Speaker 1: Jay, Dayah, it is wonderful to have you back. Thank
you so much for joining us.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Maria. I always enjoy our conversation, so I'm
glad to be back.
Speaker 1: Likewise, I have to say, you know, since we met
in person last year and did our book review of
Orthodoxy in the Religion of the Future, we had a
lot of good feedback on that and a lot of
people interested in this topic. I recently conducted an interview
with an Orthodox priest and I want to I really
want to focus on this subject with you today. I
know that we've touched on this in the past, Jay,
but viewers may not be aware of your previous life
and your transition into Orthodoxy. So if you will just
take people through a little bit of that history and
you realizing that the Orthodox Church was the one true church.
Speaker 2: I was raised a Southern Baptist and was nominal. I
mean we would go some here and there, and then
got more serious about religion in my high school period.
My senior year, I started going to a lot of
evangelical Bible studies and church meetings and decided I would
study the history of the church more in depth. I
got into theology and philosophy when I was eighteen nineteen,
started studying that at the academic level for college, and
then continued studying that in a related way in grad school,
not so much the theology per se, but worldviews and
the idea of what we call worldview warfare, and how
systems and worldviews and paradigms work in people's as the
models of people's belief systems. And then in my twenties
I decided that Protestantism didn't really have a lot to offer,
so I got really interested in the history of the Church,
as I said, and at that time, a lot of
the online discussion for the debates in their sphere were
basically just Protestant and Catholics. I didn't know about the
Orthodox Church in my twenties. I wasn't averse to it,
I just didn't know much about it, and so I
thought the debate was basically just Protestant versus Catholics. So
I became a Roman Catholic in two thousand and three,
I believe, and was in that world for eight or
nine years, and a lot of I think when you
live that for a while, you start to notice there's
some pretty significant problems. But you don't want to jump
ship too quick. So I attended the traditional Latin Mass
for many years, and I was really into Thomas Aquinas
and Tomistic philosophy and trying to be as traditionally minded
as possible. As the Vatican continued to be more and
more liberal, and eventually I just felt like there weren't
solid answers to the questions that I had as Roman Catholic,
and so I started studying Orthodoxy in about two thousand
and seven. I made some friends that were Orthodox, and
they recommended a lot of books. I was seeing a
girl at the time and we were considering both with
entering the Orthodox Church. At the same time, we were
probably going to be married, so I went through the
catechumen even back then and decided not to convert. So
I held off and decided I would just kind of wait.
I wasn't really ready. I have so many, so much
theological ideological baggage from my previous beliefs as a Roman Catholic,
that it took me a really long time to work
through a lot of the issues. So I just held
off and kind of got burned out even on going
to church and going to the sort of standard Catholic services,
and I was a little wild for those years in
my late twenties early thirties, and then by about mid thirties,
I guess I started getting a little more serious and
getting back into reading a lot of philosophy texts, reading
a lot of certain church fathers like Saint Maximistic Professor
and certain Orthodox theologians like Vladimir Lawski or Father Dmitri
stun Eloy. They stand out out as books that really
writers that really influenced me to eventually convert. So about
twenty fourteen I was getting more serious and kind of
going back to church, and I guess it was about
twenty seventeen that I went back into being catechumen and
formally joined. So twenty seventeen catechumen. I think I was
Chris made in twenty eighteen. So yeah, So that was
my short form journey during the period when I wasn't
really to go into church in my late twenties and
early thirties. I didn't become an atheist. I think a
lot of people have atheists phases or something, but I
more so was just reading a lot of different perennial
text neoplatonic stuff. So I wasn't atheist, but I was
kind of interested in a lot of different positions. And yeah,
I would say Father Stefrom Rose two had an important
impact as well. His book Nihilism Roots of the Modern
Revolution impacted me pretty significantly, probably in twenty fIF teen sixteen.
So that's the short version of and then here we
are today, where you know, I've spent a lot of
time kind of discussing orthodox philosophy and theology for the
last five or six years.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I watch her debates all the time. We love
your content here at Z Media. We encourage everyone to
check out Jay's YouTube channel and his website. I'll bring
all of that up throughout throughout the interview, But yeah,
Jayson in our lounge room regularly, so.
Speaker 2: I appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Of course. I find, you know, some of the arguments.
It's interesting because I think it's really easy to say
not easy, and I'm not in any way diminishing those
who do it, but I think it's easy to debate
atheists in the sense that the atheist worldview just doesn't
make sense. It doesn't make sense. There's no it's illogical,
it's unscientific. And I'm talking about like say, double evolutionists,
like it's to me, you know, you are placing your
blind faith in a theory that has never been proven,
the same way that someone with a religion in a
belief in a god would. I mean, that's the way
that I've always viewed it. And so, you know, I
used to do People may not know this. I was,
you know, in the Evangelical Church for many years, used
to do street ministry, you know, talking with people on
the street of people of all worldviews, very very highly
Muslim populated area, so I got to talk to a
lot of Muslims as well. It was great. I loved it.
I loved doing it because I love people and I
loved discussing world views, and so that was something I
was very passionate about. But it was from an Evangelical stance.
And then it was really during the COVID era that
I returned to Orthodoxy, which is you know, I was
baptized Orthodox as a child, and really you know, spent
a few years there. It was about eight years in
the Evangelical Church, so long time. And and and you
know what I've found, Jay was a lot of unlearning
has happened since that time of what I thought was
correct doctrine, what I thought was correct theology, and there
were a lot of sticking points for me, you know,
coming to realize the truth about Orthodoxy that exist for
a lot of Protestants these days. When I talk to
my friends from my former church and I've returned to Orthodoxy,
they think that I've become an idolator, an image worshiper,
you know, all of this kind of stuff. So I
want to focus on that with you, in terms of
the you know, the common misconceptions or the common arguments
that a lot of Protestants bring up. You know, for example,
you worship saints. Let's just start with the biggest one.
Speaker 2: I think these are pretty common objections. You know, everybody
has faces, especially if you have an atheist or excuse me,
a biblical or evangelical background, You're going to have some
of these roadblocks where there's stuff that seems foreign an
odd and in that case, it's it's interesting that a
lot of times atheists that convert typically maybe might even
have less baggage because you know, they weren't hammered into,
you know, thinking for many years that any kind of
imagery is somehow inherently idolatrous. But yeah, I remember I
kind of worked through a lot of those issues back
when I was, you know, in my early twenties kind
of sussing out between protest and Catholic, And I remember
going to a church and seeing relics for the first time,
and I remember thinking it was a little odd. It
never really experienced that being you know, raised Baptists. But
the logic of it is pretty solid if you you know,
if you're familiar with the Old Testament, especially because we
have stories where the bones of Elisha, right, that people
get raised from the dead because they're exposed to those bones.
In the Book of Back, we see you know, Paul
casting out demons through you know, cloths that he that
he had, that we're part, that we're near his body.
We see Jesus's garments heal people, and so physical matter
has the ability to take on the power or what
we call the divine energies and the Orthodox sphere. So
when I think, when we start to understand it from
that perspective, that the point is that we would be
participants in the divine energies, and that we ourselves in
our bodies, even not just our minds or our souls,
but our bodies become participants in the divine life as well,
and that's the point of the resurrection. The resurrection is
really the future eschatological end times reality that begins in
the here and the now with the energies that we
were take of in this life, and those divine energies
are really just what we mean the Orthocers by grace.
