On Owning the Left’s Abusive Labels

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

The Pauline Authorship of the Epistle to Hebrews

 

Objections and Answers

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Pauline Thought and Style in Hebrews

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

No Anonymity

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

For Further Reading

 

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

 

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

 

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

Beauty versus Blasphemy

The opening ceremonies of the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris became the latest in a series of highly controversial events to have occurred this July.  I am not going to say much about the others as they have to do with American domestic politics.  Nor am I going to say a whole lot about what happened at the Olympics as I am merely using it as a springboard for a discussion of theological aesthetics.  That it shocked anyone is rather surprising in itself.   What else would one expect from the games that represent the apex of Modern man’s regression into the pagan idolatry of sports, especially when located in the capital city of a nation that at the end of the eighteenth century threw off and murdered its divine-right king and queen, threw off its ancient allegiance to the Church, and paraded a prostitute through said capital telling the people to worship her as the “goddess” Reason?   Note that the part of the Olympic ceremonies that included a blasphemous reenactment of the Last Supper featuring drag queens, a celebration of Dionysius the Olympian whose festivals threatened civilization even in pagan days (read Euripides’ Bacchae), and the same sort of tasteless garbage that takes place in those silly parades in honour of the deadly sin of Superbia, also included an honouring of the French Revolution. Despite the glorious events of the ninth of Thermidor, the anniversary of which we just passed, France never recovered from this disaster, not even to the extent that England had recovered from the mother of all left-wing revolutions, the Puritan one, in the Restoration of the previous century and even that recovery, alas, was not as complete as it should have been.  Perhaps there are some who might still be surprised that an alphabet soup fest took place at what might reasonably be expected to be a celebration of jock culture.  Such have not been paying attention to how the costume and makeup division of the alphabet soup brigade have claimed the field of athletics as their own territory in the last few years.

 

Christian condemnation of the mockery of a key event in our sacred history has come under criticism from two directions.  There are those “liberal Christians” who can always be counted on to condemn any act of Christians standing up for themselves and their faith as being “unchristian”, “judgmental”, “hindering the Gospel”, “politicizing Christianity” or some other such balderdash. I place little value on such opinions and do not think them worthy of a response.  The other type of criticism is almost the opposite of this.  It takes Christians to task for being too milquetoastish in their defense of their faith.  The reason people like the performers at the Olympics and those who approved their performance feel free to mock Christianity in ways they would not feel similarly free to mock other religions such as, for example, Islam, is because Christians do not respond with such things as fatwas and jihads when their faith is mocked.  A more insightful variation of this would be to say that much of the Christian response to this mockery has been based on liberal principles rather than Christian ones.  In other words it has taken the form of “you wouldn’t treat other religions this way, it is unfair that you are treating us like that, this is discrimination” rather than “you have mocked the true and living God, Who will not be mocked, and furthermore mocked Him at a key moment in the history of His having taken on human nature and become Man in order to save us, the world, and yes, even you, from the sins for which we all must repent rather than celebrate as you are now doing, and if you don’t change your sorry ways and seek His forgiveness, you will suffer forever the consequences of mocking Him .”

This incident brought to mind an earlier controversy regarding a depiction of the Last Supper.  No, I am not referring to Dan Brown’s silly book but to a painting by Venetian Renaissance artist Paolo Veronese.  In 1573 he completed a very large – 18.37 ft. by 42.95 ft. – oil painting that had been commissioned by the Dominicans as a replacement for a painting by Titian of the Last Supper that had been lost to fire two years earlier.  The middle of the painting features Christ at the centre of a table with the twelve Apostles on either side of Him much like other familiar portraits of the Last Supper.  The setting is clearly not an upper room in first century Jerusalem, however, from the architecture of the room and the skyline of the city in the large window behind them.  Then there are all the extras.  There are close to fifty people in the painting, including a dwarf in jester’s attire, a few African slaves, German soldiers, and all sorts of other people, none of whom one would have expected to have been present on the occasion even if the factor of anachronism were to be excluded.  There are a number of animals there too including a cat peeking out from under the table at St. Peter’s feet at a dog sitting in front of the table and tilting its head to look back at the cat and a parrot on the jester’s arm.  These promoted an investigation by the local Venetian branch of the Inquisition which, on the grounds that he had violated the rules regarding religious art that the Council of Trent (1545-1563) had imposed, ordered him to fix the painting, which he did by re-titling it “The Feast at the House of Levi.”  Monty Python did a sketch loosely based on this although they switched in Michelangelo for Paolo Veronese and the Pope for the local Inquisition.

 

A comparison of this incident with the current one brings a few observations to mind.  It goes without saying, of course, that the Church was more powerful in the sixteenth century than today.  It is also evident that Veronese’s painting was not intrinsically blasphemous like the performance art at the Olympics.  Had it been so, the Inquisition would not have been satisfied with a change of title.  One conclusion that might be drawn from this is that the Church then took lesser offences in the realm of art more seriously than the Church today takes greater offences.  Which makes it interesting to note  that this incident occurred ten years after the closing of the Council of Trent.  The Council of Trent was the Roman Church’s response to the Reformation.  The Reformation primarily had to do with ethical matters (charges of ecclesiastical corruption that began with the 99 theses pertaining to the sale of indulgences) and doctrine (the authority of the Church in relation to that of Scripture, the doctrine of salvation), but there was also an aesthetic element that was intertwined with both the ethical and doctrinal.  The Protestant Reformers considered the invocation of the saints and a number of similar or associated practices to be in violation of the second commandment, that is to say, the commandment against idolatry.  This is an ethical issue because if the Reformers were right the practices in question are sinful, because idolatry is a major sin, and if the Reformers were wrong, they were guilty of the sin of falsely judging the motives of other Christians.  It is also a doctrinal issue, because for the Reformers to be right the ancient Christian doctrine of the Communion of the Saints, that all Christians, whether in earth or in heaven, are members of the one body of Jesus Christ within which there is no veil between the living and the dead because all are one in Christ, would have to be wrong.  It was an aesthetical matter as well and became increasingly so as the Reformation progressed and newer Reformers developed traditions within Protestantism that adopted such strict views as that any artistic depiction of God was idolatry or, more extremely, that any artistic depiction of anyone was idolatry, and that consequently Church buildings needed to be stripped of all adornment.  That it was the rules of the Roman Church, adopted in the Counter Reformation, that Veronese ran afoul of demonstrates something that a lot of Christians find difficult to grasp today.  Aesthetic permissivism is not the only alternative to Puritanism, the extreme version of Protestantism that stripped Churches of their artwork, Church music of its instruments, closed theatres, and basically looked at almost any attempt at artistic expression as an offense against the God Who had given the ability of artistic expression to man.

