The Eleventh Article – The Resurrection of the Body

The eleventh and penultimate Article of the Creed is, like the one that precedes it and the one that follows it, a short and simple Article.  In the modified version of the old Roman Symbol that has come down to us as the Apostles’ Creed it consists of two nouns, a subject and a modifying genitive.  In the Niceno-Constantinopolitan version of the Creed the subject noun is the same with a different modifying genitive.  We shall find the same difference between the two versions when we come to the twelfth and final Article, except that in the eleventh Article it is a simpler swap of a single genitive noun for another whereas in the twelfth it is a complex expression, two words in the Latin, three in the Greek, that takes the place in the conciliar Creed of the single noun in the Apostles’.  There is one other difference between the two versions of this Article.   Here, as in the tenth Article, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan introduces a new verb to govern the Article.

 

The verb that introduces this Article in the version published by the second ecumenical council is προσδοκοῦμεν.  This word means “we expect.” In the Latin version where the copula implied by the Greek text is spelled out we find “Et exspécto.”  This means “and I expect.”  The change from the plural to the singular is not a Latin innovation.  In the liturgical version of the Greek text the singular is substituted for the plural here as it is with the previous verbs in the first and tenth Articles.   Archbishop Cranmer in the Book of Common Prayer, rather than use the English transliteration of the Latin, translated it as “and I look for” which is a better rendition because it retains the strong sense of anticipation present in the original that words like “expect” and “hope” have lost through weakening over the last few centuries.  When we looked at the tenth Article it was noted that the shift from “believe” to “acknowledge” (or “confess”) was not a shift from one verbal idea to a completely different one but from a verb that expresses an inner action to that which expresses its external complement (“For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” Rom. 10:10).  Here the shift is one of temporal orientation.  To “look for” or “expect” is to express faith in that which is promised but yet to come.  Note the close relationship between faith and hope established in Scripture (1 Cor. 13:13, 1 Thess. 1:3, Heb. 11:1).

 

The noun that is the subject of the article is ἀνάστασις in the Greek of the conciliar Creed and resurrectio in the Latin of both versions, with the accusative forms ἀνάστασιν and resurrectionem being used because the Creed is a form of indirect discourse in which the nouns that are the subjects of the Articles are the objects of the first person verb(s).  Both the Greek and the Latin nouns were derived from complex versions of the verb for “stand” or “rise”.  In the Greek the prefix added to form the compound usually means “up.”  The Latin prefix means “back” or “again”, the second of these being the meaning it has here.

 

The modifying noun in the Apostles’ Creed is carnis, the genitive form of caro.  The use of this word rather than corporis, the genitive of corpus, may raise a few eyebrows.  Archbishop Cranmer rendered it “of the body” which would have been the literal translation had the original been corporis.  “Of the flesh” is the literal translation of carnis.  While “flesh” does in ordinary usage mean “the stuff of which the body is made” in theology it has a specialized meaning that is very different from this, a meaning established by the usage of St. Paul in his New Testament epistles. 

 

Consider Galatians 5:16.  In the Authorized Bible this reads “This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.”  If this verse stood alone “the lust of the flesh” could be taken to mean “bodily desires” but the Apostle expands on it and in verses 19-21 lists several “works of the flesh.”  Although the list begins with things such as “Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness” that would be consistent with this interpretation it goes on to include items that would not such as “Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies” etc.   In some more recent translations other things are substituted for “the flesh” presumably in order to avoid confusion with the word’s more literal meaning. Examples include “your sinful nature” (New Living Translation), “your old nature” (Complete Jewish Bible), “the human nature” (Good News), “your corrupt nature” (God’s Word), “your sinful selves” (New Century) and others have added yet a further degree of interpretation to their translation by rendering it as “selfishness” (The Message) or “selfish” as an attributive adjective rather than a noun (Common English).  While all of these are over-interpretations in a translation – explaining that “the flesh” in this verse doesn’t mean the part of you that you can see and touch but the part of you that inclines and incite you to do bad things is the level of interpretation that belongs to hermeneutics and exposition not translation – they do give you the general idea of what “the flesh” means in its non-literal sense.  St. Paul, however, chose to speak of the inherited fallenness of human nature as “the flesh” for a reason, and explaining that reason is as much the job of the expositor as is explaining what “the flesh” means in such contexts.  Since over-interpreting in translation can only explain the one and hide the other, it basically is doing someone else’s job and doing it badly by leaving it half undone.

 

In the New Testament, σάρξ, the Greek equivalent of caro, is frequently contrasted with πνεῦμα (spirit).  The contrast begins with these words in their literal meanings. The spirit or breathe (the same word is used for both), is the invisible mover of the physical and visible, the flesh.  Most often σάρξ is used in its literal sense.  When St. John tells us ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο (“the Word became flesh”, Jn. 1:14) this is clearly with no implications of sinfulness, nor are there any such implications when Jesus referencing Genesis says that the man and his wife are μία σάρξ (“one flesh”, Mk. 10:8).  In contrasting the spirit and the flesh, however, the flesh is depicted as the weaker of the two.  See, for example, Matt. 26:41.  St. Paul tends to use “the flesh” in a sense that includes both flesh and spirit in their literal meanings and so means “human nature” in its entirely.  When he speaks of the flesh/spirit contrast he uses “the flesh” in this inclusive sense and it is not the human spirit that he is contrasting with the flesh, but the Holy Spirit.  In Romans 7, for example, where he contrasts his “inward man” that delights in the law of God with his “flesh” that serves sin, the “inward man” is depicted as his νοῦς (mind) rather than his πνεῦμα (spirit), so as not to create confusion when in the eighth chapter he sets forth the way of freedom from walking after the flesh as that of walking after the Spirit, clearly identified as “the Spirit of God” and “the Spirit of Christ.” (Rom. 8:9)  Similarly in Galatians 5 where the contrast with the “works of the flesh” is the “fruit of the Spirit”, the Spirit is the indwelling Holy Spirit. 

 

Therefore, when St. Paul speaks of “the flesh” as human sinfulness this should not be understood as meaning that sin originates from the physical side of human nature but rather that it originates from fallen human nature.  While σάρξ in its literal sense is interchangeable with σῶμα (“the body”) the Apostle normally restricts the sense of sinfulness to the one word.  The verses could be seen as exceptions to this rule, Rom. 6:6 and 7:24, contrast a past state or condition with that experienced after baptism and the liberating power of the Holy Spirit.

 

This brings us back to the question of the use of carnis rather than corporis in the Apostles’ Creed.  It reads this way in the oldest extent versions of the Creed.  St. Irenaeus, whose 2^nd century Against Heresies includes a “rule of faith” that is an early version of the Creed, has in the relevant place the phrase καὶ ἀναστῆσαι πᾶσαν σάρκα πάσης ἀνθρωπότητος or in Latin et resuscitandam omnem carnem humani generis which in the standard translation is “and to raise up anew all flesh of the whole human race” (1)   At the end of the fourth century Rufinus of Aquileia compared the Latin text of the old Roman Symbol to that used in his own Church and in both the phrase was exactly as it appears in the current Apostles’ Creed.   Earlier that century, Marcellus of Ancyra who was one of the Fathers at the First Council of Nicaea presented a Greek version of the Symbol to Julius I, Patriarch of Rome, in which the phrase appears as σαρκὸς ἀνάστασιν.  This strongly indicates “flesh” to be the original reading.  The evidence of St. Irenaeus may indicate it was the original reading not merely of what became the Apostles’ Creed but of the ur-Creed that was the ancestor of both versions.

 

St. Irenaeus also provides a clue as to why this word was chosen over the word for body.  The heresies that he addressed in his work are those of the type that today are collectively referred to as Gnosticism.  While the teachings of these groups varied enough that some have questioned the usefulness of the lump designation they all tended to disdain the material world and to regard matter as the unfortunate by-product of the passions of a lesser deity and the source of all evil in which the spirits of men are trapped and from which they need liberating.  Since the Gnostic concept of salvation involves this liberation the concept of a resurrection was abhorrent to them.  According to St. Irenaeus (and St. Justin Marty), the first of these and of all heretics, was Simon Magus (the Samaritan magician who tried to purchase the Apostolic power in Acts 8).  That this type of heresy had started up while the Apostles were still alive can be seen from the epistles of St. John where the heretics that he called antichrists were characterized by the denial that Christ is “come in the flesh” (1 Jn. 4:3, 2 Jn. 7).  St. Irenaeus’s “rule of faith” is found towards the end of his discussion of the Valentinians, one of the earliest of the Gnostic heresies.  It is reasonable to think that the word “flesh” was chosen for the Article about resurrection in order to take a clearer stand against this type of heresy.   The word could hardly have its specialized theological sense here as that would give the Article the nonsensical meaning of “the resurrection of the sinful nature.”  With no fear of confusion in that direction, using “flesh” instead of “body” guarded against the error of taking St. Paul’s “spiritual body” to mean “a body composed of spirit rather than matter.” (2)  Since “flesh” here is clearly used in its literal sense, which is interchangeable with “body”, the English is not a wrong translation. (3)   

 

In the Creed as published by the First Council of Constantinople in 381, the word νεκρῶν is used.  The Latin correctly translates this as mortuórum and in the Book of Common Prayer it appears, also correctly, as “of the dead.”  The difference between this version and the Apostles’ Creed is that the Apostles’ Creed identifies what will be resurrected, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan identifies who will be resurrected.   The use of this word does not raise the same sort of questions as the use of “flesh” in the other Creed. 

