In this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, Father John Strickland joins the show to talk about his conversion to Orthodoxy, and why he believes it's the only true church. Charlie talks with Father John about what it means to be Orthodox and why it's important to have an Orthodox presence in our culture.
00:00:50.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:58.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:31.000And I know a fair amount about Catholicism.
00:01:34.000I know a fair amount about Protestantism, but admittedly, very little about Orthodox.
00:01:40.000And it's getting a lot of play online, as you probably know.
00:01:44.000And I know a couple people that are Serbian Orthodox growing up or were Latvian Orthodox, but I don't know much about the theology or the history.
00:01:52.000So I told Blake, I said, Blake, find me someone that can come on the show and we can just have a fun discussion.
00:02:46.000Everywhere I went, I was kind of greeted warmly, and people were really interested in learning about America and the West at that time after the collapse of communism.
00:02:56.000I started attending an Orthodox parish there and just fell in love with it and realized God made me for this and I decided to become Orthodox there.
00:03:05.000So you were in Russia when you converted.
00:03:08.000I want to have a whole separate conversation about Russia.
00:03:10.000We're told during the Soviet Union, it was mostly atheistic, but it had an Orthodox core.
00:03:17.000What percentage of Russia is Orthodox versus more secular?
00:03:20.000Well, today, most people would identify as Orthodox if they were to consider themselves a believer in a higher power.
00:03:41.000But Orthodoxy is the preeminent, historically preeminent religion there.
00:03:46.000In the Soviet Union, of course, that was attacked, and they blew up churches and shot priests and persecuted believers and things like that.
00:03:54.000But they could never eradicate from their culture the strong sense that Orthodox Christianity, Christianity generally, is a necessary part of society and its foundations.
00:04:06.000There's a couple of funny little anecdotes about that.
00:04:10.000One joke is that Soviet school students were taught that there is no God and that the Orthodox Church is the only true church.
00:04:19.000So they got this sense that there is an Orthodox presence that's really important for our culture, but we don't believe in God.
00:04:49.000And I want to start by saying, you know, there's a lot in common between the Orthodox and the Roman Catholics and the Protestants.
00:04:57.000And I want to, you know, recognize that and even kind of emphasize that, that there's a lot in common.
00:05:03.000I mean, Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants all believe that Jesus Christ is both God and man.
00:05:10.000They believe that there's one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
00:05:14.000They believe that God came into this world to save the world from sin and that the experience of salvation is a beautiful thing that lasts forever into eternity.
00:05:24.000They all have some very core, important beliefs in common.
00:05:28.000The Orthodox see themselves, believe strongly that they hold the tradition that the apostles received from Jesus Christ at Pentecost.
00:06:19.000And so until the end of time, the Orthodox believe, the faith is complete.
00:06:24.000There's nothing more needed, nothing to be added, and there could never be anything taken away from that faith.
00:06:29.000And so Orthodox today, 2,000 years later, believe very strongly that they hold to a tradition, the tradition, the holy tradition, that was delivered to the apostles at Pentecost, and that that will never change.
00:06:42.000Acts 2.42, for instance, really important for Orthodox, says that they, the apostles and those who converted on that day, 3,000 of them, continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine, in the fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and in the prayers.
00:07:13.000Unchangeably is another word, an adjective for steadfastly is unchangeably.
00:07:17.000And so today, I think one of the things that's really remarkable about the Orthodox Church in America, where I, you know, where I do my ministry, is that this authentic witness to the faith of the apostles, an unchangeable faith, is really, you know, it's really capturing people's attention.
00:07:35.000And our churches are being filled, flooded, in fact, with converts.
00:07:39.000I mean, my church in a very rural, kind of small church in Paulsbo, Washington, St. Elizabeth Orthodox Church, I think we've had like, I think maybe we've probably grown by 50%.
00:07:53.000We've lost a lot of people moving out of the area because it's so expensive to live there.
00:07:57.000Families have moved away, but we've grown by 50%.
