Via Media Inter Vias Medias

 The Anglican form of the Christian faith has often been described as a via media or “middle road.”   This is usually taken to be a compliment, a positive evaluation, one which evokes Aristotle’s idea of virtue as the path that lies between two extremes of vice.   In the case of the Anglican faith, its middle way is customarily said to fall between Catholicism and Protestantism.   

 

The roots of this way of explaining the Anglican faith can be found in the English Reformation.   In its fullest sense, the English Reformation is a period of history that can be said to have begun prior to Luther when the Christian version of Renaissance humanism spread to England and gave rise to scholastic criticism of ecclesiastical abuses and stretched all the way to the Restoration in which Charles II was brought back to his throne and the episcopal order was brought back to the Church of England.    The traditional and historical formularies of the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion – the Coverdale Psalter, Cranmer’s English liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer, the Articles of Religion, the Authorized Version of the Holy Bible, etc. – all came out of the long English Reformation. 

 

There are two important events which intersect this period.   The first is the reign of Mary (1553-1558) which saw the Church of England temporarily brought back under papal rule.   The second is the Council of Trent (1545-1563) in which the papacy and its adherents responded to the continental Reformation.   Note that the years of the first event are contained entirely within those of the second.   Both events had a tremendous impact on the course of the English Reformation.   Apart from them it is unlikely that the trajectory of the English Reformation would ever have been thought of in terms of a middle way and instead the English Reformation would have been simply regarded as being the slowest moving, most cautious and conservative, part of the same Protestant Reformation that was occurring in continental Europe.

 

In the Council of Trent, however, Rome had launched the Counter Reformation, in which she reformed herself with regards to many of the most grievous examples of complaints against her that were of the nature of moral corruption, but doubled down on the doctrines to which the Reformers had objected, working out a comprehensive theological defence of such doctrines (1) and beginning an aggressive campaign aimed at bringing the Protestants back under the papal yoke.  Meanwhile the persecutions of the reign of Mary had radicalized a certain kind of English Protestant, both by hardening him against the oppression of Rome and by driving him into exile in Geneva where he came under the influence of republican Calvinists.   Thus the Puritan was born.  When the Church of England reintroduced the earlier reforms in the reign of Elizabeth I, it was therefore assaulted on two sides, from the new Roman Catholic apologists armed with Tridentine ammunition and from the Puritans.   This forced her to clarify her own position, which naturally took the form of a via media between these two extremes.   Officially, this position was defined by the Elizabethan Settlement, but the post-Mary, post-Trent period also saw the most skilled apologists that the Church of England has ever known work out the theological case for her stance.   The foremost example of these was Richard Hooker whose extensive articulation and defence of the basic principles of the Church was written against Puritanism’s extreme claims.   Following shortly after Hooker, Bishop Lancelot Andrewes defended the same against Tridentine theology and its Jesuit apologists such as Cardinal Bellarmine, in the reign of James I.

 

While there is much to commend the via media method of explaining the Anglican faith it has one major drawback.   The expression itself, taken in its most literal sense, suggests that Anglicanism is neither Catholic nor Protestant.   The middle space between any two locations lies neither in the one nor the other.   Yet this is close to being the opposite of what many – probably most - people who use the expression via media mean by it.    What they would mean by the via media is that the Anglican faith reject the either/or dichotomy between Catholicism and Protestantism that came out of the continental Protestant Reformation and choses instead to be both Catholic and Protestant.   While the image of middle territory is sometimes used in a both/and sense, in ordinary usage this does not escape the sense of neither/nor, for it means being partially on the one side, partially on the other, like the overlapping region in a Venn Diagram.  This is hardly a satisfying image for those traditional Anglicans who would insist that our faith and Church are both fully Catholic and fully Protestant.  (2)

 

I would suggest, therefore, that it would be helpful when referring to traditional, orthodox, Anglicanism as the via media between Catholicism and Protestantism that we add the explanation that we are using this expression in a special sense that means fully both/and rather than partially both/and or neither/nor.    Furthermore I would suggest that we also add that our faith’s full Catholicism and full Protestantism are viae mediae themselves.   Which finally brings us to what the title of this essay asserts – that as a via media between Catholicism and Protestantism, Anglicanism is a via media between two other viae mediae.

 

To explain what I mean by this, I would first note that the Right Reverend Peter Robinson, the presiding bishop of a continuing Anglican communion, the United Episcopal Church of North America, has often said that if Anglicanism is a via media, it is a via media between Wittenberg and Geneva, that is to say, between Lutheranism and Calvinism.   In his article from eight years ago, entitled The Reformed Face of Anglicanism, he discussed how Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s own theological journey left its mark on the Church of England.   When Cranmer initially embraced the doctrines of the continental Protestant Reformation it was in the form of Lutheranism, but, according to Robinson, he later moved in the direction of a moderate Calvinism.    The Anglican liturgy, he says, reflects Cranmer’s early Lutheranism, but the Articles of Religion reflect his later, moderate Calvinism.   

 

At that point, Bishop Robinson’s concept of Anglicanism as a via media between Lutheranism and Calvinism seemed to amount to being Lutheran in practice and mild Calvinist in doctrine.   That the Church of England, as it emerged from the English Reformation, was officially, albeit moderately, Calvinist in theology is the point of his essay.   His arguments that Anglican theology was moderately Calvinist as opposed to Lutheran, at least insofar as the official Articles are concerned, are not particularly convincing in that the points he mentions are mostly ones on which Calvinism and Lutheranism are agreed (“centrality of Scripture”, “monergistic position on Justification”), and on the one mentioned point where there is a disagreement between Lutheranism and Calvinism,  “predestination and election”,  the official Articles are clearly closer to Lutheranism than Calvinism.   The essential difference between Lutheranism (3) and Calvinism on this doctrine is that Lutheranism rejects reprobation, and there is no mention of reprobation anywhere in the Seventeenth Article.   Interestingly, Bishop Robinson, by mentioning that the Lambeth Articles, which contained the concept of double predestination but were not made official, having been rejected by the Queen, provides indirect testimony that the official theology of Anglicanism is closer to Lutheranism than Calvinism on this issue.  

