Speaker 1: All right, thank you for having me. Glad to be here.
So I didn't really plan anything, so all I brought
was a history of the popes. So I'm just going
to start from page one and try to get comfortable
because we got a good way to go.
Speaker 2: I'm just kidding.
Speaker 1: Jim said to be sure to talk about your heritage.
And when I mentioned that I would be out this conference,
somebody on Twitter said, are you really from the South,
Where are you actually from? What's your actual heritage? I said,
I am from the South. I'm from South Kazaria, and
I'm a CAGBJ and I'm here to wreck and infiltrate
and destroy and subvert. I'm just kidding. That's a joke.
I know a lot of people can't take jokes, but no,
I am a full blooded Southern. My dad's side is English.
The Dyers tended the Royal Swans, which I don't know
if that's something to be proud of or if that
was something that's kind of of ignominious. That's true. And
then my mom's side is Clan. We're Scottish, so we're
Clan scott and Clan I forget the other one. But
when I looked into this. It turns out that we
have a castle. It's all in ruins, but the queen
owns the castle, so I'm not happy about that. Car
labor Locke is the name of the castle, and I
want to get that back from the queen. So we've
got to figure out how to do that later. Anyway,
So let's talk about something that you probably won't expect
me to talk about.
Speaker 3: This.
Speaker 1: I want to talk about how philosophy is worthless. And
you know, I prayed about this, and this is kind
of what came to me to talk about, and it
ended up vibing synergizing very well with the talks that
we've heard so far, because I think a lot of
people hear Ortho Bros. And they hear people arguing and
talking about philosophy, and a lot of people assume, oh,
you just like to talk about philosophy, you have to argue,
and you just want to talk about all this high
abstract stuff. But what I think both my good friend father,
Deacon doctor Annonius, and I have discovered, as we have
spent a lot of time in philosophy, is actually that
philosophy is quite worthless. I don't mean real philosophy in
the sense of Christ as the wisdom of God or
something like that. But I mean the secular, abstract discipline
of philosophy. If we think about the logos in John one,
this is not the logos of Marcos Aurelius's meditations. It's
not the logos of Hellenism. There might be some overlap,
there might be some parallels, but the logos in John
one is pulling from the Hebrew wisdom tradition. It's not
an impersonal abstract force. It's the I am. In fact,
the logos of John one we know in the Triads
of Saint Gregor Palomos he talks about in Exodus three
when God said I am in fourteen and fifteen. He
did not say I am it, but I am He.
That is the personal, relational covenantal God that Israel has
a relationship with. This is the one who can show
his face to Moses. But as Jesus says in John
one to eighteen, or as John says in John one eighteen,
and Jesus says in John six forty six, no man
sees God, no man sees the Father at any time.
Yet someone saw this God in Exodus three, the same face,
the same presence, the same angel is said chapters later
in twenty three to remit sins he has the name
of Yahweh in him. We don't find that in created beings.
Even throughout the Old Testament, in dozens of other passages,
we also find that Yahweh and his angel presence face
Glory Messenger, also have his spirit accompanying this presence, this manifestation.
So the God of revelation, this is a personal god.
