Speaker 1: The human guinea pig stuff in Africa.
Speaker 2: It's so insane.
Speaker 3: All right, what's up? Welcome everybody. We are back with
Speaker 3: live stream number two today. Hopefully you enjoyed part one
Speaker 3: with our bros Kai and David Arhon and now we're
Speaker 3: back with a new bro. Bros are being birthed left
Speaker 3: and right, bros being birthed. My big thick burthen hips
Speaker 3: are contributing, by God's grace to.
Speaker 4: Birthing more and more of our bros being silly. But
Speaker 4: tonight we have a guest. I want to play a
Speaker 4: little introductory song for our guest. His name is Alex.
Speaker 5: It was.
Speaker 3: It was all right, I'm not gonna play the whole song.
Speaker 4: Y'all can go.
Speaker 3: Y'all can go vibe out to that classic track very soon.
Speaker 3: But it's relevant for our guests because Alex himself was
Speaker 3: a Pentecostal. He was raised a Romanian Pentecostal, and he
Speaker 3: has an amazing story about how he eventually found his
Speaker 3: way by God's grace and buying providence to the Orthodox Church.
Speaker 4: Alex, how you doing, dog, I'm great.
Speaker 5: Thanks for having me on Jay. I appreciate that. Shout
Speaker 5: out to the Romanian mafia thereas.
Speaker 3: Back I'm assuming like every group has a mafia. Is
Speaker 3: there an actual Romanian mafia?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 5: We try to keep it low key though, because you
Speaker 5: know Romanians, you put them all together. The only way
Speaker 5: you can get them to do something is if you
Speaker 5: have one strong man in charge. It's really truly a
Speaker 5: shock that it's not a Catholic country. I think because
Speaker 5: Orthodoxy is so intertwined in the DNA, that's how they
Speaker 5: were able to work it out there.
Speaker 3: Well, you being a lawyer, you could be like the conciliary,
Speaker 3: you know, to the crime family. You could give them
Speaker 3: all the legal advice.
Speaker 4: So you are an Orthodox lawyer. Before we get into.
Speaker 3: Your backstory, can you I want to ask you this question.
Speaker 3: You seem to appreciate and enjoy debate, and I'm just
Speaker 3: wondering might that have something to do with the fact
Speaker 3: that you're a lawyer.
Speaker 5: Absolutely. I think lawyers, probably litigators in particular, they have
Speaker 5: a specific way where they debate.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: There's an old saying that says, if you have the facts,
Speaker 5: pound the facts. If you have the law, pound the law.
Speaker 5: You have neither, then pound the table. But there's like
Speaker 5: a form of debate in lawyering that is like storytelling,
Speaker 5: which is slightly different from the philosophical mode of debate
Speaker 5: that you're a little more obviously very well acquainted with.
Speaker 5: In our view, we're focused more on like persuasion, and
Speaker 5: although in an academic setting, of course, a syllogism may
Speaker 5: persuade somebody, within litigation, you're working with laypeople, you know,
Speaker 5: in a jury. Yeah, so we're focusing on like telling
Speaker 5: a compelling story and working with the facts. And I
Speaker 5: think from that perspective I bring maybe a unique approach
Speaker 5: to apologetics.
Speaker 3: Now, I think that's a perfect descriptor of where your
Speaker 3: approach is unique, because as I was watching your videos
Speaker 3: and catching up on some of the responses which we're
Speaker 3: going to get into the response to Joe Lene Heshmeier
Speaker 3: and some of the other characters that you have interacted
Speaker 3: with and responded to, you have a unique approach which
Speaker 3: I think is very persuasive. And I would say that's
Speaker 3: probably a deficit in my approach because a lot of
Speaker 3: the you know, I don't know, spurgatisms and the silliness
Speaker 3: can be off putting to some people.
Speaker 4: But you have this very smooth, very.
Speaker 3: Polished, persuasive approach which I think is a stellar in
Speaker 3: the domain of rhetoric. But you're not just a skilled rhetorician.
Speaker 3: You're also actually really good at presenting the facts and
Speaker 3: doing an analytical approach. And so that's what I want
Speaker 3: to get into today. So let's get your rewind you're
Speaker 3: from a Romanian Pentecostal background. How do we get this.
Speaker 4: Long story from that into the world of the Orthodox Church.
Speaker 5: Well, it's certainly a long story. And thank you for
Speaker 5: the compliments. I think it's high praise coming from someone
Speaker 5: like yourself, who has you know, established himself in this
Speaker 5: arena already. But for me, I am thankful. Growing up
Speaker 5: Romanian Pentecostal in a way, they have a strong emphasis
Speaker 5: on the scriptures, and my parents really immersed me in, like,
Speaker 5: you know, even as a child, you know, those old
Speaker 5: Hannah Barbera Bible cartoons, to where like even when I
Speaker 5: was eight or nine, I already had a general idea
Speaker 5: for like the overarching narrative of the Bible. Of course,
Speaker 5: you know, I was a kid, so I didn't know
Speaker 5: all the details or you know, how to structure persuasive
Speaker 5: argumentation there, but there was a very strong emphasis on
Speaker 5: like you know, maybe an excess that this book is
Speaker 5: like so important, you really have to know this book,
Speaker 5: you really have to know it covered to cover, and
Speaker 5: a very strong emphasis on experience with God, not just
Speaker 5: you know, theoretical intellectual knowledge, also experiencing God at the
Speaker 5: same time. Of course, you learn later that within Pentecostalism
Speaker 5: there are no guardrails there, which is what Orthodoxy provides
Speaker 5: to experience God. But yeah, it was emphasized scripture a lot,
Speaker 5: and I'm really thankful for that upbringing. Now Romanian Pentecostalism
Speaker 5: and I think that Eastern European Pentecostalism in general it's
Speaker 5: slightly different. Maybe it was just like thirty years behind
Speaker 5: the American style of Pentecostalism because they were still very
Speaker 5: traditional when I was growing up. The men and women
Speaker 5: sat segregated, all of the women had head coverings. So
Speaker 5: I think there was probably like holdovers from Orthodoxy because
Speaker 5: it was really like.
Speaker 3: Got to be because I've never heard of that American
Speaker 3: Pentecostal charismatic church, and I had a period where I
Speaker 3: kind of visited a lot of those when I was younger.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and today that is not the case. You see
Speaker 5: within the Romanian Pentecostal community that I think it was
Speaker 5: over COVID there was like an acceleration to the natural
Speaker 5: conclusion of what Pentecostalism is. And that's really when my
Speaker 5: radar went up and I was like, man, this is
Speaker 5: really going towards a word of faith New Apostolic Reformation.
Speaker 5: It's like really extreme hyper charismaticism.
Speaker 3: Now before we move on, help us understand because a
Speaker 3: lot of people in my I didn't even know what
Speaker 3: this was until the other day when we were doing
Speaker 3: like a Candice you know, TPUSA analysis downstream, What is
Speaker 3: the new Apostolic Reformation and tie that into what you're
Speaker 3: talking about with Pentecostalism.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So with Bill Johnson and this movement in California,
Speaker 5: I think that's probably one of the most popular places
Speaker 5: where you see the new Apostolic Reformation, where these people
Speaker 5: believe that they are on the same spiritual level as
Speaker 5: the Apostles themselves, and they think that there are new
Speaker 5: Apostles that are coming out from this charismatic movement. And
Speaker 5: of course this is a point that you yourself make
Speaker 5: jay with any new sect that Jude is very clear
Speaker 5: that the entirety of the Apostolic deposit has already been
Speaker 5: given to the church. There is no new revelation. We
Speaker 5: have all the new revelation already. So yeah, it's just
Speaker 5: it's a sect within Charismaticism that talks about these apostles
Speaker 5: that are coming up ruling the church in a way.
Speaker 3: It's weird though, it's almost like they kind of realized, hmm,
Speaker 3: we kind of need some kind of living body of authority.
Speaker 3: Let's just say we're apostles, you know what I mean,
Speaker 3: Like maybe they're sensing that, you know, there's something missing
Speaker 3: in the world of nobody can bind anybody else, you know,
Speaker 3: in terms of conscience in the Protestant world. So I mean,
Speaker 3: I know it's silly, but it's almost it's always funny
Speaker 3: when you get like these elements of Evangelicalism or Protestantism
Speaker 3: that kind of start suddenly tacking on ideas that are
Speaker 3: already kind of in orthodoxy. There was a push, for example,
Speaker 3: some years ago, about twenty years ago, when the emergent
Speaker 3: Church movement was kind of getting popular, which was a
Speaker 3: very obviously concocted, sort of corporate approach to Christianity. But
Speaker 3: what was funny about it was at a certain point
Speaker 3: they started saying, ooh, why don't we put like liturgical
Speaker 3: patterns into the worship like instead of a like it's
Speaker 3: like they just had this new, you know, branding idea,
Speaker 3: and it's like, this is not new. It's like you're
Speaker 3: doing the things that I've been here for two thousand years.
Speaker 5: That is actually a huge theme I think and how
Speaker 5: I made the move over to Orthodox, you know. And
Speaker 5: as we will get to that eventually. But when I
Speaker 5: was growing up, I was always interested in theology. I
Speaker 5: was always interested in philosophy. However, I wouldn't say that
Speaker 5: like I'm a philosophy bro. I wouldn't say that I'm
Speaker 5: a theology bro either, Like I think I'm very much
Speaker 5: formed by my profession of advocacy. But I remember through
Speaker 5: high school legality bro. Hopefully not a legalist bro, you know.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I remember in high school. That's when Christopher Hitchens,
Speaker 5: I think, was like at the top of his game,
Speaker 5: fifteen sixteen or so years ago, and I remember watching
Speaker 5: his debate with John Lennox, like over and over again.
Speaker 5: It's been a while since I've watched that debate, but
Speaker 5: if I remember correctly, John Lennox was like slamming this
Speaker 5: objective truths from maths and fine tuning, and Christopher Hitchens
Speaker 5: was just bringing this like extreme skepticism, and you know,
Speaker 5: in my sixteen year old brain or whatever it was
Speaker 5: at the time, I found Hitchens very convincing because he
Speaker 5: was a very good rhetoricician, you know, And although I
Speaker 5: think John Lennox won that debate, I think on rhetoric
Speaker 5: Christopher Hitchens might have taken it there. Looking back at what.