 

His essay of three years later entitled “The Middle Way” is much better in this regards.   Here, he stresses the relationship between the Articles of Religion and the Confession of Augsburg, making the Articles therefore basically Lutheran in theology but which “can and do strike off on their own occasionally, such as in Articles 28 and 29 concerning the Eucharist, which are clearly Reformed.”   This is a much more accurate account of the theology of the Articles.   Interestingly, John Calvin’s own theology was – and, I would argue, consciously so on Calvin’s part – itself a via media between Lutheranism and Zwinglianism.  (4)  This is worth noting here particularly because many would consider the most obvious example of this to be the very subject on which Bishop Robinson identifies the doctrine of the Articles as being Reformed.  (5)

 

If Bishop Robinson is right, and I think he is, that the Anglican Church’s Protestantism is a via media between Wittenberg and Geneva, then as a special sort of  fully both/and via media between Catholicism and Protestantism it is a via media inter vias medias, because Anglicanism’s Catholicism is obviously itself a via media between Rome and Constantinople.

 

In the English Reformation, the Anglican Church in many ways reverted to the Catholicism of the early centuries of Church history that predated the Romanism against which the Reformers protested.  (6)  This meant returning to many doctrines, practices, and structures which in the Eastern Orthodox Church had persisted from the earlier Catholicism all along.  

 

The rejection of papal supremacy is only the most obvious example of this.   By retaining the three-fold clerical order clearly established by the Apostles in the New Testament, (7) but rejecting the claims of the Patriarch of Rome to supremacy over the entire Church, the Anglican Church returned to what the old Catholicism had asserted against prelates interfering in the jurisdiction of others in the canons of the ecumenical Councils, and which had remained the position of the Eastern Church all along, most notably reiterated in the East/West Schism of 1054 AD.   In the Anglican Communion, the Archbishop of Canterbury is, like the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople in the Eastern Church, considered primus inter pares, which is the honour the early Church had awarded to the Patriarch of Rome before he elevated himself above all other bishops, declared himself infallible, and transformed his office into the papacy.

 

Other examples in which Anglican reforms returned to early Church practices that had been retained in Eastern Orthodoxy all along include allowing the clergy to marry and distributing the Eucharist in both kinds to the laity.

 

In other areas, however, Anglicanism continued to follow the Latin interpretation of the Catholic tradition.   The most obvious example of this can be found in Cranmer’s translation of the Nicene Creed which asserts of the Holy Ghost that He “proceedeth from the Father and the Son”, thus including the filioque which played such an important role in the Great Schism.   The use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist is another example.   A further example, can be found in what we have seen of Anglicanism’s Protestantism.  If Anglican Protestantism is a via media between Lutheranism and Calvinism it is a via media between two forms of Augustinianism.   St. Augustine of Hippo had a much larger influence over the theology of the Western Church than of the Eastern Church and, indeed, the Eastern theologians frequently identify St. Augustine as the source of all that they consider to be the errors of the Western tradition.

 

So we see that as a special kind of via media between Catholicism and Protestantism that is fully both at the same time, Anglicanism is a via media between two other viae mediae in the more literal sense – a Catholicism that falls between that of the Western and Eastern traditions and a Protestantism that is somewhere between Lutheranism and Calvinism.

 

(1) (1)   This aspect of the Council of Trent had an effect on Anglicanism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism.    The reason for this should be evident.   It created the need for Anglican, Lutheran and Calvinist theologians to develop a theological response, not just to what the first generation Reformers had perceived as Rome’s doctrinal errors, but to the more elaborate Tridentine theological framework.    In Lutheranism and Calvinism, this response became what is known as Protestant scholasticism.   In the same period, Anglicanism worked out its own theological answer to Trent, examples of which can be seen in Bishop Lancelot Andrewes’ Responsio ad Apologiam Cardinalis Bellarmini (1610) and Archbishop William Laud’s A Relation of the Conference Between William Laud, Late Lord Archbishop of Canterbury and Mr. Fisher the Jesuit, By the Command of King James (1639).   Doctrinally, Andrewes’ and Laud’s responses are similar to those of the Protestant scholastics, but methodologically they are quite different.   Like the writings of earlier Anglican apologists such as Bishop Jewell and Richard Hooker, these are saturated with Patristic citations.   For Andrewes and Laud, a sufficient defence of Anglican Protestantism against the claims of Rome and Tridentine theology required demonstrating that the Church Fathers were on their side.

(2)   (2) A more fitting image is the one that Dr. Ron Dart has used to contrast the Anglican approach with that of the more schismatic versions of Protestantism.   The image is of a garden – the Catholic tradition – which has weeds in it – the errors and abuses of fifteenth-sixteenth century Rome.   You can either destroy the garden altogether because of the weeds – the approach of schismatic Protestantism – or you can weed the garden – the approach of the English Reformers.   You can hear Ron Dart explain this in his short video “Is the Anglican Way Protestant? Via Media” here, but I would also recommend reading his self-published 2017 book Erasmus: Wild Bird.   The third and fourth chapters which discuss the relationship between Erasmus and English Christianity are particularly relevant.

(3)   (3) The Lutheran tradition as a whole rejects the idea of double predestination, which includes the idea of reprobation, i.e., a predestination to damnation.   Calvinists maintain that on this point Luther himself was a Calvinist rather than a Lutheran.   They may be correct about this.   My own reading of Luther and Calvin and the traditions that bear their names, suggests that the Calvinist tradition, especially the English Calvinist tradition, deviated earlier and further from Calvin, than the Lutheran tradition ever deviated from Luther.   Calvin reads like a Lutheran rather than a Calvinist on far more issues – assurance of salvation and the extent of the atonement being two that immediately come to mind – than Luther reads like a Calvinist, but of course that can hardly be said to constitute evidence that the reverse is never the case.

(4)   (4) The Lutheran and Reformed traditions diverged due to differences of interpretation between Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli of Zurich, the first major leader of the Swiss Reformation and the first theologian of the Reformed tradition.   John Calvin, the French lawyer who was recruited by William Farel to lead the Reformation in Geneva, became the most influential leader of the Swiss Reformation and lent his name to the entire Reformed tradition.   In saying that his theology was a via media between Luther and Zwingli, I mean that with regards to several of the points of contention between Zwingli and Luther he took what was basically Zwingli’s position but modified in a way that moved it closer to the views of Luther and Melanchthon.  

