Jay Dyer - The Case for Orthodoxy： Addressing Common Catholic & Protestant Arguments

and your transition into Orthodoxy. So if you will just take people through a little bit of that history and you realizing that the Orthodox Church was the one true church.

study the history of the church more in depth. I got into theology and philosophy when I was eighteen nineteen, started studying that at the academic level for college, and then continued studying that in a related way in grad school, not so much the theology per se, but worldviews and the idea of what we call worldview warfare, and how systems and worldviews and paradigms work in people's as the

models of people's belief systems. And then in my twenties I decided that Protestantism didn't really have a lot to offer, so I got really interested in the history of the Church, as I said, and at that time, a lot of the online discussion for the debates in their sphere were basically just Protestant and Catholics. I didn't know about the Orthodox Church in my twenties. I wasn't averse to it, I just didn't know much about it, and so I

thought the debate was basically just Protestant versus Catholics. So I became a Roman Catholic in two thousand and three, I believe, and was in that world for eight or nine years, and a lot of I think when you live that for a while, you start to notice there's some pretty significant problems. But you don't want to jump ship too quick. So I attended the traditional Latin Mass for many years, and I was really into Thomas Aquinas and Tomistic philosophy and trying to be as traditionally minded

as possible. As the Vatican continued to be more and more liberal, and eventually I just felt like there weren't solid answers to the questions that I had as Roman Catholic, and so I started studying Orthodoxy in about two thousand and seven. I made some friends that were Orthodox, and they recommended a lot of books. I was seeing a girl at the time and we were considering both with entering the Orthodox Church. At the same time, we were probably going to be married, so I went through the

catechumen even back then and decided not to convert. So I held off and decided I would just kind of wait. I wasn't really ready. I have so many, so much theological ideological baggage from my previous beliefs as a Roman Catholic, that it took me a really long time to work

through a lot of the issues. So I just held off and kind of got burned out even on going to church and going to the sort of standard Catholic services, and I was a little wild for those years in my late twenties early thirties, and then by about mid thirties, I guess I started getting a little more serious and getting back into reading a lot of philosophy texts, reading a lot of certain church fathers like Saint Maximistic Professor

and certain Orthodox theologians like Vladimir Lawski or Father Dmitri stun Eloy. They stand out out as books that really writers that really influenced me to eventually convert. So about twenty fourteen I was getting more serious and kind of going back to church, and I guess it was about twenty seventeen that I went back into being catechumen and formally joined. So twenty seventeen catechumen. I think I was

Chris made in twenty eighteen. So yeah, So that was my short form journey during the period when I wasn't really to go into church in my late twenties and early thirties. I didn't become an atheist. I think a lot of people have atheists phases or something, but I more so was just reading a lot of different perennial text neoplatonic stuff. So I wasn't atheist, but I was kind of interested in a lot of different positions. And yeah, I would say Father Stefrom Rose two had an important

impact as well. His book Nihilism Roots of the Modern Revolution impacted me pretty significantly, probably in twenty fIF teen sixteen. So that's the short version of and then here we are today, where you know, I've spent a lot of time kind of discussing orthodox philosophy and theology for the last five or six years.

it's unscientific. And I'm talking about like say, double evolutionists, like it's to me, you know, you are placing your blind faith in a theory that has never been proven, the same way that someone with a religion in a belief in a god would. I mean, that's the way that I've always viewed it. And so, you know, I

used to do People may not know this. I was, you know, in the Evangelical Church for many years, used to do street ministry, you know, talking with people on the street of people of all worldviews, very very highly Muslim populated area, so I got to talk to a lot of Muslims as well. It was great. I loved it. I loved doing it because I love people and I loved discussing world views, and so that was something I was very passionate about. But it was from an Evangelical stance.

And then it was really during the COVID era that I returned to Orthodoxy, which is you know, I was baptized Orthodox as a child, and really you know, spent a few years there. It was about eight years in

the Evangelical Church, so long time. And and and you know what I've found, Jay was a lot of unlearning has happened since that time of what I thought was correct doctrine, what I thought was correct theology, and there were a lot of sticking points for me, you know, coming to realize the truth about Orthodoxy that exist for a lot of Protestants these days. When I talk to my friends from my former church and I've returned to Orthodoxy, they think that I've become an idolator, an image worshiper,

you know, all of this kind of stuff. So I want to focus on that with you, in terms of the you know, the common misconceptions or the common arguments that a lot of Protestants bring up. You know, for example, you worship saints. Let's just start with the biggest one.

imagery is somehow inherently idolatrous. But yeah, I remember I kind of worked through a lot of those issues back when I was, you know, in my early twenties kind of sussing out between protest and Catholic, And I remember going to a church and seeing relics for the first time, and I remember thinking it was a little odd. It

never really experienced that being you know, raised Baptists. But the logic of it is pretty solid if you you know, if you're familiar with the Old Testament, especially because we have stories where the bones of Elisha, right, that people get raised from the dead because they're exposed to those bones. In the Book of Back, we see you know, Paul casting out demons through you know, cloths that he that he had, that we're part, that we're near his body.

