What the Hell?

 Hell has been a topic of much discussion online this past week, and not due to any speculation that the polar vortex that meteorologists are predicting will soon plunge us into some nasty temperatures, is about to arrive there and cause everything everyone has ever said would never happen to happen.  The impetus for the discussion, as far as I can tell, was the actor Kirk Cameron.  You might remember him from such TV shows as Growing Pains or from the films based on Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series.  Apparently, on his podcast on 3 December, he explained why he has shifted from a belief in “eternal conscious torment” to a belief in “conditional immortality” or as it is more commonly called “annihilationism.”

 

I had initially intended to ignore this because I have been working on something else from which I did not want to divert my time and attention.  I had, however, answered a question on a somewhat related topic in the comments to my essay “The Tenth Article – Baptism and Forgiveness”, and so I had already been thinking about the general subject.  This, and the way in which the matter was being framed by many on my side, prompted me to change my mind.   I will try to keep this short.

 

I have seen many who hold to “eternal conscious torment”, which shall be designated ECT for the remainder of this essay, accuse Cameron and those with similar views of “denying hell.”  I have also seen several references to the “heresy of annihilationism.” (1)  The first of these is clearly an inaccuracy due to lazy thinking.  The difference between ECT and annihilationism is not about the existence of hell but its nature.  Annihilationism claims that it consumes those consigned to it so that they eventually cease to exist.  ECT claims that those consigned to it suffer forever without ever ceasing to exist.

 

Those who speak of “the heresy of annihilationism” either use “heresy” interchangeably with “error” or distinguish heresy from error in general on grounds other than those generally accepted in orthodox Christianity.  There is not really much that can be said those to whom heresy and error are interchangeable synonyms.  Those who recognize the distinction, however, presumably also recognize that heresy is a more serious type of error than error in general.  To these, I would point out the ways in which heresy has traditionally been demarcated.

 

Such ancient heresies as Arianism (denial of the eternity and full deity of the Son of God) and Apollinarianism (denial of the full humanity of the Incarnate Son) were formally condemned as such by the Church in ecumenical council.   Moreover, they involve a denial, in full or in part, of a doctrine that is de fide, that is to say, of the very essence of the Christian faith, and as such is confessed in the Apostles’ and Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creeds.  The only place in either of these Creeds where the word hell appears is in the words “He descended into hell” in the Apostles’ Creed.  Both Creeds assert that Jesus will come back “to judge the quick and the dead” but nothing specific is said about the nature of the punishment that the wicked face as the outcome of this judgement.  The Athanasian Symbol does expand on the judgement by saying “And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting: and they that have done evil into everlasting fire”, but this wording does not exclude an annihilationist interpretation.   Nor was annihilationism ever formally condemned by the Church in ecumenical council.  Some Protestant confessions such as the Augsburg Confession (Lutheran) and the Westminster Confession of Faith (Presbyterian) exclude and condemn it, but these confessions are far too extensive and precise for everything confessed in them to be regarded as de fide.   On the very eve of the Reformation, the Church of Rome asserted the unconditional immortality of the soul in the Fifth Lateran Council but this council is hardly a true ecumenical council being recognized only by Rome. The closest thing to an ecumenical condemnation of annihilationism is an anathema attached to the records of the fifth ecumenical council (the Second Council of Constantinople, 553 AD) but when it condemns the idea that the punishment of the demons and the impious is temporary it is clearly the idea that this punishment will end with the restoration of the demons and the impious (universalism) that is in view and not the idea that it will end with their extinction.  

 

For these reasons we should be more cautious about applying the word “heresy” to conditional immortality or annihilationism.  If, however, it is not a heinous twisting of doctrine in which a de fide truth is denied to the peril of the soul, this does not mean that it is true doctrine.  These can hardly be the only two options, otherwise we would have to say that salvation is by dotting every i and crossing every t correctly in every doctrine, major or minor, which is a far cry from salvation by grace.

 

When it comes to ECT/conditional immorality there are both hermeneutical (Scriptural interpretation) and theological/philosophical factors to be considered.  

 

With regards to the hermeneutical, the first thing that needs to be noted is that there are two hells in the Bible.   Since there is also more than one heaven (2 Cor. 12:2) this should hardly be shocking.  The first is the place called Sheol in the Old Testament and Hades in the New Testament.  The second is the place that Jesus calls Gehenna and which is referred to as the Lake of Fire in the book of Revelation.  In Rev. 20:14, the first hell is cast into the second hell.  The idea of Sheol/Hades is of an underworld.  It corresponds to the concept expressed by “the grave” in the Bible.  When someone dies, his body goes to “the grave” and his spirit or soul goes to Sheol/Hades.  With regards to the English word “hell”, this is the idea that it originally conveyed.  We borrowed the English word from Norse/Scandanavian/German mythology in the same way the writers of the New Testament borrowed Hades from Greek mythology. Hel was the goddess who ruled the underworld in Norse mythology, the daughter of Loki, just as Hades, the brother of Zeus and Poseidon, was the god who ruled the underworld in Greek mythology.   Today, the English word more commonly suggests the idea of the second hell, Gehenna, the Lake of Fire, the place to which the lost are consigned at the Last Judgement.

