Speaker 1: This very much changes how we would think of hell
and of Christ saving us from it. Hell is not
a place somewhere where a soul, whatever that is, goes
gets prodded with picked sforks set on fire for an
eternal succession of moments. Hell then would be the hell
that we've made of our lives. Hell would be the
hell that we've made of our experiences, in our relationships,
the hell that we've crafted through our own corruption and
our own evil. Not only is that the hell that
could become eternal if there's nothing else, but that's the
hell that Christ saves us from. That's the hell that
Christ sets us free from. That's the hell that Christ
purifies us from and transforms us out of the hell
we've made for ourselves.
Speaker 2: This is Jonathan Pejol Welcome to the Symbolic World. In
early twenty twenty four, we put together the very first
Symbolic World Summit live in Florida. It was an amazing
event with so many great speakers. Martin Shaw was there,
Richard Rowland, Jordan Peterson, Deacon Nicholas kotar vesper Stamper, Father,
Siloan j Justiniano, who else, who else? And of course
I was there, and I spoke, and I've brought my
family and it was just just a wonderful time. And
so after all this time, we finally were able to
put together all these videos in a video package professionally done,
very beautifully edited and easy access. And so for those
who missed it, you can access it from the Symbolic
world dot com. We'll post a link in the description.
But in the meantime, we are decided to put up
one of the talks, father Stephen de Youong's talk, to
give you a little glimpse of what the event was like.
Speaker 3: And it was.
Speaker 2: It was a wonderful talk about the afterlife and all
of all of the big questions that we ask ourselves.
And so please enjoy.
Speaker 3: Ladies and gentlemen, Father Stephen de Young.
Speaker 1: I was expecting him to just to say, and now
a man who needs no introduction, So that was nice
as an alternative. And it's good to be speaking to
all of you at Pigotfest twenty four just the official
name of this gathering if you're not aware. Uh So,
the topic I chose to talk about today when I told, well,
when I first decided, before I even told Jonathan or
anybody what it was going to be is something that
was sort of out at the edge of my thinking
at that time that I was still kind of working at.
And fortunately it hasn't moved to the center of my thinking,
but it's enough in the field that I feel comfortable
and confident now sort of talking about it.
Speaker 3: If you ask the average.
Speaker 1: Person walking around, not even at a church, just person
walking down the street, if you ask them about the
afterlife or what happens when you die, you will get
some version of well, good people go to heaven, bad
people go to hell. Maybe if they're very kindly, they'll
leave off that last part, but usually get some version
of that because everybody has somebody who they think is
a bad person, a cousin or something who they think
really deserves to be in hell, and they'll differ on
sort of how that judgment call is made, right, like
what makes you a good person or a bad person.
Speaker 3: There are all those variants.
Speaker 1: So if you're a little more acquainted with the Christian tradition,
you know that that's not actually Christian eschatology. That's not
the Christian view of what happens when we die, even
though a lot of Christians will talk that way an
awful lot we have at the end of the Nicene
Creed that we believe in the resurrection of the body
and the life of the world to come, or the
life of the age to come, And for a lot
of us, and by a lot of us, I'm including
even a lot of theologians, what exactly that means, how
exactly the bodily resurrection works with everything else we think
about what happens when we die, what the life of
this world to come looks like, how to think it,
how to try to envision or even imagine it. There's
sort of no guidance out there. It's something we affirm,
but I don't think we have a really firm grasp
of what it means. And so to try to figure
out what it means, if you've listened to a redity
of my stuff, you kind of know. I try to
go back to the beginning of things, Right where did
this start? Who was the first person to start thinking this,
How did they see it, how did they envision it,
what did it mean for them? And so if we're
talking about the bodily resurrection in terms of this grand
scheme of things I talk about where sometimes I go
back into the Neolithic era.
Speaker 3: It's relatively new.
Speaker 1: It's relatively new, at least in terms of people talking
about it in this way. It is inherited by Christianity
out of Judaism, but even within Judaism, if we're talking
about the first century BC the second century BC, this
wasn't a universal sort of Jewish belief. This is something
that arose specifically within Phariseic Judaism. This is something that
set the Pharisees apart from all the other countless sects
of Judaism at the turn of the era. And so
as they were first thinking about this, what was it
that they meant?
Speaker 3: What were they thinking? That's what we're after.
Speaker 1: And for the record, just in advance, as people hear
this talk, there's someone out there who is going to say,
I heard you say something different in a Bible study
in twenty seventeen. The answer to that question before you
ask it is I was wrong then. I might still
be wrong now, but I was definitely wrong. Then I
have changed my mind. But so in order to get back,
we have to sort of go back into the ground, right,
go back into the beginning, go back into the basis
of this. And if we're going to go back into
the ground on this or any other topic. I feel
like we need a guy, a guide, someone to guide us,
someone to take us there, someone to point it out
to us. Virgil is boring. It's not his fault. It's
because Latin is boring. You could move, but stop me
when I tell a lie. Anyway, So we need a Greek,
We need a German, right, one of the two.
