The Bible and the Church Part One: A False Opposition

In an Anglican Facebook group, the same one that I mentioned in the introduction to my last essay, I recently saw the question posed of whether the Bible gave us the Church or the Church gave us the Bible.  These alternatives were presented in such a way as to make clear the underlying assumption that they are mutually exclusive and that it must be one or the other.  Anyone fortunate enough to have studied under the late Dr. Chuck Nichols will remember how fond he was of posing questions like this then answering them with “yes.”  I was very much tempted to follow his example but instead replied by saying that both positions are wrong, that the right way of looking at it is that God gave us both the Bible and the Church.  In thinking more about it I realized that rather than having recourse to an undefined “we” a better way of wording it would have been to say that God gave the Bible to the Church.  Since this was yet another Protestant versus Catholic dispute among orthodox Anglicans who for some reason or another are unwilling to accept that the Anglican Church is both Protestant and Catholic, but a different kind of Protestant from 5-point Calvinist Presbyterians and Baptists and a different kind of Catholic from the followers of the Patriarch of Rome, this answer would probably not have satisfied either side although it ought to satisfy both.  Either side can accept the wording, depending upon how the word Church is defined.   If Church is defined as a synonym for the word “Christians” then the Protestants would have no problem with “God gave the Bible to the Church.”  If Church is defined more narrowly as the society of Christian faith founded by Jesus Christ through His Apostles and continued to the present day under the leadership of the three-fold ministry established in the Apostolic era then the Catholics would have no problem with “God gave the Bible to the Church.”  As to the question of which definition of “Church” is the right one, in Dr. Nichols’ memory I shall give the answer “yes.”

 

Both the Bible and the Church possess authority.  These authorities differ in kind rather than degree so it is pointless to argue about which is the higher authority.  Both derive their different types of authority directly from God rather than the one from the other.  The Bible’s authority comes directly from God because the Bible is the written Word of God.  When you read the Bible or hear it read what you are reading or hearing is God speaking.  The Bible is the written Word of God, not because the Church says it is or somehow made it to be so but because the Holy Ghost inspired its human writers, not just in the sense in which we say Shakespeare was inspired, but in the sense that the words they wrote were not just their words but God’s words as well.  This is not just the Protestant view of the Bible.  The Roman Catholic Church officially declares this to be its view of the Bible in its Catechism, indeed, it even uses the “fundamentalist” language of the Bible being “without error.” (1)  The Eastern Orthodox view of the Bible, whatever David Bentley Hart might have to say about it, is no different.  Liberals in each of these ecclesiastical groups reject this view of the Bible, but this is because liberalism is unbelief wearing a thin guise of faith and so their defection does not take away from the Scriptures as the written Word of God being the common view of Christians.  The point, however, is that the Bible’s authority comes from the fact that it is God speaking, the written Word of God, and that it is God Himself and not the Church that makes it such.

 

The Church, however, also gets her authority directly from God.  When it comes to Church authority, we can speak either of the authority of the Church, that is to say, authority vested in the Church as a whole, organic, society, or we can speak of authority in the Church, which is the authority exercised in that society by the Apostolic ministerial leadership that Christ established.  The distinction is not hard and absolute because for the most part the authority of the collective body is exercised through the ministerial leadership in the body.  Those who erroneously think that the King of all creation, the King of Kings, established His Church as a type of democratic republic, think, equally erroneously, that authority in the Church is delegated to the ministers from the larger body.  This is clearly not what is depicted in the Scriptural history of the Gospels and the book of Acts.  This same Scriptural history testifies to the Church’s receiving her authority directly from God.  God the Son commissioned the Apostles before His Ascension, God the Holy Spirit descended upon them and empowered them on the first Whitsunday, and they exercised this authority and power long before the New Testament which testifies to all this is written.  

 

The Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 is a key event when it comes to grasping this.  The Council took place around the year 50 AD, almost two decades after the events of the Gospel and the birth of the Christian Church.  While the Gospel of St. Matthew was probably written already at this point in time, at least in the Hebrew or Aramaic form attested to by the Church Fathers, (2) and possibly St. Mark’s Gospel as well, the only book of the New Testament about which we can say with anything like certainty that it predated the Council is the epistle of St. James.  This is because St. James writes in that epistle as if the Church was a Jewish body that had yet to experience any significant influx of Gentile converts.  It was the first such influx that generated the controversy that the Council of Jerusalem, over which St. James presided, convened to address.  It is therefore extremely unlikely that St. James wrote the epistle after the Council.  All of St. Paul’s epistles were written after the Council, however.  Chronologically his first epistle was 1 Thessalonians which was written in his second missionary journey at some point in the time period covered by the seventeenth chapter of Acts. The book of Acts itself was obviously written in the ‘60s because it ends with the arrival of St. Paul in Rome which took place around the year 60.  St Luke wrote his Gospel first but probably just prior to writing Acts and so that Gospel can be dated to the late 50’s or early 60’s.  The epistle of St. Jude seems to have been written around the same time as St. Peter’s second epistle which was written shortly before his death around the year 67.  St. John’s writings were the last of the New Testament books to be written, traditionally ascribed to the very end of the Apostle’s ministry in the last decade of the first century.  The bulk of the New Testament was written after the Council of Jerusalem and most of it at least a decade later.

 

The Council of Jerusalem was not the first time the Apostles exercised the authority that Jesus Christ had given them in the Church.  They had exercised that authority, for example, to establish the order of deacons within the first year or so of the Church as recorded in the sixth chapter of Acts and to convert the existing office of presbyter (elder) into an order of ministry in the Church beneath themselves and above the deacons as attested by SS Paul and Barnabas ordaining such over the Churches they planted on their first missionary journey leading up to the events of the Council and by their association with the Apostles in the Council, thus completing the three tiers of ministry of the Christian Church corresponding to those of the Old Testament Church.  In the Council of Jerusalem, however, we find the Apostles, in council with their presbyters, exercising not merely their authority in the Church, but the authority of the Church, in order to settle a major controversy.  The controversy was over whether Gentile converts to Christianity had to also become Jews in order to become Christians.  After the fall of Jerusalem, 70 AD, the rabbinical leadership of those Jews who rejected Jesus as the Christ would redefine Judaism in such a way that a Jew who was baptized into the Christian faith ceased to be a Jew.  Clearly such rabbis were on the same wave length as the synagogue leaders who drove the Apostles and their converts out in the book of Acts.  In the century or so after the Council of Jerusalem the possibility of being both a Jew and a Christian was removed by the leadership of the Jewish side.  In 50 AD, however, two decades before the fall of Jerusalem, the Church had to contend with the question of whether her Gentile converts had to become Jews by being circumcised and agreeing to follow the ceremonial requirements of the Mosaic Law (the kosher dietary code, the Sabbath, etc.)  The controversy broke out first at Antioch, from where SS Paul and Barnabas went to Jerusalem to consult the Apostles, who after hearing their case and the arguments of the other side, hotly debated the matter until St. Peter addressed them and made the case for the Gentiles not being made to become Jews based upon his account of the conversion of Cornelius the centurion and how that had been brought about and upon salvation being by grace rather than Law.  SS Paul and Barnabas then added their testimony about their ministry among the Gentiles to his and St. James, who as bishop of the Church of Jerusalem had presided over the council and in ruling spoke for the council and the whole Church, ruled against the Gentiles being made to become Jews.

 

St. James referenced the Scriptures in his ruling.  He quoted Amos 9:11-12, a Messianic prophecy in which the Gentile nations are said to be called by the name of the Lord.  When he instructed the Gentile Christians to abstain from the pollution of idols, fornication, and eating things strangled and blood, these prohibitions come from the moral Law (both tablets of the Ten Commandments are represented) and from the Noachic Covenant made with all mankind after the Deluge.  The purpose of these Scriptural references, however, was not to show that the Council had found the answer spelled out for them in the pages of the Old Testament.  The Council had not found their answer there because it was not there to be found, at least not in the way one would think it to be if certain extreme versions of the Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura were correct.  The Scriptural references are to show that the Council’s decision was in accordance with the Old Testament, in harmony with the Hebrew Scriptures, rather than contradictory to them or seeking to overturn them.

St. Paul in his epistles would provide a doctrinal foundation for the Church’s ruling on this matter.  The Mosaic Law had been a wall of separation between the Jews and the Gentiles.   Jesus Christ had nailed the Law to His cross and in His death had removed the wall, uniting Jews and Gentiles to each other and Himself in His one Body, the Church.  That Jews and Gentiles were to be united in this way had been a mystery in the previous age before Christ had come, but now that Christ has come it is revealed.  In the unity of the Church, on those external and ceremonial matters where the Law had previously separated Jews and Gentiles, liberty was now to reign.  These ideas are taught by St. Paul throughout his epistles.  The Church’s ruling in the Council of Jerusalem had preceded the writing of these epistles, however, and it did not include this sort of doctrinal explanation.