 

By “aesthetic permissivism” I mean the idea that artists should not be subject to any rules external to those of their art, an idea closely related to the idea that art should not be subject to any criticism other than aesthetic.  In practice these ideas quickly translate into the artist not being subject to any rules whatsoever and his art not being subject to any criticism.  These are popular ideas today, not least among artists for whom they have an obvious self-serving appeal, because of a) the widespread notion that beauty, the standard upon which all aesthetic rules and judgements are based, is purely subjective and b) the less widespread, except among left-wing activists who think they are artists, notion that beauty is a false standard that needs to be deconstructed and so art must be made to deliberately eschew the standard of beauty by embracing its opposite.  Much of the corpus of the late Sir Roger Scruton was devoted to demonstrating how erroneous these ideas are.  Most Christians are uncomfortable with aesthetic permissiveness in its bald form as described in this paragraph although there is an idea popular in certain Christian circles that resembles an inverted version of it.  This is the idea that while artists and their art should be subject to rules and criticism of a moral nature, albeit not to the extent demanded by Puritanism, aesthetic judgements are purely subjective and should not be influenced by theology or ethics.  A version of this that arises with regards to Church worship is the notion, often supported by a misinterpretation of St. Paul, that the matter of how we worship is adiaphora. Fr. Paul A. F. Castellano’s As It is In Heaven: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Introduction to the Traditional Church and Her Worship (Tucson: Wheatmark, 2021) is an excellent rebuttal of this notion.

 

Puritanism is no more an acceptable position for orthodox Christians than aesthetic permissivism.  The premise that all artistic depictions break the commandment against idols can be answered in the same way as can the premise that killing in self-defense or defense of others, in war, and as the execution of a sentence for death passed for the commission of a capital crime are forbidden by “thou shalt not kill”, i.e., with “turn the page.”  Exodus 21:14-17 and 29 prescribe the death penalty for various offences in the chapter after “thou shalt not kill” or more literally “thou shalt not do murder” in Exodus 20:13.  Only a few chapters later in Exodus 25 comes the instructions on building the ark of the covenant, with the mercy seat, with two golden cherubim (images of heavenly – in the sense of the heaven where God dwells – beings) (vv. 18-20).  The candlestick was to have representations of almonds on it (Ex. 25:33-34).  The ephod of the high priest was to have depictions of pomegranates on it (Ex. 28:33-34).  The Puritan interpretation of Exodus 20:4 as forbidding all artistic depictions cannot hold up within the context of its own book.  It cannot hold up in the context of the next verse which provides the criteria which distinguishes an idol from something that is merely a work of art.  As for depictions of God, the ruling of the Second Council of Nicaea (787 AD) against iconoclasm maintained, Scripturally, that the Incarnation had changed things, He Who as the eternal Son of God is the perfect Image of the invisible God His Father (Col. 1:15, Heb. 1:3) became Man and in doing so revealed God that He might be seen in Him (Jn. 1:18, 14:9), and so since in the Incarnate Son God and Man are forever united in Hypostatic Union, God can be depicted because Man can be depicted.  The Second Council of Nicaea was a general council of the Church prior to the East-West Schism, received by the whole Church and both sides of the later Schism, as the seventh truly ecumenical council.  Protestantism’s reasons for rejecting it as such are insufficient in my opinion.  The attitude that manifested itself in the iconoclasm against which Nicaea II pronounced judgement and then later again in Puritanism goes back prior to the coming of Christ to the aftermath of the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucids.  Zealous lay leaders of Israel, recognizing from the prophets that the Assyrian and Babylonian Captivities had come upon Israel because of idolatry, determined that Israel would not only not practice idolatry again but would not be allowed to get close, and “hedged” the second commandment, and all the other commandments of the Mosaic Law, with extra commandments making the burden of the Law that much heavier.  These became the sect of Second Temple Judaism known as the Pharisees with whom Christ interacted in His ministry.  The spirit of Pharisaism is evident in the way the English Puritans responded to the efforts of Archbishop Laud and the other Carolinian Divines to maintain the “beauty of holiness” (Ps. 29:2, 96:9) in the English Church within the limits of the rubrics of the Protestant Elizabethan Prayer Book with accusations of papist conspiracies, armed revolt against Church and King, regicide, and a tyrannical regime that stripped the Churches of everything of aesthetic value.

