Speaker 1: We just did, like in this seminar on the Gospels,
where we spend a whole week, four hours a day
talking about the Gospel and saying we're just going to
go into the gospels and then say what we see
what we see there. At some point someone comment I
think it was even Dennis Brager, He's like, why is
it where like three quarters of the way through this
and no one has said the things that I usually
hear from Christians, from a certain branch of Christians, not like, well,
because it's not there. It's not. It's like it's I mean, yes,
you can maybe get it through Saint Paul, but it's
not there in the Gospels.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: I've gotten some feedback and there have been some reviews
posted the book where people are saying, like, this reading
of Saint Paul fits with Jesus a lot better. Right,
there's not this sort of split anymore. The fact that
reading him in context, all of a sudden, he sounds
a lot more like he's saying the same thing as
Jesus did. No one comes to Jesus, it says, you
know what must I do to inherit eternal life?
Speaker 2: And Jesus says nothing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, God already, Goden already, Josy you have.
Speaker 2: Then you know, whatever, what are you going to do? God? God,
it's a free gift.
Speaker 3: Just accept right, like that's not He talks about commandment
keeping and then you know, adds to that sell everything
you ever, give it to the poor.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: This is Jonathan Pegel. Welcome to the Symbolic World. Hello everyone,
I'm here with the Great Father Stephen the Young. Many
of you have seen him on my channel before. He's
also looking more like Santa Claus these days. I noticed
h And so Father Stephen, as you know, he is
one of the hosts of the Lord of Spirits podcast
the Whole Council of God, but he's also written several books.
He was on the Symbolic World Summit. We put up
a discussion that he talked about the Body Resurrection guided
by fred Rick Nietzche, which was really amazing. And Father
Stephen is now publishing a book on Saint Paul, and
so I thought it would be a great opportunity to
actually talk about Saint Paul. I don't I don't talk
about Saint Paul that much on my channel, at least
not explicitly. So I thought it be, it would be
a great opportunity. So, Father Stephen, thanks for coming coming on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, my pleasure, My pleasure.
Speaker 1: And so until now you've talked a lot about uh,
you know, you've tried to connect a lot of things
to Second Temple Judaism. You know, you try to to
try to create this sense of continuity between the Old
Testament and the New Testament. It's been very fruitful. And
so how how does it fit into writing a book
about Saint Paul.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, so.
Speaker 3: Saint Paul and his epistles and the interpretation of them
is sort of at the center of most of the
disputes within contemporary Christianity when you get down to the core.
And that's I mean, depending on where people watching this are,
they may have immediately had different things popped to mind,
Like so they might have had well, yes, you know,
Martin Luther's interpretation of Saint Paul basically was the Reformation
right and is sort of what separates Protestantism from Roman
Catholicism or Orthodoxy. Or they might have thought about what
Saint Paul says about women in ministry as being a
split right between more progressive and more conservative forms of Protestantism,
and on and on and on. When you trace these
things back, it comes back to Saint Paul. And I
think the biggest problem in terms of how Saint Paul
is used in all these discussions is that very rarely,
if ever, are we reading Saint Paul as a Jewish Man,
specifically a Pharisee living in the first half of the
first century a d. His epistles have been kind of
disassociated from that, so that we now read, in fact
that the Luther's reading is basically to read him over
against the Judaism of the first century, right, that he
represents this criticism and even an attack on Judaism of
the first century. Yeah, and and or you know, the
text gets isolated in and of itself due to sola
scriptura and other things, where it's just sort of like,
oh no, these are words beamed sort of directly from God.
We don't have to worry about when it was written, where,
to whom, why, Right, But when we understand Saint Paul
as the history oracle person he is, then what he's
saying suddenly makes a lot more sense, is a lot
less nebulous. There's still questions, of course, right, because we're
in a different context today. How do we apply what
he was saying then in that context to our context today.
But that's a very different discussion than presenting radically different
views of what he even said.
Speaker 5: Hello everyone, this is Annie Crawford inviting you to join
me this January for a symbolic world reading of Till
We Have Faces. The book C. S. Lewis calls far
and away the best I've written. Till We Have Faces
is Lewis's modern retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche,
a mysterious tale of dark idolatry, classical enlightenment, and the
shocking discovery of true religious vision. In our four week
online course, together, we'll explore what cus Lewis has to
show us about the nature of myth, the dangers of love,
the limits of reason, and the secrets of genuine re enchantment.
This is a book, an author, and a class you
won't want to miss.
Speaker 1: And so, what are some of the examples, let's say,
of the fact of considering his context and the fact
of considering the tradition in which he was embedded. You
know what, give me at least one or two examples
of how that enlightens the text and help us see
it in different light.
Speaker 3: Right, Well, what are the biggest examples in terms of
more contemporary readings of Saint Paul is that there's this
phrase that Saint Paul uses works of the law, which
would really be translated more like works of the Torah. Yeah,
just in general, the fact that we now translate it
as law rather than Torah already skews the picture a
great deal tour to kind of view of kind of
legal legalism and that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: But it's works.
Speaker 3: The tour has been interpreted since Luther in the Reformed
and Protestant tradition as just meaning good works, doing good things, right,
trying to do things to please God. Right, And therefore
Saint Paul's criticism of that has taken to be this
criticism of doing trying to do good and trying to
please God in your life. Whereas it becomes increasingly clear
and Matthew Thomas published his dissertation on this where he
went back to not just the scripture itself and St.
Paul's context, but went back to everyone in the second
and third centuries who comments on Saint Paul. I found
that every single one of them understands works of Torah
to mean the specific commandments that separated Jews from other people,
so circumcision, keeping kosher, right, the things that were sort
of boundary markers for the Jewish community. When you read
Saint Paul with that in mind, and understand that he's saying, look,
you are you aren't given the forgiveness of sins by
being Jewish, right, you aren't given the promises of Abraham
by just being biologically descended from him. He points out,
you know, Esau is biologically descended from him, Ishmael is
biologically from right, the Moabites are biologically descended from his family.
Speaker 2: That's not a guarantee.
Speaker 3: Then, not only does what he's saying make more sense
when you read it, but you can also see that
his positive picture of what faith is is really something
more like faithfulness, right, that it actually includes that he's
actually encouraging people to try to do good and please
God in their life. He's actually encouraging people to struggle
to keep the commandments and to repent when they don't. Right,
That this is not something he's making a break with.
This is something he's reinforcing over against a view a
sort of identitarian view of what religion is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think your insight is wonderful. That's what I mean.
