New Year, Old Tory

The twenty-fifth year of the third millennium went by rapidly and once again we find ourselves on the Kalends of January.  In 45 BC, Julius Caesar having revised the Roman calendar to approximate the solar year, the Kalends of January became New Year’s Day for the first time.  It was not regarded as such in Christendom for much of the Medieval period until in 1582 AD Gregory XIII corrected the Julian calendar with the one that has born his name ever since in the West.  This ultimately had the effect of restoring the status of 1 January as New Year’s Day although, unsurprisingly when you consider that at the time Gregory was correcting the calendar he was also conspiring against Elizabeth I, Lady Day on 25 March remained the civil New Year’s Day in the realms of the British Sovereign until the change was made legal and official in 1751.  On the Church Kalendar, of course, 1 January, the Octave Day of Christmas, has long been the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord.

 

Each year on this date I write an essay giving an overview of where I stand in my political and religious convictions.  This is something that I borrowed, with a few modifications, from the late Charley Reese, who was a long-time op-ed writer for the Orlando Sentinel with a thrice-weekly column syndicated by King Features. Reese recommended the practice of a yearly “full disclosure” column to other writers although other than myself the only writer I know of to have picked up the practice is Baptist preacher Chuck Baldwin. 

 

In the preface to his For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays in Style and Order the poet and critic T. S. Eliot described his general point of view as “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.”  I have frequently made use of these words of Eliot, in which I find an echo and an update of Dr. Johnson’s famous definition of a “tory” in his Dictionary, as an outline for explaining my own views.  This is because each of these things – classicist, royalist, Anglo-Catholic – is an expression in its own realm of culture, politics, and religion, of the same attitude of belief in order, respect and reverence for tradition, history and prescription, skepticism towards and wariness of novelty and innovation, and outright antagonism towards the prejudice in favour of the fashionable, up-to-date, and modern common to all forms of progressivism, and this attitude has been mine by instinct my entire life. 

 

The late Sir Roger Scruton said that conservatism is more an instinct than an idea and I fully agree although I prefer to call myself a “Tory” or a “reactionary” rather than a “conservative.”  I would be fine with the word “conservative” if it was understood to mean what Scruton meant by it.  His book The Meaning of Conservatism was first published in 1980, at the beginning of the Thatcher premiership in the United Kingdom and the Reagan presidency in the United States to explain what conservatism really is and that it is not the ideology of the market and individualism that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took it to be.  In this continent, at least, his message fell on deaf ears and “conservatism” has largely been used as a synonym for Thatcherism/Reaganism since the 1980s, although in the last decade, due to the political career of the current occupant of the White House, it has taken on the new meaning of populist-nationalism in the United States.  This is not, in my opinion, an improvement, for while I am against many of the things Krasnov the Orange purports to be against – wokeness, narcotics, a soft, weak, and indulgent approach to violent crime, national character changing mass immigration, and other things like this – I am no fan of populism and nationalism.  Populism is the instrument of demagoguery and nationalism, unlike patriotism, which is the instinctual and virtuous love of country that ordinarily is the natural extension of love for family and home (think of Edmund Burke’s famous remark about the “little platoons”), is an ideology that makes an idol out of the nation.  It is worth observing here that the most prescient warning ever written against the existential threat that a liberal attitude towards mass immigration poses to the civilization formerly known as Christendom, the 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, was not written by a Trump-style populist-nationalist but by the late Jean Raspail, a (Roman) Catholic royalist like the late John Lukacs and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, whose writings informed my thoughts on the matter of populism and nationalism and whose example inspired me to wear as a badge of honour that favourite label of opprobrium of the progressive left, “reactionary.”  What makes the replacement of Thatcherism/Reaganism with populist-nationalism even worse is that the MAGA movement has degenerated into a dangerous leader cult centred around an egotist with a messiah complex.   No, Thatcherism/Reaganism was much to be preferred over this, just as Scruton’s “sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created” is to be preferred over Thatcherism/Reaganism.

 

While I would like to say that what Americans, conservative or otherwise, do is their business and none of mine, unfortunately what goes on down there affects us up here.  I am a Canadian.  Many, after saying that, would add “a proud Canadian” but since I don’t like using the name of the worst of the Seven Deadly Sins in a positive sense, I will say “a patriotic Canadian” instead, in the sense of “patriotic” explained in the previous paragraph.  I was born in rural Manitoba, raised on a farm between the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers in southwestern Manitoba, studied theology for five years at what is now Providence University College (at the time it was called Providence College and Theological Seminary) in Otterburne, Manitoba, and have lived in Winnipeg ever since.  As a patriotic citizen of the Dominion of Canada, as is still the full title and name of this Commonwealth Realm, I am also a loyal subject of His Majesty King Charles III, as I was of his mother, our Sovereign Lady of Blessed Memory, Queen Elizabeth II before him.  Since I am a few months away from completing my fiftieth year, I grew up in the period which began when everyone who considered himself a conservative in Canada would have said Amen, or some secular equivalent, to the sentiment just expressed but which saw the rise of a “neo-conservatism” that looked to American “conservatism” – which is really classical liberalism – rather than British Toryism, as its guiding light.

 

When I was eight years old, Brian Mulroney led the old Conservative Party, to which the unfortunate modifier “Progressive” had become attached, to an historical landslide victory.  Four years later he would win another majority government but this would be the last time the old Conservatives won a Dominion Election.  The previous year, the Reform Party of Canada had been formed and in 1993 most of the traditional Conservative voters west of Upper Canada switched to the Reform Party.  I was in my senior year in high school at the time and not yet old enough to vote but early in my college years at Providence I took out a membership in the Reform Party.  Under Brian Mulroney, I felt, as did so many others, the Conservatives had ceased to be the party of Sir John A. Macdonald and in this I believe my assessment was right at the time. 

 

What I had not yet come to see, was that the Reform Party was not a step back from the direction in which Mulroney had been leading the party, but a huge leap forward down the same path.  The Reform Party maintained that the Mulroney Conservatives had gone astray by being less than sufficiently supportive of free market capitalism and by being too prone to compromise with liberalism on social issues such abortion.  Indeed, the Reform Party’s avowed social conservatism was its biggest drawing factor for me.  In Canada in the 1980s a significant shift towards liberal attitudes and positions on social, moral, cultural, and religious matters had begun, two to three decades after a similar shift had begun in the United States.  This shift has been ongoing in both countries ever since and the primary driving force in it, at least as far as popular attitudes goes, is the American popular entertainment industry.  While Mulroney had the misfortune of being prime minister at the time this shift was becoming disturbingly noticeable he could not fairly be blamed for it.  As far as government involvement in the shift goes, the biggest contributions were the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977, an imitation of the American Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms of 1982, both introduced by the Liberals in the premiership of Pierre Trudeau.  It was the Charter, introduced at the very end of the Trudeau premiership, which empowered the Canadian Supreme Court to act in the way the American Supreme Court had been acting since the 1950s.  In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada struck the existing laws against abortion from the Criminal Code in Morgentaler v. The Queen.  Mulroney failed to get new Charter-Compliant abortion restrictions passed but he was also the last prime minister to try.  I am not trying to defend Mulroney, of whom I had grown as tired as everyone else by the early 1990s, so much as to make the point that on the issues that attracted me to it, the Reform Party was mostly empty talk.   In reality, of course, Mulroney’s single biggest defection from Macdonald Conservatism was his signing of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States.  The Reform Party, with its look-to-America neo-conservatism, wished to move even further in this direction, which was, ironically enough, a move in the direction of the founding platform and philosophy of the Liberal Party.  Or perhaps it is not that ironic.  Reform was the name of the movement in the pre-Confederation to Confederation era, that became the Liberal Party.

