The Bible Decoded: Hidden Old to the New Testament Symbolism with Dr. Christopher Lockwood

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
The hell. All right, Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. This
is doctor David Patrick Carey with Church of the Eternal Logos,
and I have a very special stream for you guys today.

(00:26):
I am joined by scholar author, doctor Christopher Lockwood. How
you doing today, sir.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
I'm doing well, Patrick, really happy to be with you
in your audience today.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
Glory to God, Glory to God. Now I am excited.
We can't begin the stream without giving first a shout
out to Aaron. He knows who he is. We're not
going to use his full name, but Aaron a major
thank you for actually linking me and doctor Lockwood up.
We're gonna be going over your book types and symbols
in the Bible, and some of the people in the

(00:57):
audience said they've already heard of this book and they've
seen some of your other interviews. You're on Roots of Orthodoxy,
barrel aged Faith, the Paitios Brotherhood, and so on and
so forth. But before we get into the book, we
got a lot to discuss, and we're going to try
to get as much jam packed conversation as possible into

(01:19):
about an hour and a half. I know doctor Lockwood,
he's a little bit under the weather, as was I
for the last almost two weeks, week and a half
or so, So you're gonna have to bear with us.
But doctor Lockwood, I think you mentioned you'd like to
begin with a prayer before we begin to dive into conversation.

Speaker 3 (01:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:38):
There's a story about Saint Silijan on a train in
Russia when he went back to visit after he'd become
a monk with a man and the man is smoking,
and the man said them, you probably think I'm sitting
because I'm smoking, don't you? And Saint Siliwan said, no,
not necessarily, but can you say a prayer before you
light up the pipe or the cigar? And he said,

(01:58):
somehow doesn't make sense. And Saint Silowan's response was better
not to begin anything that you can't be blessed with prayer.
And so you know, I think it's always good, no
matter what we do, to make sure that we can
invite God in and bless what we're about to do,
especially if we're going to talk about holy things. So
I would like to begin with a prayer. It's a

(02:19):
habit I have, so you don't mind if I say it.

Speaker 1 (02:22):
Yeah, go ahead, okay, in the.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
Name of the Father and of the Son of the
Holy Spirit.

Speaker 1 (02:27):
One got.

Speaker 2 (02:27):
I'm in heavenly keen comfort of the Spirit of Truth,
who is prison everywhere and filling all things, the treasury
blessings and the source of life, coming to binding us
cleanses from hostain and say we'stul is a good one.
I mean, you had mentioned a couple other things about
the video streams I've been doing. I didn't do any
streams until my book was released this year, and I

(02:47):
just wanted to mention one important thing about all that.
All this came about because of my friend father Paul Truppenbach,
who was a seminary classmate of mine and it's his
When my book was released, I had I needed to
get some exposure, so I emailed him. I hadn't talked

(03:08):
to him in a long time, and I thought, I
knew he had a big channel, and I thought, well
he can, uh, you know, maybe just do a review
of the book on his channel and uh and and
post it you know, himself. I was going to send
him a copy or something, and he had this idea.
He's like, yeah, oh, you should come up to my
parish and do a retreat and uh, I'll talk to
my parish council and then we'll record something and put

(03:30):
it on my website. And he started getting putting me
in contact with all these other people, and other people
came into my life around the same time who were interested.
But yeah, Father Paul Trubenbach is a close friend of mine,
and I blame him for most of this.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
Hey, I'm actually I've never I've been ever been able
to speak with Father Paul. I've watched this stuff because
he's around Salt Lake City. Correct.

Speaker 2 (03:52):
Yeah, he's a precis Peter and Paul and.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
He he had one of the best videos. I forget
which channel was. I think the guy's pro but he
goes and he kind of experiences o other what I
guess what he considers denominations as Orthodox. Of course, we
hate being referred to as a denomination, but Father Paul
did such a wonderful introduction to him to the Orthodox faith.
And so you know, I may have to use my

(04:18):
connection with you now to try to get a hold
of Father Paul, because I would love to interview Father
Paul with with some of the stuff he's been speaking about,
especially spiritual warfare and things and the contemporary world but yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
I'd be happy to reach out to him. Unfortunately, he's
so busy exciving people he's he hardly rarely gets back
to even me, and uh and uh. You know, he's
got a big family and he just that guy is
the example of tireless service, pastoral Christian service to other people.
He's just constantly running to services to pray, to hear confessions,

(04:55):
and he just squeezes in his YouTube videos in between
all that or what he's doing.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
Anyways, That's how I feel about Father Turbo. I've had
the pleasure of meeting Father Turbo, and you know, in
a sense befriending him, he's a a I love. I
love my relationship with Father Turbo. But he sent me
his calendar one time and he was literally booked up
him every day for like three months. And he's of course,

(05:21):
he was just in the new fifty cent movie on
Saint Moses the Black. I don't know if you if
you have been seeing I've.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
Heard about that. I haven't. I haven't seen too much.
I don't watch a lot of YouTube videos myself, even
though I find myself appearing.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
In them now.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
But no, I every Orthodox priest that I know is
really extremely busy. I'm very I live very close now.
I just moved to UH Saint Andrew's Church in Riverside,
and I know Father Joseiam. He's got no time for anything.
The guy is totally swamped. I would I was there
the other day, well, a couple of months ago, on

(05:59):
the average Sunday, and there was a thousand people attending liturgy.
He has two hundred catechumens or something right now. Oh
my gosh, crazy.

Speaker 1 (06:07):
I was able. I had the pleasure of going one
time to Riverside. It was on an ascension. It was
on a Thursday morning, and I was expecting maybe the
church to be kind of half full. I mean, it's
a Thursday morning, people work. The church was jam packed
and I was blown away, coming from the Midwest, just
how many young people. His church is absolutely thriving.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
Yeah, he's doing a really great job. He's been. He's
another tireless worker. It's just him and Father Paul both.
They just they don't ever rest. It's self sacrificial in
the work, in the labor of love that they have,
so God bless them. I'm more of a quiet person.
I like to go slow, so I tend to stay
away from big crowds. But here we are on the stream,
which sounds like just you and me, although I know

(06:50):
other people are watching.

Speaker 1 (06:51):
So yeah, we got yeah, we got some some fellow
Orthodox watching. Well, now with all that said, you know,
for anybo who's not familiar with you, I know some
people in the chat just seeing people discuss they are
familiar with some of your previous interviews and discussions. But
for anybody watching now or in the future, would you
mind introducing yourself, your background potentially how it connects with

(07:16):
your journey to Orthodoxy, because although you've been Orthodox much
longer than I have, you're also a convert. And then
I'll begin to ask you specific questions about the book.

Speaker 2 (07:27):
Yeah again, you already mentioned this, But if it takes
me a second to speak or to muster up energy
to say what I want to say, I just want
to remind everybody that I've been sick for about five
or six days and this hit me really hard. So
I'm gonna do my best to get through this, but
just keep that in mind. Anyways, about myself, I was

(07:50):
raised here in southern California where I am now, and
I was born into a Christian family, but my parents
were nominally Christian. They went to a Baptist church that
later on became it was it was a Southern Baptist
I think originally, and then it became just a sort

(08:10):
of generic Baptist. And my uncle started a Christian school
and it turned into kind of like an evangelical, non
denominational kind of thing, and we had Bible classes in
chapel once a week. And I was raised in that
kind of American culture when I was a kid, that
that a Christian, uh you know, general Protestant evangelical American culture.

(08:35):
And then when I was in junior high I started
attending a rock band kind of more evangelical, free kind
of church. And there was a lot of people at
that time Calvary Chapel was picking up. I knew a
lot of people that went to Calvary Chapel, though I
never went there. And when I was in high school,
I got talking to a friend of mine who was

(08:56):
a Calvinist, and I got the knew Geneva study Bible.
I was listening to R. C. Sproull and Michael horton
the White Horse.

Speaker 1 (09:08):
In if any I know you're talking about.

Speaker 2 (09:11):
Yeah, anyways, I do all about five point Calvinism and
all that, and I went to I got interested in philosophy.
I mentioned this to you when we spoke on the
phone before. But I got interested in philosophy because I
listened to a debate between Greg Boonnsen, who was a disciple,
a student, I should say, not quite a disciple, a

(09:32):
student of Cornelius van Till, who invented presuppositional apologetics. And
I studied philosophy from that and anyways, and we don't
want to say too much about all this, but the
point is that I went through a crisis of faith.
I was searching. I became Orthodox around the same time,
but for historical reasons, and I was trying to find

(09:52):
the true church. I was debating online like a lot
of young men are today. And I found the Orthodox
Church and I and I converted, and I did my
undergraduate But during that period I had a lot of
pride and I went through I guess what you would
call existential crisis, although looking back, I think it was
more like what Saint Sophrony and the Fathers describe as

(10:15):
experiencing hell, you know, within yourself, the kind of hell.
Because I was attending the church and taking Communion. But
I had a lot of arrogance and pride and my
intellectual abilities. And anyways, I went to the seminary thinking
to be a philosophy professor, and I wanted to take
classes at the BTI the Boston Theological Institute. I took

(10:38):
some classes at Harvard because I wanted to get into
an Ivy League school and become a professor. But I
was not in the seminary program. I was just in
the theology program at the Seminary Holy Cross in Boston.
And it was then that my life really changed because
I encountered God. I learned about humility. I learned about

(11:00):
confessing your sins. I mean I kind of already I
was already gone, gone to confession, but it really humility
was the key. And I was reading those Stoevsky's novel
The Brothers Kadamazov at that time, and that really impacted
my life. And then I found the Modern Saints and
I was reading them they were just elders at the time,
particularly this book right here, which has had probably one

(11:22):
of the biggest impacts on my life. Oh yeah, just
an incredible book. Anyway, so after that happened, I'll just
summarize it. There's too much to talk about, and because
I know you want to get to the book. But
I graduated seminary and I moved to Greece. I lived
in some monasteries for months at a time. I lived
on the island of Potmost where Saint John had the

(11:45):
vision of the Revelation there on the monastery for two summers,
and other monasteries as well. I ended up doing my
PhD in Greece, and I finished that in twenty fourteen.
I lived there for six years, and and then I
went to Albania. And in Albania I lived for four years,
and I was working for a university where I started

(12:10):
writing about symbolism. I was working with an art historian,
a professor of art history, and he wanted to do
all these catalogs of artifacts and icons and things like that.
And he knew I was a theologian, so he had
wanted me to work with him on those things as
our research. He had these projects already set up. I
didn't have an interest in symbolism at the time, but

(12:31):
that work kind of drove me into that area. I
was much more interested in the modern saints and the
spirituality of the Church, and that led me in a
different direction. And as I did more and more that
I started realizing that this is a lot of what
the fathers of the Church did, what they would call
allegory in the Old Testament, in terms of allegory. And finally,

(12:55):
the last piece to all this is that I taught
a class very briefly at the university called the History
of World Religions and Civilizations and religions and religions and Civilizations.
I can't remember the exact title how it went, but
it was a look at a world history and how
civilizations were shaped by their religious traditions. And I was

(13:21):
teaching in this to a bunch of Albanian people, and
they have a history of atheism. Albania was only the
world's first officially atheistic state where nobody could believe in God.
It was against the law. You had only believe in
the state. They closed all the churches, all the mosques, everything,
everything was closed, and only the Party you could believe in.

(13:44):
And so there's people there from the older generation. You
ask them what they believe in, they say nothing. I
don't they don't have a religion even to this day.
But in any event, these are the children of those
people after communism, and I was teaching them in the university.
I thought, how can I explain to them Christianity and
had just gone over the Old Testament and Judaism, and
I said, well, I can explain to them this bye

(14:07):
going through how Christianity is a spiritual fulfillment of the Testament.
And I started having some of the lots, especially around
the Exodus story. So when I came back the virus
hit in twenty twenty and I was stuck at home.
I was looking for a job, and around that time

(14:28):
I was talking to Father of Josiah, and you know,
he was like, you should try to write stuff. And
I didn't want to, but I was like, okay, I
started writing. And this was one of several ideas for
a book that I had, and that's how it came about.
So I probably don't want to be too long winded.
That's probably enough for the gist of it.

Speaker 1 (14:47):
Yeah, So this book types and symbols in the Bible.
He has divided it. Now. The first question I was
going to ask you was on the structure of the book.
So it's title, it's multiple pages. This is over a
three hundred page book and It's got thirty five chapters
divided into five separate parts. And one of the things

(15:10):
that I loved about your book is its continual connection,
as you said, talking about how Christianity is the fulfillment
of the Old Testament, constantly referring back to themes and
symbols of the Old Testament and how they relate to
the Gospel, the Life of Christ and his selvapic victory.
Could you describe a little bit of how and why

(15:30):
you broke the book up into Creation and Life, Jesus
as the Creator, Part two, Patriarchs and People, Jesus the Sun.
Part three, Exodus and Shepherd, Jesus the Prophet and Shepherd,
Part four, Temple and Priest Jesus the Priest, and then
part five Kingdom and Anointed Jesus the King.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
Yeah. So well, the first thing I should say is
that I'm having written a book about symbols and thought
a lot about it. I tend to be a little
obsessed with the numerical, the representations, so to speak, and
so I wanted I was writing it, and I was

(16:10):
thinking about dividing it up, and I'm like, okay, I
want to have seven sub sections. Whatever they ended up
being They ended up being I called them chapters. It
could have been sub chapters, I guess. But and then
I divided that into parts, and because I wanted seven,
I started to think, Okay, I need to have some
other bigger sections overlapping. I ended up calling those parts.

(16:34):
But the point is that I had written the first
When I first started writing, I wrote about creation, and
I hammered out all this stuff, and I just had
some general thoughts that I really again, as I said,
I wanted to write. The thing that I knew very
clearly I had in mind was that I wanted to
write about the Exodus story as a symbol of the
life of the church and of the Christian life, and

(16:55):
so I knew that was coming and I and then
I thought, well, the obvious thing to discuss between Genesis
and the creation accounts is to discuss the patriarchs, because
that's what falls in between historically. So I had those
first three kind of laid out, and then when I
went through, I started like recognizing the themes as I
was writing, A lot of this comes. I'm sure you

(17:16):
know you're a writer as well. Writers know that people
who are creative in general, they talk about inspiration, which
comes from actually being in the spirit, right, and so
from this the moment, Yeah, you don't exactly know where
it's coming from, but it's coming from someplace in some

(17:36):
sense beyond you, and it's kind of flowing through you.
And that's definitely true in the Christian sense especially. That's
why it's very important to pray and make sure that
we're manifesting God's energy in the world rather than something else,
some demonic energy counterfeit energy. But in any event, I

(17:57):
prayed a lot when I was writing the book, and
I noticed the themes kind of coming out, and so
I had the first part it was about creation. I
talked about this, I think a little bit in my
other podcast I did with Cassie and the Barrel Age
Faith a few months ago. But anyways, the point is
that the first name was creation, and it was just

(18:17):
about the you know, chronologically Genesis as it appeared. But
then the I thought the Tower, the story of the
Tower babble, which I know is great interest to you.

Speaker 1 (18:30):
Yeah, we're gonna definitely dive into that one today.