This is a triad revealed throughout the scriptures, throughout divine
revelation as the Father who is the source, the found
the ark that eternally begets his son, and the Spirit
who proceeds through that son and manifests and shines forth
through that son. In Orthodox theology and trilogy, this one
cause or Arkae is the Father, the soul cause that
keeps this deity personal. Why am I talking about this, Well,
One thing that we have engaged in is a lot
of interactions with other religions other non religious people over
the last several years, last seven or eight years, And
one thing that comes to the fore is there's commonalities
that I've noticed between the other religions and what they offer,
what they present the deity that they discuss there might
be some idea that there's a personal relationship with the
Jewish God, with the Muslim God, or something like that,
but it's certainly nothing like what we offer. And so
in the domain of philosophy, this is usually referred to
as classical theism. Doctor ed Fezer, the famous Thomas, for example,
writes about the classical theist God is the god of Aristotle, Plato, Plutinus, Mimaonides, Mohammad,
and Aquinas. Really since it was a little off there,
something something's a little off, because again, to quote Saint
Gregory Palamas, when God appears in Exodus three, it's not
a supreme essence, it's something a supreme thing. It's I remember,
didn't Biden say something like, yeah, we believe in the
theme talking about God the theme? I was like, is
Biden a classical theist? What's he talking about? No, we
talket we believe in a deity that is uniquely contrast
did too the type of deity that we see amongst
the world religions and classical theism In Orthodox triadology, this
one calls this father archae that has a son and
a spirit. When and I'm not this talk is not
mainly about theology. Believe it or not, it's actually going
to be a little more down to earth. But this
part is theological. When the son takes on the hypostatic
property of the Father, what happens is we have a
move towards what many theologians have called essentialism or the
premissy of the divine essence, or the ussia or the
one over against the starting point of theology and our
relationship with God and the ordo theology and our actual relationship.
These aren't abstract. These are connected. We have a movement
away from God as personal to God as metaphysical, beating
to study a thing, to program like an algorithm, a
science project, something to look at in a test tube
and try to figure out. But that's not what we
read about in scripture, for example. To tie this into
the South, the Bible Belt, the Bible, I grew up Protestant,
and so I was, and I'm thankful for being given
a lot of Biblical indoctrination and a biblical heritage, you
could say, from the South. And I'm glad that we
heard Flannery O'Connor sided many times. She's one of my favorites,
and she talked about the South as Christ haunted, the
Christ haunt, the ghost of Christ that haunts the South,
because it's not exactly fully Christian, but there's the ghost.
Speaker 2: Of Christ there, which I think is a profound idea.
Speaker 1: And that's why Orthodoxy really makes the most sense for
a Southerner, believe it or not, because everything that the
Southerner kind of prioritizes kind of lines up with what
Orthodoxy prioritizes, the virtues to honor the tradition, et cetera.
But if we contrast this to the Latin theology of
the Middle Ages, particularly Roman, Catholic, Tomistic, and even and
Sealmian theology, we get, as I said, the move away
from the beginning point of the person of the Father
in our theology and our relationship with God, and they
moved towards a philosophical essentialism, the monad as primary, thus
subordinating the personal the existential to the metaphysical and the abstract. Thus,
the philosophical God of the Hellenists, of Plato, of Aristotle,
of the Pristocratics, et cetera, is a god of abstract principles,
is more like a number or a force. The personal
god that is Orthodox. In Orthodox Christianity is relational. He
is not abstracted, he is not far off. In fact,
Paul says this when he's preaching the Word is near you,
even in your heart. So God, we could say, has
being as one of his divine energies. But God is
not identical to pure being, as the philosophers say, the
God of the philosophers. If we were to contrast this
deity to our deity, and I'm speaking kind of generally
here as a survey of a lot of the Greek philosophers,
cannot be in time and space. In fact, doctor ed
Faser himself in his book Five Proofs, in the chapter
on the Neoplatonic proof of the classical theist God, quote
cannot be in time and space. Well, that might be
a little problematic if you believe in the incarnation. This
God is absolutely simple, undifferentiated unity, a pure monad, a
purely active eternal actualizer in Aristotle impersonal thought, thinking itself
eternally moving a world or the heavens. Opposite of him,
this deity is cashed out in opposition to the many,
to flux and to temporality. So what's ontologically better is
the one is stasis and is eternality, and he's opposite
all the things that are not that this God or
this deity is eternally willing itself at all times for
all eternity, and is thus unchanging and supposedly pure actuality.
In fact, Quinas goes so far as to say that
the divine persons are only notionally or conceptually distinct from
the divine essence, and so in that sense it would
seem like the divine persons.
Speaker 2: Are also reducible to pure actuality.
