The Right Word(s) for Opposing Liberalism

In a social media group devoted to Canadian Politics last week, I saw someone make the claim that the old Conservatives have disappeared and been replaced by the Reform/Alliance types and that today’s Liberals are where the Conservatives were forty plus years ago.  She was half-right.  The part she got wrong, however, was the exact opposite of the truth, a fact of which I informed her. 

 

It is true that those who call themselves “Conservatives”, big or little c, today, are basically a watered down version of what the Reform/Alliance was in the final decade of the last century, which was a populist party that was “conservative” only in the American sense of the word, a sense which has no roots deeper than the (classical) liberalism upon which the United States was founded and which is not significantly different from the original philosophy and platform of the Liberal Party (which called itself Reform in the era of Confederation).  The shift from the old Canadian conservatism to American-style neo-conservatism is not however, as this lady seemed to think, adequately explained by the dropping of “Progressive” from the party’s title. “Progressive” was not part of the party’s title in Confederation but was added to it about a decade after the old “Progressive” party – a farmers’ populist party – dissolved.  This was done because John Bracken, the premier of my province at that time, had been asked to take over the leadership of the federal Conservatives and made this a condition of his acceptance.  Bracken had been premier of Manitoba since 1922 (he was the longest to serve in this office), initially governing as leader of the provincial version of the Progressive Party (which at first called itself the United Farmers of Manitoba), then after the party collapsed as leader of the Manitoba Liberals.  When “progressive” was added to the title of the Conservative Party therefore, it was with the sense of “western, agrarian, populist” and not the sense it normally has in politics.

 

It is not true that today’s Liberals, big or small l, are where the old Conservatives were prior to neo-conservatism.  On one important matter they are portraying themselves as taking the position of the old Conservatives, the matter of standing up for Canada against the threat of American takeover.  Note that the threat and their stance against it conveniently came at the time when they were facing an historical defeat in a Dominion election.  That Canadians bought this posturing from the Liberals - the reverse of their historical position which had been to push for closer economic, cultural and political ties between Canada and the United States – can probably be attributed to neo-conservatism’s takeover of the Conservative party, although the Conservatives having betrayed their old position for that of the Liberal Party by no means logically implies that the Liberals can be trusted to stand up for the old Conservative position.  For most of the past thirteen years, the Liberals have positioned themselves not where the old Conservatives were prior to neo-conservatism, but in territory that forty-some years ago would have been regarded as beyond the pale in the land of the looney Left.   They were taking positions on moral, social, and cultural matters that as recently as twenty years ago, liberals of my acquaintance insisted could not possibly be the direction towards which their movement was heading and which until about twenty years ago, would have been regarded as too far to the Left even by some members of the NDP. (1)  Indeed, the Liberals’ relentless insistence on shoving this looney-tunes nonsense down Canadians throats, no matter how unpopular it was, significantly contributed to the rapidly declining polls from which they were rescued by a change in leadership around the time the jackass that the Americans had recently returned to the White House started relentlessly threatening us with Anschluss.  The current Liberal leader, whom I call Blofeld due to his resemblance to the last actor to play that character in a James Bond film, (2) is not the exact replica of his predecessor, whom I call Captain Airhead for obvious reasons, that the neo-conservative media try to make him out to be.  Nevertheless the Liberal Party he leads, while perhaps somewhat closer to the centre than before, is still out there in left field.

 

In the same social media discussion I said that I am no longer comfortable describing myself as a “conservative” since over the course of my lifetime I have seen this word co-opted by the neo-conservatives and redefined to mean what it means in the United States, i.e., the older form of American liberal.  I am comfortable with the term “conservative” only in the older and better sense of the word, the sense associated in Canada with Sir John A. Macdonald and the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker, with humourist/economist Stephen Leacock, philosopher George Grant, and historian Donald Creighton.  The “conservative” whose conservatism is that of John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown and Diefenbaker’s Those Things We Treasure rather than that of National Review and Fox News, a conservatism that looks back to Edmund Burke and better yet Richard(s) Hooker and Field, Dean Swift, John Dryden and Dr. Johnson rather than to John Locke and J. S. Mill.  A conservatism that is all about tradition, order, and continuity, which places honour, loyalty, and the virtues of Christendom and the age of chivalry above the values of commercialism and mercantilism. A conservatism which believes in freedom in community rather than in isolated and atomized individuals, which trusts the Westminster parliamentary system that has been refined during the course of a thousand years of history over any constitution drawn up on paper three centuries ago by revolutionaries who wanted a break from the past, and which believes in the institution of royal monarchy with its prescriptive authority and its superior representative ability due to its transcendence of partisan politics over the crass republicanism that makes the highest political office the prize of a highly divisive popularity contest and which is born out of thinking Satan’s thoughts after him.  Since the neo-conservatives have been so successful in divorcing the term from these associations I prefer the older term Tory and gladly self-apply the term reactionary, derived from the movement that put an end to Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, that progressives (in the normal sense of the word, not agrarian populists) have long used of non-progressives who are not content with merely questioning liberalism’s most recent ideas.

 

Shortly after the aforementioned discussion it occurred to me that in the sphere of religion and theology I feel largely the same way about the term “evangelical.”  When I first encountered this word as a young Christian it was used to mean something like “non-liberal Protestant”.  To clarify, “liberal” in the preceding sentence does not have its political connotation but refers to someone who holds to revisionist theology, that is to say, theology that has been revised in accordance with the mistaken notion that Modern discoveries of various sorts (scientific, critical, etc.) have placed such things as the historical accuracy of the Scriptures and the possibility of miracles outside the realm of the credible.  Think of the kind of person who says that he believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ but by this does not mean what Christians have historically and traditionally meant by this - that the eternal Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, at one point in history entered the womb of the Blessed Virgin, took a complete but sinless human nature at the moment into His own eternal Person from the moment it was formed and from that point forward was both fully God and fully Man in One Person, the Person Who upon His birth was given the name Jesus and Who fulfilled the prophecy of the Christ – but rather means that there is a spark of divinity in all people (as the ancient Gnostic heretics taught) that was bigger or more apparent in Jesus.  Or the kind of person who says that he believes in the resurrection of Jesus Christ but who also thinks that His bones might be discovered some day.  From the moment I became aware of this kind of liberalism, I loathed it as much if not more than the political ideology by the same name. (3)

 

That having been said, even back in the ‘90’s I was not a big fan of using the word “evangelical” for Protestants who were “conservative” in the theological sense.  I learned fairly early in my Christian walk that this use of the word dated back to the 1950s when certain conservative Protestants – Carl F. H. Henry, Harold John Ockenga, Billy Graham, Fuller Seminary, Christianity Today – started to use it to distance themselves from fundamentalists.  “Fundamentalist”, while now used by progressives to refer to anyone from any religion who has not compromised the traditional beliefs of his religion to their liking, was coined in the early twentieth century by Protestant theologians actively fighting the takeover of their denominations by liberalism and originally meant a kind of conservative pan-Protestant alternate ecumenism (4).   Those who chose the term “evangelical” to distance themselves from fundamentalism, although they claimed they wanted a more intellectual approach (5), really meant that they wanted a more compromising and less combative approach to liberalism.  Twenty years later, writers within evangelicalism were warning that some in the movement were abandoning sound theology, at least with regards to the infallible authority of Scripture. (6)

 

There are other connotations to the word “evangelical” than “theologically conservative Protestant”, of course, and when the new “evangelicals” of the 1950s chose this word to distance themselves from the fundamentalists it was because the word was older and had these other connotations.  In the sixteenth century, Dr. Luther and the other Reformers used the word to distinguish themselves from the papacy and its followers.  Used in this sense it was synonymous with Protestant and in much of Europe today it retains the meaning of “Protestant” and is used of anyone who is Protestant in ecclesiastical affiliation regardless of what his theology may be.  In the Anglican Church, which retained her Catholic structure through and after the Reformation, those who emphasized her ongoing Catholicity and those who stressed her Protestantism often sparred with each other and those stressed the Protestantism formed a faction and called themselves evangelical.  In the eighteenth century, evangelical took on yet another meaning in the English-speaking world as it became attached to the emphasis upon a personal conversion experience in the revivals that attended on the preaching of John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Howell Harris, Daniel Rowland, Ebenezer Erskine, Gilbert Tennent, Theodorus Jacobus Frelinghuysen, James Davenport, Jonathan Dickinson, Samuel Davies and others.  This became the primary meaning of the word in North America and is the meaning which the new “evangelicals” of the 1950s, who largely built their movement around the success of the Billy Graham evangelistic crusades, (7) most clearly had in mind.

