Becoming Truly Human with Nathan Jacobs

[Applause] and welcome to another podcast it's called Hank unplugged and if you've never seen the podcast before you can see all kinds of editions of the podcast at equip dot org you can also see other podcasts wherever your favorite podcasts are consumed I want to do just a little bit of housekeeping before we get into this particular podcast and then it's simply to say that if you enjoyed the podcast go to iTunes make sure to leave of 5 star rating that simple gesture will keep us bringing you this podcast as well as thousands of others around the globe hank unplugged the podcast which i've added to the broadcast that i've done for over 30 years and it is a podcast that's making a difference for time and for eternity today's podcast with nathan jacobs he is the film director of an incredible new film it's called becoming truly human it's actually a documentary that looks at the rise of the nuns those with no religious affiliation and that's now 25% of the u.s. population this film becoming truly human is a cinematic portrait of nuns it also however weaves through the production the story of nathan who not only goes from being a nun one with no religious affiliation but a person that goes from unbelief to belief and then to the eastern faith of Eastern Orthodoxy Nathan Jacobs is not only a director he's an artist he's a professor and someone that I've gotten to know as a dear friend as well I am absolutely fascinated by some of the common that we have will talk about all that and more on this edition of Henk unplugged Nathan it's good to have you back with us thanks Hank it's good to hear your voice great to be with you it was fun having you on the broadcast recently and talking about this film becoming truly human metallic self ought to be intriguing for everyone because this title actually comes or is associated closely with Ignatius of Antioch this is a Syrian Christian one of the first Christians and and remember when we talked about Antioch we're talking about the First Christian Church which was founded in Antioch and and this is the place where well where Christians were first called Christians so becoming truly human talks about or at least implies his martyrdom mmm-hmm yeah that's right so one of the things that is so remarkable about st. Ignatius is letter one of his letters when he's on the road to his martyrdom is he he offers this very counterintuitive statement where he says you know suffer me brother and not to die but let me live and everything that he says when he's talking about you know them them permitting him to live and not die is actually the inverse of what every one of us would expect you know when we typically talk about don't let me die let me live we would think were actually pleading for an opportunity to save our own lives physically speaking and yet for Ignatius is quite clear that everything about that is reversed he takes so seriously the words of Christ that the gospel is is captured in Christ's statement that whoever wants to save their life must lose it and anyone who loses their life for his sake and the sake of the gospel we'll find it and and that's exactly what say Ignatius is pointing out he's on his way to be martyred and what he wants from his readers is for them to permit him to die physically so that he can live spiritually so that he might attain to the resurrection from the dead truly the sound in the likeness of Christ having been conformed to his crucifixion and through that participating in the immortal life of God putting off corruption for in corruption and therefore becoming truly human becoming what humanity was always made to be but we never ultimately became and in fact no person ever saw a truly human being a truly a fully human person until the resurrected Jesus Christ when we really saw what it meant for humanity to participate in the life of God until then it had never been seen but in Christ we see it and that's what Ignatius understands so clearly is that that's what he strives after it to be conformed to Christ and death so he might also attain to his resurrection it kind of interesting when you talk about Ignatius of Antioch a lot of people wouldn't be able to put Ignatius in the right century but this is a person that lived in close proximity to the death of Christ in other words he was just born a few years after the death of Christ and he was born at a time where there was a brand new creed that had been formulated it was codified later on by the Apostle Paul when he says what I received I passed on to you as of first importance that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures that he was buried and that he was raised and that he appeared he appeared first to Peter and then to the twelve and then five hundred witnesses and then later to James all the Apostles and then through the Apostle Paul himself who calls himself like one abnormally born so here you have a person born about the time that a Creed was born and I think that's instructive in many ways because the faith was being passed on from Jesus through the Apostles to the early church fathers and then to the early church itself yeah yeah well and and that's one of the things that's so remarkable is that in in many ways so many of us who are have come out of any sort of Protestant background so for myself I was I was raised my mother was German Lutheran I came from a long line with German Lutheran's so German Lutheran theology was something I had in it grown up around I hadn't really fully embraced it and taken it in and into myself the way I think my mother would have liked me to but nonetheless it's what I was familiar with and and sometimes in those Protestant contexts you almost we almost get this impression that Christianity was something that you know it was written down and then then came this period of trying to figure out what was written now and what is Christianity and and maybe maybe it got lost maybe it got corrupted and maybe it was and yet once we started looking at these folks who lived Christianity for so many years before they had a fully formed New Testament when we begin to look at folks who had such a clear sense of what the gospel meant in practice and in action and we begin to see that the people who had received this faith it was something that had been handed down to them in oral form it was something that was handed down to them and practice it was something that was lived and embodied and embraced and fully manifest amongst them there was never a question of what is Christianity they knew full well what it was they saw themselves principally as curators whose job was always to protect this very precious thing that had been passed down from Christ to the Apostles and on to them and that was something that was such a different a different take such a different perspective on Christianity than I had ever encountered growing up in the Protestant world but for me I had to I had to discover that perspective for years and years and years of wandering through various religious views philosophical views then ultimately traced my way backwards to these Eastern Christian writers before I discovered the beauty of what was there a lot of people listening to you will say my goodness you are placing tradition on the same level of Scripture but the early Christians really didn't seem to make some kind of dichotomy between Scripture and tradition no no not at all they really didn't because what they saw is that you know people like Paul had said quite clearly as you know Hank Tideway and whatever I've told you whether by word of mouth or by epistle and they understood that tradition even though tradition is so often in our in some of our translations only associated with pharisaical corruptions of human imposed laws they saw that there was something else quite different going on in terms of how the Apostles themselves spoke about tradition the tradition was something that was alive and that was handed down from generation to generation in order to be lived and so what they recognized of course was that yes there's a very clear who were tative you know instruction being passed on in these written texts but they realized that the authority of the Apostles and what had been handed down to them in terms of instruction was not strictly limited that because the Apostles themselves told them that there were things by word of mouth handed down that were part of that in destruction I think one of the things you know one of the ways that I've thought about it in the past is you know i-i-i think of it almost as analogous to you know let's say we Hank you and I we start a company right we start some sort of corporation and in that company we have a certain ways of doing business and we begin to move forward with our business practices and every now and then there's a business issue that comes up we send an email to our employees we sent an email to one another whatever it may be and then as as we reach a certain point we realize you know we really should collect these instructive emails together so that people have access to them and they can understand them and and and we bring those together and we hand it to somebody and that person comes in and they begin to sit down with us and they begin to say you know