Speaker 2 (18:32):
Yeah, And it came up and and I felt like
it didn't I knew it fits somewhere else. So I
was like, I'm gonna talk about this in a later chapter.
I don't know when, but I put it aside, and
then I thought what fit better there? What I had
what was very thematic, especially with the theme of water.
I had written a standalone paper on what the symbolism

(18:57):
of water for Saint Vladimir's Theological Quarterly was the story
of Jonah, and I thought, okay, well, I have to
I think I'm going to include that in. So I
moved Jonah, even though it's not a genesis, to the
first part, and that captured a lot of the same
themes of the spirit and water, and of descending and

(19:21):
re emerging, being baptized and on coming up on the
newly created earth, the redeemed earth, the new creation, and
so I put that in the part one about creation
and rebirth. And then so that was my first theme,
and the second one was the patriarchs and about this
being this concept of the son father looking for a

(19:43):
legitimate son and passing on the inheritance. So I had
this kind of very clearly in place, and then I
moved to the third one and I thought, okay, well,
the theme here is exodus, but you know this reminded
me of Exodus that Moses was a chef, and I
started thinking about the sheep that followed the shepherd. And

(20:05):
also he was a prophet. So I started thinking about
these things. And the key here was prophet. Because once
I started thinking about Prophet, I knew I wanted to
do something with the tabernacle and the temple and sacrifices
and all that after this for the next section, but
I wasn't sure when I came to four and five.
I wrote those I as I thought of those. As

(20:26):
I wrote them, I didn't have any plan for those
I had. I knew the first three parts, but I
wasn't sure after that. So the point is that I
started thinking of Prophet, and I remembered doctor Timpetitzas had
mentioned a long time ago the threefold office of Christ,

(20:47):
and one of our lectures at the seminary. Was my
professor for a while, and he had mentioned the threefold
office of Christ, prophet, priest, and king, and I looked
into it. I asked other friend of mine who's a
professor now at Notre Dame, father Lexus Torrance, and about that.
I called him on the phone and he said, oh,
this actually, this is used by John Calvin, and he,

(21:10):
you know, he was just going off the top of
his head about this. But it turns out that I
looked into it more and apparently this goes all the
way back to Eusebius, the church historian, and as somebody
in my stream with Cassie and had written there that
it goes back even before that. I don't know how
long the actual concept goes, but there's this clearly idea

(21:33):
of Christ having a threefold office, that of prophet, priest
and king. And so I thought, okay, the first part
is on creator. The second part is on Jesus the Son,
Jesus the Creator, Jesus the Son. The third part is
on Jesus the prophet. So the next step would be
to want Jesus the priest and then Jesus the King.

(21:55):
The overall theme kind of came together as I was writing,
and I thought, well, okay, looking back again, I would
say I prayed a lot, and I was going through
a very difficult period in my life when I wrote
the book, and I think that that it bears the
imprint of inspiration all those things that they're not something

(22:16):
that I thought of on my own. You know, I'm not,
let's say, by myself, I'm not that clever. I think
that this. You know, I prayed to God that he
would speak through me, that He would be glorified in
the things that I wrote and said. I try to
apply in my life as much as possible the teachings
of the saints about humility and praying and asking God

(22:38):
for enlightenment and what to say. So I hope that
the book reflects all that, and that it came about
the book as a product of inspiration.

Speaker 1 (22:46):
So no, I the book. Again, it's hard to explain
through an interview, but for many of the people out there,
it's an incredible resource for your own understanding of scripture.
And just to give you guys a quick understanding, I
mean before we talked about bringing up all five parts

(23:10):
of the book, but knowing how we tend to talk
on the stream and we have a little bit limited
time spend today, we may skip some of those and
focus on the big ones that I'm really excited about.
But this whole part one, you keep going back through
the symbolism of the spirit and the water, looking at creation,
and in that section one of the things that I

(23:31):
guess I never really brought consciously to mind was how
the days of creation are emblematic of Christ's Sylvafic victory.
And we don't have to dwell on this one too much,
but one of the things that I really didn't fully
recognize was, you know, Good Friday to the day of
the Crucifixion is actually indicative of the day in which

(23:53):
Atom was created, symbolizing how, of course we all know
that Christ is the new Atom, and for some reason
I never explicitly connected those dots. But that's what I
loved about the book is I went through there were
so many things that I may have been familiar with,
and for those of you who are more novice in

(24:14):
your orthodoxy and your biblical studies, there probably be a
lot more things, But just going through it would connect
dots with things that I knew but hadn't fully connected
together between the Old and New Testament. And so that
first section, that part one, is really hammering the symbolism
of spirit and water and connecting the entire narrative of Genesis,

(24:37):
or at least the beginning of Genesis with creation with
Christ and the work that he was establishing. The part
that I really want you to dive into now that
I thought was really insightful that I had not connected
at all was this ascendancy. And maybe I'm using the
wrong word there, but the ascendancy of the second Son,

(24:58):
and what I mean by that is in Part two
Patriarchs and People, Jesus the Son, you begin by talking
about Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, how it's kind of an
Old Testament trinity. How when Abraham brings the three angels
to dinner, we see the typology of the trinity already
present in Genesis. But then you start going into Isaac

(25:22):
and Ismail. How Ishmael is actually the first born, but
Isaac is actually the chosen He sort of supersedes the
primacy of the first born. And you connect this with
Jacob and Isue, and I wonder could you begin talking
about the ascendancy of the second Son and how this

(25:42):
is actually a topology of the Second Covenant of Christ,
him fulfilling the first covenant, the law, and then it
being superseded by the Second Covenant.

Speaker 2 (25:53):
Yeah, of course, I'm looking for the passages right now,
but I think it might be in Roman nine where
Saint Paul quotes it. But there's a passion passage in
Genesis which sums up all this and it says, uh,
the the older will serve the younger. And this isn't
one of the themes in the in my book that

(26:15):
I extrapolate out from the scriptures. That is repeated throughout everything,
so you can look at it in so many different ways,
I mean, but it appears very clearly in the story
of the Patriarchs. I would say it's probably embodied most
clearly in the story of Esau and Jacob. But but

(26:38):
it's if you think about that theme, the younger coming
to surplant and take the blessing the place of the older.
This is something that is all over scripture. In fact,
it first appears in Genesis with canaan Abel right, because
Abele is the younger brother who's bless He's a tender,

(27:01):
he's a he's a he's a shepherd. He tends livestock,
which is something all the patriarchs end up doing and
something that David does. Saul, however, who's the first king
of Israel, is not a teeler of the field. He's
a tiller of the field. He's not a shepherd. He's
not someone who takes care of livestock. And this is

(27:21):
what Cain is Cain and Saul are kind of very
obviously parallels of the older. The first they're powerful men
physically powerful. They're strong there. We see this in Esau too.
He's a wild man, he's a hunter of the field
and all this, Uh, there's this idea that he's in
the field. The field, as we know, you have to

(27:41):
connect the all these terms that the scripture uses, they
mean something very specific.

Speaker 1 (27:48):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (27:48):
And if you get if you read through my book,
you'll see that how they keep coming up and when
once you understand them, they just and you see them again.
Every word is packed with all this imagery and history
and the way that it was used in all these
other stories, and it comes out. But the field, as
Christ says in his parables of.

Speaker 4 (28:08):
The of the the harvest and the sower and the seed,
and all these different parables that he uses, he explains
it one in one place, and he says, the field
is the world.

Speaker 2 (28:20):
And if you think about the field where the older brother,
the older king, is the one who's plowing, then you
realize that the Old Testament, the Old Covenant, of the
law of Israel, of Old Testament Israel was to plow
the earth was to uproot the paganism, to uproot the idolatry,
and to prepare the earth for the coming of the seed,

(28:43):
which is of course of Christ, the seed of the
it's the seed of Abraham. And so the purpose of
Old Testament Israel was to cultivate the earth and prepare
it for the coming, to plant the seed of the
seed of what the vine, which is Christ. And then
we see that the younger brother, of course, is a
quiet one. He's small, he's of little stature, he's he's handsome,

(29:06):
but he's also ruddy, as it says about David, or
he's as it says about a Jacob. In particular, this
is the most obvious parallel. As I was saying, he's
a quiet man who dwells intents and praise. He's not
interested in going out and hunting and running around and
being aggressive. He's you know, we might think of this

(29:29):
as a silly kind of parallel today between like the
nerds and the jocks at school, so to speak. He's
not he's a nerd, and he's a quiet man of contemplation.
Actually he's not nerd is right, not probably not the
right word. It's just a silly comparison, but it's he's
a man of contemplation, a man of prayer, of silence,
and he you know, dwelling intents. I mean we could.

(29:52):
This also brings back, like the the imagery of the
Tabernacle and the dwelling place of God the church in
some sense. But the point is that the father wants
to give the inheritance in every case to his oldest son.
That's what impulse, what God's loss, the natural order, so
to speak, specifies. So Abraham is supposed to give the

(30:17):
inheritance to Ishmael, who's his first born, but that's not
the son of his promise that came from his rightful
wife Sarah, that is Isaac. And Isaac later on wants
to give the blessing to Esau rather than Jacob. But
Jacob takes the blessing. He steals it from Esau because

(30:38):
he's obedient to his mother's extremely important imagery. Right, the
whole story is packed full of this. So we as
people who are not God's first child, which again has
symbolized as Old Testament Israel, we receive, we steal away
the inheritance because we're obedient to our mother. And then

(30:59):
there's the whole story of how this happens in Genesis
when Esau Isaac's ready to pass the inheritance to his son,
and he tells him go find me game and prepare
a meal for me. And his mother hears this, Rebecca,
and she she goes, and she she says to Jacob,

(31:21):
who she loves more. She says, listen, go get to
goats and slay them, and I'll prepare a meal for
your father, and you can go and take the blessing
in your brother's place. And he says he's going to
recognize me, and his wrath is going to be on me,
and she says, don't worry. I'll you'll take the skin
of the goat and you'll put it on your on
your arms so that you'll appear hairy like your brother.

(31:43):
And this is again all this imagery it comes from.
You know. The garment of skin is is what God
closed Adam and Eve after the Genesis, after the fall,
it appears again two goats and the Atonement ritual. And
there this the idea of being forgiven is the Hebrew
word is covered. You know whose sins are covered? Right?

(32:03):
So you're and you're covered by what by Christ taken
by itself, you know, Protestants, Evangelicals and me. So, oh,
there it is. There's the atonement. Yeah, well, there's a
lot more to it than just just that. Right, It's
like it's not just that isolated idea, but that is
there as well. And we are covered by Christ if
they pay attention, Saint Paul says and Galatians, all those

(32:29):
who have been baptized in Christ have put on Christ.
So we're actually covered by Christ. We put on Christ,
and we appear before our Father, by our Mother the church, right,
baptized with the appearance of the older son, and then
we present this meal to him, which is a symbol
of the Eucharist, right, and this fragrant meal to the Father,
and we take the place of the beloved Son.

Speaker 1 (32:50):
We just chanted that. At my parish. My wife and
I were chosen to be god parents of a couple
of babies that were just brought in. And so right
before the Christmas service we had a we had a
baptismal service, and so that exact passage, those who have
been baptized in Christ have put on Christ. That's exactly
what the whole church we chanted. When we bring new

(33:12):
people into the parish.

Speaker 2 (33:14):
Right, absolutely right, and we all you know that's chanted
at Christmas time, in at uh at Easter, because those
are typically the times of the year when the church
historically would would baptize people. But yeah, that's that's absolutely right,
and and so you know it's a quote directly from
Saint Paul. We put on Christ who were baptized, and
we enter, we become the beloved children of God, the Father,

(33:36):
through through our mother, through obedience to our mother, the church,
and so it's all symbol of that. Now, just just
to kind of circle back. I mean, once I get started,
I told.

Speaker 1 (33:45):
You I was to this is fine, this is great.

Speaker 2 (33:48):
Once I get started, I tend to ramble. I tend
to keep going, so you know, I might talk for
too long. I apologize, but.

Speaker 1 (33:54):
I know you're fine.

Speaker 2 (33:55):
Anyways, I just want to circle back and address what
you originally said, which is this idea about the younger
and the older, and this is repeated in many ways.
Actually have a line here. I don't know where it's
it's in part five. It's kind of a reflection when
I was writing that part because this happens in so
many ways. And I'm just going to go through some
of them very quickly. Here God creates the world without

(34:19):
revealing himself, and then he redeems the people for himself
as the God of creation. In so so it's like
the old, the old humanity, and the new humanity. Right,
that's the first way, and that the younger will the
older will serve the.

Speaker 1 (34:31):
Younger, right.

Speaker 2 (34:33):
Older humanity comes to serve Christianity comes to serve God's people,
which are revealed later. They're the younger humanity which is revealed.
We see this in Ishmael and Isaac. Again, there's also
the sense in which I mentioned cainaan Abel. There's a
sense in which the younger is taken out of this
is There's also this parallelism about Egypt and Israel, because

(34:56):
Egypt exists, it's established. God goes to Egypt and he
takes he extracts his people out from Egypt. So there's
a sense of not only is it the younger one
who usurps and takes the place of the older, but
there's also a sense in which God is redeeming himself
a people from a pre existing people as well, And

(35:17):
so it's not only the younger usurping the older, it's
also the younger being taken out of the Older, being
extracted from something that's already there. So again this happens
with the world with humanity. It happens with the pagan
world again and the Church, right, it happens with Egypt
and Israel. It happens with Constantine when he redeems the

(35:37):
pagan world by bringing the Church out of it, you know,
out of the pagan world, so to speak. And it
also happens again especially with the Church being born from
the Old Testament Israel right, the Law. Now, this happens
in many different stories, and I already mentioned most of them,
but I'll just go through them again. The stories in

(35:58):
the Bible are canaan Abel takes the place of the
he's blessed and and he he he receives the blessing
in place of the Older. It happens with Ishmael and Isaac.
It happens with Jacob Andissau. And it happens again especially
with David and Saul, Saul and David. But all these

(36:20):
are are in fact in some sense. By the way,
it also happens with Joseph and his brothers, although he's
one among twelve.

Speaker 1 (36:27):
But he's the youngest.

Speaker 2 (36:29):
He's one of he's one of the youngest, right, I
think Benjamin is the youngest, but yeah, he's one. He's
from his favorite Jacob's favorite wife. What's the one that
he loved. I can't remember her name, off and Leah
or yeah, I think it's Leah. Anyways, Uh, he's from

(36:49):
his favorite wife. And you know, he becomes his older brothers,
Simon and Judah and all the other ones. You know,
they they're the ones who by the way, we can
think about I didn't mean to get into this, but
we can think about the story of Joseph, which is
particularly typological of Christ because you know, it's his brother Judah,

(37:12):
there's twelve of them. He's betrayed by his brethren, and
it's his brother Judah, who has the same name as Judas,
that betrays him for silver and sells him and he's
thrown into a pit as a slave. The pit is
symbolic of Hades of Shiol, of death, of slavery. He's
taken down into Egypt, which is a symbol of the
dominion and power of sin in this world. He serves

(37:32):
as a slave. He's thrown into another dungeon, a pit,
and then from there he rises to the right hand
of the king, which is a symbol of rising to
the right hand of the father. So if anybody's interested
in all this stuff and they don't want me to
just run through it in two minutes, get my book.