So it's an uncreated life, power and reality that comes
to us not by our works, but by the grace
of God. That's what we participate in. So it's a
much it's more fleshed out, I guess you could say
metaphysical notion of what grace is, rather than the typical
Protestant idea that grace is just God's disposition towards you.
So we do agree that there is a dispositional element
that you move away from being kind of adverse to
God to now being the friend of God or to
being sons of God, et cetera. But to be in
that role requires also the transformation of the person in
a real metaphysical sense. So that's our view of grace
and what it is. And you know, we see that
in text like John seventeen, where Jesus says that he
came to give us a share in the glory that
he had with the Father before the foundation of the world.
And of course glory, God's glory is not a creature, right,
it's an uncreated reality. So we become partakers of the
uncreated reality of God without participating in the divine essence itself.
So we'll never become by nature what God is, but
we do become like God by grace, and that's what
we call theosis. And so that's the essence interview distinction
that you probably hear a lot of people in Orthodox
Church talk about. That's our conception of grace, and it
also underlies the conception that we have of why would
we why we would ask saints to intercede or believe that,
you know, relics or icons have the ability to be
positive influences in our life in a conduit of grace sense,
so they become kind of sacramental realities for us. And
it's all premised on the incarnation itself. Right, you have
the second person of the Godhead, the Logos, assuming human nature,
and by that very action of assuming it, healing it,
repairing it, and making it itself a channel of grace.
So Likewise, other physical material objects can also become channels
of grace. So we don't worship them because they're material
in themselves. They're still creatures, but those creatures can become
condos of grace, just as we can as individual people,
and our bodies even become conduits. And so that's the
theological meaning behind relics, and that's why relics existed in
the Old Testament and they continue to exist into the
New Testament Church. And it's the same principle behind why
For example, in the Book of Revelation, if you read
chapters five to eight, when John sees into heaven, he
sees a very elaborate, ornate worship service. In that liturgical
worship service, it's very ordered, smells, bells, incense, vestiments, elders, right,
priesthood offering, sacrifice going on in heaven. We believe that
that's actually the exact same service going on in the
Orthodox Church. And so that's why it's a reality. It's
not just symbols for us. It's a symbol and a
reality at the same time. And so likewise, we can
ask those people who have gone on before us in
the life of the Church to pray for us. So
technically speaking, we're not praying to them like their God.
We're asking them as fellow intercessors to pray. And that's
why in the Book of Revelation, John sees the martyrs
offering the prayers of the saints on the earth, and
so that's the whole principle behind the intercession of the
saints right there.
Speaker 1: So the I guess the I don't know if I'm
the pre true rapture. People would argue that those people
that have been martyred that are praying are those that
you know, were left behind and then ended up being
persecuted during the reign of the Antichrist, and therefore that's
who they are. They're not actually the saints is as
per the Orthodox Church. Then you'll have the people that say, well,
there is one intercessor or one mediator, I should say,
between God and men, Jesus Christ. Why would you pray
to a saint?
Speaker 2: Right, So a lot of verses have to be balanced
with other verses. So, for example, Paul says things like
I think to Timothy, he says, if you follow my teachings,
you will be able to save those around you. So
that doesn't mean that Timothy literally becomes Jesus and becomes
a savior. It means that he's a cooperator, a co worker,
as Paul says about himself, that he's a co worker
with Christ to bring people to salvation. And so sometimes
in the technical theological terminology this is just called middle salvation,
and it just means that the person that brings you
to salvation is in a sense a savior for you.
Doesn't mean that they are literally Jesus. It just means
that they cooperated in that work. You read the Book
of Amos, for example, this is an idea even in
the Old Testament, that God decides not to met out
the full punishment on Israel because Amos interceded. So intercession
is something that's very real in those examples. And again,
the saints that are in heaven are not what John
is seeing is not the martyrs at the end of
the world. He's seeing the people that were martyred in
his day. So if you look at the Book of Revelation,
it starts by saying the things that are listed are
to come to pass. And the traditional acts of Jesus
of the Church was never strictly speaking, anything like pre tribulation,
rapture pre millennialism that exist as an early theory, but
by the time of the Second Ecumenical Council, and then
by the Third Ecumenical Council, it's excluded. And that's why
the Creed says, whose kingdom shall have no end? So
christ Kingdom is not a thousand year kingdom. A thousand
years is just as symbolic as when it says God
owns the cattle on a thousand hills. Does that mean
that on thousand on hill one thousand and one that's
not owned by God. No, it's just a symbolic time
that expresses a really long ay honor era. And so
christ Kingdom, as you notice in the Gospels, is where
the king is. And so Jesus says, the Kingdom of
God has not come with signs, it comes it's within you.
And so the kingdom is an internal spiritual reality wherever
the Holy Spirit is. So the Kingdom is the Church.
And that's why Matthew sixteen he identifies it as the
institution that he sets up that the gates of Hell
would not prevail against it. And Peter and the Apostles,
not just Peter, but Peter and the Apostles very Matthew
sixteen and Matthew eighteen have a collegial reality that is
identified with the Kingdom. The kingdom is chaired by the
princes of the New Covenant, who Jesus later when he
institutes the Lord's Supper, says, you will sit with me
on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. Okay,
the twelve Tribes of Israel is the new Israel. The
spiritual reality that Matthew twenty two, twenty three, and twenty
four elucidate replaced the Old Testament Israel reality. So there's
something evil inherently about Israel in the Old Testament sense,
or not genetically evil or anything like that. It was
a typological reality that's fulfilled in the spiritual kingdom of
the Church. But spiritual, as many evangelicals think, does not
mean anti physical, it doesn't mean antihistorical. It's a very
historic institutional reality that's set up at the time of
christ first coming. And the other element that I think
evangelicals of Protestants oftentimes miss out on is the notion
of Pentecost. Pentecost, especially if you look in Acts two
and when it cites Joel three, Joel is not primarily
talking about the end of the world. It might have
an application to the end of the world. But when
Acts two cites Joel about the Holy the Spirit will
fall upon your descendants and your men, your women, your
children will see visions, there'll be signs in the heavens.
That's all fulfilled explicitly at Pentecost, and so the First
Advent is typically where the locus of the action is.
That most evangelicals and pre millennialists boot to the end
of the world, which makes all of these important prophecies
and fulfillments irrelevant. Because if Jesus is predicting in Luke
twenty one the destruction of Jerusalem in seventy eighty, then
what a powerful attestation to the veracity of the Gospels
that is fulfilled in seventy eight. Now I don't mean everything.
I don't believe the second Coming, but you'll find many,
many passages where Jesus says that he would come, you know,
on the clouds, and that he would punish you know, Israel,
and so forth. Again. Luke twenty one, because it's written
to a product to a gentile audience, is a lot
more specific than what you get in Matthew twenty four.
So Lake twenty one describes it in a very clear
way that when you speakin to the audience there in
Jesus presence, see Jerusalem surrounded by enemies, know that it's time,
its desolation is near. That's exactly what happened a few
decades later, because he describes this for his immediate audience,
that they would see these things occur. And that's why,
whether it's Athenacious, or whether it's Saint John Chrysostom, or
whether it's Saint Cyril of Alexandria, all the earliest, really
important theologians of the Church, the ones that solidified the
doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of Christology for us,
they all believe that that was referring to seventy eight.
They didn't primarily make it about the end of the world.
