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.

 

 

A Heretical Meme

I recently saw a meme that read “We are not saved because we believe, we believe because we are saved.”  The person who posted the meme was a Calvinist who presumably thought that the meme was a nugget of theological truth about God’s sovereignty in salvation.  Internet memes, however, are merely the democratization of the sound-byte and sound-bytes do not gain in accuracy and truthfulness by being created by the average Joe rather than by the corporate media.  In this case, the meme is heretical.  It is heretical even by the standards of Calvinism.

 

The meme basically asserts that salvation is the cause of faith, rather than faith the cause of salvation.  This, however, mutatis mutandis, is what orthodox Christianity asserts about works rather than faith.  Protestantism, of which Calvinism is a strand, is particularly insistent upon this point.  To assert the same about faith, therefore, is to eliminate the distinction between faith and works and to make faith into a work.  The entire point of the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith, however, is that justification is by grace (a gift) rather than by works (a wage earned), and that justification can be by grace because it is by faith, since faith is not a work.

 

That faith is the cause and salvation the effect is clearly stated in multiple verses.  Any one of these can be quoted to demonstrate the point.  I will quote Romans 5:1 “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”   If faith were the effect, this wording would be nonsense.

 

The question is what kind of cause is faith?  The answer to this question brings clarity to many other questions concerning grace and salvation.

That there are multiple kinds of causes was recognized two and a half millennia ago by Aristotle in the second book of his Physics.  He identified four types of causes and provided several examples of each.  Subsequent writers have usually thought it best to provide a single illustration for all four causes.  We will follow this example and use a bookshelf as our illustration.  The bookshelf is, of course, the effect.

 

The first cause Aristotle identified was the material cause.  This is the stuff from which the final product is taken and made.  In the case of our bookshelf, the material cause is wood.

 

Aristotle’s second cause is the formal cause.  This is the idea of the product.  The person who took the wood and put it together to assemble our bookshelf did so in accordance with an idea of what the bookshelf should look like.  If he is a designer, he may have come up with the idea himself and sketched it out.  If the bookshelf is of the self-assemble type, someone else did this and printed it out in the schematic/instructions that came in the box with the pieces.

 

In these first two causes we have the basic Aristotelean concept that everything in creation has both form and matter.

 

Aristotle’s third cause, he called the primary source.  It is more usually called the efficient cause or the Agent.  This is the person who took the matter and made a concrete example of the form, or, if you want to put the other way, who took the form and shaped the matter.  In the case of our bookshelf this is the person who built it.  That could be us, if we bought the ready-to-assemble type that a particular Swedish furniture store is famous for, or, if we bought it pre-assembled, it was the craftsman who put it together in his shop or the factory as the case may be.

 

Aristotle’s final cause, in the sense of the fourth out of the four, is the final cause, in the sense of the end or telos.  This is the purpose or reason, for which the Agent, applies form to matter and vice versa, to produce the effect.  The final cause of our bookshelf is, of course, to store books.

 

The Reformer John Calvin is not ordinarily thought of as an Aristotelean.  Aristotle was “the Philosopher” to St. Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth century Dominican Scholastic whose Summa Theologica significantly shaped the late Medieval theology to which Calvin and his associates objected, especially its popular form the abuses of which were often very far from what the Angelic Doctor wrote, although the Reformers found it in their interests to minimize this distinction.  For Calvin, the great theologian was St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Augustine was a Platonist.  Calvin, however, who like the Father of Latin theology, Tertullian, approached the study of Scripture and God with a legal education as his background, was also like his second-to-third century predecessor in regarding secular philosophy with disdain and suspicion.  This makes his application of Aristotle’s causes to salvation all the more interesting.

 

In the fourteenth chapter of the third book of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin identifies “the mercy of the Heavenly Father and his freely given love toward us” as the efficient cause of our salvation.  Christ, Calvin says, is the material cause and our faith the formal cause.  Obviously he would not be on board with “I believe because I am saved.”  All three of these causes, Calvin said, were found in one sentence in John 3:16.  The fourth cause he identified as “the proof of divine justice” and the “praise of God’s goodness.”

 

Calvin clearly did not understand these causes properly.  Since the efficient cause is the Agent it would have been better to identify God Himself as the efficient cause of our salvation.  Or, to be more precise, Jesus Christ, God the Son Incarnate, is the efficient cause or Agent of our salvation, which is why we call Him Saviour.  That in turn means that the material cause should be more precisely identified as the events of the Gospel, especially the Atoning death of Jesus Christ.  To be fair to Calvin, he did write “Surely the material cause is Christ, with his obedience, through which he acquired righteousness for us.”

 

In his identification of faith as the formal cause of our salvation he wrote “What shall we say is the formal or instrumental cause but faith?”  There is a basic misunderstanding here, because instrumental cause and formal cause are not the same thing.  Calvin was correct to identify faith as the instrumental cause of our salvation – or rather an instrumental cause – but not in identifying it as the formal cause.  This is somewhat surprising when we consider what the formal cause of our salvation actually is.  If we understand formal cause to mean what Aristotle meant by it, then applied to salvation, the formal cause must be God’s eternal design.  One would expect John Calvin of all people to have gotten this right.

 

Aristotle did not speak of an instrumental cause, but the concept is simple enough to understand.  Think back to our bookshelf illustration.  The instrumental cause would be the hammer, screwdriver, Allen wrench, and whatever other tools the efficient cause used in putting the bookshelf together.  The instrumental cause, therefore, is not synonymous with the formal cause, but a subcategory of the efficient cause.  

 

Faith is indeed an instrumental cause of our salvation but not in the way the Allen wrench is an instrumental cause of our self-assembled Swedish bookshelf.  The equivalent of that kind of instrumental cause in the order of salvation would be the cross.  Faith as an instrumental cause of our salvation corresponds more with the delivery truck that brings a pre-assembled bookshelf to us.

