hello and welcome to the byzantine scotus today i have david of the cvs podcast which is not related to the pharmacy it stands for catholic verses i'll put a link to his podcast in the description as well so you can go check it out but i was on david's podcast about two weeks ago and we had a very interesting discussion uh he didn't know much about me so he wanted to bring me on learn about me so i'm returning the favor now and allowing david to come on and tell his story so how are you doing today david i'm doing very well thank you very much for having me on i'm i'm a huge fan even though i haven't watched a lot of your content what i've seen i've just been very impressed and so i'm grateful to be here thank you yes maybe we could start off with uh from what i remember from our discussion earlier it seems like you weren't born catholic but you eventually came to uh the catholic faith maybe if you wanted to just start off there and tell what you'd like of your story sure yeah i've told it many times on my own podcast but i'll just i guess practice makes perfect right so i'll just try to give a brief overview basically i was born into a loosely protestant christian home sporadic church attendance i guess the church attendance on sunday was pretty consistent at certain points um and i loved it i loved the protestant church because that's all i knew and i loved sunday school i loved the bible stories i loved everything about it i even enjoyed praying at night and i was born in 1970 so there was a sort of lingering cold war thing russia usa superpowers with nuclear powers and all these sorts of things and so there was there were a lot of dreams apocalyptic dreams of nuclear bombs going off and they were always surprisingly peaceful because it was the end of the world i saw the you know the fire bomb mushroom cloud and it was just like almost like angels singing like yeah this is the end of something sort of mediocre and the beginning of something better you know like that's how i always viewed it in these dreams as a young child but at the age of 14 i actually lost my faith in a counter-intuitive way i think i mentioned this to you but i'll just repeat it anyway i had a nice pleasant dream about jesus christ he was on a desert island a small cartoon island with one palm tree and he's standing there looking at me peacefully serenely lovingly and he just waved and i guess it was sort of a i'll see a later wave because i woke up and i had lost my faith in god and jesus christ and i said this is very counter-intuitive to have a beautiful dream about my lord and savior jesus christ but it's over and it just so happens that that age 14 coincided with a very dark period puberty the hormones the sexual frustration you know it's wildly unpopular with the ladies still am today and i'm happily married 26 years now thank god but um yeah dark period began and then you know i was always interested in the truth i think god guided me back to him using philosophy so i started right into um what's it called logical positivism aj air and i loved it i mean i just love uh i'm i'm a natural-born rationalist and it was a long journey uh you know over 25 years from age 14 to 39 but i read a lot of philosophy sporadically but especially at the end near my conversion and it was ironically it was sort of the granddaddy of rationalism rene descartes that pulled me out of my heart solipsism because that's where i'd sort of devolved into hard solipsism and uh his uh discourse on method pulled me out of that and i found god and uh i was very happy to be a generic monotheist and then it's just a two-week journey from generic monotheist anti-catholic anti-christian generic monotheist saying well i don't want to be christian i can't be jewish so i must be muslim some sort of de facto muslim or something because i knew intuitively that i have to worship god publicly this is not a private affair the worship of god is not a private affair so i said well i don't believe in muhammad i don't believe in the quran but whatever i believe in their god so i definitely don't believe in the trinity but it just so happened that a friend of mine his one of his tenants was killed tragically in a fire in one of his apartments and there was this charred box of charred books that he presented to me he said i think he might find these books interesting because my tenant who died was a religious fanatic so all kinds of religious books in here go crazy i know you've turned religious over the past couple of weeks here you go go crazy so i found amongst these books i found the confessions of saint augustine and i read it and oh my god i was on fire for christ and his catholic church and the rest is history yeah that's quite fascinating see if we could dive into a few of those spots i'm very curious how moving from positions you were saying of hard solipsism to jake hart so how did you come across descartes and what arguments from descartes did you find compelling yeah uh how did i discover descartes i discovered descartes by starting with the pre-socratics in the western tradition and just doing an overview smattering of readings whatever i found interesting in that long journey of western tradition in philosophy and there's a lot of catholic content in there right whether you like it or not there is and uh i didn't like it but i mean i absorbed all kinds of different wacky ideas from the pre-socratics up to descartes and everything in between and i loved most of it uh i would never have given credit to jesus christ or his church for any of the the catholic stuff or christian stuff but i loved i just loved playing with ideas so when i got chronologically moving up through uh and my all-time favorite of course is socrates and plato and i have a grudging respect for aristotle but um you know there were some very interesting uh stops along the journey stoicism is mildly interesting especially as an atheist i think a lot of atheists can sympathize with stoicism with that eternal recurrence and that that all-consuming fire that we're all destined for to just you know groundhog day uh the big bang big crunch whatever way you want to phrase it i think it's uh it's very appealing to the atheist and there's a sort of uh existential thing that nietzsche brought to the whole stoicism so it's it's an interesting journey going through the history of western philosophy and i'm a very sensitive type so i was really really carried away carried along when i got to the uh 18th century is it with the german idealists i really got into that and that really freaked me out a lot uh that contributed quite uh quite a lot as did emmanuel kant to my eventual fall right into the depths of not nihilism but hard solipsism which is like nihilism 2.0 it's like it's a much better place to be but it's still not great but when i read discourse on method i can remember the exact moment that i lost my faith at age 14 when i woke up from that dream i can also remember the exact moment i came back to my faith when i'm laying in bed uh in my bathroom of all places because we moved our bathroom in this large apartment we moved our bedroom into the bathroom because it was too noisy up front because all the drunks uh drinking on the main two an intersection of two really popular streets for bars and for uh drinking so we moved i made like a loft bed in a very large bathroom when we were sleeping in there and i was reading all my philosophy and it just happened to be ready to cart discourse on method and i was just laying there as an atheist reading uh i think therefore i am and it just suddenly occurred to me because i was a hard solipsist at this point it just suddenly occurred to me uh that being you know this this eternal being this is this life eternal that i had been crushed by existentially as a hard solipsist i was able to admit i guess is the proper word i was able to admit that i'm not god that god is god and rene descartes helped me with that just by the casual hand-waving it wasn't an argument it was just a casual well of course we know that it's not evil demons fooling us and we of course we know that god is good and of course you know and that for whatever reason and you know the atheists that i tell this to they think well it's just an emotional uh experience it's just anecdotal this is just something you experience psychologically and i always i always am ready to admit it might have been something that i ate that day it might be a predisposition to mental illness who knows god only knows but i don't care i was in a deep deep deep dark philosophical place existential place with the hurt solipsism reading descartes allowed me to realize that i'm not god and that god is god and that woke me up and from that moment forward i'm like oh my god i'm so happy i'm so thankful to you god for creating me i'm so thankful that you aren't punishing me for all my blasphemies and all my uh my behavior and all my sins and these sorts of things so it wasn't argumentation it wasn't logic it wasn't uh it wasn't even philosophy it's just this poor heretical crazy some say demonic demon-possessed man renee descartes i wouldn't go quite that far but some you know some really characterize him in a bad way including uh uh hugh owen of the kobe center but um i was very grateful to him just for uh just for pulling me out and it's sort of like a damsel in distress scenario where i'm under the under the spell of the great dragon and you never know you never know what's going to wake you up in what's going to peel those scales from your eyes right so i hope that clarifies a little bit about that journey yeah it's like um balaam when he's hired by balak to curse israel and no matter what balaam tries to say the only thing that can come out of his mouth are blessings that god can use anything that's there i know in my own conversion story i think god used the writings of bart ehrman to get me interested in early christianity and to try and help me understand what sort of the best atheist arguments are against uh the resurrection of jesus so that when i stumbled into the christian sources first of all because of his writings but also then i would be prepared to know that i was reading on the christian side oh that's not a straw man i've already read the atheist side of this i think god can use that something when we look back i think on our own lives we can see those moments where god gave us actual grace right the scholastics distinguish between actual and habitual grace that actual grace is that moment where god pours grace into your heart versus habitual grace is grace that's there from god acting within us then and i think we had those moments in our life right where it seems like someone's acting from outside of us and if we had read that one day before it would have just gone right over us but at that moment god sort of opened us brought us out of our deathlike state and allowed us to be able to believe and even if then that wasn't to full the full supernatural virtue of faith it's i think what the scholastic call the preparatory gifts that god first gives us things that allow us when he finally does give us the virtue of faith we can't actually believe because we we otherwise wouldn't yet be disposed to it right it's like if you um had a kid and you hand them like a calculus textbook and there's a lot of wonderful things they could learn from that calculus textbook if they don't know addition it's not still not going to help them very much and so exactly well i often think about god my relationship with god and with you know jesus christ in the church and the whole thing [Music] in terms of the analogy of human romantic relationships and of course the reality the ultimate reality is in god and in the trinity and in between god and his church and these sorts of things that's the reality and just as the the holy families the model and uh the families here below hopefully are striving to imitate that model but i think uh not so much today not as much as i'd like anyway but uh the romantic uh analogy is very powerful to me also in terms of what you were describing where it's like there's this preparation and we don't know why yesterday if i'd read the same thing it wouldn't have had that effect on me it's the same thing when i met my wife to be it's like i you know i wasn't a philanderer i wasn't like i said i'm not great with the ladies but i'd had a couple of uh you know i'd had three women in my life and uh i liked women and uh i'm attracted to women but there's something special when i saw this woman that would be my wife there was something special and why did i see her walk by that day and why was i attracted to her it's a magical thing we shouldn't question it too much we should just appreciate it we should thank god and it was only two years later that i saw this woman again i saw her walk by me once i remarked there's something about this woman and i had to wait two years imagine i had to wait two years to meet her and she pursued me very aggressively romantically and within three months we were married so the the lord works in mysterious ways in uh in every area of life do you agree yeah yeah there's a price parable of the pearl of great price where the man find he's searching for forever buying lots of different things then he finds the one coral he's been looking for and