Eastern Christianity

But it hadn't gone down from the mind into the heart.

And When one is able to drop into the heart, in fact, in Orthodox Christianity, Eastern Christianity, one of the main practices is dropping the mind into the heart, that the thoughts you're having, can they be coming through the heart? Can the prayer you're making not be just words, but the entrance into the heart cave itself? So, when you're in the heart, then these notions of purpose and meaning, I think, are radically transformed.

It's not something to understand.

The Bible talks about the peace that passes understanding.

The older style of monasticism, to live as a hermit, is called aramidic.

A third form, primarily in Eastern Christianity, is the skite.

So tell me, does Kenobi sound like cannabitic? Very much so.

Does the Jedi Order sound like a cannabitic order? Very much so.

But I think we are running out of time because there's this huge problem of mass Muslim migration into Western countries.

So as demographics and politics change in the West, as the Muslim Brotherhood becomes more and more influential, I mean, it's going to be a lot more difficult for the West to care about Eastern Christians because I think if the Muslim Brotherhood isn't stopped in the West, Western Christians will be persecuted too.

Well, God bless you, Uzai, for the work that you're doing, trying to bring these things to the attention of people everywhere.

Where should people go to keep up with the work you're doing?

You know, as we said, right, the people that we call Greeks today would have called themselves Rom.

You know, Roman Christian, you know, Eastern Christians.

So there was no concept of a nation state, a Greek nation state, or a Lebanese nation state, a Syrian nation state at this time, right? Or any of these, Bulgaria.

So the Greek people were under the Ottoman rule.

Mehmed entered the city that afternoon.

He rode to the Hagia Sophia, the great cathedral that had been the spiritual centre of Eastern Christianity for nearly a thousand years and stood inside it quietly.

What he thought in that moment is not recorded with any certainty, but later Ottoman accounts preserved a fragment of Persian verse attributed to him, about spiders spinning webs in the palaces of kings and owls calling from the towers of the proud, whether he actually said it or whether it was attached to him later as a piece of fitting poetry.

It captured something real about the mood of the moment, the strangeness of standing in an achievement that had been a dream for so long.

I thought there were some errors in the Bible.

I thought either there's no such place as hell or it's a very different kind of place than most Christians think it is.

I vacillated between universalism and annihilationism.

So the view first that everyone will ultimately be reconciled to God and second the view that everyone will either be reconciled to God or just annihilated,

And also there aren't any bishops around today who are writing inspired scripture, right? So the powers of the apostles have not persisted.

That's right.

But also I think the powers of the apostles It's not that surprising that the powers of the apostles didn't persist, just because it makes sense that if you're trying to jumpstart the spread of Christianity, then you're going to need to bring some pretty compelling evidence to persuade people to join your movement, given that the stakes are very high and there's a lot to lose at this point in history for people who aren't Christians who want to convert.

And so...

Since I began with Hades in Josephus and Philo of Alexandria, let's go ahead and use that here.

Within the Eastern Church Fathers and in Eastern Christian literature generally, there is a tendency to use varied images of Hades.

Sometimes it is described as if it were a subterranean region of the kind described by Josephus and which appears in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus.

But sometimes Hades is a sentient monster, one that swallows men and holds them captive within his belly.

And they believed that Scripture, intentionally being God-breathed, includes clues as to where you are supposed to do that.

So the very sort of tension described there that Gregory sees in the text, a gulf between them that no man can cross, and yet they're having a conversation with one another, and the rich man thinks it can be crossed, is an indication that that gulf is not literal.

And so that's reflective of how Eastern Judaism and then Eastern Christianity tended to approach texts and look at the allegorical meaning instead of the strictly literal interpretation of the text.

We see the same thing with regard to paradise.