 

This illustrates how the authority that God has given the Church and the authority of the Bible with differs in kind.  The authority of both pertains to doctrine.  Doctrine comes in two basic kinds, doctrine regarding the faith, and doctrine regarding practice. Regardless of whether it consists of truths to be believed and confessed, or commandments to be followed or done, sound doctrine comes from God through revelation.  It is through the Scriptures that this revelation comes because the Scriptures are the very words of God which the Holy Ghost inspired the human writers to write.  This is the nature of Scriptural authority.  The truths about Christ removing the wall of partition between Jews and Gentiles and uniting them in one body were written by St. Paul in his epistles rather than declared by edict of the Church at the Council of Jerusalem because St. Paul was writing Scripture under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. 

 

This is not the nature of the authority given to the Church.  St. Jude speaks of the faith has having been “once delivered to the saints.” The faith, the body of truths which we believe and confess as Christians, was delivered to the Church by Jesus Christ in the days of the Apostles.  She was charged with safeguarding it which is the effect of St. Jude’s injunction to “earnestly contend” for it and so charged was vested with all the authority necessary to carry out this task. This includes the kind of authority on display in the Council of Jerusalem. 

 

A controversy had arisen.  It was a doctrinal dispute, having to do primarily with matters of practice although it also touched upon matters of faith particularly with regards to salvation.  The Church heard both sides, deliberated, and issued a judicial ruling.  While her ruling was not taken from the Scriptures in the same sense it would have been as if the dispute had been about whether or not one is allowed to help himself to his neighbour’s belongings and the ruling of no was taken from Exodus 20:15 she did cite the Scriptures to show her ruling was in harmony with them.  Despite not being taken directly from the Scriptures, neither did her ruling add to the teachings of Scriptures in a revelatory way in the way St. Paul’s epistles later would. 

 

The Church has no revelatory authority to add to the faith she has been entrusted with.  She can however exercise her judicial authority in safeguarding the faith to define it, and she has been called upon to do so time and again, especially in the centuries after Scriptural revelation had been completed in the first.  This includes identifying heresy as heresy, such as when she defined Arius’ doctrine (that there was a time when the Father was without the Son) as heresy.  It includes clarifying sound doctrine, such as when she issued the Definition of Chalcedon explaining that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God, Who in the Incarnation added a complete and perfect human nature to Himself in such a way that He remained the one Person He had always been, but with two natures that retained their differences and distinctions, but were now in His Person indivisible and inseparable.  It also involves summarizing the truths that are de fide, of the faith in such a way that rejection places one outside the faith, such as was done in the Apostles’ and Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creeds.  None of this added anything to the content of the Apostolic faith and we should be very grateful that the Church put this effort into contending for the faith rather than saying something to the effect of “eh, they have the Bible, that’s good enough, they don’t need us to do anything about it.”

 

The two types of authority clearly complement each other.  It is wrong to pit them against each other as is so often done by both sides in these “Protestant” vs. “Catholic” disputes.  Since they differ from each other in kind, it is also wrong to try and rank them as if the difference were one of degree.  Neither the Bible nor the Church gives the other to us.  God has given us the Christian faith.  The “us” to whom He has given the Christian faith is not merely “us” as individuals but also and even more so “us” as the community of faith that is the Church.  We, both as individual Christians and as the Church, have been charged with sharing the Christian faith with the world through evangelism.  The Church has been charged with keeping the faith with which she has been entrusted safe from error. To assist her in keeping this charge, God has given the Church the necessary tool of His own written Word, the Bible.  The Bible was primarily given to the Church as a society rather than Christians as individuals.  Protestantism tends to see it otherwise, but it was not until the eve of the Reformation that the printing industry developed the technology that would make it practical for every Christian to have a personal copy of the Bible.  Ancient Israel had received her Scriptures from God as a national community and in the time of Christ’s earthly ministry they were read, heard, and studied as such, or sung in the case of the Psalter, in the communities known as synagogues.  It was no different for the Christian Church when she inherited these Scriptures from Israel as her Old Testament and as the Apostolic teachings were written down and received by the Church as the New Testament that completed her Scriptures they were received as writings to be read and heard and studied as a community in just the same way.

 

In Part Two we shall look at the how the proper view that God has given the Bible to the Church relates to the question of how we know what belongs in the Bible.  This question is frequently raised by those arguing for the “Church gave us the Bible” position.  Usually when this question is raised in this way it is canon that is in view.  When the question is presented with a narrow focus on canon it becomes “which books belong in the Bible?”  Canon is not the only aspect to this question, however. There is also the matter of text.  The two largest examples will illustrate what I mean by this.  Do the long ending of St. Mark’s Gospel (16:8b-20) and the Pericope de Adultera (John 7:53-8:11) belong in the Bible or are they interpolations? They are found in the vast majority of Greek manuscripts as well as the ancient translations and in quotations by the Church Fathers but are missing from a couple of very old manuscripts.  Does the age of these manuscripts outweigh all the other evidence?  The question of text and the question of canon are two sides to the same question of what belongs in the Bible. We shall, Lord willing, see how the matters discussed in this essay inform the answer to this question in Part Two.

 

 (1)   Catechism of the Catholic Church: Revised in Accordance with the Official Latin Text Promulgated by Pope John Paul II, 2^nd Edition (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), 107.

(2)   Eusebius of Caesarea, the “Christian Herodotus” or father of Church History said that St. Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew prior to leaving the Holy Land (Historia Ecclesiastica, 3.24.6).  This would date the Hebrew original to about a decade prior to the Council of Jerusalem.  There is a general Patristic consensus that St. Matthew’s was the first Gospel written  which is an excellent commentary on the worth or lack thereof of Modern scholarship which disagrees and says St. Mark wrote first.  There is also a Patristic consensus that St. Matthew’s Gospel was written in Hebrew – they may have meant Aramaic although St. Jerome who saw the original in the library of Caesarea (De Viris Illustribus, 3) would have recognized the difference – before being translated into Greek.  St. Irenaeus, however, said that both SS Peter and Paul were in Rome at the time of its composition (Adversus Haereses, 3.1.1) which would have be 60 AD or later.  Although St. Irenaeus was talking about the original Hebrew composition he could have gotten the time confused with that of the Greek composition. 

Scripture is Tradition

Recently a meme was posted to an Anglican group on Facebook that asserted that everything in the Book of Common Prayer was either taken directly from Scripture or could be proven from Scripture and that nothing was taken from tradition.  In response I pointed out the obvious flaw in this assertion.  The Bible did not just drop down from Heaven complete at the time of the Reformation.  It was passed down from generation to generation in the Church for sixteen centuries from the Apostles.  The Old Testament portion of the Scriptures had been received by the Christian Church in the period of the Apostles after having been passed down from generation to generation in ancient Israel.  In the case of some of the books of the Old Testament this stretched back almost as long before Christ as the Reformation was after.  The word for something that is received by being passed down from generation to generation is tradition.  The Latin verb trado, tradere means “to hand over” and its fourth principal part, the passive perfect participle which would mean “having been handed over” is traditus –a –um, from which tradition is obviously derived.  In the Diocletian Persecution of the early fourth century those who handed over their copies of the Scriptures and/or other Christians to the persecutors were called traditores, which is also derived from this Latin word, and which is the source of our word traitor.  It makes a big difference what is handed over, to whom it is handed over, and why.  Something that is handed over or passed down from generation to generation as a priceless heritage is a tradition.  This is, usually, a good thing.  Handing over someone to be persecuted or sacred books to be burned is a bad thing.  The point, of course, is that the Bible itself as something handed down from generation to generation, is a tradition.  Therefore, to assert that the Book of Common Prayer takes from Scripture but not tradition is to commit a fallacy.

 

The person who posted the meme responded by pointing out that memes by their very nature have to be short.  If the meme were revised to accurately acknowledge that what was excluded from the BCP was not tradition in general, but a certain kind of tradition that conflicts with the Bible, it would be too long and not pithy enough to be effective as a meme.  While that is certainly true it works better as an argument against social media memes than it does as a counter to my argument.  Social media memes are essentially the democratization of the sound byte.  Democratizing things seldom if ever improves them, usually it does quite the opposite.

 

The meme poster maintained that the word tradition by itself is acceptable short hand for the idea of traditions that conflict with and contradict the Scriptures.  This usage itself, however, is unscriptural.

