In a social media group devoted to Canadian Politics last week, I saw someone make the claim that the old Conservatives have disappeared and been replaced by the Reform/Alliance types and that today’s Liberals are where the Conservatives were forty plus years ago. She was half-right. The part she got wrong, however, was the exact opposite of the truth, a fact of which I informed her.
It is true
that those who call themselves “Conservatives”, big or little c, today, are
basically a watered down version of what the Reform/Alliance was in the final
decade of the last century, which was a populist party that was “conservative”
only in the American sense of the word, a sense which has no roots deeper than
the (classical) liberalism upon which the United States was founded and which
is not significantly different from the original philosophy and platform of the
Liberal Party (which called itself Reform in the era of Confederation). The shift from the old Canadian conservatism
to American-style neo-conservatism is not however, as this lady seemed to
think, adequately explained by the dropping of “Progressive” from the party’s
title. “Progressive” was not part of the party’s title in Confederation but was
added to it about a decade after the old “Progressive” party – a farmers’
populist party – dissolved. This was
done because John Bracken, the premier of my province at that time, had been
asked to take over the leadership of the federal Conservatives and made this a
condition of his acceptance. Bracken had
been premier of Manitoba since 1922 (he was the longest to serve in this
office), initially governing as leader of the provincial version of the
Progressive Party (which at first called itself the United Farmers of
Manitoba), then after the party collapsed as leader of the Manitoba Liberals. When “progressive” was added to the title of
the Conservative Party therefore, it was with the sense of “western, agrarian,
populist” and not the sense it normally has in politics.
It is not
true that today’s Liberals, big or small l, are where the old Conservatives
were prior to neo-conservatism. On one
important matter they are portraying themselves as taking the position of the
old Conservatives, the matter of standing up for Canada against the threat of American
takeover. Note that the threat and their
stance against it conveniently came at the time when they were facing an
historical defeat in a Dominion election. That Canadians bought this posturing from the
Liberals - the reverse of their historical position which had been to push for
closer economic, cultural and political ties between Canada and the United
States – can probably be attributed to neo-conservatism’s takeover of the
Conservative party, although the Conservatives having betrayed their old
position for that of the Liberal Party by no means logically implies that the
Liberals can be trusted to stand up for the old Conservative position. For most of the past thirteen years, the
Liberals have positioned themselves not where the old Conservatives were prior
to neo-conservatism, but in territory that forty-some years ago would have been
regarded as beyond the pale in the land of the looney Left. They were taking positions on moral, social,
and cultural matters that as recently as twenty years ago, liberals of my
acquaintance insisted could not possibly be the direction towards which their
movement was heading and which until about twenty years ago, would have been
regarded as too far to the Left even by some members of the NDP. (1) Indeed, the Liberals’ relentless insistence
on shoving this looney-tunes nonsense down Canadians throats, no matter how
unpopular it was, significantly contributed to the rapidly declining polls from
which they were rescued by a change in leadership around the time the jackass
that the Americans had recently returned to the White House started
relentlessly threatening us with Anschluss.
The current Liberal leader, whom I call Blofeld due to his resemblance
to the last actor to play that character in a James Bond film, (2) is not the
exact replica of his predecessor, whom I call Captain Airhead for obvious
reasons, that the neo-conservative media try to make him out to be. Nevertheless the Liberal Party he leads,
while perhaps somewhat closer to the centre than before, is still out there in
left field.
In the same
social media discussion I said that I am no longer comfortable describing
myself as a “conservative” since over the course of my lifetime I have seen
this word co-opted by the neo-conservatives and redefined to mean what it means
in the United States, i.e., the older form of American liberal. I am comfortable with the term “conservative”
only in the older and better sense of the word, the sense associated in Canada
with Sir John A. Macdonald and the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker, with
humourist/economist Stephen Leacock, philosopher George Grant, and historian
Donald Creighton. The “conservative”
whose conservatism is that of John Farthing’s Freedom Wears a Crown and Diefenbaker’s Those
Things We Treasure rather than that of National
Review and Fox News, a conservatism that looks back to Edmund Burke and
better yet Richard(s) Hooker and Field, Dean Swift, John Dryden and Dr. Johnson
rather than to John Locke and J. S. Mill.
