A Cause Neither Lost nor Gained

“If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph” – T. S. Eliot

Has that strange sound from beneath the high altar of St. James’ Anglican Cathedral in Toronto finally ceased?

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

The forty-second General Synod of the Canadian branch of the Ecclesia Anglicana convened in Vancouver, British Columbia on the tenth of July. Prominent on the agenda was a motion to alter the canon governing holy matrimony to allow for the performance of same-sex marriages. Canon law requires that such a motion pass two consecutive General Synods. At each of these Synods it must receive a two-thirds supermajority from the lay delegates, from the clergy, and from the episcopal college. It received this, albeit through some questionable shenanigans, at the last General Synod in Richmond Hill, Upper Canada, three years ago. This year, however, while it received 80.9 percent of the lay vote, and 73.2 percent of the clerical vote, it was defeated in the House of Bishops who gave it only 62.2 percent, with fourteen bishops voting against the motion, and two abstaining.

It was this motion to which I alluded when I suggested in the concluding paragraph of my Dominion Day essay that John Strachan, first Bishop of Toronto, was probably spinning in his grave. While it is good that the motion was defeated it is important that we recognize that although this was a defeat, of sorts, for liberalism it was not a triumph for orthodoxy. Had orthodoxy triumphed we would be talking about a liberal motion that never made it past its first round through Synod because it was voted down by lay, clerical, and episcopal supermajorities larger than those required to pass it. The reason it is important to recognize this is because the temptation for the orthodox faithful in the Anglican Church of Canada will be to look upon this as the end of a decades long battle of which they are already weary. This is not the end, but rather the beginning. The liberals may not have had the numbers to overcome the constitutional roadblocks that were wisely placed in the way of quick and easy changes to canon law but they clearly outnumber the orthodox and they are not giving up. Indeed, it is quite apparent that they came to Synod with their Plan B already in place in the event they lost the vote. Their Plan B is basically to treat canon law in the same way in which they have long treated the Holy Scriptures, the Creeds, and the traditions of the Church – as texts that can mean anything, which is another way of saying they mean nothing, and therefore mean whatever they want them to mean. It is this sort of thinking, rather than the mere symptom which is their desire to redefine marriage to suit the alphabet soup crowd, that is the essence of the cancer of liberalism that has been eating away at the Church.

Indeed, the breakdown of the vote reveals that the path that lies ahead for the orthodox faithful will not be an easy one. The duty of the orthodox, when a portion of the Church has fallen into grievous error, is to win those who have strayed back to the truth. This is never easy, but it is much more difficult when those who have fallen away have the larger numbers, and especially when they are a majority even among the bishops, those to whom the specific duty of safeguarding the faith had been passed on by the Apostles. It is interesting that the motion received a larger percentage of the lay vote than the clerical vote. Twenty-one years ago Rev. George R. Eves in a book which addressed the growing divide between liberalism and orthodoxy in the Anglican Church of Canada at a time when the battle over same-sex affirmation/blessing/marriage was in its early stages (1) observed that the clergy were a lot more liberal, both theologically and politically, than the laity. If the vote at General Synod accurately reflects the thinking of clergy and laity today – and this is a big if, since it may simply suggest that liberals had control of the lay delegate selection process – then this would appear no longer to be the case. The laity are the largest segment of the Church and if they are also now the most liberal it will be that much harder to reclaim the Church for orthodoxy.

In light of this, the orthodox faithful would do well to remember the words of our Lord and Saviour as recorded in Luke 18:27 “The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.”

The fight for orthodox Christian truth has being going on since the very founding of the Church – the Apostles first encounter with Simon Magus, to whom the Fathers of the second and third centuries traced the origin of the heresy of Gnosticism, (2) is recorded in the eighth chapter of the Book of Acts – and will continue, according to prophesies made by both Jesus Christ and His Apostles, until the Second Coming. Explicit warnings against false doctrines and/or exhortations to remain true to the Apostolic faith are found in almost every book of the New Testament. With regards to the outcome of this ongoing war and the battles within it the faithful have both the assurance of the Lord Jesus Christ that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church built upon the Apostolic faith (Matt. 16:15-19) and the warnings given to particular Churches about the judgment that will come if they fall away from the faith. The letters to the angels – which in this somewhat singular use of the term means bishops – of the seven Churches of Asia Minor in the second and third chapters of Revelation are a particularly good example of this. Note the warning to the bishop of Ephesus: (3)

Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent (Rev. 2:5)

The falling away that is addressed here was less than the abandonment of the faith for which the term apostasy is usually reserved. Had the Ephesians been guilty of apostasy the warning would hardly have been lesser.