Meditating on that for a while that it seems like
one of the ways you can twist the words in
the scripture is that it's actually simply something like excessive
focus on a concept. You have a you have a
concept that's there, and then you youooge, you ontologize it,
you make it the structure of reality itself. And so
you say something like there's a text about works and faith,
and then you say, well, works actually just means anything
that you do. It's actually it's actually it's almost metaphysical
like it's it's like all things that you do are
empty and all you can do is, let's say, received
from God something, and it's like and downstream from that,
if you follow the line, then you end up with
things obviously like double predestination and all the crazy things
that end up happening in prosentism, because it's like it's
not that it's not there, and the text it's that
you've you've isolated it. You folk hyper focused on it
to the detriment of all the other things that Saint
Paul and Christ and and and the other writer say,
and you've made it like a kind of jewel, like,
you know, like a center point around which the entire
scripture turns, let's say, And it made me realize what
extent tradition is important, because you could do that in
many places in the text if you wanted to. You
could say, everything has to be interpreted in the light
of this text. So now this text becomes like the
center of the world, and now every other text is
relativized based on that. It's like, this is the metaphysical
center of the Bible. And so it's like it's a
weird trick that people play, because it actually can be
a little convincing when you think of it. At first,
you're like, well, does say that? Doesn't it?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 1: It says that, and so.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, And the argument to make that sound reasonable
is you get something like, well, you have to interpret
the difficult passages of scripture based on the parts that
are clear.
Speaker 1: Oh, clear, exactly.
Speaker 2: Of course.
Speaker 3: The parts that are clear are the parts that I
sort of already agree with. It seem to fit what
I believe. Yeah, then the hard parts are all the
ones that seem to disagree with that that I then
explained away in favor of the ones right that agree
with me. And that's obviously it's super problematic. You know, if,
especially if you're from a Protestant background, where the scriptures
are your sole source of infallible authority, that becomes a
huge problem because there's no way to sort of correct yourself.
Speaker 1: Ever, No, and it really is, and people can really
become self diluted. It's not it's not also like can
I say this, it's in some ways it's it's a
factor of reality, right you when you're dealing with reading scripture,
but not just reading scripture, like even your experiences in
everyday life, sometimes there's something that shines really brightly, right,
you have this experience and then it shines brightly, and
the danger is to say, now this is the key
to all of reality. And now, like you said, I
basically make it the focus and I and I relativize
everything because of the insight that it brings. So you
can imagine like Luther, you know, struggling with confession, you know,
going over and confessing every time, and you know, realizing
that his thoughts are coming back, and like he would
want to go to confession every two seconds, and he's
like no, this can't be. And then has this insight
you know, God has saved me through faith, and then
it's a real insight. Right, it's like a real insight.
But then it you kind of bear, you kind of
focus in on it, and then it becomes the thing
by which everything else exists.
Speaker 2: It becomes the Gospel.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it becomes the Gospel. That's a good way of
thinking about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And uh, one of the things getting feedback from the book,
and I hadn't particularly thought about it this way, but
one of the ways that it's hit people is part
of what's happened downstream from some of those readings of
Saint Paul is that it's very hard to get that
reading of Saint Paul out of Christ in the Gospels.
Speaker 2: And the things Christ says the guest, it's so interesting.
Speaker 1: Because we just did. We just did, like in this
seminar on the Gospels where we spend a whole week
like two hours, four hours a day talking about the
Gospel and saying we're just going to go into the
Gospels and then say what we see what we see there.
At some point someone comment, I think it was even
Dennis Brager, He's like, why is it where like three
three quarters of the way truth this, and no one
has said the things that I usually hear from Christians,
you know, like that from the from a certain branch
of Christians there like well, because it's not there, it's
not it's like it's I mean, yes, you can maybe
get it through Saint Paul, but it's not there in
the gospels.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: And so I've gotten some feedback, and there have been
some reviews posted the book where people are saying, like,
this reading of Saint Paul fits with Jesus a lot better. Right,
there's not this sort of split right anymore. And that split,
you know, Muslim apologists and Jewish apologists in so far
as there are Jewish apology apologists because they don't proselytize, right,
but they're doing sort of counter missionary stuff. Yes, Christians, right,
they make hay that perceived difference, right to say, like,
how come Saint Paul seems so different than the Jesus
according to you, right, And so the fact that reading
him in context, all of a sudden, he sounds a
lot more like he's saying the same things Jesus did.
No one comes to Jesus and says, you know, what
must I do to inherit eternal life?
Speaker 2: And Jesus says nothing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, God already, God already, Josie. If he hasn't, then
you know, whatever, what are you going to do?
Speaker 2: God? God, it's a free gift, Just accept right, Like,
that's not He talks about commandment keeping and then you know,
adds to that, sell everything you ever to give it
to the poor. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's very that's very interesting. And so and so
what is your you know, I'm seeing what is your
take on the relationship between Saint Paul and a lot
of the other stuff you talk about, because that interests
me because I see in some of the text where
he's clearly talking about hierarchies of angels, he's clearly talking
about principalities, and you know, and so I'm wondering, what
if you brought that out in the book at all?
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, yeah, and this is part of the caricaturing
of Saint Paul, right, so, and and it doesn't start,
I want to be fair, Martin Luther wasn't trying to
do a caricature of Saint Paul, but he was very
much reading Saint Paul in terms of.
Speaker 2: His own experience, yea.
Speaker 3: And so he presents Pharisaic Judaism as having been this
sort of legalism, which is how he perceived the Roman
Catholic Church of his own day. He kind of reads
that back into them, that there's sort of these dry legalists, right,
you think you earn salvation by by keeping commandments, keeping Torah?
Speaker 2: And then Saint Paul is that sort of radically radically
opposed to that.
Speaker 3: And then Saint Paul though is coming out for Mark Luther,
coming out of that background and rejecting it, right and
rejecting it. And so what that leaves out on the
table is all the mystical experiences Saint Paul describes having, yeah, right,
his discussion in one Corinthians fifteen about angelic bodies, right,
like celestial bodies. All that gets sort of left aside
to the point that I'm not going to name names,
but a non Protestant biblical studies professor once recently, when
asked about this, was asked about Saint Paul and mystical
experiences and practicing mysticism and gave the answer, well, no,
he was a Pharisee, so he wasn't into all that, right,
which right, is just the acceptance of this kind of
care cuture yea.
Speaker 2: And so.
Speaker 3: That has gone unexplored, and where it is explored it
in I mean, I really you know, this may rub
some of your audience the wrong way, but I really
think the idea of the West is a fiction. So
I hate saying Western Christianity, but it's sort of the
only convenient term to group together Roman Catholicism and traditional Protestantism.
So it's what we're stuck with. But in Western Christianity
and Medieval Roman Catholicism, basically this sort of schism developed
between on one hand, scholasticism and on the other hand mysticism,
like they were pulled apart. And you see that really
radically in the person of Thomas Aquinas, where he has
this profound mystical experience and stops work on the suma
right because it just seems worthless to him after what
he's experienced.
