Fr John Strickland on the Eastern Orthodox view of Christian History

hello everybody um welcome back to another episode of transfigured i am here today with father john strickland um father john is a you are a priest at st elizabeth orthodox church in palsbow washington um you are also a host of um the show um paradise and utopia on ancient faith radio and you are also the author of books that are sort of connected to and expanded upon um the content of your podcast and your your podcast is very focused on um uh i would say the history of christianity from a orthodox perspective and that's going to be the main thing that we'll we'll talk about today i feel like a lot of us in western christianity either haven't given much thought to eastern orthodoxy at all and especially very little to what their perspective would be on the history of christianity and how we got here and what that might illuminate or help us think about uh sort of some of the blind spots and maybe our our own historical or theological awareness so i'm really excited to talk to father john about that um but would you like to introduce yourself and maybe tell me a little bit about your faith journey your story and how it is that you came to be an orthodox priest and interested in history and all those sorts of things yeah thank you thanks sam yeah it's good to be with you today i've been looking forward to this i enjoy your i don't mean to interrupt you but i did promise to give richard a shout out richard uh is a listener that connected us um and said hey sam you i love your podcast you should really talk to father john he's he's talking about some stuff that would be very interesting to you so i just wanted to make sure that that richard was given credit for uh helping make this podcast episode happen yeah i want to do that too i really enjoy richard's work a lot on dante i think it's beautiful yeah well i um i've been doing this uh project uh you mentioned it's a kind of a history of christianity and certainly it is that you know for the first 1600 years or so that christianity was the driving uh force for western culture but it's really more than that it's um or tries to be more than that it's it's an effort at a history of the um the culture of the west the culture and civilization that we call the west to look at that um a lot of people today would consider certainly christians would consider the west to be in big trouble um with its culture and uh different people have written different things about that um and a lot of people will go back in time not very far um as i've often noted you know the sexual revolution seems to explain for a lot of people why we have certain elements in our culture today that we have others would go back further to things like the enlightenment or they'd go back to the protestant reformation some have done that back to nominalism that theme and theology and philosophy of the the uh the late middle ages so-called um but but um as an orthodox christian i've often taught history taught the history of the west i've been doing this for well 25 years i guess or even more so like a quarter of a century it kind of dates me um and i as an orthodox christian as someone you know who's kind of i hope steeped in the piety and experience of of the east not the west but who has lives in the west and considers himself a member of western culture and civilization for sure um i see a lot that's not discussed in in those different perspectives and so i'm convinced that really the solutions to the problems we face today the answers the questions we have about the west are um are best addressed if we go back into what might be called the deep past of of the west not the past 500 or so years but back into the first millennium go back a full millennium thousand years into that first millennium and there i think we see a common culture east and west that is something we can build on something we can look back to something we can be inspired by and it was a time when there was uh one church in in in the west in the east in europe in what i call christendom that's my preferred term for this civilization and uh and if we look back there we find a particular kind of culture that's very different than what followed um and and which predominated at any given point in the aforementioned narrative from nominalism and the reformation all the way up to the sexual revolution what we see is a what i call a paradise culture a culture that looks to the kingdom of heaven for um directs its the members of western civilization toward the kingdom of heaven which is convinced that the kingdom of heaven is not of this world which is really important sometimes people hear the term paradise the age of paradise like my first my first book is entitled and they think oh um paradise was you know accomplished or something that's not what i'm saying at all paradise can never be fully at home in this world the question is is this world fully at home in itself or is this world always looking to something beyond it namely the kingdom of heaven preached by the gospel that um that brings fulfillment to it in a transcendent transcendent relationship and that is lost after the first millennium and we're dealing i think now a thousand years after the great schism or great division we're dealing with the consequences of that loss and so as an orthodox christian um i was once you know i was once an episcopalian christian i um i was uh uh i converted to orthodox christianity uh while living in um in russia after the collapse of communism i lived in saint petersburg for a couple of years doing doctoral research for my dissertation and there i converted to orthodox christianity and since then i've kind of tried to revise my understanding of the long-term history of the west in wide of of the orthodox uh tradition yeah and i i guess to to give you a little bit of background on on me a little bit i i felt like there was a lot of what you're saying that i hugely resonated with and then there are obviously a couple points of tension so it seems you know what would a a unitarian christian who is sort of like a protestant of protestants of protestants and a an eastern orthodox have to disagree about it it would almost seem like we're on opposite ends of the spectrum in some ways and you know that's that's a little bit true but one thing in my church growing up our in our self-understanding our main distinctive was not necessarily the trinity that that was one of them but the the thing that we most lamented about most of the christians around us is that they thought sort of the goal of a christian life was to die and go to heaven and to be on the right side of the divide in terms of what happens to you post-mortem and that was almost the entire focus of the theology and the spirituality and the hope that a christian should have is just simply dying and going to heaven whereas we we emphasized um that our hope is the resurrection the hope is the renewed the renewal of our bodies and the hope is a kingdom on earth right of a a complete unity of of earth and heaven and and that sort of thing and that's what it felt to us was like our strongest distinction was that the hope was uh for this earth the hope was for us the hope was for these bodies that we are undergoing the beginning of a transformation now that would be finalized later and so when i've been listening to your podcast and reading your books i'm like i hear that theme so strongly in what you're saying and it it really encourages me um and and that was something that i think prompted richard to connect us is this idea of uh of sort of the hope is a earth that is being transformed by heaven with the hope of their eventual full unity not just an escape of our bodies to heaven not just an escape of this life to some heavenly kingdom that's completely somewhere else yeah i think there you know the way you describe it there i think there's some interesting points of um you know a comparison there um and you know i have you know very very very little experience with unitarian christian traditions and teachings and culture and you know parish life obviously and that kind of thing so i i wouldn't be able to speak much about that but um that's i guess kind of what i'm trying to say though or what you just said is is what i'm trying to say about that first millennium um the first millennium was was influenced as a culture christendom was influenced by a conviction that the kingdom of heaven has drawn near to this world and i spent a lot of time talking about the incarnation and traditional christianity's doctrine of the incarnation that god and man are united in the person of jesus christ that divinity has um assimilated uh humanity and that in christ and in the body the church that he created the the world has begun to participate in the eternal kingdom of heaven beyond this world i would want to emphasize that as i understand the teaching of the orthodox church um and and would teach it and i do teach to become a priest we don't uh think in terms of you know the renewal of this world in a kind of terminal sense we see it as something that it will will go beyond time after you know the second coming of christ and the judgment and things like this that that will be a a total renewal that we can only begin to kind of you know it's such a mystery we don't really know what that's going to be like at all but what we do do know is what we're told by the gospel and that is again the incarnation is real and so much so much of the paradise culture that i try to describe in say volume one of my uh series the age of paradise so much of that culture is shaped by the incarnation and here i bring attention especially to liturgy and the sacraments those really are for me the core as i see it the core cultural force um that shapes this culture we call the west and it's only after you know many hundreds of years does that start to weaken and finally we're looking at something that's no longer traditional christianity driving the west but we're shaping or cultivating it but we're looking at secular humanism which is for me and i talk about this in my most recent book the age of utopia which is for me a um a counterfeit of traditional christianity secular humanism is a counterfeit it's an effort to find an alternative to traditional christianity and it's transformational imperative no longer looking to the kingdom of heaven for its um transformation of the world but now looking just the world itself the seculum yeah a neutral world yeah i think that's a sort of a good overview of the topics that that we want to cover so we we've got a lot of history to cover and then maybe once we've done that then we can sort of get back into applying that to our current situation but i i suppose let's go back to the beginning how did how did traditional christianity in its origins incorporate this positive view for humanity this positive view for the kingdom of god and how did that sort of set the stage for the i don't know the ground soil i guess from which christianity would go from there yeah i i think traditional christianity um from the beginning from pentecost forward was very positive about about humanity very positive about uh the the cosmos the world uh i speak of an affirmative cosmology uh rather than a negative one um uh and i speak about a optimistic uh anthropology rather than a pessimistic one i think that um that this is this is clear from the scriptures forward um the earliest record we have of of christianity um the gospel of john for instance speaks a lot about the the problems of the world that the world you know is is is broken by sin uh if the world hated me the world will hate you he tells his disciples there jesus does but at the the same gospel speaks about how god so loved the world that he gave to it his only begotten son god loves this world god came into this world and sent his only begotten son to it and uh and jesus assimilated our humanity to his divinity to deify us to to fill us with his divinity this is the mystery of being made in the image and likeness of god which genesis proclaims and which christianity fulfills and and so i believe this is a very optimistic view of what the human experience in this life in this age in this world should be and it's it's played out from the beginning um from the beginning for three centuries uh we can see this this kind of proto-civilization of christendom forming um it's underground you know it's a catacomb uh christendom at first in many cases um its culture is kind of a subculture within the predominant pagandam christendom is you know very