he sells everything he has to get that one plural and we often complain oh why isn't it easier to find what's true but i think it's we wouldn't value what's true unless it was difficult to discover that it was true because it's going through that journey that makes us realize why it's important and so we don't we don't devalue it i think saint augustine and perhaps saint jerome said the same thing about uh the lack of perpetuity in the scriptures right it's just like it's there's there's an exercise here it's intellectual it's spiritual there's a whole lot of stuff there to work us on many levels and it's working our humility and it's working all kinds of things and yes so we we get a lot out of uh out of that i like to say to the atheist who frequently uh you know complains i guess complains about the lack of perpetuity of the texts um i just say well it's part of the punishment for original sin like we we're not in paradise anymore sorry sorry to break the bad news to you but we're not in paradise anymore guys so they're gonna there's gonna be some confusion and guess who we can blame for that not god all right but the atheists want to blame god they don't believe in god but they want to blame god why is that yeah yeah so they i think a lot of the atheists right they have some sort of issue with god and so god for the sake of their soul allows them to not believe in the existence of god right because some atheists say why doesn't god reveal himself to me and yes well god did exist what would you do and they'd say oh i'd be mad and i'd curse god and i'd say this and that to him and say maybe it's better for your soul that you're not doing that so god allows you to just simply think he doesn't exist so you don't try and do all of that yeah what i like to say that's a good point but what i like to say also to the atheist who says well i know i god could have letters in the sky formed by this constellations saying god is real and all this sort of thing and i just say yeah but hey i am a messenger of god god has a message for you right now and i'm the messenger of god and i'm telling you god is real god loves you god wants you to choose wisely choose life now and they're just like oh you're just being silly you're just being theatrical no i mean i'm i'm serious like this is actually happening right now i'm here in the flesh telling you right oh no well we need someone to come back from the dead and then i quote uh you know with the the guy who died lazarus and the rich guy that died and i quote that parable to them but you know like you said it's just that magic moment when things have been prepared by god and then click boom it's amazing yeah yeah another part of your journey you mentioned is initially you became a muslim and you said it was mostly this you couldn't accept judaism or christianity was there anything specific about islam that attracted you to it initially yeah just the fervor of the televangelists that i was watching zakir naik i really like him a lot of people don't like him i like him he was fanatical he's like yes i'm fanatical i'm fanatical for virtue i'm fanatical for peace i'm fanatical for justice and i like that that fervor for all the virtues and all the uh the you know the pure perfections of god that the muslims were preaching and uh you know i didn't agree with everything obviously i don't yeah i had no basis to believe muhammad it was anything other than just a charlatan right um but i just love i love uh i've always kind of secretly held islam as my number two uh favorite religion ahead of uh the orthodox faith the protestant uh faiths and the judeo judaism and all its forms i just secretly like islam because it's pure and it's you know somewhat fanatical in that way um this is not to disparage anyone that i just put behind islam but and it's also a little bit of a a little bit of a gold like i am kind of joking a little bit because obviously there's a lot there's so little separating us from the orthodox some of the orthodox churches that you know it's like i i would have to if forced i would realistically i would have to put some of these orthodox churches in second place right but i always say and i it's not a joke at all i always say that i don't have a plan b my plan b is generic monotheism i will never become orthodox i will never become protestant i will never become jewish i will never become muslim i will never become any religion whatsoever if the church contradicts itself and i come to believe that then i will just go back to generic monotheism and i give that uh 0.000 as many zeros as you want a probability of ever happening because it's just any question i've ever had about the faith the church has always got the answer now is it easy to always find the answer not always this week as you may know i was concerned about that apparent contradiction between two dogmas and we can talk about that later if you're if you're interested once you've exhausted the biographical side yeah yeah so i was wondering a little bit about did you actually start practicing islam so were you attending a mosque and so on okay interesting yeah yeah how long were you interested in islam at least then oh you know uh i mean i i was what you need to understand about my journey is that i was an enemy of christ and his church but i was warming up to the idea of god i've been chewing thanks to saint anselm mostly because i've been chewing on the um what's it called ontological argument yeah i've been chewing on that as an atheist for eight solid years imagine an atheist chewing on that ever since i read it just like in the back of my mind what does it mean what could it mean what does it mean how can we understand this just like uh i always compare it to a koan or whatever that they use in the east um just an absurd uh puzzle to occupy the mind and you're kind of tickled by it because you think you grabbed it and slips away and turns on you and it's just to this day it's kind of like that for me i'd love to discuss it with you and sort of get on more solid footing because as a believer i'm very comfortable with it but i'd like to sharpen it up when i talk with non-believers if that's possible i think you've expressed that that's not really a viable option anyway so yes because i think it's an argument that's true but and you hear it you go that can't be true but it's really you can't find any objections to it but it just sounds on the surface like that shouldn't be cr that shouldn't work but there's nothing that actually works against it once especially once you understand it properly because there's sort of the easy objection of oh well can't you have the um maximally great island until you realize that that doesn't actually work because we're discussing something that's finite and so you could always add another palm tree to that island but you can't come up with a maximally great being it's funny it's funny eventually because my dream where jesus said au revoir he was standing on a desert island with exactly one palm tree less is more less is more right sometimes yeah yeah there's a sometimes we have certain fittings to it being less right because then you there can be an overabundance of it but that's begun because we're dealing with just finite things right when we start dealing with infinity you made that earlier point about god's pure perfections right that god he doesn't have perfections in the same way we do these same limited perfections he has pure perfection we have some of those too but we don't have them to the infinite degree that god has we participate in them yeah yeah i always say the example i always use for the pure perfections as a counter example is that a circle is perfect but god god is not a circle why because it's not better to be a circle yeah if it were better if it were better to be a circle yeah okay god would be a circle but it's like this is not rocket science i mean this that's the thing i love about christ in this church it's like just like when you read the gospels and the the jews come up with a really fancy trick question and then he just he just pierces through it with common sense right and that's what what's what we're really missing today uh christians and non-christians are like we're missing that ability to cut through and as uh the late great archbishop fulton sheen famously said that's what that's what humor is god is the ultimate humorist because he sees through that's what humor is it sees through all the petty stuff and all the misunderstandings and all the ambiguity and he sees through all that and he's aware of all that but cuts right to the essence and that's why it's funny because it astonishes us right like uh what's that word fav massey or thabmacio or something like that in the bible and new testament greek when he talks about when jesus is constantly astonishing his heroes even they even tried to arrest him but they couldn't because he was he was so funny right he was so powerful he just said stuff and it just like blew their minds right yeah yeah on that i sort of have two related points your first one about just the common sense and sometimes in academia you know it can be so easy to get into wanting to find the complicated answer that you miss the simple answer right in front of you and it's a great example of this from i think probably my favorite biblical theologian ever uh james jordan i've learned so much from james jordan and he said one of the best insights he ever got is he was doing a bible study at his church he's a presbyterian and he's giving a talk on the fall and afterwards a little girl comes up to him and goes the snake eats the dust right and he goes yeah and adam's made of dust he goes oh wait a second yeah he'd been he'd been doing this had been gotten this phd and it had been reading like the bible for like decades now and hadn't noticed that the snake eats what adam is made of in the in the chapter before wow and yeah and it's times the simple insights you can get you go oh everything makes a lot more sense now wow so what what are some of the insights you got from that because i'm just impacted by it right away without seeing what it might mean yeah i think it shows that right there's a lot of people saying oh is this the passage about like that snakes used to walk on four legs and then they switched to not having any legs no that's not what the story is about and the word for serpent there in um hebrew can actually mean like shining one or bright one and snakes are frequently connected with angels in the bible we actually see this on a little bit of ancient israeli imagery we have we have um some coins or not coins rather seals from a few different israelite kings and they usually have cherubim or seraphim on there um and the cherubim and seraphim they're not depicted like we do in iconography now but are actually depicted as serpents with wings on them that the israelites envisioned angela especially the higher levels of angels as serpentine beings so it's clearly the case here it's a serpentine angelic being that satan is here not a just ordinary snake and there's other clues um there as well like for example when the serpent is introduced um it's usually translated in most bibles as the serpent was wiser than any other beast to the field the word other isn't there in the hebrew it just says the serpent is wiser than any beast of the field so clearly the serpent is not identified as among the beasts of the field but i think this just adds yet another detail there the question is if it is um a symbol the snake is a symbol and not a literal snake then why is it that um he said to now have to walk on this belly and eat dust well that's because it's a symbol of demons going after humans and trying to eat the souls of demons right and if we're okay the question is yeah and i think the question is are we going to end up in the body of christ or in the body of satan the body of satan we see right when we see what's cast into the lake of fire at the in the book of revelation i think remember correctly we only see the dragon thrown in right it's but it's i think that all the damned are in the body of satan rather than being in the body of christ so they're all cast into that same lake of fire with the serpent wow amazing i often meditate on the image that saint anselm uses in at least one of his meditations if you haven't read the meditations you should quote i'm speaking to your audience now if you haven't read the meditations uh of saint anselm go and read them right away but um do you remember the the meditation where he's talking about crossing a blind crippled man crossing that rope ladder across the chasm and do you remember that i actually haven't read his meditations i need to go do that yeah stop the podcast go read it but no it's amazing it's amazing i'm sure you'll love it it's so devotional it's like it's uh you know i i feel a little bit bad because my first love was saint augustine but then i sort of feel like i love saint anselmo but uh i guess it's like your children you don't you don't pick favorites right you just love them all for what they what they contribute but they do call in the second saint augustine right so yeah but anyway he talks often uh about the gaping maw like the jaws of hell like it's a it's a creature and he's dangling by a thread above this gaping mouth