 

While the Roman Church’s handling of the Paolo Veronese “incident” demonstrates that a mean can be found between these two extremes it does not necessarily illustrate what the proper mean should look like.  Let us return to the incident that prompted this discussion.  A better Christian response to the blasphemous mockery of the Last Supper than to rely solely on the liberal principle that one religion should not be singled out and targeted for the kind of mockery to which other religions would not be subjected is to stand on the Christian moral and theological principle that the true and living God will not be mocked.  To this moral and theological condemnation, however, must be added aesthetic condemnation.  The performance was bad not just on moral and theological grounds but aesthetic as well.  It was a display of ugliness not beauty.  Performances of this nature, even when they are not desecrating events from sacred history, generally are.  The spirit of mockery in which they are conducted, even when not directed explicitly against God, is directed against standards that are wrongfully considered to be oppressive, which in the arts means especially beauty.  Mockery of beauty is ultimately mockery of God, of course, because beauty like the other transcendentals (properties of being), goodness and truth, finds its ultimate expression in Him in Whom Being and Essence are one and Whose very name translates as “He Who Is.”

 

St. Peter commanded us to “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you” (1 Pet. 3:15) and to give such a response as discussed in the previous paragraph to “artistic” assaults on the faith, Christians should familiarize themselves with basic theological aesthetics.  Although more has probably been written in the last hundred years on this subject than in all the rest of Christian history put together it is much more of a niche subject than its counterpart philosophical aesthetics, the field of the aforementioned Sir Roger Scruton.  Hans Urs von Balthasar’s seven volume The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics (published in German from 1961 to 1967, English translation published by Ignatius Press in San Francisco from 1983 to 1990) is a good place to start.  For anyone wanting to learn more about how in God Being and Essence are the same thing read St. Thomas Aquinas, or if you are looking for a shorter treatment E. L. Mascall’s He Who Is: A Study in Traditional Theism, originally published in 1943, just republished last year by Angelico Press in Brooklyn.  Don’t mistake St. Thomas and Mascall as starting with being as possessed by created things and equating it with God.  This would be both idolatry and pantheism.  It is God’s Being, of which created being is merely analogous, that is one with His Essence, as no created being and essence are one.  For a warning against the idolatry of equating God with anything in creation, including our idea of Him, see the first chapter of Vladimir Lossky’s The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002) but with the caveat that Eastern theology often takes its apophaticism to the extreme of denying the possibility of natural theology, a denial that is difficult to reconcile with the first chapter of Romans.  One final recommendation is Benjamin Guyer’s The Beauty of Holiness: The Caroline Divines and Their Writings (London: Canterbury Press, 2012), from the Canterbury Studies in Spiritual Theology Series.

The Dominion of Canada – An Annotated Bibliography

 

Today is the 157th anniversary of the day when the British North America Act came into effect establishing a new realm in North America that under the reign of Her Majesty Queen Victoria and governed by her own Parliament in Ottawa would bear the title of Dominion and the name of Canada.  Originally a confederation of four provinces she would grow to include six others along with the territories which were originally a single territory, which was divided twice, just before the twentieth century and at that century’s end bringing the current number to three.  Although I was only six when the Liberals, lacking the necessary quorum in Parliament, sneakily and illegally passed a bill changing the name of our country’s holiday I still refer to it as Dominion Day which the great Robertson Davies, writing to the Globe and Mail, once described as a “splendid title” while referring to the new one as “wet” due to its being one letter off Canada Dry, and the folly of the Liberal parliamentarians as “one of the inexplicable lunacies of a democratic system temporarily running to seed.”

 

Normally for Dominion Day I write an essay, sometimes about a notable Canada, sometimes a more political piece blasting the Liberals, big and small l, and all the changes for the worse that they have wrought.  Last year’s essay was a call for religious revival in Canada.  This year I decided to do something a bit different and have put together a Dominion Day recommended reading list.  This list is not intended to be exhaustive either in whole or in any of the sections into which it is divided so non-inclusion in this list should not be taken as a recommendation against a book on my part.  

 

Canada: Political Philosophy

 

The two books that top my list of recommendations for Canadian political reading are ones to which long-time readers will have seen me make multiple mentions.  These are John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown (Toronto: Kingswood House, 1957) and the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker’s Those Things We Treasure: A Selection of Speeches on Freedom and Defence of Our Parliamentary Heritage (Toronto: Macmillan, 1972).  The first of these, which was published posthumously having been edited by journalist Judith Robinson who herself passed away not that long after, makes the case for our constitutional parliamentary monarchy against the alternatives of American capitalist republicanism or Soviet socialist totalitarianism which at the time were striving to remake the entire world, each in her own image, in the conflict we remember as the Cold War.  Farthing also discusses the first stage of the Liberal Party’s subversion of our constitution in the King-Byng affair.  A more thorough examination and defense of the constitutional principles represented by the right side of that almost century old controversy, that of Lord Byng (the King in the name of the affair was not King George V, whom Byng represented as Governor-General, but the Liberal Prime Minister whose last name was King) can be found in Eugene Forsey’s doctoral dissertation which was published as The Royal Power of Dissolution of Parliament in the British Commonwealth (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1943).  I mention this third book, which in its dissertation form can be found online if you have any difficulty locating a hard copy, before commenting on Diefenbaker’s because of its topical connection with Farthing’s. Diefenbaker’s book collects speeches that he gave during and in response to the second wave of Liberal subversion.  It is mostly changes wrought early in the premiership of Pierre Trudeau that are decried although the second wave of Liberal subversion can be dated to the moment that Lester Pearson, with the aid of both the Social Credit and the New Democrats, ousted Diefenbaker in 1963.  For the classic account of this act of Liberal subversion see George Grant’s Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1965) which is the most political of Grant’s books, although it incorporates the philosophical and moral insights more typical of his other writings.

