The Right Word(s) for Opposing Liberalism

In a social media group devoted to Canadian Politics last week, I saw someone make the claim that the old Conservatives have disappeared and been replaced by the Reform/Alliance types and that today’s Liberals are where the Conservatives were forty plus years ago.  She was half-right.  The part she got wrong, however, was the exact opposite of the truth, a fact of which I informed her. 

 

It is true that those who call themselves “Conservatives”, big or little c, today, are basically a watered down version of what the Reform/Alliance was in the final decade of the last century, which was a populist party that was “conservative” only in the American sense of the word, a sense which has no roots deeper than the (classical) liberalism upon which the United States was founded and which is not significantly different from the original philosophy and platform of the Liberal Party (which called itself Reform in the era of Confederation).  The shift from the old Canadian conservatism to American-style neo-conservatism is not however, as this lady seemed to think, adequately explained by the dropping of “Progressive” from the party’s title. “Progressive” was not part of the party’s title in Confederation but was added to it about a decade after the old “Progressive” party – a farmers’ populist party – dissolved.  This was done because John Bracken, the premier of my province at that time, had been asked to take over the leadership of the federal Conservatives and made this a condition of his acceptance.  Bracken had been premier of Manitoba since 1922 (he was the longest to serve in this office), initially governing as leader of the provincial version of the Progressive Party (which at first called itself the United Farmers of Manitoba), then after the party collapsed as leader of the Manitoba Liberals.  When “progressive” was added to the title of the Conservative Party therefore, it was with the sense of “western, agrarian, populist” and not the sense it normally has in politics.

 

It is not true that today’s Liberals, big or small l, are where the old Conservatives were prior to neo-conservatism.  On one important matter they are portraying themselves as taking the position of the old Conservatives, the matter of standing up for Canada against the threat of American takeover.  Note that the threat and their stance against it conveniently came at the time when they were facing an historical defeat in a Dominion election.  That Canadians bought this posturing from the Liberals - the reverse of their historical position which had been to push for closer economic, cultural and political ties between Canada and the United States – can probably be attributed to neo-conservatism’s takeover of the Conservative party, although the Conservatives having betrayed their old position for that of the Liberal Party by no means logically implies that the Liberals can be trusted to stand up for the old Conservative position.  For most of the past thirteen years, the Liberals have positioned themselves not where the old Conservatives were prior to neo-conservatism, but in territory that forty-some years ago would have been regarded as beyond the pale in the land of the looney Left.   They were taking positions on moral, social, and cultural matters that as recently as twenty years ago, liberals of my acquaintance insisted could not possibly be the direction towards which their movement was heading and which until about twenty years ago, would have been regarded as too far to the Left even by some members of the NDP. (1)  Indeed, the Liberals’ relentless insistence on shoving this looney-tunes nonsense down Canadians throats, no matter how unpopular it was, significantly contributed to the rapidly declining polls from which they were rescued by a change in leadership around the time the jackass that the Americans had recently returned to the White House started relentlessly threatening us with Anschluss.  The current Liberal leader, whom I call Blofeld due to his resemblance to the last actor to play that character in a James Bond film, (2) is not the exact replica of his predecessor, whom I call Captain Airhead for obvious reasons, that the neo-conservative media try to make him out to be.  Nevertheless the Liberal Party he leads, while perhaps somewhat closer to the centre than before, is still out there in left field.

 

In the same social media discussion I said that I am no longer comfortable describing myself as a “conservative” since over the course of my lifetime I have seen this word co-opted by the neo-conservatives and redefined to mean what it means in the United States, i.e., the older form of American liberal.  I am comfortable with the term “conservative” only in the older and better sense of the word, the sense associated in Canada with Sir John A. Macdonald and the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker, with humourist/economist Stephen Leacock, philosopher George Grant, and historian Donald Creighton.  The “conservative” whose conservatism is that of John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown and Diefenbaker’s Those Things We Treasure rather than that of National Review and Fox News, a conservatism that looks back to Edmund Burke and better yet Richard(s) Hooker and Field, Dean Swift, John Dryden and Dr. Johnson rather than to John Locke and J. S. Mill.  A conservatism that is all about tradition, order, and continuity, which places honour, loyalty, and the virtues of Christendom and the age of chivalry above the values of commercialism and mercantilism. A conservatism which believes in freedom in community rather than in isolated and atomized individuals, which trusts the Westminster parliamentary system that has been refined during the course of a thousand years of history over any constitution drawn up on paper three centuries ago by revolutionaries who wanted a break from the past, and which believes in the institution of royal monarchy with its prescriptive authority and its superior representative ability due to its transcendence of partisan politics over the crass republicanism that makes the highest political office the prize of a highly divisive popularity contest and which is born out of thinking Satan’s thoughts after him.  Since the neo-conservatives have been so successful in divorcing the term from these associations I prefer the older term Tory and gladly self-apply the term reactionary, derived from the movement that put an end to Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, that progressives (in the normal sense of the word, not agrarian populists) have long used of non-progressives who are not content with merely questioning liberalism’s most recent ideas.

 

Shortly after the aforementioned discussion it occurred to me that in the sphere of religion and theology I feel largely the same way about the term “evangelical.”  When I first encountered this word as a young Christian it was used to mean something like “non-liberal Protestant”.  To clarify, “liberal” in the preceding sentence does not have its political connotation but refers to someone who holds to revisionist theology, that is to say, theology that has been revised in accordance with the mistaken notion that Modern discoveries of various sorts (scientific, critical, etc.) have placed such things as the historical accuracy of the Scriptures and the possibility of miracles outside the realm of the credible.  Think of the kind of person who says that he believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ but by this does not mean what Christians have historically and traditionally meant by this - that the eternal Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, at one point in history entered the womb of the Blessed Virgin, took a complete but sinless human nature at the moment into His own eternal Person from the moment it was formed and from that point forward was both fully God and fully Man in One Person, the Person Who upon His birth was given the name Jesus and Who fulfilled the prophecy of the Christ – but rather means that there is a spark of divinity in all people (as the ancient Gnostic heretics taught) that was bigger or more apparent in Jesus.  Or the kind of person who says that he believes in the resurrection of Jesus Christ but who also thinks that His bones might be discovered some day.  From the moment I became aware of this kind of liberalism, I loathed it as much if not more than the political ideology by the same name. (3)

 

That having been said, even back in the ‘90’s I was not a big fan of using the word “evangelical” for Protestants who were “conservative” in the theological sense.  I learned fairly early in my Christian walk that this use of the word dated back to the 1950s when certain conservative Protestants – Carl F. H. Henry, Harold John Ockenga, Billy Graham, Fuller Seminary, Christianity Today – started to use it to distance themselves from fundamentalists.  “Fundamentalist”, while now used by progressives to refer to anyone from any religion who has not compromised the traditional beliefs of his religion to their liking, was coined in the early twentieth century by Protestant theologians actively fighting the takeover of their denominations by liberalism and originally meant a kind of conservative pan-Protestant alternate ecumenism (4).   Those who chose the term “evangelical” to distance themselves from fundamentalism, although they claimed they wanted a more intellectual approach (5), really meant that they wanted a more compromising and less combative approach to liberalism.  Twenty years later, writers within evangelicalism were warning that some in the movement were abandoning sound theology, at least with regards to the infallible authority of Scripture. (6)

 

There are other connotations to the word “evangelical” than “theologically conservative Protestant”, of course, and when the new “evangelicals” of the 1950s chose this word to distance themselves from the fundamentalists it was because the word was older and had these other connotations.  In the sixteenth century, Dr. Luther and the other Reformers used the word to distinguish themselves from the papacy and its followers.  Used in this sense it was synonymous with Protestant and in much of Europe today it retains the meaning of “Protestant” and is used of anyone who is Protestant in ecclesiastical affiliation regardless of what his theology may be.  In the Anglican Church, which retained her Catholic structure through and after the Reformation, those who emphasized her ongoing Catholicity and those who stressed her Protestantism often sparred with each other and those stressed the Protestantism formed a faction and called themselves evangelical.  In the eighteenth century, evangelical took on yet another meaning in the English-speaking world as it became attached to the emphasis upon a personal conversion experience in the revivals that attended on the preaching of John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Howell Harris, Daniel Rowland, Ebenezer Erskine, Gilbert Tennent, Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen, James Davenport, Jonathan Dickinson, Samuel Davies and others.  This became the primary meaning of the word in North America and is the meaning which the new “evangelicals” of the 1950s, who largely built their movement around the success of the Billy Graham evangelistic crusades, (7) most clearly had in mind.

