Semantic Shift and the Decline of Orthodoxy: Part Two – Evangelical and Catholic: Part Two of Part Two – Catholic

In the sixteenth century, the Reformers of the Magisterial Reformation, continental and English, did not identify their enemy, the Pope, his adherents, or his doctrines as “Catholic.”

In the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of the Church of England, Article XXII uses the term “Romish” to describe the Doctrine “concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints” which it says is “a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.” Earlier, Article XIX declares that like other particular Churches (Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch are named), “the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.” The Church of Rome is never identified with the adjective “Catholic.” The word “Catholic” does not appear in the Articles at all, as a matter of fact, but Article VIII declares that “The Three Creeds, Nicene Creed, Athanasius’s Creed, and that which is commonly called the Apostles’ Creed, ought thoroughly to be received and believed: for they may be proved by most certain warrants of holy Scripture.” The first of these contains the affirmation “and I believe One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church” (1) The last affirms the affirmation “The Holy Catholick Church.” (2) The Athanasian Creed (3) or the Quicumque Vult begins by saying “Whosoever will be saved: before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholick Faith.” (4)

We find very much the same thing when we turn to the confessions of the Lutheran tradition. The Book of Concord (1580), which collects the most important Lutheran confessional statements in a single volume, begins with the aforementioned three ecumenical Creeds. These are followed by the Augsburg Confession, which was addressed to Emperor Charles V in 1530 AD. In this Confession the word “Catholic” first appears in Article XXI, “Of the Worship of the Saints”, not to identify the teaching and practices they opposed, but to say “This is about the Sum of our Doctrine, in which, as can be seen, there is nothing that varies from the Scriptures, or from the Church Catholic, or from the Church of Rome as known from its writers.” Apart from a citation of St. Augustine to the effect that Catholic bishops must not be submitted to if they teach contrary to the Scriptures, all other usages of “Catholic” in this Confession are of a similar nature, denying that the Lutherans have departed from the Catholic Church and Catholic faith. The same is true of the two uses of “Catholic” under the heading “Of Original Sin” in Philip Melanchthon’s Apology for the Augsburg Confession, the two uses under the heading “Of Love and the Fulfilling of the Law”, the two uses under the heading “Of Repentance”, the one use under “Of Ecclesiastical Order”, the one use under “Of Good Works”, and the one use under “Of the Mass.” The three uses under the heading “Of the Church” are simply affirmations of the Catholic Church in accordance with the Creeds. The three times the word “Catholic” appears in the Smalcald Articles, penned by Dr. Luther himself in 1537, it is to rebut the papacy’s claims to headship over the Catholic Church and its identification of the Catholic Church with its own followers. Philip Melanchthon does not use the word “Catholic” in the text of his “Treatise on the Power and Primacy of the Pope” written in the same year as the Smalcald Articles, but it does appear once in an addendum by Johann Brenz, following the signatures, where he says that he has read all the Lutheran Confessional material to date and in his opinion they concur with both the Scriptures and “the belief of the true and genuine, Catholic Church.” In the remaining documents in the Book of Concord – Luther’s Small and Large Catechisms from the 1520, and the Formula of Concord, Epitome and Solid Declaration, from 1577, the word “Catholic” is conspicuous by its absence – “Christian” is substituted for it in citations of the Creed, but it is never used in a negative sense to refer to the papacy.

In the Reformed Church, Article XXVII of the Belgic Confession is entitled “The Holy Catholic Church” and begins by saying “We believe or confess one single Catholic or universal Church.” These are the only times the word “Catholic” appears in the Confession, which concludes its Article IX, “On the Trinity” by saying “And so, in this matter we willingly accept the three ecumenical creeds—the Apostles’, Nicene, and Athanasian—as well as what the ancient fathers decided in agreement with them.”

It is quite evident that for the Magisterial Reformers “Catholic” and “Protestant” were not mutually exclusive terms, and “Catholic” has no negative overtones whatsoever. A rejection of the Roman Patriarch’s claims of exclusive title to the word “Catholic” for those in Communion with him was a key element of Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed theology in the sixteenth century.