00:08:00.000Lots of young people, especially, which is remarkable, that today young people, I mean, who would have thought a generation ago, are seeking not just faith in general, but the authentic Christian faith that stretches back unchanged all the way back to the apostles with all of its doctrines about marriage, about sexuality, about who God is, and about fasting, and about communion, about the sacraments, about the worship, about the whole thing.
00:08:34.000Your canon, a scripture, would it be the same as the Protestant Bible, 66 books, or with the apocryphal texts as the Catholics would have it?
00:08:46.000Yeah, so our canon for the New Testament is the same.
00:08:57.000And it originated about two centuries before Christ.
00:09:02.000And it was a translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, which was the, you know, the lingua franca of the ancient world.
00:09:10.000And by the time of the apostles, it was being widely used, the Septuagint Greek translation.
00:09:15.000And it had more books than later Masoretic text, which is a later edition of the Jewish scriptures in Hebrew.
00:09:24.000In fact, the Septuagint is really older in some ways, you can measure it this way, than that version that was later appropriated and used by Protestants during the Reformation.
00:09:34.000So that Septuagint is interesting because it's what's being quoted by the apostles in the New Testament.
00:09:40.000Like an Orthodox Christian doesn't follow a doctrine of sola scriptura, that there's just a scripture, but follows a tradition in which there's a living, there's a living, that the Holy Spirit is a living presence in the church guiding the church and her interpretation of the scriptures.
00:09:56.000And that begins with the person of Jesus Christ.
00:09:58.000And so when the apostles wrote about the person of Jesus Christ in the Gospels, they quoted the Septuagint in the Greek.
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00:11:57.000That's a term used in more modern contexts, like a sola scriptura Protestant context that the Orthodox typically haven't employed that kind of language.
00:12:07.000We do believe that the scripture is the most important core of our tradition, but there's more to it than just the scriptures.
00:12:13.000For instance, if you think about scripture itself, let's talk about that 27-book New Testament.
00:12:18.000Nowhere in the New Testament is there a table of contents.
00:12:23.000I mean, of course, modern editions will have a table of contents, but the scriptures themselves were never written.
00:12:29.000The New Testament was never written with a table of contents.
00:12:32.000As a matter of fact, all the apostles, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, who wrote the Gospels, are anonymous in those Gospels.
00:12:41.000We only know their names from tradition.
00:12:44.000And for a whole generation, Christians were being saved before any of those were written down.
00:12:50.000It's quite remarkable if you think about it.
00:12:53.000And there were a lot of creeds that also predated the writing of the scriptures.
00:13:26.000We don't have 28 books in the New Testament Because there were bishops on hand being guided by that tradition with a faith that the Holy Spirit is responsible for guiding that tradition, guiding them in all truth, as John's gospel spoke, that could identify what's authentic and what's spurious.
00:14:41.000What is the Orthodoxy view on Mariology?
00:14:46.000Yeah, so Mariology is always for the Orthodox Christology.
00:14:52.000Mary is always understood in relationship to Jesus Christ.
00:14:56.000For instance, we have a very rich tradition of iconography, of icons of Mary.
00:15:02.000In those icons, you almost never find, there are a few exceptions always that prove the rule, but you almost never find in an Orthodox church an icon of Mary by herself.
00:16:09.000Yes, the church typically teaches that Mary somehow lived out her life with such faith in Christ, such hope in his eternal salvation, that she did not commit any significant sins, any serious sins.
00:16:26.000This is, I don't know, I don't, there are varying opinions.
00:16:30.000Like, when we Orthodox talk about what we believe, we don't just open the Bible and read, and we don't just think ourselves or read philosophy.
00:16:39.000We look to what the church has handed on to us.
00:16:41.000And some so-called fathers of the church, usually they were bishops from past centuries, wrote that Mary might have, you know, committed small sins, like the time she leaves Jesus behind in the temple.
00:17:28.000We reject it because it means that God intervened against her will without her saying amen and working out her salvation along in cooperation with God.
