Captain Airhead, Would You Please Go Now?

 Leap Day this year is the fortieth anniversary of Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s announcement that during a “walk in the snow” he had decided that he would step down and not lead the Liberal Party into the next Dominion election.  He had been leader of the Grits for sixteen years since Lester Pearson stepped down in April of 1968.   With the exception of the six month premiership of Joe Clark he had been Prime Minister all that time.   His was the third longest premiership in Canadian history.   The longest was that of William Lyon Mackenzie King who had been a different kind of Liberal leader.   King, like Trudeau, had been a traitor to Canada, her history, heritage, and traditions, but in his case it was American-style capitalist liberalism to which he had sold us out.   In the case of Pierre Trudeau it was Soviet and Chinese Communism that was his true master.   Canada’s second longest premiership was also her first that of Sir John A. Macdonald.   Sir John had been the leader of the Fathers of Confederation and never betrayed us.   Nor did Canadians ever grow tired of Old Tomorrow.   Shortly before his death in 1891 he won his sixth majority in that year’s Dominion Election by campaigning for “The Old Flag, the Old Policy, the Old Leader” against a Liberal Party that sought to move us closer economically and culturally into the orbit of the United States.   By contrast by the time Trudeau took his famous walk Canadians had grown absolutely sick and tired of him.   The Liberals were heading to defeat, Trudeau knew it, and in the interest of preserving his legacy and what was left of his reputation jumped off the ship before it sank.

 

The electorate’s having grown sick of Trudeau and his party should be regarded as the expected outcome when a Prime Minister remains in office for a long period of time.   Sir John’s enduring popularity can be taken as the exception explainable by the fact that he was an exceptional statesman, identified with the country he led as no other Prime Minister could ever hope to be due to his central role in her founding, and a personable leader to whom people could relate.   When a Sovereign, like Queen Victoria during whose reign Confederation took place or like our late Queen Elizabeth II of Blessed Memory, has an exceptionally long reign this is cause for celebration and rejoicing.   It is the role of the Sovereign, after all, to embody the principle of continuity and everything that is enduring, lasting, and permanent in the realm.   The man who fills the Prime Minister’s office, by contrast, is very much the man of the moment.   Premierships, therefore, are usually best kept short.

 

Pierre Trudeau’s son, Captain Airhead, has been Prime Minister since 2015 and Canadians are now far sicker of him than they ever were of his father.   Personally, I had had more than enough of him while he was still the third party leader prior to the 2015 Dominion Election.   Why it took this long for the rest of the country to catch up with me I have no idea but here we are.   It is 2024 and Canadians are divided on whether they would like Captain Airhead to follow his father’s footsteps and take a walk in the snow, whether they would like to see him suffer the humiliation of going down in defeat in the next Dominion Election or whether they would like to see him brought down in an act of direct divine intervention involving a lightning bolt that strikes the ground beneath him causing it to open up, swallow him whole, and belch out fire and brimstone.  What unites Canadians is that we all wish that he would make like Dr. Seuss’ Marvin K. Mooney and “please go now.”   Thermidor is rapidly approaching for Captain Airhead and his version of the Liberal Party as it eventually comes for all Jacobins.

 

The Canadian Robespierre seems determined, however, not to go to his inevitable guillotine without one last stab at imposing his ghoulish and clownish version of the Reign of Terror.   On Monday the Liberals tabled, as they have been threatening to do since the last Dominion Election, Bill C-63, an omnibus bill that would enhance government power in the name of combatting “online harms.”   A note to American readers, in the Commonwealth to “table” a bill does not mean to take it off the table, i.e., to suspend or postpone it as in the United States, but rather to put it on the table, i.e., to introduce it.   Defenders of omnibus bills regard them as efficient time-savers.   They are also convenient ways to smuggle in something objectionable that is unlikely to pass if forced to stand on its own merits by rolling it up with something that is desirable and difficult or impossible to oppose without making yourself look bad.   In this case, the Liberals are trying to smuggle in legislation that would allow Canadians to sue other Canadians for up to $20 000, with the possibility of being fined another $50 000 payable to the government thrown in on top of it, over online speech they consider to be hateful and legislation that would make it possible for someone to receive life imprisonment for certain “hate crimes”, by rolling it up in a bill ostensibly about protecting children from online bullying and pornographic exploitation.  As is always the case when the Liberals introduce legislation that has something to do with combatting hate it reads like they interpreted George Orwell’s depiction of Big Brother in 1984 as a “how-to” manual.  

 

Nobody with an IQ that can be expressed with a positive number could possibly be stupid enough to think that this Prime Minister or any of his Cabinet cares about protecting children.   Consider their response to the actions taken over the last year or so by provincial premiers such as New Brunswick’s Blaine Higgs and Alberta’s Danielle Smith to do just that, protect children  from perverts in the educational system hell-bent on robbing children of their innocence and filling their heads with sex and smut from the earliest grades.   Captain Airhead and his corrupt cohorts denounced and demonized these premiers’ common-sense, long overdue, efforts, treating them not as the measures taken in defense of children and their parents and families that they were, but as an attack on the alphabet soup gang, one of the many groups that the Liberals and the NDP court in the hopes that these in satisfaction over having their special interests pandered to will overlook the progressive left’s contemptuous disregard for the common good of the whole country and for the interests of those who don’t belong to one or another of their special groups.  

 

Nor could any Canadian capable of putting two and two together and who is even marginally informed about what has been going on in this country in this decade take seriously the Prime Minister’s posturing about hate.    The leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, Pierre Poilievre, when asked about what stance the Conservatives would take towards this bill made the observation that Captain Airhead given his own past is the last person who should be dictating to other Canadians about hate.   Poilievre was referring to the blackface scandal that astonishingly failed to end Captain Airhead’s career in 2019.  It would have been more to the point to have referenced the church burnings of 2021.  In the summer of that year, as Captain Airhead hosted conferences on the subjects of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia that consisted of a whole lot of crying and hand-wringing and thinking out ways to get around basic rights and freedoms so as to be able to throw in gaol anyone who looks at a Jew or Muslim cross-eyed, Canada was in the midst of the biggest spree of hate crimes in her history.   Christian church buildings all across Canada were targeted for arson and/or other acts of vandalism.  Not only did Captain Airhead fail to treat this violent and criminal display of Christophobia as a serious problem in the same way he was treating these other types of hatred directed towards specific religions he played a significant role in inciting these attacks on Canada’s Christian churches by promoting a narrative in which all allegations against Canada’s churches and her past governors with regards to the Indian Residential Schools are accepted without question or requirement of proof. (1)

 

Clearly Captain Airhead does not give a rat’s rump about hate qua hate.   If hatred is directed towards people he doesn’t like, like Christians, he shrugs it off even when it is expressed through violent, destructive, crime.   If it is directed against people he likes, or, more accurately, against groups to which he panders, he treats it as if it were the most heinous of crimes even if it is expressed merely in words.   While I am on principle opposed to all laws against hate since they are fundamentally unjust and by nature tyrannical (2) they are especially bad when drawn up by someone of Captain Airhead’s ilk.

 

Captain Airhead’s supposed concern about “online harms” is also a joke.   Consider how he handles real world harms.   His approach to the escalating problem of substance abuse is one that seeks to minimize the harm drug abusers do to themselves by providing them with a “safe” supply of their poison paid for by the government.   This approach is called “harms reduction” even though when it comes to the harms that others suffer from drug abuse such as being violently attacked by someone one doesn’t know from Adam because in his drug-induced mania he thinks his victim is a zombie space alien seeking to eat his brain and lay an egg in the cavity, this approach should be called “harms facilitation and enablement.”   Mercifully, there is only so much Captain Airhead can do to promote this folly at the Dominion level and so it is only provinces with NDP governments, like the one my province was foolish enough to elect last year, that bear the full brunt of it.   Then there was his idea that the solution to the problem of overcrowded prisons and criminal recidivism was to release those detained for criminal offenses back into the general public as soon after their arrest as possible.   Does this sound like someone who can be trusted to pass legislation protecting people from “online harms”?

 

Captain Airhead inadvertently let slip, last week, the real reason behind this bill.   In an interview he pined for the days when Canadians were all on the same page, got all their information from CBC, CTV, and Global, before “conspiracy theorists” on the internet ruined everything.   He was lamenting the passing of something that never existed, of course.   People were already getting plenty of information through alternative sources on the internet long before his premiership and the mainstream legacy media became far more monolithic in the viewpoints it presented during and because of his premiership.   What he was pining for, therefore, was not really something that existed in the past, but what he has always hoped to establish in the future – a Canada where everyone is of one opinion, namely his.    This is, after all, the same homunculus who, back when a large segment of the country objected to him saying that they would be required to take a foreign substance that had been inadequately tested and whose manufacturers were protected against liability into their bodies if they ever wanted to be integrated back into ordinary society, called them every name in the book and questioned whether they should be tolerated in our midst.

 

Some have suggested that Bill C-63 is not that bad compared with what the Liberals had originally proposed three years ago.   It still, however, is a thinly-veiled attempt at thought control from a man who is at heart a narcissistic totalitarian and whose every act as Prime Minister, from trying to reduce the cost of health care and government benefits by offering people assistance in killing themselves (MAID) to denying people who having embraced one or more of the letters of the alphabet soup, had a bad trip, the help they are seeking in getting free, deserves to be classified with the peccata clamantia.   It took a lot of pain and effort for this country to finally rid herself of the evil Section 13 hate speech provision that Captain Airhead’s father had saddled us with in the Canadian Human Rights Act.   Captain Airhead must not be allowed to get away with reversing that.

 

It is about time that he took a walk in the snow.   Or got badly trounced in a Dominion election.   Or fell screaming into a portal to the netherworld that opened up beneath his feet.   Any of these ways works.  

 

The time is come.  The time is now.  Just go. Go. GO!   I don’t care how.  Captain Airhead, would you please go now?! (3)

 

(1)   Anyone who thinks the allegations were proven needs to learn the difference between evidence and proof.   Evidence is what is brought forward to back up a claim.   Proof is what establishes the truth of a claim.   That the evidence advanced for the allegations in question simply does not add up to proof and moreover was flimsy from the onset and has subsequently been largely debunked is an entirely valid viewpoint the expression of which is in danger of being outlawed by the bill under discussion.   In a court of criminal law the burden is upon the prosecutor to prove the charge(s) against the defendant.   Not merely to present evidence but to prove the accused to be guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  The same standard must be applied to allegations made against historical figures and past generations.   They, after all, are not present to defend themselves against their accusers.   To fail to do so is to fail in our just duty towards those who have gone before us.   The ancients had a term for this failure.   It is the vice of impiety.

