SS Paul and James on Faith and Works

Recently I responded to a social media post from an apologist for the Roman Church.  In the post, the Roman apologist made the oft-repeated claim that the only verse in the Bible in which the expression “faith alone” appears is the verse which rejects it, i.e., James 2:24.  Among other things, I pointed out that this simply is not true.  The expression also appears in Mark 5:36 where it is put in the imperative mood, that is, as a command, by none other than our Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

 

The Roman apologist responded by altering his original claim to include the qualification “in the Greek.”  This was an unwise move on his part.  The Greek text translated “only believe” in the Authorized Bible in Mark 5:36 is “μόνον πίστευε” (monon pisteue).  The Greek text translated “faith only” in James 2:24 is “πίστεως μόνον” (pisteos monon).  In the Greek, the word rendered “only” is identical and the relationship between the genitive noun in St. James’ epistle and the imperative verb in St. Mark’s Gospel is much more obvious than in English.  Both are built on the same stem πίστ (pist), whereas in English we use “believe”, a verb of Germanic descent to correspond to “faith” a noun of Latin etymology.

 

A better argument that he might have used would have been to say that the Lord was speaking to the situation in Mark 5:36 and so it was not a statement about the theology of salvation.  The problem with this reasoning is that the Lord’s statement was addressed to Jairus who had just received word that his daughter, for whom he was asking the Lord for healing and her very life, had died.  This verse is, in fact, typical of the response, when a verbal response is recorded, that the Lord would give to requests for healing.  Only two verses prior the Lord had said to the woman who had been healed while He was on His way to heal Jairus’ daughter “Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole.” Late He would use almost identical wording to blind Bartimaeus who requested his sight when the Lord was traveling through Jericho on His way to Jerusalem just prior to His Triumphal Entry “Go thy way.  Thy faith has made thee whole” (Mk. 10:52).   In St. Luke’s account of both these events, the word “saved” appears in place of “made…whole.”  This was a translation choice.  It is the word σέσωκέν (sesoken) in each instance.  This is the third person singular, perfect active indicative form of σῴζω (sozo), “I save”, from which our word soteriology – the doctrine of salvation – is derived. 

 

Now, it could be argued that the salvation in view in these passages is not spiritual salvation, that is, salvation from sin and its eternal consequences, but physical salvation from temporal conditions.  It would be unwise for a Roman apologist to make such an argument, however.  The entire theological basis for thinking that anointing by the Church’s elders (presbyters, priests) for healing is a Sacrament (a means through which God conveys grace) is that spiritual healing being so much more necessary than physical, God gives the former when He gives the latter, a principle that would seem to be supported from the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ healing the man sick of palsy (in St. Mark’s account 2:1-12).  More importantly, however, is that the pattern is consistent throughout the Gospels – if someone comes to the Lord, seeking healing of illnesses, of conditions such as blindness, deliverance from demonic possession, or any such thing, all that the Lord asks of that person is faith. The faith does not even have to measure up to a set standard.  Think of the man who requested that his son be delivered from possession immediately after the Transfiguration.  The Lord tells him “If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth” (Mk. 9:23) and the man responds “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (v. 24) and receives what he had requested (vv. 225-27).  All of these things – healing, sight, the ability to walk, exorcisms, what have you – were gifts that the Lord gave freely to whoever came to Him for them.  All that was needed to receive them was faith – and faith enough to ask, was sufficient.

 

This is very similar to what St. Paul has to say about faith in the fourth chapter of his epistle to the Roman Church.  This brings us to one of the other things that I had pointed out in my response to the Roman apologist.  Even if it were true that James 2:24 was the only verse to speak of “faith alone” and in the context of denying it, which I have just demonstrated is not the case, this leaves the matter of what St. James asserts that people are justified by in addition to faith.   The expression St. James uses is ἐξ ἔργων (ex ergon) – out of, or by, works.  This is precisely what St. Paul denies that justification or salvation is by.  These denials occur not just in a single verse but multiple times throughout the Pauline corpus.  The fourth chapter of Romans is of particular importance, however, because in this chapter the reason why justification is by faith and not by works is explained at length. 

 

Before looking at that explanation another detail about the fourth chapter of Romans deserves mention.  That is that the language used by St. Paul in this chapter is very similar to that used by St. James in the second chapter of his epistle.  “Justified”, “faith”, and “works” occur repeatedly in both passages.  It is not just a matter of similar terminology.  St. Paul references the example of Abraham in the Old Testament, quoting Genesis 15:6 in the third verse of the chapter.  St. James also references Abraham and quotes the same verse in the twenty-third verse of his second chapter.  That both writers use the same primary Old Testament reference and the same terminology to argue for what on the surface seem to be contradictory conclusions places an interpretive responsibility on both sides of the debate about faith and works.  If, as both the Roman Church which rejects “Sola Fide” and our Anglican Church which affirms it (Article XI) along with the Lutherans and Reformed confess, both the writings of St. Paul and the epistle of St. James are part of the inspired written Word of God then some way of explaining why both are true even though the one seems to be affirming A and the other non-A must be found. 

 

There is, in fact, an explanation which suggests itself in the very texts in question.  The similar terminology in the two passages has already been noted but there is one term that is prominent in the fourth chapter of Romans that does not appear at all in James 2:14-26.  That word is χάρις (charis) which means “grace”.  It occurs in the fourth chapter of Romans for the first time in the fourth verse, then again in the sixteenth verse.  While these are only two occurrences they are key verses because they contain St. Paul’s explanation of his doctrine.  In the first occurrence the Authorized Bible reads “Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt.” (Rom. 4:4).  Something that is received as a reward for works is something that is owed to the person who receives it.  This is not the case with God’s justification or salvation.  All people, Jews or Gentiles, are sinners.  We do not deserve salvation.  We can do nothing to earn it.  It is given to us as a free gift.  That is what it means for justification to be “by grace” in St. Paul’s writings.  The verse that immediately follows reads “But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.”  “To him that worketh not” - Gk. τῷ δὲ μὴ ἐργαζομένῳ (to de me ergazomeno) – is a much stronger way of saying that it is not by works and it is only in the context of making his point here that the Apostle speaks in this way.  After quoting from King David who expressed the reverse side of counting of faith as righteousness (the non-imputation of sin) and arguing from Abraham’s having been justified by faith in his uncircumcised state that those who believe are justified regardless of whether they are circumcised or not, he provides this plain explanation “Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed: not to that only which is of the law, but to that also which is of the faith of Abraham; who is the father of us all.” (Rom. 4:16)  This verse says that justification is by faith that it might be by grace.  The earlier verse says that for it to be by grace it cannot be by works.  What this suggests with regards to the interpretation of St. James is that the justification that he is talking about, the justification that is “by works” and not by “faith only” cannot be justification by grace. 

 

To argue this from the absence of the word grace from the relevant passage of St. James alone would be a mere argument from silence, but when we join that absence to what St. Paul says about faith, works, and grace in Romans, the conclusion seems established.  Further support can be found in the second verse of the fourth chapter of Romans where St. Paul writes “For if Abraham were justified by works, he hath whereof to glory: but not before God.”  St. James had declared that Abraham was justified by works.  St. Paul here does not say that he wasn’t, but rather than such justification is cause for boasting but not before God.  In other words, it is not the kind of justification, justification by grace, that he is writing about.  In Ephesians 2:8-9 he wrote “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.”  The “boast” in this verse, is the verb form of the noun rendered “whereof to glory” in Rom. 4:2.  Romans 4:2, therefore, provides an explanation of James 2:14-26 that harmonizes the two passages.  James 2:14-26 provides no such explanation of Romans 4 – or Eph. 2:8-9, or all the other passages in which St. Paul asserts that salvation is by grace through faith and not by works. 