Speaker 1: Well, this is not the deity that becomes incarnate, the
God of Aristotle, of Platonis, etc. If he is all
of these categories and characteristics that we've listed these attributes,
that's not a God who responds to prayer. Now, I'm
not saying that God changes, but rather that God condescends
to interact with and synergize with his creatures. It's not
that we act upon him to change his essence or
force him to do anything he wills to have that
reciprocal relationship. But that is impossible for the God of
the philosophers. So the God that we serve is not
found in Roman Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, Unitarianism, etc. Because all
of those religions and faiths explicitly want and desire a
classical theist God. Now, many Roman Catholics are better than
their theology. I'm not saying that they don't love God,
or that they don't have degrees of grace and so forth.
But the confession of system itself, the public theology that's dogmatized,
is really the root issue here. That it attempted to
make the faith accessible to the world, and thus classical
Theism is just simply a foreign deity. The thing that
I've noticed in the last seven or eight years of
interacting with all kinds of people across the board, particularly
all of the top Muslims. And I'm not saying that
to a brag. I didn't ever expect that that happened
totally providentially. I had no interest in Islam whatsoever. And
we had some friends in the UK who became Orthodox,
and one of them was for a while catechist under
Bishop ere name, and he said, Jay, we've got to
respond to Islam. And I said, why I live in
the Bible Belt. I don't see Muslims, although now I
do because this was twenty seventeen, and now when I
go to Nashville, or if I drive around Jacksonville, I
see mosques suddenly everywhere. We drove to Las Vegas last
year and I saw a mosque on an Indian reservation.
I started to read about the Saudis and others and
how this is actually going down, and they've been putting
billions of dollars for many, many years into Islamic education,
the building of mosque and so forth. The point I'm
saying is we will be encountering the Muslim discussion, I
guarantee you in the next several years, because what we
see in places like the UK, they're really just ten, fifteen,
twenty years ahead of what's intended for us.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: Maybe providentially won't get that way. I feel like it will, though.
I feel like we will continue to encounter things like Islam,
maybe not so much Judaism, although I've had had minimal
jud debates with Jews.
Speaker 2: And so forth in the last few years.
Speaker 1: The point of all this is that there's a common
threat I've noticed between the interactions with the Jews and
the Muslims, and the Roman Catholics and the others, the
other world religions, the Unitarian world faiths, is that the more,
that we go to the scriptures, we see how preposterous
those religions are, even though they lay claim to some
degree of attachment to the Torah or something like that.
We know that, of course Judaism is actually temutic. We
know that Islam is actually based on copy paste weird
things out of the scriptures, out of gnostic texts, and
that Islam itself actually borrows from the Talmud. Many people
don't know this, but there's quite a bit of tumutic
influence on Islam as well. So what this gives us
is this unknowable, unreachable Unitarian deity that's pretty much the
same deity as the philosophers, the classical feist God, the
god of pure act, who cannot be in time and space,
cannot manifest. And when you debate with the more scholarly
people from these religions, well Christianity and christ and the Trinity,
it's all illogical, it's irrational, doesn't make any sense. And
so Allah or Hushim or God or the thing the
one has to be this perfect thing and perfection is
a presupposition based on what they believe metaphysics dictates. But
as we've seen tonight or today in the previous talks,
again providentially, it fits perfectly with what I want to discuss.
This deity is not that data. We do not put metaphysics,
the arbitrary dogmas of Aristotle and Plato and Aquitness or
whoever else before divine revelation doesn't mean that philosophy can't
be a helpful tool. Certainly, the Cappadocians made heavy use
of various Neoplatonic philosophical ideas, terminology, and so forth, say
Maximus utilize both Neoplatonic and Aristotilian ideas and categories. But
it's never, at least at least the intention is it.