Speaker 1 (37:49):
Yeah no, that's chapter fourteen. I love the section on
Joseph and how he then is the one that forgives
his brothers. She is the one that then saves his
brothers through the short of grain there in Egypt, and
and you know, he's even betrayed as you talk about
with isn't it the pharaoh's wife who because Joseph is

(38:14):
a handsome man, she trying to lure him into sexual sin.
When he rejects, of course, that gets turned around and
then he is humiliated for it and thrown into prison
I think for two years.

Speaker 2 (38:25):
So Potiphar, it was actually Potiphar's wife. It wasn't the
pharaoh's wife.

Speaker 1 (38:29):
Oh okay, but Potiphar.

Speaker 2 (38:32):
Was his master. It wasn't the pharaoh in the first
part of the story, and it was his wife. She
tries to sleep with him, he rejects her, and then
when he's running away, she grabs his garment, and the
garment is a recurring theme in his story too, appears
three different times when his father gives him one, when
Potiphar gives him one, and then when the Pharaoh ends
up giving him.

Speaker 1 (38:51):
One in the end. So right, and so again. The
way you move through these Old Testament stories and then
highlight how again the Christological typologies that in the symbolism
that persists through these narratives is very very insightful. And
as I think you've said in other interviews, but we've

(39:13):
discussed privately, if a rabbi was sincere in the reading
and if he moves through your book, it's very difficult
for them not to see how Christ is not only
the Messiah, but truly the fulfillment of every one of
these stories that you move through, and of course then
making the Church the true Israel.

Speaker 2 (39:34):
Yeah. I mean I remember saying that to you when
we spoke earlier, and I've said that, I say that
in a lot of my talks. I kind of like,
ironically joke after I explain, especially the story of Joseph,
but all the stories, and I say, I interject usually
my talks and I say, you know, but none of
this has anything to do with Jesus, of course, because

(39:54):
it's so obviously about him. All everything is about him, right,
And you know, I think, yeah, I've said that many times.
People who maybe are unfamiliar with the Biblical traditions should
understand that the Rabbinic tradition has very strict rules that

(40:15):
you are not supposed to interpret anything allegorically or spiritually.
Everything has to be taken literally at face value what
it says. They absolutely prohibit this, and they do not
like Saint Paul uses allegory as an example when he
says he uses the passage several times in the New
Testament about an ox treading out the grain. He says,

(40:37):
you shall not muzzle an ox while it treads out
the grain, And he's referring to the fact that ministers
should be paid for their labor right, they should be
supported by the community. In both instances he interprets that
passage that way, and he says in one place, he says,
is it with oxen that God's concerned? No, it's written
for us in our sake, So he's interpreting it allegorically.

(40:59):
And he does this say again and in Galatians, when
he talks about Sarah and Hagar and the sons of
Abraham and these allegories of the We just went through
the of the patriarchs. But a rabbi, according to Jewish tradition,
they have to interpret everything strictly, very literally, and because

(41:23):
of that they cannot, they will not accept any of
these interpretations. But I think it's because they you know,
probably this came about because the church fathers started doing
this very quickly and they realized that this was all
about Christ, and so in order to shield themselves from that,
they don't allow that. But the reality is that if

(41:45):
somebody does do that, they're going to very quickly see
as I did, that the whole Old Testament, the whole
Scripture is really about Christ. I had some quotes about that.
Maybe we'll get back to that in a second, but
or at the end. But yeah, I think that the
fathers do a lot of this what I was doing,
and I had some of these things I learned just

(42:09):
by at seminary, listening to other people I picked up
along the way, or I would hear patrista quote here there.
Some of it's in the hymnography of the Church. And
maybe I heard it and didn't think about it, but
it was, you know, with me subconsciously or something, and
then there's other things that I picked up I would
say through prayer and reflection when as I was writing

(42:29):
and putting all this together, and it was just sort
of like, Oh, that's so obvious, that's what it means.
As an example, you had said to me that about
the days of creation, Well, you know, it's very prominent
in our tradition that Christ rested in the tomb on
the Sabbath day. Right, this is very common. Everybody knows this.

(42:49):
It's in the hymnography. The church fathers talk about this,
how he rested in the tomb on the Sabbath day.
That's why he rested, and he rose on the on
the first day of the week, which is the beginning
of the new creation, the eighth day. These are common
Orthodox themes, but it's not common. As you said, that
point that you did not know about, which was that

(43:11):
Adam was created on Friday, and that's the day that
Christ died. And that was a sort of a something
that came to me when I was writing the book,
and I'm like, Okay, all these things mean something. And
I thought about that, and I thought about the days
of the week, and I would even add to that
that This is reflected in the religions and how they worship.
Because the Jews to this day they worship on the

(43:34):
Sabbath day. They worship in a sense of dead, a
dead religion. The law is dead, it's in the grave.
They honor something that's in the grave. And Muslims, I believe,
worship on Friday. They worshiped like the old Man, right,
the earthly and the powerful man, and he's been crucified,
right as Christians worship on Sunday, which is the Lord's Day.

(43:54):
It's the Red Day of the Resurrection. It's the new Creation.
And that says a lot about us and the way
that we understand what we're celebrating right.

Speaker 1 (44:02):
Right, it's the younger son, correct, and then Sunday is
the younger son that that supersedes the you know, the
Sabbath itself on Saturday. Yes, and let me just also
do a little bit of sing for your book. Uh,
shout out to my brother Josiah. He says, I'm definitely
getting this book, guys. The link is in the video description.

(44:22):
Thank you so much Doctor Crispy for sharing it. Go
get doctor Christopher Lockwood's book. The link from Sebastian Press
is right there in the video description, and if you'd
like to follow in his work and see some of
the other articles he's written, I've also included his Academia
dot edu link, So just open the video description and

(44:44):
and click those links. So, Josiah, do get Do you
get his book? I highly recommend it. So the the
other thing that I wanted to mention to you about
when you're talking about all the symbol is and the
typology is you know, we have the traditions of the

(45:04):
Alexandrian School and the Antiochian school that sort of find
this middle ground between a literal reading and a symbolic reading.
And I'm curious what your thoughts are. We've actually haven't
discussed this, but I think because of the massive growth
of Christianity and it being appealing to the younger generation.
I don't know if you've just saw the recent study

(45:26):
that gen Z is the highest church attending generation in
America right now currently not comparing boomers to when they
were young, but out of all the generations that Gen
Z that is attending church most frequently, that there's a
lot of talk in utilizing Christianity as almost purely symbolic,
you know, and I think most notorious of that is

(45:49):
the way that Peterson, though so many things are true
in some of the allegory that he presents is accurate,
it fails to really take a hold of the literary
and the truth behind this, and it's one of the
reasons why he's had it. It's been difficult for him
to actually say that God the logos he talks about
speaking truth, putting the world in order. But did God

(46:12):
actually incarnate, did he take human form? Was he crucified,
did he resurrect? I think that's that's difficult, And I'm
curious what your thoughts are about the importance of reconciling
both a totally literal interpretation but also a totally symbolic
interpretation which sort of nullifies the dogmas of the church.

Speaker 2 (46:36):
Yeah, I think there's a temptation in either direction. Right
as I said, there's someone can go in the direction
of the of the rabbinical way of reading the scriptures
and interpret it all literally and historically and say there's
no other meaning to it. It's just it's just lessons
for life or whatever it is they want to say.

(46:57):
Extrapolate from that, and then there's the other Their temptation
which is I think I suspect really behind a lot
of the Church's suspicion of people like Origin, because Origin
was the originator of this when the Slatanism, when Platonism
started to come into Christianity and influence it, and it

(47:17):
was embraced by many saints and fathers of our church,
to Saint Gregory of Nissa, Saint Maximus the Confessor most
Foreigned first and Foremost, but also Saint Gregory the Theologian, Basil,
Basil the Great. All these fathers used classical learning in
Platonism to some degree, and they synthesize that with the
Old Testament tradition. And so we have to say very

(47:39):
clearly that our tradition as Orthodox is a synthesis between
the Old Testament to tradition and the Greek speaking gentile world,
and it's the combination of both of those. In any event,
to go back to this, when Origin came in, he's

(48:00):
started doing this allegorical interpretation. And I think that there's
there's really a danger I mentioned this briefly my introduction
of people taking it too far to the point where
they in some sense, I'm not saying Origin did this,
but someone may say, well, that actually historically didn't happen.
It's just a symbol, it's a it's just a mythological

(48:21):
story that didn't actually take place. And this is very
dangerous because the reason it's dangerous is not because we're literalists.
When it comes to the Scripture, and you know, like
a lot of Protestants will say everything had to happen,
and they have a very almost like a physical view
of the Old Testament. They want to read back physical

(48:42):
historical historicity back into the Old Testament. That's not the
point here is that's not for us, that's not important.
It really goes to what you said about the two
exegetical schools Antioch and Alexandria, because we have If you
study historical theology, you'll start to understand that, you know,

(49:04):
start to learn about the fact that they say that
there's two Christologies from these schools, and one of them,
they say, the Alexandrian school was a Christology from above
which emphasized the divinity of Christ, his divine nature, and
it was more spiritual and they did a lot more
allegory in these kinds of things that in Alexandria. And
then there's the Antiochian school, which emphasized the humanity of Christ,

(49:29):
and that's a Christology from below, and it's very it's
almost like an ethical or morality base. And Saint John
christ system came from Antioch, so you see in his
sermons he sometimes uses allegory or symbolism, but he's very
practical in the way that he's interpreting things. He's like,
you have to help the poor, you have to you
know fast, you have to be humble.

Speaker 3 (49:51):
You know.

Speaker 2 (49:51):
It's a very very practical application of the Gospel. Let's say, right,
abstain from from sin, from immorality, these kinds of things.
And then you read uh the Alexandrian tradition after Origin,
and you see that they're interpreting these things about movements
of the soul and journeys. They're not they're not interested
in history. They're interested like this, Jacob is an allegory

(50:15):
for the soul's journey away from the body, and all
these kinds of things that they interpret in this way,
and they have a lot of freedom. So we have
to understand that both of these perspectives are united in
the one person of Christ. And this is how our
theology is all all bound together in the in the

(50:36):
revelation of the person of Christ. We say, as as
many of you know who if you study theology, that
we confess that Christ is one person and two natures.
One the word for person is you bust uses is hypotheses.
He's one person in two natures, a divine nature and
a human nature. He's fully God, but he's fully man.

(50:58):
So when when it's as that Christ was hungry, when
it says that he walked, or he slept or he wept,
those things are not spiritual. They should not be explained
allegorically away as metaphors or something. He was a man,
he lived on earth, he suffered, he died as a
human being. He had a mother. He took his first steps.

(51:21):
One of the most beautiful icons I always love is
I see it. It's very rare, but I see it
monastery sometimes is they call it in Greek the first
steps of Christ, where it shows the Theotokos says a
mother with her arms out and he's a toddler.

Speaker 1 (51:38):
And he's like, I don't think you've seen that icon.

Speaker 2 (51:41):
It's very beautiful. Yeah, it shows his humanity, right, He
took his first steps. At the end of the Partoclysis
to the Theotokos. There's a line in the in the
hymn that says, if you guys have the podoclyss you
can look it up. It's during her hymns for her
period are fasting in August when we say these special hymns,

(52:03):
and it says, there, oh, unexplainable wonder, how do you
nurse the Master? You know, the out of the universe,
the pre incarnate word of God, the the not the
pre incarnate, the pre eternal word of God, the Logos
dwelt inside of the Virgin Mary, and he took his

(52:24):
body from her body. She nursed him on her breast.
She you know, she held him in her arms. And
then that god man, he walked on the earth, he
had footprints, he ate, he was tired. All the things
that we experienced as human beings. He experienced the depression,
the rejection, all those things he went through. He was
tempted by them without sinning, and he was spit on

(52:47):
and he was mocked, as we know the whole story
and the passion, and ultimately he was unjustly crucified, tortured
and crucified and died in a humiliating way. And so
when we interpret the Bible, it's the same as again
these two allegorical schools. We can talk about the divinity

(53:08):
of Christ, and we can emphasize that he is, he
knows all things, that he's God, he's everywhere president as
the logos, but we also have to emphasize that he's
also human.

Speaker 1 (53:18):
Right, And I think that part of the problem with
the modern mind and it's overemphasis on rationalism, is that
it's constantly in conflict with these dialectics. And so when
you think of the more philosophically inclined and they're always
pursuing the abstract, the universal understanding, or as you're talking
about some of the more Protestant, very literal, physicalist interpretation

(53:42):
of scripture, it's so focused on the particular. It's not
being able to connect the stories and the symbols and
the typologies and the threads that actually weave through all
of scripture. And I think that's one of the beautiful
things about the Orthodox front themaw is that we are
non dialectic. It's always a both and and for people
journeying into the Orthodox Church, your book will help bring

(54:07):
forth that both and recognition with biblical stories that I'm
sure they're already somewhat familiar with, but maybe haven't had
the eyes to fully see them in the way in
which they all correlate to each other. And so I
think in the modernist period where we're at right now,
you find, you know, I think it's very appealing for
the rationalist mind that is having trouble with did God

(54:30):
walk on water? That God was his humanity crucified on
the cross and he resurrected three days later and performed
all these miracles and you know, with spittle and dirt,
was able to create eyeballs indicative of Genesis and heal
the blind man. That it's like, well, Christ is just
truth symbolically represented, and we can just look at this

(54:53):
as a total archetypal narrative, you know, in sort of
some type of union sense. And it missed is that Christ,
the logos, the metaphysical source of reality itself, is all
of that. And that's why we always say truth is
a who, not a what, And the rationalist mind always
wants to say what is it? And we want to
say who it is?

Speaker 2 (55:13):
Yeah, absolutely, you're you're you're getting into areas that that
I wanted to talk about. I mentioned, you know, I
had made some notes here, just a few verses that
I wanted to comment on for your audience. But you know,
before we get there, I want to just say before
we move on too quickly here, the church is also
an embodiment of these these mysteries, right, it's the it's, it's, it's, it's,

(55:37):
it is itself as the body of Christ representative of
the mystery of the incarnation, because it is it's a
human institution with human limitations and flaws, but it's also
a divine institution and it and we see God acting
in the Church, but we also see uh people who

(55:57):
are fallen and sinful and make mistakes, and we see
that God uses all this to redeem the world in
a way that goes beyond our understanding. I would add
to this, you know what you were saying there that
one of my big frustrations with I think a lot

(56:19):
of Orthodox people who have recently converted is that they
tend to approach the faith a lot like the Jews.
They're looking at the scripture as if it's some sort
of historical thing. Is if it's some the truth as again,
as you mentioned, was what And I'm glad you brought
that up because I wanted to quote some passages about
that from the Bible and talk about Saint Sophroony a

(56:40):
little bit here, if you help me to do so.
So I've made some notes. Here we go. So the
point about the entire Scripture, which is really the mystery
of what the book is trying to show reveal to people,
is that this is not just a it's not just

(57:03):
a document of historical events. It's not simply a record,
a historical record, or even a legal document. It is
not that at all. In fact, it's about, as we
say in our tradition, we have icons of Christ. It's
a verbal icon of Christ. It's a narrative representation of

(57:25):
the mystery of God the Word. And you could see
this in passages like this. There's two in particular I
or several of them I brought out here. One of
them is John five thirty nine, and this is Christ
speaking to the Jews at the time, and he says,
you search the scriptures for in them you think that
you have eternal life. And these are they which testify

(57:47):
of me. In other translation, says, and they are speaking
of me, and it's about me that they're speaking. And
so there's this idea that, yeah, it's about Christ. That's
the whole point of the Old Testament. As I try
to show my book, you see Christ on every page.

