https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=g4XeV3O2gew
How can I say this? The idea, for example, that the man Jesus Christ created the world, for example, you find that in some texts, you see that in St. Maximus, he has some crazy sayings, you know, while he was on the cross, he was creating the world, like all these types of contradictions. But for sure in the iconography, it was preserved very attentively. So until the 14th century, when you see God represented anywhere in the Old Testament, it’s always Christ. And so when you see the creation of man, you see Christ, and it’s Jesus Christ, right? It’s not the pre-incarnate logos, it’s the man, Christ, who is creating the world. And it seems like it’s a continuation of that image, you know, of the Son of Man. The idea would be something like, although in terms of time, it doesn’t make sense for us, but that ultimately doesn’t matter. The idea is that what they saw, what Daniel saw was Jesus Christ at the side of God the Father. Yeah, yeah. And the time problem is because of the type of creatures we are. Right? We were talking, you know, we mentioned Nagel, what is it like to be a bat, right? Animals don’t experience time the same way we do. Right? There are all different ways in which their consciousness is different. I was recently watching a thing about a dog that had to have a leg amputated. And animals adapt to that kind of thing almost instantly. Humans go through all kinds of, right, because we have a different kind of bodily awareness than an animal has. Right? So an animal is just, I have three legs now, okay, right? Yeah, there’s no mourning. Yeah, learn to run on three legs. So, and that includes the experience of time. And so, we want to apply our experience of time to, for example, angelic beings. So this comes up a lot with Lord of Spirits stuff because it’s, well, when did the angels fall? Right? It’s sort of like, well, what time is it in heaven right now? Like, what time zone are they on? Right? We’re projecting, right, our experience onto beings that are not like us, whose consciousness is different than us and who experience time in a different way. And there’s this huge break point as soon as you try to get to God. Yeah. And so time and space are really attributes of created things. Right? And we’ve been taught in Western theology even, right? We talk about omnipresence. You know, well, God’s everywhere, right? Created things are only in one place at one time, but he’s in all the places all the time, right? That’s not really what that means. Right? You read Father Deuteronomy of Stanoly is really good on this in his Orthodox dogmatics, right? He talks about God’s attributes being supra-essential. So it’s equally true to say God is everywhere and to say that he’s nowhere. Yeah. And that basically what we mean is these spatial categories don’t apply to God. These temporal categories don’t apply to God when we say he’s eternal. Yeah. Right. And so when we talk about Christ before the incarnation, that’s presuming that Christ as God experiences time the way we do, that there was this before and after. And over and over again in our dogmatics and our himnography and everything, it talks about how Christ took on our human nature, Christ became in without change or alteration. Yeah. And I don’t think we take that seriously enough. Yeah, we have this idea that that because we say things like Christ ascended into heaven and his body is there next to the Father, but now we think that that’s in time. It’s like, well, wait a minute. Like, yeah, yeah. And that was, you know, sorry Calvinists. I got to get one of these in here. Right. That was that was the Calvinists. It wasn’t Calvin himself, but that was the Calvinists whole argument against Luther on the Eucharist was it can’t be Christ’s body because Christ’s body is in heaven. Right. Yeah. It’s in that place so it can’t be all these other places. Yeah. What’s going on? Yeah, so there’s an interesting idea which is something like when Christ ascended into heaven he ascended into heaven from the beginning, like, he ascended into heaven from forever like from beyond time let’s say, like that there is no, that he entered into that Christ’s body is in God. Right, right. It’s not it doesn’t it doesn’t it is not no longer and is not. Yeah, it’s not limited by time or space, ultimately. Right. It’s not a question of time and change that we experience. Yeah, there are points where these realities enter into the realm of human conscious. Right. Yeah, that’s the best way to explain it. There are points in our history in our human history, where the fall of certain angelic beings entered into our conscious experience. There’s a place where Christ’s incarnation entered into our conscious experience. But it’s not that it wasn’t true before that. Yeah. Right. That’s why he’s the lamb slain before the foundation of the world. Yeah, I’ve been quoting that a lot these days. Right. I mean that’s so that these things are eternally true, but they enter into time and space. Right and our experience in a particular way. Yeah. Because of the type of beings that we are.