Transcript — Friedrich Nietzsche’s Guide to the Bodily Resurrection - Fr. Stephen De Young (Summit 2024)

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00:00 this very much changes how we would think of hell and of Christ saving us from it hell is not a place somewhere where a soul whatever that is goes gets prodded with pitchforks set on fire for an eternal succession of moments hell then would be the hell that we’ve made of our lives hell would be the hell that we’ve made of our experiences and our relationships the hell that we’ve crafted through our own corruption and our own evil not only is that the hell that could become Eternal if there’s nothing else but that’s the hell that Christ saves us from that’s the hell that Christ sets us free from that’s the hell that Christ purifies us from and transforms us out of the hell we’ve made for ourselves this is Jonathan Pedro welcome to the World in early 2024 we put together the very first symbolic World Summit live in Florida it was an amazing

01:31 event with so many great speakers Martin Shaw was there Richard Roland uh Jordan Peterson Deacon Nicholas cotar feser Stamper uh father silan Jano who else who else uh and of course I was there and I spoke and I brought my family and it was just a just a wonderful time and so after all this time we finally were able to put together all these videos in a video package uh professionally done very beautifully edited and easy access and so for those who missed it you can access it from the symbol world.com we’ll post a link in the description but in the meantime we are decided to put up one of the talks father Steven D Young’s talk to give you a little glimpse of what the event was like and and it was a was a wonderful talk about the afterlife and all of all of the big questions that we ask ourselves and so please enjoy ladies and gentlemen father Steven D I was expecting him to just to say and now a man who needs no introduction so that was nice as an alternative and uh it’s good to be speaking to all of you at Pau Fest 24 which is the official name of this Gathering if you’re not aware uh so the topic I chose to talk about today when I told well when I first decided before I even told Jonathan or anybody what

03:01 it was going to be is something that was sort of out at the edge of my thinking at that time that I was still kind of working at and fortunately it hasn’t moved to the center of my thinking but it’s enough in the field that I feel comfortable and confident Now sort of talking about it um if you ask the average person walking around not even at a church just person walking down the straight if you ask them about the afterlife or what happens when you die you will get some version of well good people go to heaven bad people go to hell uh maybe if they’re very kindly they’ll leave off that last part but usually get some version of that because everybody has somebody who they think is a bad person a cousin or something who they think really deserves to be in hell and they’ll they’ll differ on sort of how that judgment call is made right like what makes you a good person or a bad person there are all those variants so if you’re a little more acquainted with the Christian tradition you know that that’s not actually Christian eschatology that’s not the Christian view of what happens when we die um even though a lot of Christians will talk that way an awful lot we have at the end of the nyine Creed that we believe in the resurrection of the body body and the

04:31 life of the world to come or the life of the age to come and for a lot of us and by a lot of us I’m incl including even a lot of theologians uh what exactly that means how exactly the bodily Resurrection works with everything else we think about what happens when we die what the life of this world to come like how to think it how to how to try to Envision or even imagine it there’s sort of no guidance out there it’s something we affirm but I don’t think we have a really firm grasp of what it means and so to try to figure out what means if you’ve listened to or read any of my stuff you kind of know I try to go back to the the beginning of things right where did this start who was the first person to start thinking this how did they see it how did they Envision it what did it mean for them and so if we’re talking about the Resurrection in terms of this grand scheme of things I talk about where sometimes I go back into the Neolithic era it’s relatively new it’s relatively new at least in terms of people talking about it in this way

06:02 it is inherited by Christianity out of Judaism but even within Judaism if we’re talking about the 1 Century BC the 2 Century BC this wasn’t a universal sort of belief this is something that arose specifically within pharisaic Judaism this is something that set the fareses apart from all the other countless sects Judaism at the turn of the era and so as they were first thinking about this what was it that they meant what were they thinking that’s what we’re after and for the record just in advance as people hear this talk there’s someone out there who is going to say I heard you say something different in a Bible study in 2017 the answer to that question before you asket is I was wrong then I might still be wrong now but I was definitely wrong then I have changed mind but so in order to get back we have to sort of go back into the ground right go back into the beginning go back into the basis of this and if we’re going to go back into the ground on this or any other topic I feel like we need a guy a guide someone to guide us someone to take us there someone to point it out to us