 

As my five years in Otterburne drew to a close, the old Conservatives and the Reform realized that their competition would keep the Liberals perpetually in power and a “Unite the Right” movement arose which after a first partially successful attempt finally merged the two parties into the current Conservative Party early in the new millennium.   My membership ran out shortly before the final merger took place and I let it expire without renewing it.  The result of the merger, I correctly anticipated, would not be the restoration of the party of Macdonald and Diefenbaker, but would be more likely to combine the elements I liked the least in the two parent parties.  This marked the end of my getting involved in the partisan aspect of politics, at least as far as the positive side of joining and promoting a party goes – I have no intention of ever letting up on bashing the Liberals and the New Democrats – and eleven years ago, after Stephen Harper with the support of Captain Airhead decided that the privacy of Canadians needed to be defenestrated in the name of importing America’s War on Terror into Canada, I declared my intention to follow the example that I had long admired of Evelyn Waugh, who stopped voting around World War II “on grounds of conscientious objection”, because the Conservatives had failed to turn the clock back even a second in all the years he had voted for them and if he continued to do so he would be “morally inculpated in their follies” and would have “made submission to socialist oppression by admitting the validity of popular election if they lost” and declared that except in a case where a moral or religious matter is at stake, he would no longer presume to advise his Sovereign in her choice of ministers.  In practice, however, some circumstance, such as in one instance a friend and colleague running as the Christian Heritage candidate in my riding, has always come up to thwart this intention.

 

I have explained why I am not a “Big-C Conservative”, that is, a partisan of the Conservative Party.  While the customary expression in Canada for those who are to the right in their political philosophy but not partisans of the Conservative Party per se is “small-c conservative”, as I already said in the fourth paragraph of this essay my preference is for the term “Tory.”  Since this term is used in Canada for Big-C Conservatives in the same way Grit is used for Big-L Liberals, I need to clarify that I am using it to allude to the predecessor of the Conservative Party.  In Britain, the supporters of the king and of the established reformed Church of England in the English Civil Wars in the seventeenth century were called Cavaliers and Royalists and after the Restoration of the monarchy and the Church those who continued to fight for their cause in Parliament rather than with the sword came to be called Tories.  Tory, therefore, has long struck me as being the most appropriate terms for someone who, like myself, for whom that sentiment or instinct in favour of the good things that are easily destroyed but hard to create that Scruton called conservatism, takes the form of those three more precise words from T. S. Eliot. 

 

Since I have already stated that I am a loyal subject of His Majesty I will start with the “royalist in politics.”  I have been this by instinct my entire life.  The institution of royal monarchy represents tradition, continuity, the weight of prescription, authority as opposed to power, and what G. K. Chesterton called the “democracy of the dead” which is the only kind of democracy worthy of the accolades with which the baser type is showered in progressive thought.  Unlike the grassroots, bottom-up, democracy of populism which exerts a downward, levelling, force on a society, royal monarchy is an elevating influence and the virtues it inspires among the subject-citizens of the realm(s) over which it reigns are the older and better virtues of honour, loyalty, and duty rather than the mere commercial virtues inspired by classical liberalism and republicanism.  A president, or whatever term is used for an elected head-of-state, cannot properly do the task for which he was elected, being the representative of the whole of his country, for, as is evident among our neighbours to the south, eventually “he’s my president, although I didn’t vote for him” is replaced with “not my president” which in turn devolves into the civil war like partisanship that has been on display since at least 2008 and has been growing with intensity with each successive president ever since.  A king, by contrast, can not only do this task since he does not owe his office to popular and therefore partisan election, but the much more important task of representing within his realm(s), the government of the universe as a whole.  While this is how I articulate my royalism today, I have felt it by instinct my whole life, and it gets stronger with each passing year.  I am very grateful to be in a country whose hereditary head-of-state entered his Coronation service declaring that in the name of the King of Kings and after His example, he came not to be served but to serve, rather than in the country that choose for its own head of state a boorish and belligerent narcissist who crawled forth from sludge that backed up from the toilets in hell and whose cult of followers are so delusional that some of them have blurred the huge difference between him and the King of Kings.

 

T. S. Eliot called himself a “classicist in literature”, but here I would substitute the term “culture” for “literature.”   Culture, in the broader sense of the term, refers to everything that human societies pass down through instruction, training, and education rather than genetically through biological reproduction, everything that we make and do, the participation in which shapes and defines who we are as societies.  In this sense of the word, we speak of cultures in the plural and of specific cultures.  It is a concept closely related to that of tradition and the two can be either used interchangeably or distinguished by saying that tradition is the method – the handing over or passing down from generation to generation – and culture the content.  Classicism has reference, however, primarily to the term in a narrower sense.

 

Culture in this narrower sense is difficult to define but I would describe it as that, within culture in the broader sense, which, like the institution of royal monarchy as discussed above exerts an elevating influence on the larger culture and on society and civilization, at least when it is doing what it is supposed to do.   All human activities that must be learned and especially those that involve the making of something are broadly called arts.  Within this larger category, we distinguish a smaller by the addition of the definite article, and one of the uses of the word art in the singular with neither definite nor indefinite article is to designate that something that sets apart “the arts” from “arts” in general.  “Art”, however, is even harder to define than “culture.” “The arts”, of which literature is one, can be regarded as either building blocks of the higher culture or the medium by which it is transmitted. 

 

Classicism takes its name from classical antiquity, that is, ancient Greco-Roman civilization, although it is well to remember Stephen Leacock’s wise observation that Greek and Latin are “a starting point for a general knowledge of the literature, the history, and the philosophy of all ages.”   In its most general sense, it is the approach to high culture and the arts that stresses external standards that are objective and universal.   The classicist recognizes that the arts are governed by rules, although classicism need not imply a rigorous legalism.  Classicism, for example, would not censure Shakespeare for not strictly adhering to Aristotle’s three unities (time, place, action), although it would perhaps say that he earned the right to set these aside when warranted by having first mastered them.  A century ago it was generally thought of as the polar opposite of romanticism, the highly individualistic approach that stresses inner inspiration.  Today, cultural and artistic subjectivism has been taken to extremes much further than romanticism proper was ever willing to go.  Today, for example, it is not uncommon to find “art” produced in explicit repudiation of Beauty, which classicism and romanticism both recognized as the end to which art aspires.

 

Classicism is the expression with regards to culture, of the same Tory instinct as royalism, but of all the expressions of the Tory instinct, it is the least instinctual.  This is just what we ought to expect considering that culture itself is something that has to be instilled and learned – etymologically it means “that which has been cultivated.”  Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1869) famously said that culture was “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits” and while, as with Eliot, I would extend the concept beyond literature to include, for example, getting to know the music of Haydn and Mozart as well as the writings of Homer and Plato, I think that this explains quite well what culture looks like when applied to the soul of the individual person.  We each, to put it bluntly, are born into this world as barbarians and the proper goal of education is neither to indoctrinate us into the latest progressive claptrap, as the more fashionable academic institutions have all seemed to think for the last sixty or seventy years, nor, contra those who are “conservative” rather than Tory, to fit us to earn our living as cogs in the machine that is the modern economy, but to civilize us by exposing us to this higher culture. 

