Latest / The Lila Rose Show / E201: Ancient Faith & Modern Persecution: Orthodox Christianity w/Fr Josiah Trenham

Transcript

E201: Ancient Faith & Modern Persecution: Orthodox Christianity w/Fr Josiah Trenham · The Lila Rose Show

• 0:00
  Why Orthodoxy? I started going there and I just
• 0:02
  saw the icons and I felt the reverence and I heard the
• 0:05
  chanting. It completely grabbed me, melted
• 0:09
  me. It's otherworldly.
• 0:10
  It is otherworldly. I am curious how you see the
• 0:12
  biggest difference between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy.
• 0:16
  Don't want to be offensive in any way.
• 0:18
  Please speak freely. That's not the only issue.
• 0:21
  The issue is that it radically, we think that's just the biggest
• 0:24
  made-up. What does it look like to be a
• 0:25
  champion of religious freedom for a Syrian who's about to get
• 0:28
  his head chopped off because he happens to Orthodox Bishop?
• 0:31
  Metropolitan Bulos and his driver were stopped by Sunni
• 0:35
  jihadis. They pulled his Deacon out of
• 0:37
  the driver seat. We prayed for him every day in
• 0:40
  our churches for over 10 years. Was kidnapped and presumably
• 0:45
  killed. Hey guys, welcome back to the
• 0:47
  Lila Rose show. I sit down today with Father
• 0:49
  Josiah Trenham, who is an Orthodox priest.
• 0:53
  He is in touch with a lot of the Christians in Syria who are
• 0:56
  right now under attack, quite frankly.
• 0:58
  Father Josiah also shares about a Orthodox Bishop in Syria right
• 1:03
  now who was recently threatened by the new government that he
• 1:07
  would be beheaded and how he responded to that threat.
• 1:11
  We're also going to talk about some of the differences between
• 1:12
  Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy. We get into that just a little
• 1:15
  bit in this episode. So as well as always, don't
• 1:17
  forget to subscribe to the show wherever you listen to your
• 1:20
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• 1:21
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  And you'll have access to the whole library of Lila Rocheau
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  content ad free. Go sign up at the link in the
• 1:50
  bio. Father Josiah Drenham, welcome
• 1:52
  to the podcast. Thank you, Lila.
• 1:54
  Wonderful to be here. You were just instructing me
• 1:56
  about Trenham being a English. Name it is.
• 2:00
  It is. My family came from our old
• 2:03
  country a long time ago, eighteen O 8.
• 2:05
  We've been now in Southern California for four generations,
• 2:09
  but we've kept our connection to what we call the old country
• 2:12
  still. I did my education there.
• 2:14
  I did my doctorate work there, my grandfather did I.
• 2:17
  We love England. So you're an Orthodox priest?
• 2:20
  I am. And you also have 10 children.
• 2:22
  I understand. I do yes, thanks to God, from 35
• 2:26
  to almost 12. Amazing.
• 2:29
  And seven grandkids. Amazing.
• 2:31
  Congratulations. And you are I've seen you a lot
• 2:34
  of places recently. You were with our friend, Voice
• 2:36
  of Reason, who we had on the show recently, Alex.
• 2:39
  I wish I could talk like that. Your voice is great as it is,
• 2:44
  but yeah, that he has quite the voice.
• 2:46
  Oh my gosh. Well, I, I, I'd love to hear
• 2:49
  first just your background. I, we were talking before you
• 2:52
  came here in your 4th generation Californian.
• 2:55
  Yeah. I'm an Angelino.
• 2:57
  My father was born in Los Angeles, as was I I grew up in
• 3:01
  Pasadena. When I was a young college
• 3:05
  student, I went off to Santa Barbara and went to school at A
• 3:07
  at a artisan school up there, liberal arts school called
• 3:10
  Westmont, a beautiful place. And then I went to seminary and
• 3:15
  did my graduate work, ended up being ordained in 1993 as an
• 3:19
  Orthodox priest and being sent to Riverside.
• 3:23
  I've been in Riverside about 30 years and built up a small
• 3:27
  mission parish to become a really beautiful community of
• 3:30
  which I'm unworthy, dedicated to Saint Andrew.
• 3:33
  So my parish is Saint Andrew. We have a wonderful community,
• 3:36
  about 1000 active parishioners and wonderful school K through
• 3:39
  12 school and I don't deserve them, but they've put up with me
• 3:43
  for a long time. Why Orthodox bother?
• 3:48
  You know, I was actually born and raised a Presbyterian.
• 3:52
  Aren't you also from a Protestant background?
• 3:54
  I am, yeah. Yeah.
• 3:55
  I was born and raised a Presbyterian at a time when
• 3:59
  almost all of the Protestant churches were going through
• 4:02
  great theological upheaval. I loved my upbringing.
• 4:06
  My parents were very active. My mother, God rest her soul,
• 4:09
  was an incredible singer. She actually sang.
• 4:13
  I went to USC and studied music and then when she graduated at
• 4:16
  22, she went to New York and sing on Broadway till she
• 4:19
  married my dad when she was 30. My father is a just an
• 4:23
  incredible person. God rest his soul.
• 4:25
  Also I've I've buried them both in the last year.
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  I'm so sorry. I'd give them paradise.
• 4:30
  I, I want to see them again soon.
• 4:34
  But they were active. My dad taught Sunday school and
• 4:38
  my mom, mom sang in the choir every Sunday.
• 4:40
  I, I loved my upbringing, but the church was going through
• 4:42
  complete upheaval and its foundations because of being
• 4:48
  Protestant. You know, the foundations are,
• 4:50
  are weak. They're not solid and they're
• 4:51
  not Apostolic. And so it's hard to maintain the
• 4:54
  integrity. And when I went to seminary, I
• 4:57
  went to a Presbyterian seminary. I had married when I was young.
• 5:01
  As a matter of fact, we got married the year you were born.
• 5:03
  You were born 88. Yes.
• 5:05
  So Catherine, like my beloved Catherine and I married in in
• 5:09
  May of 88, a couple months before you were born.
• 5:12
  And we went off to seminary. And while I was there, her, she
• 5:18
  was, she's the youngest of six, from a Methodist family.
• 5:22
  And two of her older brothers had gone to Chicago and gone to
• 5:25
  school and had become Orthodox Christians.
• 5:28
  And they both started sending me messages.
• 5:31
  They did not want their sister marrying a Calvinist.
• 5:36
  I was unworthy in their minds. And so we started a conversation
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  when I went. To you were Calvinist at this
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  point. I was, yeah, I was a
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  Presbyterian, a serious Presbyterian.
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  And they, they've started sending me Orthodox literature.
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  And that began a conversation that at first I was hoping to
• 5:54
  win them to Presbyterianism. That definitely did not happen.
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  They won. And when I went to seminary, I
• 6:02
  wrote a list of theological differences between being a
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  Presbyterian Protestant and an Eastern Orthodox Christian.
• 6:09
  And I studied those intensively when I was in seminary.
• 6:12
  Issues of church governance. Presbyterians don't have
• 6:14
  bishops. They're called Presbyterian
• 6:16
  because they only allow themselves to be covered by what
• 6:19
  they call presbyters or pastors. The sacraments was another
• 6:24
  subject. The liturgy was another subject.
• 6:25
  These were all very important subjects that I was given to in
• 6:30
  seminary, and by the time I got done with seminary, I clearly
• 6:32
  was no longer a Presbyterian. I remember being called into the
• 6:35
  Dean's office because I had studied very hard and I was
• 6:39
  hoping to receive a very nice scholarship upon graduation.
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  But in the fine print, he informed me it can only be given
• 6:47
  to a young man who was going to go into the Presbyterian or
• 6:49
  Calvinist ministry. And he said, I'm assuming you
• 6:51
  won't. I said, you're assuming right.
• 6:54
  And so when I got out of seminary, I, I contacted an
• 6:59
  incredible Archbishop, Orthodox Archbishop in America who was a
• 7:04
  great missionary. His name was Philip Saliba, and
• 7:08
  he had been receiving just scads of Protestant ministers into
• 7:13
  Orthodox Christianity, Lutherans, Episcopalians,
• 7:16
  Presbyterians, people whose churches were literally
• 7:19
  abandoning the faith. I mean, they were ordaining
• 7:21
  women. They were no longer defending
• 7:24
  unborn life. They were compromising on all
• 7:26
  sorts of theological issues. And so I joined that to Exodus
• 7:31
  and in 1993 was the I was catechized for a year beginning
• 7:37
  in 1992 with my wife. We had two small sons at the
• 7:40
  time. We went through a year of
• 7:42
  catechism and then I became an Orthodox Christian and then I
• 7:46
  was ordained as a priest. I served as a second priest as
• 7:50
  an assistant pastor at a parish in Santa Barbara and then in the
• 7:55
  mid 90s went to my current parish.
• 7:57
  Wow, we we had on you know, this idea, you know, huge amounts of
• 8:02
  young men leaving their Protestant traditions or you
• 8:06
  know, Presbyterianism at from for you and then going into the
• 8:10
  Orthodox Church. We had on Scott Hahn recently on
• 8:13
  the show you. Know Scott was from my same
• 8:16
  background. He was, he was Presbyterian
• 8:18
  also. He came from that background.
• 8:19
  And I remember hearing about Scott when I was a a seminarian
• 8:23
  because he was and is so intelligent and so dedicated to
• 8:28
  scripture and scripture study that it was an amazing thing to
• 8:32
  me because I thought to myself, I didn't know anybody who was
• 8:34
  from a Presbyterian bachelor who had become orthodox.
• 8:36
  Not a single one. There had been a big movement
• 8:39
  from broader kind of evangelicalism, but I would not
• 8:43
  have considered myself an evangelical.
• 8:44
  Presbyterians, we didn't view ourselves that way.
• 8:46
  And so we kind of, I hate to say it, but we kind of looked down
• 8:49
  on evangelicals as though they didn't really have a defined
• 8:51
  theology. Whereas Presbyterians are quite
• 8:54
  serious. They have a confession of faith,
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  Westminster Confession of Faith 1648 serious business.
• 9:00
  But when I heard about Scott, that that impact, I mean, I've
• 9:03
  been following his life and benefiting from his writings for
• 9:07
  decades. Wow.
• 9:09
  Well, it it was fascinating talking to him about his origin
• 9:12
  story, which many folks have, you know, heard and read Rome
• 9:14
  sweet home. I think next week we're having
• 9:16
  Keith Nester on the show who's Protestant background also can't
• 9:21
  you know how to big experience of, you know, shaking the
• 9:25
  theological roots, struggling with that ends up becoming
• 9:29
  Catholic. I'm curious though, you're
• 9:30
  Orthodox and I'd love to understand, you know why
• 9:34
  Orthodox and then how you see the differences between
• 9:37
  Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism
• 9:42
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  That's a really large question, Lila.