This is a remarkable contrast with evangelical usage of the same term in our own day and age. I am using evangelical here, to refer to the subcategory of Protestants whose common identity is based primarily upon a shared experience of conversion which they identify with the new birth spoken of in the New Testament. The change in meaning of evangelical, from its sixteenth century definition based upon the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith to this new, experience-based, definition was the subject of Part One of Part Two. Seventy years ago, evangelicals by the experience-based definition, were all thought to be theologically conservative, at least by the scale that measures theological conservatism/liberalism by willingness to alter theological beliefs to accommodate the presuppositions of Modern rationalist and empiricist philosophy. This is no longer the case. Today, evangelicals include both self-identified fundamentalists, who are archconservatives by the standard of the aforementioned scale, and “liberal evangelicals.” (5) The vast majority of all types of evangelicals, however, now use the word “Catholic” to refer to the Roman Communion. Fundamentalists, railing against the Roman Communion as the “Whore of Babylon” will call it the “Catholic” Church. More liberal evangelicals, arguing for ecumenical dialogue to repair the breach of five centuries ago, will also speak of the Roman Communion as the “Catholic” Church. Conservative evangelical theologians, defending the Solas of the Reformation, usually now refer to the doctrines of transubstaniation, human merit, papal supremacy, etc. as being “Catholic.”

Some might say, and this is undoubtedly true up to a point, that this is the result of a cultural shift towards a paradigm of mutual respect, or at least lip service to the concept, that encourages calling other groups by their own preferred nomenclature. I have many criticisms that I could make about this seemingly innocuous cultural shift but they would be very extraneous to what I am discussing in this essay. My contention here is that whereas sixteenth century Magisterial evangelicalism refused to surrender “Catholic” to the Roman Communion because it regarded its own doctrines as consistent with the Catholic Faith and the traditions of the Holy Catholic Church, contemporary evangelicalism has been willing to surrender the term to the Roman Communion because it does not so regard itself as being Catholic. If both evangelicalisms have been correct in their self-assessment, sixteenth century Anglican/Lutheran/Reformed evangelicalism in its conviction that it was still Catholic, twentieth-twenty first century evangelicalism in its conviction that it is not, then this indicates that the evangelical movement has departed from the orthodoxy of the Reformation, especially its first tier.

With regards to the self-assessment of sixteenth century evangelicals, the Roman Communion, of course, accused them of breaking with Catholic tradition, the Catholic Faith, and the Catholic Church. The doctrine of “justification by faith alone”, that is, that man receives the righteousness of God offered in the Gospel through the sole instrument of believing in Jesus Christ and not by his own works since justification in the eyes of God is entirely a gracious gift of God and not something we earn, for example, the Roman Communion declared to be a novelty of Luther’s, that differed not just with late Medieval corruptions but with Catholic doctrine since the ancient days of the Church. Against their claim it can be observed that a) the doctrine of justification by faith without works was formulated as above by St. Paul himself in the very font of Catholic faith and tradition, the New Testament, and especially the fourth chapter of the epistle to – ironically – the Romans, b) no anathema was pronounced against the doctrine until the Council of Trent (1545-1563), which Council, despite the Roman Communion’s claims to the contrary, was certainly no ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church and lacked the authority thereof, and c) no similar anathema was ever pronounced by the Greek Communion, the theology of which has never included the elements of late Medieval Roman theology against which the Reformers asserted the Pauline doctrine so forcibly, i.e., human merit, the depository of supererogatory works, etc. (6)

In the Catholic tradition, that which had been taught and believed in the Church, from the time of the Apostles and Fathers downward, in all regions and all periods of time, the emphasis had been on sanctification. People are sinful. God is holy. A holy God cannot admit sin into His presence. Therefore, sanctification is necessary before a sinner can enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, in the full eschatological sense of that expression. A sinner, admitted into God’s holy presence without having his sinfulness removed and his nature restored from its fallen state to one of perfect holy righteousness, could experience God’s holy presence only as hell, and would make the Kingdom into hell for others by his very presence. Ergo sanctification is not optional but must necessarily be completed before one can be admitted to the Beatific Vision. (7)

The pope and his followers in the Roman Communion maintained that the Protestant emphasis on justification by faith apart from works amounted to a denial of everything in the previous paragraph and separated justification from sanctification. This, however, was a caricature of the Reformers’ doctrine. By saying that justification was the crediting to the believer of his faith as righteousness for the sake of Christ’s completed sacrifice and perfect merit alone and not as a reward for his own works, Luther, Calvin, and Cranmer had no intention of denying the necessity of sanctification or of maintaining that God justified sinners without committing to sanctify them. In St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, upon which they relied so heavily, the Apostle went on from teaching that all are sinners (chapters 2 and 3), who are credited with the righteousness of God revealed in the Gospel when they believe on the basis of Christ’s propitiatory death and apart from their works (chapter 4), to magnify God’s grace as being greater and more abundant than human sin (chapter 5), which is no excuse for sin because the union of believers with Christ in baptism unites us with Him in His death and resurrection so that we in His death have died to sin (chapter 6) and the Law, which due to our innate sinfulness, called “the flesh”, is powerless to produce the righteousness it commands (chapter 7), and should reckon ourselves to be alive to Christ in His resurrection and so serve Him in righteousness (chapter 6 again), and while this produces a situation where we struggle against ourselves in this life (end of chapter 7), all who belong to Christ have been given His Holy Spirit Who “quickens” our “dead members”, i.e., provides the power lacking in the Law, and we, with all of Creation, can look forward in a certain hope, to the day when God will indeed complete the work of restoration in us as He promised (chapter 8). The Reformers, by insisting that justification is first and is the foundation upon which sanctification is built rather than the other way around, as the Roman doctrine of a justification that rests in part on the works that are the fruit of sanctification would suggest, did not deny the Catholic tradition and its emphasis but rather, by going back ad fontes to the Pauline order in the source of that tradition, strengthened the tradition by correcting a late error.