 

Here the Lutheran dogmaticians are particularly helpful.  That salvation is a gift of God, the New Testament is absolutely clear on and all Christians affirm.  It is a gift that was given to the world in a general sense in the Incarnation and the events of the life and death of the Incarnate Son of God, something that we especially remember at this time of year.  It also has to be given in a more particular sense to each of us personally and here the Lutheran dogmaticians identify two different types of means through which this is accomplished.  There are the media or organa dotika, the means or instruments of giving.  These are the means through which God gives His saving grace to us.  Then there is the medium or organon leptikon, the means or instrument of receiving.  This is the hand with which we receive the gift of saving grace.   The ministry of the Gospel, which God has entrusted to His Church in the modes of Word and Sacrament, is the means through which God gives us His saving grace.  Faith is the organon leptikon, the means by which we receive it.  It is in this sense that it is the instrumental cause of our salvation.

So yes, whereas when it comes to salvation and works salvation is the cause and works the effect, when it comes to faith and salvation faith is the cause, the instrument of receiving cause, and salvation the effect.  The meme is heretical by the standards of all forms of orthodox Christianity, including orthodox Calvinism.

 

Perhaps the lesson to be learned here is that theology should not be done by meme.

Dr. Luther’s Trick and Treat

 Or

Sola Fide as Catholic Truth

 

We are in Allhallowtide, the period long ago set aside by the Church for the remembrance of those who have passed on before us.   It begins on the 31 October, All Hallows’ Eve, so called because on sacred calendars days are counted from evening to evening, not from midnight to midnight as in secular calendars, and 1 November is All Saints Day.   All Hallows’ Eve is also the anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation for it is on that day in 1517 that Dr. Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg.   This was a great trick on the corrupt Roman Patriarch and those who accepted his usurped supreme jurisdiction over the Church because the Ninety-Five Theses were a devastating critique of corrupt practices, like the sale of indulgences, that the Roman Patriarch – at the time it was Leo X – was using to raise funds.   Soon thereafter, Dr. Luther would provide a wonderful treat for Christian souls by hosing down the doctrine of justification, as taught by St. Paul in the New Testament, and washing away all the mud that had accumulated to obscure it so that it could be viewed in all its peace-and-assurance bringing clarity.

 

Dr.  Luther is often quoted as having said that justification is the article on which the Church stands or falls.   If you go looking through the corpus of Dr. Luther’s works for the exact phrase you will not find it, although you will find the idea stated in different words in multiple places, and the earliest attribution of the saying to him is close enough to his own time that there is no good reason to question its authenticity.   Justification, in the quotation, means the doctrine of justification by faith alone.

 

The Roman Church took a rather different view of the doctrine.   In the Council of Trent, which met from 1545 to 1563 to address the Reformation, the Roman Church pronounced an anathema upon justification by faith alone in the fourteenth canon of the Council’s sixth session in 1547, although the doctrine condemned in the canon is worded in such a way as to be unrecognizable as that which Dr. Luther and the other Reformers taught.       Here are the words of the canon:

 

If any one saith, that man is truly absolved from his sins and justified, because that he assuredly believed himself absolved and justified; or, that no one is truly justified but he who believes himself justified; and that, by this faith alone, absolution and justification are effected; let him be anathema.

 

In the doctrine condemned by this canon, the only content identified for this faith is that one is absolved and justified.   If this were the only content of one’s faith, the Roman Church would indeed be right in condemning the idea that such faith by itself absolved and justified one, for that idea would amount to the claim that one can make something be true by believing it.   You find that sort of idea in a lot of fuzzy, pop, New Age, thinking today, but you will look in vain to find it in the writings of Dr. Luther or Zwingle or Calvin or Archbishop Cranmer.  

 

The Reformation article is quite otherwise than the caricature that is condemned in the Roman canon.   In the Reformation article, the Gospel is the content of saving faith.   The Gospel is the Good News about everything God has done for us in Jesus Christ.  We needed a Saviour because of our sins and God gave us a Saviour, the Saviour He had promised from the Fall.   This Saviour is God’s Only-Begotten Son, that is to say, the Son Who is eternally begotten of God the Father, shares the Father’s nature, and so, like the Father and the Holy Ghost, is the One True God.   God gave Him to us in the Incarnation, in which the Son of God came down to Earth from Heaven, and took on our nature through a miracle wrought by the Holy Ghost in which He was conceived and born to the Virgin Mary and so became fully Man while remaining fully God.   Through this miracle, His human nature was not tainted with sin like ours and so He lived out the righteousness God requires of us all but which we are unable to produce because of our sin.   Then, rejected by the leadership of the people into which He had been born, He was condemned in a mock trial, and crucified at the order of a Roman governor who knew Him to be innocent but wished to appease the mob.   He submitted to this meekly in order that He Who had committed no sin, much less a crime, might die the death of a criminal.   Dying that death, He did what only One Who was both God and sinless Man could do, which was take the burden of all the guilt of the sins of the entire world upon Himself and pay for them once and for all.   Having so expiated the sins of the world and remaining sinless in Himself Death had no claim on Him. He entered Death’s Kingdom as Conqueror and rose triumphantly from the Grave before Ascending back to the right hand of the Father.   By doing all of this Jesus effected the salvation of the world on our behalf and the benefits of that salvation are promised in the Gospel to whosoever believes in Him.

 

Note how I worded that last sentence.  If you compare that with what the Roman canon condemns another way in which the canon misrepresents the Reformation doctrine should become clear.   Faith’s role is not to effect our absolution and justification.   That is what Jesus did in the events of the Gospel.   Our faith’s role is to receive absolution, justification, and indeed, all of the salvation that has been given to us freely in our Saviour Jesus.

