How Orthodox Theology Works with Frederica Mathewes-Green (Hank Unplugged Podcast)

[Applause] and welcome to another edition of Hank unplugged this is a very special edition of Hank unplugged in fact I have now commemorating the 50th episode of the Hank unplugged podcast had to do so I am welcoming back my very first guest Frederika Matthews Greene she continues to be one of the most downloaded episodes of Hank unplugged in other words she was an incredible hit with so many people around the world and by the way don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes rate it and if you really liked it leave a review Frederico Matthews Greene speaks on a wide variety of topics she in recent years is concentrated on ancient Christian spirituality in the Eastern Orthodox faith she's provided columns and commentary for NPR's Morning Edition and all things considered and so much more she's written hundreds of blog posts and essays and she touches on a wide variety of subjects including marriage family the pro-life cause cultural issues and again she is a prolific author her many books include welcome to the Orthodox Church an introduction to Eastern Orthodoxy and this was one of the first books I read as I was considering joining the Eastern Orthodox Church myself she has a new book coming out titled orthodoxy an atonement how Orthodox theology works at above all she's a great friend and I am delighted to have you back with me fredericka hi Hank it's great to be back with you again I can't believe it's the whole year it has been a year and it has been quite a year it's been a wonderful year for me I have of course been going through a battle with cancer and the cancer was almost in remission but it's back I have tumors everywhere again and so I'm in a clinical trial right now but I'm still feeling fantastic and looking forward to a complete solution to my illness I am too and of course you're in my daily prayers thank you so much you know one of the issues that you're passionate about and we really didn't touch on this the last time we spoke it is the issue of abortion Francis Schaeffer once said that it would be the watershed or was the watershed issue of our time and you call it the most important justice issue of our time yes yes that's a true you know there's so many things that can get a stirred up and about justice and wanting to help protect the weak the needy the helpless and on three counts abortion is the most serious of all issues to consider today first that there are many gradations of violence but obviously the worst violence is to kill somebody so that's number one number two that it's you know what country can decide that it is legal and justified to kill a criminal or for soldiers to kill other soldiers during a war and and so forth so you come on down but the very bottom would be children there's never a reason to kill children so that's two and then number three is the numbers the sheer numbers people don't understand that it really has reached 60 million now ever since roe v wade and when you start thinking about this on a global level the numbers become even more draconian i heard somebody say once that when God is about to do a mighty work it is preceded by the slaughter of children and we see that when of course after Christ was born the slaughter of the of the innocence as they were killed by Herod and secondly well previously actually at the time that Moses was born the Pharaoh was trying to force the Hebrew midwives to kill the newborn baby boys and now we stand at the most enormous series of killings of children that the world has ever known and it's ironic isn't it that we have so much more medical knowledge than they did back then we actually can look into the womb we can see that as a child and that wasn't the case you know but other people might have pled ignorance in previous centuries but we actually know what's in there and so we we have no excuse well you know the argument though is shifting Frederica mean now you're absolutely right you look at the sonogram and you know this is a human being and so those who are pro-abortion they will say look we know it's a human being there's no doubt it is a human being but it does not qualify as a person and therefore we're not going to afford that child the rights of personhood until we think that they deserve to have the rights of personality you can just imagine that they would take exactly the opposite stand if it were anything other than abortion that otherwise they would be wanting to protect whoever is helpless whoever is voiceless this is the one exception they make and - you're exactly right about this category of personhood that they must admit that the being in the womb is alive it's a completely composed of human cells not any other kind of matter and that it is also an individual human that is the DNA is different from the mothers or the fathers or anyone else in history for that matter but they want to reserve this word personhood as you know in a 19th century Supreme Court decision they said that that slaves that African slaves only counted as three-fifths of a person in the Tommie decision it's that same thing at this weird concept of personhood that for some reason does not exactly overlap with the question of with the idea of being a living human being a human individual it's a very convenient category it is people prefer to dehumanize their victims before they kill them that's that's the point of this term person and when I find to be astounding today as you have ethicists like Princeton's Peter Singer who is now saying that we ought to wait until three days after birth to determine whether or not a child is worth giving the rights of personhood to and then you have countries like like Iceland who are now proudly proclaiming that they are a Down syndrome baby free they've gotten rid of all the the Down syndrome babies because they consider that these babies are not worth giving the rights of personhood to yes that really the horrifying thing about this is of course there's been times all through history when people decided that other people were not worth living not worth allowing to live in their community and who has suffered the most and throughout the course of history has been newborn baby girls that newborn baby girls if my father might look at a baby girl and say this is a useless eater she's not going to be strong she can't be for me what a son can be we already have one daughter that's all we need and these girls were then strangled or drowned or just left out as you know in the city of ancient Rome just left abandoned on a garbage heap for anybody to take away if if somebody found a baby before the dogs got to her a friend of mine went to do a news story of series on sex selection abortion in India and she discovered that yes they are people do sonograms and amniocentesis to determine the sex of the baby and much more likely to abort if it's a girl but what my friend found out that was especially disturbing to me she said it turns out this is not new this is something that people have always done they just waited for the baby to be born and if it was a girl they would they would kill it or strangle it or drown it how sad that is to think of that going on all over the earth all through history all those little girls known only to God who took them into his arms and gave them the love that they didn't receive on earth but this tendency of brutal humanity to kill the least to last the children I don't think it's ever been on more garish display than it is in America today yet I'm glad that this is a passion for you and it ought to be a fashion for every single person that takes the sacred name of Jesus Christ upon their lips you might remember at this story because my kids told you the story my kids all love you of course but you remember the story that when I first started going to an Eastern Orthodox Church even just in an experimental fashion my wife Cathy and my kids want to go with me and I kept saying no you're not gonna go with me and they kept begging me you know we want to go with you and you're not gonna go with me and final I said okay I'm gonna let you go with me under one condition you have to read a little primer on what Eastern Orthodoxy is and you put together something very succinct that I copied for them they read it because I thought if they went into an Eastern Orthodox Church they would most surely freak out turns out that they they absolutely loved it and this is one of my fondest memories among the many fond memories I have of you oh well that's wonderful to hear and I hadn't met you then I didn't know you well as you know as an author that's one of the wonderful blessings of being able to write something and send it out into the world and it can go on helping people even if you haven't looked them in the eye and shaking their hand you can still touch them and help them I know that you've experienced that a great deal over your a very prolific career you know you wrote a brand new book and you sent me a chapter the book isn't out yet but the chapter you sent me I read early this morning and I was mesmerized by this chapter your new book is titled with a noxian atonement how Orthodox theology works how long before that's out you know I'm going to self-publish for this room I think within 4-6 months not too long I'll let you know well this chapter you sent me I thought was absolutely stunning and one of the things that you deal with is how the concept of theology in the Christian West is different from the idea of theology in the Christian East and I thought that might be something fun to expand on in this podcast yes um I I have talked about orthodoxy so much over the years and explain to explain details of it and had so many different starting points for trying to help people understand it and this this chapter this long chapter is when I finally sat down and I tried to figure out what is the difference and I think the starting point is as you say with the word theology that in the West whether you're Catholic or Protestant somebody says theology and you think of a matched set of assertions theological