of hell and uh he's very very acutely aware of the danger that he's in spiritually and he i like it when he says he says unironically i'm not feigning this i i'm being sincere like i really do believe this that i am on the edge of the precipice of hell so he's like he's very he's very um you know obviously he's very devout and pious and he loves god but he's he's drilling home to people like us regular folk uh that uh even the saints are this close to perdition and where does it say in the bible that uh you know the if even the saints uh st paul say that like even if it's hard for the saints to enter heaven how is it going to be for us or what what's that passage yeah yeah i don't remember the exact room i think i remember what i remember i remember there was something in there like that but something like that i remember scott hahn did a good job of bringing that home when he talked about joseph and going into egypt and all his troubles in egypt but then when potiphar's wife wanted him sexually or whatever um she grabbed his garment and he escaped and uh scott hahn does a nice job of painting a picture where i think it was or it might have been peter craft where it's just like all of salvation escaped like by a thread because it was literally literally like the threads of his garment as he escaped and that's making me think again now of the garden uh when they captured jesus wasn't there a similar story didn't someone run off and the guard had his clothing and he ran off nude or something isn't that isn't there something like that in the garden remember i have to go re-read yeah but anyways there's this idea that like even the heroes of the faith in salvation history um they have these narrow escapes and we often hear about the remnant of the jewish people and you know of course the younger son usurping the privileges of the elders on these sorts of things they're common themes and another thing i wanted to talk about with you when you feel it's appropriate is the covenants scott hunt does a good job of talking about the covenants and i was thinking about that today i could only remember six covenants i'm pretty sure there must be seven it seems to me they're seven can you take a stab at it yeah so i think that there's six that are widely recognized but james jordan has pointed out i think it's a seventh that people overlook because we have the initial adamic covenant yep uh then we have the no ache it covenant yep ah then we have the abrahamic covenant yep the mosaic covenant yep the covenant yeah and then usually people jump from the davidic covenant to the um new covenant but there's actually another covenant that most people miss there in between the two which is the restoration covenant when ezra comes and renews the covenant and actually even before ezra bowed off two persian kings before azerbaijan artaxerxes but in the reign of darius there's already the beginning of that when they rebuild the temple and joshua um the high priest and zerupabl the governor go to rebuild the temple but there's an issue that joshua is ritually impure but you can this is joshua son of noon the same famous guy no no this is a different joshua this is joshua the high priest in the reign of king darius um but he's they've the priesthood has been in exile joshua is the high priest but he cannot rebuild the temple until he becomes ritually pure but there's a problem he needs the temple in order to go through the proper rituals laid out in the book of leviticus to become ritually pure so what's going to happen and actually there he was it you know he was it the prophet zechariah is around at this time and we see in the vision of the prophet zechariah that um he has a series of eight night visions and i think it's in the third one that he sees michael the archangel and satan debating over um joshua standing there and satan's on one side and um saint michael is on the other and saint michael says to satan i think it's the lord rebuke you and then he goes and brings clean garments if i remember correctly i'm controlling from remember i might be doing this remembering some of the details but he goes and takes clean garments and gives them and puts them on joshua in this vision and then afterwards zechariah comes to joshua and tells him this vision so that joshua now knows he is ritually clean to serve as the high priest so they can begin the rebuilding of the temple wow wow and then we see in ezra that people had at this time forgotten the law and also most the jews had begun to speak aramaic and have forgotten hebrew very few people at this time knew hebrew and so ezra had to go and get the law and read the law to the people again and had to take a new census of the people and he had to translate for them the law into aramaic as he's reading it we actually see this is a tradition before even the septuagint or something called the targums which are not word for word translations of old testament books there are theological paraphrases of old testament books they might at points be pretty much line for line and at other points things are significantly changed their interesting window into the theology of jews before the time of jesus but also shortly after i think this tradition continues and so i think it's this restoration covenant we're seeing we also see lots of other things connected to it so evangelism becomes important that the jews for the most part before the fall of jerusalem did not do much evangelism they do nationwide evangelism sometimes right so elijah goes to anoint the king of syria or jonah who goes to nineveh but there's no attempt to evangelize random people in other nations but we actually see jewish missionaries now traveling all throughout the persian greek and roman empires going to convert people and people miss this a little bit but it's it's mentioned in the gospels because this whole project had become corrupted by the time of jesus because he mentions jesus says to the pharisees you travel over land and sea to make one convert and you make them twice the son of hell right that they've done it but then they're teaching them the false teachings and they're actually just making them worse off from when they were ignorant of the scriptures in the first place and so um we're seeing there's a significant change in how the covenant is structured and what's going on after the exile that i think this should really be considered another covenant i think daniel's also important to setting up this covenant where daniel has his vision of the four empires in the 490 years that i think was meant to be a framework because it would be after haggai zechariah and malachi and recently i discovered that there actually is good arguments for joel being from the post-exilic period too that's very very heavily debated but we really have four three major prophets working in uh zechariah um haggai and malachi and besides that they don't have any prophets coming and after they die off there's no more prophets for a long time there's wisdom literature and there's history but they have no prophets i think the book of daniel is sort of given as to keep in hope and remain and point forward towards what was to come and so i think there is this restoration covenant there's also sort of mini covenants that exist between the covenants right so we have between um what about melchizedek is he not in the covenant thing yeah i think he's connected with the initiation of the abrahamic covenant even if he himself is living under the noic covenant because during the abrahamic through restoration covenants well the jews are living under those the gentiles continue under the noacket covenant until the new covenant even when they were a convert right so that you could become a convert and actually convert and be received into the people of israel or you could simply be a gentile believer that was an acceptable position if you weren't born as an israelite and we see this quite frequently so it seems most lots and lots of the persians were gentile believers uh it seems that when you go around in the book of acts you notice most of the gentiles they go to aren't pagans in the book of acts most of them are gentile believers already right so you go for example to the ethiopian eunuch he wasn't a practicing jew because he wasn't jewish but he was reading the book of isaiah he was quite interested in this um and so there seems to be a status that it's okay to essentially be a non-idolatrous monotheist um following uh natural law and so on samaritans for example well i think the samaritans are under the covenant with israel because they're descended from the northern kingdom even if they were mixed in with quite a bit of idolatry as well they were heavily shunned just because it's infighting in a closely knit uh yeah yeah they're still there but they had they had edited the scriptures to have lots of false information in it um oh so if you look in their ten commandments there's an additional commandment to build a mountain an altar on mount gerizim so that could they can have that one separate from it but what is really interesting is that if they had their own independent scriptural tradition this probably came from before the period of the exile so they preserve this creates a huge issue for biblical scholars because they want to say the pentateuch who was finished in around 400 or 300 well if it's finished in 400 but the samaritans were clearly a distinct separate group that would have had to have this distinct pentateuch by the 7th century i would really say i think by these i think this is formed shortly after the system so probably somewhere in the 900s bc right this creates a significant issue for the documentary hypothesis that actually the pentateuch which is made up later yeah well there's a lot of nonsense uh speculation that's motivated consciously or unconsciously motivated by uh hatred of organized religion or whatever right yeah um i was thinking as you were talking about all that wonderful stuff about the fact that uh joshua who you mentioned uh who's obviously a lot later in history than joshua son of noon or whatever but um i was thinking about his name means jesus it's the same it's the same as jesus same name yeah and this is you're having a vision right of michael and satan debating over a jesus the high priest wow wild very wild stuff what about that nafta the fire water stuff nafta i don't know about that they they said um that the fire was supposed to keep burning and they didn't find wire water they didn't find fire but they found this water when they brought the water into the sun and ignited and they called it nafta where is this from uh i can google it yeah old testament okay yeah i don't remember this story nah sounds like something you'd like to learn the history of yeah because you would have uh it's got some scholarly interest yeah how do you spell that n-a-p-h-t-h-a um is it interesting is it in the maccabees maybe it's in the maccabees all right yeah oh yeah it's in the book of second maccabees yeah okay oh yeah so it's actually the event took place at the time of nehemiah but it's set button changed in second mac abuse but second maccabees is actually very useful that it records a lot of oral traditions that were not in the initial canonical old testament essentials i think the 22 um book canon which is 39 in our bibles that was preserved by the jews and then was um returned to just strictly that by protestants uh saint john of damascus says that those 22 books or 24 books rather were deposited within the um holy of holies there and so i think that there's other books that i think are canonical of course we're not deposited there that's why we call them deuterocannon a secondary cannon that was written down during this time once the protocannon was deposited within the holy of holies you know um okay sorry go ahead yeah but um second maccabees is very useful in that it records lots of these oral traditions of important details that i really think that book needs to be studied to give us important information like one story that i noticed is jeremiah within it hides the ark of the covenant i'm going to pull up my bible here and read the story because it's great and then i'll read where i think the new testament fulfillment of it is yeah all right so this is in second maccabees i love second maccabees i love how he introduces it and how he ends it it's like there are plenty of books that do a better job than i'm doing but you know i'm just doing a summary here you know what do you make of that uh no i think um i haven't thought about that introduction very much but i think that's the case that there is at this time there are no prophets coming so i think right if you look in first maccabees they're genuinely not sure about how to deal with the situation of the high priesthood having apostasized and a lot of biblical scholars think that they essentially screwed up by trying to make themselves the kings and the high priest after that because they were not authorized by god to do that right because in the time of um joshua as we were mentioning earlier he goes all right i'm not sure what to do with this and then god sends a sign from heaven and clarifies what to do uh but the maccabees went ahead and made themselves the high priest and that means you could do every um holiday on the