 

This is where the stress needs to be when talking about faith in respect to salvation – that its role is that of the hand that receives the free gift which God has given us in Jesus Christ.   Unless we are clear that the role of faith in God’s plan of salvation is instrumental, and instrumental on our part – how we receive the gift God has given – as opposed to instrumental on God’s part – how He brings, confers, and bestows the gift of Jesus Christ and His salvation upon us – justification by faith alone does not make sense.  Sola fide is in the ablative case.   It does not mean just “faith alone” but “by faith alone” and what this expression means is that it is by faith alone that we receive the gift of salvation.   It does not mean that faith, by itself, so pleases God that on the intrinsic merits of faith He accepts us despite our plentiful bad works and deficiency in good ones.   It does not mean that the only thing Christianity asks of people is faith or, to put it another way, that Christianity consists only of believing.   It means that the task of faith in the order of salvation – the receiving, on our part, of the free gift of salvation in Jesus Christ – belongs to faith alone, and that nothing else can either substitute for faith or add to faith in the reception of salvation.

 

That this is what Dr. Luther’s article of justification by faith alone means cannot be emphasized enough.   For while the Church of Rome, in whose eyes Dr. Luther had been poking his fingers, was the only ancient Church to pronounce a formal condemnation of the article, none of the other ancient Churches, except our English Church which joined the Reformation, embraced it.   They regarded it as a novelty because the Fathers, doctors, and theologians of the ancient Churches had not been in the habit of using the word “alone” in conjunction with “faith”.   Neither did St. Paul in the Bible.   What was meant by Sola Fide, however, that faith is the only hand we have with which to receive the gift of salvation, was clearly taught in other words by St. Paul.   We shall have more to say about that shortly.   First I wish to observe that just as the Roman Church’s formal condemnation of Sola Fide at the Council of Trent did not condemn Sola Fide as Dr. Luther taught it, that faith is the sole means by which we appropriate to ourselves the gift of salvation, but a weird caricature of it in which belief creates its own reality, so none of the reasons that the other ancient Churches gave for not affirming it speak to what the article actually says.

 

Consider the objection based upon the role of baptism.   At the end of St. Peter’s sermon on the first Whitsunday (the Christian Pentecost) in the second chapter of Acts, the crowd, under heavy conviction of sin, asked the Apostles “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” and received the answer from St. Peter “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost.”   Other passages can be pointed to that stress the role of baptism (1 Peter 3:21, Rom. 6:3-6, Mk. 16:16).   These verses, however, do not say that the role of baptism is the same as that of faith, that of a hand receiving a gift.   Nor is that the Catholic – held by all Christians, everywhere, at all times – understanding of the role of baptism.   Baptism is linked by the Scriptures to three distinct aspects of salvation – regeneration or the new birth, our sins being washed away, and our being joined in union with Jesus Christ.   Baptism is not how we receive these salvific blessings, however, but the ordinary means by which God bestows them upon us.    

 

I will try to make the distinction clearer.   God has given us salvation in our Saviour Jesus Christ.    This took place in the events of the Gospel, from the Incarnation to the Ascension, two millennia ago.   For that salvation to be ours, however, two things must happen.  1.  God must bring the salvation He has given us in Jesus to us.  2.   We must appropriate it to ourselves.    Both of these things involve the use of means or instruments.   God uses means to bring the salvation He has given us to us.   We use means to receive it to ourselves.   The means God uses to bring Jesus Christ and His salvation to us are the Church and her ministries of Word and Sacrament.   The means we use to appropriate Jesus Christ and His salvation to us is faith.

 

Baptism is the Sacrament that God ordinarily uses as His means, along with the Ministry of the Word, in bringing the salvation of Jesus Christ to us for the first time.   This is why it is connected specifically to regeneration, cleansing from sin, and union with Christ.  These are the aspects of salvation that are most prominent as the beginning of the Christian life.    Faith is the means by which we appropriate this salvation to ourselves and make it truly ours.   Baptism is the means God ordinarily uses to confer, faith is the means we always use to receive.  

 

A few words are in order here about what is meant by “ordinarily” and “always”.   It should not be surprising that we speak of the means God uses as ordinary but the means we use as absolute.   This merely means that God does not limit Himself to His appointed means, the way He limits us to ours.   What this means in practice with regards to baptism is that someone who hears the Gospel and believes in Jesus Christ will not be damned for lack of baptism.   This is why Jesus in Mark 16:16 promises salvation to those who believe and are baptized, but pronounces damnation only on those who do not believe.   It also means, however, that those who think this an excuse for neglecting baptism, ought to consider the account of Naaman in 2 Kings 5, and particularly verses 10-13.  

 

It is also important to note that while God always brings salvation, and more specifically regeneration, cleansing from sin, and union with Christ, to us in baptism, they are not ours unless we receive them by faith in Jesus Christ.   In the early Church controversies arose about the efficacy of baptism administered by those who had failed to be faithful witnesses in periods of persecution.   The orthodox Fathers, in answering the Novatians and later the Donatists, maintained soundly that the efficacy of the sacrament does not depend on the worthiness of the minister who administers it.  By the time of the Reformation, many in the Roman Church had twisted these arguments into arguments for the mechanical efficacy of the sacrament, that the salvation conferred through it is ours regardless of faith on our part.  The Reformers, rightly, upheld the original intent of the arguments of St. Augustine et al., that the efficacy of the Sacraments as channels of Grace was not overthrown by the sin of the minister, but, also rightly, rejected the mechanical view, and emphasized that Grace conferred is not received, except by faith.   The only benefit that one receives mechanically upon baptism is external, formal, membership in the Church.   To truly be united to her and her Saviour internally and spiritually requires that the Grace conferred in the Sacrament be received by faith in Jesus Christ.

 

Everything just said about baptism also applies to the other Gospel Sacrament, the Lord’s Supper.   Baptism is the Sacrament through which God bestows on us the initial Grace of regeneration, washing of sin, and union with Jesus Christ, the Lord’s Supper is the Sacrament through which God confers the Grace that sustains the new life in Jesus Christ, by feeding the believer with the spiritual food of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ as broken and shed for us on the Cross in His One True Sacrifice.   As with baptism, so with the Lord’s Supper, God uses the Sacrament as a channel to bestow Grace apart from the worthiness of the minister, but we only receive it by faith in Jesus Christ.

