Well, just like the tech issues that we recently had where our entire system shorted, sorry about that.
Sometimes confusion comes into our lives.
We often don't understand the reason why we live.
We don't understand the purpose of our existence.
And we're trying to find out exactly what it is we're supposed to be doing here.
Now, many Americans have decided that, you know, the way that we find out who God is and what our purpose is is through Christianity.
But when you approach Christianity, it's not as simple as you think.
Sometimes you look around you, there's Protestants, there's in there, there's evangelicals, there's the mainline denominations, then you go out and then there's Orthodox, there's Catholic.
But if you notice today with the gay flags in front of churches and the pastorixes, the female pastors and the weird ideology, a lot of young people are finding out that the modern church perhaps may not be the best version of Christ's holy church.
In fact, maybe, just maybe, the people of the past knew a little more than we did.
When looking back in history at myself, I found there's two churches: there's the Catholic Church, we'll call it in general, and the Orthodox Church.
They both claim to be the true church.
One follows the papacy.
It looks like the other one doesn't.
And yet, at the same time, when you ask either of them, really, where should I go to church?
They'll say, well, most of them, you should go to Catholic, but you know, you can go to Orthodox.
If I said Orthodox, they say you can go to Catholic, but you should go to Orthodox.
So why do we have both then?
Which one is true?
Which one is the way to be a part of Christ's eternal body, to be a part of the moving, living, breathing unit of Christ?
Joining me today to discuss the true church, whether it's Orthodox or Catholicism, we are talking to experts in their field.
Jay Dyer, he's a podcast host, author of many books, and an avid reader.
Jay Dyer, welcome back to the show.
Let us know who you are.
For those that are just joining for the first time, you want to explain a little bit about what it means to be an Orthodox or what that even defines itself as, and a little bit about where people can find your podcast.
Yeah, Jay Dyer, I have been Orthodox since about 2017, and prior to that, was Roman Catholic for many years, predicated Latin mass goer, was raised Protestant in the Reformed Baptist and the Reformed tradition.
And yeah, I would say that what Orthodox Christianity is, is we believe it is the church of the first millennium, still preserved and still holding to those synodal traditions that are essentially found within any of the canonical Orthodox churches throughout the world.
So we think it is the church that Christ established.
We think that it doesn't change.
There might be political, geopolitical issues that happen, but the fundamental constitution and beliefs of the church do not change.
And so we take truth to be the most important category over things like numbers and things like that.
And me personally, you can find me at jaysanalysis.com and fourth hour host of the Alex Jones show for the last five or six years.
New articles every single day on culture, politics, and religion.
Also, just a little announcement for you joining us for the first time.
This is a new network.
It just launched a few weeks ago, and this is one of our shows.
So we're hammering out some of the details.
We have a couple new shows launching, including Joel Webbin, who is a Protestant, is coming on and doing a new show for our network.
We're very excited about that.
Plus, Sarah Stock has a new channel.
If you don't know her, it's Sarah Stock on YouTube.
She's also launching a new program.
And we also have a new White House show with the Gateway Pundit and Jordan Conradson.
We're launching on September 15th.
So God is good.
We got our security clearances for the White House, and we're very happy to be here.
Anyway, joining us today are my guests, Timothy Gordon and Jay Dyer.
They're both infamous, I should say, in their own right and have both come on this show previously to discuss what it means to be Orthodox, what it means to be a Catholic.
And so if you want to watch those episodes, you can go back.
You can type in their names and you can find them.
They're very, very, very good, very developed individuals and thinkers.
Let's go ahead and let's talk about what we're going to be doing.
So we're going to be mainly covering three topics today.
One topic is going to be whether Christ did or did not establish a visible head of church.
We're talking about apostolic succession in its own way.
What really defines the church?
You know, the Orthodox and Catholic disagree on that.
Plus, topic two, we're going to be talking about the Holy Spirit does or does not hypostatically proceed from the sun.
So we're going to kind of talk about the Trinity, talk about what's going on there.
This is a very interesting topic, especially for me, background in Protestantism.
And number three, we're going to talk about the divine essence is or is not absolutely simple.
And for the affirmative position, not composed of any parts or potencies.
Now, in the middle of these topics, we'll have a normal structure.
There will be an opening statement.
There will be a rebuttal.
There will be a cross-examination and a closing.
It's a very formal debate.
So if you're not familiar with that style on this channel, we're trying it for the first time today because these are academics.
They are not retarded like myself.
But in the middle of these topics, we will have a little bit of a break.
So these will be a bit lengthy.
You might want to take out notes.
And we will also be asking a few other questions more relevant to the culture and topics and what their responses are as the Catholic and the Orthodox Church.
All right.
Jay, we'll start with you with your opening statement.
Our topic number one that we are discussing whether Christ did or did not establish a visible head of church.
We're talking, I believe, the correct phrase, apostolic succession.
I know you guys believe in the, I know you guys believe in, they believe in the papacy, right?
So if I look at scholastic dictionaries from Roman Catholic texts, we see that for God or for philosophy or scholastic philosophy in general, pure act is defined as simple for perfection without any imperfection.
It is free from any potency in the strictest sense.
It is therefore unqualified perfection of existence without any passive or limited potency.
And this is from the dictionary of scholastic philosophy.
Aquinas says something very similar, and as does Etenjiel Son, the student, Rashimi, one of the premier Thomas of the last century, in defining who God is, there is this beginning point that comes from Hellenic metaphysics.
We would not, as Orthodox, necessarily agree with every, disagree with every usage of the word pure act.
But what we would say is that when I look at that definition and I compare it to the teaching of, say, St. Maximus the Confessor in his famous 200 chapters, he begins the work by saying that God is not in himself, and as far as it is possible for us to know, any kind of first principle, nor is he in an intermediate state, nor is he an end, nor is he any other concept, for he is indefinite, immobile, and infinite, since he is infinitely beyond any substance, any potentiality, and any actuality.
So notice there, he is not pure act in himself.
He is not actuality in himself.
He goes on to say in section four, God is not therefore a potentiality, nor is he a first principle, nor is he an actuality, nor is he a first cause.
And he's citing from Aristotelian categories and definitions there.
He goes on to say, though, that in another sense, we can call God these things.
And the reason for this is that for Orthodox theology, there's two very crucial key distinctions or name, ways that we name God that are distinct.
We name God first in terms of the intra-Eternitarian life or God in himself.
And in that way, we do not positively predicate of the divine essence.
So even though Tim will agree with me that there is a via negativa, Orthodox theology has a different conception of what apophatic theology is.
So when we speak of the divine essence, we do not speak of it as identical to anything, much less identical to pure act, first act, actus purist, etc.
The divine essence is unknowable, imparticipable, unapproachable, and it is therefore, strictly speaking, apophatic.
How do we know God then if God is apophatic in this sense?
Well, he's not only essence.
God is also person.
And as St. John of Damascus says multiple times in On the Orthodox Faith, the key to all heresies is to confuse the distinction between nature and person.
For the Orthodox Church, that distinction is as, quote, real or as strong as the distinction between the persons themselves.
So while in Tim's philosophy, he would agree that the Father and the Son are really distinct, that real distinction is somehow not applicable to anything else in the triad, be it God's attributes, operations, or the distinction between nature and person itself, which is conceived of as only mental or volitional in Thomistic philosophy.
And I would argue that in Roman Catholic theology, that holds as well because the Fourth Lateran Council accepts the Peter Lombard definition of what simplicity is, known as identity thesis.
This is Denzinger 432, that person and essence are essentially identical, but they're only mentally or rationally distinct.
Thus, God is his essence.
So notice, for them, God is first and foremost essence.
But the Orthodox position is very different.
And Maximus goes on to describe the way that we do speak of God in positive catavatic categories, and that is because the energies are positive and known to us.
Those energies are his operations.
Where does this come from?
Is this something that the medieval Byzantines made up?
They just came up with this idea that energies are these things that God has that are other than him, and they're these other deities, these polytheistic parts of God.
Absolutely not.
In fact, we would argue that the only way to have divine simplicity consistently is to adhere to the divine simplicity of God, yes, but also that his operations are really there and really different from him.
How do I know that?
The Cappadocians made a classic analogy for how this is the case by looking at the difference between a man, his nature, and the work of nature and the product of nature.
Allow me to quote St. John Damascus briefly here for that specific distinction.
John Damascus says that observe that energy, capacity of energy, and product of energy, and the agent of the energy are all different.
For the Orthodox Church, we call these things the difference between nature, person, will, essence, and operation or energy, and the effect of that energy.
Energy is the efficient and essential activity of the nature.
So, notice that's the first statement from John Damascus.
The same statement is made by St. Gregory, excuse me, St. Maximus in his Ad Thalasios 63.
He says that God's supernatural energy is the identical energy that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit possess, that also the saints are deified by.
St. Gregory of Nyssa says, and against Eunomius II, the common nature is identified by common energy.
St. Gregory of Nyssa says again, the essential invisible God becomes visible by his energies.
He is not visible in his essence, but in some of his operations.
And to quote St. Cyril of Alexandria, things with the same energy are acknowledged to be of the same essence.
So energy proceeds from essence and is the proper signifier in work or operation of that nature or essence.
Now, natures don't operate, persons with natures operate.
And this is why for John Damascus, in book three, section 15, there are two wills, two energies, but one divine hypostasis working in and through those two wills and those two energies.
Now, to shift out of the philosophical definitions and statements that we have, and I would add that that definition, by the way, is accepted at the Sixth Ecumenical Council, where the confession of St. Sophronius, pulling from the explicit teachings of St. Maximus the Confessor on essence and energy, two wills, two operations, and, by the way, many energies, to cite John Damascus in book one, that is accepted at the Sixth Ecumenical Council as the teaching's Christological definition.
Again, it's called the Confession of St. Sephronius.
You can find the Oxford text available on Amazon.
Thus, even in the patristic teaching of the Roman Catholic Church, three minutes from the early few centuries, excuse me, from the early seventh centuries, in 686, excuse me, 681 at the Sixth Ecumenical Council, we have the affirmation of the teaching of St. Sephronius and St. Maximus that John of Damascus encapsulates in his later text of On the Orthodox Faith, reflecting on the essence energy distinction, which is seen most clearly in,
believe it or not, not triadic speculations, but in Christology.
In other words, it is the uncreated energies that St. Cyril says deify us in this life through feeding on the flesh.
I'm going to be interested to hear how a person who believes in the real presence, that is the body, blood, soul, and divinity present of Christ in the Eucharist, as the Roman Catholic Church claims to confess, how this is possible given that in the Orthodox conception, it's only possible given that the uncreated energies, as St. Cyril says in the two letters to Sixth Census, deify the flesh and thus make it the thing that we participate in to be deified.
He says in the two letters to Six Census, and this is reflected in the teaching of the Council of Ephesus, by the way, in the Anathemas, that we do not eat the flesh and blood of some man, but the deified flesh of the God-man, made divine, not by the divine essence, but by his uncreated energy and immortality.
So St. Cyril of Alexandria, the third ecumenical council of Ephesus is pretty explicit when we get into the actual teachings of how we participate in divine life.
On the other hand, in the Roman Catholic Church, if I read from the teaching of Ludwig Ott, Ludwig Ott says that the grace that we receive in the Roman Catholic Church and their belief, sanctifying grace is a created supernatural gift, really distinct from God.
In other words, the very thing that you are participating in, which by the way, point number one says is a creation, point number five says is a participation in the divine nature.
I'm pretty sure the divine nature isn't a creature.
So I don't know how we participate in God if the thing that we're participating in is a quote created gift really different from God.
Again, quotes from a famous Roman Catholic dogmatic manual.
Lastly, I would say that there are a couple more examples that I think are very difficult for people who deny this distinction, particularly when it comes to what are called theophanies.
Theophanes are manifestations of God in the Old Testament.
I'll give you a few that I think are really problematic.
I've got a couple more examples and then I'll be done.
So in Numbers 12, we read that the Lord said to Moses, Aaron, and Miriam, come, you three, to the tabernacle of meeting.
And they came out.
The Lord came down in the pillar and in the cloud and he stood in the door of the tabernacle and called out to Aaron and Miriam.
Now notice that we have this theophanic manifestation in the Old Testament where God comes down and is specifically said to stand there.
When we go back to the situation in Genesis in Genesis 31, we read that the angel of the Lord who identifies himself as the I am, the God who appeared to you at Bethel, is there talking to Jacob.
And that same I am that appears in time and space is also talking to Jacob and calls himself the form of God.
This is out of the Septuagint text.
The form of God was seen by Jacob.
And then we have another statement that it is the I am that he wrestles with because Jesus at the end of John 1 says that he is the gate, the doorway to heaven, the ladder of Jacob.
And the angels descending and ascending on the Son of Man signifies and shows that he was the one wrestling with Jacob.
Jacob wrestled with an actual form or being in time and space that manifested in an energetic manifestation as the church has always taught.
But after Thomism and after the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church moved away from this and decided instead that these manifestations are rather created images, holograms, angels, et cetera, whatever imagery you want to use.
They're not the uncreated energies of God in time and space.
Why?
Well, because of divine simplicity, it's not possible for God to be present in time and space in these ways because God would then undergo change.
But I want to remind them as I close on this point that this theophany argument is actually the basis and the predication, the presupposition for the doctrine of the incarnation.
It is not the divine essence that became incarnate.
It is the second person who, according to Philippians 2, willfully limited himself to step into time and space in a mode of being that the Father and the Son did not enter into.
So the reductionist actus purist position will undercut not just theophanies and the real manifestations of the glory of God in time and space.
Leviticus 9 says it's the glory of God that appeared.
God's glory is not a creature, John 17.
Thus, this refutes the Roman Catholic simplicity position.
Okay, let's go ahead and so representing the Catholic side, if you're just joining the stream, shout out as well to in the chat, Crucible Andrew said, It's in $100 super chat.
We're not going to do weird sound effects for this.
We'll keep it very, very serious to the point.
But he also said, Thank you, Andrew, for that.
He said, Andrew Wilson here, thank you very much for hosting this.
And Andrew's Orthodox, correct?
I think correct.
So that's cool that you're tuning in.
I appreciate it.
I was all your wife there too.
So go ahead, Timothy, your opening statement.
You have 10 minutes, give or take, since he took an extra two minutes.
Pure act is the basic expression of God's perfection, all-powerfulness, his essay.
That means he's self-subsisting.
His necessity, his eternality, his simplicity.
So God, as pure act, according to classical theism, Western definitions of God, which has included, broadly speaking, it's even included a lot of Orthodox thinkers, Eastern thinkers over the last 2,000 years.
It is the most basic expression of who and what God is.
So when you think pure act, because this is the term of pure metaphysics, think pure being.
By pure being, we mean being without any becoming or potency mixed in.
There are no non-actualized potencies that are mixed in with the person of who God is.
Now, just so we are clear, Jay told me last time we debated that mistaking a single aspect of God's reality means, in the context of Islam, worshiping a false God rather than worshiping the true God, errantly.
I would say, I hope for all of our sakes, Jay's sakes here, too, because he's a friend and he's a good guy, that this isn't true.
Because mistaking God as being a composite of act with passive potency is the most fundamental mistake you can make as to who God is.
Passive potency means something else can change you.
And we have to talk about passive potency today.
The fact that Jay has asserted on multiple occasions that something else can change God through this term passive potency.
So there's some basics of classical theism.
One, God cannot change.
This is in Malachi 3:6.
It's reflected in James 1:17.
God can't change.
This is a basic pillar of classical theism.
God cannot be affected by anything else.
It's reflected in Acts 17:24 to 25.
Thirdly, God cannot fail to be what he is.
The principle of necessity only applies to him in this sense: that he is utterly perfect and he cannot be anything other than what he is.
This is reflected in Matthew chapter 5, verse 48.
Now, if God were not pure act, and by this, we just mean pure being.
There are so many equivocations that are going to be made here on terms.
I just mean pure being.
Thomas and the Aristotelian lexicon that he's working out of just means pure being with no becoming possible.
The basic definition between a creator and a creature is there's only one creator, he's got to be pure being itself outside the categories of time and space.
Anything inside the categories of time and space has to be a mixture, a composite of act and potency, form and matter, substance and accidents.
There are seven modes of composition.
And anything inside the categories that was created by God has to be a creature who is a composite of these things.
But God has to be immutable, meaning he cannot change.
He cannot change because he's outside the categories.
He must be eternal.
Nicaea actually anathematizes anyone who says that he's anything other than the eternal, meaning there's no change in God, meaning God cannot exist prior to X and after X.
That would earn one the anathematizations of Nicaea.
He can't be composite.
And if God were mixed in the way that Jay is saying, act with potency in any manner, he would be composite.
I mean, there's a composer behind God because one would have to be composed of their parts by some posterior principle, and that composer itself would be God, not God.
So this is why he has to be simple.
Passive potency means that something else can change God.
This always implies temporality.
So God would not be perfect.
This is a complete and total rejection of all classical theism.
That doesn't make it good or bad.
I'm just stating it from the outset that classical theism requires God to be pure act for him to even obtain all the properties that we're talking about.
Now, what Jay will say is that God transcends logical categories.
If God truly transcended logical categories, for one thing, this would require that we predicate being univocally.
And for a Roman Catholic, we never predicate being univocally.
We always predicate being analogically.
So that's not true.
Because we predicate being analogically, we can actually talk about God in one way and one way only.
That's what the analogy is.
But if it were true that we predicated God univocally and he transcends logical categories, then there would be no debates.
We wouldn't be able to do what we're doing right now.
Wouldn't be able to identify God, name God.
There would be no dogma, no councils, no scripture, anything that's important to Catholics or Orthodox.
So there's an absolute equivocation on this idea of analogical versus univocal predication of being.
Now, because there are so many different terms between the East and the West, I will say this.
There is unintentional equivocation, meaning good faith equivocation between the Eastern thinkers and the Western thinkers on what pure act is and what it requires.
But in some sense, in the sense of meaning being, pure being without becoming, we have affirmations of one sense or another of pure being by even Eastern thinkers like Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus the Confessor, Athanasius, John Damascene, even Gregory Palamas, though he puts forward a kind of alternative theory, the hardline distinction between God's essence and energies.
And more recently, scholars like Dr. Bradshaw admits that God must be pure act.
Now, I'll just run through a few of these.
In Against Eunomius II, we have Gregory of Nyssa saying, except for the divine essence, nothing is uncreated, meaning the divine essence alone is uncreated.
This is good because for God to be God, for there to be a real distinction outside of the usia of God, would be to posit a second God.
Gregory of Nyssa also says, and again, he's operating on an Eastern equivocal definition.
So I'm not saying that he means exactly what Thomas means, but he means the important part of it, that God is pure being, and that if he were any bit of potency, passive potency, he would have to be inside the 10 categories of existence.
He says the untouched and formless God is free from all composition and likewise the only begotten.
So this proves a couple important things at once, that because God is the untouched and formless God, free from all composition, that means any of the seven modes of composition, most importantly, potency.
Same thing with the sun.
That's Gregory of Nyssa.
Maximus the Confessor says God is the active and inexhaustible state of all actualization.
The important aspect of what he's saying is that he is being.
God is pure being without becoming.
No becoming mixed in, no potency.
Maximus also says, for it is not natural to contemplate any change in God.
Of course, this has been anathematized right at the beginning at Nicaea to say that there's any change in God, in whom we cannot conceive of any movement whatsoever.
So there can be no admixture of change in God.
And again, this is basically obvious to everyone.
St. Athanasius says God is wholly what he is.
He means no potency, no division.
I'm just demonstrating here that there are Eastern thinkers who are operating out of the basic existential fact of God as pure act.
St. John of Damascus says God is uncreated, immutable, and not composed.
So composing doesn't just mean act potency.
It means any of the other six modes of possibly composing God.
Now, we can reduce this to a syllogism to prove it since we're debating after all.
This comes out of Summa Theologia 191.
Basic first premise, whatever has passive potency can be changed or moved from potentiality to actuality by something else.
By definition, this is what passive potency is.
Second premise is God can't be changed because we all agree on that premise.
And the conclusion is, therefore, God has no passive potency.
It's important to note for logic nerds that this can be propositionalized.
You can use symbolic logic to prove that this is true.
I won't go through the symbolic logic, but it's important that people know this ought to be sacrosanct for any of us.
Whatever has passive potency can be changed or moved by another.
We don't agree that that can be done with God.
Since God can't be changed, it's been anathematized at Nicaea.
We have to say God has no passive potency.
And Jay has said otherwise multiple times recently in the last year or 18 months.
So there's a simple way of explaining this to people, the analogy of an automobile, since we're using all these terms, composition, pure act, potency, whatnot.
Composed of parts is how automobiles and all things operate.
Think of your car, a drive shaft, the wheels, the windows, the chassis, whatever.
They are dependent on an external assembler, a composite is ontologically posterior to its parts.
If God had parts, he would depend on a composer, a God behind the God.
This is not a mere logical category.
This is a fact.
This is an existential fact.
It contradicts his essay, meaning he is self-subsistent, and his necessity to say otherwise.
Now, where, you know, Jay, I think, is equivocating or misunderstanding Thomism is on several of the terms.
They're just real terminological differences that I think of good faith are eluding.
Now, he will confuse Platonism, Neoplatonism, and Aristotomism.
These are three separate systems that disagree radically, and they have informed Christianity at different parts.
The Catholic Church is informed by Aristotomism, which I said predicates being analogically, which goes right to the heart of what we're going to be debating with Palamas later.
We don't use Platonism, which predicates being univocally.
I know this sounds absolutely insane.
The terms are bizarre, but it's really, really important because for us to even be able to speak about God, we have to predicate being analogically.
That means we have to be in Aristotomist mode.
Jay has said before, he thinks that Aristotle and Thomas made being a genus.
They explicitly reject this in Platonism.
So the Thomistic predication is never unidival.
Being is never a genus.
This goes right to the heart.
Because of these equivocations, there are some basic terminological difficulties, confusions, equivocations that he makes on essence versus nature.
And these are very technical and matter very much.
Energies versus accidents.
Act versus operations.
Like pure act doesn't mean God is pure action.
It means God is pure being.
And this confuses the matter.
And I think that might literally be all that we're debating at the end of the day, because God is pure being.
And even Eastern thinkers accept it.
Passive versus active potency and relations of opposition versus contrariety.
All of these together mean that I don't necessarily think Jay is intending to say that God is not pure being without any becoming.
And a time on that, I'll be adding another minute to your clock for a rebuttal because he went over a little bit there.
I was saying it, you know, it's funny because I was trying to, you know, exegete some things you were saying.
And Grock went just as complex.
He was like, the ontological exigency of Catholicism was a dogmatic corpus.
I was like, wow.
When you got two people here that are speaking at a level of AI, I'm asking a question.
This is a very complex debate.
This has been going on for, what, in many ways, well over a thousand years right now as we're talking.
And that's kind of an interesting point is that, you know, people that are Protestant are not used to these complex, deep discussions.
You know, things are like, what do we want to do today in Protestantism?
And sometimes it's like, let's all be gay pastors.
And everyone's like, yay.
And it's like, okay.
But, you know, people have been thinking about some of these topics for centuries, you know, even for millennia, if you look at the actual topic here.
And when we talk about what's important, I just want to remind you guys, if you're watching, that take notes and re-watch, rethink, re-listen, and try to understand the complexity of their arguments.
Also, Crucible Andrew Wilson, for another $100, said, and here's another, he also yelled out, say my name.
I don't know why.
We'll just say your name.
Andrew Wilson in the chat.
It's good to see you here.
We're very, very happy to have you.
He also sent another chat for $100 and said, here's the last one.
Take these guys out to dinner, Elijah, and yourself.
And I would, I don't know if you guys are free afterwards, but we'll check that out.
If you're just joining for the first time, don't forget to like the video.
Don't forget to subscribe.
It's very important that you do.
And I want to jump into what I believe to be the most important part, which is give them a chance to respond to each other.
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That starts now and here with what we're discussing, especially with Christianity.
Now, let's go over to Jay Dyer.
I want to give you an example here.
Jay is representing the Orthodox tradition in this discussion.
You have six minutes on the clock.
If you want to use, I'll give you the minute.
Do you want to use the minute here?
Do you want to use a minute on the cross-examination of the closing statement?
So the first thing that he said that was a basic theological mistake was that he identified God and the divine essence with a seity.
Of course, all the three persons have a seity or self-existence or are autotheos in that system if they are identical to the divine essence, except that he's not aware of Cappadocian theology nor the theology of Constantinople I, which accepted unanimously with explicit decree, the necessity to follow the Cappadocian dictum that the father is identified as autotheos.
So to identify the divine essence as autotheos is actually to introduce the later Christological and Trinitarian heresy that the Calvinists introduced, that the Son and the Spirit are also thus autotheos because they share the same divine essence.
So he's not aware of that.
That's a classic theological problem.
Next, I didn't say that God changed.
He's confusing the idea of what Orthodox call reciprocity with the idea that God undergoes change.
What we mean by that is that if you read the book of Amos, for example, God says he's going to destroy Israel.
Amos comes and prays and says, Lord, please don't do this.
And God says, because you prayed, I'm not going to destroy Israel.
That does not mean that God can't, or excuse me, that God undergoes change.
It means that he has willingly condescended to engage in a creaturely reciprocity.
That means that God is first and foremost a divine person, and particularly the person of the Father or the monarchia of the Father, which is a crucial Orthodox doctrine upon which all of this is built, whether it's the essence, energy, sinceration, or these other distinctions.
So, no, it is not the case that creatures cause the divine essence to change or anything like that.
In fact, I said that there's two ways that we can name God.
I guess he didn't hear that, or he just wanted to do the quote mine from the Eastern Fathers, ignoring, by the way, all the places in those Eastern Fathers where they actually make the arguments against his position.
For example, I specifically cited Maximus pointing out that the same energies that God possesses are the same energies that deify the saints, he says in Atalasios, which thus means that Trent is wrong when the Council of Trent says that we are justified in baptism by the righteousness, not that God has himself, but by the righteousness by which he makes us just.
And again, to cite Nyssa again, common nature is identified by common energy.
If you read on the Holy Spirit by St. Basil, you'll notice that the way that Basil proves the Holy Spirit is fully divine with the Father and the Son is because he possesses the exact same energy or operation because energy and operations signify nature.
Now, interestingly in the scriptures, when we read about the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the book of Corinthians, when Paul talks about the spiritual gifts, he calls them the gifts of the inner gaia of the Spirit, the energies of the spirit.
Tim could look at Strong's 1753 and he would see all the multiple uses throughout the New Testament, even places in the Septuagint, where inner Gaia is used many times over.
And that leads me to the other issue he doesn't seem to be aware of in scholarship, which is if he could read Michael René Barnes' book, Dunamis in Gregory of Nyssa, where there's this idea of this discussion of the power of God.
And this is the Cappadocian dictum to utilize first and second actuality to help explain how it's possible for God to create and yet to be perfect and to not undergo change.
So to say that God possesses first and second act and that he doesn't always actualize all of his powers does not imply any imperfection in deity.
Rather, it implies God has a free will.
If I was a Thomist or a Roman Catholic and I identified the act of creating with the divine essence as they do and with divine providence, then there's a necessary creation and a necessary providence and a necessary world that occurs because those things are isomorphically identical.
This is called the modal collapse argument.
So that also refutes Tim's reductionist position.
People could look at Radagalwitz's famous Oxford thesis on simplicity in the Cappadocians.
Moving on, he noted that as he went through his quote mine of the Eastern Church Fathers, he sort of tried to fit this into a Aristotomist scheme.
Well, if he was able to look into the scholarship on the Cappadocians and the transition from the Cappadocians into Cyril and Maximus and John Damascus in a very recent, very well-known text by Johan Zach Huber called The Rise of Christian Theology and Ancient Metaphysics, he would know that the Cappadocians were not working with a two-tiered cause-effect Aristotelian scheme.
They were working more so with a Neoplatonic scheme.
I'm not advocating for Neoplatonism.
I'm saying that when the Neoplatonic philosophy is used by the Cappadocians and thus that model and that tendency to speak that way is accepted, particularly at Constantinople I, which, by the way, is called close and had out of communion with Rome, which is the council that defines the Trinity.
It has nothing to do with Aristotomism.
And so this is a kind of a revisionist, anachronistic approach where they will take things and reread the Thomistic positions into quote minds from the church fathers.
Because as I noted, as Gregory of Nyssa says, the invisible God becomes visible by his energies.
He is not seen or known in his essence, but in his operations.
And that's from On the Beatitudes, section 4.
So divine energies are what come down to us.
It is not the mere created effects, but the actual participation in the attributes, energies, and life of God.
That's not a created thing.
Jesus says in John 17, he came to give us a share in the glory that he had with the Father before the foundation of the world.
Thus, it is a real participation in uncreated glory.
God's glory is not a creature.
The glory in the grace itself is what we partake of.
So he says that I engage in univocal predication.
I never made an argument that human terms or conceptions are univocal to the attributes.
In fact, I would agree with analogical predication.
It's just that the analogies do not match up to the divine essence.
They match up to the energies.
Hence, Basil says in letter 234, what God's essence is, we do not know, but rather it is his energies, his operations that come down to us.
In Strong's, since Jay cited it, energeia in Paul means God's activity and grace, not specifically not a metaphysical part of God distinct from his essence.
This would refute the entire position.
The Catholic theology captures this through uncreated grace.
That's our position.
God himself at work in us.
And without, it does all of this without dividing him into essence versus energies.
So it sounded by that quote as if it was essence energies.
Nothing of the sort.
The Orthodox move from a biblical usage of energea, which again, I warned you, there would be this equivocation time and time and time again, because energeia is a word in the Greek that's frequent here, to metaphysics.
Energeia means something very, very different in the distinction between essence and energies.
It's a strong extrapolation in Strong.
I think the most important question that Jay frequently asks sincerely, I've heard him ask it sincerely many times.
I'm not being facetious here.
He'll ask, and this is really at the heart of the matter.
Why, if there's a real distinction between, if Catholics allow a real distinction between the three persons, why can't they abide a real distinction between the divine essence and the energies?
Which is a fair question.
The answer is ousiological, which means when we're looking at the single essence of God, the one thing which absolutely must be worshipped.
This has been affirmed at Nicaea 2.
Worship is latria, worship proper to the divine essence alone.
We are talking about God's one Uzziah.
Real distinctions within that Uzziah can be made by what we've called relations of opposition between the three persons.
Because in proper theology, the three persons are inside that divine essence, that Uzziah, this does not enable or rehabilitate or allow extra ousiological distinctions between God's essence and energies, because the entire point of the essence-energies distinction is that there is a real distinction, and they don't have what we call virtual distinctions anyway.
There's a real distinction between God's Uziah and his energies, his operations.
And they're uncreated, both.
Whether you're talking philosophy or classical theology, anything that's uncreated is God.
Anything that is on the other side of creation is God.
So if you have an Uziah that is the divine essence of God and something else that's uncreated, you're talking about, you must be talking about two gods.
Anyway, this is why we don't allow that distinction.
Any distinctions within the single divine essence, the relations of opposition between fatherhood and filiality, affiliation, these are fine.
These make sense.
Relations of opposition make sense from within what we know to be the Trinity, within the Uziah of God.
The Father is not the Son, is not the Holy Spirit, but they're all the same substance of God.
But you can't make, you can't distinguish between two uncreated realities outside of space and time without positing a new essence.
So it's an ousiological answer.
It's very basic.
And hopefully you see that the former is possible because monotheism requires one Uziah of God, whereas the latter would require seemingly two divine Uziyas.
They won't say it.
They won't say that the position is too divine Uzi is because it's one divine essence and then something else uncreated.
If I can't worship them separately, in other words, if there's not a passive potency in them that is receptive of my worship, God's divine essence, his energies.
can't worship them separately so why call them really distinct no more because because if you guys had virtual distinctions the way you should hear this wouldn't be a problem But because you say it's a real distinction from God is a problem.
Now, what I want to know from you guys in the chat right now, if you heard the cross-examination, one's in the chat, if you think that Jay is cooking and that you think that he's winning right now in terms of just truth.
And I don't want to hear just the Orthodox pros.
I know how you guys are.
You guys will just be like, Jay wins, Jay wins.
So ones in the chat if you think theologically his arguments are more sound.
Two in the chat, if you think that Timothy's arguments and cross-examination was more sound.
That means even if you're Orthodox or you're Catholic, you don't have to vote for your home team.
One's in the chat for Jay.
Two's in the chats.
Before we do the closing statement, I do want to just read a couple super chats here, reminding you guys that Humphrey 1 said, Tim is based, Jay is based.
We should be Catholic Republic and the Orthos should build the churches.
We also had from Daniel Ward79 said, thank you, Tim Gordon, for defending the one true church that Jesus founded on the Prince of the Apostle St. Peter.
May all Eastern Orthodox become Catholics so we may be in one holy Catholic and apostolic church.
We also read the ones here from Maximus.
Decimus said, keep my name out of your mouth, little boy.
Shout out for our supreme leader, Jay Dyer.
Christ is king.
All right, we're going to give one more minute here to read a couple super chats before we get to the closing statements.
Servant Necrosis33 said, huge respect for Jay.
Keep it up, my brother.
Now, Aldo Hayan also said, Tim makes me sleepy and Elijah is using Grok.
This is the most rigorous debate I have ever seen.
It's true, because I don't use AI, but I had to use AI to look up some of the stuff he was saying in real time.
Also, we have Mr. Fistus said, I'm too sub-tarted to understand any of this, but Orthodox have better hats, which settles it.
A tree will be known by its fruit.
Come home, papists.
So it looks like we got a pretty good split in between there.
All right.
Let's move into the closing statement.
Just so you guys know watching at home, we will be taking a five-minute break between each of our topics.
So you can use the restroom, you can breathe, and it might be a couple minutes.
So don't go anywhere.
We're going to start with our closing statement.
If you guys are, gentlemen, are you prepared?
And are you prepared to go?
All right, Jay, you're going to have 10 minutes on the clock.
Yeah, I want to remind everybody that, again, I think if you are familiar with biblical theology, the patristic teaching, nobody believes that the glory of God is in any sense a creature or created.
In fact, it is the uncreated immortality and light that Paul talks about at the end of Timothy, in which God eternally dwells.
That uncreated light and glory was manifested in Matthew 17 on the Mount of Transfiguration through the human nature of Christ.
And so it is precisely this crucial mistake that's made amongst the Catholic friends of ours that they think that this in some way will violate these basic metaphysical principles.
But in fact, we have a reverse system that we derive our theology first and our metaphysics second.
This is what allowed the church fathers to be pretty fluid with the way that they appropriated the philosophy of their day.
As the Zach Cuber book notes, the church fathers were able to, in some places, pull from Aristotelian logic texts, but for the most part, they utilized a lot of Neoplatonic argumentation, at least up until John Damascus, who then does use a lot more Aristotelian argumentation.
So what that shows is that for us, it's not a question of Aristotle versus Plato, but rather divine revelation, as Father Florovsky says, which comes first and foremost.
And that's why, for example, when Aquinas on De Veritate, when he talks about the section on divine simplicity, when he rejects John of Damascus's essence-energy argument, which shows, by the way, that John Damascus is actually making the same essence-energy arguments that I'm making, which is precisely why they were present in all the Cappadocians, why it was present in St. Cyril, and it's even present in St. Athanasius himself.
If you read Florovsky's essay on creation and creaturehood about the essence-energy distinction in St. Athanasius, even you'll notice that Aquinas' rejection has nothing to do with what the actual patristic teaching is.
In fact, he says, on the contrary, moreover, Rabbi Maimonides notes that the names of God do not signify intentions added to the substance of God, because every accident signifies an intention added to the substance of its subject.
Therefore, the foregoing names do not signify an accident in God.
We simply don't have the two-tiered metaphysical collapse structure that he has, which nobody in the first 700 years of the patristic teaching has either.
So, the attempt to categorize the energies as accidental or in some way parts or something like that was never an argument that I made, nor did any of the Eastern Church fathers make it.
And in fact, if you read the dissertation with Pyrrhus, which is the theology of St. Maximus that goes into the Confession of St. Sephronius, which is accepted at the Sixth Ecumenical Council, that whole treatise, it's about 100 pages, is a treatise utilizing all the same essence-energy arguments that I make against the monotheolite monophysite position that is accepted in the Confession of St. Sephronius at the Sixth Ecumenical Council.
And even Pope Agatho, in his letter, admits two wills and two energies in Christ.
And so, when Tim said that innergeia means something very different in the Bible, it's not metaphysical, he then goes on to give this elaborate ousiological story about what it's all really meaning, doing the very opposite of what I'm doing, which is looking at the text when it says that Moses walked up on the mountain and God's glory was shown to him.
His goodness says, and by the way, it's plural there.
The goodnesses of God are shown.
And yet, Jesus says in John 5, no one saw the Father at any time.
Well, it's not the energies that are manifesting in time and space.
It is the person of the Son, who is the face of the Father in time and space.
And it is his energies that are manifestation.
So he misunderstood, especially when he was talking about the angel, the Lord, who is obviously the person of Christ in time and space in these Theophanies.
So I think that the Theophanies really clinches the whole argument.
You see the devastation to the EO position when you look at scripture on the beatific vision.
In 1 John, it says, we shall see him as he is.
That would mean the divine essence at the end of time.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.
This is Matthew chapter 5, verse 8.
They shall see God, not the works of God or the energeas of God.
They will not see his energies.
They will see God himself.
This is the teleology of the good life.
This is what we're promised.
And they say otherwise.
They say we will never see God in his essence.
All we can ever see are the energeas of God, same as what we see on earth.
It's absurd.
If we never see God's essence, we never reach full union with him also.
So this is really, really important to draw out.
It's absolutely theologically and teleologically devastating.
And it's a fatalistic worldview.
Very, very important.
Now, when Jay was asking me about glory and he was spit-firing questions at me, glory is a created reality.
The way we experience it, the way we're talking about it, the way it's predicated analogically, it's glory in our soul, in our intellects, and our participation in it is created.
And therefore, the way we interact with God's glory, again, this is a virtual distinction because it involves the way that we receive it and interact with it in the mode of the receiver, us creatures.
It's, of course, has to be created.
A created glory has to interact with creatures.
As it exists in God, it is uncreated.
But we don't know glory from the side of God because glory from the side of God remains uncreated until the beatific vision.
The most important thing he was asking about the theophanies and Jay's claim, he'll say the theophanies are this easy, easy proof that passive potency can exist in God, which is a non-sequitur.
It's absurd.
It says there's a distinction between the inner unrevealed aspect of God, his essence, and what he reveals and manifests to us, his divine personal energies.
A theophany, like I said before, it's a created sign or instrument of uncreated presence.
The change is in the medium, not in God himself.
So this does not even begin to prove that God is not pure actor, that God can change, particularly.
I thought Jay was going to come on this first segment and distinguish, well, God can change because he has active power, active potentia.
Well, that's true, but he's the unmoved mover.
He can act on things without them being acted on him.
But he came on and defended God as passive potency.
And this just doesn't begin to be shown by the fact that the theophanies have taken place as signs and instruments that are created.
This is from 2nd Constantinople, but not if we take Jay at his word.
Worship, 2nd Constantinople, belongs to the divine nature alone.
So that's really important.
I mean, the most the heart of this issue is whether or not passive potencies can be allowed within God.
And this would simply destroy all of classical theism.
God would change.
He wouldn't be immutable.
He wouldn't be eternal.
This is anathematized at Nicaea if God had passive potency.
He wouldn't be simple.
He wouldn't be perfect.
I mean, I'm restating what I said in opening because it's so very basic and it's so devastating to what we believe about God if we believe that God, if we were to allow ourselves to believe that God had passive potency.
Yeah, I just want to address in this minute the fact that, I mean, he doesn't seem to be aware that the Theophanes are called God.
They're given the name Yahweh.
They're worshipped.
And they're pre-signifiers of the incarnation.
So he's literally saying that these signs and symbols can be worshipped.
So he believes that you can worship creatures.
Then he turns around and contradicts himself because he says that only divine nature can be worshipped.
Triad is worshipped, and it doesn't say only the divine nature is worshipped, but we worship God in triad.
That's the actual definition of the council.
It doesn't say only the divine nature.
So I think it's just, it's just kind of insane to me that how far removed from divine revelation that position actually is.
And again, as I said in Philippians 2, if God is a being that is reducible to pure act, then it's not possible for the self-emptying or the limiting to occur in the incarnation when the son, according to Philippians 2 in the Kenosis passage, willfully limits himself.
A being that is pure act, according to his definition, reducibly, would undergo change via Philippians 2, and we don't believe that.
You can actually still in the other topics if you'd like to, you can always address technically if you'd like to take a little bit of time to bring back some points.
I do want to remind you guys, we're going to take a break here in a second.
So if you're just joining right now in the live stream, we are in the middle of debating some of the core dogmas, theological concepts, depending on where you come from and what wording you like to use of orthodoxy and Catholicism in terms of the church itself, not the orthodoxy of religion, orthodoxy of faith or the gospel, but of the approach and of the church.
That being said, if you guys are sending super chats, I just want to remind you guys a couple things.
We have a few more people in here.
Mista also said that it's a little bit too much beyond him.
We also have some wind Titus, Wynn Hadrian.
We also have El Chemis said, depending on Gordon's performance tonight, might be Jay's third conversion to Catholicism and second denunciation of the Orthodox Church.
Curious to know which way the wind swayed him tonight.
We also have a few more that we'll read in a moment, but let's join and let's jump into a quick break.
We're taking a couple minute break here, just a reset.
They're going to reset their books, their notes, and we're going to come back just to make sure I have it correct, by the way, from you so that we don't make a mistake again.
For the next topic that you wanted to cover, we are able to get into the Christ did not establish a papacy, or did you want to go into the Holy Spirit?
All right, so we'll be back talking about that in just a moment, and we'll be starting opening statements with Timothy Gordon representing Catholicism.
We'll see you just a few moments.
Take a break and we'll be right back.
In the Rumble section, it just says, Imagine Elijah trying to process all this when he couldn't even get the sound started to start his live stream.
Absolutely fantastic.
All right, we got a great debate going on today directly between Jay Dyer and Timothy Gordon.
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I've been very sick.
I was in El Salvador shooting content, and then I ended up picking up a stomach bug from a taco stand.
I love the country, but don't eat pork from strangers in developing countries.
That's just a little tip for Tat there.
We're going to be jumping into our next topic today on the overarching discussion of Orthodox Orthodoxy is in the church itself and Catholicism as in the church and the dogma.
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All right.
We're going to jump into the topic here, specifically about the Holy Spirit.
And, you know, we are asking ourselves, does it or does it not hypostatically proceed from the Son?
So this is a very complex topic.
It's going to get intricate.
It is going to get absolutely incredibly, in many ways, incredibly technical.
And so again, I encourage you guys to please have your notes out and be ready to discuss.
Our guests have agreed to doing 10-minute opening statements, and they will have a minute bleed if they so choose.
So the second question tonight is nothing less than the unity of the Trinity.
Does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father alone or from both the Father and the Son together as one eternal source?
This is called the Filioque.
It means and the Son.
The Catholic position is that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the person of the Father through the person of the Son.
A brief historical note: there's a semantic dodge that happens with Orthodox.
The narrative proves how absurdly reactive the Orthodox position is against the Catholic position.
Early on, there are a couple of thinkers.
One is named Photius.
The other is Michael Serularius, who was the patriarch during the schism, who mistakenly thought that the Catholic Filioque meant a polyarchic generation of the divine essence, meaning that both the Father and the Son generate the essence as it comes to the Spirit, which has never been the Catholic position.
The Catholic position has always been monarchic.
The Father alone generates it.
Through the Son, it comes to the Holy Spirit.
So together, these thinkers who are separated by about 250 years, Photius and Serialius, together reduced the Eastern Orthodox position to the view for a time that the Spirit proceeded from the Son only economically or temporally.
By the time they realized their error in interpretation in the late 13th century, the Eastern Orthodox, they're already committed to schism.
And so even though they became willing to admit that the Spirit proceeded from the Son eternally, and this is an eternal relationship, they maintain some linguistic distance from the Catholic position, which is called hypostatic procession.
It means a procession from the person by use of nonsensical language like eternal manifestation, which is either a distinction without a difference from the Roman Catholic view, and we're the same all along, or else it's nonsensical.
Here, on this one topic of three, I'm very willing to be persuaded, but it seems just like a semantic dodge.
They don't want to have the Catholic view.
By the time the Eastern Orthodox realized that Photius in around 800 and Serialarius, around 250 years later, badly misunderstood the Filioque and created this whole stink, it seems they decided to employ the semantic dodge rather than admit the error of these two thinkers.
So it depends what's being said.
If the Father alone truly spirates the Spirit, then it becomes nonsensical.
It would deny that all the Father has belongs to the Son, which is a quote directly from Scripture, from John's gospel.
It severs the eternal relation of the Spirit to the Son, which, again, Jesus says, all that the Father has, I have.
In this sense, Scripture strongly supports Filioque, which is the Father gives the divine essence to the Holy Spirit through the Son.
The Spirit is called the Spirit of the Son in Galatians 4, verse 6, in Romans chapter 8, verse 9.
Christ breathes the Spirit in John chapter 20, verse 22.
This is an image of external procession.
I think they'll say it's strictly economic, but he's breathing the spirit and it's an eternal relation.
When Jesus says, all that the Father has is mine, John chapter 16, verse 15, nothing is excluded from the Son.
The river of life in the final book of the Bible, Revelation 22, verse 1, the river of life flows from the throne of the Father and the Lamb.
This has only one possible meaning that I can construe.
Most condemningly, and there is a lot of equivocal language here.
And again, I think there's the least difference between our two positions of all these three topics by far.
I would say that the Eastern Orthodox thinkers or Eastern thinkers of the first millennium, many of them largely support it.
Cyril of Alexandria says Spirit is from God in the Son and through the Son.
That's an Eastern thinker.
St. Maximus the Confessor says, outright, the Latins are correct.
They mean from the Father, through the Son.
St. Basil and Gregory of Nyssa both say almost identically, all God's works are from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit.
St. John Damascene gives an amazing image for all of anybody out there that's trying to think about it.
This is an amazing image, and it captures both the medium and the substance of the way that I believe the Filioque works.
He says the Father is the source, the Son is a river, the Holy Spirit is a lake.
The Spirit, quote, proceeds from the Father and rests in the Son.
Saint Gregory of Nyssa writes, Every operation which extends from God to creation has its origin from the Father, proceeds through the Son, and is perfected in the Holy Spirit.
This is very, very close, very close to our view.
None of these views, because of the abstrusity of the topic, are going to be identical, particularly in the early church, but it's very close to what we're saying, a hypostatic procession, a procession of the Father through the person of the Son to the Spirit.
But still, only the Spirit only gets the divine essence from one source.
That source is the Father alone through Jesus, as a reminder.
Athanasius says the Holy Spirit has to the Son the same proper relation as we have known the Son to have to the Father.
So a nice relation of proportion.
The Holy Spirit is to the Son as the Son is to the Father.
Gregory Nazienza said, If there ever was a time that the Father was not, the Son was not.
If ever there was a time when the Son was not, then the Holy Spirit was not showing eternality through temporality.
And Saint Epiphanius of Salamis says, The Spirit is from the Father indeed, but he is not without the Son.
For if the Spirit is of the Father, he is also of the Son.
For the Son says, He will receive from me.
Ecumenical councils support this.
It was not crystal clear until the Fourth Lateran Council.
The Spirit receives equally from both.
Leones 2, which takes place, is supposed to be the reunion council, the first reunion council in 1274, from the Father and the Son, as from one principle, one spiration.
There's equivocation on whether or not there's one principle at times.
There is just one principle, one spiration through the Son.
Florence, in 1439, which actually was the reunion council, the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church did unify at the Florence Council, where the Orthodox position, 31 out of 33 delegates, said, You are right on Filioque and on the papacy.
Says spirit eternally from both, one principle, one spiration.
Now, scripturally, the Spirit is sent by both the Father and the Son in John chapter 14, verse 26, and in John chapter 16, verse 7.
Logically speaking, this holds.
If the Son cannot spirate, he is less than the Father, which is a semi-Arianist error.
Unity requires it as well.
Filioque preserves the Trinity's unity.
Denying it divides the Father and the Son.
So I would say this: that you have to take this historical look at the Filioque, one, because it's so dense, but also because the historical account is really, really important.
It seems that by the time the Orthodox realized we weren't, we Catholics did not, the Latins didn't have the position on the Filioque that they were attributing to us, they did not want to admit that the position had been correct all along.
So, until this misunderstanding about what Western fathers meant began, the Eastern Fathers were comfortable with eternal relations between the Spirit and the Son.
It's called the Athanasian model, after all.
And Athanasius is an Eastern father.
This is the Eastern formulation of the hypostatic procession, though they don't use the term hypostatic.
In the sixth century, the formulation begins getting put into the Western non-Roman creeds, which makes the, I guess, East feel threatened.
There's a lot of natural tension at the time.
In 803, Charlemagne enthusiastically adds it to the Creed.
Frankish priests at the time say the Creed this way in the Holy Land.
And then in 869, this important date, Photius of Constantinople says the Creed is heretical.
He thinks that it means the Holy Spirit's essence in the Creed comes from two sources.
This is just wrong.
It's an embarrassment.
He thought that the Catholic position was one of polyarchia.
And it's probably why we're disagreeing about this today, is because there's an error made and a misinterpretation of the Catholic position that's factual with no account ever given for it by Photius or his people.
He thinks it means the Holy Spirit's essence in the Creed comes from two sources to repeat for people out there, for those whom this is new.
Photius says the Spirit has no eternal relation with the Son, which is not, I believe, the Orthodox position today, even.
Only a historical temporal economic relation is what Photius was willing to say because he knew he didn't want that Catholic view.
In 1054, Michael Serularius revitalizes Photius's overreacting misunderstanding of the Filioque.
Going over in the chat, you know, remember, you guys, at any point, if you think someone's cooking, it's always one in the chat for Jay, two in the chat for Tim.
We're going to go over to Jay Dyer at the Orthodox position on the Filioque.
If I'm even pronouncing that right, I used to pronounce that differently.
So sorry for that, but go ahead and give us your opening statement.
So the Orthodox doctrine is again going to flow out of the teaching of the Cappadocians and particularly Constantinople one, which is the second ecumenical council.
Keep that in mind because Second Ecumenical Council was called, closed, and confirmed outside of communion with Rome at the time.
St. Miletius of Antioch was the presiding bishop.
He died outside of communion with Rome.
And a few years later, Rome eventually accepts that council as the dogmatic definition of the church.
Supposedly, I want to, before we get into this, well, I'll just start here.
In the Orthodox view, following the Cappadocians, there's a famous dictum of Gregor Nautianzius: everything that the father has, the son has likewise, except the causality.
You'll notice that nowhere in that discussion did you hear a clear explanation of what the father is as the sole archae.
The father is the principal fount, the source, and the unoriginate beginning point of the triad.
Thus, his hypostatic property in Orthodox theology is precisely to be picked out as cause.
That's why, if you heard in the first part, he made the huge mistake of calling the divine essence a say or autotheos or of himself or of itself.
It is the father alone, according to the Cappadocian and Constantinople I teaching, that is God of himself.
Why?
Because the Son and the Spirit have their origin in the Father, and particularly the Father's essence.
The Son and the Spirit thus do not possess and cannot possess the Father's hypostatic property.
And so Tim doesn't seem to be aware of what the Creed teaches when the Creed says, I believe in one God, the divine essence?
Oh, no, it's actually one God, the Father.
Tim appealed to monotheism, apparently not being aware of the fact that the word monotheism is a 1600s term.
Maybe he's not aware of the term that was used explicitly in the Creed and amongst all the church fathers, East and West, for many years, and that is the monarchia in the Greek.
The monarchia of the father is the beginning point of Orthodox Trinitarian theology, particularly Exodus 3, 14, when God says, I am, 14, 15, I am that I am.
As St. Maximus, excuse me, as St. Gregory Palamus says, he did not say, I am essence.
He said, I am, as in I am he.
Thus, the father is the beginning point of all Trinitarian theology.
And contrary to Latin metaphysical essentialism, we don't begin our Trinitarian theology with the divine essence.
The father's hypostatic property, since it's what picks him out as the one God, as the cause, the fountain, the source, the arche, this is the Cappadocian 101 teaching, cannot be shared.
As the Cappadocians noted, whatever is a hypostatic property is unique to and individuates that person.
Whatever is not is common to all three.
Otherwise, there would be some form of subordinationism in the triad if there were to be a power, an attribute, a property that two persons have that one lacks.
You'll notice when Tim gave his explanations, he explicitly affirmed the very thing that Photius pointed out.
He says he's read Photius.
It doesn't sound like he's actually read it to me.
I think he's read some Roman Catholic websites that cite it.
I've read it actually multiple times through it, so I know the mystagogy very well.
He actually talks about the manifestation of the spirit in the mystagogy, which Tim says they don't talk about.
They missed this and had to make it up later.
But wait a minute.
Tim said, if one cannot spirate, or if the, he said that if one of them does not spirate, they're less.
Thus the son has to be able to spirate.
Tim, maybe you didn't realize that in the mystagogy, that's actually an argument that Photius makes that the spirit doesn't spirate or generate.
So by your own argumentation, if the son is not equal to the father because he doesn't spirate, then the spirit has to also spirate.
But nobody teaches the spirit spirates or generates a person.
So by your own argument, you subordinated the spirit, which is the very argument that's made in the mystagogy, which tells me that you didn't actually read the mystagogy.
So the Constantinople I is the dogma of the Roman Catholic Church or not?
Because it says you have to follow the Cappadocian teaching on the Father as the sole cause, S-O-L-E cause.
Now, isn't it interesting that Roman Catholic scholars themselves have discussed, by the way, Basil talking about eternal manifestation in Edward Sashinsky's famous book, The Filioque, which is one of the more recent historical academic texts on that.
Oh, but wait a minute.
Did you know it turns out that Sashinsky actually went from Euniatism to Orthodoxy?
Why is that?
Well, he wrote this book about the Filioque and he realized that turns out Basil teaches eternal manifestation on page 39, which, oh, you thought that was made up in the Middle Ages, even though it's in St. Basil.
Oh, but it's also in the Mystagogy in book two.
So you're acclaiming all of these things about what the Orthodox position is and where it made all these mistakes.
You don't have any knowledge or familiarity with Constantinople I and its mandate that you have to follow the Cappadocian teaching on the father as the sole cause.
And in fact, you give to the son the very thing that picks out the father, which thus creates a dyad, as Photius argued in the mystagogy originally.
Now, to come back to this notion of the monarchia, again, in John 15, 26, Jesus illustrates our position when he says, when the helper comes, who I will send to you from the father, that's economia, the spirit of truth who proceeds from the father.
Procession is explicitly said by Jesus to be from the Father.
Now, Tim likes to say, ah, but I can go to Romans and I can go to Galatians 4 and I can find economia passages where Jesus sends the Holy Spirit or it's called the Spirit of the Son.
And I can read that back into the eternal Trinitarian relations.
No, you cannot.
And I'll give you an example.
In Isaiah 48, we're told that the Spirit sends the Son.
Is that going to be read back into the eternal relations in Isaiah 48?
No.
And this is a classic passage that Orthodox church fathers have cited for centuries to show that you cannot arbitrarily say that the economic relations and passages can be read into the eternal triad.
It only takes one example to show why you can't do that.
Thomas Aquinas said, persons are relations or persona at relatio.
No, a person is not a relation.
A person is a subject.
And this is precisely why his essentialist Trinitarian theology goes wrong.
We don't begin our Trinitarian theology with the divine essence, but rather with the person of the Father.
And that's what all the Orthodox church fathers teach.
That's why we continue to uphold the Father as the sole arce.
Beyond that, I want to talk about his quotation, which surprised me.
He cited Gregor of Nyssa, and I don't think he even understood what he was citing, because again, he's pulling from quote mines, where he said that every operation is from the Father, through the Son, and in the Holy Spirit.
He's apparently not aware that this is the bazillion dictum that every Orthodox person knows very clearly from the liturgy, which is about the movement of the energies.
If you'd actually read Nyssa in that section, you would know that he's talking about the energetic procession, which is the same thing as energetic manifestation.
But you didn't know that.
You just saw a quote mine that you thought would help to prove filioque when it's actually the opposite of filioque.
So I'm glad that you cited this because energetic manifestation or energetic procession is very crucial to our doctrine.
The reason that we don't believe in the Latin definition is precisely because they don't understand that the movement of the energies is necessarily connected to rejecting the person of the Son as a spirator of the spirit.
So no, he's only shown that he didn't understand any of what he read, if he even read it.
Furthermore, the letter to Marinus that he quoted doesn't say the Latins are correct.
What Maximus says in the letter to Marinus is that at this point, it's unclear what they mean.
We ought to just leave it up to an open question.
And it's not solved until 1274 at the Council of Lions.
So this happens many centuries later.
And we would agree that at that time, it was not exactly clear because if you read St. Hilary of Poitier, guess what?
He doesn't teach filioque, as Sushinsky admits.
He teaches that the Father is the sole monarchia in the Godhead.
All that the Father has belongs to the Son is correct, except not paternity or causality.
So it is not the case exclusively that all that the Father has belongs to the Son.
And anybody who knows Orthodox theology would know that.
There's no semantic dodge, as we said.
Podius doesn't teach anything different.
In fact, eternal manifestation, if you'd read some of this from people on our side, is found in the Cappadocians.
So Where do we get the idea that this both essence energy teaching, which is directly connected to the person of the father as the sole monarchia in the Godhead?
Notice the Cappadocians don't teach, quote, monotheism.
They never talk about monotheism.
If in anyone, and by the way, I sent all this information to him.
I told him to listen to Dr. Beaubranson's lectures on the monarchy of the father, because he would have been able to see that.
In On the Holy Spirit of St. Basil, Letter 38 of St. Basil and Nyssa against Eunomius by both Basil and against Eunomius by Nyssa, theological orations, particularly oration 25, we have in those statements, and as well as the decree of Constantinople 1, that you must follow the Cappadocian view that the one God is the Father.
There is no identification of the one God as the essence, as is taught in Augustinian theology.
It just so happens that in Tim's mind, in the Roman Catholic mind, all the world accepted Augustinian theology as Trinitarian, but they're totally ignorant of Constantinople I'm Cappadocian theology.
And guess what?
Augustine's not taught.
Theology is not taught at Constantinople I. All right.
I would like to hear ones in the chat if you think for the opening statement.
One's in the chat, do you feel like there was a stronger, I shouldn't say feel, do you confidently know before your family and God that Jay Dyer had a stronger argument?
And two, do you confidently know between your family and God that Timothy Gordon had a stronger argument?
As you're writing that down, let's go ahead and we will jump in to our rebuttals.
Are you prepared and ready to rebuttal?
All right, Timothy, I'm going to go ahead and reset the clock.
You're going to have five minutes.
Give me one moment here to adjust and set the clock.
One of Jay's tricks that everyone has to look out for is he'll just say, well, this is Cappadocia.
Have you read Cappadocian theology?
Well, according to Catholic theology, the father is the only autotheos.
According to Filioque, Father is the only autotheos.
The arce is the fathers.
According to Catholic theology, according to the filioque, the arce is the fathers.
Let me say that.
And it's not subordinationist to say filioque because they're all the essence.
And because of the relations of opposition between the three persons of the Trinity, they're all the essence.
And because of passive spiration of the Holy Spirit.
Now, you can quibble with scripture if you want when Jesus says in John's gospel that all the father has, I have as well.
Evidently, Jay didn't read that.
All the father has, I have as well.
And he's saying that it's subordinationism for me to read that scripture and to say, okay, two of the persons can have active spiration and one of the persons, the Holy Spirit, can have something called passive spiration.
But that's the fact.
The father is the autotheos.
That's the arce.
Retards in chat are probably saying something like, oh, this is Orthodox.
No, this is Catholic.
This is Catholic as well.
Of course, the Arce is the Fathers.
For the retards out there, only the divine, the divine essence only comes in an ungenerated way to the father.
Now, the son is the only begotten.
He gets it from the father.
So, we'll say it again.
The Holy Spirit gets it from the source, from the archae of the fathers, through the son.
This is not subordinationism.
There's spiration happening actively from the father and the son and the spirit.
Now, I wouldn't be making this bold claim, and neither would the Roman Catholic Church via Filioque, if not for passages where Jesus affirms explicitly, over against Jay Dyer and anyone else who wants to cite, that everything he has comes from the Father.
Explicitly.
So, this is Saint Hilary of Poitiers.
Concerning the Holy Spirit, he is of the Father and the Son, his sources.
I'll say that again.
He is of the Father and the Son, his sources, where he is not without origin.
He is from the Father and the Son.
This is about as explicit as you can be.
And Jay is saying, just because I don't know.
He's accused me of quote mining.
Let me read it again.
The Holy Spirit is from the Father and the Son, his sources.
Not to say that the Father is not the only autotheos, but the sources still can be the Father with the Son, where he's not without origin.
He is from the Father and the Son.
If ever there was a time the Father was not, then the Son was not.
If ever there was a time when the Son was not, then the Holy Spirit was not.
I don't know how this is merely an economic relation.
This is Gregory Nazianzis.
And it seems really strange to be talking about Nazianzas as if this is not some sort of eternal relation drawn between the Father and the Son.
Tell me where I'm wrong.
Tell me where I'm wrong if this is eternal or not.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think Tim understands half of what he's talking about because if he wanted to pull out the Hillary quote, first of all, Sushinsky admits on that section on Hillary that this isn't really a good argument for anything to do with the Filioque.
For one, Tim may not have heard or may not be aware what the Lions in Florence definition actually is, but he tried to pull Hillary to say his sources.
Are you aware that Lions and Florence teach that the Father together are a single source of spiration in your view?
There's no dual sources.
It's not the Father and the Son.
So either Hillary got it wrong or that's not a text that proves eternal hypostatic double procession.
The texts in scripture, as I pointed out, don't necessarily prove what he thinks they prove.
Again, because I pointed out in Isaiah 48, the text says that the Spirit sent the Son, and that's a messianic prophecy section.
Nobody believes that the Holy Spirit is the sender of the Son if you read that economia back into the eternal relations.
Again, he didn't address the argument I made about the power of generating and spirating.
He said that the Son must have this because it shows also that he's equal to the Father because he has everything that the Father has.
Again, he's not realizing that when I'm citing the Cappadocians, I'm not just citing church fathers because I'm citing them as random opinions.
I'm citing what the decree of Constantinople I says, which is that you must follow the Cappadocian dictum and the Cappadocian interpretation of the Niceno-Constantopolitan Creed.
When the Creed from that council, which was an edited version of Nicaea I's Creed, says, I believe in one God, the Father, it is identifying it as the Cappadocians all teach, the sole source or archae or monarchia of the father.
It is not the Latin essentialist definitions of Thomas Aquinas and later Roman Catholic councils, which by the way refutes what he said the first time around when he tried to make the church fathers into Aristotomists.
Again, they're not.
Furthermore, he said in his opening statement that a seity, God is, when he was cashing out his divine simplicity actus purist doctrine, a seity.
Aseity means self-existence or of oneself.
That's what autopheos is.
So now he's attributing the very thing that he argued in his opening statement about the divine essence to the person of the father, showing that he confuses essential properties with hypostatic properties.
But what do we expect from people who think that relations of opposition is a way to cash out something in the triad?
Nobody in the church and the church fathers teaches a relation of oppositions because as Yves Kongar says in his famous essay on St. Augustine and the Cappadocians, that's an Augustinian idea that's developed in Thomas Aquinas.
It doesn't exist in the first thousand years of the church.
And again, because he actually thinks that relations are persons, because that's the Thomistic teaching.
No, a relation is something that a subject has, right?
A subject has a relation.
A relation is a predicate.
Subjects, persons, he, the father.
So he doesn't understand these basic distinctions that the Eastern Church Fathers make, which he would have done a lot better to actually have read these Eastern Church Fathers or to actually read maybe some of the academic texts from his own theologians about the Filioque, admitting that a lot of these quote minds don't actually work to prove anything and actually work against his case because again, he wants to downplay his own church's dogmatic definition.
And he's patently totally false.
I've got scholars here right next to me for years have been talking about the fact that Constantinople I closed outside of communion with Rome.
St. Miletius of Antioch was in schism with Rome.
He doesn't even know that.
And so he just says Google it, which again shows he's deficient, totally deficient in this area.
The Miletian schism is famous.
Basil writes about it in his letters.
And in fact, Basil says Rome is absolutely worthless.
They contribute nothing to helping the church in the East.
They're a waste of time.
Doesn't sound like papal supremacy to me.
But what do you expect from people who don't know what the Cappadocians taught?
They just think that they do because, well, I can read it all through Thomas Aquinas.
Thomas Aquinas, when he argues against the Filioque in contra against the errors of the Greeks, I've got the recently printed book here.
Guess what?
It's like 60, 70% forgeries.
So shout out to George, our good buddy.
And he just published a two-volume errors of the Latins text.
The second volume is all about forgeries.
And one of those key forgeries is against the errors of the Greeks.
Thomas Aquinas, and it's entirely possible that Aquinas legitimately believed that all the sources he was reading were authentic.
But now we know, and it's now admitted in the scholarship, the Vatican admits it as well.
I've got the Alexandria document, which, by the way, I don't know if Tim ever had the time to read his own Vatican statement about the East, both in Chieti and here.
It admits most of the positions that I'm arguing for.
Okay, so like I said, let's get some ones and twos in the chats.
I want to read a couple of the super chats that we have here as we get into the cross-examination, giving them just a second to get their questions in line of what they want to talk about.
Reminding you that, you know, Buddy PPL said Tim has been forsaken.
Everyone got to donate to the stream or y'all are Yacubians, like I mentioned.
After that, Tango Ocho said, let's go.
I also have a couple of critics, late night tweakers, a critic of Tim sent $2, said, I feel embarrassed for Tim now.
However, however, let's talk.
God said, FYI, all polytheist idols are created.
Tim might be a polytheist, but others are saying Jay Dyer ain't no Yucubian.
You're not Yucubian.
Okay.
Servant Nectoria said, Jay, keep it up.
RCC is a joke.
So I'm sure that's a Roman Catholic church.
Maximus said, what I say has nothing to do with Jay.
Also, we have Let's Talk God said, question for Tim.
Heaven is created.
How can you see the divine essence in heaven in the beatific vision, aka creation?
I don't think we're going to answer those questions right now.
Don Vischel said, this is all retarded.
Splitting hairs over divine theosophy leads no one to Christ.
We also have Real Carl says, no matter what you think, who you think is winning, we are all better off knowing this conversation is drowning out James White's gay lisp.
Also, we have Machine Santo for $2.
And they said, Jay looking 20 years older, but he's defined cooking.
I've only been doing this for like about a decade now.
When I first started, I looked like a teenager.
Like, you know, look like a nice little kid.
And now I'm like, nearly look dead.
War Thunderer said $30.
Said Tim was talking about potential equivocations in the start, yet his arguments hinges on them.
He sneaks in, quote, denying actus purus, passive potency, as well as sneaking in ortho real distinction, scholastic major real distinction.
We also had Dork Jansen said, please ask Mobs to ban anyone in the chat who says that we should act more civil in chat.
Yeah, it's fine.
You guys can go to war.
And then True41C said, Tim said, we can't experience any uncreatedness of God as creatures.
So how does the incarnation work?
I'll read two more here before we move on to the cross-examination.
Cult of modernism said, and quote, we deny the Son is either a cause or a father.
But although we do not say that the Spirit is from the Son, we call him the Spirit of the Son.
And he quotes there, and I think that's perhaps probably Latin, and I'm not going to try to read it.
Machine Santo also said, I wonder if he believes the Son is begotten by the Son because the Son does what he sees the Father doing.
And one more quote from the same cult that was the second part.
He said, the Holy Spirit is a spirit of the Father as proceeding from the Father and is the Son's Spirit, not as originating from him, but as proceeding through him from the Father.
The Father alone is cause.
All right, you guys can keep sending your super chats.
We'll be reading some more after this.
We're going to jump into the cross-examination.
If you're just joining the stream here, it's where they can ask questions and then interrupt.
This is a very strict format that they've agreed to, and a lot of you are enjoying it.
With a few thousand of you watching across the platforms, I appreciate you guys watching.
Don't forget to like, share, and subscribe to this video.
Let's begin here with Timothy Gordon representing the Catholic position.
Is there a single Eastern thinker between Photius and Blackernae who embraces the eternal procession or are they all just believers in economic procession for those 400 years?
Can you name a single thinker between 800 and 1250 who says that there is an eternal procession from the Son to the Holy Spirit?
I'm saying it's the point to where I feel like we've gone in a complete circle.
I'm going to say completely unbiased here and say we can't come to a conclusion when we're asking questions to questions, so we will just leave it there.
Absolute answer is when we say active spiration, we mean that the father causes the Holy Spirit through the hypostases of the Son, the hypostasis of the Son.
These are active because the Son aids.
The view of John Damascene is literally source, father, river, son, lake, spirit.
So he's saying, well, what does the spirit do?
I'm saying, well, in Roman Catholic theology, which is perfectly, Philiokaway is perfectly square with this analogy, with this analogy, that we would say that that is what's called a passive spiration.
The question, as he asked many times, as he was asked many times, was when you said that the spirit is a cause, which you affirmed multiple times, I asked you cause of who or what, and you had no answer.
Because of the statements here, we're not going to go very long on the closing.
I want to give it basically like a, we'll basically call it a second rebuttal, but a closing, because there's a miscommunication or an intentional dodging, but I am going to stay completely unbiased in the moderation.
Say, I'll leave the chat up.
I want to know from you guys in the chat.
We'll switch it up.
The ones in the chat, if you think that Timothy answered the question and that he answered it according to what he said.
Twos in the chat, if you think he's lying slash dodging, I guess you could use different words depending on what you think and agree with Jay.
And someone's like, I see the chat of you accusing me of agreeing with both of them.
I'm neither Orthodox nor Catholic.
So you guys can all hate me because I'm neither and I don't have a I just articulated what the view is.
Let me come here and ask a question because from somebody who's not as well versed in the nuances of this debate between Catholics and Orthodox, it would just in a structural sense seem like perhaps you're avoiding answering something directly to avoid being seen as crazy or to like not be seen as in saint colony.
If somebody, you know, asks someone like, oh, are you, you know, a good question, like, are you a white supremacist or something?
And you know, it's sort of like a question if you answer it.
You're kind of screwed either way.
If you say no, people are going to get mad at you because you don't like your race.
If you say yes, they're going to call you an extremist and try to disqualify you.
So it comes across like there's a little bit of that moving around.
I'm saying, to me, I'm saying I'm getting the dancing.
I'm not saying that's lying.
I'm singing that like maybe there's a more direct way you want to answer it that you're not saying he's saying, I don't know what he's saying you're lying about because I don't understand because he's changing what it's saying.
So no, I just said that we could take the conclusion as a little extension to see where if you guys could further explain your position only because as someone who's trying to understand your position.
As trying to understand the position, I'm thinking about the audience.
And if you were, let's say, a prot sitting here and you're not familiar with the consequential dogma from Catholics or from Orthodox, I'm sitting here trying to actually understand what you're saying.
And I am not accusing you of lying.
I'm actually accusing you of doing nothing.
But I'm saying to me, I'm like, okay, I wouldn't know if you were jumping around from what he's saying.
And by the way, to the people saying, I'm trying to understand, because if you don't know, I'm just saying in a very basic sense, I'm like you guys.
Part of the reason why we're hosting this debate, and I think it's very important, is personally, I'm very interested in understanding what church I should go to, whether Catholic is a church to join and to become a part of, whether Orthodox is, and a lot of you guys are searching this too.
I don't think a lot of you guys who are Catholic or Orthodox may be wanting to revert or convert whatever you want to call it in your language into the other order.
But for myself, because just because I started attending a Catholic church, I've been to an Orthodox church before too for a while.
I've gone to a Catholic church, and sometimes they aren't always very open about exactly what they believe.
There's a lot of disagreements.
So kind of the point of this is as someone like myself to sit here and try to make sure if he's saying he's lying, I'm just asking what he's saying he's lying about.
Is he saying about what he said previously or about the Catholic's position?
Because I'm interested to find out to make sure I'm getting the correct position.
And if that's the correct position, I appreciate it.
And your position.
However, I do think in a quick, in a quick summary, like if you could do it in like one paragraph, just what is the official Orthodox position on this on this topic?
Yeah, yeah, I'm just saying, but an end summary and make sure you restate it just for people who are new to the stream or who got lost in the argument and the tit for tat.
What was it?
And if you could finish, and then we'll have you close as well.
Yeah, so essentially what I'm taking issue with is the idea that he said if the son does not spirate, he's subordinated because he's not having all that the father has.
So I ask, does the spirit spirate?
And excuse me, yeah.
And then he says he's a passive, he passively spirates.
I say, who does he spirate?
He says he is spirated passively because he receives spiration.
So I understand, you know, he's got a lot going on.
He's busy.
I don't fault him for not reading the stuff that I send, but it's been multiple years where I've linked and sent him these texts, which he hasn't read.
If he had read the mystagogy, he would know that one of the first arguments in the mystagogy, and it's said it multiple times over, it's also repeated in the Apodictic Treatise of St. Gregory Palamas, by the way, centuries later.
The same argument that to say that there's subordination because the son doesn't have the power of causality becomes a problem because the Holy Spirit now lacks that causality.
To talk about passive spiration and to equate that with to equate being spirated with spiration is just so silly.
I don't even know how to respond to it.
It's fundamentally stupid because spiration is what picks out the Holy Spirit.
Generation is what picks out the Son.
They're called hypostatic properties.
And for Orthodox, we relate them to the Father in relations of origin.
That's the Orthodox teaching of the Cappadocians.
It's restated.
You want to read Lossky's paper called The Procession of the Holy Spirit in Orthodox Doctrine.
You can also read a Roman Catholic that talks about this and admits all my points by Eves Kongar.
He wrote an essay about Augustine, relations of opposition in the Cappadocians, which also makes all of my arguments.
Again, our position is that the Father is the one true God.
He is the sole archae, the monarchia.
It is the teaching of Constantinople one.
The Cappadocians don't teach the filioque precisely because causality is the hypostatic property that is not communicable.
And again, the argument that the son becomes the cause imbalances the trinity and creates a dyad because no one teaches that the spirit is a cause.
And so he lacks causality in both the Roman Catholic and the Orthodox model.
But we're consistent because we don't give the father's unique hypostatic marker and property of being cause to the son.
And just to ask you simply, do you feel like he dictated correctly, or at least to what you know to be the actual position of the Orthodox Church on this issue?
One of Jay's tricks is he'll laugh at the Roman Catholic position, which he knows what it is, and then he'll ask for a term to be identified like passive spiration, as if it's being made up ex nihilo or something.
And he'll say, well, well, how does that relate to Orthodox theology?
And I was saying, well, it doesn't.
That's the tension that exists between the Orthodox and the Catholic position.
And he laughs.
And then all of the bots in chat say, oh, okay, good score.
I would go back to the heart of Trinitarian theology for Roman Catholics, which really has to do with Actus Purus.
The fact that the consubstantial Father, Son, Holy Spirit relate to one another oppositionally.
And this is within the substance.
He was making fun of the term ousiological.
That just means they all relate within one substance.
There's nothing uncreated outside the substance of God, the divine essence, Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
They relate to each other with a distinction, a distinction of operation.
Jay had this infamous debate with Christian Wagner, where Christian Wagner was getting him to admit, essentially, that he didn't understand what a relation of opposition was.
I brought this up today, and I was saying, okay, have you ever played paper, scissors, rock?
The reason I did that is because paper, scissors, rock proves that conceptually, at least, at the very least, conceptually, if you're trying to win paper, scissors, rock, triadic relations of opposition do exist.
Just because there are three couplets doesn't mean that there is not individual tension or opposition or a dichotomy between A, B, B, C, and C A.
This is absolutely nonsensical.
It was an embarrassment that Jay said this.
And I was saying, okay, that's fine.
When I brought this up with him earlier, he said, well, prove that that exists for the Trinity.
I'm just proving that it's conceptually possible.
So it's an embarrassment to say that to deny that the relations of opposition, which characterize the Catholic view of the Trinity, which work very, very well, because then we don't end up having to posit an uncreated energy outside of God that is not created, not a creature, but is really distinct from God, which is a nonsense term.
It means two gods or more, or infinite gods, as Jay said earlier.
We avoid this problem by saying we allow distinctions within the substance of God.
We don't allow distinctions within God that would be concerning or about another essence, an essence energies distinction.
And this all boils down to relations of opposition, which Jay, I still am not clear on his position, whether or not whether or not relations of opposition can exist within a threesome, within a triad.
We can either A, we can continue arguing this, but then we're going to have to skip the third topic altogether, do the timing of the debate and what's going on here.
Okay, so then if that's, then we're going to agree to disagree on what that is, and we can talk about things later, but I think we're going to leave it there.
Okay, we're going to take a couple minute break here.
Before we do that, I want to read a couple more of the super chats.
Remember, if you guys are leaving super chats, we'll read them as we go along.
We appreciate you guys doing so.
We have Jay Betlier said, Tim, I'm sure you're a decent guy, but you're a suit.
Late night tweaker said, threesome is crazy.
It's nothing said in regards to spiration when you sprain an ankle from the force of a ball with the force sprain, with the ball sprain, with the ankle sprain, active and passive spiration.
Josh also said, Filoque, is that how you spell it?
Says the spirit proceeds from the father and the son, but what he's arguing is from the father through the son.
That's not what the filioque says, though.
Lame semantic argument from RCs.
Uh, Maximus Desimus says, someone give Tim a pillow to bite on because Jay is going in dry.
That is a weird statement.
Um, Tia Gawanovsky said, if you can prove the Holy Ghost is from the division, you win the debate because Christ says otherwise when accused of expelling the demons in the name of the prince of the demons, he says that Satan is divided against Satan.
St. Augustine says, spirate means to breathe.
The spirit breathes on whom he wills.
Y'all are fools.
Everyone lost, apparently.
True41C said, found out I was the father today because I was fathered.
Got to find my non-existent child now.
Late Night Two Girls said, I really like the mod.
By the way, votes J 74%, RC is 26%.
Orthodox is an extreme minority in the West, and we won.
This will carry far and wide.
Thank God.
Maximus Desmos also said, I'm interested in telling us what his pope did in Chile.
We also have Quantra Merit said, shout out to Tim for restoring masculinity to Christianity and recentering the importance of patriarchy in the family.
He's a good dude.
We also have Ianasius said, Gordon, you said the spirit is a passive spirator.
Does this passivity imply a potentiality in the Holy Spirit?
I just want to say that for those that are interested in what I'm talking about, because it can't be cashed out in two-second answers, I shared two things on my Twitter.
They can check those two articles out, what I'm talking about.
Yeah, we did have to moderate some very gross stuff in the chat.
So let's avoid the derogatory sexual nature of comments.
Unless, of course, you're on our locals.
You can sign up there on locals at elijahshaf.locals.com.
If you want to support this channel as we grow and you want to join, we usually do an extra segment every single time as well on here.
And shout out to Andrew Wilson of the Crucible.
We'd love to have you on for some debates.
Again, stick around because Monday we're also having Joel Webbin on, who's representing the Protestant position.
He may be, we're trying to set up a debate between him and Adam Green and some of the guys who say that Jesus is a Jewish myth and that basically he's irrelevant.
And so we're trying to set that up.
So I encourage you to check that out.
Again, go to ElijahSchaefer.locals.com.
I don't know if we have the thing to pop up, but it would be good if you guys could meet us there.
In a second, yeah, you can find that the links on the screen and the description.
We'll be back talking about the papacy, apostolic succession.
This is an interesting question of mine.
I'm just going to say this.
Before I come out and say this, from my history and what I've known about the papacy, this is the The issue that is most confusing to me because of that one time when some pope got excommunicated, the other pope came in, and he conquered that pope.
And who's the pope?
And how do we even know who's the real pope?
Do we need to follow the pope?
Is the Vatican corrupted?
There's a lot of things we need to discuss.
We'll be right back.
Don't go anywhere.
Like, share, and subscribe to this channel.
We are on Rumble, YouTube, Facebook, and on X. We'll be right back.
I've decided to take a different approach to my life and not go to Israel and not kiss the wall because I'm not Jewish.
I am a once practicing evangelical, raised that way, turned atheist, then returned back to the church to Pentecostalism and then fell back into sin, into vice.
And then went back to the church to try to get help.
And it was an absolute horrific show of retarded people, is all I can say.
And I became very disillusioned.
And then as I've gotten older, man, people were talking about Jay aging.
You and I have the same comments.
Like, you guys are getting old.
Unfortunately, we are.
And that's what happens.
I don't know what our excuse is since the guy with the most kids in the room looks the youngest.
So that's the problem.
But in the end, what I'm saying is that it's come down to the fact of like these questions.
You know, the Bible talks about not getting lost in like arguments just about words and names, right?
So we don't want to be arguing for the sake of arguing.
A lot of people, especially in Reformed theology, even in this Catholic Orthodox debate, can just argue for the sake of arguing.
But I don't think there's anything wrong with searching.
And it's part of the masculine spirit to fight, right?
And to come against falsehood and things that are untrue.
And so in the spirit of not debate, but in the spirit of truth, right?
Spirit of God, this is an inspirational point to have these guys out here to really seek the truth.
And we were talking a bit off camera as they're just getting their notes together, preparing for our topic three for a second.
I just wanted to inform you guys, you know, that we were, they're kind of explaining to me where they misunderstood or where I was misunderstanding them, I should say, and the differences of what they believed about the Trinity.
It's very fascinating, and especially as someone who's not from either discipline of theology or orthodoxy, and not as the church itself, but the orthodox belief of our very, very precious faith of Christianity.
It is nice.
And it's a reminder, just to remind you guys, like myself, you know, let's remember to never always just get caught up in the words and the meanings of words, to remember of who it's about.
It is about Christ.
It is about our God.
And the spirit, it's about, you know, depending on what you believe or the iterations of what you believe, also remember that you're living it out.
And I, as somebody who's not fully living it out, but wants to, and admits wholeheartedly that I struggle, you know, with sin and vice at times in my life, like many men before me, do want to know how to walk in the spirit of God in order to be an example for my beautiful sons, to lead my wife and to be a good friend, you know, and a good brother.
And so we're going to be, they're gathering their notes here for just a second and gathering their voices.
So, you know, I appreciate you guys that are in the chat and it is important, you know, and like you said, yeah, words matter.
All these matter.
Yeah, of course they do.
It's not that we can't argue these things.
It's just that, you know, sometimes people can get, you know, so into arguing that they forget what the point of it is.
It's like government.
They get so into fighting for their party to get into office that once their party gets in office, the party doesn't do anything for the people.
And then they're just happy that, you know, the party's in power.
It's like, but what are they using the power for?
So I just feel like this is very helpful for me because I want to know, am I doing the right thing?
Am I part of the right church?
And I think Jay and Tim are ready now to begin our discussion on their third topic for tonight, which is absolutely fantastic.
So as we go on, we will move on to this next topic, which, of course, we're talking about What I've heard it called is apostolic succession, this idea of, is there a handing down of the church?
Is there a visible head of the church, right?
Who is at the head, right?
And so let's begin.
And let's, someone's Elijah one in the comments.
It's like, hey, you say nothing.
That's how a woman wins an argument, really.
They think it's, they think they win, but if they just shut up, you know, I think we'd like them a lot more sometimes.
Well, the real issue here is, of course, the Vatican I definition of the papacy, not just the question of did Jesus establish, quote, a visible head.
Because for the Orthodox Church, we would say that all the bishops, as many of the church fathers argued apologetically in the first few centuries, all the bishops are actually Peter, something that St. Cyprian said.
So there's no specifically unique special role that Peter gets amongst either the College of the Apostles nor amongst his successors, other than canonical privileges, which, for example, Canon 6 of Nicaea says is equivalent to other patriarchates.
Not only that, at the Council of Ephesus, I don't know, I've never heard Tim talk about this.
I don't know if he knows about it or not, but the church at Ephesus granted through the Ecumenical Council autocephaly to the Church of Cyprus.
That means that it's autonomous and independent.
This is usually unheard of in the world of Roman Catholic apologetics.
They're not aware of the fact that there were autocephalous independent churches.
And that's because the Roman Catholic Church developed eventually to have a monarchical, autocratic position, which isn't just about indefectibility, infallibility, and universal jurisdiction or a kind of papal autocracy.
It actually went much further than that in the 11th century with the Gregorian reforms to where the papacy became a de facto world emperor.
Now, the canons of Chalcedon say that civil rulership and authority and power is forbidden for clerics to have.
Not only did the Roman bishop go beyond this, the Roman bishop actually in Dictatus Papa in 1090 declared itself to be the only church founded by God, the only one that could be called universal, the only one that could reinstate and depose bishops, the only one that had the right of, quote, the imperial signia, the one in which all the princes in the world should kiss his feet, the one alone who may depose emperors, et cetera, et cetera.
Really extreme, by the way, and can never err and will never err until the end of the world.
The problem is that Dictatus Papay and those claims in the next few centuries are actually based on known famous forgeries.
Now, again, I want to promote my buddy George's book, Heirs of the Latins, Volume 2 is 300 pages just on all of the infamous forgeries, whether the Samachian forgeries, whether the Galatian decretals, or whether the donation of Constantine and many, many others.
All of these really contributed, even according to Congar himself and other Roman Catholic scholars, to leading to this evolution of the papacy into a geopolitical world power.
Now, you might say, well, that's not a big deal.
I mean, come on, Middle Ages.
There was a power vacuum.
Ah, but wait a minute.
Did you know that a few centuries after Dictatus Pape in Unum Sanctum, the last paragraph of this bull by Pope Boniface VIII in 1302 states that not only must you be in communion with the Roman see to be saved, you must also believe in the worldly temporal power of the Roman bishop to be saved.
Now, nobody had ever heard of this doctrine before.
And so how are we going to defend this?
Well, that's where the forgeries come in.
You must also believe that the Pope is the quisauts hater, the universe's super being to be saved, which nobody else believed or required for salvation prior to this.
This is a new doctrine.
Now, not only is this a new doctrine, I'm going to show definitively from the Roman Catholic teaching and from their own dogmas that this is actually now no longer held.
But wait a minute, maybe this one didn't count.
Maybe this is one of those things that I can throw in the not dogmatic bin, as you're going to see they arbitrarily do all the time.
Well, actually, in the syllabus of errors, when I come all the way up about 900 years later, from the time of Dictatus Pape all the way up to Pius IX in the syllabus of errors, which is attached, by the way, to Vatican I, we read that in paragraph 76, the abolition of the temporal power of the Roman see is possessed, that it possesses that it would be great for the church to get rid of this condemned.
So the proposition is condemned.
And there's others that relate to this as well.
Interesting because John Paul I was the first pope to cease to use the papal tiara.
That is the tree, the three-tiered tiara, which signified all levels of his power and authority, including temporal power and authority.
But when we come to the documents of Vatican II, we find the exact opposite of this.
Not only is the temporal supremacy of the Roman bishop, which was for centuries necessary for salvation, discarded, we're actually told that, quote, in the church and modern world document, Jesus didn't actually come to bequeath any political mission to the church.
It was only religious.
That's paragraph 42.
We read, for example, in the church in the modern world over in section 82 that the promotion of a world government is really the only solution in terms of internationalism, globalism, and entities presumably like the UN.
It doesn't say the UN, but it mentions surrendering power to international organizations.
And then on paragraph 84, it actually says the exact same thing.
So the papacy you see in the next page says that all Christians and non-religions can work together in human institutions for an end to war.
So now we're going to have an end to war through entities like the United Nations.
And if we flip over to the religious liberty document, chapter two, it says the Vatican declares that human persons have a right to religious freedom, that everyone should be immune from any coercion by any individual or social group or any human power at all in religious matters.
Interesting because that exact phraseology and terminology is actually condemned in the syllabus of errors numbers 55, 77, and 78.
So in John 23rd's Pachimenteris, we're told that we can now begin to work towards a globalized government.
This idea basically makes its way into the documents of Vatican II.
And we're even told that the state should in no way at all coerce and it should first and foremost respect people's liberty.
Now, maybe you think that sounds good.
Maybe you think, oh, that was a Cold War thing.
And maybe they needed to promote religious liberty for the Cold War.
But remember, for all of these centuries, all the way up until the syllabus of errors, you were required for your salvation, not just to believe in the Roman see in its spiritual supremacy and universality and validity, but also as a world emperor.
And Pius IX condemns anyone that would dare go against that.
Next, I would point out that in these same documents, we are told, for example, in Mortalium Animos of Pius XI, the Catholic Church, the Apostolic See, has never allowed its subjects to take part in any of the assemblies of non-Catholics.
A few paragraphs earlier before 14, it talks about how pan-Christians should be condemned.
Cuminist ceremonies and religious events are in no ways lawful. for Catholics to be a part of.
That is paragraph nine.
So, 1928, it is always universally the Roman Catholic teaching that you cannot be involved in these ceremonies, rituals, and rites of, at that time, Protestant groups.
But now in the post-Roman Catholic world, the Apostolic See supposedly has actually made itself part and party with other world religions, including Pachamama and other such bizarre ceremonies that took place at the Vatican.
In fact, Tim and his own website on his own, or excuse me, on his own channel, has talked about how, in his view, he thinks it's heretical that the approval of communion for adulterers was given by Pope Francis.
And we can, of course, list a long litany of problems with Francis.
Now, I'm sure that we're going to hear a two-quoque that you have corrupt bishops too.
Orthodox have ecumenist bishops.
But we don't have everything hinging on one dude, his infallibility, his indefectibility, and his universal jurisdiction.
In fact, the Vatican itself in the Chieti document, paragraph 19, admits in the very last section, appeals to the Bishop of Rome in the first thousand years it's talking about, express the communion of the church.
However, the bishop of Rome did not exercise canonical authority over the churches of the East.
Now, this is on the Vatican website.
I'm not saying they're dogmatic statements.
I don't need to say that they're dogmatic statements because essentially they're admitting the collegiality and the synodality that the Orthodox Church has been arguing for the last thousand years against the Roman Catholic Church.
Now, that was Chieti in 20, I think, 16.
And then a couple of years ago, there was a part two to Chieti called the Alexandria document.
In the Alexandria document, you have all the things that I've been talking about admitted by the Vatican, including paragraph 1.3, the false decretals and the donation of Constantine contributing to this geopolitical world power of the papacy in the Middle Ages.
Again, it has now been discarded.
So I want to know why is it that it was necessary for me to believe in the universal geopolitical quizatorach doctrine of the papacy to be saved in the year 1400?
It wasn't necessary in the year 500 because nobody taught that or believed that in the year 500.
And then now, again, we're back to it doesn't count and you don't have to believe that anymore because the Vatican now says that religious liberty is the highest of all of the excuse me, religious liberty is the goal that all states should pursue when it comes to the role of church and state.
And, you know, obviously there's a lot of questions here.
And so the Catholic position, I feel like, is more well understood by people.
But like I mentioned, you know, it is very, very hard, especially just so for myself, you know, some of the nuances of how we know that the papacy is divine or that we know that it's been passed down apostolically.
And there hasn't been, you know, bribes and confusion.
I think I'm not convinced.
And I know not a lot of, you know, some people aren't.
And just to clarify, this isn't siding with the Orthodox or anything, but sometimes I meet a lot of young Catholics and they believe in this very strongly, but then don't know about some of the nuances.
And so I hope you can answer some of our questions during this time or understand them.
So you have an opening statement.
I'm going to give you, I gave him 10 minutes and 30 seconds.
So let me add an extra 30 seconds here to the clock.
Give me a moment.
I appreciate it.
Arguing the Catholic position here on the is that is that correct to call the apostolic succession here?
The church is synodal, and every synod requires a head.
The prompt to this section that I didn't hear one word from Jay on is, did Jesus establish the Petrine office or the papacy or something, which is a chronology 2,000 years old.
It's either a yes or a no.
And if it's demonstrated that Jesus established a papacy, then it doesn't matter what might have happened 1,800 years, 1,900 years into the papacy, for better or for worse.
What would matter, I guess at that point, Christianity would be destroyed.
It wouldn't be Roman Catholicism that would be destroyed if and only if Jesus established a pontificate to head his one church.
And that's the fact.
When Christ built his church, he didn't leave us with a theory of unity, but with a living office, because again, synods require heads.
The rock, the keys, the shepherd, all of these have meaning.
From the first century to today, that office has always been recognized in the bishop of Rome.
The question tonight and third prompt is very simple.
Did Christ intend a church with a center of unity, or did he intend a circularly premised epistemology, question-begging federation of 14 or more churches that fractures whenever disputes arise?
And where you define the councils as being ecumenical when we accept them, but the accepted councils are how we know they're ecumenical.
That's the Orthodox way.
That's the way anytime you have a synod without a head.
There has to be a visible sign of unity or else it doesn't make any sense.
Remember, throughout this debate, if Christ established the papacy, which was universal to all of Christianity for over a thousand years, which is why Jay won't address the point in time that Christ established or didn't establish the papacy, and the papacy is later disproven, then it's Christianity that is false, not just Roman Catholicism.
So that's really, really important.
I hope that that point resonates with people.
Either Christ did or Christ didn't.
We're going to assess that.
I'm going to assess that tonight because that's the prompt.
And by the way, yes, all bishops can be said to succeed Peter in a sense.
Many of the patristics say this, but Rome succeeds him in a special way.
The debate's not whether or not the church has visible unity, but where that unity is concretely safeguarded.
The papacy, the good popes, the bad popes, the mediocre popes, it's concretely safeguarded there.
Jesus want all to be one so that they could believe in John's gospel, chapter 17.
And Orthodoxy simply doesn't have it, which is why Jay won't address this.
There is no oneness, no one holy Catholic apostolic.
You can point out incoherencies that you believe in here in the papacy, but if Christ established it, then that disproves all of Christianity.
The Catholic position is that I'll show it tonight.
Christ established the papacy as a perpetual principle of unity.
The Vatican II document restates this.
Orthodox often will affirm papal primacy but deny universal jurisdiction, which is a nonsensical distinction.
The question is, did Christ intend a merely honorific primacy or a juridical universal one?
In other words, can the Pope actually make decisions for all of the churches around the world?
There's three scriptural foundations for the papacy.
It's Matthew chapter 16, verses 18 to 19.
You are Peter on this rock.
I will build my church.
I will give you the keys.
There's Luke chapter 22, verse 31, 32.
Christ prays uniquely for Peter among all of the 12 that his faith may not fail, so that he alone may strengthen his brethren, confirm his brethren.
John 21 is the third papal scripture.
Peter is entrusted with universal shepherding.
He says three times, feed my lambs, feed my sheep, tend my lambs.
This triad shows something jurisdictional.
It's anagogical language.
So let's go to the patristic testimony because once again, we're trying to assess whether or not Jesus actually established the papacy, not whether or not Pope Francis signed the G80 document or whatever 2,000 years later.
We're trying to say, did Jesus establish this at the beginning?
Well, and most people don't know this.
It's been either hidden from them or they've been brainwashed.
Clement of Rome, before the year 100, successor, direct successor of Peter, intervenes authoritatively in Corinth while the Apostle John is still alive in Ephesus.
This is the earliest known exercise of Roman authority.
He intervenes, Clement of Rome, this is the year 96 AD, and it's a well-established thing, though most Christians know nothing of it.
Ignatius of Antioch, just 11 years later, one of the earliest patristics, calls the Roman church the one presiding in love.
The way this term president comes from this idea of presiding in love in his letter to the Romans.
Irenaeus, less than a century later in 180 AD, insists that all churches must agree with the Roman church because of its preeminent authority, direct quote, in against heresies, preeminent authority.
Have you ever heard Irenaeus cited this early on, before even the year, almost halfway before the Nicene Council, the first ecumenical council, you have three of these guys saying preeminent, presiding, one of the earliest popes intervenes in Corinth.
In 251 AD, Cyprian of Carthage, though he classes with Pope Stephen, he still calls Rome the chair of Peter in the principal church from which sacerdotal unity has arisen, principal PAL.
This is all before Nicaea.
People don't know it, and it's a shame that they don't know it.
What they also don't know is that among the ecumenical councils, now there's this circularity operating within Orthodoxy because they don't have a principle of unity or oneness on earth.
They'll say the councils are ecumenical when we accept them.
When we don't like them, we won't accept them.
And we know because they're not ecumenical.
So it's a classic question begging or patizio principio.
The first ecumenical council, Nicaea, 325, has canon 6, which Jay referenced.
This actually, I'm glad he brought it up, it presupposes Roman primacy as a precedent for the Alexandria and Antioch patriarchies.
It's a precedent for them.
It's really important.
It grounds Alexandria's authority by appealing to Rome's customs as the standard.
So it's not saying that they're equal.
It's saying that Rome has primacy.
Complete misreading of this.
Rome isn't local.
So it would make no sense to compare one of the Eastern churches to Rome.
Rome is the standard bearer.
It is an established, faraway authority, Rome, primacy, not equality.
That's right there, Canon 6, Council of Nicaea.
Nicaea also establishes the four marks of the church, which the Catholic Church alone really claims, as far as I know, one holy Catholic apostolic.
Orthodox can claim, because they have sacraments and real bishops, they can claim two of them, holy and apostolic, but they can't claim the other two.
One, certainly.
I've never heard of it.
Maybe I'm wrong.
But the Federation of Orthodox churches can claim two.
At the Council of Ephesus, which is the third ecumenical council accepted by both Catholics and Orthodox, what happened is you had an appeal to Rome, to the Pope, to excommunicate the Patriarch of Constantinople by another Eastern father, the head of the whole, sorry, holy and blessed Peter, it's written, the prince and head of the apostles, the column of the faith, the foundation of the Catholic Church,
received the keys of the kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that to him was given the power of binding and loosing sins, who until this day and forever lives and judges in his successors.
So it's not just Peter alone, in his successors he binds.
The head of the whole faith, the head of the apostles is blessed Peter.
This comes directly from that third council, Ephesus.
The head of the whole faith, the head of the apostles is blessed Peter.
This is not an honorific.
This is direct.
Cyril of Alexandria, who's the one writing the Pope, asking him to excommunicate what would become the number two in the church, says, we rely on the authority of the blessed apostle Peter on whom the church was founded and whose successor the blessed Pope Celestine is.
He writes directly to Pope Celestine and he says, Your holiness, who holds the place of Peter, the prince of the apostles, they're all princes in a sense, but Peter is prince of princes, has rightly judged this matter and condemned Nestorius.
In what honorary sense would you appeal to someone and say, fire this guy, excommunicate this guy, which is an extra important firing?
You wouldn't.
It's absurd.
At the Council of Chalcedon, the very next council, after Pope Leo's tome is read, it says, Peter has spoken through Leo, showing that there's a lineage, a very direct lineage, and it's Peter the prince.
Leo's now the prince.
Because, by the way, at this fourth ecumenical council, it shows the epistemic flaw in Orthodoxy, you know, that it's circular.
The councillors are ecumenical when we accept them, but only the accepted councils are ecumenical.
There is another group, the Oriental Orthodox, who broke away, and they never accepted the fourth ecumenical council.
We Catholics have a way.
We agree with the Eastern Orthodox.
This is a valid council.
We agree with each other about that.
We have a way to show it.
We have a visible sign of unity.
We know that synods all have heads.
The Orthodox can't.
The Eastern Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodox are still at odds over the Fourth Ecumenical Council.
Constantinople III, Peter is Prince of the Apostles who continues the promise undefiled to the end.
Nicaea II, primatial authority, Jay agrees with this council.
Primatial authority everywhere on earth was given by the Redeemer of the world himself to the Apostle Peter.
Constantinople IV, it's their council.
It reads the letter of Pope John VIII.
The chief of the apostles, Peter, has the authority of universal binding and loosing.
This is indisputable that at the time of the founding of the church and the immediate chain of evidence thereafter for the next seven councils, you have a universal appellate jurisdiction of the Pope, which is why he could excommunicate and he was being sought for excommunication.
Yeah, the reason that I didn't go into the question about Matthew and the passages in the book of John or Luke or whatever is that we don't disagree that there's apostolic succession from Peter, but I don't know if he's aware of it.
Peter is actually called the father of three sees.
In fact, you can read Pope St. Gregory the Great in his letter number 40, where he talks about the apostolic see being three chairs.
So as late as Gregory the Great in his day, he's still calling Rome, Antioch, and Alexandria the Petrine See.
So nobody disagrees that Rome is first.
And he cited St. Irenaeus and against heresies, but he didn't tell you why Irenaeus says that it is given this honor and authority.
He says it is doubly apostolic, Peter and Paul.
Maybe he's not aware of the fact that by the time of Vatican I, they actually reject the position of the argumentation of St. Irenaeus, that you cannot say that Rome has its supremacy because of Paul in any sense.
So even though Paul is honored still in Rome because he was martyred there, the only reason that Rome has this supposed indefectibility, its universal jurisdiction and so forth, is supposedly because of a Petrine tradition and charism.
However, Pope St. Gregory the Great, who himself was a pope, doesn't have a problem still talking about there being three Petrine sees, but of course, Roman Catholics never talk about that because they don't give you the context behind these comments and these statements.
Let me read what the Canon VI of Nicaea actually says.
It says, let the ancient customs in Egypt, Libya, and Pentapolis prevail.
Now, note the reference is to customs.
There's no reference to a divine charism, to divine law.
It's only to ancient customs.
That in all of these, the Bishop of Alexandria has jurisdiction since the like is customary for the Bishop of Rome.
Likewise in Antioch and other provinces.
He just assumed that Rome was a universal, and so it just doesn't really count.
But the jurisdictions are being likened to Rome.
And his argument is just that, well, but yeah, but of course, everybody knows that Rome was universalist jurisdictions, really?
Because he's not aware of the fact that appellate structure and the synod and canons of Sardica actually prove our position.
Because what Sardica says is not that the Roman bishop has the final say.
Rather, they actually say that the Roman bishop could be appealed to as well as other patriarchates and bishops can be appealed to and were appealed to.
And he can order a retrial in that jurisdiction.
It is the opposite of the Vatican I papal autocracy position.
Allow me to read his own Vatican statement from the Chi 80 document, which you should have read.
Over the centuries, many appeals were made to the bishop of Rome from the East in disciplinary matters such as the deposition of a bishop.
An attempt was made at Sardica in 343 to establish the rules for this procedure.
Sardica was received at the Council of Trollo in 692, which his church rejects.
The canons of Sardica determined that a bishop who has been condemned could appeal to the bishop of Rome and that in the latter, if he deemed appropriate, might order a retrial.
Oh, that's not the autocratic Vatican I view that he was arguing for that he hoped would be the kill shot.
Rather, this could be conducted by the bishops in the province neighboring that person's bishop.
Appeals regarding these matters were also disciplinary matters were also made to Constantinople and to other sees.
Oh, dang, that's synodal.
That's collegial.
By the way, Athanasius and people who are in these situations, if you read the letters of St. Basil, as I mentioned earlier, he wasn't aware of the Miletian schism.
And as Denny notes in the chapter in Papalism, Constantinople I was had, called, and closed outside of communion with Rome.
And in fact, later, centuries later, Rome accepts Constantinople I retroactively.
That's a problem for his position.
But out of all this, I would remind him that he seems to not be aware of Pope Vigilius and the really strong case that we have there, as Ubi brought up to Ibara, if you remember Arbara saying, I haven't found actually a good answer to that question yet, but I will come with them with it eventually, maybe.
Why is this?
Why is Vigilius such a key point?
Vigilius submitted to the Ecumenical Council after reversing his position four different times.
So wait a minute.
Let me get this right.
Vatican I, which says that the Roman bishop is the head of all the churches, has universal jurisdiction, even though his own Vatican documents like the Chieti document admit that the Roman bishop didn't have universal jurisdiction the first thousand years.
Now Vigilius has to submit to and does submit to the ecumenical council's judgment and being removed from the diptychs.
That's a problem position for him and for Eric Ibarra.
I don't have to prove every single specific to prove, to disprove Roman Catholicism.
All I need is one dogmatic contradiction or one papal failure, such as Vigilius submitting to a council, which shows that Vatican I is false, that ecumenical councils are inferior to and always subordinate to the Pope, to prove his position is false.
Just like when he tried to cite other examples like, well, Orthodox don't have any position that's really consistent.
Wait a minute.
Later in 649 condemned monophilitism and was intended by Pope Martin to be an ecumenical council, and yet it was not accepted as an ecumenical council.
And there was another council that happened called Constantinople III, where they themselves decided to condemn the positions based on investigating the theology of Saint Maximus.
It's not Pope St. Martin that is the key deciding figure of Constantinople III, which if the Vatican I papacy position were true, he would have already solved the issue.
Rome is spoken cases closed, supposedly, we're told, right?
But he also doesn't seem to be aware that if he'd read on the history of Chalcedon, Rome is spoken cases closed, isn't actually because Leo is the standard and test of orthodoxy at Chalcedon.
If he'd read any of the academic literature on it, he would know that even his Roman Catholic scholars admit that Cyril is the standard of orthodoxy at Chalcedon, and Leo is checked against Cyril by Chalcedon for many weeks, or excuse me, many days, investigating to see if the tome matches up to Leo.
Now, I disproved his position by pointing out one dogmatic contradiction amongst many, which was that for centuries you had to believe in the temporal supremacy of the Roman bishop.
You didn't have to believe it for centuries before that.
And now we don't have to believe it anymore past Vatican II and the religious liberty and ecumenist pronouncements.
So Vatican II, we have an ecumenical council that happens after the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, after the fall of all of the confessional states on earth.
So only the confessional states are bound because, of course, secular states can't be bound by the Pope.
The Pope can tell them what to do, but they're not going to do it.
This was always the context of this discipline.
It's a discipline anyway.
By the way, the Pope has only in the last thousand years identifiably spoken ex cathedra, making doctrine twice, count them twice, one in around 1850, one around 1950.
And in both of those cases, the Pope pulled all of the bishops first, because this is what's consistent with the papal power going all the way back to Peter.
He pulled to make sure that he did not make an ex cathedra statement in 1854 and then in 1951.
The only two ex cathedra statements that would disprove the papacy by being wrong.
He pulled all of the bishops because there's collegial brethren.
And then he named the third and the fourth Marian dogma ex cathedra.
So Jay's always just skipping over the fact that the Pope is only infallible when he speaks ex cathedra.
This is a most fundamental claim.
And by the way, popes can be heretics, whether you're talking about Honorius or other problematic popes that were borderline heretics throughout the way.
Most of the majority of Catholic scholars think that popes can actually be heretics.
They just can't contradict themselves when they're speaking ex cathedra.
And this would be really clear if Jay had read the Rolazio of Bishop Gasser at Vatican I.
It's very, very, very consistent with the collegial papacy of the previous 1,800 years.
Now, there are, I would say, in exegeting Matthew chapter 16, Luke 22, John 21, there are Eastern scholars, Theodore Studite, Abu Karah, who exegeted exactly the way that we do.
Antioch and Alexandria also succeed Peter because Mark went on to Alexandria.
Peter used to be at Antioch.
It's very, very, very clear that we're not reading into the text.
Now, the question at hand is, did Christ establish a binding, unifying papacy?
I've shown through the scripture, through patristic scholars in the first two centuries that he did, one of the very first popes after Peter literally was exercising a jurisdiction.
At several of the ecumenical councils, you had an appeal to the appellate jurisdiction of Rome.
I'm not just going to sit here and repeat the quotations from the octa of those councils where they're saying Rome alone.
Knowing that doctrinal unity requires a visible sign.
So, like I said, the original argument is if Christ established a papacy, then if that papacy should fail, all of Christianity fails.
That's just a fact.
Now, if he didn't establish the papacy, then that wouldn't be the case.
But pointing out historical difficulties, even if I granted them, which I don't, later in the timeline doesn't accomplish what Jay claims it does.
So if Christ established the papacy, then prevailing would require not that Catholicism is false, but Christianity is.
Remember, like Back to the Future 2, when Doc explains to Marty by use of a chalkboard why they wound up in an altered 1985, because the source of the problematic timeline lay at the very beginning of the story in 1955.
If you want to disprove the papacy, you have to go to the beginning of the story and show that Christ didn't establish a papacy.
You can't just sit, if you're a Christian anyway, you can't sit around and point out what you don't like about Pope Francis' CAD document, not a magisterial document, by the way, definitely not infallible.
It can't point at any of the documents that Jay is going to tonight to get to the beginning of the timeline.
In the case of Christianity, the papacy was from the very beginning universally accepted, occasionally grudgingly by the East, but they accepted it for a thousand years.
I mean, this should be more compelling to people that are passive standers by.
Why was it accepted for a thousand years, over a thousand years, and then it was just okay not to?
They just hope you don't see that fact.
This is a brute fact established beyond any doubt.
Not even Jay's going to disagree with me.
It was accepted for over half of the timeline of Christianity.
And now they just whistle past the fact that it's no longer accepted.
Instead, Eastern Orthodoxy, you'll never hear a defense of this because it's a coherentist rather than a foundationalist position.
Jay's not trying to build anything.
He's just trying to poke holes in the papacy.
They insist on a popeless ecclesiology, one with willful blindness about its own thousand-year acceptance of the pontificate until they didn't want to anymore, whose epistemology, which is really just conciliarism, a valid council is ecumenical.
We know that it's ecumenical because we deem it's valid, destroys itself for all to see, like at Chalcedon, when you had the Oriental Orthodox break away from the Eastern Orthodox.
They still don't agree about much.
It's a circular rule of faith, and you're never going to hear them build this up, this circular rule of faith, because it's indefensible.
Their hierarchy can and does fall into heresy.
This is not just two quo que.
They're not bound to accept ecumenical councils.
The councils are ecumenical when we accept them, and the accepted councils are ecumenical.
This is the rule of faith.
If you really press on orthodoxy at all, there is no epistemological framework for determining which councils are ecumenical and why.
That's not true in Roman Catholicism.
In Roman Catholicism, we have this visible sign of unity.
Three scriptural passages, several of the early fathers interpreting them exactly the way we do, and with no living visible authority or sign of unity.
How is the Eastern Orthodox believer to know which councils to accept?
They simply won't tell you this.
Well, because it's just true.
You just have to accept it as true.
It's a question begging.
Roman Catholics have the papacy to tell us.
And no, we don't just accept the papacy blindly.
We accept it because Christ established it.
So circularity ends up being embraced as a kind of theological mystery because this is the last resort.
For example, the rejection of Florence.
Florence was the reunion council in 1439.
31 out of 33 of their delegates at Florence signed it and said, we were wrong about the Filioque.
We were wrong about the papacy.
And then they went home and 10, 12, 14 years later, had a revolt and under duress were forced to undo it.
And you ask them, how do you know that council wasn't ecumenical?
First, I want to note that he seemed to be saying that there's only guidance and infallibility when it comes to ex-cathedra statements.
He must not be aware of the fact that Vatican I says that all things are divinely revealed and to be believed, whether in the word of God handed down by the church in solemn judgments, which would be ex-cathedra, by her ordinary and universal teaching, which is proposed for belief as having been divinely revealed.
So do you agree that you also have to believe the universal ordinary teaching and the ex-cathedra?
But you're trying to say that the three cathedra is that ex cathedra is not the only way that a pope can speak from the chair with the charism of universality.
God of God teaches that there are two, which is two of this three, that are protected by the Petrine charism and by infallibility and by the Holy Spirit.
The level first that is and can err is ordinary teaching.
That's individual bishops, groups of bishops, and even the bishop of Rome.
The next level is the universal ordinary magisterial teaching defined as whenever the College of Bishops throughout the world issues a united judgment with the Roman pontiff to be held in faith and morals.
Okay.
This one is protected by the charism of Peter according to Vatican I. Which one?
The first was the ordinary magisterium that can err, the ordinary teaching.
Individual bishops, groups of bishops, bishop of Rome.
The next level is the universal ordinary teaching.
Whenever the College of Bishops teaches anything in union with the Bishop of Rome, that, according to Vatican I, is literally said right here to be believed by divine revelation and magisterium.
Ordinary universal teaching has to be believed and thus it cannot err.
So the only one that could err was the first one, ordinary teaching.
Universal ordinary teaching, according to Vatican I, cannot err because just like the extraordinary or the ex-cathedra stuff, it is also protected.
Two of these are protected.
The one is not.
What I want to know from you is: can you give me an example in the first thousand years of the church where there's anything like what's in unum sanctum or what is in dictators pape or all the way up into the syllabus of errors showing that the bishop of Rome is a geopolitical world power and that you must believe that to be saved?
The last question was about the geopolitical power of the papacy, which is not just an unum sanctum as necessary for salvation.
It stated all the way up until the syllabus of errors.
You tried to castigate that to cast that as a discipline, that you're saying that it's not there in the first thousand years, but it was required for salvation.
Theoretically, you have unlimited time after the length of that situation, but also, to be fair, I'm going to give you the five minutes.
But if you guys want to go, you know, you guys want to still hammer out the point if you don't think it is, I'll give you the ability to hammer it out as well since Jay got that.
From the chat, I'd have no idea who won that because the chat's like someone's saying Tucker won.
You know what I mean?
unidentified
Like, just throwing in chat, just throwing in ideas in there.
But binding and loosing is given the third ecumenical council and the sixth ecumenical council, it's affirmed as given to Peter alone.
Primatial authority everywhere on earth.
Sorry, this is the seventh ecumenical council.
Primatial authority everywhere on earth was given by the Redeemer of the world to the blessed apostle Peter through the same apostle the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church has till now and will hold for all time primacy and sovereign authority.
What does it mean at your own council at 870, Constantinople 4, at your own council, that the chief of the apostles, Peter, has the authority of universal binding and loosing?
The pellet jurisdiction argument, according to the Chieti doc, excuse me, the Alexandria document, the Chieti documents, proves my position because appellate jurisdictions allow for retrials in the local jurisdiction.
That terminology and that phraseology is also used of the emperor, and it's also used of other patriarchates and bishops to do the same types of things.
Why would Pope Hadrian be red and stuck into the octet at Nicaea II saying that primational authority everywhere on earth has been given by – does this strike anyone else's?
So I'm not trying to say that every statement is flowery language.
I was specifically talking about some of the statements.
Let me give an example where Basil says when he's talking about the Miletian schism, he says that the church in Antioch is the head of the entire body and the whole body listens to the head.
Nobody believes that the bishop of Antioch is the head of the entire universal church.
It's one example of the flowery language, which came up multiple times in the debate between Ubi and Ibara and other debates.
So all I'm saying is that the case in Matthew of Matthew 16 in the Seventh Ecumenical Council doesn't go very far because it also applies to the emperor in the Acts of that Council, which I don't accept.
I'm just saying that they use that terminology and they cite that text for the emperor.
I'm not talking about Vatican I. I'm talking about the entire, it was like a three-line specific quote, and you're saying, well, they said basically the later Pope Hadrian thing.
So I do agree with you that over time, and if you read Sushinsky's book on Orthodoxy and the papacy, he discusses this.
By the time of Pope St. Gregory the Great, he admits and agrees to the Pentarchy.
At the same time as Pentarchy is accepted by Rome, Rome is also making more and more grandiose and grandeur-related statements and claims.
I agree with you that those claims are there and they're being made.
But from an Orthodox perspective, just because the Pope at a council says that, we don't necessarily think that it's true because the Pope said it and it's in the council, right?
It could be the acts, it could be flowery language, and we don't accept everything that a pope says.
So, in conclusion, on that, let's end with the conclusion.
Both to look, I'm going to, we're going to cut down to the five-minute conclusion because it's almost midnight.
And there's a kid in here.
So, I was like, got to go to bed.
But, so, so, we'll cut out five minutes and then I'll go through some super chats.
Uh, we went through most of the super chats, though, that were out there.
If you, if you, I didn't, I read some of the two dollar and one dollar super chats, but I was mostly keeping it the five, ten, and twenty dollars and up uh super chats.
And um, I thank you everyone who gave the super chats.
That was really appreciative of you that were there.
And we'll try to uh make sure that we get to them somehow because there was just too many, but I really appreciate it.
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And let's go into this.
We'll go ahead and we'll start with Jay.
Let me put some time on the clock here.
I'm going to go a little shorter, and we're going to try to stick to it, please, to summarize it due to the simplicity of that.
I'm going to give you six minutes instead of 10.
Uh, let me reset the clock if you're ready to go.
This is the conclusion both of this segment and of the show.
Yeah, um, so I'd like to address a couple things that did come up here.
There's a really good book, by the way, because a lot of these comments, a lot of these quotes need to be addressed in terms of the context and then more sort of spaced out.
There's a great book called Papacy and the Orthodox by Edward Szyzhinski.
He's the same person that was a unier and became Orthodox.
He wrote the book on the filioque, and he also wrote this excellent book on the history of these disputes.
And he actually begins with the patristic era or the post-apostolic period with Clement and Ignatius and talks about how, for example, for the last 60 plus years, even the Roman Catholic Church no longer utilizes things like Clement because they don't actually demonstrate what the claims of Vatican I claim.
The claims of Vatican I, for example, if you read Satis Cognitum, which is Leo XIII's description and definition of what is supposed to be understood in terms of papal supremacy, Satis Cognitum says that it has always at all times been understood that the Roman see had the claims that Vatican I has about it.
So, in other words, there's no development of doctrine according to Satis Cognitum.
It is clearly that the Roman See was indefectible, infallible, and had universal jurisdiction.
Now, he likes to say that, well, I don't have to accept these statements from the Chieti document because, well, it's just not infallible.
Of course, there is no epistemic criteria for the Roman Catholic for what is actually infallible because Tim knows that it's more than just a few excathedra statements.
You also have to believe all the dogmatic teachings in the ordinary universal magisterium.
And in fact, there's a whole list of, I'll give you the guys the list of these.
You can look them up yourself so we don't have time to go through them.
Denzinger 1683, Denzinger 1698, Denzinger 1792, Casti Canubii 104 all say that the position is condemned if you say you only follow the ex cathedra magisterial statements.
That is a condemned proposition.
And it's funny because you actually heard him seem to be arguing that tonight.
We have four hours because universal ordinary magisterial teaching would be much broader and would bind him and everyone else to a whole bunch of other things.
And that's precisely what the point of Vatican I was to say.
Now, all I needed was one dogmatic contradiction, which I think we saw with the geopolitical power claims that were necessary for salvation for 900 years.
He said, oh, it's just a discipline.
That's his way to get around this doctrinal contradiction.
But again, I will go back to the famous instance that Ubi brought up to Ibara, which Ibarra didn't have an answer to, and which I will reassert again from the papacy and the Orthodox.
Pope Vigilius submitted to the ecumenical council because he was threatened with excommunication and removal from the diptychs.
And that's where he landed.
That's where he ended up.
That's why Vigilius is such a strong argument against the claim that Jesus instituted this universal supremacy that was from all times, at all times, everywhere infallible, indefectible from the earliest days.
That's what he has to prove.
That's why he was deflecting into these passages that don't actually prove that.
They prove merely that there's those passages which can be read in an Orthodox sense or in a Roman Catholic sense.
He has a system that he has to defend.
He tried to say that it's all coherence theory.
I don't hold to secular coherence theory, so he doesn't know what he's talking about.
The position only requires one contradiction for the whole thing to fall apart.
And you can read the most recent Richard Price text on the case of Vigilius and when Richard Price was on Reason and Theology and they interviewed him a few years ago and he said that the Pope did not have universal jurisdiction in the first millennium, just like the Chieti document says the Pope did not have universal jurisdiction in the first millennium.
That means Vatican I is false and that's why Vigilius disproves the papacy.
Honorius is not just condemned because he supposedly fibbed or failed to condemn.
It's actually because he wrote a letter to a bishop.
So notice the status of the text, it wasn't ex cathedra, it wasn't magisterium, is a letter to a bishop where he affirmed monothelitism and he was successively condemned by in the East, three councils, including the Seventh Ecumenical Council.
So Honorius becomes a heretic explicitly.
Most Roman Catholics, except for a few, will admit this now today.
But that means that the Pope isn't indefectible.
And yet Vatican I claims that the Sea of Peter is indefectible.
It is never failing in its truth and in its faith.
And yet tonight we've seen in just a handful of examples, and I can give many, many more, that it is in fact failing.
And that's why we don't put our hope in a geopolitical world ruler, which now calls for open borders and all of that.
Who used to say you had to believe in his quiz outside Iraq, Lisa and Al Guib powers to be saved.
Now you don't have to believe it.
It's just a disciplined hand wave it.
No, no, no.
The papacy is a geopolitical tool.
And if you go to my channel and watch all of my old videos, you can find the lectures where I've walked through David Wimhoff's excellent book showing that the CIA also bought into and helped to buy out the papacy through Operation Gladio.
There's multiple texts from multiple Roman Catholics even on that.
So, what are we looking at with the papacy?
Is it really a center of unity or is it a tool of inclusive capitalism, socialism, World Economic Forum, all the stuff that you see Vatican II promoting with the internationalism, a new world order, et cetera, explicitly in the church and the modern world texts?
That's what the papacy actually is.
The papacy is not your friend, it is a spiritual cancer, and it does not produce the thing that it claims to produce: unity, holiness, and truth.
Well, it's very clear to prove whether or not I think the prompt of this question was Jesus instituted the papacy, we have to check whether Jesus instituted the papacy, the three gospels that I read, and what even Easterners thought of them, what all of the early church thought they meant, even if power would be aggrandized or used in ways that Jay objects to later.
You can't object later in the timeline.
You have to object earlier to show that Jesus didn't establish the papacy.
Here are, and Jay objected as Orthodox do to my exegesis of those three papal scriptures, but except here is Abu Kara.
These are all Eastern thinkers before the schism.
If he meant by these words in the gospel only Saint Peter, the church would have been deprived of comfort and would have had no one to deliver her from those heretics whose heresies are truly the gates of hell, which Christ said would not overcome the church.
Accordingly, there is no doubt that he meant by these words nothing other than the holders of the seat of Saint Peter who have continually strengthened their brethren and will not cease to do so as long as this present age lasts.
So is it multiple people?
Yes, it is the people who inhabit the chair of Peter.
Now, here's Maximus, the confessor.
All the churches of Christians everywhere have held the greatest church there to be their sole base and foundation, since, on the one hand, it is in no way overcome by the gates of Hades, according to the very promise of the Savior, referring to the same scripture, but holds the keys of the Orthodox confession and faith in him.
And on the other hand, it shuts up and locks every heretical mouth that speaks unrighteousness against the most high.
This is Theodore Studite.
I witness now before God and men, they have torn themselves away from the body of Christ, from the supreme see, in which Christ placed the keys of the faith, the supreme see, against which the gates of hell, I mean the mouths of heretics, have not prevailed and never will until the consummation.
Note all of the continual themes which ring the same in all of these thinkers, exegeting the one passage.
According to the promise of him who cannot lie, let the most blessed and apostolic Pope Pascal rejoice, therefore, for he has fulfilled the work of Peter.
This is Theodore Studite, an Orthodox scholar, says of this.
The same time we find St. Maximus the Confessor and Theodore the Studite expressing the view that Rome was in unique sense the chair of Peter that would never fall into heresy.
This is clean a work.
And it's simple and straightforward because the establishment of the pontificate by Jesus was simple and straightforward in the first Christian century.
And I read you all of these places where for the first thousand years, the Orthodox accepted the papacy.
And you heard not a word, not a single word from Jay tonight as to how they accepted the papacy.
For the last nearly thousand years, they haven't accepted the papacy.
And of course, because this is an indefensible relinquishment of a millennium-old position.
It's a relinquishment of the fundamental pinnacle of the faith, the fundament of the faith.
Saint Peter, as many, many Eastern scholars say before the schism, he is the foundation of the faith.
He's the prince of the apostles.
Flowery language, yes, but I read from multiple councils that the establishment of the papacy in these three passages is accepted in both East and West.
And of course, this always brings us back to the fact that in both East and West, there was a pontificate for a thousand years and there was jurisdiction being exercised.
As I said the first time we debated, if it's just an honorary power, if it's just an honorary role, like being a knight at a roundtable and you're the first of honor, then you are not appealed to for an excommunication.
You can't fire anyone.
Dwight Schroott can't fire anyone in the office when he's left in charge as a kind of first among equals.
That's true enough.
Well, within the first four councils, there are appeals being made to the Pope, in the first three councils, appeal being made to the Pope to excommunicate the eventual number two in the church.
I don't know what else that stands for.
And I've tried to see it that way.
I've heard nothing coherent tonight that would answer the question, what do those three papal scriptures mean?
I've read Orthodox scholars, Eastern scholars and Orthodox scholar Kleenawerk, who exeget them exactly the way we did.
Even if you ignore it, Clement of Rome, because it's inconvenient.
Ignatius of Antioch calls the Roman church the one presiding in love, Allah, a president.
Irenaeus, that all churches must agree with the Roman church because of its preeminent authority.
Is preeminent authority flowery language?
No, it's juridical language.
It's jurisdictional language.
Cyprian of Carthage says, while he's clashing with Pope Stephen, he still calls Rome, who he's not happy with at the time, the chair of Peter and principal church from which sacerdotal unity has arisen.
This is how the Roman Catholic Church stands for those four marks.
One holy Catholic apostolic established at the very first ecumenical council.
The oneness requires a visible sign of unity on earth.
All bishops can be said to succeed Peter in a sense, but Rome succeeds in a special way.
And I think that way has been made clear by these three scriptural foundations of the papacy.
I got to appreciate you guys as my super chatters.
I love you guys.
And, you know, you guys really come and show your support for Tim and for Jay, and that's why you're supporting here.
And I appreciate that because, yeah, it does cost money to host these things.
And I don't know if it fully paid it back like with the super chats, but it definitely helped, you know, and that's really, really, really fantastic.
So you guys understand the importance of independent media, and that's very, very helpful.
Thank you.
Icono Matt said, if I, as a pizza maker, put pepperoni on a person's pizza and then give them the pizza, does that make the person someone who puts pepperoni on pizza passively?
Does it make them a passive pizza maker?
Okay.
Even I think that's funny, and I don't take a side there.
That being said, you guys, these people are crazy.
War Thunder said, Tim is Emperor Leo infallible.
Is Emperor Leo infallible?
I am confident of the piety of your heart in all things and perceive that through the Holy Spirit dwelling in you are sufficiently instructed, nor can the error delude you.
Yeah, I mean, we just have, we have different authorities from what they recognize as authorities.
To answer it simply, but if you want a specific answer on divorce and remarriage, we made a whole documentary on this, or at least my friends did, Lewis and Ubi.
You can go to Ubi Petrus and watch the documentary at his channel about divorce and remarriage, where you'll see that Pope Gregory II in the Roman Catholic Church allowed for it.
The canons of St. Basil that the Roman church accepted allowed for divorce and remarriage.
So a lot of these things that they have huge issues with, they don't even know their own history on it.
And you can also look up the interview with Dr. David Bradshaw on the question of sexual ethics and the issue of contraception on Ubi Petrus' channel as well.
So those are really involved questions.
It gets into like Aristotelian medieval theology of, or excuse me, philosophy of purpose and secondary purposes and biology and all that.
I think in the chat, you know, I was going to say this.
You guys both did a fantastic job.
I think that the work that you did, there was the work that you guys did here and the way that you were able to talk this out was probably above a lot of people's IQs, including my own.
And I appreciate that.
And it's always good here to be able to hear it out and to learn something.
And I like to say that with debates or with conversations, the key thing is that hopefully you learned something constructive tonight.
Like that's open to everyone.
You learn something constructive and that your views were at least challenged, right?
Because pride and haughtiness can become a very, very, very big stumbling block in the hearts of men.
And especially sometimes, you know, you get over some of your sins and vices, and then you can become like deal with ego and pride and issues that end up blinding you from being humble and seeing the face of God.
Without holiness, you don't see the Lord.
And we have to really check our hearts at the gate there of heaven and see really what's going on in our lives and our hearts and our minds and be honest because the mind is ruthless.
