The Seed of Abraham

It is often thought that the first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis which cover the primordial history of the world from Creation to the confusing of tongues and scattering of nations at the Tower of Babel depict God in relation to the whole of humanity but in the twelfth chapter a narrower focus on His relationship to a single nation begins.   On one level, this is true.   In the first chapter of Genesis we read the account of God creating the universe.   In the second we read the account of His creating our first parents and placing them in the Garden of Eden.   In the third we have the account of the Temptation in the Garden and the Fall of Man.   The fourth begins with the account of Cain and Abel, then introduces Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve, from whom the line of descent that leads to Noah, which genealogy fills the whole of the fifth chapter, begins.  The account of how God sent the Great Deluge to destroy the primordial world for its wickedness, but preserved life, human and animal, through Noah and the ark, then after the Flood made a covenant with Noah and the human race that was to begin anew with him, takes up the sixth through the ninth chapters.   The tenth contains the genealogies of Japheth, Ham, and Shem, Noah’s three sons.   After the account of the scattering of the nations, the eleventh chapter concludes by extending Shem’s genealogy down to Terah and his family, including his son Abram.   The twelfth chapter begins with God’s call to Abram, the first stage in the establishment of His covenant with the man whose name He would change to Abraham.   Here is the account of that call:

 

Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee: And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing:And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. (Gen. 12:1-3)

 

In these verses we see that the apparent narrowing of the narrative to focus on one nation is not the entire story.   God does indeed promise Abram that He will “make of thee a great nation” and the narrative relating His doing just that fills the rest of the Torah or Pentateuch.   The concluding words of the promise to Abram, however, tell us that even here God was no less concerned with the whole world than He was in His earlier interactions with Adam and Noah and Nimrod’s construction crew.

 

There are some who interpret this passage so as to make everything that is promised to “thee”, Abram, a promise that applies to the “great nation” that God will make of Abram.   They further interpret the passage by saying that ancient national Israel has continued in the diaspora Jewish people to be reborn as a nation in the twentieth century, the present national state of Israel.   They then say that the promise to bless whoever blesses and curse whoever curses are promises to the Jewish people and the present state of Israel.   Translated into contemporary geopolitics this becomes the idea that we are required to support the state of Israel in all her conflicts or run the risk of incurring the curse of God.    Those who interpret the promise this way are obviously intent on persuading Christians to support Israel as the argument would not work with unbelievers.  It is most often heard, therefore, as part of a theological package known as “Christian Zionism”.

 

It is my intent in this essay to demonstrate that Christian Zionism is not compatible with the Christian orthodoxy of the New Testament.   First, however, I wish to show how this interpretation is not compatible with the Old Testament. 

 

One does not have to look outside the Book of Genesis itself to make this point.   Genesis makes it clear that the promises God makes to Abram/Abraham (1) do not descend automatically to all of his physical offspring.   Before Isaac was born to Sarah, she had arranged for Abram, as he was at the time, to sire a son, Ishmael, with her handmaid Hagar.   This takes place in the sixteenth chapter of Genesis.   In the twenty-first, after Isaac’s birth, when Sarah demands that Ishmael be driven out, God promises that of Ishmael He will make “a nation, because he is thy seed”, but that it is Isaac who will inherit the promises.   Later, after Sarah dies, Abraham remarries, and his second wife Keturah bears him six sons, but these do not co-inherit with Isaac any more than Ishmael does.   This is recorded in the twenty-fifth chapter, which also records Abraham’s death and burial, and the birth of Isaac and Rebekah’s twin sons, Jacob and Esau.   While they are still in the womb God tells Rebekah that they will become two nations which will strive with each other.   It is with the younger of the twins, Jacob, later renamed Israel, that God makes His Covenant and to Jacob that He confirms the promises that He made to Abraham.

 

Only one of Abraham’s literal sons inherited the promises.   Only one of Isaac’s literal sons inherited the promises.   Therefore, the promises are not automatically conferred by right of physical descent from Abraham.   Not even in the Old Testament.  

