An Introduction to Theosis (w/ Jay Dyer)

hey everyone what is up welcome or welcome back to my channel my name is austin this is gospel simplicity and i'm so glad that you're here today here on this channel we make videos about biblical and theological topics with guests from across the christian tradition and if you're enjoying them and you haven't yet already i'd really encourage you to hit subscribe become a part of this community and if you don't want to miss any future videos be sure to hit the notification bell as well to be in the loop today i'll be interviewing orthodox apologist jay dyer now jay has to be one of the most requested guests i've had on my channel but simultaneously one of the more i don't know if controversial is the right word but anytime someone says you know hey you've got to interview jay there's a bunch of people that say yes yes yes and then there's some people that say no and i understand that from some past videos perhaps that people have seen they're wary of having him on the channel i get that i hear that i appreciate all of your input there's a couple of things i want to say first i think you're going to find this video remarkably uncontroversial it's it's not my style to make my videos needlessly controversial and i thought this conversation was pretty cordial and i think you're really going to enjoy it there's a lot of good substance here the second thing i want to say is that as i was reflecting on you know do i want to do this interview he had reached out saw one of my videos we got in touch and we started talking about doing a video and as i was trying to sift through everyone's valuable feedback they had given me that i really appreciate it i was struck by this idea you know the motto of this channel is love across the lines we engage with people who disagree with us and are different than us here and in order to do that you can't just engage with people who look like you think like you believe like you often times we have people from across the christian tradition that might disagree but maybe they're all of similar dispositions well that's good but it's only the first step to really loving across the lines sometimes it requires you know really engaging with people who you just might feel your personalities aren't very similar well i thought this conversation was an excellent opportunity to kind of expand the channel and really put that motto you know out into the open hey we're out to love across the lines and just because some people find a guess controversial i don't think it's a good reason not to have them on if we can do it in a way that is edifying and informative and i think this conversation was all those things so with all that being said if you clicked on this title and you're here for controversy i don't think you're going to get it if you saw this title and you're worried i don't think you need to be i hope you enjoy this video and i think you will so as we get ready to go to the interview i just want to say i hear you all i appreciate your feedback and i really hope you enjoy it i also wanted to say a big thank you to my patreon subscribers and merch buyers who make this channel possible especially to my patrons who give monthly to support this channel thank you so much your support means so much to me and if you want to support this channel you can do so by using the link in the description or by going to patreon.com gospel simplicity that would mean a ton to me i also want to thank our sponsor for today kindred kindred is a ministry that exists to help people reclaim sacred time with god in their daily lives they do this by creating these beautiful bibles complete with full page photos that will cause you to read the bible differently it will force you to slow down read more contemplatively think about the passage in different ways really just spice up your bible reading and i think you'll really enjoy it i think you'll get a lot out of it and so if you want to check them out you can go to kindredapostle.com and use the promo code gospel 10 for 10 off your order with all that being said i hope you enjoyed the interview and here it is [Music] jay dyer is an author comedian and tv presenter known for his deep analysis of hollywood geopolitics and culture his graduate work focused on psychological warfare and film he is the author of two books esoteric hollywood one and two and the co-creator and co-host of the television show hollywood decoded he has been featured on numerous popular shows and podcasts and in debates with some of the world's top debaters and a fill-in host for some of the largest us radio shows jay thanks for being here today well thank you man um pleasure to be on your show i've seen some of the previous episodes i really enjoyed the interview with father hears he's a good friend of mine so i'm glad to be here awesome yeah it's a this has been an episode that has been highly requested uh by many people and so yeah when i saw that you saw that video and uh reached out and it worked out i was uh excited to talk about this topic today and so people who have clicked on this video in the future sometimes they know they're going to be talking about this idea of theosis but if they're not familiar with you and they just heard that bio they might not be expecting a conversation on this topic of like this intricate theological idea so i'd be curious just you know we went through that bio but how did you end up in this position as and correct me if you don't like this title but i'd say like an orthodox apologist is that fair it kind of happened uh accidentally i i was doing a lot of the hollywood analysis and symbolism stuff about four or five years ago and then some people said why don't you do a debate because we know you have an interest in philosophy and that you'd studied that and i've always had you know a lot of time that i put into church fathers in the bible and all that but uh it wasn't really what i was focusing on in terms of the public arena and then i did a couple debates with atheists adam koch and then jf and then maybe a couple more back in the day and then the debates kind of took off and people found those to be very helpful a lot of atheists said that they had converted to no longer being atheists or theism in some form as a result of those debates so that kind of kicked off just uh more theologically and philosophically oriented content over the last four or five years and so i didn't plan to be an orthodox apologist but uh it just kind of was a situation that snowballed and where people said well will you debate this guy this guy and so i don't say no so i just kind of kept doing it but um theology has was for many years my main focus that was what i was studying early on and for various personal reasons in my past i ended up just going to a secular university and not continuing the theology degree so i just did you know just straight straight up boring old philosophy so um but i never lost the interest in in theology and uh so it's just kind of something that happened on its own awesome that's really interesting and today it seems that those two things live more or less equally on your channel as far as things working through hollywood and orthodoxy maybe you know you could analyze it it might not be 50 50 but somewhere around there is that right yeah i mean i i just didn't want to stop doing what the other stuff that i was into because it really is just my interests right so i'm interested in movies i'm interested in the arts i'm interested in philosophy geopolitics um and and the bible so i just talk about really whatever i'm into so um yes the content is i would say pretty equally balanced between all that stuff nice and that's the the beauty of creating on youtube where you can kind of just make the stuff that you're interested in you know people people find it and so i'd be curious you hinted at it a bit but you know i i usually like to ask questions along these lines especially with my orthodox and catholic guests as many of them didn't grow up in those traditions did you didn't grow up orthodox did you nosray's baptist and uh nominally baptist i mean not super committed but you know we went every few months to church and the holidays and all that and then about my senior year of high school i got really interested in