The assurance of Matthew 16 and the warnings of Revelation 2-3 do not contradict each other. The former is made to the catholic Church, the latter to particular Churches. The gates of hell, of which heresy and apostasy are weapons, shall never prevail against the catholic Church, that is to say, the entire or whole Church, but particular Churches within the catholic Church - and, sadly, Church history demonstrates that this is as true of entire dioceses and provinces as it is of individual parishes – can fall to heresy or apostasy. Fortunately, the same history also provides examples of particular Churches that have been recovered from heresy. (4) The orthodox must be ever vigilant for the “faith once delivered unto the saints” but must not succumb to despair when error appears to be in the ascendancy. The present situation in the worldwide Anglican Communion is a particular smaller-scale illustration of this point. However much the Church of England, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the Episcopal Church in the United States have been permeated by the leaven of liberalism, orthodoxy prevails in most of the other provinces of the wider Anglican Communion.

There are those who would object to depicting the marriage debate as one between orthodoxy and heresy. The grounds for this objection, when it is based on something more than mere squeamishness over the use of strong language, have only the most superficial sort of validity. That same-sex marriage has never been formally condemned as a heresy by an ecumenical Council is due entirely to the fact that up until the last twenty to thirty years or so nobody would have ever dreamed that the need for such an anathema might arise. That the Creeds do not contain a line to the effect of “and I believe in one holy, sacred, matrimony between man and woman” is not because this is something about which there has been no “quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus” consensus among the faithful, but because like many other truths about which the Scriptures are clear this one would be out of place there. Creeds, as the formal affirmations of the Church’s faith, are not intended to be comprehensive lists of all the truths she adheres to but of those upon which she rests her confidence in God’s grace. (5)

There is, however, a sense in which the objectors are right, but to the opposite effect of what they intend. The ancient heresies were affirmations of the Christian faith that deviated from orthodoxy on some essential point because of an overemphasis upon another. Sabellianism emphasized the unity of God to the point of denying the Trinity, whereas Tritheism was the reverse of this. Arianism denied the full deity of Jesus Christ, whereas Docetism and Apollinarism denied His full humanity. If this is what heresy is, liberalism is something much worse. Keep in mind the point made earlier about the push for same-sex marriage being merely a symptom. (6) The disease to which it points is a way of thinking in which individual wish-fulfilment is the highest good, truth can be discovered or created by majority vote, and every affirmation of the Creed, every tradition of the Church, and every statement of Scripture is open to an infinite number of re-interpretations to bring it in accordance with these ideas. Heresy affirms the Christian faith while distorting its truths, liberalism denies the Christian faith under the guise of an affirmation. It is far more dangerous than any mere heresy.

This does not make our duty to contend for the orthodox faith against liberalism any less than against heresy. If anything, the duty is greater. The same Scriptural warnings apply – but mercifully, so do the Scriptural promises.


(1) The book entitled Two Religions – One Church: Division and Destiny in the Anglican Church of Canada was self-published by Rev. Eves in 1998 and has just been revised and updated for this year’s General Synod. The updated version is available here: https://georgereves.com/books/two-religions-one-church/

(2) St. Justin Martyr, Apologia Prima, 26, St. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, I.23. St. Hippolytus of Rome, Refutatio Omnium Haeresium, IV.51 and VI.2, 4-15.

(3) At the time the Book of Revelation was written, this would have been St. Timothy, the same St. Timothy whom St. Paul recruited to join his evangelistic mission from the Church in Lystra in Acts 16 and to whom he later wrote two canonical epistles. Since St. Timothy was bishop of Ephesus until his death in 97 AD, he would have been the one addressed regardless of whether St. John’s exile to Patmos took place under Nero or Domitian.

