The Bible and the Church Part One: A False Opposition

In an Anglican Facebook group, the same one that I mentioned in the introduction to my last essay, I recently saw the question posed of whether the Bible gave us the Church or the Church gave us the Bible.  These alternatives were presented in such a way as to make clear the underlying assumption that they are mutually exclusive and that it must be one or the other.  Anyone fortunate enough to have studied under the late Dr. Chuck Nichols will remember how fond he was of posing questions like this then answering them with “yes.”  I was very much tempted to follow his example but instead replied by saying that both positions are wrong, that the right way of looking at it is that God gave us both the Bible and the Church.  In thinking more about it I realized that rather than having recourse to an undefined “we” a better way of wording it would have been to say that God gave the Bible to the Church.  Since this was yet another Protestant versus Catholic dispute among orthodox Anglicans who for some reason or another are unwilling to accept that the Anglican Church is both Protestant and Catholic, but a different kind of Protestant from 5-point Calvinist Presbyterians and Baptists and a different kind of Catholic from the followers of the Patriarch of Rome, this answer would probably not have satisfied either side although it ought to satisfy both.  Either side can accept the wording, depending upon how the word Church is defined.   If Church is defined as a synonym for the word “Christians” then the Protestants would have no problem with “God gave the Bible to the Church.”  If Church is defined more narrowly as the society of Christian faith founded by Jesus Christ through His Apostles and continued to the present day under the leadership of the three-fold ministry established in the Apostolic era then the Catholics would have no problem with “God gave the Bible to the Church.”  As to the question of which definition of “Church” is the right one, in Dr. Nichols’ memory I shall give the answer “yes.”

 

Both the Bible and the Church possess authority.  These authorities differ in kind rather than degree so it is pointless to argue about which is the higher authority.  Both derive their different types of authority directly from God rather than the one from the other.  The Bible’s authority comes directly from God because the Bible is the written Word of God.  When you read the Bible or hear it read what you are reading or hearing is God speaking.  The Bible is the written Word of God, not because the Church says it is or somehow made it to be so but because the Holy Ghost inspired its human writers, not just in the sense in which we say Shakespeare was inspired, but in the sense that the words they wrote were not just their words but God’s words as well.  This is not just the Protestant view of the Bible.  The Roman Catholic Church officially declares this to be its view of the Bible in its Catechism, indeed, it even uses the “fundamentalist” language of the Bible being “without error.” (1)  The Eastern Orthodox view of the Bible, whatever David Bentley Hart might have to say about it, is no different.  Liberals in each of these ecclesiastical groups reject this view of the Bible, but this is because liberalism is unbelief wearing a thin guise of faith and so their defection does not take away from the Scriptures as the written Word of God being the common view of Christians.  The point, however, is that the Bible’s authority comes from the fact that it is God speaking, the written Word of God, and that it is God Himself and not the Church that makes it such.

 

The Church, however, also gets her authority directly from God.  When it comes to Church authority, we can speak either of the authority of the Church, that is to say, authority vested in the Church as a whole, organic, society, or we can speak of authority in the Church, which is the authority exercised in that society by the Apostolic ministerial leadership that Christ established.  The distinction is not hard and absolute because for the most part the authority of the collective body is exercised through the ministerial leadership in the body.  Those who erroneously think that the King of all creation, the King of Kings, established His Church as a type of democratic republic, think, equally erroneously, that authority in the Church is delegated to the ministers from the larger body.  This is clearly not what is depicted in the Scriptural history of the Gospels and the book of Acts.  This same Scriptural history testifies to the Church’s receiving her authority directly from God.  God the Son commissioned the Apostles before His Ascension, God the Holy Spirit descended upon them and empowered them on the first Whitsunday, and they exercised this authority and power long before the New Testament which testifies to all this is written.  

 

The Council of Jerusalem in Acts 15 is a key event when it comes to grasping this.  The Council took place around the year 50 AD, almost two decades after the events of the Gospel and the birth of the Christian Church.  While the Gospel of St. Matthew was probably written already at this point in time, at least in the Hebrew or Aramaic form attested to by the Church Fathers, (2) and possibly St. Mark’s Gospel as well, the only book of the New Testament about which we can say with anything like certainty that it predated the Council is the epistle of St. James.  This is because St. James writes in that epistle as if the Church was a Jewish body that had yet to experience any significant influx of Gentile converts.  It was the first such influx that generated the controversy that the Council of Jerusalem, over which St. James presided, convened to address.  It is therefore extremely unlikely that St. James wrote the epistle after the Council.  All of St. Paul’s epistles were written after the Council, however.  Chronologically his first epistle was 1 Thessalonians which was written in his second missionary journey at some point in the time period covered by the seventeenth chapter of Acts. The book of Acts itself was obviously written in the ‘60s because it ends with the arrival of St. Paul in Rome which took place around the year 60.  St Luke wrote his Gospel first but probably just prior to writing Acts and so that Gospel can be dated to the late 50’s or early 60’s.  The epistle of St. Jude seems to have been written around the same time as St. Peter’s second epistle which was written shortly before his death around the year 67.  St. John’s writings were the last of the New Testament books to be written, traditionally ascribed to the very end of the Apostle’s ministry in the last decade of the first century.  The bulk of the New Testament was written after the Council of Jerusalem and most of it at least a decade later.

 

The Council of Jerusalem was not the first time the Apostles exercised the authority that Jesus Christ had given them in the Church.  They had exercised that authority, for example, to establish the order of deacons within the first year or so of the Church as recorded in the sixth chapter of Acts and to convert the existing office of presbyter (elder) into an order of ministry in the Church beneath themselves and above the deacons as attested by SS Paul and Barnabas ordaining such over the Churches they planted on their first missionary journey leading up to the events of the Council and by their association with the Apostles in the Council, thus completing the three tiers of ministry of the Christian Church corresponding to those of the Old Testament Church.  In the Council of Jerusalem, however, we find the Apostles, in council with their presbyters, exercising not merely their authority in the Church, but the authority of the Church, in order to settle a major controversy.  The controversy was over whether Gentile converts to Christianity had to also become Jews in order to become Christians.  After the fall of Jerusalem, 70 AD, the rabbinical leadership of those Jews who rejected Jesus as the Christ would redefine Judaism in such a way that a Jew who was baptized into the Christian faith ceased to be a Jew.  Clearly such rabbis were on the same wave length as the synagogue leaders who drove the Apostles and their converts out in the book of Acts.  In the century or so after the Council of Jerusalem the possibility of being both a Jew and a Christian was removed by the leadership of the Jewish side.  In 50 AD, however, two decades before the fall of Jerusalem, the Church had to contend with the question of whether her Gentile converts had to become Jews by being circumcised and agreeing to follow the ceremonial requirements of the Mosaic Law (the kosher dietary code, the Sabbath, etc.)  The controversy broke out first at Antioch, from where SS Paul and Barnabas went to Jerusalem to consult the Apostles, who after hearing their case and the arguments of the other side, hotly debated the matter until St. Peter addressed them and made the case for the Gentiles not being made to become Jews based upon his account of the conversion of Cornelius the centurion and how that had been brought about and upon salvation being by grace rather than Law.  SS Paul and Barnabas then added their testimony about their ministry among the Gentiles to his and St. James, who as bishop of the Church of Jerusalem had presided over the council and in ruling spoke for the council and the whole Church, ruled against the Gentiles being made to become Jews.

 

St. James referenced the Scriptures in his ruling.  He quoted Amos 9:11-12, a Messianic prophecy in which the Gentile nations are said to be called by the name of the Lord.  When he instructed the Gentile Christians to abstain from the pollution of idols, fornication, and eating things strangled and blood, these prohibitions come from the moral Law (both tablets of the Ten Commandments are represented) and from the Noachic Covenant made with all mankind after the Deluge.  The purpose of these Scriptural references, however, was not to show that the Council had found the answer spelled out for them in the pages of the Old Testament.  The Council had not found their answer there because it was not there to be found, at least not in the way one would think it to be if certain extreme versions of the Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura were correct.  The Scriptural references are to show that the Council’s decision was in accordance with the Old Testament, in harmony with the Hebrew Scriptures, rather than contradictory to them or seeking to overturn them.