Speaker 3: By the way, I think I think we did cover
Speaker 3: that a couple of years ago on my channel. So
Speaker 3: I'm glad you mentioned that, because I actually forgotten about
Speaker 3: that debate, but I do remember him, you know, hammering
Speaker 3: home a lot of those sort of mathematical points, which
Speaker 3: is interesting because that seems to have had some impact
Speaker 3: on cosmic skeptic Alex O'Connor, who's now sort of sort
Speaker 3: of saying that he might be open to some kind
Speaker 3: of theism, which is fascinating.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think maybe there's something to look out for there.
Speaker 5: Who knows, you know, I wouldn't put too many chips
Speaker 5: in that after building his career on this extreme skepticism
Speaker 5: that we see. Yeah, so at one point after that,
Speaker 5: you know, I overcame this atheism because there were I
Speaker 5: guess I can't articulate it as well as you would,
Speaker 5: but even at that point in my life, I understood
Speaker 5: that there were some underlying requirements to have a worldview work,
Speaker 5: you know, these regularity in the universe, uniformity, these presuppositions
Speaker 5: for knowledge, this epistemic grounding. I think, as you would say,
Speaker 5: it was like this atheism thing is not going to
Speaker 5: work out. And you know, luckily I had some very
Speaker 5: good mentors in the Romanian Pentecostal community then that had
Speaker 5: actually gone to seminary gotten their degrees.
Speaker 3: So were you were you atheists for a period or
Speaker 3: just sort of open to it.
Speaker 5: It was maybe five or six months.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: I think everybody kind of has that edgy phase in
Speaker 5: their like teen, late teens and twenties where they consider it,
Speaker 5: and that's that's more of what it was like. But
Speaker 5: I considered going into theology at one point there because
Speaker 5: I knew I wanted a career of like talking to
Speaker 5: people and you know, helping people through their problems. And
Speaker 5: then I talked to one of my mentors and he
Speaker 5: was like, you have to be prepared to be like
Speaker 5: very poor for your life, and I was like this
Speaker 5: probably not, probably not the move for me. So that
Speaker 5: was a very good sobering conversation. Now, I think today
Speaker 5: in Pentecostalism you would not hear anybody talking about that
Speaker 5: God is going to provide for you. You just plant so
Speaker 5: a seed here and you'll get sevenfold in return.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Would you say that the Word of Faith type stuff
Speaker 3: has really spread everywhere, even in so they're like the
Speaker 3: Romanian Pentecostal circles, because that's.
Speaker 4: Odd, you know, to me.
Speaker 3: I remember when I was visiting some charismatic Pentecostal type
Speaker 3: churches when I was first reading the Bible back in
Speaker 3: the in the late nineties. The Word of Faith kind
Speaker 3: of you know, name it, claimant, blab it, grab it,
Speaker 3: kinde of copeland stuff that was only on TV and
Speaker 3: it wasn't really in like local sort of charismatic Pentecostal
Speaker 3: churches in the Bible Belt. Would you say that's different now?
Speaker 3: Is it like kind of spread to other areas?
Speaker 5: Absolutely. I think if you find a more conservative Pentecostal
Speaker 5: church within the Romanian community, that is the exception to
Speaker 5: the rule. I think the rule is that they are
Speaker 5: leaning towards that word of faith type of name it
Speaker 5: and claimate theology. Absolutely.
Speaker 3: Okay, so you, uh, let's get back to your story.
Speaker 3: So pick back up where you were. I apologize, and
Speaker 3: I mean to get us distracted, But you were talking about,
Speaker 3: you know, meeting some sort of mentors in your which
Speaker 3: is again, that's very rare to me to have the
Speaker 3: sort of mentors in that domain because usually there's not
Speaker 3: a lot of wisdom in that domain, at least not
Speaker 3: in the Bible belt.
Speaker 4: Because that was my.
Speaker 3: Only exposure to this kind of a flavor of Christianity.
Speaker 3: But so what what was happening next to get you
Speaker 3: kind of were you beginning to question Pentecostalism? By the way,
Speaker 3: was this a Trinitarian or anti Trinitarian oneness Pentecostal?
Speaker 5: This was Trinitarian. Luckily, Luckily I wasn't born into a
Speaker 5: oneness Pentecostal. But I mean I was at a point
Speaker 5: in my life where you know, I was interested in
Speaker 5: these things, in these theological issues, and we would always
Speaker 5: go back and forth, and it really seemed like the
Speaker 5: only two positions were like that or Pentecostal. Because you know,
Speaker 5: Roman Catholics they worship Mary and the Pentecostal Romanians when
Speaker 5: they migrated to America, they had a very like sour
Speaker 5: taste in their mouth, I guess from the Orthodox Church,
Speaker 5: because there were a lot of conflicts between the Orthodox
Speaker 5: Church at that point and the Romanian Pentecostal sectarians. So
Speaker 5: it was like, well, the Orthodox were mean to us
Speaker 5: in Romania, so that's not an option. The Roman Catholics
Speaker 5: they worship Mary, so that's not an option. Lutherans are like, Okay,
Speaker 5: I guess, but there wasn't really an emphasis on church
Speaker 5: history there, which I assume now is probably for a
Speaker 5: good reason because if you look at the founding of
Speaker 5: Pentecostalism with Charles Parham, who is like more probably probably
Speaker 5: was a homosexual, like a very open racist, like not
Speaker 5: race realist, like actual racist, and then the emergence of
Speaker 5: the angelic language speaking in tongues over time, church history
Speaker 5: is not the friend of a Pentecostal So I understand
Speaker 5: why there was not huge emphasis on that there.
Speaker 3: Did you have like the explanation that many of them do,
Speaker 3: like if this topic came up that oh, well, Paul's
Speaker 3: clearly talking about a kind of an angelic prayer language,
Speaker 3: or did you have some other explanation.
Speaker 5: I think that was typically the go to passage, you know,
Speaker 5: the standard proof text, like the Spirit intercedes for us
Speaker 5: with groaning, or you know in I think it's First
Speaker 5: Corinthians twelve where he has that clearly hyperbolic comparison to
Speaker 5: the language of angels, and further down in First Corinthians
Speaker 5: when he talks about how I prefer like, I've prayed
Speaker 5: in tongues more than all of you, but I prefer
Speaker 5: you to prophesy. And when I read that, now he's
Speaker 5: clearly telling them to speak in tongues. Less he's not
Speaker 5: telling them to speak in tongues, but the Pentecostal community
Speaker 5: will use that as a proof text to speak in tongues,
Speaker 5: and he's saying the opposite, it seems.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So you know, that's classic issue that we've covered many,
Speaker 3: many times in the last few months because I had
Speaker 3: so many people sort of saying, hey, when are you
Speaker 3: going to cover more charismatic Pentecostal issues, And then we
Speaker 3: did multiple streams, public and private, and one of them
Speaker 3: I think was even like four or five six hours.
Speaker 3: But you know, one of the issues that you hit on,
Speaker 3: I think in the discussion that you had with cleaves antiquity.
Speaker 3: What that you mentioned earlier was this idea of new
Speaker 3: ongoing revelations. So I'm always curious when I hear you know,
Speaker 3: former Pentecostals, like did this issue ever come up when
Speaker 3: you were Pentecostal of the problem of like new revelations
Speaker 3: and pastors that claim to have a word of knowledge
Speaker 3: and then they get it wrong, and like does that
Speaker 3: not count? Was that not God speaking through you? Like
Speaker 3: does God get it wrong? Like did any of that
Speaker 3: kind of like lodge in your mind as like a
Speaker 3: problem to kind of grapple with or was it not
Speaker 3: really an issue?
Speaker 5: It was more of like a social reinforcement to be like, oh,
Speaker 5: this guy prophesied something falsely, so like now we don't
Speaker 5: like him any more kind of thing. It wasn't really
Speaker 5: like we didn't think about it in terms of our
Speaker 5: theological system, which is like a huge problem. But usually
Speaker 5: it's just a rationalization. Like there's the reasoning I remember
Speaker 5: and that I see now is like, oh, well, the
Speaker 5: Holy Spirit gives revelation and prophecy to the individual. But
Speaker 5: because we're humans, we're like corrupted creatures. So when it
Speaker 5: comes out and we try to express the revelation. Then
Speaker 5: it gets all messed up and jumbled up, which is like, it's.
Speaker 4: Actually a pretty creative cope there. I like that one.
Speaker 4: That's pretty good.
Speaker 5: A huge problem for the Bible.
Speaker 3: Like I was gonna say, like, wouldn't that apply to
Speaker 3: Paul writing epistles?
Speaker 4: And yeah?
Speaker 3: Okay, So now so you're you've got these mentors, you're
Speaker 3: pentecostal basically, you know, at some point there's got to
Speaker 3: be chinks in the armor getting exposed, or is beginning
Speaker 3: to be cracks in this paradigm.
Speaker 4: What what were the first cracks that started happening.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So I didn't really think about this until much later.
Speaker 5: I think I had already become a lawyer and become established.
Speaker 5: You know, I was thinking about a career. I was
Speaker 5: considering maybe theology. I was dissuaded from that. I considered
Speaker 5: maybe going into like clinical psychology, because, as I said,
Speaker 5: I wanted to talk with people and work with people.
Speaker 5: And then I show up to like psych one hundred
Speaker 5: and everybody has like whispy beards and fedoras and like vests.