 

My degree of comfort with the term varies in accordance with these connotations.  None of them is entirely unproblematic.  The one with which I am the most comfortable is Dr. Luther’s.  He used the word because he did not want his followers to be called by his own name (8) but by the name of the Gospel.  The implication, however, is that the doctrine of justification by faith alone is “the Gospel”, that it had been lost, and that he had rediscovered it.  Dr. Luther did not actually think this way, but since him it has been taken this far.  I know of some, for example, who think that all of the ancient Churches, not just Rome, but the churches of the East and the further East, lost the Gospel ages ago and that it was only rediscovered in the sixteenth century.  These are blissfully ignorant of the fact that their view of Church history is both heretical and identical with that of all the sects that they label “cults.”  The doctrine of justification by faith alone, important as it is, is not the Gospel.  If it were the Gospel, then Christianity would be saying to the world “we’ve got good news for you, all you have to do is believe” and worded that way the doctrine ceases to be a precious truth and becomes the noxious heresy of antinomianism. (9) Any truth can become a heresy if focused on to the point that we lose sight of other necessary truths.  In the early Church, the deity of Jesus Christ and His humanity, the oneness and the Threeness of God, were each twisted into heresies that denied their complementary truths.  The same is done to justification by faith alone when it is made out to be the Gospel, rather than ancillary to the Gospel.  The Gospel is that Jesus Christ, the Eternal Son of God become Man for us, died for our sins, according to the Scriptures and was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and was seen by a multitude of witnesses (1 Cor. 15:3ff). This message, the Good News that Christianity is commanded to preach to the world, is central to the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, the Creed that is most truly universal being confessed by all the ancient Churches, including the Roman, and by the three main Reformation traditions.

 

I am less comfortable with the North American meaning of the word than with Dr. Luther’s.  The revivalist message, that each of us needs to internalize our faith, to repent of our sins and commit to personally following Christ, rather than relying upon external Church membership and attendance, is sound enough.  Unfortunately, it is often preached in an unhealthy way that has the opposite effect to that of Dr. Luther’s evangelical message.  Dr. Luther, in emphasizing justification by faith alone, directed the believer to look outside himself, through the eyes of faith, to his Redeemer proclaimed in the Gospel (that He died for our sins – it is finished – and rose again, objective, external, historical facts).  North American evangelicalism, by contrast, tends to turn the believer’s eyes back onto himself, to get him to constantly question whether his faith experience is real, and to answer the call of the evangelist repeated times, with decreasing levels of assurance each time.  If sixteenth century evangelicalism tended towards the error of confusing the ancillary doctrine of justification by faith alone with the Gospel itself, North American evangelicalism tends towards the error of confusing “ye must be born again” with the Gospel, a worse error because these words, by stating the need of the soul of fallen man, are closer in nature to Law than Gospel.  It lends to the problem of the inner-directed gaze by tying the re-birth, contrary to the Church Fathers, the ancient Churches, the three branches of the Magisterial Reformation, not to the Sacrament of Baptism which like the internal work of the Holy Spirit of which it is the outward symbol cannot (and need not) be repeated and in which the recipient is passive but to a personal act of repentance and (re-)dedicating oneself to Christ which is active on the part of the participant, which can be repeated, and which ought to be repeated as the need arises. (10)

 

The connotations of evangelical in the Anglican context, to the extent they are distinct from the previous two sets, are those with which I am least comfortable.  In the sixteenth century, evangelical as applied to the reformed Church of England had Dr. Luther’s meaning, today it is closer to the generic North American meaning, but in between it was the name of a faction or party within the reformed Church of England.  That forming a faction or party within the Church is a bad thing to do is one of the main themes of St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians.  Of course, someone might respond that this point could be raised against the Anglican Church’s post-Reformation status as a distinct Church.  The answer to this, of course, is that in the New Testament there was a huge difference between the factions within the Corinthian Church declaring themselves to be “of Apollos”, or “of Cephas” or “of Paul” on the one hand, and the distinction on the other hand between “the Church in Galatia” or “the Church in Thessalonica” or between the seven Churches to whom letters are addressed in the second and third chapters of the Apocalypse.  In the English Reformation, when the Church of England in conjunction with Parliament declared herself free from the usurped authority of the Patriarch of Rome, she did not excommunicate said Patriarch nor did she excommunicate the Latin Church that remained under his authority.  The excommunication ran entirely in the opposite direction, demonstrating where the spirit of schism truly lay. (11)   Indeed, apart from its factionalism what I dislike the most about the Anglican Church’s evangelical faction is the low value it places on the efforts of the English Reformers to not be schismatic, to maintain continuity with the pre-Reformation Church, to keep the reforms moderate and conservative, and to be guided by how the Church of the first millennium and especially the early Patristic centuries interpreted the Scripture in making what reforms she made.  The evangelical faction of the Anglican Church has undergone many internal changes, (12) what has remained consistent about it is that it stresses things that we have in common with only the Lutherans, Reformed, and some of the separatist sects above the faith, spelled out in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds which we have in common with all of the ancient Churches as well as the Lutherans, the Reformed on their best days, and slightly fewer of the separatist sects and other things (liturgical worship, three-fold historical ministry with episcopal government, etc.) that we have in common with the other ancient Churches and some of the Lutherans.  The proper hierarchy of value is that the common faith is most important, followed by the other things we have in common with all the ancient Churches, followed by the things we have in common with the Lutherans and Reformed.

 

With these misgivings about these three historical uses of the term and especially since the one with which I am most comfortable, Dr. Luther’s, has decayed into the contemporary European usage in which it is a synonym for Protestant regardless of theology, I would very much prefer that another term be used for a theological conservative.  Fundamentalist would be better except that around the time that the new evangelicalism was distancing itself from fundamentalism, fundamentalism was narrowing its own self-identity in less-than-desirable ways (13).  Catholic would be better yet were it not for the fact that most Protestants have conceded it to Rome making it impossible for anybody else to use it without a disclaimer as long as the Oxford English Dictionary.  This leaves us with orthodox, which has never been conceded to the Eastern Church the way Catholic has been to the Roman (traditionalist Roman Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants have always used it and it has long been the preferred term of those Anglicans who stress the importance of maintaining continuity in doctrine, structure, worship and practice with the Church of the first millennium, especially the first five centuries), and would have been the best option regardless since it has been the term for doctrinal soundness since the very beginning.

 

 

 

 (1)   It was roughly twenty years ago that one NDP member, Bev Desjarlais, voted against Bill C-38, which established the legal fiction of same-sex marriage across the Dominion, although it cost her the nomination of her party in the next election. The Liberals of the last thirteen years have moved much further down the slippery-slope from the Civil Marriage Act.

(2)   The resemblance is almost as remarkable as that between David Bentley Hart, the lay Eastern Orthodox theologian whose liberal Protestant views pass as traditional Eastern Orthodox ones to Westerners who are not sufficiently read in the theology of the East to know the difference and the late M*A*S*H actor David Ogden Stiers (after Stiers grew a beard in the mid ‘90’s) or between Captain Airhead’s current girlfriend and actress Zooey Deschanel.

(3)   The term “liberal” in both instances refers to the acceptance of Modern ideas over older, classical and traditional ideas.  About a century ago “liberal” theologians were called Modernists which is more accurate label.  The term “liberal” comes from the Latin word for “generous”.  Whether in the realm of politics or theology, it is a form of self-flattery and those who do not themselves identify as “liberals” seldom see in “liberals” the generosity and broad-mindedness they claim for themselves, quite the opposite.

(4)   As represented, for example, by the volumes The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, edited by A. C. Dixon, Louis Meyer, and R. A Torrey, originally published in twelve volumes from 1910 to 1915, then rebound in the four volumes they have been published as ever since in 1917.  Dixon was a Baptist minister, Meyer a Reformed Presbyterian, Torrey a Congregationalist, and the contributors included Presbyterians such as James Orr, A. T. Pierson, and B. B. Warfield, Baptists such as E. Y. Mullins, G. Campbell Morgan, and Thomas Spurgeon, Anglicans such as Dyson Hague, W. H. Griffith Thomas, Handley Moule, G. Osborne Troop and C. T. Studd, Methodists such as A. C. Gaebelein and John L. Nuelson, Lutheran Frederic Bettex, A. J. Pollack of the Plymouth Brethren, and various other contributors from these and other denominations.

(5)   A laughable claim since they were hardly more scholarly then the men who contributed to The Fundamentals, note 4 vide supra.  Mark A. Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994) was a tremendous indictment of the movement’s efforts in this regards after four decades.  Perhaps if “intellectual” is taken in the uncomplimentary sense with which Tom Wolfe used to use or as is used by historian Paul Johnson in his Intellectuals (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988) it might be defensible.

(6)   Harold Lindsell, The Battle for the Bible (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 1976) followed by his The Bible in the Balance (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 1979) for example.  A decade later Francis Schaeffer addressed the declining doctrinal standards of evangelicalism in his last book The Great Evangelical Disaster (Wheaton: Crossway, 1984).

(7)   Apart from doing what he was most famous for doing, Billy Graham was the founder of Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of the new evangelicalism.  Carl F. H. Henry was the magazine’s first editor.

