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Speaker 1: All right, thank you for having me. Glad to be here.

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So I didn't really plan anything, so all I brought

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was a history of the popes. So I'm just going

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to start from page one and try to get comfortable

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because we got a good way to go.

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Speaker 2: I'm just kidding.

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Speaker 1: Jim said to be sure to talk about your heritage.

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And when I mentioned that I would be out this conference,

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somebody on Twitter said, are you really from the South,

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Where are you actually from? What's your actual heritage? I said,

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I am from the South. I'm from South Kazaria, and

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I'm a CAGBJ and I'm here to wreck and infiltrate

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and destroy and subvert. I'm just kidding. That's a joke.

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I know a lot of people can't take jokes, but no,

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I am a full blooded Southern. My dad's side is English.

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The Dyers tended the Royal Swans, which I don't know

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if that's something to be proud of or if that

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was something that's kind of of ignominious. That's true. And

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then my mom's side is Clan. We're Scottish, so we're

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Clan scott and Clan I forget the other one. But

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when I looked into this. It turns out that we

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have a castle. It's all in ruins, but the queen

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owns the castle, so I'm not happy about that. Car

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labor Locke is the name of the castle, and I

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want to get that back from the queen. So we've

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got to figure out how to do that later. Anyway,

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So let's talk about something that you probably won't expect

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me to talk about.

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Speaker 3: This.

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Speaker 1: I want to talk about how philosophy is worthless. And

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you know, I prayed about this, and this is kind

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of what came to me to talk about, and it

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ended up vibing synergizing very well with the talks that

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we've heard so far, because I think a lot of

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people hear Ortho Bros. And they hear people arguing and

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talking about philosophy, and a lot of people assume, oh,

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you just like to talk about philosophy, you have to argue,

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and you just want to talk about all this high

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abstract stuff. But what I think both my good friend father,

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Deacon doctor Annonius, and I have discovered, as we have

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spent a lot of time in philosophy, is actually that

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philosophy is quite worthless. I don't mean real philosophy in

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the sense of Christ as the wisdom of God or

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something like that. But I mean the secular, abstract discipline

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of philosophy. If we think about the logos in John one,

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this is not the logos of Marcos Aurelius's meditations. It's

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not the logos of Hellenism. There might be some overlap,

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there might be some parallels, but the logos in John

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one is pulling from the Hebrew wisdom tradition. It's not

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an impersonal abstract force. It's the I am. In fact,

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the logos of John one we know in the Triads

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of Saint Gregor Palomos he talks about in Exodus three

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when God said I am in fourteen and fifteen. He

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did not say I am it, but I am He.

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That is the personal, relational covenantal God that Israel has

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a relationship with. This is the one who can show

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his face to Moses. But as Jesus says in John

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one to eighteen, or as John says in John one eighteen,

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and Jesus says in John six forty six, no man

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sees God, no man sees the Father at any time.

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Yet someone saw this God in Exodus three, the same face,

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the same presence, the same angel is said chapters later

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in twenty three to remit sins he has the name

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of Yahweh in him. We don't find that in created beings.

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Even throughout the Old Testament, in dozens of other passages,

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we also find that Yahweh and his angel presence face

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Glory Messenger, also have his spirit accompanying this presence, this manifestation.

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So the God of revelation, this is a personal god.

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This is a triad revealed throughout the scriptures, throughout divine

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revelation as the Father who is the source, the found

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the ark that eternally begets his son, and the Spirit

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who proceeds through that son and manifests and shines forth

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through that son. In Orthodox theology and trilogy, this one

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cause or Arkae is the Father, the soul cause that

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keeps this deity personal. Why am I talking about this, Well,

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One thing that we have engaged in is a lot

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of interactions with other religions other non religious people over

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the last several years, last seven or eight years, And

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one thing that comes to the fore is there's commonalities

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that I've noticed between the other religions and what they offer,

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what they present the deity that they discuss there might

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be some idea that there's a personal relationship with the

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Jewish God, with the Muslim God, or something like that,