Speaker 1 (58:05):
Quite literally in every page of the book, right.

Speaker 2 (58:10):
And and the next one is, you know, there's this
passage just story from Luke at the end of the
Gospel of Luke when he after he's crucified and rises
he's it says there was two people walking in the
countryside on the road to Emmaus, and tradition says that
it was the gospel author Luken, and the other one

(58:30):
is mentioned, I think by name, and there as Cleopus.
So it's Luke and Cleopus h And they're walking, and
as they're walking, Christ appears to them, and it says,
this is the line Luke twenty four twenty seven. It says,
and beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he explained
to them in all the scriptures, the things concerning himself,

(58:51):
the things concerning himself. And so again we see that
the point of the Old Testament, this is what he's quoting.
He's dealing with him. They did the New and he's
being written at this time. So whenever they're referring to
the scriptures in the New Testament, it's the Old Testament
that they're talking about here. And then there's this passage
in one Timothy three sixteen where Saint Paul says, great,

(59:13):
indeed we confess is the mystery of our religion. The
word religion here at mega estintovis mystidium that the word
here for religion is sevillus, which means piety, the feeling
of being religious, the feeling of piety. And so in
some I think in another another translation it may have

(59:33):
been put faith the mystery of our faith. I'm not sure,
but it says here again, great indeed we confess is
the mystery of our religion. He he was manifested in
the flesh, vindicated in the spirit, seen by angels, preached
among the gentiles, believed on in the world, taken up
in glory. He it's it's talking about Christ here, He

(59:56):
is the mystery of our religion. This is again First
Timothy three sixteen. People can look that up if they
want to. The whole scripture, the whole entire Bible, everything
is about Christ, right, And you know, I often we
were talking about this offhand and off off camera. I
think it's worth mentioning here. People who are supporters of

(01:00:21):
Israel today, I think they say they're Christians, Evangelicals or whatever,
and you hear them talk about this, and they'll say, well,
they're God's chosen people. And I think to myself, whenever
I hear them say that, I think to myself, are
you saying that they can be saved without Christ?

Speaker 1 (01:00:43):
Yes? Actually that is what they say.

Speaker 2 (01:00:45):
That doesn't That's impossible Christ, as he says, I am I.
No one comes to the Father except by me. He
is the Way, the Truth, and the life. That's the
singular right. There's not more than one truth, there's not
more than one way, there's not more than one life.
There is Christ. And the whole scripture is about him.

(01:01:05):
It points to him. And that's what Saint Paul is
trying to say so many passages when he says the
law can't save you, you can. You can follow the law.
As so many righteous people did in the Old Testament,
they still went to shield, they still went to Hades.
The only one that can deliver you from death is Christ.
He's the only one who liberated Hades. He's the only
one who resurrected from the dead because he is life

(01:01:27):
himself right his life in the in the tumor as
we chant during Holy weeks. So without Christ, I don't
know how they expect people to be saved. He is
our salvation. The law can't save you. Christ is our salvation.
If somebody rejects Christ, they're rejecting the one source of life.
And it's as simple as that. I don't understand this theology.

Speaker 1 (01:01:46):
It doesn't make sense that the official stand of the Vatican.
I don't know if you saw that, but the Vatican
has told Catholics that Jews do not no longer need
to be converted, and they actually ask them not to
evangelize through the Jewish community, that they already the chosen people.
And to your point, it calls into question the whole
understanding of who Christ is, the mystery of salvation, the

(01:02:09):
incarnation of God. I mean, it makes no sense. Why
would there be people still practicing and still aiming for
a Messiah that is not Christ and looking for accouterments
and features that are not As we'll get into the
suffering servant, believing that they somehow are just chosen by DNA.

(01:02:32):
Again a very modernist understanding. It's like, well, because their
mother was Jewish that and you know they they practice
some of the Talmudic Rabbinic tradition that they're saved. It
makes no sense. It just totally flies right in the
face of mart Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:47):
They don't understand those things as shadows as allegories for
the coming of Christ, right as we said before, they
understand them in a very worldly, literalistic way. You know,
there's no need for a temple anymore, there's no need
for a abernacle because we are the living temple of God.
And anyways, I don't want to get ahead of ourselves.

Speaker 1 (01:03:05):
If you have a well, if you want to get
that's where your book everything connects. So it's even if
you want to we can get into that right now.
And we don't. We don't have to go in some
tour of chronological progression through the text. But I mean,
just to continue on that thread you highlight in the

(01:03:25):
in the part five, which is something that I really loved.
Uh parts four and five, and we'll get into the
Tower of babble. Everybody watching this knows why I would
love that section. He does a great job diving into
all the symbolism and it connects, and that's what we'll
get into it connects with so many other things that
he mentioned throughout the book. But you talk about the

(01:03:47):
suffering servant and the kingdom and the anointed, and Jesus
has the king and it's quite clear after and this
is at the end of the book. This is after
doctor Lockwood has gone through four full parts connecting all
these stories and demonstrating how Christ is the fulfillment, demonstrating
how the Church is Israel, demonstrating how the Church is

(01:04:08):
the body of Christ the arc. And you talk about
the suffering servant, that it's us we And the problem
with the Pharisees is they couldn't see the Messiah when
he was in front of them. They chose Barabbas over
the Messiah because they didn't want a suffering servant. They
didn't want their status and their exegetical traditions to be,

(01:04:32):
you know, undermined by the Messiah who already arrived. And
so maybe you could speak a little bit too this
understand this false understanding and of a Messiah of people
waiting for a Messiah, when the Messiah has already come.
The true Israel is already here, and Israel is those
that abide by the Covenant. So yes, the Covenant of Moses,

(01:04:54):
the first Covenant. Yes, that is the historical Israel that
brings forth you know, the Messiah fulfills the line of David.
But it's the Second Covenant now. And now we're seeing
all these groups like Hebrew roots is growing because these
Protestants don't have sacraments, so now they're taking up like
Old Testament laws and dietary laws and stuffs indicative of

(01:05:18):
their piety. And you have. Last I checked, it was
forty five percent of the United States identified as Christian
Zionists who believe that the Jews in Israel are chosen
and despite them rejecting Christ, despite what the Talmud says
about Christ, are awaiting a political and a military Messiah.

(01:05:40):
And they just don't realize that this is a total
rejection of the God they say they worship. I mean,
there's a lot to unpacked there, but however you want
to dive into that topic, there's you know, there's a
handful of different I don't want to make it too
political or anything like that, but just theologically, it makes

(01:06:02):
no sense. This this the zion Christian Zionism in general,
and the these false understandings of of of matrilineal identity
and how this saves people when the whole point is
that there is no Jew and gentile in Christ. Again,
it's not a both and or it is a both
and it's not. It's not one or the other as
it was before the law was fulfilled.

Speaker 2 (01:06:24):
Yeah, I think, uh, you know, one of the first
things we should think about here is that this is
all very much manifested in the dialogue between Christ and
conscious Pilot uh during the Passion, in which uh uh
you know, they accused of Christ the crowd of being

(01:06:47):
a king. He makes himself a king, and Pilot says,
are you a king? And Christ says, uh, uh, you're
right for this reason, I was born and I came
into the world. But my kingdom is not from this world.
And if my kingdom was from this world, my followers
would fight and again. So there's this idea of the

(01:07:08):
Kingdom of God being established on earth in any other
way than the Church. The Church is the Kingdom of
God on earth. And we say this at the beginning
of every divine liturgy when the priest begins with Blessed
is the Kingdom of the Father and of the Son
and of the Holy Spirit. We are the Kingdom of God.
As Christ says in the Gospel of Luke, do not

(01:07:31):
look for the Kingdom of God outside of yourself. Low
there it is, or here it is. The Kingdom of
God is within you, is in your midst. And so
the Kingdom of God is a spiritual reality which we
will enter into, which we enter into when we're baptized
through our faith, and which we will will fully experience

(01:07:53):
when in the age to come and the resurrection, when
Christ not only conquers earthly enemies but also spiritual enemies
and liberates us. And so this again, this is the
whole confusion. Somebody a long time ago, when I was

(01:08:13):
in New Zealand, actually there was a Serbian man there
and there was a couple of priests and monks standing around,
and we were talking about the We're having a question
answered like a little Bible study, and I remember all
the details. And he said to us, he asked them
a question, why in the Bible this is so hard
in the New Testament on the tax collectors? Why is

(01:08:35):
the scripture so hard of the tax collectors? And I
asked the humbly the priests who were present, if I
could say something, you know because I knew the answer
to this, and they gave me their blessing, and I said,
the idea here is that to the Jewish mind at
the time, uh, they're awaiting them Assiah to liberate them

(01:08:57):
from captivity. You know, they had been captivity in Egypt.
They had been the Babylonian captivity, which was a punishment
and exile from God. Their temple was destroyed and then
they got the Second Temple rebuilt through Cyrus. But they're
now under the occupation of the Romans, the Gentiles, the
Pagans who are oppressing them, and they are waiting the

(01:09:17):
Messiah to liberate them from all these oppressors. And so
when as somebody in the Old Testament is a tax collector,
it's basically to the Jewish mind, it's like saying, you've
sold out to us, You've betrayed your own people to
collect money from us and give this money to the
oppressors to rard it over us and keep us enslaved
to them.

Speaker 3 (01:09:36):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:09:37):
So this is why it was such a lowesome occupation
in the Old Testament. And if you contextualize everything within
that their understanding, then it makes perfect sense that they're
thinking the Messiah is going to come and he's going
to establish an earthly kingdom, and he's going to overthrow
the political oppressors at the time, the Romans, and he's

(01:09:57):
going to re establish the Kingdom of God which they
saw and bodify and body perfectly in the kingdom of David,
the first Kingdom. And when he when David established the
Holy City of Jerusalem and built the first Temple on
the on the Holy Mountain there his son Solomon as well.
So if you're thinking again literally as they are, then

(01:10:18):
you're expecting this. But when Christ comes, he doesn't do
any of this literally. In fact, he explains this. He says,
Uh destroyed. That one of the prophecies of the Messiah
was that he would he would rebuild the temple. And
he says to him, destroy this temple, and in three days,
I'll build it again. And the scriptures in Terpethus and
they say he was speaking about the temple of his body,

(01:10:40):
and so he's talking about us as the as the
holy dwelling place of God himself, and us as his bride,
as the body, his as his mystical body. Right was destroyed,
and after three days it was rebuilt. It was resurrected.
And so if you're if you're thinking from the point
of view of a first estament Israeli jew as I

(01:11:02):
said in my pat in my book, then you don't
want to accept that Christ is the Messiah because you're
expecting something worldly. You're expecting something material, a deliverance from
the Romans, political freedom. But he doesn't give them any
of those things. In fact, he does something much more grand,
much more profound, which is that he frees them from

(01:11:23):
bondage to sin and death, a spiritual power that had
totally gripped them from the time of the fall, and
he delivers them into eternal life and into communion with God.
And that's much greater than any political kingdom that could
rise about and be destroyed. And so as to this day,

(01:11:44):
people who we say people who are worldly minded in
kind of a derogatory sense in the Church, when you
hear people talk about that, even in Greek, they say,
you know, in a cosmical is worldly. What that means
is somebody, as Saint Paul said, who is attached to
this life or this world, in love with this life,
this world, as Saint John says, what is uh You know,

(01:12:07):
if those who are in the world, and how does
he put it in his epistle the pride of life,
and the and the lust of the flesh, and these
things are not of the Father. They're not from God,
you know. And so there's a sense in which we
want to be with our eyes on Christ and who
seated at the right hand of the of the Father.

(01:12:27):
Again quoting another passage from Saint Paul, he says, keep
your keep your minds fixed on heaven, where Christ is
seated at the right hand of the Father. And so
our salvation is in death into eternal life. It's into
the world to come. And in some sense we live
in this world. We carry on a bodily existence. But

(01:12:47):
but our inheritance, as it says in the Book of Hebrews,
were wanderers upon the earth. This is not our land.
And that's why the saints they gladly went to martyrdom.
They had so much faith because they believe that this
was not their homeland. That they waited a greater homeland,
which is the age to come. And if somebody understands
that idea of the Messiah, which is what Christ actually did,

(01:13:08):
then they will accept him as their king right well.

Speaker 1 (01:13:11):
And it connects back with what we just mentioned earlier
about the second Son or the younger Son with Isaac
and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, that so many people are
still focused on a sort of dividic type Messiah where
there's going to be this worldly kingdom where just as

(01:13:33):
you pointed out the fulfillment and the usurption of the
true Son, the second Son, Christ's incarnation, it's a spiritual kingdom.
It's something eternal. This isn't a temporal understanding of how
the promise is fulfilled and how our salvation is attained.

Speaker 2 (01:13:54):
Right, that was one the wording, and I think it's
first Samuel, might be second sam know the book where
God promises to David about his son who will come,
who will build the temple, which is which is immediately
a prophecy about Solomon, but it's really a prophecy about
the Messiah Christ. This is someone will a son will

(01:14:16):
come from your own line, from the line of David,
who you know, and he will build my temple. And
then it says, and his kingdom, his dominion will have
it will be an everlasting dominion. Right, this is something
that Solomon does not fulfill. It's an everlasting dominion. It's
an everlasting kingdom, and only Christ can fulfill that because
He is life eternal himself.

Speaker 1 (01:14:38):
Right absolutely, how I mean, yeah, we'll leave that one alone. Okay,
we're running because we only have about twenty more minutes here.
I want to get into the Tower of Babel. I
loved that section. I haven't heard you talk about it
in some of the other interviews specific about it. I used.

(01:15:03):
You went into it at much more depth, but I
used that symbolism of the Tower of Babel, a man
made erection to attain divinity, of God's dealing away God's divini. Essentially,
it's all typed with a sort of apotheosis, a self worship,
a self deification, which I tied in my book to
transhumanism and this belief that really developed in the Middle

(01:15:26):
Ages with John Scotosi Regina that technology was and what
he called the mechanical arts were going to redeem everything
that was lost after the fall, that we had all
these spiritual insights, we had knowledge of all creation. For him,
he believed that they didn't use the word science, but
all the mysteries of the physical world and how it worked.

(01:15:48):
Adam had all this stuff and he lost it after
the fall, and that technology was going to redeem all
these things. And I argue that that belief, which actually
was a heresy that originated in Western Christianity and then
got further exacerbated with Hugh of Saint Victor and Roger Bacon,
and once you get to the Reformation period, the Protestant
North believe that they were the age of spiritual men

(01:16:10):
all off Yakama Fiore, and they took to the sciences
and engineering in the material world much more strongly. And
that's one of the differences still today, the differences in
the production between Northern Europe or Southern Europe has to
do with this under You know, Weber talks about the
Protestant work ethic and all that stuff.

