Alex Jones Is Certifiably Nuts, Empress Irene Put Her Son's Eyes Out

Big studio, I think, you know, you might as well rent the other one out to somebody else, I guess. No, actually, I'm going to be teaching early church history for GBTS starting in a couple weeks, and I'll probably use that.

I mean, I could use this too, but, but I can't run this one by myself, and I can run the other one pretty much by myself. So, oh, you're gonna, you're gonna take early church history, you know. Well, we'll, we'll, we'll have you sign up with GBTS, and, you know, you'll, you'll get to audit that class, and you'll have to do some, do some reading.

But anyway, here we are, and got a few things I need to talk about before we get to Empress Irene and the things I promised you, and get into the text of scripture on something too. So, I'll try to be concise, but it's, it's a challenge for me.

Actually, I'm quite good at it when I have a timer going. When I'm in a debate, I'll get what I need said, said in the time period that I'm supposed to say it. That's one thing I can definitely claim for myself.

I'm, I'm good at, at that kind of stuff. Grew up doing radio. You had to be. UPI World News started at the top of the hour, so there you go. Oh, that's interesting. Just watched it change from one to the other, and they're right above each other.

It's interesting having all these cameras. Rich loves all the doodads. It's, they're rich as doodads. Anyway, let me start off with something I just saw, because I think it's rather important. A fellow, and I, I think I had seen him in some, some of the other threads, posted on X the following, he, he posted a clip from a sermon where a pastor is speaking from scripture about how God is working in our lives, even through tragedy and difficulty.

God's Providence Through Tragedy and Difficulty

Now, this is a, a basic reality of the Christian faith. This is plainly not only what is illustrated in Job and throughout the Psalter, Joseph's life, I mean, Isaiah's life. It's just, it's basic Christianity 101.

And it's certainly what Romans 828 tells us. God causes all things to work as good, then love God, then with a call to accordance, purpose. So, what's wrong with that? Well, this guy named an average Ohioan posted it.

He said, this is one of the main reasons I cannot stand Calvinism, and why I cannot play nice with them. Stuff like this is actively taught in the church and then called good, and people hear this, listen to it, and this is supposed to give them comfort.

Yeah, that even when you go through tragedy, even when you get the cancer diagnosis, even when the loved one dies, even when the car accident happens, that God is still God, and God is accomplishing his purposes.

Yeah, that's, that's terrible. That doesn't comfort anybody. So, what's supposed to comfort them? Well, Dinesh D'Souza retweeted it. Dinesh D'Souza has so utterly destroyed his credibility on anything theological that I think we all just need to go, okay, you have a nice time over there, Dinesh, throwing your fit and throwing sand in the air and, you know, writing or whatever.

He's terrible, horrible, nasty, absolutely absurd book against Calvinism, and there have been many of them, will probably come from Dinesh D'Souza, and it'll probably happen within three months, because I think he lives in front of a keyboard.

Looking at his feed, I mean, wow. But mark my words, he's going to write on this, and it's going to be so filled with canards and straw men, and it will be the collection of all the worst anti-Calvinism you've ever seen, but it will not show the slightest interest, integrity, consistency, in actually understanding Reformed theology, just like What Love Is This.

I mean, Dave Hunt face-planted with that book, and the book that he and I co-authored, the debate book, later demonstrated that very, very clearly. Anyway, Dinesh D'Souza retweeted it and said, imagine having some horrendous evil happen to your family or your children, and then having this irrepressibly cheerful guy tell you, guess what?

God did it. It's all part of his plan for you. And I almost want to go, you don't like how the Apostle Paul wrote Romans 8 28? He should have been sad when he wrote it, because that's what he's objecting to.

And what's going to happen? We're watching this, and I'm going to talk about this when I look at Jeremiah chapter 19 here in a couple moments, but when you lose your mind denying God's freedom, denying God being God, you end up abandoning any type of orthodox doctrine of God.