(4) Take the history of the orthodox Church’s struggle with Arianism in the third and fourth centuries, for example. Several provinces which accepted or leaned towards the heresy condemned by the first ecumenical Council in 325 AD were later brought back into communion with the orthodox Church. There was a period, however, not long after the Nicene Council, when the Arians very much appeared to have the upper hand.

(5) Peter Toon made this point with regards to other truths. “Neither the Apostles’ nor the Nicene Creeds mention hell or Satan. To add to either of these the words, “and in one devil, tempter and enemy of souls; and in damnation to hell everlasting,” would sound odd; belief in Satan and hell is of a different nature than belief in God and heaven. The contents of the creeds point to realities which are to lay hold upon us and grip us in faith and love: Satan and hell are to be avoided, not greeted.” Austin Farrer said something that was very similar in Saving Belief: A Discussion of Essentials, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1964.

(6) An even more serious symptom is evident in the apology retiring primate Fred Hiltz made on behalf of the Church to Canadian aboriginals at General Synod and in some of the articles regarding dialogue with the Jewish community that have appeared in recent issues of the Anglican Journal. While dialogue and better relations between these communities can hardly be viewed as a bad thing per se, liberalism is willing to sacrifice the truths of the Christian faith to achieve these goals. One such truth is that there is only one true and living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The idols of pagans – whether we are talking about the gods such as Zeus and Odin that European peoples worshipped prior to converting to Christianity, the gods that North American aboriginals worshipped before being evangelized, or other pagan deities of other peoples – are demons. Another such truth is that the saving grace of the one true God is only available through the Redeemer He has provided for the fallen race of mankind, His Son Jesus Christ. Liberals appear to be willing to sacrifice both of these truths to achieve “reconciliation” with the aboriginals, and the second of these truths to achieve dialogue with the Jews. Stephen Roney, who is a member of the Roman Church, has pointed out how a denial of these truths is latent in Hiltz’s apology. For why the second truth should not sacrificed to the goal of better dialogue with the Jews see the chapter on evangelizing the Jews in Suicide - The Decline and Fall of the Anglican Church of Canada?, written by the “Anglican Billy Graham” Dr. Marney Patterson and published by Cambridge Publishing House in Cambridge, Ontario in 1999.

God’s Will: With and Without Means

Orthodox Christianity has always taught that God’s will is singular and immutable, i.e., that it neither changes nor contradicts itself. Due, however, to the fact that it was God’s eternal will to create other moral agents than Himself, i.e., other beings such as ourselves and the angels who are capable of making intelligent, responsible, decisions, different facets of the divine will can and must be distinguished. This is because such moral agents have, by definition, the capacity to resist the will of God – to disobey Him, rebel against Him, and, in short, to sin. This capacity is not absolute and rebellion can only occur within the limits of what God, in His Sovereignty, permits. Nevertheless, this requires that we distinguish between the ways in which God wishes or desires for us to act, and the ways in which He allows us to act. God has expressed the former facet of His will in His Law, including both the natural law written in our consciences at Creation, and the Moral Law revealed in His Word. His Law tells us what He wants us to do – love God with all our hearts and our neighbor as ourselves – and what He does not want us to do – everything forbidden in the Ten Commandments, such as idolatry, murder, theft, slander, coveting and the like. To go against the revealed will of God is to commit a sin either of omission or commission. It is never God’s wish that we sin, but since it was His wish for us to be responsible, moral, agents, He, permits or allows us to do so, in the sense that He does not prevent it by force, (1) within the limits that He establishes so as to contain the evil that we do and overrule it so that ultimately good is the result.

Another vital distinction is that which must be made between God’s will as exercised absolutely or directly and God’s will as exercised intermediately. The difference between the two can be illustrated by the account of the healing of blind Bartimaeus in Mark 10:46-52 on the one hand, and the account of the healing of a man born blind in John 9:1-11 on the other. In the former, Bartimaeus is begging at the side of the ride when Jesus passes by. Addressing Jesus by the Messianic title “Son of David”, Bartimaeus asks Him for mercy. Jesus summons Bartimaeus to Himself, asks him what he wants, and upon receiving the answer “Lord, that I might receive my sight”, says “Go thy way, thy faith hath made thee whole.” Upon this divine pronouncement Bartimaeus receives his sight. This is God exercising His will directly.

