"The Church Doesn't Have Two Lungs" | Dr. Nathan Jacobs

Dr. Nathan Jacobs, thanks so much for being here today.

My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

I've been really looking forward to this. Today, we're gonna be discussing the differences in theology between the East and the West. Now, we were just talking before we started recording, there's been something of a trend here. So, you had a a group of scholars saying, especially in Russia, saying, "Look, the Eastern and Western kind of conceptions of theology, they are just fundamentally different." And then this gets received and people say, as academia often does, they want to say, like, "Is that quite the case?" And this gets problematized. And then maybe for ecumenical reasons, there's a desire to say, "No, like they're actually much more similar, just, you know, different words." And then you have, you're working on a course right now, or you're releasing it. You can talk a little bit about how exactly to describe that, how far along it is, but I take it you want to say, "No, they are pretty much fundamentally different." So, to start with, how did you come to that conclusion?

Yeah. Okay. So, well, again, thanks for having me on. And yeah, I am working on this series. Um, it's, it's a 25-part lecture series. Uh, the lectures are probably going to be about one hour in length, and it runs through 12 different topics, an introductory lecture, and then these 12 different topics that sort of walk through what I see as the fundamental differences between the East and the West. And the way it goes is, it's just, you know, I talk through the West first, in order to talk through what is probably most familiar to folks who are going to to view it, to consume it. Uh, and then, and then in the second lecture, I go ahead and I walk through the East. And it's not, it's not, I mean, full disclosure, I became Eastern Orthodox. And I'll talk a bit about that in answering your question, uh, because that's critical to how I came to that conclusion that there are fundamental differences, uh, between the East and the West. Um, but it's not an Orthodox apologetic. Uh, I, I am, my training, one of my PhDs is in historical theology, and so I really strive to just approach these topics descriptively, um, as a historical theologian, being honest, uh, about what I'm seeing in the primary sources. Uh, so when I would teach historical theology, I always prided myself on the fact that at some point in the class, somebody would say, "Dr. Jacobs, what do you think?" Right? They'd suddenly realize, as we've been going through this, and I don't know what you actually think. Um, and I always appreciated that because it meant I'm doing my job well. I'm being an honest broker who's describing these positions and leaving it to you, the listener, to decide, you know, where you come down. Uh, and I'd always be deflective about that. I'd say, "Well, you, you should care about what other people like Thomas Aquinas think, not what I think, right? Like, why, why do you care what I think? Right?" Um, and so, and so it is with the series, right? It really isn't. It's not, you know, an Orthodox apologetic. I'm not a representative of the Orthodox Church. I'm not clergy. I'm not, you know, I'm speaking just as a scholar, uh, about this difference that I, I learned from, that I observed in the primary source material. So, I guess that gets to your question of how I came to that.

[gasps] Which is, uh, I'll tell you a little bit about my journey, and I'm happy to dig in on any parts of this that are of interest to you or that you think would be of interest to your audience. Um, but so, I was, um, my background is actually in art. You can see some of my, you know, art in the background here, and we talked beforehand. I didn't realize you were based in Baltimore, and I went to the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland. Um, so, uh, my background was really, you know, as an artist. I was a completely secular, worldly, hedonistic artist. Um, and, uh, now, I was raised, my mother was Missouri Lutheran, and so she was a devout German Lutheran. Um, and I grew up hearing about that theology. She sent me to a private, you know, Lutheran grade school where I was catechized and all that. My father, on the other hand, was nothing, right? Like, now, he supported this is what, you know, how Mom wants you to be raised. But, uh, there wasn't really a cohesion between the two of them. I really didn't know what my dad believed about these things. And whenever I brought up religion and tried to ask him about it, it did not, it seemed pretty obvious that he didn't believe what my mom believed. But he tried to, you know, sidestep that, you know, lest he create problems in the home or something. But my mom, at some point, went through this crisis of faith, and so she spent a lot of time reading Christian apologetics. And, um, and those would be on science, they would be on, you know, historical theology, they'd be on philosophy, religious pluralism. And so she was actually much better versed in handling the intellectual side of Christianity, uh, than most, most lay people. And native to my family was just debate, right? We would always, you know, pounding of tables, raised voices was just good dinner table conversation, right? Like, that's just how it goes. And because of my mom, right, a lot of that involved debate about religion. So I grew up hearing, you know, arguments for and against the existence of God, for and against Christianity. And so I walked away with a very clear sense that I actually think Christianity is a pretty rational religion. It's probably true. But growing up, I didn't have any sense, uh, that it had anything to do with my life, because the sort of version of the gospel I was exposed to was just sort of a pop quiz when you die. It's like, "Okay, you die, you're going to stand before God, he's going to say, 'Why should I let you into heaven?'" You just say, "Jesus died for my sins." "You got it? Okay, you're good to go." And so that sort of very superficial, thin understanding of the gospel left me thinking, even if it's rational, even if it's true, it doesn't matter how I live. And so I lived however I wanted, and I really left behind any sort of practice of Christianity. It had no practical value for me, as far as I could tell. And, um, and so I went down my hedonistic road, and all this is context for how that shifted. So, where that really shifted for me is, um, one of the things I loved as an artist is I loved mind-altering drugs, and LSD was one of those. And so, um, for folks who have been on LSD, you know that, um, and those who don't, this is probably more important for those who have never been on LSD. LSD is sort of thing you take it, and you're going on a psychedelic trip, and, uh, you're on that trip whether you like it or not, you know, and could be like eight hours, and you're not going to sober up. Um, you just got to let it run its course. And so, uh, so you better hope it goes well, because if it goes poorly, you're stuck, right? You're stuck in that space. And I had a bad LSD trip, and, um, it was, it was not going well. I wanted to end it. And here is another important part about LSD, uh, which is that when you're on that, uh, you end up having, you know, the way you think is altered. You know, certain things that you take for granted, like, let's say, gravity, suddenly, which normally would seem perfectly intelligible to you, might suddenly seem absurd and arbitrary. And the reason I bring that up is because my first thought when I was having a bad trip was the question of like, "Well, how would I end this?" And my first thought was, "Well, I could kill myself." And that thought, the reason I, I bring up that sort of shift in thinking, is it wasn't induced by despair, right? It wasn't a suicidal thought. It was just perfectly analytic thought. I'm an organism. I've ingested a chemical. It's affecting my brain. I don't like what it's doing. So, if I kill the brain, that would probably end the psychic experience. Uh, and so it was just as simple as that. And then what followed on that, though, was another thought, or another voice. I don't know if I was talking to myself or something else was talking to me. I like to think I was having a conversation with Socrates. But, uh, but nonetheless, what followed on, on the heels of that, was, uh, a thought that said, "Yes, you could do that, but you do realize that consciousness is not a physical object, right?" And so, if you kill the organism that it's attached to, are you sure the consciousness will end with it? And I thought, "Huh, that's an interesting thought. I don't know if it will." Now, the reason I say I, I kind of like the thought that it might have been Socrates talking to me is because that's Socrates' affinity argument for the immortality of the soul, which I had never read, and I wouldn't read for years. Uh, but in that moment, all of a sudden, I thought, "Huh, you know, what if it didn't end? What if my consciousness exist, like, continued to exist after the death of my body? And what if, because the psychic terror I'm experiencing is actually in my mind, that endured with it? And I thought, 'Well, that would be hell.'" And all of a sudden, in that moment, the idea of an afterlife, not as a location with angels or demons or something like that, not something that's all about extrinsic circumstance, but as something that is about the condition of the soul that endures in perpetuity, suddenly made intuitive sense to me.