A conservatism that is all about tradition, order, and continuity, which
places honour, loyalty, and the virtues of Christendom and the age of chivalry
above the values of commercialism and mercantilism. A conservatism which
believes in freedom in community rather than in isolated and atomized
individuals, which trusts the Westminster parliamentary system that has been
refined during the course of a thousand years of history over any constitution
drawn up on paper three centuries ago by revolutionaries who wanted a break
from the past, and which believes in the institution of royal monarchy with its
prescriptive authority and its superior representative ability due to its
transcendence of partisan politics over the crass republicanism that makes the
highest political office the prize of a highly divisive popularity contest and
which is born out of thinking Satan’s thoughts after him. Since the neo-conservatives have been so
successful in divorcing the term from these associations I prefer the older
term Tory and gladly self-apply the term reactionary, derived from the movement
that put an end to Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, that progressives (in the
normal sense of the word, not agrarian populists) have long used of
non-progressives who are not content with merely questioning liberalism’s most
recent ideas.
Shortly
after the aforementioned discussion it occurred to me that in the sphere of
religion and theology I feel largely the same way about the term “evangelical.” When I first encountered this word as a young
Christian it was used to mean something like “non-liberal Protestant”. To clarify, “liberal” in the preceding sentence
does not have its political connotation but refers to someone who holds to
revisionist theology, that is to say, theology that has been revised in
accordance with the mistaken notion that Modern discoveries of various sorts
(scientific, critical, etc.) have placed such things as the historical accuracy
of the Scriptures and the possibility of miracles outside the realm of the
credible. Think of the kind of person
who says that he believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ but by this does not
mean what Christians have historically and traditionally meant by this - that
the eternal Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, at one point in
history entered the womb of the Blessed Virgin, took a complete but sinless
human nature at the moment into His own eternal Person from the moment it was
formed and from that point forward was both fully God and fully Man in One
Person, the Person Who upon His birth was given the name Jesus and Who
fulfilled the prophecy of the Christ – but rather means that there is a spark
of divinity in all people (as the ancient Gnostic heretics taught) that was
bigger or more apparent in Jesus. Or the
kind of person who says that he believes in the resurrection of Jesus Christ
but who also thinks that His bones might be discovered some day. From the moment I became aware of this kind
of liberalism, I loathed it as much if not more than the political ideology by
the same name. (3)
That having
been said, even back in the ‘90’s I was not a big fan of using the word
“evangelical” for Protestants who were “conservative” in the theological
sense. I learned fairly early in my
Christian walk that this use of the word dated back to the 1950s when certain
conservative Protestants – Carl F. H. Henry, Harold John Ockenga, Billy Graham,
Fuller Seminary, Christianity Today –
started to use it to distance themselves from fundamentalists. “Fundamentalist”, while now used by
progressives to refer to anyone from any religion who has not compromised the
traditional beliefs of his religion to their liking, was coined in the early
twentieth century by Protestant theologians actively fighting the takeover of
their denominations by liberalism and originally meant a kind of conservative
pan-Protestant alternate ecumenism (4). Those who chose the term “evangelical” to
distance themselves from fundamentalism, although they claimed they wanted a
more intellectual approach (5), really meant that they wanted a more
compromising and less combative approach to liberalism. Twenty years later, writers within
evangelicalism were warning that some in the movement were abandoning sound
theology, at least with regards to the infallible authority of Scripture. (6)
There are
other connotations to the word “evangelical” than “theologically conservative
Protestant”, of course, and when the new “evangelicals” of the 1950s chose this
word to distance themselves from the fundamentalists it was because the word
was older and had these other connotations. In the sixteenth century, Dr. Luther and the
other Reformers used the word to distinguish themselves from the papacy and its
followers. Used in this sense it was
synonymous with Protestant and in much of Europe today it retains the meaning
of “Protestant” and is used of anyone who is Protestant in ecclesiastical
affiliation regardless of what his theology may be. In the Anglican Church, which retained her
Catholic structure through and after the Reformation, those who emphasized her
ongoing Catholicity and those who stressed her Protestantism often sparred with
each other and those stressed the Protestantism formed a faction and called
themselves evangelical. In the
eighteenth century, evangelical took on yet another meaning in the
English-speaking world as it became attached to the emphasis upon a personal
conversion experience in the revivals that attended on the preaching of John
and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, Jonathan Edwards, Howell Harris, Daniel
Rowland, Ebenezer Erskine, Gilbert Tennent, Theodorus Jacobus
Frelinghuysen, James Davenport, Jonathan Dickinson, Samuel Davies and
others. This became the primary meaning
of the word in North America and is the meaning which the new “evangelicals” of
the 1950s, who largely built their movement around the success of the Billy
Graham evangelistic crusades, (7) most clearly had in mind.