Speaker 5 (01:16:29):
But the Tower of Babel, truly is this this place
within man and mankind that has uh this pattern that
has been reiterated over and over again, that man will
sort of fill the void of God and ascend himself
to the status of God.

Speaker 1 (01:16:47):
And in your description, which I you know, I got
the macro perspective of what the Tower of Babel means.
But you talked about you had in multiple sections. You
talked about the stones, you talked about Peter talked about Christ,
and you talked about how the Tower of Babel is
is this attempt to build on on false stones, How

(01:17:09):
it's a I also iterate this is that it's an
inversion of the New Jerusalem, which is a spiritual kingdom,
and that you see all these utopianistic movements, whether it
be Marxist communism, whether it be free market capitalism, whether
it be transhumanism, is that any of these movements that
believe in some utopia the side of eternity is doomed

(01:17:31):
to failure and essentially is repeating the pattern of Babel itself.
Could you speak to because you also connected with Christ
as the true ladder, you refer to him as as
in a sense to use that metaphor his own tower,
his own his own ladder into Divindi. I refer to
Christ often as the bridge that brings us from the

(01:17:52):
tempore world into the eternal world through theosis, through our
engagement with the uncreate energies. Can you speak a little
bit to how you break down the Tower of Babble
in your book and how it relates to so many
other things in different chapters.

Speaker 2 (01:18:10):
Yeah, Uh, there's a lot of different themes running here
when you talk about this, I think if somebody wants
a comprehensive view of it again, I would just recommend.

Speaker 1 (01:18:21):
Reading the book.

Speaker 2 (01:18:22):
Read my book. Yeah, read a particular part for the
Tabernacle and Temple, and you'd have to read earlier chapters.
You can't. I mean, you can skip ahead each chapter.

Speaker 1 (01:18:32):
It builds upon each other.

Speaker 2 (01:18:33):
Yeah, it's it's self contained, but it's it's going to
make a lot more sense if you if you follow
the sequence, and you will understand everything that was laid
down before at all the meanings of these things. There's
so many passages, you know we talked, So let's start
with the structure. There's hopefully I'll remember to get to
all these points, but.

Speaker 1 (01:18:54):
Yeah, just go wherever. Well, well, I want to talk
to you about this for a minute, so don't feel
like you got encapsule all of it in one response.

Speaker 2 (01:19:01):
Okay, I'll do my best to get through the main
points here and then if I forget something bringing up
there at the end. But anyhow so, there's this language
in the New Testament about how Saint Paul says you
are the Temple. He quotes the Old Testament, you are
the Temple of the Living God. And then he says,
he quotes another passage where says, for the Scripture says

(01:19:24):
where it says, you know, come out from among them
and touch nothing unclean, and I will be your father,
and you will be my sons and daughter, says the
Lord Almighty. And in another place, Saint Paul says, don't
you know that you yourselves are temples of the Holy Spirit,
and that God's Spirit dwells within you. And Elder Zacharias

(01:19:44):
Essex was talking once and he's commenting on this passage
and he says, he says this, Saint Paul, as if
it's an everyday thing, like it's just so common, ye,
don't you you know that you're the temple of the
Holy Spirit. And yet we as Christians don't live that way.
We file our else through sin all the time. But
we are the temple. And because we are the temple,

(01:20:05):
collectively we mystically we are the body of Christ. We
are and Saint Peter uses this language, be yourselves like
holy stones built into a temple. Right, this temple is Christ.
He's the temple, He's the Tabernacle, and I could go
through it. There's a whole bunch of imagery here, because
the word tabernacle means dwelling place or tent, and it's

(01:20:29):
used in John One, when the Greek word for tabernacle
is very unique in this passage. It doesn't really appear
anywhere else in the New Testament. And it says when
the word became flesh and dwelt among us, the word
dwelt is a sarkoi, you know, it's he a tabernacle
among us. And so there's the idea that the incarnate

(01:20:49):
Christ is the tabernacle, the dwelling place of God on earth,
and it's the sense of that he's residing with us,
he's living among us, he's among the people. The tabernacle
itself was in the middle of the encampment of all Israel,
all the tribes of Israel, and when they were wandering
through the through the wilderness, and the temple was the

(01:21:10):
center of their holy city. All the tribes of Israel
had to assemble there during great feasts, and particularly the
feast of the Atonement the Young Kapor every year. So
they would assemble as a corporate body around the temple,
which was Christ, and they themselves became part of this
Temple the living stones. So when the temple is destroyed

(01:21:31):
by the Romans exactly one generation after Christ forty years
after him in eighty seventy, exactly one generation, it's level
to the ground only I think the northern wall standing.
This is absolutely a divine event. This is a divine
intervention in which God has passed his judgment, in which

(01:21:55):
there is no more typological temple is now fulfilled in Euston,
in the Church. So if somebody approaches all this with
that understanding, and then they go back and they look
at the Tower of Babel, they can start to make
sense of it within that further revelation and understanding, so
they can see, Okay, if the Church is the temple

(01:22:17):
and Jesus Christ is himself, as Scripture says, the chief cornerstone,
Peter is actually called. He's given the name Petros, which
means stone rock. And you know, the Papists won't stop
bothering us about the fact.

Speaker 1 (01:22:31):
That, yeah, despite Alexandrian Antioch also being founded by Peter.

Speaker 2 (01:22:38):
Well, I was talking to some people in my class
about this. I'm gonna give your audience, throw them a
bone here. I normally don't give away some of my
best material on free streams. But I'll get other than this.
You know, I was talking to my private class about
this on my book, and I said to them, you know,
these papists, they're sitting here trying to convince us that
Peter is the only gateway into the heavenly Jerusalem. But

(01:22:59):
in fact, it says the Book of Revelations there's twelve
gates with the twelve names of the Apostle, but just
one gate with Peter. In fact, Christ is the only
the way, and here's the chief cornerstone. So Peter is
just one of twelve using this imagery. And Christ himself
is the is the chief stone of the corner and
he says if anyone who the stone falls on, it

(01:23:19):
will anyone who falls on the stone will be broken
to pieces, and if it falls on anyone, it will
crush him. He's talking about himself. He is the chief cornerstone.
He's the foundation. And Saint Paul says that no other
foundation can anyone lay except that which has been laid,
which is Jesus Christ. Anyways, I don't want to ruffle
the feathers of any Catholics in the audience, so we'll

(01:23:40):
just leave it there.

Speaker 1 (01:23:41):
Now you won't because we go pretty hard on the papacy.
Sometimes we do have some some Catholics that follow the channel,
but they know what they're getting into if the papacy's
ever brought up anyways.

Speaker 2 (01:23:55):
So going back to all this, if we think about
the Tower of Babbel, then we understand that a structure
that is built is meant to be an image of communion.
It's the communion of all God's people in the Church.
In fact, that's exactly what it is, and that's why

(01:24:18):
when they are gathered around the tabernacle or the temple
in this Old Testament imagery, it's called the assembly. Like
you assemble something like a structure. You're putting the pieces together, right,
it's the assembly of God. There's Protestant denominations that call
themselves that.

Speaker 3 (01:24:34):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:24:35):
You assemble together, you bring things together, and you construct
something that's greater than any of its parts. And when
this happens, you are you become the structure of God.
So this is what we're seeing in Genesis. But there's
something diabolical about it. And the diabolical part of this

(01:24:57):
is that God is not revealing to them the pattern
for this temple as he did to Moses with a tabernacle,
and to David in the temple. What's happening here is
that they are getting together, using their collective reasoning to
construct a tower that's going to bring them into heaven.

(01:25:17):
And so what's happening here is the humanity is joining
forces in a communion to use their collective knowledge as
a power to ascend into heaven, to usurp God and
his throne, and to take the place of God in heaven.
And this is what we see exactly with the Antichrist, yes,

(01:25:38):
rebellion against God taking that which is in the earth
up to heaven. And there's so much I know, you're
probably more interested in this than the biblical stuff, Unlike me.
I like the biblical stuff, but there's so much more
of the occult in this kind of stuff here. So
you see, you know, in the famous gesture, you know,
as below, so above, in these statues of bach Fumed

(01:26:01):
and all these things. The idea is that they want
to make God after the image of man, not the
other way around. Man is made in God's image and
we receive from him our life and our identity. They
want to make God after man's image, and so I'll
tell you that essentially, and there's more to unpack here,
but essentially all of this has to do with how

(01:26:25):
what I would call humanism is absolutely diabolical. If by
humanism we mean human powers separate from God, that's absolute
arrogance and pride. And this reveals to us again the
danger of getting into too much rationalism, too much science,

(01:26:48):
too much of we're going to solve our problems through
government initiatives, or through scientific advancements, or through medicine or whatever.
These are not our salvation. They were grant us eternal life.
They cannot fix the problem that is at the root
core of our existence, which is sin and death. We
will die. No matter how many advancements are made and

(01:27:11):
people try to prolong their existence, they will never be
able to conquer death because they will eventually end in
sin and death, and their existence will come to an
end and they will die like everyone else. As the
scripture says, you will die in your sins. But with
Christ we can overcome that. That is salvation. And so

(01:27:33):
the whole idea of the Tower of Babble, And this
is the other point that is I think maybe we
can elaborate more. There's lots of directions. I want to
go here, but I think this is what you're getting at.
They had united themselves together as a collective humanity, and
they had tried to build this tower using their human
power to ascend to God. And God corrects this by

(01:27:56):
a so called cursing them with different languages. And the
word for language in Greek is glosa, which means tongue.
And so when you hear about in the New Testament
the gift of tongues, what you're actually talking about is
the gift of languages. And this appears when the Church

(01:28:17):
appears at Pentecost with the reduction of the Holy Spirit,
the birth of the Church in Pentecost, when they're given
the gifts of tongues. So it's the reversal. It's the
anti type of the Tower of Babbel, because the Church
is the communion of all in the true Temple, the

(01:28:38):
tower uniting heaven and Earth, which is Christ, the latter
appearing to Jacob, and the language is the language that
of the Gospel that every tribe and nation could understand,
and they're brought together again in Christ in this communion
in the Church. So the antithesis to this is trying
to humanite humanity under globalism, we would say, under a

(01:29:02):
false political under some sort of communist you know, the community.
The word communist comes from communion, right, So everything shared
in common, but in a in a fallen way, in
a in an economic way, in a political way. We
share communion with Jesus Christ, spiritually, mystically, and there's nothing
higher than that. So any kind of communion, any kind

(01:29:24):
of utopia, any kind of worldly paradise that's tried to
create on earth, on Earth that does not have Christ,
that its center is diabolical by definition, and that's the
anti Christ. There's a few other things I could say here.
I don't I know, you probably want to jump in
and all. This is very interesting. This is your as I.

Speaker 1 (01:29:42):
Said, you go ahead. If you have another thing you
want to add, I can always add on afterwards if
you I don't want you to lose your train of thought.

Speaker 2 (01:29:49):
Yeah, I'm trying to connect all these things at once. Again.
People could read the book about some of these in
more detail. But you know, I started to think about
all this symbolism, and you know, it's it's very very interesting.
If we want to dabble a little bit more in
the dark side of things, which I don't necessarily think
is good, but it's it's it's part of life. That
the Masons trace their their founding to the first a head,

(01:30:13):
a bricklayer mason of the Tower of Babel. And they
are trying Masonism is really trying to construct a structure,
build an edifice, and assemble something on earth, which is
of course a completion of the Tower of Babel. Right,
So we see in this new age Masonic stuff reflections
of the Tower of Babel and of the Antichrist and

(01:30:36):
bringing about, typologically symbolically, a false Christ. And I could
add to that that the so the number and numbers
mean are very significant. I mentioned this earlier. The number seven,
if somebody reads us in my book, that's in the
seven days in the week simp is symbolic for completion. Well,
the number six is aspiring to completion but falling short.

(01:30:58):
It's one number short. And so when when we see
the anti Christ appear in the Bible, we see him
appear the first of all, the word anti Christ means
in the place of Christ. It doesn't mean against, it
means a forgery, a false Christ in the place of Christ.
So he's going to present himself as a kind of Christ,

(01:31:19):
and he's going to as a self messiah, a redeemer.
And this is why everybody who's waiting for Christ to
return in this earthly way, including the Jews who are
waiting their their Messiah, are waiting for the anti Christ.
When Christ comes again, he's going to come in glory,
and it's not going to come in the same form
that he already did with humility as a man and
just you know, the shell of humanity, so to speak.

(01:31:40):
That's probably not a theologically proper term, but you know,
as a as a under the veil of the human flesh.
Let's say he's gonna he's going to come in all
his glory, we should say, having said that, the word
Antichrist is a false inmitation in the place of Christ.
And so when the anti Christ comes, he's going to
present himself to the world as the Messiah, as the

(01:32:01):
one who's going to bring peace. And this is why
it's very important. In the Book of Revelation, it says
he'll do a sign, and the sign will be that
he'll receive a lethal wound and he will recover what
did Christ do? He died and he rose from the dead.
The anti Christ is going to receive what seems like
a lethal wound, and he'll recover, He'll be resurrected, just

(01:32:25):
like Christ. He's going to present himself as Christ. Well,
if you look in the chapter where the anti Christ appears,
I think is Revelation thirteen. Someone a Coptic priest that
that's why the number thirteen is unlucky, by the way,
is because it's thirteenth chapter where the anti Christ appears.
I don't know if that's true or not.

Speaker 1 (01:32:41):
But I hadn't heard that.

Speaker 2 (01:32:43):
Yeah, it's interesting. But anyways, the anti Christ appears, and
there's three figures that appear in this chapter. There's the Dragon,
which is clearly this Satan, the devil, and the beast
it's called actually, I'm sorry, he's called the Dragon. Then
there's the Antichrist, and then there's the Beast, the false prophet.

(01:33:04):
I think he's called the Beast. So there's three figures here,
and each one of them is a false imitation of
the Trinity. Satan is going to present himself as a
false image of the Father. The Antichrist is going to
present himself as a false image of the Son, and
the prophet. The false prophet is going to present himself
as a false image of the Holy Spirit. And this

(01:33:24):
is the cursory number of the man, which is six
sixty six, one letter for each of them. Right, and
there's going to be connected with This is the last
thing I'll say about the whole thing. Otherwise I'll drag
you in a whole another direction. I'll let you come
in after this. But last thing I'll say, And I
mentioned this in the book. This all evokes imagery from

(01:33:44):
the Old Testament, in which when God gives the Law,
he says, he commands the Israelites with the law, tie
them around your right hand, and bind them on your
as a philactery on your forehead where your eyes are
and the reason, and put them on the doorposts of
your home. And Jews do this to this day. Is

(01:34:06):
why they where the Christ talks about this. You make
your philactories broad, he says, talking to the Pharisees. And
if you see Jews, they wrap the law around their
armies with black leather things, and they have the law
on the door and they touch it when they go
through a door post. This is all an image of
how God's law was supposed to inform the human being

(01:34:28):
he was. It was a way the idea. The right
hand in the scriptures, the right hand of the Lord
is the man's power to act in the world. It's
his ability. I can touch something means I can move it.
I have the power to affect the world with my
right hand. And this is why it was put on
your hand. It was bound on your hand. Right it's

(01:34:48):
the hand is a symbol of our ability to act.
The door post is a symbol of your dwelling place,
of your home, where you live, your most intimate space,
where your family is. It's it's the it's the law
that governs your family and your home. And finally, the
philactery on your eyes on the frontlets of your eyes

(01:35:09):
on the forehead is a symbol of the of what
we would call an orthodoxy, the news, the eye of
the soul. And it's not only bound here because it's
on the forehead. It's because it's a symbol of how
when we look at the world, our news, our eye
of our mind is that if we use the filter
of God's law to interpret and understand everything, it's our

(01:35:32):
whole way being, of the way of being of seeing
the world of understanding it. And so this is laid
out very clearly when people receive the mark, and it
says they'll have to wear the mark on their right
hand or their forehead because the the the Antichrist, following
the Tower of Babel, will impose on people a way

(01:35:56):
of seeing the world and of acting in the world
that has to do with him, him and his philosophy,
so to speak, his his false anti Christian narrative, and
not with the law of God, with Jesus Christ himself.
I'll pause there because if I keep talking, I'll just
keep going.