Hank I see here in this email you say that what you do in practice is X Y & Z you look at it you say oh oh I can see how you would read it that way but that's not in fact what we do and they and they react and they say but but no no look right here look at look at this word I've got my dictionary out here so huh and they begin to banter about the about the specifics of why they think their reading is superior to the reading that you have and you say well I understand how that's a possible reading how you might try to pull that from the text but ultimately what you have to understand is that that text is tied to our actual living company that has been doing business and that's not how we do business and and that's the sort of disconnect that sometimes happens between the way people see scripture and tradition when they pit them against each other what what these early Christians that are stood was they they didn't find themselves in a position of saying what is Christianity they already knew what it was because they already lived it with the Apostles we're living what was handed down to them by Christ and so when they look at these texts they look at these texts in the context of a lived faith that has already been handed down they know what these texts mean they know what Christianity is era næss makes a similar analogy when he's talking about the Gnostics and he compares the text to you know the biblical text to to this mosaic and he talks about the Gnostics having this you know interesting ability to take the pieces of the mosaic and rearrange them and perhaps change the image of Christ to look like a dog and they say see you look Christ is a dog and ERUs erinaceus as well it's very interesting that they can do those with the tiles but we're not thrown by that because we know Christ isn't a dog we already know who Christ is so that when we see look at the mosaic rightly we already we recognize Christ because we already know who Christ is and that's where the Living tradition and the biblical texts that speak into that tradition and speak of the speak of what Christianity is go hand-in-hand in a complementary not a competitive way in these early Christian writers and I think that's borne out by the the text I quoted earlier where where Paul in 1st Corinthians chapter 15 says brothers I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you which you received and on which you have taken your stand by this gospel you were saved if you hold to the word I preached to you because otherwise you've believed in vain and then he says for what I received I passed on to you as a first importance so he's he's talking about passing on an oral tradition or a creed that actually was was dated all the way back to the time of my messiahs murder mm-hmm that's right yeah I mean Paul uses I mean this is one of the things that can sometimes be misleading when we look at the the translations of the New Testament sometimes translators we'll reserve the word tradition only for when it's spoken of in the context of Christ speaking to the Pharisees sure in a pejorative sense right and yet Paul uses the very same terminology in positive ways and it's exactly like what you just talked about there Hank where it is the passing on of something good something living something that we need to hold fast to because it is the faith and the good news that's been given to us and entrusted to us you know when I was chris mated that was back april 9th to this year i was absolutely stunned to wake up to headlines hand calligraphed has walked away from the Christian faith and in in looking back at that because comments continued to be made about this I think one of the great dichotomies in people's mind is a dichotomy between faith and works and so for many people I have embraced a cross system works righteousness but perhaps the same thing that you just said about tradition and scripture also applies to faith and works which is to say that the early Christians really didn't pit one against the other no no not at all and I but I do think one of the things that happens is of course folks are so accustomed to the usual framing of the protestant catholic discussion about figs faith and works but they don't really even have a framework for understanding the way certainly the early Eastern Christians understood it or Eastern Orthodoxy generally and I think one of the difficulties is is that in the Western framework there's a very specific merit demerit sort of discussion going on as if there's this sort of judicial bank account happening and of course that's what gets us into the entire discussion and the Reformation era of whose merits right are there indulgences where we're somehow bringing in sort of alien merits or are they Christ's merits but you know those this the nature of those sorts of discussions as opposed to what we begin to see in the Eastern Christian writers which this was what changed everything for me was to see how focused they are not on merit and demerit not on guilt and absolution though it's important that we are cleansed and do confession and things like that but the focus on the fact that the primary enemy of humanity is corruption corrupt ability and actual corruption of course death which has entered our species due to the fall into wandering away from God and that the main hope that we have is the putting off of corruption and the putting on of in corruption participating in the immortal life of God and and this is where I think the confusion about faith and works is when I look to what Paul says about the law and the works of the law them not being able to justify or make us righteous if we look at that in the context of death and life as opposed to this legal framework what we begin to see is of course the blood of animals cannot make us righteous if if what we mean is the putting off of corruption putting on of in corruption if we mean partaking of the divine nature animals cannot connect us with the immortal life of God no amount of abstaining from thievery or adultery abiding by certain works that the laws law prescribes to do for clean or unclean can reconnect us with the immortal life of God they were only ever a shadow of something that was coming only the incarnation of Jesus Christ can do that and so of course the the letter of the law the works of the law the old the the things laid out there in the Mosaic law cannot deify us they cannot undo death and we need the Incarnation in order to do that but of course to sit back and think somehow the Incarnation with our out our grip sentence and our willful participation to turn back to God can somehow fix death is equally a misnomer and it's not because we need to somehow earn God's favor by turning back to them but it's because not even God can make creatures who live apart from him and so if we are going to somehow imbibe and participate in the immortal life of God we need to turn back to him and repentance and we need to begin to participate in that life that has been laid out and the pattern of life has been laid out and instructed for us in Christ and only by volitionally participating and turning to that and returning to that and returning to that can we hope to find that life not because we're earning it but because just like I can't I can't hope to somehow somehow see myself become physically fit without actually participating in the work plan that's been put in place for me these are just these are almost more like principles of physics I've been ordered to really to really participate in the immortal life of God there are certain things have been prescribed where we need to enter into those and take those into ourselves and unless we do that it's medicine being offered that we refused to take ultimately you know I have so often Nathan said that I still hold firmly to what scripture says when when people think that I've given myself over to a crass system of works righteousness I tell them no I mean I have always quoted Ephesians 2:8 9 and I think we ought to add Ephesians tend to that as well for it is by grace that I have been saved through faith and this not of myself it is the gift of God not of works lest I should boast but I have been created as God's workmanship I've been created in Jesus Christ to do good works which God prepared in advance for me to do so often the narrative that we hear within Christian circles has to do with Ephesians 2:8 and 9 and in the last part that that verse 10 which I paraphrased is left out of the equation of course of course well and and I think it's I I think what we begin to see is when we look at this right so much of what Paul has to say about work right I mean the workmanship or there being these works laid out for us do you or does not mean but God who works in me so much of this is sometimes depending on which passage we're talking about just for example in Philippians where he talks about it not me that works that God working in may ring there is so often a missed you know something that's missed in the translation because of the language of work arrghh on which it's not arrghh on paul is using narrations of energiya this idea of the operative power of God and this term Paul knows full well he knows full well it's philosophical background and and there's no getting around this because