The Charlie Kirk Show - America's Best-Kept Religious Secret? Learning About Eastern Orthodoxy with Fr. John Strickland

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here live from the Bitcoin.com studio.

00:00:04.000 Father John Strickland joins the show about joining the Orthodox Church.

00:00:08.000 What do they believe?

00:00:09.000 I was just curious.

00:00:10.000 I wanted to learn.

00:00:11.000 A lot of people are joining the Orthodox Church.

00:00:13.000 In fact, I know a lot more people that are joining Roman Catholicism and the Orthodox Church than the Evangelical Church.

00:00:19.000 So I seek to learn.

00:00:20.000 And I think you'll learn something too.

00:00:21.000 Very sweet, man.

00:00:22.000 Very godly man.

00:00:23.000 I think you'll enjoy it.

00:00:24.000 Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com and subscribe to our podcast.

00:00:28.000 That is the Charlie Kirk Show podcast page and get involved with Turning PointUSA at tpusa.com.

00:00:34.000 That is tpusa.com.

00:00:35.000 Buckle up, everybody.

00:00:36.000 Here we go.

00:00:37.000 Charlie, what you've done is incredible here.

00:00:39.000 Maybe Charlie Kirk is on the college campus.

00:00:41.000 I want you to know we are lucky to have Charlie Kirk.

00:00:44.000 Charlie Kirk's running the White House, folks.

00:00:48.000 I want to thank Charlie.

00:00:49.000 He's an incredible guy.

00:00:50.000 His 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.

00:00:58.000 We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.

00:01:07.000 That's why we are here.

00:01:10.000 Okay, everybody, welcome to this episode of the Charlie Kirk Show.

00:01:13.000 So excited to be sitting down with Father John Strickland from St. Elizabeth Orthodox Church in Pulspo, Washington.

00:01:22.000 Is that right?

00:01:22.000 Pretty close, yeah.

00:01:23.000 Or Poluspo?

00:01:25.000 So the reason I wanted to have you on the program, Father, you are from the Eastern Orthodox Church.

00:01:29.000 Is that correct?

00:01:30.000 Yeah.

00:01:31.000 And I know a fair amount about Catholicism.

00:01:34.000 I know a fair amount about Protestantism, but admittedly, very little about Orthodox.

00:01:40.000 And it's getting a lot of play online, as you probably know.

00:01:44.000 And 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.

00:01:52.000 So I told Blake, I said, Blake, find me someone that can come on the show and we can just have a fun discussion.

00:01:58.000 You can educate me and the audience.

00:01:59.000 So first, great to meet you and welcome to the program.

00:02:01.000 Nice to be here, Charlie.

00:02:02.000 Thank you for inviting me.

00:02:03.000 So first, kind of your story.

00:02:05.000 You're a parish priest.

00:02:06.000 You grew up in Southern California and a Protestant background.

00:02:10.000 Why did you convert to Orthodoxy?

00:02:12.000 Well, I started studying history.

00:02:14.000 They sometimes say I was raised Protestant and I was Protestant.

00:02:18.000 They say sometimes when a Protestant studies history, he becomes Roman Catholic.

00:02:22.000 In my case, I became Orthodox.

00:02:24.000 History goes further back in that case.

00:02:27.000 I studied history at college and started studying Russian history.

00:02:31.000 And the more I learned after living in Russia for about two years in the 1990s, which was an amazing time, communism had collapsed.

00:02:39.000 Putin had not come yet.

00:02:41.000 There was this real kind of fluid character to life in Russia.

00:02:45.000 Very positive toward the West.

00:02:46.000 Everywhere 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.

00:02:56.000 I 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.

00:03:05.000 So you were in Russia when you converted.

00:03:08.000 I want to have a whole separate conversation about Russia.

00:03:10.000 We're told during the Soviet Union, it was mostly atheistic, but it had an Orthodox core.

00:03:17.000 What percentage of Russia is Orthodox versus more secular?

00:03:20.000 Well, today, most people would identify as Orthodox if they were to consider themselves a believer in a higher power. 0.69

00:03:27.000 They'd say they're Orthodox.

00:03:28.000 Of course, Russia or the Soviet Union more broadly before the collapse of communism was a very diverse place.

00:03:34.000 There's millions of Muslims, for instance, many Roman Catholics, Protestants.

00:03:40.000 There were many people.

00:03:41.000 But Orthodoxy is the preeminent, historically preeminent religion there.

00:03:46.000 In the Soviet Union, of course, that was attacked, and they blew up churches and shot priests and persecuted believers and things like that.

00:03:54.000 But they could never eradicate from their culture the strong sense that Orthodox Christianity, Christianity generally, is a necessary part of society and its foundations.

00:04:06.000 There's a couple of funny little anecdotes about that.

00:04:10.000 One joke is that Soviet school students were taught that there is no God and that the Orthodox Church is the only true church.

00:04:19.000 So they got this sense that there is an Orthodox presence that's really important for our culture, but we don't believe in God.

00:04:26.000 It's a cultural institution.

00:04:27.000 Right, exactly.

00:04:28.000 So let's go through then kind Of a fast class, if you will, a spark notes, and we'll go deeper into Orthodoxy.

00:04:35.000 So, what would just explain Orthodox theology, similarities with Protestantism, differences, and also with Catholicism?

00:04:44.000 Okay, well, I'll do what I can.

00:04:46.000 I'll do what I can.

00:04:47.000 I'll interject where I feel.

00:04:48.000 Sure, yeah, please do.

00:04:49.000 And I want to start by saying, you know, there's a lot in common between the Orthodox and the Roman Catholics and the Protestants.

00:04:57.000 And I want to, you know, recognize that and even kind of emphasize that, that there's a lot in common.

00:05:03.000 I mean, Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants all believe that Jesus Christ is both God and man.

00:05:10.000 They believe that there's one God in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

00:05:14.000 They 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.

00:05:24.000 They all have some very core, important beliefs in common.

00:05:28.000 The Orthodox see themselves, believe strongly that they hold the tradition that the apostles received from Jesus Christ at Pentecost.

00:05:39.000 They hold that tradition.

00:05:41.000 This is a key word in Orthodoxy, tradition.

00:05:44.000 They hold that tradition or faith intact.

00:05:47.000 And it's never going to be changed, and they will never allow it to be changed.

00:05:51.000 What about the Apostles?

00:05:52.000 Can you say that again?

00:05:52.000 They received the Holy Spirit?

00:05:55.000 Yeah, so we believe that too.

00:05:57.000 Of course, yeah, of course.

00:05:58.000 Pentecost, chapter 2 of Acts, all Christians realize that at that moment, the Holy Spirit Exactly.

00:06:06.000 Exactly.

00:06:07.000 Jesus has ascended into heaven after 40 days after his resurrection or pauska, and then 10 days later, the Holy Spirit is sent.

00:06:15.000 And it fills the church.

00:06:17.000 It makes the church what she is.

00:06:19.000 And so until the end of time, the Orthodox believe, the faith is complete.

00:06:24.000 There's nothing more needed, nothing to be added, and there could never be anything taken away from that faith.

00:06:29.000 And 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.

00:06:42.000 Acts 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.

00:07:00.000 And so they continued steadfastly.

00:07:03.000 That's an important statement.

00:07:05.000 They continued, they didn't stop.

00:07:06.000 There wasn't a moment when the church no longer had that deposit of the faith.

00:07:12.000 And they did so steadfastly.

00:07:13.000 Unchangeably is another word, an adjective for steadfastly is unchangeably.

00:07:17.000 And 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.

00:07:35.000 And our churches are being filled, flooded, in fact, with converts.

00:07:39.000 I 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%.

00:07:53.000 We've lost a lot of people moving out of the area because it's so expensive to live there.

00:07:57.000 Families have moved away, but we've grown by 50%.

00:08:00.000 Lots 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.

00:08:28.000 It's a way of life.

00:08:30.000 Thank you for that.

00:08:31.000 So I have several questions.

00:08:34.000 Your 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?

00:08:46.000 Yeah, so our canon for the New Testament is the same.