Those who hold this view of tradition as a man-made rival that is hostile to the authority of the God-given Scriptures inevitably fall back on a single incident recorded by both SS Matthew and Mark in the fifteenth and seventh chapters of their respective Gospels.  In this incident, the Pharisees ask Jesus why His disciples violate the “tradition of the elders” by not washing their hands (a washing for ceremonial rather than hygienic purposes is in view here) before eating bread.  Jesus responded by asking them why they violate the commandment of God by their tradition.  The commandment He then specifies is the commandment to “honour thy father and thy mother” and the tradition by which they were violating the commandment was the tradition of corban, that is, of dedicating something for sacred use in the Temple.  The accusation was that they were allowing people to get out of their obligation to honour their parents by taking care of them when they are old by allowing them to declare all their possessions to be corban.  The problem with the way those who pit Scripture and tradition against each other try to use this passage is that Jesus does not condemn tradition qua tradition, or even the tradition of men qua the tradition of men, in it.  He does not even condemn the specific tradition in question which tradition is itself drawn from Scripture in which corban is one of the basic Hebrew words for gift, offering, or sacrifice.  What He condemned was its misuse to evade one’s duty to do what God has commanded.  Indeed, just as it is not tradition, man-made tradition, or the specific corban tradition that Jesus condemned but its misuse, so what is contrasted with the misuse of tradition is not “the Scriptures” in general but the narrower “the commandment of God.”  Even “the word of God” in Mark 7:13 is best understood as meaning “the commandment of God” which appears twice in verses 9-9.  Note that what we call the Ten Commandments in English were called in Hebrew by an expression that means “the Ten Words” as does the Greek word into which it was translated in the Septuagint and which is the root of our own Decalogue.   The point of this passage has to do with priorities not some troglodytic message like “Bible good, tradition bad.”  There is nothing wrong with dedicating something to God’s use but there is something wrong with doing so in order to evade one’s duty to one’s parents.  In this, as in most of Jesus’ rebukes to the Pharisees, His most basic criticism was that their priorities were wrong, that they scrupulously tithed the tiniest of seeds, while ignoring judgement, mercy, and faith, that they strained out a gnat while swallowing a camel (Matt. 23:23-24).

 

The Lord Jesus’ actions bespeak a very different attitude towards tradition than that which is sometimes read into His rebuke of the Pharisees. While He preached on a mountain (Matt. 5-7) and from a boat (Lk. 5:1-3), His most frequent place of preaching and teaching was the synagogue (Mk. 1:21-28, Lk. 4:16-37, Jn. 6:59) which the Gospels say He regularly attended.  The synagogue was the local meeting place for Scripture reading, Psalm singing, prayer and teaching.  The synagogue in this sense of the word was an extra-Scriptural tradition.  There are no instructions for establishing any such institution in the Old Testament.  The word appears in the Septuagint but as a translation of Hebrew words depicting all of Israel as an assembly or congregation.  In the eighth chapter of St. John’s Gospel Jesus is said to have gone to Jerusalem for the feast of dedication (Hanukah) which was not one of the feasts instituted in the Law of Moses or anywhere else in the books regarded as canonical by both Jews and Christians but celebrates the rededication of the Temple after the Maccabean revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes who defiled it in events recorded in the books of Maccabees which are found in the LXX but not the Hebrew Old Testament.  St. Luke’s account of the Last Supper and the institution of the Eucharist depict elements of the traditional Passover Seder.  These elements were not prescribed in the Torah but are recognizable from the Jewish tradition today.  How far that tradition had developed into what it is today by the first century is unknown but what is clear is that Jesus had no objection to observing the traditions of His people merely because they were extra-Scriptural or man-made.  It was the abuse and misuse of tradition and not tradition itself that incurred His rebuke.

 

This is entirely in keeping with the attitude towards tradition found in the Old Testament (Psalm 11;3, Prov. 22:28-29).  St. Paul in his earliest epistles tells the Thessalonian Church to “stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle” (2 Thess. 2:15) and to withdraw from any brother who does not walk “after the tradition which he received of us” (2 Thess. 3:6).  In his first epistle to the Corinthians he depicted the Gospel message itself as a tradition “For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received” (1 Cor. 15:3).

 

2 Thessalonians 2:15 reads like it was written to combat precisely the kind of ideas that I am addressing here.  That tradition is not something to be regarded as bad or suspect in itself is evident from his instructions to the Thessalonians to adhere to the traditions they had been taught.  My point that the Scriptures themselves are tradition is also present in the verse in the words “or our epistle.”  That something in tradition is not necessarily bad because it is not in the Scriptures is the only reasonable deduction from the words “hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.”

 

The false pitting of Scripture and tradition against each other belongs to the type of thinking that I call Hyper-Protestantism.  The ordinary Protestantism of Dr. Luther and his associates, the English Reformers, and even John Calvin much of the time at least when he is allowed to speak for himself rather than when he is interpreted by those who claim to be his followers, is conservative in its approach to tradition.  Tradition, the handing down of that which is valued from generation to generation, is in itself a good thing.  Attacking it, which is inevitably for the motive of setting up something of your own creation in its place, is a bad thing.  Bad things can be handed down along with good things.  When something bad is passed down this is a bad tradition and bad traditions are always man-made rather than coming from God.  It does not follow from this, however, that everything man-made is bad.  Indeed, the erroneous conclusion that everything man-made is bad is completely debunked by the example of Jesus Who Himself observed man-made traditions such as Hanukkah and synagogue attendance.  When bad things slip in to an otherwise good tradition these should be identified and removed in the interest of preserving the tradition as a whole.  This is precisely what the conservative Reformers were trying to do.  Dr. Luther, Archbishop Cranmer, and John Calvin on his good days, did not want to abolish or overthrow the Catholic tradition.  They wanted to excise certain bad things that had crept in to the Western branch of that tradition.  These were mostly recent innovations that had popped up after the Great Schism of the eleventh century.  The claims of the Roman Patriarchate to supremacy over the entire Church are an exception to that, obviously, because these were one of the factors that produced the Schism.  The sale of indulgences, by contrast, which set off the Reformation by arousing the righteous ire of Dr. Luther in the 95 Theses in 1517 was very recent at the time, although it grew out of seeds that had been planted in the first Crusade, a few decades after the formalization of the Schism.  Dr. Luther et al. did not see in these things reason to get rid of the Catholic tradition as a whole, or even as a reason to jettison everything that entered the Western branch of that tradition after the Schism (1).  They saw them as impurities that needed to be removed from the stream of tradition and the best way of cleansing the water to be to go back to the source.  In this they showed themselves to be Renaissance humanists for this is an application of the ad fontes principle behind the Renaissance revival of the study of classical antiquity.  The best result of the application of this principle to cleaning up the stream of Christian tradition where the waters had gotten muddied was with regards to the freeness of salvation.  That salvation, in the sense of forgiveness of sin, freedom from its bondage, and restoration to peace with God and everlasting life in His kingdom, is a gift of God’s grace, freely given to mankind in Jesus Christ, is essential to the Gospel message, attested throughout the New Testament, most strongly in the Johannine and Pauline writings, although it is clearly there in the others, even the Jacobean epistle (Jas. 1:17-18).  This truth has always been there in the Catholic tradition but it was particularly covered up by the mud that had entered the Roman branch of that stream and so was in most need of being cleaned up.  Classical Protestantism cleaned the mud off of this truth.  Hyper-Protestantism, as an inevitable consequence of pitting Scripture and tradition against each other, (2) has formulized and crystalized it, raising the question of whether this truth was better off with mud on it in the living water of tradition or cleaned off but embedded in dead crystal.

 