In the other account, Jesus and His disciples pass by a man who had been blind since birth. Jesus spits on the ground and makes mud, puts the mud on the man’s eyes, and then tells him to go wash in the pool of Siloam. When the man emerges from the pool he can see. This is God exercising His will intermediately – through means, or secondary causes.

Note that in the examples used to illustrate the difference, both acts of healing were miracles. C. S. Lewis defined a miracle as “an interference with Nature by supernatural power,” (2) which would certainly seem to apply to both of these events. Thus, while it is generally true that God’s will exercised absolutely is synonymous with His miraculous works, and His will exercised intermediately unfolds itself in natural processes, human history, and the like, there is a middle area in which God works the miraculous through means. In such cases, the relationship between the means or secondary cause(s) and the miraculous outcome is mysterious and inexplicable, as is the case with the mud used in the healing of the man born blind. (3)

As we have seen, created moral agents such a human beings and angels have the capacity to act against God’s will, within the limits that God has set to curb and contain evil. The rest of creation, living and non-living, does not possess this capacity and never resists God’s will. Furthermore, God’s will when exercised absolutely, cannot be resisted by any part of creation, whether it possesses moral agency or not, due to God’s Sovereign Omnipotence. It is a sign of the depraved thinking of our times that so many think that it is the other way around and that God cannot, in His Sovereign Omnipotence, work contrary to the natural laws that He Himself has put in place and which are one manifestation of His intermediate will. (4) Even theology, in modern times, has often been tainted with this blasphemous notion. (5)

It is God’s intermediate, will, therefore, that created moral agents can resist. More specifically, they can resist the revealed expressions of His intermediate will – the Law and Gospel. The Law, which consists of God’s commandments, expresses His will as to how we are to behave, and this is an intermediate expression of His will because God has made the fulfilment of this aspect of His will to be dependent upon the means of our own wills which He created with the capacity to disobey His own. The capacity to disobey is implicit within the capacity for voluntary obedience, which is essential to the moral goodness God desires and requires of His created moral agents. (6) When we exercised our wills in disobedience to His in the Fall, however, we lost the capacity for voluntary obedience and our wills became enslaved to sin.

The Gospel is God’s message of Good News about everything that He has done to rescue us from our sin. It tells how He gave us a Saviour, His Only-Begotten Son, Who came down from Heaven and became a man, Jesus Christ, Who being perfectly righteous and without sin Himself, willingly took our sins upon Himself and paid for them with His death on the cross, rising triumphant over sin, death, the grave, hell and the devil three days later. In the Gospel, God reveals His willingness to forgive our sins, accept us as perfectly righteous, adopt us as His children, and give us everlasting life in His eternal Kingdom freely, on account of our Saviour, Jesus Christ and His finished work.

The Gospel is an expression of the intermediate will of God. God’s willingness to receive us into His grace – His favour, unmerited by ourselves – is universal in extent. It is the world that was the recipient of God’s gift of a Saviour (Jn. 3:16) and it was for the sins of the whole world that the Saviour made satisfaction (1 Jn. 2:2). His grace is promised, however, only to those who believe in Jesus Christ (Jn. 1:12-13; 3:14-18, 36; 5:24; 6:35-40, 47; 11:25-27; 13:46-48; 14:6). It comes to us only through means. The atoning death of Jesus Christ on the cross as proclaimed in the Gospel was the means by which our salvation was accomplished. The Gospel itself, proclaimed in Word and Sacrament, is the means by which the grace, purchased for us by Christ at Calvary, is brought to us. (7) Faith, is the means by which we receive the grace.