(5)   (5) That Calvin’s view of the Eucharist is mediatory to Luther’s and Zwingli’s does not necessarily depend upon the identification of Zwingli’s understanding of the Eucharist with memorialism.   Memorialism is the view that denies the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and asserts that the Lord’s Supper is only a symbolic memorial of Christ’s sacrifice.   Although Zwingli is widely thought to have taught this, this has not been incontrovertibly established to be the case.   Memorialism has only ever been the official doctrine of the sects that separated from the Churches of the Magisterial Reformation.   The latter all affirm the Real Presence.   All of Protestantism concurred in rejecting the Romanist doctrine of transubstantiation – that when the celebrant pronounces the words of institution the substance of the bread and wine is replaced with that of the Body and Blood of Christ producing a “real absence” of the bread and wine in all but appearance.   In rejecting the Roman error, however, the Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed traditions all steered clear of falling into the opposite error of memorialism, and affirmed the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.   The understanding of what the Real Presence meant differed from tradition to tradition. Lutheranism declared that while the Body and Blood did not magically replace the bread and wine, they were nevertheless literally present and were received by the participants in the same way that the bread and wine were themselves received.   The Reformed leaders rejected the Lutheran interpretation and maintained that the Real Presence is “spiritual” “mystical” or “heavenly.”   This, of course, invited the Lutheran response of saying that the distinction between this and the memorialist outright rejection of the Real Presence was mere semantics.   This was arguably accurate with regards to Zwingli, for whom the spiritual presence of Christ in the Eucharist seemed hardly distinguishable from His presence among the faithful on non-sacramental occasions, but there was no consensus among the Reformed leaders as to what these terms themselves signified.   Calvin took a slight but significant step away from Zwingli towards Luther in asserting that the Sacrament itself was the instrumental means whereby the “spiritual” Real Presence was communicated to the faithful.   Bishop Robinson is, of course, correct to say that the Thirty Nine Articles take the Reformed position – “The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the means whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is Faith.”    Note, however, that the phrase “an heavenly and spiritual manner” can be understood either as an answer to the question of “how” Christ is present in the Sacrament or an assertion that God has not given us the answer to this question and that it would be impious on our part to try and answer it.    The latter is how Archbishop Laud explained the Anglican position in his response to the Jesuit Fisher, referred to above in note one.   The Roman and Lutheran positions, different as they are, he maintained, both make the same mistake of trying to provide a detailed explanation of what God has left a mystery.   Ironically, the Puritans, who regarded themselves as followers of Calvin, accused him of trying to smuggle Romanism back into the Anglican Church by teaching the Real Presence.   The Anglican view of the Real Presence as he defended it to Fisher, however, was indistinguishable from Calvin’s own.

(6)  (6) The Church of England, like the Churches of the continental Magisterial Reformation, but unlike the separatist sects, rejected Rome’s equation of Roman with Catholic.   To illustrate the distinction between the two in terms of doctrine, the Apostles and Nicene Creeds are Catholic, the doctrines of papal supremacy and infallibility are Roman.   In the Reformation and post-Reformation Anglican Church the key to understanding what is Catholic has been the Vincentian Canon, i.e., St. Vincent of Lerin’s remark in his Commonitorium (434) that the Catholic faith is that which – obviously, within the context of the Church rather than the world – “quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus, creditum est” or “has been believed everwhere, always, and by all.”   Bishop Lancelot Andrewes’ remark “One canon reduced to writing by God Himself, two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, five centuries, and the series of Fathers in that period – the centuries, that is, before Constantine, and the two after, determine the boundary of our faith” can be taken as traditional Anglicanism’s footnote commentary on the Vincentian Canon.

(7)  (7) The Apostles themselves were the first and highest order, established by Christ Himself.  They established the other two, of the presbyters (elders) and deacons.   While the followers of Calvin introduced confusion regarding this matter by pointing to the fact that the Scriptures use the term which in subsequent eras of the Church was applied to the highest order, bishops (episcopoi in Greek, literally “overseers” or “administrators”), interchangeably with presbyters, there very epistles in which this interchangeable usage occurs rebuts the Calvinist interpretation.   Those are the epistles written to Timothy and Titus, in which St. Paul gave these individuals instructions regarding the ordination of presbyters/bishops and deacons.   This demonstrates that Timothy and Titus themselves belonged to an order above the presbyters/bishops and deacons which had the power of ordaining the lower orders.   This was the order of the Apostles themselves, to which Timothy and Titus had been elevated.   Timothy and Titus are not addressed by the title – Apostle – which was used for all previous members of this order, which is perhaps the first indication that it had been decided that while the order would continue the title would be reserved for the individuals who had been directly commissioned by Christ.   This decision is what created the need for another title, and it was quickly decided – before the first century was even over – that rather than coin another one, the alternate title for presbyters would from then on be reserved for the order that had begun as the Apostles.   Anyone who thinks that because the term was used to refer to one thing in the New Testament but to a different thing in subsequent generations, the latter usage is therefore somehow “wrong” should read I Samuel 9:9.   If the same thing can be called by one name in one period and a different one in a later, as the Scriptures there assert without passing any moral judgement on the change in usage, then it stands to reason that there can be no Scriptural objection to a single word meaning one thing in one period and another in a later.

Bishop Strachan and the Soul of Canada

On July 1st, 1867, the British North America Act went into effect and the Dominion of Canada was born, consisting, at the time, of the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, but which would eventually grow to include all the provinces and territories under the sovereignty of the British Crown in continental North America. Four months later, on the Feast of All Saints, a man who had called for the confederation of British North America decades before the political realities of the 1860s spurred our statesmen into action on the matter, went to his eternal reward. That man was the Right Reverend John Strachan, the first Anglican Bishop of Toronto. For much of the half century prior to Confederation Strachan had been the spiritual and intellectual leader of Upper Canada. He was also the very embodiment of Toryism in its pure, undiluted form. A much watered-down version of this same Toryism inspired and drove the Fathers of Confederation, a fact that the Liberal Party has always resented, which resentment has been behind their relentless efforts to undo Confederation and re-make the country into their own, warped, image. In these efforts, they have been all too lamentably successful.

John Strachan was born in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1778, while the American Revolution was underway. (1) When he was fourteen, his father died in an accident at the local granite quarry of which he was the overseer, and the support of his mother and sisters fell upon him. He was able, through tutoring and teaching, to both provide that support and to fund his own studies in divinity at the University of Aberdeen. After a number of disappointments in his efforts to improve his situation in Scotland, he was told that an academy had been founded in Kingston, Upper Canada with the intention that it would grow into a college, and that the principalship of the school was offered to him. He accepted the offer and crossed the Atlantic only to discover that the school was just theoretical. Nevertheless, he found a patron in the Hon. Richard Cartwright, the United Empire Loyalist from Albany, New York who had rebuilt his family’s fortune as a businessman in Kingston, and served as a judge and legislator in the province. Cartwright made Strachan the tutor of his eldest sons, and soon other leading Loyalist families put their sons under his tutelage as well.

