The First Article – God the Father

 

The first observation that needs to be made in commenting on the first Article of the Creed is that a book could be written on the first word alone. (1)   Whether we are speaking of the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, the first word is the verb for “believe” in the present tense, active voice, indicative mood, and first person.   In the Nicene Creed in the Greek in which it was originally written this verb is “Πιστεύομεν” which is the plural form meaning “We believe”.   By ancient tradition this is the Creed recited or chanted in the liturgy of the Sacrament of the Eucharist or Holy Communion.   When employed liturgically it becomes “Πιστεύω”, the singular form of the verb meaning “I believe”.   The Latin version follows the liturgical text and uses the singular form of the verb, “Credo”, which is also the form that appears at the beginning of the equivalent Article in the Apostles’ Creed of which the Latin is the standard text.    The word “creed” is itself a derivative of this word which later came to be the term for this type of expression of the Christian faith.   Before “creed” caught on these were generally called “symbols” which is still the main term for them in the Eastern Church.  Symbol is a word in both Greek and Latin that means “sign” or “token” and was applied by the Churches to their basic statements of faith because these were used to distinguish between members of the Church and unbelievers as well as between the orthodox on the one hand and heretics and schismatics on the other.   Orthodox Churchmen could confess the faith, heretics and unbelievers could not.  

 

This is why creed is so appropriate as a substitute or synonym for symbol.   Every religion’s teachings contain elements of both faith – what is to be believed – and practice – what is to be done, but Christianity stands out in that whereas other religions, including the other Abrahamic religions, emphasize practice over belief, Christianity emphasizes belief over practice.   This is true of all Christian Churches, regardless of where they stand on the question of whether St. James interprets St. Paul or St. Paul interprets St. James on the matter of faith and works.  Jesus Christ commissioned His disciples to go into the world with a message to proclaim.   That message, called the Gospel or Good News, is about how He, God’s Son, was sent into the world by God to restore sinners to God’s favour (grace) freely offered through the New Covenant of redemption from sin that He established through His death and resurrection.   With the inauguration of the New Covenant came the institution of a new community or society of faith, the Church, participation in which is open to all, both those who had been part of the national community of the Old Covenant (Jews) and those who had been outside the Old Covenant (Gentiles).    The New Testament prescribes both an external and an internal sign or symbol of membership in this community.   The external symbol is baptism.   The internal sign is the instrument by which the grace proclaimed in the Gospel is received, faith.   Since only God can look on the heart and see faith directly, faith must be confessed.   This is why the Church was right to early recognize the importance of communal confessions of faith and why it is so appropriate that these are called creeds as well as symbols.  

 

The first Article of the Apostles’ Creed is:  Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem, Creatorem caeli et terrae.     In the Book of Common Prayer this is translated as “I believe in God, the Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth”.   The corresponding first Article of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed is Πιστεύομεν εἰς ἕνα Θεὸν Πατέρα παντοκράτορα, ποιητὴν οὐρανοῦ καὶ γῆς, ὁρατῶν τε πάντων καὶ ἀοράτων.   The liturgical version differs from this, the conciliar version, only in that it places the first word in the singular.   The Book of Common Prayer renders this “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible”.    The Article is basically identical in both versions of the Creed with the Nicene being the more precise specifying that God is ἕνα (one), and that He is the Maker of ὁρατῶν τε πάντων καὶ ἀοράτων (all things visible and invisible) as well as of caeli et terrae or οὐρανοῦ καὶ γῆς (heaven and earth).   Interestingly, the original Nicene Creed published by the First Council of Nicaea (325 AD), spoke of God as “Maker of all things visible and invisible” but did not mention “heaven and earth”.   The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, as revised by the First Council of Constantinople (381 AD), therefore, includes both phrases, the one included in the Apostles’ Creed and the one included in the original Nicene.

 

The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed was not the first time these expressions “heaven and earth” and “visible and invisible” were joined together in reference to God’s act of Creation.   St. Paul used both in the sixteenth verse of the first chapter of his epistle to the Colossian Church.   In the inspired text it was the deity of Jesus Christ, the Son, which the Apostle was stressing.  “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible”.   Although the Councils that produced this Creed were convened primarily to address a heresy that attacked the deity of Jesus Christ, Arianism, which maintained that Jesus was a lesser divinity, the first created being, rather than the Eternal Son of God, it was in response to a different heresy – or class of heresies – that they borrowed this language from St. Paul and applied it to the Father as Creator.

 

Among the many heresies that plagued the early Church were those that taught that the visible and physical was corrupt and irredeemably so whereas the spiritual and invisible was pure and incorruptible and that therefore only the spiritual was created by the God preached by Jesus Christ while the physical was created by a lesser, evil, divinity they called the Demiurge and equated with the God of the Old Testament.   The heresies that St. Irenaeus of Lyon discussed in his Adversus Haereses (180 AD) are mostly of this nature.   St. Irenaeus, following Justin Martyr, traced their origin to Simon Magus, the converted Samaritan sorcerer whose attempt to purchase the Apostolic power from St. Peter and the ensuing rebuke are recorded in the eighth chapter of the book of Acts.   That the earliest forms of this kind of heresy date back to the first century before the close of the Apostolic era and the canon of the New Testament is attested by the epistles of St. John which speak of sects which had broken away from the Churches and which denied that Christ is come in the flesh.   Today this class of heresies is usually called Gnosticism, although the term is of relatively recent coinage.   St. John called them antichrists.

 

By declaring her faith in God the Father as Maker of “heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible” the orthodox Church affirmed that the God of the New Testament is the same God as the God of the Old Testament and so definitively rejected these heresies which postulated that the two Testaments spoke of two different Gods.

 

The identification of the God of the New Testament with the God of the Old Testament is absolutely essential to the Christian truth concerning God.   The fullest revelation of Himself that God has given to mankind is in the Incarnation of His Son, Jesus Christ, Who in the verse preceding the one cited previously from Colossians, St. Paul declared to be the “image of the invisible God”.   In Jesus Christ, We have a more complete knowledge of Who and What God is than that which can be discerned from the natural revelation of Creation or that which God gave to His Old Testament people in the Law.   It is God’s revelation of Himself in the Incarnation, however, that requires our acceptance of His revelation of Himself in the Old Testament.   When Jesus asked His disciples Whom they said He was and St. Peter answered “the Christ, the Son of the Living God”, Jesus praised His answer, said that it had been revealed to St. Peter not by man but by His Father in Heaven, and declared it to be the rock upon which He would build His Church, Who was the God of Whom St. Peter said Jesus was the Son?   Zeus?  Apollo?  Odin?   Of course not.   It was Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament.

 

The Gospels record Jesus as beginning His public ministry in Galilee by going from town to town, teaching in the synagogues, and preaching that “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand”, a reference to the Kingdom promised and prophesied in the Old Testament.   At the beginning of His most famous Sermon He warned His hearers against thinking that His purpose was to abolish the Law and the Prophets (the Old Testament).  When He healed the lepers He instructed them to see the priests and bring the offering commanded in the Law.   When asked about divorce, Jesus referred to the Genesis Creation account which Marcion and other heretics maintained spoke of a God different from the God Jesus preached.   In a confrontation recorded in the eight chapter of St. John’s Gospel the Jewish leaders asked Jesus if He was greater than Abraham and Who He made Himself out to be.   In His response He said that “it is my Father that honoureth me; of whom ye say, that he is your God”.   Having thus unambiguously identified His Father with the God of the Old Testament, He went on to provoke the Jewish leaders into asking Him “hast thou seen Abraham”, to which He replied by saying “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am”, identifying Himself with Jehovah (2).