And right now, I'll be honest with you, I don't see any reason whatsoever why Dinesh D'Souza will not become an open theist. He doesn't seem to be a part of a church. He won't tell you what his theology is.

He's not confessionally bound to anything. And I just get the feeling that from this guy's perspective, he's able to figure anything out pretty quick. And he is demonstrating such a detestation for any expression of the sovereignty of God that that's what open theism thrives on.

And so this strikes me particularly because of the fact that in 1990, I believe it was, we experienced what we called Black Tuesday. And in one day, 60 of the funding for the ministry, which was absolutely minimal at the time anyways, disappeared.

And I had to find another job. I had to find another way of supporting my family. And it just so happened in the providence of God that I met with some more missionaries at this fellow's apartment. And I talked to the missionaries, they left, and then we were talking afterwards.

And this guy tells me he has been a part-time chaplain at Thunderbird Samaritan Hospital for like a year and a half or something like that. And he said, you really ought to apply. I had never done chaplaincy work, but I had a master's degree from Fuller Seminary.

So I was like, okay, this would be a challenge. So I did, I applied, got the job. And one of the things that you had to do was you had to run a grief support group, a law support group, on Sunday afternoons at the hospital.

This is not a Christian hospital, it's a secular hospital. And so I go to Bree and Christian bookstore. That's how you did things back then. There was no Amazon and there was no internet. And I buy a few books on counseling and grief and stuff like that.

And I start reading these books and I am just devastated. The theology of God in these books is God had nothing to do with what happened to you. Your kid died. God was on vacation in Tahiti. But he's come back now and he's going to make everything as good as he can.

But there was no purpose in that. The whole idea, and this is very common, the whole idea was purposeless evil is everywhere and God can't do anything about it. And so you just need to make people feel as good as they can about God, even though, to be honest with you, he can't stop it from happening again.

And he didn't have any purpose in it. And it's not actually to make you more like Christ. It's just purposeless evil. It's just, you know, it's the way it is. That seemingly is what Dinesh D'Souza believes.

At least that's what this tweet indicates. And I could not do that. And I did not do that. And when I did that law support group, when I learned much about grieving, which what eventuated in the writing of my book that is my second most popular book, it's still in print, still being used.

Many pastors have a box of those books, Grieving Our Path Back to Peace, under their desk just to hand out to people. I did not capitulate on the biblical doctrine of God to do that. And so this strikes me, because one of the most beautiful realities of the Christian life is that everything that happens to us, including the bad things, does have a purpose.

We are being conformed to the image of Christ. When Paul wrote those words in Romans chapter 8, he wasn't messing around. Now, there's a theology behind that. It's the theology of God that Dinesh D'Souza hates.

That the open theists hate. They hate that God. They love their own freedom. They will not worship a God who has an eternal decree. They hate that kind of a God. And so I don't know what they do with these verses.

They twist them and deny that they have the application that they most obviously have. Whatever they do with it, the reality is that that's where they are. And that's what we're seeing. And so would he have said these things before the past couple of weeks and this wild swing into this, I hate Reformed theology.

All of Calvinism is wrong. This is disgusting. I won't study any of this. I won't be fair to any of this. I recognize I'm actually denying the background of my own religious faith, whatever that is. I mean, if he went to Calvary Chapel, it's the only thing I've been able to find, is that for a while he went to Calvary Chapel and then after the scandal at King's College in 2012, I think it was, it's like no one has a clue where he is.

Is he in obedience to scripture? Is he under the care of elders? Nobody knows. Nobody knows. Is he just doing his own thing out there in rebellion? Looks like it to me, I'll be honest with you. But this swing just demonstrates there was no grounding in the first place.

You don't all of a sudden adopt all this wild theology if you had a foundation to start with. And so just watch what happens. He's going to be debating Bignon, what was it, September 10th or 11th. And now, we approach things differently.

The good doctor is not quite as aggressive as I am. I hope that works out in that type of a context for him. But he's much more of a philosopher and he'll make things very clear. I think he'll do a fine job.