St. Paul in his epistles would provide a doctrinal foundation for the Church’s ruling on this matter.  The Mosaic Law had been a wall of separation between the Jews and the Gentiles.   Jesus Christ had nailed the Law to His cross and in His death had removed the wall, uniting Jews and Gentiles to each other and Himself in His one Body, the Church.  That Jews and Gentiles were to be united in this way had been a mystery in the previous age before Christ had come, but now that Christ has come it is revealed.  In the unity of the Church, on those external and ceremonial matters where the Law had previously separated Jews and Gentiles, liberty was now to reign.  These ideas are taught by St. Paul throughout his epistles.  The Church’s ruling in the Council of Jerusalem had preceded the writing of these epistles, however, and it did not include this sort of doctrinal explanation.

 

This illustrates how the authority that God has given the Church and the authority of the Bible with differs in kind.  The authority of both pertains to doctrine.  Doctrine comes in two basic kinds, doctrine regarding the faith, and doctrine regarding practice. Regardless of whether it consists of truths to be believed and confessed, or commandments to be followed or done, sound doctrine comes from God through revelation.  It is through the Scriptures that this revelation comes because the Scriptures are the very words of God which the Holy Ghost inspired the human writers to write.  This is the nature of Scriptural authority.  The truths about Christ removing the wall of partition between Jews and Gentiles and uniting them in one body were written by St. Paul in his epistles rather than declared by edict of the Church at the Council of Jerusalem because St. Paul was writing Scripture under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. 

 

This is not the nature of the authority given to the Church.  St. Jude speaks of the faith has having been “once delivered to the saints.” The faith, the body of truths which we believe and confess as Christians, was delivered to the Church by Jesus Christ in the days of the Apostles.  She was charged with safeguarding it which is the effect of St. Jude’s injunction to “earnestly contend” for it and so charged was vested with all the authority necessary to carry out this task. This includes the kind of authority on display in the Council of Jerusalem. 

 

A controversy had arisen.  It was a doctrinal dispute, having to do primarily with matters of practice although it also touched upon matters of faith particularly with regards to salvation.  The Church heard both sides, deliberated, and issued a judicial ruling.  While her ruling was not taken from the Scriptures in the same sense it would have been as if the dispute had been about whether or not one is allowed to help himself to his neighbour’s belongings and the ruling of no was taken from Exodus 20:15 she did cite the Scriptures to show her ruling was in harmony with them.  Despite not being taken directly from the Scriptures, neither did her ruling add to the teachings of Scriptures in a revelatory way in the way St. Paul’s epistles later would. 

 

The Church has no revelatory authority to add to the faith she has been entrusted with.  She can however exercise her judicial authority in safeguarding the faith to define it, and she has been called upon to do so time and again, especially in the centuries after Scriptural revelation had been completed in the first.  This includes identifying heresy as heresy, such as when she defined Arius’ doctrine (that there was a time when the Father was without the Son) as heresy.  It includes clarifying sound doctrine, such as when she issued the Definition of Chalcedon explaining that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God, Who in the Incarnation added a complete and perfect human nature to Himself in such a way that He remained the one Person He had always been, but with two natures that retained their differences and distinctions, but were now in His Person indivisible and inseparable.  It also involves summarizing the truths that are de fide, of the faith in such a way that rejection places one outside the faith, such as was done in the Apostles’ and Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creeds.  None of this added anything to the content of the Apostolic faith and we should be very grateful that the Church put this effort into contending for the faith rather than saying something to the effect of “eh, they have the Bible, that’s good enough, they don’t need us to do anything about it.”

 

The two types of authority clearly complement each other.  It is wrong to pit them against each other as is so often done by both sides in these “Protestant” vs. “Catholic” disputes.  Since they differ from each other in kind, it is also wrong to try and rank them as if the difference were one of degree.  Neither the Bible nor the Church gives the other to us.  God has given us the Christian faith.  The “us” to whom He has given the Christian faith is not merely “us” as individuals but also and even more so “us” as the community of faith that is the Church.  We, both as individual Christians and as the Church, have been charged with sharing the Christian faith with the world through evangelism.  The Church has been charged with keeping the faith with which she has been entrusted safe from error. To assist her in keeping this charge, God has given the Church the necessary tool of His own written Word, the Bible.  The Bible was primarily given to the Church as a society rather than Christians as individuals.  Protestantism tends to see it otherwise, but it was not until the eve of the Reformation that the printing industry developed the technology that would make it practical for every Christian to have a personal copy of the Bible.  Ancient Israel had received her Scriptures from God as a national community and in the time of Christ’s earthly ministry they were read, heard, and studied as such, or sung in the case of the Psalter, in the communities known as synagogues.  It was no different for the Christian Church when she inherited these Scriptures from Israel as her Old Testament and as the Apostolic teachings were written down and received by the Church as the New Testament that completed her Scriptures they were received as writings to be read and heard and studied as a community in just the same way.

 

In Part Two we shall look at the how the proper view that God has given the Bible to the Church relates to the question of how we know what belongs in the Bible.  This question is frequently raised by those arguing for the “Church gave us the Bible” position.  Usually when this question is raised in this way it is canon that is in view.  When the question is presented with a narrow focus on canon it becomes “which books belong in the Bible?”  Canon is not the only aspect to this question, however. There is also the matter of text.  The two largest examples will illustrate what I mean by this.  Do the long ending of St. Mark’s Gospel (16:8b-20) and the Pericope de Adultera (John 7:53-8:11) belong in the Bible or are they interpolations? They are found in the vast majority of Greek manuscripts as well as the ancient translations and in quotations by the Church Fathers but are missing from a couple of very old manuscripts.  Does the age of these manuscripts outweigh all the other evidence?  The question of text and the question of canon are two sides to the same question of what belongs in the Bible. We shall, Lord willing, see how the matters discussed in this essay inform the answer to this question in Part Two.

 

 (1)   Catechism of the Catholic Church: Revised in Accordance with the Official Latin Text Promulgated by Pope John Paul II, 2^nd Edition (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), 107.

(2)   Eusebius of Caesarea, the “Christian Herodotus” or father of Church History said that St. Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew prior to leaving the Holy Land (Historia Ecclesiastica, 3.24.6).  This would date the Hebrew original to about a decade prior to the Council of Jerusalem.  There is a general Patristic consensus that St. Matthew’s was the first Gospel written  which is an excellent commentary on the worth or lack thereof of Modern scholarship which disagrees and says St. Mark wrote first.  There is also a Patristic consensus that St. Matthew’s Gospel was written in Hebrew – they may have meant Aramaic although St. Jerome who saw the original in the library of Caesarea (De Viris Illustribus, 3) would have recognized the difference – before being translated into Greek.  St. Irenaeus, however, said that both SS Peter and Paul were in Rome at the time of its composition (Adversus Haereses, 3.1.1) which would have be 60 AD or later.  Although St. Irenaeus was talking about the original Hebrew composition he could have gotten the time confused with that of the Greek composition. 

The Second Article – God the Son

 The first Article of the Creed, as we have seen, is an affirmation of faith in God the Father, the Creator of all things.   The second Article is an affirmation of faith in God the Son.   It is the first of six Articles that pertain to the Son before the affirmation of faith in God the Holy Spirit in the eight Article.   Since the Creed consists of twelve Articles in total, this means that half of them concern God the Son.