 

That Jesus could speak of both Himself and His Father as Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament, attests to the essential unity of God, which is affirmed in this Article of the Nicene Creed in the word ἕνα.   The Father is the One God, in Whose One eternal Being the Son and the Holy Ghost share through their eternal Generation and eternal Procession from the Father respectively.   The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are co-equal and co-eternal, but as the One Who eternally begets the Son and from Whom the Holy Ghost eternally proceeds, the Father is begotten of none and proceeds from none.  (3)  

 

There are several different senses in which God is Father.   Sometimes God is spoken of as Father in a sense that is virtually synonymous with His being Creator.   In recent centuries this sense of God’s Fatherhood has been emphasized to the exclusion of all other senses, especially by liberals who speak of the “universal Fatherhood of God”.   This sense of God’s Fatherhood does appear in the Scriptures – St. Paul uses it in his reasoning with the philosophers at Mars Hill in the seventeenth chapter of the book of Acts – but it is by no means the primary sense of the Fatherhood of God in the Bible.  When Jesus speaks of God as Father, sometimes He qualifies the term with the second person possessive when speaking to His followers, as for example when He instructs us to pray “Our Father…”   That those who are not His followers cannot claim God as Father in this sense is made quite clear in the Johannine writings where Jesus speaks of His enemies as the children of the devil and where the children of God are identified as those who have received Jesus by believing in His name.   Sometimes Jesus speaks of God as “the Father” without a possessive, in which instances the meaning is basically the same as that of “God” and this is the closest that can be found in Jesus’ own words to the universal Fatherhood concept.   Most often, however, Jesus speaks of the Father with the first person possessive pronoun.   As Jesus’ Father, God is Father in a way that He is Father of no other, the way that means that because Jesus is God’s Son, Jesus is God too.   This is the primary meaning of the Fatherhood of God the Father.   Indeed, it is in this sense of Fatherhood that the Father has always been the Father, because He has always been the Father to the Son.   The heretical evangelical teachers who teach Incarnational Sonship and claim to be orthodox Trinitarians because they acknowledge that Jesus was eternally the Word of God, co-equal and co-eternal with the Father and Holy Ghost, even if they claim He became the Son in the Incarnation, should be asked Who they think the Father was before the Incarnation.  

 

When, therefore, the first Article of the Creed begins by affirming belief in God the Father, and concludes by affirming Him as Creator, this ought not to be understood as equating God’s Fatherhood with the fact that He is Creator in a reductionist sort of way.   Each Person of the Trinity was involved in Creation.   The Holy Ghost is specifically referenced in the second verse of Genesis.   When the New Testament speaks of the Son’s involvement in Creation it uses the language of instrumentality.   “All things were made by him”, St. John writes in his Gospel, “and without him was not anything made that was made”.   The word “by” here renders the Greek διά which conveys the idea of intermediacy in place, time and means.  We have already mentioned St. Paul’s similar language in Colossians.   Note that in the passage of the Gospel where St. John writes the above Jesus is spoken of as the Word.   He too is specifically mentioned in Genesis 1 where each act of Creation begins with “And God said”.    Jesus is the Word spoken through which God creates everything.   The Father is identifiable in the Genesis Creation account as the God Who speaks the Word through Whom all things are made and in the second chapter of Genesis Who breathes the breathe of life – the words for “breathe” and “spirit” are identical in the Biblical languages – into man.   Thus, while the entire Holy Trinity participates in Creation, the Father is the principle Agent of Creation, the One Who speaks the Word and breathes the Spirit, and so the act of Creation is particularly ascribed – the theological term for this is “appropriated” – to Him in our Creedal confessions.   It is not this that makes the Father, the Father, however, but His eternal relationship to His Son, about which we shall have more to say, Lord willing, when we look at the Second Article.

 

 (1)   From a strictly grammatical point of view this first word is the most important word in the Creed.   Grammatically, the subject of the Creeds is the believer (or believers if the plural is used).   The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all placed in the accusative (direct object) case in the Creed, and in the Nicene Creed whatever actions are ascribed to them, with the exception of the verb for “made” when it says that “through Him [Christ] all things were made” are expressed as participles (verbal adjectives) rather than finite verbs.   This form of speaking or writing, in which statements that would in direct discourse contain subjects in the nominative case and ordinary finite verbs are made the predicate of a verb of thinking or speaking, with the verbs converted into infinitives or participles, and what would otherwise be put in the case of the subject is put in the case of the object, is called indirect discourse.   In the Apostles’ Creed this first verb is the only verb connecting the subject, the believer, to the predicate, that which it is asserted the believer believes about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, although it is repeated at the beginning of the  eighth Article about the Holy Spirit.   In the Nicene Creed two other verbs, “we confess” and “we look for” are included after the Articles about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and the Church to introduce the Articles about baptism and Last Things.

(2)   This is the significance of the present tense.   When Moses asked God for His name He answered “I Am”.   The Hebrew word traditionally transliterated into English as Jehovah when it is not rendered THE LORD in all caps is a variation of this.

(3)  The Quicumque Vult or Athanasian Creed puts it this way: Pater a nullo est factus: nec creatus, nec genitus. Filius a Patre solo est: non factus, nec creatus, sed genitus. Spiritus Sanctus a Patre et Filio: non factus, nec creatus, nec genitus, sed procedens.   In English this is “The Father is made of none; neither created, nor begotten. The Son is of the Father alone; not made, nor created; but begotten. The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son; neither made, nor created, nor begotten; but proceeding”.

Faith and Knowledge

 Most people are of the opinion that the truths that we accept by faith are less certain than those that we consider to be knowledge.   This is reflected in the way they use the verbs “believe” and “know” and their equivalents in other languages.   When someone says “I believe X” and “I know Y” it is usually safe to infer from this that he is more sure of Y than he is of X.   Most people, although perhaps not quite as many, infer from this that faith is inferior to knowledge.

 

 

Those of us who are Christians ought not to think this way.  

 

 

Consider how Bishop Pearson explained the distinction between belief and knowledge in his Exposition of the Creed. (1)   He began by defining belief (in general) as “an Assent to that which is credible, as credible” and by defining assent as “that act or habit of the understanding, by which it receiveth, acknowledgeth, and embraceth any thing as a truth”.  He then went on to explain that assent was more general than belief or faith, and to distinguish the latter from other forms of assent in terms of their objects.   The difference was in what makes “that which is credible” credible:

 

 

For he which sees an action done, knows it to be done, and therefore assents unto the truth of the performance of it because he sees it: but another person to whom he relates it, may assent unto the performance of the same action, not because himself sees it, but because the other relates it; in which case that which is credible is the object of Faith in one, of evident knowledge in the other.

 

 

Bishop Pearson expanded on this by providing several different ways in which the truth of something is apparent to us and thus our assent to it is properly knowledge rather than faith.   Something might be apparent to our senses (the examples he gives are the whiteness of snow and the heat of fire) or to our understanding (“the whole of anything is greater than any one part of the whole”).   Things which are apparent in these ways are more properly described as being evident than as being credible.   Then there are things which are not evident in these ways, but the truth of which we can establish through their “immediate and necessary connection with something formerly known”.   These things, he described as “scientifical”.   Note that this term as he uses it is not only an archaic form but also more comprehensive than our “scientific”.   He used mathematics as an example of a science, demonstrating thereby that his “scientifical” embraced the products of both methodologies in the Rationalism v. Empiricism debate which, at least in its Modern phase, was in its infancy at the time he preached these sermons.