small at first but it grows in three centuries and it it it doesn't await um a government to to protect it or um advance it as such as constantine's conversion and the byzantine state does in the fourth century it's doing this already and so we see from the beginning the um the liturgy the worship of the church is is is revealing the the presence of the kingdom of heaven in this world the sacramental life of the church which is already in place uh from pentecost forward um is revealing the presence of of uh of the kingdom of heaven in this world and man's participation in that divine experience can we yeah can we go a little bit deeper into that topic because that's a very important theme for your thesis is sacramentality could you explain a little bit more what you mean by that term and how we see that in the the early church itself right yeah well you know the early church uh took very seriously um i i speak a lot about what i call doctrinal integrity the importance of keeping intact a doctrinal tradition that we can trace back to pentecost acts 2 42 kind of wraps up the account of of what pentecost was all about and what happens next acts 2 42 they continued steadfastly in the apostles doctrine in the breaking of the bread and the communion or fellowship and and in the prayers um the greek original there has a definite article in front of each of those four elements so it's not the things in general are going on it's specific a specific approach to apostolic doctrine breaking of the bread or eucharistic communion fellowship and and church identity and finally the prayers the liturgical life of the church and so i think we see a an approach to liturgy something you know a word that comes a little bit later but we see approach to worship or liturgy which is very definite uh from from that from the beginning and it's centered upon a sacramental experience of christ's presence in this world through the assembled church i mean we go forward you know to the end of that first century and we we get to the epistles of saint ignatius of antioch one of the early fathers of the church uh who's the first to use the word catholic for instance as i understand it anyway that's where we first see the christians using the word catholic in in its greek original ignatius wrote in greek lived in the greek east and ignatius talks about the church as an assembly around a bishop appointing presbyters or elders at a liturgical gathering in a liturgical assembly and people sharing the chalice sharing communion sacramental eucharistic communion together and that is the experience of christ's presence christ is present christ is really here in this world when christians come together to uh to to assemble for the eucharistic assembly especially on the ward's day on the first day of the week which is why we're still doing that you know to to millennial later on on sunday mornings as christians beyond that i think doesn't ignatius of antioch call the lord's supper the food onto immortality or something like that i believe he uses a phrase either that phrase or something similar to that and that's sort of what you're talking about about how sacramentality connects with the um the early church's positive view of humanity and the positive view of the cosmos sort of that almost in a kind of you are what you eat sort of way that the eucharist is something that helps transform us into greater and greater likeness unto jesus and jesus in his divine state is sort of like coming down and lifting us up and moving us in that direction through the lord's supper i think that's right that that is sort of an image that right you and you see that very clearly early in ignatius of antioch and that that's sort of that connection between heaven earth humans and sacraments that i think you're you're sort of bundling i think so yeah i think i think so sam and and then i mean it takes a while and again it's not that the uh conversion of constantine the legalization of christianity matters not it matters a great deal because then it frees the christian community christendom to begin elaborating you know how this sacramentality uh plays out and influences the culture around it it was already going on in the first three centuries but after that important date of you know constantine's conversion 313 edicted milan if we want to date it there then the church is you know is is building temples and that sacramentality gets expressed in the very cultural you might say artistic uh media of architecture and iconography and hypnography um you look at architecture for instance it's it's totally sacramental east and west in the eastern case which becomes kind of the model for a later orthodox architecture you've got the cross and square architecture which emphasizes more as a square building that is itself within that square cross formed and above it of course the the the well-known central dome that becomes so important in orthodox architecture that central dome is a as a symbol of the kingdom of heaven coming into this world um the kingdom of heaven is drawn near repent jesus says as he begins his ministry in the gospels and so uh this eastern pattern of architecture that uses a central dome standing over the assembled eucharistic assembly is a symbol of heaven coming down into this world as you probably know the overlap of heaven and earth in the participation of the the liturgy and the religious services absolutely you know if you go out into a field at night and it's clear skies it rarely is here and in uh in western washington but when it is uh you feel like you're standing underneath the dome of heaven and that's the idea and then with time uh you know an icon of jesus is painted up in that dome known as christ pantocrator christ almighty looking down on his people ascended assembled below him reasserting that basic principle that wherever the assembly of of of the church is for eucharistic assembly as saint ignatius had said under a canonical bishop in in continuity in community and fellowship without with the church throughout the world wherever that happens christ is present there among them the body of christ is there at worship and the head christ himself the being the head is there present with the church this is the eastern pattern the western pattern uh we see this in the famous um basilicas built by a justinian in uh ravenna in in italy but the basilica was more common in the west the basilica is a long building not the square kind of upwardly um oriented one but it's oriented uh toward the east where the altar table is located and in marvelous cases of some of these churches you see lines iconographical lines of of people um on their way toward the east toward oriented toward that altar that commune that symbol of communion with god on the walls they're all facing and as it were moving in that eastward direction orienting the people assembled there yeah and could you speak a little bit about what what east symbolizes in in that imagination why east why instead of north south or west or something yeah well you know the east um we learned from basil the great who wrote in the in the 300s the 4th century in a word called on the holy spirit basil was arguing why the holy spirit and here i'll present my trinitarian understanding of of of god the holy spirit along with jesus christ the son of god is divine father son and holy spirit and in in in white of the uh the aryan controversy which asserted jesus is a great man but not divine he's a creature there was a time when when when the when the son of god was not um basil and the other eastern fathers known as cappadocian fathers in the technical language um kind of hegeography of the of the east they said no no that's not correct and they like athanasius asserted that jesus is divine as well as being human and then that opened the question that i was mentioning a moment ago with basil it's like so who's the holy spirit and basil the great writes they treat us called on the holy spirit in that fourth century which establishes um within the orthodox tradition establishes that the the spirit is divine well that's all background to this point about orientation you spoke of and facing east because as he lays out his argument basil says so people might say that nowhere in the scriptures uh and this is i definitely you know um arguable but nowhere in the scriptures is there a proclamation that the holy spirit is god the holy spirit is divine but basil says there are many things we believe that are part of an unwritten tradition that are a part of a tradition that that from which the scriptures were actually written and canonized and so he points to certain things that are part of the christian tradition and one of them is the um practice he says of facing east in our worship that we do this in order to remember um that that the east symbolizes our communion with god it symbolizes the kingdom of heaven which is now in this world and directionally um geographically like locatable of course this is all symbol symbolism right but symbolism means something is it connected with like sunrise and resurrection is that is that part of why why it's east partly partly so there are there are a few um reference um to to eastward worship to oriented worship and by the way if people you know on on your program maybe aren't used to thinking about this the word orientation here is quite significant you know we think of freshman orientation or job orientation what does that mean it means like we we learned that we learn kind of what's what about our job or where we're going but orientation we think about it means to face east oriens is the latin for east just like you know oriental or something is an english word that means east yeah yeah if you go to the orient you visit india or japan or china or something like that so it literally means east and we learn from the scriptures genesis [Music] that paradise was planted in the east we learned furthermore um in some of the prophecies about the messiah coming to the world that he would be the son s-u-n of righteousness isn't that malachi's a prophecy of the messiah that he is the s-u-n like that kind of burning globe in the sky son of righteousness and there's this idea that the sunrise now becomes a symbol a cosmic symbol of the beyond cosmic reality of god's coming into this world the kingdom of heaven drawing near to this world and so all sorts of references can be made but we could go to the new testament too jesus says i think what is it is it matthew 25 maybe you could help me with this i think it's there where jesus says that just as lightning strikes from the east so the son of man will come in in glory and so there's a sense of like the east now symbolizes with the glory of the sunrise early in the morning you know like that sense of like this is something god created a world in which a sun appears we know it doesn't it doesn't rise but the earth spins but a god created cosmos in which the rising of the sun in the morning is given to us as a kind of symbol cosmic symbol of an eternal reality and that is that god is coming in brilliance and glory and beauty and blinding um uh power and so the early church yes the early church began worshiping facing east facing the east spacing the sunrise you can still find this in modern orthodox liturgical life for instance i'm sure you can find it in other non-orthodox forms of liturgical life but in the orthodox church um the service of matins uh orthros matins that is um the office of the morning that takes place during and kind of concludes when the sun rises ideally at the end of that the priest raises his hands in the air and he says glory to thee who has shown us the light and the idea here is the sun is now rising and that there's a fulfillment of the nighttime vigil living through the darkness you know as a symbol of this world um and that and christ coming to us on a on this daily liturgical basis so yeah there's a greek orthodox church near my house and uh and i i was like i drove by it after i've been uh reading your books and i was like okay yeah sure enough it's a it's a kind of a cross square and yeah sure enough it is facing east i i i driven by that building who knows how many times and and had never noticed that until until you pointed that out so um a question i have is how so what does constantine's ascension change and how is um how is his role understood and then the role of the emperors after him understood theologically and what is the relationship then between empire and kingdom of god and church and and all of those things right yeah well i you know as i presented in age of