Maybe sometimes even some of the saints and fathers were
too philosophical, but the intention was never to have philosophy
dictate and confine divine revelation. And so though all way
it goes so far as to say that in a
strict sense God contradicts himself. Many Orthodox theologians have talked
about God transcending logical categories and transcending the antinomies, or
what we think from the humane vantage point, are oppositions
or contradictions. The Trinity is a mystery. It transcends created
logical categories, but it's not crazy or incoherent. Fact, it
is itself foult all throughout divine revelation. The strongest case
I've seen against Islam and Judaism has been in fact
that the Old Testament teaches the Trinity everywhere, and if
you really pay attention, with divine illumination, these Theophanes are
quite often, almost usually Christophanes. So the Christophanes the long
ago have refuted the unitarian deity of the philosophers and
the Jews and the Muslims. And that's because our deity
is much like the deity that appears to Jacob. In
Genesis twenty eight, we read Jacob went out from the
well of Oath towards Heran. He came to a certain
place and stayed there all night because the sun had set.
He took one of the stones of that place that
has put it at his head, and he lay on
that place to sleep. When he dreamed, behold he saw
a ladder, and it was set up on the earth.
Its top reached to heaven, and there the angels of
God were ascending and descending upon it. Behold, the Lord
stood above it. So the Lord is standing. And we
find this many many times in the Theophanes that God
comes down and he stands there, which is a bodily reference,
even though Christ doesn't incarnate yet. The Lord stood and said,
I am the Lord, God of Abraham, your father, and
the God of Isaac. Do not fear. I will give
you this land and you will be a great nation, etc.
So again reiterating the promise to Abraham. And then in
Genesis thirty one we have another Theophany, another appearance of
Christ to Jacob. The angel Lord spoke to me in
a dream, Jacob, here I am, lift up your eyes,
see the male goats and the rams, etc. I am
the God who appeared to you at Bethel. So an appearance,
a manifestation of theophany where you anointed the pillar and
made a vow I will be with you. And then
we read. Then Jacob asked, this is Genesis thirty two.
Tell me your name. He said, why do you ask
my name? Very similar to what is said to Samson's parents.
Why do you ask my name? Seeing as it is wonderful?
So we know it's the same speaker that spoke to Manoah.
Why do you ask my name? It is wonderful? He
blessed him there. Jacob called that place the form of God.
For I saw God's face. I saw God face to face,
much like Moses is said to see God face to face.
And thus my soul was saved when the form of
God passed by the sun rose on him, but he
limped on his hip. This is, of course, after the
wrestling with the Lord. This makes no sense according to
classical theism. This deity doesn't appear. He certainly doesn't wrestle
with Jacob. He's not called the form in the face
of God in time and space. That's just not philosophically possible.
And yet once again, what do we read in Leviticus
Leviticus nine, we have a very similar situation. But I
really like this passage because problematic for any position that
again wants to restrict what God can and can't do
based on arbitrary categories of human created or created human logic.
I know, saying God didn't create logic, but just calling
it created categories. Aaron lifted up his hand towards the people.
This is Liviticus not and he blessed them and came
down from the sin offering, and they'll burnt offerings and
the peace offerings After this, Moses and Aaron went into
the tabernacle, and they came out and blessed all the people,
and the glory of God appeared to all the people.
How do all the people see the glory of God? Well,
we know about the glory cloud in the Old Testament,
and we know again in numbers twelve we're told that
the Lord came down in the cloud, descended in the pillar,
and stood at the door of the tabernacle. So again
bodily movement standing there at the tabernacle. For example, when
he appears to Gideon and Judges, I think it's a
Judge six it says Yahweh turned his face to get in.
The God of the philosophers doesn't have a face, he
doesn't have a form, he doesn't manifest in time of space.
He's not a Theophanic deity. Thus this is so key
and so simple actually for those that are biblically literate
in terms of combating and refuting other world religions that
also lay claim to these same passages and texts.
Speaker 2: At least to some degree with Islam Judaism.
Speaker 1: But again, mainly I think Islam is the thing that
we will be combating in the future because the system
of the establishment of the global elite. They really see
that this is a way to alter and change the West.
More so than perhaps in the other cults or sex
or groups, new agers or whatever. This one seems to
have the real meat when it comes to altering people
groups and changing demographic warfare. Let's just call it that.