 

My degree of comfort with the term varies in accordance with these connotations.  None of them is entirely unproblematic.  The one with which I am the most comfortable is Dr. Luther’s.  He used the word because he did not want his followers to be called by his own name (8) but by the name of the Gospel.  The implication, however, is that the doctrine of justification by faith alone is “the Gospel”, that it had been lost, and that he had rediscovered it.  Dr. Luther did not actually think this way, but since him it has been taken this far.  I know of some, for example, who think that all of the ancient Churches, not just Rome, but the churches of the East and the further East, lost the Gospel ages ago and that it was only rediscovered in the sixteenth century.  These are blissfully ignorant of the fact that their view of Church history is both heretical and identical with that of all the sects that they label “cults.”  The doctrine of justification by faith alone, important as it is, is not the Gospel.  If it were the Gospel, then Christianity would be saying to the world “we’ve got good news for you, all you have to do is believe” and worded that way the doctrine ceases to be a precious truth and becomes the noxious heresy of antinomianism. (9) Any truth can become a heresy if focused on to the point that we lose sight of other necessary truths.  In the early Church, the deity of Jesus Christ and His humanity, the oneness and the Threeness of God, were each twisted into heresies that denied their complementary truths.  The same is done to justification by faith alone when it is made out to be the Gospel, rather than ancillary to the Gospel.  The Gospel is that Jesus Christ, the Eternal Son of God become Man for us, died for our sins, according to the Scriptures and was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and was seen by a multitude of witnesses (1 Cor. 15:3ff). This message, the Good News that Christianity is commanded to preach to the world, is central to the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, the Creed that is most truly universal being confessed by all the ancient Churches, including the Roman, and by the three main Reformation traditions.

 

I am less comfortable with the North American meaning of the word than with Dr. Luther’s.  The revivalist message, that each of us needs to internalize our faith, to repent of our sins and commit to personally following Christ, rather than relying upon external Church membership and attendance, is sound enough.  Unfortunately, it is often preached in an unhealthy way that has the opposite effect to that of Dr. Luther’s evangelical message.  Dr. Luther, in emphasizing justification by faith alone, directed the believer to look outside himself, through the eyes of faith, to his Redeemer proclaimed in the Gospel (that He died for our sins – it is finished – and rose again, objective, external, historical facts).  North American evangelicalism, by contrast, tends to turn the believer’s eyes back onto himself, to get him to constantly question whether his faith experience is real, and to answer the call of the evangelist repeated times, with decreasing levels of assurance each time.  If sixteenth century evangelicalism tended towards the error of confusing the ancillary doctrine of justification by faith alone with the Gospel itself, North American evangelicalism tends towards the error of confusing “ye must be born again” with the Gospel, a worse error because these words, by stating the need of the soul of fallen man, are closer in nature to Law than Gospel.  It lends to the problem of the inner-directed gaze by tying the re-birth, contrary to the Church Fathers, the ancient Churches, the three branches of the Magisterial Reformation, not to the Sacrament of Baptism which like the internal work of the Holy Spirit of which it is the outward symbol cannot (and need not) be repeated and in which the recipient is passive but to a personal act of repentance and (re-)dedicating oneself to Christ which is active on the part of the participant, which can be repeated, and which ought to be repeated as the need arises. (10)

 

The connotations of evangelical in the Anglican context, to the extent they are distinct from the previous two sets, are those with which I am least comfortable.  In the sixteenth century, evangelical as applied to the reformed Church of England had Dr. Luther’s meaning, today it is closer to the generic North American meaning, but in between it was the name of a faction or party within the reformed Church of England.  That forming a faction or party within the Church is a bad thing to do is one of the main themes of St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians.  Of course, someone might respond that this point could be raised against the Anglican Church’s post-Reformation status as a distinct Church.  The answer to this, of course, is that in the New Testament there was a huge difference between the factions within the Corinthian Church declaring themselves to be “of Apollos”, or “of Cephas” or “of Paul” on the one hand, and the distinction on the other hand between “the Church in Galatia” or “the Church in Thessalonica” or between the seven Churches to whom letters are addressed in the second and third chapters of the Apocalypse.  In the English Reformation, when the Church of England in conjunction with Parliament declared herself free from the usurped authority of the Patriarch of Rome, she did not excommunicate said Patriarch nor did she excommunicate the Latin Church that remained under his authority.  The excommunication ran entirely in the opposite direction, demonstrating where the spirit of schism truly lay. (11)   Indeed, apart from its factionalism what I dislike the most about the Anglican Church’s evangelical faction is the low value it places on the efforts of the English Reformers to not be schismatic, to maintain continuity with the pre-Reformation Church, to keep the reforms moderate and conservative, and to be guided by how the Church of the first millennium and especially the early Patristic centuries interpreted the Scripture in making what reforms she made.  The evangelical faction of the Anglican Church has undergone many internal changes, (12) what has remained consistent about it is that it stresses things that we have in common with only the Lutherans, Reformed, and some of the separatist sects above the faith, spelled out in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds which we have in common with all of the ancient Churches as well as the Lutherans, the Reformed on their best days, and slightly fewer of the separatist sects and other things (liturgical worship, three-fold historical ministry with episcopal government, etc.) that we have in common with the other ancient Churches and some of the Lutherans.  The proper hierarchy of value is that the common faith is most important, followed by the other things we have in common with all the ancient Churches, followed by the things we have in common with the Lutherans and Reformed.

 

With these misgivings about these three historical uses of the term and especially since the one with which I am most comfortable, Dr. Luther’s, has decayed into the contemporary European usage in which it is a synonym for Protestant regardless of theology, I would very much prefer that another term be used for a theological conservative.  Fundamentalist would be better except that around the time that the new evangelicalism was distancing itself from fundamentalism, fundamentalism was narrowing its own self-identity in less-than-desirable ways (13).  Catholic would be better yet were it not for the fact that most Protestants have conceded it to Rome making it impossible for anybody else to use it without a disclaimer as long as the Oxford English Dictionary.  This leaves us with orthodox, which has never been conceded to the Eastern Church the way Catholic has been to the Roman (traditionalist Roman Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants have always used it and it has long been the preferred term of those Anglicans who stress the importance of maintaining continuity in doctrine, structure, worship and practice with the Church of the first millennium, especially the first five centuries), and would have been the best option regardless since it has been the term for doctrinal soundness since the very beginning.

 

 

 

 

(1)   It was roughly twenty years ago that one NDP member, Bev Desjarlais, voted against Bill C-38, which established the legal fiction of same-sex marriage across the Dominion, although it cost her the nomination of her party in the next election. The Liberals of the last thirteen years have moved much further down the slippery-slope from the Civil Marriage Act.

(2)   The resemblance is almost as remarkable as that between David Bentley Hart, the lay Eastern Orthodox theologian whose liberal Protestant views pass as traditional Eastern Orthodox ones to Westerners who are not sufficiently read in the theology of the East to know the difference and the late M*A*S*H actor David Ogden Stiers (after Stiers grew a beard in the mid ‘90’s) or between Captain Airhead’s current girlfriend and actress Zooey Deschanel.

(3)   The term “liberal” in both instances refers to the acceptance of Modern ideas over older, classical and traditional ideas.  About a century ago “liberal” theologians were called Modernists which is more accurate label.  The term “liberal” comes from the Latin word for “generous”.  Whether in the realm of politics or theology, it is a form of self-flattery and those who do not themselves identify as “liberals” seldom see in “liberals” the generosity and broad-mindedness they claim for themselves, quite the opposite.

(4)   As represented, for example, by the volumes The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, edited by A. C. Dixon, Louis Meyer, and R. A Torrey, originally published in twelve volumes from 1910 to 1915, then rebound in the four volumes they have been published as ever since in 1917.  Dixon was a Baptist minister, Meyer a Reformed Presbyterian, Torrey a Congregationalist, and the contributors included Presbyterians such as James Orr, A. T. Pierson, and B. B. Warfield, Baptists such as E. Y. Mullins, G. Campbell Morgan, and Thomas Spurgeon, Anglicans such as Dyson Hague, W. H. Griffith Thomas, Handley Moule, G. Osborne Troop and C. T. Studd, Methodists such as A. C. Gaebelein and John L. Nuelson, Lutheran Frederic Bettex, A. J. Pollack of the Plymouth Brethren, and various other contributors from these and other denominations.

(5)   A laughable claim since they were hardly more scholarly then the men who contributed to The Fundamentals, note 4 vide supra.  Mark A. Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994) was a tremendous indictment of the movement’s efforts in this regards after four decades.  Perhaps if “intellectual” is taken in the uncomplimentary sense with which Tom Wolfe used to use or as is used by historian Paul Johnson in his Intellectuals (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988) it might be defensible.

(6)   Harold Lindsell, The Battle for the Bible (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 1976) followed by his The Bible in the Balance (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 1979) for example.  A decade later Francis Schaeffer addressed the declining doctrinal standards of evangelicalism in his last book The Great Evangelical Disaster (Wheaton: Crossway, 1984).

