and ordered a filt minan. When the waiter came back to ask me how it was, I said, "Fillet."
Okay. Filio filt. Okay. That's funny.
>> That was that someone spent a super chat on that.
>> Yes.
Well, it was funny. There was a there was a guy, Kelly Powers, who was um trying to debunk orthodoxy. He's an evangelical gentleman. And he said um they they uh they split because of the filowiki.
Oh yeah. Yeah. Nice.
>> The Philiki.
Uh that's funny. Father Joseph had a guest spot on a great podcast with Father Jeremy Davis called Welcoming Gifts. I highly recommend it. Great discussion on sacrifice and a good tiein to this PSA discussion.
>> That was Yeah, that was just last month.
That was um that's on Ancient Faith podcasts. He has a his book he wrote the book called Welcoming Gifts. Um and uh and he has an hour has a show on Ancient Faith about that. He had me on.
>> Very nice. Yeah, I saw you did a couple of shows on on um on PSA in the past that were uh >> Yeah, I'm going to be pegged the PSA guy at some point here because uh ever since PJO brought me on to talk about a few years back. That's it seems like I get asked I get asked this a lot.
>> There you go. Um Antioc and Ezekiel says, "Could you explain the exact position of the church on the aerial toll houses? I know there's some controversy. Thanks."
Yeah. Well, so I mean I don't think it's controversy at all to say u we don't have to say we believe or don't believe in toll houses.
It's the church has had a long-standing tradition of this idea of encountering the demons after death and it's described in various ways. Uh technically is originally described they were described as tax collectors.
Delonius means tax collectors right? uh like a tax leer comes demanding his due, right? That's they're accusing us. And so the basic idea you find in the early church uh you find it in um um St. Theophilus of Alexandria is the earliest move that I'm aware of uh talks about the demons uh coming to accuse us, right? Um you could imply that Christ is saying the same thing when he says the the prince of this world is coming to accuse him. You know, we'll find nothing in him from the Gospel of John. Uh but it seems to be something at least anidotically that throughout the history of the church various saints right as they're dying sort of the veil is lifted and they see the nomic realm for a moment and they see the demons that have been uh causing these intrusive thoughts, these temptations over the years. They see them visibly and they see them accusing them of all sorts of things because that's that's really what the name Satan means, the accuser, right? The one who's against us. uh and the demons kind of play that role as well. So the question with the toll houses is simply um you know will demons accuse us of various sins and passions.
Absolutely. And what are we doing to prepare for that? You know what do we do to prepare for that? Well, we're fasting, we're praying, we're going to church, receiving the sacraments and trusting in Christ that we're his and that they don't they won't find anything in us, right? We go to confession, you know? So so the utility of the of the toll houses because it's It's never been brought up at a council as a dogma, per se, but it but it's a long-standing uh narrative in our in holy tradition to help us understand what we're up against, right? What the who the enemy is. The devil and his minions are the enemy and we have to be preparing ourselves uh by being faithful to Christ. Now, the only the only aspect of toll houses that would be problematic would be um if we were to say that the demons themselves have power to judge us.
Um, some of the fathers say that they do have the power to take us away into Hades if we belong to them and not to Christ, but not that they're actually the judges, not that they actually have the ability to because a to a a tax collector isn't a judge per se. A tax collector is saying, "Do you have debts that are owed? If so, I can take I can take you to jail's prison." Right? So the analogy that the reason they start using this analogy of a tax collector early on or a toll booth that the tax collector sits in um is simply the idea that will the demons find something credible in us when they accuse us.
>> They find something credible in us things that uh you know things that we have not repented of things that we uh that are that are opposed to God. Um so in in the latter divine ascent uh it talks about how our passions uh if we have not faced them and started to deal with our passions they kind of weigh us down and prevent us from ascending into paradise when we die. And that's kind of that's kind of the problem. The problem is is is our change over time our participation in God's uh in God's grace and his energies.
Alfredo, thank you for the uh dollar super chat. Appreciate you. Uh Henry, in what sense is the Eucharist a sacrifice? Good question. I'm used to the Roman Catholic sense where they offer the Eucharist once it is consecrated to the triad or is it different for the Orthodox?
>> H yeah, I I think there's an exaggerated form of this uh in which some Orthodox have tried to go to the other extreme.
uh in the 20th century and say, "Oh, we don't think of it as a sacrifice at all." That's not true. We use sacrificial language in the postd service before and in the liturgy. Um you can and properly translated the the the the phrase from the scripture uh which are the words of Jesus that again are repeated by Paul in Corinthians is Jesus says do this as a memorial to towards me.
>> Right?
>> That's the language of sacrifice in the Old Testament. you know or some of the sacrifices like the bread offering are memorials to Yahweh. So that is definitely sacrificial language. the the difference I would say what we see in and I think this is where some of the orthodoxic scholars in the 20th century are trying to make their point was that the offering of Christ is apox right which means once for all right it's a one-time offering and there was in in some scholastic writings it seemed that they would say that every single time the mass was done uh the the the Roman Catholic priest was resacing Christ Right? That's debated in modern Roman Catholicism whether that's the case or not. Whether that's actually what they mean today but but u we don't believe that. We don't believe that we're resacrificing Christ on essentially or anything like that. We are participating in the once-forall offering of Christ, >> right?
>> And he is present through the the celebrant, right? the celebrant is is um is appointed or or placed there by Christ. Whether the bishop or the the preser on behalf of the bishop is is acting um you know sort of in the person of Christ in that. Christ is the high priest eternally um you know interceding for us before the father you know this is of the Hebrews and we are uh the clergy are representing him on behalf of the people in the liturgy to participate in this eternal offering. So it really is a sacrifice in that sense. It is the only real sacrifice of the of the new covenant. The only one that Christ has given us to do. We're not doing it. It it is the fulfillment of you know like St. Serial says it's the fulfillment of every sacrifice of the Old Testament.
All them come together in Christ. And then St. Sel says and now the Eucharist is um you know the Christ is the entity or fulfillment of all the Old Testament offerings. And the Eucharist is a participation in Christ's offering. So that that's that's the transition from the old covenant to the new covenant.
>> Uh John, if you had a question, let me know what your question was and I'll pull it up on the screen.
Alas, the great Father Joseph Lucas, PSA's boogeyman.
>> Nice.
How There you go. Here's a interesting question. How can I bring my girlfriend to church? A little change of pace here.
>> Oh, you mean like she's uh Well, I wish I knew the the background because usually it's it's specific to the background. You know, if you have someone coming from Roman Catholicism, you want them to, you know, to to understand orthodoxy is very different than say lowurch evangelical or something like that. Um I will say this though I I strongly believe that men and women are wired differently you know in the way that we there's overlap of course but uh but I believe that my you know some research that I've read psychological sociological research points to this but just my anecdotal experience uh as a priest for for a while has been that men tend to be drawn to the church through ideas. Women tend to be drawn to the church through um their the attraction to the beauty of the church and through relationships because women are generally more social than most men. So, so a guy a guy tends to read his way into the church most times, right? A guy walks into the church the first time, wants to talk to me, interest in orthodox, he's already watched 10 videos, he might have read a book, read a couple blogs, the ideas are intriguing, he wants to wrestle with those ideas. Most of the women come in um sometimes there's ideas there, right?
I'm not saying there isn't, but uh but they may have heard the chanting. They may have seen the liturgy. A friend of theirs who's becoming Orthodox uh told them about it and they're interested because they this is a friend of theirs, right? Um and so I'd say probably there's overlap in the middle, but maybe for men it's like 70% ideas. For women, it's 70% relationship and there's an overlap in the middle where where uh you know, so if you want to bring your girlfriend to church, um you know, find people that she can connect with, right?
First of all, introduce you to the beauty of the of the worship is women seem to get that more than the guys. I have uh I have so much problem with the guys coming to me and saying, "Ah, we can't stay in the liturgy. It's so boring." I'm like, you talk all these about all these ideas all day, but this is where it's at, right? The liturgy is where everything comes together. So, you need to learn. So, women have a greater perception of that. They're more intuitive that way. So they need so I maybe introduce her to the uh to the worship, maybe recordings or just try to talk her into coming to liturgy and experiencing it and then see if you can help her make some connections uh with other women in the church where she can talk about some of these things. And I think that that's probably the best way.
>> Excellent advice. Excellent. Excellent.
Excellent. I say the same thing. I've got the I've got the pro tier strat. Are you ready, everyone? I'm gonna tell you the pro the pro strat. This this works.
Okay, this is the pro strat. What you do, especially for the married guys, okay? Sometimes it's difficult. The wife doesn't want to go or something. Maybe you're an evangelical or something.
Go on a Saturday to a vesper service.
Meet another couple there that's married that attends the Orthodox church. Then what you do is you invite them out to lunch. So your wife meets that couple there, has a friend at the liturgy. Now, oh, hey, let's go spend some time with Susan at the Orthodox Church. we'll go to um you know Susan and Frank or who whatever their name is and we'll hang out at coffee hour after you know it'll be nice and it's a nice social thing.
Uh, one thing to keep in mind, I mean, I think a lot of people, especially for me, I mean, I was a pastor. I was a Protestant pastor, you know, uh, before journeying into the Orthodox church. It was very difficult on my wife and family cuz everybody knows us, you know, we had this massive social nest at the previous church. So, you have to remember what you're asking your wife or your girlfriend to do is um, you know, hey, they're nesters. It's like, well, let's shake up the nest a little bit. You got to give them a soft place to land. And if they have friends of the liturgy, that's immen that's a major thing.
Um, thanks Cleave. Your channel's been my month's best thing. Oh, thank you. By the way, also, have you or Father Steven Young uh addressed Costa on St. Arnaeus in the age of Christ?
>> Well, not everything a church father says is like an absolute tradition or something. I mean, he's the only one who basically says that Christ was 50 rather than 30. Um, where he got that tradition from, who knows? It could be. Um, I mean, obviously, we could say maybe it was a corruption in the text, but we don't have any evidence it was a corruption in the text. Um, it does seem to say 50. Um, what we c what might be the case with that is that um, so in in Jewish tradition, age 30 was an elder, >> right? you could you could more broadly participate in in in certain in the life of the synagogue and things like that at age 30. You're considered, you know, an old man in a sense, right? You're considered a a full-fledged adult. Um, and certain privileges, you could say, in in the community, it might be the case because St. Erynaeus was fully Greek, right? He's he's not he doesn't have a Jewish background or anything.
Maybe that didn't make any sense to him.
and and and and there was and he basically fudged that a little bit. Oh, 50. He must have been 50 because he's the whole point of him talking about the age is to show that Christ went through all the stages of life up through, you know, an elder. So, it could have been just because his Greek background, but nobody echoes that. So, that's the consensus of the fathers is is is what the church, you know, relies on, not uh not what one father says or, you know, an idea.
If uh is Christ offered and if so when in the liturgy I've asked priests and they tell me it's just bread and wine which becomes Christ no actual offering of him. I think we just kind of addressed this earlier but go ahead and touch on this.
>> Yeah. Well like like St. uh Nicholas Kavasilas who's a contemporary of St. Palamas writes a lot about um you know the liturgy and the meaning of the liturgy and he said and and he and others going back to like um St. Simeon of Thessaloniki, they make clear that for example when the great entrance happens and the the the patterns and the and the chalice are being brought out, they they tell the people, "Don't you dare prostrate or kneel because at that point bread and wine is being brought to the altar to offer up to the Lord."
Right? So maybe that's what he's referring to. This idea that that um it is what I mean we call it the lamb, right? the the the actual portion of the bread that's going to be placed on the altar. But in the sense that uh it's still bread and wine. It at some point, yes, it becomes the body blood of Christ. But uh but yes, we're not offering Christ up per se. We're making the sacrificial offering up to the Lord which he receives and makes himself, right? Becomes present in that.
>> Father Ron says, "That's what I've been saying." There you go. So, I guess you're in agreement here.
Um, all right. Let's see. I'm going to get to some of the inquirer questions first. So, we're through with the the super chats I had lined up here. Uh, so inquirers, I want to make sure your questions are answered first and foremost while you're still in the live stream chat. Jellyfish says, "Question.
Reading the church fathers interested in Orthodoxy. Do resources such as the Catechism of the Catholic Church exist to better understand Orthodox doctrine?
Coptic and Greek church near me?" Well, first off, go to the Greek church, not the Coptic one. But go ahead, father.
>> Yeah, I mean, the Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, um, I mean, certainly much better than 19th century Roman Catholic theology. Definitely a lot. I mean, Pope Benedict had a lot to do with that. He was a petristics guy. Uh, and so, but he also, um, you know, in he was also, um, rooted in the scholastics, who we have a lot of issues with as Orthodox. So, if you're using a small I notice in the in the text he's using a small O orthodox. I don't know if he's did that on purpose to say like general uh maybe like common church teaching between us and the Catholics. But if you want to know Eastern Orthodox uh you know tradition and how the fathers are read, I wouldn't get the Catechism of the Catholic Church because that's written by Roman Catholic scholars primarily by Pope Benedict with the purpose of teaching Roman Catholics their tradition and tries to balance sort of that return to the fathers uh impetus they had in the 20th century with their earlier scholastic ideas and things like that. It's kind of a compromise between different ideas or combining of different ideas into one.
So, um it's an interesting text, but not if you want to learn our Orthodox traditions. Uh there are lots of other books that are probably better suited to going into the church fathers.
>> All right, I'm going to go back to the beginning of the list. Johan has a long question with a lot of presuppositions baked into it. So, it's a it's a threeparter. We'll see if we can get to it.