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And in that moment, I suddenly thought, "Okay, death is coming near me. Every second that ticks past, you know, ticks by, death is one step closer to me. And I have a limited amount of time in order to figure this out. I now understand why world religions are so obsessed with how you live. All of this makes sense. I need to solve this right now." And in that moment, I was so taken with the realization of the importance of those types of questions that I did something extremely inadvisable. Uh, I climbed into my car and I drove home while still on acid. Uh, and when I got there, I went and I grabbed a Bible because I was like, "Well, I'm just going to start here." And I dropped it open and I started to read, or tried to read. Reading on acid is not an easy task. But my eyes fell on one sentence, um, and never left it for the next three hours until I sobered up. And it was the words of Christ where he says, "If your right eye causes you offense, you know, you should gouge it out and cast it away, because it's better to enter life maimed than to be cast whole into hellfire." Needless to say, that seemed very on point for what I was thinking about in that moment. And it just seemed too coincidental, right? I couldn't see it as a coincidence. And that started me down an obsessive and neurotic journey of pursuing philosophy and religion. Um, where now the, the only thing I wanted to know is, "What religion is true? What happens when you die? Is there a God? What is he like? Do we have free will?" All of those questions just naturally unfolded. And I began to pursue those questions in earnest. Um, I would go and I would confront pastors and drill them with questions. If somebody mentioned there's some apologist or a debate or something, I would go to that and I would ask questions. I would find books by professors and I'd go to the universities that I don't even go to and schedule office hours in order to grill them. I read everything I could get my hands on. And it just became obsessive, and and obsessive in a really, you know, really highly neurotic, like, "I feel the weight of this." To the point, I remember one conversation with one pastor while I'm grilling him with questions. He's like, "Are you on something?" I wasn't. But I was like, [laughter] but I was like, like, "No, I'm not." I mean, like I've taken drugs before. Yeah. But like, "No, I'm not on something." Do you not understand why this is such an important question? How is it that I understand the weight of this question and you don't understand the weight of this question? And that was actually really sort of shocking and disappointing to me. I thought, of all people who should understand the weight of these questions, a pastor. Um, and so, anyway, that started me down this journey. And initially, that over overlapped with art school, and I became very negligent of my art [snorts] classes. I'm going into art history, and I'm sneaking in volumes of, you know, philosophy or theology or something and reading it in the dark rather than paying attention to lectures about the [laughter] history of art. And eventually, I just left art school in my third year to go study philosophy. Um, and really, that was the start of the very formal journey that began there, and that led through degrees in philosophy and church history and systematic theology and historical theology. And that was really all about just pursuing answers. Now, I know this is a very long answer to your very short question. Um, but I'll keep on rolling because I'm clearly not to the point where we get to the East-West divide. Um, where I, so early on, I was, I was looking at, you know, Eastern religions. I was reading the Quran, you know, I was reading the Hebrew Bible, and then also the New Testament. But I, I had a, I tended to favor Christianity, partially because of the upbringing with my mother, where I'd already been persuaded about the reasonableness of Christianity, and also the more I looked at Eastern religions than other religions, it seemed like there was something unique about the claim of exclusivity with Christ. So there was something almost Pascalian about it, like getting this one wrong has higher stakes, you know, if it's true. And so, uh, for that reason, for those reasons, I ended up leaning into that, um, pretty early on. And where I started was, I really began, I wanted to understand what Christianity was, because I knew that there was obviously a conflict. I grew up hearing, right? You know, Catholics, right? The popes, the Antichrist, right? Like, all of these were serious Lutherans, right? They still lived in the Reformation. So, I clearly knew about, like, the Reformation divide. Um, and by this point, I very early on started reading different systems of theology. So I was reading about Reformed theology and Arminian theology and all this sort of stuff, Anabaptists, whatever I could get my hands on. So I was aware that there was this fracturing and this divide in Christian theology, and I just wanted to know what it was. And so I didn't go into it with any presupposition that the Catholics are right or the Catholics are wrong, or the Protestants are right or whatever. I just wanted to understand what it even is. And so where I decided to start was with Augustine of Hippo. And the reason was because I recognized that everybody claimed him. I was like, the, the Catholics are saying their theology is Augustinian. The Lutherans are saying he's their guy, right? The Reformed are saying he's their guy. And I was like, "So clearly, this is, if you want to understand historical Christianity, that's probably a good starting point." And that's what I did. So I drilled down into Augustine, spent years with his writings, um, and just trying to understand Augustine. And I went from him, that was where I started to do this method of just reading as much of the primary sources I could, put it in dialogue with doctoral dissertations or other secondary sources and things like that. And then the more I read Augustine, the more I became aware of, well, two things, right? The one was, I became aware that he had clearly been influenced by, as he puts it, "certain books of the Platonists." And based on the scholarship I'd read, most people thought that was Plotinus. So, you know, middle Neoplatonism stuff. Um, and some, you know, some people suggested Porphyry, but, you know, that was a minority theory. But it was like, "Okay, so I've got to read the Middle Platonists now." And then as I'm reading them, of course, oh, well, they're interacting, obviously, I've got to read Plato as the background of this, but they're also interacting and responding to Aristotle. They're interacting with the Stoics, they're interacting with Pythagoreans or Neopythagoreans. So I was like, "Okay, so now I've got to read all this other stuff." So Augustine became the catalyst for me going backwards into all of Hellenic philosophy and trying to understand what was going on there. But he also became the catalyst for moving forward. I wanted to know what happened afterwards, like, where did all of this go? And so I just started by moving meticulously forward, um, through the Scholastics, the medieval Scholastics. And along the way, I'd also read the pre-Augustinian Latin writers as well, uh, just for, you know, context for this. But then I moved in and I started meticulously working my way through Thomas Aquinas's works. Um, I read Bonaventure, I read John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, all these different Latin Scholastics. Um, and, uh, and then what [clears throat] happened was I moved forward beyond that. I had already started reading the Reformers and things like that, but I became aware that, okay, there are these other less-read post-Reformation Scholastics. Scholasticism didn't go away, and these are the guys really sort of systematizing what's gone on. Like, the Reformation is catalyzed by a figure like Luther, but the Lutheran Scholastics eventually had to do battle with the Catholic polemics, and they had to engage in Scholasticism themselves. So, anyway, if you follow this through, I intentionally worked, even though I wasn't interested in becoming a church historian. I was dealing mostly with philosophy, which I'll talk about in a moment. Um, but I intentionally put myself under church historians. Uh, so, you know, I studied under Doug Sweeney, who's a Jonathan Edwards scholar, if you know him, when I was doing my master's work and dealing with Augustinian things like that. And then, um, in my doctoral studies, I intentionally, one of the people I, I put myself under and worked under was Richard Muller, who was, uh, is the, like, foremost authority in the world on 16th, 17th-century Reformed Scholasticism. Uh, and I love Richard, and we got along great. Um, Richard knew I was not Reformed in any way, which I'll talk about here in a moment. But, um, but that was the intent, right? I just wanted to understand the history of, of Christianity. Augustine became that sort of catalyst for looking at the evolution of the Latin West, as well as looking at the sort of Hellenic background. Now, the thing is, uh, when I dove into that journey, I really had hoped that what would happen is, I was like, I, I hoped to be persuaded of Catholicism. If I were honest back then, I'd be like, "Make me a Catholic." And the reason was, I'm an artist, right? I'm an artist. I'm a budding philosopher. You know, there's a whole history of this sort of thing that sounds pretty good, you know. Um, and so I really kind of wanted to be, um, persuaded of that. I was open-minded about that sort of thing. But actually, the opposite happened. Um, what really happened is the more I dug into this, is the more I found myself actually repelled, uh, by Western Christianity. And so, even though I was hoping to be drawn into it, the more I studied it, the deeper I, I dove into it, the more I, I gave myself over to the entire scholastic enterprise, the medieval into the post-Reformation era, the more, um, I found myself at odds with historical Christianity. Um, now, I have to say, of course, Latin Western Christianity, because it's the only Christianity I knew. I had no awareness of the Christian East. Um, but there was this thing that was happening within me, um, where I was obsessive about the Old Testament along this time. You know, I was, I was, I spent a, as I'd said, I read a bunch of different things, but I ended up getting deeply sucked into Old Testament studies, and I really loved the Old Testament itself. And part of the reason was, is because there was this side of me that thought, "Well, there's something here that tells me," and I didn't have the vocabulary for this at the time, but what I was encountering was holiness, right? I was like, "Okay, if a deity is real, if religion is real, it should look and feel like this, right? It should, on the one hand, be alluring, that there's something, you know, that draws me in about the dreadfulness of the deity, and yet something that drives me away at the same time, because it's a deity, right?" And to my favorite book at, at the time was the Book of Leviticus, and it was like, I