 

From this we can establish that the matter of the ECT and annihilationist interpretations cannot be decided by the question of literalism.  The word Gehenna, taken in its most literal sense, is a place on this earth.  It is the Valley of Ben-Hinnom, located on the boundary of Judah (Jud. 15:8), which became a site of child sacrifice (2 Chron. 28:3, 33:6), which under the name Tophet was cursed by the prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 19), which in a later period was used by Jerusalem as the place to throw their garbage and the bodies of executed criminals and accordingly fires were kept perpetually burning there.  Everybody, I think, would regard it as excessive literalism, to interpret Jesus’ eschatological references to Gehenna as meaning that after the Final Judgement the earthly Gehenna that anyone can visit today will be the actual location of the punishment of the damned.

 

Short of that, it is arguable that the annihilationist is the more literal of the two interpretations.  In the ECT interpretation, the fire of Gehenna depicts the conscious suffering of the lost in hell and Jesus’ repeated description of the fire as “everlasting” means that the punishment is to consciously suffer forever.  That Jesus took the name of Jerusalem’s garbage dump, where the purpose of the perpetual fire was to burn up the corpses of the condemned and other rubbish, however, suggests that the annihilationist is the more obvious interpretation of this imagery.  It is also clearly what the fire of judgement suggests in the parables of the wheat and tares and of the net in Matthew 13. 

 

Indeed, within the Gospels, the passage involving fire which most suggests the ECT understanding of it is the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16.  In this, the rich man is consciously suffering in flame.  There are two problems, however, with using this passage to support the ECT interpretation.  The first is that the hell in the passage is Hades not Gehenna.  The second is that the entire passage is intentionally counter-factual.  Some object to it being called a parable on the grounds that an actual name is used, and they are correct, but not in the way they think.  It would more properly be called the Parody of the Rich Man and Lazarus.  Lazarus, in the story, is a fictional counterpart to the Lazarus whom Jesus raised from the dead in John 11.  The rich man in the story, is a caricature of Caiaphas, the high priest who presided at the trial that unjustly condemned Jesus.   The whole point of the parody is found in Abraham’s refusal of the rich man’s request that Lazarus be raised from the dead and sent to his five brothers (Annas, Caipahas’ father-in-law, had five sons, all of whom served as high priests like their father and brother-in-law).   They won’t believe, Abraham told the rich man, even though one rose from the dead.  This points to what happened in real life – Lazarus WAS raised from the dead, and in response Caiaphas initiated the conspiracy to put Jesus to death (Jn. 11:46-53). 

No, the strongest support for ECT in Jesus’ own words does not come from the passages in which He uses the imagery of Gehenna and fire, but the passages in which He speaks of the punishment of the lost as so terrible that it were better that one not have been born at all (in the case of Judas) or as so bad that it were better that one cut off a limb or pluck out an eye.   This language is difficult to reconcile with any interpretation other than ECT as is the whole idea of a Final Resurrection of the lost.  The Final Resurrection of the lost, however, is clearly taught in both Testaments.  “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” (Dan. 12:3)

 

When we look at the rest of the Scriptures, Rev. 14:11 provides the most support for the ECT interpretation.  “And the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night, who worship the beast and his image, and whosoever receiveth the mark of his name.”  Unlike the same book’s depiction of the Final Judgement six chapters later, in which the devil, the lost, and ultimately death and hell, are all cast into the Lake of Fire which is described as a Second Death, all of which can easily be understood in an annihilationist manner, it is very difficult if not outright impossible to read Rev. 14:11 without ECT.

 

If we take St. Paul’s epistles and Jesus’ teachings together, the strongest image associated with damnation is that of loss rather than inflicted pain.  “Depart from me”, Jesus says in Matt. 7:23, to those who He had just said would not “enter into the kingdom of heaven.”  This is what the goats are told in the Parable of the Sheep and Goats in Matt. 25, although everlasting fire prepared for the devil is also mentioned.  Earlier in that chapter the foolish virgins are denied entry by the bridegroom.  This is overwhelmingly the way St. Paul speaks of the fate of those who are ultimately lost – they will not inherit the kingdom of God.  This, of course, would be true regardless of whether ECT or annihilationism is correct.  What these words do seem to exclude is the universalist interpretation, especially the dogmatic absolute kind currently taught by David Bentley Hart.  Since the Beatific Vision – the sight of God face to face - is the good for which man, both the race and each person individually, was created, the failure to attain that end is the worst possible thing that could happen to a person.  This is true, regardless of whether the person is placed in a prison where he is kept consciously existing forever suffering inflicted physical pain, whether he is ultimately extinguished, or even whether he is place in an environment that is otherwise pleasant but where he is knowingly kept from the Beatific Vision forever.  St. John Chrysostom knew what he was talking about when he said “The pains of hell are not the greatest part of hell; the loss of heaven is the weightiest woe of hell.”  The theologians who speculated about a limbus infantium, to which the souls of unbaptized infants would be consigned where they would not endure the pains of hell but would be deprived of the Beatific Vision, did not.