(8)   As Robert Burns said “the best laid scheme o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.”

(9)   Gospel means “good news”.  If “justification by faith alone” were the Gospel this would mean that it is itself the central content of the message of Christianity.  The very wording, “justification by faith alone”, however, should make it obvious that this is not the kerygma but a theological formulation.  If you try to express what “justification by faith alone” means as a message addressed to people in the second person then you end up with “all you have to do is believe”.  There is a huge difference between saying that “all you have to do is believe” is Christianity’s message to a fallen and sinful world and saying that Christianity’s message is “God has given us a Saviour, His Only-Begotten Son, Who became a man just like us except without sin, Who died for our sins upon the cross that He might take them away and defeat the enemies that have held us in spiritual bondage since our first parents, Who after He was buried showed His triumph over these enemies of sin and death by rising again from the dead, leaving the grave behind, showing Himself to His followers, and ascending back to His Father” and that we are to believe this message and trust this Saviour rather than in our own efforts to please God.

 

The second wording shows where the doctrine of justification by faith alone belongs, in the unrolling of the implications of the Gospel for us, that because the Saviour God has given us is so perfect and the salvation He accomplished for us so complete, He and not our own efforts is the proper object of our faith, just as He and not our own faith, is the proper content of the Gospel.  The first wording, however, expresses what you get when you make justification by faith alone itself out to be the Gospel.  This is not what those who call justification by faith alone the Gospel usually intend to convey, they have just not thought through the implications of what they are saying. 

 

In the text of the essay I identified the heresy which they unintentionally make themselves guilty of by sloppy thinking as antinomianism.  This is because if “all you have to do is believe” is itself the “good news”, this translates into “you don’t have to do good” which is the historical meaning of antinomianism (more precisely, antinomianism is the idea that Christians do not have to obey the moral part of the law), whereas justification by faith alone in its proper place, does not tell you that you don’t have to do good, it tells you that your efforts to do good cannot save you or assist in your salvation, and that you are to trust in Jesus Christ rather than them. 

 

Anti-protestant apologists, usually for Rome, like to refer to the heresy of “solafideism”.  This suggests that “justification by faith alone” is itself, and not merely its being placed in the centre of the Christian kerygma bumping out Jesus, His death, and resurrection, a heresy.  This, however, ignores the very nature of heresy.  At the core of every heresy is a truth which has been misplaced, taken out of its proper context, so that other truths are diminished or denied.  The truth at the core of Sabellianism (modalism, the denial of the distinct Persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is the unity of God.  The truth at the core of Tritheism (the denial of the unity of Being of Father, Son, Holy Spirit so as to make them three Gods) is the distinction of the Persons.  The truth at the core of Nestorianism (the separation of the deity and humanity of Jesus Christ so as to divide His Person) is that His human nature remains distinct from His divine nature even though they are united in His Eternal Person so that whatever is true of either of them is also true of Him, the Person. 

 

If there is a heresy of Solafideism this can only be because there is a truth of Solafideism.  If there is a heresy of Solafideism  which denies James 2:24 (and the larger passage in which it is found), then the truth Solafideism is the affirmation of Romans 4:3-5 (the wording of verse five is much stronger than what could be conveyed by the word “alone” or “only”), the entire chapter in which it is found and those before and after, the epistle of Galatians, Ephesians 2:8-10, Titus 3:4-8 (notice how the last two passages make the good works, the need for which they declare in the final verse, rest upon the foundation of their not having contributed to salvation by grace) and all the passages in the Johannine corpus (far too numerous to list but take the best known verse of the New Testament, John 3:16 as an example) which promise everlasting life to “whosoever believeth” in Jesus. 

 

Historically, if the Reformers placed too much importance on justification by faith alone by carelessly speaking as if they had recovered a lost Gospel, this is because Rome, despite having been officially committed to Sola Gratia since the days of St. Augustine of Hippo, had in practice been denying all the “to him that worketh not” and “not by works of righteousness which we have done” and the like found in these passages by exaggerating the importance and value of good works to the point of having created a treadmill theology in which people were kept on the treadmill of good works by having the carrot of salvation dangled in front of them, tantalizingly just out of reach, while they are whipped from behind with threats of hellfire or its unscriptural second cousin once removed purgatorial fire.  When challenged by the Reformers on this, Rome doubled down on this error, denied any truth to Solafideism (thus carelessly denying the truth of the passages just referenced) and made herself guilty of a far bigger and worse heresy than the one of which they accused the Reformers.

 

“Not by works”, which expresses what the “alone” in “faith alone” means much more strongly than the word “alone” ever could, occurs throughout the Pauline corpus of the New Testament.  It cannot be explained away by saying that the works in question are merely the ceremonial works of the Mosaic Law.  Titus 3:5’s “not by works of righteousness” clearly excludes this explanation.  So does St. Paul’s explanation of why justification is not by works – “that it might be by grace” (Rom. 4:16), that is to say, a gift.  Faith can receive a salvation that is freely given, works cannot, if they enter the picture then what they receive is a reward or a wage not a gift.  All “faith alone” was ever supposed to mean is that faith does not share its role in God’s order of salvation, the role of the hand that receives the freely given gift of God’s grace in Jesus Christ, with anything else.  Works cannot perform this role, neither can repentance which has the ancillary role of preparing the soul that it may trust in God’s grace, nor can the Sacraments which like the preaching of the Word are the hands of the Giver not of the recipient.  Anyone who considers that to be heresy, is himself the heretic.

(10)                       Note that the word “conversion”, while it can often mean accepting the faith for the first time, such as when we speak of someone from another religion (Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, etc.) or from a secular faith that masquerades as a non-religion (atheism, Communism, etc.) converting to Christianity, in which case it has the same one-time, not-to-be-repeated connotations of baptism and the spiritual work of regeneration, it is also  used in Scripture for occasions when a Christian is restored after a fall (see Lk. 22:32, in which Jesus speaks of St. Peter’s restoration after denying Him as a future conversion, St. Peter having already confessed the saving faith of Jn. 20:31 at Caesarea Philippi in Matt. 16:16 and been told that he was blessed because he had been enlightened by the Father Himself) and so denotes something that is repeatable (despite the nonsense which some early Christians held and which, due to the influence of the Shephard of Hermas, it took a couple of centuries for the early Church to fully repudiate, that each Christian is allowed only one big screw up and do-over after his baptism). 

(11)                       To make the point even clearer, dialogue between the reformed Church of England and the Eastern Orthodox Churches, more specifically between the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, at the time Cyril Lucaris, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, first George Abbott then William Laud, took place in the reigns of James I and Charles I in the early seventeenth century, long before Constantinople and Rome lifted the mutual excommunication they had pronounced upon each other in the eleventh century.  Although the leadership of the English Church never formally put this into writing, this early dialogue demonstrates that they regarded the excommunications of the eleventh century as political rather than valid and did not see themselves as bound by the papal excommunication of the East now that they had repudiated Rome’s usurped authority (Dr. Luther had a similar attitude).

(12)                       When the faction first formed it was very hard-core Calvinist to the point that it accused orthodox Churchmen who did not think that the canons of Dort should be binding on Anglicans or double predestination the subject of every sermon of “Arminianism” although few if any of those so accused were adherents to the tenets of the Remonstrance.  In the eighteenth century, the preaching of the Wesleys – although they were not of the evangelical faction themselves but are considered to have been evangelicals because they were among the first of the North American sense of the word – brought both a form of Arminianism that was quite modified from the Dutch original into Anglican evangelicalism.  The Calvinists remained, now as a sub-faction within the evangelical faction, somewhat ironically (the evangelicals had historically been the liberal faction of the Church) considered the more conservative sub-faction of Anglican evangelicalism.  Some of these seem to think that the Forty-Two Articles (the Reformed aspects of which were moderated when revised into the Thirty-Nine that have been the actual standard of Anglicanism for centuries) and the Lambeth Articles (which, due to Queen Elizabeth I’s wise veto, never became official the doctrine of the Church) are genuinely Anglican but that the 1549 Book of Common Prayer (mostly the work of Archbishop Cranmer) is not.  The Calvinist evangelicals are at their best today when insisting on strict adherence to the Book of Common Prayer and other classical Anglican formularies (this should include the 1611 Authorized Bible but often doesn’t) in worship, although this insistence is somewhat one-sided being the more vehemently protested against the inclusion of more traditional ceremonies and rituals than against slimming down the liturgy and making the sermon and music more resemble what you would find in a generic evangelical “non-denominational” mega-church. 

