December 5, 2024 • 72 mins
What does Hank Hanegraaff mean when he talks about the "Paradisiacal Transformation of the Cosmos?" It is a message with a mandate—a reminder of the energy by which we are able to transform the cosmos. The energy that St. Paul invoked when he spoke of being energized by all His energy which so powerfully energizes me. This is the energy that alone is sufficient to empower the body of Christ in the present clash between sacred and secular. A contrast between the paradisiacal transformation of the Cosmos and the pagan transformational imperative. An imperative largely fueled by the transhumanist myth of progress. A myth commercialized by the quintessential marketing cliché of our day — artificial intelligence.
For further information on the historical nature of this argument please see John Strickland’s Four-Volume Series: Paradise and Utopia: The Rise and Fall of What the West Once Was. https://www.equip.org/product/cri-resource-the-age-of-paradise-the-age-of-division-the-age-of-utopia-the-age-of-nihilism-4-volumes-on-ages-of-christendom-hup/
For further information on the historical nature of this argument please see John Strickland’s Four-Volume Series: Paradise and Utopia: The Rise and Fall of What the West Once Was. https://www.equip.org/product/cri-resource-the-age-of-paradise-the-age-of-division-the-age-of-utopia-the-age-of-nihilism-4-volumes-on-ages-of-christendom-hup/
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:23):
And welcome to another edition of a handgun Plug podcast
of podcasts committed to bringing the most interesting, informative and
inspirational people on the planet directly to your earbuds. As
I've mentioned many times on this podcast, we also are
committed to training, to equipping God's people for works of
(00:45):
service so that the Body of Christ might be built
up and strengthened. So we want to equip people to
always be ready to give an answer or reason for
the hope that lies within them with gentleness and with respect,
act and that on a myriad of different topics. I
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was just in Greece at a conference in which I
presented a paper on the paradisecal transformation of the cosmos.
And I've often said on this podcast that contrast is
the conduit to clarity, and so I want to do
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in this podcast that very thing. Make a contrast, a
contrast between the paradisecal transformation of the cosmos and a
Pagan transformational imperative. By the way that Pagan transformational imperative
is largely fueled by the transhumanist myth of progress, a
(01:57):
myth commercialized the quintessential marketing cliche artificial intelligence. I'll talk
about that a little more later on in the podcast,
but again, the theme for this podcast is the paradiseacal
transformation of the cosmos contrasted with the pagan transformational imperative.
(02:24):
And let me start by quoting a passage of scripture
that comes from the very last book of the Bible,
not only the last book of the Bible, but the
last chapter of the last book of the Bible, in
which the Angel shows Saint John, the quintessential theologian, the
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river of the Water of Life. It's as clear as crystal,
and it flows from the Throne of God and of
the Lamb down the middle of the great the city.
On each side of the river stood the Tree of Life,
bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month,
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and the leaves of the tree are for the healing
of the nations. No longer will there be any curse.
The throne of God and of the Lamb will be
in the city, and his servants will serve him. They
will see his face, and his name will be on
their foreheads. There'll be no more night. They will not
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need the light of a lamp or the light of
the sun, for the Lord God will give them light
and they will reign forever and ever so. In the
last book of the Bible, the last chapter of the
last Book of the Bible, we see a tree of life.
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But we first encounter that very tree of life in Genesis,
in the very first book of the Bible. And I
think it's important to note that there are commentaries on Genesis,
and among those commentaries a commentary by Saint Ephrem the Syrian.
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You know, we live in this era where with the
click of a twenty first century mouse, we can go
back to the era of the great historians, the great commentators,
the great saints of antiquity, and again one of them
Saint Ephrem the Syrian, and he depicts the Paradise narrative
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in the most beautiful way. He depicts it as a
paradigm of deification, as an interpretive framework for the history
of and also think about it this way as a
spiritual geography for the conceptualization of deifying union with God
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as the very goal, as the very center of the
Christian life. And this goal finds ultimate illumination in this
last book of the Bible. The illumined life that Adam
and Eve were created to experience in Paradise we will
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absolutely experience it is accessible to us. And so, in
a brilliantly concise distillation, we have doctor Thomas Buchan pointing
out to us that, in the writings of Ephraim, paradise
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is actually a liminal space. It's a part of the
created cosmos that is intended to serve as a venue
for divine and human communion, and as such it's special.
It's set apart in relation to the rest of creation.
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Saint Ephraim imagines the Edenic garden not as a flatland,
but as a mountain, a mountain like under Mountain Zion,
a mountain dwarfing all other mountains. Its paradisacal peak, reaching
to the very habitation of God. And then he imagines
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that the Tree of Knowledge is planted halfway up the mountain,
and the Tree of Life located with the Chicaina at
the mountain peak. If Adam and Eve had rejected the serpent,
they would have eaten from the Tree of Life in
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the Tree of Knowledge would would not have been withheld
from them. From the one they would have gained infallible knowledge,
and from the other they would have received immortal life.
They would have acquired divinity alongside their humanity. But instead,
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as we know from scripture, they're exiled from the identic
garden and from traversing the slope leading upward toward the
peak of deification. But the rest of the story is
that of a second Atom who clothed himself in fallen humanity,
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in his temptation and in his obedience on the mountain
in the wilderness. Christ rehearsed the events, and he reversed
the effects of Adam's temptation and his disobedience on the
Mountain of Paradise, And in that process he rehabilitated human
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free will and reiterated the proper paradigm for its use.
And it was above all, in his death on the
cross and his resurrection from the dead, that Christ returned Adam.
That is to say, Christ returned humanity to the life
of Eden. The wisest man, King Solomon, who has ever
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lived upon the face of the earth. I'm not talking
about the god man. I'm talking about the wisest man.
I'm not talking about the crystal Christ, the paragon of virtue.
There is no one comparable to him, to Jesus Christ,
but the wisest man beyond that, whoever lived upon this planet,
rendered wisdom, the fruit of the righteous, and longing fulfilled well.
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The proverbial tree of life, the very tree of life
that we're talking about in this podcast, a tree that
finds ultimate root in two gardens. So think about this.
In the antihistorical state, the tree of life stands at
the apex with the Chicaina glory of God, the apex
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of the Edenic garden. In the post historical state, the
tree of life is rooted in an eternal garden, and
there it stands rooted as a memorial to paradise regained
to him who overcomes, said Jesus, how give to eat
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from the tree of life, which is in the midst
of the paradise of God. In other words, to experience
deification throughout eternity, going from one glory to another glory,
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and never reaching the apex. And the reason for that
is we can become more and more godlike, but we
can never attain to God because God is ineffable. He
is beyond our attaining. And so while we grow and
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learn and develop without error, we never become God. But
we do come to a more fulfilling knowledge of the
one who spoke and the universe leapt into existence. But
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there is a tree of life that we may presently
partake of, a tree of life that stands on Gogotha's hill.
We could call it the fulcrum of history, for on
it you can kind of picture this with me if
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you're not watching this on video. On it, Jesus stretches
one hand toward the adenic garden and the other toward
the eternal garden. The deification that the first atom could
no longer reach the second atom Jesus Christ touched in
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his place, and as such the Cross of Christ is
the way forward towards deification, or on it hangs the
eucharistic bounty. The Assembly of Saints bears resemblance to Paradise,
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saying Saint Ephraim, because in it, each day, in this
Assembly of Saints, each day is plucked the fruit of
Him who gives life to all. In it is trodden
the cluster of grapes to be the medicine of life,
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actually to be the medicine of immortality, because we are
created for immortality. And as Saint Ephraim explain, we may
presently partake of the tree of life through the liturgical
sacramental life of the Church. And it is likewise through
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the Church that you and I are equipped to bring
the transformational imperative to the entire world, to the cosmos.
And there's no one who codified that paradiseacal imperative more
brilliantly than did the Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, the present
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day patriarch, the ecumenical Patriarch, who once said that there
is a direct link between the oneness of Christians in
the image of the Holy Trinity and the missionary dimension
of the Church. He said, the Church looks not inward
but outward. It exists not for the sake of itself,
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but for the sake of the world's salvation. The Church,
which is a mystery of mutual trinitarian love, is true
to itself only if the circle of love is being
continually enlarged, only if new persons are continually being brought
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within it. Faith in the Triune God signifies this that
we are, each of us missionaries who are dedicated to
the preaching of the Gospel, who are dedicated to welcoming
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the cosmos into a mystery of mutual trinitarian love, brought
into the fellowship of the Holy Trinity. This is synonymous
with welcoming human persons created in the image and likeness
of God into the sacred sphere, wherein which union of
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human persons with God is accomplished. For a Saint Cyprian
of So memorably put it, no one can have God
for his father who does not have the Church for
his mother. Now that might be a revelation to some,
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but actually it ought to be a self evident truth.
Why because it's through the Church that God's saving power
is mediated to the whole of humanity. And therefore outside
the Church there's no salvation. Because salvation is the Church,
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the Church the purified bride that Christ one day will
carry over the threshold of Jordan into the New Jerusalem,
coming down out of Heaven, prepared as a bride beautifully
adorned for her husband. So, on the one hand we
have the paradisacal transformation of the cosmo, on the other
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the pagan transformation of the cosmos. Now think of this
for a moment. Jesus said, there are two roads. There's
a narrow road and there's a broad road. A narrow
road which leads to life, and a broad road, which
leads to destruction. The pagan transformation of the cosmos is mythological.
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It is a dream that doesn't correspond with reality. It
is a broad road leading to devastation. It is the
pagan imitation of the paradiseacal imperative. So, for the first
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millennium of church history, heavenly eminence embodied the DNA of
Christian cosmology. It directed the Church's attention towards paradisaical transformation.