Speaker 3: To go to guide us back.
Speaker 1: And so I've chosen someone who at the very least
is never boring, and that's Friedrich Nietzsche. So the shade
of Friedrich Nietzsche is going to lead us back into
the ground to help us understand the bodily resurrection. I
can see that some of you are confused, but this
is going to work, I promise. So the first thing
we have to address is we have that word bodily
in front of resurrection, the resurrection of the body.
Speaker 3: This is a distinctive right.
Speaker 1: This is depending on the era we're talking about. If
we're talking about the first, say, four centuries of Christianity,
this is something that distinguishes Orthodox Christianity from say, Gnostic
sex and groups who believed in a kind of resurrection,
who believed in a kind of eternal life, but that
was decidedly not bodily, decidedly disassociated from this world, this earth,
this life, And so the word bodily is serving a
function here. But the way we normally think about this
is well, okay, at some point in the future, Christ returns,
my physical body gets pulled back together, and my soul
comes and reinhabits it. My soul's off floating somewhere else,
and then it comes back down and comes back.
Speaker 3: Into my body, and it's my body.
Speaker 1: There are a bunch of sort of obvious problems when
we start pushing at that, though, because, for example, the
matter that makes up my body today is a completely
different set.
Speaker 3: Of matter than what made up my body tenure.
Speaker 1: Years ago, right, And once I die, my body will decompose, right,
and will become part of plants and trees and snails
and right all sorts of things, eventually maybe someone else's body.
Speaker 3: So what does it mean to say that the body.
Speaker 1: That I will have for eternal life is my body
is the same body as this body? Now this is
kind of an open question or a puzzle. So this
is the first place where our friend Nietzsche may help
us to the despisers of the body. While I speak
my word, I wish them neither to learn afresh nor
teach a new, but only to bid farewell to their
own bodies, and thus be dumb.
Speaker 3: Body.
Speaker 1: And I am body? Am I and soul? So saith
the child? And why should one not speak like children?
But the awakened one, the knowing one saith body, am
I entirely and nothing more. And soul is only the
name of something in the body that's from Thus spake
Sarah Thustra. It's fourth discourse. Part of our problem here
is that we've adopted this platonic view of the soul.
We've adopted this view that the soul is our real self,
that it is this existing thing that inhabits our body.
Speaker 3: And this has a bunch of effects.
Speaker 1: On how we see the body, how we see ourselves,
how we see the world. A very practical one. If
my soul, the soul that inhabits my body, is me,
that's the actual me. I have disassociated my identity who
I am from my body. My body is now no
longer who I am.
Speaker 3: Really.
Speaker 1: If you ever wondered how someone could get the idea
that they are in the wrong body, there you go,
there you go. But this is not how the Jewish
traditions saw the soul. There are a lot of ways
that we can see this in the Hebrew scriptures. One
of them is that very often the speaker will talk
to his soul, Lord, oh my soul. Well, if you
are your soul, who is it who's talking.
Speaker 3: In that song?
Speaker 1: The soul was seen not as this existing thing, this existing,
nebulous thing, like a forced ghost in Star Wars or something,
or a sphere. If your origin, any originists out there,
don't put your hand up, you'll get flagged.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: But the soul was the life of a body, right,
as Nietzsche alludes to there, the soul is something in
the body. The soul is what is making the body alive,
making it function. This is very practical. When you see
someone or even an animal die, you are looking at
the same set of matter you were seconds ago when
it was alive. But the life is what is gone, right,
the life is what is gone. And this means something
very important about identity. It means identity is not.
Speaker 3: An inward thing.
Speaker 1: We're used to looking at identity as if we were adolescents.
Right when you're an adolescent. What makes me me is
what makes me different than everybody else. Right, you go
and you get the T shirt at hot topic it
says you laugh at me because I'm different, But I
laugh at you because you're all the same, right, and
no one understands your pain, especially your mom and dad.
Speaker 3: Right. So, but a lot of us don't outgrow that. Right.
Speaker 1: What makes that me is the way that I'm not
my parents, the way that I'm not my family of origin,
the way that I'm not whatever is going on in society,
the way that I'm different than everyone else.
Speaker 3: This is an abstraction.
Speaker 1: Right, we move inward, and this ends in nihilism because
when you abstract every connection you have, everything you've inherited,
everything you've learned, everything that you're a part of.
Speaker 3: You're left with nothing. Your identity is nothing.