What then of contemporary evangelicalism’s self-assessment that it is not “Catholic”?

In the sixteenth century evangelicalism was predominantly Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed, that is, the evangelicalism of Churches that had been reformed by the civil power, with no intention of separating from the Catholic Church, but only rejecting the errors and false practices of the Roman Patriarch who had usurped power far exceeding that granted him in the early centuries. Contemporary evangelicalism, however, is predominantly that of separatist sects, guilty of what has been condemned under the name “schism” since the earliest days of the Church, and which were condemned by the Churches of the Magisterial Reformation when they first appeared. Unlike the Magisterial Reformers, these sects did indeed see the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation as a break from the Catholic Faith and Church, because unlike the Magisterial Reformers, they saw the Catholic tradition as starting, not with the Apostles but with Constantine in the fourth century, and because, also unlike the Magisterial Reformers, they saw the errors of Rome as not being late Medieval, but as belonging to this tradition since the earliest days. This is the same interpretation of Church history held by all of the sects that evangelicals label as “cults”, which are generally anti-Trinitarian groups who have revived ancient heresies like Arianism (Russellism) and Valentinism (Mormonism). While the sects that are part of contemporary evangelicalism have not rejected orthodox Nicene Trinitarianism or Chalcedonian Christology, the contemporary movement has produced many leaders with very defective views of these doctrines. One very prominent evangelical author who passed away three years ago, criticized Charles Wesley’s marvelous hymn “And Can It Be” by suggesting that there are hints of Patripassionism in it, but in doing so crossed the line into Nestorianism. (8) The man who until 1989 was the leading evangelical “expert” on cults, thought of himself as an orthodox Trinitarian but denied the eternal sonship of Jesus Christ, i.e., the doctrine affirmed by all orthodox Christians in the part of the Nicene Creed that goes “the only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of his Father before all worlds…Begotten, not made.” A popular evangelical pastor, seminary president, author, and radio teacher, until about twenty years ago taught the same thing. (9)

We shall, Deus Vult, examine this further in Part Three of Part Two, the final section of Part Two of Semantic Shift and the Decline of Orthodoxy, in which we shall look at how the predominance of the sectarian mindset in contemporary evangelicalism, as opposed to the sixteenth century evangelicalism, is related to the shift to an experience-based definition of the movement and the shift to following the Roman Communion’s practice of reserving the term Catholic for itself.


(1) This is how this phrase is rendered in the current Canadian edition of the Book of Common Prayer. Most previous editions of the Book of Common Prayer, including the 1662 Restoration edition that all subsequent editions have been based upon and the original 1549 edition omitted the second of the marks of the Church, “holy.” It is still absent in the edition used by the Church of England. According to the Right Reverend John Dowden, nineteenth century Bishop of Edinburgh this is probably due to critical studies of the Church Councils by Jacques Merlin, Peter Crabbe and Bartolomé Carranza published in the decades just prior to the first Book of Common Prayer which maintained that it was absent in the Greek original in the Acts of the Councils. (The Workmanship of the Prayerbook in its Literary and Liturgical Aspects, 1899, pp. 104-106). Whether or not this is the case, it most definitely belongs to the Greek and Latin, texti recepti, of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as recognized by the Eastern and Western Churches respectively. Whatever we might think of the hatchet job the Canadian edition of the BCP has made of the Coverdale Psalter, or the other, strictly stylistic, changes to this clause of the Creed (capitalizing the O in One and dropping the k from Catholick and Apostolick), the re-insertion of “Holy” is clearly an improvement over the 1662 edition.

(2) This is how it appears in all BCP editions of the baptismal Creed, thus, vide supra notwithstanding, the mark of holiness was not eliminated entirely with regards to the Church in the Anglican editions of the Creeds.