07:34 Virgil is boring it’s not his fault it’s because Latin is boring you could boo but stop me when I tell a lie anyway so we need we need a Greek we need a German right what of the two to to guide us back and so I’ve chosen someone who at the very least is boring and that’s friedi nche so the shade of friedi nche is going to lead us back into the ground to help us understand the bodily Resurrection I could see that some of you are confused but this is going to work I promise so the the first thing we have address is we have that word bodily in front of Resurrection the resurrection of the body this is a distinctive right this is depending on the era we’re talking about if we’re talking about the first say four centuries of Christianity this is something that distinguishes Orthodox Christianity from say Gnostic sex and groups who believed in a kind of Resurrection who believed in a kind

09:04 of eternal life but that was decidedly not bodily disassociated from this world this Earth this life and so the word bodily is serving a function here but the way we normally think about this is well okay at some point in the future Christ my physical body gets pulled back together and my soul comes and reinhabit it like my soul’s off floating somewhere else and then it comes back down and comes back into my body and it’s my body there there are a bunch of sort of obvious problems when we start pushing at that though because for example the matter that makes up my body today is a completely different of matter than what made up my body 10 years right and once I die my body will decompose right and will become part of plants and trees and snails and right all sorts of things eventually maybe someone else’s body so what does it mean to say that the body that I will have for eternal life is my body is

10:34 the same body as this body now this is kind of an open question or a puzzle so this is the first place where our friend n may help us to the despisers of the body will I speak my word I wish them neither to learn aresh nor teach a new but only to Bid Farewell to their own bodies and thus be dumb body and I am body am I and soul so saith the child and why should one not speak like children but the awakened one The Knowing one saith body am I entirely and nothing more and soul is only the name of something in the body that’s from thus spake zarathustra his fourth discourse part of our problem here is that we’ve adopted this platonic view of the Soul we’ve adopted this view that the soul is our real self that it is this existing thing that inhabits our body and this has a bunch of effects on how we see the body how we see ourselves how how we see the world a very practical one

12:05 is if my soul the soul that inhabits my body is me that’s the actual me I have disassociated my identity Who I Am from my body my body is now no longer who I am really right if you ever wondered how someone could get the idea that they are in the wrong body there you go there you go but this is not how the Jewish tradition saw the soul there are a lot of ways that we can see this in the Hebrew scriptures one of them is that that very often the speaker will talk to his soul bless the Lord oh my soul well if you are your soul who is it who’s talking in that Psalm the soul was seen not as this existing thing this existing nebulous thing like a force ghost in Star Wars or or a sphere if you’re origin any Origins out there don’t put your hand up

13:37 you’ll get right but the soul was the life of a body right as n alludes to there the soul is something in the body the soul is what is making the body alive making it function this is very practical when you see someone or even an animal die you are looking at the same set of matter you were seconds ago when it was alive but the life is what is gone right the life is what is gone and this means something very important about identity it means identity is not an inward thing we’re used to looking at identity as if we were adolescent right when you’re an adolescent what makes me me is what makes me different than everybody else right you go and you get the t-shirt at Hot Topic says you laugh at me CU I’m different but I laugh at you because you’re all the same right and no one understands your pain especially your mom and dad right so but a lot of us don’t outgrow that right what makes me me is the way that I’m not my