One of the Loyalists who sent his sons to study under Strachan was Dr. John Stuart, the founding rector of the Anglican parish in Kingston that would eventually evolve into St. George’s Cathedral (the basis of the fictional St. Nicholas’ Cathedral that features in Robertson Davies’ Salterton trilogy). It was Dr. Stuart who persuaded Strachan to seek ordination in the Church of England. Strachan had come from a family that was mixed religiously, and while the theology he had been taught in Aberdeen was that of his mother’s Presbyterianism, he was more drawn to the non-juring, Scottish Episcopal Church of his father, and would become a staunch advocate of the beliefs, practices, and rights of that Church’s English counterpart. In 1803 he was ordained a deacon in the Church of England, by Dr. Jacob Mountain, the first bishop of the diocese of Quebec, which at the time included all of the Anglican Churches in what is now Quebec and Ontario. The following year he was ordained a priest. His first assignment was to the mission church in Cornwall.

His entering into Holy Orders ought not to be considered a change in careers. He certainly did not see it that way himself and, if anything, his educational efforts increased after his ordination. This is entirely in keeping with his philosophy of education, in which the Church was the institution best suited to provide a sound education on a solid religious foundation. Accordingly, one of the first things he did upon taking up the ministry in Cornwall was to establish a grammar school which quickly achieved distinction. His student roster resembles a Who’s Who of the next generation of judicial, executive, legislative, and ecclesiastical leadership of Upper Canada. The school was basically a traditional, British, parochial grammar school – a classics based curriculum, daily prayer services, and an emphasis on character formation, especially the instillation of a sense of civic and religious duty – but with a larger role for what we would today call STEM classes. The non-existent academy that had lured him to Canada he thus ended up creating himself.

It was during his ministry in Cornwall that he met and married Ann, the daughter of the local physician, and the young widow of Montreal businessman Andrew McGill. He also became a close friend of his wife’s brother-in-law from her first marriage, James McGill, and convinced him to bequeath his large estate for the purpose of founding of a college. This, of course, is how McGill University came to be. Strachan was named a trustee of the college in McGill’s will and was intended by McGill to be the school’s first principal, although his commitments in Upper Canada ultimately prevented him from taking this position in Lower Canada.

In 1812 Strachan accepted the post of rector of the Anglican parish in York. At the time the future city of Toronto was just a small town, but an important one, being the capital of Upper Canada. Sir Isaac Brock, the Lieutenant Governor of the province, appointed him the chaplain to the military garrison stationed at York at the same time that he assumed the rectorship. This was immediately prior to the outbreak of war. The grasping and covetous Yankees, believing that all of North America was destined to belong to their republic, declared war on the British Empire on the assumption that her preoccupation with the Napoleonic war in Europe, would render British North America vulnerable to their plans of conquest. At the cost of much bloodshed, they were proven to be mistaken as the Canadians took up arms and fought alongside the Imperial army and such Indian allies as the Ojibwas and the Iroquois Confederacy to repel the invaders who arrogantly saw themselves as liberators. In all of this, Strachan played a major role, not only through his role as military chaplain and by using his pulpit to promote patriotic Loyalism, but as the main organizer of the “Loyal and Patriotic Society of Upper Canada”, to raise support for the relief of the wounded, widows, and orphans. He also had the unfortunate task of having to negotiate terms in 1813 when American forces overwhelmed the defenders of York and forced the Imperial troops to retreat to Kingston. He was able to secure the release of the starving, sick, and wounded militia men who had been taken prisoner, but was unable, due to the inability of the American general to control his men, to completely prevent the burning and looting of York. (2) Had he not already been a man of strong Loyalist, royalist, and Tory principles, firmly and fundamentally opposed to liberalism, republicanism, and everything else the United States stood for, this experience would have made him one, and it steeled him in these convictions.

After the war Strachan found himself fighting the forces of liberal, secular, American republicanism in the domestic form of the subversive Reform movement – the movement from which the Liberal Party of Canada, eventually sprung. The Reform movement, created by pamphleteers and yellow journalists, had as its initial goal the transformation of Canada into a Yankee style republic, but when they found that this would not sell – the republican revolution attempted by William Lyon Mackenzie in 1837 received little support and was easily defeated (3) – they moderated this into a demand for “responsible government.” This consisted of a two-fold transfer of power – first, from the Imperial to the provincial government, second from the executive branch of the provincial government to the legislative assembly. Even in this modified version, the Reformers, like the American Revolutionaries before them, followed in the footsteps of the seventeenth century Puritan Whigs, who had usurped the authority, rights, and privileges of the Crown because they saw the concentration of power in the elected assembly which they were able to control as the easiest path to shoving their radical agenda down everyone else’s throats. “Responsible government” is a nonsensical phrase – unfettered democracy is, and always has been, the least responsible form of government, and the well-spring of all tyranny. (4)

Strachan had been appointed to the Executive and Legislative Councils of Upper Canada in 1815 and 1820 respectively. He was not the first or only clergyman to serve in this capacity, but his presence there was regarded as intolerable by the Reformers. Nor did the fact that many of his former pupils also served on these Councils reconcile the Reformers to his presence.

When Upper Canada had been separated from Lower Canada in the late eighteenth century, the Crown had set aside land for the support of “Protestant clergy” with the obvious intent of establishing the English parochial system in the former. Strachan was a strong believer and defender of the original intent of the Clergy Reserves, whereas the Reform Movement took the position that the legislature should confiscate the land, sell it off, and use the proceeds to support – secular – education. Others did not go as far as this, but wanted the Reserves divided between the Church of England and the Presbyterian Kirk of Scotland. Still others wished to divide the Reserves further, including the non-conformist and enthusiastic sects as well.

Strachan, as we have seen, was a pioneer in the development of Upper Canadian education. This was related to his support for the re-creation of the parochial system because he believed firmly that schools administered by the Church, with a sound, orthodox, religious foundation for learning, were the best way to elevate and refine a culture, and civilize a society. He held this to be true of higher education as well and in 1827 around the time that he was made Archdeacon of York he obtained a Royal Charter along with an endowment of land for King’s College, an Anglican university of which he would serve as the president. The Reformers demanded that the university be confiscated and secularized.

The Reformers won in each these battles and it is worth noting that similar struggles were taking place in the United Kingdom at the same time. The Warden, the first of Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire, tells the story of a saintly clergyman, whose income as warden of an almhouse supported by a land bequest dating back centuries, comes under attack by a newspaper editor bent on reform, who makes up for what he lacks in the way of brains and information with an overabundance of self-important ideals. While the story is fictional, Trollope drew from real situations and people in writing his novels, and there are obvious parallels between this and the Clergy Reserves fight in Upper Canada. Not long after the battle for King’s College in Canada, liberal reformers in Britain successfully used their strength in Parliament to force secularizing reforms on Oxford University, diverting much of its endowments from their intended purposes in theological education, and weakening the school’s ties to the Church by making religious services and subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles optional. (5) This helps to illustrate the sad point that George Grant made in Lament for a Nation that our vulnerability to Americanization despite our Tory Fathers best efforts to shield us against it is largely due to liberal rot having already set in throughout the British Empire, including the mother country herself.