Since God’s grace is communicated to us through means, we are capable of resisting it. Indeed, as fallen sinners, in rebellion against God, who are inclined not to trust Him, we are capable only of resisting, not of co-operating with grace. It is a distortion of the Gospel to present it, as so many contemporary evangelicals do, as calling for a decision, an act of the will on our parts. This heresy both underestimates the extent of the corruption of man’s will by Original Sin, (8) and distorts the repeated promises of the Gospel that God’s grace is freely given to all who believe. Belief is never an act of the human will. When we say “I believe this” or “I trust that person” we use the active voice, because, of course, we do the believing, but we could also say, in the passive voice “I am convinced of this” or “I am persuaded that that person is reliable” and we would not be saying anything different. The interchangeability of these active and passive expressions demonstrates the truth that even non-spiritual beliefs about ordinary, mundane, affairs are not produced by our wills but by the persuasive power of the objects of our faith. (9) What is true of belief about ordinary things is all-the-more true about belief in the Gospel, as Jesus Himself pointed out to Nicodemus (Jn. 3:11-13) and St. Paul spent much of the first two chapters of his first epistle to the Corinthian church demonstrating.

This does not mean that Calvinism is correct. Calvinism gets it right that unregenerate man is incapable of any sort of voluntary response to the grace of God, but concludes from this that God’s grace is not universal in extent, that God determined in advance that He would not save certain people, that Jesus Christ died only for those He had elected to save, and the elect are called to faith by an act of the absolute will of God (irresistible grace). This in effect denies that God communicates His grace to men through means. In an upcoming essay, I will address the Calvinist-Zwinglian denial of the grace-conveying role of the Gospel sacraments, but my point here is that the Calvinist doctrine nullifies the Gospel, even preached in bare form in the ministry of the Word, as a means of conveying grace. Irresistible grace requires no means and so, the Gospel, in the Calvinist economy of salvation, bears no more discernible relationship to the production of faith in the believer, than the mud that Jesus made bears to the healing of the man born blind. Indeed, it is difficult to see how the Gospel as Calvinists understand it – Jesus might have died for you, if you one of His elect, but if not you are out of luck – could ever produce saving faith, the confidence that one is in God’s freely given grace through the merits of Christ and His Atoning death alone.

The Gospel, free of these distortions, declares that that in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and His Atoning death and resurrection, God has freely given us full and complete salvation by His grace, which we receive simply by believing. The Holy Spirit, through the Gospel, persuades us of the truth of the Gospel, and when we are so persuaded, we believe. There is no further step that is required on our part, the Gospel by persuading us, has given us the faith by which we have received God’s grace. God does not limit the persuading ministry of the Holy Spirit to a select few that He has predetermined. That ministry accompanies the Gospel wherever it is proclaimed so that the Gospel contains itself the life-giving power to produce faith. Since, however, in the Gospel God’s gracious will is exercised intermediately rather than absolutely, we remain capable of resisting it to our own perdition. The blame for the damnation of the lost belongs to them alone, the credit for the salvation of the saved belongs to God alone.