(13)                       What began as a cross-denominational cooperative movement against liberalism, became a movement which preached schism from other conservative Protestants (even within the same denomination) for not being schismatic enough (they called this second-degree separation).  While the movement remained theoretically neutral on eschatological interpretations, in practice it became even more dispensationalist than evangelicalism.  This may be due to non-dispensationalists (and non-pre-millennialists in general) moving over to the evangelical movement, but it is just as likely that dispensationalism’s bad ecclesiology appealed to their new hyper-separatism.  This, of course, meant that they became more committed to the “two peoples of God” nonsense than evangelicalism. Interestingly this did not necessarily mean they became more prone to the practical error of “Christian Zionism”, i.e., giving carte blanche support to the present state of Israel, than dispensationalist evangelicals.  Bob Jones Jr., president then chancellor of the fundamentalist university his father built for much of the second half of the twentieth century and certainly a dispensationalist devoted several pages of his memoirs, Cornbread and Caviar, to debunking Jerry Falwell’s more uncritical support of Israel by explaining that the country was secular and ungodly, persecuted Christians, hypocritically treated Arabs and Muslims the way they complained about having been treated themselves by everyone else throughout history, and at the time - as also today - were governed by a party formed and led by the leaders of the organizations that waged terrorist war against the United Kingdom in the 1940s prior to the partition of the Holy Land and their gaining independence in 1948.  He spelled out several of the crimes of the Irgun and Stern Gang in detail – can you imagine any evangelical dispensationalist doing this?  Similarly, John R. Rice of Sword of the Lord failed to get the memo that all dispensationalists must uncritically support Israel.  

 

I don’t include KJV-Onlyism in the list of undesirable elements of fundamentalism’s new self-definition.  The Authorized Bible is the preferred English translation of fundamentalism, actual KJV-Onlyism is held by some fundamentalists not by all.  While I am not a KJV-Onlyist in the sense of thinking that the Authorized Bible could not even hypothetically be improved on and that only someone involved in a Satanic New Age conspiracy or Alexandrian Cult would try I would say that until principles derived from orthodox faith are made the basis of textual scholarship again (such as, at the very least, that the correct text will be found in what has been read in the Church all along and not in manuscripts, regardless of their age, hidden away in obscure monasteries and libraries for centuries, see nineteenth century High Anglican Dean John W. Burgon for more such principles) and translators found who are at least the equals in scholarship of Bishops Andrewes, Overall and their co-translators (extremely unlikely, considering that the explosion of new translations coincided with the period of which Joe Sobran remarked “In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching remedial English in college”) a snowball stands a better chance in hell than of this happening.  By contrast with fundamentalism, evangelicalism went from a general preference for the New International Version to a general preference to the English Standard Version.   This took place because of the 2011 “update” to the NIV that made it “gender-neutral”.  Even before that, the value of the translation of which Rupert Murdoch’s company has owned the copyright since 1988, was grossly exaggerated.  In second-year Greek, one of my classmates remarked about how first year Greek had ruined the NIV for him.  I don’t remember there being much if any dissent to this opinion.  A few years after that I remember attending a service where the sermon was preached from the NIV with the text on a screen behind the preacher.  I happened to have my Greek New Testament with me, and looked up the same text.  The differences were far more than can be explained by the difference between “dynamic equivalence” and “literal” (nor could they be explained by differences in the underlying text, even if it were not the case, as it happened to be, that the Greek NT I had with me that day was not my Textus Receptus but the UBS fourth edition). Something that was a statement of fact in the Greek was a question in the NIV.  Proper names not present in the Greek were in the NIV.  As for the ESV it is the Revised Standard Version, a translation notorious for its liberal slant, the use of which was purchased from the National Council of Churches, then edited by J. I. Packer et al. sufficiently to allow for it to be sold under a different name and marketed as a “conservative” translation.

The Problem with Sermon-Centric Worship

 

What is sermon-centric worship?

 

Think of a church where every week the minister decides he wants to preach on topic X on the following Sunday, then picks Scripture readings for that day based on his topic and instructs the organist or choir director or praise and worship leader or whoever happens to be in charge of music to pick music that corresponds with the theme of his sermon.     Everything else in the service is subordinate to the sermon.   People who go to this church go there, first and foremost, to hear the sermon.

 

This is sermon-centric worship.   For many conservative Protestants, especially Calvinists and fundamentalists, this is the only way of ordering a worship service, deviation from which raises the suspicion of a weakening of standards of doctrine and practice.   This raises the question of what is being contrasted to the sermon-centric order of service.   If the sermon is deemphasized for something novel and contemporary, some gimmick chosen in order to appear more relevant and up-to-date and user-friendly and seeker-sensitive and whatever other such gibberish is currently in vogue, then our Calvinist and fundamentalist friends have a point.   When this sort of thing is done it is often, perhaps usually, a good indication that orthodoxy and orthopraxis have dropped a few places in the hierarchy of priorities of a parish and its leadership.

 

 

Suppose, however, that the alternative to sermon-centric worship were not anything novel, contemporary, or gimmicky.   Think of a church where the Scripture lessons are not chosen to support the topic of the sermons but where the preacher is expected to give a sermon explaining the Scripture lessons assigned to that Sunday in a lectionary designed to take the church through the written Word of God within a set period.   Think of a church where Holy Communion is treated not as something to be tacked on at the end of a sermon-centric service once a month or less but as something that should be done as often as possible, preferably whenever the church meets, and ideally every day, and of at least equal importance to the sermon and probably greater because it is the ministry of the Word as a whole, in which the sermon takes a subordinate position to the Scripture lessons, with which the Sacrament is on par.

 

The preceding description is what was generally the case with all churches in the first millennium of Christian history, remained true of the ancient churches other than the Roman after the first millennium, and from which the Roman church deviated not by adopting sermon-centric worship but rather by twisting Communion-centric worship into a caricature that provoked a response in the Protestant Reformation that gave birth to sermon-centric worship.

 

Calvinists are unlikely to be deterred from thinking their sermon-centric model of worship to be the only valid one by this fact.   Although the need for a greater stress on preaching – and for higher quality preaching than what had been the norm – was a common theme of all branches of the Magisterial Reformation, it was the Reformed far more than the Anglicans and Lutherans who developed the sermon-centric model, and the separatist sects, even those who would be appalled to consider themselves “Calvinist” in theology, usually took their cues on matters such as these from the Reformed.   Today, conservative Reformed theologians more than any other conservative Protestants point to what they call the return to the primacy of preaching, in explaining what was good and necessary and right about the Reformation.

 

Now in the late Medieval period, in the centuries immediately prior to the sixteenth which saw the Protestant Reformation, bad doctrine and bad practice concerning both preaching and the Sacrament became prevalent in the Roman church.   This is why the Calvinist position cannot just be dismissed wholesale.   Calvinism, however, has a tendency to lump doctrines and practices common to all the ancient churches, not just the Roman but those whose communion with Rome was broken in the first millennium, in with the errors particular to the late Medieval papacy.   The Protestant Reformation was a needed response to the errors of the late Medieval papacy, but Calvinism went too far in rejecting what was common to all the ancient churches.   Typically, when Calvinism rejected something common to Rome, the Eastern Orthodox, and the ancient near Eastern churches, it was not because it could demonstrate that the Scriptures opposed it, but because it could not be shown that the Scriptures required it.   This is a very bad way of approaching traditional doctrine and practice.   Doctrines, such as the truths confessed in the Nicene Creed, and practices, such as an annual celebration of Christ’s birth and Resurrection, common to all the ancient churches, should be regarded as good and sound and worthy of being retained and perpetuated unless it can be shown that the Scriptures are explicitly against them.   The rejection as “popish” of doctrines, practices, and traditions common to all the ancient churches rather than distinctive of Rome in the late Middle Ages is hyper-Protestantism, and is typical of both Calvinism and fundamentalism, the most sermon-centric movements within Protestantism.

 

Let us consider the difference between Protestantism and hyper-Protestantism as it pertains to that which was ubiquitously the focal point of church services prior to the Reformation – the Sacrament of the Eucharist.  What the Protestant Reformers objected to in Roman practice going into the sixteenth century was that while the Mass (the liturgy of the Eucharist) was said daily, the laity seldom took Holy Communion.  They were obliged to attend Mass regularly, but the only obligation with regards to taking Communion wat that they had do it once a year.   When they received Communion it was in one kind – the cup was withheld from them.   Their part in the Sacrament was, apart from the once a year obligation to receive it in this mutilated form, was to gaze on it and adore it.   All of this was particular to the Roman church and a fairly late development.   The practice of withholding the cup from the laity, for example, was no older than the eleventh century and the official banning of the laity from receiving the cup came barely a century prior to the Reformation.    Obviously, the reform called for here was to insist that both bread and wine be offered to the laity and to encourage the laity to receive Communion regularly rather than just adore the Sacrament.   De-emphasizing the Sacrament, however, so that it is no longer the focal point of the service, goes against the practice of all the ancient churches, not just against the errors of Rome.   A similar observation can be made with regards to the doctrine of the Sacrament.   The Protestant Reformers objected to the Roman doctrine of Transubstantiation – that during the Eucharist the bread and wine are transformed into the actual Body and Blood of Jesus Christ with only the appearance of what they were before remaining.   What all Protestants agree is objectionable in the doctrine of Transubstantiation is the idea that after the consecration the bread and wine are no longer bread and wine – the Real Absence of the bread and wine, if you will.   There are many different Protestant views as to what actually does happen which I will not be listing here as it is largely beside the point.  Suffice it to say that hyper-Protestants are usually drawn to Zwingle’s view of Communion as a mere symbol remembrance of the death of Christ, a view Calvin rejected although it is hard to discern a real difference between his view and Zwingle’s, which interpretation rejects not merely Transubstantiation and the aforementioned Real Absence of the bread and wine after consecration, but also the Real Presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in the elements of the Sacrament, which all the Church Fathers taught and which all the ancient churches hold to, with all but Rome generally regarding it as a mystery that does not require an explanation of the sort Transubstantiation was thought up to provide and for which such an explanation would be an impiety.