 

The fifth book that deserves mention under this heading is The Social Criticism Of Stephen Leacock: The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice and Other Essays (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1973) which was edited by Alan Bowker and which incorporates the whole of Leacock’s The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice, originally published in 1920 and which is a critique rather than an endorsement of socialism, as well as “Greater Canada: An Appeal” and several of the essays from Leacock’s Essays and Literary Studies (1916), including his “The Woman Question” which is the best single piece ever written by a Canadian on the subject of feminism. Leacock was the chair of the Department of Economics and Political Science at McGill where he was a mentor to both Farthing and Forsey.  Noting this connection brings me to the sixth book, Radical Tories: The Conservative Tradition in Canada (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1982).  The author of this book was Charles Taylor, not the philosopher but the journalist and race horse breeder. Eugene Forsey and George Grant both get a chapter in this book, the chapters being based on  Taylor’s personal interviews with these men, which is the same format used for the chapters on the historians Donald Creighton and William Morton and a few others.  Leacock and Farthing obviously could not be similarly interviewed although Taylor discussed Leacock and mentioned Farthing earlier in the book.

 

Canada: Topical Politics

 

The distinction between the books under the previous heading and the books under this one is that the previous books addressed Canadian politics in terms of general political philosophy whereas these address specific issues.  The Stephen Leacock book could have gone in either section.

 

On the subject of immigration, which is a very hot button topic today, Doug Collins’ Immigration: the Destruction of English Canada (Richmond Hill: BMG, 1979) is arguably still the best Canadian book ever written.  It was the eighth and last book published by BMG, a small publishing house set up by Winnett Boyd, Kenneth McDonald and Orville Gaines to warn against the path down which Pierre Trudeau was leading Canada. This was very early in the era of liberal immigration and Collins accurately predicted that the end result would be the importation of a lot of unnecessary and unwanted racial strife.  For warning against importing racial strife Collins was branded a racist.  Since that warning went unheeded, he was a Cassandra and his enemies did their worst to make him a pariah by the time he passed away in 2001.  More of his commentary on immigration and a host of other issues can be found in The Best and Worst of Doug Collins (Vancouver: Whitecap Books, 1987).  When this book was first published you could walk into an ordinary bookstore and buy it off the shelf.  When he died in 2001, the only obituaries I remember seeing were by Kevin Michael Grace in the Report and by Allan Fotheringham in MacLeans (I was never a fan of Foth but he showed a lot of class on this occasion).  The next book on my list on this topic is Ricardo Duchesne’s Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians (London: Black House Publishing, 2017).  Of all recent books on Canadian immigration this is the closest to Collins’ in terms of what it is for and what it is against although it tackles the subject from an academic rather than a journalistic angle – Duchesne is a historical sociologist who until he was driven out by leftist colleagues a few years back was a professor in the social science department of the University of New Brunswick - and has the advantage of almost four more decades of history on which to comment.  Other books deserving mention are Charles M. Campbell’s Betrayal & Deceit: The Politics of Canadian Immigration (West Vancouver: Jasmine Books, 2000) and Mike Taylor’s The Truth About Immigration: Exposing the Economic and Humanitarian Myths (Coquitlam: KARMA Publishing, 1998).  These could be described as having been written from an insider’s perspective.  Campbell, an engineer in the mining industry by profession, served ten years on the old Immigration Appeal Board that existed before it was reorganized into the Immigration and Refugee Appeal Board in 1989 following the Supreme Court’s bad ruling in the Singh case in 1985.  Taylor had worked as an immigration investigator for the federal government before writing his book.

 

The current Liberal government that has taken rather the opposite view of immigration to that expressed in the books just mentioned has promoted a lot of hatred against Canada or at least the historical Canada.  They have also promoted a lot of ethno-masochism among Canadians of European ancestry.  I am not saying that these problems began with the present government, far from it, but they have been more aggressively promoted by this government than any prior and the means employed has been a narrative in which the history of the church-administered boarding schools that Canada used to fulfil her education obligations under the Indian treaties has been heavily distorted.   In response I will recommend two books both of which are edited collections by multiple authors.   The first is Rodney A. Clifton and Mark DeWolf ed. From Truth Comes Reconciliation: An Assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Report (Winnipeg: The Frontier Centre for Public Policy, 2021) and the second is C. P. Champion and Tom Flanagan ed. Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (And the Truth About Residential Schools) (Dorchester Books and True North Media, 2023).

Since my recommendations in the previous two paragraphs will have already driven any overly sensitive progressive into a fuming frenzy I will stoke the fire of their rage further by adding Down The Drain? A Critical Re-Examination of Canadian Foreign Aid, written by Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform co-founders Paul Fromm and James P. Hull and published in Toronto by Griffin House in 1981.  This is the best Canadian book that I have read on the subject of tax money being taken from working and middle class Canadians and either dumped into the bank accounts of Third World dictators or thrown away on wasteful projects in the Third World.  While the book is obviously in need of either an update or a sequel the issue, which had largely been dormant for a decade or more, has been brought back to life with a vengeance by the present Trudeau Liberals.

 

When it comes to the topic of the ongoing moral and social decay of our country and Western Civilization in general in the post-World War II era the best and certainly most exhaustive book by a Canadian that comes to my mind is The War Against the Family: A Parent Speaks Out On the Political, Economic, and Social Policies That Threaten Us All.  The author was the late William D. Gairdner who competed for Canada in the 1964 Summer Olympics before going to university and earning his Ph.D. and becoming a well-known small-c conservative speaker and writer.  This, his second book, was originally published in hardback in1992 by Stoddart of Toronto who released a paperback edition the following year.  After Stoddart folded, BPS Books of Toronto re-released the paperback edition in 2007 with a new cover which as far as I can tell is the only revision made.  In connection with this book I would also recommend by the same author The Book of Absolutes: A Critique of Relativism and a Defence of Universals (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2008).  Where the first book looks at such matters as “Compulsory Miseducation”, “Moral Values and Sex Ed”, “The Feminist Mistake: Women Against the Family”, “Women at War: On the Military, Day Care and Home Fronts”, “Radical Homosexuals vs. The Family”, “The Invisible Holocaust: Abortion vs. the Family” to give a few chapter titles in whole or in part from the perspective of the official policies behind the various changes involved the second book digs deeper and addresses the basic ideas of which the official policies are practical applications.