reading the bible and going to bible studies and so i went to bible college and then i did a uh what it doesn't exist anymore that was called bonson seminary after dr greg bonson um who was a big influence on my my theology and philosophy when i was a protestant got me into the transcendental argument and that that realm of apologetics and then kind of separate from all that i got into reading the church fathers that you see here and studying the history of the formation of the canon and that eventually took me into one in my 20s to the roman catholic world because i didn't at that time back in about 2003 there wasn't a whole lot of orthodox stuff online and so the whole debate between protestant and catholic was really all there was and so i went into catholicism for most of my 20s many many years read a lot of thomas aquinas and continued studying church history and the church fathers and then getting into vatican ii and the whole issue with that controversy in the roman catholic world and then that got me into the eastern fathers so i've had a couple conversions in my life out of protestantism and into catholicism and then ultimately then finally into orthodoxy i would say i was convinced of orthodoxy maybe seven years ago um i didn't live near an orthodox church for many years so it took a while to eventually come into the church but it was it was yeah a long sort of series of just studying church history the church fathers biblical theology for about 20 years to get to the point where i'm at wow i that's fantastic and thank you for sharing that i think that a lot of people who uh listen to my videos or watch the videos are gonna be able to relate to that wrestling i know uh the the largest section of my audience is catholic followed by orthodox them protestants um and i'd love to pull them on this but i think many of them are converts from protestantism and so i think they'll be able to definitely kind of relate to certain touch points in your story there as i mentioned at the beginning today i want to talk about this idea of theosis to me as an outsider this seems to be something distinctive in the east not that we don't have parallels uh in in western thought but it is certainly something that comes up and growing up as an evangelical i didn't and you can probably relate to this often i didn't hear the term theosis in church this wasn't in my religious vocabulary and i imagine there's lots of people out there that can can resonate with that idea so just to start out for those that maybe aren't very deep into this what does this term even mean theosis well i remember hearing that term when i was a protestant too and it kind of struck me as strange because i thought the orthodox in the east and some of the church fathers talk about this idea of deification or theosis and that sounds pagan and surely that can't be right but i remember even back when i was a calvinist i would i would the you know come across texts in the scriptures that seemed to suggest that but i didn't really know how to fit that into the um at that time when i had a sort of a calvinist systematic theology paradigm i didn't know where to place that so i just kind of put it on the back burner but uh yeah eventually you you do come into contact with different theologies different paradigms different systems and and at some point you encounter the early church fathers and the way they conceive of christology and how christology is directly connected to one's trinitarian theology and that ultimately will be the paradigm for how we get to that conclusion that theosis is the biblical doctrine but suffice to say that simply it's not the same thing as what a pagan might conceive of as apotheosis where man literally becomes the divine nature or becomes god himself but rather it's a notion of participation so for orthodox theology we will typically look to dionysius or the cappadocian church fathers or maximus to explain the metaphysics of how the participation is possible but really we're just going back to the bible when it talks about um that jesus came to bring us eternal life immortality the divine life in john 17 even says the glory that he shared with the father before the foundation of the world you know peter ii peter 1 talks about being becoming a partaker of the divine nature and so for us all of those are just examples of texts that tell us the the full picture of what it is to participate in divine life and what it is that christ was restoring in terms of what adam lost so adam in our in our belief uh was made in the image of god that includes the likeness of god image and likeness likeness being the divine life the holy spirit etc so when he fell he retains the image of god but he lost that life of the holy spirit that participatory life in theosis or divinity um and was reduced to a natural and mortal state and so as one of our great saints famously says the life of theosis and orthodoxy is the regaining of the holy spirit that's the in other words just a way to phrase the end goal is to attain not just the status that adam had that was mutable but to be raised to even a better status for real so really for us and i know that one way to maybe bridge this with the evangelical protestant world is i know that most evangelicals and protestants do believe in a doctrine of transfiguration right that there is in in their the way that they have this kind of staked out their justification and there's a sanctification and there's glorification well for us those are really words describing the same kind of outside of time event and so it's it's all kind of describing the same process you could say so for us uh glorification or transfiguration begins now in this life and i think that's maybe the big definitely the big difference between us and the roma catholics because they push that to the end times or excuse me to the afterlife with the beatific vision doctrine that they hold to but for us the the the process the direct perception of god theosis etc is all in the here and the now so that's what we mean by theosis is participation in divine life direct perception of god himself through the noose which is a faculty that we believe god gave us to know him directly and uh again all summed up by these phrases that you might hear orthodox people say like seeing the uncreated light or being deified or regaining the life of the holy spirit all of those are phrases that encapsulate what we mean by theosis thanks for that i think that's a helpful starting place for people and i could definitely relate to something you said very early on there that concept of at times we come across passages and we know this is biblical but we don't really know what to do with it so we kind of just put it on the back burner i think a lot of growing theologically is uh being able to incorporate the entirety of the scriptural witness on these things and so you mentioned uh the cappadocians here and you know it was an area that i wanted to bring up and you you hit it a little bit of what you're not saying but i remember the first time it might have been really my first time reading uh church father which in my sophomore year of a theology major is kind of late for that but you know just the tradition i grew up in that's kind of i think the first time i came across it but i was writing a paper on union with christ which might be a a good kind of parallel in the you know reformed or evangelical world and was doing some like survey at the beginning was reading on the incarnation and came across that famous line of you know uh jesus or that god became man that man might become god and being a bit scandalized by that almost like not not really having a conceptual space for what do you mean by man becomes god that that just kind of set off these immediate red flags um and as i've dug into it more and as you started to describe there is nuance there but maybe for anyone that might be uh in a boat similar to that this is the first time they're coming across of it you you mentioned earlier the difference between theosis and apotheosis i believe um but yeah so what what is he not saying there what what is athanasius getting at but not uh going over the edge with so when i when i mentioned apotheosis i was just kind of trying to come up with uh modern uh phrases that or english