(7)   Apart from doing what he was most famous for doing, Billy Graham was the founder of Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of the new evangelicalism.  Carl F. H. Henry was the magazine’s first editor.

(8)   As Robert Burns said “the best laid scheme o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.”

(9)   Gospel means “good news”.  If “justification by faith alone” were the Gospel this would mean that it is itself the central content of the message of Christianity.  The very wording, “justification by faith alone”, however, should make it obvious that this is not the kerygma but a theological formulation.  If you try to express what “justification by faith alone” means as a message addressed to people in the second person then you end up with “all you have to do is believe”.  There is a huge difference between saying that “all you have to do is believe” is Christianity’s message to a fallen and sinful world and saying that Christianity’s message is “God has given us a Saviour, His Only-Begotten Son, Who became a man just like us except without sin, Who died for our sins upon the cross that He might take them away and defeat the enemies that have held us in spiritual bondage since our first parents, Who after He was buried showed His triumph over these enemies of sin and death by rising again from the dead, leaving the grave behind, showing Himself to His followers, and ascending back to His Father” and that we are to believe this message and trust this Saviour rather than in our own efforts to please God.

 

The second wording shows where the doctrine of justification by faith alone belongs, in the unrolling of the implications of the Gospel for us, that because the Saviour God has given us is so perfect and the salvation He accomplished for us so complete, He and not our own efforts is the proper object of our faith, just as He and not our own faith, is the proper content of the Gospel.  The first wording, however, expresses what you get when you make justification by faith alone itself out to be the Gospel.  This is not what those who call justification by faith alone the Gospel usually intend to convey, they have just not thought through the implications of what they are saying. 

 

In the text of the essay I identified the heresy which they unintentionally make themselves guilty of by sloppy thinking as antinomianism.  This is because if “all you have to do is believe” is itself the “good news”, this translates into “you don’t have to do good” which is the historical meaning of antinomianism (more precisely, antinomianism is the idea that Christians do not have to obey the moral part of the law), whereas justification by faith alone in its proper place, does not tell you that you don’t have to do good, it tells you that your efforts to do good cannot save you or assist in your salvation, and that you are to trust in Jesus Christ rather than them. 

 

Anti-protestant apologists, usually for Rome, like to refer to the heresy of “solafideism”.  This suggests that “justification by faith alone” is itself, and not merely its being placed in the centre of the Christian kerygma bumping out Jesus, His death, and resurrection, a heresy.  This, however, ignores the very nature of heresy.  At the core of every heresy is a truth which has been misplaced, taken out of its proper context, so that other truths are diminished or denied.  The truth at the core of Sabellianism (modalism, the denial of the distinct Persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is the unity of God.  The truth at the core of Tritheism (the denial of the unity of Being of Father, Son, Holy Spirit so as to make them three Gods) is the distinction of the Persons.  The truth at the core of Nestorianism (the separation of the deity and humanity of Jesus Christ so as to divide His Person) is that His human nature remains distinct from His divine nature even though they are united in His Eternal Person so that whatever is true of either of them is also true of Him, the Person. 

 

If there is a heresy of Solafideism this can only be because there is a truth of Solafideism.  If there is a heresy of Solafideism  which denies James 2:24 (and the larger passage in which it is found), then the truth Solafideism is the affirmation of Romans 4:3-5 (the wording of verse five is much stronger than what could be conveyed by the word “alone” or “only”), the entire chapter in which it is found and those before and after, the epistle of Galatians, Ephesians 2:8-10, Titus 3:4-8 (notice how the last two passages make the good works, the need for which they declare in the final verse, rest upon the foundation of their not having contributed to salvation by grace) and all the passages in the Johannine corpus (far too numerous to list but take the best known verse of the New Testament, John 3:16 as an example) which promise everlasting life to “whosoever believeth” in Jesus. 

 

Historically, if the Reformers placed too much importance on justification by faith alone by carelessly speaking as if they had recovered a lost Gospel, this is because Rome, despite having been officially committed to Sola Gratia since the days of St. Augustine of Hippo, had in practice been denying all the “to him that worketh not” and “not by works of righteousness which we have done” and the like found in these passages by exaggerating the importance and value of good works to the point of having created a treadmill theology in which people were kept on the treadmill of good works by having the carrot of salvation dangled in front of them, tantalizingly just out of reach, while they are whipped from behind with threats of hellfire or its unscriptural second cousin once removed purgatorial fire.  When challenged by the Reformers on this, Rome doubled down on this error, denied any truth to Solafideism (thus carelessly denying the truth of the passages just referenced) and made herself guilty of a far bigger and worse heresy than the one of which they accused the Reformers.

 

“Not by works”, which expresses what the “alone” in “faith alone” means much more strongly than the word “alone” ever could, occurs throughout the Pauline corpus of the New Testament.  It cannot be explained away by saying that the works in question are merely the ceremonial works of the Mosaic Law.  Titus 3:5’s “not by works of righteousness” clearly excludes this explanation.  So does St. Paul’s explanation of why justification is not by works – “that it might be by grace” (Rom. 4:16), that is to say, a gift.  Faith can receive a salvation that is freely given, works cannot, if they enter the picture then what they receive is a reward or a wage not a gift.  All “faith alone” was ever supposed to mean is that faith does not share its role in God’s order of salvation, the role of the hand that receives the freely given gift of God’s grace in Jesus Christ, with anything else.  Works cannot perform this role, neither can repentance which has the ancillary role of preparing the soul that it may trust in God’s grace, nor can the Sacraments which like the preaching of the Word are the hands of the Giver not of the recipient.  Anyone who considers that to be heresy, is himself the heretic.

(10)                       Note that the word “conversion”, while it can often mean accepting the faith for the first time, such as when we speak of someone from another religion (Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, etc.) or from a secular faith that masquerades as a non-religion (atheism, Communism, etc.) converting to Christianity, in which case it has the same one-time, not-to-be-repeated connotations of baptism and the spiritual work of regeneration, it is also  used in Scripture for occasions when a Christian is restored after a fall (see Lk. 22:32, in which Jesus speaks of St. Peter’s restoration after denying Him as a future conversion, St. Peter having already confessed the saving faith of Jn. 20:31 at Caesarea Philippi in Matt. 16:16 and been told that he was blessed because he had been enlightened by the Father Himself) and so denotes something that is repeatable (despite the nonsense which some early Christians held and which, due to the influence of the Shephard of Hermas, it took a couple of centuries for the early Church to fully repudiate, that each Christian is allowed only one big screw up and do-over after his baptism). 

(11)                       To make the point even clearer, dialogue between the reformed Church of England and the Eastern Orthodox Churches, more specifically between the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, at the time Cyril Lucaris, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, first George Abbott then William Laud, took place in the reigns of James I and Charles I in the early seventeenth century, long before Constantinople and Rome lifted the mutual excommunication they had pronounced upon each other in the eleventh century.  Although the leadership of the English Church never formally put this into writing, this early dialogue demonstrates that they regarded the excommunications of the eleventh century as political rather than valid and did not see themselves as bound by the papal excommunication of the East now that they had repudiated Rome’s usurped authority (Dr. Luther had a similar attitude).

(12)                       When the faction first formed it was very hard-core Calvinist to the point that it accused orthodox Churchmen who did not think that the canons of Dort should be binding on Anglicans or double predestination the subject of every sermon of “Arminianism” although few if any of those so accused were adherents to the tenets of the Remonstrance.  In the eighteenth century, the preaching of the Wesleys – although they were not of the evangelical faction themselves but are considered to have been evangelicals because they were among the first of the North American sense of the word – brought both a form of Arminianism that was quite modified from the Dutch original into Anglican evangelicalism.  The Calvinists remained, now as a sub-faction within the evangelical faction, somewhat ironically (the evangelicals had historically been the liberal faction of the Church) considered the more conservative sub-faction of Anglican evangelicalism.  Some of these seem to think that the Forty-Two Articles (the Reformed aspects of which were moderated when revised into the Thirty-Nine that have been the actual standard of Anglicanism for centuries) and the Lambeth Articles (which, due to Queen Elizabeth I’s wise veto, never became official the doctrine of the Church) are genuinely Anglican but that the 1549 Book of Common Prayer (mostly the work of Archbishop Cranmer) is not.  The Calvinist evangelicals are at their best today when insisting on strict adherence to the Book of Common Prayer and other classical Anglican formularies (this should include the 1611 Authorized Bible but often doesn’t) in worship, although this insistence is somewhat one-sided being the more vehemently protested against the inclusion of more traditional ceremonies and rituals than against slimming down the liturgy and making the sermon and music more resemble what you would find in a generic evangelical “non-denominational” mega-church. 