Well again, Philippians, too, we read that Christ, who was
in the form of God, did not consider it robbery
to be equal with God, but humble himself and took
on our form. This is the famous Kenosis passage where
we know that God willingly got the son, willingly limited
himself in time and space. He didn't lose any in
his powers, but in a sense, he didn't exercise every power,
every dunamus that he had when he became incarnate. When
he was walking around in Jerusalem, he was not doing
the conflagration.
Speaker 2: He was not creating the world.
Speaker 1: This again is why there's a difference between what God
is his essence, and what God does his actions or
his energies. But if Christ is the deity that becomes
incarnate and steps into time and space and becomes our advocate,
our redeemer, our or savior, our perfect Man. Then it's
not the god of classical theism, and all of the
strivings of classical theism and the God of the philosophers
really didn't amount to much. Thus, I think philosophy is
kind of worthless. And I'm speaking here of worldly philosophy.
Certainly we have Saint Justin, Martyr of the Philosopher, but
even perhaps Justin at times might have been a little
too philosophical. And certainly many of the disciples Tation and
others who were known as the logos apologists made this
mistake of putting philosophy in metaphysics before what we're actually
taught in divine revelation. We read in Saint Justin Popovich
Orthodox Faith in Life in Christ an excellent section where
he talks about perfection. And you notice the idea of
perfection in the classical theist tradition or the world religions
is this metaphysical thing. It's the one that's got to
be no distinctions, and it's out there. It's not in
time and space, and it's totally abstract. It's this and that.
Speaker 2: It's eternal.
Speaker 1: It's opposite time and space and flux. But what a
perfection isn't mainly just some metaphysical speculation. What if it's
actually about a person. And I thought this was a
really good insight that And again this matter is because
when you say debate a Muslim, a Muslim says, well,
God Allah is perfect because he's not in time of space.
He can incarnate, That's why he's perfect. Well, how do
we know that that's what is perfect? It's just an assumption.
And Saint Josephovich says, was Plato perhaps the perfect man? Well,
why did Plato want to leave this world to get
back to the ideas, the eternal ideas? If he was
the perfect man. What about Buddha, Well, Buddha wanted to
escape and achieve nirvana, so he wasn't perfect. What about Moses, Well,
Moses continued to seek help from heaven. Moses made his
own mistakes. What about Mohammed, Well, Mohammad was a bloodthirsty
warlord and he offered a sensual paradise after destroying the infidels,
so it doesn't seem very perfect. What about Kant and
the philosophy of German idealism? Now the meta rationalistic being
on zick the world of the beyond that we can
never know really.
Speaker 2: Puts us in a skeptical state.
Speaker 1: What about what about great literary figures like Shakespeare, say
Justin Bobovitch as well, Shakespeare pointed us to the worlds above,
But that doesn't really seem like a perfect man.
Speaker 2: And then he lists other characters, Nietzsche and others, And.
Speaker 1: What's missing in all these is that none of them
are the god Man. What if the god Man is
just simply the perfect Man, and that perfection isn't an
abstract category that we judge God or metaphysics by, But
the divine revelation of the Son of God is perfect God,
perfect man, and thus the god Man himself is the
perfect example of philosophy come to life life as living wisdom.
Philosophy is an abstract really ultimately, I am the way,
I'm the truth, and the life is a personal, living
philosophical being, but not abstract philosophy. It's a lived, practical,
experiential philosophy. He says, the one who has the fullness
of mystery, the wondrous god Man, in a divine way,
perfect and humanly real. His human goodness is divinely perfect
and complete. His human love is divinely perfect and complete.
So is his righteousness, his mercy, and his compassion, his eternality,
and his beauty all are humanly real, but also divinely
perfect and complete. Nothing is miraculous because he has transformed
all things human to divine. He has completed and perfected
everything by the divine. In one word, the whole man
in him is divinely perfected and divinely completed. So he
is the god Man. And I think that's really the
key differentiation here is that at the end of the day,
all this philosophical stuff, all these world religions, in the
classical theist God, it's just missing the incarnation.
Speaker 2: And that's pretty much everything.
Speaker 1: I don't know if I'm over time or if this
is the limit or where we're at.
Speaker 2: Is there any more.