15:07 parents the way that I’m not my family of origin the way that I’m not whatever is going on in society the way that I’m different than everyone else this is an abstraction right we move Inward and this ends in nihilism because when you abstract every connection you have everything you’ve inherited everything you’ve learned everything that you’re a part of you’re left with nothing your identity is nothing there’s this brief stage where identity becomes completely protean where it can change every day that’s kind of fun for a while right but eventually you realize that it being able to change every day means it is actually nothing in particular and that is a bad point to reach so if identity is more concerned with your body and your soul is what is giving your body life then that means we find our identity outside of ourselves not by delving inside ourselves we find our identity in the relationships that we have to our family of origin to our society and our culture to our friends and loved ones these are the things

16:37 that make us who we are these are the things that make us who we are and these are always for the record something chosen one possible objection to this idea one reason people don’t like it is they say well all those things were just given to me I didn’t choose them I want to choose Who I Am by rebelling against those things right I didn’t choose what family I was going to be born in I didn’t choose what country I was going to be born in what culture I was going to inherit what religion I was going to be raised in I didn’t choose any of those things but ultimately we do choose all of those things even if you were married off at age 13 in an arranged marriage to someone you never met before that marriage you choose to be a husband or wife not just every day but a countless number of times during each day you can do otherwise you can move you can object right so all these things are ultimately chosen but it is all of these external things related to our body related to our interactions and connections with other people in community that Define Who We Are why is this important to the concept of the bodily Resurrection this is important to the concept of the bodily because this is why the

18:08 bodily Resurrection is so important that it’s bodily we’re not talking about identical matter coming back together to form a physical space for a soul to inhabit we’re talking about your identity continuing to exist you continue contining to be you in every way this means not only the maintenance of those sort of relationships but the that maintained is the way that we are formed what we have come to know what we have come to think how we have come to think about things and see the world around us now another part of this a part of this that we haven’t thought the part that’s really the focus of the talk this morning the part that I’ve been trying to think over the last year especially we’ve thought about this in terms of space what do I mean by that we have this idea of the bodily resurrection that well that means right this body or at least a body like it this world or at least a world like it right we make these affirmations in the

19:38 Christian tradition no it is this world that will be redeemed it is this body that will be redeemed it is this creation that will be redeemed it’s not going to be destroyed and done away with and replaced with something else it’s not going to be destroyed and done away with and replaced with nothing in some kind of ephemeral ghostly existence but I don’t think we’ve really reckoned with how this relates to time how this relates to time because part of that view we have in our head is that well after this bodily Resurrection happens however we conceive then eternal life means we’re going to have this eternal success session of moments right it’s going to be like this with all the bad stuff gone but just going on forever right just going on forever this creates a lot of issues that it doesn’t solve right they kind of they kind of dealt with this I don’t know if anybody here watched the good place back when it was on TV but they kind of dealt with this right because they had a very uh materialist view of Heaven on the show right but so ultimately

21:09 all the characters spoilers end up in what’s sort of heaven right and everything is wonderful and everything is beautiful and every day is beautiful weather and everything good but time continues as it does here and so at a certain point at a certain point that’s not anymore right that’s not Joy anymore at a certain point I think equally importantly what does that do to our understanding of life this life that we live in this age in this world now at some point right to paraphrase one of the latter verses of Amazing Grace that nobody sings they just do the first one over and over again or play it on the bag pipes at a funeral but you know when we’ve been there for 10,000 years we’ll have no less days left to sing God’s praise than when we’ first begun just an unending Praise Chorus for at least 20,000 right

22:41 and then what does that mean about the 6070 80 years I spent on this earth going through all this and doing all this well that will be long forgotten by right who will even care distant memory right distant memory and if we envision that we’re going to be there with Christ and we see the resurrected Christ to the gospel still has his wounds from the cross that’ll seem a little odd that he went through all that in this world oh way back when we barely it it doesn’t it it doesn’t fit it doesn’t fit nevertheless in this life in this world our identity who we are if it’s formed externally in this way in relation that’s something that happens time right our life in this world is not just spread out across space right that we move about right and we’re at different places at different times but it’s spread out in time those relationships are formed over time I was not always a husband that is part of my identity now but I wasn’t always one in terms of my experience of time I wasn’t always a priest