(3) Until the sixteenth century it was widely believed that this was written by St. Athanasius of Alexandria, the fourth century champion of Trinitarian orthodoxy against Arianism. Then the Dutch theologian Gerardus Vossius argued against this view in his Dissertationes Tres de Tribus Symbolis, Apostolico, Athanasiano et Constantinopolitano in 1642, maintaining that it was probably written in Gaul much later in the first millennium, possibly even the ninth century. In response to the spread of this view, Dr. Daniel Waterland, in a critical look at all of the then-extent manuscript evidence concerning it, argued that it was probably written by St. Hilary of Arles in the early fifth century, prior to the Nestorian controversy (A Critical History of the Athanasian Creed, 1723). Whatever the truth might be about the “Athanasian” it is obviously not properly a Creed in the same sense as the Apostles’ and Nicene, not being in the form of a confession of faith beginning with credo (or credimus) but of an exposition of the content of the faith found in one or both of the other Creeds.

(4) The Canadian rendition is “WHOSOEVER would be saved / needeth before all things to hold fast the Catholic Faith.”

(5) Those who continue to identify as fundamentalists have maintained for the last sixty years or so, that the evangelicals who abandoned the fundamentalist label around the time of E. J. Carnell’s becoming president of Fuller Theological Seminary (1954), the founding of Christianity Today (1956) and the Billy Graham Madison Square Garden Crusade in the New York (1957) and in connection with these events, were even then taking a step towards a more liberal theology. In 1976 and 1984, Harold Lindsell and Francis Schaeffer would each argue from within the evangelical movement that a liberal form of evangelicalism had in fact developed. These works, The Battle for the Bible and The Great Evangelical Disaster respectively, were, as their titles suggest, polemical works intended to sound the alarm against this sort of compromise. The same phenomenon was discussed from a more detached, academic, perspective by George M. Marsden in Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminary and the New Evangelicalism (1995). Since then, segments of evangelicalism willing to adjust their theological beliefs to accommodate postmodernism and deconstructionism, and thus far more liberal than anything these previous writers could have imagined, have arisen.

(6) The closest the Eastern Church came to a “Council of Trent” was the Synod of Jerusalem, also known as the Synod of Bethlehem, in 1672. This Synod did not convene until over a century had passed since the Council of Trent had ended. Its Acts and Decrees are called the Confession of Dositheus, and while Decree XIII rejects sola fide, it is worded as an affirmation of positive belief and not as an anathema pronounced upon those who disagree. There are several anathemas in the Confession of Dositheus, most of these pertaining to practices with regards to icons, although the Calvinist doctrine of reprobation is also so anathematized. The Orthodox Synod and its Confession was not primarily a response to the Reformation, but to the Confession of Faith of Cyril Lucaris that had been published in Latin in Geneva in 1629. Cyril Lucaris, canonized by his own Communion shortly after his death in 1638, had been Patriarch of Constantinople, the highest rank in the Eastern Orthodox hierarchy although what it is to the Eastern Communion is closer to what the Archbishop of Canterbury is to the Anglican Communion than what the Pope is to the Roman. The Orthodox Church in this Synod, felt the need to respond to this Confession because it presented the Eastern Orthodox Faith as being Protestant, affirming, among other things, justification by faith alone and the Calvinist view of predestination. The Synod of Jerusalem distinguished between the Confession and its purported author, maintaining that it was a forgery. Differences of opinion persist about that matter to this day. G. A. Hadjiantoniou in his Protestant Patriarch: The Life of Cyril Lucaris (1572-1638) (1961), as is evident from the title, took the position that the Confession was genuine. At the very least, the Patriarch was far more sympathetic to Reformation doctrines than the representatives of Orthodoxy in 1672. This is the Cyril Lucaris who sent one of his priests, Metrophanes Kritopoulos, later Patriarch of Alexandria, to study at the Anglican University of Oxford, who became a friend and correspondent of the Right Reverend William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, and who gave Codex Alexandrinus (or A), the oldest uncial vellum manuscript of the Greek Bible, other than Vaticanus (B) and Sinaiticus (א), to King Charles I. Obviously, even if we take Hadjiantoniou’s position that the Confession was genuine, it would be a gross fallacy to argue that Cyril I rather than the Confession of Dositheus “speaks” for the Orthodox Church as a whole. Nevertheless, the facts that a) the Synod of Jerusalem was very late in the seventeenth century, b) that it was a response to the Confession rather than the Reformation itself, c) that the leading Patriarch of the Eastern Church for most of the first half of the seventeenth century was clearly on much better terms with Protestantism, and that d) there is no anathema on sola fide, demonstrate that it was not so certain in the minds of the East, that the Reformation doctrine was a break with the universal and Patristic tradition, as it was in the minds of those who represented the papacy in the Tridentine Council the previous century. It is also worth noting that the caricatures with which the Roman Communion dismisses the Reformation doctrine, such as that it separates justification from sanctification making it into a kind of paper transaction that creates a fictional righteousness, the Eastern Church traditionally levels at the Western tradition as a whole, from St. Augustine of Hippo onward, and including the papal doctrine as much as the Protestant.