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  I think you got, I think I know the man for The Who can help us
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  with this answer so. You know, I mentioned what I
• 10:57
  viewed as major theological deficiencies in Protestantism.
• 11:02
  Anybody who is a Protestant coming to that realization that
• 11:08
  the church that they're in cannot be identified
• 11:11
  historically back to the time of Christ, that puts you in an
• 11:15
  extremely insecure position. Jesus started his church, he
• 11:21
  said I will build my church. Not Martin Luther, not Thomas
• 11:25
  Cartwright, not some person 3/4 of the way towards our our
• 11:30
  current point in history. After 1500 years.
• 11:34
  I, I came very clearly to realize that if I couldn't
• 11:37
  identify my church in the 1st century, in the 4th century, in
• 11:43
  the 8th century, in the 12th century, in the 16th century,
• 11:45
  and in the 20th century, it wasn't the church.
• 11:50
  Because Jesus's promise is serious that he would build his
• 11:53
  church and the gates of hell would not prevail against it.
• 11:56
  So I, I tell anyone who's asking themselves the question today
• 12:00
  from a similar background to look at the way that they're
• 12:04
  believing, the way that they're worshipping, the way that
• 12:06
  they're living, and ask themselves, can I find
• 12:11
  continuity between what I'm doing now in all the centuries
• 12:15
  leading back to Christ? Because you should be able to
• 12:16
  see that. Why?
• 12:20
  Unless Jesus is either weak or a liar, you have to find it
• 12:23
  because he promised to build his church.
• 12:25
  He gave the church a Commission to go into all the world to make
• 12:28
  disciples of all the nations, and that's what the church has
• 12:31
  been doing. The church will never be
• 12:33
  defeated by Satan. The vigilance that Jesus has
• 12:36
  shown historically to guard the integrity of his church is quite
• 12:40
  clear. If you look in the Revelation,
• 12:41
  the Apocalypse, right, the last book of the New Testament, it
• 12:45
  starts with this heavenly vision in which Jesus appears to John,
• 12:48
  his beloved, right, who put his head on his chest.
• 12:50
  They were like this and John's now an old man on the island of
• 12:54
  Patmos when he receives the Revelation, the Apocalypse, and
• 12:57
  Jesus gives him 7 letters to seven local churches that John
• 13:01
  was overseeing in Asia Minor. This is just on the western part
• 13:04
  of Asia. Like you go to Constantinople,
• 13:06
  right, for this eastern part of Europe and they just go across
• 13:08
  the Bosphorus and that those, that's where the churches were.
• 13:11
  Every one of those churches, Jesus gave a message and it went
• 13:14
  something like that. It has the same literary
• 13:16
  structure, all 7 letters. He says who he is, something
• 13:19
  about him that's very relevant to that church's condition at
• 13:22
  the moment. If they're doing anything really
• 13:23
  great, he tells them, hey, I'm so proud of you for this.
• 13:27
  If they're doing something wrong, which five of the seven
• 13:29
  were, he says you're making serious mistakes in this area.
• 13:32
  And then he tells them to fix it, to repent.
• 13:35
  And then he issues a threat. He says, if you don't, I'm going
• 13:38
  to do something. And the typical threat is I'm
• 13:40
  going to blow your Candlestick out.
• 13:42
  What that means is that the Candlestick represents from
• 13:46
  chapter 1, the church is the light of Christ that they're
• 13:48
  bearing in the world. And if they weren't guarding it,
• 13:52
  if they weren't carrying the light into the darkness of the
• 13:54
  world, Jesus asked them to step up.
• 13:56
  And if they refused to step up, he says you're going to
• 13:59
  disappear and the gospel goes someplace else and you'll get
• 14:02
  replaced. And that's happened many times
• 14:04
  throughout church history. This is shows also the vigilance
• 14:09
  that Jesus takes to maintain the purity and integrity of his
• 14:11
  church. He's not just a great watchmaker
• 14:14
  that made the church and now it's running by itself and he's
• 14:17
  over there now. He's at the heart of the church.
• 14:19
  He's at the heart of every liturgy.
• 14:21
  His Spirit is what is empowering us to serve him and to fulfill
• 14:25
  the mission of the Church, which is to cover the whole world with
• 14:29
  the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.
• 14:31
  This is the prophetic vision to literally make disciples of all
• 14:34
  the nations. And that vigilance Jesus has
• 14:37
  shown, He has inspired the church in every generation to go
• 14:40
  into the world. You should be able to recognize
• 14:43
  the church for 20 centuries. And certainly we can.
• 14:47
  Orthodox Christians are very serious about this.
• 14:49
  We. I remember one time I gave a
• 14:50
  sermon in my parish. The purpose of the sermon was to
• 14:54
  articulate one or two glorious Saints from every every
• 15:00
  generation, every century. That's why I went through 20,
• 15:04
  just to help them have a flavor of the fact that we're joining
• 15:09
  something that's been going on for a very long time and we're
• 15:12
  not free to make up stuff. That's just not how it works.
• 15:16
  We have a beautiful saying. It's a prayer that the priest
• 15:20
  says at the end of every service or throws her matins in the
• 15:25
  morning, Vespers in the evening. It goes like this.
• 15:27
  Preserve, O God the Holy Orthodox faith and all Orthodox
• 15:33
  Christians unto the ages of ages.
• 15:35
  Amen. It's not improve, it's not make
• 15:38
  better. No, the faith was once delivered
• 15:42
  to the Saints. It has to be lived, it has to be
• 15:46
  cherished, applied, doesn't need to be improved, doesn't need to
• 15:50
  be made expansive. It was given to us as a precious
• 15:53
  possession, which is why we seek to preserve it, to manifest it
• 15:57
  in our life, to live it, but to hold it as a precious treasure.
• 16:02
  That was not my experience as a Presbyterian.
• 16:03
  We were changing things. You know, when I got licensed, I
• 16:06
  actually, before I converted to Orthodoxy, I was a licensed
• 16:09
  Presbyterian pastor for a short time, for one year when I was
• 16:13
  licensed by the other pastors. You have to, as a young
• 16:16
  seminarian, you have to go before your peers, you know,
• 16:18
  your seniors, and then they test you.
• 16:20
  You have to defend your faith. You have to show that you're
• 16:22
  truly Presbyterian. And then they ask you at the
• 16:24
  end, do you have any exceptions to the standard of faith, to the
• 16:28
  confession of Faith? I took 15.
• 16:30
  They were almost all Orthodox. So, for instance, Presbyterians
• 16:35
  baptize babies, but they don't give them Holy Communion, and
• 16:41
  Orthodox do. And I had become fully convinced
• 16:43
  that when a person is baptized, when a child is baptized, they
• 16:47
  become fully a Christian. And to be a full Christian means
• 16:52
  traditionally that you're baptized, you're confirmed and
• 16:57
  you're communed. And Presbyterians don't do that.
• 17:01
  You used to do that. The Latins, the Catholics used
• 17:04
  to do that. But now you have separated
• 17:07
  baptism from confirmation and communion.
• 17:10
  So now a lot of people get your babies get baptized, but they
• 17:12
  don't get communion until they're 7 or 6.
• 17:14
  Age of Reason. Yeah, the age of reason and then
• 17:16
  later confirmation as it as a team.
• 17:20
  That can flip though that kind of as a matter of, you know, a,
• 17:25
  a, a practice that has changed that confirmation happens, you
• 17:29
  know, at the time of communion in the Roman Catholic tradition
• 17:32
  as well. So it's not a hard and fast.
• 17:35
  That's good. Then you should come back to the
• 17:37
  traditional problems and give give children communion the
• 17:40
  idea. I know.
• 17:41
  I I, I I. Baptism is life.
• 17:43
  Baptism gives you new life, but the power to live then keep that
• 17:47
  new life is in the sacrament. And there's no one you know, in
• 17:52
  in Orthodox parishes, not only do the children receive Holy
• 17:54
  Communion, they usually receive Holy Communion before the
• 17:57
  adults. And that's because they're not
• 17:59
  only Christians, they're the best.
• 18:02
  The children are sinless and they're not doing what we do.
• 18:07
  And so if anyone should be receiving Holy Communion, it's
• 18:11
  them. There's certainly cases even,
• 18:13
  you know, obviously in the church's history where there
• 18:16
  have been very, very young Saints who have been, who wanted
• 18:18
  Coley communion or wanted confirmation before the certain
• 18:22
  ages that at the time were decreed and have been able to
• 18:25
  seek it out. So there's a, there is a
• 18:27
  flexibility there, you know, which I think obviously goes all
• 18:30
  the way back to the beginning of, of the order of these
• 18:33
  things. But I think the principle that
• 18:35
  we share is that yes, you know, let the little child come unto
• 18:38
  me. Yes, we do share that.
• 18:41
  We do share that. But you asked, I'm not trying
• 18:42
  to. No, I I no, no, you're not pushy
• 18:44
  at all. You're.
• 18:45
  This is one of the things for me is that I had experienced so
• 18:49
  much innovation as a Presbyterian that I looked, I,
• 18:53
  I, I really, I, when I first was just trying to discern should I
• 18:57
  become Catholic, Should I become Orthodox?
• 18:59
  There was a, a little monastery of the poor Claire's in, I love
• 19:04
  them, Santa Barbara. And I just went there and sat
• 19:06
  day after day. I just went there and SAT and
• 19:09
  prayed. What should I do and
• 19:12
  experiencing the Orthodox are very stubborn or just very
• 19:16
  stubborn. I remember hearing this great
• 19:18
  joke, but it's it's a joke, but it's also extremely potent as a
• 19:22
  truth and the joke goes like this.
• 19:26
  How many Orthodox bishops does it take to change a light bulb?
• 19:33
  I don't know. No guess.
• 19:35
  I mean, maybe they don't want to change it because they don't
• 19:38
  want to change anything. Yeah, that's the best answer.
• 19:40
  And some people, you say 321, the real answer is they won't
• 19:44
  change. Yeah, now sometimes.
• 19:47
  Like light a candle. That's what we do here.
• 19:49
  Maybe so, maybe so. And that can be, of course, if
• 19:52
  if you put your hand in the, your head in the sand and you
• 19:54
  don't change things that should be changed.
• 19:56
  Of course, that could be a. Problem, faith and morals.
• 19:58
  Yeah, those can. Change not to it's the truth or
• 20:01
  it's not the truth. Yeah, so that's why I love my my
• 20:06
  Catholic friends. I bow low before them.
• 20:08
  They're better than me and almost everything.
• 20:11
  But I hold on to my holy, holy Orthodoxy.
• 20:16
  I love. I love the fact that we're this
• 20:20
  stubborn when it comes to the faith.