assertions truths that this church or that church believes and and often the two churches will disagree with each other about what this one believes and whether that's scriptural or isn't we know how easy it is to find just about anything you want to believe in Scripture if you are totally by yourself and nobody else to guide you so that idea of theology is very very strongly just intellectual it's rational and I think perhaps that grew because of the history of the West because there's been so much arguing about theology in the last 500 years or even a thousand years if you want to go back to Aquinas I think because we were so brightly aware of our interpersonal and interger CH differences in theology it's like science theology got boiled down to only that intellectual endeavor as I kind of walked into orthodoxy and got deeper in it I realized they had a different understanding of what the word theology means and it's parallel to a word like biology it's the study of BIOS the study of life geology is the study of the earth Biagio and theology comes from that low G is the same word for science or study faith is God though theological is the knowledge of God pertaining to the things of the knowledge of God and they mean that in that in that personal relationship since that kind of knowledge like Protestants always love to say you need to know Jesus as a as a person and to have an interpersonal relationship with it that's what theology still means in Eastern Orthodoxy it for all Christians everywhere for quite a long time I think when they heard the word theology they thought it meant the knowledge of God but it has become knowing things about God or having convictions about things about God where you might disagree with someone else and argue about it that's kind of a starting point of this chapter is when you take your verse first step down that road do you think you're going to be just dealing with intellectual concepts or are you trying to know God better do you want to know God and be known by him and gradually grow into his likeness you know the Orthodox say that God created us in his own image and likeness and that image which actually in Greek the word icon that we are the icon of God that the image the icon cannot be damaged it's always there but the likeness which I understand in Hebrew is a participle it has it's more like the likeness Fiat becoming assimilated to becoming one with that that likeness has been damaged ever since the fall of Adam and Eve and we need to restore that likeness by drawing nearer to God and becoming one with him which is kind of cool when you think about theologians in the East and something you've come into dawn a theologian in the East is one whose prayer is true and that fits into this dichotomy or difference between a conceptual framework that you have in your mind and actually knowing God actually this becoming at one with God mm-hmm that's right that's a line from Evagrius of Pontus who is a church father lived in the about the second half of the 300s the 4th century and he said a theologian is one whose prayer is true just as you quoted it what would it mean for your prayer to be true it would be it would be honest it would be open it would be just completely putting yourself in the presence of God and longing to be filled with his light that's what real prayer is that's what real theology is so you see as we even begin to talk about what is the Orthodox theology of the atonement we're already going down a forked path we're taking different Forks you know as you're interested in the atonement or anything else merely to get the right answer or is it that your yearning to be transformed and filled with the presence of God the Orthodox answer is a little bit different there when you think about atonement in your forthcoming book orthodoxy and atone there's nothing more significant than the atonement of Jesus Christ and then the resurrection that we can experience as a result of becoming one with Christ yes that's true and those things are so intrinsically linked that the resurrection is the victory over death and the victory over the evil one just like the Hebrew children crossing the Red Sea it's that victory moment that Exodus that's what the resurrection really means and I think that's one of the things that happened in Western Christianity perhaps because of that same focus on rationalism which was the cross kind of got abstracted out of the whole story and became such a relentless focus that that people forget it actually as part of a story that the incarnation of Christ is a vital and unnecessary part of it the resurrection is the revelation that comes after the crucifixion you need it all to fit together you can't take only the cross by itself maybe we want to back up for everybody listening in a little bit I think one of the great contributions you've made over the years is explaining how the east and the west grew apart and in that explanation you're pointing out in the process that we're quite historically illiterate oftentimes we think that Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism are twins when they're not when there's a whole lot more consistency oftentimes between Rome and the Reformers they're quarreling cousins as I think you've once called them and so maybe to give people a little bit of a perspective you can explain how this this separation took place and how there's a big difference between what was going on in Rome for example in the new Rome Constantinople yes that's right I think if you're a Christian at all or if you've ever read history when you were in elementary school you know about the fall of Rome and that tragedy and the chaos that Europe went through from that time onward through what they used to call the Dark Ages that is a history that was very painful history experienced by Christians in Europe but a lot of people don't know that Europe isn't the only place there were Christians but the Christian faith actually began in the Middle East and it spread toward Europe but also toward Africa at the same time it spread further into Asia further north without been to Greece and Turkey and Syria there was a lot of Christian faith that remained strong even when the West even when Rome was going through that very terrible time and there's another thing which is that the Roman temperament when we think of the Roman Empire and its soldiers and its accomplishments we think of there they're very oriented around the law and about law keeping they're very precise and well organized and somewhat literal thinkers you think about ancient Greece and there was so much more of philosophy and the arts and just an openness to a whole more vivid perhaps dimension of life not as relentlessly logical as Rome was that was a distinction that also became more apparent as the centuries went by I say in my book it to a if you start with a map it kind of helps and if you open your left hand facing you tilt it a little bit so that your thumb and forefinger are pointing North West and northeast you can almost see you on your hand on a map how this might happen if Rome is the thumb and then on the other side along your fingertips there's Constantinople Antioch Jerusalem and Alexandria of Egypt those four are a lot more like each other than any of them are like Rome and as Rome fell and communication was broken and it's just Roman attitudes toward things started to shift away from where the rest of the church was going certainly one of the most obvious is an increasing sense in Rome that the Pope the Bishop of Rome is supposed to be the boss of the whole church and that was not the viewpoint of the other five cities of this it was an initial band of five cities that were the centers of Christianity the pen Turkey it was called if you ask Constantinople Antioch Jerusalem and Alexandria they think that every diocese is the equal of every other diocese every bishop has the same rank and standing of every other bishop you don't need a pope you don't need a single super Bishop to rule on top of everybody else because Christ holds that role that role Christ is present with us so we don't need somebody to bosses around well I can emphasize with the chaos going on in Rome and why it no doubt felt urgent to establish a very powerful Bishop of Rome and I understand the temptation to assert his authority over all Christian's everywhere but the Christians in the east further east for the South Africa India they did not accept that viewpoint that Rome had developed about themselves this leads me to another issue and sometimes you almost don't want to broach this issue because if you do people will misunderstand what you're talking about but I think it's always worthwhile to talk about tradition tradition is often considered to be as I'm alluding to a dirty word in reality it's not a matter of whether or not we follow traditions but rather a matter of which traditions we ought to trust I think to cash that out for people a little bit would be so helpful fredericka oh yes I I hope so the question about different traditions like you know there are people who will claim that they don't have any tradition they just go by the Bible but of course they have a tradition and someone has taught them how to read the Bible and how to interpret the verses none of us ever just out of the blue pick up a Bible and start reading at Genesis 1:1 and have no idea what's coming next all of us have been taught the story of Christ ahead of time and when that is taught you are a little seed of a tradition this plant is inside of you if you know for sure you don't believe what the Catholics believe or the Presbyterians believe that's because somebody planted and AlterNet a different tradition inside of you and so the question comes down to if everybody just by default you have to have a tradition you can't escape it which would be the best tradition which would be the wisest which would be the one that would have the most accurate understanding of what the New Testament authors were trying to convey and I think it's obvious it would be the early Christians because after all they were the recipients of the Gospels and