Mr. Steve Robinson: O heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of truth, who art everywhere present and fillest all things; Treasury of good gifts and Giver of life, come and abide in us and cleanse us from every stain, and save our souls, O gracious Lord.

And good evening and welcome to this edition of Our Life in Christ. Yes, we are alive!

Mr. Bill Gould: Yeah, it seems like we’ve done this a number of times, haven’t we?

Mr. Robinson: Yeah, I think we’ve done it.

Mr. Gould: Gone away for a while, just been kind of lolly-gagging around, finally decide to go back and do a show.

Mr. Robinson: “Déjà vu all over again.” [Laughter] Yeah, this table looks really familiar. Groundhog day!

Mr. Gould: Haven’t we done this before?

Mr. Robinson: Well, welcome to our listeners. Yes, we are back in the studio. Actually, we’ve gotten several emails from some of our listeners to say, “Where are you? We miss you!” It’s nice to be missed.

Mr. Gould: It is nice to be missed. I had some thoughts about that, too. I wanted to say to everyone that it’s not our goal to become celebrities or even authorities. So this is why we can just afford to take time off, because…

Mr. Robinson: We have nothing to prove! [Laughter] Nobody to impress.

Mr. Gould: That’s right. We do appreciate the people who’ve said that they missed us.

Mr. Robinson: We got an email today from Leah. She says: I’m old enough to remember when you used to do a show every week. [Laughter] Oh, that’s great: “I’m old enough to remember”! That was funny.

Well, speaking of old enough, I’m a grandpa!

Mr. Gould: Yes, congratulations! You are a grandpa, and I’m not far behind you.

Mr. Robinson: I know, I beat you by what? How many months?

Mr. Gould: About two months.

Mr. Robinson: Yeah, it happened over Christmas break, so I spent a little bit of my Christmas break in Texas, visiting my grandson. So I’m Pappy Steve.

Mr. Gould: Pappy Steve, wow. All right, Pappy.

Mr. Robinson: It’s just kind of weird. It’s like I’m officially old. I can already order off the senior menu on the Denny’s menu. I can get a senior coffee at McDonald’s.

Mr. Gould: That’s it. I have received already the AARP notices in the mail.

Mr. Robinson: I’m a member already, man.

Mr. Gould: Are you really?

Mr. Robinson: Oh, yeah.

Mr. Gould: See, I haven’t joined yet, but it’s coming.

Mr. Robinson: Anyway. A couple of old guys. We’re a couple of relics already.

Mr. Gould: That’s right.

Mr. Robinson: Fossils, not relics. That’s a segue for our savvy listeners who recognize what’s going on here.

Mr. Gould: Well, it has been about eight weeks or longer.

Mr. Robinson: Oh my gosh. Yeah, I think the last time we did a program we were talking about having the newsletter out by October. [Laughter] For our listeners who have received it, we made it out in 2008!

Mr. Gould: That’s right. It was supposed to go out before Christmas or by Christmas. Oh, well. That just gives you an idea of what we’re like. [Laughter]

Mr. Robinson: Once in a while we get an email from a listener that says: When is this going to happen? When are you guys going to do…? And the old joke about Orthodoxy is: don’t stand in front of the glacier, because 10,000 years from now you’re going to be killed. There’s a thing called Orthodox time, and it reminds me of the passage in Jeremiah where God says to Jeremiah when he’s complaining about something: “How can you run with the horsemen when you can’t run with the footmen?” If you can’t handle Steve and Bill being late and slow on stuff, how are you going to handle the Orthodox Church!? [Laughter]

Mr. Gould: Yeah, that’s true, very true.

Mr. Robinson: Things happen on their own time when it comes to anything happening in the Orthodox Church.

Mr. Gould: That’s right, and we do learn patience.

Mr. Robinson: We’re more than just a doctrinal, theological introduction into the Church. We’re actually an introduction into the praxis and the culture and the ethos of the Church, too! [Laughter]

Mr. Gould: Oh, that’s right.

Mr. Robinson: That’s as good as an excuse as any!

Mr. Gould: Pretty good. That’s not too bad. I think the other thing was that the truth of the matter is that this whole subjective matter that we’re talking about, relics, has led us into some serious and sobering contemplation about what it is that we’d better say. A couple of times we’ve talked to each other and said we’re not in a hurry to become heretics! [Laughter] That’s really true. This is a subject that we really do have to pay a lot of attention to. We spent a lot of time reading and preparing for this, even beyond what we did do the first few shows, because this particular subject tonight, which we promised you “next week” the last time we talked to you…

Mr. Robinson: Next year…

Mr. Gould: Yeah, right, 2008. Essence and energies is a very weighty topic. Just the idea that we’re trying to tackle this kind of is insane to begin with, but, you know, we’re going to go ahead and do this. But we really are concerned about what we say. We’ve spent some time structuring out, hopefully structuring out what we’re going to say a little more than we typically do, because we don’t want to misstep on this, because this is really important, crucial stuff.