 

In the Athanasian Symbol, which is based on the Creed but expanded and structured differently, the section corresponding to the eleventh Article reads Ad cuius adventum omnes homines resurgere habent cum corporibus suis which in the Book of Common Prayer is translated “At whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies” (the Canadian edition of the BCP substitutes the word “must” for “shall”).  The Symbol is traditionally attributed to St. Athanasian of Alexandria who fought Arianism in the fourth century.  Since the seventeenth century it has widely been considered to be later than this, usually sixth century although Daniel Waterland made a convincing argument for the early fifth.  Even if the attribution to St. Athanasius were correct this would still be in the period after other heresies had superceded Gnosticism as the primary opponents of orthodoxy and so the reason for using “flesh” rather than “body” was waning.  Nevertheless, the longer wording found here would effectively accomplish the same thing.

 

The resurrection confessed here is what is usually referred to as the General Resurrection.  It includes both the resurrection of the righteous, those who have been cleansed from their sins and justified by the grace of God in Jesus Christ, and the resurrection of the wicked, those who have rendered their souls incurably by final impenitent rejection of Christ.   Nevertheless, while both of these are included they are not included equally.  The place in the Creed where they are equal is in the seventh Article where they are implicitly in Jesus Christ’s Second Coming to judge “the quick and the dead.”   The resurrection of the righteous is very much what is in focus in the eleventh Article and the resurrection of the wicked is present merely as the inescapable background to the resurrection of the righteous.  This is evident from the fact that the resurrection is confessed as an object of faith.  “I believe” in the Apostles’ Creed does not merely mean “I affirm to be true”, although it does, of course, mean that but has the additional connotations of “I grasp these truths to myself and cling to them as my only hope in this life and eternity.”  In the conciliar Creed, as we have seen, the verb governing this Article is “I look for”, that is, “I look for in hopeful anticipation.”  The resurrection of the wicked to the condemnation of final and eternal exclusion from the blessedness of the righteous, while necessarily part of the General Resurrection confessed in this Article, can hardly be viewed as the object of these verbs in their fullest senses.  The appropriate way to confess belief in it is in the bare minimal sense of the word.  We believe, that is, we affirm it to be true, because both Testaments and especially the words of the Lord Jesus Christ declare it to us.

 

As an object of faith and hope, the bodily resurrection of the dead distinguished the religion of the True and Living God from heathenism even before the Advent of Jesus Christ.  Job, in one of the oldest books of the Old Testament, possibly the oldest, testified in the midst of his affliction “And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: Whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold, and not another; though my reins be consumed within me.” (Job 19:26-27)  Although the Old Testament speaks of Sheol, an underworld so similar in conception to those of pagan mythology that it is rendered Hades in the Septuagint and in New Testament quotation, the Old Testament contains what pagan mythologies did not, hope of deliverance from it.  This is most observable in the Psalms and while “thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption” (Ps. 16:10) is a Messianic prophecy of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is clearly depicted in the New Testament as the guarantee of the resurrection of all others.  By contrast, in pagan mythology deliverance from the underworld is generally depicted as something that heroes attempt and fail, as in the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. (4)  While pagan philosophers such as Plato explored the idea of the spirits of the dead returning to this world this was conceived of in terms of reincarnation not resurrection.

 

By the time of the New Testament a sect called the Sadducees had arisen which held only the books of Moses to be Scripture and which denied the doctrine of the General Resurrection.  Each of the Synoptic Gospels records Jesus demonstrating the truth of the resurrection to them out of the only books they recognized after they attempted to trip Him up with a garbled retelling of the story of the book of Tobit.  In St. John’s Gospel, Jesus early on identifies Himself as the One Whose voice will call the dead back to life. (5)  Later, when Lazarus dies, and He tells Martha “thy brother shall rise again” (Jn. 11:23) she understands him to speaking of the General Resurrection, “I know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day” (v. 24) and He says of Himself in response “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die” (vv. 25-26) which, when asked if she believed, Martha responded with “Yea, Lord: I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world” (v. 27).  Her confession is identical to that of St. Peter at Caesarea Philippi (Matt. 16:16) and to the content of saving faith as identified by St. John later in his Gospel (Jn. 20:31).  The doctrine of the General Resurrection and Jesus’ role as the Agent in it is thereby made inseparable from the basic truths at the heart of the Christian faith.

 

We find this again in the fifteenth chapter of St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians.  This chapter begins with St. Paul declaring the Gospel that he preaches, “that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures” (vv. 3-4) which is followed by a list of eyewitnesses to the risen Christ (vv. 5-8). (6)  This leads into St. Paul’s argument against those who deny the resurrection of the dead.  If the dead do not rise, St. Paul argues, then Christ could not have risen, but since Jesus Christ rose from the dead, therefore the dead rise. (vv.12-20) The resurrection of Jesus Christ, an element of the Gospel itself, stands or falls with the General Resurrection, therefore.  St. Paul then goes into how Christ is the firstfruits of the resurrection of all, an argument that draws on the same parallel between Christ and Adam that he would later make in the fifth chapter of his epistle to the Romans.  By Adam death came upon all, in Christ all shall be made alive, (vv.20-23) something that is connected both here (vv. 24-28) and at the end of the chapter (vv.54-57) with Christ’s triumphant defeat of all of His enemies.

 

This chapter also includes St. Paul’s response to a hypothetical question about the nature of the body with which the dead are raised. (vv.35-55). Careless misreading of this passage has been responsible for many, perhaps most, errors regarding the resurrection both in the early centuries and in more recent ones.  We have already touched on some of this when considering why the Apostles’ Creed uses the word carnis rather than corporis.

 

St. Paul compares the resurrection to the planting of grain, a comparison that the Lord had previously used in reference to His own resurrection (Jn. 12:24).  He observes that the grain when it is planted is not yet the plant that will grow from it (1 Cor. 15:37).  He then observes that flesh comes in different kinds (v. 39) and bodies come in different kinds (v. 40-41), and states that in the resurrection of the dead, the body sown is different from the body raised (vv. 42-44).  “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.” (v. 44) This verse does not mean, as many have misread it to mean, that the resurrection body is not physical or material.  The word rendered “natural” in this verse is ψυχικός (the neuter form with a final nu instead of sigma).  This word does not mean anything like “material” or “physical”.  It is derived from the word for soul, life, or mind from which word all of our English words beginning psych- are derived.  Yes, it is contrasted with “spiritual”, but both words are adjectives modifying the word σῶμα (body).  The idea of physicality or materiality is implicit in this word, the noun.  Consider the different types of bodies mentioned in verses 40-41.  They are all composed of matter.  The two adjectives are both derived from words that denote the immaterial side of human nature.  While these words they usually depict different aspects of that side it is not uncommon for them to be used interchangeably.  In 1 Cor. 15:44 the adjectival forms are used to create a distinction and since both basically refer to an immaterial force that animates and controls the body the distinction is between that which animates the body in this life and that which will animate it in the resurrection.  In the following verse Genesis is quoted about Adam having been made a ψυχὴν ζῶσαν (living soul) and the Last Adam (Christ) is said to be a πνεῦμα ζῳοποιοῦν (quickening or life-giving spirit). The distinction made by calling the pre-resurrection body “natural” or “soulish” and the resurrection body “spiritual”, therefore, is that in this life the body is animated by the life that was bestowed upon man in creation and which has come down from Adam and which has been corrupted by sin bringing death upon us all but in the resurrection the body will be animated entirely by the new life that Jesus Christ came to give us.

 

This also tells us what St. Paul’s use of the grain analogy that Jesus had used for His Own resurrection had hinted at and what the description of Jesus as the firstfruits of the resurrection states explicitly.   The final resurrection is the same resurrection that Jesus has already undergone.  It is not like the raising of Jairus’ daughter, the son of the widow of Nain, or Lazarus.  In these instances, prior to Jesus’ resurrection, the Lord returned these individuals to the same condition they were in prior to their death – life, but mortal life, susceptible to disease, decay, and death.  Jesus, when He rose from the dead, rose never to die again.  This is the resurrection for which we look.   One of the other differences between the present body and the resurrection body stressed in 1 Cor. 15 is that the present body is corruptible but the resurrection body – and the body into which the “quick” will be changed without undergoing death at the Second Coming (vv. 51-54) – is incorruptible (vv. 42, 50).

 

That Jesus’ resurrection is the pattern of the future resurrection for which we look is the final nail in the coffin of the idea that the “spiritual body” is not a physical body.  When Jesus appeared to the Apostles on the evening of His resurrection they were afraid because they thought they were seeing a ghost but He said “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Lk. 24:39) and after showing them His hands and feet gave them further proof by eating a piece of fish and a honeycomb (vv. 41-42).  Later He challenged St. Thomas who had been absent on that occasion to put his hand in the hole in His side (Jn. 20:27).  From this it is clear that Jesus’ resurrection body was a physical body, the same body in which He had been crucified, and recognizably so.  While it had been changed into a glorified, incorruptible, body with new capacities it remained a physical body.