Speaker 1: There's this brief stage where identity becomes completely protean, where
it can change every day.
Speaker 3: That's kind of fun for a while.
Speaker 1: Right, But eventually you realize that it being able to
change every day means it is actually nothing in particular,
and that is a bad point to reach. So, if
identity is more concerned with your body and your soul,
is what is giving your body life. Then that means
we find our identity outside of ourselves, not by delving
inside ourselves. We find our identity in the relationships that
we have to our family of origin, to our society
and our culture, to our friends and loved ones. These
are the things that make us who we are. These
are the things that make us who we are, and
these are always for the record, something chosen. One possible
objection to this idea. One reason people don't like it
is they say, well, all those things were just given
to me.
Speaker 3: I didn't choose them. I want to choose who.
Speaker 1: I am by rebelling against those things. I didn't choose
what family I was going to be bored in. I
didn't choose what country I was going to be born in,
what culture I was going to inherit, what religion I
was going to be raised in. I didn't choose any
of those things. But ultimately, we do choose all of
those things. Even if you were married off at age
thirteen in an arranged marriage to someone you'd never met
before that marriage, you choose to be a husband or
wife not just every day, but a countless number of
times during each day. You can do otherwise, you can move,
you can object. So all of these things are ultimately chosen.
But it is all of these external things related to
our body, related to our interactions and connections with other
people in community, that define who we are. Why is
this important to the concept of the bodily resurrection. This
is important to the concept of the bodily resurrection because
this is why the bodily resurrection is so important.
Speaker 3: That it's bodily.
Speaker 1: We're not talking about identical matter coming back together to
form a physical space for a soul to inhabit. We're
talking about your identity continuing to exist, you continuing to
be you.
Speaker 3: In every way.
Speaker 1: This means not only the maintenance of those sort of relationships,
but that maintained is the way that we are formed,
what we have come to know, what we have come
to think, how we have come to think about things
and see the world around us. Now, another part of this,
a part of this that we haven't thought, the part
that's really the focus of the talk this morning, the
part that I've been trying to think over the last
year especially. We've thought about this in terms of space.
What do I mean by that? We have this idea
of the bodily resurrection. That well, that means, right, this body,
or at least a body like it, this world or
at least a world like it. Right, we make these
affirmations in the Christian tradition. No, it is this world
that will be redeemed. It is this body that will
be redeemed. Is this creation that will be redeemed. It's
not going to be destroyed and done away with and
replaced with something else. It's not going to be destroyed
and done away with and replaced with nothing in some
kind of ephemeral.
Speaker 3: Ghostly existence.
Speaker 1: But I don't think we've really reckoned with how this
relates to time, how this relates to time, because part
of that view we have in our head is that well,
after this bodily resurrection happens, however we conceive it, then
eternal life means we're gonna have this eternal succession of moments.
Speaker 3: Right, It's gonna be like this.
Speaker 1: With all the bad stuff gone, but just going on forever, right,
just going on forever. This creates a lot of issues
that it doesn't solve. They kind of dealt with this.
I don't know if anybody here watched.
Speaker 3: The Good Place back when it was on TV.
Speaker 1: But they kind of dealt with this, right, because they
had a very materialist view of on the show.
Speaker 3: Right. But so ultimately all of the.
Speaker 1: Characters spoilers end up in what's sort of heaven, right,
And everything is wonderful, and everything is beautiful, and every
day is beautiful weather and.
Speaker 3: Everything is good.
Speaker 1: But time continues as it does here, and so at
a certain point, at a certain point, that's not bliss anymore, right,
that's not joy anymore at a certain point, I think,
equally importantly, what does that do to our understanding of
this life, this life that we live in, this age,
in this world. Now, at some point the paraphrase one
of the latter verses of amazing Grace that nobody sings.
They just do the first one over and over again,
or play it on the bag pipes at a funeral.
But you know, we've been there for ten thousand years.
We'll have no less days left to sing God's praise
than when we'd first begun, just an unending praise chorus
for at least twenty thousand years, right, And then what
does that mean about the sixty seventy eighty years I
spent on this earth, going through all this and doing
all this well, that will be long forgotten by then, right,
who will even care?
Speaker 3: Distant memory? Right, distant memory.
Speaker 1: And if we envision that we're gonna be there with Christ,
and we see the resurrected Christ to the gospel still
has his wounds from the cross, that'll seem a little
odd that he went through all that in this world,
oh way back when we barely remember it.
Speaker 3: It doesn't fit. It doesn't fit.
Speaker 1: Nevertheless, in this life, in this world, our identity who
we are, if it's formed externally in this way in relation,
that's something that happens over time. Our life in this
world is not just spread out across space, right, that
we move about, that we're in different places at different times,
but it's spread out in time. Those relationships are formed
over time. I was not always a husband. That is
part of my identity now. But I wasn't always in
terms of my experience of time. I wasn't always a priest.