>> Oh, wow. So he says, "Father, modern orthodox teaching, there's one presupposition heavenly heavily emphasizes the Christ victor model that the cross is primarily a victory over death. But when I look at the extreme excruciating agony of Gethsemane and Golgatha, a fairly therapeutic or victory model seems to leave a blind spot. Why did the price of victory have to be so brutal if it wasn't a punishment?
or payment of debt. How does orthodoxy account for the weight of Christ's suffering without lapsing into a purely sentimental view of the passion? I'm not sure what he means by the last sentence, but I think he's saying if it's Chris Victor, why does his death have to be so brutal?
>> Yeah. I mean, for one thing, the Chris Victor, I mean, the book itself is by a German, right? So, Johan sounds like a German there. uh that's why Gustaf Alvin that who wrote that book in the 20th century that's a series of lectures he gave so that was his depiction of what he thought the the early church believed almost exclusively right he breaks it uh salvation down to three models and he says Chris Victor is the early church model uh which essentially he calls the ransom model right so it's the ransom model which is more complex uh than is being kind of portrayed in this question here because the it is victory but it's not just victory It's uh it's that's too simplistic. The ransom model does have payment in it, right? Because the the word liter or and which means ransom or redemption um has the the model or analogy of payment, but it's not it's not a forensic model. It's a it's a it's a slavery model, right? It's a it's manu mission. It's it's being set free from slavery.
So, so when Christ offers himself on the cross, uh you can say yes using Paul's language that that is a ransom. That is a uh that's an analogy, right, of how payment is given to free people out of slavery.
Where does that term come from? Where does uh Lethro sees these like these words come from? That is from the Septuagent version of Exodus. St. Paul is just going back to Exodus and saying, "Okay, what happened in the Exodus?" Uh Moses came he was he came as the righteous one and he judges the gods of Egypt. He judges Pharaoh. Pharaoh is an analogically Satan in in this metaphor.
And the land of Egypt is sin and death.
The land of sin and death that the Israelites are enslaved to. Moses sets them free.
uh you lead them through the Red Sea which is analogous to baptism, right?
And they're free on the other side, right? They're set free. So when St. Paul uses the language of ransom, it isn't just victory over death. That's that's a big piece of it, right? Is victory over death ultimately. It's also victory over sin and the condemnation of the devil because it's being set free from slavery. The only question we have to ask is when Moses went and did a ransom of the Israelites in Egypt, did Pharaoh get paid anything?
Zilch, right? Pharaoh, his army ended up at the bottom of the sea, >> right? He didn't get any payment. And that's what some of the fathers are talking about, like the Capidoshian fathers are saying, look, nobody got like if if if Satan got the payment, that would not be just because why would Satan why would anything belong to Satan? If the father got the payment that wouldn't be just why would the father want a payment from his own son right so they so they basically conclude well nobody really got the payment because if you look to exodus that is the model we get Paul's drawing on exodus um so that's so the victor model I mean that's what Gustaf Allen called it is definitely more complex that it's it's a ransom model but in terms of the the suffering St. Athanasius better addresses this St. Andius suggestes why it had to be suffering on the cross because number one it had it had to happen against his will and it had to happen in a very public way and that was the most public way it could happen uh in the Roman Empire right is to be he was a he was a he was a Jew so he's not going to be nice you know get a nice clean beheading like a Roman citizen right it would have been by crucifixion if he was sentenced to death and and St. Anthony says if it was done in private or if he had lived old age and died everyone would have said like uh oh you're resurrected we never saw you die we don't believe you it had to be done in full uh view of the entire world so everybody knew he died and that he had gone through this so that's that's St. Aenius's view of this um in terms of why it had to be brutal. Well that's uh it doesn't say it had to be brutal.
It just was brutal. The Romans are were brutal, right? When they crucify someone, they they made it brutal. Uh and that was part of it. But it does give us, you know, by entering into the the most shameful and and painful type of of of death at that time in in in history. It really means, as St. Paul says in Hebrews, that he can really give aid to those who are suffering, right?
Because he was tested in all ways. not tempted. It's actually tested in Greek.
He was tested in all ways and now like through all that suffering and not commit any sin, you know, and therefore he can aid those who are now suffering.
It says clearly in Hebrews. So, so this is this is really why it had to be that particular way of method of of dying.
>> I'll get to the super chat in a moment, but we got Father Steven Young in the chat. Good to see you, Father.
>> Hello, Father. He says, "How aside from deris uh derise of laughter, would you assess shuping's recent claim that Orthodox church taught PSA until Anglican converts to orthodoxy 75 years ago changed everything?"
>> He knew I would laugh.
>> Um yeah. Uh yeah, I don't know what fever dream uh he he was in when he came up with that idea. not father but sen but shupin because uh because yeah I there's a reason why every one of his books is self-published but that's all I'll say about that but uh but yeah I mean it's uh it's just the case that that you know if you if you come with a presupposition like like shing does if you say I have to accept this I've come to a conclusion that this is correct and and then you go back and read that into the early church especially he's, you know, he's not a scholar, so he's using English translations. A lot of them are like the, you know, the Shaft series and things like that. Um, you know, to try to prove his point. Uh, like I just did an article I'm actually going to present in a couple weeks at a conference where I looked at the shaft translation of serial and compared it to the actual Greek and the and they inserted things like wrath and uh, you know, like all this legal language that's not there in the Greek text. Uh, so if you're going to be unless you're going to go back into the original text and make your point and then look at the entire text, you're just you're not doing real research. You're just you're you're proof texting.
uh and uh and you know, but uh again, this is sort of a this is part of a bigger claim though that Father Steven's referring to that that um that the 20th century was just this anti-western period and orthodoxy and we just did everything we could to try to distance ourselves. The only the only aspect of that that might be true uh is uh is the sense that that you know in the 18th and 19th century there was uh particularly in Russia a lot more influence from Latin writers because they started using Latin texts in the seminaries there and although from the time of Peter McGila Ford they tried to expunge some of the more western ideas they were still there right they were basically adapting western texts Um because Peter McGila is was in that borderland between you know the Kingdom of Poland and the Russian Empire because there was no Ukraine as like a separate country back then you know he's like on the borderland there and they're getting you know these Latin texts and they're trying to update the the seminaries to make them more academic and they're trying to adapt them and of course some of these ideas seeped in. That's what father Floroski referred to as the pseudomorphosis, you know, where there was some ideas were being presented in the particularly in the in the Russian writings with a more western sound. And so in the 19th century, the big push back came, right? The big push back came uh the return to the fathers in Russia.
Uh going back and reading the original text, people who could read multiple languages like St. Fon Recklu, St. filler out of Moscow. Some of the Optina elders were using the the new Filicia uh translations that they were that they had. So, so that is a time period in history where someone could go back to that and say, "Oh, the Orthodox Church was just like the West and then and then suddenly in the 20th century we we changed everything." That's just not true. The fact of the matter is is uh there was a push back on this intrusion you could say of things that that didn't really jive with our terminology that had come in through some of these western manuals and trying to kind of expune that um you know from our vocabulary and so forth and um and at times yes some of the some of the 20th century writers like father Romanites were strongly you know uh anti-western in the sense of like defining orthodoxy in distinction from the list. Um but yes, you can't get around it though.
There are fundamental differences that have um you know that that are the things that are just part of orthodoxy that had been there all along and things that have evolved in the west that now make them into two different versions of Christianity. I just I I've spent so many years looking at this and trying to see it from all perspectives and um and I can't get around it. So, and yes, Father Steve and I will see you at the conference as well.
>> Question from Oro question. My husband and I are traditional Catholics. I discovered Orthodoxy but my husband is not on board. We have really awesome friends and family in church. I want to honor my husband. Any advice? Good question.
>> That's a tough one. Yeah. I mean, as someone who really believes that the husband should have a spiritual leadership role, that's tough. Um, you know, certainly prayer, nense, um, you know, I'm not going to be the guy to break up a married couple here, but but definitely prayer and patience.
Um and um and I think that um I mean and by tried Catholic I think my assumption is that she's TLM, you know, traditional Latin mass. Um and you know I I I know people involved in the TLM in uh where I live. I know that, you know, they're good people. they they really uh want to try to preserve uh some some aspect or some vision of Roman Catholicism rooted in an earlier time and place. But the question I would ask uh maybe maybe she should ask her husband is like how realistic is this uh a representative of really of of 21st century Roman Catholicism?
>> Like will it really have the support of the Vatican in years to come? it seems like they keep curtailing it and although it might seem like a a growing movement in the United States.
Um, I mean, will the Roman Catholic Church at large allow it to continue to grow? And and you know, and one other thing I would say is, you know, a wise priest told me years ago about orthodoxy when I was a young hotthead in my 20s, um, and I was railing about something some theologian I disagreed with said, you know, in a journal. He said, you know, the church saves us. We don't save the church. So, I think if you feel like, because this is what Protestants are always doing, right? If you feel like you have to be the savior of your church, you're going to start this movement and you're going to bring back real Roman Catholicism the way it's meant to be done.
>> That tells you everything you need to know, >> you know, um you know, I I I've never felt that uh you know, other than maybe a few uh you know, some some theologians I disagree with whose names oftentimes have, you know, like three initials and so forth. Uh, you know, I have never felt like I had to change the church.
>> Yes.
>> Never had to like update it or take it back or anything like that.
>> Mhm. I can I can maybe weigh in with just some slight advice. Send him Life Site News articles every day.
He will eventually become so wore down he'll have to have to make a choice.
Well, you know, I was talking to somebody about this. I I do these reels and I do the Catholic news segments on the show. So, sometimes we'll go three hours and I will just be going through life site news articles of um it's not it's not even abuses, it's just the direction that the Roman Catholic Church is going in now. It's become normative.
So I think really where I've gotten so after each live stream I'll typically get DMs or emails after from people that are interested or maybe hey I'm thinking about orthodoxy. I get the most emails and DMs after Catholic news segments >> because it's it's three hours. It's three hours of just all of that week's news. Just the week or maybe if it's if it's been like three weeks I'll do the last three weeks of Roman Catholic news.
And it's the worst possible news you could possibly ever read. It's always insane.
Giant dead whale mass in Germany or Harry Potter mass or you have bishops saying that they need to accept uh unrepentant people of a certain inclination into the church fully and receive the Eucharist and make this normative across all you know just it's it's insanity day after day after day. I think eventually if somebody's insulated from this because there is a knee-jerk reaction to want to ignore news, especially if you're in the trad community, that is the that is the mode of operation is to ignore oh well that's just that affects just the novasordo.
Well, that's just that's that's oh well that's the reason we're tr but that's but that's the Vatican, right? That's you can't be more Catholic than the pope, you know? I mean that's the saying um you know and if you disagree with with what's happening at the top that that is your whole that's your whole stick, right? your model. He has a top- down universal, you know, jurisdiction model. I just did a episode on baro age faith came out couple weeks ago with uh with Cassian >> and um and I I went into that that the orthodox you know the original pattern um that we inherit from the scriptures through the apostles maintained in the earliest cannons is kind of a fractal pattern about like about leadership with like the first one equals and it kind of maps all the way up to the international level with the patriarchets and um and that is the pattern right that that that is the apostolic model that that was given to us and as it and yeah there was some development in how that worked out by the time you get to the patriarchal system you know in the in the in the in the fourth fifth century right but it's the same pattern um and that's a pattern that prevents sort of this top-down forced change you know when you have top when you have when you have a singular leadership um then what it can cause is just I mean the captain can just spin the wheel and flip the ship in a completely different uh direction, you know, instantaneously. We don't have that. One bishop can go off the rails and maybe he gets a frock, maybe he goes and schism, but the whole church stands, >> right?
>> Model.
>> Well, that's an interesting point that you bring up because in the in the early in the early church, right? I mean, even even today it should be, but you don't really see this in the modern Roman Catholic Church. Every bishop had the right to excommunicate the other. that this was the way that they would handle disagreements if these things arose. So when people will bring up say I mean it's tragedy we don't want to say this is a good thing but this is just a function of the church what's going on right now between um the EP and the MP at the moment this is actually the same functionality that the early church happened for Roman Catholics to be scandalized by this well this is just a deficiency in their ecclesiology right because there's not a bishop that's going to be communicating another bishop it's all pope down right >> so this is a deviation And I'm probably a, you know, hopeless romantic in the sense that that I really do wish that there that there'd be some possibility of reconciliation with Rome on the right terms, right? Not on not false union, but on the right terms. Um, but it just seems it seems like for every good thing that happens that they seem to draw closer to to us in our faith or in our something else happens that goes in the other direction.
Right. It's just Yeah, I don't know. It It seems like it becomes over time less and less possible. I don't know.
>> I would completely agree with that.
>> Of course, maybe maybe uh one pope could change all that, right? Suddenly change everything and go back into communion with us, you know, like by fiat. So, who knows?
>> Yeah. Um Green Emperor, is there any writings from the church fathers discussing praying to saints and why it's done?
Thank you for your work.
praying to saints like you mean asking saints for intercessions I assume. Um I mean >> I mean it's just a practice of the church. I mean I mean there's references to it. I mean going all the way back to scripture. I mean really the book of revelation implies it when you know we have prayers of the saints is the sens the incense rising up from the senses of the angels and what have you and they're praying for things to happen on earth particularly judgment to happen on earth. But um I mean the fathers generally don't write a work defending something that was non-controversial, right? Everybody sought the intercession of the saints until the reformation. So that so it was a non-controversial issue uh in the early church. So they reference it, they mention it. It's in it's for example um asking for saintly intercession is in the oldest liturgies like the you know the oldest text of liturgies that we have um yeah just like it is in the liturgy today. So, it was just taken for granted. And when things are taken for granted, unless they're challenged, we don't tend to have a lot of apologetics um you know um in um in their in their favor.
