The
twenty-fifth year of the third millennium went by rapidly and once again we
find ourselves on the Kalends of January.
In 45 BC, Julius Caesar having revised the Roman calendar to approximate
the solar year, the Kalends of January became New Year’s Day for the first
time. It was not regarded as such in
Christendom for much of the Medieval period until in 1582 AD Gregory XIII
corrected the Julian calendar with the one that has born his name ever since in
the West. This ultimately had the effect
of restoring the status of 1 January as New Year’s Day although, unsurprisingly
when you consider that at the time Gregory was correcting the calendar he was
also conspiring against Elizabeth I, Lady Day on 25 March remained the civil
New Year’s Day in the realms of the British Sovereign until the change was made
legal and official in 1751. On the
Church Kalendar, of course, 1 January, the Octave Day of Christmas, has long
been the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord.
Each year
on this date I write an essay giving an overview of where I stand in my
political and religious convictions.
This is something that I borrowed, with a few modifications, from the
late Charley Reese, who was a long-time op-ed writer for the Orlando Sentinel with a thrice-weekly
column syndicated by King Features. Reese recommended the practice of a yearly
“full disclosure” column to other writers although other than myself the only
writer I know of to have picked up the practice is Baptist preacher Chuck
Baldwin.
In the
preface to his For Lancelot Andrewes:
Essays in Style and Order the poet and critic T. S. Eliot described his
general point of view as “classicist in
literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion.” I have frequently made use of these words of
Eliot, in which I find an echo and an update of Dr. Johnson’s famous definition
of a “tory” in his Dictionary, as an outline for explaining my own views. This is because each of these things –
classicist, royalist, Anglo-Catholic – is an expression in its own realm of
culture, politics, and religion, of the same attitude of belief in order,
respect and reverence for tradition, history and prescription, skepticism
towards and wariness of novelty and innovation, and outright antagonism towards
the prejudice in favour of the fashionable, up-to-date, and modern common to
all forms of progressivism, and this attitude has been mine by instinct my
entire life.
The late Sir Roger Scruton
said that conservatism is more an instinct than an idea and I fully agree although
I prefer to call myself a “Tory” or a “reactionary” rather than a
“conservative.” I would be fine with the
word “conservative” if it was understood to mean what Scruton meant by it. His book The
Meaning of Conservatism was first published in 1980, at the beginning of
the Thatcher premiership in the United Kingdom and the Reagan presidency in the
United States to explain what conservatism really is and that it is not the
ideology of the market and individualism that Margaret Thatcher and Ronald
Reagan took it to be. In this continent,
at least, his message fell on deaf ears and “conservatism” has largely been
used as a synonym for Thatcherism/Reaganism since the 1980s, although in the
last decade, due to the political career of the current occupant of the White
House, it has taken on the new meaning of populist-nationalism in the United
States. This is not, in my opinion, an
improvement, for while I am against many of the things Krasnov the Orange
purports to be against – wokeness, narcotics, a soft, weak, and indulgent
approach to violent crime, national character changing mass immigration, and
other things like this – I am no fan of populism and nationalism. Populism is the instrument of demagoguery and
nationalism, unlike patriotism, which is the instinctual and virtuous love of
country that ordinarily is the natural extension of love for family and home (think
of Edmund Burke’s famous remark about the “little platoons”), is an ideology
that makes an idol out of the nation. It
is worth observing here that the most prescient warning ever written against
the existential threat that a liberal attitude towards mass immigration poses
to the civilization formerly known as Christendom, the 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, was not written
by a Trump-style populist-nationalist but by the late Jean Raspail, a (Roman)
Catholic royalist like the late John Lukacs and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn,
whose writings informed my thoughts on the matter of populism and nationalism and
whose example inspired me to wear as a badge of honour that favourite label of
opprobrium of the progressive left, “reactionary.” What makes the replacement of
Thatcherism/Reaganism with populist-nationalism even worse is that the MAGA
movement has degenerated into a dangerous leader cult centred around an egotist
with a messiah complex. No,
Thatcherism/Reaganism was much to be preferred over this, just as Scruton’s
“sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created” is to
be preferred over Thatcherism/Reaganism.