transliterations that might capture the idea of why we're not saying a pagan idea right um so if we became the essence of god or the nature of god if we took on or participated in god's very nature itself then we would of course become new persons in in god in the trinity so you would have not just a trinity but you would have as many people as uh right new hypostases in the trinity so to speak but so we're not saying that and that and athanasius of course is not saying that and maybe this is the point to bring in that really important paradigmatic level distinction that orthodoxy stresses which is the essence energy distinction and this is the idea that um it's we would say it's in the old testament it's in the writings of paul very clearly clearly it's in many of the church fathers and specifically the cappadocians who are the first to really go in depth into this distinction although it is present and athanasius is anti-trinitarian treatises as well as st cyril of alexandria's christological treatises and this is to say that for example when moses went up on the mountain and he saw god face to face there's an apparent contradiction i don't believe in contradictions in the bible but there's an apparent contradiction between the statement or the phrase that no man can see god and live and yet we have many instances of the old testament saints seeing not another helpful uh parallel to this is the old testament theophanies which orthodox believe is of course the second person of god had the logos in his pre-incarnate theophanic manifestation state but now if we know god is simple and god is not compound that he's not acted upon all these different meanings for the word god being simple how is it possible for the second person that god had to manifest prior to his incarnation in the old testament now we don't know all the mechanics of that but one helpful tool that we think is a metaphysically true thing from the bible is the essence inner distinction there's a distinction between what a thing is and what a thing does and so we believe quite clearly that it's a real distinction it's not just conceptual it's not just a linguistic distinction it is conceptual and linguistic but it's also a real distinction and there's many reasons why we think that but when we see moses going up on the mountain we would say well he's interacting with and knowing and seeing the second person of godhead first and foremost because even jesus says to the pharisees and that every very scandalous passage in john 5 that no man can see the father but moses saw god and so jesus is implying to the pharisees that moses talked to him to jesus you see and that's partly why they're so mad at him and they want to stone him and why jesus keeps saying in the gospel of john but i am before i read was i am i i am the i am of exodus 3 right all of which are very uh powerful statements of christ's divinity but there are also statements that suggest that he was the angel right of the lord in many of those old testament passages like the theophanies that appeared to abraham and to hagar and genesis 16 and to joshua and joshua 5 and judges 13 the parents of manoa and then all the way up into even historical books with the word or the voice that appears and speaks uh to elijah uh and then all the way up into ezekiel 1 ezekiel 10. so these appearances these manifestations can't be the essence of god uh nobody would believe or say that the essence of god can manifest in time and space but we do know that a divine person can manifest right now we believe that the divine persons possess the divine nature but it's not the essence of god proper that's manifesting it's the second person that god had and he manifests via his energies or operations that's our view and that's how we reconcile all those texts and we believe that in many cases in the new testament and paul's epistles to the philippians against chapter two uh in first corinthians 12 paul talks about the inner gaia of the spirit the operations of the spirit he talks about christ's power who worketh in me might have mightily i this which sometimes he uses the word dunamis and sometimes it's the word energy but it's the same capturing the same idea that it's the participatory power of god that works in me is the power of the holy spirit at work in me which is fully divine but it's not identical to the essence of god uh and so in that way we have this this way to have a real distinction without division or composition and that allows for again the theophanies it's partly how we do our trinitarian theology where we have um the fullness of the divine nature present in each person of the trinity without dividing or composing it in the same way god is fully present in every one of his energies or operations or attributes without it compromising his unity or his simplicity so it's a both and rather than an either or and this will be a feature that's very important in orthodox theology whether it's trinitarian theology or christology the um the both end and the reality of distinctions without composition tension or division so that for us is kind of our paramedic presuppositions and starting points for how we do this theology and then beyond the theophanies beyond the fact that it appears that the the moses when interacting directly with the the second person of the godhead and the the energies of the powers of god and not the essence of god is also manifest in the fact that god says to moses i will show you my goodness right but you can't see me directly or else it would kill you so we have one attribute or or energy or operation manifesting and not the wholeness of god right and that is still to not grant that god has parts right we're not saying that god has parts because he can manifest one of his uh operations or energies or it can manifest in one specific theophany right any more than the theophanies mean that god has parts right he's not bound by or or um constricted by the the limitations and laws of creation because he himself imposed those laws and limitations in the created order so in that regard uh in when we get to the new testament and we see the many places where for example in matthew 17 jesus is transfigured and the divine light radiates from him this becomes a kind of a historic text between east and west uh debating like what exactly is that light that's manifested now we know that pulse says to timothy in verse timothy 6 that god dwells in unapproachable light right and immor and god alone possesses immortality god alone possesses this this glory right that jesus identifies in john 17 as what he possessed with the father before the foundation of the world and nobody i know believes that that's created uh and so for us it's the uncreated light right the uncreated light of matthew 17 is the same as the glory of john 17 and it's the same as the um the last chapter to uh for paul to timothy for 76 where he talks about god possessing these powers and these operations and these energies so um that in in short is where we're getting these ideas and and you can look at other passages like where isaiah talks about the the spirit of fear the spirit of understanding the spirit of wisdom the spirit of knowledge resting upon the messiah i think it's 9 or 11 of isaiah and that's a famous messianic passage about these the seven spirits of god right and then when you look in the apocalypse you have mention of the seven spirits of god well what is that well we know that the holy spirit is a single person he doesn't have there's not seven holy spirits right but those are another example that for example saint gregory palomas will argue in his debate with the barley might he'll bring up these passages and say what do you think these seven spirits of god are if they're not energies or operations that are obviously not creatures right i mean the wisdom of god the spirit of god the knowledge of god is not created but they're also not identical to the divine essence because if they were then we would have what's known as the modal collapse problem and this is a problem for any strict proponent of divine simplicity that typically they'll do their doctrine of what god's essence is kind of apart from trinitarian theology or apart from biblical revelational theology or philosophy and come up with these sort of