the word energiya the word that Paul is so fond of in his theology it does not appear in Greek letter literature prior to Aristotle and then Aristotle develops the term I believe he uses that some somewhere somewhere in the ballpark of 300 times in his development of the concept and it begins to be picked up and have this very specific meaning which is it's this initially in its early phases it's the distinction between having a power versus using it having the capacity to see versus actively seeing but as it begins to be developed it begins to be used to distinguish the nature of the thing versus the operative powers of that nature so for example the nature of fire to be fire is one thing but the operative powers of fire are heating and lighting properties and it became apparent to folks like Aristotle and others asked him that there's has to be a logical distinction here because we have instances a certain nature right the nature of fire I'm communicating something of that nature to another thing so for example it if we place metal in fire through long enough and it the fire is hot enough we begin to see that the metal takes on heating and lighting properties but the metal is still metal and yet somehow it has begun to participate in the operative powers of fire it that those octave powers have taken up residence and and so it is truly a conduit for that nature and that became that logical distinction became the distinction of energiya that the metal has taken on not the nature of fire because in the direct sense that it is fire it's still metal but it has begun to participate in that nature through the operative powers of fire that were communicated to it the inner dia and this is something that paul is so fond of he is really talking about himself being energized by God such that Paul has really become a conduit for a foreign nature and this is such a crucial concept because when Paul is talking about being energized he's not talking about work in a sense of exertion in order to somehow gain merit before God what he's talking about is this foreign nature of the nature of God that empowers him to do things that he cannot do as a human humans cannot heal sick and raise the dead they cannot do certain things that Paul and his habits Dalek ministry is being energized in order to do and ultimately this is not unique to just the apostolic ministry because ultimately the entire Christian Hope as Paul puts it in first Corinthians 15 is that we put off corruption for in corruption and that only happens when like the resurrected Jesus we have partaken of that divine nature it's not something we earn it's not something we do in our own exertion it's something that can only ever be had because God has chosen in his mercy and His grace to descend to a dying species and give back to us the immortal life that we denied in a Hall and that is so exciting to me because it is an opportunity to let people know and to know yourself that we are operating by a power that is in us but not of us and one of my favorite passages has become what Paul says in Colossians chapter 1 where he says we proclaim Christ admonishing and teaching everyone with all wisdom so that we may present everyone perfect in Christ and they says to this end I labor struggling with all his energy which so powerfully works in me and I always think about the fact that what we can struggle with all our own energy we can be on the sidelines not struggling at all or we can struggle with all his energy and it excites me in a lot of different levels I think that if people really caught a hold of what that means a power in you but not of you we would not only be talking about making disciples but we would be talking about those reproducing disciple makers having something that allows them the energy the power to turn the world upside down very much like what the the early Christians did yes well one of the things that I think is so remarkable and I teach from time to time I teach world religions and when I begin to talk about the doctrine of the Holy Trinity in the Christian East and of course I introduced the basic distinctions between who pastas and as here's the nature of a thing Lucia verses it s or E versus the subject having a great the who pastas the end of jool and we go through this sort of doctrinal notion of the father having you know his nature of the divine nature and him eternally beginning generating a son who has the very same nature who's almost you with him as well as by rating from eternal eternal procession the Holy Spirit but one of the questions I raised is practically speaking you know why does this matter why would people be willing to lose limbs tongues hands in defense of this what does this tell us about this religion here of course I'm not speaking to Christians it's Venus their secular classroom of trying to introduce them to the Christian faith specifically as articulated in the east and one of the things that I think is so notable about it is that what what we see in the doctrines of eternal generation the beginning of the Sun and the precession of the Spirit is that the central characteristic of God the Father is that he shares himself with others that from all eternity he shares his divine nature the Sun with spirit and even in creation well it's impossible that a creature ever have the divine nature the same way the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit can there's still a degree to which we can participate in that same nature through the operative powers that issue from it and that ultimately when God makes things he makes things not just to show that he can create stuff he makes things in order that each may also participate in the immortal life of God and that divine nature to whatever extent each is able and that this is ultimately what ye as creatures are all called to and I found it so fascinating that as I first began to read the Eastern Church Fathers I started to notice that they don't think for example angels are naturally holy angels are holy because they participate in God's holiness with humanity it was always perplexing there would be these things and Paul that I would come across when I was studying him and and thought were so strange such as he would say that God alone is immortal and I thought how does that square with Christ promise of eternal life not to those who turned him and again you know seeing that oh yes God alone is immortal his nature alone in the moral nature but creatures begin to attained immortality through participating in that immortal life of God and I began to see that pattern over and over again that what the eastern father saw was that in all of these different aspects of holiness of because of holiness of incorruptibility life putting off death for life but all these things come by creatures participating more and more in the only nature that is able to offer those things which is God's alone and that really that is what is supposed to happen in terms of the whole create a whole of creation that is not Plan B it's not Plan B after something is gonna rise and we've gone awry and we've died it is plan a we were only created ever to participate in that life and that life is always not supposed to be an end in itself in our participation but it's supposed to move from us to others and of course this is the idea of even moving to objects that you know relics things like this then we see Christ even even his garments become conduits for life because of the degree to which the life of God pervades his version yeah it's so interesting I want to go back to something that you were talking about earlier although there's a richness that I'd like to explore based on what you just said that probably needs to be communicated to our audience as well but I want to go back to something that you you said sort of been passing with respect to your remarks on a Satori ology you said Catholic Protestants they sort of hold this whereas the eastern fathers are Eastern Orthodoxy hold and then you started elaborating but that in itself I think is something that needs to be expanded upon because for most people when they think of Eastern Orthodoxy they think that the similarities between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism are almost such that they're one and the same one is just a derivation of the other one is just slightly tweaking the other but you sort of pointed out when you're talking about soteriology that in many cases the Western Church the Roman Catholics and the Protestants have a whole lot more in common than let's say Catholics and Orthodox yeah well why my mom who is still getting accustomed to the idea that I'm Eastern Orthodox it's entirely foreign to her and you know every now and then we have these these conversations where she's trying to get her head around what's happened to her son and one of the things that I've occasionally tried to explain to her is that you know her Lutheranism is far closer to Roman Catholicism than my orthodoxy is which of course is something no German Lutheran ever wants to hear but she I one of the things that I think was was so remarkable to be guinea unpack this was as I began to see that central to what what became so definitive and the medieval period and beyond in terms of Western thought was the merit