My degree of comfort with the term varies in accordance with
these connotations. None of them is
entirely unproblematic. The one with
which I am the most comfortable is Dr. Luther’s. He used the word because he did not want his
followers to be called by his own name (8) but by the name of the Gospel. The implication, however, is that the
doctrine of justification by faith alone is “the Gospel”, that it had been
lost, and that he had rediscovered it.
Dr. Luther did not actually think this way, but since him it has been
taken this far. I know of some, for
example, who think that all of the ancient Churches, not just Rome, but the
churches of the East and the further East, lost the Gospel ages ago and that it
was only rediscovered in the sixteenth century.
These are blissfully ignorant of the fact that their view of Church
history is both heretical and identical with that of all the sects that they
label “cults.” The doctrine of
justification by faith alone, important as it is, is not the Gospel. If it were the Gospel, then Christianity
would be saying to the world “we’ve got good news for you, all you have to do
is believe” and worded that way the doctrine ceases to be a precious truth and
becomes the noxious heresy of antinomianism. (9) Any truth can become a heresy
if focused on to the point that we lose sight of other necessary truths. In the early Church, the deity of Jesus
Christ and His humanity, the oneness and the Threeness of God, were each
twisted into heresies that denied their complementary truths. The same is done to justification by faith
alone when it is made out to be the Gospel, rather than ancillary to the
Gospel. The Gospel is that Jesus Christ,
the Eternal Son of God become Man for us, died for our sins, according to the
Scriptures and was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to
the Scriptures and was seen by a multitude of witnesses (1 Cor. 15:3ff). This
message, the Good News that Christianity is commanded to preach to the world,
is central to the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, the Creed that is most truly
universal being confessed by all the ancient Churches, including the Roman, and
by the three main Reformation traditions.
I am less
comfortable with the North American meaning of the word than with Dr.
Luther’s. The revivalist message, that
each of us needs to internalize our faith, to repent of our sins and commit to
personally following Christ, rather than relying upon external Church
membership and attendance, is sound enough.
Unfortunately, it is often preached in an unhealthy way that has the
opposite effect to that of Dr. Luther’s evangelical message. Dr. Luther, in emphasizing justification by
faith alone, directed the believer to look outside himself, through the eyes of
faith, to his Redeemer proclaimed in the Gospel (that He died for our sins – it
is finished – and rose again, objective, external, historical facts). North American evangelicalism, by contrast,
tends to turn the believer’s eyes back onto himself, to get him to constantly question
whether his faith experience is real, and to answer the call of the evangelist
repeated times, with decreasing levels of assurance each time. If sixteenth century evangelicalism tended
towards the error of confusing the ancillary doctrine of justification by faith
alone with the Gospel itself, North American evangelicalism tends towards the
error of confusing “ye must be born again” with the Gospel, a worse error
because these words, by stating the need of the soul of fallen man, are closer
in nature to Law than Gospel. It lends
to the problem of the inner-directed gaze by tying the re-birth, contrary to
the Church Fathers, the ancient Churches, the three branches of the Magisterial
Reformation, not to the Sacrament of Baptism which like the internal work of the
Holy Spirit of which it is the outward symbol cannot (and need not) be repeated
and in which the recipient is passive but to a personal act of repentance and (re-)dedicating
oneself to Christ which is active on the part of the participant, which can be
repeated, and which ought to be repeated as the need arises. (10)
The
connotations of evangelical in the Anglican context, to the extent they are
distinct from the previous two sets, are those with which I am least
comfortable. In the sixteenth century,
evangelical as applied to the reformed Church of England had Dr. Luther’s
meaning, today it is closer to the generic North American meaning, but in
between it was the name of a faction or party within the reformed Church of
England. That forming a faction or party
within the Church is a bad thing to do is one of the main themes of St. Paul’s
first epistle to the Corinthians. Of
course, someone might respond that this point could be raised against the
Anglican Church’s post-Reformation status as a distinct Church. The answer to this, of course, is that in the
New Testament there was a huge difference between the factions within the
Corinthian Church declaring themselves to be “of Apollos”, or “of Cephas” or
“of Paul” on the one hand, and the distinction on the other hand between “the
Church in Galatia” or “the Church in Thessalonica” or between the seven
Churches to whom letters are addressed in the second and third chapters of the
Apocalypse. In the English Reformation, when
the Church of England in conjunction with Parliament declared herself free from