While I would like to say
that what Americans, conservative or otherwise, do is their business and none
of mine, unfortunately what goes on down there affects us up here. I am a Canadian. Many, after saying that, would add “a proud
Canadian” but since I don’t like using the name of the worst of the Seven
Deadly Sins in a positive sense, I will say “a patriotic Canadian” instead, in
the sense of “patriotic” explained in the previous paragraph. I was born in rural Manitoba, raised on a
farm between the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers in southwestern
Manitoba, studied theology for five years at what is now Providence University
College (at the time it was called Providence College and Theological Seminary)
in Otterburne, Manitoba, and have lived in Winnipeg ever since. As a patriotic citizen of the Dominion of
Canada, as is still the full title and name of this Commonwealth Realm, I am
also a loyal subject of His Majesty King Charles III, as I was of his mother,
our Sovereign Lady of Blessed Memory, Queen Elizabeth II before him. Since I am a few months away from completing
my fiftieth year, I grew up in the period which began when everyone who
considered himself a conservative in Canada would have said Amen, or some
secular equivalent, to the sentiment just expressed but which saw the rise of a
“neo-conservatism” that looked to American “conservatism” – which is really
classical liberalism – rather than British Toryism, as its guiding light.
When I was eight years old,
Brian Mulroney led the old Conservative Party, to which the unfortunate
modifier “Progressive” had become attached, to an historical landslide
victory. Four years later he would win
another majority government but this would be the last time the old Conservatives
won a Dominion Election. The previous
year, the Reform Party of Canada had been formed and in 1993 most of the
traditional Conservative voters west of Upper Canada switched to the Reform
Party. I was in my senior year in high
school at the time and not yet old enough to vote but early in my college years
at Providence I took out a membership in the Reform Party. Under Brian Mulroney, I felt, as did so many
others, the Conservatives had ceased to be the party of Sir John A. Macdonald
and in this I believe my assessment was right at the time.
What I had not yet come to
see, was that the Reform Party was not a step back from the direction in which
Mulroney had been leading the party, but a huge leap forward down the same
path. The Reform Party maintained that
the Mulroney Conservatives had gone astray by being less than sufficiently
supportive of free market capitalism and by being too prone to compromise with
liberalism on social issues such abortion.
Indeed, the Reform Party’s avowed social conservatism was its biggest
drawing factor for me. In Canada in the
1980s a significant shift towards liberal attitudes and positions on social,
moral, cultural, and religious matters had begun, two to three decades after a
similar shift had begun in the United States.
This shift has been ongoing in both countries ever since and the primary
driving force in it, at least as far as popular attitudes goes, is the American
popular entertainment industry. While
Mulroney had the misfortune of being prime minister at the time this shift was
becoming disturbingly noticeable he could not fairly be blamed for it. As far as government involvement in the shift
goes, the biggest contributions were the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977, an
imitation of the American Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Canadian Charter of
Rights and Freedoms of 1982, both introduced by the Liberals in the premiership
of Pierre Trudeau. It was the Charter,
introduced at the very end of the Trudeau premiership, which empowered the
Canadian Supreme Court to act in the way the American Supreme Court had been
acting since the 1950s. In 1988, the
Supreme Court of Canada struck the existing laws against abortion from the
Criminal Code in Morgentaler v. The Queen. Mulroney failed to get new Charter-Compliant
abortion restrictions passed but he was also the last prime minister to
try. I am not trying to defend Mulroney,
of whom I had grown as tired as everyone else by the early 1990s, so much as to
make the point that on the issues that attracted me to it, the Reform Party was
mostly empty talk. In reality, of course, Mulroney’s single
biggest defection from Macdonald Conservatism was his signing of the Free Trade
Agreement with the United States. The
Reform Party, with its look-to-America neo-conservatism, wished to move even
further in this direction, which was, ironically enough, a move in the direction
of the founding platform and philosophy of the Liberal Party. Or perhaps it is not that ironic. Reform was the name of the movement in the
pre-Confederation to Confederation era, that became the Liberal Party.