 

St. Paul tells us in Romans and elsewhere that we can participate in the resurrection life of Jesus Christ in the here and now by the power of the Holy Spirit Who indwells us.  To fully share in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, however, when our bodies are transformed through death and resurrection or translation at the Second Coming to be like unto His, this is the first part of our hope which is our faith looking forward into the future.  We shall discuss the second part of that hope when we come to consider the twelfth and final Article of our Creed.

 

 (1)   St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, I.10.1.  Translation that of Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut in Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, 1885.

(2)   This is not mere speculation on my part.  Philip Schaff explained the use of “flesh” here as that “by which the ancient Church protested against spiritualistic concepts of the Gnostics” in his notes on the Apostles Creed in the second volume of The Creeds of Christendom.  This occurs in the context of discussing how earlier translations of the Creed had rendered it literally, the first change to “body” having been made in The King’s Book in 1543, and the literal reading retained even by Cranmer in the interrogatory version used in the order of Baptism and Visitation of the Sick.  Schaff spoke of the change to “body” in a tone of approval because flesh “may be misunderstood in a grossly materialistic sense.” Elsewhere (in the third volume of his History of the Christian Church) he mentions the disagreement in the early church between the “spiritualistic” interpretation of the resurrection body held by Origen et al., and the “more realistic” interpretation of Tertullian and the Apostles’ Creed, saying that the realistic interpretation was “pressed by” Epiphanius and St. Jerome in a “grossly materialistic manner” that in his opinion contributed to the development of the cult of relics.  This is obviously what he was referring to in his comment on the wording of the Creed. 

(3)   Roman Catholic English translations of the Creed also tend to use “body” rather than “flesh”, as for example, in the English version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.  Interestingly translations in some other languages (German and Armenian, for example) sometimes substitute the Niceno-Constantinopolitan reading for the Apostles’.

(4)   The interesting exception to this is the myth that was dramatized by Euripides in his play Alcestis.  The title character was the wife of the Thessalonian King Admetus, whom the Fates had allowed to outlive the day they had appointed for his death provided someone was willing to take his place.  The only person so willing was his wife.  Hercules, (Heracles in the original Greek), in the midst of his labours, arrives at the palace in the midst of the mourning right after Alcestis had died and learns, despite the king’s attempt to keep it secret, what had happened.  He departs, to return soon after with a veiled woman whom he had won in a wrestling match and hands over to Admetus.  When the king removes her veil, he discovers that it is Alcestis, whom Hercules had wrestled away from Death himself.  C. S. Lewis, like St. Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria, believed that God had been working among the ancient pagan nations albeit in a different way than He had been working in Israel to prepare for the coming of Jesus Christ.  Whereas St. Justin Martyr and Clement believed this preparation to have taken the form of the ancient philosophy that sprang from the “seeds of the Logo”, Lewis argued (especially in God in the Dock) that ancient mythology, although polytheistic and containing many other errors, grew out of the truths written into the natural world and since natural revelation comes from the same God Who ultimately revealed Himself in history in the events of the Gospel, that the truths myths point to find their ultimate fulfilment in Jesus Christ.  It would be difficult not to see how this applies to the myth of Alcestis.  However imperfect their depiction, the Greeks had somehow grasped that only the Son of the Highest God could defeat Death and release those who had been held captive by him.

(5)   John 5:25-29.  Verse 25 is likely referring to spiritual regeneration rather than the resurrection, but verses 27 to 29 clearly refer to the resurrection and Final Judgement.

(6)   The structure of the Gospel is that of two acts of Jesus Christ, each supported by two forms of testimony.  The two acts of Jesus Christ are that 1) He died for our sins, and 2) He rose again from the dead.  The Scriptures are the first testimony to each. The additional witness to Christ’s death is His burial.  The additional witness to His resurrection is the long list of eyewitnesses.

 

Kenney Gets it Backwards Again

Jason Kenney, the former premier of Alberta who had been a Cabinet minister in the Dominion government during the premiership of Stephen Harper, has recently attracted attention again for his criticism of Candice Malcolm and her Juno News.  On Monday, 16 February, Malcolm hosted Daniel Tyrie, who at one time was the executive director of Maxime Bernier’s People’s Party and who is currently the chairman of the Dominion Society of Canada which he co-founded last year, on her podcast, the Candice Malcolm Show.  The topic of the interview was immigration and national identity, unsurprisingly as this is the focus of the Dominion Society, and in the course of the interview creative solutions to the problems created by the aggressive promotion of mass immigration in recent decades were discussed. 

 

That Kenney objected to this is also not surprising.  While the Liberal government under its previous leader Captain Airhead highly publicized its aggressive promotion of mass immigration the actual policy was virtually identical during the Harper premiership in which Kenney was the minister responsible for this sort of thing.  The most significant difference is that Harper and Kenney did not peacock what they were doing to the extent that Captain Airhead later did.

 

Kenney responded to the interview on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.  He opened by accusing Tyrie of being a racist, then included a self-righteous mini-rant about the immorality of racism, then asked what “remigration” meant as if the term wasn’t self-explanatory and suggested an interpretation that presented the concept in the worst possible light.

 

Malcolm, defending the interview from this and similar criticism from progressive sources, correctly argued that her job as an interviewer wasn’t to agree or disagree with her interviewee and that the topic was an important one worthy of discussion.  Later that week in another tweet – or whatever you are supposed to call that now – Kenney stated “they are getting more attention from ostensibly sane right wing media.  We have to maintain hygiene within the conservative movement by calling this stuff out.”  The spirit of Bill Buckley lives on!

 

In my right opinion, Kenney has got things backwards.  He thinks that Malcolm has tainted her platform by allowing Tyrie to appear on it.  On the contrary, I think that a better case can be made that it is Tyrie who risked tainting himself and his organization by appearing on the Candice Malcolm Show.   Over the course of the past year Juno News has promoted all sorts of odious things such as the Alberta separatist movement.  If Malcolm can be charged with giving a platform to someone who ought not to be given one it should be over her interview with Diane Francis last year, right at the time when the American president was shooting his mouth off daily about making our country “the 51^st state”, over Francis’s repugnant vision of a business-merger type joining of Canada with her country of birth.  Juno’s continuing admiration for Krasnov the Orange despite his degeneration into a petty tyrant who completely disregards the constitutional limitations of his office or the fact that it does not come with jurisdiction over the entire world and of the MAGA movement despite its having turned into a cult for whom its leader can accomplish anything but can do no wrong, is utterly disgusting.  This is a pity, because on many matters from  pretty much everything concerning the bat flu scare to the false narrative concerning the residential schools to the wave of arsons and other vandalism of church buildings, Malcolm and her organization have been far more reliable and trustworthy than the legacy or mainstream media. 

 

It was not entirely unexpected, however.  Malcolm and True North/Juno are neo-conservative which means that they consider the American conservative movement to be the measuring stick of conservatism.  The American conservative movement, however, unlike the classical Canadian Toryism expounded in John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown, the essays of Stephen Leacock, and the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker’s speeches collected and published as Those Things We Treasure, was never authentically conservative but was rather eighteenth to nineteenth century liberalism resisting liberalism’s twentieth century convergence with socialism.  Long before last year, neo-conservative organizations like Malcom’s displayed an extremely unpatriotic preference for the country built on liberalism, the United States of America, over our own country with her genuinely conservative, Loyalist, foundation. 

 

Lest you think I am being unfair to the neo-conservatives allow me to point out two ways in which this preference has long been evident.  The first is the way in which negative attitudes towards the United States are treated as compared to negative attitudes towards Canada.  On Malcom’s Juno News, as on its predecessor True North and their sister organization, Ezra Levant’s Rebel News, anti-American attitudes are treated as being something akin to mental disease. (1)   This is rather ironic when you consider that authentic conservatism, in Canada and elsewhere, historically has been highly suspicious of and skeptical towards the United States.  Diefenbaker, the last authentic Canadian conservative to hold office as prime minister, responded to criticism from the left that he was too negative in his views towards the United States by saying “I am not anti-American, I am very pro-Canadian.” The point, however, is that anti-Canadianism is not similarly treated as mental contagion by the neo-conservatives.  Some forms of it, like the attempts by progressives to “cancel” historical figures like Sir John A. Macdonald, they have rightly opposed, but other forms, such as that of the Alberta separatists get a free pass from them. 

 

The second way in which the neo-conservative anti-patriotism has long been evident is itself a form of anti-Canadianism.  Neo-conservatives have long seemed incapable of criticizing the Liberals when they, the Liberals, are in government, without framing it as an attack on Canada and her institutions.  During the previous premiership, instead of “the Grits are incompetent, Captain Airhead is an ass, and this party and its leader should not be entrusted to look after a broom closet let alone govern our country” what we kept getting from the neo-conservatives was “Canada is broken.” 

Ironically, of course, in their anti-patriotism, the neo-conservatives do not resemble the American conservatives they admire so much but rather the Hollywood liberals who keep threatening to leave their country whenever they lose an election.

 

Let Sir Walter Scott’s timeless judgement be the final word on those of this ilk:

 

If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour’d, and unsung.

