Prejudice not Pride

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

    

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

 

 

“Both/And” and “Because…Therefore”

The expression via media has often been used to describe the Anglican position with regards to Catholicism on the one hand and Protestantism on the other.  It is a positive expression that evokes Aristotle’s concept of the golden mean, the path of virtue from which if you veer off in either direction you fall into one of two ditches of opposing vices.  It is misleading, however, in that it suggests that the Anglican position is neither Catholic nor Protestant but something in between.  The classical position of the reformed Ecclesia Anglicana – the English Church, planted early in the first millennium, as reformed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – however, is not a neither/nor but a both/and.  If we are to continue to use the expression, therefore, it needs to be with the explanation that it means our Church is both Catholic and Protestant and not that it is neither one nor the other. 

 

Obviously for the Anglican Church to be Catholic, Catholic cannot be defined by communion with or submission to the Patriarch of Rome commonly called the Pope.  St. Vincent of Lérins in the fifth century defined the faith of the Catholic Church as that “which has been believed everywhere, always, by all”, that is, what the Church as a whole has taught and believed since the Apostles, excluding that which has been unique to one location or to one time period.  In accordance with this principle, the English Reformers looked to the undivided Church of the early centuries as normative when carrying out their reforms.

 

Similarly for the Anglican Church to be Protestant, Protestant cannot mean what it often means in online “Catholic versus Protestant” debates, that is, North American evangelical.  Since North American evangelicalism tends to take as normative the doctrines of dissenting separatist groups that grew out of the Puritan movement that was discontent with the conservatism of the English Reformation and demanded more radical reforms to conform the Church to the model of Calvin’s Geneva it would make little sense to define Anglican Protestantism this way.  We should also be cautious about using the Five Solas to define Anglican Protestantism.  The Five Solas are a twentieth century formulation, drawn up by Calvinists who wanted a five-point summary of the doctrines of the Reformation to correspond to the five-point summary of their doctrine of predestination.  The Anglican Church in the Reformation agreed with the Lutherans and Calvinists that the Bible is the supreme authority to which the Church must conform her doctrine and that the gift of salvation in Jesus Christ is received by faith and not earned by works or merit.  In her Articles of Religion, however, she does not use the type of language found in the fifth article of the Belgic Confession of Faith when expressing the supremacy of Scriptural authority but speaks rather of the sufficiency of Scriptures (1).  In the English version of the eleventh article (the original text of the Articles of Religion was in Latin), sola is rendered as “only” rather than “alone”, which, with the exception of one marginal note, is also how Archbishop Cranmer consistently referred to the doctrine in the homily to which the article points (2).  The distinction, while small, is not insignificant.  “Only” usually excludes others from a class or category while “alone” usually indicates their absence.  Therefore, to convey in English that faith is the sole means whereby we receive the gift of saving grace (3) without suggesting that it exists in a vacuum apart from repentance, love, works and the like in the human heart, the “only” of the Anglican formularies is to be preferred over the “alone” that is usual with other Protestants. 

 

The Anglican Church to which the both Catholic and Protestant via media belongs, it needs to be pointed out, is the orthodox portion of the Anglican Church and not the part that has succumbed to the revisionist theology that is usually called liberalism.  Liberalism, despite naming itself after the virtue of generosity implying a kind of broadmindedness, is neither/nor with regards to Catholicism and Protestantism rather than both/and.  Moreover, it is not neither/nor in the sense the literal meaning of via media implies, the occupation of middle territory between, but neither/nor in the sense that it rejects much that is common to both Catholicism and Protestantism in their classical senses.

 

I have recently read three books which all affirm the “both Catholic and Protestant” understanding of the Anglican tradition.  The first of these is a short monograph entitled The Anglican Way: Evangelical and Catholic which was written by the Reverend Dr. Peter Toon and was first published by Morehouse - Barlow in 1983.  The edition I have is the 2010 edition put out by WIPF & STOCK of Eugene, Oregon.  The second is entitled Reformed Catholic Anglicanism which has multiple contributors and which was edited by Charles F. Camlin, Charles D. Erlandson, and Joshua L. Harper.  It was published by the Anglican Way Institute which is an outreach of the Church of the Holy Communion Cathedral (Reformed Episcopal Church) in Dallas, Texas in 2024.  The third is The Gospel and the Catholic Church by the Most Reverend A. Michael Ramsay, the 100^th Archbishop of Canterbury.  This book was written early in Ramsay’s ministry, long before he became the Anglican Primate, and was first published in 1936 by Longmans and Company.  I read the 2010 edition put out by Hendrickson Publishers of Peabody, Massachusetts.  In the cases of the last two books, it is the e-book editions for Kindle that I have and which I read.