As my five years in
Otterburne drew to a close, the old Conservatives and the Reform realized that
their competition would keep the Liberals perpetually in power and a “Unite the
Right” movement arose which after a first partially successful attempt finally
merged the two parties into the current Conservative Party early in the new
millennium. My membership ran out
shortly before the final merger took place and I let it expire without renewing
it. The result of the merger, I
correctly anticipated, would not be the restoration of the party of Macdonald
and Diefenbaker, but would be more likely to combine the elements I liked the
least in the two parent parties. This
marked the end of my getting involved in the partisan aspect of politics, at
least as far as the positive side of joining and promoting a party goes – I
have no intention of ever letting up on bashing the Liberals and the New
Democrats – and eleven years ago, after Stephen Harper with the support of
Captain Airhead decided that the privacy of Canadians needed to be
defenestrated in the name of importing America’s War on Terror into Canada, I
declared my intention to follow the example that I had long admired of Evelyn
Waugh, who stopped voting around World War II “on grounds of conscientious
objection”, because the Conservatives had failed to turn the clock back even a
second in all the years he had voted for them and if he continued to do so he
would be “morally inculpated in their follies” and would have “made
submission to socialist oppression by admitting the validity of popular
election if they lost” and declared that except in a case where a moral or
religious matter is at stake, he would no longer presume to advise his Sovereign
in her choice of ministers. In practice,
however, some circumstance, such as in one instance a friend and colleague
running as the Christian Heritage candidate in my riding, has always come up to
thwart this intention.
I have explained why I am not a “Big-C Conservative”, that
is, a partisan of the Conservative Party.
While the customary expression in Canada for those who are to the right
in their political philosophy but not partisans of the Conservative Party per
se is “small-c conservative”, as I already said in the fourth paragraph of this
essay my preference is for the term “Tory.”
Since this term is used in Canada for Big-C Conservatives in the same
way Grit is used for Big-L Liberals, I need to clarify that I am using it to
allude to the predecessor of the Conservative Party. In Britain, the supporters of the king and of
the established reformed Church of England in the English Civil Wars in the
seventeenth century were called Cavaliers and Royalists and after the
Restoration of the monarchy and the Church those who continued to fight for
their cause in Parliament rather than with the sword came to be called
Tories. Tory, therefore, has long struck
me as being the most appropriate terms for someone who, like myself, for whom that
sentiment or instinct in favour of the good things that are easily destroyed
but hard to create that Scruton called conservatism, takes the form of those
three more precise words from T. S. Eliot.
Since I have already stated
that I am a loyal subject of His Majesty I will start with the “royalist in
politics.” I have been this by instinct
my entire life. The institution of royal
monarchy represents tradition, continuity, the weight of prescription, authority
as opposed to power, and what G. K. Chesterton called the “democracy of the
dead” which is the only kind of democracy worthy of the accolades with which
the baser type is showered in progressive thought. Unlike the grassroots, bottom-up, democracy
of populism which exerts a downward, levelling, force on a society, royal
monarchy is an elevating influence and the virtues it inspires among the
subject-citizens of the realm(s) over which it reigns are the older and better
virtues of honour, loyalty, and duty rather than the mere commercial virtues
inspired by classical liberalism and republicanism. A president, or whatever term is used for an
elected head-of-state, cannot properly do the task for which he was elected,
being the representative of the whole of his country, for, as is evident among
our neighbours to the south, eventually “he’s my president, although I didn’t
vote for him” is replaced with “not my president” which in turn devolves into
the civil war like partisanship that has been on display since at least 2008
and has been growing with intensity with each successive president ever since. A king, by contrast, can not only do this
task since he does not owe his office to popular and therefore partisan
election, but the much more important task of representing within his realm(s),
the government of the universe as a whole.
While this is how I articulate my royalism today, I have felt it by
instinct my whole life, and it gets stronger with each passing year. I am very grateful to be in a country whose
hereditary head-of-state entered his Coronation service declaring that in the
name of the King of Kings and after His example, he came not to be served but
to serve, rather than in the country that choose for its own head of state a
boorish and belligerent narcissist who crawled forth from sludge that backed up
from the toilets in hell and whose cult of followers are so delusional that
some of them have blurred the huge difference between him and the King of
Kings.