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• 21:23
  I know I kind of combined a few questions at once, but why
• 21:26
  Orthodox? I see the heart of why you're
• 21:28
  Orthodox and it's similar to why I'm Roman Catholic is that you
• 21:32
  come from a background where the theological foundations are not
• 21:35
  as deep, they're not as clear. I mean, the church I grew up and
• 21:39
  had some Presbyterian roots, actually it was more of an
• 21:41
  evangelical type church. They had kind of combined three
• 21:44
  different churches in the early 20th century in are.
• 21:46
  You in Southern California? I'm a Northern California San
• 21:49
  Jose, CA Anyways, Long story short, my dad was an elder.
• 21:53
  They decided to, you know, make some admission for divorce in
• 21:57
  their kind of catechism of the church, so to speak.
• 22:00
  That was a big turn off to my dad.
• 22:01
  It was really steeping himself in GK Chesterton in the church
• 22:04
  who led him to the church fathers.
• 22:06
  And so all of this, you know, you look at you go back in
• 22:09
  history. You need to be this a Catholic.
• 22:12
  They say it's to be a student of history.
• 22:13
  You go back in time and you see the history and you see, wow,
• 22:16
  there's so much more than what I'm meets the eye today in terms
• 22:20
  of Western Christianity at large.
• 22:22
  You were talking though, about Orthodox and I I, I want to stay
• 22:25
  on this for a minute because I'm I'm so interesting and and
• 22:27
  beautiful to me. Your conviction you sounds like
• 22:31
  it was Orthodox folks that reached out to you and you were
• 22:33
  that seminarian as a Presbyterian.
• 22:35
  Yeah, my brothers in law. And they, and they shook you a
• 22:38
  little bit and you, you wrestled with them and you, you lost it
• 22:42
  sounds like. I was they, you know, they were
• 22:44
  both simple men, once a dentist, you know, the other is a, is a
• 22:48
  simple working man. They were won by the liturgy.
• 22:51
  That's how they became Orthodox Christians.
• 22:53
  You know, Saint Paul describes a beautiful thing that was
• 22:56
  happening in the early churches in First Corinthians 14, where
• 22:59
  he's describing the impact of the worship service on pagans
• 23:04
  who are coming into the Christian communities.
• 23:06
  He says that people will come into our worship and that
• 23:09
  they'll be cut to the quick and they'll fall on their face with
• 23:15
  such a palpable sense of the presence of God that they'll
• 23:18
  declare God is certainly in your midst.
• 23:20
  And this was the experience of my brothers in
• 23:39
  And I started going there and I just saw the icons and I felt
• 23:43
  the reverence and I heard the chanting, you know, and it
• 23:47
  completely, he grabbed me. It melted me.
• 23:50
  And so after like six months of this, I said to my wife, I said,
• 23:52
  sweetheart, why do I want to go to Saturday night more than I
• 23:56
  want to go to our church on Sunday?
• 23:58
  I said, I I can't imagine missing it anymore.
• 24:01
  So that it really grabbed me. The worship was so banal.
• 24:07
  As a Protestant, we had great preachers.
• 24:09
  Don't get me wrong, we had great preachers.
• 24:11
  I loved hearing my mom, she gave, she was a soloist.
• 24:13
  She often saying we had 2-3 hundred person choir.
• 24:16
  It was, it was grand in that sense.
• 24:18
  But the sense of God, the sense of the fear of God, the sense of
• 24:21
  holiness. Well, well number one, we sat on
• 24:23
  our butts most of the service. You know there's three positions
• 24:26
  in scripture for prayer, standing, kneeling and
• 24:32
  prostration. 3 / 200 References to positions of prayer in the
• 24:37
  Bible. Guess how many are sitting?
• 24:42
  None one. King David, after committing a
• 24:46
  huge sin and knowing that God was going to take his son,
• 24:52
  fasted and did not eat for a week.
• 24:54
  And at the end of the week it says he was nearly sitting and
• 24:58
  praying. So I always tell people, look,
• 24:59
  you want to sit in church fast for a week, you have my
• 25:02
  blessing. Otherwise, get your butt up,
• 25:06
  stand and show some reference to God, kneel down prostate on the
• 25:10
  ground, because those are the biblical positions for
• 25:12
  approaching God. And that's what I experienced in
• 25:14
  the Orthodox Church. I went in there.
• 25:15
  I went, Oh my gosh, that they actually believe they're in the
• 25:19
  presence of God, that heaven and earth are mingling.
• 25:20
  You know this appalling conception, what you see in the
• 25:23
  Epistle to the Hebrews, chapter 10 and 12, where Paul describes
• 25:26
  Christian worship as us ascending to Mount Zion and
• 25:28
  mingling with the angelic hosts, that that's what worship is, is
• 25:32
  the we we transcend earthly realities.
• 25:36
  I have experienced that for over 3 decades now.
• 25:39
  It's my life. It's life is why I'm a priest.
• 25:43
  It's very beautiful. I remember going to an Orthodox
• 25:45
  Church when I was leaving Protestantism initially as it as
• 25:48
  in my teenage years, and it was for a few months.
• 25:51
  When I turned 16. It was I think a year of time.
• 25:53
  But what you're what the experience is absolutely it's
• 25:57
  it's otherworldly. It is otherworldly and you know,
• 25:59
  it's beautiful as the Roman Catholic Church sees your
• 26:02
  Eucharist. This is the Eucharist.
• 26:03
  This is Jesus Christ, body, blood, soul and divinity.
• 26:05
  And the Orthodox Church, it's the same bishops doing the
• 26:08
  consecration that go back all the way to Jesus Christ.
• 26:11
  So we were united in that. I am curious and I, I, there's
• 26:14
  so many things I want to ask you because there's your background
• 26:17
  is so rich and, and your experiences are so rich.
• 26:19
  But I am curious how you see the biggest difference, or maybe the
• 26:23
  top two biggest differences between Roman Catholicism,
• 26:28
  Catholic meaning universal of course, and Orthodoxy?
• 26:32
  Very legitimate question. I want to be really careful on
• 26:37
  what I say only because this is our first time sitting down
• 26:41
  together and I have admired your work, Lila, for, well, since you
• 26:45
  started it, since you started it.
• 26:48
  And I don't want to be careless. In my comments, you said two
• 26:54
  were the top two things. I'm glad you said that because
• 26:58
  my daughter Olivia, who is with me, asked me that same question
• 27:01
  on the way down here. What are the what are the 2:00?
• 27:05
  We, we live and move in our family with our Catholic
• 27:08
  friends. And so we're often emphasizing
• 27:12
  our collaboration and what we do together.
• 27:14
  And sometimes the emphasis is not on what makes us different.
• 27:20
  But if you are pressing me for it, I would say there's, there
• 27:23
  are two things. And these are the two things
• 27:25
  that we ask any Roman Catholic who wants to become Orthodox.
• 27:31
  There's two things that they have to give up.
• 27:35
  The 1st is the very egregious change to the Nicene Creed.
• 27:43
  In the third paragraph. There's 4 paragraphs.
• 27:45
  In the Nicene Creed. A paragraph get it dedicated to
• 27:48
  God the Father. A paragraph dedicated to the
• 27:51
  Lord Jesus Christ, both his person and his work.
• 27:53
  A paragraph dedicated to the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver
• 27:56
  of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and
• 27:58
  the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the
• 28:00
  prophets. And a paragraph dedicated to the
• 28:02
  Church in the sacraments. In the 6th century, the bishops
• 28:05
  in Spain began to contemplate making an addition to the Creed.
• 28:11
  They were fighting Aryan heretics who denied the divinity
• 28:13
  of Christ. And they added one Latin word to
• 28:17
  the third paragraph called the Filioque.
• 28:19
  It means and the Son. And they made an affirmation
• 28:22
  that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.
• 28:25
  The Church has never believed that.
• 28:26
  The Church didn't say that in the Creed.
• 28:29
  And after we articulated the creed, the council following
• 28:32
  Nicaea in 381 said that the creed cannot be changed, not
• 28:36
  even in a syllable. Phileo quits 4 syllables.
• 28:43
  The Pope smashed the Spanish bishops and said you can't do
• 28:48
  that again. Around the time of Charlemagne.
• 28:51
  This is about 800. The bishops at that time in that
• 28:57
  area tried to put the filioque into the creed.
• 29:00
  The Pope once again smashed them, and not only did he forbid
• 29:05
  it, but he had the original creed in its original Greek and
• 29:08
  the original Latin translation carved and affixed to the doors
• 29:13
  of Saint Peter's. I went to Saint Peter's looking
• 29:16
  for it. It's still there.
• 29:17
  It's not on the doors, but if you go into Saint Peter's, into
• 29:20
  the North X and you look to the South, it's still there on the
• 29:23
  wall without the filioque. In 1009, under pressure, the
• 29:31
  Pope consented to put it into the creed.
• 29:33
  When that happened, the Patriarch of Constantinople
• 29:37
  ceased commemorating the Pope. He considered that to be a major
• 29:40
  violation of the faith in the Church.
• 29:42
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  miracles. Can I ask a quick question about
• 30:33
  that? Number one, since we're going
• 30:36
  into this, and I really appreciate you sharing because
• 30:38
  again, there's a lot to speak about, but I think these things
• 30:41
  are very edifying to discuss. So I appreciate your, your
• 30:44
  willingness to do it with me. I am curious if you see an
• 30:48
  actual theological if, if, if for you and you can share it
• 30:51
  personally or as you want to share As for speaking for other
• 30:54
  Orthodox. But is it a theological change
• 30:57
  that you see had serious theological underpinnings, or is
• 31:00
  it more just no change? This is.
• 31:03
  A That's a great question. It's not about just not
• 31:05
  changing, although it is about that.
• 31:07
  It's about the light bulb. Don't change.
• 31:09
  Don't change that light bulb in your view.
• 31:11
  Actually, yeah, it's about the faith being given to us whole
• 31:15
  and intact. So there is an aspect of in
• 31:19
  which we resist what Latins would call the so-called
• 31:24
  development of doctrine. That's a very concerning concept
• 31:27
  to us, but that's not the only issue.
• 31:31
  The issue is that it radically changes what you believe about
• 31:34
  the Holy Spirit. Would you like me to?
• 31:37
  In your view, yeah, and let. Me say this has nothing to do
• 31:39
  with me. This is a universal orthodox
• 31:41
  opinion. I'm not personal opinions are
• 31:44
  relevant with regards to this. This is what we've said.
• 31:47
  So for instance, when this was happening and really being
• 31:53
  promoted again by the Carolingians, Saint Fotius the
• 31:57
  Great Patriarchal Constantinople, this is 9th
• 32:00
  century, wrote a book called The Mysticology of the Holy Spirit
• 32:03
  in which he explained why the Holy Spirit does not proceed
• 32:08
  from the Father and from the Son in the doctrine of the Holy
• 32:13
  Trinity. To understand what the Father,
• 32:16
  Son and Holy Spirit have in common and to understand what
• 32:18
  they have in uniqueness of their person.