Don't wish you met me when I was fifteen. I
was a problem, right, But that's part of who I
am too, right, but comes out once in a while.
But our identity is formed across this section of space,
and this section of time. That means that, in some sense,
for the bodily resurrection to be real, for our identity
to be preserved in the world to come in eternal life,
it's not just a question of the external physicality needing
to be preserved. In some sense that time, the time
of our life in this world, has to be preserved,
the actual concrete moments in which the bonds between me
and other people were forged, the actual experiences that we shared.
I can't be a husband without my wife, I can't
be a priest without the church. And so these concrete
moments also have to in some sense continue to exist.
And so it's not just a question of the bodily
resurrection and the life of the age to come.
Speaker 3: Being this body in.
Speaker 1: This world, that's our starting point, but it also has
to be a preservation of this time. It has to
be an eternalizing of this life that I actually led.
Not this life in a broad sense, but this life
that I actually led in this world. So here's the
second place where the shade of our friend Nietzsche shows
up and has a few things to say to us.
What if someday or night a demon were to steal
after you into your loneliest, loneliness, and say to you,
this life is you now live it, and have lived it.
You will have to live once more, and innumerable times more,
and there will be nothing new in it, but every
pain and every joy, and every thought and sigh, and
everything unutterably small or great in your life will have
to return to you all in the same succession. In sequence,
would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth
and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you
once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him?
Speaker 3: You are a god?
Speaker 1: And never have I heard anything more divine. That's from
the Gay Science section.
Speaker 3: Three point forty one, and that bit of.
Speaker 1: Nietzsche is referred to as the eternal return or eternal recurrence.
He had this idea, Did he think it was metaphysically real?
What does that even mean in this case?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: But he presented this as this view that essentially everyone
repeats their life over and over and over again an
infinite number of times. And he is at least using it,
is at least presenting it as sort of a test
to give yourself regarding your life. And he's saying, here,
is there a moment in which you could look at
that not as a horrible curse?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: Is there a moment where that would not be your nightmare?
Is how he's presenting it. When he writes, thus spake Zarathustra,
he says, the whole thing is a meditation on this idea,
and so not at the conclusion, but near the conclusion
we'll hear from him once again.
Speaker 3: There's a dialogue going on.
Speaker 1: These are a couple of excerpts between who he calls
the ugliest man and Zarathustra. My friends, all of you
said the ugliest man, what think ye? For the sake
of this day? I am for the first time content
to have lived mine entire life, And that I testify
so much is still not enough for me. It is
worthwhile living on the earth one day, one festival, was
Zarathustra hath taught me to love the earth?
Speaker 3: Was that life? I will say? Unto death?
Speaker 1: Well once more, my friends, what think ye? Will ye
not like me say unto to death? Was that life?
For the sake of Zarathustra? Well once more? Later Zarathustra
gets drunk. He sings a song. This is part of it.
Speaker 4: All.
Speaker 1: Joy wanteth the eternity of all things. It wanteth honey,
It wanteth lee's, It wanteth drunken midnight. It wanteth graves.
It wanteth graves, tears, consolation. It wanteth gilded evening red.
What doth not joy want? It is thirstier, heartier, hungrier,
more frightful, more mysterious than all woe. It wanteth itself.
It biteth into itself. The rings will writheth in it.
It wanteth love, It wanteth hate. It is over rich,
it bestoweth it throweth away. It beggeth for someone to
take from it.
Speaker 3: It thanketh the taker. It would fair be hated.
Speaker 1: So rich is joy that it thirsteth for woe, for hell,
for hate, for shame, for the lame, for the world,
for this world. Oh ye know it, indeed, ye, hire men,
for you doth it long this joy, this irrepressible blessed joy,
for your woe, ye failures, for failures, longeth all eternal joy,
for joys all want themselves. Therefore do they also want grief?
Oh happiness, oh pain, Oh break thou heart. Ye hire men,
do learn it that joys want eternity. Joys want the
eternity of all things. They want deep profound eternity. That's
from thus spake Zarathustra, the Ninth Discourse, And what Nietzsche
is saying is, if we've truly experienced joy in our life,
those moments, those joys, those are what would inspire a
person to.
Speaker 3: Be able to look at his idea of the.
Speaker 1: Eternal recurrence of the same as a hope and not
as a curse, because for the sake of that joy,
one could accept the pain, the struggles, the heartbreak of
this life in order to have that joy again.
Speaker 3: What if?
Speaker 1: What if the resurrection of Christ represents the triumph of joy.
Speaker 3: What if what it means.