But who knows what Dinesh D'Souza will even believe walking into that debate or walking out of that debate. He may change in the middle of the debate, which makes doing a debate somewhat problematic. It would be nice if there was a agreed upon thesis, but I have a feeling it's more of a general free-for-all and that could be, like I said, problematic.

Sorry, Eli Ayala was just texting me. We may do something on his program about some of this stuff too. But Eli, I can't respond to you right now, but you're not listening anyways, so who cares. So anyways, elsewhere in the Dinesh D'Souza universe, I tried to find it, couldn't find it, because that man lives behind the keyboard.

I mean, I don't know how many ex-posts he posts per day, but it's a lot. Oh, by the way, for those interested, a fellow from outside the United States sent me a seven-page post that D'Souza crudely referred to two days ago.

A couple people online said, yeah, I'd like to hear what you respond to that. I mean, that's a lot of good argumentation there and stuff like that. And I'm like, all right. Now, I looked at it and I'm like, there's nothing here that I have not addressed, but this guy's outside the US, doesn't seem to have any of my books.

We're willing to send them to him. I told him to call you and we'll get him. I think he's in the Dominican Republic or something like that. I don't know. And so we're happy to send them. But again, it's stuff that we've addressed for years.

But his final conclusion was sort of a version of Leighton Flower's provisionist. People choose to follow the father and they worship the father, and because of that, the father gives them to the son.

So that's the pre-existing condition. I mean, it's not mentioned in John chapter 6, but they cobble it together from other contexts that aren't the same context of John chapter 6. But it's part of the eisegetical problem that provisionism suffers with from its birth, actually.

But anyway, and so, you know, I'm sort of like, could somebody explain what the weird thing in the Trinity is to where rebel sinners against God who are dead in their sin can choose to worship God the father, but they cannot choose to worship God the son?

Because that's what this requires you to believe. That rebel sinners, still dead in their sin, but of course provisionists don't really believe that. They are full-on Pelagians at that point. But rebel sinners can choose to submit to, follow, come to God the father.

But there's something weird about Jesus to where they can't do that with the son. They can do it with the father, they can't do it with the son. It's Trinitarianly weird. But provisionism, its entire origin is as an attempted American response to a very shallow view of Calvinism.

So it won't last. It can't. And its shallowness comes from its origin, its source, and it's the people who originated it. So, you know, it's something we have to deal with now, and so we should, but I doubt that my grandchildren will be dealing with it.

Dealing with synergism, sure, but it'll just be going under another name at that particular point in time. So anyway, one of the reasons I say this, Dinesh D'Souza, I tried to find the tweet, but like I said, I was scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, couldn't find it.

Quoted, it may have been quoting somebody else, but he basically made the statement that this destroys Calvinism. You know, everything destroys Calvinism. When you haven't read and do not have the background to even understand Calvin or Turretin or Maastricht or whoever, Hodge, Machen, Warfield, you know, the big names, you know, D'Souza hasn't read any of them, not a one, and could not even begin to interact with their presentations.

But when you think you're all that plus a bag of chips, you can quote verses that have been dealt with for hundreds of years and not even think about, I wonder what they say about this. I don't care. It still refutes them.

There you go. It's an easy way to go. And that's what he does. So he quotes from Jeremiah chapter 19. So I thought we'd take just a couple of moments. Yeah, it's the Old Testament. I need to change my Old Testament color scheme.

I really do. Because, see, the New Testament looks really good on the screen like that, see. The Old Testament's got too bright a background. So remind me after the program's over and I'll get it done.

I just never get reminded, so I just keep bringing accordions up and it just defaults back to where it was. But I mean, if you bring the text up, it will look better on the screen, won't it? If we're not using the camera.

Yeah, see, that looks fine. That's nice and clear. So yeah, we're good with that. Even though for some reason it's a little bit off on this screen. I hope it's not on the actual thing, because it's actually cutting off some of the letters on the left hand side, which it's not up here.