Speaker 2: That's pulled apart.
Speaker 3: And so I think that gets read back into Saint
Paul too, this idea that he either had to be
this kind of scholastic theologian. You know, Romans is a
systematic theology da da da da da. If he's that
then he can't have been serious about mystical experiences. Yeah, right,
And so I'm amazed at how many people don't realize.
For example, that in the Book of Acts after the
Road to Damascus, Christ appears to Saint Paul twice in
person at different points in his life, and he describes
other in his epistles other mystical experiences he's had. Yeah,
but that doesn't fit with the oh well, the Road
tomat because is just describing his conversion, right, that's where
he got saved, and right as if Christianity and Judaism
were separate religions in eight thirty five, where you can
convert from one to the other. But so, yeah, all
of that gets left on the table. Everything having to
do with the demonic gets left on the table. That
makes it very difficult to understand his view. For example,
why he's trying to go see Caesar, right, who during
much of his ministry is Caligula, later on is Nero.
So these aren't even like quote unquote good emperors, right,
These aren't like philosopher emperors or something who you could
reason with, right, But he sees them as being humans
like everyone else. The problem is sort of the demonic
power that stands behind Rome, that stands behind the emperor.
Speaker 4: Mm hm.
Speaker 3: That the emperor is sort of embodying. But if you
preach the Gospel to the Emperor and he accepts it,
that would pride him loose from that. Yeah, and now
the Emperor receives the Holy Spirit and that would transform
literally the whole world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is which is what happened ultimately, Yes.
Speaker 2: Right, mean say, Constantine is the payoff of Saint Paul's bishop. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting to think about what you said, because
it's funny. I never had thought about it the way
that you that you had that you that you said it,
which is the idea in some ways that Saint Paul
was trying to do what ended up happening, you know
in the church. Like he understood this idea of the
importance of principalities in the world and how they they
come down that they came kind of come down on
on on on reality.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: And and he understood that like it's not was it
just about saving individuals, but there was a sense that
we could if we could save a nation in some ways,
you know, by removing this this influence from from from
evil spirits or something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that that would that would then transform things.
So yeah, that when that gets left out, what you
have is always just trying to convince people to join
his religion and see things his way and then exercise
whatever the power they had to try to force other
people to do likewise.
Speaker 1: Yes, so in some ways he understood that. In some
ways what you know, with Saint Dionysius, the Arapa guy
later would would inscribe, which is there's a relationship between
the divine hierarchies and the hierarchies in the world, like
they lay themselves out in similar structure as you could say.
Speaker 2: Right, and and that.
Speaker 3: The nature of humanity is to sort of synergize.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: And he gets into this, I mean famously in Philippians
to thirteen fourteen. But that human activity, there is human activity,
there is a human will, there is you know, sorry
Calvinist friends who are monogists. But the nature of that
activity is to participate in and bring into the world
to be guided by spiritual wills and energies and reality.
And so it's not sort of independent. There's this kind
of say John Cash, and this is how he connected
Pelagianism and Nestorianism. That Pelagianism, which is a kind of
modern monarchism that separates human activity from God's activity and
demonic activity. It has human activity starts standing by itself.
That that is a kind of Nestorianism, because it's pulling apart. Ultimately,
you have to pull apart Christ who is he went
in divine And that's the exact opposite of what Saint
Paul is teaching.
Speaker 2: So you kind of.
Speaker 3: You can't understand human ethics apart from a sense of
spiritual warfare. And since ancient politics is ethics writ large
at the level of community, you can't understand that.
Speaker 2: Apart from spiritual warfare.
Speaker 3: So the emperor, the governor, whoever else, they are embodying
and bringing into reality the will of certain spiritual powers,
and that's going to transform things in one way. And
if that is those spiritual powers are replaced with the
Holy Spirit, that's going to naturally transform things the other way.
But it's not a question of part of the problem.
That is, we as modern people, even a lot of
modern Christians, then impose on it this idea that, well,
our modern way of doing things is better. So why
didn't God like miraculously reveal that to them, right. And
I've said this before on Lord of Spirits, and I
know people don't like people talking this way, but.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry.
Speaker 3: One of the stupidest things I ever heard at an
academic conference was, and this is self criticism because it
was an Orthodox the Elogi. We could put scare quotes
around the ellotion uh criticizing the Council of Nicea for
not abolishing slavery in the Roman Empire, right, which is
just so anachronistic and bizarre. Right, like these bishops can
just take a vote and change the means of production
like in the Roman Empire in the early fourth century.
And what would they have changed it to. I mean,
I guess capitalism. I guess like modern capitalism, because that's
perfect and flawless and has no issues from a Christian perspective.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's it also, I mean, this whole
question of slavery, ah man. I don't like to talk
about it too much because it's it's definitely controversial. But
I think in some ways people don't they don't think
out the reality of how the world functions. And in
some ways, the way I think that the early Christians
and Saint Paul and the people there they and so
exactly the way that you said, in some ways, there
is no such thing as freedom in the way that
we think of it. There is no such thing as
not being bound or submitted to higher authorities that act
on us and and that you know that bind our behavior.
So the idea that there are these like just completely
free individuals that don't that that aren't we don't like
the word own, but to some extent owned by higher
powers in some ways like we can't we you cannot
avoid that. What what Christianity and even Judaism before, and
the and the ancient Israel did before was was mostly
to call on people to act properly with the people
that were under them. It was to say you have
to crisis, saying it's not that I'm going to free
you in the sense that you won't be bound to
like some higher will that will bind your behavior, but
that those that are there should be treating you in
the as if they're acting towards me. That is what
the call has always been. And so you know, when
Israel was freed from Egypt, it's like it was freed
from Egypt in order to then be bound to God
like in order to be bound to his law, to
his you know, and so they were making themselves slaves
to God after being freed from Egypt. The idea that
we're completely free is wrong, and so the approach of.
Speaker 2: Like we right.
Speaker 1: Now like are owned to some extent by our states.
If you tried not to not pay your taxes and
see what happens. Like an ancient serf, what he owed
to his lord was far less than what we owe
to the people that own us right now. We give
up way more to to to the to our overlords
than the people like the serfs that we consider slaves
in the Middle Ages. So we have to be very cautious,
I think in the way that we understand these things.
It's the the cosmic vision makes you see that it's
more about how a steward of reality has to treat
that which it stewards. Right, So it's like a leader
or a chief or someone who acts on others has
to treat them in the spirit that God has given
them with love. Basically, that's the that's the key to
Christians offer right right.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, and Chris Donald's slavery discussion is another one
that runs right through Saint Paul because of what he
says about it.