(2)   The folly of legislation against hate was best expressed by Auberon Waugh in an article entitled “Che Guevara in the West Midlands” that was first published in the 6 July, 1976 issue of The Spectator, and later included in the collection Brideshead Benighted (Toronto: Little, Brown & Company, 1986).    Michael Wharton, however, writing as “Peter Simple” was second to none, not even Waugh, in ridiculing this sort of thing.

(3)   Apologies to Dr. Seuss.

Advent

It is Advent Sunday, the first day in the liturgical calendar for Western Christians, and the first of the four Sundays of Advent, the period that begins now and ends with the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord and Saviour on Christmas.   It is, like the longer period of Lent that leads up to Easter or Pascha, the Christian Passover celebrating our Lord's Glorious Resurrection, a period for penitence and sober reflection.   I should say, that is what the period of Advent traditionally has been in the Church.   There is now a secular Christmas which falls on the same day as the celebration of the birth of Christ, and with it a secular Advent that is more-or-less the opposite of what Advent is all about in the Church.   Secular Advent comes in a long and a short version.   The short version is that which is evident in the secular version of Advent calendars.   An Advent calendar is the kind where you count down the days to Christmas by opening a door, eating a candy, or some such thing.   Religious Advent calendars begin with Advent Sunday which may, as this year, fall in November (the 27th is the earliest it can fall).   Secular Advent calendars typically begin on December 1st.   That is the short version of secular Advent.   The long version starts when the Christmas decorations go up.   This was remarkably early this year.   I  saw a house in Winnipeg's West End - that is the name of the section of town, not an accurate description of its location - lit up as if they were in competition with Clark Griswold, back in September.

Secular Advent, as stated above, is typically the opposite in tone and spirit to what Advent is supposed to be in the Church.   It is more of an extended version of secular Christmas, with parties and gift-giving and the like, and thus resembles Carnival, the pre-Lent festive season for those of the Roman Communion that corresponds to the more reserved Anglican Shrovetide, more than it does Lent itself.   That is what has been the norm for decades.   It does not look like it will be the case this year.   Grinches all around the world have seized the opportunity of the mass hysteria generated by media hype about the Wuhan bat flu to steal both the secular and the Christian Christmas, taking Advent to boot.   Here in the Dominion of Canada the chief Grinch has been Captain Airhead, who managed to retain his position as Her Majesty's First Minister last year despite being hit by at least three scandals any one of which would have taken down anybody who did not belong to the Canadian equivalent of the Kennedy family, but the provincial premiers, especially our own premier in Manitoba, Brian Pallister,  who cannot seem to make up his mind as to whether he is a rectal orifice or a squirt bottle used to clean the same, has come close to surpassing Captain Airhead in his Grinchiness.   He shut down the small businesses that depend upon the Christmas shopping rush to balance their books for at least a month in that very period, then, when they complained that they were being treated unfairly, instead of doing something that would actually help, ordered the larger stores to seal off everything except food and a few other "essentials", thus giving all the  business in the province for other items to Amazon.   He ordered the Churches to close and seems determined to make those Churches that have insisted upon their constitutionally guaranteed freedom of worship in defiance of his orders into scapegoats for the failure of his restrictions to produce the desired effect of lower case numbers.   I shall, Deus Vult, be addressing that scapegoating at greater length later this week , but note that this unconstitutional and totalitarian ban on in-person Church services includes even drive-in services where everyone remains in their own car in the parking lot and which cannot possibly contribute to the spread of this or any other disease.    He even had the nerve to lecture Lower Canada's premier François Legault over the latter's less Grinchy policy with regards to family gatherings over Christmas.   Sadly, Mr. Legault's response was merely to say that Mr. Pallister did not seem to be aware of the precautions surrounding the Christmas exception in his province, rather than the "va te faire foutre" that the situation seemed to call for.   Mr. Pallister is not content with trying to steal Christmas from Manitobans, he wants to steal it from other Canadians too.

Mr. Pallister, whose inability to think outside the lockdown box when it comes to the bat flu evinces his lack of understanding the meaning or perhaps even of having read Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Read Death, shows by his efforts to steal Christmas that he  has failed to grasp the lesson of Dr. Seuss's story about the Grinch as well.   In the end, despite all the Grinch's efforts, Christmas came "it came just the same".   It is perhaps too much to hope that Mr. Pallister's small heart will grow three sizes when this very thing happens this year.  Denied his annual vacation in Costa Rica because of bat flu travel restrictions he seems determined to make everybody as miserable as he is.   Those who do not understand the purpose of penitential seasons like Advent and Lent might conclude from this that he has restored the original spirit of the period.

They would be wrong, of course, because gloom and misery do not add up to penitence.   Indeed, they are even more a part of despair than they are a part of penitence or repentance.   Despair, you might recall, was in medieval moral theology, the mortal sin opposite to the theological virtue of hope and amounted to the repudiation of the latter.   In its most extreme form it was the belief that one had sinned beyond the capacity of God's grace and mercy and expressed itself in suicide.   The mental anguish that tormented the eighteenth century poet and Olney hymn writer William Cowper in the latter years of his life, from which he received release only shortly before he was allowed to die in the peace of assurance of God's forgiveness, was pretty much the textbook example.   In is a recurring subject throughout Shakespeare, the ending of Romeo and Juliet being the most obvious example although it is expressed best in all that King Lear says after he enters, in the third and last scene of Act V, carrying the dead body of Cordelia, the only one of his daughters, as he realized too late, who had been truly loving, devoted, and loyal.   Despair is so serious a sin because it precludes repentance.   Penitence or repentance, always includes hope.

True penitence or repentance involves a sober reflection upon one's own mortality and that which is ultimately the cause of the dread which the inevitability of one's own death inspires, one's sin.    "It is appointed unto man once to die", St. Paul wrote to the Hebrews, "but after this the judgement."   The Greek word translated repentance is often given the definition "change of mind".   It is, in fact, formed by adding a preposition which when used in compounds has the meaning "again" to a word referring to thought.    The image is of looking upon one's thoughts, words, and deeds of the past and recognizing how far short of God's will, whether expressed in the Ten Commandments or the Greatest and Second Greatest Commandments to which our Lord pointed, we have fallen.   The basic Greek word for sin in the New Testament, the same used by Aristotle in his works of literary/theatrical criticism/theory to denote the "fatal flaw" of a tragic hero, means literally to miss the mark, to fall short of the bull's eye.   This sort of reflection falls short of being repentance, however, and leads to despair, if it is not joined to faith and hope.

This is why seasons of penitence are always seasons which look forward to a faith and hope inspiring event.   Lent looks forward to the remembrance of the events whereby sin and death were defeated, the Crucifixion, in which Our Saviour allowed Himself to be unjustly executed by wicked men, that He might offer Himself up as the One true sacrifice that takes away the sins of the world, and the Resurrection in which His triumph over sin, death, and the very gates of hell, was declared to the world.   Advent looks forward to His birth, and what His birth signifies, the Incarnation, God coming down to earth and becoming man that He might lift man up to God.     Faith rests upon God's revelation of Himself and His love and saving mercy to the world in these events and it is faith which gives birth to hope, which is but faith looking forward, and charity or Christian love, which is but faith in action.   Repentance prepares our hearts to receive God's saving revelation of Himself in faith.

So, denied the shopping, partying, and revelry of secular Advent this year by Satan-possessed politicians and doctors determined to preserve our mere existence by forbidding us to truly live our lives, let us reflect in the true spirit of the season, on our sinfulness and mortality, repent, and embrace in faith and hope the "dawn of redeeming grace", to borrow Dr. Luther's words, in the events remembered at Christmas.   If we do so, Christmas will come just the same despite the efforts of politicians and physicians to prevent it.

Condemn Captain Airhead – But For the Right Reason

Captain Airhead, or Justin Trudeau as unimaginative types like to call him, has received a lot of much deserved criticism this week. As was the case in the notorious “blackface” scandal of last year’s Dominion election, in which it was revealed that on at least three occasions he had worn skin-darkening makeup which, had any of his subordinates or opponents done, would have resulted in him requiring that they resign and be sent in permanent exile to the land of perpetual shame, a hypocritical double standard was the problem.

Captain Airhead, like his Communist father before him, hates the rights and freedoms of Her Majesty’s free subjects in Canada and the Common Law tradition from which they arise. C. S. Lewis in The Horse and His Boy has the Tisroc of Calormen utter these words to his Grand Vizier and to his son Rabadash “It is very grievous…Every morning the sun is darkened in my eyes, and every night my sleep is the less refreshing, because I remember that Narnia is still free.” This is very similar to the sentiment of Captain Airhead, except that he is the Grand Vizier, which is another name for Prime Minister, and it is his own country’s freedom that he hates.

In what used to be called Christendom, but is now called “Western Civilization”, people who hate freedom tend to hate Christianity. Christianity teaches that God, after liberating Israel from literal slavery in Egypt, made a Covenant of Law with them, and promised that one day He would make a New and better Covenant, which promise He fulfilled in the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, events which took place on the anniversary of the original Passover, and which brought spiritual liberty to the entire world. St. Paul, especially in his epistle to the Romans but in many of his other epistles as well, emphasizes that through our union with Christ in His death we die to the sin which enslaved us and that through our union with Him in His Resurrection we are raised to the new life, which is a life of liberty. This is the reason why totalitarians have always hated Christianity above all other religions.

Needless to say, the Christian Passover, known as Easter in countries with Germanic languages, and Pascha everywhere else, which commemorates the liberation of the world from spiritual bondage in the death and Resurrection of Christ, is not the favourite holiday of freedom haters.

With all the necessary apologies to Dr. Seuss, the following is what I suspect went down in the Prime Minister’s residence as Lent drew to a close and Holy Week approached. Captain Airhead, whose heart and whose brain are at least two sizes too small, was stewing away and saying to himself “I’ve got to stop Easter from coming, but how?”

So he consulted with Hajdu, he consulted with Tam, he called on his Cabinet to think up a plan.

Then Captain Airhead, he had an idea – a terrible, monstrous, horrendous idea.