24:16 don’t wish you met me when I was 15 it was I was a problem right but that’s part of who I am too right but um comes out once in a while um but our identity is formed across this section of space and this section of time that means that in some sense for the bodily Resurrection to be real for our identity to PR be preserved in the world to come in eternal life it’s not just a question of the external physicality needing to be preserved in some sense that time the time of our life in this world has to be preserved the actual concrete moments in which the bonds between me and other people were forged the actual experiences that we shared I can’t be a husband without my wife I can’t be a priest without the church and so these concrete moments also

25:47 have to in some sense continue to exist and so it’s not just a question of the bodily resurrection and the life of the age to come being this body in this world that’s our a starting point but it also has to be a preservation of this time it has to be an eternalizing of this life that I actually LED not this life in a broad sense but this life that I actually LED in this world so here’s the second place where the shade of our friend n shows up and has a few things to say to us what if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you this life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once more an innumerable times more and there will be nothing new in it but every pain and every Joy joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you all in the same succession in sequence would you not throw yourself down and nash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus or have you once experienced a tremendous moment

27:19 when you would have answered him you are a God and never have I heard anything more Divine that’s from the gay science section 34 41 and that bit of n is referred to as the eternal return or Eternal recurrence he had this idea did he think it was metaphysically real what does that even mean in this case right but he presented this as this that essentially everyone repeats their life over and over and over again an infinite number of times and he is at least using it he’s at least presenting it as sort of a test to give yourself regarding your life and he’s saying here is there a moment in which you could look at that not as a horrible curse right is there a moment where that would not be your nightmare is how he’s presenting it when he writes thus spake zarathustra he says the whole thing is a meditation on this idea and so not at the conclusion but near the conclusion we’ll hear from him once again there’s a dialogue going on these are a couple of excerpts between who he calls the ugliest man and zarathustra

28:50 my friends all of you said the ugliest man what think ye for the sake of this day I am for the first time content to have lived my entire life and that I testify so much is still not enough for me it is worthwhile living on the earth one day one Festival was zarathustra hath taught me to love Earth was that life I will say unto death well once more my friends what think ye will you not like me say unto that to death was life for the sake of zarathustra well more later zarathustra gets drunk he sings a song this is part of it all joy WTH The Eternity of all things it WTH honey it WTH leaves it WTH drunken midnight it WTH Graves it WTH Graves tears consolation it WTH gilded evening red what does not Joy want it is thirstier heartier hungrier more frightful more mysterious than all woe it WTH itself it biteth into itself the Rings will rth in it it WTH love it WTH hate it is overr it bestoweth it throwthi

30:22 it thanketh the taker it would Fair be hated so rich is joy that it thirst for woe for hell for hate for shame for the lame for the world for this world oh ye know it indeed ye higher men for you doth it long this Joy this irrepressible blessed joy for your woe ye failures for failures longth all Eternal joy for Joys all want themselves therefore do they also want grief oh happiness oh pain oh break thou heart ye hire men do learn it that Joys want eternity Joys want the eternity of all things they want deep eternity that’s from thus spake zarathustra the ninth discourse what n is saying is if we’ve truly experienced joy in our life those moments those joys those are what would inspire a person to be able to look at his idea of the Eternal recurrence of the same as a hope and not as a curse because for the sake of that Joy one could accept the pain the struggles the Heartbreak of this life in order to have that Joy again

31:56 what if if the resurrection of Christ represents the Triumph of Joy what if what it means is that Joy has now become Eternal without accepting the rest Joy has become Eternal putting to death the rest the pain the Heartbreak the sorrow this is what I mean concretely by that what if when we talk about living an eternal life in which there is no more sorrow or sighing or pain what our forefathers were really talking about was eternally living this life without sorrow and sighing and pain they were talking about the actual times that we live the actual moments we experience all of them that are blessed all of them that are permeated by God’s love all of them that are filled with joy those become Eternal those become the life that we have forever