Speaker 5: This is not my crowd or anything. So I decided, like,
Speaker 5: maybe I'll go to law school. At that point so
Speaker 5: I go through law school, you know, I find some
Speaker 5: mentors in the legal realm within litigation, and that formed
Speaker 5: my thinking a lot, going through law school and learning
Speaker 5: this profession of litigation, these professional persuaders, and the top
Speaker 5: level of that is just insane. Like they I would
Speaker 5: compare it to they have magic powers of persuasion. And
Speaker 5: I don't think I'm on that highest tier yet. Hopefully
Speaker 5: one day I'll get there. But it was really during
Speaker 5: COVID that I saw this acceleration within the Romanian Pentecostal
Speaker 5: community going more towards Word of Faith and the New
Speaker 5: Apostolic Reformation. I'll say, this can't be right. It was
Speaker 5: really like twenty twenty, twenty twenty one when I started,
Speaker 5: like so five years ago, when I started turning back
Speaker 5: the clock and like kind of starting from present day
Speaker 5: and going back. And I was very interested in Calvinism
Speaker 5: at that time. And there was a documentary that like
Speaker 5: some Baptists made called Cessationist, which I think that really
Speaker 5: opened my eyes to the false experiences in the pre
Speaker 5: list within the Pentecostal movement, because it's really hard, I think,
Speaker 5: to shake your identity from like no, I did have
Speaker 5: this real religious experience. I did, like people really believe that.
Speaker 5: They don't want that I've been tricked for like my
Speaker 5: whole life, right, nobody wants to come to that conclusion.
Speaker 5: But when I saw that, like really, what did it
Speaker 5: for me was there was a scene of like some
Speaker 5: Kundalini reawakening images and then like a Pentecostal gathering, and
Speaker 5: I was like, man, it cannot tell the difference. They
Speaker 5: are identical.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so sometimes guys, the workaround requires me to flip
Speaker 3: the monitor on and off. So that's all that was was.
Speaker 3: That's why there was an echo, So just relax, just
Speaker 3: sit refresh. We all know that there's perpetual issues with
Speaker 3: iOS and Apple and stream labs. But yeah, so I
Speaker 3: remember too because I had a Pentecostal phase or I
Speaker 3: mean charismatic phase where I went to some charismatic churches
Speaker 3: for a while and I think eventually what really sort
Speaker 3: of stuck out to me what I thought, you know,
Speaker 3: in good faith, that well, this is what's happening in
Speaker 3: the Book of Acts, right, like this is them. You know,
Speaker 3: they look like they're drunk in the spirit. That's got
Speaker 3: to be some kind of like overwhelming you know, flopping
Speaker 3: and rolling around and acting silly type of stuff. But
Speaker 3: then I remember when I was reading Corinthians, and I
Speaker 3: would notice Paul would say things like God.
Speaker 4: Is not the author of confusion.
Speaker 3: You know, you guys are acting insane and crazy, like
Speaker 3: what is wrong with what you guys are doing?
Speaker 4: Like what's wrong with you? Right? You got it all backwards,
Speaker 4: And I realized.
Speaker 3: Well, so, wait a minute, Actually, the way the charismatic
Speaker 3: churches operate is sounds like the things that Paul's complaining about, right,
Speaker 3: And at first I thought, well, that would mean that
Speaker 3: that's the true church because they're operating the way Paul's complaining.
Speaker 3: But then I realized, no, wait a minute, the worship
Speaker 3: service isn't actually based on new ongoing revelations if the
Speaker 3: faith was once for all committed to the saints. And then,
Speaker 3: as you know, there's many other passages that really sort
Speaker 3: of back up this idea of the finality of divine
Speaker 3: revelation at some point in terms of public dogmatic revelation, right,
Speaker 3: And even that text in Daniel nine says the sealing
Speaker 3: up of vision and prophecy doesn't mean that all the
Speaker 3: prophecies are fulfilled at the first Advent, but the revelation
Speaker 3: seems to be in some way completed at the first
Speaker 3: advent of the Messiah. You have that passage in Zachariath.
Speaker 3: I think it's thirteen that talks about when the Messiah comes,
Speaker 3: there will no longer be profits we have. I remember
Speaker 3: learning a long time ago Joseph Smith altering Luke sixteen
Speaker 3: sixteen about you know, John the Baptist being the last
Speaker 3: of the prophets, and of course jose Smith had to
Speaker 3: make that, you know, some some other wordings so that
Speaker 3: he could be another prophet.
Speaker 4: And then I think, you know, over time you wait,
Speaker 4: are you guys saying that the sound doesn't work?
Speaker 3: See, we had a whole how do we have a
Speaker 3: whole freaking interview that we had a whole interview that
Speaker 3: went perfect with no issues, and then as soon as
Speaker 3: I get my law bro on, everything goes insane.
Speaker 5: All right, Right, it's because we started talking about Pentecostalism.
Speaker 3: For sure, the Pentecostals are sending this the angels to
Speaker 3: come attack us. Okay, so this sounds good now, So yeah,
Speaker 3: so I have to do these workarounds anyway. So you know,
Speaker 3: as you mentioned, Jude three says the faith was once
Speaker 3: for all committed to the same scalations. One Paul says,
Speaker 3: no one else can each a new Gospel other than
Speaker 3: what I delivered. Well, that means there has to be
Speaker 3: some finality to us delivered to judge anything, you know,
Speaker 3: future wise on on this basis. And so even as
Speaker 3: you mentioned when I was a Calvinist, you know, I realized, Okay,
Speaker 3: there's got to be some kind of like you know,
Speaker 3: finality to this, because you know, God.
Speaker 4: Takes people that speak for him very seriously.
Speaker 3: And when you've got ministers and preachers and people who
Speaker 3: claim to be prophets getting things wrong or their word
Speaker 3: of knowledge or their you know, their their prophetic statements
Speaker 3: end up not being true. You know, in the charismatic world.
Speaker 3: I was in there, not a long time, maybe a year,
Speaker 3: but enough to see like, okay, this isn't really taken seriously,
Speaker 3: Like you get this wrong.
Speaker 4: It's like, oh, well, give us another shot here. Right. Well,
Speaker 4: in scripture, right, the false prophets, as Jeremiah says, Prophet
Speaker 4: I have a vision according to their own hearts and
Speaker 4: not according to the Lord.
Speaker 3: And I was like, that's what's actually what's going on
Speaker 3: in a lot of these churches. So again, this is
Speaker 3: all kind of uh, you know, old news to you.
Speaker 3: But I think for people in the audience, we have
Speaker 3: to keep hammering this home because.
Speaker 4: Even after here's what you'll notice as.
Speaker 3: You start to make content, Alex, I mean you're already
Speaker 3: well into this. You will address a topic with the
Speaker 3: utmost most precision for three hours, it will get tons
Speaker 3: of views, and the next day you will have someone say,
Speaker 3: when are you going to address pentecostalism with any precision?
Speaker 3: It's like, dude, did you not just watch this? I mean,
Speaker 3: so get ready for all of that. But anyway, back
Speaker 3: to you, I'm sorry'm rambling. That's the whole sort of
Speaker 3: idea of the finality of revelation. And then when I
Speaker 3: started reading the Church Fathers, as you said, you start realizing, hey,
Speaker 3: wait a minute, Montanous is like the same thing, and
Speaker 3: he was condemned or in the second century. So did
Speaker 3: you start to have any interest in the Church Fathers
Speaker 3: at this period or was it just sort of the
Speaker 3: problems of charismaticism that made you think, okay, this isn't it.
Speaker 5: Well it was a bit of an extended pipeline. I guess. Basically,
Speaker 5: I had this friend in Florida, who you know, he
Speaker 5: did like seminary at Pentecostal Seminary. He had more of
Speaker 5: an open mind to these kinds of things, and he
Speaker 5: said he very much disliked that I was getting into Calvinism,
Speaker 5: and he was like, you need to go read doctor
Speaker 5: Michael Heiser's Unseen Realm because in the chapter there he
Speaker 5: makes a pretty good case against determinism. And I know
Speaker 5: Calvinists today try to like disavow the term determinism, but
Speaker 5: I don't think there's really any work around with that.
Speaker 5: But I read Michael Heiser's Unseen Realm, and then he
Speaker 5: also recommended because it also talks about like the Divine
Speaker 5: Council theology, Father Stephen Dejung's Religion of the Apostles Orthodox
Speaker 5: Christianity in the first century. So going through Michael Heiser's
Speaker 5: work and then putting an Orthodox lens on that, because
Speaker 5: not everything Michael Heiser talks about is Orthodox, but then
Speaker 5: putting an Orthodox lens to that through Father Stephen Deyong's
Speaker 5: work was like, Wow, hold on a minute, there might
Speaker 5: be something here. Like one of my big objections was
Speaker 5: seeking the intercession of the Saints, which is the video
Speaker 5: I dropped most recently, and the Divine Council theology makes
Speaker 5: I think seeking the intercessions of those members on the
Speaker 5: Divine Council feasible. So yeah, that was one of the
Speaker 5: first pipelines to get me to considering it.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And you know, it's funny because I had a
Speaker 3: different a different course into that realm, and I remember
Speaker 3: that being an issue for me. But I went back
Speaker 3: in two thousand and one and two into Catholicism. So
Speaker 3: my path for that was hardcore Calvinist. And then I
Speaker 3: read Scott Hans's book Marriage Supper of the Lamb, which
Speaker 3: is actually still a decent book. You could actually get
Speaker 3: some really good sort of liturgical argumentation and meet from
Speaker 3: that text, even though obviously I'm not Roman Catholic, but
Speaker 3: Marriage Upper of the Lamb really made me understand, oh
Speaker 3: wait a minute, you know, I'm already a Calvinist preterist,
Speaker 3: personal predist.
Speaker 4: Here I believe.
Speaker 3: Seventy a d was, you know, kind of the finality
Speaker 3: of that introduction of the last days into the here
Speaker 3: and the now they already not yet framework. And then
Speaker 3: it was like, once you understood that, oh, we're actually
Speaker 3: all part of the same family. Even those that have
Speaker 3: gone on, and we're all part of the same worship
Speaker 3: service even though they have gone on, you know, church
Speaker 3: militant united with you know, church triumphant, and you know,
Speaker 3: you read Hebrews eleven, you see that we're all part
Speaker 3: of that same city. It kind of, you know, coalesced
Speaker 3: for me, and you know, Revelations five through nine, you know,
Speaker 3: clearly saying that it's again a large communal service with
Speaker 3: all that liturgical imagery. Did the Book of Revelation play
Speaker 3: a role for you in accepting that? Because for me
Speaker 3: it was kind of the knockdown.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think so, because growing up in a Pentecostal background,
Speaker 5: it was like obviously very dispensationalists. So it was like,
Speaker 5: Revelation is this book that you can't really understand is
Speaker 5: kind of unfolding. And the hermeneutic that you use to
Speaker 5: understand Revelation is you take a news headline and you
Speaker 5: compare that to a verse in Revelation, and it's like,
Speaker 5: what can you get from comparing the news headlines and
Speaker 5: the Book of Revelation that was written nineteen hundred years ago, whatever,
Speaker 5: you know, And that's a bad hermeneutic really, as soon
Speaker 5: as you know, I got interested in Orthodox He's starting
Speaker 5: attended attending the liturgy. I was like, oh, hold on
Speaker 5: a minute, this looks familiar. It was like, yeah, revelation
Speaker 5: played a big role in that, that liturgical component, and
Speaker 5: obviously other Orthodox influencers on YouTube like yourself, like Sarah
Speaker 5: and Hamilton, I know, is big on this about this,
Speaker 5: like sacramental worldview. I think that played a big role
Speaker 5: as well as consuming all of this content from the
Speaker 5: giants that have come before me. I guess and up
Speaker 5: at out this.