just loved reading this priest manual that told me something about the holiness of this deity and what he demanded and so on. And I thought, "Religion should feel this way, right?" Um, and, and yet at the same time, I, I kind of lamented that I was like, "All of my experience with religion doesn't look or feel this way." And that was a deep disappointment to me. Um, and the other thing that emerged, though, is that having become so familiar with the God of the Old Testament, and having a sense of this person that I'm reading about there, the more I read about the God of the Scholastics, the more I thought, "I don't think these are the same being. I don't think they're describing the same being." Um, one felt more like a fully transcendent, abstract, metaphysical principle, and the other one was a person. And, and so over time, that really did sort of push me in many ways away from, I'm sorry, there's an ambulance rolling past. I don't know if you heard that. Um, uh, but that really did over time, it created a bit of a rift between me, because, uh, part of what I was seeing also while I was going through this entire history, was I was also in tandem with this. Once I was moving forward beyond the Scholastics, I was moving forward not just into the Scholastics and the Christian literature. I was moving into the philosophical literature as well. And so I wanted to know all of the sort of heterodox things that were happening, uh, in the world of modernity. And so I became well-versed in people like, you know, like Leibniz and Spinoza and Kant. And, um, for those who don't know my scholarship, my first book was on Immanuel Kant's philosophy of religion. My most recent book is on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's response to the problem of evil. Um, so I, I very much delve deeply into modern scholarship in terms of modernist philosophy of religion. And, um, and I say that because in that, in that context, you're starting to get the modern discussion about, uh, about the question of, well, how do you justify the fact that we are, on the one hand, claiming a certain form of Christianity, but we're diverging from it? Right? Because people like G.W.F. Hegel want to claim that somehow he is in the flow of Christianity. Um, and so how do you explain that? And so a lot of the German Idealists, for example, had, uh, you know, Prussian Idealists, they wanted to say things like, "Well, what's going on here is that, uh, God is sort of slowly unveiling himself, and he's educating the human race, and and religion is evolving with time." And what starts to emerge out of that is this narrative that suggests, "Well, there was sort of like this Jewish religion that was [clears throat] initially tribalistic, and then it became henotheistic, and then it became monotheistic. And then when Jesus shows up, they really don't think he's divine. So it's sort of like a human messiah, and then maybe he gets elevated to divinity. You get a binitarianism, and in the Church Fathers, you get a Trinitarianism." And they sort of offered that narrative in order to say, "Christianity has been evolving all the time, and we're just the next evolution of that." Right? So, "We are just in the flow of Providence. This is a good thing." They're not saying that as a critique. They're saying that that's a good thing. And that becomes the sort of philosophical, that that narrative of progress becomes the philosophical foundations for the Tübingen School and the entire idea of biblical studies, which is dominant in secular biblical studies today. Um, the idea that, of course, right, Moses is like more of a tribalistic thing, and, and the concept of, you know, monotheism isn't there early on, and so on and so forth. And it has this very, sort of cynical view of the evolution of the biblical text, the, the evolution of, you know, of theology, and all the rest. And, and as part of that, in people like Adolf von Harnack, the church historian, he very much took the line that said, "Look, Um, the Jewish religion of the, of the Bible is one thing, and the Church Fathers are just Greek converts who come along, and they begin to synthesize Hellenistic thought, you know, with Judaism, and create something new, which is the Christianity as we know it." And the thing was, like, I, what I saw is that in some people like Hegel, that's praise. Good for them that they're finally incorporating philosophy in there. But what I also saw is that in other people, like, let's say, like an Open Theist, for example, um, I saw that there was a critique that says, "This is proof that something has gone, and Christianity has been corrupted because they believe, they didn't believe that Christianity was somehow incomplete. They're trying to get back to the Bible." And so getting back to the Bible meant getting rid of the philosophical assumptions. Now, all of that is context for where I went, which was, I became increasingly sympathetic to the idea that something had gone amiss in Christianity because of that very fact that I had talked about, that I was like, "I don't recognize the God of the Scholastics when I read the Bible. I think these are two different things." And so, I embraced what's called process philosophy. And I went, I became a full-blown, full-throated heretic. I knew it. I didn't care. [laughter] My favorite book was Charles Hartshorne's, uh, "Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes." I was, you know, I, I was, I was very self-aware of the fact that I was rejecting historical Christianity. Um, and I was rejecting it because I found it, uh, in many ways to be philosophically untenable. I wondered about certain things, like some of the presumptions about original sin, or some of the presumptions about penal substitution, or some of the presumptions about predestination or free will, or whatever it might be. I found that those so often times require defense because they so heavily and, you know, naturally brush against the conscience of people. And I don't mean a cultural conscience. I just mean a, a basic moral intuition that says, "I'm pretty sure an infant who has never had any sort of moral choice shouldn't be burned forever for things they haven't done." That's not really like a cultural sensibility, right? That is, that's just sort of a basic moral sensibility about the basis for moral culpability. And so one of the things that I struggled with was I was like, "If, if you know, the mind is the most godlike thing about me, the thing that enables me to discern the mind in the world around me, why is it that Christianity, if it's true, it's always brushing up against the most godlike thing about me?" And so I became very sympathetic because of this dissonance between what I saw in, in, in the biblical God and the Scholastics, because of the dissonance between my moral intuitions as a philosopher and what I was, I was finding in so many Western doctrines, that this narrative about something being corrupt, corrupted along the way, was true. And so, um, and so that's one of the reasons why I embraced process philosophy and just started reinventing the wheel, you know, just having some sort of commitment, a belief in God, um, but toying with any number of heretical views. And, uh, all that changed for me, um, when I finally, in my doctoral studies, took a class on, um, Nicaea to Constantinople. Uh, and so those first two ecumenical councils. Now, I was familiar, I already had a degree in church history. Like, I was, I was familiar with, I was familiar with that period. I was familiar with those councils. I was familiar with the players involved and so on. But I hadn't really dug into the primary sources of the Christian East on this. And so this was a class with a protologist who all we're going to do is read the primary sources. We're starting with Arius and Athanasius. We're going to read Alexander of Alexandria. We're going to read the councils. We're going to move into, you know, the Cappadocians and, you know, Apollinaris and Didymus and all these other guys, right? And it was just all the primary sources. And when I read that, um, I experienced something that I hadn't experienced in a long time, which was disorientation. And so, you know, anybody who has studied theology, um, or philosophy of any kind, you're familiar what it's like to come to grips with a system of thought. You know, if you know Thomism or Calvinism or something like that, you can pretty much predict what the answer would be to a certain question. And so if you pick up a Thomist, not going to be a ton of surprises. Now, you might find a passage you really like, you might find an idiosyncrasy, but for the most part, you kind of know how this system works. Um, and by this point, you know, deep in these doctoral studies, I was already very familiar with, you know, the different philosophical systems, the different, you know, systems of theology and so on. It had been a long time since I read anything in theology and been disoriented by it. But when I was reading Athanasius, I didn't, I knew enough to know I don't know what I'm reading. It's like, this does not map on to any of the stuff that I'm familiar with. And that unnerved me because I was like, "I don't know what's happening in this text." Um, and then what was also unnerving, uh, and threw me, was when I started reading Arius, and I started recognizing that in Arius, there was this whole philosophical undercurrent to this conversation. Athanasius is clearly leveling certain objections about, like, metaphysical entailments of Arius's position, and those are being echoed by Alexander of Alexandria, and Arius is aware of them and responding. And I'm like, "Wait, what is going on here?" And so initially, I was sucked in just because I was perplexed that this is a significant moment in church history, and this is not just sort of the obvious stuff I expected about the divinity of Christ. Um, and all of a sudden, I'm just need to understand. And the more I dug into it, the more I started to see, on the one hand, there were certain philosophical things that were opening up to me. I came to see what the underlying metaphysics were that Athanasius was using, that Alexander of Alexandria was using, that ended up becoming the foundations for the charges against Arius. Um, those ended up being echoed by the councils, and that really threw me because I was like, "Whoa, I had always thought philosophy, like, Christianity is philosophically neutral. It's just a playground. We can do whatever we want." But they're actually claiming this metaphysic is Christian. And I thought, "What on earth is going on?" Um, and then with that, I was also encountering all these other things. There's talk of, like, they're talking about God's essence and God's energies. And I'm like, "What the heck is that?" Right? That's new to me. I can tell it's really important. It seems to be important to their epistemology. It seems to be important to their concept of Providence. It seems to be important to their doctrine of salvation. And I don't know what the heck it is, right? And, and so, like, that was throwing me. The way they talked about the Trinity was totally different than what I encountered. And I was