I do think that seventy eight and the destruction of
the Temple, which is what Hebrews is talking about, that's
the end of the Old Covenant system, which is demonstrated
by the events of seventy eight when Titus Vespasian destroys
the Temple in Jerusalem. That's a sign that the Old
Covenants done the New Covenant is here. The New Coven
is the fulfillment of all those old Covenant types, and
the New Coven is the reality. So what Protestanism Evangelicalism
typically does, and it's not always intentional, is that rather
than accepting the realities that the New Covenant brings, they
typically want to go back to the symbolic structure of
the Old Testament. Oh, Baptism just a symbol, the Lord's
Supper just a symbol, right. The church is just this
fallible human institution. That's a symbol, you know. And the
New Testament, the Church is said to be the body
of the god Man or the theanthroposts, the god Man,
that's the body of Christ. We are the extension of
the incarnation the churches. So there's not a whole lot
of churches that can lay claim to that. And if
you look at the study of the first thousand years
of Christianity, and there is one institution that's the Orthodox
Church at least least claim to that.
Speaker 1: When did Because church history matters a lot, and it's
often something that you know, in Protestant circles, we need
to return to the Book of Acts, we need to
return to that time where there was you know, miracles,
and the church was, you know, sold everything, they have
gave everything. It was interesting. I remember chalaging good pastor
of this a while ago, and I said, well, the
church isn't really operating how it used to. And the
response to me was, we'll sell everything you have and
give it to me and then see how we operate,
which was a fair challenge. But you know, you hear
that from a lot of evangelicals, and we need to
return to the Book of Acts and all of this
sort of stuff. And yet if you read the Book
of Acts through a non Protestant lens, you'll actually see
the established of the original church and so all the
beginnings of it. So can you talk us through the
history of the establishment of the church? Why is the
Orthodox Church the original Church?
Speaker 2: Well, if we look in the Book of Acts, we see,
for example, Judas, his episcopos in the Greek is replaced.
So when Judas dies, someone replaces him in his seat.
And so this is the idea of the successors to
the apostles, or apsolute succession. And we find this in
Paul's epistles as well, that Paul says he laid hands
on Timothy and he tells Timothy not to lay hands
on anyone else in Ephesus hastily, because through the laying
on of hands, you have the transmission of the gift
and power of the Holy Spirit for the office of
the bishop. And that is not in Protestants, and Protestism
does not have a right or a theology typically where
they recognize any sort of historic succession, do they laying
on of hands back to the apostles. But that's exactly
what Paul says in his epistles to Timothy, and he
says basically that I point, did you no one else
to be the authority, my representative, my successor in Ephesus,
and you do Likewise, that's apisodic succession. So that's our
reading not just of the Book of Acts, but also
the book the Books that Paul wrote. And if we
look at the Book of Acts, we see this point
that I mentioned earlier about Pentecost, which is that in
John fourteen to sixteen, Jesus really lays out the role
of the Holy Spirit in the life and history of
the Church. So if we understand this is a real
historical context here where Jesus is saying that I will
send the Holy Spirit. He will come and empower you.
I will never leave you and never forsake you. The
Spirit will lead you and guide you to all truth.
The gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church.
Then when that happens in Acts two, that historical church
can't lose. The Spirit can't lose, the faith can't be conquered.
There might be areas or churches that are part of
the universal Church that fall away, even patriarch's bishops fall away,
but the whole entire entity can't fail. And so that's
why we believe that the Orthodox Church has maintained and
continued that consistent testimony. And when you read the first
thousand years, you find out that you know, one of
the common Protestant objections, for example, is that, oh, the
Church changed and became pagan at the Council of Nicea.
So when I first started studying this back in two
thousand and three, I bought the Church Father's set, all
thirty eight volumes of it. I didn't read all the
thirty eight volumes, but I went through first the early
Church Fathers. So when you read the post Apostolic Fathers
right after the death of John and Paul and all
those people. You realize that Clement, Ignacious Aaron as justin
Martyr Cyprian, all church fathers that were very prominent prior
to the Council of Nicia. They taught all the things
that the Orthodox Church still teaches and all the things
that Protestants think the Council of Nicea and three twenty
five corrupted. So you find them teaching about relics, you
find them teaching about saints, you find them teaching bishops
in a succession. You find them talking about the real
presence of Christ and the Euchars. You find them talking
about you know, councils, the church being run by synods
modeled on Acts fifteen in the Jerusalem Synod, so sinodal
church government, bishopric, hierarchy, you know, all of those elements
are there in those early church fathers. And for me,
that pretty much said, well, look, it's not Protestant, it's
not Evangelical, so you know, it's got to be Orthodox
or Catholic. I mean, that's the realization I came to,
you know, back in my twenties. Again, I didn't know
much about Orthodoxy at that time, but so I mean
I think that but for the for the point against
the Protestant idea of that pretty much I think solidifies it.
And then when you get into, for example, more devastating
issues like you know, for me as a Protestant, obviously
I believed in Solar script Heira that the Bible is
the only, ultimate, final, infallible authority. But then when you
get into the history of the formation of the Biblical Canon,
you realize that this didn't drop out out of the sky.
You know, it didn't come about in a vacuum. The
Bible is a collection of books, and the history of
the Church is you can't divide that from the formation
and process of the Biblical Canon. That's the books that
were decided upon that would be in the Bible and
would be accepted. And this is a centuries long process
that really only gets solidified by about the fourth to
sixth century in the East and the West in the
first thousand years of Christianity. So for the Orthodox Church
are acceptances the Council of Trello, which is then accepted
by the sixth and seventh Council, and in the West
is typically about the fourth or fifth century, and the
decrees of Pope Damasis, where they basically accept the same
canon as the Orthodox in the East. So basically we
have a canon that's including the Deutero economical books or
what Protestants called the apocrypha, pretty much universally accepted by
the sixth seventh century. So Protestants again are really sort
of on the outs in a historical when they say, well,
we just choose the canon that Jerome had, Well, why
do you pick one church father not another church father?
It really becomes very arbitrary, and then they'll say things like, well,
we just go with what the Jews said. Well, but
by the second and third century, the Jewish canon was
already anti Christian, so they were already trying to solidify
their notion of a loose canon to combat to Christianity.
So why would we listen to not the people that
Jesus put in charge, the Apostles and their successors, the Church.
Wouldn't the church have the authority to decide the canon. Remember,
Peter Paul says to Timothy, the Church is the pillar
and ground of truth. He doesn't say the Bible texts
are the pillar and ground of truth. He says the
actual living entity of the Church. And then he says
to the Thessalonians and second Thessalonians that you should follow
whatever I teach, whether written or oral. So Paul explicitly
tells the Thessalonian Church to keep. Aren't just what is
written texts or what written gospels and texts they might have,
because they most of the early Church didn't have everything.
They didn't have all the texts for many centuries. He
tells them to keep the written and oral traditions.
Speaker 1: And in terms of the oral traditions, and you know,
I suppose this does tie into apostolic succession and the
authority of those that have been selected by the Orthodox Church,
can you talk to us about the record of the
oral traditions, because I see, you know, a pretty comprehensive
record kept by the Orthodox Church of those traditions that
are still kept to date. The Da Daki as one
of those, you know, books that's often referenced back to
which you know you've spoken to us about before as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, we could look to things like the
key or liturgical psalms and hymns that were cited in
the early Church, and they might constitute elements of tradition.