 

If high culture is the getting to know “the best which has been thought and said in the world” this means that the best can be distinguished from that which is not the best, from that which is  merely the better or the good, as well as from that which is bad, worse or the worst. Such a distinction requires the external, objective, universal standards that classicism stresses. While this can mean something quite technical, like the aforementioned unities of Aristotle in the dramatic arts, in the more general sense the measuring stick is that of the goods inherent in the structure of the universe.  A classicism informed, as it ought to be, by philosophy in its highest form which is theology, with special reference to the branches of metaphysics and aesthetics, would say that the best, not only in literature but the other arts, is that which looks to and teaches us to strive for Beauty, Goodness and Truth.  When the arts do this, the higher culture they comprise elevates the broader culture because while the natural tendency of culture in the more general sense is to focus on us and our identity as societies and a civilization, this lifts us out of our focus on ourselves and directs us to goods that are outside ourselves, fixed, and universal. Beauty, Goodness, and Truth are called transcendentals because they are the properties of Being itself, and while we participate in being as created beings, He in Whose infinite simplicity Being and Essence are one and the same, as the best theologians from St. Thomas Aquinas to E. L. Mascall have explained, is God.  The best classicism, therefore, would say that the ultimate purpose of higher culture is to point us to God, which is why T. S. Eliot wrote two books arguing that religion is the heart and soul of culture.  The reason so much of the art culture of the last century has been so horridly rotten is because it has deliberately turned its back on this its ultimate purpose.

 

While this creates an opening for turning to “Anglo-Catholic in religion”, before doing so I wish to personalize my remark about classicism being the least instinctual of the three expressions of the Tory instinct.  My royalism has been life-long and religiously, as I will shortly discuss, I have been maturing towards Anglo-Catholicism since my first moment of orthodox Christian faith, but the classicism I articulated above is the result of years of reading on a subject my serious interest in which came much later in life.  It did, however, have its beginnings in that same Tory instinct.  My late maternal grandmother was a nurse by profession and a painter by passion.  My visits to her in my youth would frequently involve a painting session and a discussion of art.  Grandma specialized in painting landscapes, usually in watercolour.  Watercolour was definitely not my forte, and what I painted is best described as caricature.  Sometimes it involved cartoon depictions of politicians, but almost always it was done in a style spoofing Modern Art.  My knowledge of Modern Art was not very extensive at the time, and Picasso was usually who I had in mind.  I instinctually recognized his work as garbage made for a market of those with too much money and not enough brains and who showed it by behaving exactly like the courtiers in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”  This, I would later learn, was exactly how Picasso saw his own work, just as I would learn that Modern Art contained much that was worse than Picasso, although not nearly as bad as what is to be found in the art designated “Postmodern.”.  Grandma had a collection of art books, and when she and I would discuss them, she would disparage her own paintings, in which the countryside we both knew was recognizable, as not being real “art.”  The basis of this distinction was her idea that “art” is what depicts what the artist sees internally rather than what he and anyone around him can see with his actual eyes. While I did not know enough at the time to recognize this as a fashionable idea derived from romanticism, I did instinctually, regard it as utter bunkum.  As with my instinctual negative assessment of Picasso and Modern Art, my opinion has not really changed although then it was little more than the prejudice of someone who had barely taken the first step from natural barbarism towards civilized taste, whereas now it is an opinion that is slightly more informed after years of trying, with whatever degree of success, to get to know Matthew Arnold’s “best which has been thought and said” and of reflecting on the insights of those such as Eliot, Sir Roger Scruton, and T. E. Hulme, who grounded his argument for the external rules and order of classicism on man’s limitations due to Original Sin.

 

This brings us back to “Anglo-Catholic in religion.” In previous years I have often started with this to emphasize the foundational aspect of orthodox Christianity but this year I have opted to leave the most important for last.  In my extended family, my relatives are generally either United Church – the United Church of Canada, that is, the product of the unlikely union of the Presbyterians and Methodists – or Anglican in their affiliation, with degrees of attendance varying from never darkening the door to being there every Sunday.   When I was a kid, for example, my mother fairly regularly attended the United Church in Oak River, and my paternal grandmother who lived in Rivers received the Anglican Journal with the Mustard Seed, the newspaper of the Diocese of Brandon.   In my childhood, both Churches were becoming increasingly plagued by liberalism in its theological sense.  This is the idea that the teachings of Christianity, at least as they were historically and traditionally understood, have been rendered, in full or in part, unbelievable by Modern “discoveries”, and so must be discarded or re-imagined in order to preserve the real “essence” of Christianity which for liberals, is usually its ethical or moral teachings, or more accurately whatever ethical or moral ideas progressivism subscribes to at the given moment, which the theological liberal deludes herself into thinking is what Jesus really meant. Theological liberalism admits of degrees and so can vary from being otherwise orthodox but rejecting the infallible authority of the Bible to basically being an atheist and completely disbelieving the Creed in its entirety but without having the decency to leave the Church.  I held this liberalism in contempt from the moment I first became aware of it which was long before I came to faith myself.  That was the old Tory instinct kicking in.

 

Therefore, when I came to faith in Jesus Christ in an evangelical conversion when I was fifteen, it was with a disposition towards orthodoxy – the truths that Christians have historically and traditionally believed and confessed – but with a suspicion of the institutional Churches that had allowed themselves to succumb to liberalism.  Accordingly, my initial expression of Christian orthodoxy was in the form of fundamentalism.  Over the course of the following decades of theological study, both formal such as in my five years at Providence and informal, my eyes were opened to the fact that the popular evangelical notion that the “real” Church is not a visible society but a convenient way of referring to all Christians in the aggregate simply doesn’t fit the way the Bible speaks of the Church and that therefore one cannot really have orthodoxy in the fullest sense without the institutional Church.  This, combined with a deepening appreciation for the Church Fathers’ work in setting the boundaries of the Apostolic and orthodox faith and defining and opposing heresy and for the ancient Creeds as the basic confessions of those truths that are de fide, along with a developing love for liturgy both for its being ancient and traditional and so the means by which the Christians of today share in the worship of the faithful of preceding ages and for its being fully participatory in a way that a streamlined service centred on the sermon (in which all but the speaker are passive), helped my orthodoxy mature into an Anglo-Catholicism.  I joined an orthodox Anglican parish about a decade into the new millennium, where I was confirmed and where I continue to worship to this day.

 

My Anglo-Catholicism, is much more the Anglo-Catholicism of the Caroline Divines, the Non-Jurors, the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, and Bishop Christopher Wordsworth’s Theophilus Anglicanus than that of say Darwell Stone or Dom Gregory Dix, which is not to disparage these men from whose writings I have learned much.  The difference is basically that the older kind of Anglo-Catholicism did not repudiate the Reformation and Protestantism but looked, like the English Reformers to the primitive belief and practices of the first millennium and especially its first half as the measuring stick of Catholicity rather than post-Tridentine Rome.  While, like the later type of Anglo-Catholics I acknowledge all seven Sacraments acknowledged by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox Churches, I also acknowledge that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are Gospel Sacraments in a way that distinguishes them from the others, they are visible modes of the Gospel.  While, like the later type of Anglo-Catholics, I acknowledge all seven of the pre-Schism ecumenical councils recognized by both Rome and the East and would go so far as to say that the theological argument of the Second Council of Nicaea is the conclusion logically required by the orthodox Christology of the first six ecumenical councils, I also understand and respect, despite my loathing of iconoclasm as boorish and philistine, the reasons why the Protestant Reformers thought the veneration of icons had been taken way too far.

 

My arrival at orthodox, Protestant, Anglo-Catholicism is not a repudiation of the steps in my Christian journey that brought me here. 

 

When I was baptized in a Baptist church about a year and a half after my conversion this did not involve the sacrilege of denying a previous, valid, baptism because it was my first and only baptism.  Being baptized in this way meant that I received baptism by immersion, and while the mode is not essential, it was definitely the preferred mode in the earliest centuries, remains the ordinary mode even for infant baptism in all pre-Reformation Churches other than Rome and, although in practice the exceptions are the rule, is the prescribed mode in the Book of Common Prayer.  Ironically, I would not have received baptism in the mode the Book of Common Prayer prescribes, had I been baptized by an Anglican priest as an infant. 