Hyper-Protestantism goes beyond classical Protestantism’s objections to errors of Roman innovation and opposes itself to the Catholic tradition claiming to be standing for Scripture in doing so.  Ironically what the meme that inspired this essay asserts about the BCP, that everything in it is either taken from Scripture directly or can be proven from Scripture, can for the most part be said about the Catholic tradition.  The errors of Roman innovation are not part of the Catholic tradition.  They have not been held everywhere, in all the ancient Churches, since the Apostolic era but are distinct to the Roman Church and, except for the Roman distinctions that contributed to the Schism, are post-Schism in origin.  The doctrine of Purgatory, for example, is a Roman distinctive.  The Eastern Church has never taught it and refused to ratify the Second Council of Lyon (1274) and the Council of Florence (1431-1449) both of which had healing the Schism as their purpose, in part because of the affirmation of Purgatory by these councils which are wrongly considered to be ecumenical by Rome and which are the occasions by which this innovation became official Roman dogma.  Protestant objections to Purgatory, therefore, are to a Roman innovation, and not to something that belongs to Catholic tradition.  Hyper-Protestant opposition to iconography, by contrast, opposes something that genuinely belongs to the Catholic tradition.  Iconoclasm had been condemned by the Second Council of Nicaea despite its having been promoted by a series of Byzantine Emperors and a pro-iconoclasm council (Hieria in 754) convened under their sponsorship.  This council was held in 787, prior to the Schism, and was received by the entire Church, East and West, as the seventh ecumenical council.  It is therefore a genuine part of the Catholic tradition.  The Hyper-Protestants say this doesn’t matter and that icons are idols condemned by the Second Commandment.  If the Second Commandment means what the Hyper-Protestants claim it means, however, then it also condemns the Ark of the Covenant that God commanded to be made shortly after giving the Ten Commandments, the tablets of which were to be kept in said Ark.  The distinction between what violates the Second Commandment and what does not is made in the Old Testament by the account of the brass serpent of Moses.  In the twenty-first chapter of Numbers, the Israelites, after grumbling against God and Moses for the umpteenth time, were smitten with a plague of fiery serpents that poisoned them with their bite.  Moses intervened for them, God told him to make a brass serpent and put it on a pole, and everyone who looked at it would be healed.  From the New Testament we know that this was a type of Christ (Jn. 3:14-15).  While this involved making an image of something “in the earth beneath” it did not violate the Second Commandment.  This is because the purpose in making it was not to make a “god” to be worshipped.  When, centuries later, the Israelites did start worshipping it as a “god” it then became an idol in violation of the Second Commandment and King Hezekiah ordered it destroyed (2 Kings 18:4).  The lesson from this is that the making of likenesses is not itself a violation of the Second Commandment without the intent to treat such likenesses as gods.  The Scriptures, therefore, clearly do not support the Hyper-Protestant understanding of the Second Commandment.  This is the closest that Hyper-Protestantism comes to finding something in the Catholic tradition that is in violation of Scripture.  Most often it operates on the obviously fallacious assumption that something that is not commanded in Scripture is therefore in violation of it.  It treats prayers for the dead, for example, as being in violation of Scripture even though they are nowhere prohibited in it and the parenthetical part of 2 Tim. 1:16-18 is probably an example of it.  In some cases it treats parts of the Catholic tradition that are clearly taken from the Scriptures as being in violation of the Scriptures.  This is most obvious with matters pertaining to the Virgin Mary.  The words of the Ave Maria come directly from the first chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke (vv. 28, 42), in which she is also called “the mother of my Lord” (v. 43) which is obviously the equivalent of Theotokos/Mother of God which cannot be rejected without being guilty of the Christological heresy of Nestorianism.  Even the title Regina Coeli comes from the Bible.  I’m not talking about the pagan practice condemned in Jeremiah 7, but the first verse of Revelation 12.  No argument that the woman in Revelation 12 is not Mary can withstand scrutiny.  The woman gives birth to Jesus and so is obviously Mary. (3)   While the Church of Rome has undeniably taken things way too far with regards to the Blessed Virgin, confusing the entire Catholic tradition of Mariology with Mariolatry as Hyper-Protestants tend to do, is not the answer. (4)  Nor, to conclude this point, do these matters which Hyper-Protestants often seem to object to in the Catholic tradition more than they do the Roman innovations that classical Protestantism objected to, comprise more than a fraction of the Catholic tradition.  Most of the traditional Catholic liturgy, Eastern or Western, is taken directly from the Bible, as is the traditional faith confessed in the ancient Creeds, and the traditional episcopal form of Church polity.

 

That is only to be expected.  The written Word of God comes to us via the route of having been passed down in the Church from generation to generation and so is itself a tradition rather than a something-other-than-tradition to be set against tradition.  Since it is the Word of God it is infallible and therefore the yardstick against which everything else in the tradition is to be measured but this should not be done in the hostile-to-tradition manner of Hyper-Protestantism.  Our attitude should be that what is in the Catholic, not merely Roman but genuinely Catholic in the Vicentian sense, (5) tradition is wholesome, good, and true unless disproven by the Scriptures, rather than that is suspect until proven by them.

 

(1)   John Calvins’s magnus opus was the Institutes of Christian Religion, the first edition of which was published in 1536.  His own account of this work was that it began as a type of catechism based on the Apostles’ Creed.  The Apostle’s Creed, however, like the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, consists of twelve articles arranged in three sections, in accordance with the Persons of the Trinity.  Calvin’s Institutes consist of four books, the subjects of which correspond to those of Peter Lombard’s four books of Sentences.  Lombard’s Sentences were one of the most important texts in Medieval Scholasticism because from Alexander of Hales in the thirteenth century onward they were the text books used for dogmatics or systematic theology in the universities and writing a commentary on them was a requirement of graduation.  Dogmatic theology as a discipline has largely followed the Sentences in its structure, is organization and classification of topics, ever since.  Calvin in his Institutes, which quote Lombard over a hundred times albeit often in a hostile manner, was no exception and it is perhaps more significant in his case because like Tertullian his training had been in law.  It is also worthy of noting that his explanation of the Atonement takes the satisfaction model of the other father of Scholasticism, St. Anselm of Canterbury to the next stage of development beyond that of St. Thomas Aquinas.  Calvin’s Hyper-Protestant fan club will, of course, say that he found his explanation of the Atonement in the pages of Scripture and it can certainly be supported from the Scriptures.  So, however, can the classical and Patristic model with which the Eastern Church has explained the Atonement since the first millennium and which Gustaf Aulén who named it the Christus Victor model argued was Dr. Luther’s.  Indeed, the easiest model of Atonement to prove from the Scriptures, provided one doesn’t press the metaphor on the point of to whom the payment is made, is probably Origen’s ransom model.  Obviously John Calvin got his understanding of the Atonement from the New Testament, and just as obviously he did not get it by reading the New Testament for himself for the first time without ever having received any prior teaching.  Regardless of to what extent he was willing to acknowledge it himself his understanding of the New Testament on the Atonement was heavily influenced by St. Anselm and St. Thomas.  Even the doctrine of predestination with which his name is permanently associated shows the influence of a tradition of interpreting St. Paul that flows from St. Augustine through Peter Lombard and St. Thomas Aquinas.

(2)  The title essay in Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962) and the essay in the same volume entitled “The Tower of Babel” are essential reading if one wishes to understand why this consequence is inevitable even though Oakeshott was writing from the perspective of political philosophy rather than theology.  The principle is the same.  Traditions, Oakeshott explained, are living and include both the kind of information that can be summarized and put down on paper as a formula and the kind of information that cannot.  Rationalism, treats the second kind of information as unimportant and discards it, taking the first kind of information and formulizing it.  So crystalized, this information which had been part of something living in the tradition, becomes a dead ideology.  The discarded type of information is not unimportant at all.  The difference is the same as that between someone who prepares a meal with nothing but the instructions in a recipe book to go by and someone who prepares the same meal after having been taught how to do it by a master chef. Hyper-Protestantism is this same approach that Oakeshott calls rationalism applied to the Christian tradition.  It separate the Scriptures, the living Word of God, from the living tradition of the Christian Church.  Then it takes the truths it wishes to emphasize from the Scriptures and formulizes them.  Think about the difference between the ancient Creeds and the Protestant Confessions.  The Creeds are as alive as the tradition to which they belong.  They contain the basic Christian faith and when they are liturgically recited in the Church the “I believe” of each individual member joins with that of each other, and with those of Christians past and yet to come, to form the collective “we believe” of Christ’s Church.  The Protestant Confessions, by contrast, are longer, contain secondary and tertiary doctrines as well as the basic faith, and express them in the form of a numbered list that gives the impression that one is supposed to go through it checking each item off.  Now consider the significance of this for the truth of the freeness of salvation.  The Protestant Confessions each express this truth clearly but contradict it by their checklist format.  The ancient Creeds don’t articulate it per se, but neither do they in any way, by direct expression or by format, contradict it, and this truth is implicit in what is confessed about Jesus Christ in the Creeds.

(3)  Since Revelation is a highly symbolic book she is also more than Mary, or rather Mary as the symbol or representative of something else.  That she is Mary as the second Eve, the fulfilment of the prophecy of Genesis 3:15 in which “the woman” is both Eve and Mary, is clear from the entire chapter in which her nemesis is the dragon, “that old serpent.”  The imagery of the first and last verses would suggest that Mary, the New Eve, appears as the symbolic representative of the people of God.  The imagery of the first verse is that of Joseph’s dream, indicating Israel, and that of the last verse, is of the Church which has “the testimony of Jesus Christ.”

(4)  It also conflicts with the high Mariology of most of the Protestant Reformers.

(5) “Now in the Catholic Church itself we take the greatest care to hold that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all. That is truly and properly 'Catholic,' as is shown by the very force and meaning of the word, which comprehends everything almost universally. We shall hold to this rule if we follow universality, antiquity, and consent.” – St. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium, 2.6.

On Owning the Left’s Abusive Labels

About a week ago I received an e-mail from the Campaign Life Coalition, the organization that is probably best known for organizing the annual March for Life, informing me that the Canadian Anti-Hate Network had placed them on some list where they were labelled “Far Right.”  They seemed rather upset about this fact and announced that they were considering legal action.  While I certainly support their suing the pants off of the bozos at the CAHN, I do think that getting all worked up about this is the wrong frame of mind to have on the matter.  A better approach would be to consider it a badge of honour and to advertise the fact.  They could put up a notice on their website, for example, saying something to the effect of “honoured to be labelled ‘Far Right’ by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network since 2024.”  If everyone similarly labelled and listed by the CAHN, its American parent organization the Southern Poverty Law Center (sic), the Anti-Defamation League, and other such self-righteous and self-appointed watchdogs of the hygiene of public opinion on all matters with even a light appearance of touching on the current progressive creed of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity were to respond in such a manner it would greatly diminish the power that such labelling and listing has to stifle thought and expression and to destroy people’s lives.