 

In the Apostles’ Creed the second Article is “et in Iesum Christum, Filium Eius unicum, Dominus nostrum” which in the English of the Book of Common Prayer is “And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord”.   In the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed the second Article is “Καὶ εἰς ἕνα Κύριον Ἰησοῦν Χριστόν, τὸν Υἱὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ, τὸν ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς γεννηθέντα πρὸ πάντων τῶν αἰώνων.”    In this series we shall treat what is ordinarily considered the third Article of the conciliar Creed to be part of the second.   This is “φῶς ἐκ φωτός, Θεὸν ἀληθινὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ ἀληθινοῦ, γεννηθέντα οὐ ποιηθέντα, ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί· δι' οὗ τὰ πάντα ἐγένετο.”    Taken together, these are rendered in the Book of Common Prayer as  “And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made.”   Note that in the Greek of the Creed the words “Θεὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ” do not precede “φῶς ἐκ φωτός”.   Here the Book of Common Prayer follows the Latin which has “Deum de Deo” before “lumen de lumine”.   This is one of two places where the Latin text of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed inserts something that is not present in the original Greek, the other being the famously controversial Filoque in the Article about the Holy Spirit.  This is less controversial than the Filoque which played a key role in the dispute which led to the Greek and Latin Churches breaking Communion with each other because here the Latin interpolation does not express anything about which the Latin and Greek Churches are in theological disagreement.   Indeed, “Θεὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ” appeared in the original Nicene Creed of 325 AD but was dropped when the Creed was revised at the First Council of Constantinople of 381 AD.   Redundancy seems to have been the reason for its having been removed.   In the original Nicene Creed the words “μονογενῆ, τοὐτέστιν ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας τοῦ Πατρός, Θεὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ” followed “begotten of the Father” and preceded “Light of Light”.   The First Council of Constantinople (381 AD) in revising the Creed moved the μονογενῆ and placed it in attributive position to “the Son of God”.   The remainder of these words which assert nothing that was not stated more precisely later in the same Article (1) were replaced with “before all worlds”.   Nobody really knows how “Deum de Deo” made its way back into the Latin version of the Creed.   It is also present in the Armenian version of the Creed but so are all the other words that were removed from the original Nicene Creed in the Constantinopolitan revision and this version also expands the “through whom all things were made” so as to repeat the “heaven and earth” and “visible and invisible” clauses of the first Article.

 

The first Article of the Creed, as we saw in our discussion of the same, established continuity between the faith we confess as Christians and the faith of Old Testament Israel by asserting our belief that the One God, the Father, is Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.   In this second Article, the faith we confess diverges from that of others who claim continuity with the Old Testament religion.   We believe in Jesus Christ.

 

Who is Jesus Christ?

 

Jesus is the Name of this Second Person Whom we confess alongside God the Father.   St. Luke in his Gospel tells of the Annunciation, the visit the angel Gabriel paid to the Virgin Mary to tell her that she was favoured by God in that she would bear a child Who would be God’s Son.  Gabriel told her that her Son was to be given the name Jesus.     St. Matthew in his Gospel records that at some point after this Joseph of Nazareth to whom Mary was espoused was visited by an angel in a dream who told him to marry Mary and raise her child Who was the Son of God.   Joseph is also told to give the child the name Jesus and is given a reason for the name “for he shall save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21).   This is what the name Jesus means.   It was a common name among the Jews because it was the name of an important figure in the Old Testament.    יְהוֹשֻׁעַ‎ which when put directly into English from Hebrew is traditionally rendered Joshua was the name of one of Moses’ lieutenants, who led the Israelites into battle against various enemies when they were en route from Egypt to the Promised Land, who was one of the spies Moses sent into the Promised Land and the only one other than Caleb who proved to be faithful, and who was chosen to lead the people into the Promised Land after Moses death.   The book narrating the conquest of Canaan bears his name.    The book of Numbers tells us that his name was originally Oshea but that Moses changed it to Jehoshua or Joshua.   Oshea means “salvation”.   J(eh)oshua means “Jehovah is salvation”.    Jesus is this Name after it has been transliterated from Hebrew into Aramaic, then from Aramaic into Greek, then from Greek into Latin, and finally Anglicized by the removal of inflection and rendering Latin’s consonantal I as J.   It is in the divine Person Who bears this name in the New Testament that its meaning is truly fulfilled.   The Old Testament Joshua prefigured Him.  Through Joshua, God brought His people out of the wilderness in which they had been wandering due to their disobedience and into the Promised Land.   Indeed, in the fact that Moses, through whom the Law was given and whose name often signifies that Law, led the people in the wilderness but could not lead them across the Jordan into the Promised Land, which was reserved for Joshua, we see illustrated in the Old Testament that key theme of the New, that the Law cannot take a person from the wildness of sin and bring him into the Promised Land of peace with God, only Jesus can do that.   Jesus is Jehovah come into the world to save His people and the world from sin by taking that sin away on the Cross.

 

Christ is said or written together with Jesus so often that many assume it to be His surname.   It is more accurately thought of as a title.   As with the name Jesus it is the Anglicization of the Latin spelling of a Greek word that represents a Hebrew original.   In this case, however, the Greek word is a translation rather than a transliteration of the Hebrew.   The Hebrew word is מָשִׁיחַ which is rendered directly into English as Messiah.   This word means “Anointed One”.   In the Old Testament the kings of Israel were anointed with oil.    So were the high priests and, on at least one occasion, prophets.  Samuel was instructed by God to anoint first Saul, then David, as king with oil.   David would not harm Saul because he was “the LORD’s anointed”.   While every king of Israel and every high priest was a small-m “messiah” or small-c “christ”, the big-M Messiah or big-C Christ was the promised King who would arise out of the House of David to restore and redeem Israel.   Promises of this Redeemer-King can be found throughout the Old Testament but especially in the writings of the prophets who arose to warn Israel and Judah and call them to repentance in the period just before and during the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions that took the northern and southern kingdoms captive respectively.   In the prophetic writings it is promised that the future King will not merely restore Israel to what she was under David and Solomon but will usher in a Golden Age in which all nations will acknowledge His kingdom which will last forever, a New Covenant will be written in the hearts of man rather than on tablets of stone, and the curse on Creation due to man’s sin will finally be lifted.  

 

The Gospel Jesus preached to Israel from the beginning of His earthly ministry was “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand”.    “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” can be paraphrased as “the promises are fulfilled, the Kingdom is present among you now”.   Jesus could proclaim such a Gospel because the Kingdom was present in the Person of Himself, the King.    He explained to them, however, in His teachings, that His Kingdom was spiritual rather than political and that it was bondage to sin that He came to deliver them and the world from rather than from the Roman Empire.   That He, Jesus, is “the Christ, the Son of the Living God” was the sole article in the very first Christian confession or creed.  This was the confession made by St. Peter in response to a query from the Lord first about Whom His disciples said that He was.   Jesus praised the confession as revelation from His Father in Heaven and declared that He would build His Church upon this rock, then began to explain to His disciples that He would be crucified and rise again the third day.   Later, just before He raised her brother Lazarus, Martha made the same confession as St. Peter in response to Jesus’ asking her whether she believed His assertion that “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” (John 11:25-27).   These interactions show that the Christ, the promised King of the House of David, the High Priest after the Order of Melchizedek, the Prophet greater than Moses, was the One Who gives everlasting life to all who believe in Him and that to do so He had to die Himself then rise again. 

 

In the confession of St. Peter and Martha, “the Christ” and “the Son of God” are placed in apposition which is a way of saying that the two expressions refer to the same Person without needing an extra word to link or equate them.   In the Psalms of David there are a number of verses in which the LORD speaks to or about the Messiah as His Son.    The Old and New Testaments use the expression “son of God” with several different meaning.   In the book of Job, the “sons of God” who assemble in His court are usually understood to be the angels.  In St. Paul’s sermon at Mars Hill he spoke of all people as being God’s children.   In the Old Testament the nation Israel is sometimes spoken of as God’s son and in the Johannine literature of the New Testament believers in Jesus are said to be children of God.   When either Testament speaks of Jesus, the Christ, as the Son of God, however, He is not spoken of as being One Son among many, but as God’s Only Son.   Similarly, when Jesus speaks of God the Father, He sometimes speaks of Him as His Father and He sometimes speaks of Him to His disciples as “your Father”, but He never speaks of God as “Our Father” so as to make His Sonship identical with that of His disciples.   While the Lord’s Prayer begins with “Our Father” this is not Jesus including Himself with His disciples in “Our” and joining them in a common prayer but prescribing this form of prayer to them.    The way in which Jesus is God’s Son, therefore, is unique to Himself and not shared with any other.

 

Everything in the portion of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed that we are considering alongside the second Article of the Apostles’ Creed that is not also found in the second Article is there for the purpose of clarifying precisely what it means that Jesus is the Son of God.   This was at the heart of the controversy over which the two first Ecumenical Councils, the ones which gave us the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, were convened.   A priest in Alexandria named Arius taught that Jesus was the first creation of God, Who had a beginning before which He was not, that God had created Him out of nothing with a similar but not identical nature to His Own, and then through Him had created all other things.    When his heresy began to spill out and infect other dioceses and provinces outside of Alexandria, the First Council of Nicaea was convened to deal with the controversy.   The orthodox side, led nominally by Arius’ own bishop, the Patriarch Alexander I of Alexandria, but in actuality by his archdeacon Athanasius, prevailed, the Arian positions were anathematized, and the Council published the original Nicene Creed, but the controversy continued long after with the Arians at times having the upper hand (Athanasius, who succeeded Alexander as Patriarch of Alexandra, was temporarily deposed of his See for seven years and was sent into exile on five separate occasions), making necessary the First Council of Constantinople which revised the Creed into the form we know today and condemned Arianism as heresy.