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but it's certainly nothing like what we offer. And so

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in the domain of philosophy, this is usually referred to

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as classical theism. Doctor ed Fezer, the famous Thomas, for example,

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writes about the classical theist God is the god of Aristotle, Plato, Plutinus, Mimaonides, Mohammad,

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and Aquinas. Really since it was a little off there,

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something something's a little off, because again, to quote Saint

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Gregory Palamas, when God appears in Exodus three, it's not

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a supreme essence, it's something a supreme thing. It's I remember,

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didn't Biden say something like, yeah, we believe in the

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theme talking about God the theme? I was like, is

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Biden a classical theist? What's he talking about? No, we

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talket we believe in a deity that is uniquely contrast

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did too the type of deity that we see amongst

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the world religions and classical theism In Orthodox triadology, this

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one calls this father archae that has a son and

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a spirit. When and I'm not this talk is not

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mainly about theology. Believe it or not, it's actually going

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to be a little more down to earth. But this

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part is theological. When the son takes on the hypostatic

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property of the Father, what happens is we have a

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move towards what many theologians have called essentialism or the

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premissy of the divine essence, or the ussia or the

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one over against the starting point of theology and our

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relationship with God and the ordo theology and our actual relationship.

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These aren't abstract. These are connected. We have a movement

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away from God as personal to God as metaphysical, beating

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to study a thing, to program like an algorithm, a

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science project, something to look at in a test tube

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and try to figure out. But that's not what we

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read about in scripture, for example. To tie this into

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the South, the Bible Belt, the Bible, I grew up Protestant,

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and so I was, and I'm thankful for being given

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a lot of Biblical indoctrination and a biblical heritage, you

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could say, from the South. And I'm glad that we

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heard Flannery O'Connor sided many times. She's one of my favorites,

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and she talked about the South as Christ haunted, the

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Christ haunt, the ghost of Christ that haunts the South,

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because it's not exactly fully Christian, but there's the ghost.

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Speaker 2: Of Christ there, which I think is a profound idea.

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Speaker 1: And that's why Orthodoxy really makes the most sense for

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a Southerner, believe it or not, because everything that the

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Southerner kind of prioritizes kind of lines up with what

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Orthodoxy prioritizes, the virtues to honor the tradition, et cetera.

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But if we contrast this to the Latin theology of

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the Middle Ages, particularly Roman, Catholic, Tomistic, and even and

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Sealmian theology, we get, as I said, the move away

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from the beginning point of the person of the Father

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in our theology and our relationship with God, and they

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moved towards a philosophical essentialism, the monad as primary, thus

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subordinating the personal the existential to the metaphysical and the abstract. Thus,

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the philosophical God of the Hellenists, of Plato, of Aristotle,

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of the Pristocratics, et cetera, is a god of abstract principles,

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is more like a number or a force. The personal

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god that is Orthodox. In Orthodox Christianity is relational. He

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is not abstracted, he is not far off. In fact,

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Paul says this when he's preaching the Word is near you,

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even in your heart. So God, we could say, has

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being as one of his divine energies. But God is

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not identical to pure being, as the philosophers say, the

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God of the philosophers. If we were to contrast this

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deity to our deity, and I'm speaking kind of generally

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here as a survey of a lot of the Greek philosophers,

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cannot be in time and space. In fact, doctor ed

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Faser himself in his book Five Proofs, in the chapter

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on the Neoplatonic proof of the classical theist God, quote

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cannot be in time and space. Well, that might be

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a little problematic if you believe in the incarnation. This

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God is absolutely simple, undifferentiated unity, a pure monad, a

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purely active eternal actualizer in Aristotle impersonal thought, thinking itself

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eternally moving a world or the heavens. Opposite of him,

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this deity is cashed out in opposition to the many,

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to flux and to temporality. So what's ontologically better is

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the one is stasis and is eternality, and he's opposite

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all the things that are not that this God or

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this deity is eternally willing itself at all times for

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all eternity, and is thus unchanging and supposedly pure actuality.