 

The War Against the Family included a chapter on euthanasia as well as a chapter on abortion and this has become a far more timely topic due to the present government’s having introduced the world’s most aggressive and extreme euthanasia policy in M.A.I.D.  Another book that addressed both abortion and euthanasia from the perspective of showing how the Modern technological way of thinking and doing has conditioned people to reject the older way of thinking about justice that rejected and condemned these things and to embrace a newer way of thinking that accepts them was George Grant’s final book Technology and Justice (Toronto: House of Ananasi Press, 1986).  The chapters on abortion and euthanasia are the last two in the book and these Grant co-wrote with his wife Sheila.

 

Bill Whatcott’s Born In a Graveyard: One man's transformation from a violent, drug-addicted criminal into Canada's most outspoken family values activist (Langley: Good Character Books, 2014) is the autobiography, or perhaps testimony would be a better word, of a man who has paid the price for translating his Christian views on these matters, especially abortion and homosexuality, into practice in the form of activism.  Whatcott was charged by the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission for distributing pamphlets that colourfully expressed his opinion about the alphabet soup gang’s public schools agenda.  The Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal ruled against Whatcott who appealed to what was then the Saskatchewan Court of Queen’s Bench (now King’s Bench) which upheld the Tribunal’s ruling, then to the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal which ruled in favour of Whatcott causing the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada which held hearings in 2011 and unanimously ruled in 2013 that while Whatcott’s rights under section 2 of the Charter had indeed been violated those who so violated them were allowed to get away with it because of the loop-hole in section 1. Needless to say this asinine ruling in which the expression of “detestation” and “vilification” was declared to be outside the protection of free expression (I suspect that the “detestation” and “vilification” of white people, men, and Christians is treated as an exception) was not exactly a step in the direction of freeing Canadians from the unjust shackles of censorship and self-censorship that the first Trudeau introduced early in his premiership.  Today it is part of the legal precedent that the second Trudeau and his cronies look to in order to justify and explain their attempts to pass draconian laws telling us what we can and cannot say on the internet.   Since Whatcott is up before the Supreme Court again this time on charges pertaining to his creative evangelistic efforts at a Hubris parade in Toronto a sequel may be on the horizon.

  

Canada: History

 

The first book on Canadian history that I recommend is W. L. Morton’s The Kingdom of Canada: A General History from Earliest Times (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1963).  The author, who was born in Gladstone, was the head of the Department of History at the University of Manitoba from 1950 to 1964.  Among his other books, all of which are worth reading, are histories of the university and of the province.   Taking its name from the original full designation of the country proposed by the Fathers of Confederation this one-volume history of Canada ends on the eve of the second wave of seditious, Liberal, revolution-within-the-form under Pearson-Trudeau.

The second on my list would be the complete works of Donald G. Creighton.  Alright, you can omit Take-Over (Toronto: McClelland and Steward, 1978) because that is a novel, but The Young Politician (Toronto: Macmillan, 1952) and The Old Chieftain (Toronto: Macmillan, 1955), the two volumes of his biography of Sir John A. Macdonald must remain on the list for the story of the life of the foremost Father of Confederation is an absolutely essential part of Canadian history and no one tells it better than Creighton.  Read both volumes in the original editions if you can, but if you must read the current one-volume edition from the University of Toronto Press consider skipping over the introduction by Creighton’s own biographer, Donald Wright of the University of New Brunswick.  His apologizing for Creighton’s not holding to the stomach-churning, woke, entirely-wrong, perspectives of the present day are bad enough in his biography of Creighton without marring Creighton’s masterful account of Sir John’s life.  My recommendation again is for the entire corpus of Creighton’s writings.  I will not list them all but a few deserve special mention.  The book that earned him his reputation is one of these, The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, 1760-1850 (Toronto: The Ryerson Press, 1937), in which Creighton tells the history of the use of the St. Lawrence River as a means of trade and transportation in the century leading up to Confederation.  Goldwyn Smith had written a book that was published in the year of Sir John A. Macdonald’s death in which he argued that Confederation was a mistake because it was a project undertaken against the natural north-south flow of trade in North America.  That year, the Canadian public gave their answer to Smith’s thesis by awarding Macdonald, who was running against Sir Wilfred Laurier’s Liberals who were campaigning on a platform of free trade, a landslide victory.  Creighton’s book was the scholarly answer.  Editions of it published from 1956 on have omitted the “Commercial” from the title.  His The Forked Road: Canada 1939-1957 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976) was published as Volume XVIII, the penultimate of the Canadian Centenary Series that he and W. L. Morton had started and edited.  It can also be regarded as the last in a series of books that he authored bringing the history of Canada down from the pre-Confederation period that he covered in The Commercial Empire and The Road to Confederation: The Emergence of Canada, 1863-1867 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964) down to the end of the St. Laurent premiership.  While I don’t think anybody would claim that this was the best book he ever wrote it is too often criticized for taking the opinion that the Liberals under King and St. Laurent were leading the country down into the sewer if not lower.  Creighton died three years after it was published.  Imagine what he would have said if he had lived to write the history of the two Trudeau eras.

