Introduction

Benjamin Boyce is a YouTube commentator best known for his documentation of Evergreen State College’s state of affairs since the infamous campus protests of 2017. It most notably involved the confrontation between Professor Bret Weinstein and his wife Professor Heather Heying, and students that eventually led to both of their resignations. In short, Weinstein opposed the student’s insistence that the white people of campus do not go on campus. This was a change in the college’s tradition of having minority students and faculty voluntarily stay off campus for a “Day of Absence”. Boyce is an alumni of Evergreen and in opposition to the extremely liberal (or anti-liberal) direction that his alma mater is taking and has been documenting Evergreen affairs since 2017. He has over 100+ videos on Evergreen and is meticulous in his documentation so if anyone is interested in that topic I highly recommend it. Boyce also does interviews with people he finds interesting on topics as far ranging as trans issues, feminism, anti-racism, etc.

I watched Boyce’s video with Esther O’Reilly titled “Jordan Peterson: Gateway to Church? with Esther O’Reilly”. As the title suggests they discuss the ascendency of Jordan Peterson as the “gateway” between the poles of Christianity and materialist science. More interesting to me was the conversation between Boyce and O’Reilly on Boyce’s beliefs which can be generally described as deistic if not monotheistic. In short, he admits that he wants to believe, but doesn’t know what actual communion or interaction with God would look like and fails to see how reading a book about events that had happened 2000 years ago can help him establish relationship with God. The guest speaker, Esther O’Reilly, as genuine and well-spoken as she is, struggles to answer his honest and genuine questions about faith. I believe this inability is due partially within O’Reilly’s own unpreparedness for those sorts of questions within the context of the video but also due to the poverty of Protestant spirituality.

This will be the first time that I’ll be doing an essay on a video but likely won’t be the last given the popularity and breadth of content available in video format so I will adopt a format that hopefully works by quoting the content and writing a timestamp in the following format HH:MM:SS.

Video Analysis

The first thing to hone in on is Boyce’s response to O’Reilly’s explanation of her belief in Christianity in which she describes the historicity of the New Testament and its witness to Christ manifestation in space and time. He says this…

“Yea but so it’s an indirect relationship. I don’t know how you reason your way into a personal relationship with somebody. Isn’t a relationship, to be personal, there has to be reciprocal. How do you have a reciprocal relationship with a historical document (ie Bible)?. How does it effect you now to be a believer in Jesus Christ?”. Boyce 00:18:25-00:18:46 [1]

This perfectly encapsulates the disconnect between the Boyce and O’Reilly, where the former absolutely wants to replicate the experience of God in the here and the now while the latter continually references to a historical document detailing a place and a time no longer accessible from the here and the now. She responds with an answer that sounds vaguely like the Nicene Creed but with more Reformed interpretation.

“Well it affects me because I believe that he said certain things and did certain things. I believe that he died for my sins and I believe he rose again and that gives me hope for the resurrection and he’s that on which I stake myself as Peterson puts it when he talks about staking your life on something…. Well I believe that God is worthy of worship and I believe that the sort of crown of that was when God redeeming humanity because I think we need as savior because I don’t think we can sort ourselves out because I think we are fallen and broken creatures. And needed God and his mercy to provide way for us to have life and to be reconciled.” - O’Reilly 00:18:47-00:20:03

Yet this answer was not sufficient to really get at the heart of things.

“So this way is a code then? Or is it a contact? Do you have a contact with God or do you have a code of evidence that helps you.. reconfigures yourself? - Boyce (00:20:05-00:20:15)”

She cedes that she personally does not claim to have a contact with God, but says that this could depend on denominational lines (I assume she refers to Pentecostals and charismatic types who claim that they receive the Holy Spirit and it makes them act in certain ways). She graciously agrees with Boyce that intellectually believing in a set of historical events and their metaphysical and soteriological implications may very well not have any effect on one’s life and does not necessarily lead to a relationship with God. O’Reilly states that there is an important difference between the intellectual assent to such propositions and embodying those beliefs.