like, "Is, is this, are they saying what I think they're saying?" And so initially, it was just being mystified, where I'm just looking at this and going, "This is a whole can of worms that I don't understand." And so I dug in, originally with just a desire to understand. And with that desire, the deeper I got into it, one of the things that I was also shocked by was how many of the assumptions of the Latin West, like original sin, for example, I could tell that they not only didn't have, but they would have rejected, right? Like, and I don't mean rejected like they read Augustine and they're rejecting Augustine. I mean, they clearly have a different anthropology. They have clearly have a different understanding of the ramifications of the fall. And all of a sudden, like the things that they were saying about free will, or about Providence, or the nature of God, or God-world interactions, what was also shocking to me was that all of those things resonated with what I had tried to construct heretically, you know, as a process philosopher. Their intuitions were the same. Their answers weren't the same, but their intuitions were the same, which was refreshing and shocking and exciting and all this sort of stuff. And then they naturally raised the question, "Is this just some pocket of weirdos that disappeared, right?" Like, because I'm familiar enough with the history of ideas, like Kantians after Kant don't agree with Kant, right? Everybody, like, changes. So, like, maybe all of this disappeared, evolved into something else. And so I became obsessive about reading the Eastern Fathers after and before. And what was shocking to me is how much continuity there was. And so that, that stunned me. I couldn't believe that not only was I finding the same things in the other Fathers, but I was finding a, a harmony that I'd never seen in any other area of the history of ideas. And that really put me on my heels in terms of saying, "Maybe I'm looking at the hand of Providence, you know, in, in this preservation," because they're all claiming that this is the faith they received from Christ and the Apostles. And, you know, given its preservation, I was like, "Maybe they're right." But it also required me to say, "And maybe I have to abandon everything I've ever constructed philosophically and theologically." And so I came to, I reached a breaking point, and I went to, I happen to live like three blocks from an Orthodox church. So I just barged in one day. It's not even the liturgy or anything. I, I'm surprised anybody was there, to be truthful. And I walk in and I'm like, "I need a priest." This poor [snorts] guy, Father Raphael Daly, he's like, "I'm a priest." And I was like, "Buckle up, man. I gotta talk to you because uh" [laughter] And he brought me into this, this chapel. They had like the big main temple, and then they had this other smaller chapel where they do these smaller, uh, sort of daily services. And, and he brought me in there, and I just unloaded on him. I told him all the stuff I've, I told you about with greater granular theological and philosophical detail. I get to the end of that, and he patiently listens. He gets to the end of that, and he's like, "Yep, no, that's our theology." I was like, [snorts] "What?" Now, keep in mind, I, I had no idea what Eastern Orthodoxy was, right? I'm just reading the Eastern Fathers. It was much later in the process that I connected, like, "Oh, Eastern Orthodoxy refers to like the Eastern Patriarchates, Roman Catholic, got it, right?" Like, and I hadn't really associated the Eastern Fathers with, "Oh, that's their theology." So when he said, like, "Yeah, that's our theology. And those are our guys." I'm like, "What? Get out of town!" [laughter] And then, and then, you know, I'm like, "So, like, there's no Reformation there?" He's like, "No, no." He's like, "That's our theology. Those are our guys." He's pointing around. There's an icon of Athanasius. There's Basil of Caesarea. He's pointing me to all these guys. And so, he told me to go to a Divine Liturgy, which I did that Sunday. And, um, I went into the Divine Liturgy. And this is where that other part of my journey that I mentioned, that being enamored with Leviticus, being enamored with holiness, and a certain approach to, um, to worship, which had always fascinated me. Um, I was like, "I'm looking at, I was like, 'I recognize all this. This is transfigured Levitical worship.'" I was like, "How have I never heard about this or encountered this?" And so now, obviously, like everybody else who's ever encountered Orthodoxy, I was made of questions. I've got, and there are, you know, lots of the usual ones, some of the unusual ones, probably because I was a trained philosopher. But, you know, um, a lot of the usual ones. And I went to him and I grilled him with my questions. And he wisely was like, "Well, you've read the Fathers. Go back and ask them, because you can find the answers in them." Which was the right thing to do with me. So I did, you know, and one by one, I started to find, like, "Oh, he's right. They address these different questions." And, um, and their answers, I found far more compelling than my objections. And so one by one, objections fell. And there emerged a tipping point where I was like, "Okay, I trust you guys, right? Like, I trust that any question I'm about, I'm about to ask, I will find a good answer in you." Um, and so that's when I was just like, "I want in. Like, I trust, I trust you guys. I want to become Orthodox." And so, um, now, I was married at the time, and that was, there was still, like, my, my then-wife didn't have any concept of what was going on, and she was like, "What's this cult you want to join?" She knew I was a heretic, right? I got us kicked out of churches by, you know, [laughter] going toe-to-toe with pastors when she would drag me along and things like that. But, um, but, but, you know, she didn't know anything about this whole Orthodox thing that was happening. And so, anyway, he wisely advised me to just practice Orthodoxy, become a catechumen, patiently wait for her, pray for her. Took seven years and about with cancer, but eventually it was like, "Okay, we became Orthodox." Um, and so, anyway, that's the very long journey, but I share all of that, which is a lot, I know. Um, but I share all of that in order to say that within that journey, that was the journey that convinced me that there is a substantive divide between the Christian East and the Christian West. Um, because, like I said, I approached the Latin West. I approached these things. It's not as if I didn't have any concern. I had a concern for my soul. I wanted to know what was true. And if Christianity is true, I want to be a Christian, right? Like, that was, that was definitely the driver there. Um, but I tried to be as honest of a broker along the way. And that's one of the reasons why, you know, even if my conclusion was, "Well, I think Christianity has been sort of molested by, you know, bad philosophy or something like that," um, or has been taken in a certain philosophical direction that's at odds with, you know, the biblical God or something like that. I was willing to say, like, "I, I'm, I'm going to take that stance." And so in that journey, it was that journey and my wrestling with the primary sources that convinced me that there is a very real and a very substantive divide between the Latin West and the Christian East. That was born all out of the primary sources. It was only after that that I started reading contemporary Orthodox writers like Vladimir Lossky or Georges Florovsky, and I, when I read them, I was like, "Okay, yeah, they are talking about East-West divides. Okay, that's true. I, okay, yeah, I completely resonate with that." But as tends to happen within both, you know, ecumenical circles, which are interested in, you know, reunion and trying to maybe whitewash certain differences and things like that, or happens in academic circles, where, you know, everything is hyper-granular and you create difference where there isn't difference, or what happens in, you know, other types of, you know, academic circles, where, you know, maybe there is an interest in, and sort of trying to dissolve those differences for other reasons, maybe ecumenical reasons or whatever it might be, I started encountering this tendency to say, "Well, the East-West divide, that's unfashionable. Like, that's dated scholarship." And for me, I could just never buy into any of that, because I was, "Dated scholarship? For me, it wasn't based on anybody's scholarship. It was based on my own scholarship. It was based on me just reading [laughter] the primary sources that convinced me." And so, nothing in anything that I ever read, um, you know, really ever persuaded me that the divide wasn't real, that that trend right now to try to in some ways erode that divide or something like that. None of it was ever persuasive to me, because it would, you know, it, it ran up against basically what had been my own couple of decades of just primary source work that had convinced me of that long before I ever knew that there was any kind of a debate about it. So, um, all that's context for saying, you know, when I talk about this East-West series, the reason I wanted to do that is because obviously there's a growing interest in Orthodoxy here in the United States. And I think a lot of times people are mystified by it. You know, there are people who are interested in becoming Orthodox who are like, trying to figure out what it is. There are people who feel like they're at a fork in the road between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, and they don't really know what the difference is. There are people who are seeing people convert, and maybe they're not interested in Orthodoxy, but they're like, "What the heck is going on?" And what is, like, "What is it, right? What is it that you guys think?" And, um, and so there's a host of reasons why I think there's just a very real need for just understanding the differences between the Christian East and the Christian West. And that was one of the reasons why, I mean, I have my own podcast, the Nathan Jacobs Podcast, where I talk a lot about, you know, East-West differences. I talk about a lot of things. It's, it's not a theology podcast or something like that. I, I talk about a spectrum of philosophy and religion stuff, but obviously it comes up in there because I'm a philosopher and historical theologian who's Eastern Orthodox. Um, but, uh, I really wanted to dig in and do this, you know, do this thing where I offer to people some sort of clear and focused attempt to meticulously walk through those differences in very real and substantive ways. And so that's where I, I opened it up to crowdfunding the project. It's in development. Um, people can go to theeastwestseries.com, theeastwestseries.com, and they can watch the trailer there, um, and and support it if they're interested. That's also how you can pre-order the series at, right now, what is the cheapest it'll ever be offered. Um, but that was the thing that convinced me of it and convinced me of the need for something like that, a resource like that, you know, in the present moment.

