“No Man is an Island”

James Dobson passed away on the 21^st of August this year.  When I heard the news it was the first time in years I had heard his name.  The last time I heard his radio program, Focus on the Family, was probably in the 1990s.  Dobson was a prominent evangelical leader, although he was a psychologist by profession rather than a minister.  His father, James Dobson Sr., had been a minister in the Church of the Nazarene, one of the Wesleyan Holiness denominations, as had his grandfather and great-grandfather.  Dobson initially achieved celebrity status among evangelicals for advising parents to avoid the culture of permissiveness encouraged by the majority in his chosen profession and raise up their children with boundaries and discipline.   His first book, Dare to Discipline (1970) which is probably still his best known, was, as is evident from the title, on this subject.  In the decades since, he fought on several other fronts although   generally those which pertained to the type of issues that are categorized as moral and social, in the emerging culture war as it was dubbed in the early 1990s (1) around the time I first heard of him.

 

I first heard of Dobson’s passing, not through the news, but through a social media post by a former classmate with whom I had attended Providence College (formerly Winnipeg Bible College, now Providence University College) in the mid to late 1990s.  This post, and several others from the same former classmate whose name out of charity I shall omit, thoroughly disgusted me.  He did not merely disregard the ancient proverb de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est but went out of his way to do the very opposite of it.  He took hearty delight in Dobson’s death and was positively rejoicing over it. 

 

I was reminded of this by the reaction of several American leftists to the murder of Charlie Kirk yesterday.  Kirk, the 31 year old founder and director of Turning Point, USA, was shot in the neck on stage during a question and answer session at an event at Utah Valley University.  He died from the wound later in the afternoon.  Kirk belonged to the Calvary Chapel Association, a Pentecostal group that separated from the Foursquare Gospel and from which the Vineyard movement would later separate.  Like Dobson, he had been a culture warrior.  Since youth was his target audience he made a lot of use of social media, he had a podcast and as of earlier this year a televised talk show.  He was also the author of a number of books.  He is probably best known, however, for going to university and other campuses and promoting his own views by, among other things, challenging overconfident progressive students to informal debates.

 

I am not going to reproduce the responses of the leftists here.  Chaya Raichik has reposted several on her Libs of Tiktok account on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, the link to which you can find in the footnote. (2)   These are generally social media posts, exalting in Kirk’s assassination in a way similar to how my former classmate rejoiced over Dobson’s death.  In the news media, progressive commentators have made remarks to the effect that Kirk brought it on himself by the views he held and expressed.  Matthew Dowd, for example, said that Kirk’s “hate speech” had brought about “hateful actions” which remark itself brought about Dowd’s termination as a commentator on MSNBC.

 

You would think that liberals and leftists would take a break from accusing others of “hate speech” for basically saying things, usually true, about groups they think should be protected from criticism, when in the act of making remarks that essentially excuse a murder.  You would be wrong. 

 

I am not going to pretend that I was a big fan of Charlie Kirk.  The principle of de mortuis nil nisi does not require that. I agreed with him on most of the issues the liberals and the left hated him over – he was anti-abortion and anti-birth control, pro-gun, anti-CRT and DEI (Critical Race Theory and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), etc.  He had all the qualities, however, that I had found obnoxious and grating in American Republicans even before the MAGA movement degenerated into a deranged personality cult.

 

One of the more obnoxious of those qualities was the assumption that everyone was either an American Republican or some kind of liberal, leftist or progressive.  Watching the disgusting manner in which people in the latter categories have been celebrating Kirk’s murder makes me all the more glad that this assumption is entirely baseless and false.  As a Canadian who finds the thought of his country become further Americanized utterly repugnant and as a dyed-in-the-wool monarchist and royalist I could never have any sympathy with American Republicanism but I have far less sympathy with the kind of politics that teaches people to be so totally devoid of class as to celebrate the deaths of their political opponents.  Liberalism and leftism are beneath contempt.

 

I direct any liberal or leftist who may have come across this essay to the poem by John Donne from which the title has been borrowed.   The third and final is the operative stanza. Now let us conclude with the traditional Requiem prayer for the late James Dobson and Charlie Kirk.  Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them. May their souls and all the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

 

 

 

 (1)   The culture war itself, and the expression “culture war”, had both been around much longer, but it was in the early 1990s that the expression became attached to the thing itself as a kind of semi-official label.

(2)   https://x.com/libsoftiktok

Who is the Heretic?

The sequel to my essay “Catholic and Protestant” to be entitled “Catholic Not Roman” is, as it was when I mentioned it in my last essay “Justification and the Hierarchy of Truth”, about half to three quarters written.  That it has not advanced any further than this in over a month is due to the fact that the twelve books that I have been reading during this time each is potentially relevant to the topic and so I thought it best to defer completing the essay until I had finished reading all of them.

