Speaker 1: And then when we look at scripture and we ask
the question, what's the unifying vision behind the whole Bible,
Scripture from beginning to end pertains to the divine in
dwelling of the world in sanctuaries. And so if you
want to see the entire world at once, we go
to Exodus twenty five to thirty one, because this is
where Moses enters into God's presence. And what does he
see when he enters into God's presence. He doesn't just
see a bright light, He doesn't just have a numinous experience,
though he does have those things. He sees a vision
of a blueprint of a building with furniture or more
prosycial furniture. And that tabernacle is the architecture of the
entire creation because it takes the totality of the cosmos
and it compresses it down into a way that can
be seen by one person. And so when we look
at the structure of the Tabernacle, we are looking into
high heaven and beyond, and we see the relation that
everything in the Tabernacle has with everything else. And in
doing that we can then look at the real world
and see it as an Exejesus of the actual creation,
and the whole Bible is fundamentally about this principle.
Speaker 2: This is Jonathan phel Welcome to the Symbolic World. Hello everyone,
I'm here with Saraphim Hamilton. If you paid attention to
the channel he has been discussing with me before, he
has a very fascinating and powerful vision of scripture. He
has his own YouTube channel. You can look him up,
Sarah fham Hamilton. But we're excited that he is going
to be teaching a class for us called Scripture the
Key to Reality. The Bible as a symbolic world, you know,
and obviously this is something that anybody who watches this
relieves to be true. But it's exciting to also get
people's minds and people's thought into the scripture because there
are all kinds of ways in which that's the case.
It's not just one single way there. You know, the
Bible is polysemic, and there's all of these powerful structures
inside and and and people's different tax on. It is
enriching for each of us. And so Sah Saraf and
thanks for doing this with us.
Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much. I'm really excited.
Speaker 2: And so that's a bold statement. You know, obviously I
also believe it. But you know, the idea that the
Scripture is the key to reality. Maybe tell us a
little bit about what is your perception on that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so when you look at the world, you're not
really looking at the totality of the world. In one case,
the world is a lot bigger than what you can
see around you. And so the question is, how do
we understand if we think there is some unifying purpose
of the world, if there's some unifying principle which undergirds
the relation between everything and everything else, how do you
see it all at once? Well, the ultimate answer to
that question is you see it in the person of
Jesus Christ. You see it in the Logos, through whom
everything has its particular existence in communion with everything else.
But Saint Maximus the Confessor draws a very interesting analogy
between the Incarnation, the Creation, and then the Scripture. So
all three of these are expressions of the one person
of the Logos in a kind of totalizing way. And
then when we look at scripture and we ask the question,
what's the unifying vision behind the whole Bible Scripture from
beginning to end, pertains to the divine in dwelling of
the world in sanctuaries. And so if you want to
see the entire world at once, we go to Exodus
twenty five to thirty one. This is where Moses enters
into God's presence. And what does he see when he
enters into God's presence. He doesn't just see a bright light.
He doesn't just have a numinous experience, though he does
have those things. He sees a vision of a blueprint
of a building with furniture, or more prosychial furniture. And
that tabernacle is the architecture of the entire creation because
it takes the totality of the cosmos and it compresses
it down into a way that can be seen by
one person. And so when we look at the structure
of the Tabernacle, we are looking into high heaven and beyond,
and we see the relation that everything in the tabernacle
has with everything else. And in doing that, we can
then look at the real world and see it as
an exegesis of the actual creation. And the whole Bible
is fundamentally about this principle, the way which God is
disclosed as the unifying principle of the world and the
way in which God intends to bring the world to
perfection through his relation and dialogue with the human race
as a single organism. So that's kind of the overarching vision,
no pun intended of the class stepping into the Tabernacle,
stepping into the temple, seeing it as the architecture of reality,
reading the whole Bible in terms of that, And then
in the last couple of classes, and then and that
brought us sense throughout them all, we're going to concretize
that a little bit and see how this isn't just
some abstraction which we make ourselves believe. It actually cashes
out in the concreate stuff of the world.
Speaker 3: Mm hmmmm.
Speaker 2: Because you said something really bold at the outset that
I'm sure some people might freak people out. Is that
you said, Sam Maximus draws this relationship right. He says,
he talks about, of course, the person of Christ as
the incarnation, talks about scripture, and then he said, he
talked about all of creation as being the fullness of
the logos. And so maybe I mean, because I know
some types of people are going to get really shocked
if you express the creation as an extension of incarnation.
Speaker 3: But maybe you can talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 2: And help people understand why that is the case and
why that's useful to understand.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but we don't want to see God as kind
of a foreigner in his own world. So when we
look out at the world, you know, we see it
having all kinds of positive qualities. It has color, and
it has sound, it has tastes, it as all of
these things. And when we consider what we believe about God,
God is the one who is self exists, meaning he
has all existent qualities to an infinite degree, and so
there's no thing in existence which could possibly come from
anything other than God. You know, in order to have equality,
if you don't have it intrinsically, you need to get
it from somewhere else. While we believe as Christians that
the creation does not exist intrinsically, it is derivative of God.