Mr. Robinson: And the reality, too, Bill, is that even with all of the reading we’ve done and all the research and the hundreds of pages of stuff that we’ve culled through and the outline we’ve got and everything, we may still misstep. This is heady stuff. One of the things, again, that we’ve talked about and that we want to share with our listeners—two things: one is in discussing this we don’t want to come off sounding like we’re a couple of scholars here. This could come off sounding really pretentious and very…

Mr. Gould: Heady and snobbish, perhaps.

Mr. Robinson: And we’re not that.

Mr. Gould: No, no! We’re certainly not scholars, and we don’t pretend to be.

Mr. Robinson: So what we’re doing is we are filtering a lot of information from a lot of people who are a whole lot smarter than we are, and trying to distill and interpret and understand what it is they’re trying to say, and bring that, in some kind of a radio-friendly, listener-friendly format, so people can at least get some kind of a broad overview of the importance of the topic and some of the high points of why this needs to be discussed in the context of relics, but also in the greater context of the entire mind of the Orthodox Church.

This is truly foundational stuff, and we talk about hot-button issues and topics and all of that, but when we really start getting down to dogmatics, this is really one of the fundamental dogmas of the Church. It’s hard stuff.

Mr. Gould: Well, we’re talking about the nature of God, and the Orthodox Church puts out kind of its own disclaimer at the beginning and says: apophatic theology says that we really can’t comprehend God. [Laughter]

Mr. Robinson: So we really can’t talk about God, but we’re going to anyway.

Mr. Gould: Again, we want to step carefully, and we want to make it a little bit entertaining in the sense of good radio. We’re not going to pretend to start the philosophy channel here.

Mr. Robinson: No, no. One of the things here, too, that we want to at least tell the listeners is, again, we’re distilling a lot of stuff here. We’re trying to simplify but also do justice to it. If anybody out there hears anything that sounds a little goofy weird, or actually that we’ve misspoken or misinterpreted something that somebody else has written about, drop us an email. Let us know. We’re not above issuing corrections and addendums.

Mr. Gould: Web 2-0, man.

Mr. Robinson: Absolutely. The second thing is, if someone is interested in getting more deeply into this, there’s a lot of material out there, and you can get as heady and as deep and as philosophical as you want with it. We have the resources, and we’ll try to post up some of that on the website. There’s entire blogs dedicated to just this topic, both from the Orthodox side and from…

Mr. Gould: The Roman Catholic side.

Mr. Robinson: So it’s out there. Anyway, Bill, let’s connect some dots here for our listeners.

Mr. Gould: Let’s dive in. Well, where did we leave off?

Mr. Robinson: We left off—I want to say “last week”—last year, talking about relics. There’s a great quote in Hierotheos (Vlachos)‘s book, Introduction to Orthodox Spirituality, and he says, “The job of the Church is to make relics.” Now, that statement is so pregnant with meaning, because it really gets to the heart of the entire purpose of our life, the entire purpose of the economy of God, the entire purpose of the revelation of God, the entire purpose of creation. The job of the body of Christ, the job of the Church that was established by Christ—because he comes to earth in flesh and saves the human race, and now we participate in him through the Church, participate in him in his body—the job of this entire thing is to make us into relics.

But what does that mean?

Mr. Gould: Again it points to the fact that, at least as far as the Church is concerned, our salvation is not merely rational, mental, intellectual ascent to truth, but it is in fact the transformation of our body, mind, soul, and spirit, because we participate in God. Now people will ask the question: Well, how does that happen? And this leads us into this topic that we’re talking about in terms of essence and energies, because answering that question is extremely difficult.

Mr. Robinson: Well, there’s a lot of questions when we start talking about what does it mean to be saved, what does it mean for us to participate in Christ, what does it mean for us to be in Christ. I think it’s 147 times in the New Testament St. Paul uses the term “in Christ.” Well, what does that mean? How does that express itself in the life of the Christian? What’s the goal of our human existence in relationship to God. It seems like a very simple question. It seems like, well, duh—salvation. That’s our goal, is to be saved. But what does that mean? It requires us to ask a lot of other questions, like, well: Who is God? Or in another sense: What is God? How does he exist? What does it mean to know God? If we are in Christ, if we are to have union with God, what does that union look like?

Mr. Gould: Yeah, and there’s a lot of different meanings for the word “know,” especially in the Scriptures. “Know” means to know in terms of having knowledge.

Mr. Robinson: And intellectual apprehension.

Mr. Gould: But it also connotes an intimacy, that we typically don’t understand or take account of when we talk about the word, “know,” today.

Mr. Robinson: Adam knew Eve, and that is definitely not an intellectual process! [Laughter] So it’s a very relational term. There’s all these questions that we really have to ask, and it really comes down to a core set of questions, and that is, well: How does the human being, the created human being, relate to its Creator?

Mr. Gould: Yes, who dwells in unapproachable light, who is wholly Other, who is totally beyond our ability to comprehend—how do we do that?