 

In the mean time, a controversy has developed on social media that is remarkably similar to that between myself and those against whom I have been arguing in this series of essays.  What I have been arguing in this series, remember, is that the first tier of Christian truths, those that are de fide, essential to the faith, are the Catholic truths, this is to say, the truths that have been confessed by the Church in all places and all times since they were deposited with the Apostles.  These are the truths confessed in their most basic form in the Apostles’ Creed, in a more nuanced form to guard against the heresies of the fourth century (primarily Arianism) in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed more commonly called the Nicene Creed, and in their fullest so as to guard against any error regarding the Trinity or the Christological errors addressed by the Definition of Chalcedon in the fifth century in the Quicumque Vult or Athanasian Symbol.1In the early twentieth century, in response to those who were peddling a theology revised to accommodate the presuppositions of post-Christian liberal philosophy, conservative Protestants began calling themselves “fundamentalists.”  This term indicates that one is standing for the “fundamentals” and the fundamentalists had to identify what the “fundamentals” were.  While different lists were drawn up, the one that was most influential in the movement was the list of five fundamentals published by conservative Presbyterians in 1910.  Instead of drawing up a new list they would have been better to say that there are twelve fundamentals – the twelve articles of the Creed.2 The teachings of Rome against which the Reformers protested in the sixteenth century are not Catholic truths because most of these are unique to Rome and not taught by the other ancient Churches and none of these is confessed in the ancient Symbols.  Neither, however, are the doctrines of the Reformation, and while I would say that the distinctives of Rome that the Reformers opposed are errors and the doctrines central to the Reformation are truths, these must be regarded as secondary truths to those confessed in the ancient Symbols.  I have been arguing this against those who maintain that the Reformation doctrine of sola fide is itself “the Gospel” and that therefore those who do not confess the Reformation doctrine do not have the Gospel even though they confess the Creed which contains the truths that St. Paul identifies as the Gospel in the Scriptures (1 Cor. 15:3ff).

 

Recently, the online personality who goes under the handle “Redeemed Zoomer” was accused of heresy by James White for saying that someone does not have to confess sola fide and penal substitution to be a Christian and that Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy are Christian.  The controversy has been conducted through at least two social media platforms, that formerly known as Twitter and that still known as Youtube.  Both individuals belong to the big-R Reformed branch of Protestant theology, although to different denominations within that branch.  Redeemed Zoomer is a Presbyterian.  James White is a Reformed Baptist.  Both could be described as apologists and in the case of White, who is the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, he is so in a professional capacity.  Five years ago I addressed arguments from two of his books in an essay entitled “Black and White.” 3 My opinion of his apologetics can be summarized in the words of Shania Twain, “That don’t impress me much.” 

 

It was Redeemed Zoomer’s Youtube response to White’s accusation on 19 August that brought this to my attention.4It is an excellent response, and he covered much of the same ground that I did in “Justification and the Hierarchy of Truth”, such as that we are justified by faith in Jesus Christ not by faith in sola fide and the Heidelberg Catechism’s use of the Apostles’ Creed to define the content of the Christian faith.  He also did an excellent job of showing that White had accused him of heresy, not for denying a true doctrine or teaching a false one, but for saying that two doctrines that he himself affirms and regards as important – sola fide and penal substitutionary atonement – are important but not so of the essence of the faith that one cannot be a Christian without them. 

I have not said anything about penal substitutionary atonement in my series, but will address it now.  That “Christ died for our sins” is, of course, de fide.  It is the first thing mentioned in St. Paul’s definition of the Gospel in 1 Corinthians 15, and is the fourth article of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.  “Penal substitutionary atonement”, however, is not merely the belief that “Christ died for our sins” but a specific explanation of what this means. 

 

The simplest way of demonstrating how one can affirm that “Christ died for our sins” without necessarily holding to penal substitutionary atonement is by contrasting penal substitutionary atonement to the theory that is closest to it.  That would be the satisfaction model of the atonement.  It was expounded in the treatise Cur Deus Homo which St. Anselm began working on in his first year as Archbishop of Canterbury and which he completed in 1098 AD.  As indicated by the title5, St. Anselm’s subject was the reason for the Incarnation.  It was not necessary, St. Anselm argued, that God become Man, in the sense that He was under some kind of external compulsion to do so, since God is never under external compulsion, but it was “fitting” or “suitable”6, because man’s sin was an offence against God’s honour for which restitution ought to be made before man can be forgiven but since man has no resources sufficient to satisfy the demands of God’s honour, only by God becoming Man could said satisfaction be made.  St. Anselm wrote this in the early days of the East-West Schism – the mutual excommunication of Rome and Constantinople had taken place less than fifty years previous – and his satisfaction model of the atonement gained widespread acceptance in the West.  The difference between it and the penal substitution model is that the satisfaction model explains the vicarious nature of the atonement in terms of offended honour, the penal substitutional model explains it in terms of strict, courtroom, legal accounting.  This difference is not such that the Christianity of those who understand the atonement in terms of St. Anselm’s model can be denied.