 

That an explanation of St. James can be found in St. Paul, while St. James contains no explanation of St. Paul, only makes sense.  St. Paul’s epistle to Romans was written towards the very end of his third missionary journey as he was about to travel to Jerusalem where he would be arrested.  St. James’ epistle was written much earlier, before the Council of Jerusalem which took place between St. Paul’s first and second missionary journeys.  This can be reasonably deduced from the fact that St. James’ epistle is written to a Jewish Church into which Gentiles have not yet been incorporated.  The author identifies himself as James and traditionally this has been thought to have been St. James the Just, who as bishop of the Church of Jerusalem presided over the Council (Acts 15), making it incredible to think that it could have been written after the Council.  If the St. James who wrote the epistle was the brother of St. John this would also mean that the epistle had to have been written before the Council of Jerusalem and, indeed, before St. Paul’s first missionary journey, because he was killed by Herod Agrippa at the beginning of the chapter of Acts prior to the one in which SS. Paul and Barnabas were sent out by the Church of Antioch.  St. Paul, then, by the time he wrote Romans, had plenty of time to have become acquainted with St. James’ epistle, but Romans would have been years in the future when St. James wrote his epistle.

 

St. Paul’s explanation of why the justification of which he wrote is by faith and not by works corresponds with what we have already noted about how the Lord healed and delivered people during His earthly ministry.  Again, the Lord bestowed these blessings freely, turning nobody away, and requiring nothing except faith enough to come to Him and ask.  St. Paul’s account of justification basically amounts to spiritual salvation being exactly the same as this.  The word χάρις, like its Latin and English counterparts,  can refer either to the attitude of favour on the part of someone who freely gives or to the attitude of thankfulness on the part of the recipient (hence, the designation of Holy Communion as The Eucharist, or Great Thanksgiving, “saying grace” and the very word gratitude for thankfulness).   When used of God it is always the grace of the Giver.  When used of God with regards to the salvation of man it can mean either His favour as actively expressed in the giving of His Son to be our Saviour (Rom. 3:24) or His favour as the state in which we stand because of Christ’s saving work. (Rom. 5:2) Either way, the primary idea of salvation by the grace of God is that everything which God does to make sinful people right with Him, He gives to them freely.  We must believe in Jesus Christ, but this is not a work we do to earn our salvation.  If it were, justification by grace could not be through faith any more than it is by works. As with the physical healing during His earthly ministry, we merely need faith sufficient to come to Him and ask (Rom. 10:13).  Faith’s role in salvation is to receive the gift.  It is to the free gift of justification (Rom 3:24, 5:14-18) and everlasting life (Rom. 6:23) what the hand of a recipient is to a material gift.  Since it is the only such hand that we have been given for receiving the gift of salvation – as means of grace, Sacraments correspond to the hand of the Giver not the hand of the recipient, the role of repentance is not to receive grace but to break down the barriers sin erects in the heart to the reception of grace (1), and the exclusion of works from this role is explicitly spelled out by St. Paul – it is indeed, “faith alone”, or better, “faith only” which receives the grace of salvation.  This is St. Paul’s teaching.  It is not what St. James denied in James 2:24.

 

That St. Paul writing later, explains St. James writing earlier and that the explanation is that Jacobean salvation/justification is not salvation/justification by grace before God, is the harmonization that most fits the sacred texts.  The explanations of St. Paul offered by those who reject this harmonization are less than satisfactory.  That when St. Paul wrote that justification was not by works he meant “works of the law” not “works of love” is true but does not support the conclusion for which those who so argue contend.  The difference between “works of the law” and “works of love” is that “works of the law” are works done in order to gain God’s acceptance and “works of love” are works done with no such motive in mind but out of love for God.  The whole idea of “works of love” rests upon the fact that we are free to love God, because He first loved us by giving us His Son to take away our sin.  If you say that “works of love” are necessary for salvation in any sense other than that they are the natural fruit of the love that God’s freely given forgiveness inspires then you have eliminated the distinction between “works of the law” and “works of love” and transformed “works of love” into “works of the law.”

 

Nor is it helpful to try and explain away St. Paul by saying that the works he excluded were works of “the Law” in the sense of the Old Covenant as opposed to works of “the Gospel” in the sense of the New Covenant.   Unless, of course, one has John 6:29 “Jesus answered and said unto them, This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent” in mind which is unlikely to be the case with someone trying to explain away St. Paul in this manner.  The moral standard the Lord Jesus set for His followers was higher than that set by Moses.  What was merely implicit in Moses, the Lord spelled out explicitly in the Sermon on the Mount – if we are to be righteous in God’s eyes by meeting His standard, then we must obey His commandments completely rather than merely in the most literal outward manner, we must obey them in our hearts, in our thoughts, words and deeds.  St. Paul, however, in the third chapter of Romans explained that the Law could not justify before God because all have sinner and so the Law can only condemn.  If this is the case with the Law as given by Moses, it is all the more the case with the higher standard of the Sermon on the Mount.  St. Paul’s argument for why justification by grace cannot be of works would make no sense if the works excluded were works under a lower standard but not works under a higher standard.

 

Finally, the argument that the works St. Paul had in mind were works of the “ceremonial Law” but not works of the “moral Law” is defeated by Titus 3:5 “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost.”   “Works of righteousness” is hardly an expression that would be used to refer to keeping the ceremonial Law rather than the moral Law.

 

Such explanations are obviously inferior to simply accepting that St. Paul, writing later, explained St. James rather than the other way around and that the explanation is that St. James was not talking about salvation/justification before God by grace.  Those who do not accept this and cling to one or more of the inferior explanations do so because they are unwilling to acknowledge that the words “Sola Fide” could express, depending upon how it is explained, a truth rather than a form of heresy. This is a dangerous unwillingness, however.

 

Someone unwilling to acknowledge that “Sola Fide” can be a truth as well as a heresy, deliberately blinds himself to the fact that heresies are not simple errors of the 2 + 2 = 5 type, but a distinct kind of error that involves exaggerating a truth to the point that it eclipses other truths that are just as important.  Sabellianism/Patripassionism/Modalism is the heresy that you get if you exaggerate the unity of God (a truth) to the point that it eclipses the distinct Personhood of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  Tri-theism is the reverse heresy.  If you exaggerate the truth of the deity of Jesus Christ to the point that His humanity is eclipsed or denied then you open the door to a number of heresies including Docetism, Apollinarism, and Eutychianism.  Similarly, if you exaggerate His humanity to the point that His deity is downgraded you can get a number of different heresies including  Ebionism, Adoptionism, and Psilanthropism (Arianism, the main heresy of the fourth century against which the first two ecumenical councils contended, also downgraded the deity of Jesus Christ but in exaggeration of a different truth).  If there is a Sola Fide heresy then there must be a truth in Sola Fide that has been exaggerated.  Indeed, technical definition of heresy aside, holding SS James and Paul together requires this.  The Sola Fide denied by St. James must be a heresy.  The Sola Fide acknowledged and emphasized by St. Paul – the fact that he does not use the word “alone” is not relevant because it is “works” that the “alone” in “faith alone” excludes and St. Paul excludes works with much stronger language than the word “alone” – must be a truth.