 

 

He then said:

 

But when anything propounded to us is neither apparent to our sense, nor evident to our understanding, in and of itself, neither certainly to be collected from any clear and necessary connection with the cause from which it proceedeth, or the effects which it naturally produceth, nor is taken up upon any real arguments, or reference to other acknowledged truths, and yet not withstanding appeareth to us true, not by a manifestation but attestation of the truth, and so moveth us to assent not of itself, but by virtue of the testimony given to it: this is said properly to be credible; and an Assent unto this, upon such credibility, is in the proper notion Faith or Belief.

 

 

After distinguishing between faith and knowledge, Bishop Pearson then went on to distinguish between different kinds of faith based upon the different kinds of authority of those whose testimony makes that which is believed credible.   The authority of those offering testimony, he said, rests upon both their ability and integrity.   Someone lacking the former might be deceived himself and so deceive others with his testimony unintentionally.   Someone lacking the latter might deliberately deceive others.   The authority of human testifiers greatly varies and may be deficient in one or both of these foundations, but God, Whose testimony may be immediate, as it was to Noah, Moses, the Prophets, and the Apostles, or mediate, as passed on through these human messengers, is perfect in both ability and integrity and so can neither be deceived Himself nor deliberately deceive others.   Faith based upon Divine Testimony, therefore, is the truest of faiths, and so, with regards to the “I believe” that begins the Creed, Bishop Pearson said that it is:

 

 

[T]o assent to the whole and every part of it, as to a certain and infallible truth revealed by God (who by reason of his infinite knowledge cannot be deceived, and by reason of his transcendent holiness cannot deceive) and delivered unto us in the writings of the blessed Apostles and Prophets, immediately inspired, moved, and acted by God, out of whose writings this brief sum of necessary points of Faith was first collected.

 

 

Now, for the very same reasons why faith in God’s Word is more certain than faith in human testimony, that is to say, that God Himself is by contrast with human authorities a sure and infallible testifier, faith in God’s Word is more certain than human knowledge.   Just as human authorities can fail us through ignorance or the intent to deceive, so the senses and understanding by which we perceive what is apparent and evident and comprehend what must necessarily follow fall short of the infallibility of the witness of God.

 

 

Dr. Edward F. Hills wrote:

 

 

He that cometh to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him.  (Heb. 11:6b)   If I truly believe in God, then God is more real to man than anything else I know, more real even than my faith in Him.   For if anything else is more real to me than God Himself, then I am not believing but doubting.   I am real, my experiences are real, my faith is real, but God is more real.   Otherwise I am not believing but doubting.   I cast myself on that which is most real, namely, God Himself.    I take God and Jesus Christ His Son as the starting point of all my thinking. (2)

 

 

If by God, we mean the God that orthodox Christianity has always proclaimed, taught, and confessed belief in, then that which Dr. Hills has affirmed must necessarily follow.   The God of orthodox Christianity is the God of the Old Testament as well as the New.  The very first verse of the Bible declares that “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”.   When Moses asked Him for His name He declared “I AM”.   This God is the Creator of everything else that exists, Whose Being is eternal and in Himself in a way that cannot be said of anything created.   Whereas the classical philosophers distinguished between things which exist in themselves, and things which exist only in other things, apple as an example of the former, redness as an example of the latter, even things which exist in themselves in this sense, are in other senses dependent upon other things for their existence.   The apple you eat today, would not have existed had the tree on which it grew not existed first.   That tree would not have existed, had it not been planted from a previous example – and so on, all the way back to the first apple tree, which was created directly by God, the uncreated Source of all being.   If everything else depends upon God for its existence, and God as the Source of all being exists eternally in Himself independent of anything else, then God must necessarily be more real than anything else.   Faith in God, therefore, must be the starting point of our thinking, for such faith is more certain, not only than faith in the testimony of human authorities, but that which we presume to call our “knowledge”.

 

 

In connection with all of this, an important observation can be made about the Scriptural account of the Fall of man.   Man, the book of Genesis tells us, was created in the image of God and placed in a Garden, which God had prepared for him in the land of Eden, in which “out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food” (Gen. 2:9).   Two specific trees are identified, “the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil” and God, after putting man into the Garden, gave him the following commandment:   “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen. 2:16-17).     While the exact nature of the “knowledge of good and evil” is something that Jewish and Christian theologians have debated for millennia, (3) the account makes it clear that in the prohibition on eating the fruit of the tree, it was this specific kind of knowledge that was forbidden to man.

 

 

In the third chapter of Genesis the serpent, whom the Book of Revelation in the New Testament identifies with Satan, deceives Eve into eating the forbidden fruit.   She in turn gives the fruit to Adam, who also eats.   Their sin is discovered and they incur a number of curses in judgement, the most important of which was that they were driven out of the Garden, barred from the tree of life, and thus assigned to the hard life of human mortality.   In the midst of the judgement, the first promise of the Redemption that God would eventually give to mankind in His Incarnate Son Jesus Christ is made (Gen. 3:15).   The observation that is important for our purposes here pertains to the deception that brought about the Fall.   When the serpent deceived Eve, he began with a question “Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?” (Gen. 3:1) which, after Eve had answered, he followed up by directly contradicting God “Ye shall not surely die” (Gen 3:4) and tempting Eve with the forbidden knowledge by making it appear desirable in a way that stoked pride and vanity “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen 3:5).    Note how each part of this deception was designed to progressively undermine faith in God’s word.   The initial question subtly introduced an element of doubt, the contradiction invited outright disbelief, and implicit in the temptation was the suggestion that by withholding the forbidden knowledge from man God was acting against man’s interests out of selfishness, an aspersion on God’s character that led to mistrust.   Therefore, in this temptation the serpent was presenting the kind of knowledge that had been forbidden to man as being preferable to faith.   This then is the source of that common notion that we have been rebutting in this essay that knowledge is superior to faith.   

 

 

It would be a mistake to conclude from this that all knowledge of every type is treated as being opposed to God and faith in Scripture.   The majority of Scriptural references to knowing and knowledge are positive.   God’s own knowledge, obviously, is always good.   Indeed, whatever the “knowledge of good and evil” was, it was appropriate and good in God (Gen. 3:22).   God’s knowledge, as discussed above, is foundational to faith in God.   God is all-knowing (1 Kings 8:39, Job 37:16, Psalm 139:4, Matthew 6:8, 1 John 3:20 to give but a handful of the references which speak of God’s omniscience using forms of the word “know”, themselves but a fraction of the Scriptural testimony to God’s omniscience as there are even more references which express the concept using other terms, such as speaking of God as “seeing” and “understanding” all things).    This is why the element of His credibility that Bishop Pearson called “ability” is absolute.   He cannot be deceived.      Most Scriptural references to human knowledge are also positive, however.   Knowledge is spoken of as a gift of God, as, for example, in the cases of the workmen appointed to make the Tabernacle and its furnishings in the book of Exodus.   King Solomon is commended by God for asking for “wisdom and knowledge” in the first chapter of II Chronicles.   Job and his counsellors are rebuked for speaking “without knowledge”, when God speaks at the end of the book of Job.    The Psalmist describes God as He who “teacheth man knowledge” (Psalm 94:10).    The book of Proverbs says that knowledge is to be desired above material wealth (Prov. 8:10).   These are but a few examples.   The Scriptures also repeatedly speak of the “knowledge of God”, in the sense of man’s knowing God, as something to be desired and sought after.   In His prayer, at the end of His discourse en route to the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus Christ said “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent”. (Jn. 17:3).  Since the Gospel in which this is recorded repeatedly stresses that eternal life is a gift from God that we receive by believing in Jesus Christ – the Fourth Evangelist states this or quotes somebody else saying it in one way or another about one hundred times – the Lord was either equating faith with knowledge in this verse, or speaking of a knowledge that is received by faith.