So if the creation has the qualities that it has,
and it receives its existence and its life from God,
then that simply means that the creation has to derive
or express those qualities which belong intrinsically to God. But
we acknowledge that there is of course an ontological distinction
in the nature of their existence between God and the world,
not because they're utterly unlike each other in every sense
of that phrase, but because the things that we see
in limited form in the Creation, we see an infinite
form to an infinitely greater degree in the life of
God himself. And one of the things that we recognized
when we think about God's relation to the world is
that all of these relations and qualities are instantiated to
their fullest degree in the Father's relation to the Son.
So we have this thing called the God world relation.
God relates to the world as something other than himself.
But we say that everything that the world is expresses
or echoes something in the life of God. So what
about that idea of relation. Well, the reason that God
can have a relationship with the world is because relation
itself is something which is infinitely possessed by the Father's
relation to the Son. So that's why the Gospel of
John says all things were made through him and says
that in the context of the Son's being begotten of
the Father, the Son is begotten of the Father. God
creates the world. Those aren't the same thing, but their analogous,
and thus the creation is brought to its perfection through
the incarnation of the world. And it's not an accident
that it's in this context where the Gospel of John
evokes the language is thanctuary. The word became flesh, and
Tabernac owned among us, and we have seen his glory.
Glory is the only son from the Father. So that's
that we enter into that life of God.
Speaker 2: So what what is the This is the question, you know,
in some ways the question that I hear all the time,
even base the things that I say. You know, if
what you're saying is true, then what is the difference
between the Christian vision of the world and you know,
a kind of pantheism or a kind of imminentism where.
Speaker 3: God is the world?
Speaker 2: Because you hear people say things like that, right though
I hear people now all the time who who are
constantly trying to avoid saying that they pray and they
say things like I asked the universe or whatever, that
kind of language. And so what is the difference? Why
do we still have then? If God is fully manifested
through the world's qualities, why do we need the you
could say, the distinction of God as a as as
a separate being or a separate source of being.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, well, I think that we wouldn't say necessarily
that God is fully manifested in the qualities of the world.
We would say that the world runs downstream of God
in the sense that God gives it life and existence
and being. But then what the world does is it
points us upwards and outwards. It points us out of itself.
And so let's see, we see light in the world,
and light makes us able to know the things on
which it shines. Light is beautiful, it has infinite color
inside of it, but it points outside of itself. And
this is an important point I think about. You know,
what we as Orthodox Christians call apathetic theology, that we
speak of God in terms of what he is not
rather than what he is. That apathetic theology is not
a statement that God cannot be known. It is a
statement that there's always more of God to know. And
so when we look at the finite world, it points
outside of itself as one which comes from God. But
then when we enter into God, we see more of
that to an infinitely more beautiful degree than we could
see looking at the world in itself. And then this is,
you know, another part of the way that Scripture frames
its concept of reality, which is that, Okay, the world
is a temple and it's a sanctuaryous place where God
lives at the place which reflects the qualities of God.
And God has made man as his partner to bring
God into the world. So if you look at the
way that the Tabernacle is consecrated, well, the Tabernacle is
a nature representation of creation and the language of the
Tabernacle is filmed with illusions back to Creation Week. But
one of the things you find that's really interesting is
that at the end of Exodus, Moses and God both
are using verbs that belong to God in Creation week,
that Moses finished the work whereas God was the one
who finished the work in Creation week. That God rested
in the Tabernacle in his glory, just as he did
in the seventh Creation Day. And so what that means
then is that man, as the one who knows God,
who exists in relation to God, is then given the
mission to bring God more and more fully into the world.
So the world isn't that which just directly immediately reveals
God to us, but the world points us to God.
And then when we turn and gaze upon the God
from whom the world comes. We can look back on
the world and bring God's glory more and more fully
into that world, which is what we're going to be
doing for all eternity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's interesting that you see that.
Speaker 2: Obviously, in Genesis at the beginning, when God creates man,
you can see that he is giving him a role
which is similar to his He's saying, now name the animals,
which is an expression of what God was doing in
the world in Genesis one. And so you really have
this sense that the purpose of the human is to
kind of continue to be like an emissary of God
in the world and to continue his work in reality.
But then maybe, yeah, we can ask this question, which
is that Again it's related to the question I asked before,
and it's something that people say all the time, which is,
if creation is this, If creation in some ways is
a tabernacle, Creation is this place in which God reveals himself,
then why do we need why do we need temples?
Like why do we need to build Why was there
this need to build a tabernacle rather than to live
in God's creation?
Speaker 1: Let's say, yeah, yeah, well, I think that the answer
to this is related to the mission that we're given right. So,
as you mentioned in Genesis one, you know, God shapes things.