T. S. Eliot called himself a
“classicist in literature”, but here I would substitute the term “culture” for
“literature.” Culture, in the broader sense of the term,
refers to everything that human societies pass down through instruction,
training, and education rather than genetically through biological
reproduction, everything that we make and do, the participation in which shapes
and defines who we are as societies. In
this sense of the word, we speak of cultures in the plural and of specific
cultures. It is a concept closely
related to that of tradition and the two can be either used interchangeably or
distinguished by saying that tradition is the method – the handing over or
passing down from generation to generation – and culture the content. Classicism has reference, however, primarily
to the term in a narrower sense.
Culture in
this narrower sense is difficult to define but I would describe it as that,
within culture in the broader sense, which, like the institution of royal
monarchy as discussed above exerts an elevating influence on the larger culture
and on society and civilization, at least when it is doing what it is supposed
to do. All human activities that must
be learned and especially those that involve the making of something are
broadly called arts. Within this larger
category, we distinguish a smaller by the addition of the definite article, and
one of the uses of the word art in the singular with neither definite nor
indefinite article is to designate that something that sets apart “the arts” from
“arts” in general. “Art”, however, is
even harder to define than “culture.” “The arts”, of which literature is one,
can be regarded as either building blocks of the higher culture or the medium
by which it is transmitted.
Classicism
takes its name from classical antiquity, that is, ancient Greco-Roman
civilization, although it is well to remember Stephen Leacock’s wise
observation that Greek and Latin are “a starting point for a general
knowledge of the literature, the history, and the philosophy of all ages.”
In its most general sense, it is the approach to high culture and the
arts that stresses external standards that are objective and universal. The classicist recognizes that the arts are
governed by rules, although classicism need not imply a rigorous legalism. Classicism, for example, would not censure
Shakespeare for not strictly adhering to Aristotle’s three unities (time,
place, action), although it would perhaps say that he earned the right to set
these aside when warranted by having first mastered them. A century ago it was generally thought of as
the polar opposite of romanticism, the highly individualistic approach that
stresses inner inspiration. Today,
cultural and artistic subjectivism has been taken to extremes much further than
romanticism proper was ever willing to go.
Today, for example, it is not uncommon to find “art” produced in
explicit repudiation of Beauty, which classicism and romanticism both
recognized as the end to which art aspires.
Classicism
is the expression with regards to culture, of the same Tory instinct as
royalism, but of all the expressions of the Tory instinct, it is the least
instinctual. This is just what we ought
to expect considering that culture itself is something that has to be instilled
and learned – etymologically it means “that which has been cultivated.” Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1869) famously said that culture was “a
pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters
which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and,
through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our
stock notions and habits” and while, as with Eliot, I would extend the concept
beyond literature to include, for example, getting to know the music of Haydn
and Mozart as well as the writings of Homer and Plato, I think that this explains
quite well what culture looks like when applied to the soul of the individual
person. We each, to put it bluntly, are
born into this world as barbarians and the proper goal of education is neither
to indoctrinate us into the latest progressive claptrap, as the more
fashionable academic institutions have all seemed to think for the last sixty
or seventy years, nor, contra those who are “conservative” rather than Tory, to
fit us to earn our living as cogs in the machine that is the modern economy,
but to civilize us by exposing us to this higher culture.
If high culture is the getting to know “the best which has
been thought and said in the world” this means that the best can be
distinguished from that which is not the best, from that which is merely the better or the good, as well as from
that which is bad, worse or the worst. Such a distinction requires the external,
objective, universal standards that classicism stresses. While this can mean
something quite technical, like the aforementioned unities of Aristotle in the
dramatic arts, in the more general sense the measuring stick is that of the
goods inherent in the structure of the universe. A classicism informed, as it ought to be, by
philosophy in its highest form which is theology, with special reference to the
branches of metaphysics and aesthetics, would say that the best, not only in
literature but the other arts, is that which looks to and teaches us to strive
for Beauty, Goodness and Truth. When the
arts do this, the higher culture they comprise elevates the broader culture
because while the natural tendency of culture in the more general sense is to
focus on us and our identity as societies and a civilization, this lifts us out
of our focus on ourselves and directs us to goods that are outside ourselves,
fixed, and universal. Beauty, Goodness, and Truth are called transcendentals
because they are the properties of Being itself, and while we participate in
being as created beings, He in Whose infinite simplicity Being and Essence are
one and the same, as the best theologians from St. Thomas Aquinas to E. L.