the usurped authority of the Patriarch of Rome, she did not excommunicate said
Patriarch nor did she excommunicate the Latin Church that remained under his
authority. The excommunication ran
entirely in the opposite direction, demonstrating where the spirit of schism
truly lay. (11) Indeed, apart from its
factionalism what I dislike the most about the Anglican Church’s evangelical
faction is the low value it places on the efforts of the English Reformers to
not be schismatic, to maintain continuity with the pre-Reformation Church, to
keep the reforms moderate and conservative, and to be guided by how the Church
of the first millennium and especially the early Patristic centuries
interpreted the Scripture in making what reforms she made. The evangelical faction of the Anglican
Church has undergone many internal changes, (12) what has remained consistent
about it is that it stresses things that we have in common with only the
Lutherans, Reformed, and some of the separatist sects above the faith, spelled
out in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds which we have in common with all of the
ancient Churches as well as the Lutherans, the Reformed on their best days, and
slightly fewer of the separatist sects and other things (liturgical worship,
three-fold historical ministry with episcopal government, etc.) that we have in
common with the other ancient Churches and some of the Lutherans. The proper hierarchy of value is that the
common faith is most important, followed by the other things we have in common
with all the ancient Churches, followed by the things we have in common with
the Lutherans and Reformed.
With these
misgivings about these three historical uses of the term and especially since
the one with which I am most comfortable, Dr. Luther’s, has decayed into the
contemporary European usage in which it is a synonym for Protestant regardless
of theology, I would very much prefer that another term be used for a
theological conservative. Fundamentalist
would be better except that around the time that the new evangelicalism was
distancing itself from fundamentalism, fundamentalism was narrowing its own
self-identity in less-than-desirable ways (13).
Catholic would be better yet were it not for the fact that most
Protestants have conceded it to Rome making it impossible for anybody else to
use it without a disclaimer as long as the Oxford English Dictionary. This leaves us with orthodox, which has never
been conceded to the Eastern Church the way Catholic has been to the Roman
(traditionalist Roman Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants have always used
it and it has long been the preferred term of those Anglicans who stress the
importance of maintaining continuity in doctrine, structure, worship and
practice with the Church of the first millennium, especially the first five
centuries), and would have been the best option regardless since it has been
the term for doctrinal soundness since the very beginning.
(2) The resemblance is almost as remarkable as that between David Bentley Hart, the lay Eastern Orthodox theologian whose liberal Protestant views pass as traditional Eastern Orthodox ones to Westerners who are not sufficiently read in the theology of the East to know the difference and the late M*A*S*H actor David Ogden Stiers (after Stiers grew a beard in the mid ‘90’s) or between Captain Airhead’s current girlfriend and actress Zooey Deschanel.
(3) The term “liberal” in both instances refers to the acceptance of Modern ideas over older, classical and traditional ideas. About a century ago “liberal” theologians were called Modernists which is more accurate label. The term “liberal” comes from the Latin word for “generous”. Whether in the realm of politics or theology, it is a form of self-flattery and those who do not themselves identify as “liberals” seldom see in “liberals” the generosity and broad-mindedness they claim for themselves, quite the opposite.
(4) As represented, for example, by the volumes The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, edited by A. C. Dixon, Louis Meyer, and R. A Torrey, originally published in twelve volumes from 1910 to 1915, then rebound in the four volumes they have been published as ever since in 1917. Dixon was a Baptist minister, Meyer a Reformed Presbyterian, Torrey a Congregationalist, and the contributors included Presbyterians such as James Orr, A. T. Pierson, and B. B. Warfield, Baptists such as E. Y. Mullins, G. Campbell Morgan, and Thomas Spurgeon, Anglicans such as Dyson Hague, W. H. Griffith Thomas, Handley Moule, G. Osborne Troop and C. T. Studd, Methodists such as A. C. Gaebelein and John L. Nuelson, Lutheran Frederic Bettex, A. J. Pollack of the Plymouth Brethren, and various other contributors from these and other denominations.
(5) A laughable claim since they were hardly more scholarly then the men who contributed to The Fundamentals, note 4 vide supra. Mark A. Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994) was a tremendous indictment of the movement’s efforts in this regards after four decades. Perhaps if “intellectual” is taken in the uncomplimentary sense with which Tom Wolfe used to use or as is used by historian Paul Johnson in his Intellectuals (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988) it might be defensible.