(7) This is the kernel of truth which is to be found deeply hidden away within all the error of the Roman doctrine of Purgatory, rightly rejected by Protestants and the Eastern Church alike. Sanctification, at whatever state it is at when the believer dies, must be brought to completion before admission into God’s Heavenly Kingdom. This much is true, although there is nothing in Scripture or the tradition that is truly Catholic rather than distinctly Roman to support the idea that the process must take place over a very long period of time in a place assigned to that purpose, much less the thoroughly blasphemous notion that there is a treasury of supererogatory works (works above and beyond what God requires of us) that the saints have stored up which can be drawn upon to lessen one’s time there in return for a sum paid to the Roman Church.

(8) http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2016/03/from-scylla-of-patripassianism-into.html

(9) Those who maintain that they hold to orthodox Trinitarianism – God is One in Being, but Three in Person, each Person of which is fully God – but reject Eternal Sonship, teach Incarnational Sonship, i.e., that Jesus as the Word was always God but became the Son in His Incarnation. The Holy Ghost, however, is clearly identified as the agent in the Incarnation in the nativity accounts of both St. Matthew and St. Luke. Incarnational Sonship, makes the Holy Ghost into Jesus’ Father. That erases the Personal distinction between the Father and the Holy Ghost, and reduces logically to the heresy of Sabellianism. I addressed this issue at great length here: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2013/05/jesus-christ-eternal-son-of-god.html

Some Modern Ancient Heresies

The late Modern Age was a period that saw Western Civilization gradually abandon the Christian religion and replace it with the secular religion of liberalism. Indeed, the very label Western Civilization indicates this change. Formerly it had been Christendom – Christian civilization. Not coincidentally, the same period saw large segments of the Christian Church abandon orthodoxy – the sound doctrines of the faith as taught by Christ and His Apostles, written in the Holy Scriptures, and formulated in the ecumenical Creeds of the early undivided Church. Many nominally Christian Churches now reject as literal truth virtually every statement in the basic Apostles’ Creed, let alone the more precise Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed or the comprehensive Athanasian Creed, and teach instead that these were mythological embellishments of the Christian message the only essential content of which is its ethical teachings, by which, such Churches always seem to mean, an interpretation of Christian ethics that supports a progressive, left-wing, political and social agenda. This kind of “theology” was once named Modernism after the Age which spawned it but is now generally called by the same name as that Age’s secular faith, liberalism.

Unsurprisingly, the Age that has seen this retreat from orthodoxy has seen also the rebirth of many of the heresies against which the orthodox Fathers successfully contended in the early centuries of Christianity. The sixteenth century saw the much needed reform of many corruptions and superstitions that had gradually risen in connection with the papacy’s usurpation of supremacy over the entire Church, itself a departure from primitive orthodoxy, but not all of the Reformers shared the same conservative respect for the primitive orthodoxy of the first five centuries as Dr. Luther and the English Reformers. The doctrine of Sola Scriptura was understood, by many of the more radical Reformers, as meaning that the individual should interpret the Bible for himself with disregard to the consensus of the early Church. Unsurprisingly, a tendency towards Nestorianism manifested itself among Calvin’s followers, and some really radical versions of Anabaptism rejected Trinitarianism.

One of the early heresies that has been reborn and which now seems to be ubiquitous is Manichaeism. This system of belief takes its name from its third century Persian founder, Mani, who incorporated elements of Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism into his teachings. For a decade in his youth, prior to his conversion to orthodox Christianity, St. Augustine was an adherent of this sect against which several of his treatises were written (De duabus animabus, Contra Faustum, Contra Fortunatum, De Natura Boni, among others). The doctrine for which it is primarily remembered is dualism – the idea that the forces of light and the forces of darkness are more or less equal principles between which the world is locked in a perpetual struggle. This is an idea that can be found everywhere today – it is a dominant theme in the Star War motion picture saga and, indeed, is quite prevalent in the fantasy genre of fiction in general. More problematic is its presence in the Church. There are, indeed, many who think that it is sound Christian doctrine.

The error of dualism, which I dealt with in a previous essay entitled The Nature and Origin of Evil, is not in the assertion that there are evil spiritual forces present in the world but in the degree of significance it attaches to these and to evil itself. There are those who in the interest of promoting morality, purity, and holiness constantly harp on the danger of treating evil lightly and, in the sense in which they are speaking they do have a point. Yet there is a greater danger in making evil more important than it really is. The fourteenth chapter of the book of Isaiah contains a “proverb against the king of Babylon” and traditionally Christianity has seen the segment of that proverb that begins at verse twelve with the words “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” as addressing through the spiritual entity standing behind the king of Babylon, an interpretation that can be supported by our Lord’s words in the eighteenth verse of the tenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke. Therefore, when Isaiah writes:

For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. (vv. 13-14)

this has been understood as referring, at least on one level, to the sin that led to the downfall of the devil. Note that the dualism, which places the forces of evil on the same level as the forces of good, gives the devil precisely the honour that he in his Pride sought to usurp according to the traditional interpretation of this passage.