He takes unformed, void matter and he molds into different things,
and then he leaves it intentionally and complete, so that
man is going to perpetuate that work, and man is
going to bring creation to its perfection. And so then
I think what we want to do is we want
to ask the question of what we're doing when we
actually build specific sanctuaries. What we're doing in building specific
sanctuaries is not taking something that's utterly unlike the world
and just like popping it into the world. Instead, what
we're doing is we're taking the matter of creation and
we're shaping it so that it becomes more fully itself
by reflecting God. So this derives from kind of the
first principles about which we spoke that the world derives
from God as the creation of God. It therefore reflects
or expresses symbolically some character of God. Therefore it finds
itself when it comes to more and more fully express
the life of God. And so this is something that
we see in Exodus as well. So the instructions of
the tavern given in seven speeches corresponding to the seven
Creation days. The sixth speech talks about a guy named
Bezilel from the tribe of Judah, the same tribe as Jesus,
and Bezilel is thus an ex to Jesus of what
Adam is meant to do. So God gives Bezilel the
spirit justice he gave Adam the spirit. And what he
does is he takes all of this stuff that they've
gotten out from Egypt. So they came out with lots
of spoils. There's a lot of back pay that they
weren't getting when they were slaves in Egypt, so they
got their back pay. And then God says, give me
a contribution from it. And what they do is they
take the matter of the world and they shape it,
and they mold it in such a way that more
fully expresses symbolically God's character so that God can come
and dwell in it. And then then the language of embodiment.
This is one of the beautiful things about scripture that
it uses different patterns of language to express different different
aspects of God's life. But you see these patterns being
married consistently the scripture, so that they're not just separate.
They stand alongside each other. The Tabernacle and the Temple.
They're not just spoken of as a static building. They're
spoken of as things like a tree of life or
an organism. And so what we see is that man.
Man's mission is to guard and cultivate the garden. He's
an agriculturist, and man plants the seed in the world
and then grows the environment of the temple like an
organism until it totally permeates all things. And that's where
you get the image of, you know, the cosmic tree.
When God speaks to Daniel and Nebekinezer in the Book
of Daniel, he sees his empire as this tree which
extends over all the nations, and then Jesus uses that
image for the Kingdom of God and the Gospels. But
the Temple itself is as a treehouse is built out
of this kind of material.
Speaker 2: One of the things I've noticed and that has fascinated
to me, you know, and it's been part of the
thing that I talk about, is that it seems that
there is a shift that happens at the fall, and
that there is an aspect of the consequence of the fall,
which is this idea of work. Right, it seems that
Adam before the fall, his role is to name. It's
almost like an effortless thing. Effortless in the sense that
we think of effort right, in the sense that it
was a more natural process of him naming the animals,
whereas after the fall there's this sense in which he
actually has to mold, like physically shape things, and that
there's a relationship between that and the fall, which you
see in the fact that human activity in human craft
then develops in the Line of Caine until the flood.
And so it's something that I've been really thinking about it.
I definitely see in some ways the Tabernacle, the end
of city of Jerusalem, and ultimately the heavenly Jerusalem in
some ways as God covering or i'd say, transforming the
fall into something glorious, right, transforming the results of the
fall into something positive. But I wondered if you've thought
about that, if you have ideas about that relationship between
the fallen world and the Tabernacle, let's say.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, one of the things that's really interesting about
what you see in the Line of Cain is that
many of the things which are described in the Line
of Cain implicitly would be necessary for Noah to build
the world into an arc. And so what we see
I think in the Fall is, you know, Man goes
into schism from the life of God. And because the
life of God is the principle of all reality, that
means man goes into schism with the communion in which
he would know everything else in God. And what you
see in Genesis too, as you point out, is Adam
is ruling the world as it were through speech. God
has spoken to him, and now Adam speaks out to
the world, and the animals just approach Adam. They freely
offer themselves to Adam so that he can rule over them.
But then in the event of the Fall, the schism
from God is manifesting a schism from the world, so
that the world begins to resist the natural operation of man.
The world rises up and rebeunds against Man. I mean,
you wouldn't be able to name a lion in the
way that Adam named the lion in the garden. You'd
have to go wrestle it to the ground and do
all this kind of stuff in order to find it
and study it and figure out an appropriate name for
And so there's this schism between God man and the world,
which has then manifest in. I don't know if I
would call it work per se. I think it would
call it toil. Right, It's a specific kind of work,
because God works during the six creation days. But creation
just responds immediately to his word, and he invites us
to enter that work and thus enter his rest. But
then there's a toil which arises out of the conflict
between man and the world. And this is where you
can then get the image of dominion, which was something
to into Adam being expressed in terms of violent conquest.
Man begins to go out and take a sword and
cut things down and bring destruction into the world in
order to rule over it. And then in the prophetic books,
this is one of the things that I'm really going
to talk about and emphasizing a lot of detail in
the class the importance of all of the specific phrases
that we find in scripture. The prophetic books take that
idea of warfare, and they don't just destroy swords and spears.
Isaiah does not say that in those days man will
melt down all his swords and break his spears. Rather,
the swords and spears are turned into plowshares, and pruning hooks.
That man has been reconciled with the world through God
and therefore is able to rule over the world in
a way that evinces the harmony between God, Man and
the world, and that is ultimately rule through the divine word.