Speaker 1: Five minutes? I'll take questions if anybody has any questions,
four or five minutes only, So raise your.
Speaker 2: Hand if you have any questions, that's okay.
Speaker 1: Question, Okay, anybody got a question. We canna do five
minutes of questions.
Speaker 2: I'm just curious that if you're going.
Speaker 4: To be talking to someone in an apologetic sense, if
you're trying to use the word, how would you describe perfection?
Because it's hard to break out a really common.
Speaker 1: Sense of the word depends on yeah, if you right,
oh absolutely, if you're talking to your ever average, every
day dude, you don't have to go into the philosophical
stuff because most of the time people are going to
be thinking in the way that Saint Justin Papovich is
laying it out moral perfection. If you're talking to a
philosophy guy or some trained Tomas, they're thinking in terms
of metaphysical categories. But I agree with you that if
you're talking with the philosophy guy, that's when I would say,
how do we know that that's what perfection is? For example,
they'll say something like, well, absolute unity is real true perfection. Well,
I thought God was a triad, and the Cave Docians
say that he's equally triad as much as he is Monat.
He's not more one than he is three, or more
three than he is one. So there's an equal ultimacy
in the trinity. And so Thomas or Romancalock has an
example or a Muslim, they're going to start their assumption
about what perfection is with their system. Well, we know
what perfection is because Allah is perfect, and to be
perfect is to be purely one and to not be many.
But then you say, well, well wait a minute, Alla
has ninety nine attributes and most soon hees think they're
really distinct. So now you're in a you know, a bind.
So that's what I would do, and just say, how
do we know what perfection is?
Speaker 2: On what standard?
Speaker 1: Great question?
Speaker 3: Other question, Jay, repeat the question for the recording.
Speaker 1: Yeah, his question was how do we know what to
say in terms of apologetic discussions when the idea of
what's perfection comes up? Which actually does come up quite
a bit if you're talking to a Muslim or something
like that, And I was distinguishing that from well, if
you're talking to like a regular guy, they're probably thinking
moral perfection and you don't have to worry too much
about critiquing the word and the presuppositions. But if you're
speaking to a philosophical guy, you might want to say,
how do we know what perfection is? And says who
where did you get that arbitrary standard? It's a question back.
Speaker 3: There, Jay louder.
Speaker 1: So, I think that the question was other religions talk
of love.
Speaker 2: Buddha talks about love, other people talk about love. What
is the difference for us?
Speaker 1: Love is twofold. There's human created love that every man
every woman has to some degree for their relations for others,
and there's uncreated love. None of these other world religions
are going to have any conception of uncreated love and
the participation in the uncreated energy of divine love.
Speaker 2: That's the big difference.
Speaker 1: So you have to stress create a creature distinction, and
that none of the world religions because they don't have
the us and centery literally, Orthodox Christianity is the only
religion that has the Essen center distinction. Thus, to talk
about love or other virtues, there's created versions of those
that humans have. You can say naturally, but that's not
all we need. We also need divine love and to
meld with and to blend with, as the Capadocians say,
not that we lose our created properties, but to really
participate in uncreated love.
Speaker 2: That's the difference. And the world religions don't have that.
Speaker 1: I mean they have they might have some kind of
melding into the the divine, but you lose your identity
in your existence if you meld into that in other
other world religions.
Speaker 2: So that's where the energies come in.
Speaker 1: Last one.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this requires those uh. Regardless of whether or not
God or still.
Speaker 1: An expredit area. God either exists as ab.
Speaker 4: And it's just the same way you and I do,
and therefore under categories or exists as existence.
Speaker 1: In the set of categories like candy is a or
existence in all categories and is like.
Speaker 4: The essence of existence itself, which is probably what's a
most blades.
Speaker 1: Systems, which one of those three are implanting goodies, none
of them. Saint Gregory Palama says that existence is a
divine energy. So anything that you predicate of God, even
God's unity, even God's existence, are themselves also energies. So
it's none of those categories or systems, because Orthodox Christian
theology is completely unique, all right,