 

A couple of months ago David Warren said that the expression “Far Right” is “media-speak for what is to the right of the Far Left.”  He was absolutely right about that, as he usually is about most matters.  See his piece from last month entitled “Annals of far-righteousness” for more sage insight from the editor of the sadly long defunct Idler on this silly expression that the Left is currently throwing around as if it were the latest entry on a “build your vocabulary” list to which they are all subscribed and so are putting into every sentence whether it belongs there or not. 

 

By labelling Campaign Life “Far Right”, the CAHN said a lot more about their organization and the people who do what passes for thinking in it than they said about the Campaign Life Coalition.  The Campaign Life Coalition is a social conservative lobby.  By social conservative, I mean approaching issues that pertain to morality and the family from a perspective that is traditional in the context of the tradition of the civilization formerly known as Christendom.  While they address a range of such issues, one in particular is obviously the focus of their efforts, and that is abortion.  They would call themselves a pro-life advocacy group.  While I share their position I prefer the negative phrasing, anti-abortion, to the positive pro-life.  Abortion is murder, as any person capable of sane reasoning must be aware if he thinks about the matter.  It is therefore a bad thing and the right thing to do is to oppose it, to be “anti” it.  The expression pro-life could be taken to imply support for the con side in the capital punishment debate.  The right position with regards to this debate, however, when it comes to basic principles, is the pro position. This is because for some crimes, such as murder of which abortion is an example, justice requires the death penalty.  Admittedly, there are good practical reasons for not taking the principled position at the present time. Basically, the sort of people who would have the power of life and death if the death penalty were reinstated – master deceivers of any and every party who have tricked the masses into voting them into public office, bureaucrats who think that degrees in such worthless and soul-destroying subjects as human resources, corporate management, and public administration have bestowed omniscience and omnicompetence upon them, and the sorry lot of fools, activists, and miscreants who currently occupy His Majesty’s bench throughout the Dominion – should never be trusted with that power.  My point, however, is that for Campaign Life’s opposition to abortion to be considered “far” anything, the one doing the considering must be coming from a pretty extreme standpoint.

 

The CAHN, like most of the large legacy media companies in Canada, is very much a part of the culture of political thought shared by the Liberal party under its current leadership and the New Democrats.  When it comes to abortion this culture is about as extreme as it gets.  They have opposed the introduction of any restrictions on abortion.  Three years ago, for example, they defeated a private member’s bill introduced by Cathay Wagantall, the MP for Yorkton-Melville, that would have banned sex-selective abortion, even though ideologically they might have been expected to support it on the grounds of their loudly trumpeted opposition to sexual discrimination of which sex-selective abortion is obviously an example.  But no, the Left voted as a block to defeat the bill because their belief in the noxious concept of “reproductive rights” – that mothers have the right of life and death over their children prior to birth – was such that they would not allow that “right” to be limited even to prevent discrimination.  Since the idea of reproductive rights is itself discriminatory in that it awards a right of power over others, and the ultimate power at that, to one sex, this was a case of opposing a measure against one type of sexual discrimination in order to support another type, on the part of people who claim to oppose all discrimination. 

 

Let us return now to the distinction between the positive terminology of being pro-life and the negative terminology of being anti-abortion and consider the position of the Left in terms of life and death.  Almost thirty years ago Pope John Paul II spoke of the culture war of the time in terms of a struggle between the “culture of life” and the “culture of death.” Since then, liberalism and the Left have embraced the culture of death with gusto and nowhere is this more openly on display than in the present government in Ottawa which shortly after it first came to power in 2015 introduced an aggressive euthanasia program which it has been expanding ever since.  Euthanasia, like abortion, is a form of murder.  The return of the Liberals to power in 2015 coincided in year with the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Carter v. Canada (Attorney General) that the prohibition of physician assisted suicide violated Charter rights.  The Liberals took this ruling as licence to run amok and make physician assisted suicide available in situations that no other society had previously regarded as appropriate for it.  Even more controversially, they began pushing it on people, suggesting it to those who had not asked for it as an alternative to the medical treatment they were seeking.  The program is called MAID, for Medical Assistance in Dying.  If government programs had theme songs it would be appropriate for this one to share the theme song of a historical fiction franchise the name of which is also a four letter acronym beginning with M, M*A*S*H.  The theme song, the lyrics of which were used only in the 1970 film version starring the late Donald Sutherland, is entitled “Suicide is Painless.”  From the standpoint of those who support and are subsidized by the government that introduced this vile program, sane, rational, and moral opposition to murdering the innocent (abortion) and those whose need is for long term care, medical or otherwise (euthanasia) must indeed appear to be “extreme.”

 

Again, Campaign Life should consider it an honour to be considered “Far Right” by people like that.

 

The expression, “Far Right”, is, of course, nonsense.  It is derived from the concept of political thought as a spectrum between a right and a left pole. The closer to the one pole you are, the further right you are, and the closer to the other pole, the further left you are.  This is a concept that originated on this continent, in the United States where the right pole was identified  classical liberalism (individualism, limited government, capitalism) and the left pole was identified with the opposite of this (collectivism, a larger state, socialism).  By this standard, the more of a classical liberal one is, the further to the right one is.  Indeed, in some presentations of this spectrum that I have seen, a form of anarcho-capitalism in which there is no state is the furthest position to the right.  Yet those who throw the label “Far Right” around clearly wish to associate in their hearers’ minds those they so label with National Socialism (Nazism).  National Socialism, however, was obviously not an extreme form of classical liberalism and on each of the points contrasted was aligned with the left pole.  National Socialism was a European rather than a North American phenomenon, and in Europe the expressions “Right” and “Left” had taken on political meaning long before the idea of a political spectrum arose.  This is because they were taken, not from a hypothetical spectrum, but the location of where certain people stood in the French Chamber of Deputies in the period of the French Revolution.  Supporters of the Revolution were to the left of the speaker, its opponents were on the right.  The “Right” therefore, in French political usage took on the meaning of the supporters of the ancient regime of the Bourbon monarchy, the Roman Catholic Church, and the feudal aristocracy and of counterrevolutionary efforts such as the Thermidorian Reaction and this meaning became the European meaning, mutatis mutandis (the Hapsburgs in Austria rather than the Bourbons for example).  It was basically the continental equivalent of the Toryism that picked up the mantle of the Cavaliers in England after the Restoration and fought for the rights of the Crown and the established and episcopal Church of England.  National Socialism, which opposed the traditional order of Throne and Altar as much as Communism did, bore no more resemblance to the classical European Right than it did to the American “Right” of classical liberal republicanism.  This is because it was clearly a species of the Left, the European and American meanings of which are much closer to each other than the European and American meanings of Right are to each other.  The expression “Far Right”, therefore, should, in both classical European and American usage, indicate distance from National Socialism rather than proximity to it.

The Left’s determination to make “Far Right” mean, contrary to the inescapable conclusion of the reasoning of the previous paragraph, “National Socialist”, and to slap that label on anyone who with opinions similar or identical to those which conservatives and liberals held in common back when the actual National Socialists were around, to the extent that that it is not merely slinging mud is an attempt to cover up the failure, moral bankruptcy, and intellectual shallowness of the extreme position on race and racial matters in which they have gradually ensnared themselves in the post-World War II period to the point where they are incapable of extracting themselves today.  It makes no difference to the Left if those they so slur are individuals or organizations like Campaign Life that advocate solely for positions on issues that are not fundamentally racial in nature.  Once again the labelling says more about the labeler than the labeled and the CAHN is built on the foundation of that extreme position on race.

 

To understand the nature of the position the Left has sold itself to in the present day and which it amusingly calls “anti-racism” it is best to go back to how the neo-orthodox Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth summed up the evil of the racialism of the actual National Socialists.  He called it the “idolatry of race and nation.”  Idolatry is what happens when man turns away from the true and living God Who created all things including man and worships and serves instead false gods of his own construction.  Through worshipping and serving these false gods he inevitably ends up worshipping and serving devils (1 Cor. 10:20) and darkening his intellect and corrupting his moral character (Rom. 1:20-32).  Christianity called mankind out of the darkness of idolatry to turn “to God from idols to serve the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come.” (1 Thess.1:9)  It is hardly a coincidence that National Socialism arose in a culture that had been moving away from the orthodox Christian faith for centuries both philosophically and theologically (theological liberalism or Modernism, which re-interprets Christian doctrine to accommodate the unbelief generated by the speculations of “Enlightenment” philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, was born in German universities and seminaries through the teachings of men like Friedrich Schleiermacher and Adolf von Harnack). When men retreat from the liberating faith in the true God and His Son they bind themselves in slavery to idols and the chosen idols of the National Socialists were the Aryan race and German nation.  This does not mean that race and nation, which God created (Acts 17:30) are bad things, but rather that the National Socialists put them in the place of God where they do not belong, and in doing so bound themselves and their society to slavery to these idols and through them to devils.