 

The penultimate entry in this section is David Orchard’s The Fight for Canada: Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansionism (Toronto: Stoddart Publishing, 1993, revised and expanded edition Montreal: Robert Davies Multimedia Publishing: 1998).  This book is a history of Canadian resistance to continentalism and particularly to American economic conquest via free trade.  The first edition came out during the talks on expanding the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement that Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan, both men betraying the protectionist traditions of their own parties, had signed in 1988 into the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) which came into effect on the first day of 1994.  The expanded edition came out during Orchard’s campaign for the Progressive Conservative leadership in 1998.  This was also the occasion for the writing/compilation of Ron Dart’s The Red Tory Tradition: Ancient Roots, New Routes (Dewdney BC: Synaxis Press, 1999) which is why I am adding it here rather than in the general political philosophy section.

 

Canada: Christianity

 

The first book in this section will be the Right Rev. Philip Carrington’s The Anglican Church of Canada: A History (Toronto: Collins, 1963).  This book was first published the same year as W. L. Morton’s The Kingdom of Canada in which year the second wave of the Liberal subversion of the country began under the premiership of Lester Pearson.  A small-l, theological liberal subversion of the Church was already underway.  A small indication of that can be seen in the 1962 Canadian edition of the Book of Common Prayer, in which the Psalter is bowdlerized to omit the imprecatory portions of the Psalms, including the 58^th in its entirety.   This was unfortunate in that it marred what is otherwise an excellent adaptation of the Restoration BCP of 1662.  It was a mild display of liberalism, however, compared to that which would soon sweep the Church leading to the present day in which I dare say most of the prelates wish that this history, written by the seventh Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Quebec who went on to become the eleventh Metropolitan Archbishop of the Ecclesiastical Province of Canada, would be swept under the rug and forgotten.

 

With regards to the liberal sweep of the Church I recommend two books both written in the late 1990s.  Suicide – The Decline and Fall of the Anglican Church of Canada? (Cambridge Publishing House, 1999) was written by Dr. Marney Patterson who was sometimes described as the “Anglican Billy Graham.” He wrote six other books with more uplifting topics and by the time he passed away two years ago had transferred to the Anglican Network in Canada.  A year prior to this Rev. George R. Eves had released Two Religions One Church: Division and Destiny in the Anglican Church of Canada (Saint John: V.O.I.C.E., 1998) which he has recently updated and made available as an e-book.  While the increasing willingness of the Church to depart from both Scripture and Tradition on the matter of moral theology as it pertains to those attracted to their own sex was the occasion for the writing of both of these books, Dr. Patterson and Rev. Eves both address the larger problem of liberalism.  Dr. Patterson dealt well with the matter of how the unwillingness to stand for unpopular Scriptural truth compromises the Church’s ability to evangelize.  Rev. Eves discussed how the introduction of the Book of Alternative Services, which in many parishes is not so much an alternative to the Book of Common Prayer but its replacement, was a victory for liberalism since on the lex orandi, lex credenda principle if you change the liturgy you change the belief.  These books both came out within five years of the conference sponsored by the Prayer Book Society, Anglican Renewal Ministries, and Barnabas Ministries for the purpose of addressing these concerns that produced the Montreal Declaration of Anglican Essentials.  The papers at the conference were edited by George Egerton and published as Anglican Essentials: Reclaiming Faith Within the Anglican Church of Canada (Toronto: Anglican Book Centre, 1995).

 

One of the speakers at the Montreal Essentials conference was the Rev. Dr. Robert D. Crouse, a priest and academic from Nova Scotia, where his home town was Crousetown, in which the house where he grew up was on Crouse Road (his family had lived there for centuries).  His address to the conference was entitled “Hope Which Does Not Disappoint” in which he warned against “that most dangerous of all sins” despair, to which souls, left weary and lethargic from the “widespread destruction of theological and liturgical tradition” resulting from the false persuasion that the ancient, ecumenical, and Anglican heritage is “somehow outmoded and inappropriate in the present time” are tempted and gave the timely reminder that our “spiritual health depends crucially on a revival of hope”, the virtue that is the opposite of the vice of despair, and which rests upon faith in the promises of God.  I cannot recommend a book that Dr. Crouse wrote because while he contributed to books and wrote plenty of reviews and articles, he never wrote a book qua book.  His doctoral dissertation was a translation.  Last year, however, Darton, Longman & Todd in London released three books compiled from his sermons.  These are Images of Pilgrimage: Paradise and Witness in Christian Spirituality, The Souls Pilgrimage – Volume 1: From Advent to Pentecost: The Theology of the Christian Year: The Sermons of Robert Crouse and The Soul's Pilgrimage - Volume 2: The Descent of the Dove and the Spiritual Life: The Theology of the Christian Year: The Sermons of Robert Crouse.  He had talked to Essentials about the need for renewing the Christian spiritual life, these books describe what that very thing looks like.

 

Two other speakers at the Montreal Essentials conference were Ron Dart and J. I. Packer.  In response to a book by Michael Ingham, who occupied the See of New Westminster at the time and basically stood for the opposite of what Essentials stood for, they wrote In a Pluralist World (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 1998) which returned to print in 2019 under the new title Christianity and Pluralism and published by Lexham Press in Bellingham.  While the origins of this book place it in the context of the same ecclesiastical turmoil that produced the books mentioned in the previous paragraphs Dart and Packer concentrate here on the question of the competing ways that have been proposed for Christians to deal with the competing truth claims of multiculturalism. Since I mentioned another book by Dart in the previous section I would add another book by Packer except that my favourites of his books were all written before he moved to Canada.   So read the revised editions.