The word goes into our mouth, we then speak in
the world is harmonized with us. And we actually see
this in some of the lives of the saints. There's
one story about Saint Seraphim where people came, they visited him,
and he spoke and he calmed a plant to rise
up out of the ground. That the spirit of God
gives life to all the plants was in him in
such a way that it was on his breath, and
the world toply responded with obedience.
Speaker 3: And so.
Speaker 2: We were kind of going somewhere with the idea that
those skills were needed to.
Speaker 3: Build the Ark.
Speaker 2: And so what were you trying to what we're trying
to point out in that idea, Like, what is it
about the arc that makes it special or different from
the cities that Cain's descendants built.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so when Cain builds his city, it's built on
the blood of his brother. So there's that idea of conflict, right,
Cain goes into a conflict with his brother, and then
he forms a whole society, takes the matter of the
world and builds it to facilitate that kind of relation
with the world. It's a breakdown of our mode of
relations with the world, and then that creates a whole civilization.
And the things that he does with the world are
built out of that principle of violence and destruction and bloodshed.
But ultimately, what it is is like any sin, it's
not just something that's out of the clear blue sky.
It's a distortion of a mode in which we are
meant to relate to God in the world. And so
what God does then in Noah is he brings that
distorted relation with the world back into the life of
the righteous human family. And so then Noah is, and
this is a major theme in the story of the flood.
What Noah does is he is first obedient to God.
God gives him the architecture of the ark just and
if you read that text, it resembles the architecture, and
he looks at that and then he takes the matter
of the world and he build owns a new world
out of it. So the old world is Caine's world.
It's a mess, It's filled with violence. You have the
breakdown of every appropriate relation. Right, Heaven and earth are
meant to relate in a harmonious, beautiful way. But then
we get the nephilimb Heaven and Earth come together in
this really twisted way. So God takes that world and
Noah takes out of it those things which belong to Cain,
and then builds it and structures it into something new.
He builds a new world, and then that new world
gives birth to the world after the flood. And this
is all an image of Christ, right, because think about
the way that Christ not only saves us from sin
but brings the world to glory. It was through a
brutal execution by his own family members, the Jewish nation
and the nations of the world that he united heaven
to earth and man to man on the cross. You
reconcile all things through those very principles of violence and
bloodshed and destruction which came into the world after the fall.
Nothing here I think about, you know, divine providence, right,
the way in which God turns all evil to good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there's an interesting in the story of the
arc there is also an interesting hint at that in
the fact that you see, like you said, that Noah
doesn't compel the animals to come into the arc, right,
the animals, like Adam at the beginning, you know, are
become subject to his will in a manner that is
not compelled. That is almost like they're offering themselves up.
They're coming to him, And there's a reflection. Obviously it's
not exactly the same, but there's a reflection in some
ways that if Adam names the animal at the beginning,
Noah is recognizing them right and letting them into this
to this art to create a new beginning. So there
is this, There definitely is this sense of the transformation
of the of the work of Cain. One of one
of my insights has been to to think that there
seems to be that all through, like even the salvation,
even the saving of Rome, how Christ ultimately saves Rome,
seems to have that image in it, right, because Rome
was of course the greatest civilization based on the blood
of his brother, you know, the blood of a murder
of a brother, just like Cain, but that Crist kind
of from the inside, you could say, right, without compelling,
like an inner transformation which kind of transforms Rome into
something that it wasn't before.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, that's really beautiful. And I think, you know,
to allude to stuff you've done with Richard Roland, this
is like the grand vision of the universal history, right
that this polity is the polity of Cain and that
has a history through the scriptures, and you see the
way the ancient chroniclers talk about this as well. You know,
you have Assyria first rules the world in the days
of Ninus, and then you go through a sequence of
other world powers, but then Ninus's empire ultimately comes into
the hands of Rome, and then it's that single world
empire which is converted by Christ. But in the biblical
person respective, Ninus is empire the first Assyrian state, which
is founded by Nimrod, the same Dudeh was involved with
Babel that was a refoundation of the city of Kane.
And so Christ takes the city of Kane. He takes
the place which is the bloody city, and he remolds it,
and he shapes it, and he baptizes it and makes
it in to the new Jerusalem, or a type of
the New Jerusalem in which God's glory dwells with man.
Speaker 2: And so what do you think of this, because this
is something that I've been pondering too, in terms of
the in terms of the idea of the tabernacle or
the temple, right like in the heavenly Jerusalem, like it
says explicitly there is no temple. There is no temple
in the heavenly Jerusalem. And there's this sense in which,
in some ways the structure of the temple is no
longer needed because all of society, or the entire communion
of the saints is a temple.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So I don't know if you thought about that
a little.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So you know what we're doing when you build
a temple is the world is being compressed down to
the size that we can engage with the totality of
it in miniature. But God created the world obviously with
the intention that in its totality, it would simply play
that function that whenever we see an individual blade of grass,
we will see the way in which God is uniquely
disclosed in that particular blade of grass, in a way
that he is not in anything else in all creation.