00:08:49.000 It's the same.

00:08:50.000 26.

00:08:50.000 27 books, yeah.

00:08:52.000 Same.

00:08:52.000 But our canon for the Old Testament is called the Septuagint.

00:08:56.000 It's a Greek word.

00:08:57.000 And it originated about two centuries before Christ.

00:09:02.000 And it was a translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Greek, which was the, you know, the lingua franca of the ancient world.

00:09:10.000 And by the time of the apostles, it was being widely used, the Septuagint Greek translation.

00:09:15.000 And it had more books than later Masoretic text, which is a later edition of the Jewish scriptures in Hebrew.

00:09:24.000 In 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.

00:09:34.000 So that Septuagint is interesting because it's what's being quoted by the apostles in the New Testament.

00:09:40.000 Like 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.

00:09:56.000 And that begins with the person of Jesus Christ.

00:09:58.000 And so when the apostles wrote about the person of Jesus Christ in the Gospels, they quoted the Septuagint in the Greek.

00:10:04.000 That's what they quoted.

00:10:05.000 And so the Orthodox churches always use that version of the Old Testament.

00:10:09.000 So would it include like 1 and 2 Maccabees books such as that?

00:10:15.000 Yeah, so similar to the Catholic Church.

00:10:17.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:10:18.000 Very similar.

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00:11:27.000 So more theological questions.

00:11:29.000 And again, I'm learning a lot, so thank you for this.

00:11:32.000 Obviously, believe in the inerrancy of scripture, so there's nothing inerrant, but it's not just sola scriptura.

00:11:41.000 You're also with, you have tradition.

00:11:44.000 You believe in the virgin birth, correct?

00:11:48.000 Do you believe that Mary was sinless?

00:11:51.000 The Immaculate Conception?

00:11:53.000 Yeah, there's several questions there.

00:11:55.000 So inerrancy of scripture.

00:11:57.000 That'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.

00:12:07.000 We do believe that the scripture is the most important core of our tradition, but there's more to it than just the scriptures.

00:12:13.000 For instance, if you think about scripture itself, let's talk about that 27-book New Testament.

00:12:18.000 Nowhere in the New Testament is there a table of contents.

00:12:22.000 There's no table of contents.

00:12:23.000 I mean, of course, modern editions will have a table of contents, but the scriptures themselves were never written.

00:12:29.000 The New Testament was never written with a table of contents.

00:12:32.000 As 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.

00:12:41.000 We only know their names from tradition.

00:12:44.000 And for a whole generation, Christians were being saved before any of those were written down.

00:12:50.000 It's quite remarkable if you think about it.

00:12:53.000 And there were a lot of creeds that also predated the writing of the scriptures.

00:12:57.000 I don't know if there were creeds.

00:12:58.000 Some of those kind of find their way kind of obliquely into the scriptures.

00:13:03.000 But the one big creed, of course, for the Orthodox is the Nicene Creed, which, of course, dates to the fourth century.

00:13:09.000 But back to that idea of scripture, you know, like, so people are being saved.

00:13:13.000 The gospel is being taught before any of it's written down in what we call the New Testament.

00:13:18.000 And then it took three centuries before that coalesced into 27 books.

00:13:24.000 And we don't have 26 books.

00:13:26.000 We 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.

00:13:45.000 Gospel of Thomas, throw it out.

00:13:47.000 Gospel of Judas, gone.

00:13:48.000 Gone.

00:13:49.000 Barnabas gone.

00:13:49.000 Throw them out.

00:13:50.000 Yeah, Barnabas was a good person.

00:13:50.000 We can't trust that.

00:13:52.000 Yeah, we can't trust those, but we can trust these.

00:13:54.000 But that took three centuries to work out.

00:13:57.000 And when it was worked out, it was worked out within the living tradition of the church.

00:14:01.000 And Paul himself speaks about this tradition.

00:14:04.000 In 2 Thessalonians, he talks about how the people he's teaching are to hold fast to those traditions, plural.

00:14:11.000 The Greek word here is paradosis.

00:14:13.000 It's not teachings, it's traditions.

00:14:15.000 That's the only thing that paradosis means in Greek, is that which is handed on in the form of tradition.

00:14:21.000 Hold fast to those traditions I've given you, both in writing like this epistle, but also by word of mouth, where it's not written down.

00:14:27.000 It's just part of the life of the church.

00:14:31.000 So that's a really big deal for us Orthodox and helps distinguish us from Protestants, some of them anyway. 1.00

00:14:38.000 So now to Mary.

00:14:41.000 What is the Orthodoxy view on Mariology?

00:14:46.000 Yeah, so Mariology is always for the Orthodox Christology. 0.99

00:14:52.000 Mary is always understood in relationship to Jesus Christ.

00:14:56.000 For instance, we have a very rich tradition of iconography, of icons of Mary.

00:15:02.000 In 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.

00:15:12.000 She's always holding Christ, always holding Christ.

00:15:15.000 And the earliest icon we have, which dates back very, very far back into the past, has her gesturing toward Christ.

00:15:21.000 It's called the icon of she who points the way.

00:15:24.000 And she's gesturing as if to say, you know, you look at the icon and you see this dominant figure of Mary.

00:15:30.000 She's the biggest one. 0.98

00:15:31.000 But then the more you look at it, the more you realize she's saying, don't look at me, look at him.

00:15:36.000 And you see that she's veiled.

00:15:38.000 You know, her beauty, her magnificent is muted.

00:15:42.000 And Christ in her arms is wearing radiant clothing.

00:15:46.000 He looks like a little adult because he's really God.

00:15:49.000 So we don't just paint a little baby like Renaissance style baby Jesus.

00:15:53.000 We paint an image of an infant who nevertheless is powerful, strong, and in fact the creator of the universe and its judge.

00:16:03.000 So Mary is a big important part, but she's always pointing us toward Christ.

00:16:07.000 You believe she was sinless.

00:16:09.000 Yes, 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.

00:16:24.000 Now, there's a difference.

00:16:26.000 This is, I don't know, I don't, there are varying opinions.

00:16:30.000 Like, 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.

00:16:39.000 We look to what the church has handed on to us.

00:16:41.000 And 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.

00:16:51.000 Sure.

00:16:52.000 Like, why wasn't she paying closer attention?

00:16:54.000 In Orthodoxy, is there mortal versus whatever?

00:16:56.000 There's a range of sins, yeah, yeah.

00:16:58.000 A hierarchy or continuum, sure.

00:17:00.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:17:01.000 So in that case, we could say that she was sinful like every other human being. 1.00

00:17:05.000 As a matter of fact, in Orthodoxy, Mary is seen as the great example to us rather than the great exception.

00:17:12.000 Like, so like Roman Catholicism has a teaching about her called the Immaculate Conception.

00:17:16.000 Well, that's what I'm asking, right?

00:17:17.000 So she was, there's churches that literally say, you know, the church should be a dogma, yeah.

00:17:24.000 Yes.

00:17:24.000 We don't hold that.

00:17:26.000 We do not hold that.

00:17:27.000 We reject that, yeah.

00:17:28.000 We 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.

00:17:38.000 And he made it happen that her humanity was different than ours somehow.

00:17:42.000 Do you believe she was assumed into heaven upon Orthodox teaching?

00:17:47.000 Yeah.

00:17:48.000 Which also is a Catholic dogma.

00:17:50.000 That's correct.

00:17:50.000 Although there are differences there too.

00:17:53.000 So in our Orthodox teaching, inherited from way, way back in the first millennium, she died first. 0.90

00:17:59.000 We call it the dormition Of the Virgin Mary.

00:18:01.000 In 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.

00:18:10.000 We believe she truly died.

00:18:12.000 She had to die.

00:18:12.000 She's human like all of us.

00:18:14.000 She's not an exception.

00:18:16.000 And then her body was miraculously raised into heaven.

00:18:20.000 So thank you for that.

00:18:23.000 That's very helpful.

00:18:24.000 So 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.

00:18:42.000 So basically the Nicene Creed, you know, we're in total harmony and agreement.