Like like that's the thing with iconography. Uh people always bring up iconography. Well, it was pretty much taken for granted. You don't have the big defense of iconography with St. The Studite and St. John Demisine until it's being challenged by the iconoclass. And that's like, wait, what are you talking about? What do you mean it's not right?
Um, so that's why there's a there's a a der of, you know, of sources before then, not because it didn't exist. You have to find sort of little anecdotal references and things prior to that because uh because it wasn't controversial. Mhm. Yeah, that's that's an interesting point that you make because I actually just had this conversation with somebody uh where there's a figure online, JP Uncut, who's an evangelical gentleman, and he challenges this notion of intercession of the saints. But when any archaeological evidence is brought up before him, it's never enough. He wants like a an early treatise defending it.
Well, just like you said, it's not going to exist if nobody's challenging this notion. It's already built in within the Christian culture. They're literally engraving it upon the tombs. Um, so >> yeah, I mean it's and and and it also that also to to give him to give him this whoever this guy is you're talking about to give him any uh to give him his terms was basically to accept solora, right? because essentially his idea is that unless it's it's stated in black and white in the 66 books that he accepts of the Bible uh because he won't even they usually often times won't even admit the ones that um that are in Bible um then that's not real evidence. So if and if so if we go outside if we go outside the Bible and look at second century references he's not going to accept that because it's really anyway.
Um, so he's going to probably say, "Well, you know, but if that's the case, then why wasn't it there in the first century? Why didn't Paul mention it?"
>> Um, yeah.
>> Well, yeah. I mean, well, it's also like if if we were going to go based off of that standard, uh, well, then tell me explicitly in the scripture where apostolic succession ceased. I mean, Acts chapter 1, that Judas's uh, uh, successor is appointed, right? The person who's going to replace his apostolic office. So >> well in academics, you know, the the argument from silence is the most tricky. That's the most problematic one.
You make when you make an So we're not the ones making an argument from silence. They are right. They're saying that because there's nothing there, it doesn't exist. What we're saying is look, >> when it when it appears in the record, even if it's a century, a little over a century later, um it appears very quickly. There's nothing challenging it. there's no controversy over it. And that generally um shows us that that it has some kind of some kind of history or pedigree to it already, right?
>> We can assume that, you know, it wasn't just some guy named Fred in Rome that one day said, "Hey, let's start let's start praying to the saints." And everyone just said, "Oh, let's do that."
Right? It already is it's popping up in different parts of the church body in different in different places around the Mediterranean, Middle East, and so forth. Um, you know, so it's it's it has some kind of prehistory before those first sources start to pop up. So the argument from silence works more in our favor in that case. If it was a 500year difference, we would have a lot worse case from the argument of silence. It would really work against us uh in in that situation.
>> Yeah. I mean, we can see we can see intercession of the saints, especially angelic intercession within the scripture itself. Um, I think sometimes that's helpful for them to see. You know, in the Psalms, pray, uh, praise him you heavenly host, so on and so forth. You've got, uh, in in the book of Job, uh, discussing an angelic commiator. Um, I mean, there's all sorts of references to this in the Old Testament. This was actually, I keep saying this, but I I had so many conversations today. This was actually something I was discussing with somebody that was asking questions about Orthodoxy Today, which, by the way, I love doing that. You guys don't bug me.
uh like uh I I specifically chose a uh a job when I was moving into Protestant pastoral min ministry. I chose a daytime job that would allow me to take phone calls. So I don't I don't mind chatting with you guys. You're not going to burn me out with that. Um, but of course you need to be plugged into a local church and have a a working relationship with your priest so that you can go to somebody who is um, you know, been trained approved by the church to teach authoritatively in these types of things. Uh, because orthodoxy does not exist in the online space. It's at your parish as uh, as father mentioned earlier with the beauty of the liturgy.
Uh, Plato. So this would be a good time to plug any books you have, father.
>> Yeah. So I have one in print right now on ancient faith called uh how to read the holy fathers. Uh the subtitle is a guide for orthodox Christians. So it's it's written for orthodox Christians who want to or inquirers into the orthodox faith who want to gain um a better a better method for delving into the fathers to avoid some of the things that I've mentioned earlier like proof texting and destroying the original context. Um and just to help give understanding in general uh because reading the fathers is complex and getting into their their thought can be quite confusing for people because they don't they're not modern people. They don't write in a modern way. So so I wrote that um that's that came out last year. I'm working on u a few things right now and uh hopefully have something out uh by early next year another book um focusing more on salvation models and the fathers. So, some of the things that we've we've talked about.
>> Awesome. If you're watching this live stream after the fact, I'll have included a link to that text in the description if you want to go ahead and purchase that. Uh, go ahead and check that out. A couple of people in the comments are already saying they've read it. It's an excellent book. So, uh, be sure to check out that text. I'll have it included in the description. Uh, Henry says, "So, to be clear, Christ isn't offered in the liturgy?" question mark.
>> Well, I mean it it's in the way that I think that people think you know the the the image of of Christ being resacrificed Roman Catholic Church. Certainly that's not the case. Um I mean for multiple reasons. Number one is the uh vice is the one serving the service, right? In the sense of, you know, u well, you've you've probably heard people say that the the liturgy um is the work of the people and then you've maybe heard the counterargument, which is actually correct. It's a work behalf of the people. It's not work of the people. It's work on behalf of the people. That's what liturgy really means, which is is what it means that God is is the one acting through. It's Christ who's really the officient of that liturgy and he's taking up the bread and and the wine that's brought forward to the um to the holy table and through the hands of the bishop or the preser is the one who's offering that up. But um we say a prayer, right? Um so in that moment he's offering him he's offering it up. He's offering himself in a sense, right? He's taking bread and wine and offering himself up through that.
But it's not him like being resacrificed, right? Because we say uh in the in the high priest priestly prayer that's said during the the Trubicon, the Tubic hymn, we this goes back to at least the 4th century because it's um quoted by St. Theophilles of Alexandria. We say uh for you, oh Lord, are the offerer and the offering the receiver and the one who's distributed.
All three or all four, right? So he is the one offering it up through the hands of the clergy. Um he's the thing being offered in that sense in that moment.
But as the bread and wine represents him, right? Um he's the one who's receiving the offering because he's one with his father and he's the one distributed to us as the part that we receive like in the Old Testament tabernacle, the meat that the people took back and ate which was their communion with God. So he's all four things simultaneously.
uh he's represented in all four things.
Um and but he's not re reenacting the cross, right? It's a participation in his once-forall um sort of offering.
That does that help? I mean, it's it's complex because we're we're we we want to see things as black and white. We want to, you know, uh paint things into a corner and it's not easy to do that with the liturgy. It's way more complex than that. And um and the fact that we have to envision that Christ is the one acting through that service. He is the he is the liturgist. You could say the celebrant.
>> He has a follow-up here. He says, "Amazing answer. What would be a good book for looking into these liturgy questions I have?"
>> Well, definitely St. Nicholas Kavasilos, his book, I can't remember the name of my head, but it's the one he does on the liturgy and the sacraments. Um he there's two two books in English by St. Nicholas, as far as I'm aware. There's only two still. Uh, one of them is more on the spiritual life, one is on liturgy and sacraments. The one on the G and sacraments is is is is very good.
Actually, they're both good, but the one that he answers his question, we'll say.
I have to uh I have to bug Johan. He says, "Eo, he's a he's a regular viewer.
Eio sounds amazing on the surface.
Catholicism can seem so guilt- driven by comparison." Well, hey, I already told you earlier in the chat, you got to go to the liturgy this Sunday. That's it.
So this Sunday, go to go to the divine liturgy. Let me know how it was the next live stream I do next week.
>> Yeah, I there is a sense I mean there's there is a historical I mean this this is what Martin Luther was was what his problem was, right? His problem was that the way that the understanding of of um you know of sins and merits you know became like a like merits and demmerits kind of the way it developed in this in up through the scholastic period um you know it it can drive you crazy am I clean am I clean you know he's going to he's going to confession every day am I clean and all he did was you know this is very pertinent to what we talked about earlier All he did was sort of flip the system upside down with with the same system though. All he said was, "Okay, well, the individual merits of saints don't need to be transferred to me to make up for my, you know, uh, my sins I've committed, you know, um, you know, through some kind of indulgence or whatever. Rather, what Christ did on the cross filled the treasury or bank of marriage to to infinite overflowing. And all I have to do, so he's he's an enlightenment guy, Martin Luther.
thinking. All I got to do is mentally accept this this this is what faith is to mentally um take on Christ as my Lord and Savior and have this moment where I say Lord you know I want you to be I want I want you to be this person then you know this this uh this relationship with me where you are my Lord and Savior and and uh and therefore in that moment Lord now that I am a believer you will transfer the infinite or impute to me we'll say you know the infinite um merits that are in that you know because it's over so he just took the same system right he's working in a in a scholastic system that was already established from you know Aluan Lombard Aquinus right you go right down the line you know like um there's the system that's been slowly kind of u you know growing and getting more detailed and adding more nuances to it and more little things to it and Martin Luther just took the same system and said okay I'll just flip it upside and and and now I don't feel guilty anymore.
>> Yeah.
>> It's like a mental exercise. It's a mental exercise, right?
>> That's why you can say sin boldly, you know, because the idea is like you can't nothing you can do is going to separate you from Christ now because you've already imputed his own righteousness to you. You know, you know, which is the full bank of of merits. So, >> so the guilt, that's where the guilt comes from. But quite frankly, I've talked to quite a few evangelicals and other types of Protestants over the years. Um, and they don't seem to escape it. Um, because they they uh particularly if they believe in predestination, they've often said to me, I sometimes I can't tell if I'm really uh part of the elect or not because I messed up and maybe I'm actually part of the damned, right?
Maybe I'm one of the ones con like there's still that worry and that guilt all the time. Um, so I think we can we can kind of try to convince ourselves we're on the good side of this and try to assuage our own guilt.
Um, but ultimately, you know, I don't think any of those those little mental exercises are going to do it. It's only a real and living uh relationship with Christ in the church that you experience both sacramentally, aesthetically, in your prayer life. um you know that you can you know that it's it's real and transformative that gives you real hope for salvation.
>> Well, you know what's interesting when you read first John and it says so that you may know you have salvation. There's a whole list of things that to check.
>> Yeah.
>> It's not it's not as if uh it's not as if your once saved always saved model is uh you know able to be shoehorned into that. Not that all Protestants believe once saved always saved, but that reminds me of a time we were responding to a um reformed Baptist gentleman that was trying to uh uh shoehorn his theology into it, which is kind of interesting. Um it doesn't work. And you're what you're saying is absolutely correct. under the Protestant framework, if you were to say, accept this, I don't know, penal substitutionary model or imputed righteousness model or if you're a reformed guy and you were to say, "Okay, well, you know what? Um, you're you're saved if you're elect. So now my purpose is to just verify my election by constantly nitpicking my works." This just becomes a this is um this is a futile exercise in fruit checking for the rest of your life which actually causes much more anxiety than the actual gospel and theosis and participating in uh and uh and Christ's uh energies and God's energies. Um it's it's a completely different thing. we can actually have uh a greater sense of uh peace knowing that we are attending the divine liturgy that we're being transformed through uh theosis that we are participating in the mysteries that we are uh walking in accordance with Christ's divine will um rather than simply okay well I I think I'm saved but now I'm I'm anxious I have to figure out if I'm saved by checking my works over and over and over again. So for for individuals who say uh you know, oh you're you're a worksbased salvationist, there sure is a lot of fruit checking involved in the solid model.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Well, even even in the uh Jerusalem council, it's very clear that it's grace working through works.
There's never been a dichotomy north church, right? People have asked me about faith and works. I just tell them to read uh St. Mark the Monk's text in the in the popular Petristic series on faith and works. I'm like, go back to the fifth century. We've never had a dichotomy. It's like St. James in the epistle doesn't have a dichotomy between faith and works. It's faith. It's it's a working faith or or faithfully working.
You know, it's, you know, >> uh wounded wounded angle says Christoi Althos.
>> You're day late, my friend. Unless you're still in another time zone somewhere.
>> Huge super chat from Moli Roofing. Thank you so much. Hear me out. Parish boxing teams for fellowship between churches and all men learning to fight get in shape. Yay or nay?
>> I don't know. This person might know me.
I was a former boxer, so maybe this person knows me. I don't know. I don't know recognize the name though. Oh, they they really paid the big bucks there. I see. Get that comment in there.
>> They really want the uh they really want the boxing matches. The orthodox boxing matches. Look, I'm not a I'm not a boxer. I'm a grappler. We could do jiu-jitsu teams. How about that?
>> We'll compromise.
You know, it's funny. Uh Trent Horn does jiu-jitsu as well. He's a blue belt. And uh back when I was a Protestant. He wanted to do a jiu-jitsu debate where we would we would debate theology and then grapple.
That would be uh that would be interesting. I'd still I'd still be down to do that in the far future. But um I just thought that was an interesting concept. I think that'd be fun. Um let's talk God question. When Christ said it was necessary for him to be baptized, wouldn't that disprove substitution being the only aspect of the atonement?
Very interesting >> insight there.