 

While I no longer believe separatism to be the appropriate way for the orthodox to combat liberalism, I remain very much committed to the position so well-articulated by J. Gresham Machen, that liberalism is a different religion from Christianity.  It is not, therefore, that I have ceased to be a fundamentalist so much as that my understanding of the fundamentals has expanded from the five, identified in the heat of conflict a century ago, to twelve, the twelve articles of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, the standards of orthodoxy for basically two millennia.  I remain committed to the infallibility of the canonical Scriptures, and very much remain convinced that the Authorized Bible – the official Anglican translation – is the best English translation and will remain the best English translation not because it cannot be improved upon in theory but because in reality, to improve on the translation would require translators who were at least the equal of the Jacobean scholars and to get these we would need to get rid of the technological distractions of the present day and return to training people in the classical languages from ages four and five.   We would also have to return to textual scholarship based on faith principles – that the true text is to be found in use in God’s Church – rather than rationalist principles – that a manuscript unused and unknown to most of the Church for most of two thousand years might have the better reading, whereas textual scholarship is generally heading in the opposite direction.  What I would add to this today is that the Authorized Bible is incomplete without the deuterocanonical or ecclesiastical books from the LXX which should be restored to the place between the Testaments in which they were found in the original 1611 edition. 

 

Although my journey into the English branch of Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church did not involve a period in the Lutheran church it did involve a lot of reading of Lutheran theologians, especially from the Missouri Synod – C. F. W. Walther, Francis Pieper, Pieper’s epitomist John Theodore Mueller, Robert Preus, Kurt Marquart, Herman Otten, John M. Drickamer – and my understanding of the doctrine of salvation, especially where it intersects with my understanding of the Sacraments, is largely Lutheran.  Salvation was objectively accomplished for all by the Saviour on the Cross and is given to man freely as a gift.  It is proclaimed to all in the Gospel of which the Church’s two-fold ministry of Word and Sacrament are both modes, at least with regards to the Gospel Sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper.  The Gospel, in both modes, is the resistible means through which God gives us the grace of salvation, faith is the hand into which He places it and with which we receive it.  The grace that sanctifies us – works in us to make us conform to the righteousness and holiness of Christ internally – is always given with the grace that justifies us – clears us of the guilt of sin and gives us the legal standing of righteousness before God, but sanctification is always based on justification, not the other way around, sanctification being, therefore God making us into what we already are because of Jesus Christ.  Our faith and hope – faith is the “substance of things hoped for” (Heb. 11:1) – rests on Who Jesus is and what He has done for us in the events of the Gospel, His death and resurrection, rather than on what He is doing in us, and it is through such faith resting on what He has done for us outside ourselves that He accomplishes what He is working in us..  I do not agree, however, with the Lutherans and Reformed, that the Gospel was recovered in the sixteenth century after being lost by the Church.  Justification by faith alone is not the Gospel.  To say that justification by faith alone is the Gospel is to say that our message of Good News to the world is “you only have to believe.”  To say that, however, would be actual Antinomianism, as opposed to the kind with which legalists frequently charge Christians who see God’s grace as freer than they themselves see it. The Gospel is that Jesus Christ, the Son of God Incarnate, fully God and fully man, died for us and rose again.  It is confessed in each of the ancient Creeds and permeates the liturgies of all the ancient Churches, and so was never lost by the Church, although had been buried under a lot of accumulated excess baggage by the Roman branch of the Church by the sixteenth century.  Justification by faith alone is part – a part, not the whole - of the extended theological explanation of why the Gospel is Good News.   It is the claim that justification by faith alone is the Gospel and that the Church lost the Gospel, rather than the doctrine of justification by faith alone itself, that has produced the sectarian separatism and the revivals of such ancient heresies as Arianism and Nestorianism that have plagued post-Reformation Protestantism.

 

These positions will no doubt seem out of step with the direction in which our civilization is heading and the spirit and fashions of the present day but that is rather the point since they are expressions of an instinctual Toryism that looks to ancient and timeless truths rather than the rapidly changing opinions of the current day.  I would not trade that Toryism for a “conservatism” with roots no deeper than individualistic market liberalism and my resolution for this New Year, as for every New Year, is to grow even more out of step with the times and more rooted in those ancient truths.

 

Happy New Year!

God Save the King!

What the Hell?

 Hell has been a topic of much discussion online this past week, and not due to any speculation that the polar vortex that meteorologists are predicting will soon plunge us into some nasty temperatures, is about to arrive there and cause everything everyone has ever said would never happen to happen.  The impetus for the discussion, as far as I can tell, was the actor Kirk Cameron.  You might remember him from such TV shows as Growing Pains or from the films based on Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series.  Apparently, on his podcast on 3 December, he explained why he has shifted from a belief in “eternal conscious torment” to a belief in “conditional immortality” or as it is more commonly called “annihilationism.”

 

I had initially intended to ignore this because I have been working on something else from which I did not want to divert my time and attention.  I had, however, answered a question on a somewhat related topic in the comments to my essay “The Tenth Article – Baptism and Forgiveness”, and so I had already been thinking about the general subject.  This, and the way in which the matter was being framed by many on my side, prompted me to change my mind.   I will try to keep this short.

 

I have seen many who hold to “eternal conscious torment”, which shall be designated ECT for the remainder of this essay, accuse Cameron and those with similar views of “denying hell.”  I have also seen several references to the “heresy of annihilationism.” (1)  The first of these is clearly an inaccuracy due to lazy thinking.  The difference between ECT and annihilationism is not about the existence of hell but its nature.  Annihilationism claims that it consumes those consigned to it so that they eventually cease to exist.  ECT claims that those consigned to it suffer forever without ever ceasing to exist.

 

Those who speak of “the heresy of annihilationism” either use “heresy” interchangeably with “error” or distinguish heresy from error in general on grounds other than those generally accepted in orthodox Christianity.  There is not really much that can be said those to whom heresy and error are interchangeable synonyms.  Those who recognize the distinction, however, presumably also recognize that heresy is a more serious type of error than error in general.  To these, I would point out the ways in which heresy has traditionally been demarcated.

 

Such ancient heresies as Arianism (denial of the eternity and full deity of the Son of God) and Apollinarianism (denial of the full humanity of the Incarnate Son) were formally condemned as such by the Church in ecumenical council.   Moreover, they involve a denial, in full or in part, of a doctrine that is de fide, that is to say, of the very essence of the Christian faith, and as such is confessed in the Apostles’ and Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creeds.  The only place in either of these Creeds where the word hell appears is in the words “He descended into hell” in the Apostles’ Creed.  Both Creeds assert that Jesus will come back “to judge the quick and the dead” but nothing specific is said about the nature of the punishment that the wicked face as the outcome of this judgement.  The Athanasian Symbol does expand on the judgement by saying “And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting: and they that have done evil into everlasting fire”, but this wording does not exclude an annihilationist interpretation.   Nor was annihilationism ever formally condemned by the Church in ecumenical council.  Some Protestant confessions such as the Augsburg Confession (Lutheran) and the Westminster Confession of Faith (Presbyterian) exclude and condemn it, but these confessions are far too extensive and precise for everything confessed in them to be regarded as de fide.   On the very eve of the Reformation, the Church of Rome asserted the unconditional immortality of the soul in the Fifth Lateran Council but this council is hardly a true ecumenical council being recognized only by Rome. The closest thing to an ecumenical condemnation of annihilationism is an anathema attached to the records of the fifth ecumenical council (the Second Council of Constantinople, 553 AD) but when it condemns the idea that the punishment of the demons and the impious is temporary it is clearly the idea that this punishment will end with the restoration of the demons and the impious (universalism) that is in view and not the idea that it will end with their extinction.  

 

For these reasons we should be more cautious about applying the word “heresy” to conditional immortality or annihilationism.  If, however, it is not a heinous twisting of doctrine in which a de fide truth is denied to the peril of the soul, this does not mean that it is true doctrine.  These can hardly be the only two options, otherwise we would have to say that salvation is by dotting every i and crossing every t correctly in every doctrine, major or minor, which is a far cry from salvation by grace.