 

The state of the question, after considering the Scriptural evidence, is such that it is most unwise to be so dogmatic in favour of either ECT or annihilationism as to pronounce the other to be heresy.  As for the theological/philosophical considerations, I will be much briefer in my treatment of them.  There seems to be a presumption in annihilationism that the extinction of the conscious existence of the damned is more merciful than allowing them to suffer torment eternally.  Is this true or is this based on presuppositions that we assume because they are common to the day in which we live without taking into consideration the corruption and degradation of that day?   Could an argument not be made, that those who are ultimately lost in hell are those who have rendered themselves so incapable of God’s blessing by refusing the proffered grace of God that in the end they are kept in existence eternally because their existence is the only good they are capable of receiving from God and He in His love and mercy is unwilling to deprive them of that?  Existence is always a good, after all.  The idea that in the hell of ECT, the lost suffer the loss of all good, is error, and perhaps an error more worthy of being considered “heresy” than annihilationism, because it contradicts what orthodox Christianity has always taught about the good and evil. (2) If the punishment of the damned truly were the loss of all good, this would mean the extinction of their existence, and so would be an argument for annihilationism.

 

Ultimately, the fact that ECT is by far the prevalent view of orthodox Christians in all places and times since the founding of the Church is what tips the balance of the hermeneutical and theological/philosophical considerations in favour of the ECT view for me.  Annihilationism has had its otherwise orthodox proponents, such as the late John R. W. Stott, but has mostly been the view of heretical sects like the neo-Arian Jehovah’s Witnesses.  This is a factor that carries no weight whatsoever for those who are now treating old Mike Seaver like he has apostasized from the faith once delivered unto the saints.  These, however, tend to be Calvinists of the strict TULIP type, the type who behave towards other Christians much like the five year old who guys around telling other kids that his dad can beat up their dad(s). 

 

For anyone looking for a more substantial treatment of this issue, Edward Fudge’s The Fire That Consumes is the best articulation of the conditional immortality viewpoint of which I am aware.  It is an extensive, scholarly treatment.  Fudge was a minister of the Churches of Christ and the first edition of his book was published in 1982.  In 1992, Dr. Larry E. Dixon, who was Professor of Theology at Providence College in Otterburne when I began my studies there in 1994 and who was my faculty advisor, published a defence of ECT entitled The Other Side of the Good News.  Anglican lay theologian Michael J. McClymond’s two-volume The Devil’s Redemption (2018) is a more recent and more extensive defence of ECT, but it is tailored towards addressing universalism (the subtitle is A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism) whereas Dixon’s book was more directed towards annihilationism.

 

 (1)   For some reason my spellchecker recognizes the word “annihilationist” but not “annihilationism”.  

(2) Evil has no existence of its own.  God, Who exists in Himself eternally, is entirely Good.  Everything He created is good.  Evil, unlike all created things, has neither form nor matter.  It is present only in a parasitic sense in created things that are otherwise good, in way exactly analogous to a hole in a wall.  The hole is there, it should not be there, but it is not there as a thing in the same way the wall itself is.  This is the orthodox Christian view of good and evil.  The Hollywood notion that evil exists in itself as a force almost equal to good, is the heresy of Mani.

The Theologians’ Cross

In this essay, written at the request of a colleague and former classmate, we shall be considering the subjects of election and predestination.   This is the first of three planned essays on these subjects.  This one will look at the difference between how the two main continental Protestant traditions have handled a theological dilemma that is at the heart of the predestination/free will debate and will conclude by briefly looking at how our Anglican tradition has handled the same dilemma in its Articles.  A second essay will consider divine foreknowledge and human responsibility from a broader perspective than how these apply in salvation and will look more at pre-Reformation thinking on the subject.  The third essay will be an exegetical consideration of certain relevant chapters of the New Testament.

 

The Scriptures speak of God’s people, under both Covenants, as having been chosen by Him which is the concept the word “election” denotes.  The verb προορίζω appears in various forms, six times in the New Testament.  This verb is a compound of a Greek preposition meaning “before” and a verb meaning “determine” or “ordain” and is translated by “predestinate” in the Authorized Bible in four out of the six occurrences. (1)  Election and predestination, therefore, are Scriptural concepts and so within the context of orthodox Christian theology, discussion and debate has not been over whether God’s people have been elected and predestined, (2) but over what the implications of these words are especially with regards to how they relate to the matters of divine Sovereignty and human moral responsibility or free will. 