00:17:38.000And he made it happen that her humanity was different than ours somehow.
00:17:42.000Do you believe she was assumed into heaven upon Orthodox teaching?
00:17:50.000Although there are differences there too.
00:17:53.000So in our Orthodox teaching, inherited from way, way back in the first millennium, she died first.
00:17:59.000We call it the dormition Of the Virgin Mary.
00:18:01.000In our icons, I have one in my back wall of our church that shows her lying on her deathbed, and then above it, Christ holding her in his arms in heaven.
00:18:24.000So now to, you obviously believe in the biblical account of Jesus' life, sinless, virgin birth, perfect life without sin, as I say, sinless, died an unjust death, unsuffering, rose from the dead after three days.
00:18:42.000So basically the Nicene Creed, you know, we're in total harmony and agreement.
00:18:46.000Are there any exceptions about Christology that you would say are different between Protestantism and Orthodoxy?
00:18:52.000Or is that probably where we're going to be able to do that?
00:18:58.000I mean, I think when it comes to, I mean, I think what we might find is that there are emphases that are different.
00:19:04.000So what happens is in the history of Christianity, in about halfway through that history to our present day, 1,000 years into the history, or from our point of view, 1,000 years back, there's something called the Great Schism, usually given the date 1054.
00:20:01.000But from an Orthodox point of view, they are actually quite two sides of the same coin.
00:20:06.000And so what we find, to your point, about our common beliefs in Jesus as they're articulated in the Gospels, is that there's an emphasis in the West, if we talk about this as an East-West difference, East being Orthodox and West being Roman Catholic/slash Protestant.
00:20:24.000There's an emphasis in the West after the Great Schism that emphasizes or overemphasizes from our point of view the almost exclusive role played by Jesus on the cross.
00:20:35.000That his crucifixion exclusively is the only thing that has any real significance in the salvation of the human race.
00:20:44.000And that furthermore, on the cross, Jesus paid a penalty to a wrathful, angry father, father and son, of course, and that Jesus was punished in a way that the Father would otherwise unleash upon the human race in his wrath against our sin.
00:21:05.000And we're all sinners, that's for sure.
00:21:39.000And then later in the Protestant Reformation, that's carried on, largely under the influence of Augustinianism.
00:21:45.000We don't probably want to get into his anthropology, his understanding of what the human being is, but it was a very negative one, imputing guilt to the whole human race for the fall of Adam and Eve.
00:21:56.000And then John Calvin picked up on that and spoke about the total depravity of the human race.
00:22:01.000And so in light of Jesus, in the Gospels, the total depravity of the human race, the really wretched condition of the human being in his sin, is taken back to the Gospels and the role of Jesus on the cross.
00:22:18.000In early Christianity, for a thousand years before the Great Schism, and certainly still alive in Orthodoxy today, there's much more of a balance there, emphasizing not only the resurrection of Jesus and his ascension into heaven, where humanity is now on the throne of God,
00:22:35.000united to Christ, but the incarnation and the healing of the human being whose sin is like a disease or a sickness that needs the healing of baptism and Eucharistic communion and a regular ascetical life of communion and love in the church.
00:22:51.000And so our view of Christ in the Gospels then is a broad view that sees a whole picture of the healing of the human race through the person of Jesus Christ.
00:23:04.000It triggers more questions than answers, but it answers a lot.
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00:24:39.000Yeah, so actually we should probably clarify that.
00:24:42.000So technically speaking, transubstantiation is this formal doctrine that was developed in what's called scholasticism after the great schism I spoke of in the Roman Catholic Church that uses categories of logic taken from Aristotle that emphasize that there's a transubstantiation, a change of substance that takes place.
00:25:08.000And so we have not accepted that logical, rational explanation of things.
00:25:15.000But to your point, and this really needs to be clarified, we do believe as Orthodox and always have believed that that really is the body and blood of Jesus Christ.
00:26:16.000You know, Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter 10 likens the Eucharistic body of Christ with the ecclesial church body of Christ as being one kind of reality.