 

When it comes to ECT/conditional immorality there are both hermeneutical (Scriptural interpretation) and theological/philosophical factors to be considered.  

 

With regards to the hermeneutical, the first thing that needs to be noted is that there are two hells in the Bible.   Since there is also more than one heaven (2 Cor. 12:2) this should hardly be shocking.  The first is the place called Sheol in the Old Testament and Hades in the New Testament.  The second is the place that Jesus calls Gehenna and which is referred to as the Lake of Fire in the book of Revelation.  In Rev. 20:14, the first hell is cast into the second hell.  The idea of Sheol/Hades is of an underworld.  It corresponds to the concept expressed by “the grave” in the Bible.  When someone dies, his body goes to “the grave” and his spirit or soul goes to Sheol/Hades.  With regards to the English word “hell”, this is the idea that it originally conveyed.  We borrowed the English word from Norse/Scandanavian/German mythology in the same way the writers of the New Testament borrowed Hades from Greek mythology. Hel was the goddess who ruled the underworld in Norse mythology, the daughter of Loki, just as Hades, the brother of Zeus and Poseidon, was the god who ruled the underworld in Greek mythology.   Today, the English word more commonly suggests the idea of the second hell, Gehenna, the Lake of Fire, the place to which the lost are consigned at the Last Judgement.

 

From this we can establish that the matter of the ECT and annihilationist interpretations cannot be decided by the question of literalism.  The word Gehenna, taken in its most literal sense, is a place on this earth.  It is the Valley of Ben-Hinnom, located on the boundary of Judah (Jud. 15:8), which became a site of child sacrifice (2 Chron. 28:3, 33:6), which under the name Tophet was cursed by the prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 19), which in a later period was used by Jerusalem as the place to throw their garbage and the bodies of executed criminals and accordingly fires were kept perpetually burning there.  Everybody, I think, would regard it as excessive literalism, to interpret Jesus’ eschatological references to Gehenna as meaning that after the Final Judgement the earthly Gehenna that anyone can visit today will be the actual location of the punishment of the damned.

 

Short of that, it is arguable that the annihilationist is the more literal of the two interpretations.  In the ECT interpretation, the fire of Gehenna depicts the conscious suffering of the lost in hell and Jesus’ repeated description of the fire as “everlasting” means that the punishment is to consciously suffer forever.  That Jesus took the name of Jerusalem’s garbage dump, where the purpose of the perpetual fire was to burn up the corpses of the condemned and other rubbish, however, suggests that the annihilationist is the more obvious interpretation of this imagery.  It is also clearly what the fire of judgement suggests in the parables of the wheat and tares and of the net in Matthew 13. 

 

Indeed, within the Gospels, the passage involving fire which most suggests the ECT understanding of it is the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16.  In this, the rich man is consciously suffering in flame.  There are two problems, however, with using this passage to support the ECT interpretation.  The first is that the hell in the passage is Hades not Gehenna.  The second is that the entire passage is intentionally counter-factual.  Some object to it being called a parable on the grounds that an actual name is used, and they are correct, but not in the way they think.  It would more properly be called the Parody of the Rich Man and Lazarus.  Lazarus, in the story, is a fictional counterpart to the Lazarus whom Jesus raised from the dead in John 11.  The rich man in the story, is a caricature of Caiaphas, the high priest who presided at the trial that unjustly condemned Jesus.   The whole point of the parody is found in Abraham’s refusal of the rich man’s request that Lazarus be raised from the dead and sent to his five brothers (Annas, Caipahas’ father-in-law, had five sons, all of whom served as high priests like their father and brother-in-law).   They won’t believe, Abraham told the rich man, even though one rose from the dead.  This points to what happened in real life – Lazarus WAS raised from the dead, and in response Caiaphas initiated the conspiracy to put Jesus to death (Jn. 11:46-53). 

No, the strongest support for ECT in Jesus’ own words does not come from the passages in which He uses the imagery of Gehenna and fire, but the passages in which He speaks of the punishment of the lost as so terrible that it were better that one not have been born at all (in the case of Judas) or as so bad that it were better that one cut off a limb or pluck out an eye.   This language is difficult to reconcile with any interpretation other than ECT as is the whole idea of a Final Resurrection of the lost.  The Final Resurrection of the lost, however, is clearly taught in both Testaments.  “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” (Dan. 12:3)

 

When we look at the rest of the Scriptures, Rev. 14:11 provides the most support for the ECT interpretation.  “And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.”  Unlike the same book’s depiction of the Final Judgement six chapters later, in which the devil, the lost, and ultimately death and hell, are all cast into the Lake of Fire which is described as a Second Death, all of which can easily be understood in an annihilationist manner, it is very difficult if not outright impossible to read Rev. 14:11 without ECT.

 

If we take St. Paul’s epistles and Jesus’ teachings together, the strongest image associated with damnation is that of loss rather than inflicted pain.  “Depart from me”, Jesus says in Matt. 7:23, to those who He had just said would not “enter into the kingdom of heaven.”  This is what the goats are told in the Parable of the Sheep and Goats in Matt. 25, although everlasting fire prepared for the devil is also mentioned.  Earlier in that chapter the foolish virgins are denied entry by the bridegroom.  This is overwhelmingly the way St. Paul speaks of the fate of those who are ultimately lost – they will not inherit the kingdom of God.  This, of course, would be true regardless of whether ECT or annihilationism is correct.  What these words do seem to exclude is the universalist interpretation, especially the dogmatic absolute kind currently taught by David Bentley Hart.  Since the Beatific Vision – the sight of God face to face - is the good for which man, both the race and each person individually, was created, the failure to attain that end is the worst possible thing that could happen to a person.  This is true, regardless of whether the person is placed in a prison where he is kept consciously existing forever suffering inflicted physical pain, whether he is ultimately extinguished, or even whether he is place in an environment that is otherwise pleasant but where he is knowingly kept from the Beatific Vision forever.  St. John Chrysostom knew what he was talking about when he said “The pains of hell are not the greatest part of hell; the loss of heaven is the weightiest woe of hell.”  The theologians who speculated about a limbus infantium, to which the souls of unbaptized infants would be consigned where they would not endure the pains of hell but would be deprived of the Beatific Vision, did not.

 

The state of the question, after considering the Scriptural evidence, is such that it is most unwise to be so dogmatic in favour of either ECT or annihilationism as to pronounce the other to be heresy.  As for the theological/philosophical considerations, I will be much briefer in my treatment of them.  There seems to be a presumption in annihilationism that the extinction of the conscious existence of the damned is more merciful than allowing them to suffer torment eternally.  Is this true or is this based on presuppositions that we assume because they are common to the day in which we live without taking into consideration the corruption and degradation of that day?   Could an argument not be made, that those who are ultimately lost in hell are those who have rendered themselves so incapable of God’s blessing by refusing the proffered grace of God that in the end they are kept in existence eternally because their existence is the only good they are capable of receiving from God and He in His love and mercy is unwilling to deprive them of that?  Existence is always a good, after all.  The idea that in the hell of ECT, the lost suffer the loss of all good, is error, and perhaps an error more worthy of being considered “heresy” than annihilationism, because it contradicts what orthodox Christianity has always taught about the good and evil. (2) If the punishment of the damned truly were the loss of all good, this would mean the extinction of their existence, and so would be an argument for annihilationism.

 

Ultimately, the fact that ECT is by far the prevalent view of orthodox Christians in all places and times since the founding of the Church is what tips the balance of the hermeneutical and theological/philosophical considerations in favour of the ECT view for me.  Annihilationism has had its otherwise orthodox proponents, such as the late John R. W. Stott, but has mostly been the view of heretical sects like the neo-Arian Jehovah’s Witnesses.  This is a factor that carries no weight whatsoever for those who are now treating old Mike Seaver like he has apostasized from the faith once delivered unto the saints.  These, however, tend to be Calvinists of the strict TULIP type, the type who behave towards other Christians much like the five year old who guys around telling other kids that his dad can beat up their dad(s). 