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In fact, Quinas goes so far as to say that

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the divine persons are only notionally or conceptually distinct from

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the divine essence, and so in that sense it would

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seem like the divine persons.

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Speaker 2: Are also reducible to pure actuality.

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Speaker 1: Well, this is not the deity that becomes incarnate, the

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God of Aristotle, of Platonis, etc. If he is all

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of these categories and characteristics that we've listed these attributes,

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that's not a God who responds to prayer. Now, I'm

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not saying that God changes, but rather that God condescends

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to interact with and synergize with his creatures. It's not

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that we act upon him to change his essence or

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force him to do anything he wills to have that

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reciprocal relationship. But that is impossible for the God of

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the philosophers. So the God that we serve is not

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found in Roman Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, Unitarianism, etc. Because all

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of those religions and faiths explicitly want and desire a

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classical theist God. Now, many Roman Catholics are better than

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their theology. I'm not saying that they don't love God,

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or that they don't have degrees of grace and so forth.

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But the confession of system itself, the public theology that's dogmatized,

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is really the root issue here. That it attempted to

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make the faith accessible to the world, and thus classical

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Theism is just simply a foreign deity. The thing that

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I've noticed in the last seven or eight years of

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interacting with all kinds of people across the board, particularly

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all of the top Muslims. And I'm not saying that

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to a brag. I didn't ever expect that that happened

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totally providentially. I had no interest in Islam whatsoever. And

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we had some friends in the UK who became Orthodox,

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and one of them was for a while catechist under

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Bishop ere name, and he said, Jay, we've got to

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respond to Islam. And I said, why I live in

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the Bible Belt. I don't see Muslims, although now I

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do because this was twenty seventeen, and now when I

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go to Nashville, or if I drive around Jacksonville, I

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see mosques suddenly everywhere. We drove to Las Vegas last

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year and I saw a mosque on an Indian reservation.

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I started to read about the Saudis and others and

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how this is actually going down, and they've been putting

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billions of dollars for many, many years into Islamic education,

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the building of mosque and so forth. The point I'm

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saying is we will be encountering the Muslim discussion, I

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guarantee you in the next several years, because what we

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see in places like the UK, they're really just ten, fifteen,

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twenty years ahead of what's intended for us.

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Speaker 2: Now.

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Speaker 1: Maybe providentially won't get that way. I feel like it will, though.

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I feel like we will continue to encounter things like Islam,

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maybe not so much Judaism, although I've had had minimal

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jud debates with Jews.

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Speaker 2: And so forth in the last few years.

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Speaker 1: The point of all this is that there's a common

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threat I've noticed between the interactions with the Jews and

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the Muslims, and the Roman Catholics and the others, the

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other world religions, the Unitarian world faiths, is that the more,

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that we go to the scriptures, we see how preposterous

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those religions are, even though they lay claim to some

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degree of attachment to the Torah or something like that.

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We know that, of course Judaism is actually temutic. We

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know that Islam is actually based on copy paste weird

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things out of the scriptures, out of gnostic texts, and

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that Islam itself actually borrows from the Talmud. Many people

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don't know this, but there's quite a bit of tumutic

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influence on Islam as well. So what this gives us

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is this unknowable, unreachable Unitarian deity that's pretty much the

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same deity as the philosophers, the classical feist God, the

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god of pure act, who cannot be in time and space,

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cannot manifest. And when you debate with the more scholarly

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people from these religions, well Christianity and christ and the Trinity,

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it's all illogical, it's irrational, doesn't make any sense. And

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so Allah or Hushim or God or the thing the

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one has to be this perfect thing and perfection is

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a presupposition based on what they believe metaphysics dictates. But

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as we've seen tonight or today in the previous talks,

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again providentially, it fits perfectly with what I want to discuss.

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This deity is not that data. We do not put metaphysics,

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the arbitrary dogmas of Aristotle and Plato and Aquitness or

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whoever else before divine revelation doesn't mean that philosophy can't

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be a helpful tool. Certainly, the Cappadocians made heavy use

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of various Neoplatonic philosophical ideas, terminology, and so forth, say

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Maximus utilize both Neoplatonic and Aristotilian ideas and categories. But

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it's never, at least at least the intention is it.