We see Jesus's garments heal people, and so physical matter has the ability to take on the power or what we call the divine energies and the Orthodox sphere. So when I think, when we start to understand it from that perspective, that the point is that we would be participants in the divine energies, and that we ourselves in our bodies, even not just our minds or our souls, but our bodies become participants in the divine life as well,

and that's the point of the resurrection. The resurrection is really the future eschatological end times reality that begins in the here and the now with the energies that we were take of in this life, and those divine energies are really just what we mean the Orthocers by grace. So it's an uncreated life, power and reality that comes to us not by our works, but by the grace

of God. That's what we participate in. So it's a much it's more fleshed out, I guess you could say metaphysical notion of what grace is, rather than the typical Protestant idea that grace is just God's disposition towards you. So we do agree that there is a dispositional element that you move away from being kind of adverse to God to now being the friend of God or to being sons of God, et cetera. But to be in that role requires also the transformation of the person in

a real metaphysical sense. So that's our view of grace and what it is. And you know, we see that in text like John seventeen, where Jesus says that he came to give us a share in the glory that he had with the Father before the foundation of the world. And of course glory, God's glory is not a creature, right, it's an uncreated reality. So we become partakers of the uncreated reality of God without participating in the divine essence itself.

So we'll never become by nature what God is, but we do become like God by grace, and that's what we call theosis. And so that's the essence interview distinction that you probably hear a lot of people in Orthodox Church talk about. That's our conception of grace, and it also underlies the conception that we have of why would we why we would ask saints to intercede or believe that, you know, relics or icons have the ability to be positive influences in our life in a conduit of grace sense,

so they become kind of sacramental realities for us. And it's all premised on the incarnation itself. Right, you have the second person of the Godhead, the Logos, assuming human nature, and by that very action of assuming it, healing it, repairing it, and making it itself a channel of grace. So Likewise, other physical material objects can also become channels of grace. So we don't worship them because they're material

in themselves. They're still creatures, but those creatures can become condos of grace, just as we can as individual people, and our bodies even become conduits. And so that's the theological meaning behind relics, and that's why relics existed in the Old Testament and they continue to exist into the New Testament Church. And it's the same principle behind why For example, in the Book of Revelation, if you read chapters five to eight, when John sees into heaven, he

sees a very elaborate, ornate worship service. In that liturgical worship service, it's very ordered, smells, bells, incense, vestiments, elders, right, priesthood offering, sacrifice going on in heaven. We believe that that's actually the exact same service going on in the Orthodox Church. And so that's why it's a reality. It's not just symbols for us. It's a symbol and a reality at the same time. And so likewise, we can ask those people who have gone on before us in

the life of the Church to pray for us. So technically speaking, we're not praying to them like their God. We're asking them as fellow intercessors to pray. And that's why in the Book of Revelation, John sees the martyrs offering the prayers of the saints on the earth, and so that's the whole principle behind the intercession of the saints right there.

between God and men, Jesus Christ. Why would you pray to a saint?

with Christ to bring people to salvation. And so sometimes in the technical theological terminology this is just called middle salvation, and it just means that the person that brings you to salvation is in a sense a savior for you. Doesn't mean that they are literally Jesus. It just means that they cooperated in that work. You read the Book of Amos, for example, this is an idea even in the Old Testament, that God decides not to met out

the full punishment on Israel because Amos interceded. So intercession is something that's very real in those examples. And again, the saints that are in heaven are not what John is seeing is not the martyrs at the end of the world. He's seeing the people that were martyred in his day. So if you look at the Book of Revelation, it starts by saying the things that are listed are

to come to pass. And the traditional acts of Jesus of the Church was never strictly speaking, anything like pre tribulation, rapture pre millennialism that exist as an early theory, but by the time of the Second Ecumenical Council, and then by the Third Ecumenical Council, it's excluded. And that's why the Creed says, whose kingdom shall have no end? So christ Kingdom is not a thousand year kingdom. A thousand years is just as symbolic as when it says God

owns the cattle on a thousand hills. Does that mean that on thousand on hill one thousand and one that's not owned by God. No, it's just a symbolic time that expresses a really long ay honor era. And so christ Kingdom, as you notice in the Gospels, is where the king is. And so Jesus says, the Kingdom of God has not come with signs, it comes it's within you. And so the kingdom is an internal spiritual reality wherever the Holy Spirit is. So the Kingdom is the Church.

And that's why Matthew sixteen he identifies it as the institution that he sets up that the gates of Hell would not prevail against it. And Peter and the Apostles, not just Peter, but Peter and the Apostles very Matthew sixteen and Matthew eighteen have a collegial reality that is identified with the Kingdom. The kingdom is chaired by the princes of the New Covenant, who Jesus later when he institutes the Lord's Supper, says, you will sit with me

on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel. Okay, the twelve Tribes of Israel is the new Israel. The spiritual reality that Matthew twenty two, twenty three, and twenty four elucidate replaced the Old Testament Israel reality. So there's something evil inherently about Israel in the Old Testament sense, or not genetically evil or anything like that. It was a typological reality that's fulfilled in the spiritual kingdom of

the Church. But spiritual, as many evangelicals think, does not mean anti physical, it doesn't mean antihistorical. It's a very historic institutional reality that's set up at the time of christ first coming. And the other element that I think evangelicals of Protestants oftentimes miss out on is the notion of Pentecost. Pentecost, especially if you look in Acts two and when it cites Joel three, Joel is not primarily talking about the end of the world. It might have