 

For anyone looking for a more substantial treatment of this issue, Edward Fudge’s The Fire That Consumes is the best articulation of the conditional immortality viewpoint of which I am aware.  It is an extensive, scholarly treatment.  Fudge was a minister of the Churches of Christ and the first edition of his book was published in 1982.  In 1992, Dr. Larry E. Dixon, who was Professor of Theology at Providence College in Otterburne when I began my studies there in 1994 and who was my faculty advisor, published a defence of ECT entitled The Other Side of the Good News.  Anglican lay theologian Michael J. McClymond’s two-volume The Devil’s Redemption (2018) is a more recent and more extensive defence of ECT, but it is tailored towards addressing universalism (the subtitle is A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism) whereas Dixon’s book was more directed towards annihilationism.

 

 (1)   For some reason my spellchecker recognizes the word “annihilationist” but not “annihilationism”.  

(2) Evil has no existence of its own.  God, Who exists in Himself eternally, is entirely Good.  Everything He created is good.  Evil, unlike all created things, has neither form nor matter.  It is present only in a parasitic sense in created things that are otherwise good, in way exactly analogous to a hole in a wall.  The hole is there, it should not be there, but it is not there as a thing in the same way the wall itself is.  This is the orthodox Christian view of good and evil.  The Hollywood notion that evil exists in itself as a force almost equal to good, is the heresy of Mani.

A Heretical Meme

I recently saw a meme that read “We are not saved because we believe, we believe because we are saved.”  The person who posted the meme was a Calvinist who presumably thought that the meme was a nugget of theological truth about God’s sovereignty in salvation.  Internet memes, however, are merely the democratization of the sound-byte and sound-bytes do not gain in accuracy and truthfulness by being created by the average Joe rather than by the corporate media.  In this case, the meme is heretical.  It is heretical even by the standards of Calvinism.

 

The meme basically asserts that salvation is the cause of faith, rather than faith the cause of salvation.  This, however, mutatis mutandis, is what orthodox Christianity asserts about works rather than faith.  Protestantism, of which Calvinism is a strand, is particularly insistent upon this point.  To assert the same about faith, therefore, is to eliminate the distinction between faith and works and to make faith into a work.  The entire point of the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith, however, is that justification is by grace (a gift) rather than by works (a wage earned), and that justification can be by grace because it is by faith, since faith is not a work.

 

That faith is the cause and salvation the effect is clearly stated in multiple verses.  Any one of these can be quoted to demonstrate the point.  I will quote Romans 5:1 “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”   If faith were the effect, this wording would be nonsense.

 

The question is what kind of cause is faith?  The answer to this question brings clarity to many other questions concerning grace and salvation.

That there are multiple kinds of causes was recognized two and a half millennia ago by Aristotle in the second book of his Physics.  He identified four types of causes and provided several examples of each.  Subsequent writers have usually thought it best to provide a single illustration for all four causes.  We will follow this example and use a bookshelf as our illustration.  The bookshelf is, of course, the effect.

 

The first cause Aristotle identified was the material cause.  This is the stuff from which the final product is taken and made.  In the case of our bookshelf, the material cause is wood.

 

Aristotle’s second cause is the formal cause.  This is the idea of the product.  The person who took the wood and put it together to assemble our bookshelf did so in accordance with an idea of what the bookshelf should look like.  If he is a designer, he may have come up with the idea himself and sketched it out.  If the bookshelf is of the self-assemble type, someone else did this and printed it out in the schematic/instructions that came in the box with the pieces.

 

In these first two causes we have the basic Aristotelean concept that everything in creation has both form and matter.

 

Aristotle’s third cause, he called the primary source.  It is more usually called the efficient cause or the Agent.  This is the person who took the matter and made a concrete example of the form, or, if you want to put the other way, who took the form and shaped the matter.  In the case of our bookshelf this is the person who built it.  That could be us, if we bought the ready-to-assemble type that a particular Swedish furniture store is famous for, or, if we bought it pre-assembled, it was the craftsman who put it together in his shop or the factory as the case may be.

 

Aristotle’s final cause, in the sense of the fourth out of the four, is the final cause, in the sense of the end or telos.  This is the purpose or reason, for which the Agent, applies form to matter and vice versa, to produce the effect.  The final cause of our bookshelf is, of course, to store books.

 

The Reformer John Calvin is not ordinarily thought of as an Aristotelean.  Aristotle was “the Philosopher” to St. Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth century Dominican Scholastic whose Summa Theologica significantly shaped the late Medieval theology to which Calvin and his associates objected, especially its popular form the abuses of which were often very far from what the Angelic Doctor wrote, although the Reformers found it in their interests to minimize this distinction.  For Calvin, the great theologian was St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Augustine was a Platonist.  Calvin, however, who like the Father of Latin theology, Tertullian, approached the study of Scripture and God with a legal education as his background, was also like his second-to-third century predecessor in regarding secular philosophy with disdain and suspicion.  This makes his application of Aristotle’s causes to salvation all the more interesting.

 

In the fourteenth chapter of the third book of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin identifies “the mercy of the Heavenly Father and his freely given love toward us” as the efficient cause of our salvation.  Christ, Calvin says, is the material cause and our faith the formal cause.  Obviously he would not be on board with “I believe because I am saved.”  All three of these causes, Calvin said, were found in one sentence in John 3:16.  The fourth cause he identified as “the proof of divine justice” and the “praise of God’s goodness.”

 

Calvin clearly did not understand these causes properly.  Since the efficient cause is the Agent it would have been better to identify God Himself as the efficient cause of our salvation.  Or, to be more precise, Jesus Christ, God the Son Incarnate, is the efficient cause or Agent of our salvation, which is why we call Him Saviour.  That in turn means that the material cause should be more precisely identified as the events of the Gospel, especially the Atoning death of Jesus Christ.  To be fair to Calvin, he did write “Surely the material cause is Christ, with his obedience, through which he acquired righteousness for us.”

 

In his identification of faith as the formal cause of our salvation he wrote “What shall we say is the formal or instrumental cause but faith?”  There is a basic misunderstanding here, because instrumental cause and formal cause are not the same thing.  Calvin was correct to identify faith as the instrumental cause of our salvation – or rather an instrumental cause – but not in identifying it as the formal cause.  This is somewhat surprising when we consider what the formal cause of our salvation actually is.  If we understand formal cause to mean what Aristotle meant by it, then applied to salvation, the formal cause must be God’s eternal design.  One would expect John Calvin of all people to have gotten this right.

 

Aristotle did not speak of an instrumental cause, but the concept is simple enough to understand.  Think back to our bookshelf illustration.  The instrumental cause would be the hammer, screwdriver, Allen wrench, and whatever other tools the efficient cause used in putting the bookshelf together.  The instrumental cause, therefore, is not synonymous with the formal cause, but a subcategory of the efficient cause.  

 

Faith is indeed an instrumental cause of our salvation but not in the way the Allen wrench is an instrumental cause of our self-assembled Swedish bookshelf.  The equivalent of that kind of instrumental cause in the order of salvation would be the cross.  Faith as an instrumental cause of our salvation corresponds more with the delivery truck that brings a pre-assembled bookshelf to us.