But all of that changed. It changed in an eleventh
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century moment when the rumblings, as I put it in
my book, truth matters, Life matters more, the rumblings of
a schismatic volcano erupted, and it left behind itself a
blackened lava trail that stretched from east to west. Disunity
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invaded the Church. Now. Prior to this division, the Body
of Christ effectively functioned as a sisterhood, a sisterhood of
five patriarchates. Antioch, where the disciples were first called Christians,
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Alexandria the patriarch founded by the gospel writer Mark Jerusalem,
home to the first Ecumenical Council, Constantinople, capital of the
Christian Greek Roman Empire, and Rome the patriarchate designated by
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the others with a primacy of honor, but not supremacy,
a primacy of honor the first among equals, but not supremacy.
And therein lay what I've called the fissure of fratricide.
In the era of the Ecumenical Councils, the Church functioned
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as a collegial and conciliar move of the spirit. The
Bishop of Rome was afforded a primacy of honor, but
not the state of supremacy. He arrogant unto himself. The
Church must never function in supreme an autonomous fashion, because
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if she did, said Nita's Archbishop of Nicomedia, the Roman
See would not be the pious mother of sons, but
a hard and an imperious mistress of slaves. So what
is the sin of fratracide. The sin of fratracide was
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a sin against the common mind of the Church. And
this is no small matter. This is not of small consequence.
To sin against the mind of the Church is to
sin against the very pillar and ground of truth. And thus,
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when the philioque, which is Latin for and the sun,
was added to the creed, disunity between East and West
became inevitable. Half a millennium after the scandal of Fratricide
had fissured the Church from east to west, another schism
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shattered Western Christianity. This time, the fissure separated Rome from
the Reformers. This time, the catalyst was indulgences. In the
summer of fifteen seventeen, a crass and carnal dominical friar
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demanded something from people. His name was Johann Tetzel, and
he was conning people with his demands. He was conning
commoners into buying special releases from sin with an an
intoxicatingly simple pitch. He was telling people that they could
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purchase a pardon from God that would purge them from
a mythological place called purgatory. And he was capitalizing on
spiritual insecurity as well as scriptural illiteracy. It's always a
problem scriptural literacy. If you don't know scripture, you're easily misled.
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If you're not familiar with the essentials of the Christian faith,
you can very easily fall for a counterfeit. And of
course this was a quintessential counterfeit. He was fleecing the
flock with this idea of indulgences for a reason. It
was to fund papal projects, and although his merchandising of
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the Gospel was outrageous, no one seemed willing to oppose him.
No one wanted to expose his mythology. His popularity, backed
by the power of Rome, just seemed too big a
hill to climb, too formidable a foe, that is, until
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a monk named Martin Luther came along. Luther's concern was
not so much indulgences as it was the pillaging of
the poor by the pope. In fact, he wrote with
great passion that the mother Church in Rome would be
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better burnt, burnt to ashes, than it should be built
up by the skin and the bones of the Pope's sheep. Well.
Rome's reaction, as we know from history, was both swift
and severe. Luther was labeled a child of the devil
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and a drunken German who, when sober, would change his mind.
But Luther did not change his mind. Under the ban
of the empire and a bull of excommunication, Luther remained
resolute in his contention that the Romanist Church was upon
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the devil, and that the Pope was the Devil's Antichrist,
and were it not for his stranglehold on scripture. The
populace would no longer be duped by his devious deceptions. Thus,
of course, the battle cry of the Reformation sol the scripture.
As the Reformation continued, so did fissuring, loosed from the
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restraining fetters of the Apostolic tradition, loosed from the creeds,
loosed from the councils. He had Houldrik Swingley, the Swiss Reformer,
reimagining both the Eucharist and baptism. For Zwingley, the Eucharist
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became merely a memorial, a mere remembrance, and in like fashions,
Wingley altered baptism from a sacramental burial to sin and
resurrection to newness of life, to a mere welcoming ceremony.
John Calvin, following on their heels, not only refashioned the
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real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but championed the
innovative notion of double predestination. He varied his conjecture on
the ratios of those preordained to eternal life and those
preordained to eternal damnation, from one salvation and every one
hundred damnations to a more palatable estimate of one in
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every five and growing up in a Dutch Calvini's context
as I did, I can personally testify that Calvin's ratios
are far from academic. They had real life consequences, and
I certainly remember that growing up as a child well.
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A great deal more attention could be assigned to the
disunity that took place with the Reformation. But suffice it
to say that the fissering did not end there, and
nor did the animus between the people and the Protestant
Reformers and their innovations. And while accounts of division can
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be multiplied indefinitely, it is sufficient at this point to
note a bewildering array of believers, all claiming that they
embody the right interpretation of sacred Scripture. Inevitably, the division
between Rome and the Reformers led to the greatest of
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all travesties. It led to the wars of Western religion,
none more so than the infamous Thirty Years War, a
war so pervasive that nearly every corner of Western Christendom
experienced its ravages. In one country alone, in Germany, half
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the populace experienced death or defilement, and in the process,
the incarnational imperative propelling Christianity toward the paradizacal transformation of
the cosmos was all but lost. In place of paradizacal transformation,
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moved inexorably towards cultural rebirth in the baptismal basin of paganism,
a thoroughly secular rather than sacramental rebirth. So, if the
first millennium of Church history from Pentecost to the Papal
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Reformation was an age of paradisical transformation, the advent of
the Enlightenment in the second millennium became the impetus for
pagan transformation. So let me pause for just a moment
here and say that the world looks in and sees
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the wars of Western Christianity, the fragmentation of Christianity after
the first millennium of Church history, and they say, look,
Christianity really doesn't offer an enlightened path towards utopia, and
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so we have a better way. Instead of the paradisaical path.
Will choose the pagan path, will choose a different impetus
for transformation, a renaissance that will promise you a utopia,
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but a renaissance that in the end didn't deliver on
its promise. What it really did deliver was a dysfunctional,
dystopian dream. What it delivered was a paradiseacal counterfeit, a
counterfeit powered by the secular myth of progress, a myth
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largely facilitated by Charles Darwin's magnum opis. You know the title,
The Origin Species by Means of natural Selection. Sir Julian Huxley,
he actually went so far as to dub the evolutionary
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dogma that this book spawned. This idea spawned as the
most powerful and the most comprehensive notion that had ever
arisen on earth. He called it the supreme ornament of
all intellectual transformations, an intellectual revolution that viewed progress through
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well through the prism of natural selection, through the prism
of survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence.
Why because if the unfit survived indefinitely, they would continue
to infect the fit with their lif less fed genes,
and the result is that the morphid genes would be
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diluted and compromised by the less fid genes, and evolution
would be rendered null and void. Karl Marx, the father
of communism, saw in Darwin and his theory the scientific
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the sociological support for an economic experiment that eclipsed even
the carnage of Hitler's Germany. In Hitler's Germany, macro evolution
was the promise of an uber Mitsch of a utopian superman.
For Marx, that evolutionary superman could only arise from the
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ashes of an archetypal social revolution, from the ashes of
a secular humanist experiment bent on pagan transformation through the
abolition of religion. Remember, Marx famously said that religion is
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the sigh of the oppressed creature, it's the heart of
a heartless world. It's the soul of soulless conditions. And
then the famous line, it is the opium of the people.
He went on to say, the abolition note that word,
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the abolition of religion, as the illusory happiness of the
people is a demand for their real happiness. To call
on them to give up their illusions about their condition,
he said, is to call on them to give up
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a condition that requires illusions. And then he famously concluded
his remarks in this brief category by saying that his
criticism of religion in Embryo was the criticism of that
veil of tears. Of which religion is the halo good
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prose bad concept. His demand for the abolition of religion
as the illusory happiness of the people was of course
anything but theoretical ideas of consequences, and Marxism held religion,
especially Orthodoxy, to be the quintessence of class oppressing. Well
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that all the time now the oppressor of the oppressed
comes from Marx To fashion the ideal Homo sapiens in
the ideal human society, to draw Heaven down to earth
necessitated the elimination of every vestige of religion, particularly Christian Orthodoxy.
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You know, I've had Father John Strickland on this podcast
a number of times, and I've learned a great deal
from him. He gives such a great condensation of history,
history from Pentagost to the present, and his four volume
series that are available to the Ministry of the Christian
Research Institute at equipped dot org. But you can also
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listen to the podcasts. I did five podcasts with him.
But anyway, Father John Strickland says as a historian that
during this period of time clergy were drowned, some of
them were buried alive, some were crucified on the Royal
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gates of their parish churches, and when the lady rose
up in protest, they were arrested, and in many cases
they were executed. They were executed as the agents of
the bourgeoisie of the rich. Well, as I said, ideas
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of consequences, and those consequences keep creating chaos after chaos.
From nineteen seventeen onward, Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik Revolution precipitated the
merciless martyrdom of more than one hundred thousand followers of Christ,
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and added to the misery, myriad cathedrals and monasteries were
desecrated or manifestly destroyed. And yet that was only the
beginning of sorrows following in the genocidal footsteps of Lenin,
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Stalin orchestrated just scale massacre of a domestic population in
human history. At its height in nineteen thirty seven and
nineteen thirty eight. Someone who's written about this eloquently is
Jay Richards. Also had him on many of my podcasts.
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But at its height in nineteen thirty seven and nineteen
thirty eight, says doctor J there were on average one
thousand political executions per day, and that doesn't even include
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the countless millions sent to labor camps, and tragically, the
Marxist humanist hell didn't end in the former Soviet Union.
As history tells us, at one time in the mid
twentieth century, almost half the human race was subject to
a Grand Marxist experiment. And during the Great Leap Forward
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in China nineteen fifty eight to nineteen sixty two, Mao
promised to create a new heaven and a new Earth
for man. But instead, well, twenty million people, maybe many
many more than that, died a fan, and twenty million
more died in Communist Chinese re education camps per capita.