an application to the end of the world. But when Acts two cites Joel about the Holy the Spirit will fall upon your descendants and your men, your women, your children will see visions, there'll be signs in the heavens. That's all fulfilled explicitly at Pentecost, and so the First Advent is typically where the locus of the action is. That most evangelicals and pre millennialists boot to the end of the world, which makes all of these important prophecies

and fulfillments irrelevant. Because if Jesus is predicting in Luke twenty one the destruction of Jerusalem in seventy eighty, then what a powerful attestation to the veracity of the Gospels that is fulfilled in seventy eight. Now I don't mean everything. I don't believe the second Coming, but you'll find many, many passages where Jesus says that he would come, you know, on the clouds, and that he would punish you know, Israel,

and so forth. Again. Luke twenty one, because it's written to a product to a gentile audience, is a lot more specific than what you get in Matthew twenty four. So Lake twenty one describes it in a very clear way that when you speakin to the audience there in Jesus presence, see Jerusalem surrounded by enemies, know that it's time, its desolation is near. That's exactly what happened a few decades later, because he describes this for his immediate audience,

that they would see these things occur. And that's why, whether it's Athenacious, or whether it's Saint John Chrysostom, or whether it's Saint Cyril of Alexandria, all the earliest, really important theologians of the Church, the ones that solidified the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of Christology for us, they all believe that that was referring to seventy eight. They didn't primarily make it about the end of the world.

I do think that seventy eight and the destruction of the Temple, which is what Hebrews is talking about, that's the end of the Old Covenant system, which is demonstrated by the events of seventy eight when Titus Vespasian destroys the Temple in Jerusalem. That's a sign that the Old Covenants done the New Covenant is here. The New Coven is the fulfillment of all those old Covenant types, and

the New Coven is the reality. So what Protestanism Evangelicalism typically does, and it's not always intentional, is that rather than accepting the realities that the New Covenant brings, they typically want to go back to the symbolic structure of the Old Testament. Oh, Baptism just a symbol, the Lord's Supper just a symbol, right. The church is just this

fallible human institution. That's a symbol, you know. And the New Testament, the Church is said to be the body of the god Man or the theanthroposts, the god Man, that's the body of Christ. We are the extension of the incarnation the churches. So there's not a whole lot of churches that can lay claim to that. And if you look at the study of the first thousand years of Christianity, and there is one institution that's the Orthodox Church at least least claim to that.

church isn't really operating how it used to. And the response to me was, we'll sell everything you have and give it to me and then see how we operate, which was a fair challenge. But you know, you hear that from a lot of evangelicals, and we need to return to the Book of Acts and all of this sort of stuff. And yet if you read the Book of Acts through a non Protestant lens, you'll actually see the established of the original church and so all the beginnings of it. So can you talk us through the

history of the establishment of the church? Why is the Orthodox Church the original Church?

the apostles, or apsolute succession. And we find this in Paul's epistles as well, that Paul says he laid hands on Timothy and he tells Timothy not to lay hands on anyone else in Ephesus hastily, because through the laying on of hands, you have the transmission of the gift and power of the Holy Spirit for the office of the bishop. And that is not in Protestants, and Protestism does not have a right or a theology typically where they recognize any sort of historic succession, do they laying

on of hands back to the apostles. But that's exactly what Paul says in his epistles to Timothy, and he says basically that I point, did you no one else to be the authority, my representative, my successor in Ephesus, and you do Likewise, that's apisodic succession. So that's our reading not just of the Book of Acts, but also

the book the Books that Paul wrote. And if we look at the Book of Acts, we see this point that I mentioned earlier about Pentecost, which is that in John fourteen to sixteen, Jesus really lays out the role of the Holy Spirit in the life and history of the Church. So if we understand this is a real historical context here where Jesus is saying that I will send the Holy Spirit. He will come and empower you.

I will never leave you and never forsake you. The Spirit will lead you and guide you to all truth. The gates of Hell will not prevail against the Church. Then when that happens in Acts two, that historical church can't lose. The Spirit can't lose, the faith can't be conquered. There might be areas or churches that are part of the universal Church that fall away, even patriarch's bishops fall away,

but the whole entire entity can't fail. And so that's why we believe that the Orthodox Church has maintained and continued that consistent testimony. And when you read the first thousand years, you find out that you know, one of the common Protestant objections, for example, is that, oh, the Church changed and became pagan at the Council of Nicea. So when I first started studying this back in two thousand and three, I bought the Church Father's set, all

thirty eight volumes of it. I didn't read all the thirty eight volumes, but I went through first the early Church Fathers. So when you read the post Apostolic Fathers right after the death of John and Paul and all those people. You realize that Clement, Ignacious Aaron as justin Martyr Cyprian, all church fathers that were very prominent prior

to the Council of Nicia. They taught all the things that the Orthodox Church still teaches and all the things that Protestants think the Council of Nicea and three twenty five corrupted. So you find them teaching about relics, you find them teaching about saints, you find them teaching bishops in a succession. You find them talking about the real

presence of Christ and the Euchars. You find them talking about you know, councils, the church being run by synods modeled on Acts fifteen in the Jerusalem Synod, so sinodal church government, bishopric, hierarchy, you know, all of those elements are there in those early church fathers. And for me, that pretty much said, well, look, it's not Protestant, it's not Evangelical, so you know, it's got to be Orthodox or Catholic. I mean, that's the realization I came to,