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Maybe sometimes even some of the saints and fathers were

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too philosophical, but the intention was never to have philosophy

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dictate and confine divine revelation. And so though all way

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it goes so far as to say that in a

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strict sense God contradicts himself. Many Orthodox theologians have talked

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about God transcending logical categories and transcending the antinomies, or

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what we think from the humane vantage point, are oppositions

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or contradictions. The Trinity is a mystery. It transcends created

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logical categories, but it's not crazy or incoherent. Fact, it

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is itself foult all throughout divine revelation. The strongest case

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I've seen against Islam and Judaism has been in fact

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that the Old Testament teaches the Trinity everywhere, and if

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you really pay attention, with divine illumination, these Theophanes are

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quite often, almost usually Christophanes. So the Christophanes the long

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ago have refuted the unitarian deity of the philosophers and

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the Jews and the Muslims. And that's because our deity

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is much like the deity that appears to Jacob. In

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Genesis twenty eight, we read Jacob went out from the

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well of Oath towards Heran. He came to a certain

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place and stayed there all night because the sun had set.

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He took one of the stones of that place that

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has put it at his head, and he lay on

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that place to sleep. When he dreamed, behold he saw

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a ladder, and it was set up on the earth.

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Its top reached to heaven, and there the angels of

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God were ascending and descending upon it. Behold, the Lord

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stood above it. So the Lord is standing. And we

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find this many many times in the Theophanes that God

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comes down and he stands there, which is a bodily reference,

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even though Christ doesn't incarnate yet. The Lord stood and said,

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I am the Lord, God of Abraham, your father, and

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the God of Isaac. Do not fear. I will give

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you this land and you will be a great nation, etc.

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So again reiterating the promise to Abraham. And then in

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Genesis thirty one we have another Theophany, another appearance of

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Christ to Jacob. The angel Lord spoke to me in

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a dream, Jacob, here I am, lift up your eyes,

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see the male goats and the rams, etc. I am

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the God who appeared to you at Bethel. So an appearance,

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a manifestation of theophany where you anointed the pillar and

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made a vow I will be with you. And then

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we read. Then Jacob asked, this is Genesis thirty two.

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Tell me your name. He said, why do you ask

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my name? Very similar to what is said to Samson's parents.

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Why do you ask my name? Seeing as it is wonderful?

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So we know it's the same speaker that spoke to Manoah.

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Why do you ask my name? It is wonderful? He

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blessed him there. Jacob called that place the form of God.

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For I saw God's face. I saw God face to face,

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much like Moses is said to see God face to face.

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And thus my soul was saved when the form of

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God passed by the sun rose on him, but he

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limped on his hip. This is, of course, after the

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wrestling with the Lord. This makes no sense according to

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classical theism. This deity doesn't appear. He certainly doesn't wrestle

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with Jacob. He's not called the form in the face

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of God in time and space. That's just not philosophically possible.

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And yet once again, what do we read in Leviticus

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Leviticus nine, we have a very similar situation. But I

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really like this passage because problematic for any position that

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again wants to restrict what God can and can't do

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based on arbitrary categories of human created or created human logic.

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I know, saying God didn't create logic, but just calling

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it created categories. Aaron lifted up his hand towards the people.

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This is Liviticus not and he blessed them and came

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down from the sin offering, and they'll burnt offerings and

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the peace offerings After this, Moses and Aaron went into

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the tabernacle, and they came out and blessed all the people,

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and the glory of God appeared to all the people.

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How do all the people see the glory of God? Well,

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we know about the glory cloud in the Old Testament,

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and we know again in numbers twelve we're told that

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the Lord came down in the cloud, descended in the pillar,

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and stood at the door of the tabernacle. So again

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bodily movement standing there at the tabernacle. For example, when

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he appears to Gideon and Judges, I think it's a

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Judge six it says Yahweh turned his face to get in.