paradise i think this is a very important point a third of the book is actually pre-constantine which is an effort at me to to challenge a going conviction you you find this in all sorts of like popular accounts of christendom you know i use that term a lot christendom that christendom is the product of constantine and the merger of church and state and and and you can't have christendom without a government that protects christianity and advances its kind of you know its moral and spiritual goals and when this collapses at the end of the middle ages early modern period christendom is wiped out i don't believe that i don't i don't use christendom that way i think christendom is there from pentecost it's still there today but in the case of constantine and his accession to power in the early 4th century this is just another dimension of of the church um uh integrating into culture and civilization um uh uh the kingdom of heaven uh seeing the kingdom of heaven working in this world maybe nothing is more of this world than the state with its laws you know that are you know that are not voluntary but coercive and and punitive justice and and killing and and and violence and wars being fought and and constantine was part of all of that that's why he waited so long to be baptized as he was afraid he'd be baptized forgiven of his sins and then he'd have to continue doing all the dirty work of government you know and he did some dirty work with his uh son and his uh his his second wife um he had them killed but but uh uh the the the idea then would be well can we even talk about a state being baptizable sanctifiable capable of being integrated into the church's paradise culture in the east you get a clear yes in the west you get ambiguity there's no question in the west this was a yes but but a very important um um statement of ambiguity is the famous city of god by saint augustine which really emphasized that there are really two he creates a dualism here really two cities the kingdom of men and the kingdom of god you know and and and he he's really critical and suspect of of claims that we get from the east that constantine's state can really be seen as kind of contributing to this paradise culture and we start to see it you know we could talk if you're interested in what flows out of this distinction but you start to get a distinction in western christendom of this dualism of this really this this eschatological gap as one great historian writes that um that there's really a distinction between what goes on in this world and what the eternal kingdom of heaven has going on in it the east you don't have that so much there's a famous uh bishop named eusebius that celebrates constantine's conversion he's the one who writes the the second great history of the church um people often think he writes the first history he doesn't saint luke writes the first history in the book of acts but he writes a history of the church and he celebrates constantine's conversion and he speaks like everything now is brought together so there's this great optimism in the east when the when the state now um commits itself to being part of the of of of christendom part of christendom yeah and so that happens now what happens later um you know if you're interested we could talk a little bit about the historical narrative that that comes next well i i guess part to a question i have is so um in the on this theme of sacramentality um part of it is that they're that that the workings of the empire become somewhat sacramentalized themselves and you talk about this in the the coronation ceremonies of a of a new byzantine emperor um could you talk a little bit about what what a what a coronation ceremony was of a new emperor and how that connected with this sense of a greater unity instead of eschatological dualism but a greater unity between sort of the this age and the kingdom of heaven yeah right sure well you know those ceremonies you know they first of all aren't there from the beginning it takes a couple centuries before byzantine christians start to think hey you know we really should ceremonialize formalize the um accession to power of a new emperor you know that takes a while and interestingly it's borrowed by the west people like charlemagne were trying to kind of ape or imitate that uh he gets crowned by the pope of rome for instance and there were a couple before him um frankish kings who had been crowned that way but um but but we see the church really now playing a role in blessing and consecrating in a sacramental way i guess you could say the the statecraft that would be uh in the hands of a new christian presumably orthodox christian ruler and this and and the church in her kind of you know her vision of a paradise culture thought this was quite legitimate and important something we've really lost in the modern west we really really love our separation so-called of church and state you know that's a really important part about being american and we have a lot of blessings that come from it uh some curses as well but um but we really do think that's important as modern americans in the west more broadly than just america too um but it's an interesting thing that idea of a church versus a state i think you you meant you kind of alluded to this is a very modern concept um it really only arises when when after the papal reformation when you get the papacy asserting supremacy over the state in the west and then the state reacts and and fights against the papacy right and you get henry viii claiming that he is king of england as head of the church of england whereas formerly pope's proclaiming they were the head of the church throughout the west you get this conflict that you know finally gets resolved after the wars of western religion and the enlightenment which creates a separate sphere for church and state and that's really secularization at work there but for a millennium you don't have that not in the east but not even in the west charlemagne had a what would later be called a cesaro papist vision of his role as a christian ruler and that is that the the life of the church is somehow incorporated into his statecraft hence the rise of the filioque clause which would separate eastern and western christians so much because for for charlemagne and the frankish empire it was important to use the filioque and he finally imposes this or tries to impose this on the pope of rome who at first resists and under charlemagne's successors finally uh adopts the philly oakway yeah i i felt like that was one of the things that i learned a lot from your book is like i i knew a little bit about charlemagne and i i could have given you some facts on him but i i had no idea sort of the theological effects of charlemagne and and the the effects on ecclesiology that his reign and his ascendancy and his descendants had um so so could you talk a little bit more about that because i i guess one thing i hadn't ever really considered is when charlemagne is trying to have himself crowned as the holy roman emperor there's someone else who thinks that that title belongs to them and that this is setting up a competition and a a division and and the seeds of future conflict yeah and i think it goes back to your question earlier which i don't think i answered very well um and that is the you know ceremonial um way in which a new emperor was was recognized as emperor in the kind of the kind of liturgical celebration of that event the what one historian called the liturgification of life like all of life gets liturgified that is to say brought into the into the liturgical sacramental experience of the church in this very unitary cosmology of the east i mentioned eusebius who had a very unitary it all gets kind of woven together that doesn't mean there's not sin and darkness and and all sorts of bad stuff going on but overall there's this vision of a of a civilization and a culture which is integrated into a unity and the and when the government becomes christian it gets integrated liturgically into that unity as well whereas in the west you've got the the model of of of of um saint augustine with city of god which will only be acted on later in history but which creates this this kind of dualism that there's two different realities we're talking about now to your question about charlemagne and um and his successors and um and especially charlemagne's relationship to the east so what charlemagne you know charlemagne's crowned in 800 by the pope of rome uh he had been ruling decades before that as a frankish king but now he begins he gets crowned emperor of the romans emperor of the romans and a crown is put on his head at st peter's basilica in rome by the pope of rome leo the third was the pope and this happens in 800 right during the the latter stages of the iconoclastic controversy and heresy in the east where byzantine emperors are actually advancing with the use of state violence the iconoclastic icon-destroying policies of that movement they had introduced it and they were advancing it and in the west this was this was appalling the pope of rome saw iconoclasm as a horrible um misuse of power earning a later term it's anachronistic at this point cesaro papism when the caesar or emperor acts like a pope with supreme authority over the church that's not a real that's not an accurate it's certainly not an historical understanding but but it's useful so we could we could talk that way so in the west charlemagne is crowned in the context with with contemporary events where you see the east kind of going bonkers over this iconoclasm and all the problems it raises and charlemagne is crowned by the by the pope um as the emperor of the romans well this as you just suggested fundamentally defies if not negates or or rejects the claims of those byzantine emperors who had been in continuity beginning with constantine both christian and roman there's another thing that needs to be pointed out i think a lot of westerners have the idea that the roman empire ended in the four or five hundreds or something like that after its decline and that then there was no roman empire and then uh you know charlemagne kind of thought he was but it doesn't really make sense that he was but a lot of westerners don't realize is that from the byzantine perspective the roman empire never ended there was just as constantine was a roman emperor so were his not necessarily his sons but his uh uh you know successors who were uh in his line after him were just continuing the same uh empirical threat and and so when charlemagne is saying hey i'm the roman emperor you know that that is in direct competition with the claim from constantinople that's that's absolutely right yeah and they were using latin at the byzantine court they were speaking of themselves as emperors of the romans they thought of the byzantine empire as the romans that's what they called it um absolutely continuous development there well so you have this thing happen in 800 and what's interesting about it sam is that on the one hand you know it totally alienates the east the byzantine emperors are like are you kidding like we're the roman emperors and what's going on here like why is the pope who used to be in communion with us and still is by the way but nevertheless why is the pope turning to another power and um and and that there's a couple interesting things that's one it alienates the east it creates a east-west divide on top of that the east-west divide is greatly um exacerbated by the fact that charlemagne now kind of gives orders to his his bishops the kind of uh cultural elite of the of the frankish empire he gives a signal that he wants them to begin generating theological treatises and other statements of identity and theology and so forth that are distinct from the east and so actually what you get is you get a lot of theological treatises by the frankish theologians the most famous in the so-called frankish or carolingian renaissance but there are others like theodolph and others and they begin become very pejorative in using the term greek they dismiss the greeks as like a heretical iconoclastic kind of who knows what's going on out there in byzantium we are the true roman empire we're the heart and center of christendom and and you get this really we're the ones that are more faithful to the teaching than the tradition and we're safeguarding it against whatever those greeks over there are doing that's right and here again is another step toward the assimilation of what has now could now be called augustinianism a distinct kind of um tradition in the west uh there's augustine