 

 

Most often when the Scriptures speak of knowing and knowledge negatively, it is either a false knowledge, that is to say, someone thinks he has knowledge but does not, or knowledge that has been overvalued.   To place too high of a value on something that is good in itself, by, for example, valuing the good over the better, or the better over the best, is to commit an error that is comparable to literal idolatry (placing the creature in the place of the Creator) and which can have similar consequences.    When the devil tempted Eve to choose forbidden knowledge over faith this was an example of overvaluing true knowledge.  Very early in Christian history, heretical sects arose which challenged the teachings of the orthodox leaders of the Church and the Christian faith, in the name of a special kind of “knowledge”.    When this happened, the “knowledge” so valued over orthodox faith in God, was false knowledge.

 

 

History knows the heretics in question by the name “Gnostics.”   The way historians use this term it is not the designation of any one specific sect, but is rather a categorical label applying to a broad class of heretical groups.     The early Church Fathers who contended for the orthodox faith against the Gnostics usually referred to them as heretics, or by the name of their specific heresy which was typically the name of its first or chief proponent.   St. John the Apostle writing in canonical Scripture called them by a stronger name - "antichrists".   St. John's account of them was that they were schismatics who had broken away from the Apostolic Church and apostates who had departed from the orthodox faith by denying the Incarnation.   According to such early Church Fathers as St. Justin Martyr, (4) St. Irenaeus of Lyons, (5) and St. Hippolytus of Rome, (6) the first of these sects was the Simonians, founded by Simon Magus - the Samaritan magician who heard St. Philip preach the Gospel in the eighth chapter of Acts and was baptized but who came under St. Peter's curse when he offered money in exchange for the power of the Apostolic ministry of conveying the Holy Spirit through the laying on of hands.    Nevertheless, the label Gnostic suits our purposes here because it points to the very element of their thinking that is relevant.  When the members of these sects referred to themselves as γνωστικοί (gnostikoi) it was with the literal sense of “those with γνῶσῐς”.    The Greek word γνῶσῐς (gnosis), like its Latin equivalent scientia and its English equivalent, was a noun formed from the verb meaning “I know” - γιγνώσκω (gignosko) in Greek, scio in Latin (7) – and it was the basic Greek word for “knowledge”.   The way the Gnostics used it, however it did not mean knowledge in general, but a special kind of “knowledge” that they regarded as their unique and elite possession.   It is likely this to which St. Paul referred when he warned St. Timothy to “keep that which is committed to thy trust”, i.e., the Christian faith, against “the oppositions of science falsely so-called: Which some professing have erred concerning the faith” (1 Tim. 6:20-21).    The Greek words rendered “science falsely so called” in the Authorized Bible, using the older, more general meaning of “science” are ψευδωνύμου γνώσεως, the first of which is recognizably the source of our “pseudonym”, the second of which is the genitive singular form of γνῶσῐς.

 

 

The so-called “knowledge” of Gnosticism stands in sharp contrast to orthodox Christian faith.    In the orthodox Christian faith, the God Whom Jesus Christ called Father is identical to the God Who created the heavens and the earth in the Old Testament.   This is clearly stated in the first Article of both Creeds (8) and is also obviously the plain teaching of Jesus Christ and the New Testament.  This God is Creator of everything other than God Himself that exists, spiritual and physical, or, in the words of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed “all things visible and invisible”.   The corruption of sin and evil, in the orthodox Christian faith, has infected all of Creation, and began in the unseen or spiritual part of Creation, before the Fall of man, with the rebellion of Satan and the angels who followed him.    The salvation that God sent His Only-Begotten Son Jesus Christ to accomplish, extends to all parts of Creation affected by the corruption of sin and so will ultimately include the corporeal resurrection of the redeemed (1 Cor. 15:12-58) and the redemption of all of physical Creation (Rom. 8:19-23).   Although the redeemed are sometimes spoken of as God’s “elect” (chosen), salvation is freely offered to all through a message, the Gospel, that is to be preached to “every creature” (Mk. 16:15).   Everyone is invited to believe that Gospel and by believing receive the saving grace of God.  

 

 

Gnosticism taught the exact opposite with regards to each of these points.   The Gnostics taught that spirit was pure and incorruptible and matter was irredeemably corrupt therefore both could not have come from the same God.   They taught a supreme deity they called “The One”, from whom lesser divinities they called aeons emanated.   These divinities, they taught, dwelt in a realm of light called the pleroma.   The aeons were grouped in male-female pairs, which in turn would emanate other lower aeons.  One of the lowest pair of aeons, in their teaching, was Sophia (this is the Greek word for “wisdom), which left the pleroma and gave birth to the Demiurge.   This name, the Gnostics borrowed from Plato’s Timaeus.  Like the title character of Plato’s dialogue, they taught that the Demiurge created the material or physical world.    Unlike Plato’s Timaeus they taught that he was evil and so was his creation.   Gnostics who made reference to the Old Testament identified the God of the Old Testament with the Demiurge.   Assisting the Demiurge in creating the physical world and ruling it, in Gnostic theology, were lesser evil divinities called archons, whose total number varied from Gnostic sect to Gnostic sect, although usually there were seven chief ones whom the Gnostics identified with various heavenly bodies. The Demiurge and his archons, according to Gnosticism, imprisoned sparks of divinity from the pleroma within physical bodies, creating human beings.   Salvation, in Gnostic theology, was a release of these divine sparks from the imprisonment of the physical back into the pure spiritual world of the pleroma.   Salvation was attained, the Gnostics claimed, through enlightenment, the achieving of “knowledge” (gnosis).   This “knowledge” did not come in a message that was to be generally preached to all, but was something revealed to individuals through personal experience with the divine of which only an elite few had the capacity.

 

 

Clearly, the core teachings of orthodox Christianity and those of heretical Gnosticism were antithetical to each other.    Just as clear is the fact that this total antithesis grew out of the fact that whereas orthodox Christianity identified itself as a faith - a set of truths  which when proclaimed to the world as a kerygma are called the Gospel ("Good News") and when spoken as a personal and communal confession are called the Creed, both of which terms point to the fact that these truths are accepted by faith,  that is to say, believed on the authority of God's Word, Gnosticism  embraced what it regarded as a special, elite, esoteric "knowledge" rather than the orthodox faith.

 

 

Unlike the knowledge that Satan tempted Eve to abandon faith for, the gnosis of the Gnostics was a false knowledge, and quite likely, as stated previously, explicitly called such by the Apostle Paul in Scripture.   In the Modern Age, what was formerly Christendom or Christian civilization, was transformed into what is now called by the secular name of Western Civilization through its permeation by a philosophical spirit that can for lack of a better term be called “liberalism” although it needs to be understood that by this a more general, underlying, attitude is meant rather than the specific philosophical and political formulations that have borne name.    This liberalism places no value whatsoever in the testimony of God, reduces faith in God to personal experience and opinion, and places its own supreme confidence in the rational faculties of mankind.   One of the fruits of this liberalism, has been the exaltation of something that bears the name of “knowledge” – this time the Latin term, Anglicized into “science” – to the level of the highest truth.   What is this thing that Modern name calls by the name of knowledge and prizes so highly?