 

The Pauline Sola Fide – the truth – is an auxiliary truth.  It supports and safeguards another, more important truth.  This truth is Sola Gratia, the truth that salvation is the free gift of God by grace and not something we earn.  Now Sola Gratia, while one of the Five Solae in the formula drawn up by twentieth-century Calvinists either to summarize the teachings of the sixteenth century Reformers or to try and make them all out to be Calvinists, is not a Reformation/Protestant distinctive.  It is not denied by those who have difficulty seeing in the words Sola Fide anything other than the Jacobean Sola Fide – the heresy.   Rather, it is affirmed by them, often quite strongly and with indignation against the suggestion that they teach salvation by works.  It is Catholic dogma in the truest sense of the word Catholic because it was defined as such against both the ultra-rigorism of the Novatian and Donatist schismatic sects and the heresy of Pelagius by the Catholic Church of the early centuries of the first millennium before such things as the cultural differences between Greek and Latin speakers, the political divisions between the Roman and Persian Empires and between the East and West within the Roman Empire, and ecclesiastical political squabbles of precisely the sort that the Lord forbade, introduced schisms of a different sort than that of someone getting mad that the Church would not go along with either his doctrinal hobby horse or his one strike and you’re out policy towards serious post-baptismal sin  and leaving to found his own sect. 

 

You contradict your affirmation of salvation by grace, however, if unlike the best Roman Patriarch of living memory, the late Benedict XVI, (2) you refuse to acknowledge that Sola Fide, properly explained, is a truth.  St. Paul clearly taught that for salvation to be a free gift of God’s grace it must be received by faith in which reception works can play no part.  That is all that Dr. Luther meant by Sola Fide, that is all that the eleventh of our Articles of Religion means by it and Archbishop Cranmer meant by it in the third sermon in the Edwardian Book of Homilies, and it is all that John Calvin meant by it in the third book of his Institutes of the Christian Religion.

 

Some acknowledge the Pauline truth of Sola Fide but say that it refers only to initial justification.  This is not the case, however.  A person does not need God’s grace only when he first becomes a believer, he is constantly in need of God’s grace.  Grace sufficient to meet his ongoing need is available for him.  It is available exactly where he obtained it from initially – in Jesus Christ.  St. Paul after having explained that Christ’s one Sacrifice accomplished what the many sacrifices of the Old Covenant never could, wrote “there remaineth no more sacrifice for sin” (Heb. 10:26).  This was part of a warning against apostasy from Christianity, one of several such dire warnings in an epistle written to Hebrew believers who were tempted to so apostatize, a general theme of which being that since the New Covenant is the substance of which the Old was a mere shadow, the judgement that would come upon those who abandoned the New Covenant would be more severe than that which came upon those who abandoned the Old.  Many in the early centuries, unfortunately, took the words of this warning as meaning that sin – or, at least, “serious sin” – after baptism, could not be forgiven, or could only be forgiven once, or one could only hope to receive forgiveness on one’s deathbed after a lifetime of non-communicant repentance.  Eventually, this sort of bad thinking was rejected by the Church when grace prevailed against the errors of Novatianism, Donatism, and Pelagianism as already mentioned.  That grace would prevail over this error was inevitable. St. John had clearly promised that Christians, confessing their sins, would be forgiven and cleansed and from his remarks about Jesus Christ being our Advocate with the Father and the propitiation for our sins it is also fairly clear that the forgiveness comes from the same source as our initial forgiveness, the one Sacrifice of Jesus Christ., (1 John 1-2:2).  This only makes sense.  In baptism, new life is conferred upon the believer, and St. Paul identifies the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ into which the believer is baptised as the source of that new life (Rom. 6:3-5).  In Holy Communion the new life of the believer is fed with His body and blood, that is to say, the same sacrifice.  In both Sacraments, the grace given comes from the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ, in both Sacraments what is given is received by faith (see John 6 for faith as the means of receiving the grace in Holy Communion).  From start to finish in the Christian life, the grace that comes from Christ’s death and resurrection through the myriad means of giving that God has provided, is received only by faith.

 

If it be objected that this contradicts what the Scriptures teach about the Last Judgement, I answer that the contradiction is surface only.  At the Last Judgement we will give account for every thought we have ever thought, every word we have ever said, and every deed we have ever done.  Of this the Scriptures are clear and even if they were not that we will be judged for our works is inherent in the very concept of judgement itself.   The Scriptures are also clear that nobody will be justified at that Judgement by having his works meet the standard of judgement.  St. Paul says that explicitly in Romans 3:20, it is also the implication of what St. James says in James 2:10-11.  Nobody will be justified by his works because all have sinned.  The only exception, the only One Who could measure up before the Judgement, is the One Who will be sitting on the throne doing the judging.  Anybody else who is pronounced righteous at this Judgement will be so pronounced because he has been made to be righteous in the eyes of God by his sins having been forgiven and removed by Jesus Christ through His propitiatory, redemptive, Sacrifice by grace.  This is how one is justified when he is first united to Christ, this is how his justification is maintained, and this is how he will be justified in the end when he stands before Jesus Christ at the Last Judgement.

 

Let us consider the Judgement passage that is most often taken as contradicting this. The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in the Olivet Discourse in Matthew 25 is the classic example.  The Sheep and Goats are both judged on the basis of what are traditionally called the Corporal Works of Mercy – feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, providing shelter and clothing to those who need it, visiting the sick and prisoners.  The Sheep are rewarded for having done these for the Judge, Who explains that He counts any such thing done for “the least of these my brethren” as done unto Him.  The Goats are sent away into everlasting punishment for having not done these for the Judge, Who counts any neglect of “the least of these my brethren” as neglect of Himself.

 

This parable is often read as if it was saying that at the Final Judgement, everyone will be judged in the same way and that on the basis of their performance they will be divided into those who will be rewarded and those who will be punished.  The parable does not say this, however.  While the same type of works are referenced with regards to both the Sheep and the Goats in the Judgement, the way in which the one group is judged according to these works is radically different from the way the other group is judged.  Note that the Sheep and Goats are separated from each other before the actual Judgement, before any mention is made of the works.  Jumping ahead to the Goats, these are punished for the slightest sin of omission, the slightest neglect of the Works of Mercy.  This is a strict, by-the-book, legal judgement.  Now consider the case of the Sheep.  Just as the Judge condemns the Goats for the slightest sin of omission, so He rewards the Sheep for the slightest Work of Mercy.  This, and not that they have deserved, earned, or merited their reward by consistent practice of the Works of Mercy, is the import of the Judge’s words.

 

So how is this not a gross injustice, the same Judge, judging two different groups of people according to the same kind of works, but in totally opposite ways, rewarding the one group for the smallest work done and punishing the other for the smallest work undone?

 

The only possible answer is that the Sheep have had that which would otherwise make them Goats removed – their sins.  What the Goats receive is what everyone deserves according to a strict, by-the-book, legal judgement.  The Goats receive this, because they did not avail themselves of the sin-removing mercy and grace of God made available to them through the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ.  With their sins unremoved, even the smallest sin of omission counts against them at the Final Judgement.   There is nothing to condemn those from whom Jesus Christ has removed their sins, however, so they can be rewarded for the slightest work.  Although called a reward, what they receive is not what their works have earned, merited or deserved.  It is not what is due them but a further expression of grace.

  

 (1)   The Parable of the Prodigal Son shows repentance’s role.  The son’s repentance was not responsible for the father’s willingness to forgive.  Those who call upon sinners to “soften God’s heart” with their tears commit blasphemy.  Even Christ’s Sacrifice shouldn’t be spoken of as if made God the Father, previously unwilling to forgive sinners, willing to forgive them (the forgiving love of God the Father initiated the work of salvation – “For God so loved the world that He gave His Only-Begotten Son”).  God, like the father who represents Him in the Parable, is already looking with a forgiving heart for the sinner to return to Him.  What the son’s repentance in the parable did was move him to so return.  This is the role of repentance.