Fascinating. Thank you so much for sharing that whole story and the development of it. There's so many things I'd love to follow up on, but I think the the most practical follow-up is, it sounds like you established that there is a divide, um, between the East and the West, but that leaves, uh, other questions of why and when. May maybe we can talk about that a little bit, because I could imagine someone encountering this and saying, "So, like, is it just from the very, from the outset, you just have parallel tracks?" And, >> "Were they not talking?"

To each other? Did they have different sets of influences?

I mean, on the one hand, I think it's a claim that makes sense to people like, "Oh yeah, there's the Orthodox Church, there's the Catholic Church. Of course, they're different." But on the other hand, I think someone says, "Wait a second, they were, they were in a united church for a thousand years. Like, what happened that they developed, you know, fundamentally different ways of seeing things?" So, could we wade into that a little bit?

Yeah, I think so. So, there are a number of different factors here that I see. Um, and I suspect, you know, you've had on the show before, David Bradshaw, and David and I know one another. Um, where, you know, I was at UK for a brief bit within the philosophy department where he is as well. Uh, so David is a friend, um, and he became a friend after actually our scholarship. I was a big fan of his scholarship. He reached out to me because of my scholarship. Had no idea that I was on this journey toward Orthodoxy. Um, and that was what unfolded, um, from a sort of professional interest in each other's work to becoming friends. Um, and, uh, and David and I have had conversations before about certain elements that we see in the East-West divide that are somewhat speculative but are obviously there. And I'm curious whether or not anybody has dug into this, and if not, hopefully somebody will.

But I'll just talk about, just start with a certain thing that I've noticed, uh, in terms of East-West differences, which is that the East and the West within, and obviously here we're talking about the East and West in the Roman Empire, um, but the East and the West, uh, the sort of Latin, Greek, and other languages, right? It's not just Greek, but, um, what's interesting is that this difference isn't just in Christianity. You'll notice it even in Judaism, right? So, a lot of people, if you've ever compared, sort of the more, you know, let's say, the types of things that Josephus will write about in terms of the preservation of Jewish theology in his day, and you compare it with someone like Philo of Alexandria, you notice a very clear theological difference. Philo is very clearly, again, Alexandrian school, right? He's very much into allegorical readings, doesn't take things highly literally, um, that, uh, in terms of the way in which he approaches, um, God.

You even have the essence-energies divide that I'd mentioned, that is an East-West divide there. You find it in Philo, um, you know, as contrasted with what you would find in the East and the West there. So, in Judaism, you see some of the differences that are already there. Like, one of the differences is, you know, as I touched on, that in the West, there's a tendency to see things in very sort of physical and literal ways. Um, and in the East, there's a tendency to allegorize or spiritualize certain things, to approach things in more of an ontological way. Um, and so, just for example, if you contrast reading Josephus's dissertation on Hades and you contrast it with what Philo says about Hades, you'll find a notable difference, right? Josephus talks in very tangible ways about, like, well, it's this subterranean region underneath the earth, and people are separated over here, the righteous and the wicked, and these angels keep the wicked in check, and these keep the, you know, comfort the righteous. And he goes into this entire sort of very literal picture. Whereas you read Philo, and he's like, "There's no subterranean region beneath your feet. Are you kidding me? The real Hades is the soul that is bound by the passions." And he starts to talk about the spiritual condition that is the condition of being spiritually dead. That's the real Hades. And he takes it in an allegorical way. Um, so that's just a simple example.

And so, like, some of these divides, these tendencies that we find, judicial tendencies in the Latin West versus ontological tendencies in the Christian East, uh, literalist tendencies within the Latin West versus allegorical or spiritualizing tendencies in the Christian East, they're not just there in Christianity, they're there in Judaism even before that. And it's also interesting because you'll even notice some of these tendencies within the Middle and Neoplatonisms, East and West, where there's a greater sympathy, uh, you know, there's a greater sympathy to, like, partaking of participation in God, like the type thing in the East versus in the West. So, it's, I find it notable that there's something about that soil. And I suspect, I suspect this is where it's somewhat speculative, in terms of some of that is that because the Latin West tended to be the center of law, it tended to be the center of political and governmental sort of initiative, that there was a tendency to approach things in that sort of very grounded, legal framework. Whereas, obviously, Alexandria was the center of philosophy, this exploration of being and ontology and, and that sort of thing. And so, I suspect that in some ways that is part of the soil that things are growing out of that influence the ways in which people generally in these areas are thinking.

Obviously, you also have a linguistic divide, right? So, in terms of language, the Greek language is wonderfully suited toward philosophical nuance, right? And, and, um, you know, I've heard it joked that you can't do philosophy without Greek, right? It's the necessary, right? It's the necessary language, uh, for for doing philosophy. Um, and so, on the one hand, I think even, even something as simple as that of which language they're they're working with and the sort of ways in which it trains the mind to think in certain philosophical ways is probably there. But even with that, that then creates a certain linguistic divide in terms of communication that is very real and very important.

And this is where we get to some of the more tangible aspects that I think grow up into East-West differences. Um, and so let's take, for example, the figure that I said I started my journey by digging into, Augustine of Hippo. So, Augustine very plainly in his, uh, *De Trinitate*, his treatise on the Trinity, he admits in that treatise, he actually says, "Look, I am sure I'm convinced you'll find any answer to any question you've got about the Trinity in the Greek writers, but [clears throat] most of us over here don't read Greek well enough to know what the heck they're saying. So I'm going to have to wing this and rely on God." He actually says that at the start of the treatise, uh, at the start of the treatise. And so that's not, you know, that's not slander, that's Augustine's own admission in text, right? That he is sort of reinventing the wheel and doesn't really know what those guys are saying.

And this really shows when you get to the doctrine of the persons, right? So he acknowledges that the word those guys are using is *hypostasis*, and he claims in his treatise, he's like, "But nobody really knows what this word means." And so he's doing this exploratory, "Let's try to figure out what a person is." And then this develops into his notion of a person or a *persona* being, you know, sort of a relational identity or something like this. But the thing is, if you actually read the Eastern Fathers, they know precisely what they mean by *hypostasis*. I mean, we have, first of all, we have the letter where they identify the linguistic confusion that's happening, uh, and why they separate them. We have, like, Epistle 38, where they dig into specifically what this term means, and they go into through the rationale, breaking down what the word is, and, um, and why they sort of introduce this, which becomes actually, and I think very importantly, becomes a highly innovative and notable shift in philosophy.

Uh, and I'll just dig down here for just a little bit because I think it's an important point in terms of answering your question. So, in Epistle 38, written by, well, it's in Basil of Caesarea's corpus. Reinhold Hübner thinks it's written by Gregory of Nyssa, but it doesn't matter to me, I think they agree either way. But that's generally acknowledged to be the first sort of real defining of the term as it would be used in Constantinople. The term was used before that, and the term in origin was specifically used to combat the Sabellians, which is why it was favored as saying that they are real substantive somethings. They are not, you know, they are not just mere masks. Um, but in Epistle 38, it introduces a highly nuanced philosophical point, which is to say that a nature, when we're talking about like human nature, right? Um, or the nature of sphericality, or the nature of square, um, has no *stasis*. And what they mean by that in this, in this letter, um, is it clearly means it's a, it's a claim of what's called sometimes moderate realism. So, somebody like Plato and Aristotle differ on the question of realism. They both agree, you know, that the sort of structures, the properties, the natures, these general nouns that we use when we talk about like genera and species, animal, human, bipedal, that those are real. Those structures are real. So they're both realists. Those are part of the nature of the world. But they disagree about what we're referring to. For Plato, he thinks the forms are a second world, at least according to the traditional reading. You know, the world of the forms. So, they're not only real, but they exist as objects. And Aristotle is like, "No, they don't exist. They subsist, right? They are in an object. Human nature is in you, right? And it's in me." Um, and, and that's of course called moderate realism. And it's identified as moderate realism as contrasted with Plato because Plato's is extreme realism because he thinks they're real and they exist as objects.