Mascall have explained, is God. The best
classicism, therefore, would say that the ultimate purpose of higher culture is
to point us to God, which is why T. S. Eliot wrote two books arguing that
religion is the heart and soul of culture.
The reason so much of the art culture of the last century has been so
horridly rotten is because it has deliberately turned its back on this its
ultimate purpose.
While this creates an opening for turning to “Anglo-Catholic
in religion”, before doing so I wish to personalize my remark about classicism
being the least instinctual of the three expressions of the Tory instinct. My royalism has been life-long and
religiously, as I will shortly discuss, I have been maturing towards
Anglo-Catholicism since my first moment of orthodox Christian faith, but the
classicism I articulated above is the result of years of reading on a subject my
serious interest in which came much later in life. It did, however, have its beginnings in that
same Tory instinct. My late maternal
grandmother was a nurse by profession and a painter by passion. My visits to her in my youth would frequently
involve a painting session and a discussion of art. Grandma specialized in painting landscapes,
usually in watercolour. Watercolour was
definitely not my forte, and what I painted is best described as
caricature. Sometimes it involved
cartoon depictions of politicians, but almost always it was done in a style
spoofing Modern Art. My knowledge of
Modern Art was not very extensive at the time, and Picasso was usually who I
had in mind. I instinctually recognized his
work as garbage made for a market of those with
too much money and not enough brains and who showed it by behaving exactly like
the courtiers in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”
This, I would later learn, was exactly how Picasso saw his own work,
just as I would learn that Modern Art contained much that was worse than
Picasso, although not nearly as bad as what is to be found in the art
designated “Postmodern.”. Grandma had a
collection of art books, and when she and I would discuss them, she would
disparage her own paintings, in which the countryside we both knew was
recognizable, as not being real “art.”
The basis of this distinction was her idea that “art” is what depicts
what the artist sees internally rather than what he and anyone around him can
see with his actual eyes. While I did not know enough at the time to recognize
this as a fashionable idea derived from romanticism, I did instinctually,
regard it as utter bunkum. As with my
instinctual negative assessment of Picasso and Modern Art, my opinion has not
really changed although then it was little more than the prejudice of someone
who had barely taken the first step from natural barbarism towards civilized
taste, whereas now it is an opinion that is slightly more informed after years
of trying, with whatever degree of success, to get to know Matthew Arnold’s “best
which has been thought and said” and of reflecting on the insights of those
such as Eliot, Sir Roger Scruton, and T. E. Hulme, who grounded his argument
for the external rules and order of classicism on man’s limitations due to
Original Sin.
This brings us back to “Anglo-Catholic in religion.” In
previous years I have often started with this to emphasize the foundational
aspect of orthodox Christianity but this year I have opted to leave the most
important for last. In my extended
family, my relatives are generally either United Church – the United Church of
Canada, that is, the product of the unlikely union of the Presbyterians and
Methodists – or Anglican in their affiliation, with degrees of attendance
varying from never darkening the door to being there every Sunday. When I was a kid, for example, my mother
fairly regularly attended the United Church in Oak River, and my paternal
grandmother who lived in Rivers received the Anglican Journal with the Mustard
Seed, the newspaper of the Diocese of Brandon. In my
childhood, both Churches were becoming increasingly plagued by liberalism in its
theological sense. This is the idea that
the teachings of Christianity, at least as they were historically and
traditionally understood, have been rendered, in full or in part, unbelievable
by Modern “discoveries”, and so must be discarded or re-imagined in order to
preserve the real “essence” of Christianity which for liberals, is usually its
ethical or moral teachings, or more accurately whatever ethical or moral ideas
progressivism subscribes to at the given moment, which the theological liberal
deludes herself into thinking is what Jesus really meant. Theological
liberalism admits of degrees and so can vary from being otherwise orthodox but
rejecting the infallible authority of the Bible to basically being an atheist
and completely disbelieving the Creed in its entirety but without having the
decency to leave the Church. I held this
liberalism in contempt from the moment I first became aware of it which was
long before I came to faith myself. That
was the old Tory instinct kicking in.