 

This sort of aggressively pro-American anti-patriotism is something that Tyrie and his organization can ill-afford to be associated with.  While the Dominion Society was only founded last year and I cannot pretend to have followed everything it has said and done, I am familiar enough with it to be confident in saying that it is best described as an advocacy organization dedicated to a single issue, that issue being the preservation and restoration of historical Canada from the deleterious effects of mass immigration.  There are two reasons why activists for this cause cannot afford to be associated with neo-conservatism.  The first is what we have already discussed about the nature of neo-conservatism.  A movement that has long wanted Canada to be more like the United States can be no friend to the cause of preserving and restoring historical Canada.  If the Dominion Society and its founders don’t understand why this is the case they would do well to read the works of the dean of Canadian history, Donald Creighton and learn to distinguish Canada’s true story from the Liberal Version shared by the neo-conservatives.

 

The second reason is that the neo-conservatives continue to admire the current American president who has been poisoning the public mind against the correction of the excesses of mass immigration through association with himself.  I have come to suspect that this is deliberate on his part.  A little under twenty years ago a crack opened up in the wall that had kept criticism of mass immigration and the deliberate and rapid increase in diversity outside the Overton Window.  This was about the time that Harvard University professor and political scientists Robert Putnam made public the findings of a five-year research project that showed that, in the short term at least, increasing ethnic diversity within a community reduced its social capital so that people had less trust, not merely in the other but in members of their own group.  Putnam did not intend this as criticism of immigration or diversity and, indeed, delayed publishing his research because he did not want it used as such, but it opened a crack which grew wider and wider until it appeared that the wall would imminently collapse and sane and open discussion of this topic would enter the sphere of public and polite discussion from which it had been excluded for decades.  Then Krasnov the Orange, the real estate developer turned public entertainer, made another career change and entered politics.  Claiming to be a political outsider, he ran for president of the United States on the issue of immigration.  In actuality, his position on immigration was not significantly different from that of the mainstream Republicans.  He did not promise to undo fifty years of a failed experiment in social engineering by means of mass immigration.  He merely promised to enforce the United States’ immigration laws and keep people from entering illegally.  Nevertheless, his supporters and opponents alike mistook him to be taking a much stronger stand on immigration than he was, and in other Western countries experiencing the consequences of the aforementioned failed social experiment immigration reformers were emboldened and inspired by him.  Then came his second term in office.  Perhaps something snapped in his brain forming the thought “they keep calling me Hitler, I’ll give them Hitler.” (2)  Perhaps, and more likely in my opinion, it had been the intention of his controllers in the international Communist movement all along to use him to discredit the growing opposition to their mass immigration social experiment.  Either way, his actions upon his return to office have put any idea or cause associated with him in the public mind, no matter how good or necessary it may be on its own merits, in danger of being set back for decades to come.

 

No, Tyrie and his society would do well, if they wish to go anywhere with their cause, to avoid any association with either the anti-patriotic neo-conservatives in Canada or the American MAGA cult.

 

I would recommend that they look to Enoch Powell.  Powell was a British classical scholar turned World War II military intelligence officer turned Tory statesman.  Although in some ways, primarily monetarism and free market economics, he was a forerunner to Margaret Thatcher, his was a more authentic Toryism.  He did not admire the United States the way Thatcher did, but referred to her as “our terrible enemy” in a letter written during World War II and in his subsequent career always distrusted her and opposed her efforts to flex her muscle around the world.  In one well-known incident, he showed Thatcher what true Tory patriotism looks like when he told her “No, we do not fight for values. I would fight for this country even if it had a Communist government.”  

 

Powell is most remembered, however, perhaps unfortunately considering his long list of achievements, for a speech he gave in 1968 in which he condemned the way the Labour government of Harold Wilson was needlessly importing American-style racial strife into the United Kingdom by bringing in immigrants in numbers far in excess of what British communities could absorb without friction and by trying to force harmony on everyone with heavy-handed legislation in imitation of the US Civil Rights Act something which anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together would recognize as doomed to accomplish the opposite of what was intended.  Powell, like all sane men of his and all previous generations who grew up without being brainwashed into the cult of diversity, knew instinctually what it took Putnam five years of research to discover.  The speech instantly made Powell the most popular man in the UK, but it was immediately condemned as incitement of racial hatred by progressives in the media and the Labour Party and its orator was labelled by the same a “racialist.”  In reality, of course, it was Wilson’s policies which were generating racial strife and so by opposing them, Powell was doing the exact opposite of inciting racial hatred. 

 

Kenney’s accusations against Tyrie are the same as those that were made against Powell after his 1968 Birmingham speech.  They ought not to be taken seriously.  In the 1960s, all the countries in the civilization formerly known as Christendom embraced the insane and absurd idea that increasing ethnic diversity as much as possible and as fast as possible can have only beneficial and no deleterious results.  They did this because the United States had emerged from the two World Wars as the dominant power in that civilization and everyone else thought they had to imitate her even though she at the time was obviously in the midst of a pendulum swing from one form of toxic racial politics into an equally toxic opposite form.  This idea, which is the basis of the social experiment to which the former Christendom has been subjected ever since, is so obviously wrong that it could not withstand even the slightest of scrutiny and so it has been protected ever since by ad hominem attacks on anyone who dares express dissent, attacks designed to prevent people from considering what the dissident has to say by imputing to him irrational prejudice and hatred, subscription to some odious racial ideology or another, or both and while irrational prejudices and hatreds undoubtedly exist as do odious racial ideologies, rarely do these accusations have any basis in fact.  The interesting thing about the word “racist” which Kenney called Tyrie is that it seems to have actually been coined to be used in this way and so has never been a word that admits of good faith usage but could actually be called an anti-word because it exists, not as the means of conveying information and ideas, but as the means of stopping discussion and debate.  Kenney professes to be a Roman Catholic Christian.  Perhaps he ought to think long and hard about whether using this word is an automatic violation of the eighth commandment by his Church’s method of numbering. (3)

 

I very much doubt, however, that Kenney lies awake at night worrying about whether he is bearing false witness against his neighbour or not.  I have long observed that those who consider themselves to be on a moral crusade against racism think truth to be an acceptable sacrifice in the name of carrying out this endeavor and that the more committed they are to this crusade, or at least the more prominently it is featured in their own self-promotion, the less compunctions they have about telling falsehoods about those they consider to be racists.  Twice in Canadian history, people who wanted the government to aggressively clamp down on racism assisted some stooge in founding a neo-nazi organization that in reality resembled the World Council of Anarchists from G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (it consisted entirely of undercover policemen rather than actual anarchists) in order to generate public fear of a threat that was obviously non-existent if it required such measures in order to create the scare.

 

The ethical reasoning that seems to justify this sort of deception to those who perpetrate it, although it may not always be consciously formulated as such in their own minds, is something like this: a) the world is divided into good people and evil people, b) racists are evil people, therefore c) anything done in the name of fighting racists is justified.   While that conclusion would not follow even if both premises were completely true because that does not even come close to being a valid syllogism the thinking that underlies at least the first premise is not sound by the standards of orthodox Christian moral theology and, indeed, in it can be recognized a form of the dualism of the third century Persian false prophet Mani, against whose heresy St. Augustine wrote extensively having been drawn to it himself prior to his conversion. (4) 

 

Many, probably most, of those who joined Kenney in decrying Tyrie’s appearance on the Candice Malcolm Show relied upon a single authority for their idea of what the Dominion Society and its founders are all about.  That authority is the Canadian Anti-Hate Group.   With this group, as with all others of its kind, nothing they say should be believed unless they can prove it, down to the minutest detail, with evidence that would meet the standard of proof in a court of criminal law, that is, beyond the shadow of any reasonable doubt. This group, founded early in the premiership of Captain Airhead who heavily subsidized it, was based on the model of a similar organization in the United States that funded its founding.  The parent organization, once the go to when American media needed an “expert” to pontificate on racism, has been largely discredited in the last ten years as the organization lost a number of defamation suits, its founder was ousted after being accused of, among other things, racism, law enforcement agencies began to disassociate themselves from it, and the public came increasingly to see it as a racket that was more about using the fear of racial hatred to raise funds rather than raising funds to combat racial hatred.  I have seen no evidence that would suggest that CAHN is any better and everything that I have seen suggests the exact opposite of that.  Its founding chairman, in his previous role with the new defunct Canadian Jewish Congress (5), first came to my attention when he was lobbying the government to strip several Ukrainian and German refugees from Communism of their citizenship in their old age and have them deported to stand trial for war crimes.  The men in question, had been captured by the Nazis when they overran their countries (the Germans were ethnic Germans who lived in countries other than Germany) during World War II and forced to serve by means such as holding their families captive and threatening harm to them if they did not comply.  To sane people, like the late Peter Worthington of the Toronto Sun, these men were clearly victims of the Third Reich.  To Bernie Farber, however, the fact that they served under duress and the fact that they served mostly in roles such as translator, meant nothing, he considered them to be collaborators, culpable in the crimes of the regime that forced them to serve at gunpoint, literal and metaphorical. 