Anyway, so let me see if this is, okay, no. Well, I guess I would like to be able to scroll it. Yeah, I don't want to, yeah, no, I'm not going to do that. I'll use the computer. Jeremiah chapter 19 is a judgment text.

Jeremiah 19 and the Meaning of “I Never Commanded”

God is explaining the judgment that has come upon Judah for its idolatry and everything else. And so, hear the word of Yahweh, O kings of Judah and inhabitants of Jerusalem. Thus says Yahweh of hosts, the God of Israel, behold I am about to bring a calamity upon this place at which the ears of everyone that hears of it will tingle.

Why? Why is God going to do this? Because they have forsaken me and have made this a foreign place and have burned incense in it to other gods that neither they nor their fathers or the kings of Judah have ever known.

And because they have filled this place the blood of the innocent and have built the high places of Baal to burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, a thing which I never commanded or spoke of nor did ever come upon my heart.

Therefore behold the days are coming declares Yahweh when this place will no longer be called Topheth or the Valley of Ben-Hinnom but rather the Valley of Slaughter. And then he goes on to describe the destruction that is coming.

Now, Jeremiah 19 .5 is one of the favorite open theist texts. Now, for those who aren't familiar with this terminology, open theism is the concept that God has certain knowledge of future events. God knows what he can do in the future, not necessarily what he's going to do, but what he can do in the future.

But what he does not know is he does not know what free creatures will do in the future. So he does not have exhaustive divine foreknowledge. Now, there are non-reformed theologies that affirm that God has exhaustive knowledge of future events.

There's the simple foreknowledge view. The reformed view connects God's sovereign decree, his purpose, his intention, his will. God works all things according to the counsel of his will. That's Bible.

That's divine revelation. And hence, God's knowledge of future events is not because he's looking down the corridors of time and sees them. It's because he's the maker of time itself and all the events in time.

So the decree, his activity in time, which is providence, this is all connected together in a consistent whole. Most of Arminian and evangelical theologies don't even try for consistency, to be perfectly honest with you.

One of the great problems we have, I think, in evangelicalism as a whole is the fact that, well, I call it chicken coop theology. You've got those chicken coops where there's one up here, one here, one here.

And it's almost like those old mailboxes we used to have in places of work, where you'd have yours up here and stuff that was meant for you being there. And you could put what? Cubbies. Nah, cubbies are bigger than that.

You'd come in, and your paycheck would be stuck up there, and announcements and stuff like that. And they're just this big. What most people do is you've got your doctrine of God, you've got your doctrine of Jesus, and doctrine of the Bible, and doctrine of the church, and doctrine of salvation, and then you got the big one in the middle, eschatology.

That's the important one. But they're never brought close enough to each other for anyone to ever go, I wonder if my doctrine of God is consistent with my doctrine of the church. Is my doctrine of the atonement consistent with my doctrine of man?

And one of the reasons that a lot of Christians just, they don't even think about this stuff, is because they're in churches where the pastors recognize, I can't bring this stuff up in a sermon, because it will make people uncomfortable.

And I don't want to make people uncomfortable, because we're going to be passing the plate at some point. And so, I'm going to, I'm not going to do what Paul said to do in Acts chapter 20. Remember what he said to the Ephesian elders?

I am innocent of the blood of all men, because I did not hesitate to proclaim to you the whole counsel of God. And so, as a result, people are rarely challenged to think about how consistent they are.

The Reformed doctrine of God is consistent. Consistent with the Trinity, consistent with atonement, soteriology, eschatology, the whole nine yards. Reformed theologians seek consistency, because we believe God is glorified when we seek to believe all of his truth.

That's what consistency is. And this ministry has been based on that. Consistency. That's how you define truth. So, as a result, when people look at a statement like this, the open theists come along, and they say, look, it says it right there.

They are burning their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal. Now, I've only been to Israel once, but we did visit a sort of re-create, not re-created, but fixed up so you can sort of see what it looked like, a place of worship to Baal, one of the high places.