 

 

At its most basic level it is merely man’s attempts to explain the phenomena of the physical world strictly by means of other phenomena within the same.   As such it is ancient, going back at least as far as Thales of Miletus in the seventh to sixth centuries BC.   At a somewhat higher level it is the methodology devised for these attempts involving observation, hypothesizing, and experimentation.   Depending upon how you look at it there have been either several such methodologies or several major revisions of the same methodology.    Aristotle’s method was the most influential in the pre-Modern world.   Sir Francis Bacon’s was one of the earliest of the Modern versions.   His most important treatise setting forth that method was a direct attack on Aristotle as is evident in the title: Novum Organum - Ὄργανον (Organon) was the title given by Aristotle’s students to the published collection of his books on logic.   Aristotle’s methodology had stressed deductive reasoning, Bacon’s emphasized inductive reasoning.   It was in his unfinished novella New Atlantis, however, that Bacon provided us with the key to understanding why Modern man has come to so value “science”.   The end or goal of “science” or “natural philosophy” as he called it – a much better and more accurate name – he placed in the words of the mission statement of his fictional Salomon’s House foundation: “the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things: and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”   Modern “science” has been exponentially more efficient at achieving this end than any prior “science” which translates into its having more effectively produced results.    This establishes its utilitarian value which Modern man, increasingly incapable of distinguishing between utility and truth, confuses with its epistemic value.   To any sane mind, however, it must be regarded as a mixed blessing at best.   The same “science” that gave us life-saving penicillin, also gave us life-threatening nuclear weapons.   Even before the invention of the atomic bomb, wise minds as disparate as Queen Victoria’s Poet Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson and German historian and prophet of doom Oswald Spengler perceived Modern “science” as a Faustian bargain after Faust who exchanged his soul for knowledge.   Spengler described Modern Western “scientific” culture as Faustian.   Tennyson allowed his readers to infer the same from his poem Ulysses, in which he places the spirit of Modern Western “scientific” adventurism in the words of his title character’s determination to “follow knowledge like a falling star/Beyond the utmost bound of human thought” and against all forces arrayed against him to “strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”, spoken as that character sets out on that final voyage that landed him in the eighth circle of Hell where he is depicted recounting it to Dante in Inferno, Canto XXVI.

 

 

So is this “science” a true knowledge like the “knowledge of good and evil” with which Eve was tempted, or a false “knowledge” like the gnosis of the Simonians, Valentians, Sethians, et al.?

 

 

“Science” obviously contains much true knowledge.   This is to be found in the raw materials of “science”, the facts or data drawn from observation, which are knowledge in the sense that Bishop Pearson used the term when distinguishing it from “belief” or “faith”.   The hypotheses, theories, and laws by which these facts are interpreted and explained are another story.   While the liberal spirit of the Modern world ascribes truth to every proclamation of “science”, “science” makes no such claim for itself.   If it did, it would never have accomplished anything.   To give but one example, if Max Planck and Albert Einstein had taken the same attitude towards the physics of Sir Isaac Newton, that those who tell us to “follow the science’ with regards to climate change or the bat flu take, they never would have developed quantum mechanics and the theories of relativity.   In the twentieth century, Sir Karl Popper made a compelling case for falsifiability as the litmus test of whether a theory is genuinely “scientific”, rather than the “verifiability” of logical positivism.   To be falsifiable and therefore “scientific”, a theory had to be susceptible to being disproven under examination.   A theory that cannot be so falsified, whatever else it might be, is not “scientific”.   Something that is susceptible to falsification, however, cannot be said to be true, or at the very least, it cannot be said to be known to be true.   At the explanatory level, therefore, “science” is neither truth nor true knowledge, heresy though this undoubtedly be to the ears of the liberal “follow the science” crowd.

 

 

The “knowledge” that Modern man values highly over faith is, therefore, a mixture of true knowledge and false knowledge.   Moreover the true knowledge within it, is clearly of a lesser order of knowledge.   Consider the example of nuclear weapons from the previous paragraph.   While the observable facts that are the true knowledge in science were the raw material from which the physicists devised the theories that enabled them to build the atomic bomb these same facts clearly did not provide them with the knowledge that they ought not to have done anything of the sort.   Whether they had that knowledge from other sources and chose willingly to ignore it or whether they did not have it at all is beside the point.   Such knowledge could not have come from the facts of the science of physics themselves.  The knowledge that one ought not to create weapons that can wipe out entire cities with a single blow and threaten all life on earth is a higher and more important kind of knowledge than the lesser and lower knowledge that gives scientists the ability to invent such things.    The knowledge within Modern medical science has enabled doctors to perform organ transplants, blood transfusions, and other life-saving surgeries.   It has not, however, provided them with the knowledge that civil liberties should not be put on hold, police states established, social isolation imposed upon everybody, businesses, livelihoods and savings destroyed to stop a respiratory disease from spreading too fast and overwhelming their hospitals.    Nor has it provided them with the knowledge that first-of-their-kind vaccines that have not completed their clinical trials should not be imposed upon people by threatening them with exclusion from society, loss of employment, and the like until they “consent” to taking the vaccines.   Since, until quite recently, this knowledge was widespread, informing international agreements and laws, it would seem that Modern medical science has had the effect of driving this higher, more important, knowledge out.    

 

Modern man, therefore, has clearly placed far too high a value on scientific knowledge.    In doing so, he has embraced the same kind of error that produced Gnosticism and the same kind of error that brought about the Fall of man.   The testimony of God is the highest possible Truth, and faith in that testimony is the highest path to Truth available to man, superior to all forms of genuine knowledge attainable by human effort, and especially to spurious types of knowledge, or lower kinds of genuine knowledge such as those found in science.

 

 

(1)   John Pearson (1613-1686) was consecrated Bishop of Chester in 1672.   The work referred to was first published in 1659 and was compiled from sermons he had given at St. Clement’s, Eastscheap in London after he had been appointed preacher there five years previously.   It is an explanatory commentary on the Apostles’ Creed that is very thorough, going through the Creed Article by Article, and indeed, clause by clause – sometimes word by word – within the Articles.   Quotations here are taken from the first volume of the 1843 Oxford University Press edition, edited by the Reverend Doctor E. Burton, Regius Professor of Divinity and Canon of Christ Church.   They all come from the exposition of the words “I believe” which begin the first Article, which exposition starts on page 2 and continues to page 22.

(2)   Edward Freer Hills, Believing Bible Study, 3^rd edition, Christian Research Press Ltd., Des Moines, Iowa, 1967, 1991.    Several sections of this book are near identical to ones found in the same author’s The King James Version Defended.   The paragraph quoted is one such paragraph.   Whereas it is the fourth paragraph of the first chapter of Believing Bible Study it is also the second last paragraph of the second chapter of The King James Version Defended.

(3)  One interpretation is that the “knowledge of good and evil” meant to experience both good and evil in man’s own existence, a problem with which interpretation is that God, within Whom there is no evil, affirms that He possesses this knowledge.   Another interpretation is that by expressing the opposite poles of “good” and “evil” this was meant to comprehend everything in between and thus “knowledge of everything” or omniscience was meant.   While this is consistent with God’s describing the knowledge as being like His Own, mankind obviously did not become omniscient in the Fall.

(4)   Apologia Prima, xxvi.

(5)   Adversus Haereses, I.xxiii, IV, VI.xxxiii.

(6)  Refutatio Omnium Haeresium,IV.li and especially VI.ii, iv-xv.

(7)  There is another Latin verb for “know” which is obviously cognate with the Greek word.   This is gnosco, gnoscere, which was frequently used in compounds with many, ahem, recognizable English derivatives, including the one just highlighted, and the one used in the first sentence of this note.  Nevertheless, the functional equivalent of γιγνώσκω was scio.   Both were the primary verbs for knowing in their respective languages.

(8)“Creed” comes from the Latin credo – “I believe”.  The Latin texts of both the Apostles’ and Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creeds begin with this word, although the plural credimus (“we believe”) is sometimes used.   There is another ancient statement of faith that is commonly called a Creed, the Athanasian.   It does not begin with this word but with “Quicumque vult” (“Whosoever will”).   Its form, therefore, is more properly that of a kerygma – the faith proclaimed as a message for others – than a Creed – the faith expressed as a confession of personal/communal belief.   It is obviously, however, a more precise – in the case of the doctrine of Trinity extremely precise – expansion of the Apostles’ Creed, which is where its common title presumably comes from. 