• 32:21
  The way theologically that that's been done by the Fathers
• 32:23
  is that which belongs to the divinity, that which belongs to
• 32:26
  the divine nature is shared in common by the Father, by the
• 32:29
  Son, and by the Holy Spirit. This would be, of course,
• 32:32
  they're being create self existent, right?
• 32:35
  They have the power of being, the ability to create, being all
• 32:39
  knowing, being all powerful. These are aspects of the divine
• 32:44
  nature that the Father, His Son, and the Holy Spirit share in
• 32:47
  common because they're one God. What's unique about the Father
• 32:54
  and the Son and the Holy Spirit, what belongs not to their feces,
• 32:57
  not to their nature, but to their person, to their
• 33:00
  hypostasis, is the Greek word is that the Father is the Father.
• 33:05
  He's the origin of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
• 33:09
  The Son is the only begotten of the Father, and the Holy Spirit
• 33:13
  proceeds from the Father. That which they do not share in
• 33:16
  common, they share it uniquely, meaning that only the Father is
• 33:20
  the Father, only the Son is the Son, and only the Holy Spirit is
• 33:23
  the Holy Spirit. As soon as you make an
• 33:25
  affirmation that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the
• 33:29
  Son, you destroy this fundamental theological
• 33:33
  conviction that what has ever not shared in common by the
• 33:36
  nature is uniquely a property of the unique person.
• 33:40
  Because now the Father remains the origin, but he shares with
• 33:46
  the Son something that the Holy Spirit does not share, which is
• 33:49
  that they're commonly the source of the Holy Spirit, but it
• 33:52
  doesn't belong to the nature. It's not as though that being
• 33:56
  the source of the Holy Spirit is a part of being deity.
• 33:58
  If it was, then the Holy Spirit wouldn't be deity.
• 34:01
  So it violated it. It made the Father and the Son
• 34:05
  special in relationship to the Holy Spirit.
• 34:07
  And we think that the consequence of that has been a
• 34:10
  demotion of the Holy Spirit and his inspired authority in the
• 34:14
  Church, which is why we think we Orthodox think that.
• 34:18
  And this leads to the second issue that a person would have
• 34:20
  to address. We think because of this
• 34:23
  downplaying of the Holy Spirit, this attribution of Co originate
• 34:29
  being to this Father and the Son for the Holy Spirit that has led
• 34:32
  to the Holy Spirit being downplayed and this explosion of
• 34:40
  post filioque authority apparatus that's taking place.
• 34:43
  This whole don't want to be offensive in any way.
• 34:48
  You're not offensive at all. Please could be Speak freely.
• 34:51
  Speak freely. This is a free free speech zone.
• 34:53
  This. Whole explosion of Cardinals and
• 34:57
  the College of Cardinals and the Pope being the temporal head and
• 35:01
  not just the spirit. We think that's just the biggest
• 35:04
  made-up joke in the universe. What a bunch of crap.
• 35:08
  That's what we think of this is just worldliness and it's
• 35:12
  happening because of your degradation of the Holy Spirit
• 35:14
  and what you did to the creed and through the inspiration of
• 35:17
  the Holy Spirit. So instead of the Holy Spirit
• 35:19
  and the spiritual life being the core of unity in the Church,
• 35:22
  you've built up this whole apparatus of and and you've
• 35:25
  ended up make taking 1 Bishop who by the way, let me show you,
• 35:30
  give you another example how this works it out.
• 35:32
  As soon as this idea of the Pope being kind of the singular
• 35:38
  Bishop in the Roman world, and this is pretty much how we see
• 35:41
  it, we really think you guys have basically just one Bishop.
• 35:44
  Everybody else works for him. Well, it's, it's a, it's a, it's
• 35:48
  a final decision maker in the sense of when there's something
• 35:52
  from the seat of Peter, you know, as Peter was for the
• 35:55
  apostles in matters of faith and morals, there's one, one that
• 35:59
  can direct the rest. But bishops absolutely have
• 36:01
  tremendous authority in the Cardinals.
• 36:03
  I mean, the College of Cardinals, it's their.
• 36:04
  Vote right until they don't. Led by the Holy Spirit that.
• 36:07
  Unless the name's Bishop. Strickland, the Papacy.
• 36:09
  Yeah, until they don't. Well, I think there's a lot we
• 36:12
  could we, we can get into details on that, but I think
• 36:14
  there's certainly, you know, imperfect priests, popes, I'm
• 36:18
  sure. Nobody's disputing that.
• 36:20
  Yeah, that are going to. Orthodox wouldn't dispute the
• 36:22
  imperfections. I mean, some of our best Saints
• 36:24
  have been, you know, as you know, there have been Saints
• 36:26
  that have been persecuted by their own bishops.
• 36:30
  No, no, this course, I'm not disputing that either.
• 36:33
  But that's not. To say that the holy.
• 36:34
  Spirit doing it it's obviously the sin of the person doing that
• 36:37
  the. Development of the concept of
• 36:39
  the papacy, we think, is directly a tie to this
• 36:42
  downplaying of the presence of the Holy Spirit that naturally
• 36:45
  follows the invention of the Filioque doctrine, and it
• 36:49
  culminated in 1870 with the so-called dogma of papal
• 36:53
  infallibility. You know, for us, the church
• 36:58
  history is full of incredible popes.
• 37:00
  We use that. That word, of course, just means
• 37:02
  Father Papa. We also use that.
• 37:04
  And so does the Pope of Rome or the Patriarch of Alexandria.
• 37:08
  He was traditionally called Pope and patriarch of Alexandria.
• 37:11
  So we understood what Pope, what a Pope was.
• 37:13
  But the creation of the supremacy of the Pope and his
• 37:18
  infallibility simply from an Orthodox person simply did not
• 37:23
  exist in the Church. That doesn't mean he didn't have
• 37:26
  a primacy of honor, that he wasn't a leader.
• 37:28
  He was. But let me give you an example.
• 37:32
  One of the greatest popes, one I love.
• 37:34
  His name's Gregory. You know him as Gregory the
• 37:36
  Great. In the East, we call him Gregory
• 37:38
  the Dialogist. He was Pope from 590 to six.
• 37:41
  O far incredible man. He also was bilingual Greek and
• 37:47
  Latin. He was the Upper Casarius or the
• 37:50
  papal ambassador under Pelagius, the second to Constantinople.
• 37:55
  While he was there, he was there for six years living in
• 37:57
  Constantinople. He at that time oversaw the
• 38:00
  creation of a liturgy which we still celebrate and Lent.
• 38:03
  As a matter of fact, I'll celebrate it tomorrow night,
• 38:05
  every Wednesday. It's called the pre sanctified
• 38:07
  liturgy. It's marvelous, but it's, it's
• 38:09
  from his inspiration. And we commemorate him by name
• 38:13
  at the end of the, of the liturgy.
• 38:16
  We call him the dialogist, Gregor the dialogist because he
• 38:19
  wrote the, his dialogues, which were accounts of all the Italian
• 38:24
  Saints that he knew and loved of his own time.
• 38:26
  You know, he came from a very impressive family, a family that
• 38:30
  was senatorial. His home was on one of the seven
• 38:34
  hills of Rome. Several popes had come from his
• 38:37
  family line. He was the prefect of the city
• 38:40
  of Rome until his father died. When his father died, Gregory
• 38:44
  said, that's it, I'm becoming a monk.
• 38:47
  So he became, he lived at the time of Benedict.
• 38:49
  He wrote Benedict's life, Saint Benedict's life.
• 38:53
  He turned, he took all of his money.
• 38:54
  He built 5 monasteries in Sicily.
• 38:57
  And then he turned his family home on one of the Roman hills
• 39:01
  into a monastery. I visited that monastery in
• 39:03
  2003, which was one of my life's ambitions and I sat in his
• 39:09
  Episcopal throne, a small stone Episcopal throne that's kept it
• 39:12
  kept in the Benedictine monastery, which is his his
• 39:15
  family home. The reason I'm bringing him up
• 39:17
  isn't just because he needs to be brought up all the time and
• 39:20
  his works. He also wrote a super famous in
• 39:23
  six books called more of the morale, morale on the prophet
• 39:27
  Job credible theologian. But he said this, he said any
• 39:33
  Bishop that claims universal authority, that claims to be
• 39:36
  ecumenical is Antichrist. So it sounds to me, if I'm
• 39:42
  understanding you correctly, Father, you talked about, of
• 39:45
  course, the, the Filiqui. And, you know, obviously the
• 39:48
  response from Roman Catholics is there's a church authority,
• 39:52
  there's councils and there's, you know, there is papal
• 39:55
  authority. And so it ends up being a
• 39:57
  quibble with papal authority, you know, are you allowed to do
• 40:00
  this? And I think.
• 40:01
  The problem is it's papal authority against papal
• 40:03
  authority. Well, and the church says this
• 40:04
  is a clarification. This isn't changing it.
• 40:06
  It's a clarification of the procession of the Holy Spirit
• 40:09
  and you know, there's a lot of theological reasons for why so I
• 40:12
  under, but just when you said the top two, it's the Philloqui
• 40:14
  and then it's also papal Philloqui and it and it's papal
• 40:17
  infallibility, of course. Because that's.
• 40:19
  They go together and together for you, as I understand.
• 40:22
  So, but I appreciate, I appreciate you sharing that.
• 40:24
  And I, I think the, you know, I think a lot of people are very
• 40:29
  curious about this and they, they should explore it.
• 40:31
  They should freely explore it. Of course, you know, as you
• 40:35
  know, I'm Catholic and I think the universality of the Catholic
• 40:39
  Church, you know, it's not tied to one ethnic, you know, lineage
• 40:43
  or another. It's this is for all people.
• 40:45
  And there is at the end of the day, one head of the church as
• 40:48
  Saint Peter was ahead and and the Pope's were heads not to be
• 40:51
  some sort of tyrant to roll over people.
• 40:53
  You know, there's been certainly imperfect popes.
• 40:55
  But when matters of faith or moral are decreed from the seat
• 40:59
  of paper Peter, you know it's it is for all Christians and the
• 41:03
  clarification on on the creed. You know, I understand caused a
• 41:07
  rift and I I I do sincerely hope that one day we will be one
• 41:12
  again. Me too.
• 41:13
  I sincerely hope it so I do more.
• 41:15
  Pray together. I pray for it.
• 41:17
  I pray for it. Yes, I, I do too.