Therefore, when I came to faith in Jesus Christ in an
evangelical conversion when I was fifteen, it was with a disposition towards
orthodoxy – the truths that Christians have historically and traditionally
believed and confessed – but with a suspicion of the institutional Churches
that had allowed themselves to succumb to liberalism. Accordingly, my initial expression of
Christian orthodoxy was in the form of fundamentalism. Over the course of the following decades of
theological study, both formal such as in my five years at Providence and
informal, my eyes were opened to the fact that the popular evangelical notion
that the “real” Church is not a visible society but a convenient way of
referring to all Christians in the aggregate simply doesn’t fit the way the Bible
speaks of the Church and that therefore one cannot really have orthodoxy in the
fullest sense without the institutional Church.
This, combined with a deepening appreciation for the Church Fathers’
work in setting the boundaries of the Apostolic and orthodox faith and defining
and opposing heresy and for the ancient Creeds as the basic confessions of
those truths that are de fide, along
with a developing love for liturgy both for its being ancient and traditional
and so the means by which the Christians of today share in the worship of the
faithful of preceding ages and for its being fully participatory in a way that
a streamlined service centred on the sermon (in which all but the speaker are
passive), helped my orthodoxy mature into an Anglo-Catholicism. I joined an orthodox Anglican parish about a
decade into the new millennium, where I was confirmed and where I continue to
worship to this day.
My Anglo-Catholicism, is much more the Anglo-Catholicism of
the Caroline Divines, the Non-Jurors, the Library
of Anglo-Catholic Theology, and Bishop Christopher Wordsworth’s Theophilus Anglicanus than that of say
Darwell Stone or Dom Gregory Dix, which is not to disparage these men from
whose writings I have learned much. The
difference is basically that the older kind of Anglo-Catholicism did not
repudiate the Reformation and Protestantism but looked, like the English
Reformers to the primitive belief and practices of the first millennium and especially
its first half as the measuring stick of Catholicity rather than
post-Tridentine Rome. While, like the
later type of Anglo-Catholics I acknowledge all seven Sacraments acknowledged
by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox Churches, I also
acknowledge that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are Gospel Sacraments in a way
that distinguishes them from the others, they are visible modes of the
Gospel. While, like the later type of
Anglo-Catholics, I acknowledge all seven of the pre-Schism ecumenical councils
recognized by both Rome and the East and would go so far as to say that the
theological argument of the Second Council of Nicaea is the conclusion logically
required by the orthodox Christology of the first six ecumenical councils, I
also understand and respect, despite my loathing of iconoclasm as boorish and
philistine, the reasons why the Protestant Reformers thought the veneration of
icons had been taken way too far.
My arrival at orthodox, Protestant, Anglo-Catholicism is not
a repudiation of the steps in my Christian journey that brought me here.
When I was baptized in a Baptist church about a year and a
half after my conversion this did not involve the sacrilege of denying a
previous, valid, baptism because it was my first and only baptism. Being baptized in this way meant that I
received baptism by immersion, and while the mode is not essential, it was
definitely the preferred mode in the earliest centuries, remains the ordinary
mode even for infant baptism in all pre-Reformation Churches other than Rome
and, although in practice the exceptions are the rule, is the prescribed mode
in the Book of Common Prayer. Ironically, I would not have received baptism
in the mode the Book of Common Prayer
prescribes, had I been baptized by an Anglican priest as an infant.