00:26:27.000And so do you, in your services, walk us through a typical Orthodoxy service?
00:26:33.000Do you take communion every single Sunday?
00:26:36.000What is the liturgical, the normative liturgical process calendar look like?
00:26:41.000Well, the calendar is really wonderful.
00:26:44.000The church early on transformed the world.
00:26:48.000I mean, it would be wonderful to talk about culture and the cosmos and how the two are related.
00:26:53.000We probably don't have time today, but what happened after Pentecost is the church sacramentally began to transform the cosmos By appropriating different categories of cosmic or world experience like time and space.
00:27:08.000So space became centered on temples and churches that were oriented, facing eastward.
00:27:20.000So like, for instance, in the book of Genesis chapter 2, I think it is, we're told that paradise was planted in the east, Orient in Latin Oriens.
00:27:32.000And so Jesus says the Son of Man will come again in glory as lightning flashes from the East.
00:27:37.000So the early church always had Christians worshiping toward the East to symbolize that they are facing paradise.
00:27:45.000That's the purpose of being a Christian, is to enter into paradise.
00:27:49.000Muslims, interestingly, if they worship, you know where they worship, they face.
00:29:36.000Of course, I mean, everyone's going to do it a little different.
00:29:38.000Some people don't keep that fast, but that is the standard expectation that every Friday we fast because, of course, Jesus died on the cross that day.
00:29:47.000And so we just, we participate in that event by depriving ourselves of the comfort and pleasure of eating what we want.
00:29:54.000Same thing on Wednesday when Judas betrayed Jesus.
00:30:36.000We have what's called the divine liturgy, the divine liturgy.
00:30:40.000That's the service that culminates in Eucharistic communion, which we spoke of earlier.
00:30:45.000In the West, it's known in the Roman Catholic case as the Mass.
00:30:48.000And then various Protestant churches, some of the more mainline Protestant churches like the Episcopal Church from which I came, for instance, I was once an Episcopalian.
00:30:58.000Lutherans, they will borrow from the Mass quite a bit and be very familiar to a Lutheran or Episcopalian.
00:31:05.000So it's something that was composed and organized over a thousand years ago, the divine liturgy.
00:31:11.000We do not worship in a way that appeals to our own kind of, you might say, temporal or contemporary tastes.
00:35:14.000No, it's time for God to come from heaven and fill us by the Holy Spirit with his presence on earth on the cosmos.
00:35:21.000And so it's time for the Lord to act, is how we start the liturgy.
00:35:24.000And then, yeah, litanies, psalms, other scripturally based hymns culminates in the first half of the liturgy with the reading of the gospel.
00:35:34.000And then after that is done, the priest gives, in most cases, the homily or sermon.
00:35:43.000So he will teach based on the scripture.
00:35:46.000Highly unusual, and certainly nothing that I've ever seen in an Orthodox church is for the priest to, for instance, talk about a film he just saw.
00:35:55.000I mean, if it's totally relevant to the gospel for the day, highly unusual.
00:36:09.000He would, if it's a Saints' Day, like if it's maybe Christmas, he might talk about, of course, the gospel is about the birth of Christ.
00:36:16.000Politics have no place in our homilies, our teaching at the liturgy.
00:36:22.000Because this is the kingdom of heaven.
00:36:24.000This is the eternal kingdom of heaven coming into this non-eternal world and transforming the world through a metamorphosis, a word you used earlier.
00:36:45.000But I want to say that's historically not always the case.
00:36:49.000Like if you go to Russia or Greece today, Romania, something like that, Serbia, most people will not receive the Eucharist every time because of the great sense of unworthiness to receive the body and blood of Christ.
00:37:00.000And so there's a lot of piety centered around kind of getting ready for that and doing it rarely with a high level of preparation and respect.
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00:38:06.000So I want to kind of go through just some of the really quick questions here that some people might have.
00:38:30.000Some people see it that way, but it makes a lot of sense.