(13)                       What began as a cross-denominational cooperative movement against liberalism, became a movement which preached schism from other conservative Protestants (even within the same denomination) for not being schismatic enough (they called this second-degree separation).  While the movement remained theoretically neutral on eschatological interpretations, in practice it became even more dispensationalist than evangelicalism.  This may be due to non-dispensationalists (and non-pre-millennialists in general) moving over to the evangelical movement, but it is just as likely that dispensationalism’s bad ecclesiology appealed to their new hyper-separatism.  This, of course, meant that they became more committed to the “two peoples of God” nonsense than evangelicalism. Interestingly this did not necessarily mean they became more prone to the practical error of “Christian Zionism”, i.e., giving carte blanche support to the present state of Israel, than dispensationalist evangelicals.  Bob Jones Jr., president then chancellor of the fundamentalist university his father built for much of the second half of the twentieth century and certainly a dispensationalist devoted several pages of his memoirs, Cornbread and Caviar, to debunking Jerry Falwell’s more uncritical support of Israel by explaining that the country was secular and ungodly, persecuted Christians, hypocritically treated Arabs and Muslims the way they complained about having been treated themselves by everyone else throughout history, and at the time - as also today - were governed by a party formed and led by the leaders of the organizations that waged terrorist war against the United Kingdom in the 1940s prior to the partition of the Holy Land and their gaining independence in 1948.  He spelled out several of the crimes of the Irgun and Stern Gang in detail – can you imagine any evangelical dispensationalist doing this?  Similarly, John R. Rice of Sword of the Lord failed to get the memo that all dispensationalists must uncritically support Israel.  

 

I don’t include KJV-Onlyism in the list of undesirable elements of fundamentalism’s new self-definition.  The Authorized Bible is the preferred English translation of fundamentalism, actual KJV-Onlyism is held by some fundamentalists not by all.  While I am not a KJV-Onlyist in the sense of thinking that the Authorized Bible could not even hypothetically be improved on and that only someone involved in a Satanic New Age conspiracy or Alexandrian Cult would try I would say that until principles derived from orthodox faith are made the basis of textual scholarship again (such as, at the very least, that the correct text will be found in what has been read in the Church all along and not in manuscripts, regardless of their age, hidden away in obscure monasteries and libraries for centuries, see nineteenth century High Anglican Dean John W. Burgon for more such principles) and translators found who are at least the equals in scholarship of Bishops Andrewes, Overall and their co-translators (extremely unlikely, considering that the explosion of new translations coincided with the period of which Joe Sobran remarked “In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college”) a snowball stands a better chance in hell than of this happening.  By contrast with fundamentalism, evangelicalism went from a general preference for the New International Version to a general preference to the English Standard Version.   This took place because of the 2011 “update” to the NIV that made it “gender-neutral”.  Even before that, the value of the translation of which Rupert Murdoch’s company has owned the copyright since 1988, was grossly exaggerated.  In second-year Greek, one of my classmates remarked about how first year Greek had ruined the NIV for him.  I don’t remember there being much if any dissent to this opinion.  A few years after that I remember attending a service where the sermon was preached from the NIV with the text on a screen behind the preacher.  I happened to have my Greek New Testament with me, and looked up the same text.  The differences were far more than can be explained by the difference between “dynamic equivalence” and “literal” (nor could they be explained by differences in the underlying text, even if it were not the case, as it happened to be, that the Greek NT I had with me that day was not my Textus Receptus but the UBS fourth edition). Something that was a statement of fact in the Greek was a question in the NIV.  Proper names not present in the Greek were in the NIV.  As for the ESV it is the Revised Standard Version, a translation notorious for its liberal slant, the use of which was purchased from the National Council of Churches, then edited by J. I. Packer et al. sufficiently to allow for it to be sold under a different name and marketed as a “conservative” translation.

Good Guys, Bad Guys, and Just War

On 28 February, American Neo-Thomist philosopher Edward Feser posted to his blog a short piece with the title “The U.S. war on Iran is manifestly unjust”.  In this piece he demonstrated that the war on Iran does not meet the criteria to be considered just according to classical Catholic just war theory, focusing on the requirements that there be a just cause and showing that the reasons put forth by the White House for the actions against Iran do not make for a genuine casus belli.  He also briefly talked about the war’s not meeting the requirement that it be conducted under lawful authority because by the terms of American constitutional law the authority to wage war belongs to Congress and not the president.

 

Roman Patriarch Leo XIV is clearly of the same opinion as Feser on this matter.  Some others of the Roman communion who hold to just war theory are less certain.  Among these is R. R. (“Rusty”) Reno, editor of First Things. His argument that it is “unwise to issue confident moral judgments about Operation Epic Fury” was posted on 3 March, three days after Feser’s.  Feser has just contributed a piece to First Things entitled “Does Just War Doctrine Require Moral Certainty?”  In response to those like Reno who disagreed with him, he argues for an affirmative answer to the question asked in his title.  “What has long been the standard teaching in the Catholic just war tradition”, he writes, “is that the probability of a war’s being just is not good enough. The case for the justice of a proposed war must be morally certain. Otherwise, it is morally wrong to initiate the conflict.”  Note his use of the illustration of a hunter shooting into the bush.  Unless the hunter is certain there is no person hiding in or behind the bush that he might hit, to shoot is a reckless and morally wrong act.  The same illustration has been used for decades to answer the argument  that we don’t know when a fetus becomes a person made by those who think women should have the right to murder their unborn offspring.

 

I agree with Feser (and Leo XIV) on this matter.  I wish to point out, however, that he has been arguing mostly the one aspect of the just war question, that of jus ad bellum or when is it just to go to war.  There is also the aspect of jus in bello or what is the right manner in which to conduct war.  These aspects are not independent of each other.  If a war cannot be fought in a manner that is jus in bello then it can never be jus ad bellum.

 

This is often avoided in contemporary discussions of just war because of the uncomfortable question it raises of whether Modern developments in the technology of war have made a jus ad bellum war a practical impossibility.

 

The rules of just war theory or doctrine were hammered out at a time when wars were fought very differently from how they are fought today.  A king who went to war with another kingdom would be expected either to lead the troops into battle himself or delegate the task to his sons, brothers, or other close relatives.  Democratically elected politicians, by contrast, do not fight in the wars for which they vote and are notorious for protecting their own children from conscription.   How did Black Sabbath put it again?  “Politicians hide themselves away/They only started the war/Why should they go out to fight?/They leave that role to the poor.” (1)

 

Furthermore, when St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, et al., were drawing out the principles of just war from Scripture, moral philosophy/theology and reason, those who did the actual fighting and killing in war, generally had to see the people they were killing in order to do so.  This meant, of course, that they were also putting their own lives in jeopardy by going to war.  This was most obviously the case with combat involving swords and other weapons that could not kill beyond the range of the slightly extended arm-length they provided, but even with longer-distance weapons such as bows and arrows, catapults, and cannons you had to see what you were aiming at with your own eyes.

 

This was the way war was fought for most of human history.  Now think of the contrast with today.  Airplanes were first used in combat in World War I.  With World War II, the use of these machines to drop high explosive bombs that could kill large numbers of unseen non-combatants became normative.  By the end of that war, the Americans had developed the first nuclear weapon, the atomic bomb, which they dropped on two Japanese cities killing about 120, 000 people instantly with the death toll growing to about twice that amount by the end of the year due to radiation poisoning and other such injuries.  Mercifully, their use did not become normative, especially since the development of this monstrous technology after the war has exponentially increased its destructive power to the point where it could eliminate humanity and all other life on earth.  In 1957, the Soviet Union conducted the first successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile, and two years later both the Americans and the Soviets had operational ICBM systems in place. By the 1970s, advanced guidance systems that used computers and lasers to direct bombs to their targets were in common use (this evolved out of technology that in a very early stage of development both the Americans and the Nazis had during World War II).  Today, cities can be reduced to rubble and thousands of non-combatants instantly killed, totally unseen by the person who does the destroying and killing with the push of a button, half a world away.

 

This, which, by the way, is what “progress” looks like, a fact which when it sinks in should be sufficient to make a reactionary out of any sane person, was not merely a series of changes to the tools of war.  It changed the very nature of war and in such a way as to raise the question of whether war fought in this manner and with these tools can ever be just.

 

It is a difficult question to answer, not least because however these changes have affected the nature and justice of war, they have not affected in the slightest its necessity.   If a hostile power attacks and invades your country this creates the necessity of your going to war defensively to stop them (blithering rubbish to the contrary from Mennonites, Quakers, and Gandhi be hanged).  To say that something is necessary, however, is not to say that it is just, since necessity and justice are two very different things. If we set the difference between necessity and justice aside and take the position that all defensive wars are just, note that this would obviously not justify the actions of the United States and Israel.