And then when God becomes man in the person of Christ,
the logos of everything is compressed down to size, not
just symbolically, but really concretely in this less and blood
jew from Nazareth. And so then what you see in
the prophetic books is kind of the image we talked
about a little bit before, where the tree is the
sanctuary which grows to encompass the totality of the cosmos.
But we come to be more and more fully appropriated
to the life of Christ, so that the whole world
then is trans formed into what the sanctuary only pointed to.
So at that point there's kind of a breakdown or
a unification between what we call symbolism and what we
call concrete reality. Like the prophets talk about the escaton
in terms of stars falling from heaven and all that
kind of stuff, and we recognize this a spiritual language
to refer to the change in political powers and things
like that. But as the world comes to more and
more fully manifest the logos in the world, that symbolic
language is simply concretized in terms of the actual life
of creation. So then when we look in Revelation twenty
one and we see the City of God, what we're
seeing is a temple which had been planted in the
world that's now grown to encompass the whole thing. So
that and you see it in the Book of Daniel.
Daniel talks about a stone cut without hands, which grows
into a mountain, the sanctuary, and it fills the entire creation,
and that's what you then see it in Revelation twenty one.
The city is the mountain.
Speaker 2: And yeah, and the more you realize that that's the pattern,
you know, you see that it's not just like you said,
it's not just in the Book of Revelation. It's actually
hinted at all through the prophetic books. I was, you know,
in this class that I'm giving myself on the on
the symbolism, I was rereading the vision of Ezekiel, and
I realized that he, like the chariot that he's describing
is literally the entire creation, because he says it's like
the dome of heaven and then there are these four corners,
you know, and then there's the chariot here like the
god on the throne above. And it's like, wait a minute,
he's saying that the whole world is is this chariot, right,
And like you said, it's the same with the with
the story of the of the mountain. And then you
see in the Church Fathers and in St. Ephroim, I
love how how he describes Paradise because he says that
the limits of Paradise, that the top of Paradise is
higher than all the mountains, and its limit is beyond
the ocean. And you think, yeah, wait a minute, he's
saying everything is paradise, Like the whole world is paradise.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, this is one of the beautiful things that
you know, we encounter when we work through scripture with
you know, an eye for symbolism. And this is one
of the things that's really you know, interesting I think
about your work and the work of others who are
kind of in the same vein, is that we see
multiple people independently coming to a lot of the same correlations.
Because this thing is, this stuff is really in the scriptures.
And when we read the scriptures with an eye for
for symbolism and the correlation that one thing as with
another thing, we find the same truths manifested in every text.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's really interesting.
Speaker 3: What's happening now?
Speaker 2: It really feels like there is an actual there's a
kind of a moment as well, which is you know,
coming out of this materialist period where we were we
were such reductionists that that that we basically splinter the
text into a bunch of sources, whatever that is. But
it feels like now there's this waking up where people
are are kind.
Speaker 3: Of almost as if after.
Speaker 2: A binge, I could drunken binge, kind of just waking
up from this chaos. And we're seeing it happening, you know,
in Orthodoxy and the Catholic Church and the Prossing Church.
We're kind of seeing all these people, like you said,
interestingly enough, come to the same to the same insights
in terms of at least the patterns that are there
in the text.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: There was an article that was posted recently by a
father damk. I think it was from Telegraph in the
UK or something, and it was talking about people who
were encountering Christianity for the first time, and one of
them said, I just felt like the veil between this
world and the other world was pulled back for a
little bit. And I think, you know, when I started
getting into scripture in a serious way about thirteen years ago.
You know, the main I don't know, opposition or whatever,
the main non Christian approach to scripture that you would
find on the web and elsewhere is you know, biblical criticism.
You take the Book of Exodus and you say, it's
an objective fact that a million different people wrote this
book because you know, there's slightly different styles or I
don't understand how how this fits together with that, and.
Speaker 2: Like the limit of my intellect is the measure by
which I'm going to decide what this text.
Speaker 1: Really exactly it. And it's a remarkable thing because, you know,
without wanting to be dismissive, because the academy I think
has a lot of really really good things, and they've
made a lot of really cool discoveries. But you know,
one of the things that I remember seeing is reading,
you know, a biblical critic was talking about the different
sources of Exodus, and he said, there's clearly multiple contradictory
sources here because God calls Moses up the mountain, and
then when he's already on theat on the mountain, God
calls him up again. And I was just stunned, because
you know, these are kind of your Bible symbolism. Maybe
sees that the mountain has three different levels. There's the base,
there's a middle part, and then there's a top part.
So of course God calls them up again, and you.
Speaker 3: Just read Sene for him, you would know.
Speaker 2: That's why the Tabernacle has three parts, and that's why
it's like it's there all true, like you said, it's
just it is in some ways because they don't want
to believe that this text has an intercoherence. You know
that they almost find it. It's for them, it's like
a sacrilege to look at the other text in order
to get a sense of why this particular text is
structured the way it is, which is just to me,
it's so hilarious because you can literally do that with
like Marvel comics.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so why so you can.