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Paul Pott's Khmer Rouge was even more destructive. A full
quarter of the entire population of Cambodia was relegated skeletons
in the infamous Killing Fields. A number of years ago,
I was in Cambodia and I met the last living
survival of the Khmer Rouge. Well, anyway, nothing exposed the
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pagan cult of evolutionary progress. You know, we talk about
all of this carnage that took place, and then we
think about something more. Well, nothing exposed the pagan cult
of evolutionary progress more more than did the First and
Second Wars of the twentieth century, and there's a history
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to that as well. In nineteen o five, Albert Einstein
discovered a life force by which the world would be
irrevocably changed, a force replete with a capacity for unleashing
a transformational energy supply, an energy supply previously unimaginable. What
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Einstein discovered was the power inherent in mass, the stunning
reality that microscopic atomic molecules contain an enormous amount of
energy that, when released, can vaporize the world or conversely
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transform it. Fission science. We're now talking about fusion science.
But fission science led to the abrupt ending of the
Second World War on August six nineteen forty five. You
have an idea rooted in scientific discovery that actually comes
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to fruition in a horrible way, because discoveries can lead
to good things into bad things. But on August sixth,
nineteen forty five, while millions of Christians celebrated the feast
of Christ's Holy Transfiguration on the amount of Transfiguration, the
United States annihilated one hundred thousand unarmed Japanese civilians at
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Hiroshima with the drop of one single solitary bomb, an
atom bomb. Unperturbed by the unprecedented carnage, America dropped a
second bomb on Nagasaki, and that was just three days later.
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So again to recapitulate. In the paradiseical transformation of the cosmos,
you had zoetic energy from the word zoe, zoetic energy,
spiritual energy inherent, and the Eucharist. That energy was the
axiomatic power by which to transform a person, transform oneself,
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but also the axiomatic power by which to transform the world. Conversely,
in the pagan transformation of the cosmos, there's zero warrant
for spiritual transformation. Sir Julian Huxley, the great grandson of
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Thomas Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, boastfully pronounced that in the evolutionary
pattern of thought, there is no longer either need or
room for the supernatural. The earth was not created, It evolved,
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So did all the animals and the plants that inhabit it,
including our human selves, our mind, our soul, as well
as brain and body. So did religion. What was his conclusion.
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His conclusion was dramatic evolutionary man can no longer take
refuge from his loneliness by creeping for shelter into the
arms of a divinized father figure whom he himself created
as the figment of his own imagination. And so evolutionary
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man lives under the illusion that what God once was
we may become. And they put that in startling prose.
I am certain, said Leonid Crescent, the man intended to
immortalize lenin that the time will come when science will
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become all powerful, and when it does, intone the secular
humanist essayist Jules Antoine Costagnery. I will build a new
Eden for myself, which I will populate with mine own kind.
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I will station the invisible sentinel Progress at the entrance
and place a flaming sword into his hands, and then
he will say to God, thou shalt not enter here.
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The transhumanist transformational imperative has dramatic consequences for people, for civilization,
for the cosmos. In the great divide of human history,
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the crator of the Cosmos clothed himself and fallen humanity.
Through his death on the cross and his resurrection from
the dead, he provided humankind with the way back to
the life of Eden, and for a millennium thereafter, the
church function in collegial and concilor fashion. And then, as
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I've already tried to communicate, then came this unity. First
a Papal Reformation replete with a plethora of innovations from
papal supremacy to purgatory, and thereafter a Protestant Reformation, largely
denuding the Church of its liturgical sacramental imperative. And on
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top of that, the wars of Western Christianity, most particularly
the Thirty Years' War, became the pretext for the pagan
transformational imperative. Again, my frequent guest Orthodox historian Father John Strickland,
recounts how in The Last Valley, a movie produced in
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nineteen seventy one, so it's an older movie, but it's
worth watching the character of a war weary captain. It's
played by Michael Caine. He's asked about the God for
whom all the West is currently fighting, and his words
are memorable, don't talk to me of God. We killed
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God at Magdeburg. The death of God, or the supposed
death of God ushered in an era in which humans
proclaim themselves sovereigns of the universe. The imperative became secular
rather than sacred, Imago Darwin rather than Amago Day, evolutionistic
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rather than eucharistic. Here's a word I coined, zooetic rather
than zoetic. In the mythology of never ending evolutionary progress,
man was deemed a zooetic animal, a zoetic animal in
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an upward evolutionary spiral that would erupt in the erudition
of a utopian Uberminsch. In accord with the Nietzschean transvaluation
of values, human beings were destined to become materialistic gods,
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and science, coupled with technological breakthroughs, were thought to be
the operative instruments of transition. And now, as we're in
the embryonic stages of the third millennium since Pentecost, popular
philosophical paradigms are touting transhumanism. In one book I read
(46:20):
recently subtitled When Humans Transcend Biology, you have this celebrated futurist,
a guy by the name of Ray Kurtzweil. He's hailed
by billionaire Bill Gates as the best person I know
at predicting the future of artificial intelligence, and he's prophesying
(46:45):
a breakthrough in which the human species sheds all shackles
of biological restraint. His words, our mortality will be in
our our own hands. We will be able to live
as long as we want. In essence, we will be
(47:10):
the gods of our own biology. We will be the
ultimate deciders in the grand meta narrative of life. Ironically,
the terror of the transhumanist transformational imperative is the illusion,
and it is an illusion, the illusion that a merely
(47:31):
material being living in a merely material world may be
supplanted by the advent of artificial intelligence, of machines, supplanting
human beings in the struggle for survival a post human
species inhabiting a post human sphere. Well, as I said
(48:00):
in my book, truth matters, life matters more. Our perceptual
lenses are in desperate need of cleansing. Has telescopes and
microscopes and covered truths about the universe previously unimaginable. So
the transfiguration of Jesus Christ unveiled realities concerning participation in
(48:21):
the divine nature previously unthinkable. As modern technology has uncovered
truths concerning the nature of matter, So Mount Tabor served
to disclose new heights of perspective and new depths of understanding.
(48:42):
Remember the disciples they saw the face of Jesus Christ
shining like the sun. And when they did, they came
face to face with the poverty of their own paltry paradigms.
The very notion that they might be transfigured like unto
their Lord, Well, that was as remote to them as
(49:05):
nuclear physics would have been to Charles Darwin. Seeing the
effulgence of Christ's glory in Mount Table produced nothing less
than a mega shift in perception, as with the uncreated
light that transfigured his Lord John. I like to call
him the quintessential theologian, because he is he perceived that
(49:30):
he too might be the repository of immaterial fire. Well,
all that to say that a similar megashift in perceptions
is precisely what is needed right now. It's precisely what
is needed today, this very moment. It's very epic that
has now been called the Golden Age. Golden age because
(49:53):
we think the politics are the answer to all our problems.
Remember this, The ballot box is necessary, but it's not sufficient.
A lot of other cultural levers move society, and often
in a very bad direction. I think the educational system
(50:14):
in the West, which is broken, or the entertainment system,
and I could go on. But suffice it to say
a mega shift in perception is what is needed, and
that is a shift from buying the materialist myth that
artificial intelligence is akin to actual intelligence. Now think that
(50:40):
over for a minute. Artificial intelligence is a marketing ploy.
It's perhaps the greatest marketing lever ever because artificial intelligence
is a misnomer. So we have to be wary of
these markets pictures that make artificial intelligence comparable to actual intelligence.
(51:06):
It's not. We need another shift, a shift from believing
that computers can develop consciousness. They can't. And even Elon
Musk is not so sure that there is such a
thing as consciousness. Wisely, he doesn't rule it out, but
(51:26):
he has a materialist perspective. So we need to shift
from believing that computers can develop consciousness, self awareness and
purposeful choices, a shift. What we really need is a
shift to authentic physical and metaphysical realities. God became man.
(51:51):
That's a reality, not blind faith, but faith and evidence.
God became man that man might become godlike the echo
of the Father's pounds at our psychees and seeks to
extricate us from our psychle epistemological cocoons. You know. First
(52:14):
you determine your paradigm, and then your paradigm determines you.
Christ invaded time and space. He took on our humanity,
and that is so that we might experience the paracritic
movement that is inherent to the divinization of Christ's flesh.
(52:37):
Those words not my own, but words that are memorable, poignant,
and profound. This paracritic movement is a movement undeniably commenced.
It's commenced by the divine nature of the Lagos, who
(52:58):
united our nature to a himself in a single hypothesis
that without division and without confusion and reciprocal movement, the
image returns to the archetype, who in turn imparts to
it divine life in one vibrant image. And I walk
(53:26):
every morning. I spend a mile in my walk memorizing,
and a mile in my walk praying, and I memorize
this during my walk. It was the vibrant image provided
in the fourteenth century by Saint Gregory Palamus, who likened
the deified life to the vivid image of an earthen
(53:49):
pot in a kiln. He said, when the pot is
in the kiln, and I hope you really focus on
these words, because they're powerful, walking and memorizing and cogitating
and meditating lost art, you know, memorizing, meditating, mining the
(54:11):
scripture for all it's worth. But also there's such wisdom
that has been passed down to us by the mind
of the church. Anyway, he said, when a pot is
in the kiln, it shares in the very life of
the fire. It takes on its hot and burning qualities.
(54:31):
And not only so, so you got the pot in
the kiln taking on the hot and burning qualities of
the fire, but it becomes capable of transferring that very
energy that fire to something else. Now, when you remove
from the fire this pot, it still participates in the
(54:56):
fire's effects, but it no longer, of course, part disipates
in the energies of the fire itself. The participation in
the energies of the fire is the truer participation than
the participation in the effects. And thus, while all God's
creatures participate in the effects of their creator, not all
(55:20):
participate in God's very life. That is reserved for the
saints who have God not only as maker but also
as father through divine adoption. Through divine adoption, we become
by grace what the Son of God is by nature
(55:42):
we become children of God. We become gods by grace,
we become God's by participation in the divine nature, the
very illumined life that Adam and Eve were created to
(56:03):
experience in Paradise. Well, the question that remains in this
podcast is can we have a transfigured today? That is
a poignant and a profound question in the Age of Neilism.