 

The events recorded in the remainder of the Torah/Pentateuch did not change this.  In the Book of Exodus, four centuries after the death of Joseph, the descendants of Israel (Jacob) had grown into an ethnos within Egypt, but their fortune had taken a turn for the worse since the days when Joseph was Pharaoh’s favourite and basically the Prime Minister of Egypt.   They were enslaved and cruel measures were taken by the Egyptians to hinder their growth.   Then God raised up a deliverer in the person of Moses, who had been born into the tribe of Levi but had been raised as an adopted member of the Egyptian royal family.   God sends Moses to speak to Pharaoh demanding the release of His people, and ultimately provokes, through a series of increasingly intense plagues, Pharaoh into driving the Israelites out of Egypt.  En route to the land of Canaan, promised by God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses leads the people to Mt. Sinai, where God enters into a covenant with them as a nation.   This covenant, however, is not like the one God made with the Patriarchs.   Everything that God promised unconditionally to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which unconditional promises we have just seen did not automatically descend to Abraham and Isaac’s progeny by right of physical descent, were in the Mosaic Covenant promised to Jacob’s descendants as a collective people group, a nation, but on a very much conditional basis.   The condition was that they obeyed all of God’s Commandments.   If they did, they would enjoy the benefits of the promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.   If they disobeyed, they would be punished with the opposite of those promises.  This is why this covenant is called the Law.   The remainder of the Old Testament demonstrates that they were unable to meet the requirements of the Law.   This is not because they were uniquely wicked.  No nation would have been able to meet those requirements.   That was not the point of the Law.   The Law demonstrated the need for a New Covenant that operated on a different basis from the Law.   That New Covenant was promised in the prophetic writings of the Old Testament in connection with the promises that God would send them a Saviour from the Davidic line Who, because He would inherit David’s throne, was called the Messiah, meaning “Anointed One”, i.e. king.   The promises of the Messiah expanded on a promise made to all of fallen mankind in the Garden of Eden (Gen. 3:15) and so did not concern one nation alone.

 

Although his story is told in the New Testament, John the Baptist was the last prophet of the Old.   Yes, that sounds weird, I know.  It is helpful to remember that “Testament” means “Covenant” and can refer either to the Old and New Covenants qua Covenants or to the collections of sacred books in which these Covenants respectively predominate.   In both Testaments, in the sense of collections of books, the historical narrative begins prior to the establishment of the Covenant.   The Old Covenant was established at Mt. Sinai but this doesn’t occur in the narrative until the second book, Exodus.   The New Covenant was established at the Cross at the end of each of the Gospels.   In the earlier part of the Gospels, and the account of John the Baptist occurs at the beginning of each, the Old Covenant is still in effect.    That John the Baptist is the last prophet of the Old Testament, meaning the last prophet filling that office in the period before the New Covenant takes over, is what Jesus was talking about when He said “Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he” and “For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John” (Matt. 11:11, 13).   It is also indicated by the fact that Jesus waited until John the Baptist had been imprisoned before He began His public ministry of proclaiming the “Kingdom of Heaven”, i.e., the promised Messianic Kingdom, “is at hand”, i.e., had arrived in the Person of Him, the promised Messiah.   It is significant therefore that John, as the last Old Testament prophet and, according to Jesus, the fulfilment of the prophecy that ends the canonical Old Testament in Malachi 4:5-6 (2), directly addressed the idea that biological descent from Abraham conveyed in itself the promises and blessings to Abraham when he warned the Sadducees and Pharisees:

 

And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. (Matt. 3:9)

 

We come now to the New Testament proper.   In the New Testament we find the substance of which the Old Testament was the shadow.   That which was concealed in the Old Testament is revealed in the New.   The New Testament makes it very clear how Abraham was made a blessing to all the families of the world, to whom the promises made to Abraham descend, and how.