Orthodox Christian doctrine, however, teaches us that there is only One Being Who is eternal – in the sense of having neither beginning nor end -, infinite, all-powerful, and omnipresent. This Being, God, is also Good. Goodness, therefore, as an attribute of God, is itself eternal. It follows from this that Goodness does not require its opposite, evil, either to exist itself, or, much less, to balance it, as some of the more perverse versions of Dualism suggest.

Furthermore, while Goodness does not require evil for its own existence, the same is not true in reverse. Evil, if it can be said to exist – and something that is neither eternal nor created by God can hardly be said to exist in the most proper meaning of the word existence – exists as a defect in the Goodness of Creation. God, Who is Good Himself and in Whom there is no evil, created all that is and He imparted Goodness to all that He created. “And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” (Gen. 1:31) God imparted this Goodness to His Creation in two tiers. The lower level of created Goodness is that of inanimate objects and irrational life forms which serve the Good for which they are created automatically and whose nature is such that they lack the power to do otherwise. The higher level of created Goodness, voluntary Goodness, is that of angels and human beings, who were created with reason, the power to recognize the Good for which they exist, and will, the power to choose that Good for themselves. This higher level of created Goodness could not exist without either reason or will, and created reason and will are therefore themselves Goods, because they serve the end of voluntary Goodness. The power to choose the Good for oneself, however, at least in a state of Innocence rather than Perfection, which was the initial state of angels and human beings, is also the power to choose what is not Good. Or, more precisely, it is the power to choose wrongly, by choosing what to mistaken reason appears to be the greater Good, but which as the object of wrong choice loses even the lesser Goodness upon which the miscalculation was based. In the case of Lucifer and the angels who followed him in his rebellion, and in the case of our first parents in the Garden of Eden, this is exactly what happened, and in each case the result was that the created Goodness of their nature was broken.

That is all that evil is – broken Goodness. Not a force in this world, equal to, opposite, and independent of Goodness, but the damaged condition of created Goodness itself. Just as speed, the ability to move fast, denotes an actual power which human beings possess but slowness is merely a term for a deficiency in that power, so is evil to the Goodness of Creation.

Note that what I have said here applies also to Truth and Beauty which, like Goodness, are eternal attributes of God, which He imparted as properties to all that He made. (1) Falsehood and ugliness, like evil, are neither things in themselves, nor real properties which exist in other things, but are present merely as defects in the Truth and Beauty of Creation. Note what some of the most famous orthodox writers of the early part of the last century had to say about the kind of falsehood, heresy, with which we are concerned here. G. K. Chesterton, writing for The Daily News on June 26, 1909 said “Every heresy is a truth taught out of proportion” and in America on November 9, 1935 “A heresy is always a half-truth turned into a whole false¬hood.” T. S. Eliot wrote:

Furthermore, the essential of any important heresy is not simply that it is wrong: it is that it is partly right. It is characteristic of the more interesting heretics, in the context in which I use the term, that they have an exceptionally acute perception, or profound insight, of some part of the truth; an insight more important often than the inferences of those who are aware of more but less acutely aware of anything. So far as we are able to redress the balance, effect the compensation, ourselves, we may find such authors of the greatest value. If we value them as they value themselves we shall go astray. And in the present state of affairs, with the low degree of education to be expected of public and of reviewers, we are more likely to go wrong than right; we must remember too, that an heresy is apt to have a seductive simplicity, to make a direct and persuasive appeal to intellect and emotions, and to be altogether more plausible than the truth. (2)

These insights into the nature of heresy are particularly helpful in understanding another ancient heresy which has even more thoroughly permeated Modern Western thought than Manichaeism. This is the heresy of Pelagianism. This heresy was named after Pelagius a fifth century monk from somewhere in the British Isles, probably Ireland, who lived and taught in Rome. St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Jerome were the primary champions of orthodoxy in the fight against this heresy, which was first condemned in the Council of Carthage, a regional synod of the African Church, in 418 AD, but which condemnation was upheld by the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD. This Council, convened to address the Nestorian controversy, was the third ecumenical Council and as such spoke with the authority of the entire orthodox Church, eastern and western. Pelagianism is ordinarily thought of as a denial of Original Sin. Think back to our explanation of the origin and nature of evil. Original Sin is the doctrine, clearly taught by St. Paul in the fifth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, that after the Goodness of human nature was broken by Adam’s sin in the Garden of Eden, it was passed down to us in that broken condition. Since one of the implications of Original Sin is the idea, fundamental to orthodox Christianity, that we cannot save ourselves but must rely entirely upon the grace of God given to us in Jesus Christ, an implication of Pelagianism’s denial of Original Sin is the idea that we can save ourselves, an idea clearly present in the Modern concept of progress. However, to go back to the insights into the nature of heresy that we borrowed from Chesterton and Eliot, if Pelagianism is “truth taught out of proportion” then it is the truth of Free Will that Pelagianism exaggerates.