>> Well, I mean certainly, yeah, he's to fulfill all righteousness, he had to to be baptized. That's true. Um, and that definitely states that would imply that it's a necessary aspect of the economy of salvation. Um, yeah, I mean it's definitely uh one biblical ref uh reference that we could probably marshall um you know in favor of kind of the orthodox but yeah I would say probably all of it though right everything that Christ does um I mean the moment that the archangel Gabriel says uh to the theas you know power from you know from on high is going to overshadow you that that was a necessary thing that had to happen right says that just like Christ sends the spirit in time on Pentecost. The spirit comes into theos to you know so it's like one sends one uh the spirit sends the son and then the son sends the spirit like all these things are necessary in the economy um and uh but uh but baptism I mean the the aspect of baptism like what what happens and if you look at the hymns that happen on the that are that are uh sung on on theophony uh St. John the Baptist says very clearly like I don't understand this.
Why why would you have to go to the water? In other words, he's saying look, you're the righteous one. You're the holy one of Israel. Why would you have to go into the water? And when Christ says fulfill our righteousness, it's because our the Lord is going down into the depths of the of the abyss again and reclaiming his cosmos, right? He's he's trans he's transforming and he's beginning to to declare the universe good again, right? like going down into the waters of creation. Uh so it's part of of his his overarching mission which is redemption of the whole universe, right? It's it's transformation of the whole universe. It's not just taking on well it's not at all taking on the wrath of the father in that sense, but it's not just his work on the cross. It's it's this this it's a cosmic reality, right? this really is a cosmic reality and and him destroying, you know, um the demonic hold on creation is a part of that work. It's part of the economy of salvation. So, it's definitely uh a big thing. And when we go down to baptism, we're new creation, right? It's because he sanctified those waters. It's why they're regenerative regenerative.
Was the sacrificial system in the Old Testament efficacious or was it simply pointing to Christ? Is Andrew's book Lamb of the Free a good book on that topic? I know he is an Anglican.
I haven't read the book so I can't comment on that. Um uh different fathers say different things about the efficacy of the Old Testament um you know culture worship. Um uh St. Sir is the one that that did the most work on because he's because he's one of the only ones that has a full commentary on the pentatio.
Um which is not very that's very that's rare. There aren't many fathers that go through systematically uh the first five books in dealing with like Leviticus and and so forth. Um St. Sirill essentially says that um it had somewhat of an efficacy in as like in as much as so long as the Israelites did it in full faith in God and didn't see it as like mechanical per se. They did it with full faith in God that it was a way God could work through that for them. He has one comment that he says in his gleira which is his commentary on on the pentatou. Uh in general though he makes the point of saying that it was never it was never necessary in the sense that we might like I've heard and it may not be an official protestant view but I've heard many protestants say that well Jesus had to shed his blood on the cross as a sacrifice because in the old testament blood was shed.
Well St. Sir as as other fathers even going back to Molo of Sardis St. Molito says the same thing in the second century it's the exact opposite that God basically establishes the types of of the offerings because the son was going to offer himself up on the cross. So it's the exact opposite. And in fact you know St. Cro says something very similar to what St. Alto says in the second century. Uh St. says, "When the destroyer came on on on the Exodus, right, on the day on the on the eve of Passover, did he see blood of lambs on the door or did he actually see the blood of Christ who would be shed?" It's he basically implies it's the latter.
Um, and so one of the points I've often made I made uh in my research is the point is the idea that you that that the types exist for the antitype. The antitype is the real reality, right?
Christ is is the is the antitype. The antitype is the fulfillment, the reality. God works through time and and in history establishing. He doesn't like God doesn't look at this like it isn't like someone rolled the dice and God says, "Oh, what do I do? Okay, humans have this thing about blood and this and that. Let me create a system that will fit in with." No, God guided the whole thing, right? God gives the revelation of the tabernacle worship, how offerings are going to be made. uh >> every single one of those those offerings is a type pointing to the one singular antitype of Christ's own work.
So that's a very different way of looking at it, you know, and that's that's essentially how how um how St. S understands it, but you find it in multiple other fathers as well.
>> Great emperor says to restate Alex's question earlier. What would you say about grace as reciprocate gift in the fathers? Barlay and NT scholars have been talking about it.
>> I'm not sure what he means or grace is reciprocate gift. What does that mean?
Is he talking about like uhism where grace is an incidental reality of of I'm not quite sure what he means by that.
>> If you if you have a clarification, send it in and I'll pull it up. Um I'll get to Alex's question next because they're arguing about this in the chat.
Father Joseph, do you consider St. Augustine to be a monarchist or a synergist?
>> Oh wow. Well, Mahhata, you know, I'm not an e expert on St. Augustine. I mean, I've read through a good many of his works.
Um, and I wouldn't say necessarily he's I don't know. I don't want to I don't want to uh pigeon hole him as a as a monergist. I think maybe that's even just an anacronism to kind of apply to him.
>> But uh but probably someone who is who's an actual Augustine scholar would have to weigh on on that because uh very few like uh like most people who are Augustine scholars that's like that's all they do right they focus on St. Augustine and uh you know but that being said I do have very a very clear view about how to use St. Augustine within the orthodox um you know um consensus of the fathers uh and and where Augustine disagrees with the consensus we go with the consensus which happens you know here and there right where St. Gustin uh says something and we don't necessarily uh it doesn't get taken up in the church as a whole and for example he sort of um seems to have an early version of predestination and the church doesn't take that up you know of course he gets taken up later on in the west but um but yeah I don't know uh Alex I can't give you like a really clear answer there >> question how do we understand the language of necessity in the New Testament in light of God's freedom such as thus it is written and thus it is necessary for Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead. Luke 24.
>> That's we we can't extrapolate that and assume that means a necessity placed upon God. That means necessary means necessary for us for the plan of salvation that was for us, right? It's necessary um for our for for the way God is going to work out the salvation. It's it's for us and it's necessary for us to take that and and then and then try to project it onto God or his attributes. That's where the problem would be where you try to put a necessity on God. So one of the things that the the Greek fathers do very clearly is uh from very early on is make a clear distinction between what they between economia and the theologia. So theologia um theology proper is what we can say about the trinity in the trinity's like internal life in any way and economia is god how the trinity acts through the created order through time and history and space and so forth. um we can say only limited things theologically properly speaking in this in the sense that we can only say various things about God's inner life and those are things that he has directly revealed to us right they're things that he has revealed to us even if we're using different terminology like um usiosubstantial that is describing something God has revealed to us something that we can find in scripture and in the in the writings of the of the um you know patriarchs the prophets the apostles you know the saints of all time. Um, economia what is is God's acting through time which is really God the person's acting. So it's their energies acting you know over time. We can say a lot more about that because we're observing that. I can I can say something about how God acts in my own life personally for example and how that is part of the bigger picture of the life of the church. Or I can say for example uh this this thing and this thing and this thing like were necessary to happen to me for me to have become a priest. Right? If this had not happened and this had not happened and and God had not worked through those particular situations I I would not be a priest today. Right?
That that so I can I can speak about necessity in my own life in that sense.
Right? I can say right these things aligned in the right way. we can see God's hand working through the economy because the economy is still is still continuing, right? God's economy hasn't come to a close. It's it doesn't come to a close. Uh it's the final uh culmination is the is the end of time.
So um so I think that's the issue. The issue is trying to keep keep uh you know keep separate there the economia and the theologia you know as as the two different aspects of speaking of how God is.
What is the theological significance of the rejection of the pilioquay? So he asked a question earlier. So a bit of a for context. He was saying, I understand that it wasn't in the initial creed, but what would be the theological reasons not to accept it?
>> Yeah. I mean, it's a big question. We could spend like a couple episodes on that. Um, I can give you a quick summary of some of the things St. Phodias the Great brought up in the 8th 9th century.
you know when he's addressing this um so the the standard description of the trinity um of for example the capidosians right the capidoshian fathers uh and what we find in descriptions in the creed and in the councils um makes clear that that what is what really distinguishes the persons what what's been revealed to us right we again we can say very little theologically except what's revealed What is revealed that makes them different is what designates them as person. Right?
And there's only two ways of doing that >> really.
>> There is the names themselves. So father, son, spirit, right? That that shows you there's distinction in some way. There's real distinction. Um or their relationship to one another in Greek causations, right? So uh the scripture gives us the term begotten for the son and and only the term proceeding forth you know from the you know for the spirit the and then implied is the father being the source of that then we give him the title like source or technically unbegotten right uh is what the fathers usually went with which means like the source. So, so uh those those names or the causation the way we describe causation is the only way we can really um show that they are distinct from each other in some way.
Everything else we say about God would have to be predicated to them as a whole for them to be the one God existing as one to have one essence right to exist as one to be one. So every other attribute we would possibly ascribe to God uh any other name we would give to them like that would describe them like what they like how they are um and most of these come from like they really come from scripture I know the most of these these um attributes um the problem with the filiove that St. FOD has pointed out is is if being source like so so think about the the origin of the filopate. It begins in like the first reference to it is in Toledo in the sixth century in Spain as an opposition to the Goths, right? The Gothic Aryans um are are subordinating Christ as a creature. you saw this these remnants of aranism and they thought at Toledo well if we say that the son is also the source of the spirit we basically elevated him up and shown that he shares everything the father shares so that was kind of the that was kind of the original intent of it right to to to really bolster the claim that Christ is fully divine that was their intention um St. Vod points out that's what you mean right if son is source or the spirit along with the father then being source um is an attribute that they both share so either one of two things happens either the spirit not having that is definitely deficient in some way right if he doesn't have an attribute that both father and son share as being source of him then the spirit is deficient so he's automatically subordinated okay that's or the other option is you say okay well then s Being source is an attribute of the whole trinity. So it's equal again. But now spirit becomes source and the spirit would have to generate a fourth. Fourth of them had the same quality and the fourth had to generate a fifth. So now you have an infinite regression persons added to the trinity. So both both are very very problematic. So the the the answer the orthodox answer has always been the same is that that when we talk about distinction only there's only two ways of saying the names themselves or the the singular causation. terms that we use which are biblically based. We don't transfer those names to each other. We don't ever call the you know uh we never um blend them because then one person would anything we say about two of them has to be said about three of them you know to to make sure that it's um that they share the same attributes.
>> I see the context for that reciprocation question. It was an earlier one from Alex says father bless St. Paul says grace is a gift. Could you speak to the understanding in ancient cultures that gifts required reciprocation? I know some new perspective scholars Barlay speak on this. Thank you. And while you address, I'm going to step away for just a second. I'll be right.
>> Sure. Um well, yes, I mean if we if we use the idea of grace in a very literal way just meaning a gift uh in a giftgiving culture, I guess you could say that. And that has tended to be the way that that modern New Testament scholars see. And actually, I think the Reformation in general sees grace as not an energy of God, but a uh but the gift of salvation itself. It's like it's represents the gift of salvation.
That was that would be where the problem is is I think that understanding because there's several occasions where Paul uses the word grace specifically to describe God acting, God doing something in or through us. Um so so it becomes clear that it is yet another operation of God or activity of God. So when it's seen in that way, it's just one of the many ways God acts within us. It's it's it's God freely offering himself to us.
So it is gift in that sense. It's God freely offering. But the very but the basic thing we could always say is what can we give to God, right? the uh the fathers say repeatedly they go back to the prophets in the Old Testament where God says I don't need anything you know God is is completely self-sufficient he doesn't need anything from us um the offerings are not for him they're really for us so we can be relationship with him we can't add anything or take anything away from God so how can the gift of god the power of god gifting himself to us which is grace that you know um there's nothing we can give back to him that he needs Now obviously in synergy um when synergy acts when the when the energies of God act through us which are all of them his grace his power his love uh everything acting through us you know when we're in when we're cooperating with uh with god's energies uh in that sense the only thing that he wants from us he does get which is us right he he we become we are brought into relationship with god which is all he ever wanted from the beginning Right?
That is the story of the fall is God wants us to be in relationship with him and we turn our backs we rebel. So so in that sense when we when we cooperate with God when uh when his energies um you know when we don't resist them then yes we we even though he doesn't need anything the one thing he wants he does receive which is us.
>> Uh Jorm says in regards to St. August in his work called in the spirit in the letter he he believed when grace is external it's monogistic but when it goes into a person it becomes synergistic >> interesting yeah I had to read up more on that again big uh big terrain um but um yeah I I've heard people say he was entirely monogistic but again I I don't have enough um um you know background in that to to go into uh get into maybe two more questions and then we'll wrap up here. Uh Blake asks, he's an inquirer. He says, "I'm going to my first Orthodox service this Saturday.
Praise God. I'm I wanted to ask how vespers works and what vespers even means."
>> Vespers is the is the Latin word for it.
It's uh it's espirinos in Greek, which means just evening. So, it's the evening service. Um so well congratulations on planning to go to your first service. Uh in churches that do best every Saturday um which is a lot of uh the OCA antio tend to always do it. Serbian um not all not all jurisdictions do them every Saturday but but where churches do it on Saturdays it is not a is not a eucharistic service. It is a a preparation for the next day because the Orthodox Church still follows the sort of ancient Jewish um clock where sunset is the beginning of the new day. Like there's evening and there's morning uh one day I guess says in Genesis. So with the setting of the sun, the first service of the day is really this evening service or vespers and um which actually it's kind of the same name and the Anglicans called it e even song like it's an evening song. So it's kind of like cited just calling it evening. In the ancient church it was the lighting of the lamps, the offering of incense for in the evening and all the hymns and themes are for whatever the the the new day is. So they so Saturday night you're already hearing hymns for that particular Sunday that's the next day.
And uh in some jurisdictions it's also seen as a good preparation for liturgy the next day. you know, just kind of getting your mind and heart into the into the stream of things so you can, you know, um be prepared for uh going to the Eucharist the next day.