00:18:46.000 Are there any exceptions about Christology that you would say are different between Protestantism and Orthodoxy?

00:18:52.000 Or is that probably where we're going to be able to do that?

00:18:53.000 I think it's a different agreement.

00:18:56.000 I think we have a lot of agreement.

00:18:57.000 Yeah.

00:18:58.000 I mean, I think when it comes to, I mean, I think what we might find is that there are emphases that are different.

00:19:04.000 So 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.

00:19:19.000 It's just a convenience date.

00:19:21.000 And what happens is there are two churches after that date.

00:19:24.000 There's the Orthodox Church that, you know, as a member, I believe, originated in the Apostles, as I've described.

00:19:31.000 And then there's the Roman Catholic Church.

00:19:33.000 And then from the Roman Catholic Church, 500 years later, come the Protestant churches, which break away in the Reformation.

00:19:40.000 From an Orthodox point of view, the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant churches are actually quite similar.

00:19:45.000 You know, growing up in America, orthodoxy is the best kept religious secret here.

00:19:49.000 So we barely ever Exactly, yeah.

00:19:51.000 Because I know so little.

00:19:53.000 I know everything about Catholicism.

00:19:54.000 Sure, I mean, who learns about Orthodoxy growing up in America?

00:19:57.000 It's either Roman Catholicism or Protestantism.

00:20:00.000 Those are the options.

00:20:01.000 But from an Orthodox point of view, they are actually quite two sides of the same coin.

00:20:06.000 And 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.

00:20:24.000 There'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.

00:20:35.000 That his crucifixion exclusively is the only thing that has any real significance in the salvation of the human race.

00:20:44.000 And 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.

00:21:05.000 And we're all sinners, that's for sure.

00:21:06.000 So substitutionary atonement.

00:21:08.000 There you go.

00:21:09.000 That's the key word.

00:21:10.000 That's the key phrase.

00:21:11.000 That would be the more technical academic answer.

00:21:14.000 That's right, very good.

00:21:15.000 And so that's not foreign to Orthodoxy, but it's not the emphasis.

00:21:19.000 And here we're talking about differences in emphasis rather than in content.

00:21:23.000 So we believe in a substitutionary kind of role that Jesus plays on the cross, but we don't look at it that way.

00:21:30.000 And the tragedy as we see it is the West, beginning with the Roman Catholic Church in what's called the Middle Ages. 0.95

00:21:37.000 I don't use that term typically.

00:21:39.000 And then later in the Protestant Reformation, that's carried on, largely under the influence of Augustinianism.

00:21:45.000 We 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.

00:21:56.000 And then John Calvin picked up on that and spoke about the total depravity of the human race.

00:22:01.000 And 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.

00:22:18.000 In 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,

00:22:35.000 united 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.

00:22:51.000 And 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.

00:23:02.000 Thank you.

00:23:04.000 It triggers more questions than answers, but it answers a lot.

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00:24:15.000 So we agree on all what I would say almost all closed-hand doctrine.

00:24:21.000 I see in Creed really completes a lot of that.

00:24:24.000 So you mentioned something, a Eucharistic communion.

00:24:27.000 Does the Orthodox Church hold to transubstantiation?

00:24:31.000 Technically, no, we don't.

00:24:33.000 So just so everyone knows, transubstantiation is the bread becoming literal flesh upon taking of the communion.

00:24:38.000 Please continue.

00:24:39.000 Yeah, so actually we should probably clarify that.

00:24:42.000 So 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.

00:25:04.000 A metamorphosis, right?

00:25:06.000 Well, you might call it that, yeah.

00:25:08.000 And so we have not accepted that logical, rational explanation of things.

00:25:15.000 But 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.

00:25:23.000 We really do believe that.

00:25:25.000 It's still bread and it's still wine somehow, but it's also truly the body and blood of Jesus.

00:25:31.000 And he makes that clear.

00:25:32.000 He says, take, eat, this is my body.

00:25:34.000 Do this, all of you.

00:25:35.000 This is my blood.

00:25:36.000 John chapter 6, he says, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

00:25:41.000 Or if you drink his, eat his flesh and drink his blood, I will abide in him and he will abide in me. 0.99

00:25:47.000 And many disciples leave at that point, we're told in John 6, because that was a hard saying and they couldn't deal with it.

00:25:53.000 It sounded scary to them.

00:25:55.000 And Jesus didn't run after them and say, no, no, no, I'm just speaking symbolically.

00:25:58.000 He didn't say, no, no, you misunderstood me.

00:26:01.000 He lets them go because we interpret it.

00:26:04.000 He's really saying, this truly is my body and blood.

00:26:07.000 And that's why when we commune Eucharistically, as you asked earlier, we are participating in Christ.

00:26:14.000 We are members of his body.

00:26:16.000 You 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.

00:26:27.000 And so do you, in your services, walk us through a typical Orthodoxy service?

00:26:33.000 Do you take communion every single Sunday?

00:26:36.000 What is the liturgical, the normative liturgical process calendar look like?

00:26:41.000 Well, the calendar is really wonderful.

00:26:44.000 The church early on transformed the world.

00:26:48.000 I mean, it would be wonderful to talk about culture and the cosmos and how the two are related.

00:26:53.000 We 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.

00:27:08.000 So space became centered on temples and churches that were oriented, facing eastward.

00:27:14.000 That's what orientation means.

00:27:16.000 If you're facing eastward as a Christian, you're facing the kingdom of heaven. 0.92

00:27:19.000 You're facing the Garden of Eden.

00:27:20.000 So 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.

00:27:32.000 And so Jesus says the Son of Man will come again in glory as lightning flashes from the East.

00:27:37.000 So the early church always had Christians worshiping toward the East to symbolize that they are facing paradise.

00:27:45.000 That's the purpose of being a Christian, is to enter into paradise.

00:27:49.000 Muslims, interestingly, if they worship, you know where they worship, they face. 1.00

00:27:53.000 They face a place on Mecca, exactly.

00:27:56.000 So if you're in America, like we are in Phoenix, Arizona right now, if you're a Muslim, you face Mecca, you face the East.

00:28:03.000 But if you're in Indonesia, where there are a lot of Muslims facing West, you're facing a place on earth. 1.00

00:28:08.000 But whether they be in the West Coast of the United States or in Japan, Christians face east. 0.99

00:28:14.000 And that is a symbolic statement that they don't put their hope in this world.

00:28:18.000 They put their hope in the kingdom of heaven.

00:28:21.000 So that's a transformation of space, the way temple church architecture was designed.

00:28:26.000 We could also talk about time, and that's to your point about liturgy.

00:28:31.000 Time is transformed.

00:28:33.000 Paul says at one point, redeem the time for the days are evil.

00:28:38.000 Christians are called to recover the time that was otherwise wasted or misspent or killed.

00:28:43.000 We have that expression in our English language.

00:28:45.000 I had a seminary professor always told me, never use that expression, killing time, because God made that time.

00:28:51.000 And the time is there for our salvation and life in God.

00:28:54.000 And so the church took the calendar and she reorganized it.

00:28:58.000 I mean, this is already happening in the Old Testament with a seven-day week, right?

00:29:02.000 So the seventh day is the Sabbath day, the day of rest.

00:29:05.000 Most European languages still have that built into them, like Sabbado, I think, in Spanish.

00:29:12.000 You can hear Sabado.

00:29:14.000 Sabado, thank you.

00:29:15.000 I'm terrible.

00:29:16.000 I don't know Spanish.

00:29:17.000 It's okay.

00:29:17.000 Saturday, I think, is from Saturn.

00:29:19.000 So we kind of messed that up.

00:29:20.000 Yeah, I mean, English Saturday.

00:29:21.000 Yeah, like Sunday, SUNY, instead of the day of the resurrection.

00:29:24.000 Exactly.

00:29:25.000 So the whole weekly calendar got reorganized.

00:29:28.000 Orthodox keep that calendar. 0.58

00:29:30.000 So for instance, on Fridays, we fast.