• 41:20
  I do too, because I, I think even our Protestant brothers and
• 41:22
  sisters, they look at the rift between the Orthodox and the
• 41:26
  Roman Catholic and they say, well, the Orthodox, you know,
• 41:29
  split off and they don't, they don't like, you know, look to
• 41:32
  the Pope as the Pope. So why should you know, where,
• 41:35
  where do we fall here? Why, why are you guys, you know,
• 41:37
  having this dispute of sorts? And I think the Christian unity
• 41:41
  will only draw more people closer to Christ himself.
• 41:43
  So we will, we will pray together for that.
• 41:45
  I know you've obviously had these discussions on, on
• 41:47
  different shows before, so I appreciate you getting into it a
• 41:51
  little bit with me. I'm, I am curious too about
• 41:53
  your, your thoughts on our brothers and sisters in the
• 41:58
  Middle East, both Orthodox and Catholic.
• 42:00
  But there are many Christians right now in places like Syria.
• 42:05
  You know, there's a news report just yesterday that violence is
• 42:08
  increasing against Christians. There are reports that there may
• 42:12
  be hundreds of Christians who've been murdered in just the last
• 42:15
  week or so. And then other people are
• 42:17
  saying, well, it's more a political divides in Syria.
• 42:21
  I know you've been to the country.
• 42:22
  I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.
• 42:25
  The Middle East is the cradle of Christianity.
• 42:30
  This is where our Savior was Incarnate in the flesh.
• 42:34
  It's where the Son of God left the bosom of His Father, while
• 42:41
  remaining in the bosom of His Father, in order to come and
• 42:43
  become a man and conquer all our enemies.
• 42:46
  He was Incarnate of the most pure Virgin Mary in the Holy
• 42:51
  Land, and he defeated Satan there.
• 42:56
  He conquered death. There he atoned for sins.
• 42:59
  There he was again from the dead.
• 43:00
  There, 40 days later, he took humanity from the Mount of
• 43:05
  Olives and ascended through the atmosphere of heavens, literally
• 43:08
  blasting away the demonic host which had suppressed human
• 43:12
  beings, good or bad, before Christ came.
• 43:15
  You went to Hades. You went to Hades.
• 43:18
  You might have been in the upper part in the in Abraham's bosom,
• 43:20
  but you went to Hades. It wasn't until our Savior
• 43:23
  really, with his own powerful hands, destroyed the devil and
• 43:28
  death that humanity was exalted, and he brought humanity up
• 43:32
  through the air and planted our flesh at the right hand of God.
• 43:40
  Humanity is on the throne of the universe right now as a pledge
• 43:45
  of what He's going to do for us, for everyone who loves him, for
• 43:48
  everyone who believes in Him. This is our destiny.
• 43:50
  This is where we're going. There's no way that the Middle
• 43:54
  East is going to ever be anything except the heartbeat of
• 43:57
  Christians. And to the end, this is where
• 43:59
  our salvation was accomplished. We won through evangelization.
• 44:06
  We won the whole area in the Middle East, all the way up
• 44:12
  through what is now Lebanon and Syria, up into modern Turkey, E
• 44:15
  to Persia, across the whole northern part of Africa that are
• 44:19
  our missionaries. So one these areas, for Christ's
• 44:24
  sake, we experienced a vibrant 1st 600 years in this part of
• 44:31
  the world an. Evangelization.
• 44:34
  You're saying, you know people becoming Christian?
• 44:36
  Absolutely. We won the we won the Pagan
• 44:38
  world, you know, by the. Through martyrdom, A lot of it.
• 44:41
  Yes, yes, our martyrs are the the witness.
• 44:45
  It's not just their deaths, but their deaths with smiles on
• 44:48
  their faces, like people weren't going to martyrdom.
• 44:51
  I'll give you an example. My oldest daughter, she's, I'm
• 44:55
  so proud of her. Her name is Victoria.
• 44:57
  She's 31. She has three beautiful kids,
• 44:59
  wonderful husband. I could talk a lot about her
• 45:04
  when we had her. We dedicated her to this
• 45:08
  incredible North African St. named St.
• 45:10
  Victoria, 3rd century martyred under Decius.
• 45:14
  This is about 258. She was at Liturgy on a Sunday
• 45:20
  when the liturgy was invaded by soldiers because it was illegal
• 45:26
  DC and had absolutely forbidden the Eucharist. 48 people were in
• 45:34
  a house church. Her priest, Father Saturninus,
• 45:36
  was arrested. They were all killed, all
• 45:38
  murdered. Saturninus is the same.
• 45:41
  They didn't kill her right away because she was the daughter of
• 45:44
  a local judge and they wanted to give the family time to like,
• 45:48
  Flipper, right, so that she wouldn't have to die.
• 45:50
  But she was stubborn. She was like, you can do
• 45:53
  whatever you want. I'm not compromising.
• 45:55
  What was the compromise specifically?
• 45:56
  We don't want you to. We want you to worship the.
• 45:58
  Yeah, we want you to worship the gods.
• 45:59
  The gods not not your God. Obey the emperor.
• 46:03
  They were calling us atheists because, you know, we considered
• 46:05
  that the Roman gods were devils and there were no gods at all.
• 46:11
  So we have actually the transcript of her trial.
• 46:15
  It is marvelous, absolutely marvelous.
• 46:18
  And in the transcript, the prosecutor is saying, why did
• 46:21
  you defy the emperor and you were forbidden to celebrate your
• 46:25
  liturgy and the Eucharist? And she said, because I'm a
• 46:27
  Christian. He said, I know that she goes,
• 46:29
  you can't be a Christian without the Eucharist and you can't have
• 46:31
  the Eucharist without a Christian.
• 46:32
  It's that simple. He pushed her and he pushed her
• 46:35
  and he pushed her. So finally he she was condemned
• 46:39
  and she was thrown into the local Coliseum in order to be
• 46:43
  gored by a boar, which she was. But this is the part that I love
• 46:47
  so much. The the boar came at her and
• 46:51
  stuck her with his horn, picked her up and threw her.
• 46:55
  And when she was thrown her hair got all messed up and her
• 47:00
  hairpin fell out and she got herself up right.
• 47:05
  She's been gored. She got herself up and she puts
• 47:08
  her hands out and said stop to the animal.
• 47:11
  She finds her hairpin. She fixes her hair, she puts her
• 47:14
  hairpin and then she says come. She calls the animal to finish
• 47:18
  herself off. That is a Christian.
• 47:21
  That is the Christian view of death, the glory of martyrdom.
• 47:25
  There's no. How do we build an appetite for
• 47:27
  that as Western Christians? Well.
• 47:30
  Mostly by telling this story and really, yeah, telling the story
• 47:35
  and respecting it. You know, for her, no greater
• 47:39
  love can a person have than to lay his life down for his
• 47:42
  friend. This is what Jesus did for us
• 47:45
  and he bought us eternal life. And what we want to give back to
• 47:49
  him is something similar. Of course, it doesn't have the
• 47:52
  value that the Son of God's life have, but to offer your life
• 47:55
  back to Christ. And if he chooses to give you
• 47:58
  the great honor of bearing witness to his life in the face
• 48:02
  of death, what greater witness can can be offered?
• 48:07
  And what a recommendation for conversion to the Christian
• 48:09
  faith. You know, as long as we treat
• 48:12
  Christianity like some sort of self help thing that's going to
• 48:15
  make your life better, you know, you can be richer, happier, or
• 48:18
  sexually fulfilled. But what does it have to do with
• 48:21
  Christianity? Forgive me, I don't know that it
• 48:23
  has anything to do with our faith at all.
• 48:24
  Christianity is about literally being joined to the Son of God
• 48:29
  and being established in His Kingdom.
• 48:31
  We're not trying to hold on to this place for us.
• 48:34
  We love this earth because our Father made it.
• 48:37
  But our real home is in the next life.
• 48:40
  Our real home is where Jesus is. Are you, are you in touch with
• 48:43
  Christians in Syria at all right now?
• 48:45
  Yes, I am. And I have lots of Syrians in my
• 48:49
  parish and Palestinians, and they're both in great sorrow.
• 48:56
  In great sorrow. You know, the Syria.
• 48:59
  When I visited Syria in 2010, I was hosted by a wonderful
• 49:04
  metropolitan who was in the southern part of Syria.
• 49:07
  It was just before the civil war broke out, just before the
• 49:10
  jihadis and ISIS really started ransacking the country.
• 49:14
  At that time, there were about 20 million Syrians and two
• 49:16
  million were Christians. That's a only 10% of the
• 49:20
  population. But we have ancient culture.
• 49:23
  They're ancient churches that go all the way back to the very
• 49:26
  beginning of the Christian faith.
• 49:28
  I traveled in all of the bishoprics of Syria all the way
• 49:31
  up to the Turkish border. We even went across the Turkish
• 49:34
  border into what is ancient Antioch, which is where
• 49:37
  Christians were first called Christians, right?
• 49:39
  This is Acts Chapter 11. The first place we actually were
• 49:42
  called Christians was in the greatest of the Roman cities in
• 49:45
  the east. The place where the emperor had
• 49:47
  his palace in the east, the place where he would launch all
• 49:49
  his Persian Wars from the east. This was Paul's missionary hub.
• 49:54
  If you read the actually the apostles, this is the place that
• 49:56
  he launched his his greatest missionary endeavors, his great
• 50:00
  4 missionary journeys. That whole area used to be the
• 50:05
  heart of the Patriarchate of Antioch, one of the five great
• 50:09
  patriarchates together with Rome, Alexandria, Jerusalem,
• 50:13
  Antioch. These these are like the core of
• 50:17
  first Millennium Christianity. Once the war broke out,
• 50:23
  Christians have been, what shall I say, brutally decimated the
• 50:28
  political power at that time and for.
• 50:31
  The war recently the. 2011. And which just for folks
• 50:35
  listening, what is what is that war?
• 50:37
  Yeah, this is the the outbreak of what we would know as the
• 50:44
  successors to al Qaeda, what are called ISIS.
• 50:47
  These are Sunni jihadis who view the murder of Christians who
• 50:56
  resist conversion to to Islam as an imperative.
• 51:00
  I think there's a lot of people who look at the Middle East and
• 51:03
  they just see constant from their, you know, Western vantage
• 51:06
  point, maybe American vantage point, maybe constant turmoil,
• 51:10
  dictators that get deposed, new regimes that, you know, come to
• 51:13
  power warring in between sects of Islam, you know, radical
• 51:17
  Islamists, you know, ISIS, al Qaeda emerging, different sex
• 51:22
  fighting. And then there's Christians who
• 51:24
  are kind of caught up in the middle of the firestorm.
• 51:27
  You know, Islam is the most disruptive historical
• 51:30
  development in the history of Christianity.
• 51:33
  Muhammad was born in 570 and what is now Saudi Arabia.