Speaker 2: And yeah, just in.
Speaker 3: The real world, right, you you have a whole economy
in the Roman Empire that's based around slavery, right, and
that's not a good thing, right, say Paul never says
slavery is a good thing. He tells fy Liban, you
can't claim to own your brother in Christ, right like,
But that's on an individual basis, right, And so yeah,
the approach Christians took starting with Saint Paul was right.
Here's how we can live within these institutions, corrupt, sinful,
flawed as they are. Right, Here's how we can live
in a God pleasing way within them. And then when
the opportunity comes, then we will change them. But even
when we have the opportunity to change them, you can't
just do that with one vote, right, Like, This is
going to take a lot of time, and so you
end up with a world in which Christian societies are
the only societies in history of the world who have
ever abolished slavery.
Speaker 2: Right Other than.
Speaker 3: That, slavery is universal, but that takes time and function
to do it. If you're you know, but you're thinking adult,
you should be able to understand that that you can't
just overhaul the economy of a global empire.
Speaker 1: See that there are degrees like you can see it
in some ways, like taking what Saint Paul said, you know,
how to treat your servants, how to treat people that
are under you became became the pattern by which then
that structure transformed moving into the Middle Ages. Like you
would have much preferred being a serf in the Middle Ages,
then you know, a slave in the Roman Empire. Yes,
because you had you actually did have rights. You were
bound to the land. There were things that your lord
was not allowed to do. He couldn't chase you away,
He had to take care of you. He actually had
to take care of your needs. All of these things
were a complete transformation, and we're in some ways the
beginning of what we now believe authority is for like
we we believe that our state is there in some
respects to care for us, you know, like a father
or like you know, take care of our needs. Whereas
that was not the case for the Roman slave. There
were basse just animals like that that could be killed
and you know, disposed of whenever they needed to.
Speaker 3: And the most basic elements were immediate, immediately immediately from
Saint Paul on right, you can't use your slaves sexual
for your sexual gratification. That's kind of huge for enslaved
people of the Roman Empire, right, I mean that that
freedom for being raped, right is pretty big, right, including
children who are slaves. A lot of dark stuff happened
to the Roman Empire. Is one of my problems with
both of the Gladiator movies is they're kind of presenting
Rome as this sort of idyllic dream that people had,
and it's kind of a dream of domination and violence.
I'm sorry, Yeah, that's uh, you know, as as Lovey said,
they created a wasteland and at peace, you know. But
but yeah, so and those things were overnight. Those things were, oh, well,
there's going to be a process by which you have
to stop sexually abuse of your slaves. It's like, no,
that ends now, right, and you know, beating them to
death ends now. And you know, uh, but changing the institutions, right,
someone coming up with the idea of wage labor was
not going to happen overnight, right, getting everybody on board
with it, and you know, hmmm.
Speaker 1: And so there's a there's a text I forget where
it is. I'm horrible I'm not a chapter in verse guy,
but there's a wonderful text in which Saint Paul talks
about how Christ is ascending at this moment, like he's
descending the hierarchy of principalities, and he's he's like dominating
the the the the principalities.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's a like to me that text is very
is wonderful because it, you know, when you think about
the situation which Paul was right both in his own
you know, Jewish world and you know, compared to what
the Romans, how the Romans were treating themselves. The fact
that he could foresee that it seems amazing to us
now because all of it happened, right, Christ was secretly
ascending the hierarchy and dominating these principalities, and at some
point the fruits of that, like you said, became visible,
you know, in the transformation of the Roman Empire, you know,
and you know, you can really realize that if you
read when you read Saint Paul from our point of view,
now we can kind of we can kind of make
the mistake and think the Christians had already won. But
in fact, it was really powerful insight that he had
that this was in some ways he could see that
it was going to happen.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, So in his mind Christ had won, yeah, right,
And now for him, this is coming out of his
reading of the Old Testament and the way in which Yahweh,
the God of Israel, led the people of Israel in battle. Right,
it was very clear he's the one who's winning the battle.
He's the one who's winning the victory. And then he
shares the spoils, you know, his people sort of come
in after right and collect the results of the victory
and come and occupy the territory. But he's the one
who's got and won. And so say Paul applies that
really to Christ. He's won the victory, and so now
what he's doing is going in He's not really I mean,
there were battles, there are still skirmishes. After the war's
basically over, right, there's still skirmishes and battles and things
that happened.
Speaker 2: But that's how he sees things.
Speaker 3: And again, he doesn't have this disconnect between material reality
and spiritual reality. Right, So the spiritual reality is playing
out in material reality. So when he goes to Thessaloniki
and he gathers a Christian community there. That Christian community
is sort of an outpost and everyone who's drawn into
it and out of the broader world of Thessalainiki that's
dominated by this spirit that they called Aphrodite, which is
a spirit of lust and sexuality and sexuality, right, is
breaking the power that that spirit has over.
Speaker 2: Thessilainiki.
Speaker 3: And then when that's ultimately completely broken, right, then Christ
replaces that spirit in the hierarchy with one of his
own appointees, right, Saint Demetrius, right comes. It is now
part of the new administration, right under new management. But
that's not just this hypothetical thing where like, oh, now
Saint Tumetrius is the patriot saint of Thessaladiki.
Speaker 2: Right. For Saint Paul, this is a very real thing
that is happening.
Speaker 1: M hm.
Speaker 3: Yeah, these spirits are being removed and replaced with by Christ,
with his own people who will shepherd the world and
the things in it in the way they were supposed
to hm.
Speaker 1: And so do you yeah, you think you see that
Saint Paul was really already talking about this in his epistles,
that he is intimating that the saints are replacing these principalities.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, absolutely, yeah, and he sees them on a
lower level. This is I know we talked about this
once before, but in terms of how I understand what
he means by baptism for the dead, that this is
asked to do with patron saints. Right, that's replacing the
gods of this family. Mm hmm, right, that's replacing the
these spirits. Actually that that's an atological reality. And so
that's why often some of our Protestant friends will say, oh, well,
the veneration of the states and this stuff, that's like
paganism and all the pagan gods and polytheism. But it's like, well, no,
we believe that that ontologically actually happened. Those spirits actually
got replaced by the spirits of the righteous made perfect.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it seems I mean, you can see it.
It's intimated by Christ. I think one of the the
mistakes people make is that they because they have this
idea of eschatology, which is something like you know, you
know in the future, that is that like when everything's over,
then we will reign with Christ and will be like
you know, some people can kind of accept that, and
they don't totally. It's hard to understand exactly what it
means for them. But the idea is that no, that
is that this is happening, It's happening already, that it
is the Kingdom of Heaven is already there, and that
there is an eschatological reality in which all of that
will be will reach its finality you could say, or
be revealed in its fullness, but that the Saints are
already ruling with Christ, you know, right after his resurrection.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And this is the influence of Puritanism.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm.