(1) When speaking of the aspect of God’s will that “allows” or “permits” the sins of men and angels, “allow” and “permit” must be carefully defined in this way. In ordinary usage these terms suggest the idea of approval, or at least the withholding of judgement and punitive consequences, on the part of an authority. God never allows or permits sin in this sense of these words.
(2) C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, (Glasgow: William Collins & Sons, 1947, 1960) p. 9. Although in a footnote to this definition Lewis says that it is not theologically precise but “crude” and “popular” for “the common reader” it is not significantly different from the definition of a miracle as God doing things “contrary to the pattern known and expected by us in nature” offered by St. Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologica, I.105.7.
(3) St. Thomas, in the article of the Summa referred to in the previous note, limited true miracles to expressions of the absolute will of God which go against the pattern of nature. Noting the derivation of the word “miracle” from the Latin verb for “to wonder at”, he excluded events that have a secondary cause of which many people are ignorant, such as an eclipse, and acts like Creation which are outside the pattern of nature altogether. At least with regards to the second category of events excluded from the miraculous, this is much stricter than customary usage. Nevertheless, miracles-through-means don’t really contradict this because while the secondary cause of an eclipse – the moon passing between the sun and the earth – is knowable, the role the mud played in the healing of the man born blind is not.
(4) The terminology “the laws of nature” contributes to the problem. These “laws” are written in the indicative, rather than the imperative mood. They are not inviolable edicts, but descriptions of how we have observed natural processes to operate. A law of nature says that under such and such conditions, X will happen, because that is what we have observed to happen under these conditions repeatedly in the past. The predictive ability of the law will be highly accurate but it does not constitute proof that the opposite of X will not happen, much less proof that the Being Who put the natural processes in operation in the first place cannot suspend them when His purposes call for it. For an excellent treatment of this, and many more aspects of modern man’s naïve faith in science, see Gordon H. Clark, The Philosophy of Science and Belief in God, (Jefferson, Md.: The Trinity Foundation, 1996, a reprint of the original 1964 edition with a new foreword and short essay at the end both by John W. Robbins)
(5) This taint can be found in varying degrees. Outright liberal or modernist theology swallows the misconception that science has debunked the miraculous and either denies that the events described in Scriptural accounts of miracles happened altogether, or reinterprets them in accordance with naturalist presuppositions. Others who are more orthodox, accept God’s performance of miracles as being truly miraculous, but try to make the concept of miracles more harmonious with that of an inviolable natural order. C. S. Lewis, for example, in his otherwise excellent defense of the reality of miracles cited above, displays this tendency when he argues that the miracles God performs in the Bible, consist of His doing instantaneously things which occur in the natural order, but through long processes. The implication of the argument that miracles, viewed this way, are more realistic and rational, is that the natural order imposes limitations on God. The same sort of thinking is evident, in a more pronounced way, in the writings of Austin Farrer, although both men were too orthodox to take this line of reasoning to its ultimate conclusion. Then there are the various attempts, such as progressive creationism (Hugh Ross, et al), to harmonize creation with Darwinism. In these theories, natural processes are made to be to be the means of creation, at least for life. What all of these views have in common is that to one degree or another they elevate the natural order above the God Who created it and is Sovereign over it.
(6) For a fuller treatment of this point see my essay “The Nature and Origin of Evil.”
(7) “The power to impart God’s own forgiveness, life, and salvation Christ has placed into His Gospel: ‘The words I have spoken to you -- they are full of the Spirit and life’ (John 6:63). Through His word the disciples were made ‘clean’ (John 15:3), and by their repeating of this same word others will come to faith till the end of time (John 17:8, 20).” Kurt E. Marquart, The Saving Truth: Doctrine for Laypeople, Volume 1 of Truth, Salvatory and Churchly: Works of Kurt E. Marquart, Ken Schurb, Robert Paul, eds. (Luther Academy, 2016), p. 78. A few pages later Marquart wrote “The Gospel is an utterly unique form of communication. In Greek the words for ‘Gospel’ and for ‘promise’ are closely related. Unlike the Law, which threatens, the Gospel is pure promise. Fulfilled in Christ (2 Cor. 1:20), God’s saving promises actually carry in and with them the very things promised. The word for ‘promise’ can mean also ‘the ghint promised,’ and these two senses can run together into one (as in Gal. 3:22; Eph. 3:6, Heb. 6:12, 17). As live divine promise, the Gospel is much more than information. This ‘more’ may be compared to the difference between a letter and a check: the letter might promise a birthday gift, but the check actually conveys it.” (p. 81). Admirers of Marshall McLuhan might appreciate the inversion of his most famous words in Marquart’s next sentence “Here it is a case of the message being the medium – for imparting the very things the message names and describes.”
(8) The ancient heresy of Pelagianism denied Original Sin and taught that man retained his full capacity for voluntary obedience after the Fall. A modified version of the heresy known as Semi-Pelagianism taught that man retained his capacity for voluntary obedience but that it required the assistance of the grace of God. The synergism, decisionism, or Arminianism (the most common term, but the most inaccurate as it properly refers to a much more precise theological position) of contemporary evangelicalism is partially, although not completely, Semi-Pelagian.
(9) As John M. Drickamer aptly put it “Christian faith is not a human achievement. It is a gift of God. We cannot choose to believe the Gospel, to have faith in Christ (John 6:29, 44; 1 Corinthians 2:14, 12:3). We do not choose to believe anything. We do not choose to believe that today’s weather is bright and sunny. We believe that the day is sunny or rainy depending on what comes down from the sky and makes an impression on our eyes and skin.” John M. Drickamer, What is the Gospel? It is Finished, (1991) p. 2. (This book is a self-published collection of the author’s articles that had previously appeared in Christian News newspaper).