(6) Harold Lindsell, The Battle for the Bible (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 1976) followed by his The Bible in the Balance (Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 1979) for example. A decade later Francis Schaeffer addressed the declining doctrinal standards of evangelicalism in his last book The Great Evangelical Disaster (Wheaton: Crossway, 1984).
(7) Apart from doing what he was most famous for doing, Billy Graham was the founder of Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of the new evangelicalism. Carl F. H. Henry was the magazine’s first editor.
(8) As Robert Burns said “the best laid scheme o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.”
(9) Gospel means “good news”. If “justification by faith alone” were the Gospel this would mean that it is itself the central content of the message of Christianity. The very wording, “justification by faith alone”, however, should make it obvious that this is not the kerygma but a theological formulation. If you try to express what “justification by faith alone” means as a message addressed to people in the second person then you end up with “all you have to do is believe”. There is a huge difference between saying that “all you have to do is believe” is Christianity’s message to a fallen and sinful world and saying that Christianity’s message is “God has given us a Saviour, His Only-Begotten Son, Who became a man just like us except without sin, Who died for our sins upon the cross that He might take them away and defeat the enemies that have held us in spiritual bondage since our first parents, Who after He was buried showed His triumph over these enemies of sin and death by rising again from the dead, leaving the grave behind, showing Himself to His followers, and ascending back to His Father” and that we are to believe this message and trust this Saviour rather than in our own efforts to please God.
The second wording shows where the doctrine of justification by faith
alone belongs, in the unrolling of the implications of the Gospel for us, that
because the Saviour God has given us is so perfect and the salvation He
accomplished for us so complete, He and not our own efforts is the proper
object of our faith, just as He and not our own faith, is the proper content of
the Gospel. The first wording, however,
expresses what you get when you make justification by faith alone itself out to
be the Gospel. This is not what those
who call justification by faith alone the Gospel usually intend to convey, they
have just not thought through the implications of what they are saying.
In the text of the essay I identified the heresy which they
unintentionally make themselves guilty of by sloppy thinking as
antinomianism. This is because if “all
you have to do is believe” is itself the “good news”, this translates into “you
don’t have to do good” which is the historical meaning of antinomianism (more
precisely, antinomianism is the idea that Christians do not have to obey the
moral part of the law), whereas justification by faith alone in its proper
place, does not tell you that you don’t have to do good, it tells you that your
efforts to do good cannot save you or assist in your salvation, and that you
are to trust in Jesus Christ rather than them.
Anti-protestant apologists, usually for Rome, like to refer to the
heresy of “solafideism”. This suggests
that “justification by faith alone” is itself, and not merely its being placed
in the centre of the Christian kerygma bumping out Jesus, His death, and
resurrection, a heresy. This, however,
ignores the very nature of heresy. At
the core of every heresy is a truth which has been misplaced, taken out of its
proper context, so that other truths are diminished or denied. The truth at the core of Sabellianism
(modalism, the denial of the distinct Persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit)
is the unity of God. The truth at the
core of Tritheism (the denial of the unity of Being of Father, Son, Holy Spirit
so as to make them three Gods) is the distinction of the Persons. The truth at the core of Nestorianism (the
separation of the deity and humanity of Jesus Christ so as to divide His Person)
is that His human nature remains distinct from His divine nature even though
they are united in His Eternal Person so that whatever is true of either of
them is also true of Him, the Person.
If there is a heresy of Solafideism this can only be because there is a
truth of Solafideism. If there is a heresy
of Solafideism which denies James 2:24
(and the larger passage in which it is found), then the truth Solafideism is
the affirmation of Romans 4:3-5 (the wording of verse five is much stronger than
what could be conveyed by the word “alone” or “only”), the entire chapter in
which it is found and those before and after, the epistle of Galatians,
Ephesians 2:8-10, Titus 3:4-8 (notice how the last two passages make the good
works, the need for which they declare in the final verse, rest upon the
foundation of their not having contributed to salvation by grace) and all the
passages in the Johannine corpus (far too numerous to list but take the best
known verse of the New Testament, John 3:16 as an example) which promise
everlasting life to “whosoever believeth” in Jesus.