At the heart of each of these three conflicts can be seen the same basic clash of ideals. The Reformers were motivated by a liberal ideal that had first been enunciated by the Anabaptists and one extreme branch of the Puritans and which later was enshrined in the Constitution of the American republic, the doctrine of separation of Church and State. This is a false ideal from the perspective of both sound theology and sound politics. The reasons why it is bad theology are too long to get into here. (6) Politically it is unsound because it reduces religion to a matter of personal choice and hinders if not outright prevents its being the force for social and civil good that it is supposed to be. Strachan understood this and fought for Church establishment on sound, orthodox, principles. He lost each of these battles – he resigned his positions on the Executive and Legislative Councils, was forced by the legislative assembly to sell the Clergy Reserves, and saw King’s College confiscated by the legislative assembly and secularized into the University of Toronto. In both cases the legislative assembly grossly exceeded their authority thus illustrating what I said earlier about democracy being the well-spring of tyranny for the confiscation of endowed property and the perversion of educational institutions into the opposite of what their founder intended constitutes a form of tyranny. They got away with it because the Imperial government, not wanting to risk another American revolution so soon after the first one, was unwilling to check the provincial legislature when it stepped out of bounds. Nevertheless, while the Reformers defeated Strachan’s vision of Church establishment, they fell short of achieving their own goal of separation of Church and State which goes beyond mere non-establishment. (7)

Strachan’s response to these losses is most admirable and shows tremendous character. After the legislative robbery of King’s College, he raised the funds to create a new Anglican university, Trinity College, for which he obtained a second Royal Charter! In 1839 the Church of England in the Canadas had grown sufficiently that is was deemed appropriate to divide the Diocese of Quebec and form the Diocese of Toronto of which he was consecrated the first Bishop. He continued to promote the growth of the ministry of the English Church, and despite the loss of the Clergy Reserves was successful enough to warrant the formation of two more Dioceses out of his own, the Diocese of Huron in 1857 and the Diocese of Ontario in 1862. Even before his efforts to create an established, parochial, system failed, he had the foresight to plan for a day when the Church would have to govern and support itself apart from Royal patronage, and in 1851 formed the first Diocesan Synod, setting the precedent that would be followed by the Anglican Church throughout the Dominion of Canada.

If Bishop Strachan, the orthodox Churchman who stood for “Apostolic Order and Evangelical Truth” can see the huge leap away from both that the Anglican Church of Canada is planning on taking in its next General Synod, he is undoubtedly spinning in his tomb, beneath the High Altar of St. James, the parish he pastored in Toronto the building of which, having to be rebuilt due to fire, re-opened as his Cathedral upon his return from his consecration at Lambeth Palace in 1839. This is all the more true if he can also see how Papa Doc and Baby Doc Trudeau have done their worst to turn the Dominion of Canada that had just come into being prior to his departure from this life into a crummy, Communist, Third World, dunghole and how the educational system of Canada, that he put so much thought and effort into, and which at its height produced such minds as Marshall McLuhan, George Grant, Harold Innis, Robertson Davies, Northrop Frye, Donald Creighton and Eugene Forsey has so decayed that it is now churning out unreflective morons who buy wholly in to the militant “wokeness” that has come to infest our country and fail to recognize it for what it is, a cruel totalitarianism that is far closer in spirit than anything else in Canada today to the regime against which we and the rest of the British family of nations bravely went to war in 1939. Whereas Bishop Strachan fought for Canada’s soul, today’s progressives have sold it.

Happy Dominion Day
God Save the Queen!

(1) For the biographical details included in this essay I consulted Alexander Neil Bethune, Memoir of the Right Reverend John Strachan, D. D., L.L.D., First Bishop of Toronto, Toronto, Henry Rowsell, 1870. The author had attended Strachan’s Grammar School in Cornwall, later became a divinity student under him, was appointed chaplain by Strachan upon his elevation to the episcopacy, then later archdeacon, and was chosen and consecrated by Strachan as coadjutor bishop in his final days, and thus ultimately succeeded him as bishop of Toronto.

(2) The following year, the Yanks experienced payback when the Imperial forces burned the city they had built on the marshy territory between the Potomac River and Tiber Creek. However, since most Americans rightly consider the swamp gas that is still emitted from the goings on in that city to be the source of a major part of their woes, perhaps we should think of this not so much in terms of payback but as doing them a favour.

(3) Mackenzie went into exile but later returned and was elected to the legislative assembly. His attempt at violent revolution ought to have barred him from even running for public office. Ideally, the ban would have extended to his descendants as well. His grandson and namesake, became Canada’s longest-serving Prime Minister and was also Canada’s third or fourth worst Prime Minister after the two Trudeaus, and possibly Pearson, depending upon which you consider to be worst, the treasonous betrayal of your country to both the Americans and the Soviets simultaneously (Pearson) or sabotaging our system of king/queen-in-Parliament and granting near dictatorial power to the Prime Minister’s Office (Mackenzie King). Any one of the notorious Black Donnellys of Kingston, even if they had been guilty of ten times the crimes of which their neighbours accused them before lynching them in 1880, would have made a better Prime Minister than any of these contemptible, lowlife, creeps.

(4) The most responsible form of government, is the traditional mixed king/queen-in-Parliament system, which still survives in Britain and Canada although badly damaged by the efforts towards democratic absolutism of liberals in both countries in the seventeenth and twentieth centuries respectively. The Whig Interpretation of History maintains that this system emerged from the triumph of the Puritans over the Stuarts in the seventeenth century, but this is nonsense. It is the Stuarts who were the champions of the balanced, responsible, Westminster system against the Puritans and the Whigs who sought to subvert it. Also nonsense is the Liberal “Authorized Version” of Canadian history which re-writes our story from one of noble Loyalism into a version of the American struggle for independence. That the majority of Canadian historians teach the Liberal version lends it no credibility. It is merely more evidence that the Liberal Party of Canada operates like the Communist Party of North Korea, where only the Kim-approved official version of Korean history is allowed to be taught. Which is one reason why aspersions cast by the Canadian Historical Association on the “academic merit” of the work of others ought to be treated as nothing more than a laughable joke. For real Canadian history the best writers were Donald Creighton and W. L. Morton.