Said Captain Airhead:

“I know what I’ll do, I’ll frighten them all with catching bat flu. The virus from China is now over here, I’ll shut down the country for over a year. I’ll close all the churches, I’ll close all the schools, I’ll close all the libraries, malls, parks and pools. I’ll close all the businesses, except grocery stores, I’ll clear out the sidewalks, and lock all the doors. I’ll scold them and nag them and boss them around, I’ll bully, I’ll badger, I’ll act like a clown. After eighteen months straight of only TV, they all will forget that they ever were free. And then when Easter is just round the bend, I’ll tell everybody ‘Stay home this weekend!’”

He’s a mean one, that Captain Airhead.

Well, we all know what happened. After telling Canadians to sacrifice their Easter plans, he then took off from Ottawa to Harrington Lake, Quebec to be with his family at their cottage for the weekend.

Did Captain Airhead’s heart and his brain grow three sizes that weekend?

Sadly, I’m afraid not. He still insisted that the rest of us give up Easter, put our lives on hold, and surrender our freedoms to the total control of the public health officials.

He has not escaped criticism in the press for his double standard, but that criticism, or at least the portion of it that I have read, has all been rather wrongheaded in my opinion. It has taken the form: Trudeau told all the rest of us to sacrifice our Easter plans, therefore he should have sacrificed his own. It should have taken this form instead: Trudeau was not willing to sacrifice his own family plans for Easter weekend, therefore he should not have told all of the rest of us to do so.

The problem is not that he spent the weekend at the cottage with his family. That at least is a human thing to do. The problem is that he has been bullying and threatening and scolding the rest of us into giving up our lives and our freedoms. That is a despotic thing to do.

Should the fourth estate finally start criticizing Trudeau for piling on rule after rule on top of an already excessive heap of rules, this will be the first sign of our recovery from our true affliction, which is not some batty coronavirus from China but a lack of appreciation of our fundamental rights and liberties.

The Other War On Christmas

The war on Christmas, as that expression is usually understood, denotes the recent North American phenomenon in which progressive forces, in the name of diversity, tolerance, multiculturalism and all those other words which serve little other purpose than to hide the spirit of Stalinist totalitarianism behind a smiley face, have sought to re-brand Christmas into a generic “holiday season”. This war is conducted on many fronts and with varying degrees of intensity, ranging from the replacement of the traditional “Merry Christmas” greeting with “Happy Holidays” or something similar to the more heavy-handed attempts by lobby groups and civil liberties organizations to drive nativity scenes and any other Christmas imagery that has a direct and obvious connection to Christianity from the public square. Back in the 1990s, Peter Brimelow and John O’Sullivan began a war against Christmas contest in National Review, to see who could find the most outrageous example of an attempt to suppress the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and put a cheap generic imitation in its place and Brimelow has continued this tradition on his immigration reform website VDare. VDare has done an excellent job of documenting this sort of thing and so we will here turn to look at the other war on Christmas, i.e., that conducted by those who consider themselves to be the faithful, against Christmas, in the name of what they consider to be a sound interpretation of the Bible.



The roots of this other war on Christmas go back to the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. The Reformation began as a response to corruption in the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Leo X had authorized a campaign in which indulgences would be offered in return for funds that would go to the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica. This crass effort to sell the grace of God, offended Dr. Martin Luther of the University of Wittenberg, who challenged not only the vulgar indulgence peddling of Johann Tetzel, but the theology that lay behind the very idea of indulgences, on the grounds of the Pauline doctrine of justification by grace through faith, and, when summoned by the Church to defend himself against charges of heresy, insisted that it is to the Holy Scriptures, as the written Word of God, that the teachings and traditions of the Church must be held accountable.



Dr. Luther had nothing against Christmas, or against most of the traditions of the Church for that matter, but the ball he started rolling picked up momentum which carried it much further than he had ever intended. The Reformation divided Western Europe, in which nation-states had begun to develop in the earlier Renaissance period. Of these, for the most part those with a Latin-based language, like French, Italian, and Spanish, remained Roman Catholic while the national churches in the northern states, with German-based languages, tended to follow one or the other of the Protestant Reformers. There were Protestants, however, who were convinced that Luther, Calvin, and even Zwingle had not gone far enough, who condemned Christendom and its traditions and institutions as hopelessly corrupt, denouncing both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant national churches and who formed sects in which only those whom they considered to be pure in doctrine and lifestyle were welcome, regarding their own sects as God’s elect remnant, and everyone else as being corrupt.



Protestant sectarianism continued to develop further and further away from the mainstream of Christian tradition and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, radical Protestant sects developed, like the Rutherfordian Russellites and the Armstrongists which went so far as to reject Nicene Trinitarian orthodoxy itself, generally reviving one or another of the ancient heresies in the process. Both the Russellites and the Armstrongists condemned Christmas as a pagan invention of the “Catholic Church” which in their view was a counterfeit church created by Emperor Constantine in the fourth century.



This same anti-Christmas view had developed in radical Protestantism much earlier than this, however, by individuals who did not go so far as to reject the Trinity. In the sixteenth century, many of the English Protestants who had introduced moderate reforms in the Church of England during the reign of Edward VI, fled to Switzerland during the reign of the Catholic Mary, and there became much more radical in their Calvinism. When these returned to England, during the reign of Elizabeth I, who had restored the Edwardian reforms, they found these did not go far enough to please them. They demanded that every practice and institution from the pre-Reformation tradition of the Church for which they could not find a text in the Holy Scriptures commanding or authorizing its use be removed from the Church as superstition and popery. Against these fanatics, who came to be known as Puritans, the theologian Richard Hooker, defended the Elizabethan Church of England in his eight volume Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, arguing that the Church was at liberty to retain whatever traditional practices and institutions were not explicitly forbidden or condemned in the Holy Scriptures, a view far more compatible with the Pauline doctrine of Christian liberty than that of the Puritans, although the latter liked to think of themselves as the champions of Christian liberty against a “legalistic” Church. When neither Elizabeth I, nor her Stuart successors James I and Charles I, were willing to give in to their demands, they became increasingly seditious and in the 1640s their rebellion against King Charles I broke out into the English Civil War. They captured the king, had him put on trial before a Parliament from which all but their own supporters had been removed by military force, and executed him. They installed their general, Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector of Britain, whose tyrannical regime lasted until his death in 1658, shortly after which the crown was restored to Charles II.


During his mercifully brief dictatorship, Cromwell sought to remove everything that brought the slightest amount of colour, light, and earthly happiness into people's lives. He banned games and amusements on Sundays - the only day of the week people were not working from dawn to dusk, stripped the churches of ornamentation and beautiful organ music, forcing everyone to listen to horrible extra long sermons all Sunday morning, shut down theatres, and outlawed Christmas as pagan.

What was Cromwell's problem? Dr. Seuss once speculated concerning a fictional character who bore a remarkable resemblance to Cromwell "It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight. It could be his head wasn't screwed on just right. But I think that the most likely reason of all may have been that his heart was two sizes too small." In the case of the real-life, seventeenth century Grinch, Cromwell, whatever role his head and shoes might have played, the problem was that his heart, soul, and spirit had been shrunk, frozen, and killed by a form of extreme Calvinism that combined a Pharisaical spirit regarding religion with a philistine attitude to culture in what was the most repulsive and vile, hell-spawned theology to claim the name of Christianity in vain, until theological modernism began to be spewed forth from the German schools of higher criticism and the North American "social gospel" movement in the nineteenth century.


Unfortunately, the spirit of Cromwellian Puritanism has survived in the misguided zealots who come out every year at this time to inform us that the first five verses of Jeremiah 10 condemn Christmas trees, even though anyone with an IQ over thirty can see that the reference to removing a tree from the forest and decking it with silver and gold is describing the construction of an idol, not something that is purely celebratory and decorative in purpose and function. They also like to remind us that December 25th was the day in which the Romans celebrated the birth of Sol Invictus at the conclusion of the pagan festival of lights, Saturnalia, concluding through some leap of reasoning that it was therefore pagan and idolatrous for the Church to have set the feast day celebrating the birth of the Son of the Living God on this same day. This sort of reasoning, however, would also condemn St. John the Apostle for introducing Jesus as the "Logos" in his Gospel. The idea of the Logos, the Divine Word or Reason, comes right out of pagan Greek philosophy. As the Hellenized first century Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria pointed out, there was a parallel concept in the "memra", the personalized Word or Wisdom of God of the Targum, the Aramaic rabbinic commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures, and it is quite in keeping with the New Testament concept that Christ abolished the division between Jews and Gentiles in establishing His Covenant and His Church, to understand the Logos of the Gospel to draw from both the Greek and Jewish antecedents. Interestingly, the Jews then, as now, also celebrated a "Festival of Lights", around the winter solstice, commemorating the rededication of the Temple, after its desecration by Antiochus Epiphanes and the Maccabean revolt that ensued. Jesus, according to the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John, went to Jerusalem for this festival, also called the Feast of the Dedication or Hanukkah, even though this feast would be regarded as extra-scriptural by Puritan theology which does not accept the First and Second books of Maccabees as Holy Scriptures. If there is nothing wrong with St. John synthesizing the Greek logos and the Jewish memra in his doctrine of the pre-incarnate Christ as the Word Who was in the beginning with God, and Who was God, and through Whom all things were made, then there is nothing wrong with the Church deciding to celebrate the birth of God's Son, at a time of year which coincides with both the Roman and the Jewish festivals of lights. Indeed, it seems most appropriate.

There is a connection between the two wars on Christmas in that Puritanism, as Eric Voegelin pointed out, was an early stage of the modern revival of Gnosticism, of which the progressive liberalism of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries are later stages. You can read all about that in Voegelin's The New Science of Politics. The original Gnostics, I would note, were the anti-Christs that St. John referred to in his epistles, who denied the doctrine of Christ, specifically the Incarnation, which, of course, is the theological event commemorated in Christmas. The war on Christmas, in its Puritan and progressive liberal forms, is ultimately a war on the Apostolic doctrine of Christ as defended and articulated by the orthodox in the Trinitarian confession of the Council of Nicaea.

So, let me conclude by wishing you all a very Merry Christmas in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Cops or Robbers?

If you were to take a large group of boys and ask each of them individually what he wished to be when grew up you would be likely to receive a wide variety of answers. If you were to ask them the same question again one year later you would again likely get a wide range of answers and probably one that is very different from the one you received previously.