(56:24):
It's the fourth of the four volume series by Father
John Strickland that I did podcast on and if you
haven't heard them, they're really worth listening to. In the
Age of Nialism, Father John Strickland provides a poignant overview
of a film. It's a nineteen eighty seven film and
the film is simply called Repentance. I mean, some of
(56:47):
these old films are packed with profundity, but it's this
nineteen eighty seven film. It's called Repentance, and it's a
film that embodies the main theme of Alexander Zol's z
Needsen's call to cultural Revival, which was repentance through a
thorough going repudiation of secular ideology. And in the film's
(57:11):
final scene, this woman I wish I could tell you
the whole story, but it take too long. But this
woman passes by the open window of a bakery. The
baker is a woman who is making cakes in the
form of churches. But in this final scene, this woman
(57:31):
is passing by the open window of this bakery, and
she asked the film's quintessential question, does this road lead
to a church? And upon hearing that it did not,
the peasant pilgrim utters the film's famous query, what good
(57:52):
is a road if it doesn't lead to a church? Indeed,
what good is a road if it doesn't lead to
a church? And let me add this, what good is
a church if it doesn't lead us to a life
of continual repentance? Church is the center of the universe.
(58:18):
In fact, Vladimir Ilawski, who has informed me in so
many ways, I love his books, Vladimirlowsky, and by the way,
he was incredibly memorable. He said, the church is the
center of the universe. It's the sphere within which union
with God takes place in the present life, the union
(58:40):
which will be consummated in the age to come after
the resurrection of the dead. In fact, he put his
finger on the essence of it. The church is the
reincarnation of Eden. Why we've already talked about this in
(59:01):
the podcast, but because it's the place in which you
and I can access the Tree of Life, replete with
its eucharistic bounty. And let me personalize that, because that's
a eucharistic bounty that I experienced Palm Sunday, October nine,
(59:21):
twenty seventeen, just days before I was diagnosed with stage
four mental cell amphoma. That was the day that I
transitioned back to when the Church was young, back to
the first millennium of church history. That was the day
that I experienced chrismation. And when I did, my eyes
(59:44):
were riveted on the gate to Paradise at the center
of an iconostasis. On the north side of the iconostasis
is an icon that proclaims the First Advent of Jesus Christ,
on the south side an icon depicting the Second Advent.
(01:00:08):
And beyond the paradiseacal gaits as it were, I could
see an altar, an altar symbolizing the Tree of Life
in the Paradise of God. And then upon my chrismation,
I tasted the medicine of immortality. I experienced the power
(01:00:30):
inherent in the eucharistic bounty. I experienced the energy by
which to transform the cosmos, the energy that Saint Paul
invoked when he spoke of being energized by all his energy,
(01:00:51):
which so powerfully energizes me. This, this is the energy
that alone is sufficient to empower the Body of Christ
in the present clash between sacred and secular. It's in Latin,
(01:01:13):
the mysterium tremendous at fiskinons it's the mystery that causes
us to tremble and yet attracts us. It is the
mysterious zoetic energy by which we may as yet reclaim
the soul of the world, reclaim the soul of the
(01:01:35):
world against the insistent transhumanist counterfeit. The dunamus. It's the dunamus.
It's the power. It's the dynamite by which the paradiseacal
transformation of the cosmos is rendered possible, a transformation that
will be complete when the reality of sin and Satan
(01:01:58):
is finally resolved, when the universe is liberated from its
bondage to decay. And we also ourselves, as many of
you know, I loved the Book of Revelation, so I'll
try to wind down this podcast by quoting from chapter
(01:02:18):
twenty one, where Saint John says, then I saw a
new Heaven and a new Earth. For the first heaven
and the first Earth had passed away, and there's no
longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the New Jerusalem,
coming down out of Heaven from God, prepared as a bride,
(01:02:42):
beautifully adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud
voice from the throne saying, now the dwelling of God
is with men. They will be as people, and God
himself will be with them and be their God. He
(01:03:02):
will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be
no more death or mourning, or crying or pain. For
the old order things will have passed away. He was
seated on the throne, said I am making everything new.
In this podcast, I have sought to make a comparison
(01:03:29):
between Paradiseacal transformation and pagan transformation, between myth and reality.
For the first century of Church history, the paradiseacal transformation
of the cosmos was the imperative. And then disunity invades
(01:03:52):
the church. First you have the papal Reformation in the
eleventh century, with all of its innovation, and as I
said from papal supremacy to purgatory, and a whole lot
of innovations in between. And then and in the sixteenth century,
you have the Protestant Reformation, a counter reformation to Rome,
(01:04:15):
for sure, but a reformation replete with its own innovations,
the worst of which is the denuding of the Eucharist,
the eradication, if you will, of the liturgical sacramental dimension
of the church. And in the midst of all of
(01:04:38):
this you have the wars between Rome and the reformers,
which become a pretext, a pretext for an enlightenment, a
pretext for a change. Well, the paradiseacal transformation of the
universe obviously doesn't work. So let's have instead of a
(01:05:02):
paradiseacal transformational imperative, let's have a pagan transformational imperative. So
we have these two roads to utopia. One is paradiseacal,
the other's pagan. Well, what happens, as Father John Strickland
explained on this podcast, what happens is epic because within
(01:05:27):
the pagan transformational imperative you have wars as well. You
have wars that far outweigh the carnage of let's say
the thirty years war between the Protestants in between Rome.
These wars are so heinous. I mean the Bolshevik revolution.
(01:05:53):
I talked about what happened in Cambodia, but the First
and Second World War, where you can vaporize entire cities
with single bomb. So we find that, well, the pagan
road doesn't lead to utopia, it leads to dystopia. So
(01:06:15):
what do we do? Just throw up our hands and
say now that we can do about it. We live
in a fallen world. Yes, we do live in a
fallen world, but there is something that we can do about.
We can return to the paradiseacal transformation of the cosmos. Well,
how do we do that? We do that by partaking
of zoetic energy, spiritual energy through the liturgical sacramental life
(01:06:39):
of the Church that empowers us to transform the world,
not by might nor by power, but by His spirit,
that ultimately is the essence of the message. We can
go in this life from one glory to another, of course,
never attaining perfection, because we live in a sin riddled world,
(01:07:03):
and that stripe of sin runs directly through the human heart,
my heart, your heart, our hearts, So it's never perfect
in this time space continuum. But that does not mean
that we should not take this transformational imperative to the
world through missions, something that the Christian Research Institute is
(01:07:26):
very involved in now training Christian leaders overseas who have
come into the church and are now leaders of the church,
but are miles and miles long, but only an inch
(01:07:49):
or so deep in terms of a metaphor. So they
need training because if they don't have training, they're going
to fall for cults. I've been working on a project
of a cult that's insidious millions of adherents, and there
are only reason people fall for this cult us they
don't know the truth. They need to be so familiar
with the truth that when a counterfeit looms in the horizon,
they know it instantaneously. And that's part of our mission
(01:08:11):
at the Christian Research Institute. So we need to be
involved in the paradiseical transformation of the cosmos, moving from
glory to glory, not only as individuals but as masses
of people. And then, of course you'll have the time
where Christ perfects his bride. I said earlier on in
(01:08:34):
the podcast, that's the time where Christ returns in the
Second Advent and he carries his perfected bride across the
threshold of Jordan into a new Jerusalem, a new Jerusalem
in which there's no more death or mourning or crying
or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.
(01:08:56):
All things have become new. And notice in the Second
Advent Christ down, It's not as though we're going to
escape this world. God's going to transform this world. That's
the transformational imperative. In reality, the direction is down. God
doesn't scrap things. He redeems things. We're resurrected, immortal and perishable, incorruptible.
(01:09:20):
And as Paul says in Romans chapter eight, the universe
itself that groans in travail will be liberated from its
bondage to decay. So what happens to the universe as
it's restored is what happens to our bodies when they're restored.
Goes hand in hand the resurrection of the universe and
(01:09:43):
the resurrection of our bodies. And then we live in
what paradise was once ordained to be. You have Eden,
(01:10:03):
and you have eternity. You have the tree of life
in the garden of Eden, and the tree of life
in the post historical state in the eternal state, and
in between, we have the tree of life standing in
the falcrum of history. We can partake of its fruit,
(01:10:25):
of its bounty, its zoetic energy, be transformed, and be
agents of transformation. As always, we appreciate you tuning in
to our teaching series as well as our interview series
on the handcum Plug podcast. If you enjoyed the podcast,
(01:10:50):
please subscribe, rate review. It helps a lot. I've mentioned
a number of resources during the course of this long discussion.
They're a valaine on the web at equipped dot org.
You can check them out there. There for people that
are standing shoulder to shoulder with us in the battle
for life and truth, and we need many of more
(01:11:10):
of you. Quite frankly, I don't do a lot of fundraising.
I try to do friend raising, but I don't like
to do a lot of fundraising. But I mean, we
live in time and space and your resources would certainly
make a difference to this ministry. You can also get
resources you can give and so forth by writing us
at Box eighty five hundred, Charlotte, North Carolina, zip code
(01:11:32):
two eight two seven to one. You can also contact
us on the web at equipp dot org and as always,
we deeply appreciate those who are partners with us in ministry,
those who benefit from the podcast, and those whose lives
are being transformed this side of Eternity, a transformation that
(01:11:53):
will be complete on the other side, Love Eternity. Thanks
for tuning in to Hank Unplugged. To see you next
time with more distas expansition
And welcome to another edition of a handgun Plug podcast
of podcasts committed to bringing the most interesting, informative and
inspirational people on the planet directly to your earbuds. As
I've mentioned many times on this podcast, we also are
committed to training, to equipping God's people for works of
(00:45):
service so that the Body of Christ might be built
up and strengthened. So we want to equip people to
always be ready to give an answer or reason for
the hope that lies within them with gentleness and with respect,
act and that on a myriad of different topics. I
(01:06):
was just in Greece at a conference in which I
presented a paper on the paradisecal transformation of the cosmos.