 

“The theologians’ cross” is a translation of the Latin expression crux theologorum.  This expression is used, primarily by Lutheran theologians, to designate a problem that has plagued theologians of all Churches, denominations, and stripes.  The problem is cur alii, alii non, or “why some, not others?” that is, “why are some saved, not others?”  Within the Reformed tradition, that is, the branch of Protestantism that began in Zurich, Switzerland with Ulrich Zwingli at about the same time that the Lutheran tradition began in Wittenberg, Germany with Dr. Martin Luther, two opposite answers to this question have been given.  Calvinism, which takes its name from John Calvin whose became the leader of the Reformation at Geneva about half a decade after Zwingli’s death, says that the answer is the eternal decree of God.  God, before the creation of the world, decided that He would save such-and-such individuals and that He would leave others to suffer damnation, and in both cases His decision was based solely on its pleasing His will so to do and not on anything in either the elect or the reprobate themselves that distinguished the one group from the other.  Arminianism, on the other hand, which began in the generation after Calvin with Jacob Arminius, a student of Calvin’s successor Theodore Beza, says that the answer is to be found in the free will of man, that God did indeed elect and predestine some to salvation, but that this was based on His foreknowledge of who would out of their own free will believe the Gospel and who would not.  Today, an increasing number of theologians can be found willing to answer the question by denying the distinction, despite the sacrifice of orthodoxy involved in doing so. (3)

 

By contrast with both the Calvinist and Arminian sides of the Reformed tradition and the non-orthodox contemporary universalists, the Lutherans who named the problem have also taken the position that it has no answer, or at least no answer that can be known to us in this life.  The Lutherans insist that there are two truths that must be affirmed simultaneously, the universality of God’s saving grace and that salvation is by grace alone.  The crux theologorum arises because by natural human reasoning, these truths taken together ought to add up to universalism and yet they do not.  The Calvinist answer to the dilemma amounts to a denial of universal grace, the Arminian to a denial of grace alone. (4)   The Lutherans maintain, against both sides of the Reformed tradition, that universal grace and grace alone can be affirmed together, because God gives His grace through means, specifically the means of the Gospel in its three modes of Word, baptism, and Communion, and that when God works through means His will is resistible.  Therefore, salvation is entirely the work of God which He completed for the whole world in Jesus Christ and the grace (state of being in favour) thereby purchased He gives to all as a free gift along with the faith which is the appointed means whereby we receive it in the Gospel, but because of the intermediate nature of the communication of grace, we are capable of resisting it and it is our natural inclination in our fallen condition to do so.  God, in the grace He gives through the Gospel, is the sole cause of salvation in those who receive it by faith, man, resisting that grace out of the perverse inclination of his fallen will, is solely responsible for his own damnation in the case of those who are finally and incurably impenitent.  The saved, are not saved because of anything in themselves (even a lesser resistance) that makes them differ from the lost, nor are the damned, damned because God loves them less or has made lesser provision for their salvation, than the saved.  There is, therefore, no answer to the question of what makes the one differ from the other, and this should be treated as a mystery.

 

The Lutheran position on this has much to commend it.  Some questions don’t need answering and given the problems with any answer that has been put forward to this one, leaving it as a mystery is the best option.  A sedes doctrinae can be found for this position in Deuteronomy 29:29 which reads “The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.”  The precise doctrine that sparked the Calvinist-Arminian controversy within the Reformed tradition is the classic example of what can happen if theologians ignore this verse and pry into the secret things that God reserves for Himself.

 

John Calvin’s career as a Reformer spanned about three decades from the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 until his death in 1564.  While predestination was not as important in his own theology as it would become in the theology of those who call their view by his name, he did teach a strong double predestination, in which the reprobation of the lost is as much a positive decree based entirely on the pleasure of God’s will as the election of the saved. (5) Jacob Arminius, who was born in 1560 a few years before Calvin’s death, was a protégé of Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor as chief pastor of Geneva.  Beza’s principal theological contribution to the development of Calvinist theology was the doctrine of supralapsarianism.  Supralapsarianism is a doctrine about the order of God’s decrees.  It asserts that God’s decree to save some and damn others, logically but not temporally (because these decrees are from eternity which is outside of time) precedes His decree to create mankind and allow him to fall into sin.  If anything warrants being described as a secret thing belonging unto the Lord our God and hence not to us, it is the order of God’s eternal decrees.  The effect, however, of the doctrine of supralapsarianism is to say that God created people and allowed them to fall into sin in order that He might damn them and have grounds  on which so to do. 