Now, the reason that's important, because Epistle 38 commits to a form of moderate realism. It says, "Look, a nature has no *stasis*," meaning you never find circularity per se floating about in the air. If there were a circle here, no matter how perfect it was, it wouldn't be the definition or the form of circle because it would have a bunch of things like actual properties. It would have a location, a certain size, a color. It would be a particular circle. And so, Epistle 38 is saying it has, you know, nature has no *stasis*, which is why it needs a *hypostasis*, right? Something underneath it that has it, that gives it concrete instantiation, reality, existence. And so it introduces the concept of the subject, the enduring subject is something that is underneath and gives stability and reality to a nature. Um, and so that's where the doctrine of the *hypostasis* begins to develop.

Now, the reason I said that that's important, um, is because the concept of the individual or the particular subject is something that's absent largely from the philosophical discussion before that. When you look at the pagan philosophers, they're so obsessed with, in their realism, they're so obsessed with with general nouns, with generics, with what the medievals would call universals, with the forms, right? You know, that they really are somewhat at a loss as far as what makes an individual an individual. So, Aristotle, it's defined kind of negatively. It's where you run out of predicates. I guess you get down to the individual, right? Um, with somebody like, you know, I think it's Porphyry who toys with a cluster theory, maybe it's the idiosyncratic bundle of properties that, you know, sort of gets you the phenomenon of the individual. The Stoics too, with the idea of an idiosyncratic property, is Plato's stub nose that makes him Plato, right? Something like that. But they don't really know. But because of the doctrine of the Trinity, the Eastern Fathers actually have to dig into this question of the subject because we're talking about three subjects, and you start to get the development of a new philosophical doctrine that's not there in the pagans. And in fact, Maximus the Confessor identifies this as uniquely Christian. It's not in the pagans.

The reason that's important is because what it means is Augustine, for all of his philosophical interest and training in Platonism, doesn't know anything about this doctrine because it is not to be found in the Platonists or in Aristotle or any of the other pagans. And so, in his admission that he doesn't know what they're talking about and that he's reinventing the wheel, he is doing something different. And that's where something like that becomes really pivotal to a major divide. And it becomes pivotal because Augustine is more than just a guy. He's the guy in the Latin West. So, what happens is, obviously, he casts a massive shadow in his own day. He's a bishop. He's a traveling preacher. He's involved in all these controversies. He's prolific. He's a convincing rhetorician, right? Like all of these reasons why he would cast a huge shadow in the Latin West. But then what happens is this becomes really solidified in the Scholastic period because what you have is you have Lombard's *Sentences* commentary, which is of course this collection of sentences from the Fathers on different topics, but the majority of the *Sentences* commentary is Augustine. And what happens is, of course, you have Alexander of Hales's gloss on the *Sentences*, where he takes that and he creates these headers, and doctors in the West to become doctors of theology have to do a *Sentences* commentary, a commentary where they're essentially sort of working through these sentences. And what that means is that how they approach every theological topic is with these Augustinian lenses.

And so, all of a sudden, what happens if is if you have a massive figure like Augustine, who admittedly doesn't know the language of the East, who is admittedly sort of reinventing the wheel and going in his own direction, not intentionally because I'm opposing them, but because I just don't know what they're talking about and they're doing something that's innovative relative to the pagan sources he's reading, inevitably, you now have difference. And it's initially an unintended difference. Obviously, you have the ecumenical councils where they're trying to sort of remain in unison. They're opposing heresies together, but this is sort of the groundwork that sort of grows up into increasing difference because, obviously, everybody after Augustine is an Augustinian, um, in in the Latin West, right? And so that is that is another element that's in there. Um, and so I would say that those are at least a couple of the elements.

And then obviously, you've always had this sort of tendency on the ecclesial level, which people are aware of, uh, for, you know, a certain movement toward Roman supremacy in terms of ecclesial authority, which is itself a theological issue, um, that becomes, obviously, breaks, breaks out into the open, uh, very heavily in in the Great Schism, and is never repaired. Uh, so you have that element as well. But I would say that those sorts of, those are some of the root things, but then they begin to grow into other things. So, um, I can dig down wherever you'd like, but I would say like a lot of, I would say one more thing about with Augustine. I see so many of the seeds for the sort of grander difference. You know, I think there's some of these initial dispositional differences, what I would say early on, but they're not so formalized, right? Like Ambrose of Milan is not as different as later figures, right? There's greater harmony, even if there's a certain Western dispositional difference between them. Um, but what happens is with Augustine, you have not only the sorts of differences that I've named, but you have very specific formative controversies like the Pelagian controversy that end up setting up unique red lines within the West and unique understandings of specific doctrines that then become treated as if they are dogma, right? Like as if they, I mean, as I said, red lines within the Latin West, but it's, it's itself a framework that is foreign to the East. And so the more those become the drivers within the discussion, uh, you start to have, you start to have those differences expand.

So I would just say that in terms of the types of root differences that grow up into something, I trace, I trace most of them to Augustine, truthfully. It's his doctrine of simplicity that grows out of the influence of certain books of the Platonists. It's how the doctrine of simplicity sands the essence-energies distinction turns into, um, you know, unfolds into the doctrine of divine providence. It's how the Pelagian controversy solidifies the understanding of anthropology and how it becomes formative on the doctrine of salvation. And then because, as I said, with the *Sentences* commentary and and all of that, that then becomes the lens through which all the Westerners are wrestling with questions. Um, and so I think that's, those are the seeds that all then start to grow up into extreme differences until it actually fractures apart and it becomes irreconcilable.

That was really helpful. So, I think moving slightly from the descriptive to maybe a bit more of a value judgment here is the question of how we make sense of those differences. Because there's a couple of ways that we can kind of reconstruct this, if you will. [clears throat] So, for instance, you could have like a Pope John Paul II, *Ut Unum Sint* kind of thing, like, "Okay, there's two lungs to the Church, and the Church needs to breathe with them both." And I take that to be something of a value judgment, in that both of these lungs offer something valuable to the overall health of the Church, right? So, they, it's maybe two ways of looking at it that are incomplete on their own, like half a lung, and brought together they're better. I think there's other ways of looking at it as one of these is the baseline from which the other is deviating. So, you could say, and I think people on either side end up doing this, like you talked about stability, right? So, there's been stability in the East, and in a sense, there was stability in the West by Augustine casting this long shadow. The *Sentences* kind of repeat Augustine, and so you've got this like Augustinian baseline, if you will.

There's another way of looking at this. You talked a little bit about like what resonates philosophically with someone. So, what what matches one's moral intuitions or philosophical intuitions or what resonates with scripture? You talked about the Old Testament. I'm just curious for you, could you help us kind of think about, if if someone kind of takes this on board, they say, "Okay, it does seem like there's two different ways of doing this. We've got pretty different theologies. Um, but now what?" Right? Like, are these just, hey, two two sides of the same coin? You know, you're looking at it from that side of the room. I'm looking at it from this side of the room. Two ways of interpreting and receiving Plato, like, you know, potato, potato. Or we've got the baseline and a deviation. How do you put this together?

Yeah. So, I think you're exactly right to say that that is a value judgment, right? And I've heard this sort of thing, right? You know, obviously Anglicans tend to say this, you know, uh, certain Catholics will say it, right? That you have these two lungs, and it's important that we breathe with both lungs. But you're correct when saying that's a value judgment, and it's a value judgment or it's actually a philosophical judgment because when you have these two different perspectives, right? Just to call them two perspectives on the same thing is actually an assessment that says they don't contradict one another and they are compatible with each other. And that's the entire question, right? Like that's a kind of a big question. [laughter] Do they contradict each other? Are they compatible with each other?

Now, I will say, um, you know, well, and actually before I say, you know, my stance on this, um, I'll also say, uh, that then, as you'd said, there's there's these other ways of approaching it, which is to say, you know, "Well, these are just sort of different." I think this is more the place where a lot of, um, Protestants tend to approach theology. So, my exposure with, um, Protestant theology circles, which was significant. I, I came away with several sort of common impressions that Protestants carried, which was that on the one hand, there was a presumption that Christianity is philosophically neutral, right? And so the idea is we have to say that, you know, that that there's a Trinity, we have to say that the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God, became incarnate, um, we have to say certain things doctrinally or theologically, but it's almost like the, the sort of historical theological facts are up here, and then when we're talking about philosophy, that's sort of this layer down here. And, um, we could trade out that for any number of things as long as it supports the house, it's fine, right? And I think for that reason, within a Protestant way of thinking, there is usually a tendency to have, um, you know, essentially almost like a buffet type, you know, approach to it, where it's like, "Well, I like the Cappadocians here, I like this in Augustine over there," and you can sort of pick and choose and borrow because you're not beholden to any one of these. Because with that, not only is there no philosophical foundation, ecclesiologically, you believe that there's an invisible church, and so, you know, and so any sort of fracture in the visible church doesn't amount to a fracture in the invisible church or something like that. And as long as I believe in Christ, you know, I am in some ways part of the invisible church. And so for that reason, I can borrow from all the different traditions and I can peacemeal my sort of favorite brand of of theology. Um, that too, of course, has commitments to it, right? It has certain commitments that says Christianity is philosophically neutral. It has commitments that say the visible church isn't, you know, the church, the church is an invisible thing. Uh, so obviously you have those sorts of things.