• 51:37
  And by the time he finished, by 6:30 or so, he had LED 25 raids
• 51:44
  against Jewish and Christian tribes.
• 51:47
  Unprovoked, he established a worldview in Islam that divides
• 51:51
  the whole world into two. You know we do this too as
• 51:54
  Christians, right? We view the whole world in two
• 51:56
  parts. The area that has been
• 51:58
  evangelized, that has heard the good news and has had an
• 52:02
  opportunity to believe in Jesus and to enter into the Kingdom of
• 52:06
  God. And those parts of the world
• 52:07
  that have not yet been evangelized for us.
• 52:09
  That's how Christians are always looking at it.
• 52:11
  Islam views the world in two parts, what they call the House
• 52:14
  of Islam. The House of Islam is where not
• 52:17
  just there are predominance of Muslims, but where Sharia or
• 52:20
  Muslim law is in force. If it's not enforced, there may
• 52:24
  be a majority of Muslims, but they don't consider that truly
• 52:27
  the House of Islam. The rest of the world, you know
• 52:29
  what they call the rest of the world?
• 52:31
  The House of war. That's how a Muslim divides.
• 52:34
  That's, that's the Quran. So you can imagine what that
• 52:38
  means for Christians, what that means for Christians and has
• 52:40
  meant for Christians since 634 when the Muslims came into
• 52:44
  Jerusalem and then into Damascus and then into all of our major
• 52:48
  cities in North Africa, and then started their jihad across the
• 52:51
  Mediterranean Sea, coming into the southern parts of France and
• 52:53
  Spain. What that has meant for us is
• 52:56
  several things. One, if you want to maintain
• 52:59
  your freedom, you want to maintain your rights, you have
• 53:01
  to convert to Islam. If you do that as a Christian,
• 53:04
  you've lost your soul, you've betrayed God.
• 53:07
  You've become what the church calls an apostate.
• 53:10
  God forbid. Most of our people didn't do
• 53:11
  that. Some did.
• 53:12
  You mean you're saying historically or you're saying
• 53:14
  recently? I'm saying since the 7th
• 53:17
  century. Since the 7th century until
• 53:18
  today, until today. Absolutely.
• 53:20
  Until today, this is Islam. It's like it's not a type of
• 53:23
  Islam. It's the idea of this, you know,
• 53:24
  how did the early church win souls, martyrdom and poverty, as
• 53:30
  you'd say, and the influence and love, of course.
• 53:33
  And then how did Islam win its? First time.
• 53:35
  No greater witness Do we have no greater potency than this, that
• 53:40
  we love one another, he said. By this all men will know that
• 53:43
  you're my disciples. What's the ultimate apologetic?
• 53:46
  If you love one another the way I loved you, this is how we won
• 53:49
  the world. Catholics and Orthodox have to
• 53:51
  get together, but that's a that's a whole other.
• 53:53
  We do love each other, of course.
• 53:54
  I think we do. We do, of course, but with Islam
• 53:57
  it's, it was a religion with it's early, you know, centuries
• 54:02
  marked in. Over Lila, there's 100 in my
• 54:06
  count. I used to teach a class at the
• 54:08
  local Christian university called Cal Baptist in my town
• 54:11
  called the Cross and the Crescent the history of
• 54:13
  Christian Muslim relations. When I was teaching that class,
• 54:17
  I read through the Quran many times in preparation for class
• 54:20
  and I noted how many direct commands to violence Muhammad
• 54:25
  gave. My count 100 and 23123, explicit
• 54:31
  commands to do violence to those who resisted the advance of
• 54:34
  Islam and particularly to Christians, including details on
• 54:38
  how to kill us. Stab them in the neck.
• 54:41
  I mean, this is one of his commands.
• 54:43
  It's not, it's not a coincidence that many people, for instance,
• 54:48
  in England who have suffered Islamic violence have been
• 54:51
  stabbed in the neck. People go, oh, they got stabbed
• 54:53
  in the neck because the person was crazy.
• 54:55
  Actually he was just following Mohammed commandments.
• 54:58
  What do you make of moderate Muslims?
• 55:00
  Because obviously, you know, we had Bill Assale on the show
• 55:02
  recently. He's a California assemblyman.
• 55:05
  You know, he's not Riverside County.
• 55:07
  He's adjacent, but you know, really solid guy.
• 55:09
  He's quoting Mother Teresa, you know, in the inner interview.
• 55:13
  Good man, you know, and he's fighting for pro-life.
• 55:15
  He's fighting for marriage. And you know, here he is raised,
• 55:19
  born and raised a Muslim. And still, you know, I, I don't
• 55:21
  get into the details of his faith practice, but you have a
• 55:24
  lot of Muslims like this who or, or a country like Jordan where
• 55:27
  you presumably have, you know, Muslims, Christians, Jew, Jewish
• 55:30
  people or Israel Muslims, Christians and Jewish people
• 55:33
  living together in largely harmony.
• 55:35
  Obviously there's can be some friction around the edges.
• 55:39
  I'm not sure I would describe the coexistence of Christians,
• 55:43
  Muslims and Jews in the Middle East as largely in harmony.
• 55:47
  I'm, I'm playing a devil's advocate to say in some
• 55:49
  cultures, it seems that there can be, you know, if we had a
• 55:53
  Muslim here to get kind of say, hey, I'm a modern.
• 55:56
  The majority there are. There are forms of.
• 55:58
  There. Are forms of Muslims right?
• 56:00
  The, the majority is this are the Sunni and the Sunni have
• 56:03
  given us the hardest time. So I, I mentioned traveling in
• 56:06
  Syria in 2010, 2011, the war broke out and now we don't have
• 56:11
  2,000,000 Christians in Syria anymore.
• 56:14
  Maybe, maybe we have 3 or 400,000.
• 56:17
  Incredible. There used to be.
• 56:19
  How many? 2 million, two million.
• 56:20
  Christians. In Syria, that was just in 2010.
• 56:22
  Used to be a lot more than. 2010, 2010 and now it's down to
• 56:25
  a few. Majority are gone.
• 56:26
  And and they've fled or they've been killed.
• 56:29
  Both give. You an example.
• 56:34
  When I was there, I stayed in the ancient city of Aleppo.
• 56:37
  It's the largest city in Syria in the north.
• 56:39
  I'd love to visit one day. Incredible town, an incredible
• 56:43
  town, literally going back to the time of the apostles.
• 56:45
  So I, I met there, I was hosted by the Metropolitan Archbishop
• 56:48
  Bulosiagi, who was a man of incredible talents and gave us
• 56:55
  a, a wide tour of his metropolis there and all the ministries
• 57:00
  that were going on. He had an Internet Cafe for the
• 57:02
  young people. I played basketball with his,
• 57:05
  with a young people there at his metropolis.
• 57:07
  He had a monastery in his on the third, I think it was a 7th
• 57:10
  floor. It's a 7th floor like
• 57:13
  archeologists and bishopry. And on one of the floors where
• 57:17
  the nuns, it was just an unbelievable, an unbelievable
• 57:19
  place. We went across into Turkey.
• 57:22
  We got to see so many churches there.
• 57:24
  And of course, our ancient cathedral in Antioch, which is
• 57:27
  the home of Saint John Chrysostom, is where he's born
• 57:29
  and raised. Just to the north of there,
• 57:32
  there's a mountain in which 300 monks lived in caves at the time
• 57:38
  the Saint John Chrysostom was born in 347.
• 57:41
  When he was growing up, I mean, that's like what they went to
• 57:43
  see on feast days. They would just walk, you know,
• 57:45
  a mile and a half to the mountain and have a conversation
• 57:48
  with the Syrian ascetic who had been there for 20 years at a
• 57:50
  cave. I mean, this is how they live.
• 57:51
  This is the potency of Christianity.
• 57:54
  Well, it was less than a year after I left Aleppo that on a
• 57:58
  humanitarian mission, Metropolitan Bulos and his
• 58:03
  driver were stopped by Sunni jihadis.
• 58:07
  They pulled his Deacon out of the driver's seat.
• 58:10
  They shot him in the head right in front of him.
• 58:12
  And we have never seen our metropolitan Archbishop since.
• 58:15
  We prayed for him every day in our churches for over 10 years.
• 58:19
  Meaning he was kidnapped. He was kidnapped and presumably
• 58:22
  killed. But you've never had been able
• 58:25
  to find the body. Of Patriarch John the 10th is
• 58:28
  Blood Brothers with Metropolitan Paul.
• 58:31
  Metropolitan Bullos means Paul. Metropolitan Paul and Patriarch
• 58:34
  John are literal brothers. They have a sister, a third
• 58:36
  sister who's a nun in Syria, one of our monasteries.
• 58:39
  So you know that he, the Deacon he was with, was shot.
• 58:42
  Pictures of that. Lord of Mercy, but you don't
• 58:44
  know what happened. To never been able to find our
• 58:46
  patriarch has literally with the collaboration of of the Pope,
• 58:51
  with the collaboration of presidents of countries, have
• 58:53
  put pressure on the Turkish government.
• 58:56
  Some people in Turkey say a judge revealed that he punished
• 59:02
  some jihadis who claim to have murdered him and buried him in
• 59:07
  the sand. But we don't know.
• 59:08
  We just don't know. But this?
• 59:10
  What do you think happened? Do you have a sense of what you
• 59:13
  think? I don't know, but this is this
• 59:16
  is 2013. This is 12 years ago.
• 59:18
  That's a long time not to hear from him, huh?
• 59:20
  It's a long time not to hear from him.
• 59:23
  And so we are our patriarch finally did replace him.
• 59:26
  So we have a new metropolitan Archbishop there.
• 59:30
  But just to bring this from 2011 to today, when the President
• 59:36
  Assad was driven out of Damascus and fled to Russia and the
• 59:42
  jihadis. The Syrian President.
• 59:43
  That's right, the president of Syria who had been president for
• 59:46
  many years and succeeded his father, they are in by the
• 59:50
  Western media considered to be terrible tyrants.
• 59:53
  All I can speak for is the reality that under Christian and
• 59:57
  under this family dictatorship, the Christians have fared much
• 1:00:03
  better than we have fared under Sunni Muslims.
• 1:00:06
  And what you mean by that is there haven't been as many
• 1:00:08
  outright acts of violence. The family comes from a Muslim
• 1:00:12
  sect called the Alawites, and the Alawites are kind of a mix
• 1:00:16
  of Christian and Muslim and don't practice jihad like the
• 1:00:21
  Sunnis do. So Christians have been able to
• 1:00:24
  have a little bit of peace. I'll tell you though, the
• 1:00:27
  current Archbishop, so this is only 7 several months old now.
• 1:00:31
  The current Archbishop of Aleppo, as soon as the new
• 1:00:36
  temporary leader in Syria who is a full blown ISIS jihadi, that
• 1:00:41
  is his history. He came from the north all the
• 1:00:45
  way down to the capital in Damascus with American weapons.