Speaker 1: Is that joy has now become eternal without accepting the rest.
Joy has become eternal, putting to death the rest, the pain,
the heartbreak, the sorrow. This is what I mean concretely
by that. What if when we talk about living an
eternal life in which there is no more sorrow or
sighing or pain, what our forefathers were really talking about
was eternally living this life without sorrow and sighing and pain.
They were talking about the actual times that we live,
the actual moments we experience, all of them that are blessed,
all of them that are permeated by God's love, all
of them that are filled with joy, Those become eternal,
Those become the life that we have forever. And everything
else is burned away, everything else dies away, everything else
is thrown away. So mean a number of things. This
very much changes how we would think of hell and
of Christ saving us from it. Hell is not a
place somewhere where a soul, whatever that is, goes, gets
prodded with picked sforks set on fire for an eternal
success in moments. Hell then would be the hell that
we've made of our lives. Hell would be the hell
that we've made of our experiences, in our relationships, the
hell that we've crafted through our own corruption and our
own evil.
Speaker 3: Not only is that the hell that could.
Speaker 1: Become eternal if there's nothing else, but that's the hell
that Christ saves us from. That's the hell that Christ
sets us free from. That's the hell that Christ purifies
us from and transforms us out of the hell we've
made for ourselves. I'm going to read a couple of
passages from the scriptures that I think this understanding sheds
light on. This is from First John five, verses eleven
through thirteen, and I'm going to translate this. You've heard
this translated a little differently because the phrase in Greek
that's usually translated in our English Bibles eternal life, doesn't
have an article in it anywhere, meaning it's a narthris.
That's a technical term meaning normally, when we have adjective
noun phrases like that in Greek, we put the indefinite
article A or N in front of it. So I'm
going to translate this that way. And this is the
testimony that God gave us an eternal life, and this
life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life.
Whoever does not have the Son of God does not
have life. I write these things to you who believe
in the name of the Son of God, that you
may know that you have an eternal life, regardless of
how you translate at Saint John is speaking in first
the perfect and then the present tense.
Speaker 3: Now you will have eternal life in the age to
come right.
Speaker 1: But you've been given it and you have it now.
The life you have now in Christ has this adjective attach.
It is now become eternal, it has now become timeless.
This is from Saint Paul one Corinthians three, verses eleven
through fifteen. For no one can lay a foundation other
than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: Now, if anyone.
Speaker 1: Builds on the foundation with gold sins over precious stones,
would hey straw. Each one's work will become manifest, for
the day will disclose it, because it will be revealed
by fire, and the fire will test what sort of
work each one has done. If the work that anyone
has built on the foundation survives, he will receive a reward.
If anyone's work is burned up, he will suffer loss,
though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire.
Speaker 3: We may be used to reading that with.
Speaker 1: A whole bunch of old Western theological baggage, that the
works here is talking about some kind of system of
merit and demerit that's attached to actions we take, to
things we do, and we're gonna be issued a repayment
for those merits or demerits.
Speaker 3: But let me submit that the word works there.
Speaker 1: Let's take it out of our sort of English and
Latin sensibilities and go for Greek, where it's sort of
a verbal idea. It's talking about, not just the things
we do, but us doing them, the moments in time
and space where we do these things, then the judgment
that's happening. Here are all those works, all of those
things that we did, experiences that we had, choices we
made that are wood, hay, straw, junk, garbage, drass are
burned away. All of those moments in time, those moments
of connection, those moments of love, of joy, of peace,
They're refined, made eternal, made permanent. There's an old Russian
folk tale. I figure this is a good crowd to
tell an old Russian folktale too, This old Russian folk
tale that there was this very bitter, miserable old woman
hated everyone in her village. No one in the village
was all that fond of her right horrible, mean, nagging
wife to her husband, beat her children, selfish, stubborn, angry.
When she died, the priest in her village said, we
need to pray for her, We need to pray for
her soul. We need to pray for her, that you'd
be forgiven her sins, especially because of the kind of
life she lived.
Speaker 3: So they prayed. God heard these prayers.
Speaker 1: There was one moment in her life where she showed kindness.
There was one moment in her life where a beggar
came and asked her for food. She had just gotten
some food. She gave the beggar an onion, just this
one moment. And so in the story, an angel takes
that onion and he goes down to Hell and he
extends the onion toward her, and he's going to use
that onion to pull her out of hell, this one
moment in her life, and she immediately grabs the onion,
says my onion, and remains it. I told you it
was a Russian folk tale. You should have seen that coming, right,
But think of what's going on there. There was this
one moment in her life, even though it was only
that one, that she could have inhabited that one moment
of generosity. She could have inhabited that eternally had she
not sort of pushed it away from herself, had she
not sort of pushed it away from herself. So the
idea of bodily resurrection, then, especially if we start thinking
it this way, helps us kind of navigate between sort
of Sylla and chryptis again the right crowd to make
a reference to this sill chryptis of on the one side,
a kind of gnosticism that wants to say this world,
this life, our bodies, everything that happens here is unimportant
and irrelevant, something to be escaped, something to be just
overcome and superseded. And on the other side actually reincarnation,
reincarnation the idea that we get a sort of infinite
number of tries at this until we eventually get it right.