liturgical calendar right except the uh feast of the day of atonement the day of atonement was the only feast day where you needed the high priest to perform it and it's interesting that's the one feast day that we never see jesus participating within in the new testament so perhaps because i think there's a lot of people who think jesus was associated with the essenes and i don't think that's the case i think the essenes were essentially a sort of systematic group and jesus never talks about them in the new testament because they weren't important to history have you heard some people say that saint john the baptist was and i seen it too yeah i think there's similarities going around but i don't think he's part of the qumran community because i think jesus by participating within the temple and john the baptist participating in the temple i mean his father was a priest shows that they rejected the essene at least the qumran we don't know the whole all the essenes were the same but at least the qumran community position of rejecting um the temple authority altogether but i think jesus put some breaks on that by not participating within the day of atonement because i mean at least we don't know if he did maybe he did maybe he didn't but it's interesting that it's omitted and that was one feast day that seems like it might have been invalid according to the way they were celebrating it that day and actually by the time of the romans the high priesthood wasn't even the maccabees anymore it was it was a appointed position by the romans and they changed every year right we we flip to the new testament and you'll read like so and so with high priest that year and that should immediately send up alarm bells high priest that year high priest serves for life why is there a high priest that year what about the fact that jesus said that we should obey those who sit in the seat of moses what is the seed of moses and like was that compromised yeah no i think the seat of moses there is referring to the seven the continuation of the seventy elders of the sanhedrin okay which was a distinct teaching authority of and especially i think a civil authority of elders right these were the people who god had appointed and there's 70 of them there's 70 people in the um and if you go to the table of nations and count the number of different nations in the world there are at least symbolically at 70. so 70 represents the number israel represents the whole world so there's 70 elders appointed by moses and then they go to mount sinai and the spirit descends upon them and they prophesy so they have a sort of pentecost by which they're appointed there and they also have a meal so it's a sort of um type of the eucharist there that they then celebrate and then moses sends them out as sort of an authority to deal with issues there and so i think jesus is affirming here yeah the sanhedrin is still the continuation of the elders at that time and we saw that there the elders seemed to have been an appointed position they were appointed by moses so that seems like there was no divine lull about how they were selected so you could change that throughout history so i think jesus is fine with their existence it's just what they're doing is problematic um be the one to read the section from here uh from um second mac b is two one finds in the record that jeremiah the prophet ordered those who were being deported to take some fire as has been told in that the prophet after giving them the law instructed those who are being deported not to forget the commandments of the lord nor to be led astray in their thoughts upon seeing the gold and silver statues in their adornment with other similar words he exhorted them that the law should not depart from their hearts it was also in the writing that the prophet having received an oracle ordered that the tent in the ark should follow with him and that he went up to the mountain where moses had gone up and had the inheritance of god and jeremiah came and found a cave and he brought there the tent in the ark and the altar of incense and sealed up the entrance some of those who followed after him came to mark the way but could not find it when jeremiah learned of it he rebuked them and declared the police shall be unknown until god gathers his people together again and shows his mercy all right so we have here so we flip back to what was going on in the time of jeremiah jeremiah is prophesying against the um house of david because they're becoming idolatrous and they're essential and jeremiah's whole message is look basically you're idolatrous god is now going to take the side of the babylonians and you are going to be subject to babylon for 70 years and jeremiah actually tells people don't take up arms don't fight it's a pointless fight you're going to lose submit to babylon the sooner you submit to babel on the sooner god is going to use it to purify you and the sooner you're going to get out of this whole predicament and jeremiah is called a traitor he's imprisoned at one point for this um and a lot of people read this just in the context of jeremiah now the book of jeremiah in terms of its chronology is a giant mess because it's all out of chronological order different manuscripts have actually different chronological markers so it's i think it's kind of a waste of time trying to figure out the chronology of jeremiah because i tried and i tried reading multiple commentaries on it and none of them could figure it out either so um i don't know how this lines up with the chronology of ezekiel we should remember jeremiah was a priest and he was a priest in um to um in jerusalem right he's preaching he spends his entire ministry in jerusalem until near the end of his life where he goes off to egypt and jeremiah is telling people actually to flee from um jerusalem to babylon and submit to babylon now jeremiah if he was a priest in one of the few good priests we see most of the priests at this time are corrupt he must have been good friends with the other good priests there and one of those we know of is ezekiel and ezekiel um goes off he's taken away there's two deportations to babylon and in the first one nebuchadnezzar first comes up and he takes away a number of captives and among those are ezekiel and daniel and so those were both good men they must have known jeremiah actually uh daniel or ezekiel mentions daniel as one of the most righteous men who have ever lived he lists noah jobe and um daniels the three most righteous man ever to have lived repeatedly yeah this creates a huge issue for textual scholars who want to say that daniel was written hundreds of years later and actually they claim this is about a totally unrelated um eugeritic hero named daniel uh but if you go read that the daniel in that story is an idolater and also we have no evidence that daniel's story was actually known about the day of ezekiel the eugeridic texts come from like nearly a thousand years before that um but anyways um ezekiel goes and ezekiel has a vision that the chariot of god gets up from the temple and leaves the temple and so i think ezekiel at this point right he i think he probably sends a letter back to jeremiah going look what we've known is going to happen for a long time has now happened the temple has been abandoned and so i think it's not recorded there in um jeremiah it's not recorded in jeremiah but in second maccabees it tells us that i think what jeremiah did is he went and he took the tabernacle and went and hit it and he says specifically i read it again here um the place shall be unknown until god gathers his people together again and shows his mercy so this we would think is immediately after the exile we know from the book of daniel that the exile never really ended and after the rebuilding of jerusalem there would be another 490 year period before the messiah comes and truly reestablishes the kingdom of israel so i think actually one of the major themes in the new testament is jesus is the one who enacts the new return from exile and brings the people truly out of babylon into the new covenant so it should be at this point that we see the new ark of the covenant and i think this is prophesying mary as the new ark of the covenant i think revelation is actually alluding the second maccabees there in revelation chapter 11 or read at the very end of it then the temple of god in heaven was opened and the ark of the covenant was seen within the temple and there were flashes of lightning loud noises pearl of thunder an earthquake and heavy hail and a great sign appeared in heaven a woman clothed with the sun and the moon under her feet and on her head a crown of twelve stars she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth in anguish for delivery so i think that this is a prophecy that jeremiah is pointing forward to there's going to be a new ark of the covenant and what do we see in both i think the gospel of luke and then again in revelation is there is the new ark of the covenant has returned and it's our lady yeah when i'm listening to my protestant radio station as i drive around at work they're always very eager to point out that the woman in revelation is not the church it's not the church it's not the church it's not the church and it's not marriage it's not mary it's not mary it's not mary it's not the church they're very very anxious to to dissuade people from connecting the dots right like it's just sort of natural it's kind of natural to connect those dots right so it takes a lot of effort to people keep people down from what's natural yeah so yeah maybe we could get into you had mentioned you've been doing some research recently into two dogmas that the face of it could seem contradictory i was wondering if you maybe want to share that what you've been discovering in your research yeah yeah and then i want your insights because i'm really curious what you think and it ties in with everything where that i'm interested in you know with uh essence substance and you have the orthodox and the catholic perspective on these different sort of terms and how they get mixed up and these sorts of things substance and accident and all these sorts of things so uh yeah it has to do with the the two dogmas one of which is that uh all ad extra activities uh are common to all three persons of the trinity ad extra just means outside of the trinity and creation i guess um and the second dogma that i see an apparent and i know it's only an apparent contradiction i'm not worried about it but it's just interesting uh is that only the second person incarnated only the second person of the trinity took on flesh i've since discovered that it is the catholic understanding and it's just because i haven't uh you know i haven't memorized this book but i've gone through it a couple of times but i just i looked it up and it is uh catholic teaching that all three persons did the incarnation but they what they did is they did an incarnation of the second person and saint anselm apparently unpacks this with uh john rosslyn or whatever his name is do you know about him i don't yeah no you don't know if you want to go into this whole controversy a little bit that would be good yeah i'm a i'm a baby i'm like baby steps here i'm just just starting to look into it i got an academic document on it i started reading it last night i got about 20 and it's very interesting it was poorly written i think it was translated from some other language into english it's just really poorly written but uh there's citations from ann selman this guy john rosslyn uh who is the nominalist actually uh he's right up there with uh william welcome uh for being like the top dog of nominalism and so he's a bad guy in my books but um the basic argument the crux of the argument has to do with what is a person what is a substance what is essence what is unity what is numerical unity what is uh what is a a relative uh what does anselm say anselm's got all these formal things relative things and he's got all sorts of subtle distinctions that you know more about than i do you know at least academically i think you've got a better grip on it than i have when it comes to these distinctions that anselm's able to make which i'm i'm just sort of like okay i'll have to look into that i'll have to look into this and i'll have to look into that but uh what's your impression yeah the anselm can be a little bit weird to read sometimes because he's often making up his own words to describe these things but his words are very important i think that actually him taking a step back actually is a huge step forward in philosophy in that he's able i think to get very new insights and i think there aren't necessarily new insights but new approaches to those existing issues there as you were saying with all these distinctions that um john f demascus he's dealing with sort of the end of the christological controversy so he was looking back at about 400 years in byzantine history um christological controversy starting with arius and going all the way through to monotheism and realizes the common theme in them is that they confuse the relationship of nature and person and once you miss that um whole point everything else falls apart unless you can properly distinguish nature in person and i think that that really is probably going on here