In his epistle to the Churches of Galatia, the region of Asia Minor that had been settled by the Celtic Gauls in the 3^rd Century BC, St. Paul discusses the same issue that was formally addressed by the Holy Catholic Church in the Council of Jerusalem recorded in the fifteenth chapter of the Book of Acts.   This issue was whether or not Gentiles, that is, non-Jews, had to become Jews, by being circumcised and agreeing to keep the Mosaic Law with all its ceremonial restrictions, in order to be Christians.   That Gentiles could become Christians was established when St. Peter was sent to Cornelius the Centurion to preach the Gospel, after which he and his household believed, the Holy Ghost came upon them, and they were baptized into the Church at St. Peter’s command.   In the ministry of SS. Paul and Barnabas, who were sent out on their first missionary journey shortly thereafter by the Church in Antioch, the Gentiles proved more receptive to the Gospel than the Jews and joined the Church in droves.   This led to the controversy about whether or not these Gentile converts should be circumcised and made to follow the Mosaic ceremonies.   The Council of Jerusalem after much testimony and deliberation ruled that the answer was no and sent out a letter to that effect.   St. Paul in his epistle went even further than the Council and pronounced an anathema upon those who were troubling the new Christians with their Judaizing claims. (3)

 

It is in the third chapter of his epistle that the Apostle incorporates into his case against the legalistic Judaizers arguments that also decisively demolish ideas that are key to the Christian Zionist position.   Here are the sixth through ninth verses of the chapter:

 

Even as Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.  Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed. So then they which be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham.

 

This passage begins with an allusion to Genesis 15:6, the same verse the Apostle similarly references in the epistle to the Romans, to make the identical point that righteousness before God, which cannot be attained by doing the good works required by the Law for the Law demands flawless obedience of which human sinners are incapable, is, on the basis of Grace, that is, favour freely given, credited to those who trust God for it.   That it is Jesus Christ Who made this possible, by providing His own flawless righteousness to meet the demands of the Law, and by paying for the sins of the world through His propitiatory death, is spelled out shortly after this passage in verse thirteen.   What makes this most relevant to our discussion is that here St. Paul makes a point of saying that it is those who share Abraham’s faith, and so are justified by faith like Abraham, who are the children of Abraham, and that these come from all nations (“the heathen”, here, like “the Gentiles”, means all the other nations of the world).   This is reiterated in verse fourteen.

 

It is at this point that St. Paul’s argument, already devastating to the Christian Zionist position, puts the final nail in its coffin.    In the fifteenth verse he says that covenants, even if they are only between men, once confirmed are neither added to nor annulled.  Then in the sixteenth verse he says this:

 

Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.

 

While it might seem to some that the Apostle is taking great liberty with his text here – there are a number of different verses this might be referencing but Gen. 17:7 is the most likely – St. Paul, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, provides God’s own interpretation of his earlier words.   Jesus is the Seed of Abraham.   St. Paul spells it out for us in black and white.   When, only a few verses earlier, he said that those who are “of faith”, that is to say, who have justifying faith like Abraham, are the children of Abraham, they are the children of Abraham because their faith unites them to Jesus Christ, the Seed of Abraham.   This is how justifying faith – or rather saving faith, because salvation in its entirety, justification, sanctification, glorification, positional and practical, is a gift received by faith – works.   It contributes nothing of its own, it receives what God gives us freely, and that which God gives us freely He gives us in Jesus.   When we receive Him by faith, we are united with Him into a corporate body of which He is Head, and we members.   Therefore, what He is in Himself, the Seed of Abraham, we who believe in Him are by virtue of being united with Him in His body.

 

Now, before I proceed to the rest of the chapter, I wish to make and emphasize the point that everything I just said is not something that is new with the New Testament.   Nobody in the Old Testament was saved by his works, much less by his race.   The Old Testament saints were saved by the Grace of God, received through faith, on account of the work of Jesus Christ as Saviour, just like New Testament saints.   The difference, of course, was that the faith of Old Testament saints looked forward to the Saviour that had been promised but with the dawn of the New Testament saving faith has looked back to the Saviour already given.   In the case of the Old Testament saints, salvation by Grace through faith worked through the anticipation of their union with Christ which union was fulfilled in the establishment of the New Covenant at the Cross and of the corporate Body of Christ on the first Whitsunday (the Christian Pentecost) as recorded in the second chapter of the book of Acts.   When the Church was born, the Old Testament saints, whom Jesus had taken to Heaven with Him after releasing them from the Kingdom of Death (Sheol/Hades) when He entered there as conqueror in the Harrowing of Hell, were brought fully into the union, becoming the first members of the Church Triumphant.  