Historically, if the Reformers placed too much importance on
justification by faith alone by carelessly speaking as if they had recovered a
lost Gospel, this is because Rome, despite having been officially committed to
Sola Gratia since the days of St. Augustine of Hippo, had in practice been
denying all the “to him that worketh not” and “not by works of righteousness
which we have done” and the like found in these passages by exaggerating the
importance and value of good works to the point of having created a treadmill
theology in which people were kept on the treadmill of good works by having the
carrot of salvation dangled in front of them, tantalizingly just out of reach,
while they are whipped from behind with threats of hellfire or its unscriptural
second cousin once removed purgatorial fire.
When challenged by the Reformers on this, Rome doubled down on this
error, denied any truth to Solafideism (thus carelessly denying the truth of
the passages just referenced) and made herself guilty of a far bigger and worse
heresy than the one of which they accused the Reformers.
“Not by works”, which expresses what the “alone” in “faith alone” means
much more strongly than the word “alone” ever could, occurs throughout the
Pauline corpus of the New Testament. It
cannot be explained away by saying that the works in question are merely the
ceremonial works of the Mosaic Law.
Titus 3:5’s “not by works of righteousness” clearly excludes this
explanation. So does St. Paul’s
explanation of why justification is not by works – “that it might be by grace”
(Rom. 4:16), that is to say, a gift.
Faith can receive a salvation that is freely given, works cannot, if
they enter the picture then what they receive is a reward or a wage not a gift. All “faith alone” was ever supposed to mean is
that faith does not share its role in God’s order of salvation, the role of the
hand that receives the freely given gift of God’s grace in Jesus Christ, with
anything else. Works cannot perform this
role, neither can repentance which has the ancillary role of preparing the soul
that it may trust in God’s grace, nor can the Sacraments which like the
preaching of the Word are the hands of the Giver not of the recipient. Anyone who considers that to be heresy, is
himself the heretic.
(10) Note that the word “conversion”, while it can often mean accepting the faith for the first time, such as when we speak of someone from another religion (Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, etc.) or from a secular faith that masquerades as a non-religion (atheism, Communism, etc.) converting to Christianity, in which case it has the same one-time, not-to-be-repeated connotations of baptism and the spiritual work of regeneration, it is also used in Scripture for occasions when a Christian is restored after a fall (see Lk. 22:32, in which Jesus speaks of St. Peter’s restoration after denying Him as a future conversion, St. Peter having already confessed the saving faith of Jn. 20:31 at Caesarea Philippi in Matt. 16:16 and been told that he was blessed because he had been enlightened by the Father Himself) and so denotes something that is repeatable (despite the nonsense which some early Christians held and which, due to the influence of the Shephard of Hermas, it took a couple of centuries for the early Church to fully repudiate, that each Christian is allowed only one big screw up and do-over after his baptism).
(11) To make the point even clearer, dialogue between the reformed Church of England and the Eastern Orthodox Churches, more specifically between the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, at the time Cyril Lucaris, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, first George Abbott then William Laud, took place in the reigns of James I and Charles I in the early seventeenth century, long before Constantinople and Rome lifted the mutual excommunication they had pronounced upon each other in the eleventh century. Although the leadership of the English Church never formally put this into writing, this early dialogue demonstrates that they regarded the excommunications of the eleventh century as political rather than valid and did not see themselves as bound by the papal excommunication of the East now that they had repudiated Rome’s usurped authority (Dr. Luther had a similar attitude).
(12) When the faction first formed it was very hard-core Calvinist to the point that it accused orthodox Churchmen who did not think that the canons of Dort should be binding on Anglicans or double predestination the subject of every sermon of “Arminianism” although few if any of those so accused were adherents to the tenets of the Remonstrance. In the eighteenth century, the preaching of the Wesleys – although they were not of the evangelical faction themselves but are considered to have been evangelicals because they were among the first of the North American sense of the word – brought both a form of Arminianism that was quite modified from the Dutch original into Anglican evangelicalism. The Calvinists remained, now as a sub-faction within the evangelical faction, somewhat ironically (the evangelicals had historically been the liberal faction of the Church) considered the more conservative sub-faction of Anglican evangelicalism. Some of these seem to think that the Forty-Two Articles (the Reformed aspects of which were moderated when revised into the Thirty-Nine that have been the actual standard of Anglicanism for centuries) and the Lambeth Articles (which, due to Queen Elizabeth I’s wise veto, never became official the doctrine of the Church) are genuinely Anglican but that the 1549 Book of Common Prayer (mostly the work of Archbishop Cranmer) is not. The Calvinist evangelicals are at their best today when insisting on strict adherence to the Book of Common Prayer and other classical Anglican formularies (this should include the 1611 Authorized Bible but often doesn’t) in worship, although this insistence is somewhat one-sided being the more vehemently protested against the inclusion of more traditional ceremonies and rituals than against slimming down the liturgy and making the sermon and music more resemble what you would find in a generic evangelical “non-denominational” mega-church.