I recently left OCIA in the Catholic Church and was taught to offer up my suffering or to carry my cross with Christ. Does Orthodoxy believe something similar?
Um yeah, I mean it dep this is a pastoral approach. I mean to say like you know Christ is there in the midst of your suffering. I mentioned that earlier with St. Sophroni of of Christ entering into our suffering and we can and we can truly sort of tap into that power that Christ gives us in suffering through prayer. Um I don't uh you know and and this kind of language carrying your cross I think is is common to all different Christian groups as uh as meaning like patiently bearing the suffering of this life. I think the only difference would be and this this has been broadly sort of rejected in a lot of modern Roman Catholicism but we have to remember that that as Roman Catholicism developed in the middle ages um there there were some dark conceptions of this right. So you have the the penitential manuals uh from like the sixth to like the to the 11th 12th century where every sin is quantifiable with a certain amount of suffering you have to inflict upon yourself or have if this this is mostly from monastics but it kind of bled over into society at large where people thought like you have to do things to make yourself suffer in order to make up for your sins um to literally to satisfy them uh so that God's judgment is no longer on So you already see this developing a little bit in these penitential manuals. Um and this is where sort of the stereotypes like oh you know the priest told me to kneel on rice with bare knees while I did my prayers because I sinned. Um you know I don't know how often that actually happened in the you know in the last hundred years but that's kind of one of the stereotypes people will say is that but people still do things like for example go up in Ireland people still crawl up the mount um that St. Patrick was supposed to have been on where he battled against the demons and persuaded tried to persuade God, you know, uh they crawl up, they're on their knees, they get all bloody and stuff and they see that self-imposed flagagillation as a sort of satisfaction of sins and participation in grace.
um you know but um now to a certain extent in early Christianity more so in the Latin West uh because you see this in Tertullian and Cyprian they saw aeticism as a mild type of self-infliction of suffering in the sense that you know you're when you when you fast and you keep vigil and you give alms you are denying yourself right there is some deprivation there and by doing that you're imposing some suffering and Tertullian is the first one actually who says that certain things like this can have a satisfaction. That's where the term actually first gets used and you know he's kind of a prickly pair. Um you know comes the joins the frigian heresy but um so you will find that occasionally in some orthodox saints where they they only the west will come to use the word satisfaction.
It tends to grow much later becomes more prevalent in St. Gregory the great and then after him they start using satisfaction to talk about like a way of God forgiving sins you know um it it seems to kind of grow but but I guess you could say that in in ways your aesthetical life if you call that bearing your cross or self-denial it it can be seen in some way as a self-imposed bit of suffering just because all uh all push back on our comfort zone is a type of suffering right but It's not the same thing as self flagagillation or purposely doing yourself harm or things like that to to make yourself pay for your sins so you can not have time in purgatory or something like that, you know.
>> Yeah. We're not we're not paying off temporal guilt or anything like this with uh right >> by beating ourselves or St. Margaret Mary Alakokway eating vomit or these types of things.
>> Lord have mercy. Um so we've got so we just got three super chats sent in. We can address these quickly. I know we're going to wrap up here in a moment, but these are some good questions. In the filth asks, not to ask you what a pigeon thinks, but I'm going to ask what a pigeon thinks. Is it taught the animals were willing participants in the Old Testament sacrifices?
>> Don't think it's taught anywhere. I I I'm not I'm not aware that we've ever theologically ascribed a real will to animals like we understand human will, right?
um only in the sense that you know you could say that animals instinctively follow the will of God. Um you know I mean you could say that you could maybe make that claim that that animals you know they just act upon instinct and and God made them that way. But I I think we're we're ascribing kind of a we're kind of personifying the the the the doves here, you know. Um when we do that um you know Yeah. I it makes makes for like a romantic image, you know, like Native American have like this idea like the animals kind of present themselves to us for food or whatever, you know, like some of those old stories like up in Alaska and stuff. It's a romantic image. I don't I don't think there's a theological basis per se for >> Vulpus says Alex Mog and Cleave would stream Stamina Monsters. I I cannot stream for eight hours. That is impossible. I cannot do it. I'm too old.
Alex Alex can do that. Alex could do the eight hour streams. I'll keep mine uh the the one I did with Father Steven D.
Young was very long for for me. It was like five hours. That was a long stream.
Uh Jay Norm says, "St. Augustine's work in the spirit."
Um and the letter was written 415 AD. So his middle years, he could have advocated for a full monistic system in his later years. his opening of >> I think the accusation is like in his Pelagian debates he kind of goes full on more majestic. That's what I've that's what I've in secondary literature at least.
>> Awesome.
>> That would be his later career. Yeah.
>> Alex says, "No, I cannot do the eight hour shoot." Yeah, you gota you're going to do them back to back and then never stream again because you're gonna be sick of it. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Father.
>> My pleasure. This is fun.
>> Absolutely. You'll have to come back sometime um in the future and then sometime I'll have to come down and visit y'all in uh y'all y'all are >> you're in Orlando, right?
>> I'm Yeah, I'm in I'm in um I'm a little bit of y'all. So, yeah. But we can come uh come and visit uh at some point.
>> But uh >> yeah, that'll be that'll be fun. Go ahead and uh go ahead and plug your book one more time and then we will uh >> yeah I don't have a copy to grab right right here but it's uh how to read the holy fathers on ancient faith. Um so that's yeah where we can get ancient faith books that's where to get it and um yeah other than that yeah just uh I I kind of a ghost that just pops up and haunts various shows I'm invited on to.
So, um, so if you want to find me, just search my Google my name and you'll find other videos I've been on. But hopefully hopefully I can start to leave the PSA stuff. I can transition to some other I've been trying to get into other topics because I think uh there's there's so many other things that we we need to talk about. So, I'm glad we did did the Q&A. That was fun.
>> Yeah. Well, you can um maybe you can get into this uncreated Bible argument that's been going on. We're gonna we're going to stream for a little longer and talk about this crazy artulating.
>> What is it? That sounds like the That's what the Muslims believe about the Quran.
>> Yes, exactly. This is Shia Protestantism basically.
>> Yeah. Yeah. It's like golden tablets or whatever written in the heavens that the law reads or whatever, you know.
>> Well, the argument was something like Alex, you want to you want me to go ahead and invite you up? We can we can discuss for a moment. Um I don't know.
Do you you have a hard you have to leave right now, father. We're going to >> Yeah, I'm good. I can stay on a little longer. Yeah.
>> Okay. Here. Alex, I just sent the I sent the stream link if you want to come up.
Father Ron, if you want to come up. Uh, >> make a big cup of coffee. So, I'm going to be wired for a little bit that I was trying to wake up before I before the show started. So there's this there's this argument that was made by a Protestant gentleman that was something along the lines of since I'm going to try to remember exactly what he said because if not he's going to clip me and he's going to say I'm like straw maning him or something. Uh the the argument was something along the lines of the text of the scripture has the unique markers of God. Therefore it it has an authority within itself that self-terminates within itself.
So >> that's just the way trying to justify soul scriptura I suppose. Yeah.
>> Yes. So he's trying to I got Father Ron on on the stage. Hey, Father Ron. Good to see you.
>> Hello.
>> Welcome to the show.
>> Hello.
>> As you can see, I I dressed up to come and see you, Father.
>> We're we're hanging out. This is the after after show discussion here.
>> So the argument was for a self- authenticating Bible. So he doesn't have to appeal to any authorities. He's not he's not necessarily talking about the canon only. He's discuss he's discussing the authority that this book has. So, Father Steven Young made the argument that this actually gives the Bible agency. Like this gives a book agency.
>> Yeah. Well, that's kind of my argument I I derived from St. John Damosine. um and I kind of expanded it in an article some years ago was that essentially um that's kind of what like you could you can really claim that what the Muslims do without even realizing it, it basically making the word of God into a person because if the if the Quran is the recitation of Allah and it's always existed with him and comes from him, then it's really that is the word of God, right? You've given personhood >> to Allah's word.
>> And since his spirit also comes from him, it says in the Quran, >> and is always with him, now you suddenly have the trinity and Muhammad didn't even realize it.
So, >> but uh but yeah, that's in that sense.
Yeah, the the word uh but the word does the word does have agency if the word is a person, which we do believe, you know, but not the text. The text has no agency. Well, that's Welcome to the show, Alex. Glad to have you on.
>> Yeah, my pleasure.
>> So, this is, by the way, by the way, guys, for the chat, I'm not bringing up just anyone, just my buddies. So, Father Ron's coming up, Alex is coming up. If Father Stephen D. Young is in the chat, he can come up.
>> Uh, but I'm not doing random callins because we're not doing debates or anything like that right now. Um, because I'm not doing debates at all on my show right now. But, uh, >> anyway, >> go ahead, Alex. I know you had some interesting thoughts on this subject.
>> I was just, you know, maybe I overstated it a bit when I said that uh when I with that like little syllogism that I put out there, but nonetheless, they're trying to say that like the Bible has some privileged like ontological status like such that you don't need anyone to apply it. You don't need anyone to like actually decide what it is. on its own it can emerge and on its own it binds people and just like from the field that I come from like you know in many areas of law whether it's the constitution or some statute or a municipal code a document does not bind people by itself a a body a legislature a city council binds people to documents right so this is kind of the point that I was trying to make and really it like what father Stephen was saying that eventually this kind of reduces down to some Muslim-like position that Father Joseph you were already like alluding to >> to some Muslim position where they're they're adding like divine attributes to a book. So like that like divine authority they're taking just that one attribute though like not pre-existence or anything. It's like picky choosy a little bit. They take that one divine attribute of God's authority and they apply it to a book and on some basis that it's like God's speech and I know like everybody on this panel is very familiar with like the most basic uh history of like textual criticis like forget textual criticism already that's like a little lofty just where what do the manuscripts look like right already this doesn't work like which which one is God speaking through of course we believe that the Holy Spirit preserved the scriptures throughout, you know, the history of the church, you know, but it's this is not a magic document, right? The the Christian faith is something that is like passed down. It's something that's received as it's getting passed down from generation to generation. You have like these the most authoritative, highly uh like binding documents in the Bible that are passed down from generation to generation along with the tradition. The Bible on its own, it it can't do things.
It's not a person. It's not an agent.
>> Yes.
>> The Bible doesn't bind you. The church binds you to the Bible, right? It's >> inspired by the Holy Spirit. It's, >> you know, >> well, you know, you know, there's there's a lot there's a lot that we can say about this, but I think we really >> like he's he's he's conflating. I'll pull up I'll pull up this um I'll pull up this tweet because this is >> first question I would ask is which Bible I mean >> right >> it's like I mean that's you know which version which which translation which text which you know the or text that that some scholar in the 20 20th century finally came up with I mean which which Bible is the is the one that is fully authoritative in his mind >> so this was his statement here so he says is um when Protestants say scripture is self- authenticating, we are not saying the physical book has personal agents. Yeah. Yes, we are aware you are not making the explicit claim, but we're saying that's an entailment.
As if paper and ink make decisions.
We're saying God's speech is self- authenticating because God is a speaker.
So, he pushes it back a step.
>> I'm I just got to interrupt, right? I'm sorry. God's speech is self- authenticating because God is What does that even mean?
>> Correct. It means nothing.
>> Yeah. tology >> this word salad.
>> Yeah.
>> Um he says that's why I emphasized in my video and in prior videos the uniqueness of divine speech is central to the solos scriptural discussion. This simply evidences that the authority belongs to the divine offer not to the material artifact. So scripture authenticates itself means this is pay attention to this means the scripture bears the marks and authority of God's own speech. It terminates in itself. It's the first rule and the spirit enables the church to recognize that voice.
>> This last statement here, >> doesn't that seem to refute his >> his own his own premise? It doesn't make any sense. If he's arguing for solos scriptura, you're saying the church has a unique authority to recognize the voice of God and to recognize these markers and to make definitive determinations on this. Well, you no longer believe in solar scripture then.
>> Well, and also again, same as question as which Bible, which church, >> you know, >> which church has the spirit to to properly recognize that voice, >> particularly if different churches have different um readings of what that voice of God is supposedly saying in the text.
>> It it almost seems like he's arguing that the Presbyterian church, which is the church of which he's a member, is the one true church. they uniquely have this terrorism to uh identify these markers. I had made an analogy and I said it's like if if uh the marks equal uh like the authentication of the text to to verify that this is uh this is like the mark of the king or something.
Let's say you have two coins, right? So I have this coin here. One's got a big X on it. One's got a circle on it. Which one of that is the is the mark of the uh is the mark of the king? Which one is his seal? the X or the circle.
You need a you need a third party to identify that an authority that the king puts in place to identify and make an affirmation that yes, this is actually the mark that the king has established.
You know what that's that's why kings have like mints. That's why governments have mints. They have authorities to judge on these things. So that was an analogy that I made. I was like, if that's the case, then this coin authenticates itself. you know.
>> Yeah. I just I can't help but see how this argument is so eager to add like some some special attribute or some special status to, you know, the Bible.
But they are not willing to add this to the church, right, which is like the body of Christ. They're not willing to grant that the church has some like elevated ontological status instead, which you see in the text, right? Like on its face, like let's you don't you don't even really need to interpret that, right? It's the body of Christ. So whatever you think the church is, that has an elevated ontological status. I don't see that the text saying that the Bible has some elevated ontological status. Also like this chain of custody of authority. I've spent so like maybe a little bit of time thinking about this uh idea recently. It's like so the the the speech of God, right? The the God's speech comes from God manifests through comes to the prophet manifests through the prophet. He speaks it to the people.
Okay. The authority is in the prophet.