too right there's the divine nature acting in the incarnation all three persons doing that but now there being a human nature that has a relationship to the the um second person of the trinity but again there we also want to distinguish that it's not the second person who comes to have a relation with the human nature but the human nature that comes to have a relationship with the second person because god does not change yeah but the human nature can change with respect to the second that's exactly what anselm said it's exactly what he said just like that so did you read that or is that just you intuitive no that's just i'm just drawing on other stuff there yeah okay okay i read something today uh just briefly uh while at work on the stanford encyclopedia philosophy i don't know how well reputed it is in christian circles but in any case i was just curious an article uh about the trinity and of course anselm's in there along with the saint augustine and others um but i read something i'll have to reread it i got the impression the impression i got from this article and i don't think it's a catholic article but the impression i got was that saint thomas aquinas saint uh and some saying augustine all these big hitters i think he threw in some other names um like household names in uh you know scholastic uh and uh just catholic philosophy generally uh they are they were pushing a certain view of the trinity which is not actually the most um supported argument today in theological circles now i could interpret that one of two ways because i'm very skeptical of modern um you know academia and scholarship theology it does doesn't mean not much to me you know uh so is it just like the stupid the stupid quote unquote stupid theologians today don't agree with these geniuses or is it actually the the that we've sort of corrected uh some of the missteps that were taken by these great geniuses because they're only human and they're not they're not perfect right no i think it's that what's become very popular today is to defend something called social trinitarianism which essentially it's sort of basically a denial of monotheism it sort of posits that what the unity in the trinity is is a sort of moral unity rather than a um i mean they'll say there's one they'll still affirm that i seem creed what they mean by person in it is not what the church fathers meant by person right they were saying essentially that there is one divine essence that exists in three different modes that are distinguished by relation but that's not modal awesome then no that's not modalisms we're not saying that it's the same person existing three different ways okay we're seeing it's the same divine essence that exists in a fatherly way a uh filial way and in a preceded way of the holy spirit it's okay to use the word mode like those are three modes yeah yeah you could it's the language we use right we have to ask the question what do we mean by that language so absolutely the language and mode could very easily slip into modalism so we don't want to say it's that sometimes he's the father sometimes a son sometimes the spirit no we're saying that it's one divine essence that exists essentially in three persons um versus what they want to say essentially the theistic personalists want to say is that there's three distinct psychological centers of consciousness versus the church falsely analyze one we have one it is one singular intellect and will proper to that divine essence and that was the argument against the aryans the aryans essentially thought that athanasius and basil and augustus and these other defenders of the trinity they thought they were social trinitarians and so their whole thing was to clarify no we're not social trinitarians um and then this actually gets brought up again in um the monothelite controversy because in the mono it felt like controversy um christ only one will in christ yeah the monotheist said there was one will in christ because christ is a person he must have a singular will if you said there are two wills you would end up then in nestorianism but what maximus clarifies he says no right the whole reason that the three persons of the trinity are not three separate beings the reason that there's still one singular divine being in part they share one singular nature which has one singular will to it right this is how we know they're all of one nature because they always um will and act the same way which means they must have one will and one activity again you're going back to your earlier question about activity this is going to be they have one singular odd extra activity one singular odd extra will and so therefore if christ has two natures human and divine he must have a human and divine to will and he must have a human activity and a divine activity um this creates an issue because some earlier father spoke of christ as having a theandrick activity a divine human activity and maximus says we can speak of that because there's who is acting as a human and as god it's one singular person but he pulls up a great passage in saint gregory and asean where he goes christ um walked as a human but he walked on water as god right he um fed people as a human but he broke the loaf into infinite pieces as god right he was um able we saw we see christ in the gospels doing both human and divine things that are distinct so we must have a distinct human activity and a divine activity right so i think really the social trinitarians are correct first of all it means the aryans were correct in most of their arguments against us but secondly i think it's because actually a lot of the social trinitarians are really just aryans themselves that they can avoid the exact errors of polytheism they're wishing to avoid um and they're going to end up denying essentially calcidonian christology um yeah you said something that was going to give me a follow-up question you were talking about um oh i can't remember my follow-up question now because you just every every part of every sentence you say has a million fascinating tangents that i want to go down but i want to talk a little bit i guess about the accidents because in this in this article it said um that some people were saying some the saints were saying that god doesn't have accidents and then later in the article it said that the persons themselves are accidental can you just talk about um and tell me what does the church teach about god and accidents are there any accidents i know jesus christ in his human nature has plenty of accidents right yeah so we're saying essentially you know that um god does not have any accidents with accidents are something that could be some other way and there's nothing in god that could be some other way right god is infinitely perfect every what god is is essential to him uh versus us all right if i put on a different shirt i would be the same person that's not essential to me but god it's not like he has a shirt on that he could then exchange for another shirt now christ's human body right which is part of his human nature that has plenty of accidents story that can change in many ways but god is not an accident now some saints when they're trying to describe the relationship between natures and persons use the analogy of accidents in essence of an accident and hearing in an essence um so um a number of saints when they're trying to describe the relationship of how can christ have both the human and divine nature they use the analogy of how multiple accidents can adhere in a single essence and so two natures could inhere in a single person i see um but they're not saying that christ's natures are actually accidental to him it's an analogy and i actually got into a long discussion on a discord voice chat with um a coptic a convert to coptic christianity so he denies that christ has two natures and he was using exactly this argument he was concerned that we are making christ nature's only accidental to him i just remembered the thing that i was trying to remember before which is the communication of idioms right uh i just want you to talk about it and talk about how uh because i heard you sort of being careful to attribute the human to the human nature and the divine to the divine nature and of course this is this is only natural we would want to be careful about that right but what is this communication of idioms i've read about it in here and i understood what i read but i'm just not quite i don't quite grasp it is it just that just making sure we keep the human with the human divine with the divine or what is it well the communication of idioms is essentially whatever is proper to that nature is proper to that person so we're saying essentially that anything that can be said of the divine nature or of the human nature can be said of christ right so we can say for example we can say um the son or the second person the trinity died on the cross because the he is the human nature and so when the human nat when he dies human nature can't die he dies in his human nature right um i'm going to pull up a specific passage here are there dangers are there dangers in the communication of idiom yeah so what is it saying um your first corinthians 2 8 says um none of the rulers of this age understood it for if they had they would not have crucified the lord of glory so the scriptures say they crucified the lord of glory right they crucified god but how can the divine how can god be crucified let's visit the christ was crucified right so um humans can be crucified christ is a human therefore christ can be crucified christ is god so when christ was crucified god was crucified that's essentially these steps we are walking through with the communication of idioms now again we are as you're saying we're speaking in a human manner right but properly speaking as god he cannot die but as a human he can die and there's not two persons there's not one human person that dies in a divine person that goes on living there's a singular person that dies and that's essentially what um pope saint leo the great is trying to get at when he discusses the communication of idioms in the tome of leo okay that's a good exposition of that teaching um is it wrong to say the second person of the divine trinity was crucified is that wrong no that's not wrong to say you can say that he was crucified okay now he was crucified right because he had a human nature so before the incarnation he could not have been crucified obviously didn't have a human nature to be god cannot be crucified right yeah um uh this reminds me oh yeah i was also going to just mention an offhand way of course the theotokos the mother of god that was that's relying on the exact same logic obviously yeah exactly it's all been hammered out like this has all been hammered out long long ago yeah we have to ask what we mean when we say god right so when we say god we could be speaking of the divine nature or we could be speaking about one person so we say god was crucified or god was born we are speaking only of the second person of the trinity versus if we say god has an intellect and a will we are speaking near of the divine essence of all three persons i still i you know i still uh i'm happy to be exploring this question but i'm still a little bit uncomfortable uh with this whole ad extra thing i mean i believe it i fully believe it but it does put me in an awkward situation because i think about the freedom uh that christ had uh you know he because it's another dogma that i discovered in this book uh and elsewhere that everything that happens at extra is freely done by god but everything that happens in the life of the trinity is done of necessity for example god loves us freely but he loves himself of necessity you agree with that right yeah yeah and you understand how i would be a little bit uncomfortable now looking at the free choices made by the god man jesus christ on earth and how every one of those free choices has to be at extra and therefore it has to be an act an activity of all three persons right yeah i think going back to that right that there's one will within god and that will is a free will i think scudus expresses that very well where scotus essentially argues that rationality in humans we can speak of the intellect as rational but he says true rationality really is the ability to freely choose between alternatives that you're not constrained at all all right he says god as the rationality is a pure perfection and so god is the maximally or the infinitely rational being is able then to more freely than even as conceivable to a human mind choose between alternatives but we're saying right it's not as though christ willed to do one thing and the father willed to do another thing it's that there's always going to be a unity in willing and when he said not my will be done but you're done that was an example for us of how to how to perform as he conformed because christ had two natures i think he's saying in his human nature not not my will be done but thy will be done as an example for how our human nature should conform as maximus talks about how part of the reason christ had to have a human will and a human activity is so that he as god could communicate divinity to every activity he participated within every possible human activity and communicated divinity to that so