And I've often said on this podcast that contrast is
the conduit to clarity, and so I want to do
(01:31):
in this podcast that very thing. Make a contrast, a
contrast between the paradisecal transformation of the cosmos and a
Pagan transformational imperative. By the way that Pagan transformational imperative
is largely fueled by the transhumanist myth of progress, a
(01:57):
myth commercialized the quintessential marketing cliche artificial intelligence. I'll talk
about that a little more later on in the podcast,
but again, the theme for this podcast is the paradiseacal
transformation of the cosmos contrasted with the pagan transformational imperative.
(02:24):
And let me start by quoting a passage of scripture
that comes from the very last book of the Bible,
not only the last book of the Bible, but the
last chapter of the last book of the Bible, in
which the Angel shows Saint John, the quintessential theologian, the
(02:49):
river of the Water of Life. It's as clear as crystal,
and it flows from the Throne of God and of
the Lamb down the middle of the great the city.
On each side of the river stood the Tree of Life,
bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month,
(03:13):
and the leaves of the tree are for the healing
of the nations. No longer will there be any curse.
The throne of God and of the Lamb will be
in the city, and his servants will serve him. They
will see his face, and his name will be on
their foreheads. There'll be no more night. They will not
(03:34):
need the light of a lamp or the light of
the sun, for the Lord God will give them light
and they will reign forever and ever so. In the
last book of the Bible, the last chapter of the
last Book of the Bible, we see a tree of life.
(03:56):
But we first encounter that very tree of life in Genesis,
in the very first book of the Bible. And I
think it's important to note that there are commentaries on Genesis,
and among those commentaries a commentary by Saint Ephrem the Syrian.
(04:23):
You know, we live in this era where with the
click of a twenty first century mouse, we can go
back to the era of the great historians, the great commentators,
the great saints of antiquity, and again one of them
Saint Ephrem the Syrian, and he depicts the Paradise narrative
(04:48):
in the most beautiful way. He depicts it as a
paradigm of deification, as an interpretive framework for the history
of and also think about it this way as a
spiritual geography for the conceptualization of deifying union with God
(05:10):
as the very goal, as the very center of the
Christian life. And this goal finds ultimate illumination in this
last book of the Bible. The illumined life that Adam
and Eve were created to experience in Paradise we will
(05:37):
absolutely experience it is accessible to us. And so, in
a brilliantly concise distillation, we have doctor Thomas Buchan pointing
out to us that, in the writings of Ephraim, paradise
(05:58):
is actually a liminal space. It's a part of the
created cosmos that is intended to serve as a venue
for divine and human communion, and as such it's special.
It's set apart in relation to the rest of creation.
(06:21):
Saint Ephraim imagines the Edenic garden not as a flatland,
but as a mountain, a mountain like under Mountain Zion,
a mountain dwarfing all other mountains. Its paradisacal peak, reaching
to the very habitation of God. And then he imagines
(06:46):
that the Tree of Knowledge is planted halfway up the mountain,
and the Tree of Life located with the Chicaina at
the mountain peak. If Adam and Eve had rejected the serpent,
they would have eaten from the Tree of Life in
(07:08):
the Tree of Knowledge would would not have been withheld
from them. From the one they would have gained infallible knowledge,
and from the other they would have received immortal life.
They would have acquired divinity alongside their humanity. But instead,
(07:33):
as we know from scripture, they're exiled from the identic
garden and from traversing the slope leading upward toward the
peak of deification. But the rest of the story is
that of a second Atom who clothed himself in fallen humanity,
(07:57):
in his temptation and in his obedience on the mountain
in the wilderness. Christ rehearsed the events, and he reversed
the effects of Adam's temptation and his disobedience on the
Mountain of Paradise, And in that process he rehabilitated human
(08:17):
free will and reiterated the proper paradigm for its use.
And it was above all, in his death on the
cross and his resurrection from the dead, that Christ returned Adam.
That is to say, Christ returned humanity to the life
of Eden. The wisest man, King Solomon, who has ever
(08:44):
lived upon the face of the earth. I'm not talking
about the god man. I'm talking about the wisest man.
I'm not talking about the crystal Christ, the paragon of virtue.
There is no one comparable to him, to Jesus Christ,
but the wisest man beyond that, whoever lived upon this planet,
rendered wisdom, the fruit of the righteous, and longing fulfilled well.
(09:11):
The proverbial tree of life, the very tree of life
that we're talking about in this podcast, a tree that
finds ultimate root in two gardens. So think about this.
In the antihistorical state, the tree of life stands at
the apex with the Chicaina glory of God, the apex
(09:35):
of the Edenic garden. In the post historical state, the
tree of life is rooted in an eternal garden, and
there it stands rooted as a memorial to paradise regained
to him who overcomes, said Jesus, how give to eat
(10:01):
from the tree of life, which is in the midst
of the paradise of God. In other words, to experience
deification throughout eternity, going from one glory to another glory,
(10:22):
and never reaching the apex. And the reason for that
is we can become more and more godlike, but we
can never attain to God because God is ineffable. He
is beyond our attaining. And so while we grow and
(10:45):
learn and develop without error, we never become God. But
we do come to a more fulfilling knowledge of the
one who spoke and the universe leapt into existence. But
(11:05):
there is a tree of life that we may presently
partake of, a tree of life that stands on Gogotha's hill.
We could call it the fulcrum of history, for on
it you can kind of picture this with me if
(11:26):
you're not watching this on video. On it, Jesus stretches
one hand toward the adenic garden and the other toward
the eternal garden. The deification that the first atom could
no longer reach the second atom Jesus Christ touched in
(11:50):
his place, and as such the Cross of Christ is
the way forward towards deification, or on it hangs the
eucharistic bounty. The Assembly of Saints bears resemblance to Paradise,
(12:10):
saying Saint Ephraim, because in it, each day, in this
Assembly of Saints, each day is plucked the fruit of
Him who gives life to all. In it is trodden
the cluster of grapes to be the medicine of life,
(12:32):
actually to be the medicine of immortality, because we are
created for immortality. And as Saint Ephraim explain, we may
presently partake of the tree of life through the liturgical
sacramental life of the Church. And it is likewise through
(12:55):
the Church that you and I are equipped to bring
the transformational imperative to the entire world, to the cosmos.
And there's no one who codified that paradiseacal imperative more
brilliantly than did the Patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew, the present
(13:21):
day patriarch, the ecumenical Patriarch, who once said that there
is a direct link between the oneness of Christians in
the image of the Holy Trinity and the missionary dimension
of the Church. He said, the Church looks not inward
but outward. It exists not for the sake of itself,
(13:46):
but for the sake of the world's salvation. The Church,
which is a mystery of mutual trinitarian love, is true
to itself only if the circle of love is being
continually enlarged, only if new persons are continually being brought
(14:09):
within it. Faith in the Triune God signifies this that
we are, each of us missionaries who are dedicated to
the preaching of the Gospel, who are dedicated to welcoming
(14:31):
the cosmos into a mystery of mutual trinitarian love, brought
into the fellowship of the Holy Trinity. This is synonymous
with welcoming human persons created in the image and likeness
of God into the sacred sphere, wherein which union of
(14:53):
human persons with God is accomplished. For a Saint Cyprian
of So memorably put it, no one can have God
for his father who does not have the Church for
his mother. Now that might be a revelation to some,
(15:15):
but actually it ought to be a self evident truth.
Why because it's through the Church that God's saving power
is mediated to the whole of humanity. And therefore outside
the Church there's no salvation. Because salvation is the Church,
(15:39):
the Church the purified bride that Christ one day will
carry over the threshold of Jordan into the New Jerusalem,
coming down out of Heaven, prepared as a bride beautifully
adorned for her husband. So, on the one hand we
have the paradisacal transformation of the cosmo, on the other
(16:04):
the pagan transformation of the cosmos. Now think of this
for a moment. Jesus said, there are two roads. There's
a narrow road and there's a broad road. A narrow
road which leads to life, and a broad road, which
leads to destruction. The pagan transformation of the cosmos is mythological.
(16:32):
It is a dream that doesn't correspond with reality. It
is a broad road leading to devastation. It is the
pagan imitation of the paradiseacal imperative. So, for the first
(16:55):
millennium of church history, heavenly eminence embodied the DNA of
Christian cosmology. It directed the Church's attention towards paradisaical transformation.
But all of that changed. It changed in an eleventh
(17:18):
century moment when the rumblings, as I put it in
my book, truth matters, Life matters more, the rumblings of
a schismatic volcano erupted, and it left behind itself a
blackened lava trail that stretched from east to west. Disunity
(17:41):
invaded the Church. Now. Prior to this division, the Body
of Christ effectively functioned as a sisterhood, a sisterhood of
five patriarchates. Antioch, where the disciples were first called Christians,
(18:02):
Alexandria the patriarch founded by the gospel writer Mark Jerusalem,
home to the first Ecumenical Council, Constantinople, capital of the
Christian Greek Roman Empire, and Rome the patriarchate designated by
(18:23):
the others with a primacy of honor, but not supremacy,
a primacy of honor the first among equals, but not supremacy.
And therein lay what I've called the fissure of fratricide.