 

I will defer further discussion of the second and third books to future essays and focus on Toon’s for the remainder of this one.  The author of this book was an Anglican priest and theology professor originally from the Diocese of Liverpool who ministered in the United States for the last eighteen years of his life, where he led the American version of the Prayer Book Society.  Other books of his that I have read in the last two years are his Knowing God Through Liturgy which is a sort of devotional guide to the Book of Common Prayer and his Neither Archaic nor Obsolete: The Language of Common Prayer and Public Worship co-written with Louis R. Tarsitano which defends the ongoing use of the Elizabethan language of the Prayer Book against the recent trend for “updated” liturgy (I found his argument for retaining the singular pronoun for addressing God as more theologically proper than using the numerically generic “you” quite compelling). I have also recently read the 2012 Gedenkschrift (4) that Roberta Bayer edited entitled Reformed and Catholic: Essays in Honor (sic) of Peter Toon.  Just how important the theme of the book under consideration here was to Toon is indicated by the fact that the title of this memorial collection was chosen to evoke its subtitle.

 

The book is not a long one.  Its ninety-four pages are divided into a preface and two introductory chapters, followed by Part One: The Evangel, which has two chapters, Part Two: Catholicity, which has two chapters, and Epilogue which in its listing in the Table of Contents confusingly looks like a third chapter to Part Two, and two Appendices. 

 

In the first chapter in the introductory section entitled “God’s Call” Toon expresses the both/and approach to Anglicanism in terms of the Church’s call:

 

In other words, the call of God to the Episcopal Church in these times, when the one Church of God is sadly divided, is that it should be simultaneously evangelical and catholic.  This does not mean that she is to be evangelical in her preaching and catholic in her liturgy.  It is not a matter of being sometimes evangelical and sometimes catholic.  The Church is called to be catholic and evangelical all the time in all that she is and does. (p. 11)

 

For the remainder of the chapter Toon elaborates on this by talking about how an evangelicalism that neglects “the wholeness of the one Church in space and time. The beauty of Liturgy, the symbolic power of sacraments, the depth of spirituality, and the episcopate as a sign of unity” (p. 12) and a Catholicity in which “the treasure of the Gospel is lost somewhere in thick layers of tradition which reach back into the dim past” (ibid) both fall short. “There must always be the primacy of Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (p. 13) he reminds us, for “Without him there is no Gospel and without him there is no Catholicity” (ibid).  “What we have to guard against” he writes “is the rejection of either the achievement of Christ in creating the Gospel or the continuing achievement of Christ in ruling and directing the Church throughout history” (p. 14).

 

The two chapters in the first part, “The Evangel”, are entitled “By Grace Alone” and “By Faith Alone.”  Clearly, the sixteenth century Reformation takes precedence over the North American revival experience in defining the word “Evangelical” for Toon. (5)  He begins the first chapter by asking “Have you been accosted by an enthusiast who asks you, ‘Are you saved?’” (p. 29) and says:

 

If you are a baptized Christian then you ought to say: ‘In Christ Jesus my salvation is completed and complete; because of the indwelling Spirit in my heart I am in the process of being saved; and, because Jesus Christ rose from the dead and will return from heaven at the end of the age to raise the dead, I look forward to salvation at the end of the age.’  

 

From this staring point, in which the fullness of Gospel salvation is contrasted with the North American evangelical tendency to think of salvation as a single event within the experience of the individual Christian, Toon proceeds to contrast North American evangelicalism’s individualistic understanding of salvation with the way “The Kingdom of God, a phrase much on the lips of Jesus, can be seen and presented only in this-worldly terms: the bringing of justice into human affairs” (p. 30) that is characteristic of liberal “Christianity”.  Toon notes, however, that the reduction of the Christian message to a certain type of political and social activism that is so evident on the part of the World Council of Churches, is matched by the way American evangelicals tend to identify the opposite kind of political and social activism with their understanding of Christianity.  Both, he says, need a deeper understanding of the basic human problem of which the full salvation proclaimed in the Gospel is the solution, “a weakness, a fundamental gone-wrong-ness which in both the individual and in society” (p. 32) which in classical theological language is called “Original Sin.”  Toon writes:

 

The human race was created by God to enjoy spiritual union and communion with himself.  Where this does not exist then there is a fundamental problem.  For the human being is made to enjoy a relationship both with his Creator and with the creatures whom God has made.  Only with right relationships with God, with human beings and with creation can a person find wholeness or salvation.