00:29:33.000 We fast from dairy products and meat.

00:29:35.000 Orthodox Christians do.

00:29:36.000 Of course, I mean, everyone's going to do it a little different.

00:29:38.000 Some 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.

00:29:47.000 And so we just, we participate in that event by depriving ourselves of the comfort and pleasure of eating what we want.

00:29:54.000 Same thing on Wednesday when Judas betrayed Jesus.

00:29:56.000 We fast on Wednesdays and Fridays.

00:29:58.000 That, by the way, is an apostolic practice.

00:30:02.000 There's a book called the Didake that was published or written about 100, a little bit later, maybe a couple years later.

00:30:08.000 And it says, we Christians fast on Wednesdays and Fridays.

00:30:11.000 It's like right there from the beginning.

00:30:13.000 Wow.

00:30:13.000 So we have this liturgification of time and space.

00:30:17.000 And it's all kind of bringing the whole cosmos back into its correct order as it was in the Garden of Eden.

00:30:23.000 And now the church sacramental.

00:30:24.000 Is it like an attempt to sanctification?

00:30:27.000 Exactly, yeah.

00:30:27.000 Sanctification of the cosmos or world.

00:30:30.000 And so our worship, you asked about what we do.

00:30:32.000 Yeah, walk us through a normal Sunday.

00:30:34.000 Okay.

00:30:34.000 I show up at your church.

00:30:36.000 Yeah.

00:30:36.000 We have what's called the divine liturgy, the divine liturgy.

00:30:40.000 That's the service that culminates in Eucharistic communion, which we spoke of earlier.

00:30:45.000 In the West, it's known in the Roman Catholic case as the Mass.

00:30:48.000 And 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.

00:30:58.000 Lutherans, they will borrow from the Mass quite a bit and be very familiar to a Lutheran or Episcopalian.

00:31:05.000 So it's something that was composed and organized over a thousand years ago, the divine liturgy.

00:31:11.000 We do not worship in a way that appeals to our own kind of, you might say, temporal or contemporary tastes.

00:31:18.000 So we don't have like bands.

00:31:20.000 We don't have guitars playing drums.

00:31:23.000 Smoke machines.

00:31:24.000 We don't have smoke machines.

00:31:25.000 Lasers.

00:31:26.000 We don't have a coffee counter out in the lobby and cup holders in our season.

00:31:30.000 So is it rather ancient in its stand the entire service, is that right?

00:31:35.000 That's normative, yeah.

00:31:36.000 Again, we have benches at our church.

00:31:38.000 Many churches have to.

00:31:40.000 of course you should sit down if you need to.

00:31:42.000 But if you can, in other words, if the president of the United States walked in this room right now, would we sit here and just say, hi?

00:31:48.000 I mean, of course, we'd stand down.

00:31:49.000 That's such a good point.

00:31:50.000 Yeah.

00:31:51.000 So how long is your service?

00:31:52.000 So in our church, it's about two hours long because my sermons are too long.

00:31:56.000 Wow, so that they will stand up.

00:31:58.000 In other churches, they'll be about an hour and a half to hour 45.

00:32:01.000 They will stand for a couple hours.

00:32:04.000 A couple hours.

00:32:05.000 You get used to it.

00:32:06.000 I remember when I was in Russia starting to attend an Orthodox church there.

00:32:10.000 I remember standing and thinking, let's wrap this up.

00:32:12.000 My legs are killing me.

00:32:13.000 But after a while, you just get used to it.

00:32:15.000 Wow.

00:32:15.000 It's like the fasting.

00:32:16.000 You know, it sounds like I can't do that.

00:32:18.000 But then you start doing it.

00:32:19.000 So what is the liturgy?

00:32:21.000 Start with some music.

00:32:22.000 Yeah.

00:32:23.000 What instrumentation is allowed?

00:32:25.000 None.

00:32:25.000 Zero.

00:32:26.000 Zero.

00:32:27.000 Zero instrumentation.

00:32:28.000 It's all the voice.

00:32:29.000 You see, the idea here is deification, theosis.

00:32:32.000 The Orthodox Church believes that the incarnation changed everything.

00:32:36.000 When God became human in Jesus Christ, the human being was joined to divinity.

00:32:43.000 And now the human being becomes the instrument.

00:32:45.000 The human being becomes the source of all praise and all glorification of God.

00:32:50.000 And so it's the human voice alone which is allowed in an Orthodox service.

00:32:54.000 It's all so-called a cappella.

00:32:55.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, of course.

00:32:57.000 And so I'm sure you learn very quickly who has the booming voice and who does not.

00:33:02.000 So you have vocal singing throughout.

00:33:07.000 And so you said sermon.

00:33:10.000 That's in Catholicism, it's called a homily.

00:33:13.000 I don't know if that's similar or not.

00:33:15.000 I use the word homily actually.

00:33:16.000 They mean the same thing.

00:33:16.000 But they're very short usually.

00:33:18.000 And there's also, as you know, the iron law of Roman Catholicism.

00:33:22.000 You can't go more than an hour.

00:33:23.000 I'm kidding.

00:33:24.000 It's like people get very mad.

00:33:26.000 So to kind of go through the sequencing or an order of such service.

00:33:30.000 Yeah.

00:33:30.000 So it's so first of all, the Orthodox liturgy is like, someone calculated this once.

00:33:36.000 It's like 90%, maybe 80%, maybe 90% scripture.

00:33:40.000 So that's really interesting.

00:33:41.000 I think from a Protestant point of view.

00:33:42.000 It's amazing.

00:33:43.000 Because often the Orthodox. 0.98

00:33:44.000 Reading of Scripture.

00:33:45.000 Yeah, reading or paraphrasing of Scripture.

00:33:47.000 So, for instance, we sing certain Psalms, for instance.

00:33:50.000 We sing the Beatitudes from the Gospel of Matthew.

00:33:52.000 Beautiful.

00:33:53.000 We sing other elements of Scripture.

00:33:55.000 But even that which is not literally Scripture, we allude to Scripture.

00:34:01.000 You know, Paul tells us to pray for the authorities or Peter and pray for the authorities.

00:34:06.000 We pray for the president of the 1st Timothy.

00:34:08.000 It says to pray for your leaders by name.

00:34:10.000 Thank you.

00:34:11.000 You got it.

00:34:11.000 Yeah.

00:34:12.000 So we pray for this country, its president, all civil authorities and the armed forces everywhere.

00:34:17.000 That's a phrase from our litanies.

00:34:19.000 We pray for our bishops.

00:34:21.000 We pray for people who are suffering and in prison and hard labor and all sorts of needs and things like this.

00:34:29.000 So we have litanies that list lots of petitions to God for our prayers in addition to just the scripture.

00:34:35.000 But even those litanies are living out or alluding to the scriptures.

00:34:40.000 Prayers said by the priest are full of scriptural allusions, full of them, all over the place.

00:34:47.000 So it's really a lot of scripture.

00:34:49.000 But it starts off, as you asked about the order, in two hours.

00:34:54.000 It starts off with saying a great litany.

00:34:59.000 It starts off interestingly before that, it actually quotes one of the Psalms: it is time for the Lord to act.

00:35:06.000 And we actually say that before the liturgy begins.

00:35:08.000 Like, it's not like in our church, it starts at 10.

00:35:11.000 It's not like, oh, it's 10 o'clock.

00:35:12.000 It's time to start the liturgy.

00:35:14.000 No, it's time for God to come from heaven and fill us by the Holy Spirit with his presence on earth on the cosmos.

00:35:21.000 And so it's time for the Lord to act, is how we start the liturgy.

00:35:24.000 And then, yeah, litanies, psalms, other scripturally based hymns culminates in the first half of the liturgy with the reading of the gospel.

00:35:34.000 And then after that is done, the priest gives, in most cases, the homily or sermon.

00:35:39.000 It doesn't matter, same word, really.

00:35:42.000 And he will teach.

00:35:43.000 So he will teach based on the scripture.

00:35:46.000 Highly 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.

00:35:55.000 I mean, if it's totally relevant to the gospel for the day, highly unusual.