In between those two, we have this one life, this
one life to live, to become who we are, with
the promise in Christ that who we are and who
we become in this life that will become eternal, this
life that we live will become eternal. And into that
Christ then further speaks the word that we can change,
that we can be transformed, that at whatever point we
realize we've been living in hell and we don't want
to live in hell one day more, let alone eternally,
that He sets us free to live a different kind
of life for the rest of our days, however many
that may be, and that gives us a time and
a space then that we can inhabit with Him for eternity.
So those have been my thoughts about the bodily resurrection.
As Dya has kind of helped me, hopefully kind of
helped us today. It's a different way of thinking it,
and I'm still kind of playing it out right, but
I hope it will get you.
Speaker 3: Thinking as it's gotten me thinking.
Speaker 1: Right, we can all kind of keep doing the work
from here in terms of how we conceive it.
Speaker 3: West even younger.
Speaker 4: So one of the things I've been talking about with
my wife is that I guess it's an extension of
something I used to do in my clinical practice. Now,
if you're dealing with people who are depressed, one of
the things you can do with them is you can
have them track their mood variation hour by hour. Even
because someone who's depressed will tell you that they're depressed
all the time, and perhaps they are, but sometimes they're
somewhat less depressed than other times.
Speaker 5: There's still variability. Now, it might be the variability of
suffering in hell, but it's still variability.
Speaker 4: And what that means is that you can help the
person delineate when they're suffering most and least intensely, right,
and then you can start to triangulate on that.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: You might think, okay, well, when things are really bad
for you, when is that exactly does that repeat is
it the morning and what's the cont text? And then
you can do an analysis of what deepened suffering, and
then you can do the reverse, which is.
Speaker 5: When is it that you're least miserable?
Speaker 4: And then the next step is, well, maybe you could
rearrange yourself so that you're doing the things that make
you most miserable less of the time, and you can
see a progression. A progression, Now you could phrase that positively,
so you could imagine that you were watching your marriage
like you didn't understand it, which you don't, and you
could see your marriage and your family. Let's say you
could see that now, and then that the light would
be shining through right that for whatever reason. Now, under
these circumstances, we're playing with each other, everyone's pleased to
be here. We're concentrating on the moment. Our experience is
suffused with joy, grace is dis sended.
Speaker 5: We're doing something to allow that to happen.
Speaker 6: What is it?
Speaker 5: And could we learn to live there more often? Okay,
so that.
Speaker 4: You're making your pointing in that direction with regards to
the emergence of eternity into life. Right, So then you
could imagine that you could practice that, and people can
do that. So it might be that you find that
in your typical day you're only spending ten minutes in
that state, But if you practice diligently for six months,
you could get it up to like half an hour,
and then you could and then within that half an hour,
you'd see that there'd be a new seed that would
be emerging, that would be a higher order of bliss
even within that, and that can be continually. That's the
pearl of great price, by the way, that's the mustard seed,
that's the Kingdom of heaven. Those are all the same things. Okay,
so I understand.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 4: I also like your emphasis, the emphasis you place on
the idea that that's something that has to be made
manifest here and that we can't throw away the world
of reality in favor of some heaven after death that's displaced.
And you can understand why that's a danger too, because
the world becomes a place to escape from and can
become denigrated and our identities become something that float above it,
which is exactly where we're at in a kind of
postmodern transhumanist world.
Speaker 6: Okay, so.
Speaker 5: That's my understanding of what you've said.
Speaker 4: Now, what I don't understand, and this is a terribly
unfair question, but I'd like to know what your thoughts are. Well,
I guess that the issue still is what of the dead? Right,
Because it's all well and good to be digging for
the kingdom of heaven while you're alive, but it's a
lot harder when you're dead. And so right, right, So
what I saw you doing today was reading with the
problem of the relationship between eternity and heaven and the
proximal and making a case that we can't abandon the
proximal in the least, we need to elevate it to
this status of the eternal. But it still leaves us
with the problem of death and so well.
Speaker 6: So that's the question. It's like, how do.
Speaker 4: You reconcile, because you by scrapping that kind of unconscious
traditional view of heaven and hell as as what happens
after you die, you also scrap the problem of how
to address the fact of the loss of death. And
so I'm wondering where your thoughts have taken you in
that regard.
Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, so, and this is obviously based on the
tradition I'm in right receive, but so that the Russian
folk tale, you see a piece of that.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: So the way this has been traditionally phrased is a
person can't repent, they can't take action to change and
train formed their life once they're dead for themselves, right,
But the community of which they were a part can
come and intercede for them. And what I think that
Russian folktale brings out is what's happening there is not
sort of oh, we're all begging God to change his
mind about this person, right and decide they were a
good person instead of a bad person. But what we
are doing is we're trying to bring to the four
those moments in that time, because I think what we
mean by the resurrection of the dead on the last
Day is us coming back to inhabit not just this
body in some sense, this physical body of this physical
world in some sense, but to reinhabit our lives, but
our lives now purified of so everything that was, everything
that was pain and suffering, and only those moments remain
and we live those moments.
Speaker 6: Okay, we sort of do that.
Speaker 4: Well, we sort of do that when we pull the
spirit of great people along with us from the past. Right.
I mean I was sitting here thinking about what you
were talking about. And I'm working with this employee of mine.
Now we're building these we're building large language models, and
we're thinking about resurrecting people essentially. And so because you
can build a large language model of Nietzsche, for example,
and now.
Speaker 6: You can more or less embody that.
Speaker 4: So we could build a large language model of Nietzsche
and provide him with a photorealistic avatar and have him
lecture again. And that is I mean, we'd already do
that with the great people of the past to some degree,
because we pull them along and we pull out their
best and we carry that with us, right, And that
is something like you could imagine that in principle being
something like the separating of the wheat from the chaff,
and the conservating of the wheat and the bringing that
along with us. But the woman that you talked about,
for example, her life was almost all chaff.
Speaker 6: It And that's a terrible.
Speaker 4: Thing to think about in relationship to your own life,
by the way, like it's the most terrible thing to
think about in fact, virtually by definition, does that mean
that if your life is.
Speaker 6: Old chaff, that you remain eternally dead. That to be
what that means.
Speaker 1: That is what I think is meant by eternal death
when that phrase is used in the scriptures, and that's
a horrible it's a horrible well, and it's and and
one of the key elements though of the scriptures, that
of the Christian tradition is with maybe a couple exceptions
like Judas and and maybe Areas, there's no one who
is that it is said, that has happened to, but
it is out there continually as.
Speaker 3: A possibility for us.
Speaker 6: I mean that death.
Speaker 1: Yes, that that is a possibility, not for other people
but for me, right, and that spurs me to continue
to examine my life.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, to.
Speaker 1: Continue to say that possibility being out there, that possibility
being extended.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: So whether there is anyone who will ultimately face that
is sort of irrelevant to the question of the work
that that idea is doing within the scriptures and within
the Christian tradition, being that possibility and.
Speaker 6: In some in some ways.
Speaker 4: You you might want that to happen, because even with
regards to Nietzsche's idea of the eternal return, I suppose
hell might be the eternal return of everything you did
stop everything you did that was stupid in your life,
being repeated forever.
Speaker 6: That is hell in your own life.
Speaker 4: By the way, that's actually why you should solve the
problems that present themselves to you, because if.
Speaker 5: You don't, all you do is repeat them.
Speaker 6: That's why you need to have.
Speaker 4: It out with people, because otherwise you just do the
same stupid thing forever well, and it gets worse as
you do it. That seems to be not the sort
of thing you want to preserve. And so in that
mud mean in some ways that what you would properly
pray for is to be submitted to the flaming swords
that turn every which way.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: The terrifying part of that, I suppose would be that
most of you would.
Speaker 1: Go yeah, so that the person who it would truly
be that far gone would not yeah.
Speaker 6: Well, I have thought, for I've been thinking that.
Speaker 4: The degree to which the flaming swords that turn every
which way are hell is proportionate to how much of
you would have to be destroyed to pass through them
to get to paradise.
Speaker 6: Right right.
Speaker 4: I don't know if that's a literal vision of hell,
because if you're ninety nine percent dead, would the flames
that purify would be experienced, would they be experienced as
hell they would be if you experienced that without voluntary compliance.
I mean that happens to you in your life all
the time.
Speaker 3: So right, Yeah, And.
Speaker 1: When I sit with people as they're dying, which is
a priest, you do, the worry and the despair of
the family is that all of the love and all
of the joy and all of the good is what
is dying. That that's what's going away, right, And the
hope that Christianity presents is no, that is what becomes eternal.
Speaker 3: It's the rest that dies.
Speaker 6: Well, that would read the case.
Speaker 4: I suppose if the world was overwhelmed by hell, then
it would be that the catastrophe that would be eternal. Right,
that would mean that the wrong was we conserved? What
was we conserved the wrong thing? Well, I'm wondering. I mean,
I'm still trying to wrestle with this issue of the dead.