Speaker 3: Did you have a period of Calvinism or you were
Speaker 3: just intellectually interested, but you didn't go into a Presbyterian
Speaker 3: church or anything.
Speaker 5: Well, it was around twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen when my
Speaker 5: wife and I we joined like a non denom evangelical church.
Speaker 5: We left the Pentecostal movement, so that was more of
Speaker 5: a baptisty church as it would be like a reform disoteriology.
Speaker 3: James White reform Baptist type idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah exactly.
Speaker 5: And a few years after adjoining, you know, reading more
Speaker 5: about church history, getting into the church fathers, there was
Speaker 5: just like something I couldn't stand about this, like goofy
Speaker 5: Calvinism anymore. I just couldn't stand hearing anything about it,
Speaker 5: and I went to the leaders of that church and
Speaker 5: that at that time, that was after Michael Heiser and
Speaker 5: Stephen Deyong and I started going into the Church fathers.
Speaker 5: My mindset kind of shifted, and I was like, forget
Speaker 5: starting here and working backwards. Let's start from the Book
Speaker 5: of Acts and move forwards. And I was like, let's
Speaker 5: just get down like the first thousand years of church history.
Speaker 3: Let's get that down and tell me about this because
Speaker 3: you mentioned this with your interview with Cleve. You said
Speaker 3: something about kind of a lawyer's approach to analytically looking
Speaker 3: at each of the heresies as schisms historically.
Speaker 4: Is that we said something like that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I guess the way my brain has been
Speaker 5: trained was to look at all of these is like
Speaker 5: court cases almost, so it'd be like Montanus versus you know,
Speaker 5: the rest of the Church, or Arius v Alexander.
Speaker 4: I think that's actually really genius.
Speaker 3: That's actually you because I've never heard anyone think about
Speaker 3: it this way, but it actually makes perfect sense.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because I think folks today are very influenced by Papism,
Speaker 5: Roman Catholicism, and they're under this assumption that councils like
Speaker 5: declare dogmas, and that is one function, but it's not
Speaker 5: like the main function I believe of a council is
Speaker 5: to like resolve disputes and to like find the truth
Speaker 5: out of this dispute. Right, you have areas who got
Speaker 5: excommunicated by Saint Alexander of Alexandria.
Speaker 4: Was that right?
Speaker 5: You know what's going on here? What is the claim?
Speaker 5: What is correct? And then out of that you get
Speaker 5: the infallible dogma that we hold on to. But like
Speaker 5: in law, there's a bunch of like, oh bitter dicta
Speaker 5: in there as well that like, not everything from a
Speaker 5: council is infallible. And when I heard you talking about that,
Speaker 5: I was like, man, there are so many parallels in
Speaker 5: this dispute resolution of mechanism within the Church to actual
Speaker 5: modern law today, where not everything that the Supreme Court
Speaker 5: says in their twenty six page opinions are binding on everybody,
Speaker 5: Like they're of course very weighty, but the part that
Speaker 5: you take out is like the actual decision, the holding,
Speaker 5: which the parallel to that in orthodoxy would be the dogma.
Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly, and key point here too, And I meant
Speaker 3: to mention this in today's earlier interview when we were
Speaker 3: kind of working through some of the Econmenical councils in
Speaker 3: regard to Christology and later you know, fifth and six
Speaker 3: Council condinations of you know, monel, thelitism and that kind
Speaker 3: of stuff. It's funny that in the in the Roman
Speaker 3: Catholic mindset, if you if you really thought that the
Speaker 3: Church of the first thousand years was papal and was
Speaker 3: Roman Catholic, why all these debates, why why all of
Speaker 3: this arguing the nuances of Christology and mono, thelitism and
Speaker 3: this and that, Like all anyone had to do was
Speaker 3: just so we were talking about the difference in the
Speaker 3: attitude between the Roman Catholic approach today and we're going
Speaker 3: to talk about replying replying to Roman Catholics here in
Speaker 3: a moment, you know, we were just we were discussing
Speaker 3: the idea that you know, the early Church, uh, in
Speaker 3: the early ecumenical councils, it would have been so much
Speaker 3: easier to just ask the Pope what the right answer
Speaker 3: is the why all of these disputes, all this nuance,
Speaker 3: all this terminology, when we could have just simply said
Speaker 3: ron tell us what's right, and then we all because
Speaker 3: we all we're all papists, like, clearly this is the
Speaker 3: easiest route to resolving disputes. But instead we have very
Speaker 3: dogged debates, very abstruse discussions about very difficult theological nuances
Speaker 3: and technicalities, and so that shows us. I think that again,
Speaker 3: the whole ethos of the first thousand years is clearly
Speaker 3: the orthodox to Nodal model, not the Roman Catholic default
Speaker 3: autocratic model, which you know, as you're pointing out, like
Speaker 3: why there's other things going, like the councils themselves. The
Speaker 3: process of the councils shows us so much more than
Speaker 3: just like the sort of clipping copy paste, Oh here's
Speaker 3: the dogma, that's all that matters, right, Well, for example,
Speaker 3: you know, if you look at Constantinople one, you can't
Speaker 3: separate the pronunciation of the council from the theology of
Speaker 3: the Cappadocians and especially Saint Gregornossa. And you know, if
Speaker 3: you have like a romanctholic mindset as an example, you
Speaker 3: can just sort of clip out what you want and
Speaker 3: say you don't really care about like Basil and the
Speaker 3: Cappidocean model of you know, the monarchical trinitarian view. I
Speaker 3: only care about the dogmatic pronouncement. And ironically, protests are
Speaker 3: the exact same thing as the papist when it comes
Speaker 3: to these councils and they say, uh, you know, I
Speaker 3: like what Athanasius said here about the deed of Christ.
Speaker 3: I don't care what the Canons of Nicia teach about
Speaker 3: the Eucharist and deacons and the episcopate. All of that
Speaker 3: is irrelevant to me. I just like this part. Papist
Speaker 3: exact singing are like this part. And really, ironically, it's
Speaker 3: only the Orthodox Church that is actually still doing the
Speaker 3: sonodal model.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I think it's the only worldview that has successfully synthesized
Speaker 5: all of these things together into a coherent worldview. And
Speaker 5: they do this especially with the Holy Script. Sure you
Speaker 5: know this redefining this doctrinal development. See it in Protestantism,
Speaker 5: you see it in Papism. I think Holy Orthodoxy is
Speaker 5: the only worldview that has successfully integrated all these things
Speaker 5: together because it's true.
Speaker 4: It's right.
Speaker 5: Probably helps to win when you're winning a debate, to
Speaker 5: actually be in the right position.
Speaker 3: Well, let's get back to your to your journey. So
Speaker 3: as COVID's happened. You're investigating the Church fathers. Now where
Speaker 3: when you say that and we all kind of go
Speaker 3: through that, you know, not that we don't we're not
Speaker 3: still interested in the Church Fathers. But I think there's
Speaker 3: a freshness and a newness when you're an Evangelic or
Speaker 3: a Protestant and you begin to read the Church Fathers.
Speaker 3: I started with things like Jerome, Saint Jerome, I started
Speaker 3: with Augustin, and I started with Ambrose, all the Latin fathers.
Speaker 3: I did read Athanasius very early on, back in about
Speaker 3: two thousand and one, and I was pretty quickly kind
Speaker 3: of struck with like, Okay, they're not Calvinists, they're not Protestant.
Speaker 3: What was your your journey to the Patristic era writings
Speaker 3: and how did that go?
Speaker 4: Well?
Speaker 5: I got this like little anthology by this Anglican scholar Betenson,
Speaker 5: who has like little snippets from each church father for
Speaker 5: like the first three hundred years, and it's like, what
Speaker 5: did Basil teach on soteriology? Okay, what did Gregory of
Speaker 5: Nissa teach on soteriology? And it's kind of like a
Speaker 5: systematized little snippets a quote mine I guess, but a
Speaker 5: well intentioned academic quote mine. And I was struck by
Speaker 5: a passage from Saint Ignatius that said, if you follow
Speaker 5: a man who causes a schism, you have what hope
Speaker 5: is there for you? For salvation? And I was like,
Speaker 5: holy cow, Like that is the entire Protestant movement, the
Speaker 5: whole thing. And then it's like, maybe I should go
Speaker 5: and like look at all of these schisms and see
Speaker 5: which one makes the most sense in each schism. And
Speaker 5: that's when I took that like, uh, that case law
Speaker 5: loyally approach where it was like, okay, we have two parties,
Speaker 5: so somebody's making an argument here, somebody's making an argument here.
Speaker 5: What did the council decide and what was their reasoning
Speaker 5: for it? And trying to put them into the form
Speaker 5: of like a narrative or a case for lack of
Speaker 5: better terms.
Speaker 3: And what as you're doing this, as you're going through
Speaker 3: these heresies.
Speaker 4: And by the way, how far did you go up?
Speaker 3: Did you go all the way up to like the
Speaker 3: eighth ninth century or like what where did that process
Speaker 3: of kind of doing the legal analysis end?
Speaker 5: Well, it was focused mostly on the seven Ecumenical councils uh.