00:38:34.000Of course, the Roman Catholic Church changed this with time.
00:38:38.000It's way not until that 11th century schism that you really get the absolute categorical rejection of married priests.
00:38:45.000Peter Damien's an important Western father of the church at that time who said, we really need to make sure that men are not married in order to be priests.
00:38:56.000Well, that is not the ancient practice.
00:38:58.000It's certainly not the Orthodox practice.
00:39:00.000It's good for a married man to be a father to a parish.
00:39:04.000How can a, I mean, the question is raised.
00:39:06.000I mean, there are many celibate Roman Catholic priests who are phenomenal priests, a lot better than I am.
00:39:12.000But there's a basic thing, though, and that is a man is equipped, better equipped to care for a community as a father.
00:39:20.000We're called father after all, if he really is a father and a husband of one wife, faithful to her, sacrificing himself.
00:39:28.000You know, I don't do enough of that for sure.
00:41:45.000So the question of salvation is different for Orthodox than it is for a lot of Protestants.
00:41:52.000For us, salvation is most often spoken of as theosis, a Greek word which usually is translated as deification or divinization.
00:42:03.000We believe that the incarnation, we're going back to what you asked earlier about our understanding of the gospels and Christ, going back to that, the incarnation enables us to participate immediately in the life of God.
00:42:17.000That his divinity, which is above us, transcendent beyond this cosmos, this world, and inaccessible to us by itself, becomes available to us and offered to us through Jesus Christ, his Son, into whom we are baptized as a body and filled by his Holy Spirit.
00:42:34.000So we're back to the sacramental reality of Orthodoxy here, early Christianity.
00:42:39.000And because we participate in the life of Christ, we participate in divinity.
00:42:46.000So back to the question of are we saved?
00:42:50.000Baptism is a necessary part of becoming saved.
00:42:53.000But once baptized and given the gift of the Holy Spirit, we call that chrismation.
00:43:28.000That was something that was added to the Roman Catholic dogmatic tradition after the Great Schism, and it was never part of our Orthodox teaching.
00:43:36.000Purgatory, of course, being a doctrine that those going to heaven, and listeners need to realize, it's not something like there's no ambiguity.
00:43:45.000Those in purgatory are going to heaven.
00:43:59.000We do not need to be punished and pay a price for every sin we've committed before we can get into heaven.
00:44:07.000That's not our, we don't have that economy of salvation that the Roman Catholic Church with a more legalistic understanding of salvation introduced after the Great Schism.
00:44:17.000We do believe in hell and believe it's eternal, and we believe in heaven and believe that's eternal too.
00:44:23.000And to your first question there, we are very reluctant, although you'll find exceptions, and historically there will be people who will speak differently in the Orthodox tradition, but we and certainly as a pastor believe very strongly we have no business declaring who's going to heaven and who's going to hell.
00:45:37.000So the classic biblical example of this is the prodigal son.
00:45:42.000Okay, the prodigal son, and he basically sins against his father, splits, winds up with prostitutes, hungry and broken, and he resolves to return to the father.
00:46:50.000It's not a one-time thing, like when we're baptized or something.
00:46:53.000And every year, of course, we have the great fast, we call it.
00:46:56.000In the West, it's just known as Lent, because it's the only time it's done during the year.
00:47:01.000But we have, actually, four Lenten periods.
00:47:03.000In fact, 40 days before Christmas, when the whole Western world is, you know, shopping and listening to Christmas carols and eating and overeating and partying and doing all sorts of watching fun entertainment on TV, their favorite Christmas movies and all that.
00:47:19.000We're actually, for 40 days, just like Jesus in the wilderness, fasting to prepare spiritually for the celebration of his birth.
00:47:26.000Christmas is usually in January, correct?
00:47:57.000So the repentance thing, if I may just add a bit more there.
00:48:00.000But coming around to Great Lent, we are increasing our services.
00:48:04.000We're fasting for like two months from meat and dairy, if we're living out the fast completely.