Speaker 1 (01:36:11):
I'm sorry, Well, no, I'm I'm loving where you're going
because it is connecting with all these things. I actually
just marked off two of them because you already hit them.
But when you're talking about the Tower of Babble being
a site of false communion, and that the Pentecost is
the correction of this as God scatters man into multiple languages,

(01:36:35):
it's the fire of Pentecost which allows language to all
be united in the singular message of Christ and his
victory over death and sin, and you're you know, in fact,
I actually recently had a conversation with somebody who was
kind of interested. I wouldn't even call him a full
inquiry into Orthodoxy. But they're coming from a Pentecostal background

(01:36:55):
and they were like, well, you know, at our church
we believe you know, people start speaking in tongues. I said, well,
isn't that like glossalalia connecting back with but you realize
that that's all gibberish, right, And he's like, well, what
don't you guys believe in in tongues? I said, yeah,
but we believe in the exam multiple examples of Saint
Paiecio's where the Japanese man comes to his dwelling place

(01:37:18):
on the Holy Mountain and speaks in Japanese, Father Paisio
speaks in Greek and they understand each other. That is
the gift of tongues. That is what we believe is
actually occurring. And when you're mentioning this false communion, I
immediately thought of Saint Paiecio's talked about what was going
to be the great heresy of the twenty first century.

(01:37:40):
It's a humanism. It's this false worldly idea, which, as
you mentioned, with humanism, I mean acumanism is just sort
of another offshoot of humanism and the religion of the Antichrist.
People always when I when we've talked about this in
previous dreams, I say, well, well, you know, how are
you going to get the Buddhists to believe in the
religion of Antichrist. The point of the religion of Antichrist

(01:38:02):
is that doesn't matter. You don't have to make a
fidelity to a new type of quote unquote religion. It's
that all the religions agree that they are somehow shared
in the same truth, and that pinnacle is going to
be Antichrist. And you see it now with the Vatican
saying that Muslims, Jews, and Catholics have the same God,
despite Muslims denying the Crucifixion, denying the Trinity. Same thing

(01:38:27):
with Judaism. And so this false communion that's occurring, whether
it be globalism at the political level or the financial system,
but specifically regarding our dear faith, it's a humanism. It's
this idea that we sort of dissolve the boundaries of
the tradition to allow for this false communion, and communion

(01:38:48):
can only be found in Christ. You mentioned about communism.
I always bring up communion, communication and community. Truthful communication
with your community is what builds communion, and this is
what we do with Christ, repentance through the Church, through
the sacraments, and so everything you're mentioning that wanted me
to ask you, like what I mean do you I

(01:39:09):
would assume you agree that not just humanism, but acumenism
is one of the great Antichrist spirits that the Church
is having to deal with right now. And it seems
so subtle. I've even seen some clergy speak, well, you know,
Archbishop l Pedophoros, in ways that seem very acumenical in

(01:39:31):
a way that sort of disregards the validity and the
dogmas of the Church and what we actually believe. This
is really a spirit of Antichrist. This is a new
Tower of Babbel.

Speaker 2 (01:39:42):
Yeah. So first of all, I think that any religion
that proposes to offer man's salvation without Christ is Antichrist, right,
And this is the key. Once you remove Christ from
the equation or you put a false Christ there, even
if such just a false Christ, it is not Christianity.

(01:40:04):
There was a bishop that I am very close to
and he's still alive. He's a very good bishop in Greece,
and he was writing an encyclical when there was a
world Council of Churches event in his metropolis years ago,
and he said, this is twenty years ago. And he said,
in this in cyclical, he said, some of these people

(01:40:24):
who are coming, you know, they believe in Christ and
were sympathetic towards them. He says they may be better
than us in fact, in terms of their character, you know,
And that's true. A lot of these Protestants Evangelicals can
be better than Orthodox when it comes to their character.
But he says, their faith, however, is seriously distorted in ailing,

(01:40:44):
and it's so bad that in some cases, not in
every case, but in some cases, he said, we could
even say that they believe in a Christ that does
not exist. You can't say that everybody who's not Orthodox.
Is that eiling, But in some cases they are right.
They do believe in a Christ that doesn't even exist.

(01:41:07):
And so when it gets to that point, it's obviously Antichrist, right,
it's it's we are everything. Our entire faith, as I
said earlier, our entire scriptures hinges on salvation to the
incarnation of the Son of God and his work as
accomplished that brings us into eternal life and communion with God.

(01:41:28):
He is the truth, He is, the way, He is,
the life. There is no one that comes to the
Father but by him, and so we there we have
to insist on this. We cannot deviate from this. We
can the term. The problem with the term of humanism
is that it's used, in my opinion, very imprecisely because uh,

(01:41:52):
they're there. There's a sense in which we we can
have dialogue with people. Try to stay very simple, right,
we have to have dialogue non orthodox because we have
to witness to them. Right, there has to be some outreach,
There has to be some discussion, absolutely, and we want
to share the truth with them. This kind of dialogue

(01:42:15):
is very good and it's necessary. You know, you could
call it missionary outreach or whatever you want. But we
that's the kind of dialogue we want. We want to
share the truth which we we believe we have with
other people, and we don't we want to do it
in a way which we're not offending them and we're
not pushing them away or insulting them or you know
this kind of thing. And we also but I should

(01:42:38):
say before I get to that, but we also do
not want to compromise something that is essential to what
we believe by coming to some sort of consensus with them,
you know, again, a compromise, a sort of a give
a take. We're not here to create a synthesis, right,
using philosophical terminology, it's not thesis, antithesis, synthesis, No, it's

(01:43:02):
we have the truth is this is the one true Church.
So we cannot yield to these people based on some
worldly understanding of unity or concession or something that that
is not acceptable to us. However, there is another sense
of ecumanism, which I do think, even though it's not

(01:43:25):
one of those two things I just mentioned, is sometimes helpful,
and that is when we get together with other people
to preserve values in a social way, conservative values that
we have in common. Right, we're both against us and
other religions as an example, or against abortion, or against
the immorality. These kinds of we can have these kinds

(01:43:48):
of organizations that promote those values which we share in common.
And that's perfectly fine. You know, we live in a
world where we have to operate with other people who
are not all Orthodox Christians. So again I would say,
you know, there's a good kind of ecumenism, and there's
a bad kind of ecumenism. And the good kind is
where we witness to our faith and we share the

(01:44:10):
light of Christ which we have and we believe fully
we're convinced of that. The bad kind of ecumenism is
when we want to win through this dialogue with other
people or people have different ideas of salvation and faith
that they start to influence us, and they change and
affect us, and they cause us to compromise, and that
is something that we cannot accept.

Speaker 1 (01:44:32):
When you're talking about the good form of ecumenists, remind
me of a talk that Father Josiah Trinham had and
talking about how we as Orthodox Christians should, if we're
going to be engaging politically, should think in sort of
pragmatic understandings and see the shared commonalities that you know,
the general category of Christianity in America has with Protestants

(01:44:53):
and Catholics, Evangelicals, and I totally agree with that. It
just seems like one of the appeals why so many
young men are flocking to the Orthodox Church is that
we are kind of the last one that's making the
definitive claim that we are the true church. Now we
don't make claims about people salvation. People always ask me

(01:45:16):
why I may evangelical. You think, I'm going that's not
what we do in the Orthodox Church. That's above my
pay grade. That's God. He understands you in your context.
But if you want the fullness of the faith, we
are that. And I think young men find that appealing.
One that we still have a patriarchy, and one that
we still have a tradition, a pre modern tradition. When

(01:45:41):
I defended my PhD, there was a Catholic scholar, she's
a Tomistic scholar, and in my book, I make the
definitive claim that when you look at Western Christianity, there
is no pre modern form left. And she said, well,
I'm Catholic. You know, why do you keep saying that
we're both Apostolic? I know you're Orthodox, And I said,
but yeah, after Vatican one and Vatican two, can you
really say that the Catholic Church is not a modern institution.

(01:46:03):
And she even conceded that. And I think for young men,
one of the appeals of the Orthodox Church is that
we do make these definitive claims and that we do
believe it. And getting to your point about the bad ehumanism,
it just seems like Chrislam, I don't know if you
were familiar with the religious center that was built in
Abu Dhabi. It has a Catholic church dedicated to reposed

(01:46:28):
Pope Francis, then a Muslim mosque and a Jewish synagogue
and they call it Krislam. This is and they talk
about how this is the future of the brother the
Abrahamic brothers coming together and forming a new understanding of
our faiths. Well, to me, that's the spirit of Antichrist.
This is putting together something where we do not have

(01:46:50):
the same gods. Unless you are willing to say that
Jesus Christ is your Lord and Savior, the incarnate God
who died and resurrected it ascended into heaven. We're not
of the We're not worshiping the same deity. We can
share commonalities in regards to against abortion or various cultural
things going on right now, but we're not the same thing.

(01:47:13):
And it feels like the Orthodox Church is the last place,
which I think is indicative of Christ talking about how
the the gates of Hell will not prevail against his
true Church. It's it's quite clear. And look at the persecution,
look at the Ottoman Empire, look at the you know,
the Fourth Crusade, look at the communism, the Bolshevik revolution,

(01:47:34):
and yet the Orthodox Church is still here with the
same dogmas and the same faith of our saints. I
think that is a There's a lot of things going
on while young people are flocking to the Orthodox Church,
but I think that is a huge one. And and
just that masculine response like this is what we believe,
we are willing to die for it, and and this

(01:47:55):
is the truth.

Speaker 2 (01:47:57):
Yeah, I think that you can you can approach this
as in anything with a positive answer or a negative answer.
And what I mean by that is to say that
you can talk about how all the other things are wrong,
or you can emphasize how we're right. There was a

(01:48:19):
young man who came to me, uh, to the to
the church where I attend here. I just met him
last few weeks, and he's a former m M A fighter,
he's a former Satanist. He's still made. But yeah, he's
a very interesting guy.

Speaker 3 (01:48:33):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:48:33):
He may be watching this stream, so I'll shout out
if he's watching him. His name's Matthew. Yeah, I really
like him. I just met him. Anyways, he he came
to my church and he was telling me about his
life and all these things, and he called me. And
you know, I try to help as many of these
young men as I can. I really have to really
take joy in helping people and meeting Christians all over.

(01:48:55):
But I was talking to him, and you know, he's interested.
As he said, I don't know something in our conversation,
I remember exactly what it was, but you know, he's
he's trained boxing, he's trained as wrestler, and he's like I.
He's like, I want to follow, you know, the way
of Christ, and I want to, you know, basically train

(01:49:17):
myself according to Christ. And he didn't use those words.
I don't can't remember exactly what he said on the phone,
but I was praying as I was talking to him,
and I said, you know, Christ says that he is
the way, the truth in the life. And I said,
he is, He is the way for us. And I said,
what that means is that whatever you did in your
life before this is non important. But right now that

(01:49:40):
you want to become a Christian, you want to believe
in Christ, you want to join the church, and by that,
of course, I mean the Orthodox Church. You will now
define your entire life based on Christ and his commandments
and his teachings. He will be the source of truth
for you. He will be the source of life for you.
He had He calls himself these these categorical terms that

(01:50:02):
are just insane.

Speaker 1 (01:50:03):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:50:03):
He says, I'm the light of the world. I'm the
life of light, the light of life. He follows me
will have the light of life in him. And the
Christ says, I am the Truth, I am the Way.
And I told him you have to look at Christ
as your teacher, as your elder, as your coach. Everything
that you would embody that you want to be like.

(01:50:23):
You have to conform everything His commandments become the law
of our life. And so what I'm saying to you is,
if somebody is worried about all this Buddhism and all
this ecumenism and all this syncretism and all this stuff,
this crazy stuff that's going around, the solution to this
is not to get involved and get confused by engaging

(01:50:45):
in all these discussions. It's to make your put your
focus on Christ and to make the center of your
life and to define everything that you do, every moment
of your being as trying to follow Him and make
his teachings the purpose for your existence. Now to live

(01:51:05):
a Christian to live and the same Sophrony says, no
one can live as a Christian. The only thing that
you can do is you can die as a Christian.
And so as sat Pole says, you have to die
every day to your sinful self. You have to walk
the path of a Christian. You have to go to liturgy,
you have to believe, you have to make your faith
the central part of your existence. And you have to
really be a Christian. And if you do that, if

(01:51:28):
the light is in you, there will be no place
for darkness. And that there was a just following up
to all this. Guy, I could say a lot more,
but I went to a monastery once and the abbot
there was talking the elder and he was talking to
a bunch of was when I was in the seminary,
and he was speaking to us and young men, and
he said, you know, when the anti Christ comes, only

(01:51:50):
the people who are living lives in the church are
going to be able to discern it and resist, meaning
those who are fasting following the fasting rules of the
church Wednesday and Fridays, going to literally he didn't, you know,
He said a few examples, but it wasn't he didn't
say this in a legalistic way. I don't want somebody
to understand me. What he's saying is somebody who's living

(01:52:13):
their faith out, who's not just a Christmas an Easter Christian, right,
somebody who's really taking it seriously and is praying and
is asking, inviting God and Christ into their life, into
their heart, into their family. That person. God will not
leave that person. He'll he'll he'll reveal to them the truth,
and he'll will protect them. But if somebody's not doing that,

(01:52:33):
if they don't have Christ at the center of their life,
then they're in danger of being deceived. And so it's
better not to engage with any of this stuff but
to focus on Christ. And that's that's why I said
it's better to give a positive answer to the question
rather than a negative one.

Speaker 1 (01:52:48):
Well, I would agree with you. My point was there's
a lot of factors that are bringing young men to
look into Orthodoxy who don't have Christ at the center
point of their life. Sometimes it's the odyssey, it's the
recognition that evil exist.