(5) See the second volume of Edward Meyrick Goulburn’s extensive biography of John William Burgon, for an account of how Burgon, later the Dean of Chichester Cathedral but at the time the vicar of the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin – the position held by John Henry Newman before his defection across the Tiber – fought, heroically but unsuccessfully, against these reforms. The biography was published by John Murray of London in 1892.

(6) I shall, Deus Vult, address this issue in full in a later essay. The orthodox view of the matter is that the Church and State are distinct kingdoms, under God, with their own sphere of authority. As members of the Church, baptized kings like other Christians, are subject to the authority of the Apostolic ministry, as members of the State, Bishops, like other subject-citizens, are subject to the authority of the king. Bishops govern the Church through the ministry of the keys, kings govern the State through the ministry of the sword. Church and State are complementary and distinct, but not separate. See George Hickes, The Constitution of the Catholick Church and the Nature and Consequences of Schism, 1716, especially the 42 propositions in the section found on pages 62 to 129, as well as the section on Church and State, Part V, found in the second volume of William Palmer’s A Treatise on the Church of Christ Designed Chiefly for the Use of Students of Theology, London, J. G. & F. Rivington, 1838.

(7) Liberal writers such as Michael Harris and Warren Kinsella have sometimes claimed that separation of Church and State is a Canadian value. If this is not just a simple matter of confusing our history and tradition with that of the United States, then they presumably have the outcome of the battles over the Church Reserves and King’s College in mind. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that non-establishment is the full equivalent of separation of Church and State, which it is not. This still would not make the separation of Church and State a Canadian value. By Canada, the Liberal writers mean the Dominion of Canada, the country founded by the Confederation of British North America. The above battles affected only Upper Canada – Ontario. They did not affect the other provinces of British North America, not even Lower Canada – Quebec – in which the Roman Catholic Church was firmly established and remained so until the Quiet Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. Quebec’s controversial Bill 21, just passed, does indeed seem to have created a separation of Church and State, but only in the province of Quebec. Warren Kinsella in a recent column condemned it as fascist. Whether he is right or wrong is a subject for another time, although I will say that in my opinion Quebec would have been better off going the route of undoing the Quiet Revolution and re-establishing the Roman Church than taking the path of complete secularization. I merely wish to point out the extremely amusing irony of the self-contradictory position Kinsella has taken.

The Tory and the Collective

In the twentieth century there were several attempts to define “left” and “right” in their political sense, as poles governing the political spectrum. Such attempts by their very nature were misleading as they required the reduction of complex political views to something so simple that it could be plotted on a chart. Thus the effort tended to be self-defeating, producing confusion where clarity was intended.

An example of these oversimplified spectrums was that of individualism v. collectivism with individualism being the right pole and collectivism being the left pole. As I pointed out in my last essay, my own political outlook of Toryism – the classical conservatism that upholds royal and ecclesiastical authority for the common good of the whole society – does not chart well on this spectrum because it is both individualist and collectivist, but individualist in a different sense than the classical liberal and collectivist in a different sense than the contemporary leftist. I then explained the difference between Tory individualism and classical liberal individualism. In this essay I intend to explain the difference between Tory collectivism and leftist collectivism.

Collectivism, in a general sense of the word, is a way of thinking in which the emphasis is placed on the group rather than the individual. In the context of economics it ordinarily suggests some form of socialism or communism, which is one of the reasons for the association between collectivism and the left. Toryism, however, can also be legitimately described as collectivist. When Naim Attallah asked Enoch Powell what it means to be a Tory in a 1998 interview, in his answer, the famous Tory statesman remarked that a Tory “reposes the ultimate authority in institutions – he is an example of collective man.” (1)

Note that Powell spoke of institutions – plural – rather than “an institution” – singular. In this, the most fundamental difference between Tory collectivism and leftist collectivism can be seen. The Tory believes in a plurality of collectives, each with its own sphere of influence, starting at the local level with examples such as the family, the local neighborhood, and the church parish. We could call this the horizontal plurality of collectives. The Tory also believes in a vertical plurality of collectives, which means that at the higher level of the national society he sees collectives of collectives, rather than merely collectives of individuals.

The Anglican Church, at one time known as the “Tory Party at prayer”, is a good illustration of what I mean. At the national level, in my country, you have the Anglican Church of Canada. Within that there are four ecclesiastical provinces. Each of these consists of several dioceses, which in turn are made up of multiple parishes. Each parish is a collective, within a collective, within a collective, within a collective – and you could extend the number of collectives further since the Anglican Church of Canada is part of the worldwide Anglican Communion, which in turn is part of the larger Christian Church.

When we enter the realm of politics, the Parliament that writes Her Majesty’s laws for us in Ottawa, writes them, for better or for worse, for the entire country of Canada, which includes ten provinces and three territories with governments of their own, which in turn consist of several cities, townships, and rural municipalities with local governments.

The Tory places a great deal of emphasis upon the importance of both the horizontal and the vertical plurality of collectives. Society, for him, is not and should not be a mere aggregation of equal individuals who just happen to live in the same place, at the same time, under the same government, but is a living thing, in which individuals and groups, join together in different ways and at different levels to form an organic whole.

Leftist collectivism is not like this. It is very much about a single collective, which it calls “the people”. This collective, has but a single institutional expression, that of the state. The Tory and the leftist both believe in an institution they call “the state.” Both would say that the state is the institution that passes laws for the common good of the society, but this is where the coincidence of their views of the state ends. The Tory holds to a classical view of the state, grounded in the thought of the ancients, whereas the lefist holds to a modern view of the state, that can be traced to the eighteenth century philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The difference is sufficiently large to justify the assetion that the Tory and the leftist are talking about two different institutions.

The Tory sees the state as one of many institutions, albeit the highest in any given society, vested, as Enoch Powell said, with authority. More specifically, the Tory sees the highest authority in society (2) as vested in the royal sovereign, and the state as the institution (3) that excercises that authority. The left’s ideal, on the other hand, is the democratic state, an institution that is the voice of the people, expressing what Rousseau called their “volonté générale”. Such a state, is the embodiment of power rather than authority, a fact openly acknowledged by the left in their oft-heard slogan “power to the people”. The difference between authority and power is that authority is the right to command, whereas power is the strength to coerce. All government must have a degree of power backing its authority to ensure its stability but civilized government does not rely upon this power except in cases of necessity because the overuse of power undermines authority. In the left’s ideal state, where the people and government are one, power is everything, specifically the strength of the numbers which is the force of the mob.

The left, to reiterate, cares about one collective, the people, and one institution, the state, and its goal is to make the latter the full political expression of the voice and collective will of the former. Who do the left mean when they speak of the people?