33:27 and everything else is burned away everything else dies away everything else is thrown away this would mean a number of things this very much changes how we would think of hell and of Christ saving us from it hell is not a place somewhere where a soul whatever that that is goes gets prodded with pitchforks set on fire for an eternal succession of moments hell then would be the hell that we’ve made of our lives hell would be the hell that we’ve made of our experiences in our relationships the hell that we’ve crafted through our own corruption and our own evil not only is that the hell that could become Eternal if there’s nothing else but that’s the hell that Christ saves us from that’s the hell that Christ sets us from that’s the hell that Christ purifies us from and transforms us out of the hell we’ve made for ourselves I’m

35:02 going to read a couple of passages from the scriptures that I think this understanding sheds light on this is from 1 John 5: 11-13 and I’m going to translate this you’ve heard this translated a little differ because the phrase in Greek that’s usually translated in our English Bibles eternal life doesn’t have an article in it anywhere meaning it’s an arthis that’s the technical term meaning normally when we have adjective noun phrases like that in Greek we put the indefinite article a or n in front of it so I’m going to translate this that way and this is the testimony that God gave us an eternal life and this life is in his son Whoever has the son has life whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life I write these things to you who believe in the name of the son of God that you may know that you have an eternal life regardless of how you translate it St John is speaking in first the perfect and then the present tense not you will have eternal life in the age to come right

36:33 but you’ve been given it and you have it now the life you have now in Christ has this adjective attached it has now Eternal it has now become Timeless this is from St Paul 1 3: 11-15 for no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid which is Jesus Christ now if anyone Builds on the foundation with gold silver precious stones wood hay straw each one’s work will become manifest for the day will disclose it because it will be revealed by fire and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done if the work that anyone has built on the foundation survives he will receive a reward if anyone’s work is burned up he will suffer loss though he himself will be saved but only as Through Fire we may be used to reading that with a whole bunch of old western theological baggage that the works here is talking about some kind of system of Merit and demerit that’s attached to actions we take to things we do and we’re going to be issued a repayment for those merits or demerits but let me submit that the word works there let’s

38:05 take it out of our sort of English and Latin sensibilities and go For Greek where it’s more of a verbal idea it’s talking about not just the things we do but us doing them the moments in time and space where we do these things then the Judgment that’s here are all those works all of those things that we did experiences that we had choices we made that are wood hay straw junk garbage dross are burned away all of those moments in time those moments of connection those moments of Love Of Joy of peace they are refined made Eternal made permanent there’s an old Russian folk tale I figure this is a good crowd to tell an old Russian folk tale to there old Russian folk tale that there was this very bitter miserable old woman hated everyone in her Village no one in the village was all that fond of her right horrible mean nagging wife to her husband beat her children selfish stubborn angry when

39:35 she died the priest in her Village said we need to pray for her we need to pray for her for her soul we need to pray for her that she’d be forgiven her sins especially because of the kind of life she lived so they prayed God heard these prayers there was one moment in her life where she showed kindness there was one moment in her life where a beggar came and asked her food she had just gotten some food she gave the beggar an onion just this one moment and so in the story an Angel takes that onion and he goes down to Hell and he extends the onion toward her and he’s going to use that onion to pull her out of hell this one moment in her life and she immediately grabs the onion says my onion and remains in I told you it was a Russian folk tail you should have seen that coming right but think of what’s going on there there was this one moment in her life even though it was only that one that

41:06 she could have inhabited that one moment of generosity she could have inhabited that eternally had she not sort of pushed it away from herself had she not sort of pushed it away from herself so the idea of bodily Resurrection then especially if we start thinking it this way helps us kind of navigate between sort of Sila and crius again the right crowd to make a reference to the sil en cryptus um of on the one side a kind of gnosticism that wants to say this world this life are bodies everything that happens here is unimportant and irrelevant something to be escaped something to be just overcome superseded and on the other side reincarnation reincarnation the idea that we get a sort of infinite number of tries at this until we eventually get it right in between those two we have this life This One Life to Live to become who are with