00:48:10.000We're really trying to look into ourselves and the hymns that are being served in church, and not just on Sundays.
00:48:16.000We have services every day of the week, are calling us to repent, to turn away from our sins, and to return to the glorious and beautiful kingdom that God has prepared for us, and that the saints already occupy.
00:48:31.000And so that repentance is the way of life that leads back to your question about salvation.
00:48:35.000We have to live a life of repentance, and that's what leads to salvation, not just a one-time decision.
00:48:41.000You know, Jesus, accept me as your Lord and Savior.
00:48:44.000That's a beautiful, important thing to do.
00:48:45.000But then it means a life of continuous, introspective looking at why I'm a sinner.
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00:51:38.000And so anyway, back to, I'm sorry, you asked about original sin.
00:51:43.000So that had an impact on the human race.
00:51:46.000Every human being since then has been sinful.
00:51:48.000You asked about the Virgin Mary earlier.
00:51:49.000The fathers that say, you know, she, of course, she was sinful in some sense, were saying that she's a human being that needs salvation from sin, like every other human being.
00:51:57.000The emphasis about the Virgin Mary is she's just the greatest of all the saints.
00:52:01.000Everything that's taught about her is just, she was just so beautifully in love with Christ that she lived for him and didn't live for sins.
00:52:09.000But so the overall teaching, I think, is original sin is a reality with an impact or a consequence that we're all disposed toward it and we're all dying and we are dying.
00:52:20.000However, we don't teach original guilt.
00:52:23.000Now, this is something Saint Augustine, who's an Orthodox saint, by the way, a holy, beautiful soul.
00:52:30.000Wrote the City of God, The Confessions, beautiful works.
00:52:34.000A really, really beautiful father, nevertheless taught things that have not been accepted and were not accepted in his time.
00:52:41.000And what he taught was that people are guilty of what Adam and Eve did, so that even a child that dies like a day, a minute into its life, has to go to hell because it was not washed of original sin.
00:52:53.000Most Protestants have a much more nuanced view than that.
00:52:58.000And I think Roman Catholics is the same.
00:53:00.000Because there's a scripture that says God will gather the children to him.
00:53:03.000But yes, that would be the extreme application of original sin.
00:53:09.000Yeah, and I think, yeah, but to get away from that extremity and just to look at it more generally, that led to a kind of, well, technically, I call it an anthropological pessimism about the human condition, a pessimism about the human condition, about what it means to be human.
00:53:26.000That, again, to use Calvinist terminology, man is totally depraved.
00:53:32.000And that's just something that the early church, the Eastern Fathers, the Greek fathers, and current fathers just never taught and don't teach.
00:53:40.000So what is the Orthodox view on free will versus God's sovereignty slash predestination?
00:53:52.000Augustine taught that, but we reject that.
00:53:54.000God is sovereign, absolutely sovereign, and nothing exists without him, his sovereign grace, creating the world, sustaining the world.
00:54:04.000If he withdrew his Holy Spirit from this cosmos, even if we're not aware of the presence of the Holy Spirit, the whole cosmos would just disintegrate.
00:54:13.000And So he's fully sovereign, but we also believe that man, made in his image and likeness, and then baptized into the body of his Son, Jesus Christ, by the Holy Spirit, given the gift of the Holy Spirit, participates in and co-operates with his salvation, his sovereign love and grace.
00:54:46.000Sin, like with, and energy meaning action or operation.
00:54:51.000And this is a really beautiful and liberating vision of the dignity of the human being, that we're not just wretched, passive receptacles of God's majestic sovereign grace, but we are raised up and made beautiful because of the image of God within us.
00:55:07.000And we are cooperating with God in bringing his holiness into our lives and the lives of people around us.
00:55:14.000And so we believe that the human being baptized into Christ has to live out his salvation, and that is part of it.
00:55:22.000Somebody told me recently the Orthodox Church is more about what God isn't than what God is.