 

Arminius, shortly after being made pastor in Amsterdam in 1587, was tasked by that city’s Ecclesiastical Court with rebutting the anti-Calvinist arguments of one Dirck Coornhert.  Later, after he had become a professor at his alma mater Leiden University in 1603, he became embroiled in a controversy with a senior member of the faculty of theology Franciscus Gomarus that would last the rest of his life.  In both cases, supralapsarianism was at the heart of the controversy.  Arminius had been asked to defend this doctrine against both Coornhert’s attacks and the proposed alternative of infralapsarianism (in which the decree to save and damn, presupposes the fall of man).  Arminius had concluded, however, that the doctrine he was asked to defend was indefensible, and by the time of his falling out with Gomarus at Leiden, he had come to see infralapsarianism as afflicted with many of the same problems as supralapsarianism.  As a consequence, he adopted a modified doctrine of predestination in which election is based on foresight of a positive response to the Gospel. 

 

In 1610, the year after Arminius’ death, his students submitted a protest against the strict predestinarianism of the Dutch Reformed Church.  The protest was entitled the Remonstrance, and consisted of five articles which have since been collectively called Arminianism although not all of them were spelled out in Arminius’ own teachings.  These are conditional election, unlimited atonement, total depravity (that fallen man is lost and sin from which he cannot extract himself but is utterly dependent on the grace of God – Arminians are no Pelagians), prevenient grace (like the Lutheran view of grace but unlike Calvin’s, Arminian prevenient grace is resistible, but unlike the Lutheran view it works by restoring the will’s ability to choose God so that the believer cooperates, although only after grace, in his own conversion), and a questioning of the guarantee of perseverance that soon hardened into the positive affirmation of the possibility of the believer’s apostasy that in wider evangelical circles today is the first if not the only thing the word “Arminian” summons to mind.  The Dutch government sat on the Remonstrance for a surprisingly long time, and in 1618 summoned representatives of the Reformed Churches to meet at Dordrecht to address the matter in what was intended to be the Reformed equivalent of a General Council.   The Synod of Dort met from late 1618 until spring of 1619 and published five canons in response to the Remonstrance.   These are what have ever since been known as the Five Points of Calvinism, for which the acronym TULIP was early coined – Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, Perseverance of the Saints. (6)   

 

This intra-Reformed schism, therefore, and its polarized theological positions, are a direct result of the Reformed tradition’s unwillingness to leave the crux theologorum unanswered and to leave to God the “secret things” that are His. This is a specific example of a general reluctance in practice to acknowledge mysteries that are beyond the explanatory capacity of human reasoning that also manifests itself with regards to other facets of the predestination-free will debate.  This reluctance helps explain the rise of Modern rationalism but is itself somewhat of a mystery in that one would expect a tradition that places such an emphasis on the gap between Sovereign Creator and fallen creature to be more willing than others to acknowledge mysteries beyond its understanding rather than less.  A partial explanation is the influence of Renaissance humanism on the Reformed tradition.  While Renaissance humanism in general, and that of Erasmus in particular, influenced both Dr. Luther and the Reformed tradition, the influence was greater in the Reformed tradition.   Note, however, that this does not mean that the strong predestinarianism of the Reformed tradition came from Erasmus.  Dr. Luther and Erasmus had a famous falling out in 1524-1525 precisely over this matter.  In 1524, Erasmus had published his treatise On the Freedom of the Will which argued for the capacity of the human will to respond positively to grace, and in the following year Dr. Luther had responded with his On the Bondage of the Will which, as the title would suggest, argued that the human will since the Fall has been bound in chains by sin and cannot respond positively to grace until freed to do so by grace itself.  It was more humanism’s general influence that led to the proto-rationalism of the Reformed tradition.   This should not be taken as entirely a negative thing.  In the Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin wrote the single most important contribution to systematic theology since St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica and this too can be largely attributed to the same influence.

 

Where the humanist influence on the Reformed tradition can be most seen to impact its approach to the crux theologorum has to do with the means of grace, especially the Sacraments.  In the broader Christian tradition, the expression “means of grace” refers to channels through which God distributes grace to people.   Protestantism takes a narrower view of this concept than other Christian traditions, limiting the grace distributed through the means to saving grace.  This is part of the reason why Protestants generally limit the Sacraments to two (baptism and the Lord’s Supper) or three (if absolution is included), although, as I recently discussed at length, (7) our Anglican Church has the best position on the matter by affirming baptism and the Lord’s Supper as Gospel Sacraments through which saving grace is distributed, without dogmatically rejecting the others affirmed by the broader Christian tradition as being Sacraments in a more general sense.   The Lutherans, helpfully distinguish between two kinds of means of grace, the organa dotika (means of giving, Word and Sacraments) and the organon leptikon (means of receiving, faith).  While the Reformed tradition uses the expression “means of grace” for Word and Sacrament (the Westminster Confession of Faith also names prayer), in their theology only the Word is a means of grace in the sense of an instrument God uses to give saving grace and faith. 