the letters letters of st. Paul as st. Paul wrote he was probably picturing people he knew he was imagining what the Christians in Rome would look like and he's sending his letter to speak to to be read aloud when the gather for worship he probably knows people and Ephesus and the other cities that he's visited before it was very I think very vivid and very down-to-earth for the New Testament writers as they wrote they weren't putting out a text document that 2008 er you can pull out anything you want you can see at how much chaos there is in Bible interpretation today I've heard there 20,000 different denominations and that's because if you have totally free interpretation of Scripture and you can whatever you think you see there you can claim to stare it's just going to go on dividing and dividing I can't believe that with God's intention I think that if God wanted us to have a written document from him he was trying to get certain things across and it shouldn't be something that 2,000 years later you you ruffle the pages and you put your finger down and you decide you know what that means we should be listening to the interpretation of the early church they would be the best interpreters just as a I know who's the best interpreter of Shakespeare you know if you could go back in time and interview somebody who was living in London during that time and went to opening night of all his plays you would be able to answer any question you had there are things that scholars do they will never be able to figure out but just an ordinary person doesn't have to be literate doesn't have to be a scholar just by living in that context that's what the early church offers us in terms of interpreting scriptures and there's a great comfort in that and I can speak to that personally when you can go back now and say I have 1600 years of church history or 2,000 years of church history that's consistently taught a particular view let's say for example the view that was dominant for 1600 years in church history that of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist there's a real comfort in saying I don't have to come up with my own your interpretation and even now for me ever at many books but I can go back and say now I can test what I have said against what the church has always taught and I think that comfort is is analogous to something I've talked about for a long time and I think you mentioned this in the chapter that you sent me as well but we're pigmy standing on the shoulder of giants and often times we want to be the Giants in our own in our own sphere of existence we want to come up with some novel interpretation and that's a very dangerous place to be on the contrary it is very comforting to to submit yourself to the teachings that have been guarded by grannies as you put it yes yes that I think that perhaps an unnoticed loss but an extreme loss due to the fragmenting of Christianity from the time of the Reformation onward I'm not saying the Reformation was a disaster but rather that a side effect was this tendency to disagree and to look for points of disagreement and to be no the conversation gets boring if you're just agreeing all the time and if you want to make a name for yourself I remember when I was in seminary the professor told us about a new book and interpretation of the Gospel of Mark that I thought that is the stupidest theory I've ever heard and after class I said there there professor why would somebody even put their name on a book with a theory you know it doesn't make any sense and he said well what you have to understand is that you can't make a name for yourself as a new theologian you can't get ahead unless you come up with something that nobody has ever said before and he said at this point there's not very many reasonable ideas left so the people that want to make a name for themselves it's that push you have to find something new and what's the alternative to that it doesn't sound very inviting to many of us today because we do have the itching ears and we want people to find something brand-new in the scriptures that no one ever noticed the alternative is that the the theology the understanding and the interpretation of Scripture is all guarded by the whole community instead of just the theologians you know instead of just the scholars who are you know work in seminaries and the way they did that the way that they spread the faith accurately throughout the early church in the east and south was by always having worship in the language of the local people the worship as you know Hank our Sunday morning service is an hour and a half to two hours and that's cut down from what it was fifteen hundred years ago it's a long service it is intensely packed with Scripture I estimate that about 75% of the words that we sing and say on Sunday morning are drawn from Scripture you can't go to worship even if you were just a milkmaid in the year 300 you couldn't go to worship without being soaked in Scripture and then the hems and sermon help you to understand what Scripture saying the prayers from being in a community of other believers who have been in the church longer than you have it was like a tea bag you know steeping in hot water the whole community came to understand the faith because it was in the language they could understand and the outcome is that the whole community defends the faith that was my line about the grannies you know I said you you would not be able to teach anything new you couldn't bring a new doctrine because it's the same face held by everyone everywhere even a circle of grannies and some remote rural parish someplace they've all got the same theology in mind because they're using the same liturgy and they know what it is and if you have it toe out of line all you can do is prove that you have left the community I gave that example of a story about a an Orthodox priest in the church in Brooklyn New York a hundred years ago hundred twenty years ago and he went to a multi-faith gathering in Chicago and while he was there he started talking about his opinion which had already been disturbing the members of his parish a little bit but he said very openly it doesn't matter what religion you belong to all religions are equal doesn't matter what name you call your God it's all one so he got back on the train went back to Brooklyn put his key in the door and it wouldn't unlock the people that were the members of his parish had already changed the locks on him that's what I mean about guarded by grannies everybody has the authority to even have authority over a clergyman if he leaves the faa's out of there and it's not that way in the West is it where's we look to the theologians to explain to us what's the latest what is the new understanding what are they finding in the Gospel of Mark now that nobody ever saw before for two thousand years that gives me great security to know that this has been the same faith all these thousands of years and that it hasn't changed and it's not going to change so the Orthodox faith is not innovative it's perpetuating something and what you're saying is there's a comfort in not changing you have a joke in your book how many Orthodox does it take to change a light bulb and the answer is change what is this change yeah yeah it's hard to believe living in a consumerist culture isn't it that somebody wouldn't want to change I usually in the analogy though of Christmas traditions you know it's a very traditional church it sounds so boring but Christmas traditions or things that we do voluntarily and we enjoy them and we feel like they bring the family closer together it doesn't bother us that it's the same star on top of the Christmas tree every year year after year I say try changing just one word when you're reading good night moon to a toddler and you'll see how much humans and grownups can love things just staying the same there's comfort in that and I think the reason that works is because Orthodox theology changes people and you can see the change I think that's a big difference that in the West because of all the arguing the emphasis came became what do you believe do you believe the right thing do you believe it in the right way to use the right terms to talk about these assertions these propositions and there's not a great expectation that people will become Saints and they're in their ordinary daily lives in the Eastern view though you believe that this incorporating this theology into yourself doesn't mean coming more and more into the presence of God and that will be transformative and so it's not just a matter of you you're saved you've got your ticket it's a matter of you're saved so you are fighting off the disease of sin in your life every day and the more you fight off that darkness and the deaths that sin brings with it the more God is able to fill you with light and every once in a while you find a person that like Jesus said you know he will do the works that I do greater works will he do and we see Orthodox people all over the world who God has allowed them to become miracle workers or Wonder workers we call them which means that when they pray they know what God intends to do and their voice their words kind of pre-announced what God is going to do they're so in tune with the will of God if you see that happening then you know that this is see ology that actually works it's theology that makes something happen so it's not just having the right assertions or propositions I believe that orthodoxy does have that but it's the fact that it's like planting a seed in the ground and it starts to grow the very analogy that Jesus used that actually is effective in transformation I'd like to really Park on that for a few moments you know I've often said the idea of truth is necessary but truth is not sufficient and I remember when I was in China I met people who really didn't have this sense of understanding the conceptual frameworks of theology that were so familiar with in the West but yet they actually knew God and I remember flying back from China sort of staring out the airplane window and wondering am I even a Christian because they had such an