 

It should be clear from what we have just seen that the move to de-emphasize Communion to the point that it becomes something infrequently tacked on to a sermon-centric service arises out of the hyper-Protestant rejection of the doctrine and practice common to all the ancient churches – that which is truly Catholic – rather than mere Protestant opposition to the late errors distinctive to Rome.

 

Now with regards to sermons themselves, the Reformers taught that the clergy must not neglect the duty of giving sermons, that the clergy needed to be better educated so that they could better explain the Scriptures, that the sermons needed to be delivered in the vernacular, and should faithfully preach Jesus Christ and not merely serve some political agenda of the papacy.  There were all valid points and that they were all made indicates that the quality of preaching had declined significantly although the picture that is often painted of preaching in Western Europe on the eve of the Reformation is probably exaggerated.   It is doubtful, for example, that outside of university pulpits sermons were given in Latin to congregations that could not understand it, rather than being preached in the vernacular to congregations but when published put in Latin for a literate readership.   Certainly, the Reformers’ emphasis on the need for an educated clergy bore good fruit in the academic institutions established at this time for the purpose of educating clergy in the Scriptural languages and the art of interpreting them.

 

The hyper-Protestants, however, again took things too far.   In their doctrine of the primacy of preaching they elevated the sermon above the very Scriptures the sermon is supposed to interpret and explain.   Consider the difference between the two models outlined earlier in this essay with regards to the relationship between the Scripture lessons and the sermon.   In the sermon-centric model, the lessons are chosen to support the preacher’s topic.   In the traditional model, the preacher composes his sermon to explain the given Scripture lessons.   The traditional model has the sermon subordinate to the Scripture lessons, the sermon-centric model suggests that the Scripture lessons are subordinate to the sermon.   In some forms of Puritan theology this was spelled out explicitly.   The Puritans were the original English hyper-Protestants.  In The Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, his response to Puritanism, Richard Hooker addressed at length arguments from a leading Puritan of his day to the effect that the mere reading of Scripture in the lessons is insufficient to quicken the spirits of men, that the Scripture had to be preached, i.e., in a sermon to be effective.  As crass and blasphemous as this notion is – it translates into the idea that the very words of God are ineffective but human interpretation of those words is effective – it is frequently encountered among the sermon-centric.

 

As with all such errors the idea that the Word of God is ineffective unless preached in a sermon has its “proof texts”.   These are Romans 10:14-15 and 1 Corinthians 1:21.   The first of these is where St. Paul asks how they shall call on the Lord if they have not believed, then how they shall believe if they have not heard, how shall they hear without a preacher, and how shall they preach except they be sent, with the point of course to each of these questions being that they will not, that it is necessary to believe to call on the Lord, it is necessary to hear to believe, and to hear one needs a preacher who has been sent.   The second proof text is the verse where St. Paul says that “it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe”.   What can be said about the Puritan, hyper-Protestant, abuse of these texts is that it illustrates the Reformers’ argument about the need for a better educated clergy. 

 

The word “preach” in these verses does not mean “give a sermon”.   It is a word that at its most literal means to do the work of a herald, to proclaim.   In these verses it basically means to tell other people about Jesus.  It is hardly confined to the concept of giving a formal address to a congregation.   Indeed, the implications that are often read into 1 Cor. 1:21 are hilariously comical when the verse is read in its context.   The sermon-centric read it as if the unbelieving world regarded preaching in the sense of the act of delivering a sermon as “foolishness” but God has shown them up by using what they consider foolish to accomplish His saving ends.     This is nonsense of course.   The ancient world did not regard preaching qua preaching, i.e., delivering an address to an audience as foolishness.   On the contrary, they held it in the highest regard.   If you don’t believe me, read up on Demosthenes, Cicero, and the role of the art of rhetoric in ancient education, including the schools of Plato and Aristotle.    The only difference between a sermon and any other sort of public oration is the subject matter.   For a Scriptural example, think of St. Paul before the philosophers at Mars Hill in Acts 17.    Those who ridiculed him did so because of what he preached to them, i.e., the Resurrection, not because of the form or manner in which he presented the Resurrection to them.   In 1 Corinthians 1 it is just as clear I the context  that it is the content of what St. Paul preached that the unbelieving world regarded as foolish, and not the mere act of preaching.   Note earlier in the passage, the Apostle, who is rebuking the factionalism that had emerged in the Corinthian church, says that Christ did not send him to baptize but to preach the Gospel, adding that he preached the Gospel “not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect”.   In other words, the power to save in his preaching came from the cross of Christ, and not from his oratorical ability.   The verse immediately after that spells it out – it is the preaching of the cross that is foolishness to them that perish, but to the saved it is the power of God.  

 

Again, when the New Testament speaks of “preaching” as God’s instrument in bringing people to faith and salvation to people, “preaching” merely means telling people about Jesus.   It could take the form of what we more commonly call preaching today, that is, giving a speech in which an entire crowd is told about Jesus at once, like when St. Peter addressed the multitude on Pentecost or what Billy Graham became famous for doing in our own time.   It could also just be you having an informal discussing with your neighbor and telling him about Who Jesus is and what He has done.  

 

The disingenuity of those who conscript these texts about God using the preaching of the Gospel to bring salvation into the service of their case for sermon-centric worship is further evinced in that the examples from the book of Acts of preaching that is used by God in this manner are all of sermons that are addressed outward to audiences other than the church.   St. Peter’s Pentecost sermon illustrates the point well.   The entire church at the time was already assembled with St. Peter in the upper room.   After the Holy Spirit descended upon the church, however, the sermon St. Peter gave which yielded the fruit of about three thousand converts baptized and added to the church, was not addressed to those with him in the upper room, but to the multitude gathered outside.   Later in the chapter, when it says that those who believed “continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers” this is where we get our earliest glimpse of what the first church did when she gathered together to worship.   Their continuing “in the apostles’ doctrine” means that when they gathered they were instructed in the faith by the Apostles.   This is the beginning of what we think of as the sermon in the regular church service today.   Addressed to those within the community of faith that is the church, rather than outward, its purpose is didactic rather than evangelistic.   Together with fellowship, the Sacrament of the Eucharist (“breaking of bread”), and prayer, we have here the basic elements of the traditional order of service.

 

A frequent accusation which hyper-Protestants level against traditional liturgical, Sacramental, worship is that it is a show put on by priests acting out a prescribed role in which the laity are observers rather than participants.   This adds a level of deep irony to their advocacy of sermon-centric worship.   The word “liturgy” which we use for the order-of-service of traditional, priest-led, Sacramental services comes from combining the Greek words for “people” and “work” and involves far more participation on the part of the laity than a non-liturgical service.   Throughout the liturgical service, the clergy and laity interact with versicles and responses, mostly consisting of the words of Scripture, which introduce or close or both, Scripture lessons, collects, and other prayers.   For example even the Anaphora – the Eucharistic Prayer in which the elements of the Sacrament are consecrated – opens with a preface that begins with the priest and laity interacting in the Sursum Corda (“The Lord be with you” “and with thy spirit” “lift up your hearts” “we lift them up unto the Lord”,  “Let us give thanks unto our Lord God” “It is meet and right so to do”) and ends, the preface that is, with the Sanctus hymn sung or said by choir and/or congregation.   The single largest element in the liturgical service in which the laity plays a merely passive role is the sermon.   In a sermon-centric service, this part is extended and emphasized, and the interactive, participatory, liturgy is minimized or eliminated, so that such a service is far more limited in terms of lay participation than a traditional liturgical service.   A similar irony, directly related to this one, is that hyper-Protestants regard the priest-lay distinction as being an offence against the unity of the church that divides Christians into two classes with one being unjustly subject to other in violation of the “universal priesthood of believers”.   Apart from being unscriptural – the establishment of the Apostles as governing order of the church and their establishing two other Holy Orders under them is clearly recorded in the New Testament – and illogical – the nation of Israel was described as a nation of priests in Deuteronomy and this did not preclude the Levitical priesthood, therefore the universal priesthood of Christian believers cannot preclude the special priesthood of the Apostolic orders of ministry – and contrary to the universal practice of every ancient church for the first fifteen centuries of Christian history, this Christian era version of the sin of Korah resembles the Communism that is its secular counterpart by producing, whenever it is acted upon, a far greater gap between minister and congregant, than exists in the ancient, traditional, order against which it rails in the name of “equality”.