In the era of the Ecumenical Councils, the Church functioned
(18:48):
as a collegial and conciliar move of the spirit. The
Bishop of Rome was afforded a primacy of honor, but
not the state of supremacy. He arrogant unto himself. The
Church must never function in supreme an autonomous fashion, because
(19:11):
if she did, said Nita's Archbishop of Nicomedia, the Roman
See would not be the pious mother of sons, but
a hard and an imperious mistress of slaves. So what
is the sin of fratracide. The sin of fratracide was
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a sin against the common mind of the Church. And
this is no small matter. This is not of small consequence.
To sin against the mind of the Church is to
sin against the very pillar and ground of truth. And thus,
(19:59):
when the philioque, which is Latin for and the sun,
was added to the creed, disunity between East and West
became inevitable. Half a millennium after the scandal of Fratricide
had fissured the Church from east to west, another schism
(20:21):
shattered Western Christianity. This time, the fissure separated Rome from
the Reformers. This time, the catalyst was indulgences. In the
summer of fifteen seventeen, a crass and carnal dominical friar
(20:44):
demanded something from people. His name was Johann Tetzel, and
he was conning people with his demands. He was conning
commoners into buying special releases from sin with an an
intoxicatingly simple pitch. He was telling people that they could
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purchase a pardon from God that would purge them from
a mythological place called purgatory. And he was capitalizing on
spiritual insecurity as well as scriptural illiteracy. It's always a
problem scriptural literacy. If you don't know scripture, you're easily misled.
(21:33):
If you're not familiar with the essentials of the Christian faith,
you can very easily fall for a counterfeit. And of
course this was a quintessential counterfeit. He was fleecing the
flock with this idea of indulgences for a reason. It
was to fund papal projects, and although his merchandising of
(21:59):
the Gospel was outrageous, no one seemed willing to oppose him.
No one wanted to expose his mythology. His popularity, backed
by the power of Rome, just seemed too big a
hill to climb, too formidable a foe, that is, until
(22:25):
a monk named Martin Luther came along. Luther's concern was
not so much indulgences as it was the pillaging of
the poor by the pope. In fact, he wrote with
great passion that the mother Church in Rome would be
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better burnt, burnt to ashes, than it should be built
up by the skin and the bones of the Pope's sheep. Well.
Rome's reaction, as we know from history, was both swift
and severe. Luther was labeled a child of the devil
(23:08):
and a drunken German who, when sober, would change his mind.
But Luther did not change his mind. Under the ban
of the empire and a bull of excommunication, Luther remained
resolute in his contention that the Romanist Church was upon
(23:29):
the devil, and that the Pope was the Devil's Antichrist,
and were it not for his stranglehold on scripture. The
populace would no longer be duped by his devious deceptions. Thus,
of course, the battle cry of the Reformation sol the scripture.
As the Reformation continued, so did fissuring, loosed from the
(23:55):
restraining fetters of the Apostolic tradition, loosed from the creeds,
loosed from the councils. He had Houldrik Swingley, the Swiss Reformer,
reimagining both the Eucharist and baptism. For Zwingley, the Eucharist
(24:16):
became merely a memorial, a mere remembrance, and in like fashions,
Wingley altered baptism from a sacramental burial to sin and
resurrection to newness of life, to a mere welcoming ceremony.
John Calvin, following on their heels, not only refashioned the
(24:42):
real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but championed the
innovative notion of double predestination. He varied his conjecture on
the ratios of those preordained to eternal life and those
preordained to eternal damnation, from one salvation and every one
hundred damnations to a more palatable estimate of one in
(25:08):
every five and growing up in a Dutch Calvini's context
as I did, I can personally testify that Calvin's ratios
are far from academic. They had real life consequences, and
I certainly remember that growing up as a child well.
(25:29):
A great deal more attention could be assigned to the
disunity that took place with the Reformation. But suffice it
to say that the fissering did not end there, and
nor did the animus between the people and the Protestant
Reformers and their innovations. And while accounts of division can
(25:50):
be multiplied indefinitely, it is sufficient at this point to
note a bewildering array of believers, all claiming that they
embody the right interpretation of sacred Scripture. Inevitably, the division
between Rome and the Reformers led to the greatest of
(26:12):
all travesties. It led to the wars of Western religion,
none more so than the infamous Thirty Years War, a
war so pervasive that nearly every corner of Western Christendom
experienced its ravages. In one country alone, in Germany, half
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the populace experienced death or defilement, and in the process,
the incarnational imperative propelling Christianity toward the paradizacal transformation of
the cosmos was all but lost. In place of paradizacal transformation,
(27:00):
moved inexorably towards cultural rebirth in the baptismal basin of paganism,
a thoroughly secular rather than sacramental rebirth. So, if the
first millennium of Church history from Pentecost to the Papal
(27:20):
Reformation was an age of paradisical transformation, the advent of
the Enlightenment in the second millennium became the impetus for
pagan transformation. So let me pause for just a moment
here and say that the world looks in and sees
(27:45):
the wars of Western Christianity, the fragmentation of Christianity after
the first millennium of Church history, and they say, look,
Christianity really doesn't offer an enlightened path towards utopia, and
(28:05):
so we have a better way. Instead of the paradisaical path.
Will choose the pagan path, will choose a different impetus
for transformation, a renaissance that will promise you a utopia,
(28:29):
but a renaissance that in the end didn't deliver on
its promise. What it really did deliver was a dysfunctional,
dystopian dream. What it delivered was a paradiseacal counterfeit, a
counterfeit powered by the secular myth of progress, a myth
(28:52):
largely facilitated by Charles Darwin's magnum opis. You know the title,
The Origin Species by Means of natural Selection. Sir Julian Huxley,
he actually went so far as to dub the evolutionary
(29:12):
dogma that this book spawned. This idea spawned as the
most powerful and the most comprehensive notion that had ever
arisen on earth. He called it the supreme ornament of
all intellectual transformations, an intellectual revolution that viewed progress through
(29:41):
well through the prism of natural selection, through the prism
of survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence.
Why because if the unfit survived indefinitely, they would continue
to infect the fit with their lif less fed genes,
and the result is that the morphid genes would be
(30:04):
diluted and compromised by the less fid genes, and evolution
would be rendered null and void. Karl Marx, the father
of communism, saw in Darwin and his theory the scientific
(30:26):
the sociological support for an economic experiment that eclipsed even
the carnage of Hitler's Germany. In Hitler's Germany, macro evolution
was the promise of an uber Mitsch of a utopian superman.
For Marx, that evolutionary superman could only arise from the
(30:51):
ashes of an archetypal social revolution, from the ashes of
a secular humanist experiment bent on pagan transformation through the
abolition of religion. Remember, Marx famously said that religion is
(31:13):
the sigh of the oppressed creature, it's the heart of
a heartless world. It's the soul of soulless conditions. And
then the famous line, it is the opium of the people.
He went on to say, the abolition note that word,
(31:36):
the abolition of religion, as the illusory happiness of the
people is a demand for their real happiness. To call
on them to give up their illusions about their condition,
he said, is to call on them to give up
(31:56):
a condition that requires illusions. And then he famously concluded
his remarks in this brief category by saying that his
criticism of religion in Embryo was the criticism of that
veil of tears. Of which religion is the halo good
(32:18):
prose bad concept. His demand for the abolition of religion
as the illusory happiness of the people was of course
anything but theoretical ideas of consequences, and Marxism held religion,
especially Orthodoxy, to be the quintessence of class oppressing. Well
(32:42):
that all the time now the oppressor of the oppressed
comes from Marx To fashion the ideal Homo sapiens in
the ideal human society, to draw Heaven down to earth
necessitated the elimination of every vestige of religion, particularly Christian Orthodoxy.
(33:07):
You know, I've had Father John Strickland on this podcast
a number of times, and I've learned a great deal
from him. He gives such a great condensation of history,
history from Pentagost to the present, and his four volume
series that are available to the Ministry of the Christian
Research Institute at equipped dot org. But you can also
(33:27):
listen to the podcasts. I did five podcasts with him.
But anyway, Father John Strickland says as a historian that
during this period of time clergy were drowned, some of
them were buried alive, some were crucified on the Royal
(33:50):
gates of their parish churches, and when the lady rose
up in protest, they were arrested, and in many cases
they were executed. They were executed as the agents of
the bourgeoisie of the rich. Well, as I said, ideas
(34:13):
of consequences, and those consequences keep creating chaos after chaos.
From nineteen seventeen onward, Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik Revolution precipitated the
merciless martyrdom of more than one hundred thousand followers of Christ,
(34:34):
and added to the misery, myriad cathedrals and monasteries were
desecrated or manifestly destroyed. And yet that was only the
beginning of sorrows following in the genocidal footsteps of Lenin,
(34:56):
Stalin orchestrated just scale massacre of a domestic population in
human history. At its height in nineteen thirty seven and
nineteen thirty eight. Someone who's written about this eloquently is
Jay Richards. Also had him on many of my podcasts.
(35:19):
But at its height in nineteen thirty seven and nineteen
thirty eight, says doctor J there were on average one
thousand political executions per day, and that doesn't even include
(35:39):
the countless millions sent to labor camps, and tragically, the
Marxist humanist hell didn't end in the former Soviet Union.
As history tells us, at one time in the mid
twentieth century, almost half the human race was subject to
a Grand Marxist experiment. And during the Great Leap Forward
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in China nineteen fifty eight to nineteen sixty two, Mao
promised to create a new heaven and a new Earth
for man. But instead, well, twenty million people, maybe many
many more than that, died a fan, and twenty million
more died in Communist Chinese re education camps per capita.