 

In popular American culture the demands of classical just war theory have largely been by-passed by a very different way of thinking about martial ethics.  In this way of thinking, it does not matter so much that a war have a valid casus belli, that it be a means of last resort, that the good that it accomplishes or at least tries to accomplish outweighs the death and destruction it causes and that non-combatants not be made into targets.  What matters is that “we” (the ones going to war) are the “good guys” and that “they” (the ones we are going to war with) are the “bad guys.”

 

This way of looking at things is so puerile if not infantile that it would scarcely be worth addressing if it were not so widespread in the United States (and other countries of the civilization formerly known as Christendom that have had the misfortune of being inundated with American pop culture) and so clearly the predominant way of thinking among those who started this war and its chief apologists.  This is, of course, the way superhero comic books and Hollywood movies tend to portray things and it can hardly be a coincidence that these started to become the staples of American pop culture that they are today around the same time as the rapid advancement of American military technology.  Hollywood and DC (2) cannot be blamed for creating this thinking, however much they may have helped popularize it, because it had been part of the American mindset long before World War II.

 

Indeed, I maintain that it can be traced back to the Calvinism that was the root of Yankee culture.  Now in this instance I am not using the word “Yankee” in the sense it normally has in my country or, for that matter, anywhere else outside of the United States, i.e., as a synonym for “American.”  I am using it rather to refer to the culture of the American northeast which developed out of the colonies settled by Puritans.  In the American Internecine War (1861-1865) this culture went to war with its chief rival, the more traditional and agrarian culture of the American states south of the Mason-Dixon Line which had developed out of colonies that were not so Puritan in nature.  It thoroughly defeated its rival and has dominated American culture on the national level ever since. (3)  By this point in time Yankee culture had become secularized, but it was still at heart a secular Calvinism.

 

While this most often comes up in the context of tracing American capitalism back to the Protestant (more specifically Calvinist) work ethic (4) or of Southern traditionalist conservatives pointing out the deleterious effects of the North’s victory on American society as a whole (5), I believe that it can be shown to also be the source of the “good guys” versus “bad guys” mindset of American culture. 

 

The doctrine that most sets Calvinism apart from other Christians, including other Protestants, is its doctrine of double predestination and election.   This might seem to be an unlikely source of dividing people into “good guys” and “bad guys” since it is closely related in Calvinist theology to what seems at first glance to be the strongest possible affirmation of the orthodox Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin, i.e., that all of Adam’s descendants are tainted with the sin that infected human nature in the Fall and are therefore utterly dependent upon the grace and mercy of God.  In Calvinist theology, especially as formulated against Arminianism (a dissenting subcategory of Calvinism that stresses free will) this is stated as Total Depravity.  From the body of humanity so totally depraved by Original Sin, the doctrine of double predestination states, God in eternity past selected some upon whom to pour His mercy and grace and to bring to final salvation and chose others upon whom to pour His wrath and to punish eternally basing the selection entirely upon His Own pleasure rather than upon anything within the “elect” and the “reprobate” that might distinguish them from each other.

 

How this idea became secularized into the American “good guys” versus “bad guys” mindset may already be apparent.  To make it clearer I will briefly show how the Calvinist doctrine differs from Christian orthodoxy.  Original Sin is sound, orthodox doctrine, taken directly from the fifth chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans.  Pelagianism (that Adam’s sin isn’t inherited and that people can be righteous before God without His grace) and Semi-Pelagianism (that God’s grace is required for salvation, but that man can make the first step towards God) are both heresies, condemned as such by the universal Church.  This means that all people are sinners (Rom. 3:23).  The division of mankind into the righteous (those cleansed of sin and made righteous before God by His grace given to man in Jesus Christ) and the wicked (those who finally and incurably reject the grace of God) is not something that took place in eternity past but something that will take place on the Last Day.   Until then, God does indeed have those He has “chosen”, who have received His grace, but unlike in the Calvinist concept of the “elect” in orthodox theology being chosen by God does not mean selected to be an elite few who are given God’s grace to enjoy among themselves but being selected to receive His grace that they may assist in bringing it to others.   Think of God’s words to Abra(ha)m the very first time He spoke to him.  “And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” (Gen. 12:2-3)  Far too many people read these verses as if the emphasis was on the words that I did not highlight with italics.  For Abraham, being chosen by God did not mean that he was the exclusive recipient of God’s favour and blessing but that he was a vessel through which it was to flow to everyone else. (6)

By contrast, the Calvinist view of election is that those chosen by God are chosen to be the sole and exclusive recipients of His saving grace and mercy.  In its strictest form, defined by the canons of the Synod of Dort (1618-1619) rather than the Institutes of John Calvin himself, Calvinism teaches that God gave Jesus Christ only to His elect and that Jesus died only for the elect, a doctrine that most Christians rightly regard as blasphemous and heretical.  In Calvinism, the numbers of the elect and reprobate have been fixed from eternity past.  One is either “elect” or “reprobate”, this can never change, and it is in no way based on anything one does.  This is the doctrine of John Winthrop and his followers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who envisioned what would become America as a Puritan “city on a hill” even as the spirit of the Modern Age, the spirit of thinking Satan’s thoughts after him, had already infested his fellow Puritans in England who not long thereafter would, in complete violation of the Scriptural injunctions of SS Peter and Paul, wage what would ultimately be a regicidal war against King Charles I and lay the foundation for the twin evil doctrines of the Modern Age, liberalism (of which Americanism is a variety) and progressivism or leftism (of which Communism is a variety). It is the clear ancestor of the American idea that in war there are “good guys” and “bad guys”, their “goodness” and “badness” being who they are and not so much what they do, a notion that conveniently allows traditional Christian doctrine as to when it is right to go to war and how war can be rightly conducted to be bypassed.

 

That, of course, is the danger of this “good guys” versus “bad guys” approach to war.  The old rules of just war doctrine were carefully thought out to limit when wars can be fought and how they can be fought so as to limit the destruction and death wrought by war.  “Good guys” versus “bad guys”, however, is not such a limiting doctrine.  To the contrary, its tendency is to give carte blanche to the “good guys” when it comes to defeating the “bad guys.”  Look at how that has played out in American history.  In the American Internecine War, the North invaded the South and waged total war against those who from their own stated perspective they regarded as still their brethren and fellow countrymen.  Total war is always unjust by the standards of traditional Christian just war doctrine.  In World War II, FDR unilaterally – he did not inform Sir Winston Churchill of it in advance, and Churchill who had a lot more sense than Roosevelt recognized it to be a bad move although he was forced to go along with FDR’s press release – declared that the Allies would accept nothing less than “unconditional surrender”, a stupid declaration that could only ever have had the result of prolonging the war and increasing rather than limiting its destructiveness.  At the end of that war Truman unconscionably ordered the atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though, contrary to the lies that are told today to justify this action, he knew that Japan was already willing to negotiate a surrender to General MacArthur.  The current head of the United States in an ill-thought out social media rant against Leo XIV said, among other things, “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.”  Would it not be more sensible to say that the only country that has ever committed the atrocity of using nuclear weapons in war is the country that should not be trusted with having them?

 

The “good guy” versus “bad guy” mentality leads those who hold it to regard earthly wars as microcosmic versions of a cosmic level struggle between good and evil.  Christians are forbidden to think this way (Eph. 6:12).  There may be a surface level resemblance between this idea of a cosmic struggle between good and evil and the Christian teaching that an angel started a rebellion against God in the spiritual realm, which was brought to earth when Adam and Eve were tempted and fell, but the resemblance does not go much deeper than this.  It is much closer to Eastern dualistic concepts which, when they made their way into the Church in the early centuries through false teachers like Mani, were rejected as heresy.  Christianity – sound, orthodox, Christianity that is – does not teach that good and evil are two opposing forces, the struggle between which basically defines the universe and life within it.  Christianity teaches that there is One God, Who is Good, that other than God, everything that exists has been created by God Who created it good and pronounced it good, that the evil that became present in Creation when Satan and then man used the good gift that is their free will to rebel against God is present not as some force or power or thing that is equal and opposite to goodness, but only in the same way that a hole is present in a wall.

 

Classical just war doctrine, carefully formulated by the Church’s best doctors and theologians from Scriptural principles and moral philosophy to limit the destructive potential of war is really the only option for orthodox Christians.  A pacifism that tells you not merely to turn the cheek to the ἐχθροί (personal enemies) you are commanded to love but to allow the πολέμῐοι (military enemies) of your country to conquer, enslave or kill your family, neighbours and countrymen without fighting back is utterly vile and not to be regarded as a valid option.  The recipe for escalating rather than limiting endless numbers of wars that is the “good guys” versus “bad guys” mindset must also be rejected as repugnant.  This leaves us with classical just war doctrine, of which the United States’ current war against Iran fails all the tests. 

 

Unless the United States can figure out a way to fight a war without using technology that enables them to kill people they can’t see in large numbers from a safe distance far away and to dismiss the civilian casualties as “collateral damage” it is doubtful that any war she fights can ever be considered just again.