when we become united with him we receive his divinity into our activities it reminds me of the baptism in the jordan and how we benefit from that that the change that the water underwent at the baptism i forget who it was a recent scholar who pointed that out to me might again might have been scott hunt but uh it's a beautiful it's a beautiful idea and uh you know as a an atheist or an enemy of christ in the church you might ask well why and even saint john the baptist asked like why do you need to be baptized right it's a natural question it is it's a it's a good question right why does the god man need to be baptized but it's for our benefit and those waters like i'm drinking water right now this is like i'm right there with jesus in the jordan like this this is transformed by his baptism no do you see it that way yeah yeah if you actually look at an icon for um the baptism of christ you will see his arms outstretched over the water like a priest does when they're blessing the waters before a baptism because when we're baptized we're blessed and brought into christ but when christ was baptized he was actually creating baptism he was he was the one blessing the waters in that baptism so that we could be baptized with that water wow and when saint john asked the question from jail are you the one what how do you read that psychologically don't despise my hero st john the baptist yeah no i think it's saint john i think christ if we just immediately accepted christ and we didn't even think about it at all that might not actually be better than having to think about it right it might be that god wanted saint john to have to think about it for a little bit to make sure he's coming to the correct conclusion because christ says right i found a house built on sand is gonna wash away when the waters come in right we need to be able to think about it and have serious thought about it because otherwise but imagine if you never a lot you see these kids who grow up in very sheltered christian homes and they go off into the world and they're almost they usually become atheists within a few months because they never encountered objections to the faith before and now they encounter objections and they have no answer and then they get it they first get annoyed but it happening over and over it's eventually going to make an impression on you and eventually it's going to start making you skeptical of the faith no matter how strong you were before going in and so i think that that's a very important thing i've got a a commenter on my youtube channel he keeps hounding me with the same uh question about uh well i've got two of them i guess i'll talk about the uh evolution creation one um yeah he seems to think that the magisterial weight is on the side of evolution i said no no no we've got quantity and quality on our side can you just back me up on that yeah actually i have just gotten involved with a new ministry we have a blog now called creationtheologyfellowship.org yeah yeah we're going to be having a lot of very good stuff uh coming out from there um so far we have two articles up i wrote one arguing just a scriptural argument for why you should read it um this the passages literally and then we also um got a submission just today which i posted up from um luis dizon who's an up and coming biblical scholar on the hebrew grammar of genesis 2 and whether or not it contradicts genesis 1. because there's a passage this is actually i was actually when i first read the objection it was actually a lot more intelligent than i expected it to be actually i didn't find this from an atheist i as i was trying to rebut the more simple objection came across the more intelligent one myself and having an issue because i was wondering all right it says that um the beasts of the field the birds of heaven were formed because adam couldn't find a partner and i'm thinking well they just had been formed earlier and god could have done it out of order but when i went to the hebrew and read it and i checked the tense of the verb for formed and it's a sequential imperfect which means it happens chronologically okay it's a special tense in hebrew that does not appear in most languages which actually strongly implies chronology at least according to the basic entry and i said oh shoot this is sending essentially here a very strong contradiction with genesis one where maybe you could say genesis one isn't chronological on each day and the bur in the beasts of the land could have been made earlier what about the birds of the heaven we know they were made a day before but so i went and i contacted a few different hebrew scholars and luis dizon got back to me first so his article got up there and they all said the same thing to me where they brought up a number of different actual like scholarly books on hebrew grammar saying that actually sometimes the sequential imperfect is a sequence of intention or thought rather than a sequence of time and so it actually could be translated as a plu perfect and the and they actually show a number of times where it's quite obvious in the context the sequential imperfect is meant to be taken as a blue perfect and so but the context here that usually it does mean temporally but if the context dictates it should be taken as a blue perfect then that there's plenty of other examples in hebrew of that being the case we have a great article on that and we have a lot of other great stuff coming up including some magisterial stuff and actually if you go to our website and sign up for our mailing list check the little type in your name and your email and check the little box and then click on it it will give you a link and also email if you've missed that link it'll email it to your email as well and click on that link and it will give you a 35-page e-book showing that the fourth ladder and council talk creation yeah that's the one always emphasizes and this this book was actually is authored by hugh owen and two other guys and it has a whole list of endorsements in the front including from a bishop and for a number of theologians as well so um we have that up there for free which you can get if you go because it says that all god made all things um simul simult which could be taken literally sort of simultaneously but and then the larger context of scholastic theology they should this was frequently a word he used to describe the work of the six days made together at a very close amount of time and that it would be sort of stretching the meaning of the word to say that seamul here means 14 billion years you know what uh last time when i had you on my show i said hey what do you think of ken hogan i meant to say he owen but i said i can't hold it by accident yeah yeah but uh so i mean uh hugh owen he's a sweet sweet generous loving man nice big family and he's been very kind and generous with me over the years he's been on my podcast a couple times uh he's not an academically trained scholar or anything like that is he no i don't think he is but he's a great guy i've met him twice so far me we've also corresponded over email quite a bit in real life yeah you met real life actually bumped into him once at a divine liturgy because i known he sometimes attended this parish which i would also attend infrequently because it was a significant drive for my house we had a beautiful divine liturgy and i'm there and i'm thinking that looks like you owe and i think he goes to this parish also but i don't want to just confront him so i quickly run out after the dismissal google him and make sure i get the picture right i'm like yeah that looks like him and we went up and met afterwards um and then actually just a few months ago um a friend of mine calls me up and is like hey like a week before easter there's going to be a colby center conference in virginia like a bunch of i i used to live in dc now i live out in seattle and the guys in um dc my bunch of my friends were going to go out to was like oh i'm actually flying out to dc but i'm like showing up like a day late to miss the conference i went and rebooked my flight two days earlier and uh we went out there and i got to meet him a second time oh that's so amazing i uh i got to meet kevin mark who's the canadian uh yeah guy yeah he um yeah he and i he was at the conference we didn't get to meet afterwards because i ran off a little bit early to try and dodge the traffic home but um we talked afterwards over email and even was nice and sent me a book and everything nice guy a beautiful big family amazing it's amazing warms the cockles of my heart you know like it's just like so it's such a powerful testimony to christ and the church i think a big nice big family you know yeah uh i'm a little bit concerned he seems to be going sspx and he's moved to the states he's attending sspx and i'm a bit worried about him because i don't agree with sspx because they oppose vatican 2 and yeah i agree yeah and um was it we actually um at this new croatian theology fellowship we actually want to do some work related to vaticans who actually quote dave verbum in my article i put out there and we're planning to also do some work on um what pope francis talks about on creation and loud auto scene oh no way just yeah because i read it but i don't recall no actually so i'm planning i know he talks about it there i'm planning to dig into it i was just like i'll read it quickly and then i see it's 184 pages and i'm like alright i need to dedicate like two or three days to like reading and taking notes um but i i know he gets into quite a bit of bonaventure there which i'm very interested in so wow and um we don't want to you know have it as like all right we're trying to do something like opposing the church all right our um our little subheading if you go to our website is to serve the servants of god through creation theology which is an allusion to the title of the pope which is servant to the servants of gods we want we are saying there's also the servants of god as the priests who are the servants of god and we're here as this layman is strong we're not actually even just a lay ministry we have lots and lots of priests associated with them um and the thing is a lot of them don't want the backlash i'm going to a conference that we're hosting in about a little over a month there's like a dozen priests going there and a lot of them i don't want to dox their names or anything like that get them in trouble or say where where when the conference is um because a lot of them are worried about the backlash they're going to get so a lot of what we want to do is work with priests not against the hierarchy or anything and try and create a better resources for academics and especially for the clergy so that hopefully maybe a hundred years down the line there's a council on this issue and that we will have helped provided some of the resources there that they can draw from that so that's our hope is that god can work through us to do that wow wow wow so amazing uh you know i was i've been accused of being an ultra montanist and i thought that was a condemned heresy but uh since i've been cozying up to uh nick fuentes and his gripers and all that uh that movement of young catholic men who are you know admittedly very edgy and say a lot of racy things no pun intended um but there's something good in there you know there's some good stuff in there uh they embrace the label ultra montanist and i in a way i like that because it's just loyalty to the living magisterium which is essential right um just tell me historically what is ultra montanism has it been condemned or am i can i call myself an ultramountainous i wouldn't i wouldn't do that because i'm just a catholic but is it is it condemned or not no it's not condemned and really historically when the word first came up it was sort of like just the catholic position i think there are some people who took it too far but essentially what was going on in france and starting around the 1700s and especially really heating up in the 1800s the french revolution and so on is that there were two groups there were the gallicans and the ultramountainous of the galacans hargening back to the gull the name of the roman province of france and the gallicans said essentially the french catholic church is a french catholic church national right so yeah so it gets to run itself it's in communion with the pope and the pope's still the head of theology but in terms of its actual affairs it gets to run itself the pope doesn't get to tell us what to do and the king is not subject to the pope the king is in charge of the french catholic church not the pope versus the ultra-mountainous um through montes is the latin word for mountains so the ultramountainous are the ones who looked over the alps over the alps mountains to rome and saw the pope as the authority over the french catholic church so that's the origin of the word now some people might have taken it too far right there are people who seem to imply especially in the wake of sort of the spirit of vatican one there are people who act like the pope can never make a mistake the pope can never commit a sin like um the pope always has to be even if they don't necessarily commit a sin they always to be a morally upright personal we we know through history these things are not true um but that's