00:35:59.000 Highly Unusual.

00:36:00.000 He wouldn't just talk about spiritual, kind of psychological, moral, kind of, you know, kind of like inspirational stuff.

00:36:08.000 He would hit the gospel.

00:36:09.000 He 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.

00:36:16.000 Politics have no place in our homilies, our teaching at the liturgy.

00:36:22.000 Because this is the kingdom of heaven.

00:36:24.000 This is the eternal kingdom of heaven coming into this non-eternal world and transforming the world through a metamorphosis, a word you used earlier.

00:36:32.000 Metamorphosis.

00:36:34.000 So then you do the Eucharist?

00:36:36.000 Yep.

00:36:36.000 The second half is focused on the Eucharist.

00:36:41.000 And most people receive it in my church.

00:36:43.000 Almost all people receive it.

00:36:45.000 But I want to say that's historically not always the case.

00:36:49.000 Like 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.

00:37:00.000 And 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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00:38:06.000 So I want to kind of go through just some of the really quick questions here that some people might have.

00:38:11.000 Sure.

00:38:11.000 Are women allowed to be priests?

00:38:13.000 No.

00:38:14.000 Okay.

00:38:14.000 Are you allowed to marry?

00:38:16.000 No.

00:38:17.000 No.

00:38:18.000 Okay, you're not allowed to marry.

00:38:19.000 I am married, and I have five children.

00:38:21.000 So how did that work?

00:38:22.000 Because the way it worked is the church, the early church, allowed married men to be ordained, but not ordained.

00:38:29.000 You found the loophole.

00:38:30.000 Some people see it that way, but it makes a lot of sense.

00:38:34.000 Of course, the Roman Catholic Church changed this with time.

00:38:38.000 It's way not until that 11th century schism that you really get the absolute categorical rejection of married priests.

00:38:45.000 Peter 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.

00:38:56.000 Well, that is not the ancient practice.

00:38:58.000 It's certainly not the Orthodox practice.

00:39:00.000 It's good for a married man to be a father to a parish.

00:39:04.000 How can a, I mean, the question is raised.

00:39:06.000 I mean, there are many celibate Roman Catholic priests who are phenomenal priests, a lot better than I am.

00:39:12.000 But there's a basic thing, though, and that is a man is equipped, better equipped to care for a community as a father.

00:39:20.000 We're called father after all, if he really is a father and a husband of one wife, faithful to her, sacrificing himself.

00:39:28.000 You know, I don't do enough of that for sure.

00:39:30.000 I'm not talking about myself.

00:39:30.000 I'm just saying if you're living in marriage and you're living out Ephesians chapter 5, we're dying for our wives.

00:39:38.000 We're dying for our wives as the wife obeys the husband. 1.00

00:39:41.000 The husband gives his life for his wife. 0.96

00:39:43.000 That's correct.

00:39:43.000 He loves her as himself.

00:39:44.000 That's the whole church.

00:39:45.000 Exactly.

00:39:46.000 So a priest should be good for him to be married.

00:39:48.000 You're allowed to have children while you are a priest.

00:39:51.000 Absolutely, yeah.

00:39:52.000 How many do you have?

00:39:53.000 Five.

00:39:53.000 Wow.

00:39:54.000 And so how many of the other priests in your parish are married?

00:39:56.000 Well, I'm the only priest in my parish.

00:39:58.000 Okay.

00:39:59.000 That's typically the case.

00:40:00.000 If you go to a Roman Catholic Church, you can have thousands of people on the books.

00:40:03.000 They don't usually show up on a given, but you might have hundreds.

00:40:06.000 In the Orthodox Church, that's pretty unusual.

00:40:08.000 Some of the Greek Orthodox parishes have very large parishes, but again, a lot of that's rather nominal.

00:40:14.000 They don't all come on the same day.

00:40:16.000 It becomes very hard for an Orthodox priest to be a father.

00:40:20.000 I mean, how could a father be a father to more than 100, 150 parishioners?

00:40:24.000 So if you have hundreds and hundreds of people, you don't know who they are, you can't hear their confessions.

00:40:29.000 You can't support them, call them on their name day.

00:40:31.000 You can't, you know, visit them.

00:40:34.000 You can't do that.

00:40:34.000 So our parishes tend to be smaller.

00:40:37.000 And so about, ours is about 150 people, a little bit less.

00:40:41.000 About 100 people come on a Sunday typically.

00:40:44.000 So then, just again, I want to just kind of do greatest, greatest hits here.

00:40:48.000 What is the view of the afterlife in Orthodoxy?

00:40:52.000 So our view is that it's not an afterlife.

00:40:56.000 Strictly speaking, I've never thought that word really does honor to Christianity.

00:41:01.000 It's like we have life and then we have an afterlife.

00:41:04.000 You know, there are two lives.

00:41:05.000 No, we have one life and it's in Christ.

00:41:07.000 Our life begins at baptism.

00:41:10.000 We're all born blind, like that blind man in the Gospel of John. 0.50

00:41:15.000 We're all born blind, as it were, and we need to be illumined and filled with the presence of Christ in our lives by the Holy Spirit.

00:41:21.000 So from baptism, that's what brings that illumination.

00:41:25.000 From baptism forward, we enter into a life that will continue beyond this world.

00:41:29.000 Do you do infant baptism?

00:41:31.000 Yes.

00:41:31.000 Yes, we do.

00:41:32.000 Yeah, always have.

00:41:33.000 So does the Orthodox Church believe that if, let's say, what's the average age of infant baptism?

00:41:40.000 40 days after birth.

00:41:42.000 Are they saved upon infant baptism?

00:41:45.000 So the question of salvation is different for Orthodox than it is for a lot of Protestants.

00:41:52.000 For us, salvation is most often spoken of as theosis, a Greek word which usually is translated as deification or divinization.

00:42:03.000 We 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.

00:42:17.000 That 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.

00:42:34.000 So we're back to the sacramental reality of Orthodoxy here, early Christianity. 0.94

00:42:39.000 And because we participate in the life of Christ, we participate in divinity.

00:42:46.000 So back to the question of are we saved?

00:42:50.000 Baptism is a necessary part of becoming saved.

00:42:53.000 But once baptized and given the gift of the Holy Spirit, we call that chrismation.

00:42:57.000 West calls it confirmation.

00:42:59.000 Our infants are given that immediately, and they receive Eucharistic communion at the moment they're baptized.

00:43:04.000 They don't have to wait until they're older, age of discretion.

00:43:08.000 We are saved in a sense, but we're still being saved.

00:43:12.000 We have to live out our faith in cooperation with God.

00:43:16.000 Yeah.

00:43:17.000 So then, are you careful saying who's able to go to heaven and who is not?

00:43:23.000 And what is your view of hell, purgatory, and heaven?

00:43:26.000 So purgatory we reject outright.

00:43:28.000 That was something that was added to the Roman Catholic dogmatic tradition after the Great Schism, and it was never part of our Orthodox teaching.

00:43:36.000 Purgatory, of course, being a doctrine that those going to heaven, and listeners need to realize, it's not something like there's no ambiguity.

00:43:45.000 Those in purgatory are going to heaven.

00:43:47.000 This is the Roman Catholic faith.

00:43:49.000 And Dante, for what it's worth, poetically presents it as being a joyful kind of suffering, but it is a suffering.

00:43:56.000 It's a pain and a punishment.

00:43:57.000 We've always rejected that.

00:43:59.000 We do not need to be punished and pay a price for every sin we've committed before we can get into heaven.

00:44:07.000 That'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.

00:44:16.000 So we reject purgatory.

00:44:17.000 We do believe in hell and believe it's eternal, and we believe in heaven and believe that's eternal too.

00:44:23.000 And 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.

00:44:43.000 We have no business doing that.

00:44:44.000 Christ has not revealed that to us.

00:44:46.000 It would make us insane to know that.

00:44:48.000 So we resist the temptation.

00:44:50.000 Can a person say confidently, I am going to heaven when talking about themselves?