Nevertheless, you could probably accurately predict one or two things about the answers you would receive. You could predict that many of the boys would give their father’s occupation as their answer. Since boys, even in this age of career choice and mobility, tend to follow their fathers into their professions, this would be a fairly safe prediction. You could also predict that certain specific jobs would be likely to appear among the answers more often than others. These jobs would include soldier, fireman and policeman. These are among the things boys most commonly dream of becoming when they grow up.

What is it in these jobs that boys find so appealing?

It is the fact that they, at least in their ideal forms, exemplify every aspect of the heroic.

The word “hero”, in ancient Greek, had the root meaning of “one who protects”, i.e., the warrior who defended the Greeks from the attacks of their enemies. This would literally correspond to today’s soldier, but the roles of fireman and policeman are also roles of protection, from fire and crime respectively.

In the earliest Greek stories, the heroes were men like Heracles and Achilles, men in whose veins ran the blood of the gods. Accordingly, they were men of superior size and strength to ordinary men, and were thus able to accomplish extraordinary feats, such as the Labours of Heracles. While soldiers, firemen, and policemen are not demigods, above average size and strength are among the most important qualifications for these jobs. Or at least they were until the feminists, ever devoid of common sense, reason, and decency, insisted that such qualifications were discriminatory and therefore must go.

As the ancient Greek literature which featured the Greek heroes, developed, the earliest literary critics arose in the Athenian school of philosophers. These, for the first time conceived of the hero as an identifiable role within the literature that told his story. Since they believed that literature should serve the moral ends of the civil order – with Plato going so far as to suggest that literary works be bowdlerized – it is not surprising that they thought of the hero as a man of moral excellence. What this meant was that the hero possessed good character, consisting of the traits the ancients honoured as virtues – such as courage and justice – which he exemplified in the way he dealt with adversity – whether he overcome that adversity or not. The roles of soldier, fireman, and policeman each come with the duty to put one’s self in harm’s way, if necessary, and even to lay down one’s life, to protect those whom one is charged with protecting from invasion, fire, or crime. This requires the classical and cardinal moral virtue of fortitude – courage.

The roles of soldier, fireman, and policeman, therefore, each encompass all that has been meant by the word hero and it is this heroic dimension that causes them so frequently to pop up in the part of a young boy’s mind that considers the question “what do I want to be?”

Here in Canada, those who dream of becoming policemen usually have our federal police force in mind. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police is both a national institution and a symbol of our country as widely recognized as the maple leaf and ice hockey. Those with ambitions of a career in the police dream of becoming a Mountie for “the Mounties always get their man.”

That which is real, of course, is different from that which is ideal and, in the words of T. S. Eliot, “Between the idea/ And the reality…Falls the Shadow.” (1)

This summer, we were presented with an image of RCMP reality which is a stark contrast with the ideal. In this picture, the RCMP displayed all the competence of Dudley Do-Right, the fictional Mountie who appeared in the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons by Jay Ward Productions. Dudley Do-Right, if you recall, like such other notable fictional cops as Inspector Jacques Clouseau and Inspector Gadget, was an implausibly lucky moron who bumbled his way through to an undeserved success in each and every episode.

Ah, but that comparison, picturesque as it may be, simply does not do justice to the situation we are discussing. It would be more to the point to say that the RCMP were behaving, not like Dudley Do-Right, but like his arch-nemesis Snidely Whiplash. You remember Snidely Whiplash don’t you? He always wore a black top hat and frock coat, handlebar moustache, and had green skin and a fetish for tying people to railroad tracks, dropping boulders on their heads, and that sort of thing.

The incident to which I am referring took place in High River, Alberta, while the town was evacuated due to the flood that began in June.

High River, a town of about 13, 000 people, is located on the Highwood River, from which it derives its name, just south of Calgary. The Highwood is one of several rivers in southern Alberta that overflowed its banks last month, due to extremely large amounts of rain falling within a short period of time. Many communities had to be partially or totally evacuated due to the flooding. High River was given a total evacuation order on the twentieth of June. The RCMP, with the help of the Canadian Armed Forces, oversaw the evacuation and carried out the rescue work necessary.

At this point, you might be scratching your heads and wondering if I have gone stark, raving, mad. How, you might be asking, is the saving of 13, 000 lives an act that warrants comparing the rescuers to a cartoon caricature of a melodramatic stock villain?

It isn’t, obviously, and it is not the evacuating of the town or the saving of lives that I am referring to. Rather, it is the seizure of their guns while the town was evacuated. As the Mounties entered people’s homes, looking for those who had been left behind, both survivors and the perished, they searched the homes for guns and made off with those that they found.

Initially, when the RCMP reported having taken the firearms, they claimed that they were taken because they had been left unsecured and in plain sight for anyone to see and take. A plausible justification for the seizure, in that case, would be that in an evacuated town, guns left out in the open could fall into the hands of looters who might use them for nefarious purposes. Questions, however, were soon raised about just how unsecure and visible these guns were. Satisfactory answers to these questions have not been forthcoming.

For example, it appears that guns were removed from people’s closets. Perhaps these had not been locked away in full compliance with the requirements of the Firearms Act, perhaps they had. The point is that a gun in the back of a closet is hardly a gun that is left out in full sight. Furthermore, while it is reasonable that police, in an emergency like this, should be able to enter people’s homes without a warrant in a search and rescue operation it is not reasonable that they should be allowed to go snooping around in people’s closets.

Faith Goldy, a reporter with Sun News, the television affiliate of the Sun newspaper chain, raise four specific questions about the gun grab when this story originally broke. These were:

1) Did they do a search prior to entry to establish if there were firearms in the home? (i.e. were firearms specifically targeted?

2) Were any seized firearms locked/bolt removed? (i.e. were any deemed safely stored by law?)

3) Exactly how many firearms were seized? Again, a basic question.

4) What were the orders given to police? (i.e. were they told to search for firearms?) (2)

The RCMP have only just now gotten around to answering the third question. On Thursday, July 18, Sgt. Patricia Neely announced that 300 guns, a little over half of the 560 seized, had been claimed by their owners and returned. (3) No wonder it took them so long to release that figure. Does anyone seriously believe that 560 guns had been left out sitting on the kitchen table for anyone to take?

The Sun News interviewed one resident of High River, Cam Fleury, whose house was not even affected by the flood being situated on the top of a hill. Nevertheless, the police broke down his door and went directly to the cabinet where his guns were stored. Clearly, Faith Goldy’s first and second questions are not unreasonable.

Some of you might be wondering what the big deal is about all of this. Perhaps you are thinking that because this was an emergency situation and the Mounties didn’t injure or kill anyone that we should cut them some slack as they were trying to rescue people. For the sake of those who are thinking along these lines it is important that we clarify what the issues are which are stake here.

Let us start with the fact that what the RCMP did would be considered a crime if anybody else did it. They forced their way into people’s homes. This would be considered the crime of breaking and entering on the part of an ordinary citizen. Worse, they broke into the homes of people who were vulnerable to a break-and-enter attack because they had been forced out of their homes due to the flood. They entered into people’s closets and storage cabinets, apparently, removed the guns they found there and took them with them. If anybody else did that it would be considered stealing. Indeed, if an ordinary citizen were to do that it would be considered worse than ordinary stealing because it was firearms that were taken. The police said they would give the guns back – provided the owners of the guns met all of the conditions the police set for their return. If an ordinary person were to steal a car, however, the argument “I was going to give it back” would probably not hold much water with the police or the courts.

Now someone might answer this by saying that some acts which are always a crime when committed by an individual person acting in his own right are not necessarily always a crime when committed by the lawful authorities. This is, of course, true. To kill another human being except in self-defence, is to commit the crime of murder. The civil authorities can, however, impose the death sentence as a just penalty for a capital crime. It is not murder for the civil authorities to pass and carry out the death sentence. This does not mean, however, that they have the right to arbitrarily decide who lives and dies. There are clear limitations, defining when the state can impose the death sentence and when it cannot, and for an officer of the state to kill outside of these defined limits is as much an act of murder as you or I were to do so.

There are those who would deny that there is any difference between a society’s civil authorities and the individual with regards to whether an act is criminal or not. Such would say that if it is criminal for the individual to do it then it is criminal for the state to do it and that the only exceptions that should be allowed for the state are those allowed for the individual. Some would even take this so far as to deny the legitimacy of government as an institution. The kind of ultra-libertarians who self-identify as anarchists, for example, consider the state to be a conspiracy against the public good on the part of those who claim an unjust monopoly on violence or coercive force for themselves.

I do not agree with this position, although I would acknowledge that it, like all errors, contains an element of truth. It is a sad fact of human nature, but a fact nevertheless, that sometimes violence is necessary. Our social nature compels us to live together as communities and societies but our individual natures create tension and conflict with each other. We therefore need laws for human society to function. The need for laws generates the need for civil authorities to make and enforce those laws and to administer justice. The enforcement of law and the administration of justice both involve the use of coercive force. Since he taking of the law into private hands and the pursuit of private justice, i.e., vengeance, create escalating cycles of destructive violence, to keep violence at a minimum it is necessary that kinds of force the civil authorities use to enforce the law and administer justice be forbidden, except in extraordinary circumstances, of the individual person. This is the message of Aeschylus’ Oresteia.

If, however, the limitation and minimization of violence requires that the civil authorities hold a monopoly on certain kinds of force, this creates a new danger, that those wielding this monopoly of force will turn it against the public. The authorities are, after all, human like anyone else. When government powers are turned to the abuse of the public we call this tyranny. We have developed safeguards in our tradition, to protect the public against tyranny, such as prescriptive, legal and civil rights, limitations upon the use of the powers of government. These are not foolproof, however, and, since governments, having crossed the line into tyranny, tend to go further and further, it behoves us to keep our eyes on that line to make sure they do not cross it.

Now let us think how this applies to the situation we are discussing. It is a crime to break and enter into someone’s house. About the only time it might be permitted of an ordinary person would be if loud screams calling for help were coming from the house. There are more circumstances in which it is permissible for police to forcibly enter a house – but these come with strict restrictions and limitations. They are allowed to enter a house and conduct a search as part of a criminal investigation. To do so, however, they must go to a judge and provide him with sufficient reason why they should be permitted to conduct the search. If they are able to provide such reasons they will receive a warrant which is a judicial permit to conduct a search that specifies when and where they are allowed to search, and what kind of search they are allowed to conduct.

In an emergency situation, such as a flood, police are allowed to enter homes without going through the process of obtaining a warrant. There are good reasons why this is the case. In this kind of search, the police are supposed to be looking for people who are in danger, to save their lives, not looking for evidence to use against them in a criminal case. Valuable time that could mean the difference between life or death for someone might be wasted if the police had to spend that time in court seeking a warrant.