 

These relationships are broken by the problem with the human condition that is Original Sin or gone-wrongness or, as Toon also suggests, the classical concept of hubris understood in a corporate sense as affecting the entire race.

 

Having identified what we need saving from, Toon then goes on to talk about the right language with which the Church needs to present the Gospel of salvation.  I opened this essay by talking about how the Anglican via media needs to be understood as both/and with regards to Catholicism and Protestantism rather than neither/nor and this is the topic of Toon’s book as a whole. (6) Here, Toon draws another such distinction without noting the parallel.  I found it to be a particularly excellent way of explaining the distinction between the way the Gospel should be proclaimed and the mistaken way in which it often is so I provide a lengthy quotation of it:

 

This mistake can best be illustrated by considering two types of sentences.  The first type we may call an ‘if…then’ statement.  Here are several examples.  Speaking to a child at table we say, ‘If you eat your meat and potatoes, then you can have some ice cream’.  To a child at school we say, ‘If you pass your examinations, then we will buy you a bike’.  To a young person starting work we say, ‘If you do your work well then we will see that you get promotion’.  Finally, we all are familiar with the politician who says, ‘If you vote for me then I will do for you what you want me to do’.

 

This form of statement, with the understanding it encapsulates is necessary for human society.  But we make a major mistake if we present or understand the Gospel of God on this basis.  In other words, if we make ‘believe’ or ‘repent and believe’ into a condition which we ourselves must fulfil by ourselves in order to get the rewards of God’s salvation, then we pervert the Gospel! It is far better to think of the promise of salvation from God, as it is described in the New Testament as being of the structure, ‘because…therefore’.  Here are a couple of examples, ‘Because there is a free national health service, go into hospital for your operation’; and ‘because the day is warm and the sand is clean go and bathe in the sea’.  So the message of salvation is something like this: ‘Because Jesus Christ died for your sins and rose for your acceptance with God, therefore you are saved’.  And, ‘Because God has provided salvation for you in Jesus Christ, therefore you are to believe and to receive this salvation’. And, “Because God loves you and will love you, therefore you are to accept his love’.

 

You can see the difference between the ‘if…then’ and the ‘because…therefore’ approach.  The first encourages us to think that we can do something to contribute to our salvation, while the second reminds us that salvation is, from beginning to end, the gift of God; and the gift is not earned but rather gratefully received and accepted.  We do not ourselves offer to God our religion, our good works, our pious thoughts, and our good endeavours so that he will accept us.  Rather we gratefully receive.  We believe God and his promises concerning salvation, and then, out of sheer amazement and gratitude to him for his wonderful salvation, we live a life of love towards him and our neighbour. (pp. 32-33)

 

Toon is absolutely correct that this is the way in which the Gospel ought to be presented and what he has captured here is really what the Reformation was all about.  He follows this up by applying it to repentance in which he provides a helpful illustration of the true purpose of repentance – telling people that they are forgiven will not be understood and appreciated if they do not recognize and accept that they have done something wrong for which they need forgiveness. (7)

 

In the first chapter, “The Anglican Experience” of the second part of the book, Toon gives his account of Catholicity.  He begins by objecting to the Roman Catholic Church “calling itself ‘the Catholic Church’”, i.e., sans Roman,  because “Catholicity is not confined to that community” (p. 63).  He then provides a “brief word study” of the words “ekklesia” (literally “assembly”, it became the name of the Christian society and therefore “Church” in English) and “catholic” (Gr. katholikos), correctly noting that “catholic” is first applied to ekklesia by St. Ignatius of Antioch in the early second century and that as applied to the Church it came to have the primary connotations of universality (“the world-wide Church in contrast to the local congregation”) and orthodoxy (the faith of the world-wide Church as opposed to the heresies of separatist sects). (p. 63-64).  “To receive and accept the Church as it has existed, and as it has believed, taught, confessed, and worshipped, is the beginnings of true Catholicity” he writes. 