 

Here the Lutheran dogmaticians are particularly helpful.  That salvation is a gift of God, the New Testament is absolutely clear on and all Christians affirm.  It is a gift that was given to the world in a general sense in the Incarnation and the events of the life and death of the Incarnate Son of God, something that we especially remember at this time of year.  It also has to be given in a more particular sense to each of us personally and here the Lutheran dogmaticians identify two different types of means through which this is accomplished.  There are the media or organa dotika, the means or instruments of giving.  These are the means through which God gives His saving grace to us.  Then there is the medium or organon leptikon, the means or instrument of receiving.  This is the hand with which we receive the gift of saving grace.   The ministry of the Gospel, which God has entrusted to His Church in the modes of Word and Sacrament, is the means through which God gives us His saving grace.  Faith is the organon leptikon, the means by which we receive it.  It is in this sense that it is the instrumental cause of our salvation.

So yes, whereas when it comes to salvation and works salvation is the cause and works the effect, when it comes to faith and salvation faith is the cause, the instrument of receiving cause, and salvation the effect.  The meme is heretical by the standards of all forms of orthodox Christianity, including orthodox Calvinism.

 

Perhaps the lesson to be learned here is that theology should not be done by meme.

Taking Offence and Denying Defence

The late Sir Roger Scruton had much to say about the difference between “giving offence” and “taking offence.”  In an interview with Douglas Murray for The Spectator about a half a year before his death, for example, he said:

 

Remember though, that there’s this great distinction between giving offence and taking offence and we’re living in a culture where people become experts in taking offence even when it hasn’t been given.  And that’s what is taught in gender studies. It teaches young women to take offence at every remark a man might make or even his being there, you know. It’s a wonderful theatrical thing to take offence but it doesn’t lead to any lasting relationships. (1)

 

The importance of this distinction has to do with more than just gender.  Every form of “identity politics” majors in taking offence.  Identity politics is informed and underlain by the contemporary “morality” that has supplanted traditional moralities, including both the older traditional morality informed by classical ethics and Christian moral theology and the more recent morality of classical liberalism, in the civilization formerly known as Christendom in the post-World War II era.  This is one of the key distinguishing feature between the contemporary “morality” and traditional moralities.  Traditional morality taught you to moderate your speech and behaviour so as to avoid giving offence.  Contemporary morality teaches you to take offence and to moderate your speech and behaviour so as to minimize the likelihood of others taking offence.

 

The distinction is quite simple.  Allow me to illustrate.  If I were to go up to you and say something to the effect of “You dirty rotten so-and-so, you are ugly and stupid, a bum and a loser, and the biggest jerk who ever lived.  Now listen to me you miserable punk, you dress like a clown and smell like a skunk, your mother is a whore and your father is a drunk” then I would be giving offence.  If, on the other hand, I were to say to you “I listened to your lecture on this-or-that historical event and I don’t like your take on what happened because I think it portrays such-and-such a group in a poor light, bolstering unfair stereotypes, and although I am not a member of that group per se, I am deeply offended by your micro-aggression and think you need to be cancelled” or some such blithering nonsense, I would be taking offence.

 

Ordinarily, when someone gives offence the offence is intentional, he is deliberately trying to hurt the feelings of the person to whom he is speaking.  To the person who takes offence, however, the intentions of the person from whom he takes offence are irrelevant. 

 

With regards to the importance of intent it is worth observing that the cultural shift from the traditional morality of avoiding giving offence to the contemporary morality of taking offence, occurred simultaneously with the rise of technocratic managers in both government and private business. (2) Traditionally, in the Westminster system, the laws by which we are governed are subject to King-in-Parliament acting through legislation.  While the form remains in Canada, in the post-World War II era, the Prime Minister and Cabinet have increasingly by-passed the constraints the traditional system placed on their ability to impose new rules on Canadians, by relying more-and-more on civil service agencies acting through regulation instead.  The counterpart to this in the private sector is the increased control of middle level managers operating through Human Resource departments.

 

The reason this is worth pointing out here is because the traditional Westminster system of legislating by King-in-Parliament was closely allied with the Common Law tradition which includes the principle with regards to criminal culpability that actus reus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea (a guilty act does not make guilty unless the mind is guilty), that is to say, there needs to be criminal intent for there to be criminal culpability.  HR departments, by contrast, seldom if ever regard intent as an essential component of any of the myriad of made-up offences in the rule books through which they micromanage their employees.  While the parallel is not perfect it is notable.

 

The other factor that distinguishes giving offence from taking offence is objectivity.  If you give offence to someone by, for example, calling him a horse’s patoot, the offence is objective because it is reasonable to assume that anyone called this would be offended by it.  When someone takes offence that has not been given, however, the offence is largely if not entirely, subjective.  In Biblical hermeneutics, we distinguish between exegesis and eisegesis.  In both of these words the basic verb means to guide or to lead.  Exegesis adds the prefix for “out” and means to bring out of the text the meaning that is already there in it.  This, of course, is the approved hermeneutical method.  The other one, eisegesis, substitutes the prefix for “in” and means to read into the text the meaning you wish to find there.   Taking offence that has not been given is similar to eisegesis in this regards.

 

In this, as in so many other areas, contemporary morality is a poor substitute for traditional morality.  Morality informs law and when an inferior morality replaces a superior morality the result will be the introduction and multiplication of bad laws. 

 

The news media recently learned that the Liberal government led by Prime Minister Blofeld has come to an agreement with the Lower Canadian separatists. (3)   The separatists agreed to support the Liberal Bill C-9, a proposed series of amendments to the section of the Criminal Code pertaining to “hate.”  Over the past couple of years, Canadians have become increasingly disturbed and disgusted at a particular type of “protest” that has been popping up all over our country and the wider civilization.  Ostensibly about the Israel-Palestine conflict in the Middle East, these protests openly embrace not merely the cause of the Palestinians but the organization Hamas, glorify its worst actions, and are filled with violent, revolutionary, rhetoric directed not only against Israel but against our country and Western Civilization as a whole.  Bill C-9 is the Liberals’ proposed “solution” to this problem.  It is typical of the “solutions” put forward by politicians, especially Liberals, to problems that are largely of their own creation, in that it creates new statutory offences and laws where the already existing laws are more than sufficient to handle the situation if they would only be followed and enforced.  Bill C-9 would make preventing access to a place of worship or community centre by means of intimidation – which already violates more than one law – into a distinct “hate” offence.  It would also criminalize the public display of certain symbols.  To gain the support of the separatists, the Liberals agreed to include a further amendment in the bill that would remove the existing provision in Section 319 of the Criminal Code that exempts speech that expresses what the speaker holds in “good faith” based on “a belief in a religious text” from criminal culpability.

 

To do this would be to make a bad law worse.  What I said about bill C-9’s making of new statutory offences in the previous paragraph applies to all laws about “hate speech.”  Anything prohibited by “hate speech” laws that warrants being prohibited by law was already prohibited by law before there were any “hate” laws.  The most defensible limitation on speech in “hate speech” legislation is the prohibition of incitement.  Incitement is the urging or encouraging of others to commit a criminal act.  If the other person(s) actually commit the criminal act, the person who did the inciting shares in their responsibility and therefore criminal culpability for the act.  It is reasonable, therefore, that criminal incitement be prohibited by law, at least if the incitement is acted on.  Criminal incitement, however, was already against the law before “hate speech” laws were thought up. All “hate speech” laws did was single out a specific type of incitement, as if telling people to commit a crime against person X was much worse than telling people to commit the same crime against person Y, if when telling them to commit the crime against person X, you give the person’s race, sex, religion, whatever, as part of the reason. 