The Wrath of God

After the reading of the epistle and before the reading of the Gospel in the traditional liturgy for the Requiem Mass – the funeral service of the Roman Catholic and many High Anglican churches – comes a long hymn entitled Dies Irae, which means “The Day of Wrath”. The words to the hymn go back at least as far as the thirteenth century and it has been set to music by countless composers. The final two lines of the hymn are often sung independently of the rest. (1) For fans of Monty Python this is what the monks in Quest for the Holy Grail who kept hitting their foreheads with their books were chanting. The hymn in its entirety speaks of the Second Coming of Christ and the Final Judgement, pleading for Christ’s propiatory mercy apart from which no one shall stand on that day.

Nothing illustrates the difference between modern and pre-modern thinking like this hymn. To the modern way of thinking a funeral is not the time or place to be talking, let alone singing, about God’s wrath and judgement. Even fundamentalist churches do not typically include preaching on hell at funerals. Other forms of modern theology do away with the subject of the wrath of God altogether. Theological liberalism, which is always glorying in how much more advanced its views of God are over the “primitive” views of Christians of previous centuries, thus demonstrating that its faith is in a deity of its own construction, i.e., an idol, rather than the eternal and unchanging God Who revealed Himself in Jesus Christ, regards the wrath of God as just such a “primitive” concept and consequently, has a similar attitude towards the propiatory, atoning, sacrifice of Christ upon the Christ. Others may not go as far as this but have problems with the idea of the wrath of God because they see it as being inconsistent with Christ’s teachings about God being a loving and forgiving Father. Some display their ignorance of the actual content of the New Testament by suggesting that the wrath of God is an Old Testament concept, imported into Christianity against the teachings of Jesus, by the ex-Pharisee St. Paul. No better answer to these can be found than the following words by that archnemesis of chronological snobbery, C. S. Lewis:

A most astonishing misconception has long dominated the modern mind on the subject of St Paul. It is to this effect: that Jesus preached a kindly and simple religion (found in the Gospels) and that St Paul afterwards corrupted it into a cruel and complicated religion (found in the Epistles).

This is really quite untenable. All the most terrifying texts come from the mouth of Our Lord: all the texts on which we can base such warrant as we have for hoping that all men will be saved come from St Paul. If it could be proved that St Paul altered the teaching of his Master in any way, he altered it in exactly the opposite way to that which is popularly supposed.
But there is no real evidence for a pre-Pauline doctrine different from St Paul’s. The Epistles are, for the most part, the earliest Christian documents we possess. The Gospels came later. They are not ‘the gospel’, the statement of the Christian belief. They were written for those who had already been converted, who had already accepted ‘the gospel’. They leave out many of the ‘complications’ (that is, the theology) because they are intended for readers who have already been instructed in it. In that sense the Epistles are more primitive and more central than the Gospels-though not, of course, than the great events which the Gospels recount. God’s act (the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection) comes first: the earliest theological analysis of it comes in the Epistles: then, when the generation who had known the Lord was dying out, the Gospels were composed to provide for believers a record of the great Act and of some of the Lord’s sayings. The ordinary popular conception has put everything upside down. (2)

Modern thinkers are not, however, the first to think that the concept of the wrath of God is out of sync with the God of love preached by Christianity. In the early centuries of the church many concluded that there was an inconsistency between the wrath displayed by YHWH in the Old Testament and the love of God proclaimed by Christ in the New Testament. This led them into Gnosticism, which maintained that the God of the Old Testament was not the Father God proclaimed by Christ but an inferior deity, the Demiurge. This was one of the earliest heresies to develop. St. Irenaeus of Lyons, whose primary surviving work is his late second century treatise against the versions of Gnosticism known to him, especially Valentinianism, (3) traced it back to Simon Magus, whom St. Peter encountered in Acts 8. The “antichrists” denounced by St. John in his first and second epistles seem to have been proponents of this heresy. Marcion of Sinope took this doctrine so far as to reject most of the New Testament as well as the Old. His “Bible” consisted of an abridged version of the Gospel according to St. Luke and ten of St. Paul’s epistles.

Gnosticism was nonsense, of course. In answering Gnosticism, with the Creedal affirmation that God the Father of Jesus Christ is the “maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible”, i.e., the God of the Old Testament Who created the material as well as the spiritual world, the orthodox, Apostolic, Christian Church simply reiterated what Jesus Christ Himself had taught regarding the authoritative Scriptures of the Old Testament and the God revealed therein. Furthermore, as noted by Lewis in the above quotation, there was plenty of wrath and judgement in Jesus’ own teachings. Indeed, as we shall see, far from it being the case that the wrath and judgement of God contradict the Christian doctrine of the love, mercy, and grace of God, it is rather the truth that the Gospel in which the latter are revealed is incomprehensible apart from the Law’s revelation of the wrath of God.

Before considering the wrath of God, however, let us take not of an important point about how we are to understand the Scriptures’ attribution to God of qualities that are possessed by humans and other created beings. These can be understood either univocally, equivocally, or analogically. If we understand them univocally, this means that we understand the same word to be identical in meaning when applied to God as applied to man. If we understand them equivocally, however, this means that we consider the qualities predicated of God to be entirely different except in name from those in man. Orthodox theologians have long rejected the univocal and equivocal views in favour of the analogical, which means that when the Scriptures ascribe to God a quality that is present in man, the quality so described is not identical to the one found in man, differing from it in both manner and degree, but with enough similarity between the two, that the term denoting the human quality provides an adequate picture of the corresponding quality in God, so that something meaningful and comprehensible can thereby be communicated about God. (4)

The reason this is important is because the word wrath means intense anger, particularly as expressed in retributive punishment against the object of wrath. In human beings anger is an emotion, a response in us prompted by something that has displeased us which, if we allow it to influence our actions without being itself governed and moderated by our reason, results in bad and inappropriate behaviour. To attribute wrath to God univocally, would be to say that His response to our sin is an emotional outburst. This is clearly not acceptable to orthodoxy because the suggestion that God is susceptible to emotional outbursts and that our actions can produce a change within Him, contradicts His immutability. An equivocal understanding of the wrath of God, however, would be meaningless and incomprehensible.

Therefore, when St. Paul writes that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness” (Rom. 1:18) this has to be understood analogically. God’s wrath resembles human anger in some ways but must not be thought of as an emotion. Like human anger, God’s wrath demands the punishment of its objects but, unlike human anger, is not an emotional response but the expression of an aspect of God’s immutable character. If you are tempted to find in this truth some sort of comfort for impenitent sinners seeking security in their carnality then you need to think over it more thoroughly. In human beings, punishment out of anger can be unjustly severe because anger clouds human judgement causing us to exact more than justice requires – which is why human civilizations build their justice systems upon the foundation of principles that place limits on the penalties that can be exacted from offenders. (5) Paradoxically, however, human anger, being a changeable emotion, is quickly exhausted. Wrath that is an expression of something that is immutable in God is not – hence the Scriptural imagery describing that wrath in terms of “their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched”, “the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels” and “the smoke of their torment ascendeth up for ever and ever: and they have no rest day nor night.”