While I no longer believe separatism to be the appropriate
way for the orthodox to combat liberalism, I remain very much committed to the
position so well-articulated by J. Gresham Machen, that liberalism is a
different religion from Christianity. It
is not, therefore, that I have ceased to be a fundamentalist so much as that my
understanding of the fundamentals has expanded from the five, identified in the
heat of conflict a century ago, to twelve, the twelve articles of the Apostles’
and Nicene Creeds, the standards of orthodoxy for basically two millennia. I remain committed to the infallibility of
the canonical Scriptures, and very much remain convinced that the Authorized
Bible – the official Anglican translation – is the best English translation and
will remain the best English translation not because it cannot be improved upon
in theory but because in reality, to improve on the translation would require
translators who were at least the equal of the Jacobean scholars and to get
these we would need to get rid of the technological distractions of the present
day and return to training people in the classical languages from ages four and
five. We would also have to return to
textual scholarship based on faith principles – that the true text is to be
found in use in God’s Church – rather than rationalist principles – that a
manuscript unused and unknown to most of the Church for most of two thousand
years might have the better reading, whereas textual scholarship is generally
heading in the opposite direction. What
I would add to this today is that the Authorized Bible is incomplete without
the deuterocanonical or ecclesiastical books from the LXX which should be
restored to the place between the Testaments in which they were found in the
original 1611 edition.
Although my journey into the English branch of Christ’s One,
Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church did not involve a period in the Lutheran
church it did involve a lot of reading of Lutheran theologians, especially from
the Missouri Synod – C. F. W. Walther, Francis Pieper, Pieper’s epitomist John
Theodore Mueller, Robert Preus, Kurt Marquart, Herman Otten, John M. Drickamer
– and my understanding of the doctrine of salvation, especially where it
intersects with my understanding of the Sacraments, is largely Lutheran. Salvation was objectively accomplished for
all by the Saviour on the Cross and is given to man freely as a gift. It is proclaimed to all in the Gospel of
which the Church’s two-fold ministry of Word and Sacrament are both modes, at
least with regards to the Gospel Sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s
Supper. The Gospel, in both modes, is
the resistible means through which God gives us the grace of salvation, faith
is the hand into which He places it and with which we receive it. The grace that sanctifies us – works in us to
make us conform to the righteousness and holiness of Christ internally – is
always given with the grace that justifies us – clears us of the guilt of sin
and gives us the legal standing of righteousness before God, but sanctification
is always based on justification, not the other way around, sanctification
being, therefore God making us into what we already are because of Jesus
Christ. Our faith and hope – faith is
the “substance of things hoped for” (Heb. 11:1) – rests on Who Jesus is and
what He has done for us in the events of the Gospel, His death and resurrection,
rather than on what He is doing in us, and it is through such faith resting on
what He has done for us outside ourselves that He accomplishes what He is
working in us.. I do not agree, however,
with the Lutherans and Reformed, that the Gospel was recovered in the sixteenth
century after being lost by the Church. Justification
by faith alone is not the Gospel. To say
that justification by faith alone is the Gospel is to say that our message of
Good News to the world is “you only have to believe.” To say that, however, would be actual
Antinomianism, as opposed to the kind with which legalists frequently charge
Christians who see God’s grace as freer than they themselves see it. The Gospel
is that Jesus Christ, the Son of God Incarnate, fully God and fully man, died
for us and rose again. It is confessed
in each of the ancient Creeds and permeates the liturgies of all the ancient
Churches, and so was never lost by the Church, although had been buried under a
lot of accumulated excess baggage by the Roman branch of the Church by the
sixteenth century. Justification by
faith alone is part – a part, not the whole - of the extended theological
explanation of why the Gospel is Good News.
It is the claim that
justification by faith alone is the Gospel and that the Church lost the Gospel,
rather than the doctrine of justification by faith alone itself, that has
produced the sectarian separatism and the revivals of such ancient heresies as
Arianism and Nestorianism that have plagued post-Reformation Protestantism.
These positions will no doubt seem out of step with the
direction in which our civilization is heading and the spirit and fashions of
the present day but that is rather the point since they are expressions of an
instinctual Toryism that looks to ancient and timeless truths rather than the
rapidly changing opinions of the current day.
I would not trade that Toryism for a “conservatism” with roots no deeper
than individualistic market liberalism and my resolution for this New Year, as
for every New Year, is to grow even more out of step with the times and more
rooted in those ancient truths.
Happy New Year!
God Save the King!