If these are valid reasons for allowing the police to enter homes without a warrant in an emergency – and they are – they are also reasons why the police should not be searching for and removing guns while they are in those homes. If the time wasted obtaining a warrant might mean life and death for someone in an emergency so would be the time wasted searching for and removing guns. If the warrant requirement is deemed unnecessary in these circumstances because it is a search and rescue operation rather than a criminal operation then they should not be searching for guns in people’s cabinets and closets.

The RCMP in High River crossed a line. On one side of that line, they were the heroic Mounties of Canadian legend, evacuating a flooded town and saving lives. On the other side of that line, they were breakers of the very law they exist to uphold.

Why did they cross that line? Could it be that their heads were not screwed on just right? Could it be that their shoes were just a little too tight? (4)

Whatever the cause, they picked a particularly bad spot at which to cross the line. From the Thirty Tyrants of Athens who disarmed all but their own followers in preparation for their reign of terror to the gun-grabbing regimes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, weapon seizures have been the mark of the tyrant since time immemorial. Perhaps it is not Snidely Whiplash the RCMP have been emulating in High River after all but that other Rocky and Bullwinkle archvillian, the Fearless Leader of Pottsylvania.

This is not the first time in which the RCMP has displayed gun-grabbing tendencies. Over the years they have been major advocates and supporters of the mountain of rules, restrictions and regulations the government has heaped up upon gun owners including the Firearms registry. While support for such laws does not necessarily make one an autocratic despot and it is not too difficult to see why law enforcement agencies might think that strict control over who has access to firearms might make their job of serving and protecting the public easier, the fact is that the more such laws multiply the more of an insult to and an onerous burden upon the law-abiding gun owner they become.

The more difficult the law makes it, for the ordinary law-abiding citizen to be a gun owner; the more guns become the property of just two elements – the lawless and the law enforcer. The more this happens, the less society looks like a civilization with order and peace maintained by the law enforcer, and the more it comes to resemble a battle field in which an endless war is waged between the lawless and the law enforcer. The more this happens, the less discernible is the difference between the lawless and the law enforcer.

The distinction between the lawless and the law enforcer breaks down much faster when gun seizure is not the result of legislation but of an arbitrary decision on the part of the police themselves – as in High River. When this happens, and the distinction between the lawless and the law enforcer is broken down, whatever resemblance there may have been between the reality of the policeman and his heroic ideal is also shattered.

When that happens, a society loses something that is irreplaceable.

(1) From “The Hollow Men”.

(2) http://www.faithgoldy.ca/more-questions-than-answers-in-high-river-gun-grab/

(3) http://www.torontosun.com/2013/07/18/most-seized-alta-flood-guns-returned

(4) Apologies to Dr. Seuss.

Fatherhood versus Feminism

Children of both sexes need both a father and a mother. I do not mean that a child will die if deprived of either parent, the way a person will die if deprived of air, water or sustenance. I mean that the most important lessons a child must learn on the path to adulthood are not those taught in schools or, heaven forbid, by peers or television, but rather those which they can only be taught by their parents. Some of these lessons can only be taught by a mother. Others can only be taught by a father. Some of the lessons a mother teaches are learned by children of both sexes alike, and this is true of the lessons a father teaches as well. There are other lessons which only a mother can teach a daughter, and only a father can teach a son, just as there are lessons which a daughter must learn from a father and a son from a mother.


It is from a father that a son learns how to be a man, a husband, and a father, partly by instruction, but mostly by seeing these things modelled in his own father. Similarly it is from a mother that a daughter learns how to be a woman, a wife, and a mother. It is from their parent of the opposite sex that children learn about the sex other than their own, form their basic image of that other sex, and learn how to love, respect, and relate to members of that other sex. This process may go wrong, and they may develop a badly skewed image of and way of relating to the opposite sex based upon a bad relationship with their own father/mother, but it is almost certain that it will go wrong in the complete absence of a parent of the opposite sex.

What I have just pointed out has been obvious to everyone since the dawn of time. It is controversial to say it, however, in this day and age. There are many progressives who would like to see people who point out this sort of thing thrown in jail. They consider it to be hate speech. It is generally the sort of things that have been true and obvious since the beginning of time that are considered to be hate speech by progressives.

So what do progressives have against this particular set of true and obvious observations?

What they object to is the truth that in the upbringing of children of either sex there is no substitute for either a father or a mother. This truth contradicts one of their beloved fantasies – the idea that you can substitute two women, two men, the State, or practically anything you want, for a father and mother, without having any adverse effect upon the children This fantasy is the basis of a number of progressive stances including their idea that homosexual couples have an inalienable, natural right to adopt children and that it is oppression far worse than anything and everything dreamed up by Pharaoh, Herod, Caligula, Nero, Genghis Khan, Atilla the Hun, Vlad the Impaler, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Idi Amin, to deny them this right.

That, however, is not the issue I wish to discuss here and I mention it mostly to poke fun at the absolute inanity of the ridiculous things progressives get uptight over.

Let us return to the point we started with: all children need both a father and a mother. There have always been children who have had to grow up without one or the other due to unavoidable circumstances, such as the death of a parent. These are situations that families, hopefully with the support of extended kin and community, have to deal with as best as they can. Today, however, there are a large number of children who have to grow up without one of their parents because that parent has either chosen to abandon the duties of parenthood or has been prevented from fulfilling those duties by the other parent. In the largest number of these cases the absent parent is the father.

This is a major social problem. This trend can be found among all classes of society and in every class it hurts the children affected but it is even more devastating among the poorer classes where it is a significant contributing factor to multi-generational poverty.

Usually when this problem is recognized and attempts are made to deal with it the focus is upon the fathers who have voluntarily abandoned their duties. While this part of the problem does deserve attention it is not what I wish to focus on here. Rather I wish to address the other part of the problem, fathers who are prevented fulfilling their duties as fathers, by the mothers of their children.

As with so many other problems that beset us in this day of rampant egalitarianism, triumphant liberalism, and social and moral collapse, when we go looking for the root cause we find the ideological movement known as feminism.

Feminism is the ideology of the equality of the sexes. It was dreamed up in the nineteenth century by radical intellectuals such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Friedrich Engels. It helped inspire the women’s suffrage movement in the early twentieth century, but was fully translated into a movement of political and social activism after the Second World War by such colourful individuals as Simone de Beauvoir, an existentialist novelist, Betty Friedan, a Marxist journalist masquerading as a normal suburban housewife, and Gloria Steinem, whose previous career included such highlights as waiting on tables in a skimpy bunny outfit in one of Hugh Hefner’s clubs and working for a CIA front.

Feminism is the implacable enemy of motherhood, which, in turn, is the implacable enemy of feminism. Motherhood, far more than any “male power structure” or “old boys’ network”, is the major impediment to feminism achieving its dream of a world in which males and females are equally represented on every rung of every ladder – social, political, and economic. This dream is unattainable as long as women keep getting pregnant, carrying their children to term, giving birth to them, and nursing and raising them. Feminism, therefore, has done everything in its power to smash motherhood. It has promoted birth control, abortion, and the transfer of the raising of children to state institutions.

Despite all of these efforts, women are still giving birth to, loving, and raising their children. Motherhood has been battered, but it has withstood the assaults of feminism. Ironically, it is fatherhood that has taken a much heavier hit from feminism.

There is a reason for this. Feminism, in its crusade to obtain what it regarded as fair treatment for women, identified the patriarchal family as the source of all injustice towards women and set out to dismantle the laws, mores, and traditions which supported the patriarchal family. These laws, mores, and traditions, however, and the patriarchal family which they upheld, were the foundation upon which fatherhood stood.

Both fatherhood and motherhood involve much more than the mere biological production of offspring. Indeed, the biological production of offspring is not an absolutely necessary component of either. The one exception to the rule that there is no substitute for a child’s having both a father and mother is when the child is adopted from birth. The reason this is an exception is because parents who adopt children from birth are not really a substitute for a father and mother – they are a father and mother in everything except the biology. When a man and woman choose to so adopt, they decide together to accept a child born to someone else as their own and love and raise that child accordingly. When this happens each parent in the adopting couple is fully aware that they are accepting someone else’s child as there own and that their partner is doing the exact same thing.

Thus adoptive parents avoid a difficulty that can cause problems for natural parents. That difficulty is that, until the very recent development of accurate paternity tests, a mother knew with absolute certainty who her children were but a father had to depend upon the word of the mother. The fear of being cuckolded, of being tricked into raising someone else’s children, down through history has been a powerful force working against fathers accepting their duties, taking responsibility for the children they sired, and shouldering their share of the burden of raising them. That force, however, was held in check by the patriarchal family, and by the laws and traditions which supported it. This, for example, was the reason for the traditional emphasis upon the importance of virginity in a bride. It was not, as the feminists falsely averred, to create a “double standard” so that men could be promiscuous themselves while insisting on purity in their wives. By lessoning the threat of cuckoldry, this tradition promoted responsible fatherhood.

Now paternal uncertainty does not in any way benefit women, although some have been foolish enough to think of it as a weapon to use against the fathers of their children. When a father is not certain that the children he is told are his actually are he is less likely to take his responsibilities as a father seriously, and if he shirks those responsibilities this increases the burden upon the mother, a burden which is already uneven due to nature as it is. Feminism, therefore, in attacking the traditions, laws, and institutions which promote responsible fatherhood as being unfair and oppressive to women, and promoting the kind of behaviour that increases paternal uncertainty and, consequently, irresponsibility, is no friend to the women it purports to speak for.

The feminist movement also considered marriage to be an instrument of oppression for women and so it demanded the liberalization of divorce laws. It campaigned for the laws to be changed so as to greatly expand the grounds for divorce and to provide for “no-fault divorce” in which the court dissolves a marriage without assigning blame to either partner if both consent to the divorce. In each of these campaigns feminism was victorious. Divorce became much easier to obtain, marriages now had less legal protection than the average business contract, and the divorce rates went through the roof.

Once rubber-stamped divorces were readily available the courts had to deal with the problem of what to do with the children of dissolved marriages. Do they give custody to the mother, to the father, or do they split custody equally?