 

The orthodox understanding of the Sacraments as the ordinary means of Grace along with the ministry of the Word, therefore, does not conflict with Sola Fide.    The Sacraments and faith are both instrumental means by which the gift of salvation given to us in Jesus Christ becomes ours, but the Sacraments, or more properly the Church in both of her ministries, is the means God has appointed for Himself to bestow the gift upon us, and faith is the means, the only means, God has appointed for us to receive it.

 

Another objection to Sola Fide is on the grounds of the necessity of repentance.   While some answer this objection by pointing out that in the New Testament, at least, the word translated by repent literally means to change your mind, something that must necessarily occur whenever someone believes for the first time, this does not, I think, do justice to the Scriptural teaching on repentance.   Repentance is not just any change of mind but the kind illustrated by the Prodigal Son’s coming to himself and returning to his father.    The right answer to the objection is to say that while the necessity of repentance is certainly taught and emphasized in the Bible this does not mean that repentance does the same thing as faith, that it shares faith’s place in the Order of Salvation.  Note that in the preaching of John the Baptist, as well as St. Peter’s response to the crowd under conviction in Acts 2, repentance is linked with baptism, whereas in the passages that talk about the beginning of Jesus’ preaching ministry repentance is linked with faith.   Just as repentance does not perform the same function as baptism, neither does it perform the same role as faith.   It is linked to both because it performs the essential auxiliary function of breaking down the pride and self-righteousness which otherwise keep sinful human beings from recognizing their need for the salvation given in Christ, conferred in baptism, and received by faith.    Repentance, therefore, is not another hand with which to receive Grace alongside faith.   It can be likened to the act of emptying the hand that it might receive the gift.

 

This brings us back to the most common objection to Sola Fide, the claim that it was novel, invented in the sixteenth century by Dr. Luther.   This is, on the surface, the most plausible of these objections.   Those who make it appeal to both Scripture and tradition.   The appeal to Scripture consists of the argument that the expression “faith alone” appears only once in the Holy Scriptures and that one occurrence is St. James’ denial in the twenty-fourth verse of the second chapter of his Epistle.   The appeal to tradition is basically that the Church Fathers and those who succeeded them down to the sixteenth century did not speak of “faith alone”.   The first point I wish to make in response to this objection is that the important matter is not whether the Scriptures and Church tradition used the expression “faith alone” but whether or not the idea behind those words is contained in the Scriptures and tradition.    Once again, the idea behind Sola Fide, is that salvation is a gift that we have been given in our Saviour Jesus Christ, and that it is only by believing in Him that we receive this gift.    It does not deny to anything else its place in the Order of Salvation, it merely insists that the place assigned to faith is not shared by anything else, and especially not by human works.    When it is clearly understood that this is what the expression means, this seemingly plausible objection becomes nonsense, for this is clearly taught in the Scriptures, and is implicit in the doctrine that salvation is a gift that God has freely given us in Jesus Christ that is very much a part of the tradition of the Church.   Nobody thinks Sola Gratia was a novelty invented in the sixteenth century.

 

That salvation is a gift means that it cannot be by works and works are what Sola Fide explicitly excludes.   This is common sense.   Something that you get by working for it is not a gift.   It is a wage, a payment, a reward.   You are owed it not given it.   Not only is it common sense, it is Scripture.   St. Paul spelled it out for us explicitly in the fourth chapter of his epistle to the Romans:

 

Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness. (Rom. 4:4-5)

 

These words make nonsense out of the claim that the only time the Scriptures mention “faith alone” is the denial in James 2;24.   Indeed, since the “alone” in “faith alone” means “and not by works”, Sola Fide is affirmed throughout the New Testament.   Here are a few examples:

 

Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified. (Gal. 2:16)

 

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.  (Eph. 2:8-9)

 

Who hath saved us, and called us with an holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began.  (2 Tim. 1:9)

 

Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost; (Tit. 3:5)

 

Consider that last example.   Some try to explain St. Paul away by claiming that when he denied that we are saved by works he was talking only about ceremonial works and not moral works.    In 2 Timothy 1:9, however, it is clearly “works of righteousness” that St. Paul says we are not saved by.   His entire reasoning in Romans 4 that it cannot be by works because otherwise it would be of debt rather than Grace would collapse if it were only ceremonial and rather than moral works that were in view.

 

Once again we need to remember that Sola Fide means that faith does not share its place in the Order of Salvation, the place of the hand that receives the gift, with anything else.   It does not deny to anything else its proper place.   This is true of works as well.   St. Paul identifies for us what the proper place of works is in regards to salvation in the verse that follows immediately after those in the above verses from Ephesians:

 

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.

 

The place of works in the Order of Salvation, is not prior to salvation as a cause, but after salvation as an effect.  I recently watched a video in which a clergyman claimed that Sola Fide was the weakest of the Reformation doctrines.   I won’t embarrass him by naming him since he is usually much sounder than this but he spent some time criticizing the idea that works are the evidence of faith, which he seemed to think to be the only role available for works in the Protestant scheme.   Evidence for whom, he asked?   For us?  For God?   Neither is very satisfactory.   Evidence of faith, however, is not the role assigned to works, but fruit of salvation.   As has been pointed out many times in the past it is a matter of getting things in their proper order, identifying the cause and effect.   We do not do good works in order to be saved.   We are saved in order that we might do good works. (1)

 

Aristotle in the third chapter of the second book of his Physics identified four different types of “causes”.   He explained the difference between them with the illustration of a statue.   Its material cause is that from which it is made, bronze, stone, whatever.   Its efficient cause is the sculptor who makes the statue from the material.   Its formal cause is the idea of the statue in the sculptor’s head to which he makes the material conform.   Its final cause is the purpose for which the sculptor makes the statue.   John Calvin in section 17 of Chapter XIV of the third book of his Institutes of Christian Religion borrows these terms and applies them to salvation saying that the efficient cause is “the mercy and free love of the heavenly Father towards us”, that the material cause is “Christ, with the obedience by which he purchased righteousness for us”, and the formal cause as “faith”.   Calvin erred slightly on this last point because he identified the formal cause with the instrumental cause.   Aristotle did not identify the instrumental cause in his Physics but if he had it would have been the hammer and chisel employed by the sculptor in his illustration.   As we have seen, since salvation is a gift, there are two kinds of instrumental causes, the instrument God uses to put the gift of salvation into our hands, the Church and her ministries, and the hand which receives it and is therefore instrumental on the part of the receiver, which is our faith.    What actually corresponds to Aristotle’s formal cause with regards to salvation is God’s eternal design.   It is rather amusing that John Calvin of all people got that wrong.  