00:44:56.000 I think so.

00:44:57.000 I think so if it's understood as by God's grace and through my belief you're going to heaven.

00:45:03.000 I believe I'm going to heaven if I live out the faith that's been given to me as a Christian and if I'm faithful to Christ.

00:45:12.000 And that depends on repentance.

00:45:14.000 Like that's the center of the whole Orthodox way of life.

00:45:16.000 It's repentance.

00:45:17.000 Repentance.

00:45:17.000 So tell me more.

00:45:18.000 That is an awesome concept that is lost on the West.

00:45:23.000 Yeah, I think it has been.

00:45:25.000 So I love that.

00:45:25.000 So tell me why that is a centerpiece, and how does that work out practically?

00:45:30.000 Yeah, repentance in the Greek, it's metania or metania.

00:45:36.000 It means a change of heart.

00:45:37.000 So the classic biblical example of this is the prodigal son.

00:45:42.000 Okay, 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.

00:45:52.000 And that's a change of heart.

00:45:53.000 And so what he does is he goes back to the father.

00:45:56.000 This is a paraphrase of the gospel account.

00:45:59.000 And you probably know the story.

00:46:00.000 It's so beautiful.

00:46:01.000 Very well.

00:46:01.000 He drops everything and literally runs to him with his robe on.

00:46:03.000 Yeah, isn't that beautiful?

00:46:05.000 Ring on the finger, fatted calf, dancing.

00:46:07.000 As if he never left.

00:46:08.000 Yep.

00:46:09.000 That's the orthodox vision of repentance, is we reject the sin that inevitably overcomes us, the passions, the sinful passions.

00:46:19.000 We realize that they're not leading to life, they're leading to death, and we reject them and return to the father.

00:46:25.000 And he rushes to give us his kingdom.

00:46:27.000 Yes, he does.

00:46:28.000 Yes.

00:46:28.000 And he forgives.

00:46:29.000 And so we have, actually, this is formalized in the sacrament of confession and absolution.

00:46:34.000 So, yeah, so do you believe in...

00:46:35.000 We do have that practice.

00:46:36.000 Yeah, we do have that practice.

00:46:37.000 James says, if you, you know, confess your sins and God...

00:46:42.000 And John says, you know, if you confess your sins, God is merciful and will forgive.

00:46:45.000 So we do believe this.

00:46:47.000 And repentance is a way of life.

00:46:50.000 It never...

00:46:50.000 It's not a one-time thing, like when we're baptized or something.

00:46:53.000 And every year, of course, we have the great fast, we call it.

00:46:56.000 In the West, it's just known as Lent, because it's the only time it's done during the year.

00:47:01.000 But we have, actually, four Lenten periods.

00:47:03.000 In 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.

00:47:19.000 We're actually, for 40 days, just like Jesus in the wilderness, fasting to prepare spiritually for the celebration of his birth.

00:47:26.000 Christmas is usually in January, correct?

00:47:28.000 It depends on the calendar followed.

00:47:30.000 So the Orthodox Church follows two calendars depending on which jurisdiction of this one church one belongs to.

00:47:36.000 The church I...

00:47:37.000 The jurisdiction I belong to, the Orthodox Church in America, or OCA, follows what's called the new calendar for the most part.

00:47:45.000 And so most of us, including my parish, celebrate on 25th of December.

00:47:48.000 Yeah.

00:47:48.000 Because growing up, all my Serbian friends, they would celebrate in January.

00:47:52.000 That's right.

00:47:52.000 January 7th.

00:47:54.000 That's right.

00:47:54.000 So that's very helpful.

00:47:57.000 So the repentance thing, if I may just add a bit more there.

00:48:00.000 But coming around to Great Lent, we are increasing our services.

00:48:04.000 We're fasting for like two months from meat and dairy, if we're living out the fast completely.

00:48:10.000 We're really trying to look into ourselves and the hymns that are being served in church, and not just on Sundays.

00:48:16.000 We 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.

00:48:31.000 And so that repentance is the way of life that leads back to your question about salvation.

00:48:35.000 We have to live a life of repentance, and that's what leads to salvation, not just a one-time decision.

00:48:41.000 You know, Jesus, accept me as your Lord and Savior.

00:48:44.000 That's a beautiful, important thing to do.

00:48:45.000 But then it means a life of continuous, introspective looking at why I'm a sinner.

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00:49:56.000 In the Orthodox Church, again, just want to go through the quick ones. 0.98

00:49:59.000 Is it firm in teaching against homosexuality?

00:50:01.000 Yes.

00:50:02.000 Against abortion.

00:50:03.000 Yes.

00:50:04.000 How about drinking?

00:50:06.000 Alcohol.

00:50:07.000 So there is no teetotaler tradition or element in orthodoxy.

00:50:12.000 The ancient church used wine, fermented grape juice, wine with alcohol content to it.

00:50:19.000 From the beginning, Jesus is clearly drinking that.

00:50:22.000 One of the psalms says, wine gladdens the heart of man.

00:50:25.000 I mean, it's right there in the scriptures.

00:50:27.000 But the abuse of this, like anything, any part of God's creature.

00:50:31.000 Even more warnings about drunkenness and, you know, man who drinks forgets the law.

00:50:35.000 Exactly.

00:50:36.000 And so drunkenness is always going to be a temptation if one is disposed toward that.

00:50:43.000 So it's considered a sin that needs repentance.

00:50:45.000 But we do not ban alcohol, no.

00:50:47.000 Here is a big question, and I don't want to get too wrapped up on this.

00:50:50.000 Do you, in the Orthodox Church, believe in original sin?

00:50:54.000 Not as it's often taught and understood in the West.

00:50:57.000 That's another interesting distinction.

00:51:00.000 We do believe that there was an original sin.

00:51:02.000 Adam and Eve, obviously, Eve first and then Adam ate that fruit of the tree, which, by the way, was a refusal to fast.

00:51:09.000 God said, don't eat, eat everything.

00:51:12.000 I've got everything for you except that.

00:51:13.000 Not that.

00:51:14.000 No, I'm going to have that.

00:51:15.000 Thank you very much.

00:51:16.000 And so that's an interesting thing.

00:51:18.000 That's one of the reasons why fasting, you know, fasting is so basic.

00:51:21.000 We are eating, especially Americans with our restaurant culture and our weight problems.

00:51:25.000 I completely agree.

00:51:26.000 Fasting is an underappreciated spiritual technology almost that God gives us.

00:51:32.000 Yeah, and it's just built right into the life of the church, you know, with the fasting seasons and days.

00:51:36.000 And Christ our Lord fasted.

00:51:37.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:51:38.000 And so anyway, back to, I'm sorry, you asked about original sin.

00:51:43.000 So that had an impact on the human race.

00:51:46.000 Every human being since then has been sinful.

00:51:48.000 You asked about the Virgin Mary earlier.

00:51:49.000 The 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.

00:51:57.000 The emphasis about the Virgin Mary is she's just the greatest of all the saints.

00:52:01.000 Everything 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.

00:52:09.000 But 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.

00:52:20.000 However, we don't teach original guilt.

00:52:23.000 Now, this is something Saint Augustine, who's an Orthodox saint, by the way, a holy, beautiful soul.

00:52:27.000 Augustine of Hippo.

00:52:28.000 Yeah, Augustine of Hippo.

00:52:29.000 The city of God.

00:52:30.000 Wrote the City of God, The Confessions, beautiful works.

00:52:34.000 A really, really beautiful father, nevertheless taught things that have not been accepted and were not accepted in his time.

00:52:41.000 And 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.

00:52:53.000 Most Protestants have a much more nuanced view than that.

00:52:56.000 But yeah, so.

00:52:57.000 Yeah, and I think so.

00:52:58.000 And I think Roman Catholics is the same. 0.97

00:53:00.000 Because there's a scripture that says God will gather the children to him.

00:53:03.000 But yes, that would be the extreme application of original sin.

00:53:09.000 Yeah, 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.

00:53:26.000 That, again, to use Calvinist terminology, man is totally depraved.