(2)   “For this reason Luther's phrase: "faith alone" is true, if it is not opposed to faith in charity, in love.” – Pope Benedict XVI, 19 November, 2008, St. Peter’s Square.  “Faith must of course be sincere. It must be a faith that performs good works through love. If faith lacks love it is not true faith.” – Dr. Martin Luther, Commentary on Galatians, 1535.

The Faith, More or Less

 

Adolf von Harnack was a German Lutheran theological and ecclesiastical historian in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  In the last decades of the nineteenth century he wrote a multi-volume work the English title of which is The History of Dogma.  In this work he maintained, among other things, that the Church had gone wrong from pretty much the first generation, that Jesus had preached a simple Gospel of universal love under the universal Fatherhood of God but His followers had buried this under layers of foreign ideas taken from Greek philosophy and so created dogma – the authoritative teachings of the Church in the ancient Creeds, especially the Nicene – and that these layers needed to be stripped away and the simple Gospel recovered.  Harnack believed that in his liberal revisionism he was merely taking Dr. Luther’s Protestant Reformation principles to their logical conclusion.  Apologists for the Roman Catholic Church jumped to agree with him on this last point.

 

One of Harnack’s better known students – I would say his best known except that Dietrich Bonhoeffer also studied under him – the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth later came to disagree with this idea that the Trinity and the other basic tenets – dogmas if you will – of Christian orthodoxy were foreign to the essence of the Christian message and rejecting the liberalism that he had been taught found his way back, for the most part, into Christian orthodoxy. 

 

In the meantime, orthodox Anglican scholars such as the Venerable A. E. Burn, Dean of Salisbury and the Right Reverend E. C. S. Gibson, Bishop of Gloucester, in their works on the history of the ancient Creeds, tore Harnack’s theory to shreds.  Two centuries earlier another orthodox Anglican scholar, the Right Reverend George Bull, Bishop of St. David’s in his Defensio Fidei Nicaenae (1685) had defended Nicene orthodoxy by showing that the truths affirmed in the Ecumenical Councils were consistent with those taught by the Ante-Nicene Fathers.  A rebuttal of Harnack had to go further than this, however, and Burn and Gibson persuasively demonstrated that what was defined, unfolded, and explained in the ancient Creeds was present in the teachings of the Apostles themselves.  While we in the West are accustomed to thinking of the Apostles’ Creed as the baptismal Creed and the Nicene Creed (the expanded version affirmed at Constantinople) as the Eucharistic Creed, both developed out of Western and Eastern baptismal Creeds.  The fourth section of the second chapter (on the Apostles’ Creed) of Gibson’s The Three Creeds (1908) directly addresses Harnack and shows that the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity is inescapably present in the baptismal formula of Matt. 28:19. (1)

 

As mentioned earlier, Roman Catholic apologists in the twentieth century regarded the liberal revisionism of Harnack, Freidrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl as being the developed form of the doctrines of Dr. Luther and Calvin thus agreeing with Harnack’s own assessment.  See, for example, Joseph Wilhelm’s entry “Protestantism” in volume 12 of the 1911 The Catholic Encyclopedia.  This could be regarded as the reverse side of the coin to the idea articulated by John Henry Newman in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine that the late medieval Roman theology to which the Reformers objected on the grounds that it was not found in the Scriptures (or, the English Reformers at least would add, the writings of the Fathers of the early centuries) was the natural evolution of Scriptural and Patristic teachings.  Newman came to look at it this way just prior to his crossing the Tiber into the Roman Church. 

 

There is a sense in which Harnack was right in regarding revisionist liberalism as an extension of ideas that played out in the Reformation.  Not the doctrines for which Dr. Luther, Zwingli and Calvin became known, but the Renaissance humanist principles that informed them (as they did others who remained in communion with Rome such as Erasmus and More), in particular the principle of ad fontes, (back to the font or source).  The problem was that Harnack and company wanted to go back to a “source” that existed only in their imagination, a “simple” message that predates that of the ancient Creeds and the Scriptures that back them.

 

Harnack and the other liberal revisionists, in other words, sought to streamline the Christian faith by removing from it that which belonged to it from the very beginning but which conflicted with nineteenth and twentieth century Modern rationalist thought.  This was not, after all, as Barth (and later and more completely, Methodist theologian Thomas Oden) was to discover, a more thorough application of the Renaissance/Reformation ad fontes principle.  Rather than returning to the source for clarity, it involved recreating from no evidence whatsoever a “source” that matched the liberals’ idea of what a source, a primitive original version of the Christian faith, should look like.  While it is understandable that Roman apologists would try to argue that Dr. Luther and the other Reformers were doing something similar, in reality liberal revisionism was a form of extreme reductionism.  A more legitimate charge against the Reformers – one which could also be levelled against the Roman Church – would be that of doing the opposite of this.

 

Harnack and company thought that the original faith as delivered to the Apostles by Christ must have been something much simpler than the faith as confessed in the ancient Creeds.  In reality, however, the ancient Creeds are about as simple as the Christian faith can get.  Jesus, at the end of St. Matthew’s Gospel, which according to the consensus of ancient writers was the first Gospel written, instructed His disciples to make other disciples of all the nations by baptizing them.  In doing so, He borrowed a rite that the rabbis of late second Temple Judaism had introduced for Gentile converts and adapted it as the rite of entrance into His Church by instructing that the baptism was to be in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.  This was not just a prescription of the words to be said over the person baptized but the content of the faith into which that person was being baptized.  The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost – the Three Persons manifested in His own baptism – as the content of that faith, are divine Persons. The fact that Christianity is a continuation and fulfilment of the Old Testament faith “Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God is one Lord” along with the fact that Jesus spoke of a singular name of the Three Persons tells us that the Three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, are but One God.  This is the Trinity, God as confessed in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.  The first part of the Athanasian Symbol unfolds this truth so as to protect it against pretty much any conceivable error, while the second half like the Definition of Chalcedon (2) does the same for doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ that of necessity belongs to the Trinitarian faith, i.e., that the Eternal Son in the Incarnation, without ceasing to be God, took a full and perfect human nature formed from that of His Virgin Mother and united it with His Eternal Person so that from the moment of the Incarnation, He, remaining the same Person in the Trinity that He always had been, had two complete natures, being fully God and fully Man. Apart from these truths the ancient Symbols contain a brief narrative account of Gospel, the historical events of Christ’s earthly life and ministry from His Incarnation to His Ascension, especially His death for us on the cross and Resurrection, and the most basic of the truths auxiliary to those of the Trinity and the Person of Jesus Christ such as the Second Coming, the Church, and the promise of forgiveness of sins and everlasting life.

 

The history of how these ancient Symbols of the faith came to be in the form in which we have received them is the history of how the basic truths of the faith as entrusted to the Apostles by Christ were defined and unfolded in response to the numerous heresies that arose as Jesus and the Apostles had warned they would.  The process involved the development of precise theological meanings for certain terms.  The Greek words hypostasis and ousia, for example, virtually identical in meaning in the first century had to be differentiated so that hypostasis (person) could indicate what the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are as distinct from each other whereas ousia (essence, substance, being) indicates how they are One.  This enabled the word homoousios (of one being, essence, or substance) which had been used with heretical intent by Paul of Samosata whose teachings blended a Trinitarian heresy similar to that of Sabellianism (modalism) and an Adoptionist heresy regarding the Person of Christ, to become the safeguard of Christ’s true deity against the Arian heresy in the Nicene Creed in the fourth century.  Nothing ended up in these Symbols which did not belong to the “faith once delivered unto the saints” as believed in the Church “everywhere, always, and by all”.