incredible life about them it was obvious it was tangible so I debated truth I defended truth I define truth but they knew God so again truth is necessary but it's hardly sufficient I'm writing a book now titled truth matters life matters more discovering the authentic Christian life but I think we ought to cash this out for people because it's not knowing about God it's actually knowing God that's part of of what gives us life that is life to the fall yes yes I am I was I'm kind of scattered right Bhandari with all those different directions to go I've attended a grandsons graduation from a Christian home school this past weekend and I noticed how the head of the home school when it gave us talk it had nothing to do with graduating from high school the whole emphasis was it's not enough to just know about God you have to know the Lord personally you have to you have to engage with him as a person you need to be walking with him every day and I thought how I have heard Orthodox Catholic and Protestant people say that and it seems like there are people who really know this and they get it and it burns inside of them and yet word scene it's so hard to find the words to get it across and you know I can imagine people sitting in the audience kind of rolling their eyes and being like yeah that's what preachers always say how do you get that across is real so yes that I'm trying to say something about orthodoxy that I think many people in many different churches assent the one reason I would give like a higher grade to orthodoxy is they have honed this and they have perfected it over 2,000 years they have a steady history of learning which kinds of prayer practices work about how do you fast what's a good way too fast what's a way that doesn't work so well everything has been tried and true for 2,000 years now and so I'm always inviting people to just come on give it a try like almost like it's a diet and exercise program you know like give it a try and see the transformation it's that question about truth matters life matters more it's the life application are you really engaging with God it's very hard to express in a way that doesn't just sound like cliches but I think you Hank you're going to be good at that you've always been good at that couple of things that may be before we go on with this discussion that I don't let you know about and that is when I use words in the Bible answer man broadcast and even on the Hank unplug podcast or in other forums when I use the word now my priest said this or that or if I say father Alex or father Steve or father John I get such a bad reaction first of all people don't like the word priest and they wonder how in the world can you call someone father we're not allowed to call anyone father according to Scripture oh I know isn't that a shame and yet they probably call their own father's father you know they it's a it's a word you can hardly avoid so obviously Jesus didn't mean that to be the literal application he was talking about his own standing and the uniqueness of it in a way it's like apophatic theology to pull out a big word it's can we say anything in words that is really sufficiently true words are always weak and I think what Christ was saying there was if you call this man father and you call the father and god of us all father you need to understand it's a whole different word when it applies to God and and they really don't deserve to be covered by the same word it's like the word love you know who could define love and if you think that little four-letter words summarizes everything that stands behind it it just shows how how fragile and how futile to some extent language is it's funny though Hank that people would pick on that one little thing I think so much of it goes back to that there's just bad blood between Protestant Catholic for five hundred years and people latch on to a little symbolic thing make it a symbolic thing like that like like the word father when there's so much more to understand and as I'm sure you found it makes it very hard for Protestants to understand the differences between Orthodox and Catholic I think I told you I had a friend who said you know the Protestants think that the Orthodox are just like the Catholics but they don't know the oriented ox broke up with the Catholics five hundred years before they did that's right they were resisting the the primacy of the Pope and the infallibility of the Pope from the very beginning and finally it just reached ahead in the 11th century that's when the splintered plan when you talk about a split and break up it reminds me of the word fragmentation within the body of Christ we've become accustomed to this so you see a new permutation someone else has a new billboard up you've got a new pastor in town you have a new denomination that springs up or a fragmentation of a denomination that springs up we expect that we ought to consider that a scandal but we don't yes isn't that true we should be a scandal like we should be horrified that we've allowed the body of Christ to become this fragmented and that we've brought to our safety attitude of shoppers as if you need every possible kind of flavor of Cheerios just Cheerios all up and down the aisle it's it's a trap attitude toward church and I think it is a poison I think it eventually it destroys Church there's always a new fad coming around you just I guess yesterday I started thinking whatever happened to the emerging church you know you go back 15 years and that was like it was going to revolutionize everything and now it's what happened to it what happened to the charismatic movement in the 1970s that was going to revolutionize everything you know it wasn't it wasn't a you know big ending but somehow it just faded away these these new things because they're not new and substance they're only new in terms of packaging they just can't live very long and if you want something that is rooted and that can really bring you into the life of Christ you probably need to look back to the beginning because the early Christians knew how to do it and I know you've spoken about this I mean there's a sense in which we now have what we have in other words there is this fragmentation but as Benjamin Franklin once said and very memorably so he said if we don't hang together we're going to hang separately we are facing the onslaught of Berlant secularism scientism and the like and so there should be some kind of unity some kind of mere christianity that we can embrace as opposed to this tribalism that is is continuing to fragment us as followers of Jesus Christ yes yes I I so strongly agree and I see the difficulty because everybody has ideas of things that they absolutely will not compromise on like you know I'm right side by side and hang with hangul and everything except I'm not gonna accept that he calls his priest father or it calls him a priest even there are these red flag words that it's so hard for us to give up I know I don't have time to go into all of this but I I told you before my story that I was a non-believer in college and then I was kind of synchronous picking up little bits of religions here and there it was a an Episcopal priest said you will never grow as long as you're picking and choosing the things like because you're only able to choose the things you like you only choose the things that you understand or that seem attractive and they won't choose you they'll just confirm you and being exactly the way you already are he said you need to choose one of the great religions he I wish he'd specified Christianity and just submit yourself to it with the things you like and the things you don't like just take it all in at once and let it go to work on you submit to the whole thing and let it act upon you and as you know at that point I chose Hinduism so there's my story goes on from there but I think that's true about Christianity too that there's so much interest in the early church there's so much curiosity about it and what is it authenticity is the kind of stonewashed quality you know that it's been it's been going on for 2,000 years now and so much of it is completely unchanged from the beginning and that gives it depth and power and authenticity and if you come to it and you pick out little pieces like I like this prayer custom and I like this and I like that I don't like this I'm going to reject that all that picking and choosing destroys the authenticity it destroys the ancientness of it because by this year fact of being the editor that does the picking and choosing your you've just reestablished the longevity of the church til last week you just made your choices so there can be no deeper than your 2018 American mass culture mind there is a lot that can happen if you take the whole thing and submit to it even the parts you don't understand I think people do get good out of it if they pick and choose you get something from that but it's like bringing in a vase with cut flowers that they smell wonderful they look great and they're going to die because you cut them off from their roots but it's better than nothing so so I encourage people to investigate the ancient Church the Orthodox Church if all you can do is just apply bits and pieces please do that but you'll get more out of it if you're Chris mated and you start living the life and you join this ancient community 2000 year old community it is the early church the early church never stopped you can go worship with the early church this coming Sunday if you want to it's right there there's so many people that would say well you talk about fragmentation within Protestant denominations and within Catholicism but what about Eastern Orthodoxy I mean you have the Greeks and the Romanians and the Antioch ian's and the Serbians and the divisions go on and on and on how would you address the idea that orthodoxy is just as tribal I think that's uh that's a very good question and actually it has a very easy answer the expectation in orthodoxy if the people group themselves by tongue and tribe and people and nation and that every people group ought to have their own organization of the church like I was saying