 

In the Heidelberg Catechism, Question 65 is “It is through faith alone that we share in Christ and all his benefits: where then does that faith come from?”  The answer is “The Holy Spirit produces it in our hearts by the preaching of the holy gospel, and confirms it by the use of the holy sacraments.” (8)  Note the distinction.  “Confirm” here is used in its original sense of “strengthen” rather than “verify” but since faith’s reception of grace is in no way dependent on its strength this position nullifies the concept of the Sacraments as an effectual means of grace in Reformed theology.  Orthodox Lutherans argue that Reformed theology by its doctrine of immediate grace nullifies even the Word as an effectual means of grace. (9)  This is because in Reformed theology, conversion is produced by irresistible grace or the effectual call, which is distinguished from the outward call of the Gospel, and which is regarded as a work of the Holy Spirit that is entirely internal to the person on whom it has the effect.  It is the Holy Spirit in the elect, in other words, rather than the Holy Spirit in the Word, who makes the elect believe the Word by the direct exercise of His power within the elect, rather than through the instrument of the Word.

 

The idea in Reformed theology, that the Holy Spirit operates directly on the human spirit, and that the external means of grace are inappropriate tools for Him to use to accomplish His work but are at most external signs testifying to it points to something in Reformed theology that manifests itself elsewhere in Reformed theology, and that is a tendency towards a moderate neo-Gnosticism.  The original heresies to which the term Gnosticism is applied, saw the physical world and the matter of which it is composed, as irredeemably corrupt and the spirit as incorruptible and pristine.   Their idea of salvation was the liberation of the human spirit from what they regarded as its material prison.  The Gnostics derived their ideas from secular philosophy, and in particular from Plato who saw everything in the physical world as an imperfect reflection of a perfect original in the unseen world.  While Plato also clearly influenced the thinking of St. Paul, the Apostle like the orthodox Church Fathers who contended against the Gnostics, recognized both the material and the spiritual as the creation of the One God, the same God of both Covenants, Who was manifest in the flesh in the “mystery of godliness” (1 Tim. 3:16).  While the Reformed tradition’s affirmation of the Nicene Creed and the Definition of Chalcedon prevents it from being outright Gnostic, its rejection of Nicaea II, the theological argument of which, whatever one might think of the practices that the Roman and Eastern Church justify with it, are the reasonable consequences of the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation as articulated and defended in the earlier ecumenical councils, demonstrates an uncomfortableness with regarding the material as the vehicle of the spiritual that approaches Gnosticism without quite crossing the boundary between it and Christianity.  This entered the Reformed tradition through the influence of humanistic philosophy on, especially, Zwingli, and is the reason that tradition, while retaining the language of means of grace with reference to Word and Sacrament, falls short of seeing them as the actual instruments God uses to give His grace.  This in turn is the reason why the Reformed tradition is unwilling to leave the crux theologorum as an unsolvable mystery.

 

Predestination and Election are addressed in Article XVII of our Anglican Articles of Religion.  Although it is a fairly long Article I will quote it in its entirety:

 

Predestination to Life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) he hath constantly decreed by his counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation, as vessels made to honour. Wherefore, they which be endued with so excellent a benefit of God be called according to God’s purpose by his Spirit working in due season: they through Grace obey the calling: they be justified freely: they be made sons of God by adoption: they be made like the image of his only-begotten Son Jesus Christ: they walk religiously in good works, and at length, by God’s mercy, they attain to everlasting felicity.

 

As the godly consideration of Predestination, and our Election in Christ, is full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons, and such as feel in themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ, mortifying the works of the flesh, and their earthly members, and drawing up their mind to high and heavenly things, as well because it doth greatly establish and confirm their faith of eternal Salvation to be enjoyed through Christ, as because it doth fervently kindle their love towards God: So, for curious and carnal persons, lacking the Spirit of Christ, to have continually before their eyes the sentence of God’s Predestination, is a most dangerous downfall, whereby the Devil doth thrust them either into desperation, or into wretchlessness of most unclean living, no less perilous than desperation.

 

Furthermore, we must receive God’ s promises in such wise, as they be generally set forth to us in holy Scripture: and, in our doings, that Will of God is to be followed, which we have expressly declared unto us in the Word of God.