 

 (1)   Ozzy Osbourne, Terence Michael Butler, William T. Ward, F. Frank Iommi, “War Pigs”, 1970.

(2)   Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman were introduced in 1938, 1939, and 1941 respectively.  Although Timely introduced Captain America in 1940, it was not until 1961 when the company rebranded as Marvel and Editor-in-chief Stan Lee working with Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four, soon to be followed by Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and X-Men that it became the big player in the superhero comics market.

(3)   See Clyde N. Wilson, The Yankee Problem: An American Dilemma, (Columbia SC: Shotwell Publishing, 2016). 

(4)   Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated from 1905 German edition by Talcott Parsons (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1930).

(5)   Note 3, vide supra, and also The Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (New York & London: Harper and Bros, 1930) which is still in print from Louisiana State University Press and pretty much any book by M. E. Bradford.

(6)  The Calvinist view of election is not the only one that could stand correction from this passage.  Unlike previous American military escapades in the Middle East, the current war against Iran has little international support.  The United States’ most conspicuous ally in this war is Israel.  Much of the internal support for the war in the United States has come from Christians, mostly evangelical Protestants, who have a particular version of the “good guys” versus “bad guys” mindset in which Israel is always the “good guy” in a Middle East conflict regardless of the circumstances and her neighbour is always the “bad guy”.

 

This is because the present day state of Israel shares the same name as the people of God in the Old Testament and these evangelicals believe that the Genesis 12 passage – the parts not highlighted in the quotation in the text of this essay – require that Christians give unconditional support to the present day state. 

 

This is an absurd conclusion.  It starts from an interpretation of Genesis 12 that like the Calvinist, regards God’s choosing or electing as being for the sake of the chosen or elect rather than for everyone.  In this case it is the interpretation that this passage, subsequent passages like it, and basically the whole of Old Testament history was all about creating an ethnic group which would enjoy God’s special favour.  The New Testament does not allow for this interpretation.  Galatians 3:16 clearly states that the Seed to Whom the promises to Abraham pertain is Christ.  Since everyone who believes in Christ is united to Christ and therefore in Christ the promises are available to everyone through faith in Jesus Christ.  They are only available through such faith, not through biological descent from Abraham. 

 

This is the clear teaching of the passage which, ironically, those who argue otherwise, claim as their principal proof text.  This passage, which interestingly follows the two chapters which Calvinists like to twist to support their view of election, is Romans 11.  In this chapter Israel, the people of God, is likened to an olive true.  Biological descendants of ancient Israel are described as “natural branches” of the tree. “Natural branches” who do not believe in Jesus Christ are cut out of the tree for their unbelief. Gentiles (from the Latin word for “nation” this is used to mean non-Jews) who believe in Jesus Christ are “wild branches” which are grafted in by faith.  The cut off “natural branches” can be grafted back in again if they believe.  Therefore, those who are in the olive tree that is the true Israel of both Testaments are believing (in Jesus Christ) Jews and believing Gentiles.  Believing Jews and Gentiles, however, make up the Catholic (universal) Church.  Clearly, therefore, this passage cannot support the claim that the Israel of God is a biological nation distinct from the Church which is the fundamental claim of the rubbish theology that underlies the “Christian Zionist” position. 

 

Those who cling to this theology, which, not coincidentally, is primarily to be found in the United States, will no doubt scream “Replacement Theology” at having this obvious truth pointed out, much like how Calvinists scream “Arminian” at anyone who does not accept their claim that God doesn’t love everyone and that Jesus died only for the elect, but this is akin to liberals screaming “racist” at anyone who disagrees with them.  “Replacement theology” would say either that the “wild branches” were grafted in to replace the “natural branches” or that a “wild olive tree” was substituted for the “natural olive tree” but neither of these is the case (that the “wild branches” are not “replacements” of the “natural branches” is evident from the fact that the “natural branches” can be grafted back in).  This is rather “Continuation theology”, that Israel, the olive tree, continues into the Church.   The only “replacement” is the “replacement” of the Old Covenant with the New, a “replacement” that is actually a “fulfillment” of the promises of the Old Covenant, and the replacement of the spiritual leadership of Israel under the New Covenant (the Apostles and their successor bishops leading a ministry of presbyters supported by deacons) from that of the Old Covenant (the Aaronic priesthood, supported by the Levites and led by the chief or high priest) which is what was prophesied by Jesus in the Parable of the Wicked Tenants. 

 

Note that “replacement” of this sort took place in Judaism as well.  A parallel error to the one I have been debunking in this note is the error of thinking that what is called Judaism today is the religion of the Old Testament.  This is not the case.  Judaism shares a common history with Christianity before the coming of Christ, but with the coming of Christ the prophecies of the Messiah were fulfilled and the New Covenant established.  The Gospel was to be preached to the Jews first but many of these did not believe and held on to the religion of the Old Testament.  This was eventually taken away from them when the forces of Titus of Rome sacked Jerusalem in AD 70.  The principal elements of the Old Testament religion were the aforementioned Aaronic priesthood, the sacrifices that this priesthood was commanded to offer daily and on special occasions, at first in the Tabernacle, then in the Temple which replaced the Tabernacle and which had to be in a specific place in Jerusalem, and the feasts which by the Mosaic Law had to be celebrated in Jerusalem.   The destruction of the Temple made all that impossible.  The rabbis, originally lay teachers and leaders in late Second Temple Judaism, became the clergy of the new Judaism that arose after the destruction of the Temple.  Synagogue worship, which had developed after the Babylonian Captivity, probably around the time of Ezra himself, elements of which were incorporated into Christianity (the Ministry of the Word portion of the service prior to the Ministry of the Sacrament is largely an adaptation of synagogue worship), took over the central place in the worship of Judaism from Temple worship.  The feasts remained, but obviously they could no longer be kept in strict accordance to the Mosaic Law.  This new Judaism is not, as some Christians mistakenly think, an older parent religion to Christianity, but a younger religion by about forty years.  It too has other Scriptures by which the Scriptures which Jews and Christians have in common are interpreted.  These, consisting of the Mishnah (the codification of what the Second Temple Pharisees called the oral law) and rabbinic commentary on the Mishnah called the Gemara, comprise the Talmud, which was compiled between the third and sixth centuries AD (both in Palestine and Babylon with the Babylonian version which was completed later becoming the authoritative version).  

 

None of this excuses us from our duty to leave peacefully, so far as it depends on us, with all people and to “Give none offence, neither to the Jews, nor to the Gentiles, nor to the church of God” (1 Cor. 10:32).  It shows the folly in thinking that we are under an obligation to God to support the present state that calls herself Israel in all of her conflicts without taking any consideration of who, if anyone, is in the right in the conflict.  Note that thinking we have to oppose the present state of Israel in all of her conflicts is just as much folly and the kind of folly that is usually attached to the “woke” anti-white bigotry in the kind of academic leftism that Americans think is a form of Marxism created by the infiltration of American higher learning by European Communists but which is actually Americanism taken to its totalitarian extreme.  These conflicts should be evaluated by the standards with which we would judge the conflicts of any other states.  Certainly it is not helpful for Christians to be repeating the inane Scripture-twisting rhetoric of the state of Israel’s leaders that treats the nation that is currently located in the heart of what was King Cyrus’ empire as if it were Amalek.

Bill C-9 and the Difference between Good Law and Bad

On Lady Day this year, which fell on the Wednesday before Palm Sunday, Bill C-9 passed its third hearing in the House of Commons.  The following day the first reading in the Senate was completed and it is now in its second reading before that august chamber of sober second thought.  This bill, entitled the “Combatting Hate Act”, was introduced by the governing Liberals last September.  It consists of a series of amendments to the Criminal Code.  These would create four new offences.  The first two have to do with preventing access to places of worship, cultural centres, educational institutions (including daycare centres), seniors’ residences, and cemeteries, by means of intimidation (the first offence) or obstruction (the second offence).  The third new offence is “hate crime” defined to include any existing offence when it is committed with the motivation of hatred.  Creating this “hate crime” offence includes increasing the penalties attached to the existing offences when committed for this motivation.   The final new offence involves the public display of specified symbols, including ones used by terrorists, Nazi symbols, and “a symbol that so nearly resembles” the aforementioned “that it is likely to be confused with that symbol”.  The order in which I have listed the offences here is that of the government’s initial announcement of the legislation, not the order in which they currently stand in the bill (1).

 

In addition to creating these new offences the bill adds a definition “hatred” into the Criminal Code.  Here is the definition from the text of the bill: “hatred means an emotion of an intense and extreme nature that is clearly associated with vilification and detestation; (haine)”.  It also adds this clarifying note “For greater certainty, the communication of a statement does not incite or promote hatred, for the purposes of this section, [Section 319 of the Criminal Code pertaining to “hate propaganda”] solely because it discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends.”