 

Finally, one telling indicator that the sermon-centric model of worship is deeply and dangerously flawed, is the language that one often hears when such preaching is discussed.   It is not infrequent to hear the sermon described in such a way as would suggest that the sermon itself is the Word of God.  Let us be clear.   The Scriptures are the Word of God.   The sermon is someone’s interpretation and explanation of the Word of God.   When the Old Testament, Epistle, and Gospel lessons are read out, this is more properly called “preaching the Word”, than when the homilist gives his talk on what these lessons mean, no matter how sound his hermeneutics may be.    The two must never be confused.  

Fulfilment Theology

South of the border, in the secular, liberal, republic founded by deistic Freemasons almost two and a half centuries ago in the first wave of the Modern Age’s revolution against Christian civilization, their current President, Donald the Orange, besieged by the barbaric and uncivilized forces of the mainstream media and the Democratic Party, has been doing what he does best, which is to make waves. On a side note, allow me to say that although I, as a staunch royalist and monarchist, disapprove of the office of President of the United States, as I do of the offices of all elected heads of state, I am rather inclined to think well of Donald the Orange, if only because, like Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon before him, he had all the right enemies.

One item that has recently gotten his critics’ dander up, is his having invited Dr. Robert Jeffress to speak at a White House Hanukkah ceremony in which he, that is Trump, vowed to crush anti-Semitism. Dr. Jeffress is a Southern Baptist minister, the present senior pastor at First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas, where he occupies the pulpit that once belonged to such homiletical giants as George Truett and W. A. Criswell. This is the church of which the late evangelist, Billy Graham, was a member for over fifty years.

My question for those who say that it was mal à propos for Dr. Jeffress to be invited to speak at this event is whether or not they would say the same thing if a rabbi were invited to speak at a White House Christmas celebration.

Those who are raising a stink about Jeffress point to his having said the following “Judaism, you can't be saved being a Jew, you know who said that by the way, the three greatest Jews in the New Testament, Peter, Paul, and Jesus Christ, they all said Judaism won't do it, it's faith in Jesus Christ.” Which is, of course, the orthodox Christian view of the matter. Anyone who says he is a Christian and disagrees with this is a heretic.

While it is easy to see why Jews would find this offensive and object, therefore, to someone holding these views being asked to speak at an event honouring an important Jewish festival, let us return to the question I raised. Would it be similarly offensive to invite a rabbi to speak at a Christmas celebration?

It ought to be. Christmas is the Christian festival commemorating the nativity of Jesus Christ, that is, Jesus of Nazareth Whom Christians believe to be the Christ, the Son of God. Christ is a Greek word with the same meaning as the Hebrew Messiah. It means “anointed one” and refers specifically to the One Whom God in the Old Testament promised He would send to deliver Israel, make a New Covenant in which His laws would be written in men’s hearts rather than on tablets of stone, and establish the eternal Kingdom of God in which He will reign on the throne of David. Rabbinic Judaism rejects Jesus’ claim to be the fulfilment of these prophesies. Indeed, the suggestion that this rejection of Jesus as the Christ has for almost two thousand years been more central to the identity of Judaism than any positive affirmation, such as descent from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the deliverance from Egyptian bondage in the Exodus, or the Covenant made at Mt. Sinai, while controversial, is defensible. According to traditional rabbinic teaching, a Jew doesn’t necessarily cease to be a Jew if he loses all faith in God and becomes an atheist, but he does cease to be a Jew is he is baptized a Christian. Traditionally, when a Jew so converts, his family holds a funeral for him.

If Jeffress’ holding the orthodox Christian teaching that Jesus Christ is the only way to God disqualifies him from being a speaker at a Hanukkah event, then the traditional teachings of rabbinic Judaism ought to disqualify any rabbi from speaking at a Christmas event.

In saying all of this, I am, of course, breaking one of biggest taboos of the day in which we live. It is considered, by the bien pensants of the progressive age, perfectly okay to criticize Christianity and especially for ideas and attitudes, traditions and habits, words and behaviour that are considered, rightly or wrongly, to be anti-Jewish, but it is considered unacceptable to criticize Judaism and absolutely verboten when that criticism points out comparable anti-Christian elements of the Jewish tradition. I have no problem with saying that I have no respect, either for this taboo, or for the people of whatever faith – and this includes plenty of nominal Christians – who impose it upon us.

In this taboo, we see precisely what is wrong with the interfaith “dialogue” that has sprung up between Christians and Jews since 1945. I place “dialogue” in scare quotes because this word suggests a two-way conversation and the “dialogue” in question has been anything but. The talk has been entirely about Jewish grievances against Christianity. Any attempt to raise the question of anti-Christian attitudes and behaviour on the part of the Jews runs the risk of being called “anti-Semitic”.

The blame for this belongs almost entirely on spineless “Christians” who are unwilling to stand up for the faith and cower before any attack. These cowards, although there has been no dearth of respectable and scholarly Jewish leaders who have spoken out against the charge that it was the traditional teachings of the Christian Church that generated the animus against the Jews that ultimately culminated in the Holocaust (1), have no inclination to do the same on behalf of their own professed faith. Instead, they jettison essential Christian truth as they bend over backwards to accept the blame for the crimes of a regime built on an ideology that blended nationalism, socialism, Darwinism, and various other strands of the Modern revolt against Christianity and Christendom with elements of pre-Christian paganism and occult mysticism, the Fuhrer of which, ridiculed the faith among his intimate acquaintances. (2)

The truth these “Christians” wish to throw out is that spoken by Dr. Jeffress in the quotation found in the fourth paragraph of this essay. It is a truth spoken by Jesus Christ Himself. Stated positively, it is the truth that Jesus Christ is the only way to God.

“I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life: no man cometh unto the Father but by me”. (John 14:6)

What Dr. Jeffress said was the negative side to this same coin.

Then said Jesus again unto them, I go my way, and ye shall seek me, and shall die in your sins: whither I go, ye cannot come. Then said the Jews, Will he kill himself? because he saith, Whither I go, ye cannot come. And he said unto them, Ye are from beneath; I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world. I said therefore unto you, that ye shall die in your sins: for if ye believe not that I am he, ye shall die in your sins. (John 8:21-24)

Earlier this year at its General Synod, the Anglican Church of Canada passed a contemptible and foolish resolution to replace the fourth prayer in the “Prayers and Thanksgivings upon Several Occasions” section of the Book of Common Prayer, with a “Prayer for Reconciliation with the Jews”. The prayer it is replacing was entitled “For the Conversion of the Jews” and reads:

O God, who didst choose Israel to be thine inheritance: Look, we beseech thee, upon thine ancient people; open their hearts that they may see and confess the Lord Jesus to be thy Son and their true Messiah, and, believing, they may have life through his Name. Take away all pride and prejudice in us that may hinder their understanding of the Gospel, and hasten the time when all Israel shall be saved; through the merits of the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The prayer that replaces it is for the most part the same, but it replaces “Look, we beseech thee, upon thine ancient people: open their hearts that they may see and confess the Lord Jesus to be thy Son and their true Messiah, and believing, they may have life through his Name” with “Have mercy upon us and forgive us for violence and wickedness against our brother Jacob; the arrogance of our hearts and minds hath deceived us, and shame hath covered our face” and similarly alters the final petition to remove any suggestion that the Jews need to accept the Gospel to be saved.

Twenty-seven years ago, the General Synod had voted to remove the third Collect for Good Friday, from subsequent editions of the Book of Common Prayer. That Collect had read:

O Merciful God, who has made all men, and hatest nothing that thou hast made, nor wouldest the death of a sinner, but rather that he should be converted and live: Have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Hereticks, and take from them all ignorance, hardness of heart, and contempt of thy word; and so fetch them home, blessed Lord, to thy flock, that they may be saved among the remnant of the true Israelites, and be made one fold under one shepherd, Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.

Oddly, the resolution to replace the Prayer For Conversion of the Jews has met with little outcry from those who rightly opposed the resolution, defeated at the same Synod – although one would think otherwise from the behaviour of many within the House of Bishops – to change the marriage canon to allow for same-sex marriages. Yet, it is arguably a much more serious deviation from orthodoxy. Sexual ethics and the sanctity of marriage, important as they are, occupy a lower tier in the Christian hierarchy of truth than “Jesus Christ is the only way to God.”