 

Worse, they expanded the prohibited speech beyond actual incitement.  Actual incitement is explicit.  It involves someone saying, in so many words, that such-and-such a criminal act should be committed.  The concept of “hate speech”, however, treats as the equivalent of actual incitement, speech that portrays groups that supporters of “hate speech” laws think should be protected in such a negative light that someone might be inspired to act criminally against that group.   It is interesting, isn’t it, how the progressive supporters of these kind of laws think that in the case of groups to which they think the law should extend special protection, negative portrayals will inspire people to commit crimes who were not already inclined to do so, whereas in the case of groups they do not think should be specially protected by the law – Christians, rather than Jews or Muslims, whites rather than any other race, men rather than women, heterosexuals rather than homosexuals, actual men and women rather than transsexuals – the non-stop stream of negative rhetoric on the part of progressives themselves, usually far more full of expressions of hate in the literal sense of the word than that which they seek to ban, will have no such effect.  Basically, “hate speech” laws in effect protect groups that progressives feel are entitled to special protection from having their feelings hurt.  Here, the thinking of the contemporary morality with regards to taking offence finds its legal manifestation.

 

The old laws against actual incitement were justifiable limitations on freedom of speech because they were not there to prevent the circulation of ideas but rather to prevent the encouraging of criminal acts.  “Hate speech” laws are not similarly justifiable.  Narrowing the range of ideas that can be circulated is precisely what those who introduce such legislation have in mind.  Moreover, good laws are few in number, clear and easy to understand, protect people and their property from objective, quantifiable, harm and not from subjective hurt feelings and extend this protection to everyone in the realm and not just to certain groups that progressive political parties think need special protection.  “Hate speech” laws do not meet any of those qualifications but are rather the opposite.  They are the textbook example of bad laws.

 

After the news was leaked about the deal between the Grits and the Bloc, the apologists for removing the exemption came crawling out of the woodworks.  Unsurprisingly, foremost among them was Marc Miller, (4) whom Blofeld just named Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, replacing Steven Guilbeault who resigned from Cabinet last weekend over Blofeld’s pipeline deal with Alberta.  It was difficult, prior to last weekend, to imagine that replacing eco-extremist Guilbeault could be anything but an improvement, but lo and behold, Blofeld managed the unthinkable.  Miller, a childhood friend of Captain Airhead, belongs to the former prime minister’s innermost circle.  If Blofeld really wants to move his party and the government he leads away from the blighted legacy of his predecessor, replacing one Trudeau-insider with another is not the way to go about it.  To the point at hand, however, Miller has been shooting his mouth off for months about how he considers certain Biblical texts “hateful” and wants to see the religious text exemption for “hate speech” eliminated. (5) 

 

In a meeting of the House of Commons’ Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, of which he was at the time the chair, just prior to All Hallows, Miller said “In Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Romans — there’s other passages — there’s clear hatred towards, for example, homosexuals.”  This is a nonsensical statement.  The Bible identifies many different acts as sins.  This is not ordinarily interpreted as “hatred”, clear or otherwise, towards those who commit such acts, the late Fred Phelps notwithstanding.  When the Ten Commandments say “thou shalt not commit adultery”, which act carried the penalty of death under the Mosaic Law, do we understand this to be hatred against adulterers? When the Ten Commandments say “thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour”, do we interpret this to be hatred against perjurers?    If identifying someone’s behaviour as sinful is expressing “hatred” against that person, then the Bible could be interpreted as expressing hatred against all mankind when it says “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God.”  That it would be absurd to interpret it this way, however, is generally understood because the text, St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, goes immediately on to say “Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”  Far from an expression of hatred towards those who sin, the Scriptures are a message of God’s redeeming love to sinners.  The thought contained in the verse from St. Paul just quoted is also expressed in what is undoubtedly the best-known verse in the Bible “For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.’

 

When his words were immediately understood by several commentators, members of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, and provincial ministers as calling for these Scriptural texts, their being read as Scripture lessons in church, and preached on from the pulpit, to be criminalized, Mr. Miller took offence.  All he intended, he maintained, was to say that these texts should not be allowed as defences, in cases of public incitement.  This is how he is now defending the proposed removal of the religious exemption from Section 319.  Note, however, the sleight-of-hand that is at play.  He hopes that those whose suspicions he wishes to allay will understand the public incitement, to which he says sincere belief in these Scriptural texts should not be a defence, to mean someone telling other people that they should commit some kind of violent crime.  If, however, interpreting these Scriptural texts in accordance with traditional Christian orthodoxy as identifying same-sex sexual activity as sinful is itself regarded as an expression of hate, then removing the religious exemption from Section 319 would have precisely the effect that Miller’s opponents say it would have, of opening the door for criminal prosecutions of Christian ministers who faithfully preach on these portions of Scripture.

 

All one has to do is look at the track record of the Liberal Party since Miller’s lifelong intimate friend Captain Airhead took over as leader in 2013 to realize that Miller should not be trusted to mean merely that the religious defence should be removed from cases of actual, explicit, incitement to violent crime.  One of the first things that Captain Airhead did upon becoming Liberal leader was to ban anyone who held the orthodox Christian view of abortion from running for a seat in the House as a member of the Liberal party.  During Captain Airhead’s premiership, the Liberal government made a lot of noise about combatting Islamophobia and anti-Semitism at the same time that a wave of arson and other vandalism directed against Christian churches was underway.  Arguably, the Liberal government itself had a hand in inciting that wave.   One of Miller’s Liberal colleagues, John-Paul Danko described the factual reporting of the over 120 churches so attacked as a “conspiracy theory.”  Repeatedly, over the course of the Airhead premiership, the Liberal government promoted as “Canadian values” ideas that were contrary to orthodox Christian moral theology – and, as they discovered to their discomfort, contrary to the traditional morality of other religions as well – and sought through various measures to coerce Christian churches into changing their moral theology to align with progressive values.

 

So no, we should not believe Mr. Miller that the removal of the religious defence will not lead to a wave of litigation and even criminal charges against churches unwilling to change their orthodox moral theology or to muzzle themselves.

 

Instead of doing what the Liberals and the Bloc are planning on doing, I propose that the government do the right thing instead.  It should strike Section 319 from the Criminal Code in its entirety and abandon its plans on reintroducing legislation similar to the notorious Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the bill repealing which had gone into effect the year after it received royal assent and the year before the Liberals resumed government.  It is the right thing to do because “hate speech” legislation is by its very nature, fundamentally bad law.  (6) 

 

Since morality informs law, we will also need to repeal the contemporary new morality that encourages people to take offence over every perceived slight to their identity, real or self-chosen, and reinstate the traditional morality that merely encourages people not to give offence.  This will be more difficult to do because it cannot be accomplished simply by passing or repealing a bill, but it is here at the cultural level rather than at the political and legislative, that the real battle must be waged.

 

 

 (1)   https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/ full-transcript-douglas-murray-in-conversation-with-roger-scruton/

(2)   Today, due to decades of speculative fiction and the current state of AI development, “technocratic”, probably suggests to most people the idea of machines taking over.  That is not how I am using it here.  I am referring to the fact that the professional managers – government bureaucrats and HR types in the corporate world – considered as a class, are distinguished by the use of language that is “technical” in the sense employed by Michael Oakeshott in the title essay of his Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962) in which he distinguishes “technical” from “traditional” knowledge.

(3)   https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/liberals-bloc-hate-speech-laws-religious-exemptions

(4)   https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/religion-is-no-excuse-for-hate-carneys-newest-minister-says-of-proposed-removal-of-hate-speech-defence

(5)   https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/canadian-mp-reciting-hateful-bible-verses-about-homosexuality-in-public-should-be-illegal/

(6)    Earlier this week, paleo-libertarian editor Lew Rockwell published an article entitled “Why Banning Hate Speech is Evil.” I agree with the premise entirely although I would employ a different line of reasoning to argue for it.  Bans on “hate speech” are attempts to legislate what is in the human heart.  The civil government that attempts to do this, however, exceeds its own jurisdiction and intrudes into that which belongs to God alone.  This is the root of the evil the ancients called tyranny and that is often called totalitarianism in our own day. https://www.lewrockwell.com/ 2025/12/lew-rockwell/why-banning-hate-speech-is-evil/