 

The error of the liberal revisionists was to subtract from the deposit of faith.  In the sixteenth century those on both sides of the Reformation controversy had little interest in subtraction.  The Apostles and Nicene Creeds both consist of the same twelve articles, usually worded more elaborately and precisely in the Nicene version.  The Lutheran Augsburg Confession of 1530 contains twenty-eight articles and the Reformed Belgic Confession of Faith of 1561 contains thirty-seven and it is not a matter of their having both merely added the difference between these numbers to the twelve of the Creeds.  The truths of the Creeds are affirmed but summarized in these Confessions and take up considerably less than twelve of each of their sets of articles.  Our own English Articles of Religion, in their final Elizabethan form of 1571 are thirty-nine in number, down from the Edwardian forty-two. (3) The eighth article affirms the ancient Creeds, many of the truths of which were also restated in the articles preceding, but everything after the eighth pertains to other matters either not covered in the ancient Symbols or merely briefly mentioned. 

 

Meanwhile on the other side, in 1564 after the Council of Trent (1545-1563) Roman Patriarch Pius IV published a Creed which, while technically consisting of twelve articles like the earlier Creeds, includes the entire Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as its first article, then goes on to add eleven others which include such fun and exciting things as “that there are truly and properly Seven Sacraments of the New Law, instituted by Jesus Christ our Lord, and necessary for the salvation of mankind, though not all for every one”, “that in the Mass there is offered to God a true, proper, and propitiatory sacrifice for the living and the dead”, “that there is made a conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the Body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the Blood, which conversion the Catholic Church calls Transubstantiation”, “that there is a Purgatory, and that the souls therein detained are helped by the suffrages of the faithful”, “that the saints, reigning together with Christ, are to be honored and invoked, and that they offer prayers to God for us, and that their relics are to be venerated”, “that the images of Christ, of the Mother of God, ever virgin, and also of other Saints, ought to be had and retained, and that due honor and veneration is to be given them”, “that the power of indulgences was left by Christ in the Church, and that the use of them is most wholesome to Christian people” and “the Holy Catholic Apostolic Roman Church as the mother and mistress of all churches”.    

 

By including these items in a new Creed, the making of which was forbidden by the Council of Ephesus, the third of the general Councils that the same Creed claims to “receive and profess”, Rome declared them to be de fide, that is to say, to be of the essence of the faith and so required to be believed for salvation.   Now, the question of whether any or all of these things are de fide is different to that of whether they are true.   For a doctrine to be de fide it must also true, but a doctrine does not have to be de fide to be true.   To go through each of the additional articles of the Profession of Pius IV and examine them as to their truth value would be a too lengthy diversion here.  One of them is clearly false from a historical point of view – the Church from which all other churches after the persecution following the martyrdom of St. Stephen are descended, was situated in Jerusalem not Rome, so if any Church deserves the honour of being called the Mother of all Churches it is the Church of Jerusalem.  We do not need to show that the others are similarly false to show that none of them are de fide.  At least two of them, Purgatory and Indulgences, fail the Vincentian test of Catholicity (believed “everywhere, always, and by all”) and have never been confessed by any of the other ancient Churches whose communion with Rome was broken prior to the second millennium and while the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist does pass the test of Catholicity, the account of the Real Presence to which the term Transubstantiation refers does not, owing far more to the Medieval rediscovery of Aristotle than to the Scriptures and the Fathers of the first millennium.   At an even more fundamental level, none of these things can be shown to have belonged to the original deposit of the “faith once delivered unto the saints” either explicitly or implicitly in the same way as the Eternal Generation of the Son or the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son.  That Rome was willing to declare these things to be de fide, as in later Councils she would declare such other things as the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary and the infallibility of the Roman Patriarch, lends much weight to the accusation that the authority she claims for herself goes way beyond the Catholic truth that the Church has authority to define the faith by explaining the original deposit in such a way as to protect it against heresy and that she believes she has the power to just add to the deposit of faith by her own fiat.

 

Neither the Lutherans nor the Reformed officially made such claims for the extra-Creedal doctrines in their Confessions, although sometimes in practice certain of their theologians and preachers have acted like they did.  Calvinist preachers of various denominational stripes have been known to say that the “doctrines of grace”, by which they mean the doctrines of the Synod of Dort (1618-1619) – total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints -, are the Gospel, as if a rigid predestinarianism in which God has arbitrarily picked out a handful of people to receive His mercy and nobody else ever has any real opportunity to escape condemnation could possibly be accurately described as “Good News.”  The Lutheran claim that “justification by faith alone is the article upon which the Church stands or falls”, while more defensible than the Calvinist equation of predestinarianism with the Gospel, (4) makes a doctrine about Christian faith more important that the truths that are the essential content of Christian faith.

Although our English Articles of Religion are, in terms of article count, longer than either the Lutheran Augsburg or Reformed Belgic Confessions, there is no extra-Creedal doctrine that defines Anglicanism the way TULIP defines Dortian Calvinism or Sola Fide defines Lutheranism (not in the sense that it is distinct to Lutheranism – the Reformed and Anglican Churches also affirm it – but it is more associated with Lutheranism, in the theology of which it is more central).  In part this is because the Articles of Religion – in their final, Elizabethan form at least, if the same cannot exactly be said about such predecessors as the Henrician Ten Articles or the Edwardian Forty-Two – were formulated with the end in mind of achieving the peace and unity in the English Church that Queen Elizabeth and Archbishop Parker sought rather than in the polemical spirit that drove the Continental Protestant Confessions (and, for that matter, the Creed of Pius IV and the Council of Trent).  In part it is because the English Reformers, much more so than their Continental counterparts, were determined to preserve the Catholicity of the English Church, to remove only the blatant late Medieval abuses in their reforms, and, while affirming the supremacy of the Scriptures as the Word of God above ecclesiastical authority and tradition like other Protestants, to look to the Fathers of the early centuries and Councils for the orthodox interpretation of the Scriptures.  This is reflected in all the formularies to come out of the English Reformation of which the Articles are but one.  These define the Anglican faith as the Catholic faith of the ancient Creeds. (5)  The (interrogative) Apostles’ Creed is the faith into which one is baptized in the service of the Book of Common Prayer.  The Apostles’ Creed is also the faith confessed in the daily offices of prayer (except on those to which the Athanasian Symbol is assigned), the Nicene Creed is the faith confessed in the service of Holy Communion.  To avoid any confusion on this matter, the Articles are entitled Articles of Religion and not Confession of Faith.

 

The English Reformers had it right, I believe.  The twelve articles which comprise the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, developed in the same early centuries in the West and East respectively out of the baptismal Creeds of Rome and probably Jerusalem, arguably themselves variants of a proto-Creed perhaps dating back to the Apostles, certainly ultimately derived from the formula with which Jesus Himself commissioned His Church to baptize the nations, are the Christian faith.  The Definition of Chalcedon provided further clarity on the Person and Two Natures of Jesus Christ to guard against latter heresies, the Athanasian Symbol provides the fullest exposition of the Trinity, but everything in the Definition of Chalcedon and the Athanasian Symbol is either explicit or implicit in the Creeds, just as everything in the twelve articles of the Creeds is either explicit or implicit in the original deposit of the “faith once delivered unto the saints” as recorded in the Scriptures.  To subtract from this faith the way liberal revisionists like Harnack did is to create a new religion that is less than Christianity.  To add to it by declaring other things, true or false, that are neither explicit nor implicit in the ancient Creeds to be of the essence of the faith in the way Pius IV and the Council of Trent did is to arrogantly claim authority far in excess of that given to the Church.  Nothing else resembles this error of the papacy so much as the attitude of those who treat the doctrines of the Reformation, or worse of five-point Calvinism, as if they were on par with the truths of the ancient Symbols. 