42:37 the promise in Christ that who we are and who we become in this life that will become Eternal this life that we live will Eternal and into that Christ then further speaks the word that we can change that we can be transformed that at whatever point we realize we’ve been living in hell and we don’t want to live in hell One Day More let alone eternally that he sets us free to live a different kind of life for the rest of our days however many that may be that gives us a time and a space then that we can inhabit with him for eternity so those have been my thoughts about the bodily Resurrection as D has kind of helped me hopefully kind of helped us today it’s a different way of thinking it and I’m still kind of playing it out but I hope it will get you thinking as it’s gotten me thinking right we can all kind of keep doing the work from here here in terms of how we conceive it father Steven D young

44:12 so one of the things I’ve been talking about with my wife is that I guess it’s an extension of something I used to do in my clinical practice now if you’re dealing with people who are depressed one of the things you can do with them is you can have them track their mood VAR variation hour by hour even because someone who’s depressed will tell you that they’re depressed all the time and perhaps they are but sometimes they’re somewhat less depressed than other times there’s still variability now it might be the variability of suffering in hell but it’s still variability and what that means is that you can help the person delineate when they’re suffering most and least intensely right and then you can start to triangulate on that right you might think okay well when things are really bad for you when is that exactly does that repeat is it the morning and what’s the context and then you can do an analysis of what deepens suffering and then you can do the reverse which is when is it that you’re miserable and then the next step is well maybe you could rearrange yourself so that you’re doing the things that make you most miserable less of the time and you can see a progression a progression now you could you could phrase that positively so you could imagine that you were watching your marriage like like you didn’t understand it which you don’t and and you

45:43 could see your marriage and your family let’s say you could see that now and then that the light would be shining through right that for whatever reason now under these circumstances we’re playing with each other everyone pleased to be here we’re concentrating on the moment our experience is suffused with joy Grace is descended we’re doing something to allow that to happen what is it and could we learn to live there more often okay so you’re making you’re pointing in that direction with regards to the emergence of Eternity into life right so then you could imagine that you could practice that and people can do that so it might be that you find that in your typical day you’re only spending 10 minutes in that state but if you practice diligently for six months you could get it up to like half an hour and then you could and then within that half an hour you’d see that there’d be a new seed that would be emerging that would be a higher order of bliss even within that and that can be continually that’s the pearl of great price by the way that’s the Mustard Seed that’s the Kingdom of Heaven those are all the same things okay so I understand now and I also like your emphasis the emphasis you place on the idea that that’s something that had has to be made manifest here and that we can’t throw away the world

47:13 of reality in favor of some heaven after death that’s displaced and you can understand why that’s a danger too because the world becomes a place to escape from and can become denigrated and our identities become something that float above it which is exactly where we’re at in a kind of postmodern transhumanist world okay so that’s my understanding of what you’ve said now I what I don’t understand and this is a terribly unfair question but I’d like to know what your thoughts are well I guess the the issue still is what of the dead right because it’s all well and good to be digging for the kingdom of heaven while you’re alive but it’s a lot harder when you’re dead and so right right so so what what I saw you doing today was wrestling with the problem of the relationship between eternity and Heaven and the proximal and making a case that we can’t abandon the proximal in the least we need to elevate it to the status of the Eternal but it still leaves us with the problem of death and so well so that’s the question it’s like how do you reconcile cuz you by scrapping that kind of unconscious traditional view of Heaven and Hell as as what happens after you die you also scrap the problem of how to address the fact of the loss of death and so I’m wondering where your thoughts have