 

Before the second Ecumenical Council produced the final version of the Creed there were numerous attempts by Arian groups and other similar heresies to revise the Nicene Creed to their liking.   An account of these can be found in the Historia Ecclesiastica of Socrates Scholasticus, the fifth century Christian historian who picked up where Eusebius of Caesarea, the “Christian Herodotus” left off. (2)  The word in the Nicene Creed to which the most objections were made was ὁμοούσιον which means “of the same essence”.   The heretical revisions replaced this word with such alternatives as ὁμοιούσιον which means “of a similar essence” and ὅμοιον which means “similar” in a more general sense.   There are many today who consider such disputes to be hairsplitting but the orthodox side was right to stand its ground and insist upon ὁμοούσιον because that one iota that separates ὁμοούσιον from ὁμοιούσιον is the difference between the Son being God and the Son being a creature, the closest to God of all creatures, but a creature nonetheless.   The word ὁμοούσιον captures what it is that makes Jesus’ Sonship distinct from that of all lesser beings who are in some lesser sense children of God.   Human beings in general and angels are “sons of God” in the sense that they are His creatures but this does not make them God.   Christians are children of God through regeneration (John 1:12-13) and adoption (Rom. 8:15) but this does not make them God.   In creation, living things reproduce after their own kind.   A cat gives birth to a cat, a dog sires another dog, a bird lays an egg and when it hatches it is another bird that comes out, etc.   A man has a son and that son is a man like his father.   This is the sense in which Jesus is God’s Son and in this sense of the word God has only the One Son, the Son Who is God as His Father is God.    ὁμοούσιον was the best word for this because it guarded against the Arian heresy that Jesus is of a similar but different and lesser nature to God the Father without lending any support to the Sabellian heresy which stresses the unity in nature of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to the point that it denies the distinction between the Persons.

 

There is another way in which the Creed expresses the truth that Jesus’ Sonship to the Father is the kind of Sonship that means that He like His Father is God and this is the word “begotten”.   In the English text of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed this word appears three times.   The first of these is when it says that Jesus Christ is “the only-begotten Son of God”.   Here “only-begotten” is the translation of τὸν μονογενῆ, the same word that is translated this way in the Authorized Bible in John 3:16.   In the last century or so a consensus has arisen among New Testament Greek scholars this is a mistranslation based upon a mistaken etymology and that this word is better understood as meaning “unique” or “one of a kind”.   This consensus is wrong, but even if it were correct it would not apply to the other two instances of “begotten” for in these the word γεννηθέντα is used which is the aorist passive participle of the verb which means “beget”.   While this verb when used of the relationship between two created beings signifies that the begetter existed before the begotten when used of the Eternal Uncreated Father and His Eternal Uncreated Son it indicates the priority of the Father in the sense that He is the Source of the Son and the Son comes from Him but not priority in any temporal sense.   That there never was a time before the Father had His Son is, indeed, what the two uses of “begotten” signify, the first by saying that the Son was begotten of the Father “before all worlds”, that is to say, before Creation, of which time is a dimension, the second by saying that “begotten” does not mean “created”.   Theologically, this truth is usually referred to as the “eternal generation” of the Son, although the term filiation is also used.

 

These truths, that Jesus as the Son comes from the Father in such a way that What the Father is, God, He, the Son, is also are simply stated in each of the expressions “God of God”, “Light of Light” and “Very God of Very God”.

 

In this Article of the Creed we also affirm the Son’s Lordship.   Saying that Jesus Christ is Lord can be another way of affirming His deity.   To avoid profaning the divine Name, the custom had developed in the Hebrew tradition of saying the word that means “Lord” instead when reading the Old Testament text.    When the Old Testament was translated into the Greek Septuagint this custom influenced the translators to put κύριος in the place of the divine Name and this practice persists into our English translation where the divine Name is transliterated as Jehovah or Jah in only a small handful of instances but otherwise rendered LORD spelled in all capitals to distinguish where the Name of God is what is indicated from places where אֲדֹנָי appears in the Hebrew text in which cases only the L is capitalized.  When the New Testament calls Jesus κύριος, sometimes this word has the weight that it has in the LXX when it stands in for the Name of God, at other times it is used in a more literal sense of “Ruler” or “Master”.   These meanings overlap, of course – Jesus as God is the Ultimate Sovereign Ruler of all – but there is a real distinction.  Generally, when Jesus is declared to be Lord in a confessional sort of way (Rom. 10:9) the emphasis is upon His deity, when is spoken of as Lord in a more personal sort of way, the emphasis is upon His authority in His relationship with His disciples.    In the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed the word “Lord” is qualified by the number “One”.  This is directly parallel to how the Creed declares God to be One in the first Article about the Father.    In the Nicene Creed, therefore, the emphasis in affirming Jesus’ Lordship is upon His deity.   The Apostles’ Creed, however, which qualifies the word “Lord” with the possessive “our”, places the emphasis in His Lordship upon His relationship of authority to we who confess Him as such.   The two versions of the Creed, therefore, complement each other, and present both aspects of Jesus’ Lordship as it is found in the New Testament.

 

The final affirmation in this portion of the Creed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan version is “through whom all things were made”.   This wording identifies the Son’s role in Creation in terms of instrumentality or means.  The Son is the instrument through Whom the Father created all things.   This is what we find asserted by St. John in the third verse of His Gospel “all things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made”.   This follows shortly after St. John’s introduction of Jesus as “the Word” Who was “in the beginning” with God and Who “was God”.  This alludes to the first chapter of Genesis which also starts with the words “in the beginning” and in which God creates all things through the means of His Word.

 

The second Article is all about the deity of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.   We shall, Lord willing, next look at the third Article, in which the focus shifts to His humanity, God the Son become Man.

  ,

 

 

 (1)   “τοὐτέστιν ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας τοῦ Πατρός” is asserted with more precision as “ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί” and  “Θεὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ” as “Θεὸν ἀληθινὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ ἀληθινοῦ”.

(2)   Eusebius was present at the Council of Nicaea as Bishop of Caesarea but finished writing his History just prior to the Council and concluded his narrative with the triumph of Constantine over his rivals.

 

 

The Donatist Dilemma

 

In the early centuries of Christian history the orthodox had to contend with hundreds of heretical and schismatic movements.   Except among apologists and ecclesiastical historians, only a handful of these are remembered by name today.   Gnosticism, the first proponents of which challenged the authority and teachings of the Apostles themselves, was not the name of a specific heretical movement but the collective term for a large class of heretical movements.     Valentinianism, after Valentinus of Alexandria, was one such movement that was widespread in the second century and was the main heresy against which St. Irenaeus of Lyons wrote.   The ideas that the term Gnosticism usually brings to mind today more properly belong to Marcionism, named after Marcion of Sinope.    Historians are divided as to whether Marcionism is properly classified as Gnostic or whether it is best regarded as a heresy that deviated from both Gnosticism and orthodox Christianity.

 

The heresies that are still widely known by name are the major heresies that were addressed by the four earliest ecumenical Councils, the two that put together the most basic and fundamental of Christian Creeds (1) in the fourth century, i.e., the First Council of Nicaea (325 AD) and the First Council of Constantinople (381 AD), and the two that resulted in the Christological clarification of the Definition of Chalcedon in the fifth century, i.e., the Council of Ephesus (431 AD) and the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD).   In one way or another the heresies addressed by these Councils deviated from orthodoxy as to the Person and Nature of Jesus Christ.   Arianism, which takes its name from Arius of Alexandria and which was the principal heresy addressed by the Creed-forming Councils of the fourth century, denied the full deity of Jesus Christ and taught that He was a created being possessed of a lesser divinity than the Father.   Nestorianism, named after Nestorius of Constantinople, the principal heresy addressed by the fifth century Councils, stressed the distinction between the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ to the point where the unity of His Person was compromised.   This latter is a good illustration of the general nature of heresy which is not, as is often supposed, merely “wrong doctrine”.   Heresy is a truth taken out of the context of other equal or more important, balancing truths, and so twisted by exaggeration into an error that is far more dangerous than something that it is merely and entirely false.   G. K. Chesterton in his biography of William Blake (1910) said that “A fad or heresy is the exaltation of something which, even if true, is secondary or temporary in its nature against those things which are essential and eternal, those things which always prove themselves true in the long run”.   T. S. Eliot in After Strange Gods (1933) wrote that “the essential of any important heresy is not simply that it is wrong: it is that it is partly right.”