 

 (1)   Gibson’s book is part of the Oxford Library of Practical Theology edited by W. C. E. Newbolt and Darwell Stone.  Burn contributed separate volumes on each of the Creeds to the same series.  The material in these naturally overlaps that in his earlier An Introduction to The Creeds and the Te Deum (1899).

(2)   Although the Athanasian Symbol and the Definition of Chalcedon are both sometimes called Creeds, neither begins with “I/We believe” and so these are not Creeds in the proper sense.  Symbol is the Anglicization of the Greek word that was first used for these sort of faith formulations.  The Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds are, like the Athanasian Symbol and Definition of Chalcedon, Symbols, but the Athanasian Symbol and Definition of Chalcedon are not properly Creeds.

(3)   The very Calvinistic Irish Articles of Religion of 1615, drawn up primarily by Archbishop Ussher (at the time Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin and not yet a bishop), number 104.  This is the longest in terms of article number of which I am aware. Longest in terms of article number does not translate into longest in in terms of total content.  The Presbyterian Westminster Confession of Faith, which is not organized into articles, is longer. In 1523 Zwingli put out “The Sixty-Seven Articles”.  This however, was not the same sort of thing as either the English or Irish Articles or the Lutheran and Reformed Confessions but a personal statement, drawn up as part of his defence before the Zurich city council after he had been charged with heresy and many of the sixty-seven are short sentences joined together in larger divisions which in other Confessions would constitute a single article.  The last of the sixty-seven is an invitation to ask him questions about various topics.

(4)   The best defence of the statement would be to examine how St. John uses St. Peter’s Confession in his Gospel.  St. Peter’s Confession was that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the Living God” in His response to which Jesus said “thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matt. 16:16, 18)  That the confession and not St. Peter personally, is this foundation rock, is evident in the Greek of rock which is feminine whereas St. Peter’s name is masculine.  In St. John’s Gospel, this very Confession is identified by the Evangelist as what one must believe to have everlasting life (Jn. 20:31).  Earlier in his narrative, Martha makes the same confession in response to Jesus’ asking her if she believed His statement “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.” (Jn. 11:25-26, Martha’s answer in 27).  What Dr. Luther called “justification by faith alone” is the truth explained by St. Paul in the fourth chapter of Romans that being right with God is not something that we earn by works, but is a gift given by grace in Jesus Christ and received by us by faith.  St. Paul did not use the word “alone” in expressing this and many objected to Dr. Luther’s use of it on the grounds that St. James did use it  (Jas. 2:24) and negated it, although these failed to note that in doing so St. James asserted that justification was by precisely the thing St. Paul said it was not by and that the only reasonable way of harmonizing the two is to recognize that St. James was not talking about justification by grace (a word conspicuous by its absence from his second chapter which incorporates all of the other main terms of the fourth chapter of Romans) which is more or less what St. Paul himself said in the second verse of Romans 4 (frequently those who point to James 2:24 in this way claim that it is the only occurrence of “faith alone” in the Scriptures, ignoring or ignorant of Mark 5:36 in which it is stated by Jesus Himself positively in the imperative mood as a command).  All that the doctrine means is that for salvation to be a free gift of grace – which all Churches, even the Roman, acknowledge it to be – then faith must perform its role as the hand which receives that gift with no assistance from works.   The best Roman Patriarch of living memory, Benedict XVI, acknowledged that Dr. Luther was right about this.  At any rate, outside of St. Paul’s epistles, this is most emphasized in the Johannine writings, especially the fourth Gospel in which Jesus Himself and the Evangelist repeatedly promise everlasting life to everyone who believes in Jesus.  The exchange in the eleventh chapter between Martha and Jesus, associates Jesus’ being able to make this promise with His being Whom St. Peter confessed Him to be, which brings us back to that confession being the rock upon which Christ would build His Church and upon which it stands.

(5)   To be fair to the Reformed, one of their Forms of Unity (formularies), their Heidelberg Catechism of 1563, primarily the work of Zacharias Ursinus also clearly identifies the Gospel and the Christian faith with the faith of the Apostles’ Creed in Q and A 22 and 23.

What Dominion Day Signifies

In the early 1980s, towards the end of the premiership of the first Trudeau, the name of the day celebrating the birth of our country was changed to “Canada Day.”  The change was made in a most underhanded fashion.  The bill underwent all of its readings in a single day.  The members of Parliament present were almost certainly too few to constitute a legitimate quorum – no count was taken, the speaker simply declared a quorum.  As dishonest and dirty as this was, in a perverse sense it was a fitting manner for this change to be accomplished.  This change was one more in a long series of attacks on the traditional symbols of the country that was born on 1 July, 1867.  The series had started with the replacement during Pearson’s premiership of the flag that had been baptized the Canadian flag in the blood of the soldiers who fought under it in two World Wars with one deliberately designed to not evoke the heritage of the Canada of Confederation.  It had continued throughout the almost two decades of Liberal government punctuated only by Joe Clark’s brief premiership.  The change of the name of the country’s birthday encapsulated all these previous changes.

 

The new designation of the holiday merely states the name of the country in conjunction with the word day.  As far as national holidays go, this is as minimalist as it comes.  The great Canadian novelist Robertson Davies mocked it in disgust as a “wet” designation, being one letter removed from the name of a brand of ginger ale.  The norm for countries that celebrate this kind of holiday is for the designation to say something meaningful about the country and the event celebrated on the day.  The United States and Mexico, for example, both call their holidays on 4 July and 16 September respectively, Independence Day (contrary to a popular misconception Cinco de Mayo is not Mexico’s national holiday and is more widely celebrated in Mexican communities in the United States than in Mexico).  The old designation of our holiday, Dominion Day, was such a name that said something about both our country and how she came to be.  1 July was the day when the British North America Act came into effect making Canada the first Dominion in the British Empire. 

 

The Liberals’ objection to this designation was based entirely on ignorance.  “Dominion” denoted neither colonial status nor subservience.  It was essentially the equivalent, prior to the Statute of Westminster, to what is now called a “Commonwealth Realm”, i.e., a country that governs herself through her own parliament under the reign of the shared monarch.  The designation spread throughout the British Empire as she transformed herself into the Commonwealth, with Australia becoming the second Dominion in 1901, but its origins were here in Canada where it was chosen by the Fathers of Confederation themselves.  They had originally planned on calling us “the Kingdom of Canada” but, advised by London that this might look to our southern neighbours like we were deliberately poking them in the eye they chose “Dominion” out of Psalm 72:8 to be a less provocative synonym for “Kingdom.”   Although “Commonwealth Realm” has succeeded “Dominion” throughout the Commonwealth, “Dominion” remains the official title of Canada for, although the Liberals removed it from the designation of the holiday they did not remove it from the designation of the country.  Contrary to another widespread misconception, the British North America Act was neither repealed nor replaced in the 1980s.  It was renamed the Constitution Act, 1867 when the power to amend it was transferred to Canada’s parliament, but it remains in our constitutional law where it continues to call the union formed by Confederation “One Dominion” with the name “Canada.” (1)

 

As a national holiday, Dominion Day was in one sense similar to the American Independence Day and in another sense the opposite of it.   The holidays were similar in that they both celebrated what made their respective countries what they are.  Dominion Day commemorated Canada’s becoming a self-governing Dominion within the Empire that was evolving into the Commonwealth.  Independence Day commemorated the Thirteen Colonies’ declaration of independence from the same Empire.  They were the opposite of each other because that which made Canada what she is and that which made the United States what she is were the opposite of each other.  The United States was born out of a revolution and it is a revolution that she celebrates every 4^th of July.  Canada became what she is by rejecting that revolution and this is what Dominion Day signifies.  In his Considerations on France (1796) Joseph de Maistre wrote "Le rétablissement de la monarchie, qu'on appelle contre-révolution, ne sera point une révolution contraire, mais le contraire de la revolution” which in English is usually shortened and slightly paraphrased as “what is needed is not a revolution in the opposite direction but the opposite of a revolution.” (2)  The path that led from the parting of ways with the Americans over their revolution to Confederation and the formation of the Dominion of Canada could be described as “the opposite of a revolution.”