48:43 taken you in that regard sure yeah so and and this is obviously based on the tradition I’m in right receive but so the the the the Russian folk tale you see a piece of that right so the way this has been traditionally phrased is a person can’t repent they can’t take action to change and transform their life once they’re dead for themselves right but the community of which they were a part can come and intercede for them and what I think that Russian folk tale brings out is that what’s happening there is not sort of oh we’re all begging God to change his mind about this person right and decide they were a good person instead of a bad person but what we are doing is we’re we’re trying to bring to the four those moments in that time because I think what we mean by the resurrection of the Dead on the last day is us coming back to inhabit not just this body in some sense this physical body this physical world in some sense but to reinhabit our lives but our lives now purified of okay so everything that was everything that was pain and suffering and only those moments remain and we live those moments okay we sort of do that we sort of do that well we sort of do that when we pull the spirit of great people along with us from the past right I mean I was I was sitting here thinking

50:14 about what you were talking about and I’m working with this employee of mine now we’re building these we’re building large language models and we’re thinking about resurrecting people essentially and so because you can build a large language model of nche for example and now you can more or less embody that so we could build a large language model of nche and provide him with a photorealistic avatar and have him lecture again and that is I mean we’ already do that with the great people of the past to some degree be because we pull them along and we pull out their best and we carry that with us right and that is something like the you could imagine that in principle being something like the the separating of the wheat from the chaff and the conserving of the wheat and the bringing that along with us but the woman that you talked about for for example her life was almost all chaff so what it and that’s a terrible thing to think about in relationship to your own life by the way like it’s the most terrible thing to think about in fact virtually by definition does that mean that if your life is all chaff that you remain eternally dead be what that that is what I think is meant by Eternal death when that phrase is used in the scriptures and that’s a horrible it’s a hor yeah well and it’s and and one of the key elements though of the scriptures and of the Christian tradition is with maybe a couple exceptions like Judas

51:45 and and maybe Aras there’s no one who that it is said that has happened to but it is out there continually as a possibility for us US mean the that death the yes that that is a possibility not for other people but for me right and that Spurs me to continue to examine my life yeah yeah to to continue to say that possibility being out there that possibility being extended right so whe whether there is anyone who will ultimately face that is sort of ir relevant to the question of the work that that idea is doing within the scriptures and within the Christian tradition of being that possibility well in some in some ways you you might want that to happen because even with regards to n’s idea of the eternal return I suppose hell might be the eternal return of everything you did St everything you did that was stupid in your life being repeated forever that is hell in your own life by the way that’s actually why you should solve the problems that present themselves to you because if you don’t all you do is repeat them that’s why you need to to have it out with people because otherwise you just do the same stupid thing forever

53:16 well and it gets worse as you do it that seems to be not the sort of thing you want to preserve and so in that would mean in some ways that what you would properly pray for is to be submitted to the flaming swords that turn Every Which Way right but the terrifying part of that I suppose would be that most of you would go yeah that that the person who would truly be that far gone would not yeah well I thought for I’ve been thinking that the degree to which the flaming swords that turn Every Witch Way are hell is proportionate to how much of you would have to be destroyed to pass through them to get to Paradise right right I don’t know if that’s a literal vision of hell because if you’re 99% Deadwood the Flames that purify would be experienced would they be experienced as hell they would be if you experienced that without voluntary compliance I mean that happens to you in your life all the time so right yeah and the when I when I sit with people as they’re dying which is a priest you do the worry and the despair of the family is that all of the love and all of the joy and all of the good is what dying that that’s what’s going away right