 

If we were to poll Christians, asking them to name and rank a few of the early heresies, it is unlikely that we would find many for whom Donatism would be at the top of their list.   Indeed, while I hope I am too cynical and am completely wrong in this, I suspect that if we were to instead provide that name and ask people to identify it, many would associate it with Donatello, the fifteenth century Florentine Renaissance sculptor – or the Ninja Turtle who bears his name. 

 

Donatism has nothing to do with either sculptor or Ninja Turtle, of course.   It takes its name from the fourth century figure Donatus Magnus, a priest from the Berber settlement of Casae Nigrae in Numidia, which is now the town of Negrine in Algeria.   With Donatus and his followers, it was not a dispute over doctrine that separated them from the orthodox Church as it was with the aforementioned heresiarchs Valentius, Marcion, Arius and Nestorius and their sects, but rather a dispute over practice.   It would be more accurate therefore to describe Donatism as schismatic rather than heretical, although the schism, as we shall see, eventually corrupted the doctrine of the schismatics.   It deviated from orthopraxis (sound practice), however, in much the same way that heresy deviates from orthodoxy (sound doctrine) – by taking a part of sound practice and emphasizing it to the point that other parts fell by the wayside.    The part of sound practice they so over-emphasized was holiness or separation from the world. (2)

 

The Donatist schism had its origins in the persecution of Christians in the reign of Diocletian.   This was the largest and harshest persecution of Christians in the history of the Roman Empire.   Previous persecutions had usually been local affairs, conducted with the authority or at least toleration of a regional governor.   This one came down from the very top and in theory covered the entire Empire, although in actuality certain regions were far more severely affected than others.   The severity of this persecution made it unpopular which contributed to the Roman Empire’s reversing course ten years after it began and issuing the Edict of Milan which legalized Christianity throughout the Roman Empire and granted it protection against persecution.

 

North Africa was a region that was particularly severely affected by the Great Persecution, as it had been during the lesser persecutions of the previous century.   It was almost, in a sense, the epicentre of the Persecution.   In 302 AD, Diocletian had issued an edict outlawing the Manichaeans, ordering that their leaders be burned along with their books and any of their followers who didn’t recant.   The Manichaeans were the followers of Mani, a third century Persian religious teacher who blended ideas from Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Gnosticism, and whose teachings were noted for their dualism.   Their teachings had spread from the Persian Empire westward and had become particularly influential in the academic centres of Egypt and North Africa. (3)   Diocletian had been persuaded that they were a subversive movement acting on behalf of the Persian Empire to infiltrate and weaken Rome.   Later that year, Diocletian’s ire would fall upon orthodox Christians when St. Romanus, a deacon of the Caesarean Church, denounced the pagan sacrifices that took place in his court at Antioch.   He was already ill-disposed towards Christianity because he blamed Christian members of his court for the failure of his attempts at divination after the Roman victory against the Persians in the Battle of Satala and the renewal of peace with the Sassanid dynasty.   Diocletian was, therefore, already half persuaded when his co-emperor Galerius (4) began to talk him into extending towards orthodox Christianity the same policy he had taken towards Manichaeism – persecution with the end of total extirpation.   While he initially proposed a more moderate persecution, his resistance to Galerius’ proposal was overcome when the two sent away to the oracle at the Temple to Apollo in Didyma and were told that Apollo was silent because of the presence of Christianity in the Empire.   In February of 303 AD, he and his co-emperors began issuing a series of edicts that forbade Christians from assembling to worship and ordered the Christian Scriptures and other Christian literature to be burned, Christian Church buildings to be destroyed, and Christian clergy to be imprisoned and stripped Christians of all the legal rights of Roman citizens.

 

Although all Christians were targeted by this persecution, the clergy - the bishops and priests who led, taught, and officiated in the Churches - were particularly hit hard.   While many of these remained faithful to the point of martyrdom, many others did not.   These handed over their copies of the Bible to the Roman soldiers to be burned.    Often they handed over the names of other Christians as well.   This earned them the label traditores, meaning “those who handed over” which is the root of our word traitor.  (5)

 

Mensurius, who was Bishop of Carthage at the time, removed the Scriptures from the Church building and hid them in his own home, substituting heretical writings in their place for the soldiers to seize.    While he thus cleverly avoided becoming a traditor himself, this act was not exactly impressive to those who contrasted his example unfavourably with that of those who submitted to arrest, torture, and death.   It did not help his image any that the contrast was particularly great with his own predecessor in the See of Carthage, St. Cyprian, who had been martyred in the earlier persecution under Valerian, less than half a century prior to this.   Mensurius then forbade the Carthaginian Church from honouring as martyrs any who initiated their own martyrdom by defiantly turning themselves in to the Roman authorities.    Needless to say, he was far from being the most admired bishop in the Christian Church at the time.  

 

Mensurius died in 311 AD, about six years after the Great Persecution had begun to wane.   The Edict of Milan was still two years away, but North Africa was governed by Maxentius (6) who had already liberated the Christians.   Caecilian, who had served as archdeacon under Mensurius, was chosen as his successor, and among those participating in his consecration was Felix, Bishop of Aptunga.   Immediately this succession met with protest.   Caecilian had been an even more zealous advocate of Mensurius’ position vis-à-vis the voluntary martyrs than Mensurius had been himself and so was most objectionable to those who found that position odious.   These then claimed that his consecration was invalid because of the participation of Felix.   Felix had been absent from his See during the Persecution and so had avoided arrest.   The opponents of Caecilian accused Felix of being a traditor, and maintained that this invalidated the consecration.

 

The matter was appealed to Secundus, Bishop of Tigisis who was the closest Primate (7), and Secundus with the support of 70 other bishops ruled against Caecilian.    These then chose and consecrated Majorinus, who had been a lector in the Carthaginian Church, as bishop.   With two different groups claiming two different individuals to be the validly consecrated holder of the same bishopric, a schism was born.   Each side excommunicated the other, albeit on different grounds.   Those who supported Majorinus as the validly consecrated Bishop of Carthage maintained that those in fellowship with Caecilian were tainted by association with the sins of the traditor alleged against Caecilian himself and against Felix who consecrated him.   Those who supported Caecilian excommunicated those in fellowship with Majorinus on the grounds that their actions were schismatic.   This schism was very much a local affair as outside of North Africa the supporters of Caecilian were a clear supermajority.   The Patriarch of Rome was asked to look into the matter and with the backing of the Roman Synod he ruled in favour of Caecilian in 313 AD, as did the Council of Arles of 314 AD to which the decision was appealed.   These rulings were upheld in the ecumenical Councils later in that century.   Majorinus died two years after his consecration and was succeeded in the schismatic line by Donatus Magnus and so the schism came to take the name of Donatism.

 

The error of the Donatists, as we noted at the outset of this discussion, grew out of a matter of practice rather than a matter of doctrine.   When it comes to the actions of the traditores, orthodox Christians and Donatists were in agreement that it was reprehensible to collaborate with the persecutors of the faith by handing over Scriptures, sacred items, and the names of the brethren.   The Donatists, however, in their zeal for the holiness and purity of the Church, good things in themselves, insisted that the betrayal of the traditores forever disqualified them from being restored to their positions of leadership in the Church and thus invalidated their every ministry from administering baptisms to celebrating the Eucharist to, in the case of bishops, ordinations and consecrations of other bishops.   As easy as it is to see where the Donatists were coming from in this, had the Lord Jesus Christ thought the same way, St. Peter would never have been restored to his position as Apostle after he denied Christ three times on the evening of His betrayal and arrest, would never have been empowered to preach the sermon on the first Whitsunday through which  three thousand souls were converted, would never have opened the door to the evangelism of the Gentiles by bringing  the Gospel to Cornelius, and would not have written the two epistles under his name that are part of the Sacred Canon.   Yet even before the denial had taken place, indeed, just before the Lord predicted it, He said unto St. Peter “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren” (Lk. 22:31-32).   After St. Peter had denied Him, and after He had risen from the dead, He called him to feed His sheep three times – one for each denial – and then, prophesying his eventual martyrdom, repeated to him the call to “Follow Me” (Jn. 21:15-19).   The difference between the Lord’s response to St. Peter and the Donatists’ response to the traditores shows us how their emphasis on holiness was at the expense of other elements of orthopraxis such as forgiveness and restoration and thus the equivalent of heresy in practice.   Ultimately, this error in practice translated itself into an error in doctrine, the error that the efficacy of the Church’s Ministries of Word and Sacrament as conduits of the grace of God is dependent upon the spotless purity of the ministers.   The controversy over this was still raging almost a century later when St. Augustine of Hippo, than whom there was no clearer and stronger expositor of the grace of God between St. Clement of Rome and the Reformation, answered the Donatists in his De Baptismo.