It was big. And you could almost still feel, it felt really creepy to be there. But, you know, you had worship of Moloch. The offering of children happens as well to Baal. Baal just simply means Lord, by the way.

It could even mean husband. So, you have to read it within its context. But notice what it says. They burn their sons in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, a thing which I never commanded or spoke of, nor did it ever come upon my heart.

Therefore, behold, days are coming, declares Yahweh, when this place will no longer be. So, the judgment's coming. They say, see? God never even thought about it. Never even thought about it. So, what they're literally saying is the first day, the first time, some pagan high priest in ancient history said, we can appease the gods and you can get a better crop next year if we take that baby from your arms and offer it as a burnt sacrifice on an altar.

God was in heaven going, you've got to be kidding me. I never dreamed that they could get this evil. I'm stunned. That's what they want you to believe. And they believe that. The open theist believes that the first time that happened, God was like, wow, I am in utter shock.

I do not, I'm going to go on vacation for a while, then come back and I'll feel better. Okay. Is that what this is saying? Well, not if you sort of allow it to speak for itself. A thing which I never commanded, I never spoke of.

Okay, let's let's let those start. What's Yahweh saying? And remember, if you understand ancient problems in Israel, you understand something called syncretism. And that is, especially right here, Baal, the worship of Baal came to be joined with the worship of Yahweh.

The prophets condemn this constantly. The best kings are the kings that separate these things out and get rid of the worship of Baal. But the constant temptation was, yeah, keep worshiping Yahweh, but let's cover our bases.

Let's cover our bases. Let's worship Yahweh and Baal, and maybe a few other guys while we're at it. And that way, you know, we'll get favor from each one of them, even though Yahweh is sort of exclusivistic about this stuff.

And so what God is saying is, these priests of Baal may tell you that this is a command from a God. They may even syncretistically tell you, and Yahweh would be okay with it too. But what Jeremiah is saying, what God is saying through Jeremiah, is that offering of their sons in a fire is burnt offerings to Baal.

I never commanded that. I never spoke that, nor did it ever come upon my heart. It was never something I desired. And immediately, the nationalist suzerain goes, but it's part of his decree. See? That's how it works.

If it's part of the decree, then it must be something that God desired. So the fundamental starting point of open theism, and what he himself is saying, which is why I say I don't see how, you know, I can just imagine certain open theists that I know of who are banging down his door right now.

They would love to have him become an open theist. I mean, that would be, wow, there's a feather in my cap, right? What they start with is that there can never be a decree of God that includes the existence of evil without God being the one who is evil in and of himself.

So God could never have a plan of salvation. He could never have a fall. He could never have redemption. He could never work in such a way that through the gospel, through the incarnation, through the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, through the building of the church, that all of his attributes, all of his glory, both his wrath and his holiness and his justice, as well as his mercy and his grace and his love, can be demonstrated fully.

And they don't believe, Romans chapter 9, what if, willing to put up with these, he wanted to demonstrate his justice, demonstrate his wrath, demonstrate his power. These folks just don't believe that stuff.

That's not, that's not a priority for them. It doesn't matter if it's right there on the page of scripture. That's not relevant. We just put that off to the side. And so when it says, nor did it ever come upon my heart, they literally want to say God was stunned the first time it happened.

That's not what he's talking about. What he's saying is, no syncretism. I never commanded it. I never spoke it. I am too pure of that to even to be something that would be a desire in my heart. But you all did it because you followed the Baal.

So he quoted this and said, this is the death of Calvinism. You think, you think maybe some other reformed theologians have said the same things I just said, maybe, I don't know, 400 or 500 years ago, even?

I think maybe that's been in print for a long, long time. Yeah. And in fact, we could go back before that and we could find people in church history that have dealt with these things and, because a belief in God's exhaustive divine foreknowledge is not specifically reformed.

Many people believed that. Now they had different ways of dealing with man's will as a result, but they did believe God has exhaustive knowledge of future events. So did God know that this would happen when he created?