• 1:00:48
  That is very, very concerning. To me and his American weapons
• 1:00:51
  were received How? From our government, directly we
• 1:00:55
  have been supporting jihadis. They went from being our enemies
• 1:01:00
  to our agents because our government has been very opposed
• 1:01:06
  to the Assad regime for decades. And this is a.
• 1:01:10
  Comment just, you know, obviously people listening are
• 1:01:12
  probably familiar with this, but it's a common American, you
• 1:01:15
  know, tactic to, you know, create instability in some of
• 1:01:18
  these regions because we see, you know, the the the the
• 1:01:21
  prevailing power as we wanted to stabilize, destabilize the
• 1:01:25
  prevailing power, but then you end up arming, you know someone
• 1:01:28
  else who might become the prevailing power that.
• 1:01:30
  Isn't your friend. We're very arrogant from our
• 1:01:32
  perspective, from our. Perspective.
• 1:01:34
  Pure arrogance. I think we're very arrogant.
• 1:01:36
  I think we're an imperial power. Traditional Americana being
• 1:01:41
  concerned about our own country is called considered
• 1:01:43
  protectionism today. I think that's just called being
• 1:01:45
  an American respecting our founding fathers who
• 1:01:49
  intentionally spoke against imperial ambitions.
• 1:01:54
  And this is this is how we live. We try to rule the world.
• 1:01:56
  Very arrogant and in my opinion. The argument from the rule of
• 1:01:59
  the world people is we're trying to maintain enough, you know,
• 1:02:02
  American influence and and power to protect our interests over
• 1:02:05
  overboard over abroad. Excuse me in in your view it's
• 1:02:09
  like, no, we look, you're literally the weapons we gave
• 1:02:11
  you now are now being used to slaughter Christians.
• 1:02:14
  We aren't who we think we are. We used to be a a much more God
• 1:02:19
  fearing, much more conscientious people.
• 1:02:21
  We have become a debased, immoral country that has
• 1:02:28
  promoted, I mean, for goodness sake, sweetheart, we have, we
• 1:02:30
  have an ambassador for the promoter of the LGBTS.
• 1:02:33
  Had right? No and.
• 1:02:35
  So he's still, he's still in. Kept them in power.
• 1:02:38
  This is interesting. Yeah, literally.
• 1:02:40
  He's an ambassador to like a like.
• 1:02:42
  An ideological ambassador that promotes the LGBT agenda across
• 1:02:46
  the world, that threatens poor African countries with get
• 1:02:48
  having their aid cut off unless they start promoting
• 1:02:51
  homosexuality. Doge just forget to cut this
• 1:02:53
  guy. I mean, hopefully they're
• 1:02:54
  cutting. I'm not surprised though,
• 1:02:56
  because Father, Planned Parenthood has still not been
• 1:02:58
  cut by Doge. I mean, all the big talk of
• 1:03:00
  we're going to go on and, you know, cut the, you know, this,
• 1:03:03
  that experiment for transgender rats, and that's maybe $20
• 1:03:06
  million. We're spending $700 million on
• 1:03:09
  Planned Parenthood domestically. Domestically.
• 1:03:12
  Can we? And nothing has been done here.
• 1:03:14
  We said, you know what is it? Talk to you about Planned
• 1:03:16
  Parenthood with your background. I have my own questions.
• 1:03:20
  Before I do, can I say one last thing about Syria?
• 1:03:22
  Yeah, of. Course, and I want to ask how
• 1:03:23
  your friends are faring, because this is happening right now.
• 1:03:26
  Syrian Christians are being chased down by ISIS jihadists.
• 1:03:31
  When the leader of ISIS was coming to take the seat of the
• 1:03:35
  former president in Damascus, in the capital, he passed 1st
• 1:03:38
  through Aleppo, which I was just telling you about I was at in
• 1:03:40
  2010, and he sent a note to the Archbishop there, who is the
• 1:03:45
  successor of my friend. You know what he said?
• 1:03:50
  I'll have your head. Yeah, that was that moderate
• 1:03:55
  current man sitting are. Are the Syrian Christians and as
• 1:03:58
  well as your Bishop, are they fleeing?
• 1:03:59
  What what? What's to be done?
• 1:04:01
  Our Bishop responded back. I was so proud of him.
• 1:04:03
  He said come and take it, but I'm not leaving my people.
• 1:04:06
  No way. Yeah.
• 1:04:06
  That was his message. How does one respond formally to
• 1:04:09
  I'm going to behead you with the Did he send a text message?
• 1:04:12
  How did that communication I? Don't know if it was text, but I
• 1:04:15
  don't know how the message came, but the message came.
• 1:04:17
  So the jihadist lead he. Didn't have time to stop because
• 1:04:20
  he was he had to get to Damascus to see power over the country.
• 1:04:23
  So he was passing through Aleppo.
• 1:04:25
  But he's just, he wanted to make, he wanted to register the.
• 1:04:27
  Guy to walk to the steps I wish I knew rectory and say I'll have
• 1:04:30
  your head and he says come and take it like how do I?
• 1:04:33
  Wish I knew. It's incredible.
• 1:04:35
  Yeah, it is incredible and it's very, it was a very Christian
• 1:04:38
  answer. Do they have do they have any
• 1:04:40
  Christian militias to defend their churches or homes?
• 1:04:43
  I mean, what's the from what you can share and what you know of
• 1:04:47
  our Christian brothers and sisters right now in Aleppo?
• 1:04:48
  What what are they? What is the plan?
• 1:04:51
  The plan is to of our patriarch issued an incredibly bold
• 1:04:57
  statement in writing as soon as this happened, saying that we
• 1:05:01
  Christians are the children of Syria.
• 1:05:04
  We were here hundreds of years before the Muslims came here.
• 1:05:08
  We are children of this land and we are going nowhere, and we ask
• 1:05:12
  for a democratic constitution that affirms the rights of all
• 1:05:18
  religious minorities in Syria. This is what he published.
• 1:05:23
  We pray for him, for his safety, and we hope that that will come
• 1:05:25
  to pass. So is he recommending to
• 1:05:28
  Christian families to stick it out?
• 1:05:30
  Our patriarch has been a champion of not leaving our home
• 1:05:34
  country and accepting whatever comes.
• 1:05:39
  But many of our people have come.
• 1:05:41
  So I have in my parish many, many Syrian Orthodox Christians
• 1:05:44
  who have fled Syria in the last 10 years, or in my parish.
• 1:05:49
  Are you in touch with any Syrian families right now?
• 1:05:52
  Yes. And how are they feeling about
• 1:05:54
  the violence that's unfolding around them?
• 1:05:57
  As you can imagine, extremely uncertain if you come to my
• 1:06:04
  parish, I hope you will visit sometime.
• 1:06:06
  It's a jewel to as an architectural jewel, my parish.
• 1:06:11
  And when you walk in, you'll see beautiful white marble icon wall
• 1:06:16
  iconostasis and beautiful white marble altar, including a
• 1:06:20
  Kabuklean, which like a sea boream like would be over the
• 1:06:24
  high altar in Saint Peter's. It's a very classic first
• 1:06:27
  Millennium element over an altar.
• 1:06:30
  All of this, all of the marble, all of the carving was done
• 1:06:34
  actually in central Syria by a young Syrian Christian artisan
• 1:06:40
  who came and spent months in America building this and
• 1:06:43
  installing this for me. The last component of his work
• 1:06:47
  was to build a ciborium over the altar, which is made of this
• 1:06:50
  incredible Maplewood and carved over there.
• 1:06:53
  And he started it just as the war broke out.
• 1:06:55
  In 2011, he sent us an e-mail from a refugee camp in Turkey
• 1:07:00
  letting us know that his home had been destroyed.
• 1:07:04
  Just just in the last. No, this was 2000 and. 11 the
• 1:07:06
  first, yeah. The first time ago and that his
• 1:07:11
  that probably I should find another artisan because the
• 1:07:14
  chances for him to return to his home, he was from Homs in the
• 1:07:18
  middle of the country was very small.
• 1:07:22
  I said, look, let's just wait and see what happens for a year.
• 1:07:24
  So we waited a year. He sent us another e-mail.
• 1:07:27
  He said it's worse. So we waited another year and
• 1:07:30
  contacted him. It's worse.
• 1:07:32
  He was doing this by e-mail from his laptop in a refugee camp in
• 1:07:35
  southern Turkey. Eventually.
• 1:07:40
  I have a Deacon. He's from Lebanon.
• 1:07:42
  He's been my Deacon for almost 30 years.
• 1:07:44
  And Chrome, he's 75 years old. It's my right arm.
• 1:07:47
  His brother was visiting from Lebanon and he heard us crying.
• 1:07:50
  One liturgy after the Mass was over, we were talking and he
• 1:07:55
  heard us saying, you know, probably we're never going to
• 1:07:57
  get our siborum, we're never going to get our Kabuklian.
• 1:08:00
  And God put in his heart to hire someone, a driver, to drive at
• 1:08:07
  night from Lebanon into central Syria to try to find the man's
• 1:08:11
  workshop, which he did. They broke into it and they
• 1:08:15
  found the wooden pillars cut for the Siborium.
• 1:08:19
  And this is a war-torn area. This is the war was going on.
• 1:08:21
  So there's the. Number cover mission.
• 1:08:23
  The bullets are flying while he drove in.
• 1:08:24
  That's crazy. He drives it out safely.
• 1:08:27
  They drive. They drive out all the pillars.
• 1:08:28
  He hires a Carver. Well, actually, he contacts the
• 1:08:32
  refugee. Bias is his name Bias Kachuk.
• 1:08:36
  God bless you, brother. If you're listening to this and
• 1:08:38
  asks him, do you have any drawings?
• 1:08:40
  And he goes that on your computer.
• 1:08:42
  He goes, yeah, I have CAD documents of what your suborium
• 1:08:44
  is going to look like. He sends them to them by e-mail.
• 1:08:47
  He hires a Carver. He has the ciborium carved.
• 1:08:50
  And one day a couple years ago, I'm in, I'm at my parish, and an
• 1:08:54
  18 wheel truck drives up with 11 crates.
• 1:08:57
  I said, what is this? They said, is this Saint Andrew
• 1:08:59
  Orthodox Church? Are you Father Josiah?
• 1:09:00
  I said, yeah, I didn't order 11 crates on an 18 wheel truck.
• 1:09:03
  Yeah, you did. And he unloaded it.
• 1:09:05
  We took it apart. It was the ciborium, Yeah, which
• 1:09:07
  is now over our alter. Look at that love and
• 1:09:10
  dedication. This is how our people live in
• 1:09:12
  the middle. East.
• 1:09:12
  But here's the thing, what can we do for them?