Speaker 2: Do it with Marvel comics, but you can't do it
with like the most important text in the history of
Western civilization. And so it's it's I don't know, I
think that you said, I don't want to be dismissive,
but I think it's time to be dismissive about this stuff,
to be done with it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And that's what's really exciting for me is that
I felt like when I was getting into scripture, like
maybe I'm just just nuts because so much of this
stuff that I'm reading from people who are the experts
on this. It just seemed nonsensical to me. So what
am I missing? What am I missing? I must be
missing something. Then eventually I became comfortable with the idea
that actually, those who operate in the paradigm of biblical
criticism shopping things into sources and stuff, they're just missing
the point in a dramatic way. But now I think
you're seeing more and more people become comfortable with that,
and more and more scholars because there's always been you know,
at least a minority report within biblical scholarship which thought,
you know, this isn't really convincing, but they felt they
had to treat it really seriously. You're seeing more and
more scholars come out and say, look, there's just nothing
to this. But one of the things for me that
I felt from an apologetic point of view, because a
lot of people at crises of faith over this is
you can't be the best defense is a good offense? Yeah,
we want to show people what the Bible does say,
rather than going point by point through what the biblical
critics say it says and just refuting those points.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and showing how like you said, how the things
that we've been told are incoherent, you know, and that
you know the and the reason the doubling is just
because it's different sources that are like glued together randomly
for no reason, and to show that there are these
like it's so weird because like in the text, there
are these these fractal structures like in the text itself.
But that's interesting because that's the way that the world
is described in the Bible. So the fact that the
text does what it describes the world to be shouldn't
surprise you. My brother Matsyr was talking about the cherub
in Ezekiel, and he has a great He had this
amazing take because there are two descriptions of the cherub.
One is that the cherub has four faces, right, so
a bull, a man aligned, and an eagle. And then
later he describes it again and he says, he has
four faces, a man align, an eagle, and a cherub.
Those are his four faces. So he has a fractal face. Basically,
it's like basically one of the faces is the cherub.
And then it just goes and he says, it's like
these structures are there everywhere in the text, and so
when you see a repetition that is something somewhat different
in the text, just pay attention to that difference, because
it's really important, pay attention to why those texts exist
if you just tried to. And even it's so funny
because to me, even the whole sources thing, it's just
so irrelevant because even if there are different sources, who cares,
Like why why is it that you think that finding
some trail outside of scripture to the source is more
relevant than realizing why they were put together in the
first place. It's like that seems more relevant, you know.
And I say that I was joking about Marvel comics before,
but I think that, like, imagine if I did an
interpretation of like Infinity War, and I said, oh, this
particular strain in the text comes from like some comic
series in like the nineteen seventy seventies, and this one
comes from the nineteen eighties, and this particular version, and
that's what's.
Speaker 3: My interpretation of the story. I write this.
Speaker 2: Huge, like four hundred page book about every single line,
how it's taken from all these different authors and everything,
Like who cares?
Speaker 3: Like why would anybody care about that? Yeah?
Speaker 2: I don't even understand the people that go into these fields,
Like what is it that you're doing? I don't understand
what what is the thing that's animating you?
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, exactly, Sorry sor right.
Speaker 2: If you get me into rant mode about biblical criticism,
I'll never stop me too.
Speaker 1: It's it used to be for me worse because everybody
around me seemed to take it really seriously. But I
got to tell you, it's so satisfying to watch, you know, to.
Speaker 3: Watch it crumble.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, and so also watch like this kind of
in some ways it's interesting. This is the thing that
I've been finding the most interesting, is into some ways.
When I was young, I remember, when I was in
my twenties, like this kind of Second Temple scholarship stuff.
You know, it was being used to deconstruct Christianity, right
like when when the when the even Kuman, like they
were saying, oh, they were trying to use it to deconstruct.
But now as things have kind of moved forward, it's
like the opposite is true. We actually are finding things
that are enlightening our perception of our own Christianity in
ways that had been maybe not forgotten, but maybe a
little bit put to the side that it had been
that had.
Speaker 3: Been less in the center.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, and like all of this kind of
Council of God theology that obviously Father Stephen talks about
in Michael Heizer and all of this, like this is
so enlightening to Orthodox Christianity. It really brings in it
kind of fills in some of the little gaps sometimes
in the references that we struggle to understand what is
going on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is you know, this is something that you
see when you look at second type of literature. A
lot of people look at parallels between the New Testament
and second type of literature, and basically their comment is, well,
Paul got this from his Jewish background. That's not the
interesting question to me. The interesting question is why did
they read the text this way? What did they see
in the text which led them to this conclusion. If
they say, and this is something I'm stealing a shamelessly
from Peterleitheart, who I know you had on the channel,
which is awesome. You know, Paul says that the rock
which gave Israel water followed Israel in the wilderness, and
that's something that that you find in the mid Rash
as well. And you find it in Jewish traday and
people say, well, that's where Paul got it. But the
question is you know why. It's because God is identified
with the rock. He stands in front of it, and
then he goes around with him in the wilderness.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's interesting because that rock becomes very similar to
like the Delphic, the rock that is in Delphied. Like
this idea of of a of a stone as a
central thing you this is somewhere there are many actually
traditions where you have this idea of like this kind
of stone that is the central place.