Boyce then moves on and asks if she acts as if God is real since she doesn’t personally have contact with God. This question reminds me of Peterson’s answer to whenever someone asks him if he believes in God, to which he always responds with either “Depends on what you mean by God” or “I act as if God is real”. They continue to go back and forth with Boyce asking questions about how O’Reilly’s faith tangibly affects her life and her answering them. Then Boyce goes on to postulate that he doesn’t understand how anyone can stake their life on something that they did not directly experience, quoting Paul’s own conversion experience on the road to Emmaus in which the apostle personally experienced God. He criticizes the rationalistic approach to God rather than a direct personal one.

In the next part of the video he sounds strangely similar to Orthodox theologians using the apophatic approach to theology. He says that feels limited by language when describing God. This description is similar to the description offered by Dionysius the Aeropagite in Chapters 5 and 6 on being and life in The Divine Names.

“Everything is necessarily unverifiable because I’m reducing it to language that is inaccurate. There is a vibration, force, a light, that suffuses reality. There is a love that connects everything that flows one thing to another that is constantly suffusing and sustaining it’s existence. And that human beings can be unaware of that or more aware of that but they need to go through a path or journey of being opened and trained by God to become closer to God.” - Boyce (00:26:50-00:27:35)

She goes on to quote the conversion story of a German scientist who rationally accepted Christ and the Christian narrative (29:39-30:50), but he counters that anecdote with “Yea but you reason your way into love with somebody. You can reason your way out of it but do you reason your way into love with somebody? How does a personal relationship result from a rational empirical argument?”” (00:30:55-00:31:06)

He gets a little frustrated later and clarifies that his beliefs. He reiterates his desire to experience God rather than to deliberate on the idea of God or think about God.

“I’m not an atheist at all. I’m a monotheist and etc. But I just, earlier you said that we need more information we need more revelation… I’m just to figure out how do I talk about revelation. If nobody else is experiencing revelation and people either reason themselves into a relationship with God or reason themselves out of a relationship with God, but nobody is experiencing God as a phenomena, as a phenomenological experience that undergirds every other experience then there is no way for me to interact with this conversation. I’m out of this conversation. I’ve felt out of this conversation for a long time because everybody is arguing ideas they are not arguing experience…. I pine for people who are looking for that that do see it in this present life not as a historical document or as a first order cause or anything impersonal. If it is truly personal then we would have a personal relationship. And the reason, and rationality is not a personal relationship.” - Boyce (00:34:52-00:36:10)

She continues to struggle to convince Boyce or even directly answer him as to HOW one begins to experience God and to meet God, talking about our consciousness, morality, choices etc. He attacks her ideas about consciousness and morality by bringing evolutionary biology/psychology into the midst and how that can explain group morality, or individual consciousness while also admitting that he “pines” for something beyond the evolutionary framework. In the next monologue he really tries to make himself clear that he disagrees and doesn’t mesh with this rationalistic and intellectualized version of faith and theism.

“In the end how does a conclusion… how does a rational language logical argument do anything for your soul. How does that do anything for your life? Unless you use that to pin a whole bunch of other things on. That’s not what is going to get you into heaven that’s not what is going to show you… God. You’re not going to get to God through your brain” - Boyce (00:46:03-00:46:26)

She replies with a statement about how Christianity puts itself out on a limb when it makes very specific prophesies anchored in history, prophesies that have actually ended up being fulfilled in the life and resurrection of Christ. He says that it is “not radical enough for me” (00:49:05) he appreciates that but he does not want to rely on testimonies of people long gone, but want something “here and now” (00:49:19). Furthermore Boyce states that the tools that religion has offered do not offer him what he desires, namely experience of God, “except for certain strands of like basically mystic tradition through various mostly monotheistic religions. They are the closest I’ve come” (00:50:21).

In response to the interviewee she once again returns to Scripture and references the mystical experience of the apostles. Boyce quickly retorts leading to this interaction..