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The God of the philosophers doesn't have a face, he

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doesn't have a form, he doesn't manifest in time of space.

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He's not a Theophanic deity. Thus this is so key

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and so simple actually for those that are biblically literate

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in terms of combating and refuting other world religions that

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also lay claim to these same passages and texts.

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Speaker 2: At least to some degree with Islam Judaism.

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Speaker 1: But again, mainly I think Islam is the thing that

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we will be combating in the future because the system

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of the establishment of the global elite. They really see

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that this is a way to alter and change the West.

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More so than perhaps in the other cults or sex

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or groups, new agers or whatever. This one seems to

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have the real meat when it comes to altering people

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groups and changing demographic warfare. Let's just call it that.

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Well again, Philippians, too, we read that Christ, who was

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in the form of God, did not consider it robbery

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to be equal with God, but humble himself and took

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on our form. This is the famous Kenosis passage where

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we know that God willingly got the son, willingly limited

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himself in time and space. He didn't lose any in

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his powers, but in a sense, he didn't exercise every power,

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every dunamus that he had when he became incarnate. When

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he was walking around in Jerusalem, he was not doing

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the conflagration.

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Speaker 2: He was not creating the world.

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Speaker 1: This again is why there's a difference between what God

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is his essence, and what God does his actions or

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his energies. But if Christ is the deity that becomes

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incarnate and steps into time and space and becomes our advocate,

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our redeemer, our or savior, our perfect Man. Then it's

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not the god of classical theism, and all of the

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strivings of classical theism and the God of the philosophers

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really didn't amount to much. Thus, I think philosophy is

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kind of worthless. And I'm speaking here of worldly philosophy.

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Certainly we have Saint Justin, Martyr of the Philosopher, but

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even perhaps Justin at times might have been a little

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too philosophical. And certainly many of the disciples Tation and

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others who were known as the logos apologists made this

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mistake of putting philosophy in metaphysics before what we're actually

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taught in divine revelation. We read in Saint Justin Popovich

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Orthodox Faith in Life in Christ an excellent section where

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he talks about perfection. And you notice the idea of

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perfection in the classical theist tradition or the world religions

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is this metaphysical thing. It's the one that's got to

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be no distinctions, and it's out there. It's not in

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time and space, and it's totally abstract. It's this and that.

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Speaker 2: It's eternal.

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Speaker 1: It's opposite time and space and flux. But what a

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perfection isn't mainly just some metaphysical speculation. What if it's

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actually about a person. And I thought this was a

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really good insight that And again this matter is because

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when you say debate a Muslim, a Muslim says, well,

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God Allah is perfect because he's not in time of space.

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He can incarnate, That's why he's perfect. Well, how do

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we know that that's what is perfect? It's just an assumption.

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And Saint Josephovich says, was Plato perhaps the perfect man? Well,

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why did Plato want to leave this world to get

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back to the ideas, the eternal ideas? If he was

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the perfect man. What about Buddha, Well, Buddha wanted to

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escape and achieve nirvana, so he wasn't perfect. What about Moses, Well,

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Moses continued to seek help from heaven. Moses made his

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own mistakes. What about Mohammed, Well, Mohammad was a bloodthirsty

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warlord and he offered a sensual paradise after destroying the infidels,

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so it doesn't seem very perfect. What about Kant and

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the philosophy of German idealism? Now the meta rationalistic being

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on zick the world of the beyond that we can

387
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never know really.

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Speaker 2: Puts us in a skeptical state.

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Speaker 1: What about what about great literary figures like Shakespeare, say

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Justin Bobovitch as well, Shakespeare pointed us to the worlds above,

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But that doesn't really seem like a perfect man.

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Speaker 2: And then he lists other characters, Nietzsche and others, And.

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Speaker 1: What's missing in all these is that none of them

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are the god Man. What if the god Man is

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just simply the perfect Man, and that perfection isn't an

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abstract category that we judge God or metaphysics by, But

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the divine revelation of the Son of God is perfect God,

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perfect man, and thus the god Man himself is the

399
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perfect example of philosophy come to life life as living wisdom.