Now this created a dilemma for the feminist movement. If they took the position that custody of the children should be awarded to the mother they would be saying that children belong with their mother which would be tantamount to saying that mothers belong with their children, a truth upon the denial of which the entire feminist movement was built. If, on the other hand, they took the position that custody of the children should be awarded to the father, would they not be handing over the children to the big, bad, patriarchy that they had put so much time and energy into denouncing and combating?

Oh my! Given a choice like that what’s a feminist to do?

Then the feminists got an idea. An awful idea. They had a wonderful, awful, idea. (1)

The courts, the feminists said, should award custody of the children to their mothers. Mothers should have sole custody, with the absolute right to determine what contact, if any a father has with his children, and what influence, if any, he has over them. Their decision would be enforced by the courts and the police. Fathers could still contribute to the raising of their children. In fact they would be made to do so. The court would order them to hand over a sizable percentage of their paycheque to the mother of their children and they would be expected to do so regardless of whether they were allowed any contact with their children or any say in how they are raised.

What if a father could not afford to pay the amount that his ex-wife’s new sugar daddy the judge decided she was entitled to? After all, it is far bigger drain on a man’s resources to support a family he is not living with than to support one he is living with. Well now, he should have thought of that before his wife decided to divorce him, then, shouldn’t he?

It was at this point that a new stock villain was added to the “Most Wanted’ roster, i.e., the “deadbeat dad”. “Deadbeat dad” is an expression that you or I might use to refer to some irresponsible bounder who for entirely selfish reasons, at least as far as we can determine, walks out on his wife, his children, and his duties. On the tongues and lips of feminists, however, and the foolish young women who were convinced by feminism that they could exile the fathers of their children from their homes and lives, and the lives of their children while still laying claim to financial support from those men, it tended to refer to men who objected to the injustice of all of this and defaulted on the payments.

Meanwhile a new generic saint was added to the secular canon, i.e., the “single mom”, who is a rather different character from the widow or abandoned mother.

I say all of this to add some needed perspective to the discussion of fathers who shirk their duties, a discussion that is usually rather one-sided, and do not mean to suggest that the misdeeds of a mother absolve a father from his responsibility to his children or that his contribution to their upkeep should be considered a quid pro quo for the right to see and spend time with his children. Nor do I mean to suggest that things would have been better if the courts had made the awarding of full custody to fathers the default or that there have been no situations where fathers who have been awarded custody have treated the mothers of their children unjustly.

Nor has the legal situation gone unchallenged or completely unamended. Various fathers groups have challenged the system, accused it of bias and discrimination, and demanded that some type of shared custody arrangement be made the default, and the courts have shown varying degrees of sympathy to this.

There is both good and bad in this. It is good that the situation is being slowly adjusted to be less unjust. I say “less unjust” because there can never be a truly just outcome to a divorce and a custody battle. It is not so good that the mens’ or fathers’ movement has been largely organized with the same tactics and same victim mentality as feminism. The last thing we need are yet more groups crying “unfair” and accusing society of discrimination.

Shared custody may be the best way of handling custody after a divorce. That does not mean that it is the best thing for the child. Think back to our initial point. Children of both sexes need both a father and a mother. That is true, but it turns out that something was missing from this statement, so let us revise it. Children of both sexes, need both a father and a mother, who are raising their children together in mutual love and cooperation.

That is something that traditional marriage, the traditional family, and the laws and customs that supported these things could provide children. It is not something that even the fairest of shared custody arrangements can provide. If we are truly concerned about the needs of children, perhaps we need to start asking ourselves how we can make the system support the traditional arrangement again instead of working to undermine it.

Happy Fathers’ Day!

(1) My apologies to Dr. Seuss for the shameless borrowing of his words and to the Grinch for the implied comparison.

The 400-Year Old Version

My first encounter with the Bible came, not in the form of an actual translation of the sacred writings, but in the form of Bible stories – episodes taken from the Biblical narrative and re-told in language suitable for children. My mother read these to me when I was very young, and in the early grades in school our teacher would read them to us as well (this was in a rural community which had not yet been penetrated by progressive liberalism’s decree that positive mention of Christianity and the Bible in a public school constitutes a hate crime). I also read these for myself as a boy, my favorite being Rev. Jesse Lyman Hurlbut’s Stories of the Bible.

In grade 5 the Gideons presented each of us with our own New Testaments. Whether this still goes on or has been banned as a hate crime by the apostles of tolerance, diversity, and multiculturalism, I am not aware. The New Testament I was given came in a bright-red soft-cover with gold lettering and contained the New American Standard translation of the New Testament along with the Psalms and Proverbs.

When I was 15 I read the entire Bible through for the first time. There were a number of Bibles in the house. The one I opted to read that summer was a paperback version of Today’s English Version. More commonly known as the “Good News Bible” this one came with Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha and was bizarrely illustrated by a number of stick figure drawings. I chose to read this version because I was under the impression that it would be much easier to understand than the older black leather and red hardcover Bibles that were in the family library. Both of those were copies of the King James Version.

At the end of that summer I became a believer in Jesus Christ and began to read my Gideons New Testament regularly. I had not fallen in love with the Good News translation and throughout high school would try out a number of translations, including the New International Version and New King James Version. By the time I graduated and went off to study theology, however, the King James Version had become my preferred Bible translation. It remains so to this day.

The King James Bible is 400 years old this year having been first published by Robert Baker, the King’s Printer, in 1611. For a large part of those four centuries it was the English Bible. It earned that status by the end of the 17th century and maintained it well into the 20th Century. It was the third “official” translation of the Bible into English in the sense of being authorized by the English king for official use in the established Church of England. As such, it faced no competition from its predecessors (the Great Bible of 1539, authorized by King Henry VIII, and the Bishops Bible of 1568 authorized by Queen Elizabeth I). Its primary competition was an unauthorized English translation made by English Calvinists who had fled to Geneva to escape persecution during the reign of Mary I, hence its being known as the “Geneva Bible”. (1)

The King James Bible, as we will soon see, was authorized for the purpose of supplanting the Geneva Bible in the English people’s affections. King James, like Elizabeth I before him, disliked the Geneva Bible, not for the translation itself but because it was published with marginal notes that attacked the Crown and the established Church. It would take most of a century, but eventually the King James Bible became accepted as the English Bible in the established and non-conformist English churches alike, throughout the English-speaking world.

It would face greater competition, in terms of numbers, in the 20th Century. The Revised Version came out in England in 1881, which with some modifications was published as the American Standard Version in 1901. These opened the gates to a flood of new translations that would be published in the 20th and 21st centuries. There are well over a hundred of these by now but none which has achieved anything remotely close to the status of the King James Version, which in many ways remains the English Bible.

The Bible verses and passages that have most permeated the culture of English-speaking societies, so as to be familiar to almost everyone regardless of their religious convictions or lack thereof, are known to us in the language of the King James Bible. The Ten Commandments, given by God to the Israelites in the Book of Exodus, are foundational to both Jewish and Christian morality. When we speak of them there are three words that pop into everyone’s head almost immediately – “thou shalt not”. We can hardly imagine those authoritative ordinances of God spoken in any other way. The same holds true for the Lord’s Prayer and the comforting Twenty-Third Psalm. Despite the multitude of contemporary language versions available, the universally recognizable forms of these remain the renditions beginning “Our Father, Which art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name” and “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.” The most loved Bible verse of all time, John 3:16 is still quoted throughout the English-speaking world as “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”. We can hardly think of the Parable of the Good Samaritan without it ending without it ending with Jesus exhorting the lawyer to “Go, and do thou likewise”, or of the story of the woman taken in adultery, without Jesus saying to her “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more” (2)

Fundamentalist educator Dr. Bob Jones Jr. in his memoirs wrote that none of the modern translations “has the tremendous power and majestic glory of the King James Version”, going on to say:

I love the old Elizabethan “hath” and “doth” and “receiveth.” I told someone recently that if I can read the Bible without “lithping,” it doesn’t seem like the Scripture to me. (3)

Dr. Alister McGrath, until recently of Oxford University, from a somewhat different angle, wrote:

Our culture has been enriched by both aspects [as “the superb translation of the Bible” and “the classic work of English”] of the King James Bible. Sadly, we shall never see its equal – or even its like – again. (4)

What Dr. Jones celebrated and Dr. McGrath lamented is the unique status of the King James Bible, among all other translations, in the English speaking world.

Why is it that no newer translation can ever take the place of the King James Bible?

One obvious reason is that each new translation must compete, not only against the King James, but against all the other new translations. The King James had one major rival – the Geneva Bible. The RSV, ESV, NASV, NIV, NKJV, NRSV, TEV etc. are all rivals of each other as much as they are of the King James.

More importantly, however, is the fact that the King James Bible came out at just the right time in history to become the English Bible. The King James Bible came out in the era that saw an explosion of English literature that shaped modern English as we know it, and was itself one of the most important, probably the most important example of that literature. It was published two decades after Edmund Spencer’s Faerie Queen and a little under six decades before John Milton’s Paradise Lost. This was the era of the greatest English dramatists – William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson were still writing when the KJV came out and Christopher Marlowe had only died ten years before King James ascended to the throne. The most important of the metaphysical poets, John Donne, was writing in the period immediately before and after the publication of the King James Bible.

The literature of this era became a tremendous source of inspiration, allusions, and outright quotations for the literature of the centuries to follow. This was especially true of the King James Bible because it was not only an exemplary work of literature but Holy Scripture as well. It was the official Bible of the established Church of England and as such was read from the lectern in Anglican Churches every Sunday for centuries. It would be the Bible of the great revivals within the Church of England – the evangelical Wesleyan revival of the 18th century and the Catholic revival of the Oxford Movement in the 19th century. It also, however, became accepted as the Bible of the non-conformist Protestant churches and in Presbyterian, Congregationalist, and Baptist pulpits the preachers would expound from the text of the King James Bible in the 18th, 19th and early 20th Centuries.

Only the plays of Shakespeare come even close to approaching the King James Bible in terms of the number of quotations, axioms, and other expressions and allusions that it added to everyday, conversational, English.

When looked at from this perspective, the peers of the King James Bible are not other English translations, but such culture-shaping translations as the 4th Century Vulgate of St. Jerome or Martin Luther’s German translation of the Bible. With the latter in particular, a number of parallels can be drawn. The Luther translation, shaped modern German, as the King James Version shaped modern English. Just as the Luther translation was a key element of the Reformation in Germany, so the history of the King James Version is the history of the English Reformation.