in his writings you know like city of god and confessions and others and then there's the kind of assimilation and digestion of those of that theology which follows some of it contested by latin fathers after constantine but now the franks see this as a a western legacy that they can oppose to the cappadocian fathers like basil the great and other eastern fathers who had this unitary vision of christendom unitary vision of culture and now more and more you see in in the in charlemagne's west a a distinction from that arising and that brings if i just say one final point of importance in addition to uh charlemagne's alienation of the east charlemagne's creation of a of a cultural um elite that just distinguish themselves from the east as a distinct west the third thing would be the role of the papacy in all this so the papacy now becomes tied to linked to the fortunes of the franks and a distinctly western conception of culture and civilization that right away will not um will will not um develop uh but with the within a couple centuries will become very very important and so the papacy for instance right now resists the use of the filioque which the franks were advocating in fact the very poku crown charlemagne makes um silver shields to put on the very tomb of peter at saint peter's basilica with the nicene creed written without the philly oakway in latin or greek both actually two shields one latin one greek and it's like we will never ever adopt the filioque because it violates the ecumenical council's ban on changing the creed but with two within two centuries by the early 100s just before the great schism happens um the papacy has become so weakened and so dependent on these the successors of the frankish charlemagne line that he adopts finally the filioque the pope does and from that point forward the philippi is part of western uh uh christianity christendom right so there's this sort of combination of forces that are starting to increase and grow the rift between east and west one is charlemagne claiming his position as the rom the the true roman emperor um one of the another part of that is that the bishop of rome is the one recognizing that when previously i assume byzantine emperors are are coordinated by the bishop or the metropolitan of constantinople right yeah so par the patriarch of constantinople so part of that is the the the roman bishop claiming some authority over what had previously been constantinople's prerogative and then there is this also this theological creedal division um with the filioque filioque just in case anyone doesn't know it's in the the nicene creed it says the holy spirit proceeds from the father and the son in latin that that word filioquoi means and the son the greek version the original creed from the council of constantinople did not have the word and the sun in it that starts to creep up sometime in the west and then um charlemagne perhaps both for theological and political reasons starts to emphasize that and it's a way of distinguishing again in a in the very heart of the nicene creed the the west from the east and a reason why on either side the other side was wrong yeah yeah yeah you got that that's right yeah uh-huh and so so what are what are some of the other theological and spiritual trends that you can sort of see in carolingian frankish christianity that come to influence the the trajectory of western uh christianity after that well one of the things that i find interesting about the uh frankish uh period of western christendom uh which begins to set the west on a course distinct from where it had been before in the throughout the first millennium in which the the east continued on um is the um attention to reform attention to correctness um charlemagne is known not only for advocating a uh kind of a revival of learning uh use of latin he systematizes the use of latin i mean even going so far as to specify a certain script um he's very attentive to and his bishops you know kind of fulfill this he sends bishops out on mission throughout the whole of his empire it's very vast um stretches from like the borderlands of spain all the way to saxony and beyond in central europe uh includes italy now um he he begins um uh uh uh trying to integrate and and reform uh the practice of christianity uh within his empire i mean hence the filioque way he wanted one form of the creed that used the filioque for very specific political missionary kind of reasons the phillie oakway asserts jesus as god by saying the holy spirit who is also god uh proceeds from the holy from from the son as well as the father and that asserts that the son truly is god this was used against aryan christians like in spain and so forth that were still left over as it were and and serves to assimilate them into charlemagne's orthodox empire and charlemagne is orthodox we shouldn't forget this there's been no permanent split yet so back to the reformation kind of thing charlemagne is all about reformation reforming trying to correct and and perfect um ecclesiastical usage throughout his empire which which has great effects and and consequences in some cases but it also um sets a precedent for later western equesistical um kind of administration that sees like the church as something like the practice of christianity as being something that has to be corrected all the time and brought back into conformity with some sort of model um of course protestant protestant reformation is the most you know well-known example where luther and calvin and others are trying to bring christian practice and belief back into accord with what they understand the first century apostolic experience related in the scriptures to be uh charlemagne's not like that as such but he i for instance revive revises the mass um the the latin form of the uh of the eucharistic assembly um he does other things like that and so this is very important and it sets a precedent that will be picked up by the papacy itself a couple centuries after charlemagne could you also talk sort of about um a greater emphasis on sinfulness um a greater emphasis on fallenness and how that relates to um penance and purgatory and and a couple other of those things that you start to see developing more and more in the west kind of in and after the time of charlemagne yeah and i'd say after the time of the so charlemagne so let's call it charlemagne 800. uh in the middle of the 11th century 250 years later occurs what's called the great schism i call it culturally speaking the great division with division schism it's the same word but i i can't i think great division kind of helps us think about it a little bit more is more than just an ecclesiastical um event it's a cultural event as well well by the middle of the 11th century um the papacy has um resolved to um assert leadership throughout the west in an effort to reform christendom there uh it had fallen christendom christianity christian practice had fallen into you know a really miserable state uh all historians agree with this there's no there's no controversy here um local lords and and lay leaders were in control of so much of christian life including the pope's the election of popes of rome the local roman aristocracy kept the papacy in its pocket for political and economic reasons and there's this bursting you know christianity is about transformation that's something that goes through all my books i talk about a transformational imperative that's built in to christian civilization from the beginning romans 12 2 be not conformed to the ways of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind i think that transformation rather than conformity but transformation of the world is a um a culturally creative element in in christianity from the start and so we get the popes of the 11th century saying we've got a trend we've got to change this uh and that transformational imperative is behind what they do however the way they do it is to advocate the creation of a new administration administrative structure where they are the supreme head of everything in in the west including the government um instead of a unity or symphony between emperor and and patriarch or bishops as you had in the east you now have a very clear hierarchical model where the pope is the supreme head of every everything and everyone in the west including governments and this begins the long conflict that pope gregory the seventh has with uh henry iv the holy roman emperor you know the famous uh pilgrimage that henry makes to the snows of canosa and neal's out in front for three days waiting for pope gregory to come out and absolve him so he can get back to ruling because he can't rule without the pope's blessing um this now creates that church-state divide that we were talking about earlier but it also entails brings in its in its wake other developments which you alluded to uh sam one for instance is is purgatory purgatory is a theological opinion that circulates and exists before the great uh schism before the papal reformation but it only becomes dogmatic as a roman catholic doctrine in the 12th century it seems it it became a dogma of of the roman catholic church now how it's laid out is may be different over time and i'm not a specialist in this and i'm not roman catholic so i don't want to pretend that i can you know say the final word about purgatory is a doctrine i can't but i do know as an historian that it manifests itself throughout what we call the middle ages a term i don't use in my writing um in in in different ways to uh emphasize uh the the terror the horror of what will happen to someone when they die and will have to be purged hence purgatory purged of of the effects of their sins and there's uh different ways of doing this um uh uh there are different ways of um of talking about this dante which we're going to richard earlier richard's done a wonderful job talking about dante and how beautiful beautifully he he elaborates the purgatorial doctrine in the second volume of his divine comedy but other accounts are very pessimistic like the purgatory of saint patrick which appears at this time it's an account of going into purgatory and suffering hell essentially purgatory becomes a temporal hell that someone has to undergo after they die so a kind of post-mortem punishment and suffering needs to take place before one experiences paradise well i would say that this fundamentally subverts the paradise culture of the first millennium because why because that culture said that we are already participating in and experiencing our salvation deification the experience of of union with god and many other things the liturgical sacramental experience of standing in one of those temples and and seeing the kingdom of heaven symbolized over your head with that central dome or being oriented toward the altar these are experiences of joy and and uh and and harmony and and salvation and now though these don't disappear from western christendom after the papal reformation they get minimized and more and more the um culturally pessimistic elements such as the fear and horror of purgatory begin to cloud that paradise culture and so you know that would be one one way i would have of describing how after the papal reformation this starts to happen and purgatory is closely connected to that reformation because um in order to obtain so-called indulgences from that punishment of purgatory one has to receive from the pope the personally from the pope not from a local bishop from the pope a indulgence these indulgences are introduced only at this time in the 11th century urban ii the pope uh who launched the uh the first crusade spoke of such indulgences fighting crusades and going to war which formerly had been considered a a a sin even if it was to defend your own country or even defend christendom it was still sinful to take the life of fellow human beings made in the image of god uh now now fighting such crusades becomes a means toward salvation itself and so you get this kind of really militarized vision of um of salvation in the crusades and and legalized and almost transactional or something like that absolutely yeah yeah with time i mean that's what luther just couldn't couldn't take anymore and so many like him is that after 500 years of this um in in some cases and not always with the with the papacy's blessing but nevertheless it happened indulgences become transactional it's just okay i'll pay this much money or do make this pilgrimage to this uh schwein or saints relics hence this or enlist in this crusade or yeah yeah yeah and and go fight you know that's that's a little bit