(13) What began as a cross-denominational cooperative movement against liberalism, became a movement which preached schism from other conservative Protestants (even within the same denomination) for not being schismatic enough (they called this second-degree separation). While the movement remained theoretically neutral on eschatological interpretations, in practice it became even more dispensationalist than evangelicalism. This may be due to non-dispensationalists (and non-pre-millennialists in general) moving over to the evangelical movement, but it is just as likely that dispensationalism’s bad ecclesiology appealed to their new hyper-separatism. This, of course, meant that they became more committed to the “two peoples of God” nonsense than evangelicalism. Interestingly this did not necessarily mean they became more prone to the practical error of “Christian Zionism”, i.e., giving carte blanche support to the present state of Israel, than dispensationalist evangelicals. Bob Jones Jr., president then chancellor of the fundamentalist university his father built for much of the second half of the twentieth century and certainly a dispensationalist devoted several pages of his memoirs, Cornbread and Caviar, to debunking Jerry Falwell’s more uncritical support of Israel by explaining that the country was secular and ungodly, persecuted Christians, hypocritically treated Arabs and Muslims the way they complained about having been treated themselves by everyone else throughout history, and at the time - as also today - were governed by a party formed and led by the leaders of the organizations that waged terrorist war against the United Kingdom in the 1940s prior to the partition of the Holy Land and their gaining independence in 1948. He spelled out several of the crimes of the Irgun and Stern Gang in detail – can you imagine any evangelical dispensationalist doing this? Similarly, John R. Rice of Sword of the Lord failed to get the memo that all dispensationalists must uncritically support Israel.
I don’t include KJV-Onlyism in the list of undesirable elements of
fundamentalism’s new self-definition.
The Authorized Bible is the preferred English translation of
fundamentalism, actual KJV-Onlyism is held by some fundamentalists not by
all. While I am not a KJV-Onlyist in the
sense of thinking that the Authorized Bible could not even hypothetically be
improved on and that only someone involved in a Satanic New Age conspiracy or
Alexandrian Cult would try I would say that until principles derived from
orthodox faith are made the basis of textual scholarship again (such as, at the
very least, that the correct text will be found in what has been read in the
Church all along and not in manuscripts, regardless of their age, hidden away
in obscure monasteries and libraries for centuries, see nineteenth century High
Anglican Dean John W. Burgon for more such principles) and translators found
who are at least the equals in scholarship of Bishops Andrewes, Overall and
their co-translators (extremely unlikely, considering that the explosion of new
translations coincided with the period of which Joe Sobran remarked “In
100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching
remedial English in college”) a snowball stands a better chance in hell than of
this happening. By contrast with
fundamentalism, evangelicalism went from a general preference for the New International Version to a general
preference to the English Standard Version. This took
place because of the 2011 “update” to the NIV that made it “gender-neutral”. Even before that, the value of the translation
of which Rupert Murdoch’s company has owned the copyright since 1988, was
grossly exaggerated. In second-year
Greek, one of my classmates remarked about how first year Greek had ruined the
NIV for him. I don’t remember there
being much if any dissent to this opinion.
A few years after that I remember attending a service where the sermon
was preached from the NIV with the text on a screen behind the preacher. I happened to have my Greek New Testament with
me, and looked up the same text. The
differences were far more than can be explained by the difference between “dynamic
equivalence” and “literal” (nor could they be explained by differences in the
underlying text, even if it were not the case, as it happened to be, that the
Greek NT I had with me that day was not my Textus
Receptus but the UBS fourth edition). Something that was a statement of
fact in the Greek was a question in the NIV.
Proper names not present in the Greek were in the NIV. As for the ESV it is the Revised Standard Version, a translation notorious for its liberal
slant, the use of which was purchased from the National Council of Churches,
then edited by J. I. Packer et al.
sufficiently to allow for it to be sold under a different name and marketed as
a “conservative” translation.