But I would want to give an example of something
like the liturgy itself, right, I mean, for example, how
do we get the worship service that we have if
it's not in the New Testament. Well, the reality is
that the Apostles, when they went and founded the various
churches throughout the Roman Empire, many of them gave a
kind of a basic pattern of the worship service. And
so this is called a liturgical theology. This is the
history where the church gets its patterns of worship, and
the Apostles shows the rough outline the way they did
it from both the temple service, the ancient Jewish temple service,
and the synagogue system in its services. So they kind
of combine elements of bose and that's why when you
go to an Orthodox Church service, you will find it
to be very reminiscent of both temple elements the imagery,
and the synagogue elements of the antiphonal singing and liturgical
patterns that you find. So both things are going on
to help the Apostles kind of come up with the
rough outline. But we notice that the New Testament itself
doesn't tell us how we're supposed to worship, and worship
is something very important. And when we find passages where
Paul says for example, in Hebrews thirteen, that we have
an altar which those who serve at the Jewish Tabernacle
don't have any right to eat from. So there's an
eating service and an altar. Okay, that right there is
not Protestant because Protestantism rejects the idea of an altar,
because an altar is a sacrificial thing, and Protestism believes
that sacrifice is done and gone right Jesus. Jesus said
it's finished. There's no longer any need or notion for
priesthood or sacrifice. Well, but wait a minute, because the
New Testament says that we have an altar that we
eave from, and it also includes the idea idea that
Christ's priesthood isn't done, It's not finished. It's a Melchizedecian
priesthood that continues on. Yes, So the notion of priesthood
is still there. The notion of a sacrificial eucharistic offering
is also in the Book of Revelation going on in Heaven.
Paul says we have an altar that we eat from.
Jesus talks about the New Testament being a fulfillment the
Lord's Supper, is a type of passover. So all of
these ideas, even though yeah, the reality comes with the
first coming, it doesn't mean that everything is done away
in the sense of there's no more sacrifice, there's no
more alter. So that's why when you go to an
Orthodox church, you see there is a priesthood, there is
an altar, there is a sacrifice, there are vestiments, there
is incense. This actually fulfills the Old Testament prophecies and
the Minor prophets that incense will be offered to my
name throughout the nations among the gentiles. How would incense
be offered if there's not incense in the church, and
much most Protestant church churches don't believe in that.
Speaker 1: So that's like idolatry in some way exactly. You know
that having a structure. It's really interesting though, because human beings,
you know, are creatures of worship, and we're creatures of structure,
and you know the and you know, this isn't like
a Protestant bash, but for me, I can relate to
it the most because I was one for so long.
You know. You know, it's like, you know, God's not
sitting here demanding that you stick to this format. He
wants free worship. You know, David danced and he revealed
himself as he was dancing because he was so excited,
and you know, all this kind of stuff. And yet
you know, there's like this format that everyone follows exactly.
Speaker 2: So let's think about that. That's a great point. So
remember God's not the author of confusion. If you read
the book Paul's letters to the Corinthians, he's buking a
lot of their chaotic and things getting out of hand,
and he says that keep the traditions that I delivered
to you. He says the same thing to the Corinthians
that he said to the Thessalonians. He doesn't mention oral
traditions there. But if that's mentioned, what are the traditions, Well,
Paul's talking about the teaching that he gave for many
months years at these different locations. For example, we're told
in Acts. I think it's Acts twenty that Paul taught
for three years, day and night in emphasis. So when
Paul tells Timothy to keep everything that you heard from
me in the presence of many witnesses and passed that on,
he's talking about the body of oral teaching. Exposition prophecy, etc.
That Paul gave for three years straight, all of it.
He doesn't say, I taught you for three years. Now,
just hand down this letter that I wrote, and he says,
the whole body of teachings. Okay, so they're catechizing, is
what I'm trying to say. So like the same way,
we can't think of oral tradition or that it's like
necessarily going to be boiled down in a reductionist way
to just this thing over here. Uh, it's it's a
body of doctrines that would be passed down that might
encapsulate Catechisis that meaning then the basic interpretive framework that
you would have when you're baptizing brought into the church
to learn the theology, to learn the interpretive structure of scripture,
Because yes, you would have people reading scriptures as best
they could. Many of the people would be illiterate, so
they would have to be getting this information from oral catechisis.
Most people couldn't read, and yet they were converting and
becoming Christians, and most of the churches in the first, second, third,
four fifth century it didn't have the whole Bible. Well,
how are you getting Christians of the other so they're
being taught orally from the bishops, from the Levi, from
the deacons, which corresponds to the levit, and from the
press beitheros or the priests. So this is universal in
the church in the early days. But again, liturgy in
the pattern of worship is very important because you know,
Paul applies the same warning about unworthily doing the Lord's
Supper leading to death. Yes, and that's the same warning
that happens in the Old Testament with nadab and Abaye
Whuo and people who offer strange fire and people who
get creative with worship. So you have the same curse
that Paul applies that's applied to the Old Testament. You know,
violators of how to worship God by offering strange fire,
they're killed. Paul says that you might end up, you know,
God might strike you dead too, if you go against
the little world. Why would that be so severe a
punishment if it's just a mere symbol. It's a really
severe punishment for things that are just plain and pure
empty symbols. Suppose now I'm not saying empty, that proses
they are empty. But so the point is that, no,
there's a liturgical background to what Paul's saying, And just
think about this. When Jesus went to church and he did,
did he worship in a crazy, wild, do it yourself way? No,
he worshiped dogs. Yeah, he worshiped in a synagogue structure
that was very ordered.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: Why would Jesus himself, the son of God number one,
he's the one that gave all the liturgical worship to
Israel in the Old Testament anyway, and then when he
comes to worship as our example, he worshiped liturgically in
a very ordered way. And the assumption that many prisons
have is that, like you know, in the Book of
Acts or something, because they had this period of manifestations
of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, that oh, well,
then it was therefore chaotic. No, that's a non sequate.
Doesn't follow that because there are healings and miracles or
something like that, that it was chaotic. There's also assumptions
that prayer language or something like this is some sort
of gibberish. No, no, no. In the Book of Acts
is very clear that when the apostles speak languages in
a miraculous way, everybody's hearing this same language miraculously that's tongues. Okay,
it's not gibberish, it's not rolling on the ground. Those
are ridiculous manifestations that are rebuked and called confusion and chaos.
God is not the author of chaos, Paul says to
the Corinthians. So why would chaotic, nonsense, gibberous worship be
the very way that is the true spiritual manifestation. So
I'm just mainly speaking about like the Charismatics there, but
even classical Protestants, you know, traditional Lutherans or Calvinists and Presbyterians,
and you know, they have an order of worship that's
not in the Bible that they have sort of constructed,
and ironically, they've loosely constructed it for itself from older
liturgical traditions of the Roman Roman Church. So you can't
get away from this point of tradition even if you're
a Protestant. Uh. And the irony is that, Paul, if
we had, if the Bible was operating, if the Church
is supposed to operate on a solar scripture of principle,
why were we not given a pattern of worship in
the New Testament.
Speaker 1: I'll argue that the traditions of men make the Word
of God of null effect, and that that's actually what's
happening in churches like the Orthodox Church, where it is
very structured and traditions are followed.
Speaker 2: But again, as we saw with Paul's injunction to the Thessalonians
as well as to the Corinthians, how if all the
traditions are so, this is what's called a word concept fallacy. Right,
So Jesus is talking about traditions that the Pharisees came
up with, that supplant and a trump God's word, God's revelation.
And Paul is saying, when I give you this pattern
of doctrine that you are to hand down, that is
also the word of God that you heard me preach,
he says, So Heah identifies his oral teaching with the
Word of God as well as what he wrote down.