We have already set forward the doctrine of Free Will without naming it as such in our discussion of the origin of evil. It is the power which God gave to rational beings such as men and angels to perceive the Good with their reason and to choose it with their will. (3) While this power is what made evil a possibility and in practice a reality, it is itself a Good because the end it serves, which could not be achieved without it, is Good, which Good, as we have already seen, is the higher order of Created Goodness that is voluntarily chosen. This is a truth that orthodox Christianity holds simultaneously with that of Original Sin. There is a degree of tension between the two truths since an obvious implication of Original Sin is that Free Will along with human Goodness was damaged in the Fall. Orthodox Christians have disagreed as to the extent of the damage however. The Pelagian view, that the Fall did not damage man’s ability to choose Good unassisted by God’s grace, and the Semi-Pelagian view, that after the Fall man retains the ability to initiate the choice of Good but requires the grace of God to complete it, have both been rejected as heresy by orthodox Christianity, but this still leaves a large spectrum of degrees of damage that fall within the scope of orthodoxy, and some of the most unedifying theological conflicts of the Modern Age have been the direct result of attempts to limit that scope even further.

Free Will in orthodox Christianity is not unlimited. It is the power to choose Good or evil, not the right to decide for ourselves what is Good. Goodness is what it is, it is the role of reason to perceive it, and the will is supposed to follow the lead of reason. In the post-modernism of today – if we have not actually arrived at a post-post-modernism – liberalism has arrived at the point where freedom is regarded by many liberals as being so absolute that it is not subject to the limitations even of reality. This is Pelagianism taken to the nth degree, for Pelagius himself would never have dreamed of asserting a freedom of our will that places limitations on the authority of God as Sovereign Ruler over all His Creation, to issue laws, reward obedience, and punish disobedience.

The history of liberalism, from the Whiggism of the seventeenth century to the present day madness described in the previous paragraph, has been one of the progressive removal of limitations, real or perceived, on the freedom of the will. In other words, it is the history of Pelagianism going to seed. The Whig Interpretation of History, which was prevalent in the history books of the nineteenth century and which lingers on still despite having been ably refuted by Herbert Butterfield in 1931 almost a decade before the Modern Age was brought to its conclusion when the rival totalitarianisms of Communism and National Socialism plunged the world into the Second World War, maintains that this period was also a period in which, through the efforts of reformers and revolutionaries, political rights and freedoms gradually increased and tyranny receded. That this is utter nonsense is most evident in the fact that today’s uber-Pelagian liberalism with its absolute freedom of the will from the constraints of reality is one side of a coin the other side of which is the soft totalitarianism of politically correct thought control. If this seems paradoxical, consider the implications of George Grant’s wise judgement on the American and Canadian Supreme Courts after they had struck down their respective nations’ abortion laws in Roe v. Wade and R. v. Morganthaler, that they had “used the language of North American liberalism to say yes to the very core of fascist thought—the triumph of the will.”

A more genuine paradox is perhaps to be found in the fact that the Whigs who started the ball rolling on all of this were originally Puritans, i.e., fanatical Calvinists. Calvinism is ordinarily thought of as erring in the exact opposite direction of Pelagianism by taking Original Sin to the extreme of teaching that it annihilates utterly the Image of God in man and by denying, at least in effect, Free Will. How Whiggism developed from this to the opposite error is difficult to explain but the fact that it did is undeniable. The answer may simply be that to depart from orthodox truth in one area, opens one up to other heresies, even if they seem to be miles removed from your original position. Samuel Johnson had some interesting observations about the direction in which their political ideas pointed. Boswell records the following incident which had been related to him by Dr. John Douglas, Bishop of Salisbury:

One day when dining at old Mr. Langton's, where Miss Roberts, his niece, was one of the company, Johnson, with his usual complacent attention to the fair sex, took her by the hand and said, “My dear, I hope you are a Jacobite.” Old Mr. Langton, who, though a high and steady Tory, was attached to the present Royal Family, seemed offended, and asked Johnson, with great warmth, what he could mean by putting such a question to his niece! “Why, Sir, (said Johnson) I meant no offence to your niece, I meant her a great compliment. A Jacobite, Sir, believes in the divine right of Kings. He that believes in the divine right of Kings believes in a Divinity. A Jacobite believes in the divine right of Bishops. He that believes in the divine right of Bishops believes in the divine authority of the Christian religion. Therefore, Sir, a Jacobite is neither an Atheist nor a Deist. That cannot be said of a Whig; for Whiggism is a negation of all principle.” (4)