and demerit system of the West there's this judicial tendency that's there in the West and and we see it very early you can already see it in contrast such as the way Tertullian talks about you know he'll talk about in very judicial terms about about exacting demonic exacting of certain deaths for example which contrasts very starkly with the way the Eastern writers talk but what what what was very sort of formative in the systematizing of it was a gustin's notion of the order of lugs so Augustine of Hippo as he developed this concept of the order of Love's he he essentially becomes to realize that we have various affections right I can have affections for God I can have a fishing news for man I can I have affections for animals or for pizza you know for that matter and he recognized that in in each of us the order or the hierarchy of those affections can vary so for example we talk of people who are dog lovers and when we say that the reason that we call them dog lovers rather than philanthropists is because it it appears that they may well love dogs more than they love you in some cases and then there are other of us who have very low affection for dogs you know we might think that they're they smell or their library or whatever we almost have a disdain for them and so I guess it and came to realize that there's this these various sort of priorities that we can have in our affections and and crucial to Agustin's thinking when he's navigating the question of what does it mean that when we talk about God being just or man being just or us being made just the Latin semantic range for justice just it see I had a very limited semantic range which meant very precisely to render to each what is due and that began to provide a framework for interpreting how does a just person do just deeds and an Agustin came to see that well adjust person's affections somebody who renders teach what is due should render to each thing in creation the appropriate amount of affection at do so in the hierarchy of goods angles are superior to humans and humans are superior to dogs and God with above all our affections should reflect that we should have affection for God among angels and man and then dogs and then we would have just orders of love or workers of affections and because it just didn't begin to talk about the affections from which our deeds proceeded this created the difference between external character of an act and the internal character of an act and this is what provides the framework for saying well you might have two people do the same deed for example someone gives to a homeless person food another person gives to a homeless person food well as that deed good or is it not well by distinguishing the internal character from the external character agustin can say well both deeds line up with the moral law what we ought to do but one might be just and one might be unjust one might be done for the mere love of self and it's the fact that it makes me feel good the other might be done out of love for God above all else and so you might have one person do that way in a way that is just and meritorious before God and another person who does that deed in a way that is d meritorious toward God is not just even though externally they're the same type of act and and this sort of way of looking at deeds is what sets up the entire medieval system for talking about the idea that Adam has a special grace called original righteousness that enables him to perform deeds out of true love for God and that in the fall that grace is cast off and that we are all born with inverted order of loaves and thus bound by necessity to sin now the necessity to sin is not that we have to commit adultery and steal and things like that the necessity to sin is that our affections are jumbled they're not just and so even when we do deeds in accord with the moral law they're not meritorious before God this is why pravin in grace a special assistance is needed in order to correct the order of loaves or at least make it possible for the order of loves us to do deeds out of proper just affections and therefore begin to perform meritorious deeds and this becomes the basis for the medieval soteriology that then sort of gives away later to indulgences and the question of surpluses of merits with saints might have and perhaps the church can redistribute and so on but what we find is that in the Reformation this entire notion of the order of Love's prevenient grace the necessity of sin and those thirds of things isn't cast off that remains in full in the discussions that Luther and Calvin others are having what we find is that dispute is just a question of whose merits and you know how are these merits being shuffled around and of course the the revolutionary thing that Luther is introducing is the question that perhaps the needs even when they're done in grace are not meritorious and perhaps what we really need is the merits of Christ who alone was able to do fully meritorious deemed maybe we need his merits imputed to us and our Rd merits imputed to him on the cross and that ultimately prevenient grace did not enable us to do meritorious deeds but to believe unto salvation rather than the Catholic framework in which the fixing of affections permits us or enables us to do meritorious deeds that entire framework is very alien to the Christian East as I've as I've put it and I put it in the snow and becoming truly human the East the primary concern the main enemy we face is death and corruption and we see this come through very clearly in these early disputes specifically with folks like Athanasius where what we see happen is arias comes along and suggests that son of God is a creature there was a time where it was just God and then he decided to create a son and Athanasius sees I receive it at the Nations when he hears arias does Hera see what he suggests as he says you know arias if you're correct the son of God could be of no help to us and the reason is because if he's a creature then he is corruptible just like we are he is mutable just like we are he is not necessarily good but he could be turned morally and so on and so forth and he goes through all these entailments and what comes through in that discussion is that Athenee she's is crystal clear about the fact that what the gospel offers us is that we are a dying species as creatures we are susceptible to corruption in the fall that corrupt ability became actual corruption and what the Incarnation offers to us is the immortal life of God reentering our species and offering the possibility of us putting off corruption or in corruption as Saint Paul talks about in 1st Corinthians 15 it is all about remedying death and taking in life there is not a merit demerit system at work here and that is a world of a difference between how the Christian faith has looked at and what the gospel of Jesus Christ is really offering to us you know you have communicated so many things that are so rich and need so much expansion and and one of those things has to do with the tree of life in the Garden of Eden we find that tree of life again in the New Jerusalem where the Angels showing john the river of the water of life as clear as crystal flowing from the throne of god and of the lamb and on the other side the river stood the tree of life bearing 12 crops of fruit yielding its fruit every month and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations and so forth so the tree of life that we see in eden reappears in the eternal garden but i think what needs to be cashed out for christians today is that adam and we've needed to eat from the tree of life they were then barred from eating from the tree of life and with the restoration with the unfolding plan of redemption that tree of life comes into play again and when we embrace Christ we can eat from the tree of life in other words we can experience deification we can experience the graces that allow us to become by grace what God is by nature and and and so we don't just have to wait for something that we're going to experience in the hereafter we don't have to wait for something that we're gonna experience when Jesus appears a second time we can experience that divine life now so Christ not only saves us by his death he saves us as Galatians 2 makes but he saves us into his life and that makes the Christian experience so rich and powerful and transcendent right now right here mm-hmm yeah one of the things that I think is so remarkable I remember asking once how often is God the Father do something directly in the Bible and and I of course mean God is of course active throughout all history but I mean where the agent we see show up directly acting is God the Father and it is very difficult to find passages where God acts directly as opposed to you through his son through his spirit there's an angel through a prophet and so on and of course it's significant what those are for example they are things like speaking at the baptism of Christ and declaring him to be his son speaking at the Transfiguration for example speaking creation it's being and yet what we begin to see is that God chooses not to act through supernatural lightning bolts that appear between things and creation but God chooses Joey's act in and through the things he creates or