 

The bill will also remove something from the Criminal Code.  This is mentioned alongside the four new offences in the summary at the beginning of the bill, indeed, it is the second item in the summary: “repeal the defence based on the expression of opinions on religious subjects or texts in relation to the offences of wilful promotion of hatred or antisemitism”.  What this will repeal is subsection 3 (b) of Section 319 of the Criminal Code as it currently stands.  This reads “3 No person shall be convicted of an offence under subsection (2)… (b) if, in good faith, the person expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text”.  The repeal of this subsection, it was reported last fall, was added to this bill in order to obtain the support of the Lower Canadian separatists who made it a condition of their support.

 

Most of the discussion of this bill – the popular discussion, I mean, not the official discussion in the House and Senate – has centred around this last matter, the removal of the good faith religious defence.  The entire bill is rotten to the core, in my opinion, and so is the entire section of the Criminal Code (318-319) which it seeks to amend. 

 

Consider the proposal to create a “hate crime” offence consisting of other offences committed with hatred as their motivation.   If somebody shoots you in the head, will you be deader if he shot you because of the colour of your skin than if he shot you because you were impeding his attempt to rob your house?  Or, if he hits your foot instead of your head, will it be less likely to turn gangrenous and have to be amputated?  Suppose instead of shooting you he punches you in the nose and kicks you in the groin.  Will this hurt any less if he does so because he is high on meth than if he does so because he doesn’t like your religion?  If these questions are absurd then so is the idea that a law prescribing higher penalties to the same crime when committed for reasons having to do with hate could be just. 

 

Someone might counter that the law recognizes different grades of homicide.  For a homicide to be classified as murder the murderer must have intended either to kill the victim or to do something criminal that would make the victim’s death a likely outcome.  (2) To be classified as first degree murder either the murder or some other felony in the context of which the murder took place has to have been planned in advance in cold blood. (3)  A homicide that does not meet the requirements to be classified as murder but is still culpable under law - if done out of the necessity of self-defence it is not so culpable, at least by the letter of the law if not by how morons in His Majesty’s constabulary and on His Majesty’s benches interpret it (4) - is classified as manslaughter (unless it falls under the category of infanticide).  Homicide committed in the heat of passion is the primary example of culpable manslaughter. (5) 

 

These differences, however, are more substantial than mere differences in motivation, they are differences in the very nature of the crime.  In the case of the proposed “hate crime” offence, the motivation is only the difference.  This is because it is the motivation of “hate” and not the criminal act per se that the bill seeks to punish.  This ought to be obvious from the fact that every single act that will fall under the classification of “hate crime” if Bill C-9 passes the Senate and receives royal assent is already against the law.  That this is the case is spelled out in the very wording of the bill.  Therefore, it can only be the motivation that the bill seeks to punish. 

 

A far more honest version of Bill C-9 would simply state that it is creating a new offence, punishable under the Criminal Code, entitled “hate.”  The Liberals would not likely have drafted a bill worded this way, however, because it would have stood far less of a chance of passing the House, and little to no chance of surviving a court challenge if it made it into law.  A bill that proposed directly criminalizing “hate” itself, without attaching it to some act or another, would be a bill that proposes criminalizing something people think and feel.  This would be open intrusion into what has long been regarded as beyond the legitimate sphere of government authority.

 

By “long”, I do not mean merely going back to 1982 when the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was passed, or even back to the formulation of classical liberal theory in the eighteenth century.  When Queen Elizabeth I acceded the throne in 1558, the people of her realm were divided in religious opinion.  Some were opposed to the reforms introduced in the brief reign of her brother Edward VI or even those moderate reforms her father Henry VIII had allowed and favoured the reconciliation with Rome during the reign of her sister Mary. Others were the exact opposite of this and felt the Henrician and Edwardian reforms had not gone far enough and that every last vestige of the pre-Reformation tradition needed to be expunged from the Church. Most fell somewhere in between.  Elizabeth restored the Henrician and Edwardian reforms, in a few instances moderating them somewhat, rarely going further, and required of all her subjects external conformity to the Church of England.  While it is unlikely to win her any accolades as an advocate of freedom of conscience from an age like ours, drunk on liberalism and its doctrine of separation of church and state, Elizabeth declared “I have no desire to make windows into men's souls.”  With both papists and Puritans threatening the security of the realm with their plots against her, she defended her authority to regulate the externals of the Church and require conformity to it, while denying to Parliament as much as to herself the right to dictate what her subjects privately believed and how they interpreted the Prayer Book and Articles.

 

A bill that proposed criminalizing “hate”, something that people think and feel, would do the very thing that Elizabeth I said she had no desire to do, open a window into men’s souls.  While volumes could be written about how Modern democratic liberalism has made government more intrusive rather than less intrusive than it was in Christian civilization prior to the onset of the Modern Age, that is something to be explored at length at another time.  Our point here is different.  The governing Liberals, by not drafting such a bill, and by introducing C-9 in the way they did with a lot of fluff about how it was carefully worded to avoid violating the Charter, demonstrated that they recognize that a bill that proposed to directly criminalize what people think or feel would intrude into an area beyond where government can legitimately govern.  What they either are not aware of or are pretending not to be aware of – and this lack of awareness predates the Charter, all the way back to when the Liberals added Sections 318-319 to the Criminal Code in 1970 – is that indirectly criminalizing what people think and feel is no better than directly criminalizing it.

 

All “hate” laws are fundamentally bad laws because they all try to do indirectly what would be instantly recognizable as a tyrannical or totalitarian move if it were done directly

 

Defenders of “hate” laws, particularly those that would limit what someone can say in public, try to ward off criticism by saying that all these laws do is prohibit threatening and urging violence against protected groups.  If this were the case, such laws would still be bad laws because they are not needed due to their redundancy. Incitement has been a crime for a very long time – it did not begin as a statutory offence, that is to say one written into law by an act of legislation, but as a Common Law offence.  Incitement is the act of encouraging others to commit a crime.  It is itself a criminal act because it involves the person who does the incitement in the guilt of the person who commits the criminal act that has been incited.  The fact that it is a crime is a limit on speech, but not a limit due to the thought or feeling expressed in the speech, but rather due to its nature as an act, as explained in the previous sentence.  For speech to be incitement it must take the form “Do X to Y”.

 

Either “hate speech” legislation prohibits only speech that takes the form “Do X to Y” or it prohibits speech that does not take this form.  If it only prohibits speech that takes the form “Do X to Y”, it is redundant because that was already covered by the law against incitement.  On top of its redundancy, it adds to the law against criminal incitement by saying that such and such groups deserve more protection against criminal incitement than others, in order to make it easier for law enforcement to “get” such and such offenders.  Neither of these things, providing special protection for certain groups nor trying to “get” someone, is characteristic of good law, it is rather a red flag that the law in question is bad. 

 

If, on the other hand, the “hate speech” legislation goes beyond “Do X to Y” then it is limiting speech due to something other than it being an act of incitement.  It is limiting speech due to its content, due to its expression of what the speaker thinks or feels.  It is the government intruding where it has no business to intrude, trying to open up “windows into the souls of men.”

 

The history of “hate” legislation in Canada shows that it has been bad in both of these ways at the same time.

That the original “hate propaganda” act that put Sections 318-319 into the Criminal Code in 1970 was intended to “get” certain people is evident from the fact that when, due to defendants under these sections being entitled to the protections all defendants are entitled to under criminal law (right to a trial, right to a defense, right to the presumption of innocence until guilt is established beyond a reasonable doubt), it turned out that it was not so easy to “get” those people after all, the government was immediately lobbied to find a way around this, which it did by including Section 13 in the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977.  The Canadian Human Rights Act is civil, not criminal, legislation and so those accused under it do not have the rights to which criminal defendants are entitled.  Section 13 was hardly limited to speech that takes the form “Do X to Y”, it was so broadly worded – speech that is “likely to” expose someone to “hatred or contempt” - that you could drive a convoy of trucks driving side by each through it.  The entire Canadian Human Rights Act, obiter dictum, is bad law, passed like its UK equivalent the Race Relations Act, in imitation of a bad Act in the United States.  For decades complaints made under Section 13 had a 100% conviction rate, which is a huge indication that the law is not just bad but horridly so.  Eventually, when the spotlight was turned on Section 13 in the first decade of this millennium, public opinion turned against it in Canada and in 2012, a private members bill to repeal Section 13 which had been introduced by Brian Storseth, then MP for Westlock-St. Paul, passed third reading in the House, receiving royal assent in 2013, and coming into effect in 2014. 