The immutable quality of the character of God that when directed towards sinners is expressed as what the Scriptures call the wrath of God is His justice. God’s justice is one aspect of His perfect goodness. God is perfectly good and righteous, and the Sovereign Lord over all He created. We, His creation, were created good and righteous, and we owe it to our Sovereign Lord to remain that way. God’s justice is the facet of His goodness that requires that we pay this debt. We, however, failed to meet our obligation, corrupted ourselves, and fell into sin, rebellion, and disobedience. The same justice that rightly requires righteousness of us now rightly demands a penalty from us for our sin. That penalty, the Scriptures speak of as death – the spiritual death that describes our condition of being spiritually alienated from God, the physical death that ends our earthly lives, and the second death which is eternal. The wrath of God is His exactment from us of the penalty that His justice demands for our sin.

The wrath of God is not an outdated doctrine to be done away with but is absolutely essential to sound theology. Without the wrath that expresses His justice towards sin, His justice and therefore His goodness, would be less than perfect and complete. If His goodness is less than perfect in this aspect, then the perfection of other aspects of His goodness, such as His love, are also compromised. Indeed, the fact that God’s love is so widely considered to be incompatible with His wrath, shows just how much the doctrine of His love has been compromised. What many, probably most, people think of today when they hear the expression “the love of God” is love in the watered-down modern sense of some sappy, sentimental, feeling. By contrast, the love of God spoken of in the Scriptures, is His benevolent good-will towards His creation, which is not simply an empty sentiment, but which translates into positive action.

If we reject the idea of the wrath of God, compromising the justice that lies behind that wrath, and so compromising the love of God by reducing it to an empty sentiment, than we strip the Gospel of its meaning and rob the forgiveness offered in the Gospel of its value. For many today, forgiveness means something along the lines of “letting it slide.” The person who forgives in this sense says to the person who has wronged him “forget about it” or “its no big deal”. In other words, he makes light of the offense and trivializes it. This is not the forgiveness spoken of in the Scriptures – either the forgiveness offered to us in the Gospel, or the forgiveness required of us towards others. The Scriptures make it quite clear that God “will by no means clear the guilty.” (Ex. 34:7, Num. 14:18) This means that He will not just dismiss our sin, pretend that it is not serious or of no consequence. God’s justice demands that sin be paid for and God never offers us any sort of forgiveness that just sets His justice aside. This is why forgiveness is only extended to us on the grounds that Someone else paid our debt for us.

In John 3:16, which is rightly the most familiar and loved verse in all the Bible, aptly dubbed “the Gospel in a nutshell”, we are told that “God so loved the world that He gave His Only-Begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” The word translated “so” in this verse does not mean so in the sense of extent, as in “so much”, “so many”, “so large”, although undoubtedly the verse as a whole conveys a sense of that, but rather means “so” in the sense of manner, as in “thus”, “so” or “in this way.” (6) The verse is telling us that the way in which God loved the world was by giving us His Son that all who believe in Him will have everlasting life. St. Paul makes it clear to us how God’s giving us His Son accomplishes this end:

Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. (Rom. 3:24-26)

To forgive someone in the truest sense of the word, not the watered down sense of trivializing the offence and “letting it slide”, means that the forgiver takes the burden of paying the damages caused by the injury he is forgiving upon himself. The words “redemption” and “propitiation” in this passage both have connotations of a price being paid for our being justified, i.e., accepted as righteous by God which includes the idea of our sins being forgiven. Redemption suggests the idea of payment for release from bondage. Propitiation, however, means the payment that satisfies the offended justice – the wrath – of God. (7) This, St. Paul explicitly declares, is the only way God could be just Himself while acquitting and justifying the sinner who believes in Jesus Christ – by voluntarily bearing the guilt of all of our sins upon Himself as He hung upon the Cross and allowing His Own wrath to be exhausted upon Himself, paying the debt that we owed, thus satisfying the demands of His justice against us once and for all.

Without an appreciation of the reality of the wrath of God against sin as the expression of His offended and infinite justice we cannot have even the most basic understanding of the significance of what Jesus Christ did for us at the Cross. Without the humble and contrite acknowledgement that the wrath of God is exactly what we deserve as sinners – not just a “sure nobody’s perfect” which really only means “I have my problems but I’m good enough” – that is produced in us by the Law, the Gospel, through which the Holy Spirit persuades us of the truth of Who Jesus is, what He did for us, and the grace – freely given favour – in which we stand because of Jesus, will bounce right off of us without forming in us the faith which is the only means by which we can receive that grace.

Perhaps the medieval Church got it right after all, in placing several stanzas of wrath and judgement just before the reading of the Gospel, in services for departed loved ones, whose deaths remind us of our own mortality, and of the coming Judgement.


Quærens me, sedisti lassus:
Redemisti Crucem passus:
Tantus labor non sit cassus.

Juste Judex ultionis,
Donum fac remissionis,
Ante diem rationis.

Ingemisco, tamquam reus:
Culpa rubet vultus meus:
Supplicanti parce, Deus. (8)


(1) "Pie Iesu Domine, Dona eis requiem." Which means "Holy Lord Jesus, grant them rest."
(2) C. S. Lewis, “Modern Translations of the Bible”, originally published as the introduction to J. B. Phillips’ Letters to Young Christians: A Translation of the New Testament Epistles (1947), later included as the tenth essay in Part II of God in The Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, a posthumous collection of Lewis’ apologetics essays compiled and edited by Walter Hooper and published by William B. Eerdmans of Grand Rapids in 1970.
(3) St. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, (180).
(4) St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I.13.5. Note that in the Sed Contra, i.e., the part of the article where St. Thomas asserts his own view against the opposing view presented in the Utrum and supported by the Oportets, he seems to affirm the equivocal position. At this point in the article, however, he is using “equivocal” in a general sense that includes the analogous. Later, in the Respondeo Dicens where he fleshes out his argument he distinguishes between a “purely equivocal sense” and an “analogous” sense, affirming the latter rather than the former. Ever an Aristotolean, he describes the analogous sense as a “mean between pure equivocation and simple univocation.” See also John Theodore Mueller in Christian Dogmatics: A Handbook of Doctrinal Theology for Pastors, Teachers, and Laymen, (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1934), pp.161-162.
(5) The much maligned Lex Talionis, understood properly, is just such a limitation.
(6) The word is οὕτως. For those who know Latin it was rendered “sic” in the Vulgate, not “tantus.”
(7) The Greek word ἱλαστήριον that St. Paul used here was also the word that denoted the Mercy Seat, i.e., the lid of the Ark of the Covenant upon which the high priest would sprinkle sacrificial blood on the Day of Atonement.
(8) “Seeking me, You sat tired, Having suffered the Cross, You have redeemed, Let so much labour not be in vain. Just Judge of vengeance, Make a gift of forgiveness, before the Day of Reckoning. I lament as a guilty one, with shame my face grows red, spare Your supplicant, O God.” – from the Dies Irae.

Thoughts on the Times

Smoking Stupidity

The solons who govern the city of Winnipeg in which I reside have, in their inscrutable wisdom, ruled, that as of April 1st, no one is to be allowed to smoke in outdoor patios where food and beverages are served. Although set to come into effect on April Fool’s Day, sadly, this fascist bylaw, is no joke. This latest and most absurd assault, in the neopuritan war on tobacco, is, like previous ones, based on the myth of harmful and deadly second-hand smoke. Undoubtedly, many if not most of the dingbats championing this ban are the same people applauding the federal Liberals’ decision, also coming into effect this year, to legalize the recreational smoking of the flowers and leaves of non-industrial hemp. Tobacco smoking can over time be damaging to the health of the body. The risk is much higher for cigarette smokers than for those who smoke tobacco the way God intended it in pipes and cigars, although this distinction and difference means nothing to the Mrs. Grundys of the Winnipeg City Council. Cannabis smoking damages the health of the mind. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Heed my advice if you wish to stay sane;
If you smoke, smoke Old Toby and not Mary Jane.