• 1:09:15
  Because we are here in the West, we have endless material
• 1:09:20
  opportunities, we have endless freedoms and protections.
• 1:09:23
  Obviously we're fighting our culture wars here and there's
• 1:09:25
  spiritual rot that we're suffering and there's much to do
• 1:09:28
  here. But there are people literally
• 1:09:31
  facing the loss of everything in Syria right now.
• 1:09:33
  Democratic Republic of Congo is another country.
• 1:09:36
  ISIS militants literally beheaded over 100 men, women and
• 1:09:41
  children in a church. I mean really horrific acts of
• 1:09:44
  violence against their brothers and sisters in other.
• 1:09:46
  Places happening in our Country Life.
• 1:09:48
  I don't know exactly how it's going to end up, but I've never
• 1:09:51
  seen what's happening today. The number of young people who
• 1:09:55
  are seeking Jesus and are abandoning atheism, which was so
• 1:10:01
  popular for the last 15 years. This whole new atheist
• 1:10:04
  ridiculous movement, which was so intellectually shallow but
• 1:10:07
  appealed because there was so much darkness in our own
• 1:10:09
  culture. People fell into it.
• 1:10:11
  So many are leaving this, so many are becoming Christians, so
• 1:10:14
  many, so many really want to root themselves in Christ.
• 1:10:17
  We see this incredible seismic shift politically if this
• 1:10:23
  continues, and I pray it does, and we can recover some of our
• 1:10:27
  Christian sense in this nation, if we can return a little bit
• 1:10:33
  from our globalized imperial ambitions and start remembering
• 1:10:38
  who we are, that we're a Christian nation, that that was
• 1:10:42
  in all of our documents. This was in Supreme Court
• 1:10:44
  decision after Supreme Court decision until the middle of the
• 1:10:46
  20th century. We were never afraid of or
• 1:10:49
  embarrassed about being a Christian nation until recently.
• 1:10:52
  If we can do that, then we could become champions again of
• 1:10:56
  religious freedom. What does it look like to be a
• 1:10:58
  champion of religious freedom for a Syrian who's about to get
• 1:11:01
  his head chopped off because he happens to be a Orthodox Bishop?
• 1:11:09
  There is plenty of evidence to show that when our leadership,
• 1:11:16
  when American leadership, wants to project important messages to
• 1:11:20
  the world, we do. Plenty of evidence.
• 1:11:23
  We've just been promoting the wrong things.
• 1:11:26
  So you think that there is actual you you kind of oppose
• 1:11:29
  imperialism and, you know, you said maybe it'd be more
• 1:11:32
  protectionist, but there are things that our government can
• 1:11:35
  do to protect Christians in the Middle East and what and and I
• 1:11:38
  think, you know, President Trump, what what do we want
• 1:11:40
  President Trump and his administration?
• 1:11:42
  What posture should they have we.
• 1:11:44
  Have an ambassador for religious freedom.
• 1:11:46
  The promotion of the LGBT movement isn't the only
• 1:11:49
  ideological ambassadorship we have, right?
• 1:11:51
  It used to be Sam, Sam Brownback, I don't know, the
• 1:11:53
  former governor of of Kansas. I don't know if it's still him
• 1:11:56
  or not. Between us.
• 1:11:57
  I didn't think he did a very good job.
• 1:11:59
  But we absolutely can become concerned about it without this
• 1:12:06
  idea that somehow the abandonment of the priority of
• 1:12:11
  Christianity in the United States is normative for us.
• 1:12:14
  Have you noticed how many Hindus are becoming leaders of the
• 1:12:21
  political, conservative political movement in America?
• 1:12:25
  Beautiful people, beautiful people.
• 1:12:27
  I have nothing against them. People like Vivek Ramaswamy,
• 1:12:31
  Tulsi Gabbard, JD Vance's wife, they're all Hindus and they all
• 1:12:35
  claim to be practicing Hindus. That does that.
• 1:12:40
  Does polytheism not concern us? Have you ever studied who
• 1:12:45
  Krishna is? Who Vishnu is?
• 1:12:47
  Where you just actually had Sean McDowell on the show talking
• 1:12:50
  about the differences between Hinduism and Christianity and
• 1:12:54
  how dramatically different they are.
• 1:12:57
  The outcomes for the human race extremely difficult to
• 1:13:01
  different. I visited Mother Teresa once
• 1:13:04
  when I was young. Oh, wow.
• 1:13:06
  Yeah, I was. How amazing.
• 1:13:07
  I was how old would I have been, 19?
• 1:13:10
  In Calcutta. Yeah, in Calcutta I went to her
• 1:13:12
  House of the dying. As a Presbyterian young young
• 1:13:14
  chap. Yep.
• 1:13:16
  See, the seed was planted there. I, I didn't actually get to be
• 1:13:20
  with her, which was much sadness, but I got to be with
• 1:13:22
  her nuns and I get to got, I got to go into their House of the
• 1:13:25
  dying and watch their incredible ministry of being with people
• 1:13:31
  who are dying, watching them feed and give, drink and touch
• 1:13:37
  and pray over people who are dying.
• 1:13:39
  Right across from the House of the dying mother is a, a Hindu
• 1:13:44
  temple. And I came out of the House of
• 1:13:47
  the dying and I'm 19 years old. And the man who spoke of the
• 1:13:51
  broken English who was kind of the doorkeeper to the temple,
• 1:13:54
  tried to get me and all of my friends to go into the temple.
• 1:13:57
  And he said, oh, come. And I said no, no thanks.
• 1:14:00
  And you could see the idol, which was this massive idol of
• 1:14:06
  Vishnu. Very scary blood, people's
• 1:14:11
  heads. I mean, violent.
• 1:14:13
  I mean, the depiction of the Indian gods are just atrocious
• 1:14:18
  and water pouring over the idol. And then people, men, the
• 1:14:23
  streets of Calcutta are filthy, absolutely standing, washing
• 1:14:27
  themselves and drinking this water.
• 1:14:29
  And he's trying to get this 19 year old Presbyterian boy to
• 1:14:32
  come in. I'm like, no, I'm not going to
• 1:14:34
  do that. And then he looks at me and he
• 1:14:35
  goes, Billy Graham, Billy Graham, come here.
• 1:14:37
  I said, I'm sure he did. And I'm sure he gave a really
• 1:14:39
  great sermon right here about the vanity of idolatry.
• 1:14:45
  Do you think that you're we're going to see some good things
• 1:14:47
  from this administration when it comes to addressing the
• 1:14:50
  persecution of Christians? I was contacted recently by a
• 1:14:55
  number of very politically active Orthodox Christians who
• 1:14:59
  are trying to create a Christian lobby group for Congress that
• 1:15:08
  has as its goal issues of religious freedom.
• 1:15:12
  If we could collaborate, if Catholic and Orthodox Christians
• 1:15:16
  could collaborate in this area. Count me in.
• 1:15:19
  This would be incredible. This would be absolutely
• 1:15:21
  incredible. I think that President Trump
• 1:15:24
  obviously has made incredible choices.
• 1:15:27
  I think JD Vance shows great interest in this.
• 1:15:29
  He's obviously an articulate Catholic Christian.
• 1:15:32
  The things that I've heard coming out of his mouth with
• 1:15:34
  regards to God, with regards to love, very articulate Christian
• 1:15:40
  sentiments. Could something like a Christian
• 1:15:45
  group forum that could advocate for religious freedom around the
• 1:15:50
  world? I think so.
• 1:15:51
  I think so, especially because our current leadership seems
• 1:15:54
  quite open to doing radically new things and also disposing of
• 1:15:59
  old traditional things that are completely worthless and
• 1:16:01
  sometimes harmful. The I hope Doge will just
• 1:16:04
  continue and expand because we are dying.
• 1:16:09
  We're really dying as a culture. This is my sense and this is
• 1:16:13
  showing some sense of reviving a traditional American spirit.
• 1:16:18
  You know, I never could imagine my my father and his father were
• 1:16:21
  always very active politically. My grandfather, Newton Bradford
• 1:16:25
  Trenham, started the Taxpayer Association of California, ran
• 1:16:30
  for state Senate. I have pictures of my father
• 1:16:32
  riding a bike up to Sacramento in order to advertise his
• 1:16:35
  father's campaign with a a little statement on the back of
• 1:16:38
  his bicycle. You know, vote for Trenham for
• 1:16:39
  Senate. The things that I was taught
• 1:16:42
  growing up about what basic to be a basic American meant,
• 1:16:47
  owning your responsibility, balancing your budget.
• 1:16:50
  Nobody talks about this stuff. Dave Ramsey.
• 1:16:53
  Yeah, Dave, someone who's not in politics, right?
• 1:16:56
  Yeah, someone who's not in politics.
• 1:16:58
  So I'm hoping that that we might be able to put the brakes on our
• 1:17:02
  very fast and decline into oblivion and remember God,
• 1:17:08
  remember the unborn, remember marriage, Amen.
• 1:17:12
  And maybe get some dignity back. I hope so.
• 1:17:16
  Well, Father, I appreciate very much you coming here and, and
• 1:17:20
  just the voice that you are on these cultural issues and these
• 1:17:23
  political issues to the degree that I know you speak.
• 1:17:25
  And and Father Josiah, how can people find your work?
• 1:17:28
  If you go to patristicnectar.org, you'll find
• 1:17:32
  most of our work there. That website connects to an app.
• 1:17:36
  The Patristic Nectar app has more than 150 entire series of
• 1:17:42
  theological teachings, from expositions of biblical books to
• 1:17:47
  large theological talk topics to thematic studies on politics and
• 1:17:51
  other things like that, as well as daily professionally recorded
• 1:17:56
  lives of the Saints for every day of the year.
• 1:17:59
  A complete recording of the Filo Calia, which is a an incredible
• 1:18:02
  collection of spiritual life books written between the 4th
• 1:18:06
  and the 15th century and cherished very much in the East,
• 1:18:09
  but also in the West. And it's all for free.
• 1:18:12
  Beautiful Patristic Nectar app. Amazing.
• 1:18:16
  Thank you so much, Father Josiah.
• 1:18:17
  Thanks Lila for having me real pleasure.
• 1:18:20
  Thanks so much for listening to this episode with Father Josiah.
• 1:18:22
  Let me know if you think we should have on a a debate.
• 1:18:25
  We could have father Josiah. We could have Alex back from
• 1:18:28
  voice of reason could be interesting.
• 1:18:29
  They're already friends. Let me know you guys think and
• 1:18:31
  don't forget to subscribe if you're not already subscribed.
• 1:18:33
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• 1:18:36
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• 1:18:40
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• 1:18:43
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• 1:18:46
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• 1:18:50
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• 1:18:54
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• 1:18:56
  bring souls to Jesus.