 

Penal substitutionary atonement, therefore, is not the only way in which one who faithfully confesses that “Christ died for our sins” can understand these words.  While we should be wary of going too far in the other direction and saying that any theory or model of how the Atonement works is acceptable, St. Paul’s expression “died for our sins”7 is certainly broad enough to include both the penal substitution model and the satisfaction model from which, from a historical perspective, the penal substitution model developed.  Indeed, while both of these models develop the image of vicarious suffering found in such verses as 2 Cor. 5:21 and 1 Pet. 2:24 and 3:18 this is not the only imagery the New Testament uses of Christ’s death.  Origen explained the Atonement in terms of a ransom paid, and while this explanation created problems if the metaphor was pressed to the point that the question of to whom the ransom was paid was raised, which was one of the reasons St. Anselm found it deficient, it too is an image taken directly from Scripture.  “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God; Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 3:23-24).   “Redemption”, here, translates the genitive form of the word ἀπολύτρωσις, which is derived from the word λύτρον which means “ransom” and which occurs twice in the NT in Matt. 20:28 and 10:45, both of which record the same saying of Jesus that He “came not be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.”  Nor is Rom. 3:24 the only occurrence of ἀπολύτρωσις in reference to Christ’s death.  Eph. 1:7, Col. 1:14, and Heb. 9:15 all use it this way. The ransom model, therefore, despite the problems when it is pressed, cannot be legitimately said to be an unacceptable explanation of the Atonement that invalidates a confession of faith that “Christ died for our sins.”

 

White, therefore, is as wrong in declaring Redeemed Zoomer to be a heretic for saying that penal substitutionary atonement is not of the indispensable essence of the Christian faith as he is declaring him to be a heretic for saying the same about sola fide.

 

Indeed, by making this accusation James White has demonstrated himself to be a heretic.  Heresy is what you get when you put so much stress on one truth that this truth becomes distorted and other truths are downplayed or denied.  Praxeas, Noetus and Sabellius so stressed the unity of God that they denied the Personal distinctions between Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, conversely, Arius so stressed these distinctions that he denied that the Son was of One Being with the Father.  The Docetists has so stressed the deity and the spiritual nature of Jesus Christ that they denied His humanity, teaching that He merely “appeared” to be human, Apollinaris did not go that far, but in his dotage he stressed Christ’s deity to the point of denying that Jesus had a human mind. Under Theodore of Mopsuestia, the Antiochian School of Theology stressed the distinction between the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ to the point of teaching that there were two Sons, the divine Son of God and the human Son of Man, inhabiting the same body, the heresy which bears the name of Nestorius of Constantinople who was condemned for it in the fifth century.  Conversely, disciples of Nestorius’ opponent St. Cyril took their teacher’s stress on the unity of the Person of Christ to the point of denying a distinction between His two natures.  If truths as important as the deity of Jesus Christ, His humanity, the unity of God, the distinction between the divine Persons, the distinction between Christ’s natures and the unity of His Person, all of which are de fide, can each become a heresy by exaggeration, then Reformation doctrines can certainly become heresies by exaggeration, and that is exactly what happens when someone makes doctrines such as justification by faith alone and penal substitutionary atonement, important in themselves as they are, to be so important that their denial negates the Christianity of those who confess the truths that are confessed as de fide in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.

 

Redeemed Zoomer is in the right and James White is wrong.  For his sake, let us pray that he repent of his heresy and acknowledge that the truths of the Reformation, important though they are, must take second place to the truths that are of the essence of the Christian faith, the Catholic truths of the ancient Creeds and embrace the fundamentalism that is true Catholicism and the Catholicism that is true fundamentalism.

 

 

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1 The term “creed” comes from the Latin word credo/credimus (“I believe”, “we believe”).  The Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds are called such because this is the first word in each in their Latin text.  Symbol is the earlier designation of these “rules of faith”.  Since the Quicumcque Vult (“Whosoever will”) is written in the third person rather than the first person, Symbol is a more accurate designation for it than Creed. ^↩

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2 Interestingly, this corresponds with the number of booklets in the series The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, edited by A. C. Dixon, Louis Meyer and R. A. Torrey and published between 1910 and 1915.  This is only a coincidence, the number of number of booklets was not intended by the editors to indicate the number of fundamentals, nor did each booklet focus on a single truth.  In later editions, the essays were rearranged and bound into four volumes.^↩

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3 https://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2020/08/black-and-white.html^↩

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4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkiyVxT6o5Y^↩

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5 If understood as a question the title means “Why did God become Man?” and as a statement “Why God became Man” or “Why the God-Man”.  Either way, it clearly identifies the reason for the Incarnation as the subject of the treatise.^↩

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6 The Latin word St. Anselm used is the source of our word “convenient” which no longer means “fitting” or “suitable” in an absolute moral sense but in a sense relative to the purposes of the individual for whom something is “convenient.”  It retained its original sense, however, as late as the early seventeenth century and should be understood in this sense when encountered in the Authorized Bible.  This concept of “fittingness” or “suitability” became very important in Scholasticism because it allowed for intelligent discussion of the question of God’s motivations. ^↩

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7 ὑπὲρ τῶν ἁμαρτιῶν ἡμῶν^↩