 

This blindness and/or indifference to the difference between the actual historical Nazis and people they forced to serve them is more than sufficient to justify dismissing claims to expertise on such matters from this source and completely disregarding what he and his ilk have to say about contemporary individuals and groups like Tyrie and the Dominion Society.

 

So no, Candice Malcom was not tainting her platform by allowing Tyrie to speak for the Dominion Society on it.  Challenging the idea behind the experiment in social engineering through mass immigration that has been ongoing from the ‘60’s to the present that the more you increase ethnic diversity and the faster the better, an idea that has far too long been protected from scrutiny, is more like a breath of fresh air than a contagion. (6)  If anything, the contagion went in the other direction, the contagion that is, of Americanist neo-conservatism.

 

.

 (1)   Indeed, the only country negative attitudes towards which are more quickly condemned by the neo-conservatives than those towards the United States, is Israel, the tail that has wagged the American dog since the Lyndon Johnson administration.

(2)   When the left likens Krasnov to Hitler, as they have been doing since before his first term, it is because in their fevered brains his immigration policies resemble Hitler’s racial ideology.  The two are nothing alike.  In Hitler’s thinking, the races were involved in a Darwinian struggle against each other that was a winner-take all zero-sum game.  Krasnov’s is a civil, not a racial, nationalism.  This remains true in his second term.  Where he has begun to resemble Hitler is in the following areas: a) disregard for constitutional limits on the powers of his office, b) threatening other countries and making territorial demands, c) the optics of his crackdown on illegal immigration.  With regards to the last mentioned, illegal immigration has been a problem demanding a crackdown for decades, but the way it is being done seems to be deliberately evoking images of Nazi or Soviet secret police – faceless, unaccountable, demanding to see one’s papers.

(3)   My own Church, the Anglican, like the Jews, the Eastern Orthodox, and all other Protestants except the Lutherans, consider it as the ninth commandment.

(4)   Mani’s dualism erred by reifying evil which in orthodox Christian theology “exists” not as a thing but in the way the hole left in a wall after you accidentally drive your car through it might be said to “exist” in the wall.  God created everything good, evil is a defect in goodness not a created “thing”, it possesses neither form nor substance.  The idea of an eternal struggle between an equally or almost equally matched good and evil, light and darkness, while a popular theme in Hollywood, is false.  There is a conflict in the spiritual realm, but this conflict is not eternal, it had a beginning and it will end in the total defeat of the evil side, the two sides are nowhere near being evenly matched, and evil, even in the being that initiated the conflict by rebelling against God, is a self-imposed defect in the goodness with which he was created.  The idea that the world is divided into good and evil people is ultimately derived from Manichean dualism.  In orthodox Christian theology, such a division is the result of the Final Judgement at the end of time, not a description of the state of affairs in time.  Note that St. Augustine was not merely the great opponent of Manichaeism but of Pelagianism as well and in opposing Pelagianism he upheld the orthodox doctrine of Original Sin, that in Adam all fell so that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”, from which condition the Son of God entered human history in order to rescue and redeem us.  When the final division into the “righteous” and “wicked” takes place at the end of time, the latter will be those who rendered their sinful condition incurable by finally rejecting redeeming grace.  A system that divides people into good and evil in time and demands repentance from those it considers to be evil while offering them nothing in the way of redemption, forgiveness, and cleansing is fundamentally Manichean and must be recognized and condemned as such by all orthodox Christians. 

(5)   This organization features in the first of the Man Who Was Thursday incidents.  Farber was not involved, of course, since it took place in 1965, almost two decades before he started working for the CJC and while he was still a teenager. In this year a man named John Beattie started a “Canadian Nazi Party” which the CJC hired an ex-cop named John Garrity to infiltrate.  There was not much more to this group than the two of them.  When Ezra Levant wrote about the incident in his 2009 book Shakedown the CJC denied that their purpose had been to facilitate the passing of hate speech legislation.  They had long been lobbying for such legislation, however, and 1965 had begun with Lester Pearson appointing the Special Committee on Hate Propaganda in Canada to look into the matter.  This committee, called the “Cohen Committee” after its chairman Maxwell Cohen of McGill University included among its members Saul Hayes, then executive vice president of the CJC and Pierre Trudeau who would succeed Pearson and Liberal leader and prime minister and who early in his premiership would act upon the committee’s report and pass the first hate propaganda legislation.  Given this historical context, does the CJC’s denial decades later seem at all credible?

(6)   It should go without saying that the challenging ideas should not just be accepted uncritically either but should be weighed and allowed to stand or fall on their own merits.

Schools, Shootings and Stuff

 

In the days since the shooting spree at Tumbler Ridge in British Columbia the legacy media in Canada which is overwhelmingly liberal and the neoconservative alternative media have been spatting over the incident.  The source of the contention is primarily the fact that the eighteen year old male who killed himself, a couple of relatives, and six people at the local high school and wounded several others, seems to have thought himself to be female.  The legacy media appears to think that publicizing his state of confusion would instigate a wave of hatred toward people who mistakenly think that they are not of their biological birth sex.   This is pretty much typical of their level of mendacity and stupidity.  The alternative media such as Juno News which Candace Malcolm rebranded her True North News around this time last year has done a fairly decent job of exposing this duplicity.  I acknowledge this with reluctance because I have been loath to give them credit for anything since the rebrand for while True North and Ezra Levant’s similar Rebel News have always been too Americanist and too Zionist for the liking of this Tory (High Church royalist), they have been absolutely intolerable for the past year as they have continued to embrace the MAGA movement long after it degenerated into a dangerous leader cult.

 

In my opinion the transgender angle is the least interesting facet of the Tumbler Ridge incident. (1)  About the only interesting thing about transgenderism is the question of who is crazier, the boy who thinks he is a girl, the girl who thinks she is a boy, the boy or girl who thinks he or she is something different altogether, or the people who think that the appropriate way to handle the previous is to indulge the fantasy to the point of insisting that everyone pretend the fantasy is reality or even trying to force reality itself to conform to the fantasy.  I’m inclined to think that the answer, if not six of one, half a dozen of the other, is that the last group is the craziest.  In my lifetime we have come to this point from one in which ninety-nine times out of a hundred if a girl said she was a boy or a boy said he was a girl, it was a short-lived phase which the parents might humour rather than indulge until it passed and if it didn’t would only then take it seriously which meant finding the kid help in adjusting to reality than trying to force reality to adjust.  I think everybody involved in this farcical phenomenon should be made to read Hans Christian Anderson’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and George Orwell’s 1984 and asked where they see themselves in these stories.  If necessary, this should be repeated until they get it right.  Of course, these are all stories with which they would already be familiar had they been properly educated, but I am getting ahead of myself.

 

Every time incidents like this occur, politicians of all stripes and their partisans in the media seek to politicize the narrative in a way that benefits them and their party’s clients.  In the midst of this a number of important questions are asked and while it is difficult to extract the questions and proffered answers from the politicization process it is vital that it be done.  The most important of the questions are “Why did this happen?” and “What can be done to prevent this from happening again?”  Clearly, any answer given to the second of these questions must depend upon the answer given to the first.

 

The first question is actually several different questions rolled into one.  The person asking it could be asking what are the circumstances which brought about this particular incident and this can only be answered by looking at the motivations of the perpetrator and the specific circumstances which led to their development.  He could also be asking, however, why incidents of this general nature occur.  Someone asking this question in this way is looking for things that are common to most or all such shootings sprees.  One example of asking and answering the question in this manner is that of the North American liberal.  She will often answer the question with “guns” and use this answer to bolster her call for further gun control measures as the solution to the problem.  The flaw in her reasoning is that while guns are indeed common to all mass shootings their role in each of these shootings is that of the instrument not that of the agent.  The agent controls the instrument and not the other way around.  A better answer to the question asked this way is that suggested by Peter Hitchens years ago, that drug abuse is the factor that is both common and causal.  Tumbler Ridge was not an exception to this, the perpetrator was a frequent user of mind-altering drugs.

 

Let us consider this with specific application to school shootings.  While the first school shootings on record were in the nineteenth century, they were quite rare, with the exception of the 1960s, until the 1990s.  In the 1990s a wave of school shootings began that has yet to abate with each successive decade seeing a larger number than the previous.  The drug factor is at least a partial explanation for the temporary spike in the 1960s.   It undoubtedly a factor in the later wave as well.  The 1990s was the beginning of the opioid crisis in the United States, coming immediately after two decades in which the American government was heavily pushing the “War on Drugs.”  The drug crisis has escalated alongside the school shooting crisis.  Perhaps more significantly, the 1960s, apart from the rise in drug abuse associated with hippie culture, was the first decade in which methylphenidate was administered to children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and the 1990s was the decade when this really caught on.  Indeed, this entire growing wave of school shootings has coincided entirely with a period in which either a) the number of cases of children with ADHD has skyrocketed, b) doctors have become better at diagnosing ADHD or c), the option preferred by skeptical cynics like myself and Peter Hitchens, doctors, under pressure from the companies that produce methylphenidate, have recklessly been making diagnoses of ADHD and writing prescriptions over ordinary childhood rambunctiousness and have gotten away with it because parents and teachers have been to quick to pass off dealing with the children under their care when they act up to the medical profession.