Mr. Robinson: Well, there’s an interesting quote from St. Irenaeus, and this is from the second century, so this is very shortly post-apostolic times. He said, “It is impossible to life without life.” [Laughter] Well, you know, that’s kind of like a duh, but he says, “and the existence of life proceeds from the participation in God.” So what does this participation mean? Is our existence in God, is our relationship to God merely a change of God’s attitude toward us? Is it an intellectual regard that God has for the human being that changes because of the work of Christ? In some ways that’s really what salvation boils down to for most of our Evangelical listeners.

Mr. Gould: Yeah, substitutionary atonement.

Mr. Robinson: Our life is viewed through the lens of Jesus Christ. God regards us as snow-covered dung.

Mr. Gould: He doesn’t see us; he sees Christ.

Mr. Robinson: And his mercy, his forgiveness, is a change of his attitude toward us. He is no longer angry and wrathful, but now he is forgiving and merciful. So if we’re looking at St. Irenaeus’ statement, “It is impossible to live without life, and the existence of life proceeds from the participation in God,” then what does it mean for us to participate in God? As we mentioned, St. Paul talks about us being “in Christ.” What does that look like? How is that manifested in our human existence? Is it just a moral change? And moral change is important. The New Testament talks about moral change. Is it just an intellectual change?

Mr. Gould: Do we think differently about it? God thinks differently about us; we think differently about God. Is that the level at which this all takes place?

Mr. Robinson: A change of attitude. These are the things that we really have to get to the root of, if our life, if our very existence is now in Christ. If the life of God is now part of our life, then what does that mean? What does that look like? How does that happen? Is it possible for there to be a real, true, substantive connection between the created and its Creator? Can there be a real connection between us and God? Can there be a true union between the Creator and that which he creates?

Mr. Gould: Well, that’s right, and I think most people would agree that there can be, there must be able to be, because of the way the Scriptures speak about this. I think what the question really comes down to is how. How can it be? We will give all of Christendom the benefit of the doubt when it comes to believing there is a relationship between us and God, but it’s the nature of that relationship, how it’s worked out in our lives that we’re really going to try to get down to, and which really separates the Orthodox worldview, the Orthodox idea and teaching about relics puts that into its own sort of category in terms of the way we look at the relationship.

Mr. Robinson: Well, you know, all Christendom talks about having a personal relationship with Christ, having a personal relationship with God. J.I. Packer wrote a book called Knowing God. So, no, this is not off the radar screen. I mean, we’re definitely not trying to say nobody understands or nobody has a goal of having an intimacy with God, an intimacy with Christ—but what format intimacy takes, how that intimacy happens, how does the finite human being, the limited, created being that we are, have true communion, participate in, be a part of, have God dwelling in us, how can we be a temple of the Holy Spirit? How can the Holy Spirit in-dwell us?

Mr. Gould: What drives this notion that human beings can actually be holy relics? That’s really what we’re trying to get to.

Mr. Robinson: The phenomenon of relics for the Church really defines what we mean by the human being having a union with God, because ultimately what this means God is truly a personal God. God is truly, personally, involved in our lives, but in a way that I think has really escaped the mind of the Western world.

Mr. Gould: Absolutely.

Mr. Robinson: Because ultimately this personal relationship with God, this personal relationship with Christ kind of boils down to attitudinal changes, to changes of status. We have moved from the status of sinner and lost and condemned and under wrath to the status of sons and in Christ and forgiven and saved.

Mr. Gould: Well, we’ve tended to abstract the truth and apply it in terms of its intellectual, rational capacity. What we’ve failed to do is fully understand how our incarnational theology, our incarnational teaching in the Orthodox Church actually penetrates all of our life. This really comes down to some of the things we’ve said in the past. We’ve talked about this even on the other relics shows. We have this sacramental worldview, where we believe that matter is good, fundamentally. When we look at the problem and really take a good look at it, we see that, over time, especially in the West, this sort of rational abstraction of the truth has led more actually towards a Gnostic view of Christianity, more than most people realize. We’re going to try to call you back to understand that the Incarnation, the perfect union of human nature and divine nature together in Christ is not a Plan B; it’s not a fallback plan, but it’s actually the design of God.

Mr. Robinson: It’s the goal of the existence of creation from the very beginning, all things summed up in Christ—Ephesians 1, Colossians 1. So salvation, then, the relationship that we have with God, is not the ultimate Vulcan mind-meld. [Laughter] The notion of salvation is not merely to have our will conform to the will of God; it’s not merely for us to, in a sense, know the mind of God. It’s not just for us to know the will of God. It’s not merely for us just to, in a sense, live a more moral life. Those are conceptual changes of attitudes. Those are things that are important. Those are things that are part of the bigger bigger picture. It’s not the whole of the picture, and I think that that’s where, when we talk about the Orthodox view of salvation, very often people say, “Well, you don’t think forgiveness is important. You don’t think that the will of God is important. You don’t think that a moral transformation is important.”

Mr. Gould: No, no, we think it’s all important; we don’t just focus on one area.