you know, back in my twenties. Again, I didn't know much about Orthodoxy at that time, but so I mean I think that but for the for the point against the Protestant idea of that pretty much I think solidifies it. And then when you get into, for example, more devastating issues like you know, for me as a Protestant, obviously I believed in Solar script Heira that the Bible is

the only, ultimate, final, infallible authority. But then when you get into the history of the formation of the Biblical Canon, you realize that this didn't drop out out of the sky. You know, it didn't come about in a vacuum. The Bible is a collection of books, and the history of the Church is you can't divide that from the formation and process of the Biblical Canon. That's the books that were decided upon that would be in the Bible and

would be accepted. And this is a centuries long process that really only gets solidified by about the fourth to sixth century in the East and the West in the first thousand years of Christianity. So for the Orthodox Church are acceptances the Council of Trello, which is then accepted by the sixth and seventh Council, and in the West is typically about the fourth or fifth century, and the decrees of Pope Damasis, where they basically accept the same

canon as the Orthodox in the East. So basically we have a canon that's including the Deutero economical books or what Protestants called the apocrypha, pretty much universally accepted by the sixth seventh century. So Protestants again are really sort of on the outs in a historical when they say, well, we just choose the canon that Jerome had, Well, why do you pick one church father not another church father? It really becomes very arbitrary, and then they'll say things like, well,

we just go with what the Jews said. Well, but by the second and third century, the Jewish canon was already anti Christian, so they were already trying to solidify their notion of a loose canon to combat to Christianity. So why would we listen to not the people that Jesus put in charge, the Apostles and their successors, the Church. Wouldn't the church have the authority to decide the canon. Remember, Peter Paul says to Timothy, the Church is the pillar

and ground of truth. He doesn't say the Bible texts are the pillar and ground of truth. He says the actual living entity of the Church. And then he says to the Thessalonians and second Thessalonians that you should follow whatever I teach, whether written or oral. So Paul explicitly tells the Thessalonian Church to keep. Aren't just what is written texts or what written gospels and texts they might have, because they most of the early Church didn't have everything.

They didn't have all the texts for many centuries. He tells them to keep the written and oral traditions.

are still kept to date. The Da Daki as one of those, you know, books that's often referenced back to which you know you've spoken to us about before as well.

kind of a basic pattern of the worship service. And so this is called a liturgical theology. This is the history where the church gets its patterns of worship, and the Apostles shows the rough outline the way they did it from both the temple service, the ancient Jewish temple service,

and the synagogue system in its services. So they kind of combine elements of bose and that's why when you go to an Orthodox Church service, you will find it to be very reminiscent of both temple elements the imagery, and the synagogue elements of the antiphonal singing and liturgical patterns that you find. So both things are going on to help the Apostles kind of come up with the

rough outline. But we notice that the New Testament itself doesn't tell us how we're supposed to worship, and worship is something very important. And when we find passages where Paul says for example, in Hebrews thirteen, that we have an altar which those who serve at the Jewish Tabernacle don't have any right to eat from. So there's an

eating service and an altar. Okay, that right there is not Protestant because Protestantism rejects the idea of an altar, because an altar is a sacrificial thing, and Protestism believes that sacrifice is done and gone right Jesus. Jesus said it's finished. There's no longer any need or notion for priesthood or sacrifice. Well, but wait a minute, because the New Testament says that we have an altar that we eave from, and it also includes the idea idea that

Christ's priesthood isn't done, It's not finished. It's a Melchizedecian priesthood that continues on. Yes, So the notion of priesthood is still there. The notion of a sacrificial eucharistic offering is also in the Book of Revelation going on in Heaven. Paul says we have an altar that we eat from. Jesus talks about the New Testament being a fulfillment the

Lord's Supper, is a type of passover. So all of these ideas, even though yeah, the reality comes with the first coming, it doesn't mean that everything is done away in the sense of there's no more sacrifice, there's no more alter. So that's why when you go to an Orthodox church, you see there is a priesthood, there is an altar, there is a sacrifice, there are vestiments, there

is incense. This actually fulfills the Old Testament prophecies and the Minor prophets that incense will be offered to my name throughout the nations among the gentiles. How would incense be offered if there's not incense in the church, and much most Protestant church churches don't believe in that.

wants free worship. You know, David danced and he revealed himself as he was dancing because he was so excited, and you know, all this kind of stuff. And yet you know, there's like this format that everyone follows exactly.

traditions there. But if that's mentioned, what are the traditions, Well, Paul's talking about the teaching that he gave for many months years at these different locations. For example, we're told in Acts. I think it's Acts twenty that Paul taught for three years, day and night in emphasis. So when Paul tells Timothy to keep everything that you heard from me in the presence of many witnesses and passed that on,

he's talking about the body of oral teaching. Exposition prophecy, etc. That Paul gave for three years straight, all of it. He doesn't say, I taught you for three years. Now, just hand down this letter that I wrote, and he says, the whole body of teachings. Okay, so they're catechizing, is what I'm trying to say. So like the same way, we can't think of oral tradition or that it's like necessarily going to be boiled down in a reductionist way

to just this thing over here. Uh, it's it's a body of doctrines that would be passed down that might encapsulate Catechisis that meaning then the basic interpretive framework that you would have when you're baptizing brought into the church to learn the theology, to learn the interpretive structure of scripture, Because yes, you would have people reading scriptures as best they could. Many of the people would be illiterate, so they would have to be getting this information from oral catechisis.