 

What message is there in this historical episode for our own day?

 

There are a number of parallels between the Diocletian Persecution and the bat flu madness of the last two years.   There are huge differences too, of course.   Whereas Diocletian and Galerius saw their persecution of Christianity for what it was – a deliberate attempt to extirpate the Christian faith and religion – the governments of the present day deny to themselves that they are doing anything of the sort.  Since they allow Christians and people of other religions to “worship” online, they have convinced themselves that their having forbidden Christians and those of other faiths to meet and assemble in person for much of the last two years is not the same thing as Diocletian’s outlawing of all Christian assembly.   Having convinced themselves of this, they have also persuaded themselves that in having Christian ministers arrested for holding services where their congregations could, well, congregate is not the same thing as when Galerius ordered bishops and priests to be arrested.   They obviously see no similarities between their attempts to prevent the spread of any information that disagrees with their narrow, official, narrative about the bat flu and, indeed, to stomp it out as “misinformation” and the Roman Empire’s efforts to burn all copies of the Christian Scriptures and other sacred literature.   Some would say that because with regards to each of these parallels the difference is that what the Roman Empire did was that much more severe the comparison is therefore inappropriate.   Others will, more astutely, note that this difference is what allows today’s governments to convince themselves that they are not engaged in persecution which self-deception makes what they are doing that much more dangerous than the open persecution of the Roman Empire or in more recent times of the Communist countries.

 

A similar comparison could be made between the response of the Churches to the almost universal medical technocratic tyranny of the bat flu scare and the actions of the traditores.   Again, there are huge differences, but not such as necessarily mean that the Churches of the present day come out favourably in the comparison.   Complying with an order from the state that the Church not assemble is, in one sense, not as extreme a betrayal of the faith as handing over the Scriptures to be burned and handing over the names of other Christians to those seeking to arrest them, but it is a betrayal in that the teachings of the Scriptures, as interpreted by the faithful in all places and all times from the Apostles to the present  (8) is that a state ban on Church assembly is a clear and obvious exception to the Scriptural injunction of civil obedience. (9)    If it is less extreme in this sense, it is greater in that it is far more widespread than that of the traditores was.    The compliance of the Churches with these tyrannical public health orders was almost universal.   The leaders of the Churches have undoubtedly persuaded themselves that they are not guilty of the same thing as the traditores and even that their compliance with this medical totalitarianism is virtuous, an act of sacrifice for the safety and wellbeing of others, especially the most vulnerable among us.    However, just as governments are capable of more and greater oppression and persecution when they have deceived themselves into thinking that they are acting for the public good instead of oppressing and persecuting people, so this self-deception on the part of the Churches compounds rather than mitigates the problem.    Those who regard their sinful betrayal of the faith not as a sinful betrayal of the faith but as a virtuous act of self-sacrifice are incapable of the repentance and confession that the orthodox Churches of the fourth century required from the traditores before their restoration.                                                                                                                                           

 

This leaves anyone who is trying to follow Christ in accordance with what historically and traditionally have been regarded as orthodox faith and orthopraxis and who has not bought into the Great Deception of the bat flu madness caught on the horns of a terrible dilemma.   To anyone trying to follow Christ in this manner, Church is essential not optional.   For almost two years, however, the leadership of the Churches have acted as if the opposite is true.   They have closed their doors, tried to get us to live a lie by pretending that watching a tiny Church service broadcast online and saying the words along with them is a form of assembling together as a Church (it is not), and allowed attendance on occasions that the public health tyrants permitted provided that a stringent list of requirements all arising out of a worldly spirit of fear that would drive the sanctity out of the Church were adhered to.   The Christian leaders who have most conspicuously and admirably resisted the public health tyranny have for the most part come from sects that are either extremely schismatic, enthusiastic (in the theological sense of the word which is not a good thing), heretical – sometimes grossly so – or all of the above.  

 

Should the public health scare ever end, what ought we to do?

 

If we wait for the leaders of our Churches to acknowledge and repent of the sins of betraying the faith and leaving us without the ministry of the Church in any real sense for the duration of the public health scare before resuming fellowship with them we will be waiting a very long time and run the risk of becoming Donatists in spirit, if not in letter.

 

If, on the other hand, we just try to pick up where we had left off in March 2020, forgetting the entire horrible interlude, and pretending that there was no betrayal or apostasy to forgive (since offering forgiveness in the absence of acknowledgement of wrongdoing cheapens forgiveness), we will have traded the Scylla of Donatism for the Charbydis that is its opposite.

 

There is no obvious solution to this dilemma short of the public health scare being brought to an end with the Second Coming of Christ in Glory to judge both the quick and the dead.   Whatever we end up doing, we should devote much prayer and contemplation to the matter.

 

 (1)   The Nicene-Constantinopolitan, the Creed that was put together by and in the first two ecumenical Councils of the early Church, is the most basic and fundamental Christian Creed in that it is the only Creed universally accepted among all the Churches that can claim organic lineage from the Apostolic Church.   This is further attested to by the fact that the addition of a single word – filioque – to the Latin text of this Creed, was the most important doctrinal issue that separated the Eastern Greek-speaking Church from the Western Latin-speaking Church in the eleventh century.   The Apostles’ Creed is shorter and simpler than the Nicene-Constantinopolitan, but it does not seem to have ever been as universally accepted and used as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan.     The traditional account of its origin – that it was composed on the first Whitsunday by the Apostles themselves, with each of the Apostles, St. Matthias having been chosen as Judas Iscariot’s replacement already, contributing one of the twelve lines – is very old.   St. Ambrose of Milan and Rufinus of Aquileia both spoke of it as a well-established account less than a century after the Council of Nicaea.     If true, this would be an incontrovertible argument for the priority of the Apostles’ Creed over the Nicene-Constantinopolitan as the basic Creed of Christianity (not that the two, which are very similar, and could almost be taken for the longer and shorter forms of a singular Creed, contradict each other), but if true, it would be difficult to explain how it fell so quickly out of use in the Greek-speaking Churches of the East.     In its earliest form, the old Roman Symbol used in the baptismal rite of the Church of Rome – in the sense of the Church particular to that city, not in the sense of the “Roman Catholic Church”, i.e., all Churches that remained in communion with the Roman Patriarch after the Great Schism and the Reformation – it predates the Nicene-Constantinopolitan and goes back to at least the early part of the second century.   Nevertheless, although a strong case can be made that it was originally written in Greek – see Rev. John Baron The Greek Origins of the Apostles’ Creed Illustrated by Ancient Documents and Recent Research (1885) for the case that the Greek text of the Creed that Marcellus of Ancyra brought with him to Rome during his exile was the original form – the history of its usage is almost entirely Latin and Western.

(2)   “World” is the word we use in English where the Greek-speaking Church used κόσμος.   In Scriptural and ecclesiastical usage these terms have a positive sense in which they are basically synonyms of “Creation”, i.e., everything God made.   The Latinized transliteration of κόσμος as “cosmos”, a synonym for “universe”, is a secularized equivalent of this.   This positive sense of these words can be narrowed to focus on one aspect of Creation if the context requires it.   For example, the world in “For God so loved the world” in John 3:16 is Creation but with a focus on the people who live in it.    There is also a negative sense in which these words are used by the Scriptures and the Church and this is obviously the sense intended when we speak of holiness as separation from the world.   In this sense, world or κόσμος means the fallen state of Creation, human sin or rebellion against God not merely as it touches each of us as individuals, in which case the word for it would be flesh as a rendition of the Greek σὰρξ in its specialized New Testament usage, but as it permeates and corrupts human organized society.