Let's say, I mean, you make the case for the
embodiment for the resurrection of the body very powerfully. I Mean,
one of the things our culture is very perverse about
is the notion that identity is something that floats above
embodiment in a manner that should be disembodied, and that
is which is why we insist that you can define
your own identity, which Nietzsche had something to do with, right,
because he said we should formulate our own values, that
we'd have to come to the point where we formulated
our own.
Speaker 6: That was a very bad idea.
Speaker 4: I mean, that was a very bad idea, and I
think the psychoanalysts actually corrected that pretty rapidly, although that's
not particularly well known. We would we would winn the
good and pull it along with us, right, and that
we would build the world on the basis of that good,
and that would be something like building the weight world
on the foundation of Christ. It's the same idea fundamentally, right,
is that if that's the good that's at the foundation,
and then that makes itself manifest in the particularities of
each person's time and place, then we pull all that,
we gather all that as we move along, and that
spirit suffuses us, and that's the movement towards eternity. But
then I'm still struggling with that. I see that that's true,
but I'm still struggling with that and the notion of
an embodied resurrection. So I really I know you can't
answer that, because I don't think anybody can answer that.
I'll think we understand it. Well, it's also something we're
stumbling towards the realization of.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but okay, So when you're sitting with people dying
and they're worried that the good will disappear, how is
it that you what is it that you find to
comfort people in those moments?
Speaker 1: I think it is precisely this idea, this idea that
not only are those moments not dying, not only is
that love you shared not dying, but that is going
to become your reality. That is going to become your
reality eternally. And I think in terms of drawing the
dead with us, I think that's part of the function
of saints in the church. Right, the church is not
just Christ, it's also the.
Speaker 3: Communion of Saints.
Speaker 1: Right, it's the communion of saints who are because of
their whole life. Right, we read the lives of the saints,
their actual stories play down in time as their identity
right and their spirits, the spirits of the righteous made
perfect as we call them right, are now continually part
of and foundational to the community.
Speaker 4: I could imagine too, that if you're evaluating your life
and you see those moments when you exist in something
that's at least closer to paradise than your normative existence.
That it is during those times that the spirits of
the spirit of what was best in the past is
making itself manifest in the present in your life.
Speaker 6: That is what's happening. I mean, those are the times where.
Speaker 4: Your existence is configured and things come together so that
the spirit of what, the eternal redeeming spirit of your ancestors,
is making itself manifest within you. That's what's happening. And
you can invite that in. You know, in the story
of Cain and Abel, when Cain is bitter, Cain invites
the predatory spirit that crouches on the predatory spirit of
resentment that crouches on his doorstep. He invites that in
to take possession of him. That's the accusation that God
levels against Cain when Cain shakes his fist at the cosmos,
and people do that when things are when the world
reveals itself to you in love, that's an indication that,
for whatever reason, you were fortunate enough to be wise
enough to invite in that the spirit of what's good
to possess you, right, and you can learn to do
that right, And that's that's really I would say that's
the Christian journey fundamentally to do that, and that is
something like a conservation of the of the good of
the past. You can see that too, even if you're
able to do that in part because maybe you have
a wonderful moment with your son, let's say, when he's
a child.
Speaker 6: If you think that through.
Speaker 4: You understand that that's the moment in which the best
of your father shines through you, right, And that best
of him was an amalgam of what was best about
fathers since time immemorial. I mean literally, because we imitate
each other as we move down the generations and the
centuries and so and that is the emergence of something
eternal into the space of the proximal.
Speaker 1: And the saints maintain their identity. It's not just their writings,
their thoughts, what they did, what we read their lives, right,
their identity.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, that's well, that's the other thing about the
the insistence of the resurrection of the body. That's so brilliant,
because if you abandon the notion of the body, you
abandon the value of the particularities of.
Speaker 6: Time and space.
Speaker 4: Right, it means that only what's abstract about you is real,
and that's not. Well, that leads to this transhuman postmodernism.
It's another pathway there. It has to be that the
particularities are just as important as the universalities, not and
and I think that has something to do with Jonathan's
constant and insistence that you have to understand the reflection
of the Kingdom of Heaven not as something that's merely
at the pinnacle or that's the foundation, but that's the
pinnacle and the foundation, and that suffuses the whole simultaneously, right,
And so you don't get to abandon the particularities in
preference to the to the general or vice versa. Right.
I suppose vice versa is kind of what the hedonists do.
It's only about the embodiment in the present, right, Okay, okay,
well that's well, thank you, yeah yeah yeah yeah.
Speaker 3: Thank you father, thank you, and thank you Jordan.
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