Speaker 5: And then after that, you know, I started making my
Speaker 5: way back to the Reformation. But by the time I
Speaker 5: got to like the fifth sixth Council, I had a
Speaker 5: lot of questions for my non denom baptisty evangelical pastors,
Speaker 5: and I had a few conversations with them, and you know,
Speaker 5: nice people interpersonally, but I was shocked, Jay, I was
Speaker 5: shocked that these people have mdivs and doctoral level degrees.
Speaker 5: And if I talk about, like, hey, doesn't monothelaticism from
Speaker 5: the sixth Ecumenical Council sound a bit like monargism and conversion,
Speaker 5: they look at me like I'm speaking another language, Like
Speaker 5: they have no clue what I'm talking about, like not
Speaker 5: an idea in the world. And I was like, man,
Speaker 5: these people have been short changed by their seminaries. So
Speaker 5: I started wondering, like, what do they teach in seminaries
Speaker 5: these days? And it's not historical theology. That's that's like
Speaker 5: a specialty for sub PhD graduate project. They teach you
Speaker 5: about like building organizations, mobilizing volunteers, trying to build a church,
Speaker 5: involving the community. It's not so much about theology as
Speaker 5: you would think it is maybe.
Speaker 3: Back in the way I remember very well. I mean
Speaker 3: I was at a Baptist school. I remember over Christmas break,
Speaker 3: I was there for two weeks kind of alone, and
Speaker 3: I read almost all of the City of God in
Speaker 3: that two weeks, and I wrote down a bunch of
Speaker 3: questions and I took it to I even remember who
Speaker 3: the professor were. This's like back in like the year
Speaker 3: two thousand and doctor hawt Ostrender and doctor Chad Brand,
Speaker 3: and I think they're still Baptist pastors. But I took
Speaker 3: my questions out of City of God to them, and
Speaker 3: it was just like like they'd never even thought about like,
Speaker 3: wait a minute, wait, Augustine says that. Augustine says, what
Speaker 3: about the real I thought he was our guy. Yeah,
Speaker 3: they were sort of yeah, like what so I think
Speaker 3: there's a lot of even in the academic realm of
Speaker 3: Protestantism and Evangelicalism, there's just this assumption that, oh, yeah, Augustine,
Speaker 3: he's our guy, and that's you know, Athanasius, he's our guy.
Speaker 4: But then you.
Speaker 3: Actually start to read the letters, festal letters, you know,
Speaker 3: this kind of stuff, the councils, and you start to realize,
Speaker 3: wait a minute, I'm not at all like in this domain.
Speaker 3: And you know I made the mistake, you know, without
Speaker 3: knowing any better back in two thousand and one two three,
Speaker 3: of just thinking oh, it's either Protestant or Roman Catholic,
Speaker 3: and later you know, got a lot more sophisticated than God.
Speaker 3: But what was it that, as you're reading their church
Speaker 3: fathers made you not go to the Roman Catholic.
Speaker 5: It was how they acted. You know, people say all
Speaker 5: kinds of things, right, there's honorifics, there's flattery, like unfortunately,
Speaker 5: it's just a part of it that the Church on
Speaker 5: earth is has like a human element to it. So
Speaker 5: there you're gonna see flattery in letters. But you know,
Speaker 5: all the things that the Papists will use to support
Speaker 5: their claim that Rome had universal, unhindered jurisdiction over all
Speaker 5: the faithful, throughout the entire church, and they weren't subject
Speaker 5: to review by anybody. Every single quote you can find
Speaker 5: an identical quote about another church. I think Saint Basil's
Speaker 5: Late Letters where he's talking about the Church in Antioch says,
Speaker 5: the church in Antioch is the head of the church.
Speaker 5: What will the church do the body without its head?
Speaker 5: We need to have malicious Saint Malicius as the bishop
Speaker 5: in Antioch. He's trying to get Saint Athanasius on his side.
Speaker 5: And so you can't really put too much weight in
Speaker 5: these like political movements where they're trying to persuade somebody.
Speaker 5: You have to look at what they actually do. So
Speaker 5: in Roman Catholicism, I was like, Okay, if I were
Speaker 5: to join Roman Catholicism today, what am I signing up for?
Speaker 5: And I just read through Pastor returnis in my legal mind,
Speaker 5: the phrase that stuck out to me is that the
Speaker 5: Roman See is not subject to review by anybody. And
Speaker 5: the corollary to that in the American court system is
Speaker 5: the supreme court. It is not subject to review by anybody.
Speaker 5: It's the highest authority. And Pastor Returnists actually uses that
Speaker 5: term unsurpassed authority. They are saying that the Roman See
Speaker 5: is the supreme court in the church, and you just
Speaker 5: don't see anyone acting that way. Like one proof that
Speaker 5: they like to use is Pope Celestine and how he
Speaker 5: excommunicated Nestorius prior to the Third Council. Okay, well, why
Speaker 5: do we have a review from scratch of that entire decision?
Speaker 5: They totally disregard Rome's decision, and then in the third
Speaker 5: Acumenical Council they relitigate the entire issue from scratch, and
Speaker 5: Mystorius is not treated as somebody who's excommunicated. He's treated
Speaker 5: as a bishop in good standing at the beginning of
Speaker 5: that council.
Speaker 4: Yeah, six nine.
Speaker 3: Why would you redo this at Constantinople if Pope Martin
Speaker 3: at latter in six forty nine has already ruled on
Speaker 3: the issue.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so we see right away that like, hey, these
Speaker 5: claims that Rome is making about their role in the
Speaker 5: church is just not true. It's nobody acted that way. Uh,
Speaker 5: maybe later on they have some claims, and that's I
Speaker 5: think that's why they have to get into the minutia
Speaker 5: of the Latin and like, didn't Saint Maximus the Confessor
Speaker 5: like teach that Rome was divinely inspired. Well, there's another
Speaker 5: bishop that says the patriarchy in Jerusalem is also divinely
Speaker 5: or divinely founded, I think has divine foundation. So you
Speaker 5: have all this flowery, honorific language going either way. Okay,
Speaker 5: that's fine. What did they do? How did they act?
Speaker 5: And they didn't act in a way that's conducive to
Speaker 5: the Roman Catholic paper. Well.
Speaker 3: The other thing too is I've noticed amongst the Roman
Speaker 3: Catholic apologists that there's a heavy, heavy tendency, especially in
Speaker 3: the last five years of this discourse. And I've been
Speaker 3: in this, you know, contra Roman Catholic Roman pro Roman
Speaker 3: Catholic discourse since two thousand and one, two thousand, right,
Speaker 3: and there is when I really started getting into these
Speaker 3: kinds of apologetics, and I noticed that it's gotten less
Speaker 3: and less academic, and it's actually more and more, at
Speaker 3: least on the internet sphere, like not even polemical. It's
Speaker 3: just more like me meme war fare now because the
Speaker 3: domain of the Roman Catholic apologists actually they tend to
Speaker 3: just completely ignore any counter objections. And you know, when
Speaker 3: it comes to the way that we approach these topics,
Speaker 3: I think we do pretty good on the Orthodox side
Speaker 3: of dealing with the steelman of the Roman Catholic position. Okay,
Speaker 3: what's their strongest case. It's going to be, you know, Hormizdus,
Speaker 3: It's going to be Pope Bagatho's letter, right, So we're
Speaker 3: going to have to work through and deal with these
Speaker 3: the Roman Catholice position. They don't even address the things
Speaker 3: that we bring up. It's never touched on, at least
Speaker 3: not in a lot of what I see. Maybe Jolene
Speaker 3: Heshmeier has touched on it. I don't know, but we're
Speaker 3: going to talk about that here in a bit. But
Speaker 3: I mean, I just feel like they're just sort of
Speaker 3: breezing past and they've long given up steelmanning the positions,
Speaker 3: at least from the majority of their apologists.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So, like I said at the beginning of our talk
Speaker 5: here that like when a lawyer will like analyze this,
Speaker 5: they'll be like, Okay, what are the facts, like what happened?
Speaker 5: And then like what is the law? What is the
Speaker 5: principle that you can draw out of what happened? So
Speaker 5: my investigation at first was like, okay, objectively what happened?
Speaker 5: And I went to I have Philip Schaff's eight volume
Speaker 5: set on the history of the Church. He's Protestant, he
Speaker 5: doesn't have a bone in this fight to be Roman
Speaker 5: Catholic or Orthodox, and I have a few other historical
Speaker 5: books up there. And if you just read the source
Speaker 5: documents themselves too, like nobody is going out of their
Speaker 5: way to submit to Rome. So when I went on
Speaker 5: this like fact finding expedition, like what exactly, Like, let's
Speaker 5: get to the bottom of this, what happened? It seemed
Speaker 5: very clear to me that like Roman Catholicism, that is
Speaker 5: not the correct church. It's not the church that you
Speaker 5: see for the first one thousand years. Certainly an innovation.
Speaker 5: And then that brought me to wholly orthodoxy, and of
Speaker 5: course I investigated, you know, the non Calcedonian positions a bit.
Speaker 5: I just couldn't get over the tertien quid. And it
Speaker 5: really seems like they don't even really understand what their
Speaker 5: own position is, right. I'm like, I don't want to
Speaker 5: talk too much smack here. I try to hold myself
Speaker 5: out as the ironic one. When I've been doing this
Speaker 5: for twenty years, like Jay has, then I can bring
Speaker 5: myself to be like a little more curmudgeony here. But
Speaker 5: I really just I don't think they understand what their
Speaker 5: position is. Whenever I hear them talk about it, it's
Speaker 5: just like, okay, so a composite nature and they're like, no,
Speaker 5: not exactly, it's okay, what are you saying. And then
Speaker 5: because I did catch a bit of the stream earlier,
Speaker 5: I understand why Kai is like, hey, you need to
Speaker 5: write down what you believe, because I don't know what
Speaker 5: you believe. I can't engage in a debate with you
Speaker 5: if I don't know your position. I don't want to
Speaker 5: be swinging at ghosts here.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's talk a little bit about some of the
Speaker 3: material that you produced lately, because I've been enjoying some
Speaker 3: of these videos, and you know, you hit on topics
Speaker 3: even in insights that that I miss.
Speaker 4: And that's a great thing about Orthodoxy is.