Mr. Robinson: Yeah, and those are parts of a much, much bigger picture, and that bigger picture is that God has become flesh, that the divine nature, the divine essence of God, has participated in and become one with human nature and with creation in the Person of Jesus Christ.

Mr. Gould: And continues to.

Mr. Robinson: And continues to be so, and in that union God has shown us the goal of all of creation. He has shown us what his end game is, for us and for the entire created order. So, Bill, on that note, let’s take a quick break, and when we come back from the break we want to go to the Scriptures. We want to talk about how do we understand God in the Scriptures.

Mr. Gould: In terms of his essence and his energies.

Mr. Robinson: Yes. Yeah, we’re going to talk about what his energies and what his energies [are], because these are some terms that the early Fathers used to talk about how it is that the created can participate fully and completely with its creator and yet maintain the integrity of the transcendence—

Mr. Gould: And holiness.

Mr. Robinson: —and holiness and complete otherness of our Creator.

Mr. Gould: That’s right.

Mr. Robinson: So, Bill, take a quick break. When we come back, essence and energies. You’re listening to Our Life in Christ.

Mr. Robinson: Welcome back to this edition of Our Life in Christ. I’m your host tonight, Steve Robinson, in the studio with a rather peaked-looking Bill Gould. [Laughter]

Mr. Gould: I feel like an old man tonight, I tell you. My voice is hoarse…

Mr. Robinson: You’ve been sick. We were going to try to do this earlier this week. Gosh, it seemed like every time we wanted to sit down to the microphone, something comes up: I have a grandchild, you have a cold, Christmas comes around, we have a service to some saint or something.

Mr. Gould: On top of everything else, I’m half-blind tonight. [Laughter]

Mr. Robinson: Forgot your reading glasses!

Mr. Gould: So we’re flying blind, at least on this side of the table. [Laughter]

Mr. Robinson: Anyway, Bill, before the break we were talking about beginning the discussion of essence and energies and its importance in the dogmatic structure of the Orthodox Church’s understanding of what does it mean for the human being to have union with God.

Mr. Gould: That’s right, and I think we should point out to the audience that the word “essence” actually doesn’t appear in the Scriptures; however, the word “energies” absolutely does, many times, in the New Testament especially. It’s a word that’s used about God and about his work, and about his work in us.

Mr. Robinson: And our participation in that work.

Mr. Gould: That’s right. So when we say these two words, it’s not just a parlor trick.

Mr. Robinson: Well, it’s just like the word “trinity” doesn’t occur in the Scriptures either. Yet when you distill the presence of God from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22, the Trinity is evident. So the term “essence,” as you say doesn’t precisely appear in the New Testament, but it does speak of the divine nature.

Mr. Gould: Well, it’s in our Creed. It says that Jesus is of one essence with the Father. So this is essentially what we’re coming from: the essence of God. How do we look at that?

Mr. Robinson: Who or what is God? Depending on how you define who or what God is is really going to define ultimately how you understand how we can relate to who or what God it. And it will ultimately define who or what we are, if we’re created in his image. So these are not light-weight things that we are talking about. [Laughter]

So, Bill, we talk about essence and energies, and when we talk about ultimately that ontological, existential, teleological… [Laughter]

Mr. Gould: Ontical!

Mr. Robinson: We are talking about the end game of everything, really the bottom-line question really does boil down to: How do we understand God in a way that permits us to understand that we as his creation can actually have a real, true relationship with him that goes beyond just attitudinal changes or changes of status or a change in how God regards us intellectually or emotionally.

Mr. Gould: Well, that’s right, and again, modern man has to deal with sort of the sum of his experience. It probably won’t get to it this week, but next week I think we have planned a little bit more of a historical overview of kind of how this shapes up. Tonight we wanted to focus more on specifically what the Scriptures have to say, but we do have to go back in time and understand that our experience with God and our understanding with God primarily comes from the Hebrew culture and the Hebrew experience with God, in the Old Testament and of course with the Church in the New Testament.

Mr. Robinson: And the revelation of who God is through the incarnation of Christ. “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father,” as Christ says. So, again, everything hinges on, as we always say, the Trinity, God as he exists in three Persons in one nature, and the incarnation of God in human flesh.

Mr. Gould: And we did cover a little bit of some of this in the burning bush and some of the other stuff, but tonight we wanted to try to get to this whole experience of Moses with God on the mount, Mount Sinai, and discuss that a little bit, because this gives us some real insight into how it is that men relate to a wholly other, transcendent God.

Mr. Robinson: It also gives us some insight into how the Fathers came to this distinction of the essence and energies of God, because in that encounter that Moses has with God, here is Moses who speaks with God, face to face as friends, and how the Fathers read these accounts and how these accounts give us a picture or give us an understanding of how the human being can have a relationship with a transcendent Creator.

Mr. Gould: Right, and that God is transcendent is really not in question. We have that all over the place. The fundamental understanding of God by the Hebrews was that God was unapproachable, that God was… He was holy and you weren’t! [Laughter] And that he was beyond us in every possible way, so much so that you couldn’t even say his name, because you weren’t allowed to. It was so beyond and so other than our experience. That gave the Hebrew worship and that gave the Hebrew culture a lot of its substance, was this fundamental notion that God was…

Mr. Robinson: He was the Creator.