in the case of a sudden spirit in and through second and third persons of the Trinity and these become the agents through which God is is acting but I think that's so significant because what we begin to see is this pattern throughout history prior to the Incarnation we're not acts and gives life through a tree he speaks their prophets he speaks through angels He healed leprosy through water beds he he and even in the Incarnation it's not as if what we see is the divine nature jumping over the human nature in order to you know in order to heal a person but rather he heals through his own flesh the power goes out to him through his garments he uses mud whatever it may be and we see this pattern where God is so insistent on supplying his life and his healing and his acts in and through the creation so it should be no surprise to us that we discover that he gives us life through things such as sacraments such as the washing of Baptism and being baptized into Christ receiving the Holy Spirit through the oil of chrismation through the Eucharist and that we again see this tree as you pointed out Hank appearing in the book of Revelation that seems to be the pattern that God gives his life not waiting for us to be disembodied and getting rid of this evil flesh as if we are Gnostics but rather that the whole of creation begins to participate in that life and we see the conduit for that life coming to us in the gifts sacraments and ultimately that we ourselves are supposed to be conduits for that life to things beyond ourselves what's really interesting to me is that I first encountered all of this as a result of the teachings of watchman Nee and I embraced those teachings when I went to China and I saw people who didn't have a whole lot of theological acumen but they had this life and it actually ended up changing the moniker for our ministry from simply saying we do what we do because truth matters just saying we do what we do because life and truth matter so in in in in the teachings of watchman Nee and witness Li you had this idea of deification that seems to be absent on the whole within modern day Christianity in general it's even within orthodoxy I don't think that people fully grasp the jewel that they have that jewel has been ensconced in a box and then protected by another box and pretty soon we lose touch with the jewel The Jewel by which when we partake of the Eucharist when we partake of the Lord's table or of mass we are partaking of something that allows us that gives us a grace that allows us to be a partaker in the divine nature and that's a game-changer mm-hmm yeah you know the first place I began to really encounter deification I was it was actually prior to reading these turned Church Fathers but I didn't quite realize what I had stumbled on until I read athenais shis and then basil and and on from there but I remember I was I was doing a study on the doctrine of resurrection not just in Christian literature I was looking at the doctrine in Judaism in Islam as contrasting with views about the body and the soul and in Greek philosophers and one of the things that I came across that seemed so odd to me in Christianity in the New Testament that wouldn't make any sense until I read the eastern fathers was that I noticed that sure there were certain patterns that were common in Jewish literature and then appear again also in religions later like Islam and that I could find in the New Testament such as the idea that what resurrection is is there is a day when there's a future judgment and disembodied souls are put back into bodies and people appear before the judgement seat and they are and their judge for deeds and they received rewards and punishment but one of the things I started noticing in the New Testament and contrast with these other religions I was looking at was I said find these very strange statements that at first just seem like inconsistency such as the fact that Paul seemed to talk about resurrection as something that was first experienced in Christ first experience by Christ he began to speak about resurrection as something to be attained which seemed strange and it just seemed given in Jewish literature that everyone was resurrected in order to be judged and and and the reason these things seemed strange was because I thought well weren't there resurrections such as glass race and things like that beforehand and and then I also found certain statements in Paul that seemed really strange such as him talking about because Christ has been raised you can't die again and I thought again why why does that followed and Lazarus died again and and as these anomalies began to stand out I began to dig more and more what I started to see in the writings of Paul was that resurrection in his in his writings were not just it was not just reanimation it was a metamorphosis in which we put off corruption and we put on corruption and our we put we put off corruption and we put on in corruption and this being something that he understood to first appear in the person of Jesus and his resurrection and then to be something to be attained to by those who are united with Christ and as I begin to see that and think that was so odd I thought I had discovered an anomaly in the religious landscape because that was clearly not what was meant by resurrection in Islam or in Judaism from what I could tell but then when I began to read the Eastern Church Fathers and I began to encounter what they talked about about this participation in the divine nature deification as you talked about all of a sudden that seemed to be the only possible framework for understanding this anomaly I had seen in the New Testament and and that's what I think is so remarkable is that Christianity is the only religion that really has resurrection not merely as a divine act of reanimation so that we can be judged and then go receive rewards or punishment it is the only religion that truly understands that our real hope is the undoing of death not merely by putting being put back into the body but the undoing of death in all of its facets because we have partaken of the divine nature and this said death itself has been undone because we have been joined with the only nature that is immune to death namely God's own you keep referring back to Scripture and it just brought to mind the idea that somebody have communicated to me that if you become Orthodox you're gonna part with your Bible or Orthodox really don't have any sense of the scriptures whatsoever and and quite frankly I sort of had that framework in mind before I went through Holy Week about three or four years in a row and realized wow there are the there are made available to to Orthodox people Church oh and that one week alone about 30 hours in which vast majority of time is consumed with with with the direct focus on the Scriptures so you know certainly there are biblically illiterate people within orthodoxy but my goodness there are biblically illiterate people throughout the Christian world in general so maybe before we get back to your film can you add weigh in a little bit on this particular issue the idea that if you become Orthodox you by virtue of that you part with your Bible and now you're going to get into a whole system of maybe the spiritual gymnasium but it's going to be apart from participation in the Word of God yeah well that was certainly not my experience in fact as I said it was it was Scripture itself that was one of the many things that I was studying that began to point me toward orthodoxy I have to admit that there were all sorts of anomalies that I found in in the Bible very uneasy tensions throughout it that just did not seem to sit well with me when I was reading it through a Western framework and I as I began one of the things that was so remarkable for me was as I began to consider what the eastern Fathers were saying and I began to compare it with Scripture and I began to look at the whole of the consultation of what Scripture was saying these uneasy tensions started to go away and and and suddenly it became a cohesive whole where it wasn't this balancing act or this tension between whether this passage is talking about her merits or demerits or whatever it may be suddenly the whole of it held together it made sense why the Gospels are called the gospel of Jesus Christ and they start at the beginning as opposed to just at the crucifixion again the the entire cohesive whole began to pull together and as I've mentioned in things like resurrection when I was looking at those doctrines in the New Testament there were just there were just anomalies and what was being said throughout it that just did not hold together I didn't know how all could defensively say certain things he was saying until I arrived at at the at the Eastern at the way the eastern fathers were reading it and I think this is a good my candid honest transparent reason for why I think that is is that I think the eastern fathers when they say they are preserving something that was handed down to them said they're being truthful they really are preserving something that's handed down to them and that's why those texts pulled together so much more cleanly and makes so much more sense within that framework than they did outside of it but of course as you point out Hank