Speaker 3: That you know, we're not like we follow that one guy, right,
Speaker 3: we have a very sonodal, very diffused gifts idea that
Speaker 3: you know, even as somebody who is not you know,
Speaker 3: hasn't been in the church for twenty years, they can
Speaker 3: even as a new comer, they can have insights, wisdom
Speaker 3: and takes and new information that you know, even somebody
Speaker 3: who's been studying the stuff for decades can can miss.
Speaker 3: So we always have to be humble and try to
Speaker 3: be teachable about God's grace as best we can. You
Speaker 3: responded to Joel Heshmeyer Joe Heshmeyer, whatever it is, and
Speaker 3: in an excellent video, And so let's walk through a
Speaker 3: few of these because I noticed as I watch his
Speaker 3: video and then your response it was, it was he
Speaker 3: did a little bit better than the sort of rumman
Speaker 3: caltholcy pop apologist does. I'll give him some credit for
Speaker 3: at least, you know, putting a little bit more time
Speaker 3: and effort into some the argumentation. But let's talk about
Speaker 3: strong points and arguments that he relied on, and then
Speaker 3: some of your responses.
Speaker 5: Sure well, I guess one of the parts from Joe's
Speaker 5: video that stuck out to me was I think one
Speaker 5: of the strongest points he made maybe was about how
Speaker 5: can we identify what an ecumenical council is? And he
Speaker 5: brought up the Council of Florence And for me, I
Speaker 5: that was a bit of a stumbling block at first,
Speaker 5: because it was like, Okay, did we accept you know,
Speaker 5: the phillyoquay and all these papal claims or not. So
Speaker 5: I actually I came across a stream with you and
Speaker 5: David Hrhon talking about this issue, and there are a
Speaker 5: few book recommendations there, and like, guys, don't get me wrong,
Speaker 5: Streams are great, Podcasts are great, you can learn a lot,
Speaker 5: but nothing replaces buying the book and actually doing the
Speaker 5: work yourself and actually going through underlining, notating and interacting
Speaker 5: with the material of yourself. So I bought a few books,
Speaker 5: and Ostromov's book on the Council of Florence I think
Speaker 5: was very enlightening.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't uh, I don't know why he would
Speaker 3: be muted. He shouldn't be muted. I can hear him. Fine,
Speaker 3: it looks like his his audio should be playing, Alex,
Speaker 3: can you give me a one two three one two test?
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
Speaker 3: It's weird because I noticed that it started to Yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't know why. I think it didn't. Actually it
Speaker 3: didn't actually mute. What it did was h Actually it
Speaker 3: was starting to crash because I noticed, like my mouse
Speaker 3: froze and inn it. But I mean, this is like
Speaker 3: straight up just stream laves issues like there's no.
Speaker 4: So I noticed too, didn't I remember?
Speaker 3: If I remember, didn't Hashmeyer try to go to Clement route,
Speaker 3: And it's like, that's funny because you know, if you
Speaker 3: read like the Sashinsky book, like Rumman, Cawcol like Apologetics
Speaker 3: has dropped using Clement for many, many decades because it
Speaker 3: doesn't actually show what they wanted to show.
Speaker 4: Are you familiar with that?
Speaker 5: The two assemblies. He also went through the road of datas.
Speaker 3: And okay, hold on a second, because something has died
Speaker 3: in terms of your sound.
Speaker 4: For some reason.
Speaker 3: There's no you're not coming in too. Yeah, try that,
Speaker 3: m so hopefully we'll get this ironed out. Like, I
Speaker 3: don't know why. This is just it's unreal. It's never
Speaker 3: never worked like we had a perfect stream today. Maybe
Speaker 3: I should have just used zoom like we did with
Speaker 3: Kai and then we wouldn't have had these issues. Okay,
Speaker 3: So can you guys hear Alex now?
Speaker 4: Is he back talk for me? You know?
Speaker 3: It's it's crazy because like on the mixer, I can
Speaker 3: see that you're coming through and I'm coming through, but
Speaker 3: then when I played you like, it's not there's no
Speaker 3: audio for you.
Speaker 4: It's weird.
Speaker 3: No, so there's no there's no audio for you for
Speaker 3: some reason. Yeah, something happened and it crashed. Uh so
Speaker 3: let me try to start stream lives again. So let's
Speaker 3: hit Live Go Live again. So let's hit Live Go
Speaker 3: Live again? And is Sam.
Speaker 4: Shamun is attacking us with warbs?
Speaker 3: He's ready to finish me off. He's trying to do
Speaker 3: his finish hit, you know, his his final move. Okay,
Speaker 3: can we hear Alex now?
Speaker 5: Testest test test test one two test test test.
Speaker 4: Is he back?
Speaker 3: We need to know it says, it says you're back.
Speaker 3: I think, so pick back up where you were. I apologize.
Speaker 3: We're talking about Clement, and yes, so you're right. What
Speaker 3: happened was stream Lives is crashing. That's what it was.
Speaker 3: Go ahead, Alex.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So in Sashinsky's book, like you mentioned, he talks
Speaker 5: about how Roman Catholic apologists and polemicists have kind of
Speaker 5: abandoned this, uh, this argument that Clement is a strating
Speaker 5: some sort of papal authority. They say that it's very
Speaker 5: clear that this is one church writing to another church,
Speaker 5: not from some sense of authority, but a sense of
Speaker 5: like brotherly affection, like from one church to another sister church,
Speaker 5: to where it's like, hey, you guys should probably get
Speaker 5: your act in order, because like people are talking about,
Speaker 5: you know, this squabble that you have within your leadership.
Speaker 5: And he talks about how like the Apostles foresaw that
Speaker 5: there would be disputes like this, and they chose these
Speaker 5: people on purpose, so you shouldn't depose them without, you know,
Speaker 5: some sort of good reason. So yeah, he took that
Speaker 5: Clement approach and also Saint Optatus. It's just usually the
Speaker 5: same story over and over again that you see with
Speaker 5: these Roman Catholic apologists, which from a litigation perspective as
Speaker 5: a lawyer, that's kind of expected because they have their story.
Speaker 5: We have our story. Now let's subject each of them
Speaker 5: to scrutiny and see which one wins out at the
Speaker 5: end of the day. So what I like to look
Speaker 5: at is like, Okay, you have Saint Optatus. You have
Speaker 5: Saint Cyprian at about the same time, who basically says
Speaker 5: every bishop has the fullness of Peter within himself. He
Speaker 5: says there is no bishop that is a ruler of bishops,
Speaker 5: especially in his disputes with Saint Stephen so and also
Speaker 5: with Saint Optatus. I don't think you can discount the
Speaker 5: special relationship that Carthage has with Rome, because if like literally,
Speaker 5: you can pull up a map today and see that
Speaker 5: Carthage is just a stone's throw away from Rome. So
Speaker 5: although Carthage was its own independent diocese, of course they
Speaker 5: had a special relationship with Rome. It had a special
Speaker 5: prestige within the Early Church. And I think that lens
Speaker 5: of viewing the different patriarchates in terms of prestige is
Speaker 5: probably the best way to see it. I don't think
Speaker 5: I've seen a better way to interpret those early documents.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: You have some other good insights in the videos that
Speaker 3: you deal with with relics things like that, And I
Speaker 3: think that probably because you came out of a Pentecostal background,
Speaker 3: Protestant background like myself. I wasn't raised Pentecostal, but I was,
Speaker 3: you know, charismatic, right, I was charismatic for a little while,
Speaker 3: but I was eventually Calvinist and very serious about that.
Speaker 3: So I think we all deal with things like relig
Speaker 3: intersession of saints and whatnot. And I really appreciated what
Speaker 3: you came up with in terms of like Moses's staff.
Speaker 3: I never even thought about that as like an Old
Speaker 3: Testament relic. So what was the hang up with you
Speaker 3: with relics? And then what was the kind of thing
Speaker 3: that flipped you over to being like, oh, okay, this
Speaker 3: makes perfect sense.
Speaker 5: What was just reevaluating the Bible and taking a systematic
Speaker 5: theology approach and just like kind of doing it on
Speaker 5: my own while building up this orthodox fronema by reading
Speaker 5: the Fathers, right, I think that's so important it cannot
Speaker 5: be overstated. But it's in the same way that I
Speaker 5: went through the New Testament, and I was like, Okay,
Speaker 5: what exactly do they say about the church? Oh wait,
Speaker 5: it's the pillar and grounds of the truth. The Church
Speaker 5: is indeffectible, the gates of Hades will not prevail against
Speaker 5: the Church. And then the Apostolic succession through the laying
Speaker 5: on of hands of Paul and Timothy. You see, a
Speaker 5: lot of these passages are just excluded completely from these
Speaker 5: Protestant circles because they don't help them. So I was like, okay, well,
Speaker 5: let's go through the New Testament. Let's see what it
Speaker 5: has to say about the Church. Let's go through the
Speaker 5: whole Bible and see what it has to say about
Speaker 5: like sacred objects in general. So right away, you see
Speaker 5: like Joseph's bones were processed through the desert for forty years.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is another one that I didn't think about
Speaker 3: when I was Protestant. I remember hearing this when I
Speaker 3: first got into Catholicism. I was like, man, I never
Speaker 3: even thought about that that Joseph's bones being treated with
Speaker 3: us reverence could be also kind of a relic.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So I was thinking, surely there is something in
Speaker 5: the Jewish tradition about this, like there's no way they
Speaker 5: carried Joseph's bones around the desert for forty years and
Speaker 5: nobody has anything to say about it. And when I
Speaker 5: looked through the Jewish Mishnah on passages about Joseph's bones,
Speaker 5: it sounded exactly like a procession in the Orthodox Church
Speaker 5: today that you see with relics, And I was like, man, really,
Speaker 5: the continuity of the Abrahamic religion is not through modern
Speaker 5: day Judaism, it is through Orthodox Christianity. You see them
Speaker 5: doing the exact same things that they did with Joseph's bones,
Speaker 5: and the way they describe it in the Mishnah as
Speaker 5: well as like the passers by couldn't even tell, like
Speaker 5: which arc was more special than the other one, Like,
Speaker 5: clearly this is some like ornate box, a very ornate
Speaker 5: coffin that they're bringing it says in the mission a
Speaker 5: side by side with the ark of the Covenant. So
Speaker 5: clearly this is something that was held in high regard.