In the early days of the left, when it was the party of revolution seeking to overthrow the ancient, classical, and Christian order, the people were the governed as opposed to the established authorities. In the nineteenth century, a specific political phenomenon known as nationalism sprung from the roots of Rousseau’s philosophy and the French Revolution. We don’t often think of nationalism as being leftist today, but it was recognizably so then, and in this stage of the left, the people were the nation, that is, an ethnic group defined by a common racial ancestry, language, religion, and other cultural markers. The leftist nationalists sought to overthrow the royal houses and the Catholic Church to establish the democratic nation-state, embodying the voice of their particular nation. In the twentieth century, the left moved on from the nation, and began to speak of the people in international terms and on a global scale. This evolution of leftist thought is quite in keeping with the left’s avowed progressivism, when we consider Canadian Tory philosopher George Grant’s description of progress as the movement of history towards a “universal and homogeneous state”.

Nineteenth century leftist nationalism, in its attempt to create democratic nation-states, was suspicious of the other collectives and other institutions that had claims on people’s loyalties and affections, and insisted that one’s loyalty to the nation-state be undivided and come before all other loyalties. Today this is what leftists insist upon such loyalty to all of humanity and perhaps to a future democratic world state that will embody the voice of this global scale people. It is here that the leftist collectivist and the liberal individualist approach each other, in their mutual distrust of the plurality of traditional, organic, collective institutions that share claims on our loyalties. From different starting points, the leftist and liberal arrive at mass society, the single large collective, first on a national scale now growing internationally to the global scale, that is an aggregate of equal, undifferentiated, individuals rather than a many-layered organism.

Nothing could be further from Tory collectivism than this.

(1) https://quartetbooks.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/no-longer-with-us-enoch-powell/
(2) The authority of God is higher, but that is an authority that transcends society, rather than an authority within society.
(3) NB, that the state in the Tory view, is a collective institution, made up of several institutions of which the two Houses of Parliament, the various ministries, and the Courts are examples.

Grace and Sacrament

In the Reformation of the sixteenth century, one of the key theological issues over which the Reformers and the papal hierarchy in Rome contended, was the doctrine of justification, God’s declaration of a man to be righteous in His eyes. The Roman Catholic Church and the Reformers agreed that justification was by grace on God’s part. Where they disagreed was over how man receives the grace of God. The Reformers insisted that man received the grace of God and was justified thereby through faith alone. At the Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic Church declared this view to be anathema and said that justification was by faith and works of love.

I believe that the Roman Catholic Church made a terrible mistake in pronouncing this anathema at Trent and that in doing so they failed to uphold the doctrine of the Apostles, as recorded in the New Testament, explained by the Church Fathers, and traditionally held by the Church. In condemning the doctrine of justification by faith alone they pointed out that the New Testament does not qualify the word faith with the word alone in speaking of justification except to express disagreement in James 2:24. As true as this observation is it avoids the fact that when the Reformers spoke of “faith alone”, alone was shorthand for “and not by works.” It excludes works as a means along with faith of receiving grace. This is precisely what St. Paul the Apostle taught. It is the major theme of his epistles to the Romans and Galatians and is mentioned in one way or another in most of his other epistles. In Romans 4, where St. Paul answers James by asserting that the type of justification he wrote about, i.e., by works, was something to boast about and therefore not “before God” (v. 2) he declares that by faith God justifies the person who “worketh not” (v. 5), an extremely strong wording of this doctrine that approaches the border of antinomianism. The Roman Catholic argument that St. Paul was talking about “works of the law” rather than “works of love” defeats the very distinction it tries to make, because the difference between works of the law and works of love is precisely that the former are done with the motivation of earning justification from God for oneself whereas the latter are done with the motivation of pleasing the God one loves rather than obtaining something for oneself. Such works are impossible if they are also necessary alongside faith for receiving the grace of justification.

The error of Trent is one of confusing ends with means or, to use an analogy that was once common, putting the cart before the horse. Means are the methods and tools we utilize to achieve ends which in turn are the goals, goods, and purposes we seek to accomplish. Works are not the means whereby we either achieve or receive the end of our justification and salvation. Rather, salvation which includes justification, is the means whereby God takes us from our fallen, broken condition, and makes us into a new creation which responds to Him with works of love. To repeat, works are not our means for achieving the end of our salvation, rather our works are the end for which salvation is God’s means. St. Paul could not have stated this more clearly than he did in Ephesians 2:8-10.

This understanding is fundamental to the very idea of salvation by grace. For to say that salvation is by grace is to say that salvation is a gift, something that God bestows upon us freely rather than in exchange for something. Something that is a freely given gift can only be received, rather than worked for, because if it is worked for it is a reward or wage rather than a gift, a point St. Paul spells out for us in Romans 4. The understanding that salvation is the means and our works the ends is also vital to the realization that salvation entails more than a divine “fire insurance” policy, that it is a divine rescue mission in which we are lifted out of our fallen estate in which the image of God is broken and marred by sin and brought into a place where restored, we can once again reflect His goodness and grace, as we were created to do.

Rome was clearly in serious error on this point, although it needs to be said that their error was well-intentioned. They wished to guard against the danger of license, i.e., the idea that because one is saved by grace one can therefore feel free to sin without consequence. As good as that intention was it is no solution to the error rebuked by St. Paul in Romans 6 to fall into the error that the entire epistle argues against.

If Rome, to prevent against license, erred in adding works to faith as the means of receiving grace and salvation when in fact salvation is the means to the end of works, a tendency developed on the Protestant side of the Reformation divide to err by limiting the channels by which God’s grace comes to us that we might receive it by faith. I do not mean that they erred in saying that Jesus Christ is the only Saviour and that salvation is only found in Him. On this truth, Rome and the Reformers were in agreement. Jesus is Himself our salvation, and everything from His Incarnation through His Miraculous Conception by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, through His Life and Teachings, Passion, Death, Burial, Descent into Hell, and Resurrection to His Ascension back into Heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father, is God’s loving, gracious, and merciful, gift of salvation to us. The channels of grace to which I refer are the means by which God’s gift to us in Jesus is brought to us that we may respond in faith and receive it..

I began my Christian walk with an evangelical conversion experience when I was fifteen. I began to attend and was baptized in a church in which the Word, written and spoken, was stressed as the channel by which God’s salvation in Christ comes to us that we might receive it by faith. This was how I had been brought to my conversion, having read the Gospel message about how God had given us His Son to suffer and die for our sins and then raised Him from the dead in Christian literature and heard it preached on Christian radio. Furthermore, this teaching is very much in accordance with St. Paul’s statement that “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God” (Rom. 10:17).