presuppositions of what simplicity must mean has to mean and for example it can't have any real distinctions in it well for us that would suggest modalism and in fact you see those very arguments being made by eunomius and that's why the cappadocians become so important for us is that cap the cappadocians really take younomius to task both in saint gregory nissa's against eunomius and saint basil's very shorter much more concise against the numerous book because basil gregory nissa's is like 800 pages of basil's is like 150 200. but they take them to task for the mistaken ideas of of what god simplicity is and not allowing for this reality between both person and nature which allows us to have a real trinity and the distinction between uh nature and the operation of nature or the essence energy sanctions so for us those are all really crucial we think they're grounded in the old and the new testament and paul and really the church fathers are just kind of following in the biblical tradition they're not doing anything new the only thing that's new you could say in a sense is that what you get with cappadocians and especially up into maximus and the christological debates which will rely heavily on the essence of distinction for us is the metaphysics right so the bible's not a metaphysical textbook it does talk about different metaphysical ideas and philosophical ideas in certain places um you know paul interacts in acts 17 with the philosophers on mars hill but really the bible isn't telling the mechanics of how and when you get to the 5th 6th 7th century councils and debates they're doing a lot more metaphysical explanations of how how is christ humanity participating in his divine energy how are we participating in christ's uncreated energy how is the eucharist transformed into the uncreated energy well it's it's the body blood soul and uncreated power uh we would say following saint cyril so the they they're not doing unbiblical stuff they're just trying to explain the metaphysics of it and that's where i think some people get tripped up as they think that well you guys are doing a bunch of philosophy and you know uh platonism or something like that but really the the the irony of that is that the essence interdistinction if you read somebody like dr david bradshaw's excellent book aerosol east and west it's actually being used by the church fathers to refute platonism right because eunomius um nestorius aries even the monophysites they actually have a doctrine of simplicity in the assumptions of simplicity that are causing so many of the problems in their trinitarian and christological views and that's why we up when you get up into the period of byzantium definitively reject all forms of platonism so you get the rejection by the sonatakon and the seventh council of any kind of platonic philosophy any kind of academy uh and and i'm just saying that because a lot of times people say well you're what you're talking about here is just platonism but actually it's a direct reputation of the assumptions of plagiarism i had no idea about the um like the direct rejection of platonism uh and byzantium that's really interesting i appreciate you bringing that up i certainly learned if you read this excellent book by father john mayandorff he wrote a book called byzantine theology someone actually just said that to me in the mail oh cool yeah he talks about uh there's multiple places especially i think it's the chapter on monks and humanists where he goes into the history of how at the seventh council where the orthodox church was really defining uh its doctrine of icons um the the icono uh class were platonous they were actually heavily influenced by platonic philosophy and so they were on a crusade against icons because of platonic assumptions and so when the seventh council confirmed the belief in icons they wrote up this document called what's called the sonatakon of orthodoxy and in the orthodox church it's red maybe not in every single parish but at least in the churches where the bishops are present it's red in the bit most of the bishops will read it if they're traditional at least some of the liberal ones don't read it but um it actually lists a lot of these condemnations of the plaintiffs of platonism of john italos who was a famous byzantine guy who wanted to resurrect platonism and myendorf is correct to say that really the byzantine condemnations of uh in the sonatakon represent the victory of hebrew theology over hellenism and i think he's correct that's really interesting because i think as you know in the tradition i grew up in which was not very historical at all there's this common i think misconception of you know as we go through church history it just becomes this kind of metaphysical philosophical thing that goes on and i think you described well that what they're seeking to do they're not trying to do something new but they're trying to you know give greater clarity to these orthodox doctrines here like we all believe yeah this thing about christ but how can we say that how like how can we define that often in times in light of heresies that are propping up that they need to kind of defend against and i think it's really interesting how the essence energy's distinction has come up here because i had actually well in real time people will be watching this later but tomorrow i have a video premiering with dr david bradshaw and i went into that just not very familiar i knew it was something i i should form an opinion on i knew it was something that divided the east and the west but it's not something that really has interfaced in my theological development much and so i just went into it and you know i had done a little reading on it but i was fascinated by all the connections he made one of them glorification which you kind of brought up here a bit but i guess to go all the way back so the reason that theosis is possible without just becoming god is this idea that there is this meaningful distinction between the essence and energies of god without that it would be saying perhaps you're either becoming god or i think that the protestant move um is often placing that and there's a dispute between calvin and osander that shows up in the institutes about between being united to christ via his divinity and via his humanity calvin preferring his humanity so i guess that's the direction you have on the protestant side of saying hey this idea of being united to christ it's through the incarnation through his humanity which you're not denying but there's something more there i'm not sure that's the greatest summary is there anything you want to speak into there that is precisely in the direction that the fathers take this dispute so for example for us the the trinity for the most part is pretty much solidified by constantinople one so after the cappadocians there's not a whole lot of trinitarian debates until you get to the middle ages for the east when uh the black grenade council is the palamite councils are called in contrast to the roman catholic councils of lions in 1274 in florence so for us the the trinity itself is really not debated a whole lot because the debate shifts immediately to christology and so i bring this up because at ephesus which immediately follows um cause of the number one the rejection of nestorianism it relates to uh christology right in terms of the the eucharist and this is a very important argument that saint cyril will use against nestorius which is to say nestorius we all believe that we're offering the unbloody sacrifice in the liturgy and if you agree with us in the story that we're doing that then it can't be the body and blood of just some guy right it can't just be because if you don't notice i mean i'm sure you know but nestorius thought that what happened in the incarnation was that there was just this guy jesus of nazareth who was kind of in a special unique way joined to the logos the second person of the godhead so he had a dual subject christology and that's really what cyril is rejecting is that we can't have this dual subject we have to have a single subject in christ namely the second person of the godhead so his his personhood is divine and his human hood is is fully human but it's not a human person again recalling the importance for the nature person distinction