it wasn't just that the biblical text was something that was one of many texts that I was studying as I was wrestling with these questions when these pet Altima tanned penultimate questions about myself and God and future judgment and whatever else there may be scripture is central of course to the Orthodox life in terms of how it is read how it is presented that it is pervasive in the liturgy if you know your if you know your Bible when you step into the liturgy you'll hear scripture song and in that sense that it is part of the work of the people right liturgy that you do every Sunday but as also throughout the year and this is and this is where it is it's just it's something that's woven into the entire life of the believer from daily readings to the liturgies to as you pointed out certain times such as Holy Week where the sheer quantity of text that you run through over and over and over again are heard and they are in many ways lived I mean this is this is one of the things that I thought was so remarkable was the first time I ever experienced her Holy Week it was realize you're not just hearing the stories the holy week itself is a journeying with Christ through the entire drama of the passion the fact that we stand there and and lean to Psalms after he's to cry mean are these sorts of things all of these all of these things are just they take on not only new significance and meaning but new life because they are blowing into the Christian life and that is something that I think is not often recognized is that orthodoxy properly lived is ultimately a lifestyle and Cree and the Scriptures themselves are woven deeply and deeply into that lifestyle from start to finish what do you think is something we started talking about about an hour ago and that is your film becoming truly human I mean that was one of the most remarkable films I think I've ever seen i've now watched it I think three or four times and planned to watch it again I remember thinking wow this is an absolutely fascinating title and I had no framework for it whatsoever so I want to set you up on something I mean we talked about this as I said at the beginning of the podcast and it'd be worth it for people to go back and listen to what you had to say but let's see if I can summarize it a little bit we were talking about how the first Christian Church was founded in Antioch where where Christians were first called Christians and then we started talking about Ignatius of Antioch who was born somewhere around 35 and he died 108 I believe he was born in Syria he died in Rome and there's this quote in the film that you use and do you only see it towards the end of the film and it's the quote where where Antioch says I mean Ignatius says birth pangs are now upon me suffer me my brethren hinder me not from living do not wish me to die suffer me to receive the pure light when I shall have arrived there I shall become human to wit the title of your of your film and then he goes on to say suffer me to to follow the example of the passion of my god and again he's he saying this on his road to what would be a very cruel martyrdom he's martyred in in in Rome and he's writing to Christians in that city telling them don't try to save my life don't wish me not to die because if you do you're gonna hinder me from actually living so the impending martyrdom is for him his birth it's a rebirth by which he will become truly human he will become remade as it were in the likeness of the perfect human in the likeness of the new Adam in Jesus Christ the faithful witness as Christ is called the firstborn from among the dead the Amen the beginning of God's new creation so in this film you are telling the story of people in fact they are sharing their stories people who have no religious affiliation you identify with that but instead of remaining in that category throughout the film you see how in fact the road leads to becoming truly human and then you see ultimately that everyone is an icon of Christ you see the potential of becoming truly human not only in life but also a martyrdom yeah I mean one of the things we see in the in the Eastern Fathers as they draw this distinction because it's a biblical distinction between the image and the likeness of God they recognize that in the book of Genesis God says let us make man in our own image and according to our own likeness and then he makes man in his own image and the likeness is not repeated and then of course after corruption has set in Adam has children according to the idea idea being the term here used for an archetype of Adam meaning we are now corrupt copies of a corrupt copy and so what we see is that the making of man while we are made having a rational spirit free choice the the capacity to ascend to our archetype right as icons images of the archetype that is God well we have the capacity did you ascend to him and participate in his nature and ultimately reflect is just as his goodness his wisdom and even is in corruption and his holiness because we participate in those things ultimately when you make volitional entities at some point we have to freely participate in our own making and and this is where we see that God begins to making of man but man is to freely participate in this not just being an image but also volitionally conforming to that likeness and manifesting that likeness and yet rather than that occurring of course we're familiar with the story of the fall and so we see Adam rather than ascending he descends earth man earth he is enter earth he will return and in this sense there's really from an Orthodox perspective the fall is not this titanic crash from the height of some sort of ideal rather it is a halting of our own creation it is rather than continuing the movement forward and onward and upward into God it is a decision to retreat backwards and begin to unmake ourselves and this is why of course in the person of Christ well we begin to see is in restoring that icon and not just restoring it in the sense of properly ordering it again but restoring it in the sense of bringing it to where it was always intended to be which is why only in the resurrected Christ do we begin to see the image and likeness of God manifest in a human person the first fully human which is exactly what Pilate announces behold man and and Christ of course refers in John to his crucifixion as his glory and the reason it says glory is because it is the exact contrast the very contrast Paul makes in Romans 5 the contrast between his act of righteousness versus Adams act of disobedience that brings death his brings life and so there's this contrast between the martyrdom of Christ versus the disobedience of Adam and in this way what we begin to see is we begin this all takes on new meaning when Christ tells us that if you want to find life you too need to take up your cross and follow me because Christ has shown us the pattern of repentance and death to self now of course Renee she is that's very explicit death to self but for us it's even if we aren't subject to martyrdom in the sense that we're going to be fed to lions or crucified upside down or whatever it may be there's still a very real sense in which we are to be living sacrifices and that we are to die to ourselves mortifying right the passions and in this is undergoing a daily martyrdom following after that pattern in the hope of attaining life so that we - as Paul says might attain to the resurrection of the dead and of course that is what what what the film talks about it's talking about and and the connection with the nuns is ultimately to say yes the nuns have wandered away from religion but for me that was that wandering was not a wandering without purpose it was a wandering on the way to someplace and ultimately that led to this road which is not the end of my destination but it has set me on the path to life and the completion of the journey the beginning of me becoming truly human you know I couldn't help but think as I was looking through your film a number of different times how the objection of the nuns the the people with no religious affiliation the objections seemed to be pointing to the fact that Millennials in general are looking for two things I don't know if you'll agree with this or not but it seemed to me that that that it pointed down the road of they are looking for two things one is for authority something that is authoritative and something that has chops or gravitas the other thing I was thinking about is that they were looking for authenticity they were looking for something that is truly authentic because all of their objections to the historic Christian faith seemed to be pointing at the fact that it was inauthentic to them mm-hmm City is something that is is absolutely crucial to them it was crucial to me in my own journey I had a very difficult time with the fact that there was this disconnect between something that well I'll back up here and say that one of the crucial moments in my journey was the fact that I found myself drawn to the religious spaces sacred spaces religious art and it wasn't for aesthetic reasons as I point out in the film it wasn't just I was an artist of course I was at art school but it wasn't just because I thought the artwork was technically proficient it was because there was