00:55:27.000Is that a fair characterization, or what were they trying to say when they— I think I know what they were getting at, and it's fair as far as if they're trying to get to this.
00:55:45.000And what this is, it's a way of talking about God by saying God is so beyond our categories of human knowledge.
00:57:00.000Well, from an Orthodox point of view, and I wrote a book series that included this is a really key moment in the history of the West.
00:57:07.000It's called Paradise and Utopia, The Rise and Fall of What the West Once Was.
00:57:13.000What I think a lot of us see, and certainly I tried to articulate, is the Protestant Reformation was a reaction to a Christianity that was itself no longer very healthy or had a lot of unhealthy elements in it.
00:57:29.000And, of course, we all know that the Reformation, you know, if you want to find a date, it's 1517.
00:57:34.000Martin Luther nails his 95 theses to the church door of Wittenberg against what?
00:59:24.000Yeah, let me just, can I just wrap one thing up about the Reformation, then let's get into that.
00:59:29.000So the Reformation comes about because a lot of very biblically informed and smart Christians, you know, Luther was a professor of theology, Calvin was a lawyer, realized or reached the conclusion what we're seeing in Roman Catholicism, circa 1500, is not right.
00:59:48.000And so they rejected Roman Catholicism and its many doctrines that actually are not even Orthodox doctrines.
00:59:55.000This is the remarkable thing: the Protestant Reformation was a reaction against exactly those features of Roman Catholicism that came into existence after the Roman Catholic Church broke from the Orthodox Church.
01:00:24.000Of course, as we've talked about, priests are married in the Orthodox Church.
01:00:27.000So, sadly, the Protestant Reformation was a reaction to something.
01:00:31.000And like any pendulum swinging back and forth, it went in the opposite direction by throwing out the idea of tradition and sacraments and things like that, because it perceived all of that as being Roman Catholic and it wanted nothing to do with that.
01:00:45.000So it became a, in some ways, it became a kind of Christianity of minimalism, solas, faith alone, grace alone, scripture alone.
01:00:55.000When Christianity is full, it's the fullness of life in Christ, not a limitation or a minimalism of just one thing at the expense of all other things.
01:01:08.000You know, one of the biggest lies being sold to American people right now is that you're in control of your money, especially when it comes to crypto.
01:01:14.000But the truth, most of these so-called crypto platforms are just banks in disguise, fully capable of freezing your assets the moment some bureaucrat makes a phone call.
01:01:23.000That is not what Bitcoin was built for.
01:01:35.000No one can touch your crypto, not the IRS or not a rogue bank, not some three-letter agency that thinks it knows better than you do.
01:01:42.000This is how it was intended by the original creators of Bitcoin: peer-to-peer money, free from centralized control, free from surveillance, and free from arbitrary seizure.
01:01:51.000So if you're serious about financial sovereignty, go to bitcoin.com, set up your wallet, take back control, because if you don't hold the keys, you don't own your money.
01:02:34.000So our model of church life and governance dates from the apostles, is recorded and documented in Scripture.
01:02:44.000In Acts chapter 15, you might remember there's this council of the apostles in Jerusalem where they deal with a heresy, in that case, circumcising Gentile converts.
01:02:55.000And they say, no, we don't need to do that.
01:02:56.000They got together in that council, the apostles did.
01:02:59.000And at that time, they're being called bishops, too.
01:03:02.000The word for bishop in the Greek in the New Testament is episkopos.
01:03:06.000So that's where we get the word episcopal, for instance.
01:03:23.000They all conferenced together, counseled together in Jerusalem.
01:03:27.000And in the end, one of them stood up and said, this is what we're going to do.
01:03:31.000And you probably remember who that was.
01:03:33.000It was not Peter, first of the apostles.
01:03:35.000It was James, because he was the local apostle of Jerusalem.
01:03:40.000So we've always believed that there are local jurisdictions of the Orthodox, of the one church, and that these jurisdictions are all in communion with each other, accountable to each other, and that there's not a single bishop over all of the others.