Speaker 5: And I guess the retort to that would be like
Speaker 5: you don't see them kissing Alex or bowing down to it. Well,
Speaker 5: I mean they bow down to the arc into the temple.
Speaker 5: Those are also creating.
Speaker 3: Objects, right, Yeah, and you see bowing to even earthly authorities, right,
Speaker 3: you see Joseph prostrating before Pharaoh, you see Elijah and elijhah.
Speaker 3: I mean this prostration idea itself, I think is something
Speaker 3: that I came to when I was you know, Calvinists
Speaker 3: coming into Catholicism back in two thousand and two or three.
Speaker 4: It was like, well, wait a minute.
Speaker 3: It can't just be the external bodily you know, movement
Speaker 3: that is the essence of the idolatry first and foremost,
Speaker 3: because idolatry is an issue of the heart first, and
Speaker 3: then secondly it's expressed and shown by the extra actions
Speaker 3: of devotion. So clearly in the Bible there's differences between
Speaker 3: you know, showing deference to authority versus actually sort of
Speaker 3: from the heart worshiping. Even though the bodily movement itself
Speaker 3: might be the same, right, there's a difference there. And
Speaker 3: you know, like like FDA is saying, like there's a
Speaker 3: lot of times that for a Protestant you just kind
Speaker 3: of approach the text with a very flat level of interpretation, like, well,
Speaker 3: that verse, you know, has to mean this, right, So
Speaker 3: like there's only one way to understand the word, you know,
Speaker 3: idolatry or images, graven images or whatever. So it's like
Speaker 3: everything is flat, everything has one single reference and there's
Speaker 3: no levels of nuance. And I think it was actually
Speaker 3: a good thing for me to read Jerome, you know,
Speaker 3: back in the day, Saint Jerome talking about the difference
Speaker 3: between you know, showing honor and deference versus like worship. Right,
Speaker 3: because scriptures say honor your father and mother. So obviously
Speaker 3: I have a greater type of honor that I would
Speaker 3: give to God the Father versus my father and mother.
Speaker 3: But even within the Ten Commandments, you're instructed to show
Speaker 3: reverence and honor and devotion to even created beings and authorities.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well, another passage that stuck out to me on this
Speaker 5: issue was Jacob's Blessings to his sons. The blessing to
Speaker 5: Judah says that all of your brothers will praise you
Speaker 5: and they will bow down to you, exactly, and also
Speaker 5: in Revelation, Yeah, in the same vein where Jesus says
Speaker 5: I will bring those who hate you, you know, down,
Speaker 5: they will bow down to you. Yeah.
Speaker 4: So this is God speaking here.
Speaker 5: This is not some orthodox theologian, right, this is everybody
Speaker 5: can agree on the scriptures, I hope, at least on
Speaker 5: the basic sixty six book.
Speaker 4: Cannon right, well, what would you say? What would you
Speaker 4: say to somebody said, well.
Speaker 3: But wait a minute, though, Alex, you know that's Old
Speaker 3: Testament stuff, like you know what about the New test
Speaker 3: And I remember one time I was reading this.
Speaker 4: This wasn't even an argument.
Speaker 3: I remember just eating one day Peter and I was
Speaker 3: a Protestant, and I remember reading Peter's Epistles and he
Speaker 3: says he's talking about the transfiguration and he mentions the
Speaker 3: Holy Mountain. And I'm like, wait a minute, You're not
Speaker 3: supposed to call places or things holy in the New Testament.
Speaker 4: That's an Old Testament thing.
Speaker 3: I remember that, Like I was really struggling with that
Speaker 3: one time when I was a Calvinist, I was reading
Speaker 3: Peter's Epistles and he calls it the Holy Mountain.
Speaker 5: Yeah, there's a huge objection, guess within like neo Protestantism
Speaker 5: to this idea that God can like sanctify matter, that
Speaker 5: God can use matter. But we see, like I think
Speaker 5: the Epistles to the Hebrews is like spot on in
Speaker 5: this because it's like, look, in the Old Testament, we
Speaker 5: have shadows in the New Testament. If we have a fulfillment,
Speaker 5: that's not an abolishment of it, it's ushering it in
Speaker 5: a way that's real now, like ritual washing in the
Speaker 5: Old Testament. Like, yes, that was for as a tutor,
Speaker 5: you know, as Paul says in Galatians, to teach people
Speaker 5: the ways of God. That like, hey, you are a human.
Speaker 5: God is God. You know you have to be holy,
Speaker 5: You have to sanctify yourself in baptism. In the New Testament,
Speaker 5: you get the real thing. When Christ is baptized and
Speaker 5: he sanctifies the water of baptism, you have a fulfillment
Speaker 5: of these things. A section in Religion of the Apostles
Speaker 5: really put this together for me. From Stephen to Young
Speaker 5: when he was talking about like the Orthodox Church, this
Speaker 5: line still sticks with me today. Says, the Orthodox Church
Speaker 5: holds to the Torah to a t. We hold to
Speaker 5: the Old Testament law to a t, but the fulfillment
Speaker 5: of it where yes, we keep the Sabbath, it's fulfillment
Speaker 5: in Sunday in the Lord's Day. Yes, we maintain the
Speaker 5: law of the Torah. In Acts fifteen, it talks about
Speaker 5: how like these laws that they to not consume blood,
Speaker 5: to abstain from sexual immorality, to not worship idols, whatever.
Speaker 5: Those were all the laws in the Torah that appeal,
Speaker 5: that applied to the gentiles. So we keep all the
Speaker 5: laws to a t. We are the fulfillment, We are
Speaker 5: the continuation of this Old Testament. So it's just a
Speaker 5: more beautiful form of continuity, are more coherent form of
Speaker 5: continuity instead of this Protestant approach. That's like they recently.
Speaker 5: I don't know if you saw this Jay Joshua Haymes.
Speaker 5: I think it is probably the like some reformed influencer
Speaker 5: on Twitter who said one of the most abominable things
Speaker 5: I've heard, which is a misunderstanding of the law in
Speaker 5: the Old Testament. He said, slavery is an institution, is
Speaker 5: not inherently evil. Meanwhile, I see Gregory of Nissa talking
Speaker 5: about how slavery is a form of blasphemy against God
Speaker 5: because every human is made in the image of God
Speaker 5: and to have property rights over another human, Well, this
Speaker 5: is actually a God.
Speaker 3: This is actually a really difficult, nuanced topic that, believe
Speaker 3: it or not. Lewis, our buddy over Orthodoxia Hata has
Speaker 3: been working on a documentary on this because there's actually
Speaker 3: quite a there's somewhat of divergence between different church fathers
Speaker 3: on this issue, and Nissa has a position that is
Speaker 3: the most anti slavery. However, there are many other church
Speaker 3: fathers that will say otherwise. And I'm only saying that
Speaker 3: not to contradict you, Alex, but just to point out
Speaker 3: that it's the reason that Lewis has been working on
Speaker 3: this is that it's also a huge issue with Muslims.
Speaker 3: Muslims are making and have made a pretty big deal
Speaker 3: about this. And if you go over to Orthodox Shahata,
Speaker 3: if you want to get deep into the weeds on this,
Speaker 3: I'm saying eight months ago Lewis uploaded the first part,
Speaker 3: which is slavery and Christian and Muslim thought.
Speaker 4: I highly recommend.
Speaker 3: People check out Lewis's documentary or here or at Orthodox Shahata.
Speaker 3: But now I don't want to take away from your flow.
Speaker 3: We do have quite a few super chats before we
Speaker 3: move on to superchats, and everybody should follow Alex his
Speaker 3: channels link in the show description.
Speaker 4: Could you tell us about.
Speaker 3: What you think the debate is going to be coming
Speaker 3: up and what can you tell us about this debate
Speaker 3: and what you plan to without giving us your of
Speaker 3: showing your hand here, what what's your what's your strategy
Speaker 3: coming up for this debate?
Speaker 5: So I have two debates coming up. My first debate
Speaker 5: is on Distrember I thought was one.
Speaker 4: I have two.
Speaker 5: On December nineteenth, I'll be debating Elijah Yassi on is
Speaker 5: the Vatican one papacy is true? And as my approach
Speaker 5: to that will be, you know, I'm not gonna study
Speaker 5: at all. I'm just going to show up that day
Speaker 5: and I'm going to be You're.
Speaker 4: Going to tongs. You should just do the debate, and Tongs.
Speaker 5: Should about a yamaha, what's that? John MacArthur quotas Yeah.
Speaker 5: And then in April twenty twenty six, this is not
Speaker 5: official yet, but I have been going back and forth
Speaker 5: with Joe Heshmeier to have a debate with Joe Heshmeyer.
Speaker 5: We've been going back and forth a bit on whether
Speaker 5: we're just going to do the papacy or if it'll
Speaker 5: be like uh a survey of different distinctives between Orthodoxy
Speaker 5: and UH Roman Catholicism. So I would like to think,
Speaker 5: you know, the Ortho bros. On the interwebs, a few
Speaker 5: of them have reached out to me to helped me
Speaker 5: prep for some of this stuff. So a lot of
Speaker 5: people say that, you know, the orthobro community is like
Speaker 5: pretty mean and disinterested. That has not been my experience
Speaker 5: at all.
Speaker 3: No, it's just a way for people to fuss about
Speaker 3: stuff and have an excuse to oh, he's mean, won't
Speaker 3: have to deal with him.
Speaker 4: But in reality, I mean, this is.
Speaker 3: Some of the best dudes out there, right, Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 3: that has been my experience for sure.
Speaker 4: Okay, so let's see we got some superjest notorious seventy
Speaker 4: seventy six five dollars Jay, what is your thought about
Speaker 4: going to college at this point? What about for somebody
Speaker 4: wh wants to study philosophy and higher education? Is that
Speaker 4: a lost cause? Unfortunately, especially if you're a heterosexual.
Speaker 3: White dude, you're not going to be very welcomed at
Speaker 3: the average university state university system school.
Speaker 4: I would not recommend that.