 

The Left of today has hardly returned to the true and living God and is as much in bondage to idols as National Socialism was.  What it wishes to conceal is that the idols it serves are one and the same as those National Socialism served.  Like the National Socialists they worship at the altar of race and nation.  There is a difference, of course, in that whereas the National Socialists made idols out of their own race and their own nation, the Left has made idols out of every race except one and every nation except the nations of that race, which is for the most part their own.  Moreover, they are actively engaged in offering that one race and its nations up as human sacrifices to idols of (other) races and nations.  This is the true nature of what the Left calls anti-racism.  It is a worse form of this idolatry than that practiced by the National Socialists.  Implicit within the Commandment to honour our fathers and our mothers is the duty to honour our ancestors.  The Second Greatest Commandment, according to the Lord Jesus, is the Commandment to love our neighbours as ourselves.  Neighbours means those in proximity to us, and placing the interests and the good of people far distant from us over that of people in proximity to us both in the literal special sense and in the sense of familial, cultural, religious and other such proximities, is the opposite of fulfilling this Commandment no matter how hard someone tries to twist the Parable of the Good Samaritan to teach otherwise.  From this it follows that the idolatry of the race and nation of the other that requires the sacrifice of one’s own race and nation is a far worse idolatry of race and nation than making an idol of one’s own race and nation.  It can be safely predicted, therefore, that unless the anti-racist Left is stopped and its power and influence broken history will one day look back on its crimes as dwarfing those of the Third Reich as true history already does look back on the crimes of Communism. 

 

To avoid the anti-racist Left’s idolatry of other races and nations without falling into an idolatry of one’s own race and nation we must turn back “to God from idols to serve the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come.”  The call to do so, although religious in nature rather than political, is a reactionary one, a call to turn back the clock.  The irony, therefore, is that to avoid both forms of racial idolatry by taking this step is to move in the direction of the “Far Right” at least in the classical European sense of Right.  The irony is due entirely to the Left’s misusage of language.  In neither American nor European usage does it make sense to think of ideological racialism, as the terminus of rightward motion. The more one moves to the Right in the American sense – or at least the historical American sense – the greater importance one places on the individual and the less on the collective, including the collective of race.  In the classical European sense of the Right, political loyalty is to the Sovereign rather than to the nation or race, whose office is that of the minister of God in temporal matters, and whose duties as the minister of God include being the protector of the Church, which is Catholic, which is to say universal, a body membership in which is open through baptism to every kindred and tribe and nation and to which all from every kindred and tribe and nation are invited and called to join.  The further one moves to this Right, the less likely one is to make idols out of race and nation, or for that matter to make an idol out of the individual which is the temptation in the American classical liberal Right.

 

The classical European Right is, in my informed opinion, the only political position compatible with orthodox Christian faith and it is my own position, albeit in its traditional British Tory form that we inherited in Canada as our traditional Right, which has sadly been almost entirely subverted by neoconservatives who prefer the American Right and who themselves have been subverted by people for whom the principles of neither Right are sacred.  The traditional British-Canadian form of the classical European Right shares with the classical liberalism of the American Right a higher regard for personal rights and freedoms than in its traditional continental form.  If holding this position makes me “Far Right” in the eyes of those whose opinion I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for, such as the dingbats in the Prime Minister’s Office or the CAHN, then I gladly own the label.  My advice to the Campaign Life Coalition is to do the same.

 

If invocation of the saints were my regular practice, I could think of no better way of closing this essay than with "Colonel Sibthorp, pray for us."

The Pauline Authorship of the Epistle to Hebrews

 

Objections and Answers

 

The arguments against St. Paul’s authorship of the epistle to Hebrews are incredibly weak as is almost inevitably the case for opinions that claim the consensus of Modern scholarship.  Thomas R. Schreiner, the James Buchanan Harrison Professor of New Testament Interpretation at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and author of the commentary on Hebrews in the Evangelical Biblical Theology Commentary (Bellingham: Lexham Press, 2015) provides three such arguments. 

 

The first of these is “in Paul’s 13 letters he identifies himself by name, thus the absence of a name in Hebrews renders it doubtful that Paul wrote the letter.”  This, in my opinion, is the only reason there has ever been any question about the matter. 

 

Here is why it is a weak argument.  While St. Paul mentions his name more than once in several of his epistles (both to the Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, both to the Thessalonians, II Timothy and Philemon), the place where it occurs consistently in each of these and all his other acknowledged epistles is the first verse where it can be found as the first word in the opening salutation.  This is not unique to St. Paul.  SS James and Jude begin their epistles with such a salutation in which their names come first, followed by a description of themselves, then an identification of to whom the epistle is addressed.  St. Peter begins both of his epistles this way.  St. John includes such an introductory salutation in his second and third epistle, but does not include his name but rather identifies himself only as “the elder.”  St. John’s first epistle, however, does not contain an introductory salutation.  There are only two epistles in the New Testament in which this is omitted.  Hebrews is the other.  Since the entire customary section of the epistle in which St. Paul’s name can be counted on to appear in his other epistles is omitted entirely from this one, the absence of his name is much less of an argument against his authorship than it would have been had the introductory salutation appeared without his name or with a substitute for it as in St. John’s epistles.  

 

Schreiner’s second argument is “stylistic arguments should not be relied on too heavily since the Pauline corpus is so limited. Still, the polished Greek style of Hebrews doesn’t accord with what we find in the Pauline letters.”

 

This is the strongest of his three arguments.  Note however, his own caveat against relying too much upon this kind of argument.  There are other reasons than the size of the Pauline corpus for why this argument should not be given too much weight.  For one thing, this is frequently grossly exaggerated.  There are plenty of similarities as well as differences between the Greek of Hebrews and that of the acknowledged Pauline corpus.  The claim that Hebrews presents a fine-tuned argument of a superior type to that found in St. Paul’s other epistles does not hold up if the comparison is to Romans.  The acknowledged Pauline epistles were written over a period from the early 50’s until close to the Apostle’s death around 65 AD (II Timothy).  They vary in the degree of polish to their Greek style.  The ones in which he himself describes his speech as “rude” (II Corinthians 11:6, in a context that alludes back to the beginning chapters of I Corinthians) are among his earliest.  The more polished ones, such as Philippians, are among he later Prison Epistles.  This needs to be taken into consideration in contrasting style because after a decade of practice in writing epistles, which he had spent planting Churches in Greek cities in the company of some polished Greek speakers, it is to be expected that his style would become more polished. His own earlier reference to his speech as rude, however, should not necessarily be taken as meaning that he could not speak or write polished Greek.  It would be rather odd for this to be the case of someone with his education raised in Tarsus.  In the Corinthian epistles his point seems to be, rather, that he is not relying upon clever rhetoric to persuade but on the power intrinsic to the Gospel, which suggests a deliberate choice to speak plainly rather than the inability to speak otherwise. 

 

Moreover, there is no reason to think that St. Paul, who we know made use of amanuenses for his epistles, might not have made use of St. Luke in an advisory or editorial capacity to polish up his Greek on this occasion.  The evidence that supports Pauline authorship tells us that if St. Paul was the author, the epistle was written after his first imprisonment in Rome.  That St. Luke accompanied St. Paul to Rome we know from the book of Acts, in which the arrival at Rome like the voyage is told in the first person plural (Acts 28:16).  That St. Luke was with him in Rome at the very end we know from II Timothy 4:11.  Therefore, when writing the epistle to the Hebrews, St. Paul would have had at hand a companion who was quite capable of polishing up his Greek style as it is similar to the style he used in his own two books.  Indeed, that something very much like this took place appears to be hinted at by Origen, whose teacher St. Clement of Alexandria was the first to comment on the stylistic differences between Hebrews and the other Pauline epistles.  St. Clement thought that St. Paul wrote the epistle in Hebrew and that someone else translated it into the Greek text that has been handed down.

 

Schreiner attempted to argue that this is not what Origen was saying but David Alan Black’s misinterpretation of Origen.  He wrote:

 

David Alan Black, however, argues Origen believed Paul was the author but someone else was the penman. Black’s interpretation of Origen should be rejected. It has been shown that when Origen speaks of who wrote the epistle he was referring to the author, not merely the secretary. Hence, the notion that Origen believed Paul was the author fails to persuade.

 

While he provides a reference to David L. Allen’s commentary on Hebrews to back up his claim that Black is wrong about Origen, here is the entire quotation of Origen from Eusebius in context with bold added for emphasis:

 

In addition he makes the following statements in regard to the Epistle to the Hebrews in his Homilies upon it: That the verbal style of the epistle entitled ‘To the Hebrews,’ is not rude like the language of the apostle, who acknowledged himself ‘rude in speech’ (2 Corinthians 11:6) that is, in expression; but that its diction is purer Greek, any one who has the power to discern differences of phraseology will acknowledge. Moreover, that the thoughts of the epistle are admirable, and not inferior to the acknowledged apostolic writings, any one who carefully examines the apostolic text will admit.’ Farther on he adds: If I gave my opinion, I should say that the thoughts are those of the apostle, but the diction and phraseology are those of some one who remembered the apostolic teachings, and wrote down at his leisure what had been said by his teacher. Therefore if any church holds that this epistle is by Paul, let it be commended for this. For not without reason have the ancients handed it down as Paul’s. But who wrote the epistle, in truth, God knows. The statement of some who have gone before us is that Clement, bishop of the Romans, wrote the epistle, and of others that Luke, the author of the Gospel and the Acts, wrote it. But let this suffice on these matters. (Eusebius, Church History, 6.25.11-14).