Most people couldn't read, and yet they were converting and becoming Christians, and most of the churches in the first, second, third, four fifth century it didn't have the whole Bible. Well, how are you getting Christians of the other so they're being taught orally from the bishops, from the Levi, from the deacons, which corresponds to the levit, and from the press beitheros or the priests. So this is universal in

the church in the early days. But again, liturgy in the pattern of worship is very important because you know, Paul applies the same warning about unworthily doing the Lord's Supper leading to death. Yes, and that's the same warning that happens in the Old Testament with nadab and Abaye Whuo and people who offer strange fire and people who get creative with worship. So you have the same curse

that Paul applies that's applied to the Old Testament. You know, violators of how to worship God by offering strange fire, they're killed. Paul says that you might end up, you know, God might strike you dead too, if you go against the little world. Why would that be so severe a punishment if it's just a mere symbol. It's a really severe punishment for things that are just plain and pure empty symbols. Suppose now I'm not saying empty, that proses

they are empty. But so the point is that, no, there's a liturgical background to what Paul's saying, And just think about this. When Jesus went to church and he did, did he worship in a crazy, wild, do it yourself way? No, he worshiped dogs. Yeah, he worshiped in a synagogue structure that was very ordered.

Doesn't follow that because there are healings and miracles or something like that, that it was chaotic. There's also assumptions that prayer language or something like this is some sort of gibberish. No, no, no. In the Book of Acts is very clear that when the apostles speak languages in a miraculous way, everybody's hearing this same language miraculously that's tongues. Okay,

it's not gibberish, it's not rolling on the ground. Those are ridiculous manifestations that are rebuked and called confusion and chaos. God is not the author of chaos, Paul says to the Corinthians. So why would chaotic, nonsense, gibberous worship be

the very way that is the true spiritual manifestation. So I'm just mainly speaking about like the Charismatics there, but even classical Protestants, you know, traditional Lutherans or Calvinists and Presbyterians, and you know, they have an order of worship that's not in the Bible that they have sort of constructed, and ironically, they've loosely constructed it for itself from older

liturgical traditions of the Roman Roman Church. So you can't get away from this point of tradition even if you're a Protestant. Uh. And the irony is that, Paul, if we had, if the Bible was operating, if the Church is supposed to operate on a solar scripture of principle, why were we not given a pattern of worship in the New Testament.

And Paul is saying, when I give you this pattern of doctrine that you are to hand down, that is also the word of God that you heard me preach, he says, So Heah identifies his oral teaching with the Word of God as well as what he wrote down. And again, the Bible itself doesn't tell us what what

books go into the Bible. So we need we have to have this tradition of the church to even identify, for example, the tradition that Matthew wrote Matthew's Gospel, because for example, it doesn't we're not told who wrote it or that Matthew is the Matthew that we identify with an apostle. It's the tradition of the Church that says that that's who that was. And it's a tradition of the Church that said these other gospels over here that

are called the Gospel of Thomas are fake. They're fake and gray, all right, So we know partly what books to include and not include by that same tradition that a Protestant is inadvertently denying by saying or assuming that all tradition is what Jesus is talking about. Now, Jesus

affirmed and observed many traditions. For example, going to the synagogue worship service itself was partly a tradition because the synagogue system was set up posts Moses by Ezra, and it was a traditional way to set up worship throughout Israel. But we're not told explain how you're supposed to do it in the synagogue. That was something Ezra set up, So that was a tradition. Attending the service the Feast of Lights that Jesus does, that's the celebration of the Maccabees.

We're never told that you're supposed to go to the Maccabee service. So Jesus is attending excuse me, services that are themselves fine, legitimate and good traditions. So the point is that there's good traditions and there's bad traditions. Good traditions are traditions that the church and those an authority have accepted, the whole church universally accepts. They're not problems,

they're not contradicting or contravening the Word of God. Bad traditions are the traditions that do those things.

of the papacy and it's infallibility and so forth. You don't see that exercised and explicated in that way in the first years. And so because many even though Vatican Want itself actually says that it was always the case, many Roman Catholics, when dealing with this point or this objection,

will say, well, but it evolved. But you run into a whole host of other problems with the idea of doctrinal evolution, because if that's the case, then it seems like it evolved to be where we are now, where you know, skittles unions can be blessed, right, so why can't it involve And now we don't have the death Pale team.