that's waning that has already waned and kind of faded by the time of luther but yes that's part of it as well yeah and i think a lot of uh a lot of protestants are to the extent that they're aware of reasons of the reformation know those sorts of things but i think they might not be aware of how localized that was to the particular western christianity that protestantism found itself in and that these developments were not there in eastern christianity at the same time yeah and eastern christianity throughout this time and before it you know has plenty of problems and the orthodox church has plenty of problems there's lots of violence in the you know orthodox christians are killing each other i mean let's look at yvonne the terrible i mean 16th century yvonne the terrible contemporary of henry viii i mean talk about violence and statecraft gone totally bonkers in the in in the name of christianity too yvonne the terrible had a very strong christian self-identity um so we don't want to idealize the the east in the sense that everything's fine it's not it never was and it never will be but what we don't have are these cultural institutions like purgatory um crusades the inquisition there is no institutional inquisition that grows out of the albigensian crusade um of the early 1200s under pope innocent iii the same pope who oversaw the sack of constantinople in the east and so you don't have probably you don't have um you don't have an instant institutional inquisition um you know using using using governmental power to uh supervise and detect and punish heresy and a lot of this stuff is really accumulating by the time of luther and the protestant reformation um can i just say one last thing though about this this what is going on here um penitential pessimism which i you know point to purgatory as being kind of uh institutional doctrinal support for not not that purgatory is necessarily this way it's just kind of culturally speaking has this effect but also um penance itself becomes seen like you said is a transactional thing like i've committed certain sins i go and i list those sins to a priest the priest is seen now under the clerical kind of system that exists as a servant of the pope and therefore the one with power to absolve me from my sins and he he's almost more important than my act of repentance is right and so and so that that principle of repent for the kingdom of heaven is drawn near is giving way to repent so that you can get out of punishment right or even help your loved ones out of punishment yeah yeah kind of a very personal kind of you know effort to manage salvation and the experience of paradise yeah so how how does how do these forces sort of set up the the protestant reformation and and what sort of i guess the eastern orthodox view or maybe maybe there isn't one official view that's not quite the right way to uh to put it but what's sort of an orthodox perspective on the reformation uh so kind of those are two big questions obviously and we could go into numerous podcasts just on that but some what are the causes and and how how is this viewed from the east right yeah well um for the first you know what kind of leads immediately to the protestant reformation um i mean that that obviously is a very well known uh uh a subject of historical inquiry and and people have done a great job talking about some of those things um i would emphasize at you know with my own interests and such i would emphasize that there's a um reaction to this penitential pessimism when luther you know goes to rome on pilgrimage he's actually assigned just to go to rome for a kind of a local um um it's kind of a business trip for him for his augustinian monastery but when he gets there he uses he acts like a pilgrim and he goes up the steps the famous steps um in the lateran palace that were said to have been brought from pontius pilate's temple or not temple but palace that jesus had to walk up and so this becomes a pilgrimage site and what i was saying earlier about the purgatorial culture or ethos is certain acts now become like salvific in the sense of if i perform these in this transactional way i'll get i'll obtain some some measurable benefit such as less time being punished in purgatory well formerly pilgrimage had been an experience of paradise right i mean wow this is this is where jesus was and and jesus is present here in these steps and i'm participating in this world in this life right now physically touching the the penetration or breaking in of paradise into this world in the incarnation of of jesus christ or going to pilgrimage sites like saints relics which protestants become so negative toward why because they've become so transactional so institutionalized so legalistically defined as go to saints relics you'll get this and and you'll you'll escape purgatory for a certain certain amount of time and this saints worth this amount this saint's worth this amount yeah you go to a priest and you make your confession and like i've done this this this and this and it's almost like the well the priest would literally pull out a kind of a table and say this okay this many hail marys and you've done this you have to do this to get out of that and make a pilgrimage here this kind of thing and i don't want to over like emphasize you know the the the problems dysfunctionality of this i mean there's a lot of beauty and good stuff going on in the salvation of the human race uh in in in western christendom on the eve of the reformation but people like luther you know finally they're brilliant and creative here's the second part of your question um and there are a lot of other reasons why the protestant reformation occurred but but here's the second part of your question from an orthodox point of view people like luther made the decisions they made um you know cranmer in england and calvin and france and geneva they made the decisions they made to break from the roman catholic church because of that same reformational element that had started to creep into western christendom under charlemagne as i mentioned and then it had really been institutionalized by the papal reformation of the 11th century now it's part of the culture of chris chris christianity and christendom and so now it's time to reform yet again the the faith reform it and this attention to reform which is very can be very external rather than transform as paul says in 12 romans 12 2 rather to be transformed mystically through the experience of communion with god which had been at the heart of paradise christendom for a millennium and was still very much a part of paradise christendom in the orthodox east at this time well it's it there's so much attention to reformation uh rather than transformation that luther and calvin and other reformers look very much to an orthodox christian very much like you know the heirs of of pope gregory vii of rome and and you know my my second volume the age of division has as it were you know historical bookends of the papal reformation of the 11th century and the protestant reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries and i see this as all being kind of part of one civilization whereas protestants roman catholics will see it as being a break like a a completely different you know kind of approach to things luther forward uh or or or going backward in time and i see it from the east as being really two sides of one coin and i i can imagine that there's sort of two tugging tensions that an eastern might view the present reformation like well yeah i can certainly understand what those protestants were upset about if you look at their list of grievances i might agree with a good chunk of it but the schismatic and the anti-authoritarian art and the anti-clerical anti-structural however you want to put that element an anti-surgical and he would act anti-sacramental look at calvin's you know efforts to reduce the sacraments yeah although one question that i that i had about that is is you know as a unitarian i'm like only so loyal to luther and calvin and calvin wasn't so nice to non-trinitarians so we don't tend to like him very much but um one one thing that i i think that luther and calvin and a lot of the other reformers were motivated by was the fact that communion and the lord's supper had been so clerically oriented that the common man maybe participated in it once a year or something like that was a relatively common practice mainly out of kind of perhaps too much fear uh that to participate in it in an unworthy state would be counterproductive so then you only maybe do it once a year normally around easter or something like that and a lot of the reformers are like no we need to bring this back to the people we need to take it away from those special from the special reserve of the clerics and then again share it with the people and i can imagine making an argument that in certain ways that the protestant reformers are in interested in spreading the liturgical participation even though they might not have used those words but that this is one of their motivations to to spread it to greater common participation and in that way i'm not sure if anti-sacramental is always necessarily a fair representation although i i also do kind of know what you mean yeah let me let me say two things about that one i totally agree with what you're saying your interpretation of what they were trying to do is i think quite correct they were trying to they were opposing and rejecting um with a lot of vehemence the convention that it crept into the west of of what i call the bifurcation of christendom between a clerical elite and a lay kind of uh whatever the elite is not um the clergy more and more after the papal reformation because of the dynamic and logic of the papal reformation right the clergy become integrated into what now is known as the church right i mean how often do we in even in modern times say the church you know so and so is in is on the outs with the church by church we mean clergy yeah but that's a crazy i mean that's a completely un um scriptural untraditional non-traditional way of defining the church the church is the body of christ it's everything yeah it's the assembly that's what the word means in greek it's the people gathered together yeah the kahal the ecclesia the drawn out from the world with a special purpose and identity that's what the church is and it includes the laity which makes up the majority of it that participate ideally as much as the clergy in the experience of the kingdom of heaven in this world but what happens with the papal reformation is because of the logic of of of influence and reform and and administration the pope create the papacy creates a kind of a hierarchy that that then is cut off and especially over around the question of a clerical celibacy creates a divide between the clergy and everyone else the laity clerical celibacy you know historically had a very legitimate place east and west in um in in the church's kind of assignment of clerical positions in the east parish priests we're all married i'm married i have five kids um pat the average parish priest was married in the west that was less the case and there was more of an expectation of clerical celibacy but what happens in the papal reformation in that very 11th century is peter like people like peter damien make a really really strong case against um clerical marriage saying for the following reasons that it defiles a priest to have relations with his wife and still be overseeing the holy things on the altar table you know and he he really he gets quite graphic about it actually and and that's a that's really a development that that suggests then when it becomes institutionalized as it does in the roman catholic church where no priest may be married it institutionalizes a sense that if you're married as a layperson and you're engaged in normal marital relations you're somehow defiling yourself and take that augustinianism that i mentioned earlier yeah not just anthropological pessimism but sex negativity i guess you could call it yeah i mean it breeds that for sure yeah and and then if you take augustinianism and it's it's uh you know the claim that you know sexual desire for one's lawful spouse is itself concupiscence and a desire for something other than god and therefore inherently sinful even if it brings forth children this kind of thing i mean that's just that wasn't part of the eastern christian ethos of the first millennium and it's not beyond but that also is a big part of why back to your question with the sacramentality of the protestants why they