for us so this is the whole reason why uh cyril stresses theotokos that mary's the mother of god by which she means that the person that she gave birth to the person that came forth from her is divine because that person is the second person of the godhead and so there's no human personhood there's no created hypostasis in christ's proper uh his he is fully human he's fully divine but the personhood itself is the second person god had and can only be the logos and thus the question arises well then what happens to the humanity that he assumes and by extension what happens in the eucharistic offering when we partake of that eucharist and cyril's answer becomes the definitive paradigmatic answer for the rest of the church from this point on which is that jesus is communicating to his human nature the logos is communicating to his human nature all of the powers of his immortal glory and divinity right not the essence of god but the energies that he possesses as god he's communicating to and deifying his humanity and the deification of that humanity becomes through the uncreated energies the means by which we in the eucharist participate in christ humanity so you're absolutely right that if we did want to find the bridge we could look at how we do participate uh in the divinity of christ or excuse me in the humanity of christ but by participating in the humanity of christ what we are partaking of is a deified flesh a deified humanity and so deification becomes just as important for christology and what jesus is doing to his human nature to raise it above the power of death and even the blameless passions saint cyril says in the two letters to six senses he says that we are partaking of that same resurrection power and so that is the meaning by of of christ or when paul talks about the power of the resurrected christ at work in him that energy uh we're saying that's all the same thing so the model of tr of of incarnation becomes the paradigmatic model for the eucharist right so the same way that christ deifies his humanity that's that identical same deified flesh that we are partaking of in the eucharist and thereby you know cyril believes in the if you read the anathemas of ephesus that he's refuted an astorias he says that you you've been refuted here and cyril actually makes this argument uh by appealing to the essence in our distinction that there's a distinction between not between what we participate in god's actions towards us and what he is in himself his very inner essence and being which we cannot know or participate in so when you get that argument at ephesus this condition is then the eucharistic view that we have and it conditions the view of the church so we believe that the church as a body is also the very body of the god man so it becomes a theandric institution it's not a social institution it's not a gathering of just random believers it's not a it's not the invisible church doctrine of calvin it's a visible body that really possesses in a visible sense all the powers and means that jesus himself had walking around in a visible physical body and hence for us we would read rather than paul's epistles you know like in the calvinist way like well he's really writing to the invisible number of the elect even though it's written to a visible church we would say that when paul is writing to the corinthians and saying you are god's hands feet etc eyes that he's literally saying the visible collection of baptized people there is who he's talking about not the invisible church so that for us we don't make that we would say that's an historian view of ecclesiology and then um by extension 2 this relates to our icon doctrine because the icons are have the ability to image the hypostasis and the nature assumed by the hypostasis just as words can pick out the words are kind of iconographic and that's why we call icon painters writers right because they're doing no they're not doing anything different than a person who writes right but they're just doing it with a picture rather than uh than a word so for us the essence center distinction literally explains everything right and and the the trinitarian distinctions that we have that you mentioned that were kind of the metaphysical house of this is of how this is possible nature person will energy in the trinity will directly explain and determine nature person will and energy in terms of christology which explains how we view nature person will and energy in anthropology and nature person will energy in terms of the church in terms of the eucharist and even in terms of the eschaton that's really interesting and something i find not to use the word interesting again but interesting here is that you know it i feel like it's protestants that are known for systematic theology i could look on my shelf and i've got several but the inner coherence uh is something that i really appreciate in orthodoxy and generally that we see in the fathers in general of like hey we want to tie everything back to these principles and they're going to inform other things it really seems to be systematic in the proper use of that word even though that's and maybe i'm wrong here but it's not a word i often see being associated with orthodoxy that's a great question in point i mean when we get to the early phases of the patriotistic period um the closest thing in the first several centuries to a systematic theology would be like uh saint irenaeus is against heresies even though it's not really a systematic theology it's the first kind of systematic presentation of the dogmas and why we don't believe gnosticism and what we do think exposition of the creed this kind of stuff then maybe the next closest thing would be the really excellent um catechetical lectures of saint cyril of jerusalem so even though they're catechetical lectures they actually do follow the creed right so he goes through each each line of the creed and gives a catechetical exegesis and by the way in all of these famous fathers you will consistently find the essence energy distinction and you know all of the points that we believe still we don't think we're out of accord at all with any of those church fathers doesn't mean we accept every opinion of every individual church father nobody does there's nobody who believes that you know any specific church father got everything right we don't think that but on the whole when they're you know teaching the basics of the creed and this kind of stuff we don't think that they aired um mostly for the most part 99 of the time they don't make mistakes but um it's not until we get up until about uh i would say really the first systematic theology of saint john damascus is on the orthodox faith and uh that shows us that even though it's not typical for orthodox theology to to do that there's nothing wrong with it and so there are some byzantine theologians who were very academic and scholarly who kind of did systematic presentation st fodius was a kind of the philosopher academic of the whole byzantine empire of his day um and and there is a very systematic kind of presentation even in st gregory palomas the great mystic um and even sending the new theologian his writings are kind of a systematic presentation but yeah i would say that uh it's not totally unheard of but even still today i think if you look at saint john damascus is on the orthodox faith what you'll notice is that he begins the work with the trinity the very first paragraph is that we all of our theology starts with the trinity we don't start with you know if you read uh thomas's summa country denti lace you've got 300 pages of volume one that's nothing about the trinity it's just all about what the essence of god is the the one the the first cause the unmoved mover the supreme essence of one etc so it's a very different approach and even in thomas's book de veritate he mentions his dis difference with uh st john damascus and he takes issue with the essence energy distinction and says i can't accept this this is a an area that we have to part ways on and he thinks that john damascus was wrong on that point so that to me is an admission that we know john damascus is teaching he has his energy station because aquinas is rejecting the arguments that he makes for it so um that being the case i would say that we have a