And again, the Bible itself doesn't tell us what what
books go into the Bible. So we need we have
to have this tradition of the church to even identify,
for example, the tradition that Matthew wrote Matthew's Gospel, because
for example, it doesn't we're not told who wrote it
or that Matthew is the Matthew that we identify with
an apostle. It's the tradition of the Church that says
that that's who that was. And it's a tradition of
the Church that said these other gospels over here that
are called the Gospel of Thomas are fake. They're fake
and gray, all right, So we know partly what books
to include and not include by that same tradition that
a Protestant is inadvertently denying by saying or assuming that
all tradition is what Jesus is talking about. Now, Jesus
affirmed and observed many traditions. For example, going to the
synagogue worship service itself was partly a tradition because the
synagogue system was set up posts Moses by Ezra, and
it was a traditional way to set up worship throughout Israel.
But we're not told explain how you're supposed to do
it in the synagogue. That was something Ezra set up,
So that was a tradition. Attending the service the Feast
of Lights that Jesus does, that's the celebration of the Maccabees.
We're never told that you're supposed to go to the
Maccabee service. So Jesus is attending excuse me, services that
are themselves fine, legitimate and good traditions. So the point
is that there's good traditions and there's bad traditions. Good
traditions are traditions that the church and those an authority
have accepted, the whole church universally accepts. They're not problems,
they're not contradicting or contravening the Word of God. Bad
traditions are the traditions that do those things.
Speaker 1: So I want to ask you because you said that,
you know, you came to the point where you realized
it's either between Catholicism and Orthodoxy. What is it exactly
you know that made you decide that it's not Catholicism
because the Catholics will say, this is, you know, passed
on Jesus past, established his church through Peta, and we're still,
you know, carrying on with that.
Speaker 2: If I was to boil it down to the most.
Speaker 1: That's that's my incredibly basic explanation of Catholicism. But by
the way, so forgive me, but that's you understand my point.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, and if I were to boil it
down to maybe two or three of the main reasons
why I think orthodoxy is these is the church and
not the Roman Church? Is that? And the more I
studied the first thousand years of Christianity, you find that
you don't see the Roman Catholic idea of the pope
and particularly his powers that are outlined at Vatican One,
which is the Roman Catholic Council that dogmatizes the doctrine
of the papacy and it's infallibility and so forth. You
don't see that exercised and explicated in that way in
the first years. And so because many even though Vatican
Want itself actually says that it was always the case,
many Roman Catholics, when dealing with this point or this objection,
will say, well, but it evolved. But you run into
a whole host of other problems with the idea of
doctrinal evolution, because if that's the case, then it seems
like it evolved to be where we are now, where
you know, skittles unions can be blessed, right, so why
can't it involve And now we don't have the death
Pale team.
Speaker 1: Right now, I can a baptize aliens?
Speaker 2: I mean, well, yeah, if it can evolve, then it
can reasonably evolve into the opposite of itself, and if
all doctrinal positions are subject to some notion of evolution,
then the idea that the doctrine evolves itself can also
evolve and have become self refuting. So at a philosophical level,
it's kind of nonsensical.
Speaker 1: That's a really good point, Jay, because I know a
lot of faithful Catholics. We have them in our audience,
and I've interviewed some and they are wonderful people, and
they love Jesus and they love the Church, and they say,
you know, what we're doing is fighting to preserve the
roots of the Church, everything that the doctrine actually is
supposed to be, rather than this bastardized version that this
Satanic pope is sprouting now. But what you just said
is if you go on the basis of that evolution
of theology or doctrine or whatever the case may be,
you actually it allows for this.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Unfortunately, although I understand why they feel that way,
and I felt the exact same way when I was
a traditional Roman Catholic in my twenties, you don't have
that liberty as a Roman Catholic because of the nature
of the system of Roman Catholicism. So if you go
and read Vatican One, which I highly recommend people do.
You go to Peopleandcyclicals dot net, type in Vatican One
and read the full If you print it out, it
might be ten to fifteen pages. What you'll notice is
that you're actually bound to much more than just the
so called fallible teachings. You actually have to follow the
Pope pretty much across the board, and if you disagree
in even what is considered quote nonfallible teachings, you're still
supposed to submit with docility and humility of minds. So
you're not actually allowed in that system, if they're consistent
with it, to publicly oppose any of the moral and
theological dogmatic teachings of Pope Francis. So while they might
like to have the idea of rebelling against the papacy,
the actual text of vaticant One in about four or
five other places in Denzinger, which is their official dogma book,
don't allow you to do that. In fact, you even
have to submit to the Pope's decisions on mundane matters,
juridical matters, decisions of the Holy Office, even you're supposed
to submit to them. So this idea that you can
be a traditional, faithful Roman Catholic and reject the last
sixty seventy years of liberalism post Vatican two is just
absolutely absurd and not the case, especially given the fact
that Vatican two actually specifies and multiple times after Vaticano
it's been specified in at least five places that you
have to believe Vatican two, you don't have the right
or the ability as Roman Caloty two reject an ecumenical
council so consistent Roman Catholic papalism itself, I think is
the ultimate defeater for Roman Catholicism. And so again let
me give you a couple other key examples. The first
thousand years of the Church, you have these econmenical councils
that are shared between East and West for the most part,
and those canons. Those councils produce what we call canons.
Canons are ecclesiastical laws that are produced as sort of
rules and guidelines for the church in each of those councils.
And what's interesting is that every one of the first
seven produces canons that contradict and don't line up with
the idea of Vatican one's view of the papacy. For example,
you have canons that talk about every bishop being limited
in jurisdiction. Well, if every bishop's limited in jurisdiction, then
there's no universal super bishop who has jurisdiction over everybody.
And make a long story short, if you look at
two important documents that the Vatican has approved, the Vatican
has approved in the last few years. The first one
is called the ch eighty document and the second one
is called the Alexandria Document. Chad document came out, I
don't know, twenty sixteen, somewhere in there. Gad document came.
Alexander document came out last year. And both of those
documents together, they're not that long on high they recommend
interested people go read them. They actually admit, between the
two documents, about ninety percent, I would say, of the
Orthodox problems and critiques of the papacy for the last
thousand years. Now, if we're at the point where Rome
is now admitting and I don't believe the motivations are good.
I believe the motivations are actually acumenism and to try
to coax the Orthodox back into union with Rome. But
if we think about it, well, now, wait a minute.
If these documents are admitting that the Roman Church has
basically been wrong about a lot of its critiques ninety
percent of it the last thousand years, and his claims,
then that actually means Vatican One's not true. It actually
means that the Vatican One view of the papal indefectibility
and infallibility is not the case. So to me, those
are a couple of the strongest proofs that the ro
Meancallic Church is not the one true church. And if
you just think about it from kind of practical perspective,
if everything hinges on one guy and it's the guy
over in Rome, and if that guy gets compromised and
co opted as a lot of evidence I think demonstrates,
I mean, Francis basically works in lockstep with the world
economic forms of Agenda and Klaus Schwab. Then to me
that that demonstrates that that's not under this infallible guide
and carorism of Jesus and Peter.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a really good point. People may argue that,
you know, I always think about the I guess because
I did so much, you know, talking to people of
different ideologies and sort of tackling arguments apologetics if you will,
on a really small scale. But people may argue, oh, well, say,
for example, you know, the Orthodox Church hasn't been absent
when they do all these ecumenical meetings and I don't know,
light flames with Hindus and all this kind of stuff.
We've had representation from the Orthodox Church at some of
these climate things and you know, so, how then is
that any different from what the Catholics are doing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great question, and it often comes up.
And I think the important thing to keep in mind
here is that it's two different structures and two different ecclesiologies.