 

The drug factor, however, is not the whole story.   We have considered two ways in which the question “Why did this happen?” can be asked, both of which focus on the perpetrator.  The question can also be asked with an eye on the schools in which case it could be paraphrased “What happened to the schools that they have become places where these shootings are likely to occur?”

 

The answer is that over the last century they have largely ceased to be places where education in the traditional sense of the word takes place and have become something else entirely.  What that something is could be described as factories that turn out diploma-holders on the assembly-line principle.  Alternatively today’s schools might be described as laboratories for the experiments of professional educators on the students, their Guinea-pigs.  Either description is of an institution that has a dehumanizing effect on those who go through it.  This is the opposite of what traditional education is supposed to do.  Traditional education was designed to humanize people, to take the barbarians or savages we are each born as, and civilize us.

 

By the time Hilda Neatby wrote So Little for the Mind in 1953, a devastating critique of the direction Canadian education was headed due to the influence of the rotten ideas of John Dewey from south of the border, North American education had already largely become the experimental laboratory of the professional educator.  Dewey’s vision was of an educational system in which professional experts would accomplish progressive social engineering by indoctrinating children with liberalism.  In this education pretty much reached the terminus of the downward path upon which Joseph Lancaster had set it and on which it had previously been advanced by Horace Mann. (2)  In the decades since Neatby’s book (3) the restraining influences on the educational experts of the remnants of traditional education were gradually removed as the courts, first in the United States then in Canada, removed the Bible and prayer from the schools, and the control of local school boards themselves controlled by the parents of students was leached away by state and provincial educational authorities.  As this happened, the professional educators grew increasingly to resent parental attempts to influence the education of their children, just as their, that is the “experts’” ideas of what ought to be taught became increasingly cockamamie and screwball.

 

By the 1990s, especially in urban areas, the schools had become so dehumanizing and spiritually dead that this combined with the new fad of doping kids with methylphenidate to treat the condition of childhood (especially boyhood) to produce the ever growing wave of school shootings.

 (1)   An interesting, although entirely unimportant aspect, is that the school where the shooting took place actually has “Secondary School” in its name.

(2)   It was greatly assisted down this path by the achievement of the “universal education” plank of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.  As with most of Marx’s bad ideas, liberalism and especially American liberalism, was far more effective at putting it into practice than the actual Communist movement.  Universal education is a bad idea for a number of reasons such as, but not limited to, that it involves the state confiscation of what is the natural property of the parent and it requires dropping the standards of education to a lowest common denominator.

(3)   In 1947, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote an essay “The Lost Tools of Learning” which points out the path back to sound education.

The Tests of Hyper-Protestantism

 

I have addressed various aspects of the problem of Hyper-Protestantism in several essays over the last few years.  I distinguish Hyper-Protestantism from ordinary Protestantism as being that which goes beyond rejecting and opposing errors that are distinctly Roman and rejects things that are genuinely Catholic as well.  That which is distinctly Roman is taught, practiced, or otherwise held only by the Roman Church, that is to say, the communion under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Rome who is more commonly called the Pope.  That is genuinely Catholic which is the common heritage of all Churches that descended from the Apostolic Church in Jerusalem.  In the fifth century, St. Vincent of Lérins identified three tests of Catholicity that have been widely accepted ever since – Antiquity, Universality, and Consent.  The test of Antiquity means that to be considered truly Catholic something must have demonstrably been part of Christian faith and practice, at least implicitly, since the earliest centuries.  The test of Universality means that something that only ever caught on in one region of the Church or something that became dominant throughout the Church for a limited period before being finally rejected cannot be considered Catholic, but only that which can be found throughout all the ancient Churches in all places and times.  The word consent does not today ordinarily mean what it does in St. Vincent’s test.  The test of Consent is the official approbation of legitimate Church authority.  If something is taught throughout the writings of the Church Fathers, was defined and defended against error by the Church in council, especially an ecumenical council (at the time St. Vincent wrote the Council of Ephesus had just brought the number of these to three, the first two having been Nicaea I and Constantinople I in the previous century, by the  end of the fifth century Chalcedon became the fourth ecumenical council, and three others Constantinople II, Constantinople III, and Nicaea II were generally recognized before the Great Schism at the end of the first millennium), or can otherwise be shown to be “official” Church teaching or practice  it passes the test of Consent.

 

To give a specific example of the difference between that which is Roman and that which is Catholic look at the doctrine of Purgatory and the practice of praying for the faithful departed.

 

Purgatory is a Roman doctrine not a Catholic doctrine.  The Church of Rome teaches it dogmatically, but the other ancient Churches do not.  Since neither the Oriental Orthodox Churches (Coptic Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, etc.) which rejected the Definition of Chalcedon of 451 and so broke with the rest of the Church nor the Assyrian Church of the East which rejected the condemnation of Nestorius in 431 teach Purgatory, this demonstrates that it was not received doctrine prior to the fifth century.  Some specific Eastern Orthodox leaders have taught it, but the Eastern Orthodox Church as a whole has rejected it, and it was a bone of contention during the reunification talks at both the Second Council of Lyon (1274) and the Council of Florence (1438-1445).  Clearly, therefore, Purgatory was not accepted as doctrine by the Catholic Church prior to the Great Schism (1054).    In the Church Fathers, the closest thing to it is found in the writings of Origen and St. Gregory of Nyssa.  These, however, were talking about hell, which their doctrine of Apokatastasis (final universal reconciliation for all) required that they interpret as something similar to what Rome would later call Purgatory. Apokatastasis was formally rejected by the Church in the fifth ecumenical council in the sixth century.  The doctrine of Purgatory, therefore, is distinctly Roman and not genuinely Catholic. 

 

This is not the case with the practice of praying for the faithful departed, however.  It is attested to since the earliest centuries, and an example of it may very well be found in the New Testament itself in II Tim. 1:18.  It is practiced not only by the Church of Rome but by the ancient pre-Reformation Churches that reject Purgatory, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Assyrian Church of the East.  The sixteenth century Reformers who thought it to stand or fall with the doctrine of Purgatory were clearly mistaken. It passes at least the tests of Antiquity and Universality.

 

This brings us to the question of whether there are any tests that we can apply to Protestant doctrines, positions, customs and assertions to determine whether they are Hyper or not.  The answer is yes.  Since St. Vincent offered three tests of Catholicity, I shall identity and discuss three tests of Hyper-Protestantism although more could be listed.  The rejection of things that are Catholic by St. Vincent’s definition as well as those that are distinctly Roman is the definition of Hyper-Protestantism and not one of the tests.

 

The first test of Hyper-Protestantism is the test of Catachresis.  Catachresis means the misuse of terms.  The specific example that is involved in this test is the pejorative use of the word Catholic.  Or, to approach it from another angle, the use of the word Catholic to mean that which is Roman.  This second wording is, perhaps, the better of the two because it reveals how Hyper-Protestantism actually betrays a principle of the Reformation.  The Roman Church claims that St. Peter was given jurisdiction over the Apostles and therefore over the whole Apostolic Church and that this jurisdiction was passed on to his successors in the bishopric of Rome, making the bishop of Rome the universal Patriarch, and the Catholic or whole Church co-extensive with his jurisdiction.   In other words, the Roman Church claims herself to be the Catholic (whole) Church.  The Reformers disputed this claim in the sixteenth century, as did the other four of the ancient patriarchates when the East and West mutually excommunicated each other in 1054.  Since one of those patriarchates is that of Jerusalem, which clearly has the better right to be considered the Mother Church than Rome, and another of those patriarchates is Antioch, which St. Peter also held before that of Rome, and yet a third is Constantinople which itself had claimed universal jurisdiction in the sixth century to have its claims – and all claims of universal jurisdiction – rebutted by Gregory I of Rome, using the same arguments that would later be used against his successors – Rome’s position is built on a foundation of quicksand.  Hyper-Protestantism’s use of the word Catholic, however, conforms to Rome’s position, not that of the Reformers

 

The second test of Hyper-Protestantism is the test of Misprioritization.  This is the elevating of Protestant doctrines to a level of importance higher than the faith common to all Christians as confessed in the ancient Creeds.  There is a secondary type of misprioritization in which even lesser doctrines (eschatological schemes, specific understandings of predestination, and the sort) are elevated above the core truths of the Reformation.  It is the first type that we will focus on here. 

 

There are various ways in which this done.  A common one is to threat the doctrines of the Reformation as if they were incapable of being distorted through exaggeration into heresy.  By contrast, the defenders of orthodoxy in the early Church recognized that any truth could be distorted into heresy by exaggeration and that the path of orthodoxy was the path of balancing and harmonizing different truths.  In those days, the main contested truths had to do with theology proper, the doctrine of God, especially the doctrine of the Trinity, and Christology, the Person of Jesus Christ.  The true and living God is One.  He is also, in a way different from the way in which He is One, Three.  If the Oneness of God is exaggerated, you get Judaism, Islam, and Unitarianism.  If the Threeness of God is exaggerated, you get polytheism.  The orthodox truth lies in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which harmonized and balances the Oneness and Threeness of God.  If you exaggerate the deity of Jesus Christ, you get such things as Docetism, the idea that Jesus’ humanity was just an appearance and had no material substance, or Apollinarianism, the idea that the divine Logos took the place that is filled by the human mind in other men, making His humanity incomplete.  Conversely, Jesus’ humanity can be exaggerated to as to deny or diminish His deity in ways such as Adoptionism (the idea that He was a man who became God at some point such as His baptism) or Ebionism (the idea that He was merely the greatest of all prophets rather than God Incarnate).  The orthodox truth is that He is fully God and fully Man.  The fifth century demonstrated that this was susceptible of further distortions by exaggerating either His two natures (so as to make Him two Persons occupying the same body, the Son of God and the Son of Man, which is the heresy called Nestorianism) or the unity of His Person so as to deny His two natures (such as in Eutychianism in which Jesus’ humanity is swallowed up into His deity so that only the latter remains) requiring the clarification of the orthodox doctrine of the Hypostatic Union in the Definition of Chalcedon.