Later the prophet goes and records whatever relation he received in some like written text or uh his assistant or his students will write it down for him.
Right?
>> What Miles is saying is that the authority vested in the prophet somehow transfers through a piece of paper or papyrus or a clay tablet to whoever receives it. Now, so Miles because he has a Bible has the authority to start a new church. Well, well, the bigger question then would be uh what about all the redactions, the editors over time? I mean, you know, it wasn't, you know, one person that sat down and wrote each book of the Bible. There's a process uh of editing, of updating like the place names are updated later on, new details are added. Um, you know, the the the idea of inspiration is highly complex.
like how many different people over time were were inspired and moved by God and um and to think that that after all that complexity just suddenly I guess we're going to arbitrarily choose the date 98 you know AD98 it all just came crashing to a close and then after that you know the church supposedly just can can read it and and get you know meaning from it now as if the same spirit doesn't continue to guide the I I think the big the big the orthodox view is simply put is the is that um the fathers the saints of the church are no different than the patriarchs and prophets and apostles in the sense that they don't have the saints have do not have something more or less than they had particularly the apostles you know in the new covenant um but because it is the same spirit the understanding of the saints will always be consent with what the scripture says they're not going to contradict icted, right? It's not going to say something radically different because it's the same spirit. The spirit does not change. And so, so in the Orthodox church, yes, the scriptures is is elevated up on this pedestal like this is this is a a extremely important revelation of of or self-disclosure of God. But it doesn't stop there.
>> Should I just put up my hand?
>> Go ahead, father. You chime in whenever you would like.
Um, so I kind of took a middle position and I'm not sure how to articulate it best, but one of the things I wrote, you know, an X and stuff like that responding to some of these things was um, you know, uh, we the way we treat the gospel book uh, in the church, we enthrone it on the altar. We decorate it with, you know, a gold cover with icons and jewels.
We process it. We bow down before it. We bless the altar with it. We read from it. No Eucharist until we do all that.
Uh it can stand as a proxy for a bishop on the bishop's throne.
Uh or vice versa because Christ is the teacher. And so um but I think what that does is reflects our understanding of iconography, right? And so some of the things I I've been going up against this guy about iconography and I I threw it out there in a um in a video uh and somebody made a short of it actually a contemporary compendium made a short of it and that is this that um I I think in in in a manner of speaking so I'm shifting gears a bit from the gospel book to iconography but I it it is a it is a form of iconography. I think um because it's it's like it says in Mark, Jesus appeared in another morphe, another form, right? Um it's very interesting language in the New Testament, but um uh St. Paul refers to Christ as the icon of the invisible God. And by the way, that's the only time I think the word icon is used in the in the New Testament because there's another word that's exact representation that's used in Hebrews. it's not icon. And then in the Old Testament, you don't have the word icon except for uh a creation where we're made in the image of God and all the stuff about the images in the book of Daniel. That's the only time the word icon is used. Um but what you do have is instead of icon, you have idol in the Old Testament.
So my challenge to this guy was, sorry, I'm going a little bit off topic, but what why not? It's it's a chill afterparty, right? Um, one of the things I I I said to him is um, if iconography was so um, contested, let's put it that way.
I mean, again, an argument from silence.
Father, I agree with you. Arguments from silence are difficult. But I will I think I I think I can ask the question, why would St. Paul use that word? That would be a rather inflammatory word. uh because and especially to say he's the icon of the invisible God. I mean you can't in the Old Testament you can't do that and yet Jesus is the icon specifically of the invisible God and what we worship not just venerate we worship the icon of the invisible God.
I don't know if this if anyway so um going back to the gospel book um it to me is akin to everything all the iconography of the church and that is it is through that the veneration of it that we pass to the prototype to the word of God. So it's not God himself but it's not just another book. I'm going to take a middle position and say, "Well, no, it has its place as a as a very robust and powerful icon in the church." I don't I submit that to you, >> father. If you if you if you think uh >> but don't you know if you're an independent fundamentalist Baptist, you got to affirm Jesus is the Bible.
>> So that >> Well, isn't that interesting? But they Okay, fair enough. Now, so so that means that St. Paul should have written um he is the biblio of the invisible God, >> right? He didn't say that. So anyway, >> Alex, I like your I liked your um >> my little syllogism your little syllogism here of Miles's conundrum here. So Miles believes one, the Bible is God's speech. Two, God's energy speech is identical to God. Therefore, or uh via the transit of property, the Bible is identical to God. Miles view entails the Bible is God. Yeah. He's basically doing the the IFB thing. It's like the the uncreated the uncreated uh book. He's he's he's like a Shia Protestant now.
>> Yeah. Shia or Sunni Protestant. And you know, reasonable minds could differ like the syllogism might be on the edge. Some people complain about it might be on the edges of but I think a reasonable mind could be like yeah this this is a case that could be made here in in this syllogism and like of course like verbally he will say of course I don't think the Bible is God but the way he talks about it as we just saw is very different than this conclusion that he's trying to get us to believe >> that he doesn't think the Bible is God.
He's always saying the Bible is doing things. The Bible is self- authenticating. The Bible does this. The Bible does that. The Bible sits on a shelf. It's inspired by the Holy Spirit.
It's we see it as inherent as pride of place in terms of authoritative documents in the Orthodox Church, >> but it doesn't it it doesn't do things.
It's not a person. People do things.
>> Even even uh even NT Wright, I remember put out a book some years ago as a you know, as a Protestant New Testament scholar uh all about the authority of the scripture about how the authority is in the reading. Right? The authority is is how it's read and how it's applied by by someone. That's where the authority is, not in the text itself because you can you can take something out of context and misapply it and has no authority, >> you know. So, it is uh so it's it doesn't have an inherent authority. The authority is how the church uh utilizes it, right? Because it's it's to the church, by the church, from the church, used within the church. That's its purpose.
>> Yeah. There's also I feel like they're using the term authority like very like fast and loose here. Like there are different senses of the term authority, right? Like if you contact the authorities because like two dudes are having a a brawl in your front yard.
That means like the cops come the police go and they like they break they have authority. They are the authorities. You go to a judge who issues an order that you have to listen to it. If you don't then you go to jail, right? Like when we say that uh the constitution is an authority, we do not mean it in that sense that like you call the constitution like a piece of paper and you say, "Hey, come break up the fight in my front yard." No, we're saying that it's an authoritative document and it's an authority in that sense. And the way that Miles and I've seen also Gavin Ortland the way he uses the term authority they are using they are switching between both senses in the sense that like the the the Bible is an authority in the sense of an agent and then that like sometimes they'll switch and say that the Bible is an authority in the sense of an authoritative document that you know you have to obey right and listen to as described by an agent that has the proper authority to interpret. that document. So there's there's just so many dimensions to it that I think they're glossing over just to make this view work and like >> it it just doesn't. And you know, I'm going to have to beg your forgiveness, fathers, I'm going to have a little smoke here because >> your bubble smoker.
>> My bubble >> causes so much stress. That's so funny.
I want I wanted to pull this up uh because uh Father Hi was just on David Wood's show presenting a positive case for orthodoxy and we have already got some of the Protestant responses on X. I refreshed my feed just to see what I could find because I knew it would pop up at the top of my feed. So here's a Protestant uh reacting to that interview. He says uh autonomous self-governing churches are not in schisms and perfectly acceptable as long as there is no differences in belief. So of course the Protestant not understanding what autophily is responds with, by that standard, Protestants are autophilis churches who could still be considered one united yet decentralized body of Christ as long as we're all following the scriptures that were handed down to us. Again, what's which which what what canon uh to us? What >> handed down? That means they received a tradition.
>> Yeah.
>> There's something governing the script that's above the scriptures, right?
>> Exactly. We're We're united on the Bible. That's what they say. What does this mean?
>> They're not though.
>> Nothing at all.
>> Anyone who strays away from the Bible is in a schism with a Z. Schism.
>> Schism.
>> Extra schism.
>> That's a Yeah, that's a that's a business church schism right there.
Therefore, beliefs like praying to dead saints, icon veneration, amongst other things, would make you a schism from the original.
That's so awesome. That's so funny. So, be not deceived. Stay focused.
>> What is the pre-4th century Antiochian original New Testamental scholars? What does that even mean?
>> I I don't know. I don't know. Um, so this is a clip of uh, Father's basically saying what he said up here, but then Father >> Nukes him in the chat >> and he says, "There is unity in the Eucharist, in the faith, and the life in in the ethos of all the Orthodox churches. This is not the case for Protestantism." Mic drop.
But what are your thoughts?
I don't want to dominate the chat here, but I just I feel so much zeal about this topic. I'm so no way to buy it. I mean the essentials I mean even the idea of an essential he his response right there I mean that is an early 20th century concept right from the book the essentials that's this idea that we have this lowest common denominator version of Christianity that all us evangelicals agree on and therefore we're all one any anyone who agrees on these fundamentals as the evangelicals have defined them at circa 1907 um are on the same page. So that's, you know, it's great when you create your own criteria and then hold everybody else, even churches that are like centuries and centuries older than you are, to your criteria, you know? That's that's great.
>> Also, why why are we using the term Protestant still? That that doesn't really convey any information. Like Lutheran do not recognize the non-denoms like a Dutch reformed church like that.
Some of them I think still have closed communion. They would not really recognize uh like they would not say that uh you know the Pentecostal the oneness Pentecostals from down the street they would not say that they are a true church. They they do not recognize each other like this >> humor would agree.
>> It's such well he's right on this. I I'll give him credit like it's not like I'll disagree with him on everything.
He's right. I think he's right. But it's it's really just an umbrella term that's everybody that's protesting Rome like in from an apologetics perspective like this this we are seeding too much ground by using this term Protestant. Like we we really need to get specific about it.
I think and Father Steven like on my stream last night he said just call them American Evangelicals because they're not Protestant. like a a true historic Lutheran like they they believe they are the western church that they are the Roman Catholic Church like that's them and like the church in the Vatican right now is not a real church they believe they're the continuation of that ancient church >> but Alex if I if I don't call the evangelicals Protestant how am I going to make the Lutheran see >> you know what there's an exception to every rule >> how I know that when I when I'm uh talking to my students students in the college. Um, when I ask them, I always ask everyone what what religion they are at the beginning of the semester. Uh, if they say if they say, "I'm Christian, not Catholic." I know they're an evangelical.
>> Nice.
>> But if uh if because if there's something else, they usually know I'm Lutheran. I'm Presbyterian. I'm Methodist. They know exactly what denomination they are if they're actually, you know, Protestant. But if they don't know, they have no clue.
Usually they'll just say, "I'm Christian, not not Catholic."
>> Right. Yeah. I think this idea, getting back to this essentials thing, this idea of the essentials, this mere Christianity, this is such a dangerous concept. We've been dealing with this all week. Uh, Father Joseph, there is this group um that basically just pushes anti-Islamianity.
They are uh their entire identity online is that they debate Islam, but they will send the people who convert from Islam to literally anywhere, including Messianic Jewish synagogues that teach them that it's a sin to eat pork and a sin to uh go to church on the Lord's day. Uh so they're sending them anywhere. So we're we're rightly pointing this out that they they should not be doing this that they should actually adopt um you know the proper framework which is that of the orthodox church and this is causing uh quite a bit of discussion online. This is the backdrop of the uh David Wood and Orthodox ethos father Peter here's conversation is this discussion that's been had online. So any thoughts on the sounds of mere Christianity? This sounds like, you know, reminds me of the famous dialogue between the Tubingan scholars, Lutheran, and Jeremas II patriarch, right? Because the dialogue comes a close because Jeremiah basically says, "Look, they're trying to convince him to join like for the Orthodox church to come around to their way and he's like, look, no, you're you're the one with the new ideas. you're the one with the you're the one in schism from Rome, you know, why are you trying to get us to come to your like to to you know to join us? You should be joining we you should be joining us, not us joining you, you know. And I think that's um you know, even though it's a couple centuries later now and the Lutheran have split into, you know, into all these other different types of uh you know, evangelicals and Pentecostals and everything, it's still it's still a unilateral conversation on their part.
you know, it's like, look, we we've never gone anywhere. So, you know, we the the the onus of proof should be on them, right? Not on us to prove like, oh, we why we do the things we do. We've done them as far as back as we can remember. We have evidence going back into, you know, to the earliest period when barely anything survives because of the persecutions and books being burnt and things like that.
um everything that they have is coming is from, you know, late medieval Roman Catholicism and the enlightenment.
That's it, you know. So, >> well, you know what's interesting? You bring up the enlightenment. Um there are a lot of different parallels in enlightenment philosophy, Protestant theology, and ironically, Freemasonic philosophy. Uh we were discussing this on a recent show. If you were to read the works of people like Albert Pike or um General uh people people that are within his orbit, uh a lot of his sentiments sound exactly like something you would hear a Protestant say. Like for instance, there are no infallible authority like no human infallible like where where do these concepts come from?
They're all very very similar. a lot of the religious pluralism um that we see in like the modern postvatican 2 Roman Catholic Church, a lot of these statements seem almost identical to some of this >> uh enlightenment philosophy and also statements by prominent Freemasonic writers. Um which of course, you know, we oppose Freemasonry for good reason.
Um but let me see if I could find that one. Here you go. So this is a citation from Albert Pike. I was going to play a game on the show at some point and do is this a Protestant or is this a Freemason and find >> find some citations that sound similar, but this is Albert Pike from morals and dogma. No, no man or body of men can be infallible and authorized to decide what other men shall be shall believe as to any tenant of faith except those who have first received it. Every religion and the truth of all inspired writings depends on human testimony and internal evidences to be judged of by reason and the wise analogies of faith. Each man must necessarily have the right to judge of their truth for himself. So subjective truth because no man can have any higher or better right to judge than another of equal information or intelligence. So no man or body of men can be infallible. Everybody judges for themselves. Subjective truth. What does this sound like?