Satanic pope is sprouting now. But what you just said is if you go on the basis of that evolution of theology or doctrine or whatever the case may be, you actually it allows for this.

might be ten to fifteen pages. What you'll notice is that you're actually bound to much more than just the so called fallible teachings. You actually have to follow the Pope pretty much across the board, and if you disagree in even what is considered quote nonfallible teachings, you're still supposed to submit with docility and humility of minds. So you're not actually allowed in that system, if they're consistent with it, to publicly oppose any of the moral and

theological dogmatic teachings of Pope Francis. So while they might like to have the idea of rebelling against the papacy, the actual text of vaticant One in about four or five other places in Denzinger, which is their official dogma book, don't allow you to do that. In fact, you even have to submit to the Pope's decisions on mundane matters, juridical matters, decisions of the Holy Office, even you're supposed

to submit to them. So this idea that you can be a traditional, faithful Roman Catholic and reject the last sixty seventy years of liberalism post Vatican two is just absolutely absurd and not the case, especially given the fact that Vatican two actually specifies and multiple times after Vaticano it's been specified in at least five places that you have to believe Vatican two, you don't have the right or the ability as Roman Caloty two reject an ecumenical

council so consistent Roman Catholic papalism itself, I think is the ultimate defeater for Roman Catholicism. And so again let me give you a couple other key examples. The first thousand years of the Church, you have these econmenical councils that are shared between East and West for the most part, and those canons. Those councils produce what we call canons. Canons are ecclesiastical laws that are produced as sort of rules and guidelines for the church in each of those councils.

And what's interesting is that every one of the first seven produces canons that contradict and don't line up with the idea of Vatican one's view of the papacy. For example, you have canons that talk about every bishop being limited in jurisdiction. Well, if every bishop's limited in jurisdiction, then there's no universal super bishop who has jurisdiction over everybody. And make a long story short, if you look at two important documents that the Vatican has approved, the Vatican

has approved in the last few years. The first one is called the ch eighty document and the second one is called the Alexandria Document. Chad document came out, I don't know, twenty sixteen, somewhere in there. Gad document came. Alexander document came out last year. And both of those documents together, they're not that long on high they recommend

interested people go read them. They actually admit, between the two documents, about ninety percent, I would say, of the Orthodox problems and critiques of the papacy for the last thousand years. Now, if we're at the point where Rome is now admitting and I don't believe the motivations are good. I believe the motivations are actually acumenism and to try to coax the Orthodox back into union with Rome. But if we think about it, well, now, wait a minute.

If these documents are admitting that the Roman Church has basically been wrong about a lot of its critiques ninety percent of it the last thousand years, and his claims, then that actually means Vatican One's not true. It actually means that the Vatican One view of the papal indefectibility and infallibility is not the case. So to me, those are a couple of the strongest proofs that the ro

Meancallic Church is not the one true church. And if you just think about it from kind of practical perspective, if everything hinges on one guy and it's the guy over in Rome, and if that guy gets compromised and co opted as a lot of evidence I think demonstrates, I mean, Francis basically works in lockstep with the world economic forms of Agenda and Klaus Schwab. Then to me that that demonstrates that that's not under this infallible guide and carorism of Jesus and Peter.

We've had representation from the Orthodox Church at some of these climate things and you know, so, how then is that any different from what the Catholics are doing.

Church is not like that. A lot of people think of it, like, especially if they're Catholic, they look at the Orthodox Church and say, oh, you're kind of like the pope and but you have like the patriarch concept and noople, or you have five patriarchs, and then therefore you're like a five headed church. You know, those are just canonical privileges. In other words, those bishops have privileges within synods. It doesn't mean or they have a large jurisdiction.

It doesn't mean that they're popes. Every bishop is just as much a bishop as the next bishop. So the Orthodox Church surprisingly is decentralized. A lot of people might find that kind of odd or very foreign, especially if you're Roman Catholic, because you're sort of, you know, locked into that pyramid type of system, and the Orthodox Church is more I mean, this is a maybe not the best analogy, but it's a little more like a republican type of system. Then it would be like a top down,

tyrannical type of you know, auto see. So you know, the bishops are are elected and chosen, and they have more authority than the priests, but there's no super bishop. And it's true that at times any one bishop, like the Bishop of Rome, he might try to get a lot more power because he might have honor and prestige, and then he might say, okay, well that honor and prestige actually now translates into like a divine you know,

I'm the guy that everybody should look to. Right. That's our review of what happened in the See of Rome, because for the first thousand years we Orthodox would believe that the pope is Orthodox, but then he eventually departs when we have the schism. So likewise, if we thought about the patriarchal concept and noble for example, much of the Orthodox Church is concerned and believes that he's now

trying to kind of be like the pope. He wants to have this prestige and authority even beyond what's normal like the pope. Now it's not I mean, it's a problem in the Orthodox Church, but it's not a problem for our ecclesiology because we believe and have no problem admitting that any bishop can be corrupted and become eventually a heretic or an apostate. So the problem is not so much. The argument is not the Orthodox Church has no problems and the calolgy Church has a bad popes.

That's not the argument. The argument is that the system of Roman Catholicism hangs everything on one guy and his dogmatic teaching, such that if he makes a contradiction in dogma or morals, the system is not true anymore, whereas in the Orthodox Church you don't have everything hanging in on one guy. Though a patriarch can become a heretic and fall away. Many of them have. In fact, many of the most important heretics in the history of the Church have been patriarchs of Constantinople.

It's moved on now to us. And in fact, you know, saying that we're somehow not the chosen people of God now it really diminishes what Jesus did and what are you established through the New Covenant? And so, you know, I find it insane how many people don't understand this. But what do you think is the key takeaway for the Protestants? Because so many of them genuinely love Jesus Jaye like they love Jesus. They they do. They try their hardest to be good people, good representatives of Christ

on this earth, and yet are often so misled. What do you think they really need to understand about Protestantism and why it's really not the right way.