If you say no, you're an open theist. You're no longer a classical Christian of any kind. You are on your road to fundamental denials of very basic Christian truth. If you say God didn't know, then God is surprised by things and you do not have the slightest promise of tomorrow.

Okay? You really don't. God might get surprised tomorrow. Might have to change everything he's promised you. Who knows? If you say yes and everyone just automatically sort of defaults to wanting to say yes.

If you say yes, then you have to explain how God came across this knowledge. Is it something that was passively given to him? So he creates time and then time sort of does its own thing because of free will and everything, and he creates and then he looks and goes, hey, I win at the end.

Worship me. Is that how it works? I say to you, God had a purpose for this. God had a purpose for all the evil that has taken place in history, and we may not know what it is right now, but we have the promise that his throne is built upon justice, and we have the promise of an empty tomb that he has defeated evil, and that someday we will know, we will see, because God is going to be justified.

Remember theodicy? We talked about a few programs ago. We have those promises. Men who detest the sovereign God will twist scripture to do anything to get rid of this testimony, because if that's who God is, then they have to be completely submitted to him.

Completely submitted to him. CleanMyMac would like to access data from other apps. Would you go away? I just love stuff like that, you know? It's like, go away. You're not in the middle of something right now, are you?

Yeah, yeah, you're not actually using me for anything right now. So there's Jeremiah chapter 19. Wanted to lead with that in light of the silliness that D'Souza posted yesterday, and that's taken us through most of the program anyways, but it's good to cover these things and to give folks the stuff.

All right, let us... where did it go? I don't want that one. I don't want that one. This one. There we go. I knew it was there somewhere. All right, I told you. Oh, don't go to this yet. I will walk wherever I want.

If I want to walk behind you, I will walk behind you. I will drive you insane. Yes, so one other thing that I forgot to mention at the beginning, and we may go a little long today. I need to get through Empress Irene.

Alex Jones, Political Nationalism, and the Profaning of Christ’s Name

But yesterday, a fellow on Twitter, I do not know who he is. I know that he is a critic of Joel Webben and NXR and that whole movement, posted a clip from Alex Jones. He was on a webcast. I recognize the host, but I don't remember these people's names.

It's not religious, not Christian. I've seen other people on it. I do recall that all the other people on the webcast were stunned by the way Alex Jones was behaving. He seemed to be on drugs to me. He really did.

He was completely out of control. He was insane. Certifiably insane. Not just acting weird, he was certifiably insane. Nuttier than the proverbial fruitcake. He was dropping F-bombs right, left, and center.

Other terms, he was talking about Joe Rogan's bodily parts, but ascribing to him female bodily parts. It was unbelievable. Vile, disgusting, uh, puerile. And this is the lead speaker at the Christ is King conference in November.

That should be enough. That should be it. For any rational Christian, that should have closed the door. You don't invite people like this to stand under a banner that says Christ is King. You want to get them involved politically?

Then get Jesus out of it. Don't drag his name through that cesspool. That's all there is to it. And so he posts this, and I just, I repost it and go, here's the lead speaker. Here's the lead guy. He's, this is the guy that's getting the clicks and getting the ticket sales.

Alex Jones. He's insane. And he is an absolute raving reprobate. That should be enough. Every person on that entire list of speakers should watch that and go, sorry, I can't. Not as long as you've got Christ is King over there.

Because obviously that man doesn't believe that and is not going to speak in accordance with that. Joshua Hames is no longer on the list. I hope, Joshua, honestly, I hope you woke up enough and bailed on your own.

I hope they didn't just remove you. I was so disappointed when I saw you're on that in the first place. Really, really was. I hope you just woke up and went, whoa, whoa, whoa, can't go here. I really hope that's what happened.

I don't know if I'm going to find out, but that's what I really hope took place. Anyway, one thing that I want to mention, there was some fellow last week when this first broke, when we were talking about that Harrison Smith guy and his love of the F-bomb too, even connecting it with Jesus's name.