 

In subsequent sections he fleshes this out.  He reminds us “that it was the catholic Church, with its imperfections, that gave recognition to what we now call the canon of the New Testament” (p. 66) and while his claims for the Church in this regards are far more modest than those of the Latin and Greek Churches, he adds:

 

Parallel developments in the Church in this same general period of time included the general recognition of the threefold ministry of bishop, presbyter (=priest) and deacon, the centrality of the Eucharist as the main act of worship on the Lord’s Day, the creation of creeds (e.g. the Apostles’ and Nicene) and the recognition of apostolic tradition (having reference to both the succession of sound teaching and to the historical, personal, succession of bishops). (ibid).

 

He warns against claiming too much from history, pointing to the example of Roman Catholicism as doing this by seeing in the historical development of the See of Rome into the papacy ruling the entire episcopate and the dogmatization of the Immaculate Conception and Bodily Assumption of Mary proof of divine approbation of the same and argues for the Church’s indefectibility rather than infallibility. (pp. 67-68)   Then, in discussing how the Church of England’s Catholicity is reformed, i.e., from “deviant and exaggerated developments and expressions” (p. 68) that had entered the Church in the period prior to the Reformation, he lists twelve examples of elements of the Catholic tradition that the English Reformers made a point of retaining, in some cases even when their Continental counterparts did not.  The list can be found on pages 68-69, I won’t reproduce it here, but will merely note that it is basically an expansion of everything mentioned in the previous block quote.

 

In the second chapter of this section entitled “Pertinent Examples” he provides extended discussion of the topics of “Bishops”, “the Liturgy of the Eucharist” and “Visible Unity”.  I disagree with his saying under the first heading that “A careful reading of the New Testament reveals that it does not describe or prescribe a single pattern of ordained ministry in the apostolic churches” (p. 76) as it seems quite clear to me that the three-fold ministry is present in the New Testament where it is originally Apostles, presbyters, and deacons, with St. Timothy and St. Titus later assuming the governing role of the Apostles in the office to which the title of bishop (overseer) would very shortly after become attached. (8)  Toon argues for the plene esse view of the episcopate that bishops are necessary for the fullness of the Church, but their absence doesn’t necessarily de-church a body (pp. 77-79) to which I have no objection. (9)  Under the second heading, he begins by observing that the basic structure of the Eucharistic liturgy goes back to the earliest days of Church history and by providing a list of its basic elements (p. 80).  He then draws out the significance of it all – that it is as the very name Eucharist indicates “a great thanksgiving to the Father for all he has done and is doing”, an anamnesis, “the living and effective sign of the sacrifice of Christ, accomplished once for all on the Cross of Calvary”, which includes “an invocation of the Holy Spirit”, and is “the communion of the faithful” (p. 81).  He notes how “the doctrine of Christ presented in the Nicene Creed” is fundamental “to the structure, content and ethos of the developed Eucharist celebrated in the Church over the centuries” (p, 82) and observes that the significance of the Sursum Corda (the vesicles and responses that introduce the Sacramental portion of the liturgy) and shortly thereafter the introduction to the Sanctus is that “we are invited to share in Christ’s heavenly worship through our union with, and in, him” (p. 82).  He reminds us that worship is not supposed to be something we do privately in our pews but is a corporate act (p. 83).

 

Overall it is an excellent introduction to the evangelicalism and Catholicity of the (orthodox) Anglican tradition.

 

(1)   There is also a noticeable difference between how the distinction between the canonical books and the “Apocrypha” is handled in the Thirty-Nine Articles and how it is handled in the Belgic Confession in both of which the relevant article is the sixth.

(2)   Cranmer’s original version of the article just names the doctrine and refers to the homily, the Elizabethan revision provides an account of the doctrine.  In both versions the homily is called “The Homily of Justification”.  The homily referred to is the third in the first (1547) Certain Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches, more commonly called Book of Homilies, and its actual title is “A Sermon of the Salvation of Mankind by Only Christ Our Saviour from Sin and Death Everlasting.”

(3)   This does not contradict the idea of Sacraments as means of grace.  Sacraments are means by which grace is given, faith is the means by which it is received.  Dr. Luther likened faith to the empty hand which receives a gift.  Sacraments, in this analogy, are hands of the Giver not the recipient.  Sacraments share the role of the Word, of which St. Augustine of Hippo said they were a visual form, not the role of faith.