essentially every time you have an you have a um error there's always be some people who are going to go too far rejecting the error but i think overall that um ultramountainism was the catholic position it essentially meant that the catholic church both in its theological and temporal affairs is under the authority of the pope uh one of my friends uh is a little bit of a rad trad and he when he criticizes pope francis which he's done many times uh i find it distasteful and he says well look uh saint paul criticized saint peter and my immediate response is you're no saint paul sorry you're not in the role of saint paul to saint peter you're just not in that that role it's just nowhere close not even close right you back me up on that yeah yeah and i also think that you have to do we have to do it in a correct spirit right so if our spirit is the fraternal correction of the pope i mean really even there we're that's not our duty to do so right i think it's that's the duty of someone like a cardinal or even if they are a lay person catherine of siena was a lay person but she was very close to the pope personally and so you have to be right i think in the right position that god gives different people different stations in life now do you have to agree with everything the pope did no i think the pope's recent approach to the latin mass has been quite problematic and a lot of local bishops have been resisting that and allowing people to continue the latin mass and i think if you're bishop's saying you can keep doing the latin mass then absolutely go ahead right you're on under the authority of your bishop on that matter until the pope intervenes but um it's then the job of that bishop then to go back to the pope and say i think that was an unwise decision that should be changed and vatican ii pushes latin it pushes gregory and chant it pushes the organ it pushes everything that's traditional and it just allows for certain response rail parts to be in the in the colloquial local language right yeah so it's obviously been like the needle's been pushed by that spirit of vatican ii so far and the mother church is very accommodating and gentle and patient so mother church is allowing these abuses and there are many abuses but mother church is allowing them very patiently and just going to gently bring us back on course is that how you see it yeah i think so that essentially you have to remember that god's ultimately in control of the church right there are bad times but i think right god chastises the church sometimes where we're doing bad things but the holy spirit will never abandon the church so next time i'm at a a clown mass i'll just say don't don't resist babylon go join babylon join bible i'm just kidding i'm kidding i'm kidding of course of course that's actually something that i think really needs to be done right now is research on that period in history with jeremiah ezekiel and daniel how much of it even corresponds to now right because there are also many differences at that time the holy spirit had not been given to the church yet right the prophets had the holy spirit but as a whole the church had not been given the holy spirit and so we have to factor that and i think that there really needs to be biblical scholars i think need to undertake to study that period to see how it applies to today and how we can get wisdom from it is there any history chronological dating where you would be comfortable like having a a poster a big poster on your wall and it says this is when roughly when adam and eve were created in paradise this is roughly when this biblical old testament thing happened this is roughly when that happened is there one is there a version of that and i've seen many versions of them online i even own i i even have a poster yeah but is there any version of that hypothetically where you can put put it on your wall and you'd say i'm 99 sure this is what the timeline is of human salvation history ap i think i've seen enough good arguments on multiple sides at quite a number of different spots in biblical chronology that i'm saying all right i think i'm gonna really leave my mind can't work with chronology well enough to really say that like my mind starts getting jumbled with the numbers so i'm going to leave that really i think there needs to be historians who are serious historians who also seriously believe the authority of the bible to really work on that and i think especially reconstructing the period of the kings because that work was done by um edwin tealy and he was he was a very good scholar but he was generally accepting from what i understand the secular chronology of assyria at that time and trying to reconcile the two whereas uh martin um and stay um from what i understand rejected that period and ended up with about 15 more years than edwin's healey did so that's a really cool good question all right we need i think we need to investigate on the bible's own terms who is correct on that because um when anstey ad i think it's antsy or ants day or something like that added up the years he actually found quite a number of gaps within it which he argues are interregna periods between the kings and once you start adding that in you start realizing oh shoot they were regularly 10 or 20 years without kings this is why there's so much chaos going on because there are constantly the book of kings records so many civil wars both in the northern and southern kingdom and those are apparently only the ones we get record that are important enough to record if anstey is correct in his chronology that there probably are like a dozen more that are don't even make it into the text um and there's lots of other things like i've been trying desperately to find good resources on the um egyptian assyrian like babylonian wars it seems to be the three-way war going on between egypt assyria and babylon that shows up as very important in the books of ezekiel and jeremiah it's referenced quite a bit especially the battles of megiddo and carcamesh um and i i can't find good enough resources like there's not even a wikipedia page on this war there's a wikipedia page only on the two battles that appear in the bible and it could just genuinely be that our few biblical records of it are pretty much the only records we have of this war and so historians don't know how to reconstruct it well um but i think a lot of that work needs either needs to be done or i have yet to find good resources on it david roll who's one biblical he's actually an agnostic but he's doing a lot of work trying to reconstruct biblical chronology and he's actually become convinced um that the biblical chronology is very right and secular historians are very very wrong despite him being an agnostic and he's sort of been exiled from the academy for this um and i don't know if his revised chronology is actually entirely correct i have seen very good criticisms of his work as well uh david falk is a guy on youtube who's put out some very detailed critiques of rural's work and uh folk is actually a christian uh who does believe in biblical authority so it could well be that role is totally wrong uh but roll is doing he wrote mainly on egypt originally but he's been doing a two volume work on um the history of israel in specific and the first volume came out the second volume is coming out whenever he finishes it which might be quite a number of years uh i think he said he's half done writing it and so hopefully we'll get the answers to some of these questions in his book or at least i'm hoping he'll help clarify some of this i listened to a really entertaining catholic sort of a conservative academic catholic scholar guy professor you you wouldn't know his name if i said i just can't remember it really entertaining guy uh but he did a talk about i don't know if the talk was about creationism or not but he actually pulled up documents from the liturgy like sort of the calendar of the church and how certain times of the year there was a festival or whatever it was i don't know what it was but they would always maybe it was christmas i don't know but they would talk about creation and what day of the week it was what time it was and all these sorts of things and uh it was at that time x thousand number of years ago that you know adam and eve were created and he cited this as very strong uh documentary evidence that the church always believed in young earth creationism and uh i wish i had taken note of what this document is or what the feast what i think it was christmas oh yeah it's not crazy yeah yeah so it's actually if you go to the one the vatican puts out now or at least you know it's all in the vatican the only the usccb puts out they edited out all the dates oh the one read at most churches now on christmas edits out all the dates it says like many ages ago and then many ages later oh no and then only and then only around moses starts giving dates oh why did they do that i don't know yeah and and i'm not saying that this chronology given to us it's necessarily 100 correct you know um but i think that it's a good signpost of um that the church did hold this as a real chronology of history okay in the eastern churches and the orthodox churches i'm very curious do they uh embrace uh darwinianism and evolution all that crap a lot of their seminaries do but actually many of their recent saints have condemned it as a heresy sarah from rose and all those people yes sarah fema rose um elder paecios who they've canonized yeah he actually went on a whole rant at one point where he's saying are you going to say the theotokos is descended from an ape yeah yeah period and end of controversy right there boom yeah it's ridiculous not only descended from an ape but an ape herself like that's that's what the theory of evolution teaches she is she is i'm not saying she's night but they're saying she's like um so what about the nephilim i don't want to keep you because i mean i'm uh i will have to let you go here soon but what about the nephilim you know the uh what about the giants and the uh the nephilim and the line of cane the line of seth can you just sort of outline that for me because actually my wife uh she's agnostic but she was asking me about the nephilim yeah i actually did a video on the nephilim uh sort of my two cents on it because i think it is a very complex issue so sort of two theories right there's the they were demonic offspring theory that essentially humans and demons interbred and created these giants and there's another theory that um what is it uh that essentially this is the line of seth in the line of cain um getting married now that one works better metaphysically but i think uh just textually it doesn't really work that sons of god much more frequently in the pentateuch later on it does refer to the people of god but in the pentateuch i think pretty much every passage i could find it refers to angels um and this passage um like why would there be giants produced from intermarriage and also this will go against the scriptural account that intramarriage in itself is not wrong it's intermarrying with the unrighteous that is wrong right intramural with the convert isn't an issue um and so why if these were converted cainites who they were marrying then that would not have been an issue if they were marrying them then they were falling into idolatry already that sort of it's its own separate issue but the demons the demons cannot take on flesh that's the fact yeah that's the issue yes one good explanation i've seen at you is if you look in a lot of ancient cultures they have what they would call sort of a ritual intermarriage where they would have um temple priestesses and they would essentially have sexual relations with the temple priests that would then be connected to prayers that would involve essentially a sort of possession by the god where the priest comes to represent the god i see and so i think this is going on that these are essentially children who are offered up to these demonic gods and so if they were we know that demonic possession can cause physical deformity or superhuman strength and stuff no imagine if they were possessed from the moment of birth they might be like giants though i think that these are yeah from the moment of conception right and so i think these are real giants that are produced through something like this and i think it's probably um if you notice the canites and the sethites now the canines rather they last seven generations from cane versus the sethites last 10 generations well i think this is because in that seventh generation the cane the sethites turn against god produce the nephilim and use them to conquer the canites does the canites no longer exist at this point they are conquered and the seventh person is uh jared i think that's his name if i remember correctly now most of them right we have the line of first-born sons going down i think this is a succession of kings from seth in the southlight area of the world right outside the garden um we have a succession it's i think it's about at 60 years the first born son is born so i think this is a succession of kings but enoch is born i think at around like 165 or so uh probably a number of kids later than normally sex i think enoch is not um his first born son now i think enoch right we see in um here we go