were why they were so anti-roman and why they wanted to emphasize the laities now reintegration um into a sacramental life around the eucharist you're right luther wanted regular communion and especially for everyone i think he wanted both kinds right because yeah yeah both elements instead of just the lady getting the bread only i think that's right that's right calvin too who i called anti-sacramento and i'll come back to that in a moment calvin too thought that that communion should be a regular thing because it wasn't like you said yeah once a year sort of thing i think there's even an event in the council of geneva where they're trying to negotiate how often the laity will receive communi or how often it's not just the lady how often everybody anybody receives communion and calvin's saying we need to do it weekly and everybody needs to take it weekly and that needs to be the center and some of the other council members of the city who maybe are maybe still have one foot kind of more in a catholic mindset and aren't quite so sure about this whole new calvin thing are saying that that that's too much you know we only used to do it one once a year and so they kind of arrive on once a quarter i think as sort of the compromise but instead of the catholic oriented people saying do it every week and calvin's saying don't do it very often it was actually the opposite where calvin was pushing in in the direction of greater frequency but he had to compromise in the middle at once a quarter which an amazing number of protestants still only do it once a quarter because of that that uh compromise uh once upon a time in the city of geneva but but that's sort of to my point that in a certain way the reformers actually were more concerned about greater sacramental participation for the entire church well yes and no so definitely we've we've established i think we both agree that there was an obvious emphasis placed by luther calvin and other protestants on greater access to the eucharist by the laity and greater frequency of that access yes however i would not agree um on the second point that it was more sacramentality in general it was limited to the eucharist and only a eucharist understood in a certain way um it's it's uh it's uh john knox of of scotland the founder of the presbyterian church with its calvinist roots who said um against the more catholic you might say roman catholic sacramental liturgical anglican church about the eucharist that christ is in heaven and not here when it came to the material uh dimension of the eucharist he's in heaven he's not here that's john knox drawing and certainly zwingli was also very much a non-realist in in communion but impressionism there's there's a spectrum because luther had consubstantiality he didn't like transubstantiation the the the aquinas um you know articulation but you know uh my my wife grew up lutheran and and they they get taught that with jesus is within and under or i and what exactly that means i'm not quite sure but but and calvinists some of them still emphasize a real presence which is again a re-articulation kind of denying some presence yeah spiritual presence denying a kind of i i think what had happened i i had an interview with brett sockled who's a catholic theologian and he uh specializes in in uh theology of the eucharist and the disputes during the protestant reformation and and he said something interesting that that once upon a time when aquinas was describing transubstantiation he was he wasn't saying that there was any physical change right it was a change in the substance but he understands substance as something only apprehended with the mind and that's not actually that different from what calvin was saying when he's when calvin is saying well no it doesn't actually change into the bread and body of jesus or into the blood and body of jesus it's something that you understand with your mind and brett suckled actually said that calvin in a weird way is actually way more similar to aquinas than he or his catholic contemporaries realize so i'd be interested in looking at that i i sometimes think but but i also do agree with you that especially over time the more zwinglian it's just memory if anything spiritual presence gets sort of downplayed and the main purpose of it is to remember the crucifixion as deposed to in that kind of way that i quoted from ignatius of antioch eating the food that renders onto immortality that that sort of change does take place and especially over time like nowadays almost all protestants have a zwingli in interpretation even if calvin and luther didn't themselves yeah yeah it's interesting i mean i don't want to um because we're both kind of referring to stuff that others have said and i don't myself really understand at all but i would say that you know beyond just aquinas however we understand aquinas there was a piety and that's frankly as a cultural historian what i'm more interested in than like i know this is the doctrine we go to and that's enough for us there was a piety in the in the period before luther uh where people would actually see on the altar table the consecrated eucharist bleeding like it would be like it would there be blood there because this really is the body of christ materially after all that kind of piety you know is a different kind of piety than we have in the first millennium for sure and it was certainly a piety against which the protestants like calvin wanted to reform the church but when it comes to calvin as much as you know you you're you know you're definitely right that he was he was trying to expand sacramentality around the eucharist and that he could even maybe um accommodate some sort of presence that presence was limited to a spiritual versus material presence for calvin and if we exclude matter the physical creation we're no longer talking about we're talking about a negative cosmology god created the world as a physical thing and gave us human bodies that are physical that are called to participate in our sanctification alongside our minds and souls and that's one of the things that protestantism protestantism did in the person of calvin and his theology is it prepared the way for the gnostic christianity that would follow the enlightenment the kind of it's all in the mind that christianity is really just a a series of doctrines that i assent to um or my worship is to sit down and just listen to someone ex explicate the scriptures in my in my church you know the four walls and a in a pulpit kind of model of and no longer is there's is there this transformation a heavenly transformation of the world where the world is being transformed by the sacramental presence of the incarnate god it's now being boxed in around largely mental and non-physical and therefore non you know non-cosmic elements and i think that that really is a a long-term consequence of the of the papal um reformation that we've we've spoke about in our in our talk today and that is an interesting thing is maybe almost aquinas could get some of the blame himself in splitting apart accidents and substance because that's sort of in his own model that is sort of accidents are what you see and what you touch and what it looks like right and substance is only apprehended by the mind so the the in here versus out there split is actually kind of there in aquinas's own language and is it not you know a legacy of scholasticism a legacy of this really a philosophical approach to understanding and getting the mind around what in the greek language is called a mystery you know we use the word sacrament in english but the greek word for sacrament is mystery um in uh in in sylvanic you know the orthodox church in russia uses the same word and the first millennium there was really no effort to get the mind around and explain what this mystery is all about it was just affirmed this truly is the body and blood of christ and now aquinas tries to clarify it with accidents and substance and and although the debate had started a little bit before him but but yeah he he's responding to questions but yeah i i see what you're talking about and and i agree even if we could say some protestants even still to this day have a more real and active sense of how they theologically describe christ's presence in the eucharist then i think sometimes is often misunderstood i do agree with you that there is a huge shift in i think really all of protestantism to focusing on the transformation of the person kind of through their mind as opposed to this happening by the actions that are performed in the liturgy of the church and that's why church becomes more focused in prosinism both on preaching uh which is you know trying to exhort people and inform people in a way that transforms their person but also music i i would say that really kind of for protestantism what takes the place of liturgical sacramentalism is sort of a that that energy then gets focused on music which is also a very mental and sort of personal transformative thing but also a communal transformative thing because singing together is a very powerful experience but sort of the i think that music really i mean there's a i know that in some circles anyway there's an emphasis upon music that stirs one's feelings one's emotional yes that one's sentiments yes yes and yeah and i think that like if you look in american protestantism like when churches do surveys of why did you come here why are you staying here or why'd you leave and why did you go to a different church to try and improve themselves what often rises to the top of those surveys is music a i liked the music here or b i left because i didn't like the music here i like the music better at your neighboring church and that really i think not that i mean obviously catholicism and orthodoxy have music and have a role for music and their services so it's not like protestantism invented music inside christian services but like you often say a lot of these things are a matter of emphasis and attention as opposed to hard and fast distinctions right and so prosinism really comes to emphasize music as its transformative thing and every time there's a protestant revival of some kind or a new present denomination or a strong protestant movement whether it was you know luther himself was a hymn writer the wesley brothers were also him writers um pentecostalism writes his own new music african-american christianity is very music-centric and then sort of even evangelical 20th century american christianity has its own genre of music and i think that's very much because music helps capture the spirit of what's going on in the church and helps give a cohesive identity to expressing things that can't be expressed just purely by a sermon and that music like when you ask a protestantism oh yeah oh now we're entering our period of worship in our surface it's not the eucharist that is the worship period it worship is singing and uh at church i've been a worship leader before that doesn't mean i administer the sacrament it means i play guitar on the stage right and and so that that emphasis on music i think is really kind of what takes uh what what what stirs the emotions for protestants in a way that sort of replaced the sacramental emphasis of worship that was more historic before that i think that's interesting sam that's really interesting inside two like if you can if one can and this is often done it's it's it's not um very uh sophisticated but i think one often distinguishes between the rational and the uh emotive faculties of a person right and and i think what you're saying here is that the protestantism kind of appeals to both of those faculties the the one the former by by through sermons and reflection on scripture um doctrinally uh bible studies and that sort of thing establish bible studies and the other is by music that makes us you know makes one feel a certain way that's very interesting i think and and and and both of those could be in principle sacramental but in practice perhaps are less so certainly in comparison to traditional christianity and it's it's orthodox or roman catholic forms yeah or even lutheran i mean even lutheran probably forms yeah lutheranism has great music i have to give them that credit like you know if i go to sainola's choir in in minnesota they're they're it's fabulously good music and so a lot of because there is no more there's less of an emphasis on art right be it in iconography or elaborate sort of decoration of of uh churches and cathedrals and temples and a sense architecture is also not very i mean some protestant churches are pretty architecturally