before you have you know Greeks and Greece and Russians and Russia and Albanians and Albania and that is as high as the administration or the hierarchy goes you don't have a ruler over the whole world of Orthodoxy the thing that keeps them all alike though is that they're still using the same worship and so they're still embracing the same theology they may have arguments about borders or get their feelings hurt or something they might ally with each other and then break out again but the safe stays the same so it's a deliberate choice not to have an international Orthodox world to let it remain at these natural groupings of people tongue and tribe and yet the theology is the same no matter where you go because the worship is the same I give the example in the book of the that oriental Orthodox Coptic Egyptians Orthodox the Armenian Orthodox there are few Orthodox churches that are have been estranged from the Eastern Orthodox Church for 15 years it goes all the way back to the 400s and yet if you go to worship in one of their churches if you talk to the members of those churches boy it felt like they are so close in their spirit their reverence their attitude their expectations of how you live the life it was a disagreement about how how do you express the two nature's of Christ but because both churches are still going back to the unity they had before that split they're still they just look like twins and you think about that and then you think about it's that's 1500 years it's 500 years since the Reformation think about the insane amount of variety there is in the West and the two Orthodox churches have been separated three times longer than that and you have their soldiers alike yeah that's interesting I think very very informative I think what you say is absolutely true and I have now experienced that all over the world there is something else then I don't know if you want to address this but I don't think I've ever brought this up to you before but there's a sense in which if you go to a place like Russia for example there's this danger where you have a patriarch like Crill who seems to be aligned strongly with Putin or the possibility of Putin using the Russian Orthodox Church as a way of propagating his own geopolitical realities and perspectives around the world how is this unhealthy mix between church and state sometimes used in an untoward manner oh yes I think that that that certainly happens in orthodoxy just as it could happen in any other Church than any other state Church or really any Church anywhere that gets power and influence we might look back a few decades and say the Episcopal Church was everybody that was wealthy everybody that was powerful always went to the Episcopal Church and certainly there's some back and forth there and you know you can say the some extent well maybe the churchmen are influencing the president and the Senators but maybe it's the other way around I should not expect any church to have leadership that has not fallen there are going to be fallen leaders everywhere and they're going to be tempted by power everywhere it's just human nature and so there shouldn't be an expectation that among the leadership of Orthodox churches that they're all going to be Saints sometimes they are sometimes they are at least there's that goal that you know what you're working toward and you know that your theology should be transforming you day by day but it would be misplaced to to go to Russia and see something that doesn't look right to you and assume therefore that orthodoxy is not is not correct or that orthodoxy isn't isn't the real church the original early church it's kind of like if there was a if there's a hospital you've got all the doctors and the nurses and everybody that has medical training you've also got an Administrative Board that decides when it's time to buy more lightbulbs you have something like that imagine that the Administrative Board was corrupt but even that even if they were terribly corrupt they still couldn't damage medical science the healing in that hospital could still go on even if their embezzlers and doing terrible things so if you see something disappointing in that hierarchy of a church you can think it's just like those incompetence there were self-serving members of the hospital administration nevertheless the healing still goes on the liturgy is still teaching scriptures in such a deep way there is still such an expectation of transformation and an experience of transformation such that you see living miracle workers and living Saints that's what we're going to Orthodox before and you just shouldn't you shouldn't be surprised if a bad egg turns up every once in a while that's a very very satisfying answer I won't talk about I wrote a book in 2001 it was a runaway bestseller it was called the prayer of Jesus and what I did was I explicate 'add the Lord's Prayer in book well since I joined an Eastern Orthodox Church and become Eastern Orthodox Chris made it I fell in love with the Jesus Prayer and I thought it might be fun to talk about that a little bit I used to think when I heard about the Jesus Prayer years and years ago that it was analogous to what Jesus Christ was talking about when he said so when you pray do not be like the pagans because they keep on babbling and so I would think if you repeat something like the Jesus Prayer over and over again it is like taken babbling and yet I can tell you that the Jesus Prayer has been the most significant prayer for me as I go through the difficulties of life when I am going through chemotherapy or I'm going through a clinical trial whatever I'm going through this gives me solace when I get anxious during the day my mind now goes back to the Jesus Prayer it's become part of my DNA Lord Jesus Christ son of God have mercy on me a sinner and it becomes almost the same as breathing for me talk about how this is not a vain repetition but a transformational prayer oh that's so wonderful I just love listening to what you said there it's such a blessing to me to hear but to go back historically where does the Jesus Prayer comes from she said the words our Lord Jesus Christ son of God have mercy on me or have mercy on me a sinner it can vary a little bit the core of it is that you call on the Lord Jesus Christ and ask him for mercy and historically this began probably in the 200s when people began going out into the desert of Egypt or Palestine in order to seek constant prayer like st. Paul said said four times we should pray without ceasing we should pray constantly they wanted to figure out how to do that and quickly realize the problem is that your mind wanders you can be intending to pray but if there's not a hope to hang it on it's just fooling around thinking about so many different things and they realize that they needed just a little fray as you could repeat like the hang on to to hold yourself in the presence of Christ and they tried they tried things like just pick whatever your favorite scripture is just keep repeating that verse in the back of your mind they tried a number of short prayers just like help me Lord it would be an example asking for help about the year 500 is when this form emerges what we call the Jesus Prayer Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me Lord Jesus Christ son of God have mercy on me as I said you can make it longer and shorter and it immediately catches on it's like this is what we've been waiting for because it's got the name of Jesus in it the name of Jesus is powerful when you say his name you invoke his presence and he is there with you I wonder how they didn't notice that from the very beginning that that the prayers gotta include the name of Jesus and asking for mercy is not like a criminal asking for leniency at first it bothered me because I thought it sounded like groveling you know but all the times in the Gospels when people asked Jesus for mercy they're asking for healing like the blind bartimaeus by the side of the road Jesus master have mercy on me Jesus son of David have mercy on me it's the it's the word in in Greek and also in in Hebrew that means compassion that's tenderness tender love long-suffering the love that reaches out to heal so there's there's never a time when we don't need that kind of mercy from the Lord and they found that using this prayer it like gives you a way to hook your attention on the Lord a way to blow you know breathe out all of the other distracting thoughts and then inhale the presence of Christ and to remain right there with him now I know you've found we all do that you can be saying the Jesus Prayer just repeating it you know not fast just just like a walking pace in the back of your mind I certainly know that I can be doing that and thinking about other things so I totally wander away but it does get better with practice yes and the usual advice is to start just try to just do a few minutes like at the end of the day when you're going to sleep a lot of people start you start this practice just when they're going to sleep they start reciting the Jesus Prayer silently in their minds and move on from there to maybe establishing a five-minute period like as soon as you get home from work or something just pick a time that you can stick to and gradually you begin to experience not just his presence but the the tenderness the consoling quality of his presence the peace that he brings in all those things it becomes something you want to do I think that's what you're talking about Hank you find that it's what you you almost flee to when you're in a stressful painful I'm sure sometimes terrifying certainly anxiety provoking things you must go through it's like you just run toward the prayer you just want to hold on to the name of Jesus and what it brings is indescribable but you find out what it is after you've done it for a while yeah and what you said about this being you know efficacious for example when you're falling asleep it certainly is something that I do when I'm in bed and I'm following asleep that's what's going through my mind always now it's pretty much a hundred percent of the time I mean I can't think of any exceptions