Transcription
I did have something before I wrote a note down before, cuz it was about Gavin Ortlund stuff. I was going to ask you and Father Stephen real quick. Um, one of the things that I think Dr. Ortlund doesn't do, and I think you pointed out this, you alluded to this a little bit about icons, is that the a cultural practice historically, he's not assessing the history. Anyway, any historian I've ever, when I went to college for history, no historian I ever read interprets history or applies history the way he does. Cuz if we were to do that, all of history becomes essentially impossible to do. Like the study of history becomes impossible.
"There's no reasonable certainty for anything that happened ever at any time." Yeah, exactly. And I think one of the things that I always point out to is that it takes close to, historically speaking, it takes close to 3 to 400 years before a cultural practice is relevant enough to even be recorded, to even be bothered being recorded by people in observation. We, we see this with pagan practices with the Vikings. Um, Viking uh funeral burials, it took 800 years before the first recorded instance of that being found. But we know, we know that the cultural practice of Viking uh funeral burials um happened at least 800 years prior to the first written attestation of it. And so I think his, and the further back you go in time, the longer that that variance happens. So I think his entire argument actually starts falling apart because, um, just because, let's grant him, if we grant him even that we don't see this historically until 400, which I don't think is true. Even if we subtract.
"It's not true. It's not true. It's not true." [laughter] Yeah, it's not true. But even if we, even if we grant that, you subtract two to 300 years from that, then you know where the origin point of that practice is. And wow, 2 to 300 years uh before the year 400 is what time? Within the lifetime of the apostles. So for me, that that's kind of another like uh I guess notch against him in his entire argumentation. Yeah, I think that's why I like critiques on methodology are so devastating for Protestants cuz it's just like they don't apply that same standard to anywhere else. To be fair to him, he is a Baptist. So that is the same standard he applies to infant baptism, right? Until he goes to a new church, Father Stephen. As you know, uh that's amorphous.
[laughter] But there's no explicit, right? [snorts] No explicit mention of it. Yes. Which I like Perry Robinson's example. Uh where he says, "What's the first reference we have to a woman receiving the Eucharist?"
Yeah. [laughter] It's pretty devastating. The first, the first one I know of is actually Nestorius complaining about the empress receiving it behind the iconostasis. And he thinks it's bad. So see, we don't have a reference for like 400 years. And the first one we have is a negative example.
[laughter] Yeah, there you go. So clearly women should not receive the Eucharist. Um, like by that. But but overall, this is just a Protestant thing where the Bible is in brackets. Anything outside the Bible, they are hyper skeptical. Like almost secular. Yeah.
Because because conservative evangelicalism used to be called fundamentalism, right? Is just the flip side of liberalism and they're both modernism. Mhm. Right? They're both modernism. Just anything outside the Bible, oh good, my conscience is clear. I don't have to try to defend it. That's one thing off my plate. I can be just as hyper skeptical, right? About that as, you know, these other folks are about everything, right?
[laughter] Yeah, and Father, when you talked about that in the whole Council of God book, like I think you framed it so perfectly, but it didn't even like need to be framed. It was just like, let's set out the timeline. You have the fundamentalists and you have like the liberal progressives and it's like just two sides of the same coin. Yeah. Like happened at the same time, it happened in the same place. It's a purely American phenomenon. Yeah.
Entirely reactionary. I mean, I grew up in that sphere. It was entirely reactionary. So. Yeah. Yeah. And that's Yeah, and that's I've said several times at Lord of Spirits and it always triggers a bunch of people that young earth creationism is modernism. Yeah. And they're like, "What? What? No, all the fathers thought it was." I'm like, "Well, first of all, they had a different date than you do by about a thousand years. Yeah. Second, none of them were trying to use science to prove it."
[laughter] There was not a Ken Ham among the church fathers. Yeah, that's a "No, you stupid Greeks. Look,"
[laughter] That's a rabbit hole. I repeated Archimedes' experiments.
[laughter] Piseos of Eof $5. I am a young earth creationist only because I follow the Eastern Orthodox liturgical calendar year, which is 7534. Well, that's older than young earth creationists say the earth is.
[laughter] Yeah, what's uh they're saying like 6,460 something. Is this just a the discrepancy in the timeline between Oh, that's the next super chat. Uh Septuagint chronology or the Masoretic chronology? Neither.
Neither match up to that specific number. They weren't counting the genealogies cuz that's not how the genealogies work. Interesting. So how how did they get that number then? Uh they seem to have adapted the actual rabbinical Jewish number.
[laughter] Which also was not based on that. Where Where did Where did it come from like astrology or something? Nobody's exactly sure. Oh. Mystery.
Right. The The So the uh If you really want to get into this, so there was this Jewish traditional number. That number seems to have gotten coordinated by the church fathers with the Roman calendar. And what year they said it was based on the founding of the empire and then some other things. Um, and that's what gets that 7,500 number. Uh the other number, the number most Protestant young earth creationists use, comes from Matthew Henry's commentary, who's following Bishop Usher's dating scheme.
[laughter] But if you pick up, go to a library somewhere and find Matthew Henry's commentary, uh he has up at the top of each page. He was a Puritan. Uh he has up at the top of each page the exact date. So it's like the second day of creation is like April 3rd uh 4,000.
[laughter] Wow.
600 something BC. That really is [laughter] something, I guess. The exact date all the way through, right? Which is just a level of confidence that I don't have. So when I talk about young earth creationism, I don't mean people who think the earth is a certain age. Right? I I mean like Ken Ham, the people who are trying to use science to prove that some timeline they get from a literal reading of the Bible is accurate. And I don't know of any Orthodox Christians doing that. Modernist biblical exegesis.
Yeah. Yeah.