Remember S. Charles, King and Martyr

Yesterday was the Feast of King Charles the Martyr, murdered by the regicidal and heretical, Puritan sect 369 years ago. The December 2017 edition of the American Region Edition of SKCM News, the Magazine of the Society of King Charles the Martyr, contains this item:

BBC History magazine has published a seventeenth-century recipe for drinking chocolate. Charles I enjoyed the beverage, but Oliver Cromwell banned it, deeming it sinful. (p. 3)

Yet further evidence, as if more were needed, that Puritanism is evil. In addition to being Pharisees, the Puritans were also Philistines and in the Interregnum, they broke up King Charles’ impressive collection of art and sold most of it off. The Telegraph reports that with the help of the Royal Martyr’s namesake, the present Prince of Wales, the Royal Academy of Arts has reassembled the collection for the first time in almost four centuries, for a special show commemorating the Academy’s 250th anniversary.

Some Quotes from a Church Father

St. Irenaeus was a second century Church Father. He was born and raised in Smyrna, in what is now Turkey, when St. Polycarp, who had been the disciple of St. John the Apostle, was bishop there. Later he served, first as presbyter (priest) then as bishop, in what is now Lyon in France. He is most remembered as a defender of Apostolic orthodoxy against the various Gnostic sects that taught that the God of the Old Testament Who created the heavens and the earth was an inferior deity, the Demiurge, and not the Father of the New Testament. Eric Voegelin argued, in The New Science of Politics, that in Calvinist Puritanism, Gnosticism had been revived and had evolved into the spirit of the Modern Age.

St. Irenaeus wrote a five-book treatise against the Gnostics which in Latin is titled Adversus Haereses. The first book outlines the teachings of several varieties of Gnosticism, focusing primarily on the Valentinian sect. In the second paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of this book can be found this remark about a different Gnostic sect, the followers of Saturninus:

Many of those, too, who belong to his school, abstain from animal food, and draw away multitudes by a feigned temperance of this kind.

Later, of yet another Gnostic sect, the Encratites, he writes:

Some of those reckoned among them have also introduced abstinence from animal food, thus proving themselves ungrateful to God, who formed all things. (I.28.1)

Sadly, there has been a great deal of ignorance of and indifference to the Patristic writings among Western Protestants for the last century or so which perhaps explains the revival and popularity of the Gnostic heresy of vegan vegetarianism in our day and age.

A Quote From Our Friends Down Under

The Australian traditionalist and reactionary group Sydney Trads, in its “The Year in Review: 2017, Year of the Hate Hoax, the Heckler’s Veto and the Persecuted ‘Oppressor’”, included the following:

2017 was the year of Schrodinger’s ethnicity: Whites apparently exist as an identifiable category if they are being attacked, mocked, ridiculed or blamed for something, but also do not exist as a legitimate category of self-identification when a representative defends their interests as a group.

That is liberalism’s essential self-contradiction on race all summed up in a nutshell. Nicely done.

Justin Trudeau’s Nightmare

In the 1860s, the Fathers of Confederation formed a new country out of the provinces of British North America, giving it the title of Dominion and the name of Canada. The new country was to be a federation of provinces, with a parliamentary government modeled after the Westminster parliament, under the monarchy shared with Great Britain and the rest of the British Empire. The Fathers of Confederation looked to the federal system to overcome the difficulties of British Protestants and French Catholics living together in one country and to the monarchy as the source of continuity and unity, envisioned the evolution of the British Empire itself into a federation in which Canada would play a senior role, and tried to protect their country from the gravitational pull of the republic to their south with a national economic program of protective tariffs and internal trade facilitated by the construction of a transcontinental railroad. From that time to today, the Liberal Party of Canada has been the anti-Confederation party, the party that has sought to belittle the accomplishments of the Fathers of Confederation and Canada’s Loyalist heritage, to line the pockets of its financial backers through increased trade with the United States up to the point of continental economic integration, to weaken our parliamentary constitution and give autocratic power to the Prime Minister and Cabinet, to replace our traditional national symbols with ones of their own manufacture and to seriously undermine our traditional Common Law rights and freedoms. The Liberal Party found out in 1891 and again in 1911 that presenting their naked agenda to Canadians at election time was a losing strategy and evolved the strategy of pandering and grievance mongering that worked much better for them in the twentieth century. The strategy consists of telling identifiable groups that the Old Canada of Confederation had treated them unfairly but that if they would give their support to the Liberals, the Liberals would fix the situation and give them a bag of taxpayer-supplied goodies.

At first it was French Canadians that Liberals focused on, telling them that all the Britishness of the Canada of a Confederation was an unfair reminder of their defeat at the Plains of Abraham. This was nonsense – French Canadians knew full well that the protection of the British Crown had secured their language, religion, and culture for them when the Puritan Americans had wanted to take them away from them and their leaders were fully involved in the Confederation talks, helping shape the Dominion. The Liberal strategy had an unintended consequence – the emergence of the Quebec nationalist separatism that threatened to divide the country.

When this happened the Liberals adjusted their strategy. They now told a broad, “rainbow coalition” of different races, religions, and ethnic groups that they had been unfairly “excluded” from the Old Canada of Confederation, but would receive redress in the New Canada of the Liberal Party. To ensure that the coalition was as large as possible they revamped the immigration system, bringing in the race-neutral points system of 1965 as our “official” immigration policy, but this was merely a cover for their true policy of exploiting the loopholes to the points system (the largest of these being “family reunification”) to make Canada as ethnically diverse as possible as quickly as possible. They, of course, silenced anybody who pointed out the obvious drawbacks to this by calling him a “racist.”

This was done largely during the premiership of Pierre Trudeau. Now, in the premiership of Justin Trudeau, the Liberal coalition has been expanded to include minority sexual orientations and gender identities as well.

This strategy has always been a divisive one, first pitting French Canadians against English Canadians, then pitting a coalition of racial, religious, and ethnic minorities against European Christian Canadians, and maximizing diversity in total disregard to the fact that this is the way to generate ethnic and racial strife and conflict rather than harmony. It has been quite clear for some time now that the Liberal coalition cannot hold together for long. Earlier in the premiership of the second Trudeau it seemed likely that the breaking point would be between Muslims and the alphabet soupers, both of whose causes the Prime Minister was loudly, vehemently, and recklessly championing despite the obvious contradiction between the two. Now, however, a different fracture has become evident.

Earlier this month, the Prime Minister shamelessly turned the occasion of a young Muslim girl in Toronto, Khawlah Noman’s, claim that she had been attacked by a man who cut her hijab with scissors, into an opportunity to grandstand, get his name and picture in the press yet again, and lecture Canadians about how horribly “Islamophobic” we all are. It later turned out that, like the vast majority of highly publicized “hate crimes”, the incident was a hoax and had not occurred after all. Those who have been waiting for Trudeau to return to his taxpayer-funded soap box and eat crow have been listening to crickets chirp and watching the tumbleweeds drift by ever since.

This weekend, however, protests were held all across Canada by the Asian communities of cities such as Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, and Regina. It turns out that it was an Asian man whom the girl had falsely accused – a detail that was not widely reported by the press as it conflicts with their narrative in which bigotry and bigotry-inspired-violence are the exclusive domain of white, heterosexual, Christian males. The protests were aimed at Trudeau, insisting that the hoax, and his gullible swallowing it without waiting for a full investigation, constituted a “hate crime” against them. While I have little sympathy for the protestors, as their claim that they were being scapegoated and discriminated against is ludicrous seeing that the school division, the federal and provincial governments, the leaders of the opposition, and the news media all went out of their way to avoid drawing attention to the fact that the girl had accused one of their ethnicity, there is something deeply satisfying in seeing Trudeau’s coalition fall apart, and its members turn on him.