Speaker 3: If if you have a unique situation where maybe you
Speaker 3: have a family that's going to pay for you to
Speaker 3: go to a private school, some you know, decent Catholic
Speaker 3: school and you want to get that type of an education.
Speaker 3: In those cases, that might work. But if you're a
Speaker 3: working class dude. I would not tell you to go
Speaker 3: into massive amounts of debt to get a piece of paper.
Speaker 3: It's not worth it. But again that's you know, I can't.
Speaker 3: It really depends on your scenario. Flavias ten dollars, thank
Speaker 3: you so much. Appreciate that he doesn't say anything.
Speaker 4: Jordaane says, guys, if everybody, if there's audio, refresh the stream.
Speaker 4: It'll get better days.
Speaker 3: The King says, for five dollars, can you guys talk
Speaker 3: about the early church hierarchy structure in terms of bishop,
Speaker 3: priests and deacons. My evangelical friends all argue that they're
Speaker 3: the same. There is a great talk that's kind of
Speaker 3: a classic that I will put into the chat for
Speaker 3: you guys, and it's Perry Robinson's talk on Apostolic succession.
Speaker 3: So I'm gonna put that in the chat for you
Speaker 3: right here.
Speaker 5: I'd also recommend Father Agree rodgers yessay here on Apostolic succession.
Speaker 4: There's a great essay on that as well. I was
Speaker 4: going to bring that up too, so appreciate it. Yeah,
Speaker 4: go ahead.
Speaker 5: The Pamazansky dogmatic theology, I know that's a popular one
Speaker 5: these days. He has a very good section I think
Speaker 5: on apostolic succession in the three tiered office, I think
Speaker 5: Perry's point, I think if I remember it correctly to summarize,
Speaker 5: is that like, regardless of the terms, you do see
Speaker 5: like a distinction between three offices. Like, for example, you
Speaker 5: see that Saint Paul has authority over Saint Timothy and
Speaker 5: Saint Titus, and Saint Timothy and Saint Titus have the
Speaker 5: authority to review complaints against other elders in the church,
Speaker 5: So that puts Saint Timothy and Saint Titus above those
Speaker 5: other clergy members. So you see a three tiered structure regardless.
Speaker 4: John, and on five dollars, Jay, thank you for your influence.
Speaker 4: Good to see you having discussions with Alex Wren on
Speaker 4: his journey to Orthodoxy. I'm enjoying.
Speaker 3: Also looking forward to your upcoming Athens and Jerusalem conference.
Speaker 4: Keep up the good work. Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 3: I think next year, since this one sold out so fruitfully,
Speaker 3: we will probably try to have another venue with an
Speaker 3: even larger crowd, Lord Willings, so maybe next year we
Speaker 3: get up into three four five hundred people versus two
Speaker 3: hundred this year. But fun ten dollars, Jay, I'm not
Speaker 3: sure if you read this last time my brother and
Speaker 3: I saw a homeless guy. He said he was speaking
Speaker 3: in tongues and it was a woman's voice, but he
Speaker 3: was barking.
Speaker 4: Like a dog. But he laughed hysterically.
Speaker 3: It's demonic and people think that that's the Holy Spirit. Well,
Speaker 3: like Alex said earlier about like comparing where we sent
Speaker 3: some kind of like tribal scenario or something.
Speaker 4: Like compair of the Kundalini.
Speaker 3: Oh Show where if you've seen an O show like
Speaker 3: the you know, Wild Wall Country and the documentaries of
Speaker 3: people doing you know, the show, oh show stuff, and
Speaker 3: just like you might see, you know, it's schizophrenic homeless guy,
Speaker 3: you know, out there gibbering at a mailbox, screaming and
Speaker 3: cussing out a mailbox.
Speaker 4: It's like, not a whole lot of difference, would you agree? Yeah?
Speaker 5: I think Also for me, they were like two key
Speaker 5: tech on this. It was like obviously Father Sarah fim
Speaker 5: Rose his orthodoxy in the religion of the Future was
Speaker 5: he really made that connection for me explicit. But another
Speaker 5: one that I think probably doesn't get enough attention on
Speaker 5: this topic is like I think it's the introduction, either
Speaker 5: the introduction or chapter one to Losky's Mystical Theology of
Speaker 5: the Eastern Church, because he talks about like the title
Speaker 5: of the book, and he's like, Okay, mystical theology, what
Speaker 5: does that mean. Well, mysticism is experienced. Theology is like
Speaker 5: the intellectual side. Orthodoxy has both. And I think that
Speaker 5: was like probably a unique advantage of my upbringing, where
Speaker 5: it was like, Okay, Pentecostalism was all this experience without
Speaker 5: any of the guardrails. Calvinism is just this like intellectual
Speaker 5: experience without that much mystical experience, if I could word
Speaker 5: it that way, And the way Loski describes it at
Speaker 5: the beginning of his book just like connects those two
Speaker 5: ideas so beautifully. I was like, this is what I've
Speaker 5: been looking for the whole time. He describes it perfectly.
Speaker 5: There another excellent point that I think you made in Hey, Jammy,
Speaker 5: somebody's out the door, which is weird. We don't usually
Speaker 5: get people in them.
Speaker 3: Oh oh, it's a plumber. You made a great point
Speaker 3: too about holistic argumentation. I think when you were talking
Speaker 3: to Cleeve, I thought that was a really good point
Speaker 3: that I'm glad you saw that and you were talking
Speaker 3: about reading, you know, Father deconductor and Anisis paper on yes,
Speaker 3: you know, revelational epistemology and that kind of stuff, and
Speaker 3: how both Protestants and you know with Redeem Zoomer and
Speaker 3: that debate that we had, and a lot of the
Speaker 3: Roman Catholics like they don't really think about these things
Speaker 3: as systems. And I appreciate that you understood the importance
Speaker 3: of that. Could you maybe speak to that a little bit,
Speaker 3: like why do you think systemic level argumentation is important
Speaker 3: in these debates and discussions.
Speaker 5: Well, it avoids a bigger problem, which I think is
Speaker 5: theological relativism. I think that's something that you see within
Speaker 5: the Protestant movement with and you see akind of in
Speaker 5: Roman Catholicism as well with any system that.
Speaker 4: I have to step away for just a second, so
Speaker 4: continue to talk.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no problem, but yeah, guys, so theological relativism, it's
Speaker 5: like a big problem that you see within any of
Speaker 5: these other worldviews. Orthodoxy, Holy Orthodoxy was so influential on
Speaker 5: me because as a system, it avoids this problem of
Speaker 5: relativizing the scriptures to mean what you want them to
Speaker 5: mean in a certain context, and it works together as
Speaker 5: a coherent truth, and you need some sort of objectivity,
Speaker 5: because if we just have you know, these subjective truths,
Speaker 5: I mean, I don't think you really have much of
Speaker 5: a religion there.
Speaker 4: I had to go talk to the plumber.
Speaker 5: Sorry, so said that you have to fight the plumber.
Speaker 5: But I basically just made a point on theological relativism
Speaker 5: and how if if you don't have that systemic approach,
Speaker 5: then you're just left like kind of creating doctrines piecemeal, right,
Speaker 5: And you need it to work as a whole system,
Speaker 5: because you know, you can't change one thing in your
Speaker 5: Christology and have that not affect your soteriology. So that
Speaker 5: systemic level thinking fights against theological relativism and you have
Speaker 5: a form of objectivism, objective theological truths. I think that's
Speaker 5: why young men are attracted to Orthodoxy these days too,
Speaker 5: because we are like, we grew up in a relativistic culture,
Speaker 5: a relativist society where your truth is your truth, my
Speaker 5: truth is my truth, and it leaks into theology as well, like,
Speaker 5: oh that's where you feel God over there, Well I
Speaker 5: guess you should go there as well. Oh you feel
Speaker 5: like you're called into this ministry? Well then you ask
Speaker 5: go ahead, Well, no, there are objective theological truths. You
Speaker 5: can't just believe and take whatever interpretation you want.
Speaker 3: Yes, dirt, poor Robbinson's for ten dollars, Alex has three
Speaker 3: types of beards at the same time. Is this actually
Speaker 3: canonically orthodoxodox? I'm not orthodox enough yet. Well it's a
Speaker 3: great fair question. Uh Shaquina. Two dollars.
Speaker 4: Did you know that the Brandes or followers of Brandham?
Speaker 4: Is that a Pentecostal.
Speaker 5: Not familiar with the Brandon mice?
Speaker 4: Okay, notorious, No, we did that one. Excuse me, okay,
Speaker 4: we've done these contemporary companion ten dollars.
Speaker 3: Ah, yeah, diere by fire. This is the law bishop,
Speaker 3: so you are apparently the law bishop. I'll take it,
Speaker 3: I guess, and then I think we'll see we have
Speaker 3: one or two more over here. Notorious, No, we did that, Jordaine,
Speaker 3: and I think we have twenty one new members. Shout
Speaker 3: out to much Barrat, who also bought more members. He's
Speaker 3: a very generous member buyer.
Speaker 4: Guys, be sure and follow Alex over in his channel.
Speaker 4: He is linked.
Speaker 3: So anything you want to leave us with before we
Speaker 3: close it out tonight. Thank you for coming on. By
Speaker 3: the way, it was a great conversation. Also, guys, id
Speaker 3: on to Chalk dot com, HQ dot com and use
Speaker 3: a promo co Jife was already get forty percent off
Speaker 3: of all those great chalk products.
Speaker 5: Alex partying thoughts, say thank you for having me on Jay.
Speaker 5: It's a pleasure, you know. It's awesome to you know,
Speaker 5: be consuming your content for so long and then to
Speaker 5: be able to you know, build up a following, to
Speaker 5: come on and to have this conversation with you. You
Speaker 5: guys can find me on YouTube, Alex Soren Alex or
Speaker 5: tod C on Instagram and Twitter. That's in the Romanian spelling.
Speaker 5: It's O R T O d o x i E
Speaker 5: or A to dox C.
Speaker 4: See.
Speaker 5: I have a few videos in mind coming out, and
Speaker 5: I do have those few debates, so keep an eye out, guys.
Speaker 4: All right, Thank you guys, and a run over, a
Speaker 4: good night,