different ordo theology a different order of theology so and meindorf makes that point in the byzantine theology book but uh the order of theology for us as we said we'll begin with trinity and then you'll notice what john damascus does is that he takes all these principles of nature person will and energy in view of his trinitarian theology and then by book three it's four books book one is trinity and then by book three is where he really gets into christology he will apply all those same arguments and principles of nature personal will and energy and the trinity to christology because obviously it's going to be reflexive because it's the second person of the godhead who's becoming incarnate entering into the mode of being incarnate right so obviously there's going to be a direct reflexivity there and so he will he will argue and then i actually said gregory palmer later argues against i can diagnose it against the barley mites that really if you wanted to understand the essence energy distinction the best approach or way is in christology because it's really seen much more clearly in christology and the relationship between christ and his human nature than it is in terms of just sitting back and trying to understand how the trinity relates to creation now there's nothing wrong with sitting back and trying to consider how the trinity relates to creation but even the way that the trinity relates to creation is only known by us by virtue of the incarnation and this is because for orthodox theology the created world is actually created with the presupposition of incarnation and this is a difference that we have with kind of mystic natural theology we don't think that the incarnation was like a plan b but rather as paul says the whole created order was made through the logos and so it's going to bear the stamp of the logos and in fact the saint maximus argues it's going to bear the stamp of the trinity itself and this is why saint gregory palomas and st maximus argue that we will see little trinities or trinity everywhere in creation including man himself as a little trinity gregory says in the 150 chapters because the very creation of the world is triatic and it bears that stamp and so that is an important point of distinction between where actually we might find more ground with calvinists or protestants because some protestants because we don't accept the thomistic natural theology doctrine which doesn't see creation as directly being a revelation of the logos that's really interesting and i think one insightful thing that you brought up there is the amount we can learn about someone's theological presuppositions and this isn't foolproof but that we can learn from someone's theological presuppositions from just the way that the table of contents of their theological works for instance uh wayne grudem who's like famous for his systematic theology that's been used in you know evangelical seminaries for quite a while now i think he just came out with a second edition actually the first thing he talks about and i'd say typical maybe not uh historically typical but an evangelical fashion is it's bibliology that is you know chapter one of greeting systematic theology and then you know looking at aquinas how he sets it up his with uh natural theology the essence of god then john of damascus starting with the trinity there's there's a lot to be learned there that i think people might overlook when they are comparing texts just look at how they're laid out again not foolproof some people might just lay their work out poorly but i think good theologians are making a point in what they're doing there yeah i would agree that so the protestants are correct in uh in my my view well maybe not wayne green per se but um i would give uh uh credit to calvin and to a lot of the the calvinists that i was studied under like bonson and van till and these guys they at least understood that um you couldn't really make sense of the created order apart from the trinity if the trinity is who creates the created order right so it's odd to think that um we're going to do a bunch of what john paul the second calls in fidesz at ratio autonomous reasoning and then after we do a bunch of autonomous reasoning that will then stack on top of that the supernatural doctrines of trinity incarnation virgin birth i mean just take somebody like saint maximus who's very important to both the east and the west you know maximus says the created order is one of the logos embodiments and he says that it's almost like the whole created order is a garment that is worn by the logos now he's not identifying the incarnation with jesus presence or the logos presence in all creation in the same way there's a different way in which he's present in his humanity than he is in all of creation but he does draw this parallel to talk about the three embodiments of the logos and from maximus's metaphysic and epistemology what that means is that fundamentally the created order cannot be understood apart from the logos it's if you want to know the meaning of the created order is jesus and that's a really radical statement in terms of theology especially in contrast to um to aquinas and what that shows is that from the outset uh if we were just looking at somebody like say maximus i mean that's that's so different from aquinas i mean it's just really night and day from aquinas and that's a better bridge i saw more commonality when i was a calvinist and a van tillian with saint maximus than i did with aquinas and i was really interested in both right i was really interested in in studying aquinas for many years and trying to understand that system as best i could and and then also getting into maximus and just realizing that there really is a difference of approach here because the the the the order of theology that we have might in this regard not at every point but in this regard be closer to the way that a bonson or evantillian type of person would understand revelation so even bonson and bentil for example believe in natural revelation uh now we don't believe in total depravity but um the the doctrine of natural revelation that they have is closer to what you get and for example uh father demetrius daniloy the orthodox famous orthodox theologian of the 20th century who in the very beginning of his orthodox dogmatics says that we can't accept domestic natural theology he says if you want a better phraseology it would be natural revelation because you know maximus doesn't teach doesn't do natural theology uh and therefore even though so so there is some common ground there but where we disagree in terms of with the protestant over the order of theology or ordo theologia where we both so in other words rome is over here saying we want to we're going to start with natural theology in the order of how we do theology protestants and orthodox are agreed that we've got to start with revelation that's what that's what the way i phrase it um and then at least calvinist unless you're like rc sprole right who believes in natural theology but if you're a bonsinian ventilian uh calvinist you would agree with the orthodox person that we want to start our ordo theologia with revelation the only now where we get into differences is that we don't want to start our revelational ordo theology with sateriology we start with trinity and christology and for us trinity and christology will determine how we use the teriology whereas for typical westminster confession type it's the sateriology will come first and then down the road we'll do christology or trinitarian theology however we want to do that later yeah i think that's insightful and i think there there's maybe a bit of a gap there between calvin and his later heirs because in fairness to calvin you know book two you've got uh got the knowledge of god as uh trinity and the book three you've got as like his work and salvation but i think that does segue well to this idea of salvation and i think it was it was really helpful to compare eastern and western approaches there i it's not necessarily something i anticipated for this but i think it's going to be really insightful for people and helpful there is some debate too i reckon i was just trying to simplify i know that there's actually debate over calvin so in terms of uh reformed epistemology