“What makes it unique then?… What makes it so unique that it stands in the way of me attaining it myself? That I have to rely on these guys that aren’t around anymore to get close to God, who created me” - Boyce (00:51:10-00:51:29)

“I can’t come up with a good natural explanation for the things that they were saying, the things that they were reporting, besides that a man literally died and rose again from the dead. To me when I way out the evidence it seems like that is literally what happened. And so if i believe that is a thing that happened in history that Jesus actually rose from the dead that is SEISMIC. That’s huge” - Esther O’Reilly (00:51:33-00:52:13)

“Yea but that was 2000 years ago” - Boyce (00:52:14)

She attempts to bring it back to Christ commandments and his identity as God, paraphrasing his mission and objective while he was on Earth. “I love human beings and I see that human beings are broken but I am coming to restore that and I’m coming to bring healing.” (00:54:32). So far none of O’Reilly’s statements are heterodox. In fact most of what she says is sound, but none of what she says actually answers Boyce’s most deepest longing for a direct and personal relationship with God akin to that of the apostles.

He butts in and says “Eventually? or now…..” (00:54:44), to which O’ Reilly talks about healings in Africa. Boyce then says this…

“I don’t really care about the physical healings I’m talking about the… if we’re broken we’re broken in spirit. And if I’m not going to be fixed in spirit until after I die and I have certain words in my mouth and my brain then I get fixed in the end that doesn’t matter to me. Even if God, let’s just take that all the claims that are true, it is still me and my capacity of experience that I’m hinging my entire eventual fixedness on. Like I want to be fixed now I want to go through the process now while I’m alive with my volition to experiment, to mess up, and to get taught lessons and to find guidance, and to build something out of myself. I don’t want to just put it all on hold because of a bunch of claims whether they are true or not.”- Boyce (00:54:59-00:55:46)

This is someone seeking help and guidance. Boyce is clearly yearning for God, for spiritual healing and enlightenment, and eventually to SEE God but he does not know the way.

Boyce’s words epitomize a frustration with the Western paradigm of Christian faith and a standard criticism of Western Christianity by the Eastern Orthodox. In the context of this video it is a frustration with the Protestant expression of the faith, which reduces faith to a binary of belief or non-belief. What Boyce wants, and what many people who are seeking true spirituality want, is not a set of beliefs and a set of behaviors that result from the acceptance of a set of beliefs, but a mystical union with God.

In the East, the Orthodox Church describes this unity with God in the doctrine of theosis. In the transformative process whose aim is the union with God, one is purified, illumined, and perfected. When one experiences illumination or theoria one has the vision of God, and no longer sees “in a mirror dimly” but “face to face”; one no longer knows only “in part” but knows “fully” (1 Corinthians 11:12).

The West, since the advent of scholasticism and especially after Thomas Aquinas’ theology was dogmatized, lost touch with the true goal of the spiritual life as it was understood by the unified Church in the first millennia. Instead of theoria which can be experienced in this life, they reserved vision of God to be something that could only be experienced in the afterlife in heaven via the beatific vision. This theory was first explicated by Aquinas who was most influenced by Platonic ideals through his early studies in Aristotle, Averroes, Maimomonides, and Dionysius the Aeropagite rather than the entire witness of the Fathers. In place of a union with God in this life, there was speculation about God, or intellectualizing about God. Such emphasis on the idea of God, rather than how to commune with him is likely what causes Boyce to say that he is “out of this conversation.”

To give them credit, the Reformers and their successors rightly rejected Catholic scholasticism and its over-rational approach to faith. However in their rejection of what they believed to be innovations of Christianity they did not return to Orthodoxy. As Boyce wisely notes, Reformed tradition places a emphasis on the afterlife and on heaven but has scant instructions as to how to interact with God in the present life. The general formula of “if you believe that Christ died for your sins, then you go to heaven” is not sufficient for those who want to enter into a rich relationship with God in the now. After all, did Christ not say “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21),and that we would be one with God through Him (John 17:18)? How does one achieve such unity, such oneness in this life and in the here and now? O’ Reilly who I take to be representative of a typical Christian of the Reformed tradition certainly did not seem to know.