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Philosophy is an abstract really ultimately, I am the way,

401
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I'm the truth, and the life is a personal, living

402
00:26:09,799 --> 00:26:15,079
philosophical being, but not abstract philosophy. It's a lived, practical,

403
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experiential philosophy. He says, the one who has the fullness

404
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of mystery, the wondrous god Man, in a divine way,

405
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perfect and humanly real. His human goodness is divinely perfect

406
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and complete. His human love is divinely perfect and complete.

407
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So is his righteousness, his mercy, and his compassion, his eternality,

408
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and his beauty all are humanly real, but also divinely

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perfect and complete. Nothing is miraculous because he has transformed

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all things human to divine. He has completed and perfected

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everything by the divine. In one word, the whole man

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in him is divinely perfected and divinely completed. So he

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is the god Man. And I think that's really the

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key differentiation here is that at the end of the day,

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all this philosophical stuff, all these world religions, in the

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classical theist God, it's just missing the incarnation.

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Speaker 2: And that's pretty much everything.

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Speaker 1: I don't know if I'm over time or if this

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is the limit or where we're at.

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Speaker 2: Is there any more.

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Speaker 1: Five minutes? I'll take questions if anybody has any questions,

422
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four or five minutes only, So raise your.

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Speaker 2: Hand if you have any questions, that's okay.

424
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Speaker 1: Question, Okay, anybody got a question. We canna do five

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minutes of questions.

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Speaker 2: I'm just curious that if you're going.

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Speaker 4: To be talking to someone in an apologetic sense, if

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you're trying to use the word, how would you describe perfection?

429
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Because it's hard to break out a really common.

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Speaker 1: Sense of the word depends on yeah, if you right,

431
00:27:49,400 --> 00:27:52,279
oh absolutely, if you're talking to your ever average, every

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00:27:52,359 --> 00:27:56,039
day dude, you don't have to go into the philosophical

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stuff because most of the time people are going to

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be thinking in the way that Saint Justin Papovich is

435
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laying it out moral perfection. If you're talking to a

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philosophy guy or some trained Tomas, they're thinking in terms

437
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of metaphysical categories. But I agree with you that if

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you're talking with the philosophy guy, that's when I would say,

439
00:28:15,079 --> 00:28:17,920
how do we know that that's what perfection is? For example,

440
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they'll say something like, well, absolute unity is real true perfection. Well,

441
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I thought God was a triad, and the Cave Docians

442
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say that he's equally triad as much as he is Monat.

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He's not more one than he is three, or more

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three than he is one. So there's an equal ultimacy

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in the trinity. And so Thomas or Romancalock has an

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example or a Muslim, they're going to start their assumption

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about what perfection is with their system. Well, we know

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what perfection is because Allah is perfect, and to be

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perfect is to be purely one and to not be many.

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But then you say, well, well wait a minute, Alla

451
00:28:50,079 --> 00:28:52,960
has ninety nine attributes and most soon hees think they're

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really distinct. So now you're in a you know, a bind.

453
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So that's what I would do, and just say, how

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do we know what perfection is?

455
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Speaker 2: On what standard?

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Speaker 1: Great question?

457
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Speaker 3: Other question, Jay, repeat the question for the recording.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, his question was how do we know what to

459
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say in terms of apologetic discussions when the idea of

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what's perfection comes up? Which actually does come up quite

461
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a bit if you're talking to a Muslim or something

462
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like that, And I was distinguishing that from well, if

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you're talking to like a regular guy, they're probably thinking

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moral perfection and you don't have to worry too much

465
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about critiquing the word and the presuppositions. But if you're

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speaking to a philosophical guy, you might want to say,

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how do we know what perfection is? And says who

468
00:29:38,000 --> 00:29:43,000
where did you get that arbitrary standard? It's a question back.

469
00:29:42,839 --> 00:30:06,599
Speaker 3: There, Jay louder.