Not only, however, has there been little outcry over this but some have actually defended it. The Anglican Planet, for example, a generally orthodox newspaper, in June reposted excerpts from a few articles originally published by the Prayer Book Society of Canada written by the PBS National Chairman Rev. Gordon Maitland and the Rev. Chris Dow, both of whom were involved in the revision. Rev. Maitland, attempts to argue that the change does not actually deviate from the truth that Jesus Christ is the only way to God:

None of this implies that the Prayer Book Society is giving up on mission and witness to the uniqueness of Jesus Christ and his saving message of peace and reconciliation for all the world. The three prayers “For the Extension of the Church” in the “Prayers and Thanksgivings upon Several Occasions” section of the BCP (pp.40-41) are not being altered in any way, and we will continue to pray that our Lord’s Kingdom will be extended and that people will continue to be called into fellowship with Christ in his Church.

In other words “Jesus is still the only way to God, but we want to word it in universal terms, rather than singling any particular group out.” That’s all very well and good but I very much doubt that any but a small minority of those who supported the resolution interpret it this way.

Rev. Dow bases his rationale for the new Prayer upon a repudiation of supersessionism. I will explain the meaning of that word shortly. First, I will observe that at the end of Rev. Dow’s essay, which is worth reading in the full, unabridged version, he notes that the original ending of the new prayer “through thy wellbeloved Son Jesus Christ our Lord” was removed because “Our Jewish consultants for this project felt that this implied that the redemption of the Jewish people is to be achieved through Jesus Christ, thus contradicting the project’s stated aim of renouncing supersessionism.” Since the idea that the redemption of the Jewish people can be achieved other than through Jesus Christ is soul-damning heresy, the admission that the committee capitulated on this point ought to be sufficient grounds for any orthodox Christian to repudiate this project.

Rev. Dow, to his credit, goes on to say:

This raises a vitally important question: can Christian theology ever be entirely nonsupersessionist? In my view, this is doubtful. Though hard and hostile supersessionism must certainly be rejected, it would seem that a much softer, irenic and more theologically sophisticated form of supersessionism is inherent to the claims of the New Testament, which presents Jesus Christ as the long-awaited Davidic Messiah, who died for the sins of the whole world and rose again according to the Scriptures (1 Cor. 15:3-4), thus fulfilling the Law and the Prophets and inaugurating a New Covenant that emerges from the Old.

The distinction between a “hard” and a “soft” supersessionism is not original with Rev. Dow but is borrowed from Rabbi David Novak. He makes reference to Novak’s having said that the soft form of supersessionism “need not denigrate Judaism” and that Christianity cannot be truly Christian without it. Rev. Dow clearly hopes that the noting of this distinction, affirmation of soft supersessionism and rejection of hard supersession is sufficient to deal with any objections that might arise out of orthodox doctrine. In my opinion, it is not, and what is more, it avoids not only addressing the Christian truth that is being compromised here but also the real problem with supersessionism.

It is time now to define supersessionism. Supersessionism is also known as “replacement theology.” As the alternative label suggests it is the idea that God, in judgement upon the nation Israel for their rejection of Jesus Christ, has nullified His Covenant with them and replaced them as His people with the Christian Church. Those who are comfortable with affirming this idea as just stated would claim support for their position in the Parable of the Vineyard and similar passages. In Rabbi Novak’s terminology this is what would be called hard supersessionism. What he calls soft supersessionism, the idea that the New Covenant is an addition to the Old Covenant rather than a replacement for it, is actually a modified form of dual covenant theology. Dual covenant theology, while increasingly popular due to the spread of the very liberalism that William Law in the Bangorian Controversy had correctly argued was Hoadlyism taken to its logical conclusion, is unacceptable to orthodox Christianity.

There are many orthodox Christians who think that supersessionism is the traditional, teaching of the Church. I would argue, however, that there is a difference between what the Church has traditionally taught and supersessionism as defined above, and that supersessionism is something of a caricature of the orthodox doctrine. Consider again how we defined it above: the idea that God, in judgement upon the nation Israel for their rejection of Jesus Christ, has nullified His Covenant with them and replaced them as His people with the Christian Church. The problem with this doctrine, as stated, is that one could argue that it teaches that God has reneged on all of the promises He made to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and David, many of which, unlike the Sinaitic Covenant itself, are stated in absolute, unconditional, and eternal terms. Taken this way, it is comparable to teaching that God is about to send another world-destroying flood because of the way His rainbow, the symbol of His promise never to do so again, is currently being misused and abused.

The orthodox Christian doctrine is that not that God has reneged on all of His promises to Israel in the Old Testament but that He has fulfilled them. He promised that He would send them a Messiah, a Saviour of the bloodline of David, and He did precisely that when He sent them – and the world - His Son, Jesus Christ. He promised that He would make a New Covenant with them:

Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah: Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the LORD: But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. (Jer. 31:31-34)

Jesus declared this promise to be fulfilled when, at His last Passover Seder in commemoration of God’s ancient deliverance of Israel from Egyptian bondage, following the supper He took up the Cup of Blessing and instituted the Sacrament of the Eucharist declaring “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you” (Luke 22:20).

Now think that through. The passage in the prophet Jeremiah, where God tells Israel that He will make a New Covenant with them, is very clearly a promise of blessing not a warning of judgement. To declare that promise to be fulfilled, therefore, hardly constitutes bad news for Israel. Indeed, it is declared to be good news for Israel – the Good News, that is, the Gospel, which is “the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” (Rom. 1:16). Furthermore, since the promise of the New Covenant is part of the prophetic writings of the Old Covenant, it would have been breaking the Old Covenant for God NOT to have made the New Covenant. Finally, since the promise of the New Covenant explicitly declares that it would be made “with the house of Israel” this allows for no form of dual-covenant theology in which the Jews find salvation through the Old Covenant, and Gentiles through the New.

The Old Covenant, as St. Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews (3) clearly explains, was never the instrument of salvation in the sense in which we have been using the word in this essay, that is to say, salvation from sin and its ultimate consequences, but was rather an illustration of it. The descendants of Jacob had grown into the nation Israel while they were held in slavery in Egypt. Their physical bondage in Egypt was figurative of their, and the entire world’s, spiritual bondage to sin. God delivered them from that physical bondage in the events known as the Exodus which are recounted in the Book by that name. This salvation from physical slavery was figurative of how God would save them, and the entire world, from spiritual slavery to sin when His Son, Jesus the Christ, would bear the sins of the nation and the world to the Cross and make full propitiatory satisfaction for them through His death. The Old Covenant, which God made with Israel at Mt. Sinai shortly after the Exodus, looked backward to commemorate this physical deliverance that it might look forward in anticipation to the spiritual deliverance that it signified. The sacrifices it required, of bulls and goats, while they could not take away sin in themselves, depicted the sacrifice that would effectually do so.

On the night of the first Passover, when God sent the Angel of Death to strike down the first born of each Egyptian household in the last of the plagues by which He persuaded Pharaoh to release His people, the Israelites were told to slay a lamb and to mark their doors with its blood. Those in houses so marked would be spared from the visitation of the Angel of Death. This pointed to the day – the same day, as it occurred on the anniversary – when He, Whom John the Baptist described as “the Lamb of God which taketh away the sins of the world” would become the true Passover Sacrifice. The blood of that Lamb, applied to the metaphorical doorway of one’s heart when received in faith, spares one from something far worse than the Angel of Death. It spares one from what St. John in the Book of Revelation calls the Second Death – the eternal condemnation which awaits all who meet their death bearing the guilt of their sins. The blood of the true Passover was applied retroactively to all who, before the coming of Jesus Christ, had looked forward to the coming of the Messiah in faith, trusting God’s promise that He would send a Saviour. Since He came and accomplished the salvation of the world, His blood is applied through faith to all who hear the Gospel that He has come, died for their sins, and risen again, and who believe in His name. Whatever uncovenanted mercies we may hope are available to those who through ordinary human means have never heard of Him, it is the unmistakable teaching of the New Testament that those who know His name and reject Him, will, unless they repent of this unbelief and turn to Him in faith, perish in their sins.

There is no sane and rational way in which this doctrine can be said to be unfair to the Jews. Imagine if you will, a father, who on his son’s sixteenth birthday hands him an envelope. The boy opens the envelope and inside there is a card. On the card is the picture of an automobile. Outside in the driveway, the car, which is the real gift, sits parked. The son, thinking the card is his gift, thanks his father, has the card framed, puts it up on his wall, and parks himself in his room in front of it, gazing upon it with admiration. His father tries to explain to him that it is the car, not the card, that is the gift, and to hand him the keys, but he refuses to listen. The car rusts away unused in the driveway. Who in their right mind would say that the son had been treated unfairly?