 

Now think about that.  If such truths as the Oneness of God, the Threeness of God, the deity of Jesus Christ and His humanity, the Unity of His Person and His two natures can and have been each distorted by exaggeration into heresy, would it not be elevating the doctrines of the Reformation far above these truths to pretend that they cannot be similarly distorted?  Furthermore, would it not be precisely this sort of distortion to say, for example, that Churches which confess the orthodox truths of the ancient Creeds are not expressions of Biblical Christianity because they do not affirm the Reformation doctrine of justification?  Especially if in making such a statement all the ancient Churches are lumped in with Rome even though the worst errors that the Reformers opposed with regards to justification (that the works of sinful human beings have merit in God’s eyes, that they can have merit above and beyond what is required by God, that the keys involve the right to distribute or even sell for a profit this supererogatory merit, etc.) are ones that Rome alone among the ancient Churches fell into.

 

The answer to both of these questions is yes.  Moreover, it needs to be recognized that the Reformation doctrines are particularly susceptible of being exaggerated and distorted into heresies because of the way they are formulated.  Keep in mind here that the Five Solae are not a sixteenth century formulation but a twentieth century formulation read back onto the sixteenth century.  It was first formulated by German Roman Catholic liberation theologian Johann Baptiste Metz in 1965 but caught on especially among Calvinists who found a five point summary of the Reformation appealing because it made Calvinism (famously summarized in five points, those articulated in the canons of the Synod of Dort in the second decade of the seventeenth century which responded to the five points of the Arminian Remonstrance) seem more normative of Protestantism in general. It should also be noted that one of the Five Solae, Sola Gratia, is not a Reformation distinctive but is a Catholic doctrine recognized as such universally since the (regional) Council of Carthage’s condemnation of Pelagianism was confirmed the third ecumenical council and that the Five Solae do not include the doctrine of assurance which was at least as important to the sixteenth century Reformation, especially the Lutheran side, as any of the Solae.  Nevertheless, Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide were both indisputably central to the Reformation.  Both doctrines, defined properly, are sound.  The Latin word Sola, however, and its English equivalent “alone” is not a word that usually marks a doctrine as having been carefully formulated with an eye to the balanced truth of orthodoxy.

 

Consider Sola Scriptura.  The expression was first used by Dr. Luther just prior to the Diet of Worms (1521) where he famously took his stand on the doctrine. As Dr. Luther used it, however, it did not mean anything remotely close to what later Protestants, especially the Hypers, have taken it to mean.  Dr. Luther taught the Sufficiency, Primacy and Supremacy of the Scriptures, not the idea that each Christian should get his faith and practice directly from the Bible and only from the Bible with no regards whatsoever to what previous Christians have said, thought, and done individually or as the Church.  The expression “Sola Scriptura”, however, especially when not used in a full sentence such as “The Scriptures alone are infallible”, easily suggests this idea of the go-it-alone Christian.  Ironically, it contradicts the very authority it is intended to uphold for Scriptures themselves, St. Paul’s second epistle to the Thessalonians specifically, contain the instruction “Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle” (2 Thess. 2:15).  The traditions, i.e., that which has been passed on or handed down, which they have been taught, are what Christians are instructed here to stand fast and hold, whether the transmission is oral (“by word”) or written (“our epistle”) which latter category is the Scripture, the very designation of which means that which is written.  Note that the Scripture in this verse of the Scriptures is very much not “alone.”  Far better than this expression for explaining the Reformation teaching would be to employ the expressions the Sufficiency, Primacy, and Supremacy of the Scriptures.  Either Primacy or Sufficiency would be a better summary of all that Dr. Luther and the Reformers intended than that most insufficient word “Alone”.   Article VI of our reformed Anglican Church is not entitled “The Scriptures Alone” but “Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation.” It asserts “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.” (1)

 

Sola Fide, understood correctly, is merely the doctrine St. Paul taught in the fourth chapter of Romans, that being righteous in the eyes of God is a gift God gives by His grace and that for it to be such it has to be by faith and not by works.  St. Paul did not contradict St. James who says that justification is by works but he explained St. James, who does not use the word “grace” in the relevant portion of his epistle, to not be talking about justification before God (Rom. 4:2).   The Reformers were right to re-emphasize St. Paul’s doctrine to correct the heavy over-emphasis on works in late Medieval Roman theology.  Note, however, that St. Paul was able to articulate this doctrine without using the word “alone”.  Note also, that when St. Paul identified the Gospel that he preached, he did not say that it was the doctrine of justification but that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and the testimony of eyewitnesses enumerated by the Apostle (1 Cor. 15:3ff).  Since this is included in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, confessed by all the ancient Churches, and is indeed, central to it, it cannot be legitimately said that the Church ever “lost” the Gospel as is claimed by the idea of restorationism which is common to all the heretical sects that evangelicals grew accustomed to calling cults towards the end of the last century.  Neither Dr. Luther and his associates nor the English Reformers (or the more responsible among the Swiss Reformers) were restorationists but the door which let restorationism and Hyper-Protestantism in was opened by referring to St. Paul’s doctrine of justification, re-articulated with the word alone, as being itself the Gospel.  (2)

 

 

The third test of Hyper-Protestantism is the test of Mendacity.  Hyper-Protestantism is willing to sacrifice truthfulness to the cause of opposing Rome. While some of the better known examples of this predate the internet, the internet meme has greatly exacerbated this tendency of Hyper-Protestantism.  In the last couple of months I have seen Hyper-Protestant memes attacking the Roman Church posted to social media on a daily basis.  I don’t remember a single one of them that did not make some irresponsible and easily rebuttable claim or another.

 

One of these, from a Baptist source, made the claim that the Scriptures do not teach that Mary is the New Eve, that this claim comes from late Medieval Scholasticism, and was invented for the purpose of supporting Rome’s doctrine about Mary being the Co-Redemptrix.  This was a particularly remarkable example because rather than mixing one or two errors into what was otherwise correct this meme did not get a single thing right. 

 

Mary is contrasted with Eve in this way by St. Justin Martyr in Dialogue With Trypho 100 and by St. Irenaeus of Lyon in Against Heresies 3.22.4.  These are both second century sources, written in approximately 150 and 180 respectively.  This identification of Mary with Eve was raised again by Tertullian, the first major theologian to write in Latin, in a treatise written against the Docetic arguments of the Marcionites and Valentinians in the first decade of the third century, On the Flesh of Christ, 17.  It was also one of several Marian themes that appear in the writings of Origen, the most important theologian of the early Alexandrian Church, who was about thirty years younger than Tertullian.  Origen, in whose writings the first extent use of the word Theotokos can be found, wrote about the Perpetual Virginity of Mary and explored the parallels between her and Eve in the commentaries and expository homilies he wrote and gave after his relocation to Caesarea Maritima in 231.  The theme of Mary as the New Eve is also prominent in the homilies of Origen’s most celebrated student, St. Gregory Thaumaturgos, who was born a couple of years after Tertullian wrote the work mentioned above and became Bishop of his native Neocaesarea later that century.  See, for example, the first three of the homilies in the collection Four Homilies, which three have the common topic of the Annunciation and the homily on “The Holy Mother of God, Ever Virgin” which is extent only in Armenian rather than Greek and in which the comparison/contrast between Eve and Mary opens the homily. In the centuries that follow this theme can be found in the extend works of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and basically all the major Church Fathers.  It was a common Patristic idea long before there was any such thing as Scholasticism.

 

Moreover, the idea is derived directly from the Scriptures.  In Genesis 3:15, the first promise of the Messiah in the Old Testament, the expression “the woman” appears.  In the context of Genesis 3, “the woman” has to be Eve.  The Seed of the woman, Who is prophesied to crush the head of the serpent, however, is Christ, so “the woman” of this verse also has to be Mary.  This one expression “the woman” has, therefore, double reference to Eve and to Mary.  We find this again in the twelfth chapter of Revelation.  The woman there is identified as Mary by the fact that she gives birth to Christ (vv. 4-5).  The chapter also, however, stresses the enmity between her and the dragon (vv. 4, 6, 13-17) and when it identifies the dragon the wording points directly back to Genesis 3 “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan” (v. 9). Revelation 12, therefore, places this woman who gave birth to Christ, Mary, in the role of Eve, whose enemy is the serpent.  The identification of Mary with Eve is also the significance of Jesus’ addressing His mother as “Woman” in John 2:4 and 19:26. (3)  In Genesis, this is what Adam calls Eve when God first makes her (Gen. 2:24) and what she is called throughout the Creation/Fall narrative until after the curse, when her name Eve is used for the first time (Gen. 3:20).