Mr. Gould: He was the Creator of all things—how do you say it? I mean, I can’t even begin to say it. Even now, it’s hard to say: omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent. You can put those words to it, but when you try to get to the essence, as we say, the essence of it, you can’t.

Mr. Robinson: Ultimately God in, as you say, the tetragrammaton, the four unpronounceable letters which prohibit the Hebrew from even saying the name of God, really does give us, right out of the gate, the vision of God that God is utterly transcendent, that God is utterly unapproachable, that God is, in the final analysis, utterly unknowable by the human being; that our finite mind and our finite existence and our finite bodies—our eyes, our ears—cannot in any way even begin to apprehend or circumscribe or understand who God is in his essence. And yet!

Mr. Gould: And yet!

Mr. Robinson: And yet, God reveals himself. Moses speaks with God as a friend, face to face. And we have the entire Old Testament, which is a historical record of people who walked with God, who spoke with God, whom God spoke with, that God carried into heaven bodily, that God wrestled with. So we have the immanent, we have the transcendent, unknowable God, wholly other, who condescends, who comes in some form, in some fashion, in some way, to his creation, and manifests himself in a relational way that can be understood at some level by the created.

We have the passage in 1 Timothy 6:16 where St. Paul says, “God alone possesses immortality. He lives in unapproachable light. No man has seen him nor can see him.” So when we go back to Moses now, where we started out, and we look at how Moses related to God, this really gives us the framework for how we understand God in essence and energies.

So, Bill, we go to the Old Testament; we go to the New Testament: we have several statements about God. We just quoted the one from 1 Timothy. We have one in Exodus 33, where God tells Moses, “You cannot see my face, for man cannot see my face and live.” We’re going to talk about this passage extensively, because this really does give us the whole framework for this essence and energies distinction. In Psalm 97:2, David says that “clouds in thick darkness surround him.” He’s talking about God, and the Fathers have read this verse and said this is ultimately the vision of God on Sinai who is covered in a thick, dark cloud, where people hear the voice of God. They see the light and they hear the thunder, but God himself is covered in a thick cloud. Here again you have the manifestation of God and you have the very…

Mr. Gould: We know he’s there.

Mr. Robinson: We know he’s there, but what’s in that cloud? [Laughter]

Mr. Gould: Don’t touch that cloud! [Laughter]

Mr. Robinson: But then we have other passages. We’ve already heard God say, “You cannot see my face and live,” and yet in Numbers 6:25, one of the major prayers of the Jews is, “Let thy face shine upon us, O Lord.” In Matthew 5:8: “Blessed are the pure in the heart,”

Mr. Gould: “For they shall see God.”

Mr. Robinson: “For they shall see God,” exactly. Revelation 22:4 says, “They shall see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. So how is it, then, that we can both not see God’s face and live, and yet the very life of the believer, if you are pure in heart, if you are in the kingdom, if you are in the covenant chosen people of God, that the face of God is seen? So which is it? [Laughter]

Mr. Gould: Well, it’s both.

Mr. Robinson: Really!? How did you do that?

Mr. Gould: It’s easy. I just said, “It’s both.” [Laughter]

Mr. Robinson: Okay, well, yeah, it is both. What we need to do is take a look at the Scriptures and take a look at how it is that the Church and the Scriptures can look at both of these statements and understand how it is that we can both not see God and see God. And that’s ultimately the…

Mr. Gould: Again, we come back to Exodus 33, because this is really, in a sense, the first place where we have this seeing and not-seeing spelled out for us.

Mr. Robinson: Right, well, you know, Bill, this is kind of interesting, because back when I was a Bible teacher—gosh, 20-some-odd years ago in my former church—I was reading Luke 9, where Jesus heals the epileptic boy. I don’t know what it was, but at the end of that story, it says that they were all amazed at the majesty of God.

Mr. Gould: Yes, and in the wake of the healing.

Mr. Robinson: So I sat down with my Bible and read, “And they were amazed at the majesty of God.” In my mind, I was sitting there going: They should have been amazed at the power of God; they should have been amazed at the miracle of God—but why the majesty? Why did Luke say they were amazed at the majesty of God? So I got out my concordance, I got out my work study and all that stuff, and it ultimately took me back to Exodus 33. I think in some ways, 20-something years ago, I’m sitting there reading this passage and I’m looking at the connection between the miracles of Christ and God incarnate, healing and displaying the love of God, and then saying, “How can we know God? How can we understand God? How do we approach the glory of God?” I always thought of glorifying God as singing a praise hymn, extolling the attributes of God, his wonder, his greatness, his power, and all of that stuff. But when I went back to Exodus 33 and I looked at the glory of God in this incident in the life of Moses, it really laid a foundation for me for getting a sense of what the Fathers were talking about when they talk about the essence and energies of God.