Speaker 3: That's where this comes from, right, which is a rejection
of monarchy, a rejection of hierarchies, and so they recast
Hell as a hierarchy, the devil at the top, Like
look at Milton, who's appearing, right, So now evil has
a hierarchy, the pagan gods have a hierarchy.
Speaker 2: But then that gets done away with.
Speaker 3: By Christ in terms of this sort of blessed peaceful anarchy,
right where all of these authority structures are taken, are
not replaced, but take it away.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, yeah, and then it's God, it's God above,
and then a bunch of free anarchic individuals here below
that are kind of freely associated with each other, but
there's no hierarchy amongst them, and there's no hierarchy left
in the world, and.
Speaker 3: Any one of them who tries to take power is
sort of being like the way they've now recast Satan.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But the thing it's funny because in some ways
that's actually true. It's true that if you try to
take power usually that's what ends up happening. But that's
not how it manifests itself in the Christian tradition, you know,
And it's like that there's people who it's not that
people are taking powers, that they're receiving it.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: That's where we have this idea of apostolic succession. You know,
we would someone self declaring themselves a bishop or a
priest today is as much excommunicated, you know, although it's happened.
Obviously we know it's happened, but it's still we view
that as as a serious issue. That is not the
right way it should happen.
Speaker 3: Right, right, because we would say that was exercising and
this is so this is the core I think if
you want to isolate what Saint Paul is saying in
terms of salvation in the Gospel, the core of it
is this idea of faithfulness, but not just a kind
of general universal faithfulness. So there is that level, there's
that level at which everyone, every human is called to
you know, put off sexual immorality, put off idolatry. Right,
So there's a common put off lies, put off.
Speaker 2: Right. But then for Saint Paul, every person.
Speaker 3: Receives their own gifts from the Holy Spirit and has
their own particular calling from God.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: His is to become you know, the apostle to the gentiles.
The emperor's colleague is to be emperor, right. The governor's
college is to be emperor right. And and you know,
Saint Peter's college is to be an apostle right to
the community Jerusalem and then right, So every person has
their own particular calling, and it is faithfulness not just
to that broad calling, but to that particular one.
Speaker 2: That is where you find salvation. Right.
Speaker 3: So it's it's in the particular time and place where
God has placed you and the gifts He's given to you.
Speaker 2: You're called to fulfill this role, right.
Speaker 3: And so wherever that role is in the hierarchy, right,
wherever that role is in terms of the esteem of
other people, it is through fulfilling that role that you
find that you find salvation. And this cuts against again
that puritan kind of generalizing thing where it has to
be the same for everybody. Yeah, which is which is
why a lot of Saint Paul could totally understand Saint
Simeon the stylight, but most Christians today can't understand Saint
Simme in the stilt. Why is it good for him
to sit on a pole and be covered with bugs
and be filthy and right receive this wisdom from God?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: This just seems totally bizarre, yeah to people today, But
Saint Paul could totally understand that. No, he's like Ezekiel
who wandered around naked, you know, yeah, yeah, the Jewish.
Speaker 2: People for a year.
Speaker 3: This is this weird radical calling that this one person
has gotten from God and.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no one else should do that, but he needs
to do that. Right.
Speaker 1: That is such a great point because you definitely see
that all the time where people use this content imperative
idea about reality and they apply it everywhere. They have
this idea that you know, you know, if everybody did
what Saint Simeon, or if everybody became a monk, then
it means that there'd be no more human. So obviously
monasticism can't be what God wants because you know, God
said be fruitful and multiplied. Therefore, if they are monks,
it has to be like against God's will. And like
you said, there is a way in which there are
there is a hierarchy of callings, and that hierarchy of
calling leads apathetically towards the kind of self sacrifice as
you move up. But what it does, it does the
opposite of what people think. It actually yields the world.
It's like the monastery yields families downstream from itself, not directly,
not the monk himself, but the fact of monks and
the fact of character. Crazy characters like Saint Simeon or
you know, the hermits that live in caves, you know,
down the mountain from them are like fruitful, large families
that are living faithfully. That's what that's what it yields.
That's what in some ways, that's one of the things
that understanding hierarchy can can do is to help you
understand how how the world kind of proceeds down how
when you have characters that shine, that become these examples
that they they open up, they open up the world, right,
and and all of that makes how can help you
make sense with so many things? You know, like the
idea that Christians believe that the highest ideal is something
like a someone who like Saint Simeon the stylight, or
I say Modses the black You know that that that
that I let themselves be killed by bandits or you know,
do all these kinds of stuff that are very extreme
that downstream from that is actually nations that defend themselves.
Like now, downstream that is actually like healthy, you know,
nations that are able to or doesn't mean that it
has to happen it. How can I say this, Like
the apothetic yields fruit, it doesn't make the whole world
stop to disappear like it doesn't. It doesn't like swallow
the world into it. I don't know if that makes sense.
I'm kind of on the edge here by thinking.
Speaker 3: Well, right, but it also doesn't make everything the same yeah, yeah, yeah,
and everyone the same? Right we have This is one
of the wonderful things I think about Orthodox iconography as
an object lesson in this look at visit ted icidography,
and on one level, all the saints kind of look
the same, right in terms of the style and everything, right, Like,
there's definite patterns, right. But on the other hand, they
also are all different, and that's important because they show
us a thousand different ways to follow Christ and be
faithful to one's calling.
Speaker 2: Right, So you're not being called all Christians.
Speaker 3: Aren't called to just you know, adopt the same mode
of dress and attire and way of speaking and tone
of voice and and all these quite the opposite, right,
quite the opposite. There are people who are called to
different different things, and and pride struggles against that mightily
because we all want to have the callings that get
more prestige.
Speaker 2: And more thanks for they're humans. You know, people want
to be priests.
Speaker 3: They don't want to be church janitors, right like aspirationally,
but there are times where the things the janitor does
are more important to the life of the community than
than what the priests might be.
Speaker 2: Doing that day.
Speaker 3: You know, there's a lot of there's a lot of that.
But but that could be mistaken, as the Puritans did,
for there being something wrong with someone trying to exercise
God given authority.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And I think that Christian Christian hierarchy and
the way that Christ sets it sets it up is
in some ways, I always thought that it's the solution
to hierarchy, you know, because there's a sense in which
we actually we can't avoid hierarchy. We need it, there's
no way around it. Even your actions are organized hierarchically,
even your perception is organized hierarchically, you just can't avoid it.