 

Again,  even in the Old Testament, those who were the children of Abraham in the sense acknowledged by God, were so in anticipation of their union with the true Seed of Abraham, Jesus Christ, because they like Abraham looked forward to Him in faith, and not because of physical descent from Abraham.  

 

In the verses that follow after Galatians 3:16, St. Paul, elaborates on the significance of this.   The covenant that God made with Abraham and his Seed, he explains, a covenant based on His own freely given promises, i.e., Grace, precedes the Law.   Since the earlier covenant was confirmed in Christ, the Law which came latter cannot disannul it.  The Law, he explains, was a temporary measure, a schoolmaster or tutor assigned the duty of leading the heirs of the promise to Christ to be justified by faith, after which “we are no longer under a schoolmaster” (v. 25).  

 

What St. Paul says here is the opposite of what the Plymouth Brethren/Scofield Reference Bible/Dallas Theological Seminary school of dispensationalist theology teaches.   This is the theology that gave birth to Christian Zionism.   It teaches that the present Church Age in which Jewish and Gentile believers are one in Jesus Christ is a previously unknown parenthesis in God’s prophetic timeline and that when the Church Age is over the Church will be removed, the Age of Law will resume, and God will return to His real prophetic agenda which is all about national Israel.   St. Paul, however, makes it clear that the Law is the parenthesis in God’s timeline, and that God’s grand plan was always about His promises of blessing freely given in Grace in Jesus Christ to all who believe, regardless of ethnicity.   After telling us that with the coming of the faith of Christ the parenthetical period of Law the tutor is over he concludes his argument with the following:

 

For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.  There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise. (vv. 26-29)

 

Clearly, therefore, St. Paul’s epistle to the Galatians precludes the Christian Zionist interpretation of Genesis 12 as requiring us to support the contemporary state of Israel in any and all conflict with her neighbours.   This would be so even if we were to accept what the Christian Zionists take for granted, i.e., that Jewish identity has not changed from the New Testament to our day.   We would be fools to accept any such thing, however, because that is plainly not the case.

 

Even in the Bible Jewish identity is not a constant.  Judah was the fourth son of Jacob, whose name became that of the tribe of his descendants from whom King David came, then later the name of the Southern Kingdom that remained loyal to the House of David after the schism of the Northern Kingdom which called itself after the whole of the nation, Israel.   Originally, the word that corresponds to our “Jew”, derived from “Judah”, referred to the subjects of the House of David in the Kingdom of Judah, but following the Babylonian exile it was expanded to include all ancient Israelites.   This is the meaning that carries over into the New Testament where for the most part it is synonymous with Hebrew or Israelite, although in the Gospel of John as the narrative progresses it takes on the narrower meaning of the religious leaders in Jerusalem.  

 

Shortly after the events recorded in the book of Acts and the writing of most of the books of the New Testament – all except those by St. John – an event took place which had been predicted by Jesus that radically altered the nature of Jewish identity.   To suppress a Jewish revolt, the Roman Empire sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, dispersed the Jews, and abolished their national identity as it was at the beginning of the first century.   With the destruction of their national identity, they were left with a religious identity.   Yet at the same time, and for the same reason, the religion which God had given Israel through Moses was no longer available to them.  Without the Temple, the sacrifices could no longer be offered.   The Levitical priesthood ceased to be the spiritual leaders of the people, even in the nominal sense that had lingered after the Herodian corruption of the priesthood.    The centre of Jewish worship shifted from the destroyed Temple to the synagogue and with it the spiritual leadership of Judaism shifted from the Levitical priesthood to the teachers of the synagogue.   These were the scribes, scholars, and lay teachers, mostly from the sect of Second Temple Judaism known as the Pharisees, who under the title rabbi became the new clergy of this new Judaism.  The rabbis were scholars not just of the Tanakh – what we call the Old Testament – but even more so the oral traditions that they would start to write down as the Mishnah which along with their own commentary on it, the Gemara, forms the Talmud.   The rabbis notoriously disagreed on almost everything, a fact to which the Talmud bears abundant witness.   On one thing, however, they agreed.   They agreed that Jesus of Nazareth was not the Christ. 