Where do works fit into this?

 

Works share the same final cause as salvation.   Of the final cause of salvation, John Calvin says “The Apostle, moreover, declares that the final cause is the demonstration of the divine righteousness and the praise of his goodness.”  A simpler way of putting that would be “the glory of God”.   Numerous verses could be cited in support of the glory of God being the final cause, the end or telos, of salvation, but since this is not really a controversial point, I will reference only 1 Tim. 1:15-17.   Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:16) and St. Peter in his first epistle (chapter 2, verse 12) instruct their hearers/readers to do good works that thereby men would glorify God.   This tells us that the good works of the believer have the same telos as our salvation.   Works are not any kind of cause of our salvation, but our salvation is the material cause of our good works, the final cause of both being the glory of God.

 

St. James does not contradict this.   Earlier in the epistle, long before the controversial passage, he asserts that salvation is a gift:

 

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures. (Jas. 1:17-18)

 

It is significant that he does not say this of the salvation and justification of which he writes in the controversial passage in his second chapter.   Nor does the word Grace appear in that passage, unlike the other key terms shared by the passage and the fourth chapter of Romans.   This, and the argument of St. Paul in Romans 4:4-5, indicates that whatever the salvation and justification St. James was talking about is it is not salvation/justification by Grace, justification/salvation as a gift of God.   St. James points further to that conclusion in the very verse that has caused so much difficulty:

 

Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.

 

The word “only” there is an adverb in Greek, modifying “justified”, not an adjective modifying “faith.”   St. James is saying there are two justifications, one by faith, one by works, not that faith and works are two causes of the same justification.   St. Paul himself seals that interpretation as the correct one when he writes:

 

For if Abraham were justified by works, he hath whereof to glory; but not before God. (Rom. 4:2)

 

That is St. Paul interpreting St. James.   Whatever St. James was talking about when he said Abraham was justified by works it was not justification before God which is a gift by Grace and therefore cannot be of works.

 

The only novelty in Dr. Luther’s article of justification by faith alone, was the wording.   That salvation is a gift that God gives us in Jesus Christ and not something we earn by our works is the plain teaching of the New Testament and it is the teaching of Catholic – belonging to the entire Church everywhere, at all times – tradition as well.   Sola Fide, that we receive this gift to ourselves only by the hand of faith in Jesus Christ, while not usually expressed in Dr. Luther’s wording prior the sixteenth century, is implicit in this Catholic doctrine of Sola Fide.   It is also required by the Catholic concept of good works as the fruit of a faith that works by love.   If the works of love are necessary, it is not the necessity of an imposed condition – do these or salvation is invalidated – because that kind of necessity would eliminate the distinction between the works of love and the works of the law.  Works of love are works of love, because the one who does them does them not in order to obtain God’s favour or out of the fear that he will lose God’s favour if he does not, but because he loves God.   Love cannot be produced by the compulsion of the Law.   That is the entire point of the Law.   Jesus summed up the Law in the commandments to love God and love our neighbour.   That should be regarded as the most sobering and terrifying words that Jesus ever spoke.  They were not words of comfort.   If love of God and love of our neighbour is what the Law demands, and these loves come with qualifications –we are to love God with all that we are, and to love our neighbour as ourselves – then we are in constant violation of the two greatest commandments.   Not one of us has lived up to either of these for a second of our lives.   The works of love that are the fruit of salvation are the fruit of a love that God works in our hearts by His Grace, through the means of the Gospel, which assures us that God in His love has met the demands of the Law for us, both its demands for perfect righteousness and its demands for just punishment of our sin, in Jesus Christ, freeing us to love God, not because the Law demands it, but because he first loved us (1 Jn. 4:19).   Ironically, that which the Roman Council of Trent feared most in Dr. Luther’s doctrine, which, as is obvious from their straw man caricature, was its assuring nature, is precisely what makes Sola Fide so essential to this Catholic truth of faith working by love.   It is only when one is assured through faith that he is secure in the freely given Grace of God in Jesus Christ that one is free to love God because God is so worthy of our love rather than to try and love God under the compulsion of the threats of the Law. 

 

All of this was clearly lost on the Church of Rome at the Council of Tent.    A recent Roman Patriarch, the late Benedict XVI, wrote:

 

For this reason Luther's phrase: "faith alone" is true, if it is not opposed to faith in charity, in love. Faith is looking at Christ, entrusting oneself to Christ, being united to Christ, conformed to Christ, to his life. And the form, the life of Christ, is love; hence to believe is to conform to Christ and to enter into his love. So it is that in the Letter to the Galatians in which he primarily developed his teaching on justification St Paul speaks of faith that works through love (cf. Gal 5: 14).

 

This displayed far more understanding than his predecessors in the sixteenth century.   Such a pity that he was forced from St. Peter’s throne and replaced with the Clown Pretender that currently occupies it.