something about encountering sacred spaces and here I have in mind ancient sacred spaces this could be anything from you know Egyptian - you know medieval cathedrals or whatever it may be that felt I had an intuition that this wasn't just art this wasn't just a building this wasn't just a room this is a conduit for something something I'm not seeing and that instinct was something that I couldn't shake and it stood there stood out to me and in many ways one of the great difficulties I had was that it's so much of contemporary Christianity when I and I tried out you know wandering into these spaces which were maybe just today a contemporary praise band or a pulpit you know just sort of a teaching no sort of contemporary evangelical sir service I didn't have that same intuition and there was something there that felt like a loss there's there's a disconnect because the only thing that really sort of resonated with me and religion was something about that authenticity fact that this seemed truly religious it seemed like truly a conduit for something it seemed ancient it seemed holy and in fact one of the things I don't mention this in the film but egg when I was a nun my favorite book of the Bible is the book of leviticus of all things and the reason it was my favorite was because I found it to be such a strange thing to look at these ancient rituals and prescriptions for priests it's it it had the smell of holiness to it and that was something I longed for but in practice could not find and and I and that's one of the reasons why the first time even though I was very suspicious of Orthodoxy the first time I encountered a liturgy I had all sorts of questions till the first time I walked into one the first thing that grabbed me is that it had that smell of holiness and obviously I'm not speaking terribly literally about the incense I'm but it had that sense of the ancient of this being more than just a space this being a conduit for something and in that sense that's the sort of authenticity I was looking for that this seemed authentically spiritual and religious and ultimately holy and I think it's no I think it's no mistake that would you find in the other nuns when you ask them what are the things that you still resonate with what is there any aspect of religion you connect with they all talk about the architecture and the art and they begin to talk about those same sorts of things there's something about that that that seems authentic it seems to have a gravitas it seems to have some transcendent quality to it and I think they're looking for that and I think they sense that in the religion of their upbringing their experiences up to this point they haven't really experienced that so I do think those encounters with the authentic is is very is it's a very real thing as for the authority I they they definitely are not swayed by there's certainly a disconnect between them and what seemed to be the sort of very superficial answers they get to issues they have questions about the problem of evil and the problem of pain and the sorts of answers that are given to them really do you leave them with a question of what why you know would they find them to be thin they thought and find them to be less than satisfying and they ultimately send them on a search for something else something deeper something weightier something more authentic and that's where I don't see when I look at the nuns I don't see any of those things as bad I think those are all very good things for me they are what kept me searching and hunting and studying until ultimately I found something that did satisfy and met that longing of my soul which was Eastern Orthodoxy a lot of things that we could speak about that we share a willingness to follow truth wherever it leads to follow truth no matter what the cost but I want to touch on just a couple of other things one is the commonality that we share with respect to adoption what are the most moving parts of the film becoming truly human had to do with your willingness to adopt both you and Heather were in in unison wanting to find the most downtrodden the least of these and in that you saw a microcosm of the film in that you saw and your children actually communicated that I mean I was absolutely stunned by the ability that your children had to communicate in this regard but how how in your adopted son I forget the name is it is it Mukhtar no exposure dar Rossiter okay mojit are so in your adopted son mojit our minh that was truly remade in in the sense that you you saw something that was potentially marred and damaged becoming something that was remade in the image and likeness of God that was remade as an icon of Christ I mean already you had a human being so stamped on the human being is the imago Dei but the in which becomes the likeness and the transformation of your son was simply glorious as it was woven into the the overall narrative of the film yeah yeah I mean budget are really is a great microcosm for that because he he is the picture of what you know what happens when our movement away from God begins to bring about death in our own lives and and begins to spread to others Bossier dar was only when we when we adopted him he was yes he was seven but he only weighed you know 20 pounds and that was because he was so severely neglected and as you said our interest in in Bossier R was entirely because we we had before our minds the very parable of the the sheep and the goats and the very fact that Christ you know talks about these it would you know whatever you've done to the least of these you've done to me and when we looked at Bossier are we related see Christ naked and starving alone and dying in Eastern Europe and I remember one of the the hardest things about that for me was that there were so many people and I don't know if you ever encountered this Hank but I know that there were a lot of people who much to my surprise didn't understand why we would do it right why would you adopt why would you adopt a child and for us it was just so painfully obvious from the gospel readings that that we are called to care for the least of these that when we look into Bojan our we see is it dispelled trampled on a neglected icon of God who is deserves to have a family who deserves to be loved and and we had an opportunity to step in and care for and restore a life and so and so that's what we did with much you know fear and trembling knowing that it would be a long and difficult road but in many ways that's where Bossier are as you pointed out becomes a microcosm for the entire film precisely because he is the picture of dying you know discarded twiddling humanity who then when brought into the life of God who's brought into love and compassion and cared for embraced by the love God begins to be restored nursed back to health and thrive and become full of life and his transformation is it is extraordinary just the way he grew and flourished in the context of a family was was just absolutely remarkable and that's not to say that adoption is I would hate to you know came to flowery of a picture of adoption as if it's not difficult it's an incredibly difficult thing but that was actually precisely we talked about us I mentioned before the call of Christ to take up your cross and follow him and you know we recognized that yeah there is a there's a decision here to lay down a part of our lives for the sake of another but that is that is the Gospel crawl that's the road to life that's the being conformed to the image of Christ that we have a chance to to sit down some of our comforts and and and actually give our lives over for the sake of another so that he can live that's it's it's just such a incredibly moving story and it's so beautiful to see in the film and there's so much richness that needs to be unpacked in this regard but due to the clock and wood to move on and you know just talk about the fact that maybe you can relate to this in a way that very few people can but I'm now facing one of the most difficult weeks and months of my life this week I'm going to be preparing to put another port in my body I'll have two ports now and that is for the harvesting of stem cells and then next week I'm going to be harvesting those stem cells and and then those will be frozen and then I'll go into a period of nine days of intensive chemo whereby I lose my immune system entirely and then the rebirth begins is it where as stem cells are reinserted in my bone marrow and they start to grow and flourish and eventually I'll have the same strength that I have right now so I'm going to go through a microcosm of the whole the whole cancer experience and the reason I bring this up is that's something that we have in common you also were diagnosed with cancer and I suppose that as in my life it had a transcendent well-put it was a difference-maker a transcendent difference-maker for me it allowed me to look at life so much differently I mean when you're a public figure you face scrutiny and slander and a lot of things that kind of matter to you but but when you have cancer you you you you you start to realize well I'm steering my own mortality in the face and the only thing that really matters is what does God think it's not what human beings think what does God think so it has had such well such