01:03:55.000So you asked about how things look today 2,000 years later.
01:03:58.0002,000 years later, over the course of time, as Orthodox Christianity spread throughout the world, we have very big jurisdictions like the Moscow Patriarchate of Russia.
01:04:10.000We have the Ecumenical Patriarch of Istanbul.
01:04:14.000It's called Constantinople usually, using the old name for the city.
01:04:18.000And then we have other local, smaller jurisdictions.
01:04:21.000The Romanian Orthodox Church is big and things like that.
01:04:26.000There's a big Arabic church in America.
01:04:28.000It's called the Antiochian Orthodox Church.
01:04:30.000There's a big Greek church in America.
01:04:32.000It's called the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese.
01:04:35.000I belong to the Orthodox Church in America, which is yet another jurisdiction.
01:04:51.000And for an Orthodox, this is a sign that the Holy Spirit is the unifying element in our life together.
01:04:59.000It's not a single bishop with a juridical kind of legal understanding of submission to him or subjugation to him.
01:05:09.000One Roman Catholic pope of the Middle Ages named Boniface VIII issued a famous papal bull called Unum Sanctum that said, and I'm paraphrasing, but it's pretty close, it is altogether necessary for the salvation of every human being to be subject to the Pope of Rome.
01:05:58.000There's all sorts of sense of impending doom and things like that.
01:06:04.000And disagreements on how to do the Mass and whether gays should be blessed or even married and things like that.
01:06:13.000If you look at the Orthodox Church, you see what seems to be a kind of disorganized series or range of jurisdictions, but you look at the inside and it's the same faith.
01:06:30.000If you go to any of these centers of Orthodox Christianity around the world, you'll find the same doctrines of marriage, the same understanding that there's only two sexes, male and female, and can't be any others.
01:06:42.000You'll find the same moral positions about marriage and everything else.
01:06:48.000And finally, the worship is almost completely universal.
01:06:51.000Same thing going on everywhere, same service.
01:06:55.000So it's really remarkably uniform and harmonious.
01:06:59.000And that's, we believe, by the Holy Spirit, not by a human being who stands in and says, I will create an order that kind of legally is defined by my headship over it.
01:07:11.000Christ is the head, mystically, in the Orthodox Church.
01:07:13.000Let's close with this, and then I want you to be able to bring up anything that else is on your mind.
01:07:39.000Every Orthodox pastor I talk to, and not just in Washington state, but I'm going to hear plenty about it.
01:07:45.000And we're right now meeting down the street at what's called the All-American Council, where bishops and priests come together and talk about church life, and we're all talking about this now.
01:07:54.000People are flooding into the Orthodox Church today because they're seeking authentic spiritual life, something to ground their lives in, in an age of nihilism.
01:08:04.000I wrote a book called The Age of Nihilism as part of that book series I mentioned earlier.
01:08:09.000The final volume is about the past hundred years and how all sorts of projects to build a progressive world, a world where progress is inevitable and everyone just finds happiness in a secular kind of mode of existence, has failed for so many people.
01:08:26.000And so many people see where this leads.
01:08:47.000And a lot of people realize they're not going to find salvation and stability and anchor their lives in neo-paganism or any of these progressive ideologies or any ideology at all.
01:09:00.000If an ideology is something made by men to create a sense of purpose in life, it's only going to be found in Christianity, in Christ.
01:09:09.000And Orthodox Christianity, you know, I hope I've been able to describe this a little bit.
01:10:09.000What about Orthodoxy that we did not cover?
01:10:13.000Do you wish people knew about that you feel compelled to share?
01:10:20.000Best kept religious secret in America.
01:10:22.000The one thing I would love to share is just to a wonderful nation and a wonderful community of people that there's something really beautiful there.
01:10:31.000And Protestantism and Roman Catholicism are beautiful too.
01:10:35.000And I think we, as I said when we started, there's a lot that we share in common, thank God.
01:10:40.000I think that as we go forward and we continue to see the disintegration of our society around us.