The principles that Dr. Johnson ascribes to the “Jacobite” here are the principles of seventeenth century Toryism, and also the principles of civil and ecclesiastical government to which all orthodox Christian believers, if they wish to be consistent with the teachings of their faith, must subscribe. The Jacobites were the Tories who were so true to these principles that they remained loyal to King James II and his heirs after 1688, (5) as opposed to today’s Conservatives, who claim the name and mantle of the Tories while showing little evidence of being acquainted with their principles, let alone subscribing to them. The relevant point, however, is that Whiggism, the original liberalism, was in its rejection of these political principles, a step away from Christian orthodoxy and, while the first Whigs were fanatical Calvinists, by the next century, in which Dr. Johnson lived, many of them had taken further steps towards Deism or even Atheism. If we consider how Unitarianism, a non-Trinitarian sect built on a foundation of theological liberalism, developed in New England out of the colony’s original strict Puritanism, then perhaps it will be less surprising that the political expression of Calvinist Puritanism eventually developed into an extreme version of Pelagianism.

Indeed, the root of the problem with Puritanism and what made it the well-spring of so much revived ancient heresy, can be found in its Calvinism. To return to a point made at the beginning of this essay, John Calvin, like Dr. Luther and the English Reformers held that the Holy Scriptures as God’s Written Word held supreme authority over the teachings and traditions of the Church. There was a difference, however, in how Calvin understood this truth and how Dr. Luther and the English Reformers understood it. Dr. Luther and the English Reformers believed – correctly – that they shared this truth with the Fathers of the early, undivided, Church and that while the Scriptures must have the final say, we need to pay respectful attention to how the Church Fathers understood them. This was not entirely untrue of John Calvin, but it was much less true of him than of these other Reformers, and it would become even less true among his followers, especially the English Puritans. The idea developed among them that the individual believer, aided only by the Holy Spirit, should mine the truth of Scripture for himself, and ignore what other Christians – prior to Calvin – had to say about it.

This goes a long way towards explaining why there has been such leanings towards ancient heresies like Nestorianism (6) in the Calvinist tradition. In it can also be seen the seeds of the perverse Modern attitude that C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield so aptly dubbed “chronological snobbery.” If we, who live in the present, have better access to the truth the Holy Spirit conveys through the Scriptures when we apply to them directly without consulting the exegesis of the Fathers of the Church, then chronological snobbery, “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited” (7) necessarily follows.

By contrast, Dr. Daniel Waterland, the early eighteenth century champion of orthodoxy against the revived Arianism of Dr. Samuel Clarke, wrote:

Having taken a view of the moderns in relation to the Creed, we may now enter upon a detail of the ancients and their testimonies, by which the moderns must be tried. (8)

Dr. Waterland was speaking with regards to the question of the age and authorship of the Athanasian Creed, but it we would apply this principle, that the moderns must be tried by the testimonies of the ancients, more broadly, we would find in it a curative to chronological snobbery, and the many heresies of our own age.

(1) The philosophical way of saying this is to say that these are the Transcendentals – the properties of Being itself.

(2) T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, Faber & Faber, 1934, pp. 24-25.

(3) See Richard Hooker’s excellent discussion of this in chapters VII through IX of Book I of his Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie.

(4) James Boswell, Life of Johnson, July 14, 1763.

(5) Dr. Johnson held these principles all his life but upon the accession of George III accepted the Hanoverian Succession as having attained legitimacy through prescription. Boswell inserts the anecdote from Douglas at the point in his narrative where he notes this fact.

(6) Thomas F. Torrance in his book Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, Downers Grove, IVP Academic, 2009, argued that the doctrine of Limited Atonement, implied, although not directly worded as such, by the Second Main Point of Doctrine of the Canons of the Synod of Dort (1618-1619) had Nestorian implications. Nestorianism cannot be imputed to John Calvin himself, because of this, for it is clear from his writings that he taught an Unlimited Atonement, but others, especially of the Lutheran tradition, have found evidence of Nestorianism in his doctrine of the Eucharist. That the late R. C. Sproul was guilty of outright and open Nestorianism, I demonstrated here: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2016/03/from-scylla-of-patripassianism-into.html.

(7) C. S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1966 p, 207.

(8) Daniel Waterland, A Critical History of the Athanasian Creed: A New Edition, Revised and Corrected by the Rev. J. R. King, Oxford and London, James Parker And Co., 1870, p. 20.