Speaker 3: And and it makes sense.
Speaker 2: Because that's how Christ talks about this too, like he
talks about this idea of the foundation stone and all
of these these these images.
Speaker 1: So well, yeah, it's another place which I was thinking
about recently, is you know, in Daniel you have the
image of the stone comes down from heaven and cut
without hands and it grows to fill the whole creation. Well,
Luke loves the Book of Daniel, and both Luke and
Axe he makes a lot of reference to it. And
that's the theme of Acts, is the growth of the
temple where the spirit dwells to grow to fill the
entire Roman world, and Paul has this little encounter with
folks in Ephesus who venerate this sacred stone which came
down from heaven. And what Luke is saying is the
Apostolic ministry is the actual expression of that. And then
this is one of the awesome things is that when
you realize that connection, it illuminates other things, like why
are the apostles described as a foundation because they have
that correlation the idea of the stone which came down.
Speaker 3: It came from heaven.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, interesting because that's by the way, like people
know that that's what's in the kaba, like that's what's
they're in the in it is basically it's a stone
that fell from from heaven.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so this imagery of the stone that fell from heaven,
I mean it's it's like you said, it's a powerful image,
but it only finds its it only finds its fullness
in some ways in the incarnation that like this this
stone that comes from heaven, like it's it's of course
there's a there's a ritual aspect to it, which is
which is not impossible, but ultimately it has to be
anchored in something that is life giving, truly you know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And you know, this is one of the
things that that I find really exciting about scripture is,
you know, just when there's concrete language like a stone,
I think what you want to do is you want
to ask what if I pick up a big stone,
you know, what is it? What am I experiencing? A
stone is very heavy and it's very solid, and this
is who the logos is. He's got more stuff in
him than anything else because he's infinite, that he's the
heaviest possible subject that could come into the world. And
that's the language that's used in the Old Testament where
the word glory a covode is a play actually on
the word for weight, because God is so full of
existence that he overcomes everything else. And if you try
to smash yourself against a diamond, you're the one who's
going to smash it. And that's the same with God.
God is the one in terms of which everything else
is molded. He is not himself molded. And that's I mean,
this is one of the things that is so cool.
I think that we both experienced about this way of
thinking symbolically and then just dogmatic theology, is that we
get in the scriptures and in these patterns of thinking,
the very same theology that you find in the Church.
It's spoken of in really really concrete in particular terms,
but the philosophical tradition of the fathers, it's all there.
It's just spoken of in a distinct accent. You might say, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, I have a big question for you,
because this is something that I'm thinking about. I think
I have like an idea I think I have, but
I'd like to hear your take on it. Which is
one of the things we see in Christianity is where
there's a transformation to some extent in the shape of
our temple. And this transformation appears in the Book of
Revelation where you find the lamb on the altar, and
that the procession is around the altar. And so in Christianity,
in some ways what we have is that the in
the Holy of Holies we have something which is at
least part alter. It's not the ark, right, because in
the Tabernacle, the ark is in the Holy of Holies, and.
Speaker 3: The the.
Speaker 2: The sorry the altar is on the in the outer court, right,
and there's almost there's like this exchange, right, you sacrifice
and the glory comes down. But in Christianity that that
place is the same. And so I don't know if
you've thought about that, and if you have some insight
about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is one of the things that we see
when you look at the structure of the sanctuary in
the Old Testament, is that there are gradations in terms
of which the divine presence is more or less distant. Right,
so if you're in the outer Court, you're farther from
the Divine glory than you would be if you were
in the Holy Place, and you're farther there than you
would be if you walked into the Holy of Holies,
where you're so close that you're probably gonna die unless
you take precautions before going in, as the high priest
does on the day of Atonement. But then when you
look at the strike of these three layers, and these
three layers are consistent across a variety of sanctuaries, you
find that the structure of them corresponds to each other. So,
for example, in the Holy of Holies, you have the
ark of the Covenant over which God sits, and you
have the manna from heaven. So this is the man
of the bread that came down from heaven and gave
life to the nation of Israel. Well, in the Holy
Place you have an altar. You do have an altar
of incense, which leads you up to God. And what
does God appear in when he comes into the Holy
of Holies. A cloud's going around the altar of incense.
It is a cloud of incense. And then where as
you have mana from heaven in the Holy of Holies,
in the Holy Place, you do have twelve loaves of
face bread, and you have overlooking those twelve loaves of
face bread, you have a menora, a lampstand, which represents
the Israelite priesthood. And then you look at what you
have in the Holy of Holies. You have angels. You
have cheribah, which are overlooking God's throne, and priests and
angels correspond to each other. And then you see the
same thing when you go out to the courtyard where
you've got a bronze alter on which you offer what
gets called burnt offerings, but it means something like ascension offerings,
and it gets burned all up as smoke. And so
you're going through the layers of the Tabernacle up to God.
And then as you point out, and this again is
one of those really cool things that you described you
when your brother talked about the relation between the two
visions of the chariot. Looking at the details, seeing how
they correspond to each other, you find so much cool stuff.
Well here as well. The New Testament isn't just being sloppy.
It's not being sloppy when it combines these images together,
because God, as it were, unfolded himself in a creaturely way.
He unfolded himself to create a created analog of himself.
And then what he does, having extended himself outwards, he
pulls us inwards, and so it folds back in without
losing any of the particularity which develops throughout creation history,
so that, as Saint Denysius the Areabaga you talk about
procession and reversion, things process outwards from God as he
extends himself creatively to give the world a contingent life.
And then, in virtue of its source in God, things
revert inwards so that they return to God in a
simultaneous motion. But us, who live in time, we experience
this in sequence. God extends himself out in creation, draws
us back in and the scriptures are filmed with images
which concretize that like a river which flows out from
the sanctuary. Isaiah says that that river flows out from
the sanctuary, it accumulates the wealth of the nations, that
is their productive energy, and then it goes back and
it carries all that stuff back into the life of God,
and that is all of history.
Speaker 3: Hmm. That's awesome.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I've been talking a lot about that
recently in the I mean in the class that I'm
giving about the side of creation, breathing in and breathing out,
and like all this imagery of how things kind of
move out from God and then come back. But that's
also fractal, like we also do that. We are constantly
like extending ourselves out into the world and then bringing
things into ourselves. And like you said, it's interesting because
it in some ways it is a simultaneous moment. You
can experience when you make something that it's actually a
simultaneous thing because as you're forming reality outside of you.
Let's say you're building I don't know, a table, that
you are both extending yourself into the table, but you're
also taking the wood and bringing it into yourself. It is,
it becomes an extension of you, like a part, like
an extension of your body in that way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a really beautiful image because we see it
in you know, in the language of clothing. Christ clothes
himself in our nature. What's he do. He fashions the world,
He creates the things which are going to become linen,
threads and all this kind of stuff, and then he
takes that into himself and he wears it. And when
you wear clothing, when your arm moves, your sleeve moves,
the motion is simultaneous because you're so close to united
with your clothing that it's identified with you. And now
with the incarnation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a priest was telling me recently about how
important it was in fact in the transfiguration, like that
it's the clothing, Like it's not just him that that
was white, it's his clothing, and it means us, like
it means everything when it says it's clothing. The fact
that his clothing is transfigured, it means that all of
creation is transfigured, not just his own, let's say, integral body,
And that's an amazing hope for us.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, and this is one of those other things
about biblical language, which we always want to pay attention to.
We can pass it over because we're so used to
talking in these figures of speech. So we talk about
a body. Why is it important that Jesus' body was
raised from the dead. Well, body has a series of
extended meanings. Right. You can talk about the physical body
in which your soul lives and animates itself in relation
to the world. But you can also talk about a
body politic, which is constituted around a central state, and it,
as it were, moves as one. And we want to
fold these things together and understand why when scripture uses
the language of the church as the body of Christ,
it again is not just using a cute figure of speech.
It's not coming out of the clear blue sky. It's
something which if you pursue the whole language of embodiment
through the Bible, you're going to find so much beautiful,
beautiful stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's awesome. I can't I can't wait. This is exciting.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: One of the things that I like about your work,
like even just in compared to mind, is just how
meticulous you are, like an attentive and you're able to
you provide the sources and the references.
Speaker 3: And you have this approach because I'm.
Speaker 2: My eye when I talk, I just kind of things
are a little they're not as they're not I know
where it comes from. Like I kind of know, but
I'm not always saying, well, this, this, this.
Speaker 3: And what I love about the way you do it
is that you really.
Speaker 2: In some ways are training people through the scripture itself.
You're giving people references, You're helping them get through the stories.
And so I think it's going to be it's just
going to be great and at a great addition to
our courses and for people that love what I'm talking about.
Speaker 3: You know, this is if you want it to be
kind of.
Speaker 2: Anchored, like especially a lot of you who are saying,
what do I say to my Protestant you know, family,
how do I defend this? And I and I give
you a few ideas, but Serafim can really kind of
give you all you need, all the references to kind
of show how there is this beautiful symbolic and imagistic
relationship between the Old Testament in the New Testament, in
both the history of the people, but also the prophetic
stories that go all the way and travelation. So I
am definitely excited about this and Sefron, thank you for doing.
Speaker 3: This for us.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be, you know,
after a fashion part of the Symbolic World body.
Speaker 3: That's amazing, all right, thanks everyone.
Speaker 2: So so we all have a link in the description
you can sign up.
Speaker 3: Do you ever know when the dates are for the course?
Speaker 1: It starts on June tenth.
Speaker 2: So it starts June tenth, and how many weeks?
Speaker 1: It'll be five weeks total, but on July one we're
going to miss a week.
Speaker 2: That's a bit of a break, all right. So everyone
sign up and I can't wait to see you there.
Speaker 1: Bye bye bye, thank you.
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