 

The New Testament is absolutely clear as to what that constitutes:

 

Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son. (1 John 2:22)

 

Christian Zionists, although they usually have a very elaborate concept of the Antichrist, shy away from applying this term to rabbinic Judaism even though it meets the New Testament definition of the word.   Many of them have no problem applying the label to a particular Christian bishop who, although guilty of exceeding his jurisdiction and perverting a number of doctrines, has not yet denied Jesus.  

 

Note that while rabbinic Judaism most definitely is antichrist by the scriptural definition of 1 John 2:22 this is not grounds for harbouring hatred towards individual adherents of this religion.   Our attitude towards them should be one of pity towards those bound by the shackles of false religion and of prayer that they would be enlightened by the Holy Ghost to see in Jesus the true Christ Who is their only salvation.   The same attitude, in other words, that we take towards the Mussulmen or adherents of any other false religion.

 

Judaism, both the Old Testament religion of Moses of which Christianity is the true spiritual heir, and the post-Temple rabbinic religion that also lays claim to being the heir of the Old Testament religion but which rejects the Christ Who is the fulfilment of the Old Testament, admits converts.   While post-Temple Judaism has not exactly been characterized by a zealous mission to convert the world, converts have not been unknown either.   Ironically, considering the absurd claim of many Christian Zionists that the Palestinians are the descendants of the enemies of Israel in the Old Testament, one group that was converted to Judaism in the second century BC was the Edomites.   A few of the better known stories in the Talmud feature Gentiles who go to Rabbis Hillel and Shammai, the two most prominent rabbis of the early first century, challenging them with questions and promising to convert if given a satisfactory answer.   In the eighth century AD the king of Khazaria, a Turkish realm in the southern part of what is now the Ukraine, asked Christianity, Islam, and Judaism to send representatives to explain the tenets of their religions, and in the end, converted to Judaism and made his entire kingdom convert with him.   In the twentieth century there were a number of celebrity conversions to Judaism – Marilyn Monroe, Ivanka Trump and Elizabeth Taylor to give just three examples.   This places the Christian Zionist in the absurd position of maintaining that Marilyn Monroe, in order to marry the playwright Arthur Miller whom she divorced five years later, obtained a God-given right to a portion of the Holy Land by converting to a religion that meets the Scriptural definition of antichrist for rejecting God’s Son as Christ.

 

None of this means that the opposite of Christian Zionism, the idea of those who insist that we are under some sort of obligation to support the Palestinians are right.   In my next essay, Lord willing, I shall discuss the masses cheering on Hamas, look at their infantile mentality, and show that it comes from a far more perverse source than the banal “anti-Semitism” the neo-conservatives have been mindlessly yammering about.

 

(1)   Genesis 12:1-3 contain just the first set of these promises, to which more are added later in the chapter in verse 7, then in verses 14-17 of the thirteenth chapter after Abram and Lot part ways, then in the fifteenth chapter in which God formally enters into covenant with Abram, then in the seventeenth chapter in which God changes Abram’s name to Abraham and promises that he will be “a father of many nations” (not just one), and that his wife Sarai, whose name is also changed to Sarah, will give birth to an heir despite their old age, and adds circumcision as the sacramental sign to the covenant between Him and Abraham, then again in the twenty-second chapter after God tests Abraham’s faith in the matter of the command to sacrifice Isaac

(2)   John’s own denial that he was Elijah (Jn. 1:21) does not contradict Jesus as it may seem.   John was addressing a party sent from Jerusalem that thought of Elijah in terms of the historical personage sent back to earth.   John was right to say that this is not who he was.   Jesus’ words in Matthew 11:14, affirming that John was the fulfilment of this prophecy, mean that this prophecy was not to be taken as literally as that.

(3)   The epistle was clearly written in the midst of the controversy.   Whether it was written before or after the Council, which took place towards the end of the fifth decade of the first century, cannot be determined with certainty, although the absence of reference to the Council might be taken as indicating that the epistle was written first.