Speaker 3 (01:53:02):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:53:02):
I remember in the Bay Area, I was a psychoonaut
new age spiritual, not religious, and when I saw the
pride parade, and I saw professors at the University of
Berkeley support what they call maps minor attracted persons. I
was horrified, and I thought I was a progressive, psychedelic,
you know guy, and I was doing and we talked

(01:53:23):
privately about some of the research that led me into
learning about Orthodoxy. But it was right before I took
my course on Orthodoxy that I saw this and I thought, oh,
my gosh, like, how do how is the these university
professors promoting this stuff? My gosh, what's the antithesis to this?
You know? And and I think there there's multiple factors

(01:53:44):
that are bringing and that's where I've been very vocal
about the young guys that are getting into the church
making Orthodoxy too intellectual. And they learn about the energy
essence distinction, the uncreated energies, you know, the the metaphysical
basis of our faith. And they're like, yep, that's right.
But then when I ask them, you know, how often

(01:54:05):
you going to church? You know, nah, maybe once every
couple of months. It's like forty five minutes an hour
a way. It's like you got to go to church? Man,
Like are you going to the bake sale? When the
women's group has the bake sale and they need men
to help. Are you Are you participating now? It's like, well, dude,
this is more than all that intellectual stuff. And that
was how I entered the church, and I talked to

(01:54:26):
you about that. It is the intellectual aesthetics of Orthodoxy
that got me to go to Holy Virgin in San
Francisco and see Saint John. But that's that's not the
lived faith. The faith isn't And again that's part of
this modernist disposition towards rational certainty or rational apprehension. It's
about joining a parish. It's about belonging to the life

(01:54:48):
of the parish, submitting to your priests, participating in the sacraments,
making sure your prayer, life, your scripture, reading, all this
stuff is in par and And for me it was
about a year after being brought into the church where
you know, there was a gentleman in my parish that
I saw his Twitter account. This was before Elon purchased

(01:55:10):
it and turned into x dot com, and I was
horrified by the stuff he was liking and reposting Nancy
Pelosi about abortion, and you know, liking because back then
you could see what people liked very sexually suggestive photos
of women online and I'm thinking, this guy is a
major voice in our parish, like this is crazy, and
I was I had this pride as somebody who was

(01:55:33):
new to the faith. I was in the church for
a year, and I was like, how can this guy
believe all this stuff and support this stuff? But it
was for me diving deeper into the work of actually
being an orthodox Christian and participating in the life of
the church. The fast, the prayers, the you know, the
sacraments that I witness in myself. My heart softened where

(01:55:55):
I could actually turn to him and tell him my love,
dhame on forgiveness Sunday, you know, and give him a hug.
That is where that's the goal of all of us.
There's a lot of reasons that are bringing these young
guys to the church. And you know, part of my
job and what I hope, like this conversation does and
content that I promote. I just want young men to

(01:56:15):
go into the doors. It's like I just want to
pass the boys off to the priests and get them
in there. And then you listen to the priests, You
do what the priest says, submit to your spiritual father,
and then move on the journey from there. So I
totally agree with you that we shouldn't define the Orthox
faith by all the things that are going on in
the world. I think all the things going on in

(01:56:36):
the world though it's causing young men. You know, they
talk about the meaning crisis and stuff like this. Paggio
has been talking about the meaning crisis and Peterson, which
they're totally right about. It's the post modern turn you're
familiar with in academia. There is no universal truth, there
is no universal morality. Everything subjective and they need something
to stand on, and we the Church is the rock.

(01:56:58):
Christ is the rock, and I think that that provides
such a security for young men. That's why gen Z
according to the last week as the highest church attendance
generation in America right now, you know, Glory to God.
That doesn't mean that the journey stops there. We have
to actually live out the faith.

Speaker 2 (01:57:18):
Yeah, do I have. I want to make two kind
of broader points here, and I hope we're you're wrapping
up and you may want to get to some questions.

Speaker 1 (01:57:24):
So yeah, we do have some quiet apologize. I told
you once we start talking, it's I apologize and everybody,
UH give give doctor Christopher Lockwood a special thank you.
He's under the weather. I've been under the weather for
last week. I feel much better, especially after yesterday, and
he was willing to fight through it and be here
for today's conversation. So everybody give a serious appreciation for

(01:57:47):
for doctor Lockwood.

Speaker 2 (01:57:49):
Thank you for that, Patrick. I appreciate it, and I'm
happy to be here. I'm I feel joy to be
here and share with you and to help people as
I love doing. But in any event, I have a
little bit more strengths is thank god, I'm just sitting
here in the chair. I'm not moving around. If I
was up giving a sermon or something, I'd be moving around.
I'd be dead after ten minutes. But anyways, no, I

(01:58:11):
was going to make two last points, and I think
these are important, especially to some of the young men
who are converting, who maybe you'd be watching your channel.
The first thing is I have gotten into a lot
of a lot of these types of people, even older men,
but especially younger ones come to me at my church
or in different capacities, and they'll they'll bring some of

(01:58:33):
the same kind of questions to me that you that
you were mentioning earlier about ecumenism and about different things
that they heard that the bishop did this or that
this happened. And I always tell them the same thing.
I said, Look, sometimes if when something when a delusion exists,
sometimes you know, I don't want to minimize it. It

(01:58:55):
needs to be confessed. It needs to be said that
people are clear about what the truth is. Okay, in
a very simple way, that's true. But having said that,
what I always tell them is, I say, you know,
a lot of people have a lot of pride, and
they have this idea of it's kind of like a

(01:59:17):
kind of megalomanian exaggerated view of their own importance. And
they think that it's their responsibility to engage in global stuff,
at global issues or topics, to be in the spotlight
and to be fighting for the truth. And they see
themselves as kind of the defenders of orthodoxy. And I
always tell the young guys that come to my church

(01:59:38):
or the people that I talked to, I said, God
is not asking any of that stuff from you, right,
you know what God is concerned with, actually, He's very
concerned with your heart focus on is, yeah, the relationships
with the people around you and your family and where
you work, going to your parish. Did somebody do something

(01:59:58):
wrong to you? Did you forget of them? Are you humble?
Are you praying? Are you fighting against your passions? Are
you going to confession and taking holy community? God is
very concerned with our personal life right the things that
we're doing, and he does not want us to get
involved in things that are too big for us. There

(02:00:19):
are people that have influence and can correct those things,
and that happens to some people that God puts in
positions of authority, usually towards the end of their life.
We see this with the Holy Fathers, where they fought
for the truth because they were pastors, they were bishops.
There were holy people who fought for the truth. But

(02:00:40):
most of us, it's like we have to work out
our salvation, as Saint Paul says, with fear and trembling
in the daily grind. So I would say to everybody,
focus on that. Focus on your daily prayer life, Focus
on your own sins and problems. Focus on productive things
with your time. Try to work, even if it's outid
in the garden, washing dishes, sweep, say that Jesus prayer,

(02:01:04):
do something constructive, volunteer, your time to help some people
that might need help soup kitchen or whatever. Or in
my case, I try to occument by myself with my
work and my writing and positive things. I don't want
to sit here and read all this news and get
lose my peace right. So people are free to do
what they want. But my first piece of advice to

(02:01:24):
them is focus on the things that you know that
you that God is concerned about, that He's commanded you
to do, that you're not doing, and forget about the
other stuff.

Speaker 1 (02:01:32):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (02:01:33):
The second thing I wanted to say about this, and
it was kind of a not exactly the same point,
but you had talked before, we've touched on this about
how truth is who and not what. We started to
talk about this, and I wanted to say, you know,
the whole purpose of our faith is to encounter the

(02:01:58):
person of our Lord Jesus Christ. Is for us to
encounter him through faith and to be sanctified and united
to Him through the sacraments of the Church, the mysteries
of the Church, but also through our own active will
and our own repentance and obedience commandments. That sums up
as Nicholas Cavasilis says the entire mystery of our faith

(02:02:22):
right there, what I just said, and relative to that,
there's a lot of people out there who think that
they can encounter truth, even Christians by understanding all this.
I'm a person who loves theology, who's given my whole
life to this who I feel, you know, I have
a disposition in myself and I feel like God called

(02:02:43):
me to this clearly talking about these things and to
help people. But I'm doing them in a way where
I'm trying to help people's faith get stronger. And you know,
this goes back to the book. I hope. I'm just
going to put little parentheses here. Please buy my book
because I really believe that it will. It has power
to be life changing. It can transform your perspective, yes scriptures,

(02:03:05):
and it will make you see that everything about our
that our church teaches, everything that Christ claims, is absolutely true.
But having said that, I would just say to add
to this that I want to read a little passage
here from from the book Saint Silo on the Atheonite,
which really sums up some of my you know, the

(02:03:27):
struggle that I that I see people facing in America
in particular as they convert to orthodoxy. He's talking about
here the difference between between truth as as of what
and truth as who, and it says here he says,
I'm just going to read some of this. This is

(02:03:47):
about half of page. It's not going to be too long.
Saint Sophrony says. Science and philosophy set themselves the question
what is truth? Whereas Christian religious perception always considers truth
as who, scientists and philosophers not infrequently look upon Christians
as unsound day dreamers, whereas they themselves stand on firm

(02:04:08):
grounded so label themselves positivists. In a curious way. They
do not realize all the negativeness of truth is what.
They do not understand that authentic truth, absolute truth can
only be who and never what, since truth is not
some abstract formula, some abstract idea, but life itself. In fact,
what could be more abstract, more negative than truth? Is what?

(02:04:31):
We notice this tremendous paradox throughout the history of human
of the human race, starting with Adam's fall. Enchanted by
his reasoning mind, man lives intoxicated, as it were, so
that not only positive science and philosophy, like Pilot, pose
the question what is truth. But even in the religious
life of mankind we find the same great delusion, with

(02:04:52):
people continually seeking truth as what they reason. And this
is a key line here, I want to emphasize, they've
reasoned it. If they can arrive at the truth they
seek as what they as what, they will be Excuse me,
let me reread this sentence. They reason, and if they
can arrive at the truth they seek as what they
will be possessed of magic power. As if they will

(02:05:15):
be possessed of magic power and become unrestrained masters of being.
How people think, right, if I just get acknowledge, I'll
master the universe and I'll understand everything right. And he
says here he goes on, if man in his religious
life adopts the course of rational research, his approach to
the world will inevitably be pantheistic. Every time the theologizing

(02:05:36):
mind is says, of its own strength and know the
truth about God, whether or not it understands fatally, it
falls into the same error in which science and philosophy
and pantheism are sunk intuiting truth as what truth as
who has never arrived at through reason, God as who
can be known only through communion and being that is
only by the Holy Spirit. The Lord himself spoke of

(02:05:59):
it us. If a man loved me, he will keep
my words, and my father will love him he and
we will come to him and make our home with him.
And then I'm just going to skip this to this
one little passage here where he says true contemplation is
given by God through his coming into the soul. The
soul then contemplates God and beholds that He loves, that

(02:06:21):
He is good, magnificent, eternal. And then he says, genuine
concourse with God is to be sought solely through personal
prayer to the personal God. And finally he adds this
sentence here later on the feeling of God being personal
delivers prayer from the imagination and abstract argument, transporting everything

(02:06:41):
into an invisible core of living inward communion. We seek
communion with God. This is one of the I was
rereading this preparing for our discussion today, and I realized
what a profound influence this book, and not only this,
but but particularly this book is on me over the years,
going back and rereading these things. You will not find

(02:07:05):
the answers by using your reason, your humanistic powers, as
they did in the Tower of Babble, to try to
ascend to God. You will find the answers through faith
and prayer and humility, accepting the salvation that God has
revealed in the person of our Lord, God and Savior
Jesus Christ, who alone is our Savior, who alone is
the light of the world, the Truth, the Way, and

(02:07:26):
everything else.

Speaker 1 (02:07:27):
Amen.

Speaker 2 (02:07:28):
I want to conclude on some.

Speaker 1 (02:07:29):
That was a perfect summation of really the whole convo
that brought it all back together. So thank you again,
doctor Lockwood. We have a few questions for you. I apologize.
The goal was to try to wrap this thing up
in an hour and a half. Already over the two
hour mark. I apologize, but we do have some questions
that are specifically for you. I'm gonna move through these

(02:07:51):
real quick. Any any question, you don't just give whatever
you feel comfortable with if you're tired, just you know,
don't feel like you have to give a huge elaborate
response unless you desire to. Thank you very much, missed
a fist for the five Coldal crew memberships. Josiah el Ron,
who he said he already purchased your book, said God

(02:08:12):
bless you, my brother. Thank you very much, Josiah, God
bless you, brother. I promise you you're going to enjoy
Dr Lockwood's book. Above man became a coldal crew member.
Thank you very much. Josiah had a question for you,
said Doctor Lockwood. I was wondering, if you go into
any detail on the symbol of bread in the Bible,
how many times our blessed Lord provided us bread in

(02:08:35):
the Bible? Give us today our daily bread. Jesus was
literally born in the house of Brad Bethlehem. How that
all ties in with John six.

Speaker 2 (02:08:46):
I just recently did a small podcast here about that.
And if someone could look that up and I can
pull it up. Yeah, I'm trying to look at the
name of it just so I can refer somebody to
it one second here, just so they can find it.
It's called Theologian explains why the Eucharist is Biblical, and

(02:09:12):
I taught I went into some Bible verses about that.
That's going to be the longer answer there was just
to analyze bread specifically. Things I didn't say in that video.
I would say the first thing is that the bread
is it's Christ. But it's also if we think about

(02:09:32):
the prosfora which means offering in the church. The bread
that's brought for the Eucharist, this is a symbol of
our work, of our toil on the earth right we toil.
We in the ancient world in the when the people
would toil, they would produce bread, and they would produce wine.
They would grow vineyards, and they would process the grapes

(02:09:52):
and the grain and they would turn them into flour.
They would turn the grain into flour and make bread
out of it. And the same thing they would turn
the wine and they would thrush it in it would
be made into wine. And so we bring these gifts
olive oil as well everything as offerings of our own life.
And yeah, there is you posted it so so you

(02:10:12):
can watch that video when I talk about the Eucharist
a little bit more. But the idea is that bread
is a symbol of our offering to God, and very
specifically in the Church's tradition. I mentioned this mostly in
a footnote in my book, but it is very clearly
a symbol of the theotokos because the body of Christ

(02:10:35):
which we use in the Eucharis is cut from the
pros fo loaf. It's the bread taken from the bread
from the body of the bread. And in monasteries, when
this leftover prosphota is set there, they take it into
the refectory and they posess around and they sing to him,
to the Theotokos, truly it is right to bless you,

(02:10:55):
ever blessed and most pure in the Mother of our God,
more honorable than the chair of Him, and beyond comparimal, glorious,
and the seraphim without corruption. You gave birth to God
the word. They sing this hymn, and while they do that,
they take pieces of the spread the monks and eat
them as like a kind of second blessing. After that
the celebration of the feast day. And this is not

(02:11:16):
on Monathos and and other monasteries, And so they clearly
associate the loaf with the virgin Mary. But again it's
these are symbolic things. So we could say the loaf
is also us the church. We're offering up our life.
We the Church are consecrated into the body and blood
of Christ. But it's the Theotokos is an image of that.
She's a mystery of that. So anyways, that's the first

(02:11:38):
thing I would say about it. I also know somebody
from Salt Lake City, who's still an inquirer. He's not
Orthodox yet, but he is writing a book on the
symbolism of bread. He has not released that because he's
not an Orthodox and me and his spiritual father have
advised him to wait. He's a very smart person, and

(02:12:00):
when that book comes out, keep an eye out for
it if you're interested, because he goes very deep into
the symbolism of bread in his book. He's thought many
years about this, but he needs some more time with
it before it's ready to be released. So we all
need to have patients and know where we are in
our situal walk. So those are the things I would
say briefly about bread.