 

One thing that Anglican bishops and fundamentalist Baptists have in common is that they tend to be great subjects for biographies and to write excellent autobiographies.  The Right Reverend John Cragg Farthing, father of the John Farthing mentioned in the first section (whose middle name was Colborne so this is not a case of Sr. and Jr. which requires all the names to match) and the Bishop of Montreal in the early twentieth century wrote an excellent memoir entitled Recollections of the Right Rev. John Cragg Farthing, Bishop of Montreal (1909-1939).  It was printed without any publication information but was likely published either by Farthing himself or by what would then have been called the Church of England in Canada at some point in the early 1940s. The Right Reverend John Strachan, the first Bishop of Toronto and an important figure in pre-Confederation Canada did not write his own biography but his successor the Right Reverend A. N. Bethune wrote a very readable Memoir of the Right Reverend John Strachan, D.D., D. C. L., First Bishop of Toronto (Toronto: Henry Rowsell, 1870).  If the title confuses you note that while “memoirs” and “autobiography” are often used interchangeably they are not the same thing.  An autobiography is when someone tells the story of his own life.  A memoir is recorded memory of something, an event, a person, whatever.  There is a lot of overlap but basically in an autobiography one’s self is always the subject whereas one’s memoir can be focused on the people and places and events one knew rather than on one’s self. An account of someone else’s life can be called a memoir if the writer knew the person well which is the case here.  Either type can be called a memoir.  If there is an s on the end it is referring either to more than one book or, less properly but more commonly, to the kind that overlaps with autobiography.  The Most Reverend Robert Machray, the second Bishop of the Diocese of Rupert’s Land to which my own parish belongs, became the first primate of what would become the Anglican Church of Canada.  His biography, written by a nephew of the same name, came out the year he died.  That is Robert Machray, Life of Robert Machray, Archbishop of Rupert’s Land (Toronto: Macmillan, 1909).

 

As for the fundamentalist Baptists, since we are listing Canadian books here the obvious biography to mention is Leslie K. Tarr’s Shields of Canada (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1967).  Like his subject, Leslie K. Tarr was a Baptist minister, as well as the first editor of the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada’s publication Faith Today.  His subject, T. T. Shields was the pastor of Jarvis Street Baptist Church in Toronto and of the Baptist preachers who fought for orthodoxy against encroaching liberalism in their denomination was by far the most prominent Canadian.  He joined the short-lived Baptist Bible Union and in consequence is usually remembered alongside that group’s co-founders, W. B. Riley of Minneapolis and J. Frank Norris of Fort Worth as a sort of triumvirate of the Baptist fundamentalism of the era.  Honourable mention goes to Lois Neely’s Fire In His Bones: The Official Biography of Oswald J. Smith (Carol Stream: Tyndale House, 1982).  Oswald J. Smith was not a Baptist.  He was first ordained a Presbyterian minister, then switched to Christian and Missionary Alliance (the founder of which, A. B. Simpson, was originally a Presbyterian from Prince Edward Island), before founding the non-denominational megachurch the People’s Church of Toronto.  As pastor of People’s Church before handing the reins over to his son Paul B. Smith he was probably the best known evangelical preacher in Canada in the twentieth century.  I’ll also throw in Perry F. Rockwood’s Triumph in God: The Life Story of Radio Pastor Perry F. Rockwood (Halifax: The People’s Gospel Hour, 1974).  At fifty-seven pages and staple bound it is a booklet rather than a book and the only one to make it into this list.  Rockwood was ordained in the Presbyterian Church of Canada in 1943 which at that point consisted of the parishes that had opted to remain Presbyterian after most, about seventy percent, had joined with the Methodists to become the United Church in 1925.   While one might think that those who opted out of the merger would be very conservative and orthodox it was only a few years after his ordination that Rockwood was hauled before an ecclesiastical court over four sermons he gave on the subject of “The Church Sick unto Death” and while a case could made that he was indeed guilty of the charge of “divisiveness” a stronger case can be made that those who put him on trial were guilty of exactly what he charged them with in the sermons i.e., the greater crime of defecting, not only from the Presbyterian Westminster Confession but from the basic Christian faith as confessed in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. The four sermons are reproduced in full in his autobiography.

 

This section would not be complete without The Christians: Their First Two Thousand Years, a twelve-volume history of Christianity that was produced from 2001 to 2013.  The idea for it came from the late Ted Byfield, most remembered as the founding editor and publisher of the Alberta Report newsmagazine the final version of which folded in 2003 the year the first volume was published.  Byfield served as general editor of the series.  The series was published out of Edmonton under the imprint of The Christian History Project which after 2006 came under the aegis of SEARCH, the Society to Explore And Record Christian History.  I exclude volume 10 from the recommendation because it presents the Enlightenment, the separation of church and state, and basically the Modern way of doing things or liberalism as the product, albeit unintended, of Christianity rather than what it actually is, the embodiment of the Modern Age’s apostasy from and rebellion against Christianity.  Byfield began his Christian walk as an orthodox Anglican and joined the Eastern Orthodox Church in the events mentioned previously in this section and so has no excuse for not knowing better.

 

Canada - Humour

 

All of Stephen Leacock’s fiction can be included here, as can, for that matter, his non-fiction for even when writing on serious subjects he was funny.

 

Peter V. Macdonald, Q. C., a lawyer from Hanover had a column that appeared in the Toronto Star entitled “Court Jesters” in which he recounted hilarious true anecdotes from courtrooms across Canada.  A compilation of these was published as Court Jesters: Canada’s Lawyers and Judges Take the Stand to Relate Their Funniest Stories (Toronto: Stoddart, 1985).  This was followed up by a sequel More Court Jesters: Back to the Bar for More of the Funniest Stories from Canada’s Courts (Toronto: Stoddart, 1987) and then Return of the Court Jesters: By Popular Demand More of the Funniest Stories From Canada’s Courts (Toronto: Stoddart, 1990).  I received the first one of these for Christmas one year and annoyed my family for days with loud laughter.  There are also versions of at least the first two books in which the anecdotes are illustrated with cartoons.  It appears he also wrote a book with funny police stories.  I have not seen a copy although I have read a similar book by Bruce Day, a retired police officer here in Winnipeg, that was self-published in 1995 and is entitled Stop! Police Humour.