(36:29):
Paul Pott's Khmer Rouge was even more destructive. A full
quarter of the entire population of Cambodia was relegated skeletons
in the infamous Killing Fields. A number of years ago,
I was in Cambodia and I met the last living
survival of the Khmer Rouge. Well, anyway, nothing exposed the
(36:57):
pagan cult of evolutionary progress. You know, we talk about
all of this carnage that took place, and then we
think about something more. Well, nothing exposed the pagan cult
of evolutionary progress more more than did the First and
Second Wars of the twentieth century, and there's a history
(37:22):
to that as well. In nineteen o five, Albert Einstein
discovered a life force by which the world would be
irrevocably changed, a force replete with a capacity for unleashing
a transformational energy supply, an energy supply previously unimaginable. What
(37:45):
Einstein discovered was the power inherent in mass, the stunning
reality that microscopic atomic molecules contain an enormous amount of
energy that, when released, can vaporize the world or conversely
(38:06):
transform it. Fission science. We're now talking about fusion science.
But fission science led to the abrupt ending of the
Second World War on August six nineteen forty five. You
have an idea rooted in scientific discovery that actually comes
(38:29):
to fruition in a horrible way, because discoveries can lead
to good things into bad things. But on August sixth,
nineteen forty five, while millions of Christians celebrated the feast
of Christ's Holy Transfiguration on the amount of Transfiguration, the
United States annihilated one hundred thousand unarmed Japanese civilians at
(38:57):
Hiroshima with the drop of one single solitary bomb, an
atom bomb. Unperturbed by the unprecedented carnage, America dropped a
second bomb on Nagasaki, and that was just three days later.
(39:18):
So again to recapitulate. In the paradiseical transformation of the cosmos,
you had zoetic energy from the word zoe, zoetic energy,
spiritual energy inherent, and the Eucharist. That energy was the
axiomatic power by which to transform a person, transform oneself,
(39:46):
but also the axiomatic power by which to transform the world. Conversely,
in the pagan transformation of the cosmos, there's zero warrant
for spiritual transformation. Sir Julian Huxley, the great grandson of
(40:07):
Thomas Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, boastfully pronounced that in the evolutionary
pattern of thought, there is no longer either need or
room for the supernatural. The earth was not created, It evolved,
(40:31):
So did all the animals and the plants that inhabit it,
including our human selves, our mind, our soul, as well
as brain and body. So did religion. What was his conclusion.
(40:51):
His conclusion was dramatic evolutionary man can no longer take
refuge from his loneliness by creeping for shelter into the
arms of a divinized father figure whom he himself created
as the figment of his own imagination. And so evolutionary
(41:15):
man lives under the illusion that what God once was
we may become. And they put that in startling prose.
I am certain, said Leonid Crescent, the man intended to
immortalize lenin that the time will come when science will
(41:43):
become all powerful, and when it does, intone the secular
humanist essayist Jules Antoine Costagnery. I will build a new
Eden for myself, which I will populate with mine own kind.
(42:06):
I will station the invisible sentinel Progress at the entrance
and place a flaming sword into his hands, and then
he will say to God, thou shalt not enter here.
(42:31):
The transhumanist transformational imperative has dramatic consequences for people, for civilization,
for the cosmos. In the great divide of human history,
(42:57):
the crator of the Cosmos clothed himself and fallen humanity.
Through his death on the cross and his resurrection from
the dead, he provided humankind with the way back to
the life of Eden, and for a millennium thereafter, the
church function in collegial and concilor fashion. And then, as
(43:23):
I've already tried to communicate, then came this unity. First
a Papal Reformation replete with a plethora of innovations from
papal supremacy to purgatory, and thereafter a Protestant Reformation, largely
denuding the Church of its liturgical sacramental imperative. And on
(43:50):
top of that, the wars of Western Christianity, most particularly
the Thirty Years' War, became the pretext for the pagan
transformational imperative. Again, my frequent guest Orthodox historian Father John Strickland,
recounts how in The Last Valley, a movie produced in
(44:12):
nineteen seventy one, so it's an older movie, but it's
worth watching the character of a war weary captain. It's
played by Michael Caine. He's asked about the God for
whom all the West is currently fighting, and his words
are memorable, don't talk to me of God. We killed
(44:38):
God at Magdeburg. The death of God, or the supposed
death of God ushered in an era in which humans
proclaim themselves sovereigns of the universe. The imperative became secular
rather than sacred, Imago Darwin rather than Amago Day, evolutionistic
(45:09):
rather than eucharistic. Here's a word I coined, zooetic rather
than zoetic. In the mythology of never ending evolutionary progress,
man was deemed a zooetic animal, a zoetic animal in
(45:32):
an upward evolutionary spiral that would erupt in the erudition
of a utopian Uberminsch. In accord with the Nietzschean transvaluation
of values, human beings were destined to become materialistic gods,
(45:54):
and science, coupled with technological breakthroughs, were thought to be
the operative instruments of transition. And now, as we're in
the embryonic stages of the third millennium since Pentecost, popular
philosophical paradigms are touting transhumanism. In one book I read
(46:20):
recently subtitled When Humans Transcend Biology, you have this celebrated futurist,
a guy by the name of Ray Kurtzweil. He's hailed
by billionaire Bill Gates as the best person I know
at predicting the future of artificial intelligence, and he's prophesying
(46:45):
a breakthrough in which the human species sheds all shackles
of biological restraint. His words, our mortality will be in
our our own hands. We will be able to live
as long as we want. In essence, we will be
(47:10):
the gods of our own biology. We will be the
ultimate deciders in the grand meta narrative of life. Ironically,
the terror of the transhumanist transformational imperative is the illusion,
and it is an illusion, the illusion that a merely
(47:31):
material being living in a merely material world may be
supplanted by the advent of artificial intelligence, of machines, supplanting
human beings in the struggle for survival a post human
species inhabiting a post human sphere. Well, as I said
(48:00):
in my book, truth matters, life matters more. Our perceptual
lenses are in desperate need of cleansing. Has telescopes and
microscopes and covered truths about the universe previously unimaginable. So
the transfiguration of Jesus Christ unveiled realities concerning participation in
(48:21):
the divine nature previously unthinkable. As modern technology has uncovered
truths concerning the nature of matter, So Mount Tabor served
to disclose new heights of perspective and new depths of understanding.
(48:42):
Remember the disciples they saw the face of Jesus Christ
shining like the sun. And when they did, they came
face to face with the poverty of their own paltry paradigms.
The very notion that they might be transfigured like unto
their Lord, Well, that was as remote to them as
(49:05):
nuclear physics would have been to Charles Darwin. Seeing the
effulgence of Christ's glory in Mount Table produced nothing less
than a mega shift in perception, as with the uncreated
light that transfigured his Lord John. I like to call
him the quintessential theologian, because he is he perceived that
(49:30):
he too might be the repository of immaterial fire. Well,
all that to say that a similar megashift in perceptions
is precisely what is needed right now. It's precisely what
is needed today, this very moment. It's very epic that
has now been called the Golden Age. Golden age because
(49:53):
we think the politics are the answer to all our problems.
Remember this, The ballot box is necessary, but it's not sufficient.
A lot of other cultural levers move society, and often
in a very bad direction. I think the educational system
(50:14):
in the West, which is broken, or the entertainment system,
and I could go on. But suffice it to say
a mega shift in perception is what is needed, and
that is a shift from buying the materialist myth that
artificial intelligence is akin to actual intelligence. Now think that
(50:40):
over for a minute. Artificial intelligence is a marketing ploy.
It's perhaps the greatest marketing lever ever because artificial intelligence
is a misnomer. So we have to be wary of
these markets pictures that make artificial intelligence comparable to actual intelligence.
(51:06):
It's not. We need another shift, a shift from believing
that computers can develop consciousness. They can't. And even Elon
Musk is not so sure that there is such a
thing as consciousness. Wisely, he doesn't rule it out, but
(51:26):
he has a materialist perspective. So we need to shift
from believing that computers can develop consciousness, self awareness and
purposeful choices, a shift. What we really need is a
shift to authentic physical and metaphysical realities. God became man.
(51:51):
That's a reality, not blind faith, but faith and evidence.
God became man that man might become godlike the echo
of the Father's pounds at our psychees and seeks to
extricate us from our psychle epistemological cocoons. You know. First
(52:14):
you determine your paradigm, and then your paradigm determines you.
Christ invaded time and space. He took on our humanity,
and that is so that we might experience the paracritic
movement that is inherent to the divinization of Christ's flesh.
(52:37):
Those words not my own, but words that are memorable, poignant,
and profound. This paracritic movement is a movement undeniably commenced.
It's commenced by the divine nature of the Lagos, who
(52:58):
united our nature to a himself in a single hypothesis
that without division and without confusion and reciprocal movement, the
image returns to the archetype, who in turn imparts to
it divine life in one vibrant image. And I walk
(53:26):
every morning. I spend a mile in my walk memorizing,
and a mile in my walk praying, and I memorize
this during my walk. It was the vibrant image provided
in the fourteenth century by Saint Gregory Palamus, who likened
the deified life to the vivid image of an earthen
(53:49):
pot in a kiln. He said, when the pot is
in the kiln, and I hope you really focus on
these words, because they're powerful, walking and memorizing and cogitating
and meditating lost art, you know, memorizing, meditating, mining the
(54:11):
scripture for all it's worth. But also there's such wisdom
that has been passed down to us by the mind
of the church. Anyway, he said, when a pot is
in the kiln, it shares in the very life of
the fire. It takes on its hot and burning qualities.
(54:31):
And not only so, so you got the pot in
the kiln taking on the hot and burning qualities of
the fire, but it becomes capable of transferring that very
energy that fire to something else. Now, when you remove
from the fire this pot, it still participates in the
(54:56):
fire's effects, but it no longer, of course, part disipates
in the energies of the fire itself. The participation in
the energies of the fire is the truer participation than
the participation in the effects. And thus, while all God's
creatures participate in the effects of their creator, not all
(55:20):
participate in God's very life. That is reserved for the
saints who have God not only as maker but also
as father through divine adoption. Through divine adoption, we become
by grace what the Son of God is by nature
(55:42):
we become children of God. We become gods by grace,
we become God's by participation in the divine nature, the
very illumined life that Adam and Eve were created to
(56:03):
experience in Paradise. Well, the question that remains in this
podcast is can we have a transfigured today? That is
a poignant and a profound question in the Age of Neilism.