So, Bill, in Exodus 33:11, the Scriptures say that the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, just as a man speaks to his friend. Okay. So here we have Moses speaking with God face to face, God condescending to Moses to speak with him as a friend. Now, the interesting thing is that this isn’t enough for Moses. It’s not enough for him to speak with God as a friend, face to face.

Mr. Gould: Well, and I think it begs another question, too, and that is, when we say “face to face,” what is the face of God in that respect? Is it a voice out of thin air? Is it some partial light? Does he light up a bush again and speak to him out of a bush? When he says he speaks to him face to face, is it more directly, like he speaks directly to him, and Moses speaks directly back to him? We don’t really know.

Mr. Robinson: Yeah, but we know that when the Scriptures talk about somebody’s face, it’s talking about an intimacy. It’s talking about a deep personal encounter.

Mr. Gould: And that we know for sure.

Mr. Robinson: We know that for sure. And yet, that deep personal encounter, even though it is a face-to-face encounter, leaves Moses still wanting to know something more of God.

Mr. Gould: More thoroughly.

Mr. Robinson: So we move on to Exodus 33:18, and Moses approaches God, after God gives him some commandments and tells him he’s going to lead these people, and Moses says, “I pray thee, show me thy glory.” “Show me thy glory”!

Mr. Gould: Right, so whatever face-to-face encounter that he had with God, in terms of their ability to speak to each other, it did not include a manifestation of God’s glory…

Mr. Robinson: Or at least enough of his glory.

Mr. Gould: A manifestation of his glory, for Moses to feel like he knew there was more. And that’s actually an important thing: that we, as we look at God, how do we consider God, that we want to be drawn forward into a relationship with him, and that we become enamored with the notion that God’s glory is something for us to seek after. Someone put it a certain way: that God is a horizon that’s always moving forward.

Mr. Robinson: I think it was St. Gregory of Nyssa, if I remember correctly. Or St. Basil; it was one of the Cappadocian Fathers.

Mr. Gould: Exactly.

Mr. Robinson: But they do talk about the glory of God, as you say, being that ever-receding horizon that continually draws us closer to God, and yet we never arrive.

Mr. Gould: We never quite get there.

Mr. Robinson: We can never quite it.

Mr. Gould: And of course, this is what Moses is experiencing. He’s obviously had a taste of God that few, if any—maybe Enoch, perhaps, and Adam—

Mr. Robinson: Or Elijah.

Mr. Gould: Well, that’s later. ...till this point, few have seen. Abraham, sons of Abraham, but very few have had this encounter with God. And yet, he’s drawn forward. He’s drawn into this: “Show me thy glory.”

Mr. Robinson: To back to this point that you were making, again, that God is ultimately, God is in the final analysis, [incomprehensible]. No matter how deep we get into God, no matter how deep God gets into us, no matter how…

Mr. Gould: How gracious he happens to be to us in terms of our “personal relationship.”

Mr. Robinson: There is always more. There is always something that has not been apprehended, that has not been experienced, that God is infinitely more than anything that we have experienced or have known or have seen of him. So this is the relationship that God has with Moses. This gives us that tension that the Fathers talk about, that God is ultimately and finally unknowable in his essence, that no matter how far we get there’s always going to be more. So Moses, with this experience of God, realizes this. So he tells God, he asks God, “Show me thy glory. Show me more. I want to see it all.” I think this is the importance of what God says to him.

Mr. Gould: And what does God say back to Moses?

Mr. Robinson: And God says to Moses, in verse 19 of Exodus 33; he said, “I myself will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim the name of the Lord before you, and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion.” And he said, “You cannot see my face, for no man can see me and can live.” So he sets up this scenario with Moses now. He says, “I’m going to pass before you. I’m going to put you in the cleft of a rock. I’m going to cover you with my hand, and I’m going to pass by you. And as I pass by, I’m going to show you my glory. I’m going to remove my hand as I pass by, and you will see my backward parts.” So this is the deal that God offers to Moses: “You cannot see my face and live, but you will see my backward parts, and I will declare my glory as I pass by.”

Now, what happens? This is the cool part.

Mr. Gould: Well, everything that God says happens, right? Moses goes up on the mount, God puts him in the cleft of the rock, he passes by.

Mr. Robinson: And in chapter 34 of Exodus, beginning in verse 5, it says:

The Lord descended in the cloud and stood there with him, and Moses called upon the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed by in front of him and proclaimed:

The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loving-kindness and truth, who keeps loving-kindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression, and sin; yet he will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and on the grandchildren, to the third and fourth generations.

And Moses made haste to bow low toward the earth and worship.

So what does all that mean?

Mr. Gould: Oh man, honestly? [Laughter]

Mr. Robinson: We should just do what Moses did, and just bow low to the earth and worship!

Mr. Gould: That’s probably what we ought to do.

Mr. Robinson: But, no, we’re going to talk instead. [Laughter] Oh, man. So, Bill, but I think we need to keep talking after a little break. [Laughter] Let’s take a short break.