But the vision of the relationship between the people who
are an authority and those that follow them, you know,
in some ways, it's like a self sacrificial authority, and
that what that does is it actually grounds hierarchy in
something which fills fills the world, right, it fills the
world with and so the leader is there. The people
serve the leader, but the leader gives himself, right, gives
himself down to the people that serve him. And that
seems to be the way the world works. It actually
seems to be the way that that that that reality functions,
and that Christ has revealed that to us in a
in a very powerful way. But we always fall back
on the old models of obviously of power. But that's
not what Christ showed us.
Speaker 2: Right, right, and it's and it's sacrificial on both sides.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3: And you know, as much as it's it's very easy
for us to point to, well, yes, our leaders should
be more self sacrificial, it should be more christ like.
That it's true, right, I as a preach should be
much more christ Like than I am.
Speaker 2: But most of us struggle more with the other side
of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, especially especially like in America, especially in North America,
we struggle with the other part.
Speaker 3: Right, because even if there are situations right, there are
situations where not with my bishop. My bishop is wonderful,
it never makes mistakes. But you know, certain times I
have been around other bishops, of course I won't name right,
and I've got PhD in Biblical studies, and they'll say
something about the Bible that I know is just not
true right, or just not correct right, or needs a
lot more nuance at least right.
Speaker 1: The actually aspect of even is just burning inside that they.
Speaker 3: Are above me in the hierarchy, and so I have
to muster the humility to say no, mhm right and
not try to correct right.
Speaker 2: And but that you don't need a PhD to have
that experience. Right.
Speaker 3: The first time your spiritual father gives you advice that
you don't like you have that experience right of well, no,
this seems right to me, and I know the scriptures
say the way that seems right to me has its
end in destruction. But but what he's saying seems wrong
to me, and so I don't want to do it,
you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And there are so many beautiful examples in our
tradition of people who find themselves in unjust even sometimes
unjust situations, and to a kind of wisdom and a
kind of way of having reverence towards the authority without
necessarily giving into them moral aspects or whatever, they're able
to transform the situation, you know, you know, without rebelling,
you could say, rebelling explicitly, like without trying to take
over authority, revolution rulet revolutionary thinking.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well yeah, I mean you think of David's men
standing there with him, saying, look, you've already been anointed king. Okay,
God has anointed you king. He's trying to kill you, right,
just take about We'll say it was self defense, right,
he's striving to kill you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, and there's no.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's pretty amazing. Yeah, there's so many, there are
so many powerful you know stories of uh, there are
so many powerful stories of that. I forget I think
it was is it? I forget? I think is it
saying Elizabeth, I'm it's horrible. You know the story of
you know, certain corrupt priests who are acting, Oh it's
Saint Francis has done this, like in the in the
Western tradition where he somebody asked him, like a priest
is living with a woman, and he says, you know
what about this guy? You know, he's leaving a woman.
And Francis like gets down on his these and kisses
his feet and says, I'm not worthy, you know, to
even be in this person's presence. And it's like, then
the this whole image of Saint Paul saying like, you know,
putting coal on someone's head, like they're basically shoving coal
on their head. It's like, man, can you imagine that
that priest then like going back home after that and
like having a serious decision to make about what his
life is going to be.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 1: So they are beautiful moments like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so that's yeah.
Speaker 6: And again you know, talking about taking Saint Paul its
historical context, right, the idea of some kind of anarchic
situation or sort of it's just everything is just between
me and.
Speaker 2: God or you know, ah, it just is ridiculous, right,
it's absurd.
Speaker 1: There is this accusation father, that I've heard, you know,
from different circles, that in some ways we're the Church
of Saint Paul. Right, you know, this this idea also
coming out of different supposedly the idea of different Christianities
that would have existed at the time, that the conflict
between Saint Paul and Saint Peter was actually more than
what we think. You know, I've even heard people say
that Simon the Magus is actually Peter. You've heard these
these these these legends, these ideas that modern scholars have,
you know. And so how do you see I think,
in rereading Saint Paul in the contexts, you know, how
do you see him as an more of an extension
of Christ? Is the way you talk about?
Speaker 3: Well, I mean, the big problem there is that there's
this assumption that, again because of the caricature of first
century Judaism, that Saint Paul is somehow anti Judaism.
Speaker 2: And so when you look at.
Speaker 3: Saint James and you look at Saint Peter, who are
very clearly practicing Jewish Christianity, meaning they're still keeping.
Speaker 2: The Torah right there, there's still keb kosher.
Speaker 3: They're still doing all those things that therefore, and if
you then misread Saint Paul to be saying all those
things are bad and you should stop doing them, then
it seems like there's this obvious dichotomy. But if you
actually read Saint Paul, he literally never says they're bad
and that people should stop doing.
Speaker 2: Them, and he.
Speaker 3: His epistle to the Galatians is basically him explaining and
helping circulate the epistle that Saint James sends out in
Acts fifteen, which is to say that the Christians from
the nations, because that's what gentiles means right, are to
enter into the Christian communities, to enter into the Church
as whoever they are, and remain that. So if you're
a Greek, right, you become a Christian Greek. If you're
an Egyptian, you become a Christian Egyptian. If you're a Syrian,
you become a Christian Syrian. You don't become Jewish right
in order to become Christian. But Saint Paul is also
very clear over and over again, and you have to
do a lot of twisting around to get around some
of these passages. Frankly, you have to do the whole
well clear unclear thing. Right, So here he's clear that
you know, usually the places where they say he's clear,
places where he's talking to gentiles and telling that these
things don't apply.
Speaker 2: To you, and he's talking to nod Jews and say
these things.
Speaker 3: Don't apply to you, which every Jewish person at the
time and every Jewish person today would agree with, by
the way, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah right, and.
Speaker 1: This is this is, this is this is going to
be a little more controversial. Sorry, you feel free to
answer or not. So, you know, there was there did
come a time, you know, in the later centuries where
there were more or explicit canons and rules against the
practicing of the Jewish fees. For example, you know, we
don't we don't practice the Sabbath, and there are certain
you know, there are certain rules later that made it
that we wouldn't, you know, like even I think our
pasca can never be on the same in the in
the or that's not true, all right, okay, yeah, yeah,
all right, okay, uh And so how would you I mean,
I'm trying to think about it, like maybe think about
it in like a modern sense. So if you were
let's say, if you were Jewish today and you converted
to Orthodox Christianity, do you think there would be room
for people still maintaining some of their Jewish practices? You know,
because this is the whole Spanish inquisition question.
Speaker 2: Right, So there are actually a bud to variables there
to consider. Okay, right.
Speaker 3: Now, I do have to say, and I'm not going
to out anybody here, but there are cases in our
own day of people who were religiously Jewish. So it's
relatively rare that religious Jews convert to Orthodox christ secular right, right,
And so there's two different issues there, right, So a
secular Jew who hasn't been practicing these.