but something else that I found is that I start my prayer time with this so I may before I start praying anything else I may be praying that Jesus prayer for five or ten minutes and and then I expressed my faith in the Lord I worship the Lord I confess my sins to the Lord I thank the Lord for His many blessings all of that before I ever get around to supplications and I find that that's a big change for me because it used to be that supplication was the primary or the first thing before my knees had ever hit the ground I was already thinking about the requests I could bring to the Lord and oftentimes that bring those requests the Lord and then I'd rush out of his presence with nary another thought and so this has been very very grounding in my own prayer life in general I've heard some Orthodox elders and holy people say before you start to pray you have to warm up your heart remember what older cars used to be like you have to warm it up before you started driving and I think that's true that's something the Jesus Prayer can do is it just warms up your heart it's like breathing on the the coals that are starting to die down in your heart it brings up that flame again then it reminds you of His mercy so you don't have to ask in anxiety you can ask in a way knowing the goodness that he has for us and trusting in him and it does render so many other anxious prayers unnecessary yeah you can just be there with him yeah you know there are some other things that I wanted to talk to you about one of them has to do with Mary yeah it now been involved in orthodoxy for a while and I've had the the reactions of people and one of the reactions I have is to Mary for me when I was a Protestant you you know Mary just wasn't part of my orbit I certainly believed Mary was the mother of God but the idea of Mary being someone that I was attracted to as the exemplar for my faith as perhaps the chief icon other than the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ that was completely foreign to me but now when I talk about Mary I mean she has become my exemplar so I want to talk about her but when I do and you know about this probably better than anybody else people oftentimes have sort of a dour reaction to that as though what I'm doing is somehow a rather a disservice to the Christian faith talk about why that is I guess and on the one hand it's explicable because I sort of had that that frame of reference myself but now it seems inexplicable to me yes yes I know what you mean I think the reason that negative attitude toward Mary arose was there certainly were in the Christian West excesses during the medieval period and longer there was a tendency to kind of put Mary in place of Jesus or other Saints or two and they're always focusing they're always focusing on someone else as if it was a like an earthly Kingdom and you had to go through a chain of command you couldn't go directly to Jesus you had to ask all the intermediaries and there were certainly some stories that suggested that people thought that if Jesus said no you could still go to Mary and she would fix it for you as if she would ever have a will that differed from her son's will all she wanted was the will of God if you can clear out that stuff out of your mind and just think more immediately about how did Jesus love his mother how would he want us to respect his mother and I think the experience that I hadn't that you had is that you know Mary is not what the church preaches we preach Jesus Christ but if you keep going into the house of your Lord and you love him and you start meeting other friends there at some point you meet his mother and you think she's my friend too he's wonderful you can become so drawn to her and so attracted to her that she becomes like a prayer partner so the distinction is she's not a junior God she's not a demigod with her own power and she can't you know overrule things that God wants to do but she is another person who loves the Lord Jesus Christ as much as we do maybe even more than we do I think and we can enjoy her presence in her fellowship I think that the shocking thing to some people is that they think that those who are alive in Christ are actually sleeping or that they're dead and they will come into life in Christ at some future point but the church has always believed that they they are alive and they are aware they're like the people gathered around the throne in the book of Revelation or like Moses and Elijah appearing and speaking with the Lord they are there they are doing nothing except pray all the time so just as I would ask you to pray for me or ask another friend to pray for me I can ask the Virgin Mary to pray for me she's just another one of our friends yeah which is another thing that was very off-putting to me quite frankly when I was experimenting going to Orthodox churches way back when I would hear this phrase Mary save us or Mother of God save us and I would think wow that's blasphemous I know I know that was that was really disturbing to me too and I think it's a different use of the word faith that because of the all the contention in the Christian West we reserved the word saved to mean specifically the forgiveness of your sins and that has nothing to do with anybody else except God we just there's no point I would be senseless to apply the word save to anything that Saint Mary or anyone else can do for us there's a there's something in Orthodox prayer that is completely timeless like when we when it's Christmas we say today the Virgin comes to the cave to give birth it's always today it's always happening today some of what we pray to Mary is asking her to say yes when Gabriel says you will bear a child that's how she says this is my saying yes at that moment it's it's kind of hard to explain but it's like you're lifted up into timelessness and everything is going on simultaneously and you're participating in it when we ask her to save us it can also just mean we're asking her to pray for us that we're just putting so much confidence in her prayers and there's also something that I think is not very familiar in the West anymore which is that language is it's exaggerated the language of worship is is so profuse and so overflowing and it's all you know hyperbole and superlative I forget which which say that was it was not a it wasn't a big well-known Saint but the prayer that we say for him on his day talks about him is the most illustrious of all the saints and you know that that's not literally what we believe he's not considered the most illustrious of all the Saints but that's just the kind of thing you say it's like a banquet you know where you're honoring somebody and everybody says from those elaborate and extreme things they can think of about how wonderful this person is it's not like writing a legal contract it's not meant to be a theological argument against a different point of view it's meant to be the outpouring of love and joy that's beautiful in you know I was thinking also about the fact that when we talk about orthodoxy we oftentimes say and Isis saying this for 30 years I'd say it's the Church of the seven ecumenical councils and when we talk about the seven ecumenical councils we oftentimes don't know what we're talking about but it starts with Nicaea 1 and 325 AD and that goes to Nicaea 2 and 787 with respect and I see a 2 there was a great iconoclastic heresy which was condemned by night SIA 2 so if you condemn icons today you may well have a false Cristalle adji for the invisible word becomes flesh sanctifying physical visible realities and that's really what orthodoxy often times does it takes those things that are hard to conceptualize and God uses then earthly perceptible realities to point to those spiritual verities and one of those things are icons I mean this was difficult for me as well Frederica I used to walk in the back of a Orthodox Church and you know if I'd go with a friend who was Orthodox as I did upon occasion you don't have to wait for that person in the narthex of the church to venerate icons like candles before they ever walked into the nave and so that was like oh my goodness I wish you'd get over with that no I want to go into the nave and you know I but this is now something that is very precious to me because it's not just rushing into the nave but spending time in the north x part of which is preparing my heart for what I'm going to parents when I experienced liturgy and when I experienced the real presence of Christ you know I wonder wonder sometimes how much we lost due to the Western Church leaving the scriptures and the liturgy in Latin because it almost reduces people to dealing with God in a magical way if they don't really know what the words are saying and they don't they don't know what they're actually doing they just have to assume that if I light this candle it's like a bribe you know I think we inherit all that as Western Christians so those attitudes are we that's kind of our background and we know we don't want that so we pushed the whole thing away and or if it actually is something that we just don't experience in the West but the idea is that you like you light the candle like sort of like you'd light candles on a dining room table because they look beautiful of course also in the past before electric lights it was the only way you could actually see the icon was if you lit a candle in front of it but it's a there's a gracious and admiring thing going on there and it's not like a bribe it's just a way of making that connection feeling that something that you do when you stand in front of the icon you light it up so you can look at it and speak to that to that person that's there depicted you're exactly right about how God became flesh he entered our material world and also when we have icons it's all right to venerate an icon because it's like a it's like a window window into heaven you look through it and see the Lord if you if you kiss the icon it's like kissing the window it's like a toddler kissing the telephone you know kiss her grandma it's just the means of communication it's the way you make contact across a distance like it like a telephone