(56:24):
It's the fourth of the four volume series by Father
John Strickland that I did podcast on and if you
haven't heard them, they're really worth listening to. In the
Age of Nialism, Father John Strickland provides a poignant overview
of a film. It's a nineteen eighty seven film and
the film is simply called Repentance. I mean, some of
(56:47):
these old films are packed with profundity, but it's this
nineteen eighty seven film. It's called Repentance, and it's a
film that embodies the main theme of Alexander Zol's z
Needsen's call to cultural Revival, which was repentance through a
thorough going repudiation of secular ideology. And in the film's
(57:11):
final scene, this woman I wish I could tell you
the whole story, but it take too long. But this
woman passes by the open window of a bakery. The
baker is a woman who is making cakes in the
form of churches. But in this final scene, this woman
(57:31):
is passing by the open window of this bakery, and
she asked the film's quintessential question, does this road lead
to a church? And upon hearing that it did not,
the peasant pilgrim utters the film's famous query, what good
(57:52):
is a road if it doesn't lead to a church? Indeed,
what good is a road if it doesn't lead to
a church? And let me add this, what good is
a church if it doesn't lead us to a life
of continual repentance? Church is the center of the universe.
(58:18):
In fact, Vladimir Ilawski, who has informed me in so
many ways, I love his books, Vladimirlowsky, and by the way,
he was incredibly memorable. He said, the church is the
center of the universe. It's the sphere within which union
with God takes place in the present life, the union
(58:40):
which will be consummated in the age to come after
the resurrection of the dead. In fact, he put his
finger on the essence of it. The church is the
reincarnation of Eden. Why we've already talked about this in
(59:01):
the podcast, but because it's the place in which you
and I can access the Tree of Life, replete with
its eucharistic bounty. And let me personalize that, because that's
a eucharistic bounty that I experienced Palm Sunday, October nine,
(59:21):
twenty seventeen, just days before I was diagnosed with stage
four mental cell amphoma. That was the day that I
transitioned back to when the Church was young, back to
the first millennium of church history. That was the day
that I experienced chrismation. And when I did, my eyes
(59:44):
were riveted on the gate to Paradise at the center
of an iconostasis. On the north side of the iconostasis
is an icon that proclaims the First Advent of Jesus Christ,
on the south side an icon depicting the Second Advent.
(01:00:08):
And beyond the paradiseacal gaits as it were, I could
see an altar, an altar symbolizing the Tree of Life
in the Paradise of God. And then upon my chrismation,
I tasted the medicine of immortality. I experienced the power
(01:00:30):
inherent in the eucharistic bounty. I experienced the energy by
which to transform the cosmos, the energy that Saint Paul
invoked when he spoke of being energized by all his energy,
(01:00:51):
which so powerfully energizes me. This, this is the energy
that alone is sufficient to empower the Body of Christ
in the present clash between sacred and secular. It's in Latin,
(01:01:13):
the mysterium tremendous at fiskinons it's the mystery that causes
us to tremble and yet attracts us. It is the
mysterious zoetic energy by which we may as yet reclaim
the soul of the world, reclaim the soul of the
(01:01:35):
world against the insistent transhumanist counterfeit. The dunamus. It's the dunamus.
It's the power. It's the dynamite by which the paradiseacal
transformation of the cosmos is rendered possible, a transformation that
will be complete when the reality of sin and Satan
(01:01:58):
is finally resolved, when the universe is liberated from its
bondage to decay. And we also ourselves, as many of
you know, I loved the Book of Revelation, so I'll
try to wind down this podcast by quoting from chapter
(01:02:18):
twenty one, where Saint John says, then I saw a
new Heaven and a new Earth. For the first heaven
and the first Earth had passed away, and there's no
longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the New Jerusalem,
coming down out of Heaven from God, prepared as a bride,
(01:02:42):
beautifully adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud
voice from the throne saying, now the dwelling of God
is with men. They will be as people, and God
himself will be with them and be their God. He
(01:03:02):
will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be
no more death or mourning, or crying or pain. For
the old order things will have passed away. He was
seated on the throne, said I am making everything new.
In this podcast, I have sought to make a comparison
(01:03:29):
between Paradiseacal transformation and pagan transformation, between myth and reality.
For the first century of Church history, the paradiseacal transformation
of the cosmos was the imperative. And then disunity invades
(01:03:52):
the church. First you have the papal Reformation in the
eleventh century, with all of its innovation, and as I
said from papal supremacy to purgatory, and a whole lot
of innovations in between. And then and in the sixteenth century,
you have the Protestant Reformation, a counter reformation to Rome,
(01:04:15):
for sure, but a reformation replete with its own innovations,
the worst of which is the denuding of the Eucharist,
the eradication, if you will, of the liturgical sacramental dimension
of the church. And in the midst of all of
(01:04:38):
this you have the wars between Rome and the reformers,
which become a pretext, a pretext for an enlightenment, a
pretext for a change. Well, the paradiseacal transformation of the
universe obviously doesn't work. So let's have instead of a
(01:05:02):
paradiseacal transformational imperative, let's have a pagan transformational imperative. So
we have these two roads to utopia. One is paradiseacal,
the other's pagan. Well, what happens, as Father John Strickland
explained on this podcast, what happens is epic because within
(01:05:27):
the pagan transformational imperative you have wars as well. You
have wars that far outweigh the carnage of let's say
the thirty years war between the Protestants in between Rome.
These wars are so heinous. I mean the Bolshevik revolution.
(01:05:53):
I talked about what happened in Cambodia, but the First
and Second World War, where you can vaporize entire cities
with single bomb. So we find that, well, the pagan
road doesn't lead to utopia, it leads to dystopia. So
(01:06:15):
what do we do? Just throw up our hands and
say now that we can do about it. We live
in a fallen world. Yes, we do live in a
fallen world, but there is something that we can do about.
We can return to the paradiseacal transformation of the cosmos. Well,
how do we do that? We do that by partaking
of zoetic energy, spiritual energy through the liturgical sacramental life
(01:06:39):
of the Church that empowers us to transform the world,
not by might nor by power, but by His spirit,
that ultimately is the essence of the message. We can
go in this life from one glory to another, of course,
never attaining perfection, because we live in a sin riddled world,
(01:07:03):
and that stripe of sin runs directly through the human heart,
my heart, your heart, our hearts, So it's never perfect
in this time space continuum. But that does not mean
that we should not take this transformational imperative to the
world through missions, something that the Christian Research Institute is
(01:07:26):
very involved in now training Christian leaders overseas who have
come into the church and are now leaders of the church,
but are miles and miles long, but only an inch
(01:07:49):
or so deep in terms of a metaphor. So they
need training because if they don't have training, they're going
to fall for cults. I've been working on a project
of a cult that's insidious millions of adherents, and there
are only reason people fall for this cult us they
don't know the truth. They need to be so familiar
with the truth that when a counterfeit looms in the horizon,
they know it instantaneously. And that's part of our mission
(01:08:11):
at the Christian Research Institute. So we need to be
involved in the paradiseical transformation of the cosmos, moving from
glory to glory, not only as individuals but as masses
of people. And then, of course you'll have the time
where Christ perfects his bride. I said earlier on in
(01:08:34):
the podcast, that's the time where Christ returns in the
Second Advent and he carries his perfected bride across the
threshold of Jordan into a new Jerusalem, a new Jerusalem
in which there's no more death or mourning or crying
or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.
(01:08:56):
All things have become new. And notice in the Second
Advent Christ down, It's not as though we're going to
escape this world. God's going to transform this world. That's
the transformational imperative. In reality, the direction is down. God
doesn't scrap things. He redeems things. We're resurrected, immortal and perishable, incorruptible.
(01:09:20):
And as Paul says in Romans chapter eight, the universe
itself that groans in travail will be liberated from its
bondage to decay. So what happens to the universe as
it's restored is what happens to our bodies when they're restored.
Goes hand in hand the resurrection of the universe and
(01:09:43):
the resurrection of our bodies. And then we live in
what paradise was once ordained to be. You have Eden,
(01:10:03):
and you have eternity. You have the tree of life
in the garden of Eden, and the tree of life
in the post historical state in the eternal state, and
in between, we have the tree of life standing in
the falcrum of history. We can partake of its fruit,
(01:10:25):
of its bounty, its zoetic energy, be transformed, and be
agents of transformation. As always, we appreciate you tuning in
to our teaching series as well as our interview series
on the handcum Plug podcast. If you enjoyed the podcast,
(01:10:50):
please subscribe, rate review. It helps a lot. I've mentioned
a number of resources during the course of this long discussion.
They're a valaine on the web at equipped dot org.
You can check them out there. There for people that
are standing shoulder to shoulder with us in the battle
for life and truth, and we need many of more
(01:11:10):
of you. Quite frankly, I don't do a lot of fundraising.
I try to do friend raising, but I don't like
to do a lot of fundraising. But I mean, we
live in time and space and your resources would certainly
make a difference to this ministry. You can also get
resources you can give and so forth by writing us
at Box eighty five hundred, Charlotte, North Carolina, zip code
(01:11:32):
two eight two seven to one. You can also contact
us on the web at equipp dot org and as always,
we deeply appreciate those who are partners with us in ministry,
those who benefit from the podcast, and those whose lives
are being transformed this side of Eternity, a transformation that
(01:11:53):
will be complete on the other side, Love Eternity. Thanks
for tuning in to Hank Unplugged. To see you next
time with more distas expansition
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