Speaker 2: Things, has it been keeping kosher, has it been practicing
any of these things? Who joins the Orthodox Church.
Speaker 3: The Orthodox Church is not going to say, oh, well
you need to start doing all.
Speaker 2: These things, right, obviously, right.
Speaker 3: But if you have a religious Jewish person, right, the
question is is the does the Orthodox Church tell them, well,
you need to stop, you need to start eating double
cheeseburgers and put bacon on them to boot, right, you
need to start doing these things or stop doing those
things and change. And again, without outing anybody, I could
tell you there are cases of this in the present
day Orthodox Church where bishops have encouraged those Jewish Orthodox
Christians to continue in those things. The bigger issue there
with individual conversions, though, is the life of the community,
because then you've got one person keeping kosher in an
Orthodox Christian community that isn't.
Speaker 2: Because no one else there's Jewish.
Speaker 3: That causes problems, you know, after at coffee hour on
Sunday at Caposcope East at the And so it's important
where we think very individualistically as wider people, right, And
the Torah is not designed to be practiced individually. Yeah,
it's designed to be practiced as a community. And from
the Jewish side, you have to have ten adult Jewish
males to have a Jewish community and to put these
things into practice. Right, So to me, the question becomes
more if and this would be wonderful, Like let's say
tomorrow the chief Rabbinant of Israel converse to Orthodox Christianity
and comes into the Patriarchate of Jerusalem. This would be
a wonderful miracle, right if this were to happen, because
if they did that, you'd have this mass conversion of
Orthodox Jews right to Christianity in their communities, where you
have a community that is entirely made up of Jewish
Orthodox Christians, right, I suspect that it would look a
lot more like first century of Jewish Christianity, and that
there would be significant parts of the Torah that they
continued to keep, possibly like keeping kosher and those kind
of things, right, that would continue. But the key thing
here is, and this is what this is what really
makes these discussions controversial, is that we're thinking like Protestants.
We're thinking like Protestants in the sense that both in
that universalization and in terms of we make everything about like, well, does.
Speaker 2: That mean to go to hell? Are you saying Jewish
people have to keep kosher, they go to hell?
Speaker 3: Are you saying that It's like, go ask a Jewish person, right,
are you keeping kosher? Because if you don't, you won't
go to Heaven?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: They'll laugh at you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, That's never how it worked, right. It is
much more like and this should be understandable to Orthodox Christians, right,
because we have the same thing if we're honest.
Speaker 2: Within Orthodox Christianity, just like in Orthodox Judaism, there's levels
of observance.
Speaker 3: Of course, we have people at our church who keep
the fast very strictly, and we have people who don't
keep them at all, yeah.
Speaker 2: And everything in between.
Speaker 3: And you have Jewish people even who identify as Orthodox,
who keep Kosher very strictly, yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: And who don't keep it at all.
Speaker 3: And everything in between, everything between, right, and and so
those things are functioning the same kind of way, right
as the traditions we've received as Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox,
and those are titentical, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean what about I mean, I
guess one of the questions is circumcision. You know, I
do have I have some friends that have Jewish ancestry,
you know, practicing Jewish ancestry, and you know, they decided
to circumcise their son even though they are Orthodox. And
that was an example of a place where I was
I was kind of wondering in my you know, I'm
not of I'm not a rigorous I'm not a rigorous
and so I thought that it was a that it
was appropriate, you know, to kind of to respect that
tradition if they if it's something that came all the
way down to them. But I wondered I'm like, I
wondered what some of the ecclesiastical authorities would think about that.
Speaker 3: Right, Well, so if I was, if I was that
person's spiritual father, and this wasn't a case where I
felt like I needed to punt to the bishop, right,
which with difficult cases, that's the right thing.
Speaker 2: To do, by the way a priest's But I what
I would want to know is why, right? Why?
Speaker 3: And if they told me, like, well, this is what
makes them a child of Abraham and an heir to
the promises of God, that would be a problem m.
Speaker 2: Hm, right, like that as opposed to their baptism.
Speaker 3: Right, if they said to me, this is the ancient
tradition of our people, give it us by God, right,
and we think this is a good thing, and.
Speaker 2: Here's what it represents to us.
Speaker 3: Right, and they had a thoroughly understood view of baptism
in addition to that, right, and they were baptizing the
baby too, right and everything. I think that would be
a place where it would be salutary, right, because we
have to deal with the fact that, like Saint Paul
has Saint Timothy get circumcised. Yeah, right, I mean we
really we when it comes down to it. If you're
really going to deal honestly with Saint Paul, you have
to deal with the fact that, right, not only did
he take a Nazarite vow at one point, but he
went and paid for the animal sacrifices at the conclusion
of a bunch of Christians taking Nazarite vows. Mm hmm,
animal sacrifices including a sit off, right hmmm, after the
accession of Christ. Yeah, right, this is just the reality.
There were those Jewish Christians in the first century. They
included many of the most notable apostles like Saint James
and Saint Peter, who continued to practice these things. So
there was a Jewish Orthodox Christianity of the first century.
Speaker 1: Well, when you see like when you see that it
says that the that the apostles and the disciples went
to the temple, It's like, what, that's what happened at
the temple. And so if they if they were going
to the temple all the time, it meant that they
were participating in these in these rituals. There was no
it seems like there's no it's a little different when
it says they went to the synagogue. Then you could
kind of sneaking kind of. But when it said they
went to the temple, it's like, yeah, that's what was
going on, right, And.
Speaker 3: It makes everybody uncomfortable, but we have to be honest
with that and record with that.
Speaker 2: And I think the way we reckon with that is.
Speaker 3: Those were things given to the Jewish people right until
the temple was taken away.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Then and then God took the temple away, and so
that was no longer a part of things. But everywhere
else the way Christianity was practiced was additive, right. So
they went to the synagogue on the Sabbath, right, And
then there was a gathering just of the Christian subset
of the Jewish community on the Lord's Day, which actually
started at sundown, but this is where that gathering started.
But and that was centered around the Eucharist, right, which
was a sacrificial thank offering.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so it.
Speaker 3: Was seen as this is right, this additional ministry right
with its own Christian priesthood and its own things.
Speaker 2: And then it went for being a supplement to being
the thing. But you know you mentioned you mentioned h
the Sabbath.
Speaker 3: Uh interestingly, Uh, go ask a Jewish person if gentiles
should be able should keep the Sabbath.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: They'll tell you Gentiles aren't allowed to keep the Sabbath
mm hmm. Right.