And when Jesus sets up the church and he causes apostles, he says very clearly, he who hears you, here's me. He breathes on them, it says in the Book of John, and gives them a power to remit and retain sins. Whoever sins you remit, they're remitted. Whoever sins you retain, they're retained. So that's a real power that's given to these apostles, believe by extension to the people that they

set up. And what that means is that if there is a visible institutional body of bishops and that makes up the church and history, then they do have authority, and that means that that authority will continue with the church. It doesn't go away, it doesn't die. They continue to have the ability to excommunicate people. How could you excommunicate people and enforce these judgments if there's no living body

that does it. It would be like to make an analogy having the Constitution but no supreme court to actually rule on the Constitution. It's just every man reading the Constitution for himself. Well, that would be nonsense and chaos. So that Jesus didn't even think to set up some body of people to make decisions and to be a kind of supreme court, so to speak, for his church.

egregious things. And you know, I mean maybe that's not the best example, but you know, there's a process for someone who's unrepentant for example.

And so this is why we have the Council of nicea meeting, is to solve this crisis throughout the Church and the Roman Empire, that most people are believing that Jesus is a creature or some kind of demigod, a created being. And the decision, of course, following sant Anthonatian, is that no, Jesus is the eternally generated son of the Father, and therefore he has the same nature as

the Father. And therefore, because God cannot have degrees of divinity, there's no eighty percent God, or because the divine nature is the divine nature. If you're uncreated, you're uncreated, then the sun is uncreated. And so as the second person that God had, he must be believed in as fully divine Homousius to be saved, and so that's why the

Nicene Creed comes about. And as a result you get the excommunicating of Arians and people that believe that Jesus is a creature, and then later on you get a further specification of other errors about Christ's nature in terms of Christology. So what I'm saying is that it's not just everybody fitting for themselves and reading the Bible for themselves.

It's not The problem is not reading the Bible. The problem is that Jesus gave to his church a body of people that could make decisions and enforce these things. And if everybody's just DIY and it's just me and the Bible, and there's no practical way to have what's called normative authority in philosophy, not just the individual figuring out what's true and false and right and wrong, but an actual group of people that can bind people to these decisions.

our intellect and our logic sorting through this. Now, that's not to say that you should take the authority of a man above your own sense, because that's often led people into the wrong path. You know, test everything and apply the test of you know, history and scripture and context and all of that, of course, but this is how we end up with I don't know, what is it, seventy thousand denominations.

So how do we resolve an issue when say, five different factions all believe that the Holy Spirit is leading and guiding them. That's why there has to be something within history that can make that decision. That's what I mean by normative authority. And for the Orthodox Church, the normative practice of that is called synodalism synods councils. So the Orthodox Church is concillier, meaning that it is governed by not one dude, but synods and councils, and most

I mean some Protestant groups have that. But the problem is that in Protestantism, because they don't have the notion that there is one true church in history, the binding people to a decision or the excommunicating of people doesn't really do much. It doesn't have much force because you could go start your own church, you see. But and you might do that even if you're excommunicated from the

Orthodox Church. But the point is that the theology is still consistent and the notion of authority is there to say that, Well, look, you know, if you're excommunicated from the Orthodox Church, you can't really go have another Orthodox church. It's very it would be very difficult to do that, you know what I mean, Like you might wear the costumes and say that you're some sort of something, but it's not going to be recognized by the rest of

the world. So it's probably not going to work. You know, no Orthodox person, for example, recognizes Protestant pastors as possessing authority. They just simply don't. They're just another layman like any other laymen trying to do those things. So it's not a question of is the authority infallible and is it then able to give me knowledge of what's true and false? That's not what we're saying. The question is how do you resolve an issue when five, six, twenty different people

are claiming to be led by the Holy Spirit. There's got to be somebody with authority. Again, the Constitution, it wasn't just mailed out or written out in letter letter form to every American in their mailbox to then find for themselves. Doesn't mean that an individual Americans can't read the Constitution, but the point is that for practical purposes, there's got to be somebody that interprets it.

me over was the topic of communion. And you brought this up before about how serious it is partaking in the wrong manner. I'd really love you to spend a bit of time talking about communion in the Orthodox Church, what it actually is, uh, and why it's so so serious to your soul uh to partake correctly.

I was just talking of it as a symbol. I don't know the Old Testament, rituals and writes, the levitical services and so forth, the temples.

and wine, bread and wine. We believe that's a type of Christ offering bread and wine in the Melchizedecian priesthood. When you get to Exodus, when Moses goes up on the mountain, he eats a meal with God. When the Israelites get the levitical services established, many of those services deal with ways that you would have a meal with

the priest and with God. So this idea of covenantal meals eating with God is all throughout the Old Testament, and the most famous would be obviously the Passover, and the Passover is the actual partaking of the passover land. Jesus is the passover Lamb. But the difference is that his blood and partaking of his blood and his flesh is the very thing that has to correspond to the passover with the Angel that comes and destroys the houses

of the Egyptians, where there's not the blood of the Passover. Well, in the word the Dox Church, we are saying, no, you really are exposed to the blood. Protestants, you know, will say, well, I'm saved by the blood. They're power in the blood, power in the blood. And yet the blood is never actually what you you never come in contact with it. So we're actually a lot more literal in the sense of, you know, when Paul talks about being baptized into Christ, we think baptism really does accomplish

that regeneration. When Paul talks about, you know, the blood, it's literally what you're talking about the Eucharist, So that's where you come in contact with it. It's not all just an intellectual notional thing. It's an actual, real thing. And I think that's the big stumbling block for a lot of Protestants is that they they hear this stuff and they kind of don't even realize their own gnostic presuppositions that they have. Well, that's flesh and physical and