St. Paul makes it clear in the context in which he says this that the role of the Word is essential. The Apostle does not say, however, that there are no other channels that supplement the spoken or written Word. That there were, in fact, other such channels was suggested to me early in my Christian walk by a story in one of L. M. Montgomery’s Chronicles of Avonlea anthologies, about a fallen woman on her deathbed who was unable to grasp the concept of God as a loving Father, freely forgiving her of her sins in Christ, no matter how the minister tried to explain it to her, until his nephew arrived and expressed the message in a language she could understand, that of the violin. A year or so after reading that story I read Johnny Cash’s autobiography Man in Black, in which he testified to more or less the same thing, that the Gospel message which spoke to his brother through preaching, had to come to him through the vessel of Gospel music. Perhaps the prominence of music in the services of virtually all Christian worship traditions also testifies to this.

The idea that the spoken or written Word is the sole means whereby Christ is brought to us that we might believe in Him is in conflict with St. John’s declaration in the first chapter of his Gospel that “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn. 1:14). The Word of which the Apostle speaks is Jesus Himself, the Living Word of God. If the Living Word of God had to put on flesh and live amongst men as a Man in order to reveal His Father to us is it reasonable to expect the written Word, the testimony of His disciples to Who He was and what He did, to bring Him to us without also being “made flesh” in a sense? For this is precisely what the church has traditionally said its mysteries or sacraments do.

St. Augustine of Hippo said that a sacrament is formed by the combination of the Word with a physical element so that the physical element, the water of baptism and the bread and wine of Holy Communion becomes a vessel in which the Word and the grace it contains is conveyed. The sacraments are administered, of course, by the church which was established by Christ through His Apostles and said by St. Paul to be the body of Christ. In his first epistle to the Corinthians St. Paul elaborates on that concept, explaining that the church is an organic collective whole, the members of which, with their distinct gifts and offices, are like unto the organs in the body with Christ Himself as the head. Earlier in the same epistle, he says “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” (1 Cor. 3:16) Note that the King James Version just quoted uses distinct forms for the singular and plural second person pronouns as does the original Greek, and that the plural is used here. As temple of God is in the singular, the second person plural is a collective plural and so the verse expresses, with a different metaphor, the same basic concept that the church is a collective whole, collectively indwelt by the Spirit of God sent upon the church at Pentecost. The clear implication of all of this is that the church was established as a continuation of what began in the Incarnation. In Jesus Christ, the Living Word of God was made flesh and after He ascended back into heaven, He sent His Spirit to indwell the church that it might continue His ministry as His physical presence here on earth, and in the mysteries or sacraments of the church the written Word of God is likewise “made flesh” so as to be brought to the believer in a tangible way, that supplements and complements the mere reading, speaking and preaching of the Word.

The versions of Protestantism that rejected this understanding – and not all did, of course – and made the reading and preaching of the Word the sole channel by which God’s gift of grace to us in Christ is to be brought to us to be believed, had good intentions in doing so, just as Rome had good intentions in declaring its anathema on sola fide. These Protestants wished to guard against the danger of misplaced faith, of putting one’s trust in the church and its sacraments rather than in God and the Saviour He has given us in His love, mercy, and grace. This is a real danger and when a person falls into this error, making the church and its sacraments into steps one must climb to approach Christ, they can actually become a wall that keeps him from Christ. This danger must be warned against like that of license which Rome sought to avoid, but just as it is a mistake to stick the cart of works before the horse of salvation, confusing means with ends, so it is a mistake to throw the baby of Incarnational and sacramental theology, out with the bathwater.

If Rome, by declaring anathema the Pauline doctrine that grace is received by faith and not by works and that works are the end to which salvation is the means and not the other way around, brought its own curse down upon its own head, advanced Protestantism impoverished itself, by making preaching and reading the Word the sole channel of grace. For grace is not something we need once and receive once but something in which we are in constant need of. Faith is not, as much of North American evangelicalism unfortunately seems to think, a single act or decision, but a heartfelt response of confidence and trust in God and His grace as given to us in our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ that is ongoing and continual. Faith is formed in us by the very grace it receives, and since faith can weaken and falter, it is in constant need of being replenished and strengthened. This, of course, means that the believer needs to continually read and hear the Word, which is why the liturgy of the Word is an important part of the traditional worship of the church but how much more is the believer’s faith strengthened and replenished when the ministry of the Word is supplemented and complemented by the sacraments in which the church “makes the Word” flesh?

All of this has been on my mind recently as I prepared for and received confirmation by our bishop, in the orthodox Anglican church I have been attending for several years now. This was not a repudiation for me, of the church in which I began my Christian walk for the ministry of which I will always be grateful, but an embracing of the multiple ways in which God’s grace in Christ has been made available to the believer in the wider tradition of Christianity.

Confirmation, the ancient rite in which the bishop lays his hands on the believer’s head and prays over him for strengthening by the Holy Spirit as the believer reaffirms his baptismal vows of repentance and faith, is not considered by the Anglican Church to be a sacrament in the same sense as baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The Anglican Church differs from the Greek and Latin Churches in this for it, rightly I believe, reserves the term sacrament in its strictest sense for the rites actually ordained by Christ Himself. It recognizes a sacramental quality to the rite, however, and if as we have been discussing, the purpose of a sacrament is to make the written Word flesh so that the believer can receive it in ways other than by hearing and reading, then all aspects of the life of the church have a sacramental quality in one way or another to them. The calendar of the Christian year makes the Gospel story flesh, by re-enacting and celebrating Christ’s life and ministry, from the anticipation of His coming in Advent to His reign as Christ the King. The Gospel is made flesh in the images and decorations of the church, and, as L. M. Montgomery’s fictional story and Johnny Cash’s actual testimony referred to earlier tell us, music can tell the story in a language which can reach those who could not otherwise understand it.

This points to the truth upon which I will conclude these reflections. Just as salvation, in its fullest sense, is much more than “fire insurance” but is the rescuing of people from the brokenness of sin and restoring them to a harmonious relationship with God out of which works of Christian love grow as fruit so grace, in its fullest sense, embraces more than the giving of salvation but every other gift that God gives us as well, from the gifts of what the Calvinist divines call “Common Grace”, such as the rain which Christ said His Father sends upon righteous and wicked alike, to the superabundant blessings of God for the believer (Rom. 8:32). “The heavens declare the glory of God”, the Psalmist says and according to St. Paul the invisible things of God have been clearly seen from creation, “being understood by the things that are made” (Rom. 1:20). There is a very real sense in which all of the world and life itself is a sacrament, making flesh the Word of God, and conveying the grace therein to all who will receive it by faith.