(3)   Manichaeism had a strong presence in these places both before and after the Persecution. St. Augustine, prior to his conversion to the orthodox Christian faith of his mother, had been associated with the Manichaeans for about a decade.  He had come under their influence as a student at the University of Carthage.   This was about seventy years after Diocletian had ordered Manichaeism rubbed out.

(4)   This was the period of the Roman Tetrachy.   Although Diocletian’s treatment of the Manichaeans and Christians was undoubtedly tyrannical, in one sense he behaved atypically for a despot and divided his power with others.   Two years after becoming emperor in 284 AD, he named one of his cavalry comrades Maximian his co-emperor, assigning the Western Empire to Maximian and governing the Eastern Empire himself.   Seven years later, he named two other co-emperors, Galerius and Constantius to serve as Junior Emperors under him and Maximian.    The Senior Emperors took the title Augustus, the Junior Emperors took the title Caesar. The Tetrarchy was short lived.  Constantius’ son Constantine succeeded his father in 306 and was awarded both imperial titles.    In less than two decades he had consolidated his reign over the whole Roman Empire, although the division between East and West was lasting and would re-assert itself after his reign.   A famous episode in the process of consolidating his rule was the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 AD in which he defeated Maximian’s successor Maxentius, leaving him the sole Western claimant to the Imperial title.  This was the battle in which in response to a vision he fought under a standard bearing the ☧, the Christian monogram formed by combining X (Chi) with P (Rho) the first two letters of the word Christ.

(5)   While the word “traitor” is derived from traditor(es), the word “tradition” comes from the same source as traditor.   The concept common to both is of something having been handed or given over.   The source is the Latin verb trado “I hand over, surrender”, tradere “to hand over, surrender”, a contraction of the compound formed by combining the preposition trans meaning “across” and the verb do, dare meaning “give”.   This verb takes the form traditus “having been handed over” in its fourth part, the passive perfect participle.   “Tradition”, which preserves the passive voice of this form of the verb, means “that which has been handed over” in the sense of that which has been handed down to us from those who have gone before us and lacks the perjorative connotations of traditor(es) which is formed from the same part of the verb, by modifying it with the suffix that indicates the agent of the action of the otherwise passive form and which is pejorative because the handing over indicated in this case was an act of cowardly betrayal.

(6)   Vide supra, note 4.

(7)   The Bishop of Carthage was also the Primate of North Africa but for obvious reasons could not adjudicate this case.   Secundus was Primate of Numidia.

(8)   This is the test of Catholicity – ecumenicity, antiquity, and consent - proposed by St. Vincent of Lerins in his famous canon – “quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est” (“whatever is believed everywhere, always, and by all”) in Commonitorium 2:6.

(9)   The examples of Daniel when forbidden by Darius to pray to the true God in the sixth chapter of Daniel, and of the Apostles when forbidden by the Sanhredrin to preach and teach in the name of Jesus in the fourth and fifth chapters of Acts, set the Scriptural precedent followed by the Churches that continued to meet during the persecutions including the Diocletian.

Orthodoxy and/or Calvinism: A Question of Priority

In a previous essay (1) I showed how popular, Calvinist, evangelical theologian R. C. Sproul, out of concern that speaking of God dying in the crucifixion, as Charles Wesley does in his well-loved song “And Can It Be”, might lead people to think that in the death of Christ, God perished in His eternal being, went too far in his efforts to avoid this heretical pitfall and landed himself in another one, that of Nestorianism, the ancient heresy condemned by the councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon. Dr. Sproul denied that the Second Person of the Trinity died on the cross and asserted that it was Christ’s human nature that made the atonement. This is a version of the Nestorian heresy, and one specifically condemned in the twelfth of the twelve anathemas which St. Cyril of Alexandria had proposed in a letter addressed to Nestorius and which were accepted by the Council of Ephesus. (2)

This illustrates something that I have long observed about certain Calvinist theologians, namely the tendency, in practice if not in theory, to rank the teachings of the Synod of Dort as being of greater importance than those of the early councils of the Church. They also, for that matter, tend to place the doctrines of the canons of Dort, collectively referred to as the “Doctrine of Grace”, above the Pauline-Augustinian doctrines of justification which had been the basis of the Reformation. In other words, for these theologians, Calvinism is more important than either the orthodoxy of the Apostolic Christianity of the early undivided Church or the teachings of the early Reformers, including John Calvin himself. More than one such Calvinist has followed C. H. Spurgeon in equating the doctrines of Calvinism with the gospel itself. The gospel, however, is not a set of doctrines about predestination and the sovereignty of God, but the basic Christian message of "good news" addressed to the world, the content of which is that Jesus Christ died for our sins, was buried, and rose again as attested by the Scriptures and witnesses of the resurrection (1 Cor. 15), and which functions as an invitation for all people to trust the Saviour so proclaimed.

If you will allow me to give another example, in the late 1980s a book came out which accused, with a great deal of justification, contemporary evangelicalism of having watered down the gospel and the teachings of Jesus Christ. Entitled The Gospel According to Jesus, it’s author was John F. MacArthur Jr., popular radio Bible teacher, the pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California and president of The Master's College and Seminary. It was heavily endorsed by Calvinist theologians such as John Piper, R. C. Sproul, John H. Gerstner, James Montgomery Boice and J. I. Packer. Packer and Boice even contributed forwards to the book.

This endorsement of The Gospel According to Jesus was bad enough, when the book is evaluated on its own merits. (3) My point, however, is that at the time MacArthur wrote this book – he has subsequently recanted, or at least changed his mind (4) – he denied the Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ. (5) He had taught since at least 1983 that Jesus Christ, while eternally the Word of God, only became the Son of God in the Incarnation. This placed him outside the bounds of the orthodox Trinitarian faith. When the first ecumenical council of the Church was convened in Nicaea in 325 AD to address the heresy of Arius, the Alexandrian priest who taught that Jesus is neither eternal nor equal to God the Father, but the first created being, it asserted that Jesus Christ as the Son of God was of “one substance” with God the Father, that He was “begotten not made”, and that His having been begotten of the Father describes not an event in time before which He was not, but His eternal relationship with the Father for He was “begotten of the Father before all worlds.” That MacArthur did not accept Nicene orthodoxy did not appear to faze any of these Calvinist theologians who wrote glowing endorsements of his book. That MacArthur taught the canons of Dort and the Puritan doctrine of assurance through introspective fruit inspection was more important to them than that he could not honestly recite the Nicene Creed as a statement of his own faith.

There are at least three things wrong with the rather appalling failure to prioritize that this demonstrates: it places a regional, sectarian, synod above the councils of the early, undivided, church, it makes the doctrine of predestination, a secondary doctrine at best, if not tertiary, more important than sound Trinitarianism and Christology, and it places the emphasis on doctrines, such as particular redemption, the soundness of which is rather dubious.

The First Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople in 325 and 381 AD respectively, and the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon in 431 and 451 AD, were ecumenical (6) councils, that is to say, councils in which representatives from the entire church throughout the world had been invited to participate, at a time when this was still possible as the major schisms had yet to take place (6) Their conciliar authority, as such, is therefore considerably greater than that of the Synod of Dort, which was a national council of the Dutch Reformed Church, although a number of representatives from the German Reformed Churches and the Church of England also participated by invitation.

Jesus Christ had warned His disciples that false Christs would arise, meaning people who falsely claimed to be the Messiah, and before the writings recognized by the Church as the Christian Scriptures were completed, another kind of false Christ had arisen in that false teachers had arisen in the Church, challenging the authority and doctrine of the Apostle, and denying in particular the Incarnation of Christ. St. John wrote of these in his first and second epistles, calling these false teachers “antichrists”. They rejected the Incarnation because in their philosophy the material world was irredeemably corrupt, whereas the spiritual world was immaculately pure, so the idea of the divine Christ becoming flesh seemed an abomination to them. For the same reason they could not accept that the God of the Hebrew Scriptures, Who created the material world, was the supreme and good God. Known to history as the Gnostics, these would plague the orthodox, Apostolic faith for centuries, but they were not the only heretics. If they rejected the humanity of Christ, that He was “come in the flesh”, others, such as Arius of Alexandria, stumbled over His deity.