(4)  The same thing as a Festschrift (a collection of essays in honour of somebody) but published posthumously.

(5)   Toon’s background, prior to his entering the Church of England and her ministry was Methodist.  He began his ministry in the Diocese of Liverpool, the first bishop of which was the very Calvinistic evangelical J. C. Ryle about whom Toon co-wrote a biography.

(6)   Toon saw the both/and approach as different from the via media rather than a different interpretation of it.

(7)   Repentance has far too often been preached in a way that blasphemes the character of God.  Have you ever heard a sermon in which sinners were encouraged to soften the heart of God with their tears or heard of such a sermon?  That this misrepresents the character of God can be seen in the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  While the title character when he determines to return home devises a speech “Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants” he is forgiven by his father before he utters a word of it “But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him”.  The son’s contrition did not produce the mercy and forgiveness in his father’s heart – it was already there.  What it did do was move him to seek his father where forgiveness was already awaiting him.  The error that attributes more to repentance than this goes back very early but this does not make it less of an error.  As early as the Apostolic Fathers the question of whether serious sins after baptism can be forgiven arose.  One answer was that they could, but only once.  That this would mean that the Jesus Who commanded His disciples to forgive up to 70 times 7 (and He did not mean that they were free to not forgive the 491^st time as the Puritan preacher in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights thought) was less forgiving than He required His sinful disciples to be did not seem to occur to such as the author of the Shephard of Hermas.  A more common answer was that they could be forgiven, but that only after a lifetime of repentance and that the forgiveness was less certain than that offered in initial baptism.  This was based on a misreading of the tenth chapter of Hebrews.  The antiquity of these views does not make them Catholic – remember, there are two other tests. The second of these wrong answers produced bad fruit such as the deferral of baptism until the deathbed (Emperor Constantine is a notable example of this) and ultimately the Catholic tradition rejected these bad ideas and a better understanding of grace prevailed.  Satisfaction for sins after baptism is not made by us in our always far from what it should be repentance.  It was made once for all by the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross.  This Sacrifice is the source of the grace conveyed in the one-time Sacrament of baptism.  It is also the source of the grace conveyed in the repeated Eucharist.  Since it is the same once-for-all Sacrifice the believer confessing his sins in accordance with John 1:9 can be as sure of forgiveness of his post-baptismal sins as of that of his pre-baptismal sins.  Scottish Barthian theologian T. F. Torrance in his doctoral dissertation The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers was quite critical of the Fathers of the second and third centuries for the weakness of their understanding of grace  However, the words from Edmund Burke about accumulated wisdom and the self-correcting power of tradition that Russell Kirk liked to quote seem appropriate here “the individual is foolish…but the species is wise” and just as orthodox Trinitarianism triumphed over Arianism by the end of the fourth century so grace ultimately prevailed around the same time as well.

(8)   The thing, the three-fold ministry of the Christian Church corresponding to the three-fold ministry of the Old Testament Church (High Priest/Priest/Levite), is present in the New Testament.  The only reason there is any dispute about this is due to the words that name the three orders and even there presbyter and deacon when used for offices in the ministry (the words can just mean “elder” and “servant” in a general sense) refer to the same offices to which they have traditionally been applied.  What is disputed is whether episkopos (literally overseer) or bishop is used of the office of the presiding presbyter who shares in the Apostolic governance as in the later tradition (SS Timothy and Titus as examples) or of all presbyters (as its usage in the epistles to SS Timothy and Titus would suggest).  Either way, however, the governing office itself is present in the New Testament and if the word that would become its title was not yet restricted to it in the New Testament this in no way invalidates the later usage of the term since it had to be called something and “overseer” certainly describes the role.

(9)  The alternate views are that the episcopate is esse (no Church without it) and bene esse (it is better if the Church has it but a Church can be a Church even in the fullest sense without it).  Plene esse is how most High Churchmen understood it prior to the Oxford Movement.  The only caveat I would offer is that for a Church to be a Church but in a less than full sense because it lacks the Apostolic episcopate it must have an organic connection to the Church of Jerusalem.  While bishops in Apostolic Succession are one form of organic connection and so every Church with them has an organic connection they are not the only such connection. A Church planted as an extension of an older Church (and so on back to the Church of Jerusalem) does not lose this organic connection although it sustains an injury if it loses its bishops such as occurred with the (German) Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Reformation.