 

Happy All Hallowtide

(1) It is sometimes said in response to this that salvation is a process not just an event.   More elaborately put, there are three tenses to salvation.  There is salvation past, our being brought into God’s family, united with Jesus Christ, cleansed of past sins, justified, regenerated.   There is salvation present, in which we are progressively conformed into the image of Christ by the sanctifying work of God and in which we are cleansed and forgiven of our ongoing sins.   There is salvation future, in which we are perfected, and brought into the presence of God.   Sometimes this is put more simply as salvation from the guilt of sin (past), power of sin (present), and presence of sin (future).   Or they are just called justification, sanctification, and glorification.   The more simpler the version the more precision is sacrificed.  Justification and sanctification, at least, have past, present, and future aspects to each of them, just as they have both positional and practical aspects, corresponding to the two aspects of our union with Christ (positional = us in Christ, practical = Christ in us).   All of this is valid, but what we have stressed in the main body of this essay, is true of all of it.   Salvation in all of its tenses and aspects, is the gift of God.   All of it was accomplished for us by Jesus Christ in the events of the Gospel.   It is all given to us on the basis of Grace.   The means God has appointed to bring all of it to us is His Church and her ministries of Word and Sacrament.   Faith is always the hand by which we receive it.   None of this changes from salvation past, to salvation present, to salvation future, although the specific Sacramental ministry God uses to bring it to us changes from the not-to-be-repeated baptism of salvation past to the perpetual Lord’s Supper of salvation present.   Those things that have auxiliary roles, like repentance, may vary over the course of the progress of salvation present (the specifics of what repentance calls for depend on the situation).   The basics – salvation is a gift, it was accomplished by Jesus Christ in the events of the Gospel, it is brought to us through the ministry of the Church, we receive it by faith – never change, nor does the fact that our good works are always the fruit of salvation – in all of its aspects and tenses – and never the cause of it in any of its aspects or tenses.   

The Season of Hubris

 

Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.  And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good. (Ezekiel 16:49-50)

 

A couple of decades ago the degradation of our culture and civilization had only proceeded so far as to devote a parade once a year to honouring the worst of all sins, the sin that brought the judgement of fire and brimstone down upon the cities of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, in the nineteenth chapter of Genesis.   The parade became a day, the day became a week, and now the entire sixth month of the year is dedicated to the celebration of this sin.   This year Captain Airhead, the dolt who for eight years has disgraced the office of Prime Minister of His Majesty’s government in Ottawa, somehow clinging to power despite scandal after scandal each of which should have been career destroying, and who never opens his mouth without sticking his foot in it, informally extended the period to a “season”.

 

As can be seen in the Scriptural passage that I have used as the epigraph for this essay there are several sins for which God’s judgement fell on Sodom.   Until a few generations ago, however, reference to the sin of Sodom in the singular would not likely have caused confusion because the name of the city was associated with a single sin of a sexual nature, the sin highlighted by St. Jude in his reference to the judgement on the cities in his epistle and which appears in the list in the Ezekiel passage as the last item referenced.  While this sin is, obviously, a huge part of what is being celebrated this month, it is not this sin that I am talking about but the first sin in Ezekiel’s list, the sin after which the celebration has been named.

 

I have often made the observation that when the name of this celebration was reduced to Pride, they abandoned the lesser of two sins – sins of a sexual nature fall under the heading of the least of the Seven Deadly Sins, Lust – and kept the worst of all, Pride.

 

Pride is the worst sin of all.   The concept of the Seven Deadly Sins goes back to the fourth century of Christianity.   St. Evagrius Ponticus was a disciple of the Cappadocian Fathers, first of St. Basil the Great then of St. Gregory Nazianzus whom he followed to Constantinople on the eve of the Second Ecumenical Council before withdrawing first to Jerusalem then later to Egypt, to live a monastic life.   In Egypt, he encountered the teachings of the Alexandrian Neoplatonist monks who, dividing the human being into body, soul, and mind, identified for each a trio of λογισμοί – literally, this is the plural of “calculation”, but is probably better rendered “thoughts” in this context – that influenced the components in bad ways.   This made for nine in total, which were arranged in a hierarchy proceeding from those which afflicted the body to those which afflicted the mind, with the ones affecting the body being the lowest and least, the ones affecting the mind being the worst.   St. Evagrius reduced this to a list of eight sins or rather vices if we distinguish between sins as acts and vices as behavioural patterns or habits.   St. John Cassian, who brought the monastic movement out of the deserts of Egypt by founding a monastery in Gaul or France as it is today, popularized St. Evagrius’ list in his writings.   It was further revised around 590 AD by St. Gregory the Great, Bishop of Rome, in his commentary on Job entitled The Book of Morals.    Technically, St. Gregory retained a list of eight sins because he separated Pride from what he called the “seven principal sins”, declaring Pride to be the source from which these seven flow.   The seven were Vainglory, Envy, Wrath, Melancholy, Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust.   This was later revised so that Vainglory was folded up into Pride and Melancholy was replaced with Sloth, producing the list that found its way into St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologicae and Dante’s Divine Comedy in which the seven levels of Purgatory correspond to the seven.   This is the list that we know as the Seven Deadly Sins to this day.  The order represents their ranking.   In The Book of Morals they are listed in descending order from worst to least, in the later revised version they would be listed in ascending order.  Although his criteria for determining the hierarchy of sin differed from that of the Neoplatonists the result was largely the same.   Subsequent lists of the Seven Deadly Sins have varied the order.   Sometimes they are listed in ascending order, sometimes in descending, other times whether in ascending or descending order there are slight changes in the ranking reflecting differences of opinion as to what is worse than what.   Consistently, however, from the Neoplatonists and St. Evagrius to St. Gregory the Great to Dante to us today, Pride has been considered the worst of all.