Christians Defending Bat Flu Tyranny and Oppression are Deluded and Deceived

The last Anglican priests that I spoke to in person were those of my own parish in March of last year, the day before the bishop’s order shutting down the diocese went into effect.   Since then, I have spoken to one of the priests by phone once, and communicated with the others through e-mail.   Oh, I could have seen them in person again, had I started attending services when the parish partially re-opened last summer.   That would have meant a compromise of conviction however.   I will not darken my parish door again as long as I am told to register in advance to do so, to impede my breathing in that hot, stuffy, building for the hour and a half that I am there by covering my nose and mouth with a stupid diaper that has reminded me of nothing so much as a the Mark of the Beast since it was first introduced, and to “socially distance” while there.   As far as I am concerned telling people to pre-register to book a place in Church because only a limited few will be admitted constitutes turning people away from the Ministry of Jesus Christ in Word and Sacrament and is an act of blasphemy crying out to heaven for vengeance.   To be fair to my parish – and the entire Anglican Church of Canada – I did not include the practice of Communion in one kind in the above list of deal-breakers, since I think they are using pre-intinction as a means of distributing the Sacrament in both kinds and thus are not in technical violation of the Thirtieth Article of Religion (and the basic principles of the English Reformation).   I watch their services on Youtube but I refuse to regard this as “participating in an online service” or anything more than watching a broadcast of somebody else performing a service.   This is because I have taken to heart Aleksandr Soltzhenitsyn’s instructions on the day of his arrest in 1974 to those oppressed by Communist tyranny.   Those instructions were to “live not by lies”.   When the government refuses to respect the constitution’s limits on its powers and claims for itself the right to completely suspend our basic freedoms of assembly, association, religion, and, increasingly, speech, in its self-delusion that a respiratory virus can be stopped by government action, subjects the entire population to the absolute rule of medical technocrats, and goes out of its way to demonstrate its contempt for religion, classifying Churches and synagogues and mosques as “non-essential” while liquor and cannabis stores and abortion clinics are classified as “essential”, it comes disgustingly close to the Soviet-style Communist tyranny that Soltzhenitsyn suffered under and about which he warned the West.   While it is true that rights and freedoms are not absolute, as our governments have been saying in response to challenges to their actions, this is not at all at issue.   It deflects from the fact that they have been acting like their authority to limit our rights and freedoms is absolute – this is what “nothing is off the table” means – and this is the essence of totalitarian tyranny.

 

My purpose here is not to knock the clergy of my parish.   I have explained why I haven’t seen any of them in person since last March to lead in to the fact that apart from them, the last Anglican clergyman that I had spoken to in person, earlier the same month, was the Right Reverend Donald Phillips.    Donald Phillips was consecrated Bishop of the Diocese of Rupert’s Land in 2000, the year after I had left what is now Providence University College in Otterburne and moved to Winnipeg.   He served the diocese in this capacity until his retirement upon the consecration of his successor, the current incumbent, the Right Reverend Geoffrey Woodcroft, in November 2018.   When I was confirmed in the Anglican Church as an adult, he was the bishop to do it.

  

It was at the Centennial Concert Hall that I ran into him and his wife Nancy about a week or so prior to the lockdown.  2020 was the 250^th year since the birth of Ludwig van Beethoven.   As part of its celebration of this anniversary, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra performed all five of his Piano Concertos and his Choral Fantasy over the course of the two evenings of the 6^th and 7^th of March.   The performances, conducted by WSO Music Director Daniel Raiskin, featured Russian pianist Alexei Volodin.   The vocals were provided by the University of Manitoba Singers and the Canadian Mennonite University Chorus.    The 2019/2020 season was the first time in several years where I had opted to buy tickets for only a handful of concerts rather than the “Ultimate Classics” package that comes with one performance each for all the shows in both of the Masterworks series.   I lost my usual seat doing it this way, but was able to take in both of evenings of “Back to Beethoven” as the Piano Concerto marathon was called.    These were the last WSO performances that I attended.   They are likely to be the last WSO performances that I shall ever hear because the lake of fire will freeze into a solid block of ice before I ever pay concert admission to watch a livestreamed performance and am certainly not going to be bullied into taking an experimental new kind of vaccine that took less than a year to develop about which the long term side effects cannot possibly be known just to regain as “privileges” the rights that were stolen from me by power-mad paranoid hypochondriacs shortly after the concerts I have just described.

