November Q&A

Subscriber Q&A

The December, the book club (Mere Christianity book 3) will be held on Saturday, December 13 at 10am Central Time.

The December Q&A will be held Thursday, December 11 at 7pm Central Time.

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00:01:34 - Question 1 - My wife and I were dialoguing about penal substitution. Both of us were taught that view being raised Protestant, but I’m now wrestling with the orthodox perspective. She keeps going back to Isaiah 53:5 that references the punishment that brought us peace was upon him. From her perspective, it’s an open and shut case for penal substitution. I was wondering what your view on that verse was.

00:05:53 - Question 2 - Define nature as opposed to essence. How does that differ from Aristotle’s nature and from blindness as nature?

00:14:43 - Question 3 - How do we discern between the essential and accidental traits of human beings? We could see a human and discern that bipedal is one of the essential traits, but you could point to a baby born with a birth defect who does not have two legs. We wouldn’t say that’s not a human. So how do we discern between these essential and accidental traits given that sometimes people seem to be lacking essential traits?

00:20:44 - Question 4 - I was just watching the fourth episode of your podcast which addresses the trans mindset. From my understanding of secondary scholarship on Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky is writing this as a polemical work against Chernyshevsky, who holds to a deterministic worldview. One of the things Dostoevsky highlights is this dialectical tension between personhood on one hand or acting in accord with reason on the other - and if you go down that route you lose all sense of identity. Do you find that sort of dialectical tension in trans thought?

00:28:12 - Question 5 - I’m trying to read St. John Damascus’s philosophical chapters, and I have some concerns about the Chase translation. Can you spot check my thoughts on chapter 17, particularly about how St. John distinguishes between “one and another” versus numerical distinction?

00:37:47 - Question 6 - In the church fathers or in any orthodox theology in general, is there a big distinction between the spirit and the soul? In the more charismatic Pentecostal theology that I came from, that’s a big distinction - they’re very two separate things for most people.

00:46:08 - Question 7 - I’m going to try to weave together some threads. You gave a podcast on Hell at Northern Arizona University where in the Q&A somebody asked you to steelman nominalism, and you declined because you said it’s not coherent - you can’t steelman something that’s not coherent. I agree with that in principle. However, it seems to me like the case for proving the existence of God or Christianity has been somewhat overstated. Nominalism seems like a legitimate view in the sense that it could be true. It doesn’t mean you can talk about it because to talk about it you’d have to be coherent, but it also doesn’t make it false just because you can’t talk about it. It could be that all the order we see, all the goodness, truth, and beauty we see could just be constructions of our mind or just happenstance. That seems like a possibility if we’re talking about pure logical possibilities. At the end of the day, you’re kind of left with a choice like Puddleglum made in The Silver Chair when the witch contrasts different views of the world and reality. You can recognize God because it aligns with your image, and you can kind of make a choice to cooperate with that or not. That’s not a proof so much as it’s almost a belief or faith statement. This seems to be kind of a minor point of contention in some philosophical circles, but to me it’s almost everything because I feel like we often overstate the case and tell people that you can prove things, and that always leads to something bad because somebody comes along like Hume and says “well that’s not true” and can knock holes in it. Could you comment on that?

00:56:58 - Question 8 - I often run into fellow Orthodox Christians who are very fideistic in their approach to knowledge. If topics like philosophy or metaphysics come up, they say the church fathers had nothing to do with that. They’ll dismiss the ecumenical councils and natural sciences. I read in St. Isaac of Nineveh about the three degrees of knowledge. As an Orthodox Christian, what is the proper interplay between the three degrees of knowledge, and is it similar or dissimilar to Stephen Jay Gould’s non-overlapping magisteria?

01:16:43 - Question 9 - I got baptized earlier this year - your stuff was instrumental in my journey to Orthodoxy, particularly your documentary. My question is related to your story about psychedelics. I had a pretty bad trip myself when I was about 16 that pulled back the veil to the demonic realm, which drove me to seek God. I’m a therapist, and in the world of therapy there’s all this research about psychedelics being helpful for PTSD. Rod Dreher apparently had a positive experience with psychedelics that was instrumental for his journey toward God. What is your view on psychedelics in therapeutic contexts?

01:29:46 - Question 10 - I listened to your podcast on realism versus nominalism, and then your Jordan Peterson podcast where you said Jordan Peterson might be a non-realist. What does that mean? I wouldn’t consider him a nominalist - is non-realism something different that slides along a spectrum between realism and nominalism?

01:49:20 - Question 11 - I’m very interested in natural law, particularly regarding Humanae Vitae issues in Catholic and Protestant circles. I’m trying to look at how Aquinas’s view of natural law versus an older understanding relates to questions about Humanae Vitae and sexual ethics. I was reading David Bradshaw’s article “What Does It Mean to Be Contrary to Nature?” trying to look at East versus West understandings. What’s your perspective on different types of contraception versus natural family planning, and also embryo adoption, which is popular in Protestant circles but rejected in Catholic circles?

02:08:53 - Question 14 - I’ve been reflecting on Lewis’s Perelandra and reading “On the Incarnation.” It connects to previous comments about the individual. I’m trying to get your thoughts on Lewis’s understanding of what humanity is and salvation - particularly how it seems that when it comes to humanity, it’s not so much about species in the scientific way but something related to the nous or the capability of having a nous. Before I read Perelandra, one of my biggest questions was what to do with salvation if humanity encountered a foreign intelligence. How does Lewis address this?

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