complex but in general there's less of an emphasis on architecture a lot of the artistic energy gets funneled into music and often in a way that's very concentrated on stirring the emotions and creating the right mindset and connecting people with jesus and giving them a strong sense of redemption and and all that sort of thing and various different kinds of protestantism have different flavors of music that reflect differences in sort of their emphases doctrinally and and that sort of thing too yeah yeah that's interesting um but i guess sort of i i we i guess we need to probably close up on talking about what you mean by the age of utopia and so we we've sort of covered you know a lot of the previous eras and then your your most recent book is the age of utopia and so so what do you mean by utopia and a utopic if that's the right word focused christianity compared to a paradisically if i'm saying that right oriented christianity yeah well okay so i i do try to make this distinction and of course historians put together they they coin phrases or they use phrases in certain ways that are in i call them interpretive devices you know this is not neces if we went back in time and talked to a um uh you know a first millennium christian you know and we said well you know you practice traditional christianity right they wouldn't know what we're talking about so this but it's useful for an historian to try to create um terms a terminology that makes that helps us make sense of the historical record and its narrative so what i do is in the in the in the first book age of paradise i speak of traditional christianity as an orthodox christian i consider orthodoxy traditional christianity and vice versa but i want to certainly open and and honor and accommodate other people who are not orthodox in the second volume i introduce a term called reformational christianity to define that part of western roman catholic traditional christianity became influenced by reformational logic and thinking i think that that form of christianity reformational christianity reached a peak in the uh protestant reformation and and and then kind of crashed in the 17th century with the terrible wars of western religion these wars are often called the wars of religion by itself because most people are talking about them are western and you don't need that but an orthodox christian never participated in these wars of religion and so they're really better known as the wars of western religion where roman catholics and protestants fought each other in pitched battles over the course of a century and a half the worst war being the 30 years war and finally it came to an end mp and in the west protestants and roman catholics were so exhausted by the reformational energy of their christianity which led them to even fight wars that they just christianity in the west just kind of lost its strength reformational christianity would continue in like the the uh so-called neo-orthodoxy of carl bart of the 20th century and more recent expressions of neo-calvinism and so forth it's clear revival of reformational christianity in its calvinistic you know form for instance but i think that once in the 17th century going into the 18th century which of course is the century of the so-called enlightenment uh where christianity is just kind of like dismissed altogether as being the core force or influence for our culture in the west and deism and and and such takes its place what you see is um the rise of like a a pietistic christianity i pietism like you just referred to this i think when you're talking about the goal of um some forms of protestantism is to make one one feel the experience of personal transformation uh pietism you know in the case of spainer the the lutheran um uh theologian and writer who then influenced people like the um the methodists the wesley brothers and so forth these people began to emphasize the individual's experience of salvation but not to root it in an ecclesiological definition of what the true church is that no longer seemed viable after in the wake of the wars of western religion or even in a doctrinal sense like emphasis on doctrine because everyone disagrees with each other you know that wonderful book called um um i've got too much going through my head right now but um brad gregory's book the unintended reformation i don't know if you've read that but it's a it's an account of it's a really great book he's roman catholic so it has roman catholic kind of you know logic or thinking behind it but it's a really great effort to understand post-modernism and pluralism in our present um culture today by looking at the protestant reformation and all the disagreements and controversies that finally couldn't be resolved and so they they they kind of um spawned a a a kind of a mutual agreement uh um a kind of um uh uh sense of just acceptance of of kind of multiple truths and truth claims well pietist christianity had this kind of character to it so you see this in the the reform movements in america the revival movements the first great awakening right of the of the 18th century the second great awakening of the early 19th century are are very intra-denominational right i mean they bring people all sorts of theological ecclesiological doctrinal backgrounds together in camp revivals where the most important thing is is proclaiming jesus as your savior and and joining with people who you have very different beliefs doctrinally speaking belong to different churches but you're all in the same kind of you're all in the same tent at least for a little while even if the next sunday you might go to different buildings yeah that's right that's right so that's a that's a phase in the development of of what i think is uh the the utopian influence on christianity in the west after the uh after the um after the uh the wars of western religion but but then there's another form of christianity that i think kind of you know culturally speaking like this is not a obviously a confessional definition this is more of a look at at christianity's a cultural force right which i call utopian christianity and that goes even beyond the pietistic kind which is still very centered upon my relationship with christ my eternal salvation stuff like this my repentance of sin my internal renewing of my own mind yeah exactly yeah and and what i see going on here is that there's a kind of utopian utopian element where christianity is more and more assigned and seen legitimately as concerned with making things better in this world improving the world appealing to people's experiences in this world and making them feel more comfortable and more optimistic about those experiences i see this as being like the really the real influence of secular humanism we haven't talked about its origin i have a big argument to make about the origin of secularization and secular humanism in the age of utopia but i think that that that that that development which takes centuries to unfold finally kind of gets control of christianity in some forms as well so that christianity more and more becomes utopian its character by which i mean it's concerned not with the eternal kingdom of heaven that may have broken into this world but belongs beyond this world but rather this world is an end in itself and we can find in in the 20th century plenty of examples of you know christianity's main rea kind of reason for existence is to make you know to bring about social change bring out something like the civil rights movement yeah the civil rights movement would be a big part of that too and so you know that that i think is is what can be called utopian christianity i'm not trying to use polemics here i'm not trying to dismiss those you know thank god for the civil rights movement but but i'm just saying like i can i just see a different kind of emphasis there and i'm not sure that that emphasis supports the paradise culture that i see at in place in the first millennium and i think it it it really just shows influence because honestly sometimes when i was when i was reading and listening to your podcast i was like i'm not quite sure i i found myself struggling to understand the difference between that utopic emphasis and the paradisal emphasis like you know i'm i am uh i'm about i don't know 30 or 40 ethnically descended from the puritans right who you know got on their boats came over here from england and you know set up a shop in massachusetts and their goal was to you know escape the impurities of what they saw in the english reformation and created no a good pure church and a good pure society and to be the city on the hill where god is sort of like beaming down from heaven this new pure society and everyone looks to it and sees it's self-evident goodness and that then spreads from there by the force of compelling example which is still a huge animating idea in the in america whether people realize that or not that that puritan ideal and to me i i see what you mean but it still seems like it's focused on paradise and their eschatology was a little bit different right they believed that in order for jesus to come back christians had to sort of pave the way and purify um the world to such an extent that then jesus could come back right and and that the quicker they did that the sooner that would happen right um and and so that sort of eschatological oomph and weight on it was a little bit different than in a uh eastern orthodox setting where that isn't quite the same eschatology but but the the idea that there's something pure up up in heaven that we're bringing it down it comes to us through us and in our church and then it radiates from us into our society and then from our society into the other societies it seems very similar to me and almost as if that were a recovery of that same idea so i i guess it could maybe help me understand and maybe even help me buy into this distinction a little bit because it seems quite similar to me well yeah and and sam i i agree with what you're saying there um the puritan experiment of new england is the is the final gasp of reformational christianity not not pietistic and certainly not utopian christianity as i'm conceiving of these different kind of tendencies of christianity in in the culture of the west so i see that as being exactly in line with calvin and in fact uh with gregory the seventh pope of rome and that is to reform society specifically institutionally to alter things in a self-conscious directed targeted way according to some model of what the kingdom of heaven is supposed to be and and and even using force to cause that to happen you know the puritans were known for this with their stock stockades and all that stuff yeah so uh there's just their scarlet a's on that you know so i think that you're i mean so what you just said was an example of what i would what i do call in the age of utopia reformational christianity at work now what's interesting is it exhausted itself just like in the wars of western religion in in the old world which the puritans were trying to set up this kind of you know kind of bastion of uh to to re-evangelize the the the decrepit old christendom of the of them yeah we'll make the new world and the old world will look on it with such envy that it will then ship backwards across the atlantic the city on a hill um idea there yeah uh they exhausted themselves so that by the end of the 1600s the puritans are pretty much you know done for they they can't sustain this highly energized reformational approach to creating the kingdom of heaven on earth which had never been really the goal of of of of traditional christianity or or the first millennium again it's not centered on sacramental life it's not centered upon liturgical worship it's centered upon you know righteousness it's centered upon biblical literacy it's centered upon you know good public order there was so much in the uh i mean there's so much in the orthodox church's history of bad public order and you know drunkenness and and all that kind of stuff but it could still coexist with a culture in which the um the standard of legitimacy is the presence of the kingdom of heaven in this world and the calling to repentance of those who through drunkenness or some other i mean read dostoevsky's novels you really see it there like you know marmalade of in crime and punishment is this wretched drunken guy who's who's always talking about how christ will come and he will be with me in eschatol it's all eschatological finally gets run over by a cart when he's wandering across a street drunk in st petersburg he gets killed and