That just means the doctrine of the church. So the
Romancality Church is a top down system at all. It's
a house of car that either stands or falls based
on what the guy in Rome is doing. The Orthodox
Church is not like that. A lot of people think
of it, like, especially if they're Catholic, they look at
the Orthodox Church and say, oh, you're kind of like
the pope and but you have like the patriarch concept
and noople, or you have five patriarchs, and then therefore
you're like a five headed church. You know, those are
just canonical privileges. In other words, those bishops have privileges
within synods. It doesn't mean or they have a large jurisdiction.
It doesn't mean that they're popes. Every bishop is just
as much a bishop as the next bishop. So the
Orthodox Church surprisingly is decentralized. A lot of people might
find that kind of odd or very foreign, especially if
you're Roman Catholic, because you're sort of, you know, locked
into that pyramid type of system, and the Orthodox Church
is more I mean, this is a maybe not the
best analogy, but it's a little more like a republican
type of system. Then it would be like a top down,
tyrannical type of you know, auto see. So you know,
the bishops are are elected and chosen, and they have
more authority than the priests, but there's no super bishop.
And it's true that at times any one bishop, like
the Bishop of Rome, he might try to get a
lot more power because he might have honor and prestige,
and then he might say, okay, well that honor and
prestige actually now translates into like a divine you know,
I'm the guy that everybody should look to. Right. That's
our review of what happened in the See of Rome,
because for the first thousand years we Orthodox would believe
that the pope is Orthodox, but then he eventually departs
when we have the schism. So likewise, if we thought
about the patriarchal concept and noble for example, much of
the Orthodox Church is concerned and believes that he's now
trying to kind of be like the pope. He wants
to have this prestige and authority even beyond what's normal
like the pope. Now it's not I mean, it's a
problem in the Orthodox Church, but it's not a problem
for our ecclesiology because we believe and have no problem
admitting that any bishop can be corrupted and become eventually
a heretic or an apostate. So the problem is not
so much. The argument is not the Orthodox Church has
no problems and the calolgy Church has a bad popes.
That's not the argument. The argument is that the system
of Roman Catholicism hangs everything on one guy and his
dogmatic teaching, such that if he makes a contradiction in
dogma or morals, the system is not true anymore, whereas
in the Orthodox Church you don't have everything hanging in
on one guy. Though a patriarch can become a heretic
and fall away. Many of them have. In fact, many
of the most important heretics in the history of the
Church have been patriarchs of Constantinople.
Speaker 1: Right, what do you think the key takeaways? I guess
for the Protestant because we have a lot of evangelicals
in our audience, right, so, you know, they got really
angry with me for you know, talking about the fact
that something that you brought up before, that the New
Covenant really is like what is the new Israel? And
you know, the Christians are the inheritors of the Covenant.
It's moved on now to us. And in fact, you know,
saying that we're somehow not the chosen people of God
now it really diminishes what Jesus did and what are
you established through the New Covenant? And so, you know,
I find it insane how many people don't understand this.
But what do you think is the key takeaway for
the Protestants? Because so many of them genuinely love Jesus
Jaye like they love Jesus. They they do. They try
their hardest to be good people, good representatives of Christ
on this earth, and yet are often so misled. What
do you think they really need to understand about Protestantism
and why it's really not the right way.
Speaker 2: Well, I would say, first of all, even in the
Old Testament, the Jews had ways to deal with problems
and issues in the church, and so you had a
kind of a normative authority in the structure of the
levites and the priests who were the interpreters and could
then make judgments on the basis of the law. And yeah,
they made mistakes and they were fallible men for sure,
but there was still a structure, a normative structure in place.
And when Jesus sets up the church and he causes apostles,
he says very clearly, he who hears you, here's me.
He breathes on them, it says in the Book of John,
and gives them a power to remit and retain sins.
Whoever sins you remit, they're remitted. Whoever sins you retain,
they're retained. So that's a real power that's given to
these apostles, believe by extension to the people that they
set up. And what that means is that if there
is a visible institutional body of bishops and that makes
up the church and history, then they do have authority,
and that means that that authority will continue with the church.
It doesn't go away, it doesn't die. They continue to
have the ability to excommunicate people. How could you excommunicate
people and enforce these judgments if there's no living body
that does it. It would be like to make an
analogy having the Constitution but no supreme court to actually
rule on the Constitution. It's just every man reading the
Constitution for himself. Well, that would be nonsense and chaos.
So that Jesus didn't even think to set up some
body of people to make decisions and to be a
kind of supreme court, so to speak, for his church.
Speaker 1: I mean, communication doesn't even really happen all that much. Jay,
It's all very floppy, and I guess that would you
know a purpose. It's all very floppy and flippant. You know,
someone's found out to have been hiding pedophile secrets from
his dad and you know, no big deal. God's grace
will cover it. It's like, well, hang on a second,
there is actually a process for people that have done
egregious things. And you know, I mean maybe that's not
the best example, but you know, there's a process for
someone who's unrepentant for example.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean you could use those moral examples
of individuals, but I was thinking more so, like, for example,
what we see in the fourth century when the main
challenge to Christianity at that time is the doctrine of
arianism or semi arianism, which is the idea that Jesus
isn't fully divine. He's not the second person of the Godhead.
He's the first thing God created, so he's just a creature.
And so this is why we have the Council of
nicea meeting, is to solve this crisis throughout the Church
and the Roman Empire, that most people are believing that
Jesus is a creature or some kind of demigod, a
created being. And the decision, of course, following sant Anthonatian,
is that no, Jesus is the eternally generated son of
the Father, and therefore he has the same nature as
the Father. And therefore, because God cannot have degrees of divinity,
there's no eighty percent God, or because the divine nature
is the divine nature. If you're uncreated, you're uncreated, then
the sun is uncreated. And so as the second person
that God had, he must be believed in as fully
divine Homousius to be saved, and so that's why the
Nicene Creed comes about. And as a result you get
the excommunicating of Arians and people that believe that Jesus
is a creature, and then later on you get a
further specification of other errors about Christ's nature in terms
of Christology. So what I'm saying is that it's not
just everybody fitting for themselves and reading the Bible for themselves.
It's not The problem is not reading the Bible. The
problem is that Jesus gave to his church a body
of people that could make decisions and enforce these things.
And if everybody's just DIY and it's just me and
the Bible, and there's no practical way to have what's
called normative authority in philosophy, not just the individual figuring
out what's true and false and right and wrong, but
an actual group of people that can bind people to
these decisions.
Speaker 1: That's crucial because the argument from a lot of Protestants
will be that we have the Holy Spirit, he teaches
us in all things, and we don't need a body
of people to tell us because we have the ultimate teacher.
The problem that we have is that, in our human fallibility,
we interpret things through our own lens, through our own culture,
through our own experiences, and we think it may be
the Holy Spirit teaching us, when in fact, it's just
our intellect and our logic sorting through this. Now, that's
not to say that you should take the authority of
a man above your own sense, because that's often led
people into the wrong path. You know, test everything and
apply the test of you know, history and scripture and
context and all of that, of course, but this is
how we end up with I don't know, what is it,
seventy thousand denominations.
Speaker 2: Jay, Yeah, So the question isn't can an individual come
to know the truth? That's that's different. That's why I
keep using this term normative authority. The question is who
has the right to make those decisions? Because everybody, if
you have lived very long and argued with people in
the religious sphere or even within the sphere of what's
called Christianity, everybody believes that they're guided by the Holy Spirit.