such an incredible a benefit for me in so many different ways I mean I don't want to spend a whole lot more time talking about it because I could go on and on about this but there's a sense in which you can identify and perhaps you can weigh in on that as well yeah well yeah so yeah I would I too was diagnosed with cancer now mine is mine it was mine being malignant melanoma doesn't involve this unfortunately what it with malignant melanoma it's very aggressive and there aren't really many ways of treating it other than early detection and so once you realize that you have it the only thing to do is to regularly just monitor it find it if you think you find it got it test it and just just proactively do that really for the rest of your life is because that's if you miss it and it does its work it's all over and I've seen that in my own family as I kill my aunt and of course with only two months so I was very familiar when I got the diagnosis but what it was and what it can do and why the doctor was talking in the serious terms that he was and I still remember her standing there in my office getting that news and it was like something in a movie where there's sort of the drowning out of the voice and and a bit of a dizziness that comes with it as there is this narrowing of perspective that happens and I remember for myself that became a definitive moment when all of a sudden the big question was you know I'm mortal right so what what decisions have I been making am i making that matter or don't matter and for me it marked it marked the beginning of the truest acts of repentance I've ever experienced and what I mean is that I'm sure we're all familiar with repent in the sense of I've done something wrong it troubles my conscience I confess it to God I try not to do it again but repentance in the deep deep sense of self-examination and really sitting alone with your mortality with your wounds with your suffering with the things that are deep down inside that you perhaps don't like to talk about or maybe even not acknowledge her there is something that for me had never really happened at that level until I got that diagnosis and and in fact I really I mean I have to admit I fumbled around I didn't do it very gracefully because I didn't know how to do that you know that's that degree of self-examination them and the result was of course turning our lives upside down as I'm trying to go to my wife and go to trusted mentors and and tried to take my inventories it's very you know sort of an AAA type of type of a way of putting it to really deal with those things but it was what sent me down a road of saying I the only thing that really does matter is really dealing with this stuff that has deepened down inside me because this is the stuff that first of all when it comes to true healing with God true participation in God this is the road to life it needs to be dealt with but it's also that is that is the real process right that's the real road of becoming truly becoming truly human to use that title and that's where that started the road for me saying I really need to nothing else matters and none of the none of the you know none of the none of the employment none of the none of the career stuff none of that stuff matters in comparison with doing this which is the real the real work the real hard work enough examination and repentance and healing and that's that marked for me one of the crucial things that happened there for me was that was the definitive turn toward orthodoxy I had been living Orthodox for seven years and standing on the edge waiting for time when it was convenient but it was that where I said you know what I matter what happens you know I can't I can't I can't I just need to embrace Orthodox you know that means you know I can't teach in certain type of schools if that has negative fallout for other things regarding to the career I've been building whatever none of that matters because this life repentance you know union with God these things matter far more than any of the convenient things I may be trying to protect well oh yeah if I had another hour I'd love to I'd love to talk about what you just said it just resonates in in so many different ways unfortunately I don't have another hour and I hope that we'll be able to have this this discussion again sometime this has truly been a time of enrichment I'm sure for everybody listening in and I just want to say that if if you're listening in and you enjoyed the podcast go to iTunes make sure you leave a five star rating that that simple move that simple act that simple gesture is going to help to keep bringing these kinds of podcasts to you and thousands of others around the globe so what you can do in terms of action points is you can subscribe you can share you can rate you can review and you can make a difference while there is yet time by those simple acts in and of themselves I'm treating you quite frankly to some of the most extraordinary people on the planet and today was no exception as we had an opportunity to talk to Nathan Jacob seasoned Arthur's artist he's a film maker is a professor but but but someone that is communicating on such a beautiful level the deep truths of the historic Christian faith and Nathan for that I'm deeply grateful well thanks so much Hank I appreciate the work you do and I appreciate them you have it me on and really truly happy too happy to talk whenever whenever you want to have me I'm I'm happy to participate it and this is always a joy to talk to you I never felt such a frustration in talking to anybody about just thinking you know I want to unpack this I want to unpack this I want to get to and then thinking you know what if I did all of that we'd be here five hours later and I wouldn't be able to do the Bible answer via broadcast foot but honestly this was this was just fantastic and and and God bless you I mean that film in it of itself if you never did anything else for the rest of your life your life would be a life of transcendent significance and and obviously there are many other things that we could say because they're all encapsulated in that film including your adoption and the story that you just told us I mean it was priceless people think MasterCard is priceless this was priceless thanks Hank I greatly appreciate it and I mean if anybody wants to get tickets for this film they can they can see it it'll be doing a limited theatrical run on November in select theaters on November 8th and 9th and select cities and folks can just go to tug that's Tugg dot-com backslash titles and look for the becoming truly human poster click on that find a city near you purchase tickets and so I hope that folks will go out and support it it's sort of film that really does require a word-of-mouth that doesn't have you know big studio bucks out there pushing the advertising and it's really a sort of film that Hank as I'm sure you know and testify is wonderful for conversation for whether you want you to see it with fellow Christians to talk about the trends in in our culture we talk about the Orthodox faith or you didn't take folks who are themselves religiously unaffiliated whatever it may be it really is an opportunity to have some wonderful deep conversation how else is this film going to be available in the future yes so in addition to the theatrical run if you're interested in DVDs and blu-rays ancient faith is selling those so ancient faith would be the exclusive distributor of DVD and blu-ray so if you want a hard copy of it alternatively it's on various platforms including downloadable or streaming platforms for rental or for purchase including Amazon amazon.com obviously and iTunes and a number of others so and it will be you know circulating throughout the digital platforms as it tends to do so whatever you subscribe to if it's Netflix Hulu Amazon just keep an eye out for it as it makes its way around those platforms should be no problem finding it as it will be available on a number of different platforms it currently is and will be in the future again Tugg Tugg dot-com backslash titles check out becoming truly human it is truly extraordinary as this hour has been truly extraordinary remember hank unplugged it's the podcast that is touching the lives of people all around the globe I was absolutely fascinated the first time we did a podcast it got to number six in the religion space which was unheard of and that's a direct result of people that are letting other people know sharing the message about the podcast so Hank unplug let other people know share subscribe rate review go to iTunes and that make a difference thanks for tuning in to this edition I look forward to seeing you next time with more of the podcast [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Bible Answer Man

Views: 2,326

Rating: 4.7931032 out of 5

Keywords: Podcast, Apologetics, Hank Unplugged Podcast, Bible Answer Man, Bible, Christian Research Institute, CRI, Hank Hanegraaff, Christ, Christian, Christianity, God, Gospel, Jesus, Scripture, Truth, Nathan Jacobs, Becoming Truly Human, Religion, Documentary Film, Early Church Fathers, Tradition, Theology, Incarnation, Deification, Resurrection, Cancer

Id: T-y1zHK9X6M

Length: 96min 25sec (5785 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 02 2017