00:53:32.000 Yes.

00:53:32.000 And that's just something that the early church, the Eastern Fathers, the Greek fathers, and current fathers just never taught and don't teach.

00:53:40.000 So what is the Orthodox view on free will versus God's sovereignty slash predestination?

00:53:48.000 Yeah.

00:53:48.000 So we do not believe in predestination.

00:53:51.000 We reject that.

00:53:52.000 Augustine taught that, but we reject that.

00:53:54.000 God is sovereign, absolutely sovereign, and nothing exists without him, his sovereign grace, creating the world, sustaining the world.

00:54:04.000 If 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.

00:54:11.000 Yes.

00:54:13.000 And 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.

00:54:36.000 So Paul speaks about this.

00:54:37.000 He says, I am a co-worker with Christ.

00:54:40.000 The Greek word there is synergy, synergy.

00:54:43.000 And synergy means co-operation.

00:54:46.000 Sin, like with, and energy meaning action or operation.

00:54:51.000 And 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.

00:55:07.000 And we are cooperating with God in bringing his holiness into our lives and the lives of people around us.

00:55:14.000 And so we believe that the human being baptized into Christ has to live out his salvation, and that is part of it.

00:55:22.000 Somebody told me recently the Orthodox Church is more about what God isn't than what God is.

00:55:27.000 Is 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.

00:55:45.000 And what this is, it's a way of talking about God by saying God is so beyond our categories of human knowledge.

00:55:51.000 We can't even say he's good.

00:55:53.000 We can't say he's kind or just or anything because our understanding of what's good, kind, just, it just fails.

00:56:00.000 He's so totally beyond us.

00:56:02.000 We're a creature, we're not God, and so we can't even communicate and make statements about God that are really full.

00:56:11.000 And so that's called apophaticism.

00:56:14.000 It's a kind of mystical way of acknowledging the glory of God that's so beyond us.

00:56:19.000 But there's a balancing element in Orthodox theology called catophaticism.

00:56:25.000 And this says we can make statements about God.

00:56:28.000 We can say who he is.

00:56:30.000 And because he became one of us, he became human in Jesus Christ.

00:56:34.000 And he gave us the Holy Spirit.

00:56:36.000 And so that the tradition of the church, in fact, is saying a lot about God.

00:56:40.000 And I would never feel comfortable saying we can't.

00:56:43.000 Orthodoxy is characterized by saying we can't know God or can't say things about God, which is doing it all the time. 1.00

00:56:49.000 Look at the Nicene Creed.

00:56:50.000 Of course.

00:56:51.000 So why do you, or why did the Orthodox Church think the Reformation happened?

00:56:58.000 What caused the Reformation?

00:57:00.000 Yeah.

00:57:00.000 Well, 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.

00:57:07.000 It's called Paradise and Utopia, The Rise and Fall of What the West Once Was.

00:57:13.000 What 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.

00:57:29.000 And, of course, we all know that the Reformation, you know, if you want to find a date, it's 1517.

00:57:34.000 Martin Luther nails his 95 theses to the church door of Wittenberg against what?

00:57:38.000 Indulgences.

00:57:40.000 Indulgences are the practice that depended on a papacy to issue escape from or freedom from the punishment of purgatory.

00:57:48.000 And as I said earlier, we reject purgatory.

00:57:50.000 We obviously therefore reject indulgences.

00:57:53.000 We reject a papacy.

00:57:54.000 That was the reason why we no longer are part of the Roman Catholic Church is no longer part of the Orthodox Churches.

00:58:02.000 We do not accept one bishop presiding over the whole church.

00:58:06.000 Peter was certainly first of the apostles, but he never presided over the apostles.

00:58:11.000 Look at Acts chapter 15.

00:58:13.000 So you reject the idea of the papacy.

00:58:14.000 Absolutely.

00:58:15.000 The papal supremacy.

00:58:17.000 Now, we always accepted the popes as Orthodox bishops until the Great Schism happened. 0.95

00:58:23.000 The bishops of Rome were the first among all the ancient patriarchates or bishops that were kind of honored.

00:58:30.000 But he, the Pope, never had authority over the rest of the church in the way that follows the Great Schism.

00:58:36.000 And so today, Roman Catholicism, and for a thousand years, has had a model of the papacy that we totally reject.

00:58:43.000 You do not have universal supreme authority over the whole church.

00:58:47.000 Bishops have local communities that they rule over, but they're in conciliar relationship with each other.

00:58:55.000 And Christ is fully present in the whole church, and it does not require a single bishop who stands in his place as the vicar of Christ.

00:59:06.000 We reject that.

00:59:07.000 So, right now, this is a great segue: there's Eastern Orthodox, there's Serbian Orthodox, there's Latvian Orthodox.

00:59:14.000 Walk us through the composition of the Orthodox Church.

00:59:17.000 This has always been confusing to me.

00:59:20.000 What is the hierarchy, the structure?

00:59:22.000 Who's in charge?

00:59:24.000 Sure.

00:59:24.000 Yeah, let me just, can I just wrap one thing up about the Reformation, then let's get into that.

00:59:29.000 So 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. 0.60

00:59:48.000 And so they rejected Roman Catholicism and its many doctrines that actually are not even Orthodox doctrines.

00:59:55.000 This 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.

01:00:06.000 Papal supremacy, purgatory, indulgences.

01:00:10.000 Protestants were saying that the scriptures should be written in the vernacular and understood by the people in the liturgy.

01:00:15.000 We've always been doing that.

01:00:16.000 We never had a doctrine that had to be in one language like Latin or Greek.

01:00:21.000 Priests should be married. 0.97

01:00:22.000 That was a big Protestant thing.

01:00:24.000 Of course, as we've talked about, priests are married in the Orthodox Church.

01:00:27.000 So, sadly, the Protestant Reformation was a reaction to something.

01:00:31.000 And 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.

01:00:45.000 So it became a, in some ways, it became a kind of Christianity of minimalism, solas, faith alone, grace alone, scripture alone.

01:00:55.000 When 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.

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01:01:23.000 That is not what Bitcoin was built for.

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01:01:27.000 I just did a major transaction on it.

01:01:29.000 They offer a self-custodial wallet, which means you hold the keys.

01:01:33.000 You control your assets.

01:01:35.000 No 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.

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01:01:59.000 Bitcoin.com, freedom starts here.

01:02:04.000 So let's go down to the Orthodox kind of just technical structure here.

01:02:10.000 Walk us through it, as if I know nothing about kind of orthodoxy or very little.

01:02:15.000 What is the composition?

01:02:16.000 Sure.

01:02:16.000 And are you thinking again about the different jurisdictions?

01:02:19.000 Jurisdictions?

01:02:19.000 I mean, is there a head of who's the highest?

01:02:26.000 For example, is the Russian Orthodox Church connected to the American Orthodox Church?

01:02:32.000 How is that all structured?

01:02:33.000 Right, yeah, that's a good question.

01:02:34.000 So our model of church life and governance dates from the apostles, is recorded and documented in Scripture.

01:02:44.000 In 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. 0.93

01:02:55.000 And they say, no, we don't need to do that.

01:02:56.000 They got together in that council, the apostles did.

01:02:59.000 And at that time, they're being called bishops, too.

01:03:02.000 The word for bishop in the Greek in the New Testament is episkopos.

01:03:06.000 So that's where we get the word episcopal, for instance.

01:03:09.000 Yeah.

01:03:09.000 So that's the apostles functioned as episcopi or overseers, is what that means.

01:03:14.000 If you like, epi means above and scopos, if you go hunting, you put a scopos on your rifle to see your target.

01:03:20.000 So episkopos means overseers.

01:03:23.000 They all conferenced together, counseled together in Jerusalem.

01:03:27.000 And in the end, one of them stood up and said, this is what we're going to do.

01:03:31.000 And you probably remember who that was.

01:03:33.000 It was not Peter, first of the apostles.

01:03:35.000 It was James, because he was the local apostle of Jerusalem.

01:03:40.000 So 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.

01:03:55.000 So you asked about how things look today 2,000 years later.