leaves a wife and dependent children you know suffering from disease and and starvation as a result um it's very dostoyevsky in other words but but this this model of christendom that i see in the first millennium is not one in which in which reformational actions such as a reforming papacy or reforming theologians or a a reform reformational city on a hill where we're going to re remove ourselves from the corruption of of england and and and holland and set this perfect society up in america that's not what i see in the first millennium there's much more i think there's a freer sense of civilization at that time in the west and because it's so um it's so uh over managed that puritan new england really collapses under its own weight and so you get people like jonathan edwards great example jonathan edwards writes sinners in the hands of an angry god that famous sermon which is very reformational in character like god is going to punish you and destroy you and he's he's full of loathing hatred for you you'd better repent you know the altar call and all that stuff the hot the uh the um anxious seat and all those things that the revivalists spoke of at the same time jonathan edwards wrote and it's been picked up by historians beautiful accounts of how how america is going to flourish as a council the puritans were weird that way they they had this extreme optimism and pessimism simultaneously that it almost doesn't make sense so it's like okay so you're wretched and you're evil and you're entirely sinful but yet it's entirely on you to build this city on a hill that's going to purify the earth such that the return of jesus can happen yeah it almost doesn't make sense but both of those two things were held in a weird tension with each other and they were both very energizing i guess like you said yeah yeah so so your example of you know puritan new england um i mean i think that's for me that's an example of the kind of last gasp of reformational christendom the last effort to make that happen in the very unusual circumstances of of of the north american colonies you know outside of the historic sphere of chris christian civilization so so i would say that that's not at all utopian in in the way that i use the term utopian christianity okay and so so when when does sort of the utopian christianity um kind of set in and what are its distinctives well so in in the age of utopia um i see it really appearing in in the form of unitarianism in in the form of you know in the early 19th century and people like william channing um who's such and and i'd like to hear from you sam you know obviously a lot more than i do about this topic like what the different variations of unitarian thought are and where what kind of cultural impact they have on on 19th century and beyond american culture but but certainly william channing um as a figure is interesting because on the one hand it's all about this world it's all about it's all about the um the seculum it's all about this world it's all about eminence right now yeah imminence yeah you could use that term um but what's interesting about him is he's speaking the language of of traditional christianity to do so not by this i mean like the greek fathers deification the presence of christ in this world our um our immediate communion with god um you know that god is not this uh malevolent or or um uh threatening angry father figure that the way calvin might have described him or jonathan edwards did yeah but rather he's within you and and wants to have communion with you and make you experience in this world his beautiful and glorious presence and he wants you to participate with him like that language of participation yeah it's so important in in orthodox christianity and in the first millennium this is all over the place in basil the great another of those greek fathers we participate in the divinity of god and that's i mean if you tell me i think that's what william channing was trying to say so i i should say i'm like not a direct theological descendant of william ellery channing but i i know him and i've read him and i admire him a lot the weird thing is is in america unitarianism has crept up multiple times right like especially in protestantism that's very solo scripture i get back to the bible restorationist we need to believe what the first century church believed and that that kind of fervor has happened multiple times in american protestantism and almost inevitably there will be one or two branches of that that become unitarian because they would say well it seems like the doctrine of the trinity developed over time you know so that means if you go back earlier in time then it's not there right so that that that's part of what um causes unitarianism to pop up multiple times in restorationistly oriented christianity especially in the united states where there's no state church telling you that you can't be you know you can't you have to be trinitarian in england there were blasphemy laws requiring belief in the trinity until the mid to late 1800s or something like that whereas in america with freedom of religion there is no legal consequence there still might be a social consequence uh um to non-trinitarianism but without legal consequence it's much easier for it to pop up so that like i've been to conferences of unitarians and there's like sometimes four or five or six different independent traditions represented and we're like okay so so we have our differences on on this that are the other thing because of our our histories and our independent trajectories but we agree about this thing um but so but regarding kind of new england unitarianism which has its roots like unitarianism was there from the beginning of the protestant reformation it just had to hide and run lots of times right it was in italy sosanus was in italy and then he got kicked out of italy he went to poland there was like a 70 or 80 year unitarian reign in poland which actually most people don't know about and then you know the the catholic or the poles and the swedes go to war and the the catholic polish people are suspicious of the protestant polish people because they're worried they're going to ally with luther and sweden right and so then a persecution emerges of the unitarians in poland so then they run to romania and there actually actually still are a good number of unitarians in romania which most people don't know but then that idea kind of spreads to england and it's underground in england for a while and people like isaac newton and john locke and also who's reading john locke all the time the american founding fathers so then in 1770-ish starts to be a growing presence of unitarianism in the united states mainly under the influence of john locke and other english enlightenment e sort of people and then in boston by about 1800 it really starts to explode i think between 1800 and 1820 something like 90 of the puritan churches in boston switch from trinitarian calvinist to unitarian right which is like 90 or something like that in just a couple decades and then shortly after that harvard uh divinity school is officially unitarian et cetera and then there are other things but anyway back to william mallory channing the thing that i think is really interesting is you're right there are a lot of interesting similarities between william ellery channing and eastern spirituality the positive anthropology you know that's one of the clearest things in willie mallory channing is he's clearly reacting against calvinist negative anthropology and being like no the destiny of humans is likeness unto god and his you've mentioned that that sermon in one of your podcast episodes that's just a pure articulation of the doctrine of theosis just in american 1800s boston accent right this idea that we grow in divinity and that our grow our goal is to participate in the the divinity of god and you might say well how can unitarians believe that if we don't think jesus is god or at least not in the same way and for us if you think that jesus was merely a man you can't have very negative of an anthropology right because salvation happens through a man ascending to participation in divinity so you can't not think that that's possible and have an atonement theory involving a human jesus right and so the lack of incarnational theory prevents a negative anthropology in in unitarianism because how if you have a negative anthropology like calvin had how could a human accomplish what jesus accomplished right and so that is really what opens the door to positive anthropology and to the doctrine theosis because we would basically say like instead of athanasius saying god became man so that man might become god we would say something like jesus the son of god became god so that we might become god in brothers with him or something like that sort of jesus is the first human to achieve theosis and opens the door for the rest of humanity to follow him so so that that's sort of that utopian thing is if you believe in the possibility of how jesus ascended to where he is now and glorified theosified state at the right hand of god the father with all authority and heaven and earth given to him that sort of creates i think this sort of optimistic thing of what can happen through human effort and sometimes it can border on pelagianism which is something that the calvinists always like to remind us of because they're always accusing everyone of pelagianism but but that that i think is sort of how that happens and then this also this re-emphasizing of the kingdom of god which is something like i talked about at the beginning which instead of our destiny of dying and going to heaven our destiny is to be resurrected and to participate in jesus's reign of the kingdom of god here on earth right like and so that is how i think kind of in a weird way of the horseshoes the ends of the horseshoe starting to look like each other with eastern orthodoxy all the way over here and unitarianism all the way over here there's some weird ways in which it gets kind of similar again even though we're going to have our disagreements especially over the incarnation and the trinity but but that's how i would sort of explain that i don't know if that answered your question but it does help yeah no thank you yeah i think you know yeah the orthodox would say the incarnation is the necessary um precondition for the deification of the human being and in my case as a cultural historian the um the creation of a paradisiacal culture where the communion with god is a living kind of regular especially liturgically sacramentally defined experience um and without the without without god descending he can't ascend you know there's that that that scriptural passage orthodox christians just heard this uh recently um at least on the new calendar they heard this recently on a sunday reading that that christ descended in order that he might ascend and bring the human race he descended from heaven that he might you know fill all fill all creation with himself and that then he there for us ended bringing uh the human being into the fullness of the experience of divinity and and so the incarnation would be absolutely necessary as i've understood the development of a paradise culture with its optimistic or positive view of man that you described there but it is interesting how there's some similarities there yeah um but we we should probably wrap up we we almost doubled our sort of budgeted uh amount of time but but this has been a really a really great conversation i guess are there are there any kind of closing thoughts or anything you want to add um uh that that we haven't covered yet no i i um but i would like to learn more about uh about you know american christianity i've been trained mainly as someone who you know has that only kind of on the periphery so some of the things you said today i'm going to be working on and thinking about as i write my final volume but beyond that as well so thank you for for helping me understand that a little bit better yeah well well thank you father john thank you uh again i i'll put links to your podcasts and your books in the description for this video and i i feel like i i've learned a lot sometimes i felt a little bit challenged or a little bit tugged in a certain way uh but i that that's some one of the best ways to learn so i really appreciate our our conversation today yeah thank you thank you sam real good to be with you today

Channel: Transfigured

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Length: 112min 59sec (6779 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 14 2022