 

Note that the New Testament basis for identifying Mary as the New Eve comes from the writings of St. John the Apostle.  This is itself significant because St. Irenaeus grew up under the teaching of St. Polycarp of Smyrna, himself a direct disciple of St. John.  St. Justin Martyr, while not among the direct disciples of St. John in this same way, incorporated Johannine themes into all his writings, wrote and set Dialogue with Trypho in Ephesus, the city where St. John had spent most of the latter part of his life, and is the earliest witness to the Johannine authorship of Revelation.  The earliest Church Fathers to speak of Mary as the New Eve were directly influenced by the Apostle whose New Testament writings provide the Scriptural basis for this idea.

 

Not only does this meme illustrate the lackadaisical attitude towards the truth, at least where Rome is concerned, on the part of Hyper-Protestants, (Luke Skywalker’s line from The Last Jedi, “Amazing, every word of what you just said was wrong” could have been addressed to it), it also illustrates the fittingness of the expression “Hyper-Protestant.”  By accusing an idea, which the slightest amount of real research would have revealed to date to the earliest centuries of Christianity, to have been ubiquitous among the Church Fathers, and to be based in Scripture itself, of having been developed late in Church history to support the least defensible of Rome’s Marian terminology, one never formally dogmatized and which Rome has recently taken steps to walk back, Hyper-Protestants go well beyond what the sixteenth century Reformers themselves had to say against Rome with regards to Mary, which really wasn’t all that much.  Indeed, most of the Reformers, certainly the Lutheran and English Reformers, but even the fathers of the Reformed tradition including Calvin himself, would have to be classified as rank Mariolators if we were to go by the standards of Hyper-Protestantism.

 

As noted earlier, this characteristic of Hyper-Protestantism predates the internet meme.  The late Jack T. Chick, the fundamentalist Baptist publisher from Los Angeles famous for his cartoon tracts – small, rectangular booklets, which tell a story in comic-book style that leads up to an evangelistic appeal – saw his credibility take several blows in the last decades of the twentieth century when he repeatedly published or distributed testimonies/exposes that proved incapable of withstanding serious scrutiny as to their truthfulness.  While not all of these pertained to the Roman Church, the most notorious example was his publication of the testimony of Alberto Rivera, who claimed to be an ex-Jesuit and on the basis of whose testimony, he accused the Roman Church of being behind everything from the creation of Islam to Nazi Germany to the decay of morals in the late twentieth century United States. 

 

Evangelist Ralph Woodrow wrote “It puzzles me how some can be so fanatical against one set of errors—or what they perceive to be errors—only to develop greater errors: becoming judgmental, hateful, and dishonest”.  Woodrow wrote this in the context of explaining why he had withdrawn his best-seller, Babylon Mystery Religion, widely distributed by Chick, from circulation.  His book had drawn its inspiration from The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop, a nineteenth century minister of the Scottish Free Church (Presbyterian) that tried to trace everything in Roman Catholicism that could not be found in the pages of Scripture (and much that could) back to Nimrod (who built the Tower of Babel/Babylon, the cult of whom Hislop claimed to be the original template of all paganism).  Woodrow, after prayerfully re-examining Hislop’s book and checking its sources, withdrew his own book and wrote The Babylon Connection? a book length rebuttal of his own previous book and his primary source.  A shorter version of his critique of Hislop’s methodology appeared in the Christian Research Journal.

 

With the Vincentian tests of antiquity, universality, and consent, something has to pass all three to be genuinely Catholic.  With these tests of Hyper-Protestantism, Catachresis, Misprioritization and Mendacity, passing any one of them indicates an infection.  Passing all three indicates that the theological disease has reached an advanced stage.

 

(1)   Article VI is quite lengthy, but the first sentence as quoted in the text of this essay is the full content of the Article as far as explaining the subject in the title goes.  The remainder of the Article is a clarification of what is meant by “Holy Scripture”.  Here too, the Article is worded so as to assert only what all Protestants can affirm and not the more extreme position which became more common starting in the seventeenth century.  The canonical books are listed for both Testaments, and the deutero-canonical books are also listed of which the Article merely says “And the other Books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.”  The more extreme version of Protestantism says that these books have no place in the Bible whatsoever, warns people against reading them, and says that they were added to the Bible by the Roman Church in the Council of Trent.

 

This, however, illustrates the third test of Hyper-Protestantism, the devaluing of truth.  It is common today for Roman Catholic apologists to accuse Protestants of taking books out of the Bible, and of Protestant apologists to accuse the Roman Catholic Church of adding them.  Neither of these is entirely right, although the Roman Catholic accusation is closer to the truth.  The deutero-canonical books are, for the most part, (2 Esdras, called “The Fourth Book of Esdras” in Article VI, is the exception) books found in the Septuagint, the Greek translation that the Church received as her Old Testament from the first century but which were never included in the canon recognized by rabbinic Judaism.  If the Roman Catholic Church had “added” them in the sixteenth century, we could expect that Churches that broke fellowship with Rome earlier wold not include them in their Bibles.  This is not the case.  Generally, the further back the schism, the more the deuterocanonical books you find in the Bibles of the other Churches.  The Eastern Orthodox Church which broke with the Roman Catholic in 1054 has 3 and 4 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh, and Psalm 151 in its Bible.  The Oriental Orthodox Churches which broke with the Chalcedonian Churches in the fifth century has these and, in the case of those which use the Tewahedo Bible (Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Churches), Enoch and Jubilees.  The Assyrian Church of the East which uses the Syriac Peshitta as its Bible includes most of the same deutero-canon as the Roman Catholic Church plus Psalm 151 and the Prayer of Manasseh. 

 

What happened in the sixteenth century was that both the Roman Catholic Church and the early Reformers, shifted books from category to category in the Bible.  Dr. Luther left the deuterocanonical books in the Bible but shifted them out of the Old Testament and into a section unfortunately labelled “Apocrypha”, inaccurately using a term that the Church Fathers applied to a different set of writings altogether.  The same was done in the Authorized Bible in 1611 and Article VI reflects the thinking behind this.  The deuterocanonical books are not “canonical” in the sense of being the “canon” or “rule” by which doctrine is proved, but they are not “non-canonical” in the sense of not being included in the Bible altogether.  What the Roman Catholic Church did at Trent was to shift these books into the “canon” in the sense of doctrine-proving books.  The other ancient Churches, while regarding these books as part of the Old Testament, had never regarded them as being equally canonical in this sense.

(2)  Once something other than the Gospel preached by St. Paul, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures and was buried and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures is identified as the Gospel, even if it be St. Paul’s own doctrine of justification, so as to make the claim that all the Churches that confess that Christ, the second person of the Trinity, incarnate as the God-Man, died for our sins, and was buried, and rose again don’t have the Gospel  if they don’t have that doctrine in its Reformation reformulation, the door is opened to making this same claim about another doctrine so as to exclude others who do also confess the doctrine of justification in its Reformation formulation. 

 

Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the Calvinist Baptist preacher of the nineteenth century, is frequently quoted as having said “Calvinism is the Gospel, and nothing else.”  Other Calvinists have identified the “doctrines of grace” as the Gospel.  These, however, are doctrines pertaining to predestination, a matter about which God keeps His own counsel and which is hardly of the essence of the kerygma His Church is charged with proclaiming to the world.  

 

Recently a Calvinist Baptist friend posted to social media an excerpt from John Wesley’s writings in which he referred to himself as “almost a Christian”.  My friend used to this to try and argue that Wesley was never a Christian and that the Gospel he preached – Wesley was an Arminian – was not the real Gospel.  I had to rebuke him and point out that it was quite clear, even from the excerpt from Wesley that he had included in his post, that the revivalist was talking about his life prior to Aldersgate (where, at a meeting of the Moravians in which Dr. Luther’s preface to Romans was being read, he testified “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”)

(3)   Jesus also addresses the Samaritan woman, the woman caught in adultery, and Mary Magdalen as “woman” but there was nothing unusual about these instances.  This was not rude in first century Palestine the way it is in the English-speaking world of our day, it was closer to addressing a woman as “ma’am” in our culture.  Jesus’ addressing His mother this way was unusual, however. St. John records Jesus doing so twice, at the very beginning of His ministry and the very end.  The first of these is at the wedding of Cana, where Jesus performed His first miracle.  St. John tells us that this occurred on “the third day” which was to the last of the four days in the previous chapter as the Sunday on which Jesus rose was “the third day” to the Friday on which He was crucified, making this the sixth day.  This, coming as it does at the start of a Gospel which begins by pointing back to Genesis and Creation, is evocative of the sixth day of Creation, the day in which God created man “male and female” and Adam named Eve “woman”.  At the end of His earthly ministry, Jesus’ addresses Mary as “woman” again and tells her to “behold thy son” as He instructs St. John to “behold thy mother”.  Here too is an allusion to the first woman who at the end of the Creation/Fall account in Genesis is given the name Eve because she is the “mother of all living.”