01:03:58.000 2,000 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.

01:04:10.000 We have the Ecumenical Patriarch of Istanbul.

01:04:14.000 It's called Constantinople usually, using the old name for the city.

01:04:18.000 And then we have other local, smaller jurisdictions.

01:04:21.000 The Romanian Orthodox Church is big and things like that.

01:04:26.000 There's a big Arabic church in America.

01:04:28.000 It's called the Antiochian Orthodox Church.

01:04:30.000 There's a big Greek church in America.

01:04:32.000 It's called the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese.

01:04:35.000 I belong to the Orthodox Church in America, which is yet another jurisdiction. 0.66

01:04:40.000 But we're all part of one church.

01:04:41.000 We all go to each other's churches.

01:04:43.000 We stand in the altar together.

01:04:44.000 We receive the same communion together, Eucharistic communion, serve together, all those things.

01:04:49.000 That's how the church is formed.

01:04:51.000 And for an Orthodox, this is a sign that the Holy Spirit is the unifying element in our life together.

01:04:59.000 It's not a single bishop with a juridical kind of legal understanding of submission to him or subjugation to him.

01:05:09.000 One 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.

01:05:28.000 We've always rejected that.

01:05:29.000 That, of course, was issued long after the Great Schism.

01:05:31.000 We believe that these various jurisdictions all work in harmony as one church.

01:05:36.000 And you know what?

01:05:37.000 I guess I could say this, Charlie.

01:05:39.000 It's a remarkable thing if we use this next to a kind of Roman Catholic model.

01:05:44.000 You have this Roman Catholic model where there's a pope at top, and everything somehow flows out of that.

01:05:49.000 And externally, that all looks marvelously unified.

01:05:52.000 But if you look inside the Roman Catholic Church today, there's all sorts of disagreements.

01:05:56.000 There's all sorts of arguments.

01:05:58.000 There's all sorts of sense of impending doom and things like that.

01:06:04.000 And disagreements on how to do the Mass and whether gays should be blessed or even married and things like that.

01:06:13.000 If 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.

01:06:25.000 It's the same doctrines.

01:06:26.000 There's no disagreement about dogmas of the church.

01:06:29.000 It's the same morality.

01:06:30.000 If 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.

01:06:42.000 You'll find the same moral positions about marriage and everything else.

01:06:48.000 And finally, the worship is almost completely universal.

01:06:51.000 Same thing going on everywhere, same service.

01:06:55.000 So it's really remarkably uniform and harmonious.

01:06:59.000 And 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.

01:07:11.000 Christ is the head, mystically, in the Orthodox Church.

01:07:13.000 Let's close with this, and then I want you to be able to bring up anything that else is on your mind.

01:07:17.000 You see, your church is growing.

01:07:19.000 Is the Orthodox Church growing in America?

01:07:21.000 And tell us more about that.

01:07:23.000 Yeah, it's amazing.

01:07:23.000 It really is.

01:07:24.000 Why do you think that is?

01:07:25.000 I think today, and it's growing, especially among young people, young adults, or just flooding into the world.

01:07:31.000 Both young men and women are primarily young men.

01:07:34.000 Primarily young men in my experience, and I've heard this from other Orthodox pastors.

01:07:37.000 It's across the board.

01:07:39.000 Every Orthodox pastor I talk to, and not just in Washington state, but I'm going to hear plenty about it.

01:07:45.000 And 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.

01:07:54.000 People 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. 0.94

01:08:04.000 I wrote a book called The Age of Nihilism as part of that book series I mentioned earlier.

01:08:08.000 I want to read that.

01:08:09.000 The 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.

01:08:26.000 And so many people see where this leads.

01:08:28.000 It leads to transgenderism. 0.95

01:08:30.000 It leads to divorce.

01:08:32.000 It leads to abortion on a scale of millions of people.

01:08:36.000 It just leads to a nihilistic end.

01:08:39.000 The great world wars are kind of symptoms of this nihilism.

01:08:45.000 And I talk about all this stuff.

01:08:47.000 And 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.

01:09:00.000 If 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.

01:09:09.000 And Orthodox Christianity, you know, I hope I've been able to describe this a little bit.

01:09:12.000 You've done a wonderful job.

01:09:14.000 You know, really stands for an unchangeable tradition that can be traced and documented all the way back to the apostles themselves.

01:09:22.000 So your method of worship, no music, same as the apostles, right?

01:09:28.000 I mean, is it, it's pretty constant.

01:09:30.000 I mean, that is as unchanging as it gets.

01:09:32.000 Has anything changed?

01:09:33.000 I mean, you have lights and electricity and air conditioning, I'm guessing, right?

01:09:36.000 We do.

01:09:37.000 Although we prefer to, at Vespers, our evening service at night, we prefer just to do it by lamplight and candlelight.

01:09:44.000 And so in some ways, you guys look at yourself as an unbroken chain and you want to keep that.

01:09:52.000 Yeah.

01:09:52.000 I think that's very powerful for people today that see such disruptions and everything's changing.

01:09:58.000 Their friends are changing their genders.

01:10:00.000 I mean, things are happening so rapidly.

01:10:02.000 They want something to anchor them and something to keep them grounded and rooted in this chaotic world.

01:10:08.000 Last question.

01:10:09.000 What about Orthodoxy that we did not cover?

01:10:13.000 Do you wish people knew about that you feel compelled to share?

01:10:20.000 Best kept religious secret in America.

01:10:22.000 The 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.

01:10:31.000 And Protestantism and Roman Catholicism are beautiful too.

01:10:35.000 And I think we, as I said when we started, there's a lot that we share in common, thank God.

01:10:40.000 I think that as we go forward and we continue to see the disintegration of our society around us.

01:10:45.000 Modernity.

01:10:46.000 Modernity, post-modernity, nihilism is my word for it.

01:10:50.000 As we see this disintegration, this kneehill, this nothingness.

01:10:54.000 And describe your book one more time.

01:10:56.000 So the book Age of Nihilism, it's part of a four-volume series of books that started with Pentecost and it ends with the culture wars.

01:11:03.000 So it brings it right up to the present moment, really.

01:11:06.000 Just published it the last volume a few years ago.

01:11:08.000 We're going to put what's up on screen right now.

01:11:10.000 Oh, okay.

01:11:10.000 Yeah, okay.

01:11:11.000 Yeah.

01:11:12.000 Yeah, there it is.

01:11:13.000 The whole series.

01:11:14.000 The Age of Paradise, the Age of Division, the Age of Utopia, the Age of Nihilism.

01:11:18.000 Yeah.

01:11:20.000 Yeah, it took a while.

01:11:22.000 It's about 25 years of teaching college, so about a quarter of a century.

01:11:25.000 Do you still?

01:11:27.000 No, I write.

01:11:27.000 I write books.

01:11:29.000 I was able to get out of that and start just writing instead of teaching.

01:11:33.000 Oh, impressive.

01:11:34.000 But it was something I really cared about.

01:11:36.000 I always loved Christendom.

01:11:38.000 A Christian civilization, which is really what we have in the West.

01:11:42.000 And I'd love to contribute to a restoration of its most healthy elements.

01:11:46.000 Amen.

01:11:47.000 So the books are Age of Paradise, The Age of Division, Age of Utopia, The Age of Nihilism by John Strickland.

01:11:54.000 I have a whole page of notes, as you can tell, and lots of things to follow up on.

01:11:57.000 But thank you so much, Father, for your time.

01:12:00.000 And I hope to visit your church sometime soon.

01:12:02.000 You bet you're away.

01:12:02.000 Come anytime.

01:12:03.000 God bless you.

01:12:04.000 God bless you.

01:12:04.000 Thank you.

01:12:05.000 Thanks so much for listening, everybody.

01:12:06.000 Email us as always, freedom at charliekirk.com.

01:12:09.000 Thanks so much for listening, and God bless.

The Charlie Kirk Show - August 13, 2025

America's Best-Kept Religious Secret? Learning About Eastern Orthodoxy with Fr. John Strickland

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