I posted that and he wrote back, I just don't know why you're so upset. All of these men affirm the Nicene Creed. I wrote back, thank you for illustrating fully Christless nationalism and for the deadness of sacralism.

We've already had over a thousand years of this in the past. If you're literally sitting here looking, look at that clip that was posted from Alex Jones. Now, I don't believe for a second that he affirms the Nicene Creed.

I don't believe that for a second, but it would be actually worse for him if he said that he did. It'd be much better for him to go, I don't care about that stuff. I'm not, no, I'm not affirming nothing like that.

It'd be much worse if we go, oh yeah, sure, sure, and then go on and describe the Nicene Creed by throwing F-bombs into it, because that's what he would do. The man has absolutely no limits, no boundaries, nuttier than the proverbial fruitcake.

And so, their sacralism, all the things that were done under the Christ is King banner, the Inquisition, and the wars, and the profaning of Christ's name. Sacralism, Christless nationalism, that's what this stuff is.

And people are, I just don't know why you're so upset. Funny thing is, every single one of these people promoting it now would have been on my side six years ago. They didn't believe this stuff. They've fallen into it.

So yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna point it out. We're gonna expose it. Needs to be exposed. That's what sacralism is. So there you go. All right, switching gears to doing something that I promised we would do before.

Empress Irene and the Political Origins of Nicaea II

Let me remind you of where we are. So, the debate coming up in a month and a half on the Second Nicene Council and the veneration of icons. As I've pointed out to you, the reason to do this is because this debate topic brings us to the central authority claims of both Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

They apply them differently, but they both accept the Second Nicene Council as infallible, as ecumenical, as binding. So you demonstrate that the Second Nicene Council was in error, that it used false sources, that its argumentation is bogus, and that its conclusions are completely ahistorical, and you have fundamentally destroyed the authority claims of both Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy in one shot.

You rarely get opportunities to cover that much ground, but that's why it's important. Last week, we talked to you about Saint Tarasius, the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, who was a politician elevated to that position from being a politician, not even a priest or anything else.

He wasn't even a cleric in one week by Empress Irene. The Second Nicene Council in 787 is Irene's. She wants it. She calls it. She funds it. She runs it. She makes sure it gives the right answers to the things she wants.

She's an iconophile. She loves venerating icons. Her daddy didn't, but she did. And so, what is she remembered for in history? Only this. Well, pretty much only this. I mean, we'll talk about a few other things, but those are more bad things than good things.

She wanted to undo what had been done in the preceding decades in the banishing of icons. And she succeeded. The reason that anyone venerates icons today in Eastern Orthodoxy and in Roman Catholicism, especially in Eastern Orthodoxy, is this woman.

That's why you venerate icons. No other reason. Not the apostles. Don't blame the apostles. Don't blame Basil on the Holy Spirit. It's Empress Irene of Athens. Regent, co-empress, and sole ruler of Byzantium 780 to 802, architect of Nicaea II, first woman to rule Rome in her own right.

All right, let's find out about her. Born around 752 to an obscure but noble Athenian family, brought to Constantinople and married in 769 to Leo IV, son of the reigning emperor Constantine V. Bore the future Constantine VI in 771.

When Leo IV died of fever in 780, the nine-year-old boy inherited the throne with Irene as regent. So, she has a son, Constantine VI, in 771. Nine years later, Leo IV dies of fever, and so he becomes emperor, but she is the regent, because he is too young to make mature decisions on his own.

So, it's not the first time this had happened. Unlike her late husband and father-in-law, Irene privately favored the veneration of icons, a conviction that would shape her entire regency. So, she has a particular theological commitment to the veneration of icons, and she is going to use her position to establish this in the empire.

Oops, wrong direction. So, how a regent reversed 50 years imperial policy? Because icons have been banished for about 50 years. In 784, Irene eases out the aging iconoclast leading Paul IV, and elevates her own secretary, Terrasios, still a layman, to the patriarchy.