When we come back from the break, we’re going to talk about what does it mean to see the backward parts of God; what does it mean for God to pass by and declare his glory; what’s the importance of this in understanding the nature, the essence, and the energies of God.

Mr. Gould: Well put, Steve.

Mr. Robinson: Okay, we’re going to take a short break. We’ll be right back. You’re listening to Our Life in Christ.

Mr. Robinson: And welcome back to this final segment of Our Life in Christ. It might be final if we’re struck by lightning, Bill, by the energies of God.

Mr. Gould: We finished bowing low to the earth. We’ve come up now. We’ve got to talk.

Mr. Robinson: Come up for some air! [Laughter] So, Bill, before the break, we were talking about God manifesting himself to Moses, showing him his glory. Now, if I was Moses and if I was God, and somebody said, “Show me your glory,” I probably would have put on a light show. I would have, you know, made the sun come up in the west or something.

Mr. Gould: Throw all the stars together at one time.

Mr. Robinson: Written my name in the stars in heaven or something like that. But it’s interesting that God, as he passes by Moses, he declares how he relates to the human being. He declares his relationship to his creation.

Mr. Gould: It’s exactly what you would expect a person to do.

Mr. Robinson: Exactly, and the glory of God here is spoken of as the backward parts of God. Now, this is where the Fathers really hone in on this, because they talk about this incident in the life of Moses, and they say that the face of God is the essence of God; it is the part of God that is totally and ultimately unknowable to the human being. That part we cannot see; that part is inaccessible to us. But just as a human being—if you stood up and left the room right now, Bill, and I saw your backward parts walking out the door, I would still be seeing you.

Mr. Gould: Yes.

Mr. Robinson: I would be seeing—it would be Bill, walking out the door, but it wouldn’t be your face. I would be seeing a side of you. It’s still you. So when the Fathers talk about God passing by Moses and declaring his relationship to the human race, he is manifesting himself to Moses in his energies. He is showing himself, completely and fully and totally to Moses, as God relates to the human being, as he relates to the creation. So everything that is accessible to God, everything that God is—truly is—as God, that is manifested to creation, that can be apprehended, can be understood, can be grasped by the human being, is manifested to Moses. This is the glory of God.

Mr. Gould: Right. Moses really does see God.

Mr. Robinson: He really does.

Mr. Gould: He doesn’t see his face, but he sees God.

Mr. Robinson: And so when we look at this in the Fathers, it’s interesting, because St. Gregory of Nyssa, in discussing this passage, he talks about the face of God. He says for us to see the face of God means that we would be in front of God.

Mr. Gould: That’s right. I remember that.

Mr. Robinson: We would be before God.

Mr. Gould: And that’s the wrong place for us to be! [Laughter]

Mr. Robinson: Right. Exactly. We need to be behind God, following God, not seeing his face. And the other thing he talks about in that is for us to demand or to desire to know the face of God means that we want to see and fully define and fully recognize everything about God. He says ultimately if we can do that, if we can see the face of God or we believe that we have seen the face of God…

Mr. Gould: Then God isn’t God.

Mr. Robinson: Then God isn’t God, because now God is contained in our minds, and ultimately we have created a false God; we have created an image of God, and that’s idolatry, because now God is a created thing in our own heads, and we have contained God instead of God containing us.

Mr. Gould: That’s right. Again, we have even this in the New Testament, where Christ says, “Follow me.” Nobody gets out ahead of Christ.

Mr. Robinson: Exactly.

Mr. Gould: There’s a lot to that. We’re not going to fathom all of that right now, but I guess it points up the fact that seeing, again, as you say, seeing the backside of God and it truly being God, this is our place; this is the good thing that we can see about God and still live, and then still be drawn further to follow him, to go forward with him.

Mr. Robinson: Well, that is our life, is to follow God and to experience that relationship with God: the loving-kindness, the mercy, the forgiveness of transgressions and sins, and the visiting of the transgressions on the generations to come. All of these are ways in which God relates to creation in order to join himself to it. These are the ways in which that relationship is manifested.

Mr. Gould: It’s very much a loving, relational, wonderful thing that God does in showing him his backside. It’s not a snub. It’s not a “I’m going to give you…”

Mr. Robinson: “I’m going to give you a taste here.”

Mr. Gould: Well, yeah: “I’m going to give you something that’s not of the quality.” It’s obvious that he does show him his glory, he does see God, and something happens.

Mr. Robinson: Ultimately what happens is Jesus Christ. Ultimately what happens is what Jesus Christ prays about in the garden in John 17, where he prays that “the glory which you gave me I have given them, that they may be one, even as we are one, I in them, thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one.” And he prays that they may behold his glory, the same glory that he shared with the Father from eternity. So ultimately the goal of creation is not just to see the glory of God, it’s not just to apprehend it, but it’s to participate in it, to be one in it, as God and Christ are one, so that we can be one together in God, in Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, and share in that same glory. That glory is a part of our very being, and this is what Peter means when he talks about our being partakers of the divine nature. This is not just a conceptual apprehension of the nature of God; this is not J.I. Packer Knowing God—I’ve got God’s attributes all laid out here, and I can tell you about God as a loving Father…

Mr. Gould: God as wrath, God of this, God of that. No, exactly. I think that’s true. That sums up our destiny as Christians, in the prayer of Christ in the garden in chapter 17 of John. When we go back to Moses and we see that he is given the glory of God: his face lights up; he comes down from the hill with something that he didn’t have when he went up there.