 

While the Seven Deadly Sins are a later theological construct and so are not listed as such in the Bible it is difficult to argue with the contention that the ranking of Pride as the worst of all sins is Biblical.   A search of the Bible for a use of the word that is positive or even neutral yields little in the way of fruit.   The first occurrence of the word and the only occurrence in the Pentateuch is found in Leviticus 26:19 in which the LORD, telling the Israelites what He will do to them if they do not obey His commandments, says that “I will break the pride of your power”.   In the historical books, David’s brother claims to know David’s Pride (1 Sam. 17:28)  in what is clearly not intended as a compliment and Pride is what King Hezekiah has to repent and humble himself from (2 Chron. 32:26) .   In the Psalms Pride is consistently the characteristic of the wicked (10:2,4; 36:11; 59:12).   In Proverbs Pride is hated by the LORD and those who fear Him (8:13), brings with it shame (11:2), contention (13:10), destruction and a fall (16:18), is in the mouth of the foolish (14:3) and will bring him low (29:23).   In the Prophets Pride is something that brings the judgement of God upon a people whether it be Israel (Is. 28:1, 3 – Ephraim, from which tribe the ruling dynasty of the Northern Kingdom came, is used here as it often is to signify the schismatic Kingdom as a whole), Moab (Is. 16:6), or Judah (Jer. 13:9).  In the book of Daniel it is what brings judgement on Nebuchadnezzar (5:20). There is only one verse in the Old Testament in which the word Pride could possibly be taken in a sense less negative than those we have already looked at.   We shall consider it after looking at the New Testament references which are few.   In the New Testament, Pride is absolutely, unambiguously evil.   In Mark 7:22 it is one of the evil things that come from within a man and defile him.   In 1 John 2:16 the “pride of life” is one of the three things that make up “the world” in the sense of the system organized against God.   In 1 Tim. 3:6 St. Paul warns St. Timothy against the ordination of a novice “lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil”.   Here the Apostle associates Pride with the devil, a traditional association which is the reason why the one verse in the Old Testament that could possibly be taken as neutral probably should not be so taken.   The verse is Job 41:15 which begins with “his scales are his pride”.   His in this passage refers to Leviathan.   Leviathan was the name of a creature conceived of as a sea serpent or sea dragon.   When the Old Testament speaks of him it is invariably speaking about Satan.   The enemy of God makes his first appearance as a serpent in Genesis.   In Revelation the Dragon is identified as that serpent of old, the devil and Satan.   In Isaiah 27:1 Leviathan the sea serpent is clearly Satan.  There is no reason to think that the Leviathan of Job is any different, especially when the chapter goes on to describe him as “king over all the children of pride” (Job 41:34), and the structure of the book as a whole rather demands that a reference to Satan be made precisely at this point.   The reference to his Pride in verse 15, therefore, cannot be taken as an exception to the rule that Pride is always a bad thing in the Bible.

 

The verses we looked at in the previous paragraph are verses that use words rendered “Pride” in our Authorized Bible.  The related adjective “proud” is used slightly more often than the noun.   The noun can be found in 46 verses, the adjective in 47, but these support the picture of Pride that one gets from the verses that use the noun.   Several of them, for example, use the adjective as a substantive, “the proud”, who might as well be called “the wicked” as they are always referred to as people whom God “resisteth” or hath otherwise set Himself against.   Needless to say verses that use synonyms that are translated “haughty”, “arrogant”, and the like, provide additional support.

 

Now it might be argued that all of this merely proves that Pride is bad, not that it is the worst of evils.   The traditional view that it is the worst of sins was derived in a number of ways.   To the Neoplatonists it was the worst because it was the ultimate sin of the mind, the sins of the mind being worse than the sins of the soul, which in turn are worse than the sins of the body, because the mind is higher than the soul which is higher than the body.   For St. Gregory the Great it was the worst because it offended the most against Love.   One can only image what St. Gregory would have thought if he could have looked ahead in time to the day when multitudes would march under the banner of Pride chanting the tautological mantra “love is love”.   Scripturally, Pride’s being the worst of sins is derived from it literally being the Original Sin, the source of all others.   There are two ways in which this is the case.   The one, clearly found in the Bible, is that Pride led to the Fall of Man.   The serpent’s temptation of Eve in the Garden was temptation to Pride.   “Ye shall be as gods”, i.e., like God Himself.   That the serpent – the serpent of old who is the Devil and Satan – would tempt man with Pride, provides support for the traditional view that Pride is what was behind his own Fall.   In the traditional view, the devil started out as Lucifer, a high ranking angel in heaven, who became the first liberal, or Whig to use Dr. Johnson’s parlance, urging his fellow angels to support him in his rebellious bid to overthrow the Sovereign King of the universe, God, and establish a cosmic democratic republic with him as its head.   His rebellion failed but the Cosmic Cromwell became the cruel tyrant of all who followed him in rejecting the King of the universe, setting the pattern for all subsequent human liberal democratic republicanism.   There is no explicit account of the origin of Satan in the Old Testament as there is of the Fall of Man but it is inferred from passages in Isaiah and Ezekiel where human rulers are spoken to in such a way as to suggest that the supernatural evil behind them is who is truly being addressed.   The explicit account is found in the twelfth chapter of the book of Revelation.   The point is that Pride is believed to have been what motivated the rebellion.   This is based on St. Paul’s words to St. Timothy and what can be inferred from Isaiah 14.

 

In the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek made by seventy Jewish scholars for Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt and which became the Christian Old Testament,  the Wisdom of Solomon says that “through envy of the devil came death into the world: and they that do hold of his side do find it” (Wis. 2:24).   This is not discussing the cause of Satan’s Fall but his motivation in tempting man.   Envy, however, is closely related to Pride.   It refers to hating someone else for having something you don’t or being something you aren’t so much that you seek to destroy that person. In the standard list of the Seven Deadly Sins it stands next to Pride.     On the one end of the list are the vices which are classic Aristotelian vices – ordinary human appetites indulged in to excess.   Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, and Sloth fall into this category.   On the other end of the list are the vices that are Satanic in nature.   Pride and Envy fall into this category.  Wrath either belongs with Pride and Envy or is the middle ground between the two categories.   Some have produced lists in which Avarice rather than Envy stands next to Pride.   I suspect this to be the result of crackpot left-wing ideas infiltrating theological circles.   Avarice is the vice associated with capitalism.   Envy is the vice associated with socialism.   One can be a businessman, or at least one used to be able to be a businessman in the days before globalism, multi-national corporations, tech giants and media conglomerates, without succumbing to Avarice.   One cannot be a socialist without embracing Envy for Envy is the essence of socialism, its sine qua non, the spirit that moves it and motivates it.