And then obviously, you also have the position that says, like, "No, um, there is a visible church, and, um, and some of these commitments between East and West actually do contradict and are incompatible, and there is a faith that's been handed down, and it needs to be preserved, and when there is innovation, that's divergence, right, from." And there's this interest in sort of finding the through line that goes all the way back to the apostles. Uh, so those are all very different theological perspectives. And and so I find it somewhat presumptuous when people just will float as if it's self-evident, you know, the two lungs thing, because I'm like, that's a massive, that's a massive [laughter] philosophical and theological assumption that you have there.

Um, I will give you my honest assessment, which is just speaking, like, even if I were an atheist, like, I just suddenly was like, "I don't believe any of this stuff. I think it's all just historical nonsense." Um, my philosophical assessment would be that there are fundamentally irreconcilable differences between the East and the West. These are not just two perspectives on the same thing. It's not just like, "Ah, well, they they see some, they emphasize something over here, but this other thing over here is also useful." Um, certain commitments, uh, like what I talked about, I talked about in, um, the doctrine of God, that the doctrine of God, I see fundamentally, I, you know, fundamentally incompatible philosophical commitments. Um, and so, you know, um, and I, I could give some examples of these if, if you'd like. Um, but I would say in terms of the way in which the doctrine of simplicity plays out, and the way that then develops into its own idiosyncratic doctrine of the persons and the form of Trinitarianism that plays out there, uh, that is actually incompatible with the developments of Nicaea and Constantinople that you find in the Eastern Fathers. Um, their approach on a fundamental metaphysical level means that those two cannot be reconciled. One is correct and one is wrong, or both are wrong if you think Christianity is all wrong. But, you know, like, um, but, uh, assuming that somebody is right in that, in that discussion, they're not both right. They cannot both be correct because they are, it is a binary choice about certain things they're asking about, about the locus of existence, about, you know, whether or not a nature can exist on its own, and so on. Um, and so that's not a perspectival difference.

Um, when you look at certain things like the essence-energies divide, uh, which again, you've talked to David Bradshaw about this, this isn't just like, "Oh, that's an interesting, that's an interesting concept, hypothetically useful." In the Eastern Fathers, that is actually integral to the Gospel itself. That's how they understand the Gospel. You cannot understand the Eastern Fathers, and I would say you can't understand the Seven Ecumenical Councils, candidly, without it because it's so integral to their concept of Christology, and it's so integral, uh, to their concept of salvation. Um, and so, um, and yet the concept of created grace within the Latin West, as it develops, is fundamentally incompatible with that. Um, that also plays, [clears throat] out in things like the Theophanies. How the East and the West understand theophanies. The fact that in the Christian East, the Theophanies are the Son of God showing up. In the East, following after Augustine, they're always creatures. That's what they are. Uh, and that is again an outgrowth of a more fundamental divide.

And I would say, even with something like the Filioque, um, for folks who don't know, right? The Filioque, that, you know, this is one of the central theological, one of the theological issues in the Great Schism, that in the Latin West, the Nicene Creed has now the addition in the West of "and the Son" in reference to the procession of the Spirit, right? The Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father, is the way it's said in the East. In the West, "and the Son," which is the addition, Filioque, right? The *que*. And, and, um, and the thing is, what will happen sometimes in what I would consider superficial apologetic debates is there's a tendency to say, "Well, if I'm a Westerner, right, of some kind, Protestant or Catholic, and I want to defend the Filioque, I start to dig through and I'm like, 'Can I find a passage in Athanasius or Basil of Caesarea where it says like, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father through the Son?'" And I'm like, "Aha! See?" And the reason I call that superficial is because there's a lack of recognition about the fact that when you're talking about the doctrine of the Trinity itself, and you're talking about the understanding of the persons, and that sort of incompatibility that I mentioned, about how a person is understood, um, the way the West understands the Trinity necessitates the Filioque, and that's why those passages have to be read the way a Western apologist would forward them. It is not required by the Christian East, and the way they read them. So, in some ways, you're sort of bantering about a secondary, like an outgrowth of a doctrine. If you dig down further, you'll find a fundamental divide that is affecting how the two are reading it because there's a fundamental incompatibility there underneath it. And that, I think, is consistent across the board.

Um, for a lot of folks, I think in the West who have encountered systematic theology, for example, they're accustomed to having sort of insulated theological topics, right? "I'm going to look at this doctrine over here, and this doctrine over here, and maybe I swap it out." And maybe I'm a five-point Calvinist, maybe I'm a four-point Calvinist, maybe I'm a three-point Calvinist, right? And you're sort of like trading in and out, different borrowing and sort of assembling, almost more like Lego pieces. What was once said to me by somebody, um, is they, you know, it, that within in that way of approaching it, theology, theological doctrines are more like Lego pieces than puzzle pieces. Um, whereas in the Christian East, and in the ecumenical councils, they're puzzle pieces. All of these things are interconnected. Um, and, um, and that's one of the reasons why there's a sense in which the Seven Ecumenical Councils, from an Eastern perspective, are all just sort of one big conversation. It's all talking about the same thing over and over again.

Now, the reason I say that is because I think sometimes when people don't have a point of orientation for the East and the West, and they just sort of come to it from the outside, and there's all this stuff swirling around, they're like, "What is the difference? I don't understand." Again, this is part of the reason I, I wanted to do this series. There's a tendency to jump around to punctuated issues. And again, that's where it feels kind of hodgepodge and disorienting. And I'm not sure I really get what the differences are. Whereas I think the problem is, the real problem is that those differences are way down at the foundations. Like, a lot of the differences that are up here that you might encounter are outgrowths of things that are far more foundational. Um, and so, anyway, I say all that to say that my assessment as a philosopher and as a historical theologian is to say that I think the East-West differences, many of them on anthropology, on divine simplicity, on divine providence, on soteriology, are actually on a foundational level incompatible. That they actually are mutually exclusive. Um, and they can, they are not just two perspectives on the same thing or different points of emphasis or something like that.

And, um, and then in terms of my own assessment, I've obviously given it in my own story that I came to the conclusion that when I look at the Latin West, I do not see consistency. There's a certain level of consistency, as you note, that once sort of the Augustinianism takes hold, there are certain things that are locking into place that become red lines, and that becomes consistent, and now it's sort of an in-house Augustinian discussion. But there really is a fracturing in terms of all these different systems in the medieval, well, long before Protestant. I mean, Protestants always get pegged for it, right? Like we're saying, like, uh, Protestants are the ones who splinter into thousands of denominations, right? But it's like the fracturing was there well before the Protestant Reformation. And the medieval scholastics, Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus, absolutely do not agree. Like, are you [laughter] these are fundamentally different ways of of processing, you know, the sort of Augustinian paradigm. And so when I look at the Latin West, I see a consistent Augustinian conversation, but I don't see a consistent theology. I don't see a consistent through line that's saying, "This is the Christian religion." Whereas, and, and I would also say that what I see in Augustine is a shift, right? Like that theology after Augustine is different than before Augustine. And so when I look at it, just from a historical point of view, I would say that if there is a faith that is there from the start and is preserved, it's found in the East. That's my honest assessment. Um, because that's the only one that I see being consistent from the start. Um, so, but like I said, that's my assessment. Obviously, I've lived that out in my life by choosing to become Eastern Orthodox. Obviously, that was the natural ramification of it. Um, but that, that would be my assessment. Um, you know, that would be my assessment, uh, just as a historical theologian and as a philosopher.

So, I'd say in terms of the several perspectives we talked about, obviously I'm I'm not a Protestant in the sense that I don't see the church as just an invisible thing. And I don't, um, and I'm I'm not in favor of *sola scriptura*, and I'm not in favor of just sort of picking and choosing and assembling a theology all your own. Um, even though when I was a wildeyed heretic, I totally did that all I wanted, right? Um, but I've since, you know, rejected that way of approaching, uh, Christianity. And I also am not sympathetic to the "two lungs" thing. These are just different emphases or perspectives. I'm convinced that at the foundations, there are fundamentally incompatible things that you have to decide between. Um, and, and, uh, and obviously I've given my assessment of of where I've where I've come down on that.