let me pull up in the book of jude um where did i put my bible down yeah here we go pull up in my bible we don't have any recorded sayings of um enoch himself we have a book of enoch yeah um but the book of enoch we have now is probably a jumble of both real and fake stuff so i don't think it in itself is trustworthy it probably didn't a lot of people point out that jude quotes it but we don't even know if it existed in its current form at the time of the new testament um so it could be very well that it's quoting jude we really don't know where they're quoting a common source um but here we go um see if i can find yeah oh jude verse 14 it was also the it was these of these also that enoch in the seventh generation from adams the seventh generation here prophesied saying behold the lord comes with myriad of his holy ones to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness which they have committed in such an ungodly way and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against him and i actually think jude is writing his letter shortly before the destruction of jerusalem warning of the judgment that's about to come on jerusalem so i think in the same way enoch was there to prophesy against the house of jared and prophesies and she if you're doing this you're turning away from god god will destroy you three generations later right god destroys it and um we see what is it saying um the second half of the first commandment here we gonna pull up exodus 20 here so i can quote it in full all right here we go you shall not make for yourself any graven image of any likeness of anything that is in the heaven above or anything on the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth you shall not bow down to them or serve them for i uh the lord your god i'm a jealous god right so don't make idols because i'm a jealous god visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me right so god generally when there's a corporate act of apostasy god doesn't usually destroy that generation he says visiting the iniquities of the fathers upon the sons to the third and the fourth generation god usually gives them about three or four generations and then goes and destroys them so there's a god gives them another three or four generations after jared to repent and they don't repent so god sends the flood and destroys them is the flood uh does it introduce chronological issues if you take it literally as you and i do that only eight people survived like the the the light the long lifespans of uh noah's father and grandfather they they would have been still alive right at the time yeah uh i think he's um it's i think it's his father dies before but i think his grandfather is still alive and actually dies in the year of the flood okay but methuselah would have been a couple of generations 900 something yeah and there's sort of a debate in the tradition of was he did he die in the flood because he was actually evil and he died or essentially that he was so old essentially he's just not gonna go right we don't really know we don't really know we don't know we don't know anything about methuselah's life whether or not he was a good guy but we know everyone else in his in that line was righteous so i'm guessing he probably was a good guy and then just i said she was either too old or died shortly before the flood i know is it not like russell crowe version of noah uh they have him passing away like moments before the flood is going to happen cool i'm not endorsing that as canonical but um that to me makes sense and that that that one detail of the of the movie um but um what's interesting is we see giants again after the flood yeah so i think that um this same sort of ritual intermarriage happened after the flood yeah and this is why giants were very frequent throughout the ancient world and maybe this still exists today or maybe the coming of christ put an end to it i don't know which one of those it is um like well i guess we'll see if there's any giants around yeah yeah but i do know i heard one theory for a little while i don't know if this is true or not that uh peter the great of russia i consider one of the villains of history he was unusually large so that's all i put out there it's fascinating stuff uh i really appreciate you having me on the show man i'm gonna have to uh i'm gonna have to wrap it up here but what were you just about to say now yeah i was gonna say this is just my speculation about the nephilim there's no dogmatic teaching of the church on this so people can feel free to disagree with me on this as much as you want this is just my theory on it it's going to be it's going to be beautiful uh on judgment day if we make it to heaven uh on judgment day to see uh or maybe throughout the course of of our stay in heaven maybe that's when we're going to see the bible stories in their full depth and detail and i think we'll be surprised to see uh the overlap of some of the stories and and the chronology of some of these stories and i think it's just a common sense to admit humbly admit that we're wrong about a lot of the chronology and a lot of this stuff yeah yeah because i think if you notice it the bible is very good at relative chronology like when you're looking at one person's life you can usually get enough details to figure everything out it's figuring out long distances of time and i think that's because that's not the exact number of years between significant events aren't important unless the bible tends to give us a number telling us why it's important like 480 euros from the exodus the building of the temple because right dave verbum says that god committed everything to scripture which is necessary for our salvation so god only committed exactly right the holy spirit i think doesn't waste his breath god committed exactly the right number of words to the bible that are necessary for us to know all all catholic doctrine all catholic doctors communicated in exactly the right number of words to do that now there are lots of other details that help us understand the stories help us better understand history but they're not the bible story that's also another important thing to remember we don't want to confuse our interpretations of the bible with the bible the bible gives us a story and we can really easily in our mind have an interpretation of it that we then treat as the bible and if it turns out that version of the story in our head is wrong we start having a crisis of faith we need to be careful to distinguish the two because our faith is in ourselves ultimately yeah and our genius intellects but uh yeah you know uh yeah you were talking about the uh the bible the chronology you you brought up an interesting point that i want to touch on here um if it can if i can only remember what you were talking about there um just give me give me one moment because it was an important question i wanted to ask you about this it'll probably come to me uh it'll come to me but we'll definitely talk again and uh i do have to run now but i really appreciate you having me on it's a joy it's just a real joy to talk to you and listen to you thank you and i did want to i did want to ask you very very briefly um are you aware of the dangers of getting obsessed with the academic questions are you consciously aware of that and fighting that like you said early on in this talk about the young child and the innocence she brings to a simple uh a simple insight are you are you aware that it could be tantalizing to go down a rabbit trail because uh we we are just given what we need out of the bible and we're not we're not supposed to go beyond uh what we need right that's a form of hubris i guess yeah yeah i think so and assuming that we have all the answers now right one of my favorite creation scientists is a guy named todd wood and he has a great story of him he read a bunch of books on he's a biologist he doesn't focus on geology he read a bunch of books on how the flood works andrew thought he understood it well um then was reading an article about dinosaur nests and it seems from the fossil record that there are cases where there was a dinosaur nest that was abandoned for a significant amount of time partially fossilized then it was used again by a dinosaur and he said all right how does the flood happen bury it the flood goes away a dinosaur comes back lives there for a little while and the flood comes again he says a lot of people at that point would have said all right i can't believe the flood anymore because i don't have the answer to how that works and he just goes maybe i don't understand the flood right like those books that creationists have worked to do they they probably are still right on the overall framework of the flood but there's probably a lot of details that worked out at the moment that we don't fully understand if you actually go back to the text it mentions it took 150 days for the waters to prevail in the flood that's a significant amount of time for stuff to be happening before the world is actually fully flooded right so he just went i don't understand the flood and he said 25 years later i still don't understand the flood but i understand a lot more than i did back then right that we have to simply sit back and let god reveal things as maybe in my lifetime we won't ever figure out fully how this detail happened during the flood but i trust with time god will give us the answer when it's when it's right i remember the thing i was trying i was listening i was listening when you came to me as you were talking the thing i wanted to talk just touch on very briefly was the numerology of the bible you see the jews with their alphabet with the numerical values of each letter and their movies made about this and the significance of numerology and then you have astrology like the meaning of the with the heavens the shapes of the heavens all these things in my catholic understanding everything is well ordered and everything has meaning and everything is ordered to our salvation and everything is good numbers are good numbers have meaning letters are good letters have meaning the stars and the shapes and everything everything is meaningful so i think on judgment day and thereafter in heaven we're going to understand the numerology of the bible isn't that going to be exciting and the funny thing is even palm reading god can do a palm reading it's not it's not a blasphemous thing god can do he could do all these new he could do all the new age junk which is demonic now because it's not appropriate now for us to be peering in and uh you know like raising samuel to talk to samuel or whatever right yeah because i think numerology very frequently turns into this is what i feel like the numbers mean and it's not well grounded but i think if we're looking there are plenty of numbers that um are well are clear there's actually one point actually where jesus performs some miracle involving numbers i can't remember what it is and the apostles don't understand what it means and jesus rebukes them for not understanding the meaning of the numbers there because they should be as they should have studied their old testament and knowing what these numbers meant um and so i think it's good to try and peer into what those numbers mean but it has to be grounded in something it can't be just pure speculation it has to be all right here's uh lots of biblical stories that use this number here's the common theme they have all right let's see if that bringing that number related to that insight actually helps us better understand the stories if it does i think that's good confirmation we're on to something but if it's if it doesn't help us understand it then it's probably not right or or if it's just pure idol speculation when i read the bible um and i listen to the bible i don't read it like i don't spend a lot of time physically reading the bible with my eyeballs i listen to the bible i think that's a nice way to digest it uh i've sort of taken on the habit of just letting it wash over me and i got this analogy like this way of looking at the incomprehensible parts of the bible which is what's incomprehensible to me right now anyway a lot of it a lot of the old testament especially i've taken on the habit of saying it's like a trailer video for a movie like heaven is the movie and the bible is a series of trailers for the actual movie and when we get to judgment day in heaven that's when you see the movie that's when you you know so that there's some spoiler alerts in the bible for sure for sure spoiler alert we know we know the outcome for satan right we already know so just like any good trailer we know who's the good guy who's the bad guy we know who wins in the end but the spoilers are just well balanced and the other the other aspect uh is that we live in a fallen world and just uh there's going to be some confusion i think you admitted that that much too yeah no i agree yeah do you like my spoiler alert idea with the trailer no i do yeah thank you so much for having me on again i'd love to talk some more and i hope we'll uh hope we'll talk again i hope you come back on my podcast and uh we'll uh we'll get some talking points to dig deep into some of your favorite topics okay i think that sounds good yeah talk to you soon david thank you so much god bless you god bless bye