Sounds like Protestantism to me.
>> So, >> it's all the same enlightenment religion at the end of the day. Like, it's like there what's this book I've been reading by the ontology of death talking about uh uh the petristic witness against nominalism. I think is the subtitle.
It's the ontology. It's uh and it's just it it really just like ramps up with of course William of AAM Gabriel Bile and heavily influencing the reformation and then it's just like fullon in the enlightenment period and then in the United States I think it has a pretty profound impact because like I think the effect of that is you have like all of these second great awakening religions like specifically in the United States and they're all kind of like teaching the same thing more or less. Like sure, you have some sects that are a little more apocalyptic than others, but this this this concept of like the idea in your head is what saves you like that >> that is a new thing. None of the holy fathers taught this.
>> I we've combined Americans combined the the >> No, I I interrupted you. Go ahead, please. I was going to say the the the American twist on this is that we we took the rationalistic idea and we just like like poured emotional outburst all over it as Americans, you know.
>> That's right.
>> It's true. Go ahead. Follow.
>> Yeah.
>> I I think I misunderstood you. I was going to say I did something onnosticism today and how it sort of transfers through time up till up to today. I saw you had a you had a video on um Protestantism and Gnosticism some parallels.
>> Yeah, I'm doing this book um against the Protestant Gnostics and so I just did the first chapter today. It was about 45 minute video where I summarized the chapter. It's uh it's not a scholarly approach. I'm just you know looking you know basically conveying to you in a in a truncated form what he said and just adding some of my own thoughts. But uh I'm going to go chapter by chapter, but but it is uh a lot a lot of the language sounds the same to to some of what how the Protestants talk um when you compare it to some of the Gnostic hown Gnostics how they um spoke about things. And I laughed because when you said, oh, you were going to compare, you know, some I think you said Protestant and um Freemason, who said that? Was that you, Ben? Well, I was thinking the same thing about Gnostic um Gnostic uh stuff and and um Protestant stuff because um I was just what I was looking for is I went up against a guy this week who put out a statement and I said, "Yeah, I I challenged him, trolled, and said to him, um what a beautiful definition ofnosticism." because he was he had just sent him flying. But anyway, um but it's the same thing because he used New Testament stuff um and assembled it in such a way that it sounded like ancient Gnosticism. So anyway, kind of the same along the same line. Well, you know what's interesting about that, Father Ron, is a lot of these very early esoteric religions um are kind of these seeds that we see, especially like in in uh early like cobbalism and things like this. You do actually see some parallels and you can trace the lineage, especially in like cobalistic thought to the reformation and some of them actually do have ties to Cabala. We did a um a show showing some of the parallels between the two the two camps and actually some of the historic ties um in the reformation shortly after the reformation more like the direct followers of the reformer um shortly after did have some cobalistic ties. This was with uh Anthony Westgate on my show. You wrote a very nice in-depth article. It is very very very very long on the history of Cabala and um >> he's a smart guy. He's Yeah, he's one of He's one of those brainiacs. He's like Ubby Ubby Petus Brainiac.
Excellent research. Somebody says David Woods uh doing a stream right now about icons.
>> Bye. Just kidding.
>> Everybody leave. Yeah. Um well, you know, >> must be burning. He just got off of the He just got off of the show with Father Hier and immediately he's going to dive into a debunk of icons.
>> Well, I mean, up until 5 minutes ago, he didn't really even know what orthodoxy was. So, this is like quite shocking, honestly, that he feels confident enough to go around debunking icons. Like, look, this is very simple. When the priests in the tabernacle went to go burn incense on the altar of incense, like what were they looking at exactly in front of them, right? The cherubim on the curtains, the veil that separated the holy of holies and the holy place, right? What is the job of the cherubim to bring the incense up to God? How is that not an interactive icon already in the tabernacle in the temple? All the images you see in the temple correspond to like different invocations in the psalms, right? like the the angels represent like the divine council, the gemstones would represent like the the cosmology like the these different celestial bodies. Then like the trees representing all of creation. Even on the carts in the temple, you have like the animals that are they're all invoked in the Psalms. And like second temple Jews in particular, they would see all of these things as like having like patron spiritual beings over them as well that they were like associated with celestial bodies or like bodies of land or bodies of water and like it's just it's our view is the default view and they try to take this posture that like we have to show like some affirmative case.
There's enough circumstantial evidence to show that like our view is the actually the default. They have to show that our view is not true.
At >> least that's how I'm looking at it.
>> Uh Ben, when you brought that screen up, I got scared.
>> Was that you thought they were joining?
>> That frightened me.
>> Oh, yeah. They were the guy >> What's up with the apostate there?
Wasn't he going towards Orthodoxy at one point? People are saying >> he still is, I believe. Um, somebody in the chat said that he's talking to the Protestants about icons. So, I haven't I'm not I haven't watched what's going on. The video says Protestants react to icon veneration. I'll have to watch this later. This will be uh too much to watch in 30 minutes, I think.
>> But, uh, looks like they've got JP Uncut, the evangelical, these two evangelicals with David Wood, and then Apostate Prophet. Um, I don't know. Is he somebody is somebody watched that? Let me know in the chat.
Is he attacking Is he attacking icons or is AP defending them in this instance?
So, I'm not sure.
>> Hey, AP, if you need an Orthodox uh friend to tag in, I'm available.
>> There you go.
>> Hit me up on X.
>> Well, let's see. Let's watch a little bit of it. Why not? We're not We're just kind of hanging out. I'll do playback to 1.25.
>> What's your interest in this? You don't mind going first, do you, JP?
>> Yeah, I'll go first and you can take us home. I'll keep it nice and short.
>> Yeah. So, so my story was this. Uh, you know, growing up as a evangelical, I was afraid of the early church. Uh, because uh they said that, you know, back in the time they're like, "Oh, you run from the early church because they prove that you can pray to saints in heaven." And I'm like, "Man, like I'm just going to stick to >> So, he's doing the whole intercession of the saints is fake thing again. That seems to be like his only his only trick.
Well, that plus an extremely high burden of proof for whoever calls in. Like he like Father Joseph said earlier like JP is looking for an explicit like a line that says you ought to pray to the saints and like invoke them in prayer like ask them to intercede for you, right? Like that's because it's the default view and this is not something that's controversial. They're not going to be writing about it a lot.
>> I want to I want to talk about this comment in here. I thought this was so funny. JP cooked cleave with the smells and bells video though. So uh he was uh there there was a video that I was reacting to where they were like everybody's just converting to orthodoxy for the smells and bells and then it goes back to my testimony where I talk about smelling and incense and prayer and they clicked it and they repeated it like 20 times. You know what's funny? I talk about that all not not the experience but the whole gimmick is like uh spam w incense in the chat. Where's my incense sniffers at? You know what's funny? So, I made this edit after where it was like um uh Mickey Mouse when he smells a pie. He's being like led by the smell >> right to an Orthodox parish.
>> It was. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. He says that was hilarious.
>> Floating right into the Narthx.
>> It was funny. I show I was I was like I heard my wife. I'm like, "You got to come see this video I made." She's like, "Is it another stupid edit?"
Yeah.
>> The Bible. And then I was afraid of the 73 book canon. 7372. I always get those numbers mixed up. Uh because people said you're afraid of those extra books because they teach you can pray to saints in heaven. So at a particular point, I said, "Hey, you know what? Let me read some of this early church stuff and let me read the 73 book canon." And what you have is at best saints in heaven to pray for people on earth in a general sense. Uh never anybody praying to a saint in heaven. So when I figured that out, I said, "Wait a minute." Um, according to second Isaiah and according to the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church is exactly today how it was in the first century and what it was like in the apostles era. You know, when we look at the New Testament.
So once I started seeing those cracks, I said, "Wait a minute, this is something to talk about." And then, you know, I had a a conversation with the Hamburglar um and uh where he kind of lied uh in some some of his things. And then, you know, one thing led to another. We we don't know who the hamburger is apart from the old McDonald's commercial. So who whose code whose code name is this that why are you name calling? But who was who are you talking about?
>> Uh the Sam Shimone man. The same >> Oh come on man. Very rude. Very rude. Oh people always trying to people just Sam Shimone here catching strays man. What did he ever do to anyone?
>> Yeah. Why why are you insulting Sam Shimone? Come on.
>> Just say Cleave didn't he call you a son of the devil or something?
>> That's okay. It's all right. All is forgiven. Honestly, I like Sam character.
>> Sam is a Sam is a interesting figure.
He's been very nice to us lately though on X. Have you noticed this?
>> I have noticed this.
>> Yes, he's he's been very nice. So, he's being nice to me. I will be nice to him.
How about that?
>> Well, he also he reviewed my debate with Metaphysics Mike and he was nice to me in that one. Like I mean, he had uh critiques, but like he didn't call me a son of the devil or anything. So, >> he calls everyone a son of the devil, though.
>> Yeah, maybe that's like I'm left out now. I should be >> You're not in the club, Alex. You don't have that. You don't have that chip on your shoulder yet. You know what you should do? Honestly, since since uh Shimone's been nice to you, you should just bring him on your show and talk to him about his like random uh he has this concept of >> apostolic Christianity, right? like like there's like, oh, like all the apostolic churches are like the same. Like it's okay if you go to a Roman Catholic church, a Coptic church, an Orthodox church. They're all the same kind of deal. You should talk to him about that and then maybe you could also talk to him about the David Wood situation because he talks about that a lot as well. So you could bring him on, talk about the one >> and then maybe discuss some of the differences and why he should just be Orthodox instead of going to I think he goes to a Catholic church, but he's not Catholic. He's Assyrian like he's Assyrian Church of the East >> or was baptized the Syrian. You know what I mean?
>> Yeah. But the Roman Catholics will commune him or something, right?
>> That's why he >> Yeah, Plato. I think he would. I think he would do it.
>> I Yeah, I think you'd be surprised.
>> I think he would do it.
>> I think he would.
>> You could you could uh you could try to uh >> I think if I ask nicely enough >> Yeah. Yeah. If you if you if you don't frame it as like you're going to be mean to him, you wouldn't be mean to him at all either. you would just tell him the truth about orthodoxy and then see >> well I had a full predtoist call in the other day I could have been a lot meaner to him but I mean you know like that's at the end of the day we are like trying to win souls right so it's like you can tell sometimes people call with bad intentions then you kind of have to set the frame and be like okay no you're not going to go past this line okay uh but you know you really from the first few sentences you can tell whether somebody's act actually asking a good faith question or not you know that Cleave.
>> Absolutely. Well, uh, you know, but also people can change too, you know. Uh, just because just because Sam has attacked me in the past doesn't mean that he wouldn't be willing to have a conversation with me today.
>> We are men after all, right? Like we can disagree and still have a friendly conversation. We can disagree vehematly and still have a friendly conversation, >> right?
>> Yeah. Father Joseph, you were a boxer.
I'm sure you knew about that.
>> Honestly, I'm not surprised. I I you know, at first I thought maybe it's the beard, but like Father Joseph has like the thick neck over there. So like I know you can you can see it.
>> Yeah. Yeah. There there have been times where uh where I thought maybe it'd be easier just to get in the ring with someone instead of uh trying to debate them.
>> Yeah. Okay. I win, you come to the divine liturgy. You know, >> I lose, you still come to the divine liturgy.
Plato says I mean he didn't want to talk about the trinity with Jay after Jay was asked nicely at first. So I don't know I have a feeling he wants to avoid topics that cause arguments among Christian. I think really what it is is he doesn't want to be pressed beyond his um maybe what he's prepared to defend.
But if you propose it as I'm going to teach you something, then he might be willing to come on Alex because I think in that way it does help save face if he could just ask questions and say, "Well, what's your perspective on this?" you know, it's a little more of a friendlier exchange of thoughts rather than him having to defend things.
Does that make sense?
>> It's a good idea. Yeah.
>> I mean, because ultimately, I mean, if we care for his soul, right, we should want to give him the truth. So, that's just my that's my thoughts. I mean, I would do the same thing for >> um David. I would obviously have a priest or something on to explain it to him, this type of thing, but >> I would do the same with any any of these guys.
>> Correct.
>> For sure.
>> Yeah. Let's see what else he has to say here.
>> Did he ever do to anyone? Nicest guy on the planet.
>> Loves everyone.
>> That's what I was saying.
>> The funny thing is I know the context and I I I didn't know either. I was just uh reading something else right now and loosely paying attention to that to to that question and then as I as I found out >> it's quite funny.
>> You know, he always used to call me fat.
You know, he always calls me fat. I I you know, >> he call he calls everyone fat. It's the weirdest projection thing. Yeah.
Somebody somebody explained it. They said that this is this is a thing uh that toddlers go through when they're when they learn how >> fast forward. This is funny, but I want to see if they actually get into anything about iconography. That's the title of the video.
>> Ideas and people in the Discord had said, "Hey, and I don't know if it's the quote unquote Protestant in me or if it's just me inquiring and wanting good answers, solid answers, positive claims." And uh JP's going to focus in on tonight because this is his area. So we kind of connected again and JP said, "Hey, I've been diving into this this uh you know, this intercession topic and I become, you know, a little bit of a >> the understanding there is uh I I think you have a wrong understanding of how it was historically because it's the it's how the west uh because >> Okay, so here you go. You have AP defending icons here.
>> Oh, Rome presented it basically. Um so the Catholic the Roman Catholic Church presents it.