can do for you the love that goes through is the important thing and it doesn't just stop at the surface of the acre or at the surface of the telephone speak to the vestments and the incense and the bells and all of these things that seem outrageous to so many different people particularly when they don't understand history so we were talking earlier about how orthodoxy is perpetuating something as opposed to innovating something and it doesn't just go back to the early church it goes back to the judeo-christian tradition and thus the vestments and all of the ways in which your senses are impacted have their roots in biblical history extending into the Old Testament yes yes that's so true and as you know this past Sunday if the Gospel reading that we heard was the blind man and the Gospel of John and it says that they can steam out of the synagogue that they expelled him that's what was happening to the early Christians they at first they would go to worship in the synagogue or the temple you can see in acts you know Peter and John went to pray they went to went to pray in the temple but when they were cast out when the Christians were rejected they didn't have to invent a whole new form of worship they already knew how God wanted to be worshipped because he had explained it to Moses and great detailed in minut detail and when you read through Exodus 25 to 30 I just reread that recently looking at all the things he says instance oil lamps bells gold silver precious stones cloth you know an expensive cloth blue and purple oil for anointing vestments of all kinds embroidery images of angels you know there were carved images of angels on top of the top of holy of holies and then even down to detailing there will be an altar in the altar is square I looked at that whole list and I thought about my church and I thought you can find every one of those things in my church they are used in worship every week we are continuing not just the early church's worship but the worship of the Jewish people from the time of Moses because God gained to explain how he wanted to be worshipped and if you're worshiping instead with with drums and guitars and you know that's actually not an exodus you know that's not the way God said he wanted it then there's a reason for beauty that beauty speaks to us Beauty gets through our defenses and even though the children of Israel were refugees and they were just wandering around the desert they had nothing God said give me everything you do have all your gold all your precious stones and it was that importance that worship of God be beautiful that it honored him appropriately that it honored him appropriately it was that important that God detailed all of those steps and you will still find that in the Orthodox Church we've continued at all this time I don't know if I've ever told you this frederique ago when I was 14 years old I remember traveling back to the country that I was born in the Netherlands and we went through London and I was in st. Paul's Cathedral and I remember as a boy of 14 and I was really struggling at that time with Christianity in general and I ended up walking away from the Christian Church shortly thereafter but I would still remember standing in that big Cathedral and you know you could look up and you could hardly see the dome it was so distant because the cathedral was so so majestic and tall and large and spacious and then having the crypts there and all of that I still remember standing there and feeling so small in the sense of history and I think about that often when I walk into an Orthodox Church how different it is from for bare walls and a sermon where the sermon itself is embedded in the walls it's embedded in the surroundings and the majesty of a Cathedral points you to God as opposed to pointing you to a human being so your icon doesn't become the gifted speaker but the icon becomes God whom you are worshipping boy that is that is so true you need something to draw you out of yourself or else you you come in carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders and you go back out with it having been briefly entertained and how much of our brokenness and their sorrow we can't we can't exchange or share in church because it's all about being happy like if you left church and you didn't feel happy that you didn't do it right this week you know um the marketing of the church the way the church has become a consumer product and I think that's true of Protestant Catholic liberal conservative everyone that is such a tragic because it's empty that of its power its emptied the cross of its power I think it's a bold thing to say but it's as if we've substituted a view of the congregation as the customers and the the worship leaders are not trying to give worship to God they're trying to give the worshipers a good worship experience so I feel like they had a good experience when they went to church last time I think this is so tragic and it is so undermined the power of the church and the ability of the church to be what it needs to be to be an ancient unending community that has the power of Christ well beautifully said you know another thing that you speak to is the false dichotomy between head and heart we have become dichotomy knee acts and what I'd like to do is actually quote you you wrote in the chapter that you sent me in your forthcoming book we think we can keep reason and emotion separate or discuss theology using reason alone but that's an illusion in practice reason and emotion are inseparable permeating and influencing each other all the time scripture doesn't separate head and heart but sees them mingled together inextricably along with memory with will with desire and all else that makes us human there is no separate head and heart in Scripture instead it all bubbles away in the culture and at the center of our being which scripture calls the heart by the way you really have a way with words oh my goodness that's beautiful I love that I've been trying to express that for a long time but when I read this I thought yeah that's what I was trying to say actually well I'm glad I hope it's useful to you just change it around use it however you like I'm I feel honored yes this was something that um you know when I was becoming Orthodox there wasn't very much to explain the differences out there it was 25 years ago before the internet I had to just figure out some things on my own and one of the things kept being the word noose which means the mind and I thought oh okay then the mind then that means reason and but I'd see as I read through no it doesn't mean reason that's the reason and emotion opposites I discovered that the noose is the kind of mind that perceives or understands like when Jesus after his resurrection he breathed on the apostles and said receive the Holy Spirit and he opened their minds to understand the scriptures it's like a perception thing well that kind of overturned my ideas of people being divided into emotion and reason and the more I've worked at it and thought about it I realized that emotion and reason are not opposites that in fact all our emotions are based on our thoughts if you're feeling an emotion it's because you had a thought that provoked that emotion and it could be a very rational you know with emotions are not necessarily irrational the thoughts might be very rational they're causing us to feel elated or worried or whatever it is the emotion and reason are like two phases of a single process rather than being opposites this idea that you are either rational or you're emotional is done tremendous damage I think because it's not true and it's not scriptural and it's brought us into a misunderstanding of how we experience God what we need is that open receptive understanding mind it's true that you cannot reason your way to God but you can listen your way to cut you can you can absorb you can stand in worship and here it's going on around you here the scriptures and it just opens you up you perceive the presence of God but to divide emotion and reason from each other that's a false division I think it's caused a huge amount of damage over the centuries yeah absolutely you've also pointed out that Western theologians often refer to Eastern Orthodox Christianity as being anti intellectual so mystical and you talk about something that happened with Thomas Aquinas who could not continue his Summa following the encounter he had with Christ in 1273 where he said all I have written seems like straw to me and I will tell you that in a lot of ways I feel that same sense of the experience of God making every snarling logic allottee seem insignificant by comparison that's why I definitely feel the same way if there's anything I regret after all my years of writing it would be those times that I was especially clever or cutting you know it anytime that I wrote something hoping that people would think I was an extremely brilliant and intellectual person all that just just make me feel deflated now how unnecessary all of that is and I certainly do know Western Christians for whom the intellectual combat of theology is the thing that thrills them if they want to do the most and I feel like I've moved to a point where I see the damage that causes but initially it's just empty but a secondary thing is it can actually be damaging to us as scripture sees it the center of the human being is the heart and you think in your heart like Saint Mary pondered these things in her heart every thought of a man's heart is only evil continually except the Lord there's not a lot of high regard for reason and rationality in the scriptures all of those things they're bubbling around in the heart all the time if it's United you're single united person you can't come before the Lord with only your reason or only any other part of you it's gosh it's a misunderstanding of what a human being is able to do now that's one of the points I made was that if we can't really think about theology rationally because then anytime thinking is going on it's going on inside a person and the person is fallen so that is it's every time that's going to affect what you're willing