So how do we resolve an issue when say, five
different factions all believe that the Holy Spirit is leading
and guiding them. That's why there has to be something
within history that can make that decision. That's what I
mean by normative authority. And for the Orthodox Church, the
normative practice of that is called synodalism synods councils. So
the Orthodox Church is concillier, meaning that it is governed
by not one dude, but synods and councils, and most
I mean some Protestant groups have that. But the problem
is that in Protestantism, because they don't have the notion
that there is one true church in history, the binding
people to a decision or the excommunicating of people doesn't
really do much. It doesn't have much force because you
could go start your own church, you see. But and
you might do that even if you're excommunicated from the
Orthodox Church. But the point is that the theology is
still consistent and the notion of authority is there to
say that, Well, look, you know, if you're excommunicated from
the Orthodox Church, you can't really go have another Orthodox church.
It's very it would be very difficult to do that,
you know what I mean, Like you might wear the
costumes and say that you're some sort of something, but
it's not going to be recognized by the rest of
the world. So it's probably not going to work. You know,
no Orthodox person, for example, recognizes Protestant pastors as possessing authority.
They just simply don't. They're just another layman like any
other laymen trying to do those things. So it's not
a question of is the authority infallible and is it
then able to give me knowledge of what's true and false?
That's not what we're saying. The question is how do
you resolve an issue when five, six, twenty different people
are claiming to be led by the Holy Spirit. There's
got to be somebody with authority. Again, the Constitution, it
wasn't just mailed out or written out in letter letter
form to every American in their mailbox to then find
for themselves. Doesn't mean that an individual Americans can't read
the Constitution, but the point is that for practical purposes,
there's got to be somebody that interprets it.
Speaker 1: I have a final topic I'd like to bring up
with you, Jay, because I think it's vital and it's
actually the topic that for a lot of Protestants when
I speak with them, you know, after some time, you know,
from my old church or whatever the case may be,
and they say to me, you know, what the hell
have you done, you idolata? And you know, I spent
the time obviously explaining to them that they're misunderstood. But
the one thing that I that I that really tipped
me over was the topic of communion. And you brought
this up before about how serious it is partaking in
the wrong manner. I'd really love you to spend a
bit of time talking about communion in the Orthodox Church,
what it actually is, uh, and why it's so so
serious to your soul uh to partake correctly.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So, I mean, for us, we believe that it
is the actual, uh deified flesh of Christ. And we
believe that when in John six, you know, when Jesus
talks about eating his flesh and duringing his blood, that
it's literal. And it's literal because when people are offended
by that teaching in John six, Jesus doesn't say, oh wait, wait, wait,
my bad. Don't get you guys got the wrong idea.
I was just talking of it as a symbol. I
don't know the Old Testament, rituals and writes, the levitical
services and so forth, the temples.
Speaker 1: Sorry, if I could just say that a lot of
them left him at that point because they were offended
because they thought this guy's trying to get us to
participate in cannibalism. So he like they took it literally.
Speaker 2: Correct, Yeah, and uh yeah, Jesus doesn't say no, no,
it's just a symbol. He I mean, it doesn't He's
not saying this cannibalism, but he's saying that, no, you
really do have to partake of Me in the way
that He chose to make that partaking possible, we believe
is itself a fulfillment. Actually a lot of the things
in the Old Testament. So for example, you'll notice many
times when God meets with people like Abraham, they have
a meal. When Abraham meets with Melchisedec, Melchisidic offers bread
and wine, bread and wine. We believe that's a type
of Christ offering bread and wine in the Melchizedecian priesthood.
When you get to Exodus, when Moses goes up on
the mountain, he eats a meal with God. When the
Israelites get the levitical services established, many of those services
deal with ways that you would have a meal with
the priest and with God. So this idea of covenantal
meals eating with God is all throughout the Old Testament,
and the most famous would be obviously the Passover, and
the Passover is the actual partaking of the passover land.
Jesus is the passover Lamb. But the difference is that
his blood and partaking of his blood and his flesh
is the very thing that has to correspond to the
passover with the Angel that comes and destroys the houses
of the Egyptians, where there's not the blood of the Passover. Well,
in the word the Dox Church, we are saying, no,
you really are exposed to the blood. Protestants, you know,
will say, well, I'm saved by the blood. They're power
in the blood, power in the blood. And yet the
blood is never actually what you you never come in
contact with it. So we're actually a lot more literal
in the sense of, you know, when Paul talks about
being baptized into Christ, we think baptism really does accomplish
that regeneration. When Paul talks about, you know, the blood,
it's literally what you're talking about the Eucharist, So that's
where you come in contact with it. It's not all
just an intellectual notional thing. It's an actual, real thing.
And I think that's the big stumbling block for a
lot of Protestants is that they they hear this stuff
and they kind of don't even realize their own gnostic
presuppositions that they have. Well, that's flesh and physical and
God is against flesh and physical stuff. Really, well, then
why did he create the world, Why did he give
us bodies? Why did Jesus resurrect his same physical body?
Of God's against the physical. So there's just this innate
sort of gnostic tendency within Protestantism that I think a
lot of Protestants don't recognize. It underlies a lot of
the iconoclasm, which is like Calvinism would be opposed to imagery. Well,
I mean, the Book of Hebrews says that the son
is the icon, the Greek word icon of the Father.
So if God has a son and it's his direct
image and likeness then and it's his icon, then God's
not against icons.
Speaker 1: Oh, well, that would be you know, the point is
not creating graven images for yourselves and all of this
sort of stuff, but that's specifically worshiping those things. That's
different to commemoration of the Family of God. It's different
to commemoration of Jesus, artistic expression of Jesus. You know,
Bethel as an example, will sit there and draw paintings
while people wave ribbons and flags around. I mean, is
that now, you know, creating graven images because you're doing
that through a worship service. I mean, there's there's a
lot of it's illogically right.
Speaker 2: So yeah, I mean the notion of graven images is
it's not specifically only talking about literal engraving, image of image,
because if that was the point that's being made there,
then the temple itself violates this because the temple was
full of images. It was full of seraphim angels everywhere.
Those are images. The Arc of the Covenant is a
golden box with angels on it, which is an image.
And there's many places where in the Old Testament people
prostrate before. They prostrate before. In the Book of Chronicles,
I think a second Chronicles, they prostrate before Solomon and
the arc when the Chicaina glory cloud comes down to
the arc. So prostrating before created things is not itself
the problem. Because Elijah, Elijah prostrates before Elijah, Moses, Sami
Joseph prostrates before Pharaoh, We have examples in the Bible
where people prostrate before another created being is a sign
of reverence. So it's not the external action of drawing
a picture or putting your body down on your face
that is the idolatry. Idolatry is, primarily, as Jesus notes
many times, a problem of the heart and the mind.
So if I, you know, am believing and worshiping a
created thing as if it's God, then that is what
idolatry is. Idolatry is not revering a created thing, and
that happens all throughout the Old Testament throughout the Bible.
God says honor your father and mother because it's a
way to show deference to God your father. So is
that idolatry to honor my father? I mean a lot
of the Protestant ideas are bound up with very simplistic
and one dimensional understandings of words. For example, call no
man father. Well, but the Ten Commandments say honor your father. Yes,
So if I can call no man father, then I
can't call my dad.
Speaker 1: Can you actually just address that what it means by
call no man father? Please, Jay, because this is actually
you know, when when I interviewed priest recently. The first
one of the one of the comments, Maria, we're told
call no man father. I cannot watch these.