there will be some people who will claim calvin as a proponent of a kind of natural theology so for example if you read arvind vos he has a book kind of trying to show common ground between calvin and aquinas and then you've got other people maybe john frame or bonson or van till who will argue that that's not the case that really calvin is not um a proponent of natural theology uh so i i'm just that's an inter-reformed debate which i i i grant your point i was just trying to kind of simplify yeah no and i wasn't even trying to uh refute that i was just yeah on natural theology it's complicated with his uh talk of the census divinitatis and how that compares to aquinas conversation for another day um but yeah i think there is a general trend of uh almost like a protestant scholasticism coming out of calvinism later that uh calvin might not have left but again a conversation for another day but as far as um i do want to get back to this idea of theosis a bit here because and i think this is actually going to play in a bit as far as the differences between maybe a protestant approach and an orthodox approach uh maybe around the idea of imputation we'll see where this goes but i i think as a protestant looking on to orthodox dialogue around theosis it might seem and maybe this even would be uh something maybe like less catechized orthodox might think or maybe it's accurate but is i want to talk theosis as kind of process destination how does that work so is this like hey theosis is a thing for the monks on athos but the rest of us we can't hope for what i heard you saying earlier is it sounded more like theosis is it's what it puts in context what protestants would refer to as like the ordo salutus like justification sanctification um but how could you flesh that out a bit so is it just for the spiritual elite or is this really the underpinning of any meaningful talk of salvation um it's the underpinning of any meaningful talk now there have been periods in church history where it did turn into a thing that was seen as only a bunch of kind of spiritual elites on mount athos and in fact st simeon the famous uh who's known as the new theologian he was actually kicked out of his monastery for pointing out that this was for every christian right uh he he was dealing with a kind of um resurgence of what in his day was called a a new form of misogynism which was an early church kind of weird charismatic heresy that thought that only a select special elite could actually physically see god um and that was eventually rejected in the early church as heretical and then it kind of popped up again um in his day in his monastic circles and and he was a champion for pointing out that you know the purpose of the uh the initiation rituals of christianity baptism and chrismation or holy unction are really intended to give everybody access to the same power that's the whole purpose of it it would really undercut the purpose of the sacraments if that wasn't the case i mean and if we think about the way john for our exegesis for example of john's epistles when he says you have an unction from the holy one and there thereby you know all things now he doesn't literally mean your omniscient but he's saying that you as an individual um or orthodox christian have access to the exact same power and and process so to speak as the monk on alphas um the only difference is just that they have taken a certain approach to life and vowels that will allow them right to be more you know they're trying to model themselves on john the baptist right every ascetic is kind of modeling themselves on john the baptist so but but in terms of what is the potentiality there's no difference right and this is something that's again often misunderstood um so and one real quick too this is also a very important distinction between roman catholic monasticism and orthodox which is that in the roman catholic tradition you will find especially in the second millennium a lot of different manifestations of mystical experiences and union with god and and dark night of the soul and uh you know these very sort of even quasi-sexual outlandish approaches with somebody like uh saint catherine or or uh uh teresa avila uh it gets very bizarre in a lot of the counts accounts of the mystical experiences and you don't find a stigmata as another example you don't find that in the orthodox tradition of union with christ because we believe pretty strongly that the palamite hesacast union is the same for all the saints so we don't think that there's any variation in like one saint will have the vision i'm not saying that has the same vision but i'm saying that the process of deification we believe is the same whether it's paul or whether it's moses or whether it's palamos or whether it's gregory nazianzus or whether it's somebody today it's the exact same process and experience and so there's none of the wild stories so to speak that you do find in a lot of the especially the roman catholic circles of nuns um uh and i'm not trying to be unfair i just think that that's that that's how they present their mystical experiences uh most famous in the last century faustina kowalska who's a famous roman catholic saint i mean she's most well known for these really wild stories of you know crazy things happening but so you don't find that orthodoxy because we think that the experience of union with god is identical across all the saints across time and so there if that's the case we would expect the same accounts and the same experiences and this is something that in orthodoxy is supposed to be again literally available to everyone right and this is something that again we would if you read saint uh similar theologian it would sound like a protestant at times because he's stressing that the individual christian has direct access to knowledge of god and you might think that that's impossible in a church with priests and hierarchy but orthodoxy has never seen a an either or between having an authoritative hierarchy and the individual laity and people having a direct experience of god we think those things work together and that's something that i found very unique because when i was between protestant and catholic i would keep going back and forth between well you know i do find evidence in the bible that like i as an individual believer should have direct access to this power to this experience of god and in the roman catholic system even though there's kind of verbal credence given to that there's a very kind of a very strict kind of strata of what it is to be the body of christ even so much that even so that in the in the early middle ages they developed a novel distinction between the um the juridical body and the sacramental body and they would kind of place it on a weird tear you can read uh the two bodies of the king and you can read um church pepsi schism by charade where he where he traces this out but the juridical body of like the cardinals and the prelates is like definitely on a higher metaphysical status than the the body of the laity and the mystical uh the mis the mystical body so to speak and they literally flesh this out as a scholastic distinction in the early middle ages which is just completely foreign to orthodoxy so for us there's no difference in terms of what you have access to as a monastic or as a laity that's really interesting and i i definitely can attest to you know understanding that attention of as a protestant looking at uh catholicism like there's there's certain nice things about uh institutions and you know they're able to do certain nice things in that stratification but it can seem very foreign and then it's interesting how you've kind of found something that plays to both of those ideas in orthodoxy not saying that um that's all there was to it that you know it was this nice middle ground ergo become orthodox but it is interesting that that kind of situates itself there as we begin to wrap up i'd like to ask you know there's if well first of all thanks to everyone that's with us this far you have you know there's been a lot to think about maybe people had to pause as they go to think through some of these concepts it's a lot and so i appreciate everyone who's been keeping up at this point i would like to ask and maybe this is uh the inner protestant