It was against heresies of this type and for what St. John called “the doctrine of Christ” that the Church contended in these early ecumenical councils. This doctrine is the very essence of Christianity – that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, come in the flesh, fully God, fully Man in One Person. The councils did not invent this doctrine, which is found in the Apostolic Scriptures and Ante-Nicene Patristic writings, but they issued a clear and authoritative statement of the doctrine, and condemned the heretical deviations from it.

This required that similar clear and authoritative statements be made as to what orthodox Christianity teaches about the nature of God. The orthodox and Apostolic doctrine was that the God of the Old Testament was the same God Who is Father of Jesus Christ, as Christ Himself had said (Jn. 8:54) but the Gnostics denied, and so the Creed of the Council of Nicaea began by declaring that God, the Father Almighty, is “Maker of all things visible and invisible”, which the Council of Constantinople expanded to “Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisble.” The God of the Old Testament is notably One, (Deut. 6:4), but in the New Testament He has a Son Who is also God, and on the night prior to His crucifixion that Son promised His disciples that when He returned to His Father, the Father would send them a Comforter, the Holy Ghost, in His name (Jn. 14:16-26). Some took this as meaning that there were three Gods, others, such as the heretic Sabellius, that “Father”, “Son”, and “Holy Ghost” were just titles or offices. The Church, therefore, had to defend the essential unity of God against the former, and the distinction between the Divine Persons against the latter, clarifying that God is One in His essential being, but Three in Person.

By contrast, when the Dutch Reformed Church called together its Synod in Dordrecht in 1618 AD, it was to deal with a matter which is best understood as being itself a footnote – or at most, a parenthesis - to one of the secondary doctrines dealt with by the ecumenical councils. When the Council of Ephesus convened to address the heresy of Nestorius of Constantinople in 431 AD it also confirmed the condemnation of the heresy of Pelagius by the Council of Carthage, a North African regional synod, in 418 AD. Pelagius, a lay monk, born somewhere in the British Isles, but who taught first in Rome, then in North Africa, and later in the Middle East, had denied the doctrine of Original Sin, i.e., that in Adam the entire human race fell as Adam’s sin and fallen nature has been passed down to us, and rejected the absolute necessity of God’s grace for salvation and good works. It was St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, who had led the opposition to the heresy of Pelagianism, arguing in several works for the doctrine of Original Sin and that salvation only comes through the grace of God.

In the course of his combatting the heresies of Pelagius and his disciple Caelestus, St. Augustine developed a strong view of predestination, in which God decided whom He would give His saving grace to in eternity past before the creation of the world. While the Augustinian view of Original Sin and salvation only by the grace of God had been ruled to be orthodox by the Council of Ephesus, with the authority of the undivided Church, the same cannot be said of his later doctrine of predestination and whether this doctrine of predestination is logically required by Original Sin and salvation by grace has been a divisive subject. The Reformers, including the Lutherans and the English Reformers as well as the Calvinists, held to the Augustinian view of predestination, but whereas the Lutherans and the Anglicans insisted on contextualizing the doctrine, (8) the followers of Calvin prioritized it, and having done so, took it to extremes that invited the formation of opposite extremes. Thus, when Calvin’s disciple Theodore Beza, whose theology was as horrible as his politics (9), developed the harshest version of predestination possible in supralapsarianism (10), it met with resistance, and, unsurprisingly, when the young Reformed pastor at Amsterdam, newly appointed to his post, Jacob Arminius, was asked to defend this doctrine, he found himself reconsidering the entire idea of predestination. God, Arminius argued, had given men sufficient grace in Christ, for the entire world to be saved, and predestinated men in accordance with His foreknowledge of whether they would respond to the Gospel in faith or not.

The Synod of Dort was the Dutch Reformed Church’s response to Arminius, or, to be more precise, to the Five Articles of Remonstance against their own Calvinist view of predestination that his followers had published the year after his death in 1609 AD. While the Synod attempted, in the articles and catalogues of “errors” it put forth arguing for its own five points, to pin the charge of Pelagianism on its opponents, the matters in question were not those over which the early church condemned the teachings of Pelagius. The original condemnation of Pelagius at the Council of Carthage, later upheld by the ecumenical Council of Ephesus, found him in error on the following points: that death was the consequence of Adam’s fall, that new born infants possess Original Sin and so ought to be baptized, that God’s grace provides both forgiveness for past sins and fortification against future sins as well as strength to obey God’s commandments and not merely knowledge of them, that it is impossible rather than just difficult to please God apart from grace, and that the faithful speak out of truth and not just humility when confessing themselves to be sinners and praying “forgive us our trespasses”, which includes their own personal trespasses. Pelagius’ denial of all of these points was condemned as heresy, but none of these points was an issue in the controversy between the Calvinists and Arminians, only the way the Calvinist tradition had interpreted John Calvin’s interpretation of St. Augustine’s later teachings on predestination.

Yet, to hear many of the Calvinist theologians who winked at John F. MacArthur Jr.’s denial of the eternal Sonship of Christ in the 1980s and 1990s and turn a blind eye to R. C. Sproul’s Nestorianism, you would think that the greatest plague afflicting the Christian church today is a revival of Pelagianism (11), to be found in the rejection of one or more of the petals of the TULIP of Dort.



(1) http://www.thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2016/03/from-scylla-of-patripassianism-into.html
(2) The anathema reads “Whosoever shall not recognize that the Word of God suffered in the flesh, that he was crucified in the flesh, and that likewise in that same flesh he tasted death and that he has become the first-begotten of the dead, for, as he is God, he is the life and it is he that gives life: let him be anathema.”
(3) The problem MacArthur was addressing in the book was real enough – the way, many evangelical churches were making shallow converts, many of whom either fell away or showed little interest in the things of God thereafter. Unfortunately, MacArthur misdiagnosed the problem and so prescribed a cure that was as bad if not worse than the actual ailment. The correct diagnosis would be that much of the contemporary evangelical church often treats the gospel as an instrument for talking people into “praying the sinner’s prayer” and tells those who do so that they have by doing so ensured their place in heaven. Proclaimed properly, the gospel is a message of good news about God and what He has done in giving us His Son, Who died for us on the cross, was buried, and rose again, which invites people to believe the good news and trust the Saviour. Instead, MacArthur’s solution was to substitute a harder decision for “praying the sinner’s prayer” and to tell people they needed to be constantly looking for evidence of their regeneration in their daily lives.
(4) http://www.gtycanada.org/resources/articles/A235/reexamining-the-eternal-sonship-of-christ
(5) I explained and defended the doctrine of the Eternal Sonship at length here: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2013/05/jesus-christ-eternal-son-of-god.html
(6) Ecumenical comes from a Greek word meaning “the entire world”. An “ecumenical” council, therefore, was a council of the church throughout “the entire world” rather than a local or regional synod. It had a different set of connotations in the early centuries of Christianity than it does today. Since the early twentieth century it has been used by the movement to restore Christian unity which, unfortunately, has often demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice truth and orthodoxy for the sake of unity. In the early centuries, the ecumenical councils sought unity through the means of clarifying the truth and condemning heresy.
(7) Although one of those schisms was in response to the Council of Chalcedon, the decisions of which the Coptic, Armenian, Syrian, and several other ancient near east churches refused to accept.
(8) The Church of England, for example, addresses the matter in Article VII of the Articles of Religion, eight articles after the one affirming Augustinian orthodoxy on the matter of Original Sin, having affirmed such matters as the Holy Trinity (Article I), the eternal Sonship of Christ and the unity of His “Godhead and Manhood” in “one Person, never to be divided” (Article II) at the very beginning. In Article VII, it is made plain that the doctrine of predestination, so affirmed, is “full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons” but that for “carnal persons, lacking the Spirit of Christ” for it to be “continually before their eyes” is “a most dangerous downfall” that serves the purposes of the Devil.
(9) Beza was an antimonarchist republican.
(10) Basically, the idea that God decided to allow sin to enter into the world in order to be able to damn people to Hell.
(11) The charge is not entirely baseless. Pelagianism has certainly influenced North American evangelicalism, but this was more through nineteenth century revivalist Charles G. Finney, ironically a Presbyterian minister, than through Arminius, Arminianism, or Wesleyism. I discussed this here: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2012/12/evangelicalism-is-not-enough.html