 

Since Origen lived in the late second to mid third centuries the ancients to whom he refers must go back very far.

 

Origen made reference to Hebrews in numerous other works and consistently identified St. Paul as the author, including in multiple places in his magnus opus, On First Principles.  See, for example, his Letter to Africanus, 9.  David Alan Black was quite right in saying Origen thought St. Paul to be the author of Hebrews.

 

If the objection be made that St. Paul did not do this with his other epistles, including his final epistle, II Timothy, to this the answer can be made that Hebrews was written to a very different audience than that to which St. Paul was accustomed to write, to Jewish Christians outside of his own jurisdiction (Gal. 2:7-8) for whom he could not rely upon his own Apostolic authority in the way that he did with Gentile Christians in Churches under his jurisdiction which he for the most part had planted, which provides ample reason for him to have made use of the resource of St. Luke that we know was available to him.  That he did not do so in writing to St. Timothy is easily enough explained by the fact that he would have felt no such need in writing to a close companion.

 

Schreiner’s third argument is “the writer separates himself from the original eyewitnesses in Heb 2:3.  Paul, by way of contrast, emphasizes repeatedly his authority as an apostle of Jesus Christ and refuses to put himself in a subordinate position to the apostles and eyewitnesses. This last reason, in particular, rules out the notion that Paul was the author.”

 

Schreiner seems to think that this is the deathblow to the claim of Pauline authorship.  It is no such thing.  In fact, it is explained by a factor that I already identified in my response to Schreiner’s second argument.  The epistle of Hebrews was written to Jewish Christians.  In his epistle to the Galatians, St. Paul writes that he was the Apostle to the uncircumcision – Gentiles -, as St. Peter was the Apostle to the circumcision – Jews.  Therefore, as author of Hebrews St. Paul would have been writing to those whom he acknowledged as belonging to St. Peter’s jurisdiction rather than his.  Therefore, the occasion called for a very different approach than trumpeting his own Apostolic authority as he did especially when it was challenged, as is the case with the epistles to the Corinthians, or when there was a need to establish his equality with the other Apostles as when, in the epistle to the Galatians, the ruling of the Council of Jerusalem in which the other Apostles backed up his position, was still in the process of being circulated throughout the Churches.  That Hebrews 2:3 if written by St. Paul is compatible with Galatians 1:11-12 can be seen in the fifteenth chapter of I Corinthians.  In the third verse St. Paul speaks of his gospel as “that which I also received” which brings Hebrews 2:3 in, and in the eighth verse he testifies to his own witness to the central Gospel fact of the Resurrection.  Note the “first of all” in verse three and the “last of all” in verse eight.  The thoughts of both Hebrews 2:3 and Galatians 1:11-12 are here united in a single passage.  Look at the wording of St. Paul in Hebrews 2:3 “and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him.”  What was delivered unto him by the Twelve confirmed what he had already received directly from Christ.

 

Pauline Thought and Style in Hebrews

 

That these arguments against Pauline authorship are far from being persuasive I trust that I have demonstrated.  I will now move on to making the positive case for the Pauline authorship of the epistle.  Since so much has been made of the difference in Greek style between the text of Hebrews and the text of the acknowledged Pauline corpus I will start by noting textual similarities between these.  This will not be an exhaustive treatment but will focus on the biggest similarities.  For those interested in Greek Paulisms in Hebrews I refer you to David Alan Black’s book listed in For More Reading below.

First I will make what ought to be an obvious observation.  While pointing out that letter X and letter Y both contain word Z does not amount to conclusive proof that letter X and letter Y were written by the same person it is stronger evidence for that conclusion than pointing out that letter A contains word C while letter B does not is for the conclusion that letters A and B were written by different people.  Pointing out that the expression “flesh and blood” appears only five times in the entire Bible, all in the New Testament, once spoken by the Lord Jesus (Matt. 16:17), thrice in acknowledged Pauline epistles (1 Cor. 15:50, Gal. 1:16, and Eph. 6:12) and the final time in Hebrews 2:14 is stronger evidence that St. Paul wrote Hebrews than the argument that the Lord Jesus is repeatedly called a priest in Hebrews but not once in the rest of the Pauline corpus is against the Pauline authorship of Hebrews.  This would be the case even if there was not a glaring explanation of St. Paul’s heavy use of the word in one epistle and non-use of it in the others.  Writing to Jewish Christians, in Hebrews St. Paul is making the case for Jesus as the fulfilment of all to which the Old Covenant pointed, the Priest of the heavenly tabernacle Who offered Himself there as the one sacrifice that could actually accomplish that which the Levitical priests and the sacrifices of bulls and goats could only prefigure.  Writing to Gentile Christians, St. Paul emphasized their full inclusion in the New Covenant alongside Jewish Christians accomplished by Jesus Christ in His death in which the Law was removed as a divider between Jew and Gentile.  Speaking of Jesus as Priest was necessary to the argument in Hebrews but not to that in the other epistles.

 

The similarities between Hebrews and the other Pauline epistles go beyond expressions which appear in both, however.  Take the warning passages in the epistle to Hebrews for example.  There are five of them in total, the first of which being the very verse (2:3) that some think is the definitive evidence against Pauline authorship, the second is the extended quotation and commentary on the Venite in the third and fourth chapters, the third being the favourite passage of those on the Arminian side of a debate I have no intention of getting into here (6:4-8), the fourth occurring at the spot where the main argument has been wrapped up and the shift into practical application is beginning (10:26-31), and the fifth being 12:14-29.  The way these appear, punctuating the flow of the main argument, closely resembles the warning passages in the acknowledged Pauline corpus (1 Cor. 6:9-10, Gal. 5:19-21, Eph. 5:5-7).  Now these last warning passages consist of a list of types of people or the behaviours that characterize them who will not inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.  The warnings in Hebrews are against apostasy and more specifically the apostasy of falling back from Christianity into a Judaism that does not acknowledge Jesus as the Christ.  This is precisely the sort of difference we would expect given the difference between those addressed and the nature of the case being made to them.  That there are more of these in Hebrews than the other epistles can be explained by the fact that they are far more directly connected to the purpose of the epistle than is the case with the others.  Nevertheless, they share with the other Pauline warnings the feature of being followed by a positive exhortation based upon the Apostle’s confidence that God’s grace in those to whom he is writing is greater than the evils against which he is warning them.  Compare Hebrews 6:9 with 1 Corinthians 6:11 and Galatians 5:22-25.

 

Or consider the ending of the warning passage in Hebrews 10.  Verse 38 begins with a quotation from Habakkuk “the just shall live by faith” that is used by St. Paul in Romans 1:17 and Galatians 3:11 but by no other New Testament writer.  This is followed by the final words of the warning in the remainder of the verse, then by the confident assertion “But we are not of them who draw back unto perdition; but of them that believe to the saving of the soul” in the next verse, the final verse of the chapters, which segues into an extended discussion of faith in the next chapter that includes a definition of faith (v. 1), a declaration of the necessity of faith (v. 6), and a catalogue of Old Testament figures that emphasizes all that they were able to accomplish by faith.  Notice what is said about Noah in verse 7 “By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.”  Could there be any expression more Pauline than this?  While Johannine literature also emphasizes the role of faith in salvation, St. John prefers the verbal form to the noun and the concept of salvation that he stresses in connection with believing is everlasting life.  It is St. Paul who talks about the righteousness that is by faith. Think about how he addresses this in Romans.  After having shown salvation to be unattainable through works, whether one is under the Law like the Jews, or under his own conscience like the Gentiles, because with or without Law all have sinned, he returns to the thought with which he began the discussion in 1:16-17, and declares that “now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; Even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all and upon all them that believe” (3:21-22, italics mine).  In the following chapter he connects this thought with heirship just as in Hebrews 11:7, albeit speaking about Abraham rather than Noah (Rom. 4:13).  There are other variations on this wording throughout Romans with “righteousness which is of faith” occurring again in verse 10:6.