Indeed. Well, you've left our our viewers and our listeners with with tons to think about, plenty to read, and decisions to make, as you say. I mean, sure, if you end up viewing this as fundamentally incompatible, well, you probably want to pick a side, uh, or decide that that neither is right, which is to pick a side as well.

Which is a, well, I'll just say along those lines, when I would teach historical theology and somebody would come to me afterwards and they'd be like, "I'm think I'm kind of in crisis because I grew up Baptist and I'm not sure I'm Baptist anymore, right?" I wouldn't tell them to become Orthodox. I would just do a decision tree with them. I'm like, "Okay, well, here's the initial fork in the road between the East and the West. Who do you side with?" If you say the East, now you're done, right? Like, if you say the West, now we have to go through the other decisions. You know, Protestant or Catholic? Do you believe there's an invisible church, visible church? What's your understanding of salvation? And I would just sort of walk them through the decision trees. And, and I do think that is the right way to approach it because, um, yeah, as you said, there are decisions to be made and sides to be chosen, even if the side you pick is, "It's all rubbish and all you Christians are full of, you know, full of nonsense."

Well, I think that might be a helpful place to land the plane, actually, is to talk just briefly about that decision tree because I think a lot of people who who listen to this or or watch it are going to resonate with the the very student that you mentioned of like, "Ooh, I I don't know if I still am what I grew up with, but I don't know what to do now." That's daunting and scary and that, you know, we're talking 2,000 years of history and lots of primary sources and like, what do I do? Um, so what is that first, that that first division that you would offer people of like, "Hey, if you want to look into this and and you we've talked a lot about the importance of reading the primary sources," um, but but where do they start? What, what's that first decision tree area for you, and who do they read?

Yeah. So, I would say here's what I would typically say. So, methodologically, just as a, as a scholar, my approach is typically to just read as as much of the primary sources as I can, and then approach the secondary sources as exactly that, secondary, where it's like, I want to become familiar with the primary source enough that I'm dialoguing with the secondary source rather than starting with the secondary source. I'm putting on the lenses, and now I bring that into the source that I'm reading. Um, and so methodologically, I think that's really important to do that. Um, and so if somebody wanted to jump into, I mean, I, if if we're talking about jumping into say, the Eastern Fathers, because I'm guessing that's the part where a lot of people are least familiar. Uh, I'm guessing most people who read theology, which is obviously the people we're talking about, have probably read Western theology of of one kind or another. Um, and so in terms of like some good primary sources to get your hands on that are accessible. I mean, it would be great to read Athanasius's *On the Incarnation*. Um, Gregory of Nyssa's, uh, *Great Catechism* is another good one to read. It's a catechism, after all. Um, and, uh, and I would also, the one that I very much recommend, which I've always said, if I was stuck on a desert island and I could only take like one patristic text with me, um, I would get John of Damascus's *On the Orthodox Faith*.

Now, um, the reason I would do that, John of Damascus is an 8th-century Church Father, uh, brilliant 8th-century Church Father, and he's one of the primary ones involved in the Iconoclast, uh, controversy, one of them. And he wrote three works that are particularly useful. One of those is, you know, *The Fountain of Knowledge*, which is basically a patristic encyclopedia of terms. So, this is a Church Father writing an encyclopedia of Church Father terms where he's saying, "When the Fathers use this word, this is what they mean, and when they use this word, this is what they mean." And that's all that *The Fountain of Knowledge* is. It's just his philosophical chapters where he's training you in philosophy. Um, then he also has *On Heresies*. Now, this is, uh, I believe it's an expansion of Epiphanius of Salamis's catalog, but he sort of takes that and he expands it, and it's quite literally just like a catalog of heresies. Um, but then what you have is *On the Orthodox Faith*. Now, all three of those are of value, but, um, and I think there's, um, there's some, uh, works that, like, I think Catholic University of America Press publishes all three together. Um, and so you could get all three together. I would just say, however, the St. Vladimir's translation is the more reliable translation. Um, and so, but *On the Orthodox Faith*, and that one, I think it is just *On the Orthodox Faith*. I don't think it comes with the other two works. Um, but *On the Orthodox Faith* is just this beautiful work because it is the closest thing you could find to a systematic theology by a Church Father. You know, that's saying, "Here is my exact exposition of the Orthodox Faith." And what's beautiful about John of Damascus is that he says, um, you know, he says, "Look, I'm going to strive to add nothing of my own, like, to this. I'm just trying to offer to you a consensus of the Fathers on different topics." And it's intriguing because of course John of Damascus will offer that consensus. He'll acknowledge where there's differences and he'll sort of weigh in. So, for example, he, it'll be like on small things like, you know, "Well, is the tree in Eden a real tree?" And he's like, "Well, some Fathers think it is a real tree, and some Fathers think it's an allegory for, you know, for the, you know, for the passions and things like that." And he's like, "And I don't see why both can't be true. It could be both, right? Like that it's a real tree that's also, you know, sort of allegorically representative of that." And, and he just sort of will acknowledge where there's difference, you know, where there's a spectrum of opinion, uh, of the Eastern Fathers on something. Um, but it's, it's such a useful work. So I would say in terms of primary sources, if you're going to pick one, that would be one one to pick up. Um, other works that people obviously are very fond of, as I said, *On the Incarnation* is a great sort of work that people can read. It's great to read around Christmas because it's on the Incarnation, right? Uh, and then also, like I said, Gregory of Nyssa is wonderful in any number of works, you know, *The Life of Moses* or whatever, but, you know, um, his his *Great Catechism*. And then, um, and there are others. I, I'll restrain myself from giving too exhaustive a book list, but those are a few of the places you could start.

Um, I'll plug my own work. So, I have a Substack, theologicals.com. And I think that's probably where you first encountered my stuff. And that, that was quite literally started as, um, it was a Lutheran pastor who had, who had come across some of my letters on, well, he had taken prology from me, and then he, I shared with him a letter that I wrote to somebody, an email, right? Um, that I had written to somebody in answer to a question, and he's like, "Man, that was great. Like, it was super clear and accessible. Do you have any more letters like that?" I was like, "I think so." And I went and counted, and he was like, "Oh, I've got 86 of those that I've written over the years." And he was like, "You should publish those." And me being a scholar, I'm like, "Where?" And his thought is, "On the internet." I was like, "Oh, you mean that when you say publish them, you mean that." And so he suggested I do a Substack. And so I did. And so on my Substack, that's where I've published past theological letters from people. Sometimes new questions roll in, like I got one not too long ago on slavery in the Old Testament. And so I, I wrote a a letter on that. And, uh, but I also publish other things, like, um, I published the, you know, the the transcript for the first lecture from the East-West series on there to give people a sample of it. Um, so anyway, it's over the years it's evolved. But the reason I'd point people there is that there are a number of things that I think would be helpful to Westerners, because that's exactly what it was. These are letters written to the perplexed about certain questions. So, um, a place where you could start there, um, I suspect some of the helpful places would be, um, there was a trio of letters that I did on anthropology, deification, and asceticism. Um, and so that would be a useful framework for just understanding anthropology in the Christian East and their understanding of salvation. That's a useful bit. Um, there's another piece I did on penal substitution, and that's actually wasn't written. It's just a transcript of a podcast that I did. Um, and there's three parts to that, but the first one, a lot of folks have written to me and said, like, "That was the most helpful thing I've ever written read on that topic," because again, it's just me going through the East and the West and saying, like, "Here's what the West thinks, where the doctrine comes from. Here's the Eastern view." Um, and so those are a couple of places you could go, and then you can just dig around for any number of other things that are on there. I talk about prayers of the saints, you know, when Himnology talks about Mary's mediatrix, what is that about? Like, you know, all sorts of different things, Eucharistic controversies, whatever it might be, whatever people end up writing to me about. So, yeah. So, there you go. Those, those are a couple of resources.

Wonderful. Well, Dr. Jacobs, thank you so much for this. This has been an absolute pleasure. I'll be sure to link to your Substack, the series that you're doing on the East and the West, your YouTube, and whatever else you'd like in the description. But thank you so much.

Thanks so much for having me. It's been great talking to you.