 

This is the real reason why the Liberals, big and small l, hated the word “Dominion” so much. It perpetually reminded them that Confederation was not a progressive project and that at the foundational level Canada was built in opposition to their philosophy and ideals.  In the twentieth century, they had put a lot of effort into deluding themselves that this was not so.  Just as they deluded themselves into thinking that the American capitalism that was uprooting families and communities, replacing the traditional surroundings of those families and communities (both countryside and buildings that looked like they were made for humans rather than machines) with a world of unfeeling steel and concrete, eliminating the sacred – the portion of time and space set apart from commercial activity for higher purposes -  while erecting altars to mammon, and mechanizing every aspect of life (3) was somehow a reactionary force in the world so they deluded themselves into thinking that the country that until the 1970s was far more rural than her southern neighbour, which resisted the secularizing and socially progressive trends that the United States succumbed to shortly after the Second World War until close to the end of the twentieth century, which has never had a separation of church and state and over which a traditional, hereditary, king reigns is somehow a more progressive product of the same Modern thinking that produced the United States.  The Liberal Interpretation of Canadian History which dominated the Canadian history classrooms of the twentieth century the way its ancestor the Whig Interpretation of History had dominated the history classrooms of the previous century taught that Canada’s national story is identical to that of the United States, the story of a country that forged a new identify for herself by breaking with the parent country, except that in Canada’s case this was done diplomatically and peacefully, rather than through revolutionary war.  Donald Creighton, who derided this as the “Authorized Version”, told Canada’s true story in such histories as The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, The Road to Confederation, Dominion of the North, Canada’s First Century and, of course, his masterful two volume biography of Sir John A. Macdonald.  Creighton laid waste to the Liberals’ cherished idea of Canada as a politer America-lite throughout his career as the dean of Canadian history.  That single word “Dominion” in our country’s title and the older name of her national birthday testified to the truth he spoke against the lies the Liberals told themselves. No wonder they hated that word so much.

 

That our country was born, not out of a revolution but out of “the opposite of a revolution” is very much something worth celebrating.  Indeed, we were very fortunate that we did not need the type of “opposite of a revolution” that Maistre had in mind, the type that restored Charles II to his throne and the status quo ante of the Church of England after the Cromwellian rebellion, but that our “opposite of a revolution” consisted of not participating in the American revolution and so retaining our ties to both Great Britain (and the larger Empire, now Commonwealth) and through her to the older civilization of Christendom. 

Sadly, many Canadians are not as appreciative of this as they ought to be.  After the Liberals resumed government in 2015 attacks on our country’s history and traditions resumed.  One conspicuous form these attacks took was attempts to “cancel” our historical figures, most notably Sir John A. Macdonald, the leading Father of Confederation and our first prime minister.  Neoconservatives rightly opposed these attacks and defended Sir John, but as these same neoconservatives are extremely pro-American to the point of often speaking and acting as if they preferred the United States to our country, valued America’s constitution and traditions over ours, there was always a question of how much they knew about and how well they understood what they knew about the man they were defending and what he stood for.   Would they understand the previous paragraph or the argument of this entire essay?

 

I pray that they and all my countrymen would come to a full appreciation of how due to the efforts of our forebears from the Loyalists through to the Fathers of Confederation our country has roots deeper and older than herself or the Modern Age.

 

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the King!

 

(1)   Senator and constitutional expert Eugene Forsey was very pleased to realize that the Liberals had ultimately failed to remove Dominion from the official designation of the country.  See the chapter on him in Charles Taylor’s Radical Tories.

(2)   The full, literal, translation is “The restoration of the monarchy, which is called a counter-revolution, will not be an opposite revolution, but the opposite of revolution.”

(3)  This critical description of American capitalism is not from the perspective known as socialism but from a perspective in which capitalism and socialism are two sides of one coin.  While socialists see the uneven distribution of wealth as the problem in capitalism and diagnose the ownership of private property as the cause and liberals (liberal is to capitalism what socialist is to socialism, a capitalist is someone who owns and uses capital) see inefficiency and too little individual freedom as the problems caused by state control in socialism what the two systems have in common is more important than what distinguishes them.  They are both ultimately expressions of Modern man’s choice of mammon over God.

Prejudice not Pride

The other day I encountered someone wearing a button that had the same three words as in my title here, except in reverse order.  The sentiment thereby expressed is widely held and on conspicuous display in this, the month formerly known as June.  It is very much a sentiment of the present day.  It also reveals much this wrong about the present day.

The “prejudice” refered to in the sentiment on the button can be defined as “a negative attitude towards an identifiable group of people.”  It is unlikely that the sort of people who would wear buttons like this or, for that matter, the sort of people who would make buttons like this, know of any other sort of prejudice.  Fifty years ago the definition might have included the idea that the negative attitude is unfair because it is formed with inadequate information about the group in question.  Today, a negative attitude towards groups towards which you are not supposed to have negative attitudes is regarded as a prejudice even if it is informed and those who have built their careers and reputations on combatting prejudice generally support government attempts to suppress the spread of information, even if it is accurate, that could contribute to the forming of such negative attitudes.   This is what the expression “truth is no defence” which sometimes comes up in discussions of “hate speech” is all about.

 

This change in the meaning of the word prejudice that has been observable within my lifetime is small but it is also significant.  There is a much larger difference, however, between prejudice in both of these senses and the sense attached to the word in 1813 when the Jane Austen novel, the title of which is alluded to both by the button and by my own title, was first published.  Even larger is the gap between today’s usage of the word and that of Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France published twenty years before Austen’s novel.  

 

Burke’s Reflections include an extended defence of prejudice which would be unintelligible if the word were taken in its present day meaning.  Prejudice, as Burke used the word, was not necessarily either directed towards people or negative (that prejudice can be connected to its object by the preposition “for” as well as the preposition “against” has largely been forgotten).  Rather it had reference to tapping into the accumulated wisdom of the human race available in tradition as opposed to relying entirely upon one’s individual reason.  “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason”, Burke wrote, “because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.”  Continuing the thought he said:

 

Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.

 

To speak of prejudice as a good thing was uncommon even in Burke’s day.  His contemporary and friend, the lexicographer Samuel Johnson who was immortalized for his table talk by James Boswell, included two definitions under prejudice in his Dictionary, the second of which was “Mischief; detriment; hurt; injury.”  Obviously this is not what Burke was defending and Dr. Johnson himself said of this definition “This sense is only accidental or consequential; a bad thing being called a prejudice, only because prejudice is commonly a bad thing, and is not derived from the original or etymology of the word: it were therefore better to use it less; perhaps prejudice ought never to be applied to any mischief, which does not imply some partiality or prepossession.”  It is in the sense of Dr. Johnson’s first definition of the word that Burke used it.  That definition is:

 

Prepossession; judgment formed beforehand without examination. It is used for prepossession in favour of any thing or against it. (1)

The word prepossession is less familiar than the word it is being used to define, so much so that it does not have its own entry in the same Dictionary, but the meaning of both words is provided in the remainder of the first sentence and it is exactly what the Latin root of prejudice suggests.  Instead of prepossession we are more likely to speak of “preconceived opinion.”  In a court of law this is, of course, a bad thing.  That justice involves listening to the arguments of a case and deciding based upon the facts in evidence rather than pre-judging based on other factors is part of what the ancient depiction of the personification of Justice as wearing a blind-fold is supposed to indicate.  The negative implications of prejudice in a legal context are the original reason for the more general notion in other contexts that prejudice is a bad thing that Dr. Johnson alluded to in his second definition.  What Burke demonstrated was that preconceived opinion has a positive as well as a negative side.  Note how he spoke of “just prejudice”.  That is “just” as in “righteous”, not “just” as in “mere”. 