 

Another collection of hilarious true stories is Ben Wicks’ Book of Losers (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1979).  The author whose name is indeed part of the title was best known as a cartoonist.  He followed it up with Ben Wicks’ More Losers (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982).  It should be obvious what these stories are like but if not here is the definition of a loser provided at the beginning of the first book “A German tourist, en route to the west coast, who steps off his plane in Bangor, Maine, and spends four days there thinking he is in California.”  Actually that is quite mild compared to what happens to most of the people in the book.  Wicks’ wrote and illustrated several other books of humour.  The only two that I have read are his Ben Wicks’ Canada and Ben Wicks’ Women which were also published by McClelland and Stewart in 1976 and 1978 respectively.

 

Canada – Fiction

 

I will not be listing all the titles and bibliographic details in this section because it would be very tedious due to the number of lengthy series included.  What I recommend under this heading are all the works of fiction of Lucy Maud Montgomery, Robertson Davies, and Mazo de la Roche.  Remember that this recommended reading list, neither in whole nor in any section, is intended to be exhaustive, and that non-mention of an author does not constitute a recommendation against.  There are Canadian writers that I would recommend against but I am not going to name them here because that is not the purpose of this list.

 

L. M. Montgomery is, of course, internationally famous as the author of Anne of Green Gables, the first in a series of eight novels chronicling the life of the title character.  Two collections of short stories, Chronicles of Avonlea and Further Chronicles of Avonlea are also part of the Anne of Green Gables continuity.  If you remember Kevin Sullivan’s television series Road to Avonlea it was based in part on these short stories although the main characters of that series were taken from The Story Girl and The Golden Road neither of which were connected to the Anne storyline in Montgomery’s original novels.  She wrote several other novels, some in series such as the Emily of New Moon trilogy, others stand alone.

 

Robertson Davies tended to write his fiction in trilogies, including those that he wrote as “Samuel Marchbanks” the pen-name he used when writing for the Peterborough Examiner in his time as editor.   A selection of his Marchbanks pieces were collected and published as three volumes, although it is best, in my opinion, to read them in the later omnibus edition The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks for while some abridgement takes place you also get a great introduction in which Davies interviews his alter-ego Marchbanks. There are three completed trilogies of novels that are usually called the Salterton, Deptford and Cornish trilogies, the first two after the fictional locations in which they are set, the third after the character whose death sets off the plot of the first novel and whose life is told in the second.  Davies started a fourth trilogy, set in Toronto, but only completed two of the novels.  The earliest of these trilogies, the Salterton, is my favourite.  Davies also wrote several plays but only one book of short stories, High Spirits, a collection of the ghost stories that he composed to tell at Massey College at the school’s Gaudy Night each year while he was Master (president, headmaster, principal) there.

 

Mazo de la Roche was for much of the twentieth century the single most read Canadian novelist.  An interesting piece of trivia is that she is buried in St. George’s Anglican cemetery at Sibbald Point in Sutton West the other most famous resident of which is Stephen Leacock whose grave is very close to hers.  She wrote short stories and plays as well, but is most remembered for her twenty some novels of which the most read are the Jalna series, a family saga, somewhat like a novelized soap opera, spanning one century over sixteen books.  Jalna was the first published in 1927.  Its title is the name of the family estate or more properly the manor on the estate where the novels are set.  The family that live there bear the last name Whiteoak and so the series is also known albeit less commonly as the Whiteoak saga.  The hero of the saga is Renny Whiteoak, who inherits the estate and the role if not the authority of family patriarch from his father and grandfather, fights in both World Wars, and breeds and rides show horses while trying to raise his own younger brothers and keep the struggling estate afloat.   We had a number of hard cover editions of these books in the family library when I was a child.  The ones I remember usually featured Renny on a horse on the cover.  The real ruler of the family was Renny’s grandmother Adeline whom the family called Gran, a sharp-tongued old woman who kept them all in line by not disclosing the sole beneficiary of her will and who had a parrot that she taught to make extremely rude remarks in Hindi.  The books were not published in order of internal chronology, although as with C. S. Lewis’ children’s novels subsequent re-print editions have numbered them in that order. The last of the series to be published, Morning at Jalna, which came out in 1960 the year before de la Roche died, is second in internal chronology, being set just prior to Confederation in the period in which the American North and South were fighting.  This book’s not-so-subtle sympathy with the South was a not-so-subtle expression of de la Roche’s contemptuous opinion of the “second Reconstruction” then underway in the United States.  That such sentiment prevented neither the publication of the novel nor the adaptation of the entire series into the television mini-series The Whiteoaks of Jalna and by CBC nonetheless about ten years after her death demonstrates how much healthier and saner our country was in terms of not having to toe a party line on liberal social values before two generations of Trudeaus messed everything up.  The last of the novels in terms of internal chronology was Centenary at Jalna and it was set in the year in which it is was published, 1954.  That it is set exactly one hundred years after the story begins, as the title indicates, would suggest that this was where de la Roche intended the saga to end, although the ending of the novel itself very much suggests otherwise

 

That brings this list to a close.  If you are looking for something to read this Dominion Day because some Canada-hating woke jackasses have cancelled the celebrations in your area try one or more of these.

 

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the King!