to consider not what you try to block out which try to make fun of there's no such thing as pure reason basically I love talking to you I could talk to you forever you know I want to touch on perhaps one last thing and maybe we can do this again sometime soon I mean we just scratched surface of things that you can lighten people with you're truly wonderful and you've been a blessing to my family a blessing to me in my own journey but I want to talk about something as we sort of close this podcast that is really really significant and maybe I'll preface my question to you by saying that I had a color on the Bible in sermon broadcast just a week or two ago and he said that when he found out I had become Orthodox after you know listening to me for 30 years and after supporting our ministry he said I felt like I got sucker-punched that's the exact phrase that he used and then he brought up the fact that in his view and I'm paraphrasing him now because I don't remember exactly what he said but in his view orthodoxy was a crass system of works righteousness and I remember that just prior to him calling I had looked in the Orthodox Study Bible for a note under Romans 6:23 I wondered what the Orthodox Study Bible would say and let me read to you what it said this is the note under Romans 6:20 for the wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord and then the no day's wages are something earned thus death is earned by man through his sins eternal life however is never earned but is a gift no human actions no matter how good no matter how noble they may seem can earn eternal life or it is only through the Grace and love of God that life everlasting is given to us and as I read that note I thought you know how interesting in the Eastern Church faith and works were never set in opposition to one another as it is primarily in Western Christianity yes and what that's another tragedy and I wonder if two that had something to do with the people having only the vaguest idea of what Christian faith is unable to absorb the depths of it through worship but it's so much easier to understand working and earning and and being able to buy what you need and you need salvation desperately you don't want to go to hell so you want to plug in and and just work it off and but that's very easy for the human mind to grasp I think it is much more subtle and much more challenging to realize that God forgives us completely freely that that it is never earned it is completely a gift you know I somewhere in my my book welcome to the Orthodox Church I say that it's a satisfaction theory of the atonement the Christ's death on the cross satisfied the depth but the depth of our sin but it's also satisfying to think that the death has been completely paid off and we would almost rather it be paid off than that it be a free gift what if God forgives us freely and what Jesus did on the cross was not a payment that like the manager of a restaurant if he says I forgive your debt it's different from saying the man over at that table paid your debt that it is so completely free God was always ready to forgive us always right ready to give us salvation and if you can't accept it you will not have it you have to be able to accept it accept it in humility accept Jesus Christ as Lord but it's totally free that's a good distinction in that that commentary as you said between the sins or wages that we earn death but we have the gift of eternal life and I think so often about what James said that we we as people are justified by what we do and not by faith alone and then later on you have James using the example of Rahab the prostitute who considered righteousness to be imputed to her in some sense the text tells us that Rahab the prostitute was considered righteous for what she did when she gave lodging to the spies and sent them off in a different direction and then James says as the body without the Spirit is dead so faith without deeds is dead and the emphasis in orthodoxy is certainly not a crass system of works righteousness but we have to continue on in the faith we need to receive the graces whereby we can become by grace what God is by nature and you can't do that by getting a get out of jail card free right right every minute of our lives we're making choices in our mind is not in actual activity and every choice we make turns us more into a goat or more into a sheep in Matthew 25 at the Last Judgement it's not Jesus is not describing a criminal trial it sounds more like a livestock trial you know livestock contest you know it doesn't take a lot of scrutiny to tell a sheep from a goat we choose which we will become through our works it's not a matter of earning heaven it's a matter of becoming a follower of Jesus more and more devoting more and more of ourselves to him versus more and more to getting our things our way doesn't feeis lewis has a great line about if we will not say thy will be done to God eventually God says to you thy will be done and then you get your own well you get what you wanted you get eternal misery because you did not want the things of God I was thinking as you're talking about how important the point you made earlier is that you know if you are living in a different continent speaking a different language many many years after the Bible was written you're going to be less apt to have a proper interpretation then if you're someone actually listening to the Apostle Paul or someone in the next generation so we oftentimes think that our understanding of the Scriptures increases over time very much like our understanding of biology increases over time but with scripture the closer you were to the event the better chance you have of understanding what was going on and I like the illustration that you used with the Shakespearean play oh yes yeah that the closer you go back to the beginning the more unity there is not that we don't see there are many people teaching strange things in the early years but there's unanimity and in the New Testament and there was a New Testament community that spread all around that end of the Mediterranean bold and they had the faith in common I think that's something you can trust when you go ahead in time and it's shooting off in all directions there's no way to recover the truth except going back to the root well this is a commemoration of the 50th episode of Hank unplugged you know we did the first podcast together and you were my first guest and guess what my conversation with you on the very first episode is the most listened-to episode of Hank and blood thus far it continues to be one of the most downloaded episodes every week as well and now having this conversation with you again I sort of feel like we're sitting on our porch with my kids around all over again and I'm just thinking as we're talking no wonder this was so popular last time I have to tell you Hank you're a wonderful interviewer I I really I can feel how you just lead from one to the next to the next thought it's all connective and you give me so many wide-open openings to step into it I know a good interviewer when I see one and I really appreciate it well I love and appreciate you I'm so glad that God brought you into my life and you know what it just as we close our health good how you doing with you had a brush with cancer as well yes yes i did i am i had just stage one a very tiny four millimeter breast tumor and it was removed I had just 17 radiation treatments I was I was just such a crybaby cuz we were both invited to speak at a conference at the end of September and I was like I can't go I can't go and you went to it and you were you were so much thicker than I was and and going through so much more rigorous treatment than I was so my hats off to you I'm fine as far as I know the last mammogram it was all clear I'm not doing any more treatments and I always say it wasn't the big C was just a little C it gave me a chance to see what it's like you know now I know when other women have breast cancer I can think oh that's what it's like so it was a it was a teaching experience it was a gift of God in some sense and I found out as the gift of God goes that the seeing cancer is very very small compared to the see in Christ well again I I love and appreciate you and you have illuminated me in so many different ways I'm just so grateful that you sent that last chapter to me I was having breakfast this morning I started reading it I read it once with well just scanned it and then I read it again with a pen tell and then I read it again with a marker so I really I mean I really appreciate your gift the gift God has given you to write and I can't wait til the book comes out yes you will be the first I want an autograph copy you will get one that's very sure well bless you fredericka I'm looking forward to talking to you and seeing you again soon all right thanks a lot Hank I enjoyed talking to you it was great and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes write it and if you really like it leave a review give us a 5-star rating if you love it I mean this is how we have an opportunity to bring to you some of the most inspirational informative incredible people on the planet that's what we do with Hank unplugged we have had the privilege of talking to I mean the cream of the cream when it comes to God's people around the world and certainly today was no exception this is my 50th the podcast and I'm so glad to have done it with fredericka Matthews green thanks for tuning in to the podcast today look forward to seeing you on another edition of Hank unplugged very very soon so long for now [Applause]

Channel: Bible Answer Man

Views: 12,159

Rating: 4.7671232 out of 5

Keywords: Podcast, Apologetics, Hank Unplugged Podcast, Bible Answer Man, Bible, Christian Research Institute, CRI, Hank Hanegraaff, Christ, Christian, Christianity, God, Gospel, Jesus, Scripture, Truth, Frederica Mathewes-Green, Eastern Orthodoxy, Theology, Abortion, Justice, Pro-choice, Personhood, Atonement, Christus Victor, Tradition, Tribalism, Venerating Icons, Works Righteousness

Id: 8_3kUHcYcQ0

Length: 94min 16sec (5656 seconds)

Published: Thu May 31 2018