Mr. Robinson: A face shining…

Mr. Gould: A face shining so brightly he has to put a veil over it. Of course, the Church teaches this is the energies of God that have been joined to Moses.

Mr. Robinson: Yeah, and this isn’t just God sticking a battery and a flashlight in Moses and making him glow. It’s not a parlor trick. This is the energies of God; this is the very being of God, infusing Moses and becoming a very part of who Moses is.

Mr. Gould: Exactly, kind of going back to Hollywood a bit here: in the movie, The Ten Commandments, I was always struck by the fact that Charlton Heston’s this guy with brown hair and stuff, he gets a little gray as he’s going along with the Israelites, right? When he comes back down from the mountain and they show him in the last scenes before he goes off by himself, he’s white. He’s changed. His hair is changed; he’s transfigured.

Mr. Robinson: He’s transfigured.

Mr. Gould: He becomes different, physically looking different. Again, that’s a Hollywood thing, but it gives you a sense that he’s changed.

Mr. Robinson: That when we participate in God, that the energies of God, when we become partakers of the divine nature, we are transformed, just as, ultimately, the flesh of Christ is transformed by the deity that he shares in his Person on the mount of Transfiguration.

Mr. Gould: Exactly. When we celebrate the feast of the Transfiguration, one of the things, one of the Scriptures that shows up in our canons is the story of Moses, for this very reason. He is seeing Christ.

Mr. Robinson: And he glows with the uncreated light. He glows with God, with the glory of God. So, Bill, we’ve got to wrap this. We could go on and on and on, but let’s just try to tie a little bit of a ribbon around this, and next week we’re going to have to unpack this a whole lot more. Ultimately, we have to bring away from this two things. One is, as we said in the very beginning of the program, God is ultimately and finally unknowable. In his essence, he is absolutely unapprehendable by the created.

Mr. Gould: He is a receding horizon that we’re never going to get to.

Mr. Robinson: But on the other hand, we have a personal relationship with God, and when we say personal we’re not just talking about an attitudinal change, we’re not just talking about a conceptual shift. We’re talking about a true participation in God, that the divinity of God infuses our very being. In him we live and breathe and have our very being. We have no life without being in life, and life is in God.

Mr. Gould: That’s right, and this is the whole rationale for the Eucharist. We share in his flesh, and in sharing in his flesh, that means we have become—what does it say?—we have become not merely slaves, but we’ve become sons. We are sons of God.

Mr. Robinson: And how do you become a son in human existence? It’s through a relationship and two human beings come together, and something of those two human beings, their very personhood, comes together and creates a new life. So there is something of both of those people in that life.

Mr. Gould: That’s right, and not just in our heads; not just rational, intellectual.

Mr. Robinson: It’s not just a birth certificate down in city hall that says these two people are your progenitors. There is a reality of existence, a reality of interpenetration of these two beings that create a new life, and that new life exists in the lives of those two people.

Mr. Gould: And having said that, then—that’s the first thing—what’s the other thing we want to say? We want to make sure that everybody understands, however, that the way that this happens is not by way of our participating in the essence of God, but it’s by participating in his energies, the energeia of God. We’re going to talk a lot more about that next time, because there’s a lot to say about that we haven’t covered yet, but we want to get this Moses thing out of the way, because this really does give us a framework to understand kind of what we’re going to say on the next program—whenever that might be. [Laughter]

Mr. Robinson: Well, God willing, that will happen next week, Bill.

Mr. Gould: We’ll figure out the energies to get together and sit here and do this again soon.

Mr. Robinson: Yeah. We can only hope that we’ve made some sense tonight. We can only pray that this has maybe at least opened a window, or opened a curtain and let a little bit of light in on something here. This is hard stuff. At some level, it’s almost a duh, when we talk about relationship with God, but on the other hand, this is really, as we said, the very root and foundation of everything that the Church is and everything that our life is and everything that God is and that we are in God, in Christ, through the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, we get this and we participate in it—we become relics!

Mr. Gould: That’s the goal.

Mr. Robinson: To tie it back in!

Mr. Gould: Into relics, yeah. Like you said, next time we’ll talk a bit more about how… about the energies.

Mr. Robinson: We’re really going to have to unpack the idea of a personal God. I mean, we’ve talked a lot about that tonight, but I think we need to really unpack what we mean when we talk about having a personal relationship with God. So, Bill, what more can we say? Why don’t we just say good night, thanks for joining us this week?

Mr. Gould: That sounds like a good idea.

Mr. Robinson: Yeah, let’s just do that.

Mr. Gould: Good night!

Mr. Robinson: Good night! Thanks for joining us this week. We’ll see you next time on Our Life in Christ.