54:48 and the hope that Christianity presents is no that is what becomes Eternal it’s the rest that dies well that would be case dies away and is gone I suppose if the world was overwhelmed by hell then it would be that the catastrophe that would be Eternal right that would mean that the wrong yeah what was we conserved what was we conserved the wrong thing well I’m wondering I mean I’m still trying to wrestle with this issue of the Dead let’s say yeah I mean you you make the case for the embodiment for the resurrection of the body very powerfully I mean one of the things our culture is very perverse about is the notion that identity is something that floats above embodiment in a in a manner that should be disembodied and that is which is why we insist that you can Define your own identity which nche had something to do with right because he said we should formulate our own values that we’d have to come to the point where we formulated our own that was a very bad idea I mean that was a very bad idea and and I think the psychoanal s actually corrected that pretty rap rapidly although that’s not particularly well known we we would hope we would winnow the good and pull it along with us right and that we would build the world on the basis of that good and that would be something like building the weight World on the foundation of Christ it’s the same idea fundamentally right is that if that’s the good that’s at the

56:18 foundation and then that makes itself manifest in the particularities of each person’s time and and place then we pull all that we gather all that as we move along and that Spirit suffuses us and that’s the movement towards eternity but then I’m still struggling with that I see that that’s true but I’m still struggling with that in the notion of an embodied Resurrection so I I’m not I really I know you can’t answer that because I don’t think anybody can answer I don’t think we understand it’s a way of thinking it well it’s also something we’re stumbling towards the realization of right yeah so but okay so when you’re sitting with people dying and they’re worried that the good will disappear what how is it that you what is it that you find to comfort people in moments I think it is precisely this idea this idea that not only are those moments not dying not only is that love you shared dying but that is going to become your reality that is going to become your reality eternally and I think in terms of drawing the Dead with us I think that’s part of the function of saints in church right the church is not just Christ it’s also the communion of saints right it’s the communion of saints who are Saints because of their whole life right we read the

57:48 lives of the Saints they actual stories play out in time as their identity right and their spirit the spirits of the righteous made perfect as we call them right are now are now continually part of and foundational to the community well you could imagine too that if you’re evaluating your life and and you see those moments when you exist in something that’s at least closer to Paradise than your normative existence that it is during those times that the spirits of the spirit of what was best in the past is making itself manifest in the present in your life that is what’s happening I mean those are the times where your your your existence is configured and things come together so that the spirit of the what the Eternal redeeming Spirit of your ancestors is making itself manifest within you that’s what’s happening and you can you can invite that in you know in the story of Cain and Abel when Cain is bitter Cain invites the the the predatory spirit that crouches on the predatory Spirit of resentment that crouches on his doorstep he invites that in to take possession of him that’s the accusation that God levels against Cain when Cain shakes his fist at the cosmos and people do that when things are when the world reveals itself to you in love that’s an indication that for reason

59:20 you were fortunate enough to be wise enough to invite in that the spirit of what’s good to possess you right and you can learn to do that right and that’s that’s really I would say that’s the Christian Journey fundamentally to do that and that is something like a conservation of the of the good of the past you can see that too even if you’re able to do that in part because maybe you have a wonderful moment with your son let’s say when he’s a child if you think that through you understand that that’s the moment in which the best of your father shines through you right and that best of him was an amalgam of what was best about fathers since time immemorial I mean literally because we imitate each other as we move down the generations and the centuries and so and that is the emergence of something Eternal into the space of the proximal and this the Saints maintain identity it’s not just their writings their thoughts what they did but we read their lives right their identity right that’s the well that’s the other thing about the the insistence of the resurrection of the body that’s so brilliant because if you abandon the notion of the body you abandon the value of the particularities of time and space right it means that only what’s abstract about you is real and

1:00:51 that’s not well that leads to this transhuman postmodernism it’s another pathway there it has to be that the particularities are just as important as the universalities not and and I think that has something to do with Jonathan’s constant insistence that you have to understand the reflection of the Kingdom of Heaven not as something that’s merely at the Pinnacle or that’s the foundation but that’s the Pinnacle and the foundation and that suffuses the whole simultaneously right and so you don’t get to abandon the particularities in in preference to the to the general or vice vers Versa right I suppose vice versa is kind of what the hedonists do it’s only about the embodiment in the present right okay okay well that’s well thank you yeah thank you yeah yeah thank you Father thank you and thank you Jordan