God is against flesh and physical stuff. Really, well, then why did he create the world, Why did he give us bodies? Why did Jesus resurrect his same physical body? Of God's against the physical. So there's just this innate sort of gnostic tendency within Protestantism that I think a lot of Protestants don't recognize. It underlies a lot of

the iconoclasm, which is like Calvinism would be opposed to imagery. Well, I mean, the Book of Hebrews says that the son is the icon, the Greek word icon of the Father. So if God has a son and it's his direct image and likeness then and it's his icon, then God's not against icons.

that through a worship service. I mean, there's there's a lot of it's illogically right.

prostrate before. They prostrate before. In the Book of Chronicles, I think a second Chronicles, they prostrate before Solomon and the arc when the Chicaina glory cloud comes down to the arc. So prostrating before created things is not itself the problem. Because Elijah, Elijah prostrates before Elijah, Moses, Sami Joseph prostrates before Pharaoh, We have examples in the Bible where people prostrate before another created being is a sign

of reverence. So it's not the external action of drawing a picture or putting your body down on your face that is the idolatry. Idolatry is, primarily, as Jesus notes many times, a problem of the heart and the mind. So if I, you know, am believing and worshiping a created thing as if it's God, then that is what idolatry is. Idolatry is not revering a created thing, and that happens all throughout the Old Testament throughout the Bible. God says honor your father and mother because it's a

way to show deference to God your father. So is that idolatry to honor my father? I mean a lot of the Protestant ideas are bound up with very simplistic and one dimensional understandings of words. For example, call no man father. Well, but the Ten Commandments say honor your father. Yes, So if I can call no man father, then I can't call my dad.

with and displace God in that theology. So Jesus, I think, is attacking this idea that the person that you're calling father might actually be extending beyond his authoritative place to be like God, you know, like a Guru or a you know, something like that. That would be replacing the natural position that God should have in that hierarchy. But Jesus is not saying literally, never call another person father. Jesus talks about people's fathers.

willing to learn, that God will teach you. This is something everyone believes. It's really just about whether we're open to learning. And I think, you know, someone that's very close to me always says, if you really want to know the truth, it will always lead you back to the Orthodox Church, and so I think that that's you know, I've found that to be true. Certainly. Jay, you do a lot of debates, you do a lot of talks on philosophy, you do a lot of breakdowns of Hollywood.

I know that you've recently watched June two and you were very impressed. I didn't even like the first one. What was so great about the second?

Dennis Villainew had. I thought that it, for the most part, captured what was in the first book. The new movie is I think a technical achievement. The aesthetics, the art, direction, the sound, that's all phenomenal. It's not I think for moviegoers if you're a movie buff, you know, we haven't really had that type of a theater experience since like Lord of the Rings or something like that. Yeah.

always promoting kind of crazy stuff. So there are some conservative traditional elements within the Do novels that I think make it interesting in regard to how most sci fi is not that way. It also is, you know, a couple other ways it's unique is that it's not uh, there's not really aliens in that world. There are no uh, it's not pro AI. So it's a very unique sci fi where it's anti AI. And so I like those elements. That does not mean that that I think that the

message of Dune overall is like, oh it's Christian. It's not Christian, it's more perennialism. But it's at least not like totally soy you know, it's not pro skal Oh, I'm serious. I mean most science fiction is just propaganda for for that stuff, you know, living in the matrix or getting a sexpot. I mean, and this is not that way at all. It also really it has a

really weird religious expression. I mean, in this future ten thousand years from now scenario, there's a there's a blended world religion that's like Catholicism mixed with Islam and and all of that's very bizarre. But it's just a breath of fresh air for me. And I just did I just read the second one done Messiah and did a big breakdown of that a couple of months ago, so

so it's always all still fresh in my mind. And uh, you know, from a predictive programming perspective, Dune is amazing because you have geoengineering, you have terror forming, you have MK ultra, you have espionage, sexpionage, you have intrigue, all of that in sci fi, which I mean, I'm not a huge sci fi nerd. I don't read a whole lot of sci fi, but I mean, how often do we get that kind of real conspiracy stuff in fi? Not very much.

And then at this LA event March fifteenth, we'll have Jamie Kennedy, the comedian from Scream, and he's going to be headlining. We did this. We did an event in LA about eight months ago and it was so much fun we thought we'd do it again. So this is not the same event. It's all new material, all new topics. I'm gonna be signing books, the Red book at this event, which is six hundred pages of all my geopolitics and philosophy and theology essays, so people can come out and

watch us. The links the tickets are all on my website, on my Twitter penned at the top in the event bright link.

says subscribe there, but definitely subscribe to Jay's YouTube. Anything else you want to mention.

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