in me that you know grew up on enough messages that ended in application to ask a question like this but you know what what are the the practical outpourings of this doctrine i think what we believe about salvation is going to determine a lot about our christian life and a common um kind of critique of protestantism is if you have this kind of imputed righteousness or this cheap grace it's going to turn into a certain way of living the christian life if you know it's this once saved always saved we don't have to get into all of whether those are caricatures or not but the the main idea of you know your soteriology is going to determine how you live out the christian faith you already mentioned that there's a bit of an overlap here with the sacraments how that kind of democratizes if you will this idea that you know hey we're all receiving this same uh deification theosis but what how does this shape the orthodox life of faith it's definitely a much more serious calling and i don't mean that against the individual protestants as if they're not all serious i mean i know when i was a protestant i was very serious about it but what i'm getting at is that the um the expectations are a lot more um serious that's the best way i could put it for example if a person becomes orthodox catechesis is usually one to three years if you want to join a protestant church you could join that day right um typically uh and and even a little even more so than roman catholic rcia like that's usually three to six months and then you can be received into the roman cali church and there's always exceptions i mean the bishops and the priests can make you know decisions on the basis of economy and make exceptions but the first thing i would say is that it's um it's a more serious calling number one because we even with the problems of liberalism in the orthodox world as well as in the roman catholic process where liberalism is a problem across any group or denomination or or church or whatever even with the problems of liberalism there's still a pretty serious application of coming to the eucharist so for example in the orthodox church it's still pretty normative that you're going to go to confession before receiving the eucharist and that's so that we prepare ourselves to be in a the proper state because we take very serious you know paul's statement in corinthians that if you don't if you eat and drink unworthily you can bring about death and damnation right so we take the covenant curses so to speak of the eucharistic meal very serious even in the liberal versions of orthodoxy and so that's uh one element that comes to mind just off the top of my head as to um what is different in terms of the lifestyle um the the daily prayer rule and and keeping to a regimen of daily prayer is a lot more serious and a lot is stressed a lot more in orthodoxy um things like prayer excuse me not just prayer but things like fasting and alms is stressed a lot more uh even than in the roman catholic world when i was in the roman catholic world that might be mentioned here and there but i've definitely noticed that the the emphasis on um giving to the poor is is a lot heavier in in the orthodox world which is a good thing actually that's a really good thing and um i i would uh i would also say um viewing marriage as a sacrament is a lot it it will turn marriage into an ascetic task where you're really having to learn your own sins uh to fix your own character and so those are just some examples that you know is me somebody being married and and recently married and then kind of experiencing this stuff those things come to mind which is very different when i was i mean i wasn't married as a protestant but you know i was a single guy and i was dating girls as a protestant and so forth so these are just ideas that come to mind as to how it's different um and then i really do think that you will you'll tend to notice a much more heightened awareness of spiritual warfare which is not to say that nobody in the present world believes in spiritual warfare i know that they do but when i was a calvinist it wasn't something i thought about a whole lot but you will tend to notice those kinds of things in the realm of orthodoxy for sure those are just some ones that come to mind well thank you for that i always think it's interesting to see how different things end up connecting to one another and i think theology just gets a lot more understandable when people can make connections rather than feel like there's all these things existing in silos and that goes back to the kind of conversation we had about the systematic or integrated nature of theology but seeing how this plays out in life i think is also going to be helpful for people well jay thank you so much for coming on today i thank you for your time this has been really enjoyable to get to explore this concept of theosis i'd like to give you the last word and if you wouldn't mind you've mentioned lots of resources but if there's anywhere you'd point people to if they want to learn more about this if you could let them know that then also i'll leave links in the description but if you want to let people know where they can find you and your work that would be great yeah i mean you can go to my website jsonalisos.com you can find me on youtube jay dyer and then the other social medias twitter and instagram and all that as well um just a couple decent books is most the time a pretty good introduction is a book by vladimir losky which is called mystical theology of eastern church that's a really good introduction if you're more philosophically minded um as you mentioned with dr bradshaw he has a really good book called aristotle east and west that's it's not just about aerosol it's actually the way the aristotelian categories are conceived of for 2000 years between the east and the west of christianity so it's a very important book um also lasky has a good book called image and likeness of god that i recommend that kind of describes our christology and anthropology um if you want to know more about deification proper there's a good book by uh orthodox professor uh giorgios it's called deification of man sanger of palomas in the orthodox tradition it's a really good short read um highly recommend that and then as an overview as i said earlier the visiting theology of father meindorf is good and then if you want to go into the master himself you can get the triads of saint gregory palamos and then an orthodox study bible too the the notes are really good in the orthodox study bible for those who are interested in our exegesis of the text awesome thank you so much i love the number of sticky notes in there as well it looks like quite the system you've got going i don't actually read the books though that's the joke i just put the sticky notes in there it looks it looks like i read it but well it's kind of like the obligation of having the antenacean fathers and somewhere in the background of any like good theology channel that my channel is lacking because of that yep well you have to get a copy in just to go or just print out like a do like a screen print of just a 2d just the covers and but just pin it up on the wall the screen there's an idea there you know i i think it would give me at least 10 percent more credibility talking on any given subject i don't have to read them but uh but anyway this has been a lot of fun thank you and thanks to everyone watching i don't take your time lightly i really appreciate that i hope you enjoyed the video and as i always do say until next time be on the lookout for more videos and as always go out and love god and love others because truly above all else that will change the world [Music] you

Channel: Gospel Simplicity

Views: 54,853

Keywords: becoming god, theosis, jay dyer, austin suggs, gospel simplicity, east vs west, orthodox vs catholic, orthodox vs protestant, union with christ, orthodox theology, understanding theosis, theosis vs union with christ, introduction to orthodoxy, introduction to theosis, essence energies, energies of god, participating in the divine nature, theosis in scripture, history of theosis, is theosis biblical, is theosis historical, catholic theosis

Id: dAshU1PrD9A

Length: 66min 54sec (4014 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021