Jesus Christ was given to the nation Israel as the Messiah they had been promised and to the world in general as the Saviour that we all needed. Furthermore, He was given to Israel on the same terms as He was given to the world, not with a special set of stipulations that stood in their way. Indeed, since Jesus was born into national Israel, lived among the Israelites all His life with the exception of the flight to Egypt in His infancy, called twelve Jews to be the Apostles of His Church, and commissioned them to take the Gospel to Jerusalem, David’s capital, then Judea, once the kingdom of Judah that had remained loyal to the House of David, then to Samaria, where the schismatic northern Kingdom had been located, before finally taking it to the rest of the world, it is clear that they were given preference, first dibs if you will, at accepting the Gospel. Nor has the door ever been shut to them. To the contrary, the famous illustration in the eleventh chapter of Romans compares the covenant of everlasting salvation to an olive tree, to which the natural Israelites are the natural branches, and Gentile believers are wild branches that have been grafted in through faith, saying that while the former, excluding, of course, those of the stock of ancient Israel who actually do believe, have been cut off from the tree temporarily by their unbelief, they can and will be grafted back into the tree when they finally come to believe in Jesus as their Messiah.

It would undoubtedly be more prudent to end on that note, but there is one more point that I feel I must address. In the New Testament, after the conversion of the first Gentiles when St. Peter was sent to Cornelius with the Gospel (4), the Apostolic Church met at the Jerusalem Council as narrated in Acts 15, to debate the question of whether the Gentiles needed to become Jews in order to become Christians. Their ruling was no, and St. Paul, who had become the Apostle to the Gentiles, elaborated the theology behind this in several of his epistles. He stressed the point that the ceremonial elements of the Mosaic Law which had been a wall, setting Israel apart from other nations as a kind of object lesson, which she constantly ignored, that she should not fall into their idolatrous practices, had been removed as such a barrier within the Christian Church. As the Book of Acts makes obvious, even as the Apostles were developing the Christian style of worship – meeting on the day of the resurrection, each week, for example - they, including St. Paul, did not see their ruling that the Gentiles need not be circumcised, eat kosher, etc., as prohibiting them from participating in the worship of Second Temple Judaism. Christian liberty was the doctrine, and it went both ways. Christians were free to follow the diet of the Old Testament and keep its festivals, but they were not required to do so.

In the more-or-less useless “interfaith dialogue”, dominated by progressives from both religions, that sprung up immediately after World War II, those “Christians” who have been bending over backwards to take the blame for Hitler’s atrocities – or the Protestants who have been pointing fingers at the “Catholic”, i.e., Roman Church – it has been argued that in the Patristic period a radical reversal on this Christian liberty was brought about, and the Church began to require that Jews cease to be Jews in order to become Christians.

There is, of course, a degree of truth in this but it is incomplete with no discussion of the radical change in the nature of Judaism that took place towards the end of the first generation of Christians. Jesus, His Apostles, and all the pre-Cornelius Christians had been Jews in two senses of the word. First, they were of the ethnic stock of Israel, descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Second, they practiced the religion that would later be designated Second Temple Judaism. (5) This was the religion established by the Old Testament – taking that term to include all the history, including the partial return from exile and the rebuilding of the Temple. This was a national religion – practiced by a people who were bound to each other and to the land in which they lived by the ties that set a people apart as an ethnos – led by the clergy established in the Old Testament, the Levitical priesthood, the national worship of which was focused on the Temple in Jerusalem. Both Christianity and what we call Judaism today began within Second Temple Judaism but Second Temple Judaism itself came to an end in 70 AD, when Titus of Rome sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple, half-way through the war that would end three years later when Israel’s last besieged defenders committed suicide as their stronghold in Masada fell, and most of the nation was scattered into diaspora throughout the Empire.

As a consequence of this, the rabbis, who had not been the clergy of Second Temple Judaism but a sort of lay teacher, associated especially with the sect of the Pharisees, became the leaders of those who continued to identify as Jews. Accordingly, their interpretation of the Old Testament has been the defining element of the religion known as Judaism ever since. For this reason it is known as rabbinic Judaism or Talmudic Judaism, the Talmud being the written compilation of rabbinic commentary on the Torah, on their own commentary, on their commentary on their commentary, and so on, starting well back in the intertestamental period. Jesus had participated in this traditional dialogue, as evidenced by St. Luke’s account of the incident when He was twelve and His occasional references to the disputes which were raging between the various rabbinic schools at the time of His earthly ministry, but was also a severe critic of it. In Second Temple Judaism, as we see in the Book of Acts, the rabbis greatly differed among themselves in their attitudes towards Christianity, the most positive in the New Testament record being that of Gamaliel, who had been a mentor of St. Paul before his conversion. After AD 70, the party most hostile to Christianity gained the uppermost hand in the rabbinic school, just as it itself became the top tier of post-Temple Judaism.

The explanation for this is not difficult to find. While Christianity could hardly be blamed for Rome’s actions in the Jewish-Roman War, as it had exactly zero political influence in the Empire at that time, and indeed, for a few centuries after, Jesus Christ Himself has both predicted the destruction of the Temple – see the Olivet Discourse, His references to the destruction of the Temple do not all refer to His own death – and proclaimed it to be an act of divine judgement. (6) When these prophecies materialized, the rabbinic attitude towards the One Who had made them, Whom they had rejected as their Messiah, hardened into hatred. Today, nearly two thousand years later, it is not hard to find rabbis who take a more positive view of Jesus, although obviously not accepting His claims to Messiahship. At the time, however, their descriptions of Him were such that Christians could only describe as blasphemous and their attitude towards His disciples was hardly amicable.

It was this new, strongly anti-Christian version of Judaism, aflame with hatred towards the One Who had prophesied the destruction of their Temple, that was denounced so vehemently by Church Fathers such as St. John Chrysostom. Obviously, this in no way justifies mistreatment of the Jews at the hands of Christians. It does, however, show that negative interaction between the two faiths has hardly been the one-sided affair with Christians bearing the sole blame, that the so-called interfaith dialogue of the present day often implies. Until that is properly acknowledged, no real such dialogue can ever take place.

In the meantime, it is hardly right for Christians to compromise the truth that Jesus Christ is the one and only Saviour of the world. Nor is there any good reason to abandon our prayers for the conversion of the Jews. See what the “Anglican Billy Graham” Marney Patterson had to say about this subject in his excellent book Suicide: The Decline and Fall of the Anglican Church of Canada? (1998) From the genuine Christian point of view, it is refusing to pray for their conversion and abandoning attempts to evangelize them, which would truly amount to Jew-hatred, not loving them enough to pray that Romans 11 would finally be fulfilled and they would embrace their Messiah.

So Merry Christmas everyone. For all the Jews out there, Happy Hanukkah and may you accept Jesus Christ as your Messiah. After all, we would hate to see you go to hell.


(1) See, for example, the late Rabbi Jacob Neusner’s “Sorting Out Jew Haters” in the March 1995 issue of Chronicles Magazine. “For nearly 20 centuries, faithful Christians have maintained that Judaism died at Calvary, meaning, Jesus Christ replaced Judaism and Christianity superseded it. This is anti-Judaism. Until Vatican II (for Catholicism) and its counterparts in Protestantism, that view prevailed universally. Classify this as the quite familiar theological warfare— all against all in God's name…None of these trivialities changes the world very much. None qualifies as anti-Semitism, because, by themselves or all together, none can have led to the holocaust of World War II... But anti-Semitism is not the same thing as casual bigotry, mere dislike of the unlike, let alone theological animus or a spiteful form of politics.” The most extreme version of the accusation that the Church is to blame for the Holocaust of which I am familiar is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair, (2002). Goldhagen was also the author of the earlier Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) which displayed a Teutonophobia that fell just short of saying that the Holocaust was caused by something in the German DNA. Goldhagen’s books have been rejected as vile tripe by serious historians, foremost among them being such Jewish historians as Raul Hilberg, Fritz Stern, and Yehuda Bauer.

(2) See Hitler’s Table Talk, a compilation of his private conversations as transcribed by Martin Bormann, Henry Picker, and Heinrich Heim.

(3) St. Peter in II Peter 3:15-16 makes reference to a Scriptural epistle that St. Paul had written to the same people to whom he was writing. Since St. Peter’s epistles were catholic epistles, written to the churches in general at a time when they were majority Jewish, and all of St. Paul’s signed epistles were written either to particular churches, usually majority Gentile, or specific individuals, the only epistle that St. Peter could have been referring to is Hebrews, identifying it therefore, although it is internally unsigned, as Pauline.

(4) Those who heard the Gospel in a multitude of languages at Pentecost in Acts 2, the “Grecian widows” whose neglect led the Apostles to establish the order of deacons in Acts 6, and the Ethiopian eunich whom St. Philip led to Christ in Acts 8, were all Jews.

(5) The word “Judaism”, or rather its Greek antecedent, was already around at the time, but it was used as a cultural description and only later became the proper name of the religion of the Jews.

(6) See, for example, the Parable of the Vineyard. Note, by the way, that while this hardly leaves room for orthodox Christians to argue that AD 70 was not a divine judgement, the preterist view that it fulfilled all Scriptural prophecy, negating both Romans 11 and all New Testament prophecies of Christ’s literal Second Coming in glory is utter heresy.