 

From start to finish, important concepts from the acknowledged Pauline corpus reappear in Hebrews.  In Hebrews 1:2 the Son’s instrumental role in creation is mentioned “by whom also he made the worlds” and then connected in the following verse with the Son’s being the image of the Father “Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person.”  These thoughts are similarly connected in Colossians 1:15-16 where they are presented in the reverse order, although different words for image are used.  Indeed, the next phrase in Hebrews 1:3 about the Son’s sustaining or preserving all things in being “and upholding all things by the word of his power” has a parallel, albeit a more loose one, in the continuation of the thought in Colossians “And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.” (v. 17) Hebrews then goes on to say “when he had by himself purged our sins, sat down on the right hand of the Majesty on high” and a similar reference to His atoning work occurs right before the Colossians passage “In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins.” (v. 14) If we look at the larger context of the Hebrews passage we find that just before the mention of Christ’s role in creation, it is said that God has appointed Him “heir of all things” and a few verses later the Son is called the “firstbegotten.” (v. 6) The Colossians passage calls the Son the “firstborn of every creature” (v. 15) and the “firstborn from the dead” (v. 18).  The same word πρωτότοκος that is rendered “firstbegotten” in Hebrews is rendered “firstborn” in the two verses in Colossians.  It needs to be stated that it is not temporal beginning but the position or status, with rights and authority, that is indicated by this word in these verses.  This position/status which is called “preeminence” in Col. 1:18 is the overarching theme of both passages.

 

This is not like the lengthy parallel passages in the Synoptic Gospels.  The Evangelists each wrote his own account of events in the same life.  A great degree of overlap is to be expected.  Even the parallels between Jude’s epistle and the second chapter of II Peter are a different case.  Both are denunciations of false teachers and it is likely that SS Jude and Peter were talking about the same specific false teachers.  In Hebrews and Colossians what we find are the same doctrinal concepts about Jesus and the fact that we find them all in association with each other in one place in both epistles is stronger evidence that St. Paul wrote both than if all of the concepts from Hebrews had been found separately and interspersed throughout St. Paul’s other writings. Compare this to the reference to the Son’s sitting down at the right hand of God. This recurs throughout Hebrews (8:1, 10:12, 12:2) and it also recurs throughout St. Paul’s acknowledged corpus (Rom 8:34, Eph. 1:20, Col. 3:1).   On its own this is a much weaker argument for Pauline authorship of Hebrews than the parallels between Hebrews 1 and Colossians 1, especially since it is referred to by many others as well (Jesus in His trial before Caiaphas, St. Peter and the other Apostles in Acts 5:31, St. Luke in reference to St. Stephen’s vision in Acts 7:55, and St. Peter in 1 Pet. 3:22 also mention it).  Taken with the Hebrews/Colossians comparison, however, the multiple references in both Hebrews and St. Paul’s other epistles provide additional corroborating evidence.

 

Also note that while the instrumental role of the Son in creation is also emphasized by St. John in the prologue to his Gospel, St. John speaks of Him there as the Word, as part of his larger allusion to Genesis 1 in which God speaks everything into existence.  In Hebrews as in Colossians, He is spoken of as the Son.

 

In the second chapter of Hebrews we find a passage (vv. 9-18) that has parallels throughout St. Paul’s corpus.  Jesus’ journey to Exaltation through Humiliation unto death (v. 9) is discussed here as in Philippians 2:5-11, His destruction through death of death personified in the devil (v. 14) brings to mind 1 Corinthians 15, note especially verse 26, and when Hebrews 2:16 says “ but he took on him the seed of Abraham” remember that it is St. Paul who identifies the seed of Abraham with Christ in Galatians 3:16.

 

At the end of chapter five of Hebrews we find a lengthy rebuke of the intended readers for being less mature in their faith than they ought to be.  Jesus has just been referred to as a “high priest after the order of Melchisedec” (v. 10) and of Melchisedec the epistle says “Of whom we have many things to say, and hard to be uttered, seeing ye are dull of hearing.” (v. 11) Immediately after this the epistle says:

 

For when for the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need that one teach you again which be the first principles of the oracles of God; and are become such as have need of milk, and not of strong meat. For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe. But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil. (vv. 12-14)

 

There is one other passage in the New Testament that is very similar to this.  St. Paul also rebukes the Corinthians for their immaturity, saying that he needs to feed them with milk when they should have moved on to meat.  Here is the passage:

 

And I, brethren, could not speak unto you as unto spiritual, but as unto carnal, even as unto babes in Christ. I have fed you with milk, and not with meat: for hitherto ye were not able to bear it, neither yet now are ye able. For ye are yet carnal: for whereas there is among you envying, and strife, and divisions, are ye not carnal, and walk as men? (I Corinthians 3:1-3)

 

No Anonymity

 

Perhaps the most important similarity between Hebrews and the rest of the Pauline corpus, however, is the final verse.  That verse is “Grace be with you all. Amen.” (Heb. 13:25).  A version of this ends every single Pauline epistle in the New Testament, usually in the last verse, sometimes in the penultimate (1 Cor. 16:23 for example).  This is the simple version of it.  The most complex is the familiar Trinitarian Grace from 2 Corinthians 13:14, “
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen.”  The significance of this is a) again, all St. Paul’s epistles end with this, b) no epistle attributed to any other author ends with this and the only other book to end with it is Revelation which is not an epistle and was written long after St. Paul’s death, and most importantly c) St. Paul tells us what this means.   The first two epistles St. Paul wrote are I and II Thessalonians.  These were written shortly after the events of Acts 17:1-10 in which St. Paul on his second missionary journey had come to Thessalonica, preached in the synagogue, established a Church in the house of one Jason, then fled to Berea after trouble was stirred up by those in the synagogue who did not believe assisted by “certain lewd fellows of the baser sort” (v. 5) Not having had time to properly instruct the Thessalonian Church, St. Paul wrote the first epistle shortly after his flight, then wrote the second epistle when word came to him that the Thessalonians had received a letter purporting to be from him and claiming that the Second Coming had already occurred (II Thess. 2:1-2).  Therefore, he ended this epistle with instructions as to how they could tell a real epistle of his from a false one.  Every epistle of his would end with a salutation that he would write himself (without an amanuensis) and it would be the Grace. “The salutation of Paul with mine own hand, which is the token in every epistle: so I write.  The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.” (II Thess. 3:17-18).

 

This means that St. Paul did identify himself as the author of Hebrews after all.  The grace at the end is his signature.  The verses prior to that strongly indicate his identity as well.  He was writing from Italy (13:24), and would travel to them with St. Timothy who had just been set free if he were to make the journey shortly (v. 23).  The wording reads like a short version of the wrap-up to any Pauline epistle (and the brevity of it is noted v. 22).  Earlier in the epistle he wrote “For ye had compassion of me in my bonds, and took joyfully the spoiling of your goods, knowing in yourselves that ye have in heaven a better and an enduring substance.” (10:34). He had been in bonds, clearly had been set at liberty if he was contemplating making a trip to them with St. Timothy, and was in Italy.

 

If that were not sufficient proof, St. Peter also identifies St. Paul as the writer of the epistle to the Hebrews.  Here is St. Peter writing at the end of his second epistle (and his life):

 

And account that the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation; even as our beloved brother Paul also according to the wisdom given unto him hath written unto you; As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction. (II Pet. 3:15-16).

 

We see from this passage that St. Paul had written to the same people to whom St. Peter was writing.  These were the same people to whom he wrote his first epistle (II Pet. 3:1).  These were “the strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia” (I Pet. 1:1), i.e., diaspora Jews in Asia Minor who had become Christians (v. 2).  None of the thirteen epistles that begin with St. Paul’s name were written to these.  This could not be an allusion to a non-scriptural epistle because St. Peter identifies it as scripture.  The epistle he is talking about contains “things hard to be understood.”    While this is not necessarily what St. Peter is alluding to, note that Hebrews says of things concerning Melchisedec that they are “things hard to be uttered” (5:11) but utters them anyway a couple of chapters later (7:1-10).  Presumably something hard to utter is also hard to understand.  Finally “the longsuffering of our Lord is salvation” is the minor theme of Hebrews.  The major theme, of course, is that the first and lesser Covenant has been fulfilled – made full or complete – by that of which it was merely the shadow, the greater New Covenant.  The minor theme, however, is there in all the warnings as the reverse complement of the idea that if neglecting or violating the first Covenant had severe consequences, so much worse will be the consequences for neglecting the salvation offered in the New Covenant, which salvation has come at last, after and in despite of all the sin and rebellion, because of the patient, longsuffering, grace of God.

 

At a future date I may follow this up with an examination of the Patristic evidence that was only touched in the Objections Answered section.

 

For Further Reading

 

David Alan Black, The Authorship of Hebrews: The Case for Paul (Gonzalez, Fl: Energion Publications, 2013).

 

Christopher Wordsworth, On the Canon of the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, and on the Apocrypha, Eleven Discourses Preached Before the University of Cambridge, Being the Hulsean Lectures for the Year 1847 (London: Francis & John Rivington, 1848), “Lecture VIII” 200-243.

 

There is a chapter in a seventh century commentary on Hebrews which also presents a very strong case for Pauline authorship that answers many of the arguments “the consensus of Modern scholarship” finds so convincing before there ever was such a consensus but it is against my principles to recommend anything by someone who supported the Puritan revolt against King Charles I which was the mother of all left-wing revolutions.