 

That the people that both Sections 318-319 and Section 13 were originally intended to “get” were people generally reviled in Canadian society does not make these laws any better.  Indeed, this is the way bad laws of this sort work.  They start by going after people who, because of the general revulsion against them, have few defenders, and then, when these have all been “gotten” move on to others.  Although the Rev. Martin Niemöller’s famous poem starting with “First they came for the Communists” was talking about the actions of a regime rather than the cumulative mission creep of a piece of legislation, it illustrates the process quite well.  That those the Canadian “hate” laws were initially intended to “get” were those who continue to identify with the ideology of the regime that did the “coming for” in Niemöller’s poem does not alter the point.  This ideology was one of two ideologies held by parties that established remarkably similar totalitarian terror-states that murdered a lot of people in the twentieth century.  This ideology was short-lived, it basically died with its regime in 1945, whereas the other ideology seized power earlier (Russia, 1917), in more countries (at its peak it controlled roughly a third of the world), lasted longer (some countries still officially claim the ideology today), and killed more people (over 100 million).  Yet the second category of “hate” symbols to be banned under C-9 consists entirely of symbols of this dead ideology, which very few people would display in public in Canada at this point in time, but not the symbols of the other ideology which plenty of people, especially idiots in academia (faculty and students alike) are fond of displaying.  No, my point is not that Bill C-9 would be improved if the hammer and sickle were banned alongside the swastika.

 

There are two reasons the swastika and the SS symbol are specified to be banned by C-9 and the hammer and sickle, red star, and raised fist are not.  The first is that the ban is designed to “get” an extremely small number of people.  The second is that it is designed to provide special protection to the adherents of one particular religion in Canada, Judaism.  There is already a subsection of Section 319 of the Criminal Code that explicitly provides special protection to the adherents of Judaism. (6)  This subsection, which was smuggled in by the Liberals under their previous leader in a budget bill four years ago, deserves examination here because it demonstrates that speech of the “Do X to Y” form is hardly what “hate” legislation is intended to combat.

 

The special protection that subsection 2.1 provides to adherents of Judaism is protection of their feelings. This is because hurt feelings is the only way the speech prohibited by subsection 2.1 could possibly hurt them.  The speech prohibited does not take the form “Do X to Y”.  It takes the forms “I approve of Event A”, “Event A happened differently than what we have been told” and “Event A wasn’t as important as it is made out to be.”  Only the first of these could be reasonably considered to be an expression of hatred.  Speech of the second and third forms ought never to be banned, it is a crime against conscience, reason, and common sense to ban it and a violation of the fundamental freedoms of His Majesty’s subjects, even in the watered down wording of section 2 of the Charter, to so ban it.  (7)

 

Organizations purporting to speak for Judaism – generally self-appointed activists rather than the religion’s spiritual teachers and leaders - had been lobbying for “hate” legislation since long before the first “hate” bill was passed in 1970.  This is not a criticism of such organizations, per se.  Any group of His Majesty’s subjects has the right to petition His Majesty’s government for what they feel is in their own best interest.  They do not, however, have the right to have their petition granted at the expense of the general good of the realm.  It is the duty of His Majesty’s government to see to it that the general good is protected, even if it means denying the petition of the lobbying group.  This duty that has been sorely neglected, when it comes to “hate” laws, when the Liberals have formed His Majesty’s government in Ottawa, at least since the first Trudeau premiership.  Yes, it is a duty of His Majesty’s government, because the general good that is compromised by “hate” legislation is the good of freedom of conscience, of freedom from having the government try to open “windows into men’s souls” a good that protects us all.

 

Now, someone might object that the religious defence that Bill C-9 will remove from Section 319, also provides special protection to specific groups.  Unlike the case of the second class of symbols to be banned under C-9, however, the defence to be removed is written in general terms.  See the text of the defence quoted in the third paragraph of this essay.  Subsection 3 (b) was included in Section 319 to prevent a section intended to prevent people from being made the targets of propaganda because of their religion from itself becoming a weapon with which to target religion.   The assurances of government ministers, such as Marc Miller, that the removal of this defence will not mean that religions will be so targeted ring very false and are not to be trusted.  In the context of advocating this bill, he declared three Biblical passages, two from the Old Testament and one from the New to contain “clear hatred”. That anyone quoting these passages in public might find himself to be charged is hardly an unlikely outcome of this bill. (8)

 

To put the matter in more general terms, the proposed removal of a legal defence should sound warning alarms.  A fundamental principle of our justice system – not merely that of Canada, not merely that of the Commonwealth, but of the civilization formerly known as Christendom, with roots in ancient Roman Law and in the Scriptures common to Christianity and Judaism (9) – is that it is better to leave the guilty unpunished than to unjustly punish the innocent.  Good laws, rarely if ever, make it easier to prosecute.  This is the reverse side of the coin to the bad laws are written to “get” people principle that we have already discussed.

 

Defenders of the removal of the defence argue that nobody should be allowed to use religion as a defence for urging violence.  As we have seen, those who drafted this defence, did so with regards to speech that was not limited to the “Do X to Y” form.  There is, however, a simple solution to this which would give the advocates of C-9 what they claim they want without creating a cudgel against religion.  That is to eliminate Sections 318-319 entirely.  

 

This should have been done long ago.  There is nothing in Sections 318-319 worth preserving.   There is only one thing under the absurd category of “hate speech” or “hate propaganda” that ought to be against the law.  That is criminal incitement, the urging of violence or other criminal activity in the “Do X to Y” form.  This was against the law before Sections 318-319 were entered into the Criminal Code.  It will still be against the law if those Sections are removed.  Moreover, it will only be against the law in a way that protects everyone, without trying to “get” anyone and without pandering to those who think they deserve special protection.  There will be no religious exception, both because this will die with Sections 318-319 and because it won’t be needed.  The basic law against criminal incitement cannot be weaponized against religion because unlike “hate” laws which are designed to be weaponized against certain people on behalf of other people, it is there to keep the king’s peace.  There is little, if anything, that could be regarded as good law, which does not exist mainly if not solely for this purpose.

 

 (1)   In the text of the bill the prohibition of symbols is the first offence, hate crime is the second, intimidation the third, and obstruction the fourth.

(2)   Criminal Code of Canada, Section 229.

(3)   Criminal Code of Canada, Section 231.

(4)   Criminal Code of Canada, Section 34.

(5)  Criminal Code of Canada, Section 232.

(6)  Criminal Code of Canada, Section 319, (2.1).

(7)   The two most notorious “hate” trials in Canadian history, both of which took place in my youth during the Mulroney premiership, were primarily about speech of this “Event A happened differently than we have been told” form.  One individual, the one charged under section 319 of the Criminal Codes, was also charged with speech in the form “Y is guilty of Z”.  None of the speech was in the form “Do X to Y”, and in the course of the trials, the other individual, who was charged under a different law that the Supreme Court of Canada threw out on appeal, himself became the target of criminal violence.  I thought at the time, and I think so still, that these trials were an utter disgrace and the type of thing better suited to the sort of regime that these men were accused, with varying degrees of accuracy, of supporting, than to a Realm of His (Her at the time) Majesty’s Commonwealth.  In February 2001, Esquire published an article by Jewish, liberal, literary journalist, war correspondent, and author John Sack in which he discussed a meeting he had attended of those who hold the “Event A happened differently than we have been told” perspective where he had met the second mentioned of these defendants.  To this day it is my go to reference whenever some jackass takes exception to my obviously correct position that if the spirit of the Third Reich lives on today it is more in the “liberals” (would J. S. Mill recognize them as such?) who pass laws against “Holocaust Denial” than in those they persecute.

(8)   Charges of this sort were made against Hugh Owens in 1997.  During the week which has subsequently dropped the lesser of the two sins in its title and retained the worse (and expanded to a month, then a season), he took out an advertisement with the Saskatoon StarPhoenix with two male stick figures holding hands inside the red circle with a slash symbol.  It also contained references to a number of Bible verses on the subject.  The complaint, which was made under the provincial human rights code, was initially upheld, but in 2006 overturned by the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal.  More recently (2013) the Supreme Court of Canada overturned Bill Whatcott’s successful appeal to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal against his conviction by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal in a somewhat similar case.  In the unanimous ruling, the Court utilized the earlier court definition of hatred from R v Taylor.  Although the Supreme Court said that “hatred” needs to be understood as "extreme manifestations of the emotion described by the words 'detestation' and 'vilification'" the fact that they ruled that Whatcott’s flyer distribution constituted such shows how empty this description really is.  That this is the basis of the definition of “hatred” to be added to the Criminal Code by C-9 is not a good sign.  An “extreme manifestation” of “detestation”, to any sane person, would consist of violent actions rather than words.  “Vilification” is an act not an emotion and it is already covered by defamation law, there is no need to include it under “hate.”  The use of the word “emotion” is revealing (among other things it reveals how much a better sort of justice is needed for the highest bench of His Majesty’s court).  It is not the place of government to tell people what to think or feel.

(9)   Gen. 18:16-33.