>> So the the Roman Catholic Church presents it uh presents it often. Now >> throwaway account number two with the $2 super chat. Orthodox Avengers minus Iron Man. Father Steven D. Young.
This is our This is our our our Teimu Orthodox Avengers stream. Well, you know what's funny? We we actually we just booked uh an Orthodox Avengers stream.
Me and Alex. Me, Alex, and Jay. And we will have a fourth guest. We're going to figure out whoever we want for that, but that'll be in June. So, uh stay tuned for that. Those are always uh very big streams. So check out the Orthodox Avenger stream. I think it's 6:16 was what we decided on 8:00 p.m.
>> and presented later on as if all the churches in the world had always accepted uh the the church of Rome as their superior leader in charge. But that was never the case. The church the other patriarchs, the other bishops never ever accepted such a thing. All they ever did accept was that um was that the pope of Rome that the church of Rome has um has has primacy or primacy um of honor because it is the seed of the empire of the Roman Empire. So which is why when it when it comes to discussions uh it comes first and it also has a special attention from uh from from from the apostle Paul and from Peter early on and is described by early church fathers uh as uh as as as a very very righteous church that >> oh I think he's talking about papal supremacy actually in this segment.
people should look to and look at and ask questions when they have certain disputes. So they uh the the bishops always acknowledge that there is something special about the Roman Catholic Church and when they had severe disagreements among each other, they called upon the pope of Rome to come and settle the case for them. However, they never ever there is no evidence ever that they ever accepted Rome as their superior authority, as their leader.
That was never the case. And later on um when the imperial suit when the imperial seat was moved from Rome to Constantinople through an ecumenical council the seat of Constant the sea of Constantinople. So the bishop of Constantinople was actually given equal um equal um premacy to Rome. So they now had the equal privilege of coming first but never of being superior overall. The Eastern Orthodox Christians or the Eastern Church >> I like AP's zeal but he's explaining >> fired up.
>> Huh? Go ahead.
>> He's fired up. Yeah.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> But I think he's he's uh and this is where you know uh with the comments of the the guy was the guy at the hat on the left was at the beginning there JP.
>> Yes. This is JP. Yes.
>> Okay. So at the beginning his comments at the beginning show that he has he has a it always comes down to a flawed epistemology, right? It's a flawed epistemology.
uh what what AP is trying to say is what you know he's going into of course what our view is on Rome and their primacy and their ability to to make determinations and things like that but it's about the epistemology because the because uh the the uncut uh guy here it is he again the same thing he's he has set the criteria but that's basically he has this epistemology that he has established first he's going to make the the rules on what what actually is allowed in and that That's basically that's his epistemology, right? That's his his method for reading texts, how he understands things. So for example, on penal substitutionary atonement, there's no quote in the Bible that says that Jesus Christ receives the wrath of his father. It's just not there. So if his epistemology is truly just solos scriptor and it's all apparent and plain reading, it's that's that's not actually his real methodology. Israel epistemology is um you know are things like the the solas you know the five solas the PSA the things that he's already taken as a tradition of the enlightenment west and now and then he's going to impose that upon the text and and then he tries to hold his opponents to a again the impossibly high standard because he's he's superimposing his own ideas on the text and then he's and then our reading of the text. So you could certainly get icon of integration out of the Bible very easily, right? You know, look on to look on Christ is to see the father. You worship Christ and that also goes to the father, right? It's all there, right?
It's very easy in the Bible, but but not if you have a a a 16th century, you know, era epistemology, you know, and then he's trying to hold the Orthodox up to something that's just an unfair um you know, an unfair level of evidence, >> right?
>> Well, what's interesting is he doesn't even have a six a 16th century uh epistemology because he doesn't even have tradition as a secondary authority.
It's his uh tradition is like this non-concept and he's not he's not bound by any creed. He's not bound by any historic reformed Protestant creed. Um even the the radical reformers would have been less radical.
>> He's just Christian, not Catholic.
>> Correct. Exactly. He's just holding to nothing basically. Solah solo my own interpretation basically. Um but good to see that AP is um at least attempting to defend orthodoxy. Um that's a positive shift I would say Alex.
>> Yeah, I think he's doing a a fine job so far. I like to because he has been counter signaling I think the the orthodox a little bit. So you know it's it's good to hear him actually like what are his thoughts on this kind of thing?
How would he go about defending it?
because he too is a debater like he's done some some debates in the past and u I don't think he's a dummy like he's a smart guy absolutely >> has had never had such an idea that they are all supposed to be ruled by one single pope it is only the Roman Catholic Church itself that later on in the 8th 9th and especially 10th and later centuries uh tried to make the assertion that they have superiority overall this was actually one of the one of the major reasons why the schism and the eventual break happened because um they said we don't acknowledge such a thing you are not superior. The pope does not rule over all. Nobody has ever agreed to this. The church fathers have never ever done such a thing. So stop making this assertion. And Rome kept saying, "Yes, this is how it is. We are we are the we are we are in charge of everyone." And so that led that was one of the main reasons why the whole split happened. So such a thing as Rome being the pope of all never.
>> But Kelly Powers told me it was the filiki.
>> It was the filouke. Yeah, that's right.
That's one thing that I would add here in AP's section is that a lot of those claims were based they were on the basis of fraud. like the donation of Constantine I think played a big role in a lot of the back and forths between the west and the east and that's like on its face a fraudulent document. Uh there were various other documents that were fraudulent that uh you know I think you could even say I think there might be enough to say that at least certain popes had good reason to believe that these documents were fraudulent and used them anyway. So I think that I think I don't know Father Joseph I don't know if you you commit to that uh that level of an analysis but >> I don't know if you know this Alex >> my lawyer antennas are going up when I see that kind of thing >> during a certain period they actually did fund forgery schools like forging schools um so yes I would say that at a certain point they were intentional and there's plenty of documentation to back that up. No, I I definitely some of the historical like documents. Yeah, definitely intentional. Yeah.
>> Yeah, absolutely. I think there's plenty of evidence of that, >> right? Well, I mean, it would have to it would have to be intentional for them to forge the document to begin with. So, >> well, they have very very they're very specific claims. All the documents that have been disproven have very specific claims that just seem to to fit into very specific historical times when those things were necessary. Right?
Almost like Muhammad getting prophecies.
Exactly. Oh, we need some more uh we need some more some more uh camels and goods. Allah says we can go rob the caravans. You know, it's kind of like, you know, they just these things just appear right at the right time in history and just be happen to be accredited to very famous influential figures.
>> Yeah.
>> You know, it's >> it's very convenient.
>> All a law says I must take my adopted son's wife.
I'm getting a message.
>> I get a lot of credit to Roman Catholics though that they have admitted that these things are, you know, are, you know, fraudulent. You know, they're not really on the table for debates anymore and things like that, you know. So, I do give them credit for that that they admitted it and that they, you know, say, "Okay, yeah, you got us." You know, they're not they're not real.
>> Yeah. It's still I think it still throws a wrench in there apologetic even today because like I think it was John Omali that was talking about and uh it's like uh yeah I think it was it was John Ali I think he has passed now but uh a Roman Catholic scholar and priest who he was saying that uh like a lot of Bellereman's work was based off of like fraudulent documents and even like like a lot of the the the guys that they relied on for Vatican 1 like it's so intertwined in a lot of the Roman Catholic history, it's kind of hard to get like a a clean sample, so to speak, out of out of the past. So, >> well, you know, there's um there's kind of two different categories that you can look at with a lot of these documents, especially in the West. Um, a lot of the reformers would use these pseudo writers, like they would use pseudo chrostm, and they didn't know it was actually notorious. Um, I think we we've spoken about that before. This was in uh examination of the council of Trent.
They cite this uh pseudo John chrostm citation that's supposed to be a proof text for solid. It says something along I'm going to butcher this but it says something along the lines of once the abomination that causes desolation comes over the hill then it's up to us to cling to the scriptures alone because we'll know that the church is lost.
Well, come to find out this is um it wasn't it actually wasn't notorious. it was a angry bitter Aryan that had been kicked out of the church. So he's writing as a proof text uh under the name John Casostum to try to say look this gives me justification to kind of make up my own thing now because I've been kicked out. I have no other options. So this is what the reformers did as well. Um and I'm I'm certain um many of the I mean of course this has happened um not just forgeries but these pseudo texts being used as proof texts.
>> I mean to be fair you know that's happened in the east as well. not on any sort of, you know, we've never formed a doctrine or or altered our our our path, you could say, because of of of something we misqued from a from a a text that was misattributed or something like that.
Uh, you know, when serial when say serial was accused of, you know, of quoting something that actually turned out to be uh from a pollinarius, his only response was, well, you know, not everything a heretic says is heretical.
That was his only response.
>> Genetic fallacy.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. Well, you see even like Protestant apologists doing the same blunders today. It was I think needed God like Ryan from Need God and also Anthony Rogers at one point like Perry Robinson I think called both of them out saying that hey you're quoting like pseudo Jerome that's actually Pelagius like are you guys gonna like issue a public correction at any point? like, "No, >> that sounds like Perry."
>> Yeah, >> that's my man.
>> Who else did that? There was um uh Michael Horton in his book.
>> Yes. Yes. In a textbook. That's correct.
Yes. And he hasn't corrected it.
>> It's still there in his textbook.
>> That's a common That's a common one. Uh when I was a Protestant, I had a uh I had a guest on my show that quoted it as well. And I was kind of it was like I had done like three shows in one day and it was like a little 10-minute episode.
So I didn't even catch it. And when I sent it out, somebody called it out and I pulled the video like immediately and I was like, "Guy, you need to do better research before you come on other people's platforms."
>> That usually happens when people are using a lot of secondary literature and not verifying the things themselves.
That's that's where it comes from because if you actually if you're working in the, you know, in the original text and you and you get the CPG and you look to see if it's authentic, you you know, >> so that somebody else has probably already made the mistake and then they're quoting it from somebody else's probably, you know, that's that's a sure shorefire sign that uh that they're just regurgitating something, you know, not from somebody else.
>> I have to say I'm like so thankful that like, you know, in the YouTube space, we're generally like all amateurs, right? Nonetheless, I think because we have this like oversight in the Orthodox church that like you know we're all we are all like getting a blessing before we come on here and like all the priests kind of know each other at least generally. they're like familiar with somebody in each jurisdiction and like the connections we we make are like they're they're kind of quick and the the the priests and the scholars like Father Rod and Father Joseph like Father Steven, Father Peter Ears, they've all been like so generous with their time and like I I've never met so many father doctors in like a short period of time.
>> Yeah. Isn't it awesome?
>> It's awesome. So like we we kind of get access to like the the the high tier scholarship like thank God um because of the clergy in the church.
>> Yeah. We're not doing anything else.
There's no Orthodox universities for us to work at.
>> Father Ron, you had something you wanted to chime in with?
>> I've already forgotten.
>> It's okay.
>> Well, I'm I'm getting kind of tired, everybody, so I think this might be a good time to wrap up. Um, if you're not already subscribed to Alex Saurin's channel, go ahead and do so now.
Subscribe to Remote Orthodoxy. That's Father Ron over here in the corner. And then I will have uh, Father Joseph your book linked in the description. Um, please make sure to text that to me and I will update the uh, the description with the link for anyone who's watching this after the fact to go ahead and purchase his book. Um, let's see what I have coming up next. I would like to plug whatever my next show is. Oh, you know what? I think my next show is free.
So, I may just respond to this video that they're doing now on the on the icons if there's anything worth replying to. So, I might I might have that open for my friends to call in and uh we can review, you know, whoever is free at the time, we can review that.
That might be interesting.
Uh Cleaves, if you leave, send us to Nikolai, who's live right now. Let's see. Hold on. Before I wrap up, my next scheduled live stream will be I'm going to be on Alex Saurin's show on the 27th this next week. And my next scheduled show will be June 4th. I'm going to I'm still doing streams Tuesdays and Thursdays. I just don't have a guest set up for the next three of them. On the fourth, I'm going to have Samuel Farerra's brother on my show uh to discuss his conversion from Coptic Christianity to Orthodoxy. And I will also have David David Erhan will be on the show because uh uh mean Farra was um inspired by a lot of the argumentation put forth by David and uh uh Sam's brother um Mina Farog. He told me some arguments against Coptic Christianity that I'd never heard of before that I thought were very interesting, particularly surrounding theosis and around um Pope Shenot's statements and his soon to be canonization. So, this will be very interesting. This will be stuff that hasn't been discussed on YouTube yet. So, >> go check out the uh the interview of Dr. Jer Pabi and Road to Emmas a few years back before he died. It's really insightful. he why he was kicked out of the Coptic church and what he has to say about all that.
>> That'd be interesting.
>> Ended up uh I think his last years he was in the he joined the OCA when he came to America I think.
>> But he was a disciple of uh Matthew the poor.
>> Alex, you have a debate against Sam soon, don't you?
>> I have a debate against Sam on June 18th, but coming up on the 29th, I have a debate against Lucas Cersio Method Ministries. The prompt is, "Is justification forensic?" So, it's kind of a nerdy title, but it's an important topic. So, it sounds a little niche, but I think it'll be a good one. That will be on Modern Day debates uh on the 29th in the evening. Uh I have a debate coming up at some point with the friend we just saw on the screen, JP Uncut on the invocation of the saints. Um yeah, and then that Sam Farag debate as well is coming up.
All right, perfect. Let me go ahead and I'll give y'all someone to go raid.
All right, until next time. Thank you again, father, for coming on the show.
Both fathers and Alex for coming on the show. This has been fun. Until next time.
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