Speaker 1 (02:12:19):
Thank you. Thomas throws In five says, just wanted to
say thank you for the copy of your book. Merry
Christmas and Happy New Year. Thank you Thomas. He actually
won a stream before Christmas. He won a basically little
game we're playing, so I see him a free copy.
Octavian gifted five total crew memberships. Thank you very much. Octavian.

(02:12:40):
Wicked Wally, an Orthodox brother who has recently been brought
into the church, says, as a former Catholic, please feel
free to pile on about the papacy and anything else
you got. Really it isn't like we don't deserve it.
I think that was when we were talking about the
pope a bet Mister Fist throws in five, says, but

(02:13:00):
real utopianism has never been tried. Actually, yeah, that's usually
what they say. Lockstep twenty twenty six logos Channel on
the Rise. Let's go hope you all had a good Christmas.
Just got here, but love the topic. Gotta go back. Well,
thank you very much, Lockstep, and thank you. Daniel Ritter
throws in two. And actually Aaron had another question. So

(02:13:23):
Aaron asked a question over on Dono Chat. He says,
doctor Lockwood, can you talk about Christ being the Way,
the Truth and the life, the Eucharist and the blood
on the door post.

Speaker 2 (02:13:39):
There's a lot of themes that are being combined there, right,
I mean Christ again. He So, I gave a sermon,
and I hope one day at the end of my
life to publish a book A hole my sermons, but
I just have them if someone happens to hear to
be there in the church and they hear it. And
I gave a sermon in North Carolina when I'm there

(02:14:00):
in September about at the Feast of the Cross. And
in this sermon I was talking about I was extrapolating
a little bit on things that I had said in
my book, and I said, the Cross is the way,
because Christ is the way, and the Cross is the door.
Christ said, I am the door of the sheep. Any
if anyone comes and through my in and out through me,
he will find life. And so the door this is

(02:14:23):
all imagery from the Passover. When you hear that Israel
is delivered from the Egyptians from the bondage of slavery,
of sin and death, this is all symbolic. Of course,
They're delivered by the death of the first born, which
of course is symbolic of Christ, the first the first born,
the only begotten son, the death of the only begotten,

(02:14:45):
the first born. And but the other thing that delivers
them is the death the sacrifice of the passover lamb,
and the passover lambs again a symbol of Christ. You know,
Saint Paul says, Christ, our Pascal Lamb has been sacrificed,
and they they so they're delivered from bondage from Egypt.
They're able to depart because the lamb is sacrificed and

(02:15:09):
its blood is put on the door, which is the wood.
So the blood of the sacrifice lamb is put on
the wood of the door, which is the way, and
they have to go through that way in order to
leave the world and depart for the promised land. And
so all this again is sym symbolic imagery of the Cross.
We have to follow our profit are shepherd out from Egypt. Again,
this is discussed in my book in part three Exodus.

(02:15:32):
We have to follow that out through the through the
sacrifice of the cross. The door which is the door,
it's it's the way out of the sinful, fallen world,
through the wilderness and into the promised land. I could
say more about that, but that's what he's.

Speaker 1 (02:15:48):
Got an erin, and it's the erin that you and
I both know. He followed up with an even more
general and encompassing question and says, can you explain the
role of the priesthood?

Speaker 2 (02:16:01):
Yeah, I was trying to keep a little bit an eye.

Speaker 1 (02:16:05):
He's not giving. He's not giving.

Speaker 2 (02:16:06):
I don't think your mind's uh uh. You know, he's
asking these questions because he's read my book, and he's familiar,
and he's probably happy that we're talking about it.

Speaker 1 (02:16:16):
He's a big fan of yours.

Speaker 2 (02:16:19):
Really great guy. God bless him in his family. Uh. Anyways, Uh,
he's just I think he's tried to talk about the
fact that the priesthood is a Uh it's the reconcilient.
It's as what Saint Paul says in a nutshell, it's
the ministry of reconciliation. It's taking the material world embodied
in us and in our lives, just as as Christ
assumed human nature and assumed all of the created world

(02:16:43):
in himself. Uh. It's to use our our common nature
with Christ as human beings, as little priest, to take
the world and to consecrate it by offering it up
to God to become holy, to be dedicated to him.
That's the meaning of holy is consecrated or dedicated to God.
And so when we take the world through our lives,

(02:17:03):
through our free will, and we offer it to God,
we are reconciling the world to God again, and we're
reconciling God with the world in ourselves because again we're
standing on behalf of God to the world by blessing it.
We're standing as a representative of God to the world,
just as Christ does for us, as he's the great
High Priest, and we participate in that. In our humanity.

(02:17:25):
We can bless the world or we can curse it,
and when we bless it, we sanctify it. But we're
also able to take the world and offer it up
to God to be consecrated, to give it to him
as an offering, as a gift, offer our own lives
to him, to consecrate ourselves. And in that sense we
represent the world to God. We stand as representatives of

(02:17:47):
the world offering it back to God. And so this
is all personified in Christ. And that's really what the
priesthood is. Again, if somebody wants to read more about that, you.

Speaker 1 (02:17:55):
Have a whole section and in part four or you know,
and I have Christ the High priest icon right here.
I believe you have a wonderful wording. When you're talking
about Christ as the high priest to this point about
sacrifice and offering up the material world. You mentioned that
Christ is both the offering and the offerer, again collapsing

(02:18:16):
a dialectic there and being both. It's the both and
and that's why he is the high priest. You know,
we don't we don't have the pope standing as the vicar.
Christ is at the top of our church.

Speaker 2 (02:18:30):
Right. There's lots of other people who are priests and
arch priests in the type of Christ. But Christ is
the ultimate for high priest. And so this is what
This is not really a point that was brought up,
but I want to just mention this since we're talking
about it. Protestants will often say, well, you know, you
could just pray to God. Only there's one mediator between
God and man, and the man Jesus, Christ is the

(02:18:51):
book of Hebrews says, And that's right. But the mystery
of Christ is Us and him, right. It's it's that
they that we may be one, that there were one,
and he gave his authorities to the apostles and to
their successors. And so this is a mystery in which
we all participate. We all become like Christ. The word
Christian means like Christ, christ like, and so we're supposed

(02:19:12):
to fulfill in ourselves to Saint Paul says, the mystery
of Him, of his own salvation, to fulfill in us,
to make it our own in a sense, to embrace it,
as he tells Timothy, to do, embrace it. So sorry,
I don't.

Speaker 1 (02:19:25):
Want to No, no, that was great. And Heidi, uh,
she sent in a super chat over on Dono Chat
and said, thank you for the great conversation. Well, thank you, Heidi.
God bless you and the family. Hope you guys are
doing well. And then Aaron just followed up here on
YouTube and says, Chris, your book was a total paradigm shift.
I would agree it is a guys, get the book.

(02:19:47):
The link is in the video description. It's printed by
Saint Sebastian Press, and follow doctor Lockwood's work. The Academia
dot edu link is right there in the video description.
He said, your book was a huge paradigm a total
paradigm shifter, had a huge impact on me. Much appreciated.
Brother christ is born, glorify him. I men, well with that,

(02:20:12):
I apologize. I've already taken you much further, much further
than we agreed upon originally, and he's already under the weather.
So seriously, great appreciation for you. Even doing the stream today,
we're talking about postponing it, and I totally can relate
because I was sick last week all last week. So

(02:20:33):
thank you very very much, and thank you for your
work and everything you've been doing, and guys go get
the book Types and Symbols in the Bible by doctor
Christopher Lockwood. Is there anything you would like to say
promote whatever you want to mention before we wrap up
the stream.

Speaker 2 (02:20:51):
Well, I'll say just two quick things and then maybe
some concluding comments. First thing, in terms of promotion, I mean,
I have to try to support myself like anybody else.
I don't make any money off the streams or even
from the book really, but if you want to help
me and support my work, one way that you can
do that as you can. There's a class that I
already concluded. You can find it on see Ethanacious website

(02:21:12):
and it goes through the book. It's a ten hour
course and you can watch the recordings. I think it's
discounted now that it's not live anymore. So if you
want to go do a deep dive, you can go
there and I get a little bit of the proceeds
from that. And one of the things that I'm thinking
of doing planting the process of planning is trying to
take a pilgrimage trips to Greece. We're talking about this

(02:21:33):
with Patrick earlier. And if somebody's interested in doing that
and having me host them maybe to go to relics
or young men in particular who would like to go
to Monathos. They can try to reach out to me
through online. I don't want to give my email directly,
but if you search around, you'll find a way to

(02:21:54):
contact me if you're serious. Please only email me if
you're serious about that, and I can I can get
back to you about that if you're interested in doing
a pilgrimage trip. Those are the only things I would say.

Speaker 1 (02:22:06):
Do you have the link for that course? I cannot
find it.

Speaker 2 (02:22:09):
It might be because it's finished, It might be in
the courses that went into their archives. I'm not sure.

Speaker 1 (02:22:15):
You have to search around what would be their website
rocket because I want to share that link? Where where
would I find that?

Speaker 2 (02:22:20):
As if you go to say it's they're called they're run.
They're offered through Sane Ethanacious College, and they're called enrichment courses.
Enrichment courses. So they offer a lot of these on
different different books and speakers online. Some people you'll be
familiar with, like father Stephen DeJong has some and different
other other people who are kind of well known. They

(02:22:40):
offer courses on their books, and I did a video
course there and uh, it's completed on the book, and
I was in very great detail with the guys who
were on the course. So if you're interested and you
want you want some something to go along with it,
you can go and look into that. Yeah, it's somewhere there.
I think it's a it's not under the upcoming ones,
it's it's uh, it's in the there is. Yeah, they

(02:23:04):
got zach Zachary there. Maybe scroll up that I got
past it. Yeah, I think it's it's it was recently done,
so it might be there there in the middle. I
can't tell. It's going too fast below. Sorry, Yeah, I'm
not sure. It was cult types and symbols or something

(02:23:24):
in the Bible. It's related to what I did.

Speaker 1 (02:23:27):
Let me find it real quick.

Speaker 3 (02:23:28):
I want huh, it's there somewhere.

Speaker 1 (02:23:38):
Okay, I'll share the link. What the heck? Okay, I'll
share the link. So anybody go sign up and you
can catch all his It was it was ten ten classes.
Did I hear that?

Speaker 2 (02:23:56):
It was ten hours? So it's fine, it's lessons. Each
lesson was was basically an hour and a half to
two hour lecture on the book. I tried to go
through the whole book with people who were interested, and
if people wanted to want to go, I mean, you
should read the book, but that gives a little you know,
it's easier sometimes to go through with someone who's explaining

(02:24:17):
things as you go through, and I talk about some background,
kind of like I did today in our interviews. So
people are interested in more, they can find the class
on there somewhere. I don't know exactly where they filed
it because I haven't.

Speaker 1 (02:24:27):
Looked, but okay, yeah, I'm not seeing it on this
page here, and I'm not seeing an option to see more,
but it's on there somewhere, guys. And is there any
other way people can support your work do you have?
Do you have a donate link or anything like that?

Speaker 2 (02:24:48):
I wish I did. I do not If somebody really
wants to reach out and help me because I recently
lost my job as a chanter, I had to move,
I suppose they could contact me and they could just
send me a ZL donation, but that's not necessary. I
mean I don't. I probably need to be more active.
I don't really monetize my stuff other than going to

(02:25:09):
churches and giving presentations on my book and just selling
it in person. That's that's usually the way that I
try to support my work. So yeah, there's nothing really
else can I just in just in concluding, I don't
I like to conclude with something powerful, and I'm at
a loss or what I want to say, but I

(02:25:29):
would just say to everybody who's listening, reemphasize the things
I said before, which are that Christ is our life,
He's everything, He's our salvation. And the purpose of me
writing this book is to help people increase their faith
and get closer to God. And I would encourage you,
no matter where you are, to seek Christ, to love Him,
to believe in Him, to pray, and to use all

(02:25:52):
the tools of our Church to get as close to
Him as you can, and to acquire a certain spiritual level,
a certain level of holiness in this life. That's the
only thing that matters. I'll just tell you one last
story related to that. There was a there was a
recent modern saint. He was we called him an elder before,
but he's been recognized as the Sat Saint Jakovos of

(02:26:14):
Eva and he was a very humble man. The other
elder said he was one of the most humble men
in all of Greece, and they were humble themselves, Saint
Paesius and Sat Porpheteus and these other people, they were
extremely humble, but they said he was even more humble
than they were. And he he one time some people
came to him and they knew he was a holy person,
and they said to him, uh, there's a scientist who

(02:26:36):
wants to meet you, and and he says, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay,
and he says, yeah, but he's a he's a world
renowned scientist and you know, he's he's famous in his university.
Yeah yeah, yeah, and he's written about all these things,
and he's a brilliant man. Yeah yeah yeah. And he
and they kept trying to convince the elder to meet
this person, and they kept saying things about him. I
think he'd maybe won a Nobel prize or something, and

(02:26:57):
he was visiting and he had heard about him and
he wanted to go see him, and they kept trying
to convince him, and he said yeah, yeah, yeah, And
then finally he stopped and he said to these people
that knew him, that we're trying to introduce him to
this person. He said, look, does he have piety? Because
everything else doesn't mean anything, and that's really the essence
of everything. In the end, only the things that we do,

(02:27:20):
as Saint johnal Cronstest says, for heaven based on faith,
and when we do things for the sake of Jesus
Christ again, Saint Seraphram misarovs is the same thing. Only
those things have eternal meaning. We should look at our
lives and we should think to ourselves the most important
reason that I'm here is to fulfill the purpose that
God gave for me. And you will find that purpose

(02:27:42):
in Christ, through faith and in the Church. So I
encourage you no matter where you are, read the books, study, learn,
be positive, you know, do whatever you can, but seek
out Christ because of Ina and all glory to our
Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 (02:28:00):
To that. Well, thank you again, Doctor Lockwood for spending
the time and sharing your wisdom with us. Again, fantastic book.
I highly recommend it Types and Symbols. I know I've
seen at least about five to ten people in the
chat say they already purchased IT Types and Symbols in
the Bible. Go get a copy. The link to Saint
Sebastian Press is in the video. Description. Avoid using Amazon,

(02:28:24):
Doctor Lockwood, I think he only has the kindle version
on there, so get a physical copy this. This is
a dense text. I mean you could spend as I
when we were preparing, I was like literally a chapter.
We could do a whole stream on there. It's hard
to really encapsulate this in two hours, three hours, four
hour conversation. So read the book, take notes, and I

(02:28:47):
promise you guys will find it edifying and spiritually edifying,
and also more symbolically edifying and connecting the Old and
New Testament. So thank you again for your work. God
bless every everyone for being here. Blessed Nativity, I mean
blessed Christ is born, but blessed Nativity for those on

(02:29:07):
the old calendar who are still waiting for your Nativity celebration.
But I'm Antiochi and so we're new. We're the new,
the revised Julian. So I will see you guys in
the next dream later this week. Thank you all so much,
and as always, until then, God bless

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The Bible Decoded: Hidden Old to the New Testament Symbolism with Dr. Christopher Lockwood

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