 

Just as Article XXV on the Sacraments affirms the Protestant view of baptism and the Lord’s Supper as being unique as Sacraments of the Gospel without dogmatically rejecting the other five others affirmed by all the ancient Churches (with a partial exception of the Assyrian Church) as being Sacraments, so this Article affirms only the bare basics that all Christians should be able to affirm about predestination.  There is no mention of reprobation or even of preterition or any other predestination other than predestination to life.  It speaks of those so predestined as “chosen in Christ out of mankind” without commenting on whether that election is based on foresight or unconditional.   Although this Article was written before Jacob Arminius was born – it is a slightly shorter, but substantially the same version of what Archbishop Cranmer had written in the Forty-Two Articles of 1553 – there is nothing in this that Arminians cannot affirm. (10)  Nor is there anything in it that Calvinists cannot affirm, although their attempt in the late Elizabethan period to have the more explicitly Calvinist Lambeth Articles passed demonstrates that this Article did not impose their interpretation to the extent they would have liked (11).  It is more Lutheran than either Calvinist or Arminian, however, belonging to the section of the Articles immediately following the first section (Articles I-VIII) which affirms the most important Christian truths, the Catholic truths.  This section (Articles IX to XVIII) could be described as the “Augustinian” section of the Articles, and in it Archbishop Cranmer clearly drew his inspiration from the Lutherans as can be seen by comparing Articles IX, X, XI and XII/XIII to Articles II, XVII, IV and XX of the Augsburg Confession (and its Apology) respectively.  (12)  In the later section on Sacraments, Archbishop Cranmer was more influenced by the Reformed tradition than the Lutheran when it comes to the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper (his Article XXIX was much toned down in this regards in its revision into the current Article XXVIII in the reign of Elizabeth I) but his language in the last paragraph of his Article XXVI, which became the first paragraph of the current Article XXV, would seem to rule out the idea that Sacraments are merely external witnesses rather than actual instruments of communicating grace. 

 

Therefore, while the Articles do not require that Churchmen take the Lutheran position on the crux theologorum, it is the position they most direct us towards.  Many serious historical and present-day theological conflicts could have been avoided in our Church, if Churchmen had agreed to that position.

 

 

 

 

 

 (1)    When used as verbs, there is no difference in meaning between “predestinate” and “predestine”, “predestinate” being the older form of the verb which more closely corresponds to the cognate noun predestination.  Unlike “predestine”, “predestinate” is also used as an adjective, indicating that the noun it modifies has been predestined.

(2)   The question of whether God’s people are elected as individuals, i.e., Joe was elected qua Joe to be part of God’s covenant people or as a collective, i.e., the entire Church is collectively chosen to be in covenant relationship with God, is a question that arises within the boundaries of orthodoxy because it is a question about the nature of election rather than the fact of election.  Similarly, the difference between the Arminian (conditional election) and Calvinist (unconditional election) views is a difference about the grounds of election among those who hold to individual election.  The recent calling into question to varying degrees of God’s foreknowledge of the outcome of the Final Judgement by “open theists” (Richard Rice, John E. Sanders, Greg Boyd, Clark Pinnock, et al.) does not fall within the bounds of orthodoxy because it rejects the fact of election as well as classical theism and Augustinianism in the general sense in which it was accepted as orthodox against the Pelagian heresy in the early Church.

(3)   In 1987, Swiss Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, best known for his work on theological aesthetics, raised a few eyebrows with his book Dare We Hope? “That All Men Be Saved”? although the book merely raised the hypothetical possibility that all would be saved ultimately without affirming that this must be so.  More recently, David Bentley Hart, a lay Eastern Orthodox theologian who is the brother of two Anglican priests (one of whom crossed the Tiber in both directions) and a doppelganger of the late David Ogden Stiers (if you only know the actor from M*A*S*H or the revived Perry Mason movies you won’t see it, look up an image of him from Doc Hollywood or later in the period when he wore a beard), published That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).  Note the similarity between Hart’s title and von Balthasar’s and the big difference – Hart’s is an assertion, Balthasar’s was a question.  In his book, Hart declares that everyone will ultimately be saved and that to say otherwise is to make the eternal suffering of the damned the price paid for the everlasting bliss of the saved and to teach a God Who is unworthy of our faith and love.  It would be far beyond the scope of this essay to rebut his thesis which I have brought up only as an illustration of answering the crux theologorum by denying the dilemma.  For a book length rebuttal of universalism (and annihilationism) see The Other Side of the Good News: Confronting the Contemporary Challenge’s to Jesus’ Teaching on Hell (Wheaton: Victor Books, 1992) by Dr. Larry E. Dixon, who was my Greek and theology professor and faculty advisor in the 1990s.  Or, if you are looking for something more recent, try Michael J. McClymond’s two-volume The Devil’s Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018).