Speaker 2: Well. Paul himself refers to himself as Timothy's spiritual father. Yes,
so clearly it's not contradictory in this sense to literally
never call a human being father, and nobody, no Protestant
unless they're crazy, actually keeps that. In that sense, Jesus
is talking about the ussurpation of God's place in a
person's life and a person replacing that role and being
themselves because there was this tendency, and it exists even
in Telmuitic Rabbinic Judaism, where the rabbi can actually argue
with and displace God in that theology. So Jesus, I think,
is attacking this idea that the person that you're calling
father might actually be extending beyond his authoritative place to
be like God, you know, like a Guru or a
you know, something like that. That would be replacing the
natural position that God should have in that hierarchy. But
Jesus is not saying literally, never call another person father.
Jesus talks about people's fathers.
Speaker 1: I'm really glad we addressed that you know, for me,
j I've certainly I said this a while ago, particularly
when I was even looking at the at the subject
of you know, who is rallies now and all of
that sort of stuff, and it was very confronting for me,
and I was very afraid to face some of these
former beliefs that I had worried I was going to
upset God. You know these I've been quite quite open
about that with the viewers. And what I found was
that if you just open your heart that and be
willing to learn, that God will teach you. This is
something everyone believes. It's really just about whether we're open
to learning. And I think, you know, someone that's very
close to me always says, if you really want to
know the truth, it will always lead you back to
the Orthodox Church, and so I think that that's you know,
I've found that to be true. Certainly. Jay, you do
a lot of debates, you do a lot of talks
on philosophy, you do a lot of breakdowns of Hollywood.
I know that you've recently watched June two and you
were very impressed. I didn't even like the first one.
What was so great about the second?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean I mentioned it. I would be interested
to know why you didn't like it, because you know, people,
I'm a big fan of the novels. I've read the
first two. Yeah, and I was really impressed with Doune
one just because of the depth of philosophical depth that
it has. It's not it's not a Christian work. I'm
not saying it's great because it's Christianity or anything like that.
I just thought that I really appreciated the execution that
Dennis Villainew had. I thought that it, for the most part,
captured what was in the first book. The new movie
is I think a technical achievement. The aesthetics, the art, direction,
the sound, that's all phenomenal. It's not I think for
moviegoers if you're a movie buff, you know, we haven't
really had that type of a theater experience since like
Lord of the Rings or something like that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I saw you say that, and I thought I had
no intention of watching it, And then I saw that
you were like for fIF you said you it was
like the experience you haven't had for fifteen years, and
I thought, well, now I have to watch it. I
wanted to know what made it.
Speaker 2: I mean, it might not be up your alley. I
mean it's it's it's a very weird world. It's a
very bizarre uh. You know, Frank Herbert was a GOP
speech writer. He was a curiously not liberal so to speak, uh,
sci fi person, and so, you know, in the in
the world of science fiction, that's kind of unheard of.
It's very rare there. They're usually soy men and they're
always promoting kind of crazy stuff. So there are some
conservative traditional elements within the Do novels that I think
make it interesting in regard to how most sci fi
is not that way. It also is, you know, a
couple other ways it's unique is that it's not uh,
there's not really aliens in that world. There are no uh,
it's not pro AI. So it's a very unique sci
fi where it's anti AI. And so I like those elements.
That does not mean that that I think that the
message of Dune overall is like, oh it's Christian. It's
not Christian, it's more perennialism. But it's at least not
like totally soy you know, it's not pro skal Oh,
I'm serious. I mean most science fiction is just propaganda
for for that stuff, you know, living in the matrix
or getting a sexpot. I mean, and this is not
that way at all. It also really it has a
really weird religious expression. I mean, in this future ten
thousand years from now scenario, there's a there's a blended
world religion that's like Catholicism mixed with Islam and and
all of that's very bizarre. But it's just a breath
of fresh air for me. And I just did I
just read the second one done Messiah and did a
big breakdown of that a couple of months ago, so
so it's always all still fresh in my mind. And uh,
you know, from a predictive programming perspective, Dune is amazing
because you have geoengineering, you have terror forming, you have
MK ultra, you have espionage, sexpionage, you have intrigue, all
of that in sci fi, which I mean, I'm not
a huge sci fi nerd. I don't read a whole
lot of sci fi, but I mean, how often do
we get that kind of real conspiracy stuff in fi?
Not very much.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well I asked you because I wanted to highlight
for you know, most people that watch our content know you.
They really enjoy your our interviews together but for anyone
that isn't for me. Now, this is the other stuff
that Jay does, so it's not just religious discussions. He
does a lot of I mean a huge focus. On
his website you can go to Jay's analysis dot com
lots of movie analysis.
Speaker 2: We're also doing a live event in LA I would
add two if people want to come out and see
us live with What we do in our live events
is pretty diverse as well. We do I do comedy
to a lot of impressions, so I end up doing
like ten twenty minutes of impressions. Then we have a
lecture from my wife Jamie. She does a lot of
occult esotery, Hollywood stuff. Then I do a lecture that's
a lot of deep geopolitics, philosophy, spirituality like we've talked about.
And then at this LA event March fifteenth, we'll have
Jamie Kennedy, the comedian from Scream, and he's going to
be headlining. We did this. We did an event in
LA about eight months ago and it was so much
fun we thought we'd do it again. So this is
not the same event. It's all new material, all new topics.
I'm gonna be signing books, the Red book at this event,
which is six hundred pages of all my geopolitics and
philosophy and theology essays, so people can come out and
watch us. The links the tickets are all on my website,
on my Twitter penned at the top in the event
bright link.
Speaker 1: We can find Jay on x jay under school d
seven and there is the live event pinned post that
he's talking about. I encourage everyone to follow him. He
posts hilarious stuff. I just I shared he sent me.
He sent me that. AI like the thing that you
did with the microwave as well, Oh sorry, I've just
opened one of your streams, and so really entertaining but
also incredibly informative. I also encourage everyone to subscribe to
Jay's YouTube. I'm not signed in, so that's why it
says subscribe there, but definitely subscribe to Jay's YouTube. Anything
else you want to mention.
Speaker 2: Jay, No, I appreciate that great conversation. Like I said,
people want the books. You can go to my website
and the shop and you can get the Red Book
as the newest one. It's basically all of my essays
the last ten years, six hundred and sixty pages on theology, philosophy, geopolitics.
I have a smaller book on philosophy you can get.
Then I have my two Hollywood books and those are
all signed copies, so if you order it from the website,
you get signed copies. You can follow me on Rockfinn.
My sponsors Chalk dot com the best in supplementation. Use
promo code J fifty J WIFEI Zeria get fifty percent
off all Chalk products choq dot com. And that's all
I can think of.
Speaker 1: Amazing, Thank you so much, Jay, really really love this conversation.
I'm sure we'll do more. Another book review is on
the horizon.
Speaker 2: I think, oh yeah, we should definitely do that. By
the way, you're also a co Fourth Hour host, and
we both I think, have been pretty much killing it
in the Fourth Hours.
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, absolutely, Jay's been there a lot longer than me,
but bringing amazing, amazing quality information to the Alex Jones
Show each Friday? Is it Jay that your host?
Speaker 2: Yes, you do get confused because.
Speaker 1: For me it's Saturday. No, I'm on Tuesdays, which are
Wednesdays in Australia.
Speaker 2: Gotcha, Yeah, I'm every Friday, and yeah, I usually I
try to check out yours as well, so you've been
killing it.
Speaker 1: Thanks Jay, really appreciate you. Thank you for all your work.
God bless and we'll talk
Speaker 2: To you sin Likewise, thanking Maria