 

To understand Burke’s argument, it is important to keep in mind what he was arguing against.  Burke’s Reflections was written in response to the destructive violence of the French Revolution.  The worst of that violence was still yet to come at the time he wrote but what he had seen had left a huge impact on him because those perpetrating that violence were doing so in the name of the ideals that he himself had professed as a Whig (classical liberal) in Parliament.  His defence of the virtues of the Age of chivalry and of established, traditional institutions such as the Crown and the Church in Reflections reads like what one would have expected his friend Dr. Johnson, a Tory, to have written had he lived to see the French Revolution and it is likely that Burke as he wrote was asking himself what Dr. Johnson would have said.  Burke was, to borrow and slightly adjust a famous definition from Irving Kristol, a Whig who had been mugged by reality.

 

Burke was addressing not merely the way the revolutionaries had turned ideals into “armed doctrines” but the way of thinking that had brought this about.  The French Revolution came at the end of a century in which Modern philosophers had declared war against tradition in the name of reason.  This was utterly foolish on their part.  Tradition – knowledge and wisdom accumulated and passed down from the past – is what prevents us from having to re-invent the wheel, literally as well as figuratively, in each generation, and this applies to philosophy as much as to anything else.   The temptation to exalt reason, the individual’s capacity for judgement based on the knowledge available to him, over tradition, the capacity of man in the collective whether as family, nation, civilization or the entire race or species to accumulate and pass on knowledge and wisdom for the benefit of those yet to come, however, was one which the thinkers of the eighteenth century found difficult to resist.  It must be resisted, however, if consequences like those of the French Revolution are to be avoided and this requires a healthy share of the instinct the late Sir Roger Scruton spoke of that the good things in life are difficult to build but easy to destroy.

 

The wisdom that we inherit through tradition in Burke’s argument, while it can be described as prejudice in that its availability precedes the application of reason on the part of the individual to its justification, is not necessarily contrary to reason.  Indeed, the difference between Burke’s “just prejudice” and bigotry in the word’s lexical meaning (as opposed to its common use as pejorative epithet for disagreement with liberalism) is that whereas just prejudice is opinion derived from tradition that has yet to be confirmed by the individual’s use of reason bigotry is opinion that is stubbornly held to even after it has been convincingly rebutted by reason.  That tradition, the source of just prejudices, is self-correcting and flexible by contrast with ideology, which is what you get when you reduce human knowledge to the technical knowledge that you are left with when rationalism’s irrational demand that reason precede all knowledge is complied with, was a key insight of the title essay in Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1963), an essay which revisited this theme from Burke’s Reflections from the position of hindsight available in the twentieth century after the rationalism that in Burke’s day was in its infancy had run its course for a couple of centuries.

Prejudice, at least in the sense defended by Burke, is much to be preferred over pride.  Although Aristotle, at least in some English translations, spoke of a “pride” that he considered to be the highest of virtues rather than a vice, the word he used was μεγαλοψυχία which is not an exact equivalent of the English pride.  Indeed, pride is not among the definitions that Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott provide for μεγαλοψυχία in their exhaustive and definitive Greek Lexicon.  Arrogance is provided as a secondary meaning for the occasions when the word is used in a negative sense, but the primary definition is “greatness of soul, highmindness, lordliness”, with the implication of “generosity” and in their intermediate Lexicon “magnanimity” is provided alongside the literal first meaning of “greatness of soul.” In other words, μεγαλοψυχία, while it does include a sense of thinking well of self also includes the idea of being generous to others.  While Aristotle contrasts it with a vice that is sometimes rendered “humility” in translation, the word he used is not the word for the humility praised as a virtue in the New Testament (ταπεινοφροσύνη) but the literal opposite of μεγαλοψυχία, i.e., μικροψυχία, defined by Liddell and Scott as “littleness of soul, meanness of spirit.”   Similarly, μεγαλοψυχία is not among the words used by the New Testament for the pride consistently condemned as a sin.  The main words for pride in the New Testament are ὑπερηφανία which Liddell and Scott define as “arrogance” and when used with an object “contempt towards or for” and ἀλαζονεία which they define as “false pretension, imposture” and “boastfulness” (Koine lexicons usually define it as “arrogance” and “boastfulness”) and τυφόω which is a verb which in classical Greek usually meant to delude (when others were the object) or to be crazy or demented (when self was the object) but which in the New Testament means to be conceited.  In the Authorized Bible, the passive participle of the verb is rendered “lifted up with pride” in 1 Timothy 3:6, the verse which links pride to the fall of the devil.

 

These New Testament words are closer in meaning to the English “pride” than Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία.  So is the word ὕβρις which Aristotle and for that matter the ancient Greeks in general regarded as the worst defect in character.  This word has passed into English as hubris which we ordinarily think of as a synonym for arrogance.  In ancient Greek it was an arrogance that manifested itself in acts of violence, insolence or insult towards others, i.e., the opposite sort of behaviour towards others than that suggested by Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία.  In Greek tragedy, this was most often the “fatal flaw” (Aristotle’s word for which is the same word the New Testament uses as its basic word for “sin”) which brought down the tragic hero.

 

Pride is the English word which translates the Latin Superbia which in Latin theology is consistently identified as the worst of all sins.  It is, for example, always listed either first or last in lists of the Seven Deadly Sins depending upon whether they are listed in descending or ascending order.  In this matter Latin theology is in close agreement with Greek theology.  Evagrius Pontius identified a list of eight vices which was later reproduced by St. John Cassian in his Institutes.  The list is for the most part identical to the Latin Seven Deadly Sins – the lower sins or vices in each include gluttony, anger, avarice, and lust (fornication in Pontius/Cassian).  In this list, which goes from least to worst, the eighth vice was pride, which Cassian described as the most savage vice and the root of all the others.  The New Testament word ὑπερηφανία is used for pride.  The seventh vice, and therefore second worst, was κενοδοξία which is usually rendered in English by “vainglory” (as, for example, the Authorized Bible does in the one New Testament verse in which it appears Phil. 2:3) or by “boasting” and which is almost identical in meaning to pride, the basic difference being that whereas vainglory/ κενοδοξία requires an audience pride/ ὑπερηφανία is something one can have in solitude.  Another way of looking at it is that pride is the internal sin, vainglory its outer expression.  In the Latin Seven Deadly Sins, produced by Gregory the Great’s revising of the earlier list and condensing these two into the single Superbia, Invidia (Envy) is added as the second worst sin and it too is closely connect with pride.  Traditionally Pride and Envy are the sins which first arose in Lucifer’s heart prompting his rebellion against God and are thus literally the source of all other sins.

 

So, no, the button, like the present day, has it backwards.  Prejudice – in Burke’s sense – is preferable by far over Pride.

    

 (1)   Dr. Johnson also included a line criticizing the use of the preposition “to” as the link between prejudice and its object as improper.  Dr. Johnson’s opinion has won out and this usage is mostly if not entirely obsolete.