(4)   Neither Calvinists nor Arminians necessarily accept this assessment of their views.  The Lutheran assessment of the Arminian position is based on the Arminian view of prevenient grace as enabling the will to choose to respond positively to the Gospel.  The Lutherans argue, correctly, that a positive effect on the will is the result of grace being received through faith produced by grace rather than an intervening secondary cause in producing faith.  They point out, again correctly, that faith, even in other contexts, is not a product of the will.  We say “I trust so-and-so” and “I believe such-and-such” but this is not because we choose to do so, but because so-and-so has persuaded us of his trustworthiness and such-and-such has impressed us with its truth.  With regards to the Gospel, of course, ordinary persuasion is insufficient because man in his fallen condition is disinclined to believe God, but the Holy Spirit is always present in the Gospel working to overcome this. Much of the second volume of Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology is devoted to arguing that Calvinism does not deny the universal aspect of God’s grace.  To give but one example of how his arguments fail to persuade, however, Hodge, in his defence of the Calvinist view of the design of the Atonement – he conspicuously avoids the expression “Limited Atonement” – directs his argument against the claim that the Atonement must apply equally to everyone and in no way have a special reference to the elect.  In reality, of course, what everyone other than Calvinists find objectionable in the Calvinist doctrine, is the denial that there is provision for the salvation of those who will ultimately reject it in the Atonement.

(5)   See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.23.

(6)   The order of the canons required adjustment to produce the acronym.  In the order published, it would be ULTIP.

(7)   https://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2025/10/sacraments-and-gospel-sacraments.html

(8)   Richard Hooker in the fifth volume of his Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie had to contend with the absurd contention on the part of Elizabethan era Puritans that the Word was powerless to convert unless “preached” in the sense of exposited in a pulpit address.  Some of these objected to the reading of the Lessons (actual passages from the Scriptures) in the Church on this basis.   Ursinus and the other framers of the Heidelberg Catechism did not intend “by the preaching of the holy gospel” to be understood in this grossly ignorant manner.

(9)    “Because saving grace is particular, according to the teaching of the Calvinists, there are no means of grace for that part of mankind to which the grace of God and the merit of Christ do not extend…But neither do the Calvinists have means of grace for the elect.  Believers are expressly directed by Calvin not to ascertain their predestination from the external Word, that is, from the universal call (universalis vocation) which occurs through the outward Word (per externam praedicationem), but from the special call (specialis vocation), which consists in an inner illumination by the Holy Spirit…But according to the teaching of Calvinism this “inner illumination” is not brought about through the means of grace; it is worked immediately by the Holy Ghost.” Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, Volume III (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1953), 118-122.  Pieper is, of course, a hostile witness to Calvinism, but when he goes on to quote Charles Hodge to prove this point he does not misrepresent him.  Indeed, if anything he understates his case because he elides from his quotation the following “When Christ said to the leper, ‘I will: be thou clean’, nothing intervened between his volition and the effect.  And when he put clay on the eyes of the blind man, and bade him wash in the pool of Siloam, there was nothing in the properties of the clay or of the water that cooperated in the restoration of his sight.” (This is on page 684 of the 1872 edition published by Thomas Nelson in London and Edinburgh, and in New York by Charles Scribner.  Pieper cites it as 634f.  Either he was looking at a different edition or, more likely, he or his English translator wrote a 3 for an 8).  This is sloppy thinking, and worse exegesis on Hodge’s part.  Obviously, Christ’s words expressing His will for the cleansing of the leper, intervened between His volition and the effect to bring about the latter.  In the case of the blind man, while it is true that nothing in the properties of the clay or water contributed to the restoration of his sight, this is entirely beside the point.  While Christ could have just spoken and healed the blind man like He did the leper, in this case He chose the means of mud and the pool of Siloam, and the mud and water were effective means not because of their intrinsic properties, but because He so chose to use them.

(10)                       Despite this, John Wesley removed it from his Twenty-Five Articles for Methodism.  In the century before Wesley, Bishop Andrewes, Archbishop Laud, and other Orthodox Churchman of the Jacobean and Caroline reigns were accused of “Arminianism” by the Hyper-Calvinist Puritans.  A case can be made that this accusation was no more substantial than the ridiculous accusation of popery made by the same people because the Laudians insisted that the Church follow the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer to the letter (if you don’t see why that accusation is ridiculous you are hopeless and I will not waste my time explaining it).  See, however, Samuel D. Fornecker, Bisschop’s Bench, Contours of Arminian Conformity in the Church of England, c. 1674-1742 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022) for an account of Arminian Churchmanship of a slightly later period (Bisschop is the Dutch name of the man more commonly known as Simon Episcopius, who was the leader of the Remonstrants, Arminius’ first generation followers).  Whether their Arminianism was real or merely in the minds of their opponents, these Churchmen subscribed to the Articles of Religion.

(11)                       See my discussion of this here: https://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/ 2023/08/1595-anglicanism-at-crossroads.html

(12)                       Note also the wording of Article XVI.  It suggests the Lutheran rather than the Calvinist view of perseverance, although not strongly enough so that a Calvinist could not affirm the Article.

The Bible and the Church Part One: A False Opposition

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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