A number of factors led to the 16th Century Reformation in both England and continental Europe. In the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance the modern nation-state, in which a single government has political sovereignty over a nation (a people group with a common cultural identity) had begun to develop. This, in and of itself, probably made another division in the Church, similar to that which had divided the Greek and Latin Churches in the 11th Century, inevitable. In continental Europe, the catalyst for the division was corruption in the Church, particularly the sale of indulgences. Dr. Martin Luther denounced this corruption, resulting in a conflict with Church authorities which was intensified by controversy over theological issues such the authority of Scripture and justification by faith. He translated the Bible into the German vernacular because he wanted the German people to have access to the Word of God for themselves. His translation had a tremendous literary, cultural, and political impact as well as a religious one.

The English Reformation happened a bit differently. It began in 1534 when Parliament upon the request of King Henry VIII, passed the Act of Supremacy, declaring King Henry “the only supreme head on earth” of the Church of England. If the King was the “only supreme head on earth” of the English Church, the Pope could not be, and so this Act effectively separated the English Church from the Roman Catholic Church. It was not done out of theological controversy or to confront corruption. This was done purely for political reasons.

As a result, the Church of England after the Act of Supremacy, was initially no different in doctrine, practice, and organizational structure than it was prior to the Act of Supremacy, except that it no longer recognized the authority of the Pope. This was more or less the way it remained under Henry VIII, although his chief supporter among the clergy in his conflict with the Pope, a man whom he appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, was sympathetic to the doctrines of Luther and Calvin. After Henry died, his throne passed to three of his children in succession, each of whom died without an heir – Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. Edward and Elizabeth were Protestants and in their reigns, briefly interrupted by the reign of Mary I, a Roman Catholic who burned about 300 Protestants at the stake and temporarily reversed all of her brother’s reforms and her father’s Act of Supremacy, the Church of England adopted a number of Protestant reforms. The requirement that priests be celibate was abandoned, services were held in English for which Thomas Cranmer prepared the Book of Common Prayer, and finally in Elizabeth’s reign, the 39 articles, a Protestant Confession affirming justification by faith and rejecting transubstantiation and purgatory, was adopted by the established Church.

A broad spectrum of theological views were tolerated in the Church of England under Elizabeth I, but what was not tolerated was disloyalty to the throne or to the established Church. Two groups were not satisfied with the Elizabethan Settlement, Roman Catholics, and Puritans. The latter were a group of Protestants who believed that the reforms under Edward and Elizabeth had not gone far enough. They wanted to get rid of the hierarchy of bishops, the vestments of the clergy, crosses in the church, the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer, and a host of other things. They took the position that if the Bible didn’t explicitly command these things, they should not be tolerated. It was during Elizabeth’s reign, that the High Church (5) arguments for the established Church and its position, against the Roman Catholic and Puritan objections were developed by men like Richard Hooker, author of Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

This is the historical backdrop against which the development of the English Bible must be understood. Early in the 1500’s, William Tyndale, in various German and Flemish cities, published his translations of the Bible from Greek and Hebrew into English, and had those translations smuggled into England. He was eventually arrested and executed for heresy, but his translation became the starting point for all subsequent translations. Henry VIII authorized the first official English translation for the Church of England a few years after Tyndale’s execution. This translation became the Great Bible. A second official translation was authorized by Elizabeth I, which became the Bishop’s Bible. Both of these relied heavily on Tyndale’s work, as did the Geneva Bible preferred by the Puritans. English Catholics, living in exile during the reign of Elizabeth I, began work on a Catholic translation as well. They published the New Testament in Reims and then completed the Old Testament in Douay. The translation is named after those cities, usually in reverse order for some reason.

Elizabeth was the last descendant of Henry VIII and she died childless. The throne then passed to the next available descendant of Henry VII. That happened to be James Stuart, who was already James VI of Scotland. Since James had been raised Protestant and already ruled a Presbyterian country , the Puritans thought his ascension meant their day had arrived. Before he arrived in England to claim his throne, they sent him a petition asking him to hear and redress their grievances against the Established Church.

In response, King James called a conference at Hampton Court Palace in January of 1604. Moderate Puritans were summoned to present their complaints and representatives of the Established Church were summoned to respond to the Puritan position. John Reynolds, president of Corpus Christ College led the Puritan party. Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London was the voice of the High Church at Hampton Court even though the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift was also present. As Reynolds presented the Puritan demands for presbyterian church government, the abolition of Prayer Book liturgy and vestments, and these sort of things, King James listened politely, but did not grant the requests.

He had no intention of doing so. The Puritans had misunderstood his position. King James had been raised Protestant, although he was baptized a Catholic, but he was a Protestant in theology in the way that High Churchmen like Richard Hooker, John Whitgift, and Richard Bancroft were. He had no sympathy for Protestant extremism – it was Protestant extremists who had separated him from his mother, the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, when he was 1 year old, forcing her to abdicate in his favour, so that they could control Scotland and him, through a series of tyrannical regents, in his youth. When he achieved the age of majority, and began to rule in his own right, he endorsed the established Presbyterian Church of Scotland, but his experience had led him to believe that fanatical Calvinism was potentially a seditious movement. The marginal notes of the Geneva Bible, which were heavily flavoured with Calvinism, confirmed him in this suspicion. A handful of the notes read like anti-royalist, republican propaganda to him. Subsequent history, as we shall shortly see, showed his fears to be well-grounded.

King James, therefore, had entered Hampton Court committed to supporting the retention of the episcopal hierarchy in the established Church. He wished, however, to maintain peace with as many Puritans as possible. When, therefore, Reynolds proposed that a new translation of the English Bible be made he immediately granted the request. It allowed him to give the Puritans at least one thing they wanted, and the opportunity to get rid of the hated Geneva Bible and its republican notes.

King James appointed Richard Bancroft the overseer of the project. Bancroft, you recall, was the most vocal spokesman for the High Church position at Hampton Court. He would be made Archbishop of Canterbury following Whitgift’s death shortly after the Conference. Bancroft was to appoint the translators, establish general rules to guide them in the translation, and oversee the final revision of the translation.

The translators were divided into six companies, generally consisting of six translators and a director, each of which was given its own section of the Bible to translate. Two of the companies were based in Westminster Abbey, two in Oxford University, and two in Cambridge University. The process was that each scholar in a committee would be assigned the text they would translate, then the committee would meet and produce a final version of their portion of the Scripture, which would be submitted to the General Review committee, which met in 1609 in Stationer’s Hall. This committee, drawn from the membership of the six companies, produced a revision of the text which was submitted to Bancroft for approval. It was then turned over to Richard Baker for publication.

Bancroft, in selecting the translators, chose men who were loyal to the church and state. Only moderate Puritans, like John Reynolds, who were willing to work within the established Church and were loyal to the king, were allowed onto the committees (Reynolds served in the First Oxford Company, which translated the Old Testament Prophets). Most of the translators were High Churchmen, and Bancroft’s first appointment was Lancelot Andrewes, dean of Westminster, who headed the First Westminster Company which translated Genesis through Second Kings in the Old Testament. Andrewes also assisted Bancroft in the general overseeing of the project. Since Hooker’s death, Andrewes had become the main theoretical defender of the established Church against both the Roman Catholic and Puritan oppositions. He was a devout man (6) and in many ways was a precursor to the Oxford Movement revival in the 19th Century. (7) He was also a very learned scholar. The exclusion of the seditious and disloyal did not mean that that scholarly credentials were ignored. The translators were drawn from the top scholars in England at that time, and had instructions to consult with other scholars who did not make it onto the final committees.

The instructions Bancroft gave the translators were simple. They were to translate from the Greek and Hebrew, following the Bishop’s Bible whenever it was possible to both do so and give an accurate English translation of the original. Where the Bishop’s Bible rendition was insufficient, Tyndale’s, Coverdale’s, the Geneva, and a couple of other translations were to be consulted. The Douay-Rheims was not listed but the translators appear to have consulted it anyway. Familiar renditions of Biblical names were to be kept, as was ecclesiastical language such as “bishop” and “church”.

The magnificence of the translation that ensued gradually came to be appreciated over the course of the next century. The Geneva Bible remained popular for a few decades, but it’s popularity declined shortly after the Puritans took their doctrine to the extreme King James had feared they would.

King James was succeeded by his son, Charles I. During Charles reign, the Puritan Oliver Cromwell led a military rebellion against the government, and forcibly removing supporters of the King from Parliament, had that body declared England to be a republic under the protectorship of Cromwell. In an ugly act that would foreshadow the revolution in France at the end of the next century, and the Communist revolution in Russia in the 20th Century, Cromwell had the king condemned and beheaded. During Cromwell’s dictatorship, he closed the theatres, which under the reigns of Elizabeth and James had produced the greatest plays in the history of English literature. Then, long before Dr. Seuss’s Grinch got the idea, he outlawed Christmas. Even though the Puritans had gotten a tremendous amount of mileage out of accusing the Roman Catholic Church and the established Church of England of intolerance and persecution, Cromwell used his armies to persecute Catholics and Anglicans, in some cases massacring them by the thousands.

When Cromwell died, the British Parliament quickly voted to restore the monarchy and the established Church with its bishops and the Book of Common Prayer. Britain had had quite enough of the likes of Cromwell. Puritanism was disgraced, and the Geneva Bible lost favour. The Authorized version, became the English Bible, among members of the Church of England, and non-conformists alike.

The King James Version of the Bible, as we have just seen, is the end result of a century of revision, official and unofficial, of the Tyndale translation of the Bible. It was born out of the English Reformation and after the English Civil War was finally recognized as an exemplary work of English literature from the era that produced Shakespeare, Jonson, and Donne, as well as being the authoritative English translation of the Word of God. No other translation can ever take its place.

This judgment pertains to the King James Version’s status in terms of its unique place in English literature, the history of the English language, and the history of the English Church. Few would contest it, but many would argue that contemporary translations of the Bible are superior translations in terms of their ability to convey to English speakers today, the meaning of God’s Word in the original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek.

This is a matter that has been fiercely debated among conservative Protestants, especially in North America, ever since the Revised Version was published in 1881. It has been debated on both a popular and an academic level. Those who believe that the contemporary translations are superior argue that the English of the KJV is out of date, that our understanding of the Greek of the New Testament has improved and better translation methods had been developed since the 17th Century, and that better Greek manuscripts than those available to the King James translators have been discovered enabling us to better reconstruct the original text of the New Testament.