470
00:30:00,640 --> 00:30:05,319
Speaker 1: So, I think that the question was other religions talk

471
00:30:05,359 --> 00:30:05,759
of love.

472
00:30:06,960 --> 00:30:09,559
Speaker 2: Buddha talks about love, other people talk about love. What

473
00:30:09,720 --> 00:30:11,480
is the difference for us?

474
00:30:11,799 --> 00:30:16,240
Speaker 1: Love is twofold. There's human created love that every man

475
00:30:16,440 --> 00:30:20,279
every woman has to some degree for their relations for others,

476
00:30:21,319 --> 00:30:25,319
and there's uncreated love. None of these other world religions

477
00:30:25,319 --> 00:30:29,039
are going to have any conception of uncreated love and

478
00:30:29,079 --> 00:30:32,000
the participation in the uncreated energy of divine love.

479
00:30:32,759 --> 00:30:33,640
Speaker 2: That's the big difference.

480
00:30:34,640 --> 00:30:37,920
Speaker 1: So you have to stress create a creature distinction, and

481
00:30:37,960 --> 00:30:40,200
that none of the world religions because they don't have

482
00:30:40,200 --> 00:30:42,599
the us and centery literally, Orthodox Christianity is the only

483
00:30:42,599 --> 00:30:46,559
religion that has the Essen center distinction. Thus, to talk

484
00:30:46,599 --> 00:30:51,799
about love or other virtues, there's created versions of those

485
00:30:51,839 --> 00:30:56,119
that humans have. You can say naturally, but that's not

486
00:30:56,319 --> 00:30:59,519
all we need. We also need divine love and to

487
00:30:59,599 --> 00:31:03,079
meld with and to blend with, as the Capadocians say,

488
00:31:03,200 --> 00:31:06,000
not that we lose our created properties, but to really

489
00:31:06,000 --> 00:31:07,799
participate in uncreated love.

490
00:31:08,920 --> 00:31:11,480
Speaker 2: That's the difference. And the world religions don't have that.

491
00:31:12,000 --> 00:31:13,400
Speaker 1: I mean they have they might have some kind of

492
00:31:13,440 --> 00:31:16,759
melding into the the divine, but you lose your identity

493
00:31:16,799 --> 00:31:18,960
in your existence if you meld into that in other

494
00:31:19,119 --> 00:31:20,039
other world religions.

495
00:31:20,160 --> 00:31:22,279
Speaker 2: So that's where the energies come in.

496
00:31:25,359 --> 00:31:27,440
Speaker 1: Last one.

497
00:31:28,119 --> 00:31:31,799
Speaker 4: Yeah, this requires those uh. Regardless of whether or not

498
00:31:31,880 --> 00:31:33,039
God or still.

499
00:31:32,799 --> 00:31:36,680
Speaker 1: An expredit area. God either exists as ab.

500
00:31:36,640 --> 00:31:38,839
Speaker 4: And it's just the same way you and I do,

501
00:31:39,240 --> 00:31:44,559
and therefore under categories or exists as existence.

502
00:31:44,039 --> 00:31:47,160
Speaker 1: In the set of categories like candy is a or

503
00:31:47,440 --> 00:31:51,240
existence in all categories and is like.

504
00:31:51,160 --> 00:31:53,720
Speaker 4: The essence of existence itself, which is probably what's a

505
00:31:53,759 --> 00:31:54,680
most blades.

506
00:31:54,440 --> 00:31:59,079
Speaker 1: Systems, which one of those three are implanting goodies, none

507
00:31:59,079 --> 00:32:02,799
of them. Saint Gregory Palama says that existence is a

508
00:32:02,839 --> 00:32:06,519
divine energy. So anything that you predicate of God, even

509
00:32:06,559 --> 00:32:14,519
God's unity, even God's existence, are themselves also energies. So

510
00:32:14,559 --> 00:32:17,920
it's none of those categories or systems, because Orthodox Christian

511
00:32:17,960 --> 00:32:25,279
theology is completely unique, all right,