The rest of the video more or less goes in the same direction where Boyce tries to understand how one, and specifically how O’Reilly interacts with God in the present life. O’ Reilly later mentions repentance (1:01:00) and the need for God’s forgiveness which Boyce duly notes is a way in which she interacts with God in a personal manner (1:02:27). She also mentions the need to give thanks, and how the Christian framework allows one to be grateful to a Creator (1:09:00), but Boyce counters by saying that he doesn’t necessarily need the Christian framework to do that and that a general monotheistic framework would work just the same (1:09:40).

The last two things that I will discuss are repentance and thankfulness as was mentioned in the last paragraph. Both are extremely important parts of the Christian faith, but O’Reilly seems to miss the point that they are necessary only as a means to the an end rather than an end in itself. As a Christian, one does not repent to repent, but repent in order to reconcile and reorient oneself towards God once more. Likewise, one does not thank God for the sake of thanking God, but does so in order to worship God which is a form of communion in itself. As Christians (and non-Christians) are always falling short of the mark, and therefore sinning, they must always be in a state of repentance, a permanent state of metanoia, or reorientation towards God. Only by this fixedness and attention to God does one even begin to start this process of theosis.

Boyce is skeptical about how figure of Christ maintains its RELEVANCE since it happened almost 2000 years ago. Even if Christ was who He said we was, that is God in the flesh, how does that affect me today? How can I enter into relationship with God? O’Reilly later makes a video comment further explaining that “every Sunday, I participate in a liturgical cycle of prayer that offers thanks to God, acknowledges His worthiness, confesses sin, and asks for strength and guidance in my daily life. This service also includes receiving the Sacrament, which I view as a vehicle of grace (though I don’t have a Catholic view of this).” This is definitely more relevant to Boyce’s inquiries as it places emphasis on the Church and even mentions receiving sacraments.

Conclusion

The proper response to this question of how one unites to God that every historical church that claims apostolic succession, including the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Oriental Orthodox Churches (Armenian, Ethiopian, Coptic, etc)[1] would give is that Christ did not leave a book behind when He died. He left behind a body of believers and the Holy Spirit abiding within them that constituted the Church that eventually and organically compiled the New Testament. It is by entering the Church founded by Christ and His apostles that we are able to enter into communion with Him, the heavenly hosts, and the saints, and by God’s grace be permitted to see him as He is. Such vision of God is exclusive to the saints who have become truly living temples of the Holy Spirit. However exclusive it may, the possibility of becoming a saint, a person not just in the image of God but through spiritual labors became in the likeness of God as well, is open to all.

Saint Paul often uses athletic metaphors to describe the Christian life such as in Hebrews 12:1.

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us” (NIV).

Such imagery is apt because the spiritual life does not end the moment you profess belief in Christ. Rather, it is merely placing your name on the sign-up sheet for a competition. The training, the labor, and the hardship of this spiritual race is in preparation for the afterlife yes, but it is also possible in this life to reap the rewards of the Kingdom of Heaven which is direct communion with the Highest. If we continue to use the analogy of athletics, the Church would be the gymnasium, providing the training equipment, the coaches, and more generally the means for becoming an athlete in Christ. These means include the holy mysteries (or sacraments), the guidance from the saints of times past and from clergy in the present era, holy Tradition, etc.

It is also apt that Paul says that there is a “great cloud of witnesses” because it is a modern tendency to believe that salvation is achieved alone. The Eastern Orthodox Church holds that salvation is always something that is collective, that no-one is saved alone. There are people in this life and on Earth that lift us up to God through prayers, spiritual guidance, etc, and likewise there are saints and the heavenly hosts that do similar functions in the spiritual world. Spiritual warfare, and the competition towards sanctity is a cosmic affair involving all of Creation.

I don’t know if Benjamin Boyce will see this essay but I hope that he finds what he is looking for in the end. There is a place for him and all those like him looking for an authentic tradition, a tried and true way towards God. This place is the Orthodox Church.

Endnotes

[1] I mention the other communions that claim apostolic succession so that the reader is clear that all historic forms of Christianity will answer in this manner… They would place centrality on the Church rather than Scripture which though are extremely important serve as witness to the Church and to the ministry of Christ and the apostles.