While some of these arguments have merit there is a case to be made against them and for the general superiority of the King James as a translation. Unfortunately, some opponents of the “contemporary translations are superior” position have often expressed their position in terms of a conspiracy theory in which the modern versions are part of a deliberate and diabolical plot to pervert God’s Word and have turned use of only the King James and rejection of the modern versions into a badge of orthodoxy. The legitimate arguments that can be made against the case for the superiority of the contemporary versions as translations is often lost sight of because of these extreme assertions.

It is beyond the scope of this essay to present those arguments fully here. This is especially true of the textual debate. (8) I will conclude this essay with a brief response to the arguments about the archaic English of the KJV and about how our knowledge of 1st Century Greek has improved since the 17th Century.

The extent to which the English of the KJV is out of date is greatly exaggerated. The KJV was not translated into Chaucer’s English, it was translated into Shakespeare’s English, which is still readable today. There are a handful of cases where a word has reversed its meaning since the 17th century, such as the oft-cited example of “prevent”, which in the KJV means “precede” but in contemporary English means “hinder”. Most people who complain about the English of the KJV, however, give the archaic 2nd person singular pronouns (thee, thou, thy, thine) and the old verb forms which end in –th as their examples.

Alister McGrath points out that the second person pronouns were already archaic when the KJV was translated. “By the sixteenth century”, he writes:

The use of the singular form to address a single individual had virtually ceased in English, except in the specific case of family and inferiors. To address another as “thou” was thus to claim social superiority over him or her. (9)

If you read Shakespeare’s plays, you will see what Dr. McGrath is talking about there. The singular 2nd person is only used in Shakespeare by people who are close friends/family, by royalty and nobility speaking to their social inferiors, and occasionally by someone speaking to a social superior in order to be impertinent.

The KJV does not follow Shakespeare’s usage. It uses the same pronouns for everybody, the ones beginning with t- for individual persons, the ones beginning with y- for when groups of people are being addressed. This way of using these pronouns was archaic already in Shakespeare’s day, and Dr. McGrath explains this as being the result of the rule that the Bishop’s Bible be followed whenever possible.

However, Dr. McGrath also uses this to make a point:

Some have suggested that the King James Bible’s use of “Thee,” “Thou,” and “Thy” to refer specifically to God is a title of respect, and argued that modern Christianity should retain this practice. This is clearly indefensible… (10)

Dr. McGrath is half right. It is not true that the singular pronouns were used by the KJV as a sing of respect for God because they were used for everybody. What he fails to take into consideration, however, which is remarkable considering that he raises this in a chapter entitled “The Bible and the Shaping of Modern English”, is that the King James Version itself created this very usage for these pronouns. People stopped using the old pronouns in everyday English shortly after the KJV was published. Since the KJV retained these pronouns, and did not reserve them for intimates and inferiors as had been the most recent usage, the concept of “reverential language” developed naturally. Nobody else spoke this way anymore. Therefore “thee” and “thou” became the way God spoke, for only the Bible used it, and the way one spoke to God.

There is another fact pertaining to these pronouns which Dr. McGrath does not mention. The readers of his book probably all know that “thee” and “thou” mean “you”. So, for that matter, does everyone who encounters the “thees” and “thous” in the King James Version. It is not a serious obstacle to comprehension. What the readers of McGrath’s book might not be aware of is that Greek and Hebrew both have separate second person pronouns for the singular and plural, the way English used to. By retaining the archaic pronouns, the KJV is able to more precisely translate the Greek and Hebrew, than translations which use “you” for both singular and plural. This is not as minor as it may appear because in some instances, knowing whether or not an individual or a crowd is addressed, greatly affects how we understand the meaning of a text.

Earlier in his book, Dr. McGrath points out that it was not until the late 19th Century, that scholars identified the kind of Greek used in the New Testament. This had been a topic of debate for centuries because it was recognized that, with a few exceptions, the Greek of the New Testament was different from classical Greek. Eventually, scholars were able to identify the Greek of the Bible as “koine”, the everyday vernacular of the 1st century.

Dr. McGrath writes:

This raises an important point concerning the companies of translators assembled by King James. There is no doubt that these included some of the finest classical scholars of the period, well used to dealing with questions of translation of classical Greek. Yet the Greek they were being asked to translate dates from much later, and seems to follow more fluid grammatical rules. To translate it on the basis of an earlier form of Greek would cause difficulties. (11)

To a certain extent this is true but it is exaggerated. If we were to take someone who has studied Attic Greek, the dialect of 4th-5th Century BC Athens that is often called “classical Greek”, and someone who has studied Koine Greek, the common Greek of the 1st Century AD, the former would have far less difficulty reading and understanding the Greek New Testament, than the latter would have reading and understanding Xenophon, Plato, and Thucydides. Koine is a simplified version of Attic. The “dual” number for verbs and nouns, that was rarely used except in poetry in Attic, has dropped out completely in Koine, for example, and the rules are a lot less rigid.

An understanding of how the Koine dialect developed out of the Attic dialect, and how the two differ, does provide contemporary scholars with an advantage that the scholars of the 17th century did not have. How does that advantage weigh, however, against the overall decline in the quality of scholarship?

In North America especially, the last century in which over a hundred new translations have been produced, has been a century of decline in classical scholarship. We are no longer living in the days when someone can become the Chair of Classical Philology at the leading university in Switzerland at age 24, as Friedrich Nietzsche did in 1869. We are no longer living in the days when preparation for University included a solid grounding in the classics and their languages. We are no longer living in the days in which Greek and Latin are learned in youth and a serious scholar is expected to be able, not just to read both languages, but to be able to compose prose and poetry and carry on a debate in both as well. (12)

The men who translated the King James Version were men who had been immersed in the world of classical languages and literature from their early youth and who entered the project of translation, in many cases after a lifetime of study. Is the benefit of living after and knowing about the identification of the Koine dialect sufficient to give men who in many cases did not begin their Greek studies until University or Bible College a superior grasp of their text than men like Lancelot Andrewes and John Reynolds?



(1) My primary sources for the history of the translation of the King James Bible as presented in this essay are Adam Nicolson’s God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible (Harper Collins: New York, 2003) and Alister E. McGrath’s In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible and How It Changed a Nation, a Language, and a Culture (Doubleday: New York, 2001). My theological, ecclesiastical, and political interpretation of this history does not necessarily correspond to that of either of those writers.

(2) Oddly, the other most famous line from this same story, we always remember in a wording that uses King James English but is not the wording of the KJV or any other translation. “Let he that is without sin cast the first stone” is actually found as “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” in the KJV.

(3) Bob Jones Jr., Cornbread and Caviar (Bob Jones University Press: Greenville, 1985) p. 47.

(4) Alister E. McGrath, In the Beginning, p. 310

(5) “High Church” can have a number of meanings. For the purposes of this essay I am using it to refer to those who defended the established Church of England and the Elizabethan Settlement against Roman Catholicism and Puritanism. Against the Roman Catholic, men like Hooker argued that the established Church of England was the same English Church that had existed prior to the Reformation, that it kept its ecclesiastical hierarchy intact, remained faithful to the Ecumenical Creeds, and celebrated the Sacraments and so remained in organic and organizational continuity with the Apostolic and Medieval Church even though it now recognized the King rather than the Pope as the supreme earthly authority. Against the Puritans, they argued that the established Church had rejected those doctrines of Rome which were demonstrably unscriptural, and accepted those of the Reformers doctrines which clearly were Scriptural, such as the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith. The Puritan idea, however, that something needed explicit Biblical authorization or it was “unscriptural” and should be purged, was rejected. While Scripture must be the highest authority, Hooker taught, overruling all others when conflict arises, tradition and reason are the other legs upon which the Church stands.

(6) Andrewes’ theological and ecclesiastical views were similar to those of Hooker described in the previous footnote, and many would argue that Andrewes was Hooker’s successor as apologist for the Church of England. Adam Nicolson, who records several of Andrewes’ personal shortcomings, also describes his piety: “Down at Chiswick, as throughout his life, the time he spent in private, about five hours every morning, was devoted almost entirely to prayer…It was a daily habit of self-mortification and ritualized unworthiness in front of an all-powerful God.” (Nicolson, God’s Secretaries, p. 32). His prayers and sermons are still in print and T. S. Eliot, inspired by his writings, wrote an essay about him in the early 30’s, and later dedicated a collection of essays to him.

(7) See, for example, Nicolson’s description of the chapel furnished by Andrewes’ on page 188 of God’s Secretaries.

(8) The Greek text used by the King James Version, was an early printed text reflecting a version of the Byzantine text type, i.e. the Greek text that was continually in use in the Greek-speaking Church. The “Majority Text” is another version of the Byzantine text type, that differs from the “Textus Receptus” used by the KJV. Another text type, the Alexandrian text-type, was later discovered among a family of manuscripts that predate the Byzantine manuscripts. Textual critics of the 19th Century argued that the Alexandrian text-type was closest to the autographs because of the age of the Alexandrian manuscripts. John William Burgon, Dean of Chichester Cathedral provided the scholarly answer to their position in a series of articles for the Quarterly Review that were later rebound into his Revision Revised (1883). Burgon argued that the manuscripts that were given the most weight by the new theory of criticism were poor quality manuscripts, that showed evidence of having been corrupted, and which often provided indirect testimony that the Byzantine readings were at least as old as their own, and that textual evidence from Scriptural quotations in the Church fathers and lectionaries, should be given more weight. In the century since, textual critics have ignored, but never adequately answered Burgon’s arguments, while a handful of textual scholars, such as Edward Freer Hills, a self-published Presbyterian author with a Th.D in textual criticism from Harvard and the late Zane C. Hodges, a pastor in Dallas and for many decades a professor of the New Testament at Dallas Theological Society, provided the best additional arguments for the Byzantine text. In Hodges’s case, the arguments were for the Majority Text, an edition of which he co-edited with Art Farstad for publication in 1982. For those interested in the arguments of the other side, I refer you to the writings of the late Bruce M. Metzger of Princeton Theological Seminary, in particular his The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration. Look for the 1992 edition as it is the most up-to-date.

(9) McGrath, In the Beginning, p. 266.

(10) Ibid., p. 268.

(11) Ibid, p. 237.

(12) The case for a revival of classical education has been argued by Dr. E. Christian Kopff of the University of Colorado - Boulder in The Devil Knows Latin: Why America Needs the Classical Tradition (ISI Books: Wilmington, 1999). Also see Who Killed Homer: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (Encounter Books: San Francisco, 2001) by Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath.