December Q&A

Subscriber Q&A

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Question 1

00:01:36 - I’ve been reading Maximus the Confessor’s “On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ” and I’m loving it - it’s very clear and concise. The only thing left ambiguous is the distinction he makes about the body and soul. In Ambiguum 7 and 8, he discusses the body before the fall (pre-fall) versus after the fall (post-fall). He says man is the union of body and soul, but he seems to make a distinction between pre-fall and post-fall. Can you help clarify what he’s saying about this? Also, there’s a passage where he uses the word “satisfaction” - can you help me understand it without the lens of substitutionary atonement?

Question 2

00:21:17 - I have a question about John Zizioulas. He writes that the Cappadocian Fathers had to reinvent a new primary concept that wasn’t existent in Greek thought - the concept of the person - in order to define the Trinity. I’m curious how this primary concept was not existent or was ambiguous in previous Greek thought with Plato and Aristotle. Could you comment on that?

Question 3

00:35:10 - I’ve been thinking about Gregory of Nyssa’s statement that the whole body of humanity, or the whole of humanity, is the body of Christ. In Western (especially evangelical) theology, “Body of Christ” is used exclusively to denote those who’ve expressed faith in Christ. But I’ve been reading that this isn’t universal in the West - Karl Barth and T.F. Torrance, going back to Athanasius, see the whole of humanity in union with Christ because of the vicarious humanity of Christ. I’d love you to talk about how Paul uses “in Christ,” especially in Ephesians and Colossians, which on surface reading would suggest this is an exclusive group. Yet the understanding of Christ being creator and sustainer must put the whole of humanity in some form of union with Him.

Question 4

00:52:47 - For 2026 I’m planning on reading through all of Plato and Aristotle. I already have some good translations from Hackett. Do you have any other advice on how to read these first philosophers?

Question 5

00:58:43 - I recently read your article on idealism in the Church Fathers, and I also recently read Berkeley’s “Three Dialogues of Hylas and Philonous.” You make a side comment about how some people interpret Gregory of Nyssa as being an idealist, and you say that’s nonsense. I actually know someone who defends that interpretation. I’m curious what you think of Berkeley and idealism. Reading the three dialogues, I found some of his arguments pretty compelling, but I can think of a couple objections. Part of the problem is that he appears to be working with a different definition of matter compared to classical philosophers - he imagines matter as this inert stuff that’s out there. But if we take a more Aristotelian definition of matter as the potential to be something, then Berkeley’s idealism kind of makes more sense to me. As Christians, do we actually believe there’s this thing independent of mind that’s just sitting there? What would you think of these ideas?

Question 6

01:16:30 - I have a question about our modern condition and pluralism. You’ve done work on the Nous, and I think there’s somewhat of a pluralist spirit in that experimentation (you can correct me if that’s wrong). But my question is more about the academic side of pluralism. I think recently in Orthodoxy we’ve seen some pluralist thinking starting to come up, especially on Substack. I used to be more pluralistic myself - I was heavily influenced by Kenneth Rose’s book “Pluralism: The Religion of the Future.” What I wanted to pose to you was a problem: I used to look at the world’s religions and see a sage here and a sage there - both geniuses, both good people, both pursuing truth. If I imagine myself being born in their conditions with all the contingencies, I don’t see myself escaping that religion to go to a different one. When you multiply that by all the world’s religions, you’re left with epistemic paralysis. How would you escape that epistemic paralysis? And if you’d like to share your comments about pluralism in general, I’d like to hear that.

Question 7

01:51:18 - This is a History of Ideas question. You’ve said in your class that the empiricist movement was largely a backlash against the scholastics’ beloved Aristotle. Where did the backlash against Aristotelian philosophy come from? I understand the backlash against scholastic method, but not Aristotelian philosophy in general.

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