Speaker 3: And I would also point out that in Christian countries,
actual Christian countries where they don't name the days of
the week after pagan gods, uh, the name of that
day is still the Sabbath, right, and then the day
of the day after that is the Lord's Day.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean it is still it's still for us
because Sabbath, because Sabbath is also Saturn, Like, we still
have Saturn to Saturn day.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, so we go it. Yeah, we also do.
Speaker 1: We also still have an idea that that Saturday is
the Sabbath day. Although it's a little it's it's like
once removed, but it's still definitely definitely. I mean, this
is really fascinating. It'll be interesting to see how people
react to some of the things we said in the comments.
Speaker 3: And so finally, on a good day, I get called
both a judaizer and an anti semi at the same time.
Speaker 1: There you go. Yeah, I've seen people. I think people
kind of kind of call you that. I think, you know,
it's interesting for me to think about that because it
seems like in the evacuation of Christianity from popular culture,
there is no other solution besides going back and reconnecting
things together, you know, because it was understandable that in
like the year sixteen hundred in Serbia or something, that
we just were baking. We're just soaking, like we're soaking
in all of this tradition. Everything is there, and so
there isn't maybe as much a need, for example, even
for people to know the scripture, like to know all
the Old Testament stories, like you know, some villager and
it wasn't something that was that was needed for their
for their spiritual life. Maybe a little bit, but not
not as much as as now. Now we almost have
no choice to really kind of redive dive back into
the cosmology of the first century to help people kind
of see how it affords a world for us at
this moment. And strangely enough, this is what I also believe,
is that we are in a moment with these weird
artificial intelligent things happening, with all of this kind of
technification of our reality, we are in a world where
the actually the cosmology and the vision of principalities and
you know, the Council of God, all of these images
that were there in the first century, they are actually
the thing we need to understand right now in order
to understand the world we live in. And so there's
a strange there's these strange threads kind of being pulled
together where we just have to be more deliberate about
this stuff today.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think one of the major functions of tradition
has been to preserve context m right. So one example
of this that I've used a lot before is and
I know not all Orthodox churches do this every pasca,
but the knocking on the doors and the lift up
the heads oe gates, right, which we understand it's quote
from a Psalm. We understand this to be connected to
the heroic of Hades. If you go back to the Psalm,
you can.
Speaker 2: Kind of see how that works.
Speaker 3: It looks like this weird allegorical reading of it. But
now since in the nineteen sixties we dug up the
city of Ugarit and have read the bail cycle in Ugarritic,
we now know that that psalm is referencing the bail cycle,
and so what the psalm was talking about in its
original context was Yahweh descending into the deather world to
defeat Bail And so now we've taken that and applied
that to the heroic of Hades.
Speaker 2: Right in Christ's.
Speaker 3: Resurrection, and so that all fits together and makes it now. Yeah,
right now, for centuries, they didn't need to read the
Bail cycle. They didn't need tradition had preserved that interpretation
of the song.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, liturgically, right.
Speaker 3: But now we've come into an age where we have
a lot of people, even our fellow Christians, going, well,
that tradition of hers just seems weird and arbitrary. Where
are you getting that right? Where you get that that's
just some tradition somebody made up sometime.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And so now simultaneously with that, we've had these finds
like the Dead Sea scrolls and who gar it right,
and going back into the text and uncovering that original context,
which to me, when the more you understand it, the
more you see the bay what it is that tradition
has been preserving, hmm, right, And and it all kinds
of falls and kind of falls into place.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I think, at least for me, that's one of
the greatest roles that you're playing, is because a lot
of these texts, these old ancient texts have been used
to attack Christianity, right, people, they discovered all these these
ancient text and they're saying, well, here's another vision, like
here's something that you didn't know, and it's it's actually
undermined the Christian message. And I think one of the
greatest things you've been able to bring is to say, no, actually,
it's very opposite. It actually enlightened. It actually illuminates the
text and ground it and and shows us how what
we thought about it traditionally until now is right all along,
you know. And like I said, even though we had
lost the explicit connections. You know, the tradition has preserved it,
and now we can if we can draw the explicit connections,
that's great, but it was already there, you know, right right.
Speaker 3: And so yeah, and I think that's that's part of
you know, people are talking now because of that article.
Speaker 2: About people coming into the Orthodox Church.
Speaker 3: And they want to try and make it all about
masculinity so that I can try and make it into
this weird alt right thing. Yeah, but in my experience,
I mean the people who bluntly, the people who are
like looking at your content and then coming and listening
to the Lord of Spirits and then coming into the church.
What I hear from them a lot more the ones
who are coming from sort of evangelical backgrounds. It's not like, oh,
I wanted to be super manly, but more that you know, oh,
now all of that sort of makes sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The deeper, the deeper connection, the sense of like a
whole well of possibilities of understanding that is more than
just up here. But it's like, it's this, this grounded,
it's it offers the cosmos is what it does in
some ways.
Speaker 3: Yeah, XYZ never made sense to me, but now I
get it. Yeah, right, And that's and making those connections
is very attractive to people.
Speaker 1: I totally agree.
Speaker 2: I totally agree.
Speaker 1: So, Father, what are you hoping, let's say, if you
could reduce, if you could bring it to one thing,
what do you hope being that this book's going to do,
this book on St. Paul, Like, what are you hoping
that it can help people understand? Mostly?
Speaker 3: Yeah, Honestly, my biggest goal, the best compliment I could
get after somebody reads it, and I've said this a
couple times before, is that people feel like they know
Saint Paul better as a person after reading it, because
it's structured like a biography, but also there's commentary on
the epistles.
Speaker 2: There's a new translation of the Epistles.
Speaker 3: One person who read it, who has a PhD in history,
told me that when they were reading the translation, they said, oh,
this sounds like it was written by the.
Speaker 2: Person you were talking about, like in the first part
of the book.
Speaker 1: Right, that's right.
Speaker 2: I took that as a great compliment. Right.
Speaker 3: That I think is my biggest goal is to try
to bring people into sort of contact with Saint Paul,
the actual person, right, And and so these other things
like I said saying, oh, well, wait, now I see
how Jesus and Saint Paul fit together, right, Or I
see how Saint Paul fits into the rest of the Bible.
Or oh wow, this makes a lot more sense of
the Old Testament than the other way of trying to write.
Speaker 2: Those are all sort of icing on the cake to
me afterwards.
Speaker 1: Wonderful, Well father, thanks for everything you do, and everybody
check out the book. I don't have a copy. I
was supposed to have one, but I think the mail,
our mail has been on strike, and so I was
supposed to have a copy that I could show you,
but we'll well, we'll post a link to it in
the description so you can so you can all get it.
And hopefully this is once again. We'll talk again father
as usual.
Speaker 2: I'm pretty sure, yeah, I'm sure at some point. Thanks