 

Many would say that there is a good Pride and a bad Pride and that everything said above pertains to the bad Pride.   This is an Aristotelian concept, at least if we regard Pride as a proper translation of μεγαλοψυχία from book four of his Nicomachean Ethics.   That this is a proper translation is rather doubtful.   Liddell and Scott give as their first definition of it “greatness of soul, highmindedness, lordliness” and even “generosity”.   “Greatness of soul” is what you get when you split the word into its components and literally translate each of them.  Unfortunately, what you get when you transliterate the word is megalopsychia, which sounds like it describes a mental condition that will get you locked up in an asylum for the criminally insane.    This is not the word translated Pride in the New Testament.   In Mark 7:22 the word is ὑπερηφανία, in 1 John 2:12 it is ἀλαζονεία, in 1 Timothy 3:6 the phrase in which it occurs is in Greek the single word τυφωθείς.   ὑπερηφανία, a compound formed from the word for “over” and the word for “shine”, basically means self-promoting arrogance.   This is the word that is used for Pride in the early Greek versions of what would become the Seven Deadly Sins.   Its adjectival form occurs five times in the New Testament, in three instances being used substantively to mean “the proud” and in the other two used as “proud” in lists of attributive adjectives, all of which are negative.  The primary meaning of ἀλαζονεία is “false pretension, imposture” from which the meaning of “boastfulness” is derived, which is its meaning in the Scriptural text.   Τυφωθείς, rendered “being lifted up with pride” in the Authorized Bible, is a passive aorist participle form of the verb τυφόω which in the active voice means to “delude”, but when it is used in the passive voice indicates that the subject of the verb is “crazy, demented”.   Liddell and Scott give as more specific versions of the passive meaning “demented, rendered vain” and “filled with insane arrogance”.  Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία does not appear in the New Testament and it would be difficult to take the word as he uses and describes it as a synonym for any of the New Testament words for Pride, although it would also be difficult to argue that it is consistent with humility, which both Testaments stress is something God insists upon among the faithful.   Liddell and Scott do give a second definition, noting that the word can be used in a bad sense, in which case they render it “arrogance”, which of course, would be a synonym for the New Testament words for Pride.   Those today who would distinguish between a good Pride and a bad Pride seldom have anything like what Aristotle meant by μεγαλοψυχία in mind.   What they think of good Pride is something along the lines of “an honest and non-inflated sense of achievement or accomplishment” or “thinking well, but not too highly, of oneself”.

 

The Pride that our civilization has decided in its apostasy and decadence to celebrate every June, however, bears no resemblance to either these more modest redefinitions of Pride or to Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία.   Observe the way in which those who celebrate Pride now demand that everyone else do so as well.   Public figures, even if they do not actively speak against Pride but merely do not speak in favour of it, do not march in its parades, do not wave its flag perverted from the sign God gave the world as a token of His Covenant never to send a world-destroying Flood again in defiance of Him and ignorance of its full implications (1), and are basically deemed insufficiently supportive, find themselves in a position eerily similar to the person in the Soviet Union who was the first to stop clapping after one of Stalin’s boring harangues.   This “you must support us or be destroyed” attitude is hardly consistent with either a modest rather than inflated positive feeling about yourself and your accomplishments or Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία which can be translated “generosity” or “magnitude”, i.e., the opposite of the attitude in question.   It is, however, very consistent with another Greek word that is often associated with Aristotle, albeit with his writings on rhetoric and Greek tragedy more than his Ethics.   This is the word ὕβρις.   Transliterated as hubris this word continues to be used in English today.

 

The primary meaning of ὕβρις provided by Liddell and Scott is “wanton violence, insolence”.   They provide an explanation of this definition in which they clarify that the violence arises out of the Pride of strength or of passion.   Think of someone who thinks that because he is strong he can walk all over those who are weaker – a bully would be a good example – and you have a pretty good picture of what is meant by it.   Aristotle identified it as foremost example of a character flaw – interestingly he used a word that has the basic meaning of “failure, fault” that in the New Testament is the primary word for sin – that in tragedy, brings about the fall of the hero.   ὕβρις is not used often in the New Testament.  It occurs three times and in our Authorized Bible is translated “hurt”, “harm” and “reproaches”, i.e., designating the acts that spring from the attitude rather than the attitude itself.    In the LXX, however, it is frequently used for Pride.   It is used alongside ὑπερηφανία in Leviticus 26:19 when the LORD says that He will break the “pride of your power”.   Rather fittingly considering its association with a fall in Aristotle and popular ancient Greek thought it is also used in the LXX of Proverbs 16:18 and is the Pride those who fear the Lord are enjoined to hate in Proverbs 8:13.

 

This word so appropriately describes the attitude that is on display in the celebrations of Pride that I humbly suggest it be used instead to clarify more precisely what is being celebrated.

 (1)   The “bow” in “rainbow” is not the bow you tie around your neck or in the strings of your shoes but the “bow” that an archer uses.   The Latin word for bow is arcus, from which the words archer, arch, and arc are derived.  Arch is an architectural device that shares the shape of the weapon which is also the shape of the sign that appears in the sky after it rains.   An arc is a curve in geometry.  The kind of artificial rainbow that is sometimes produced by passing light through a prism is often called an arc.  Welding arcs and electrical arcs are also so-named for their curved, bow-like, shape.   When Genesis records the LORD’s covenant with Noah and His placing His “bow” in the sky as His promise never to destroy the world in a Flood again, the word for “bow” is קֶשֶׁת which denotes the weapon and which like its English equivalents is derived from a verb meaning “bend”.   The significance of this sign is that LORD was hanging up His bow, i.e., putting it away never to use it again.   Also implied, however, in the use of the image of a weapon as the sign, is a warning not to behave in the way that brought the judgement of the Deluge in the first place.