 

I have seldom attended a symphony, opera, or anything else at the Centennial Concert Hall without encountering at least one, and usually several, people whom I know, and this was no exception.   Indeed, I was seated right next to one old acquaintance for the Friday evening performance.   It was also in the Friday evening performance – some people went to both concerts, others showed up only for the one or the other – that I ran into Don and Nancy.  They were seated in the row behind me, a few seats down – very close to where my subscription seat had been, actually.  I chatted with them briefly in the intermission and after the concert.   Did any of us suspect at the time that shortly thereafter the diocese would be essentially closed and everyone forced into social isolation for over a year by public health orders?

 

All of the above is a very long introduction to the real purpose of this essay.   On the 9^th of last month the diocesan newspaper, the Rupert’s Land News, posted an article to its website by the bishop emeritus, entitled “Christians Protesting COVID-19 Health Orders are Misguided and Missing the Greater Call”.     This article also appeared on the website of the Winnipeg Free Press on May 12^th.   If it was not already obvious that I am of a very different opinion, the fact that the Winnipeg Free Press carried the article should confirm it.    It is almost a matter of principle for me to disagree with whatever they publish, especially on matters of religion.   I read it, nevertheless, for while I have disagreed with our previous bishop on other issues in the past, I have always found what he has to say, whether as a homilist or in the Rupert’s Land News, very interesting.   

 

Towards the end of his article, he raised the following hypothetical objections to his article:

 

Some might call into question the whole nature of what I am saying.  Should a Christian publicly challenge the actions of other Christians?   Is that not being judgmental?

 

His answer was “Not when the integrity of the proclamation of the Gospel is at stake”.  

 

Very well then.   Since nothing in recent memory has threatened the integrity of the proclamation of the Gospel more than the quisling behaviour of the Church leaders who collaborated with totalitarianism in the Third Reich and behind the Iron Curtain,  I claim our retired bishop’s justification for his remarks as my own for my rebuttal.

 

He begins by saying that one of the pastors with whom he disagrees – he does not mention any names but it was Tobias Tissen of the Church of God Restoration, just outside Steinbach – had been quoted as having said “We have no authority, scripturally-based and based on Christian convictions, to limit anyone from coming to hear the word of God.   We have no authority to tell people you can’t come to church.  That’s in God’s jurisdiction.”

 

Retired Bishop Don answers this by saying “the New Testament presents quite a different picture of the responsibility of the Church for itself”.

 

He proceeds to justify this statement by making reference, first to the bestowing of the “keys of the kingdom” in St. Matthew’s Gospel, and second to the Pauline epistles in which the Apostle “constantly confronts and admonishes churches to teach, direct, and sometimes even discipline their members so as not to hinder or distort the mission of the Gospel in the world and Christ’s command to his Church".

 

This is an interestingly novel way of interpreting these passages.   Yes, the “keys of the kingdom”, regardless of whether they are understood as having been given to St. Peter and his successors alone, all of the Apostles and their successors collectively, or the entire assembly of Christian disciples (the Church) collectively, have traditionally been understood to include the authority  to exclude from the fellowship of the Church.   In most Christian communions the technical term for the exercise of this authority is excommunication.    Some more radical sects use the word “shunning” with the same basic meaning but often with additional connotations of a more complete social ostracism.     This is not where the novelty lies.   What is novel in this interpretation is the suggestion that this authority can be legitimately exercised other than as corrective discipline in cases where someone refuses to repent of open sin or is found to be teaching serious doctrinal error.   Had our retired bishop not intended to suggest this it would have made no sense to bring the keys up in this context.   It is rather surprising, therefore, that he tries to bolster the suggestion with an appeal to St. Paul.   In his first epistle to the Corinthians, St. Paul instructs them to excommunicate a man who has been committing “such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles”, meaning a type that was condemned and considered extremely shameful by the rather tolerant pagan culture of the time, an assessment to which  all the extent classical literature pertaining to the myth of Oedipus indeed, bears testimony.   In his second epistle to the Corinthians, however, he told them that the punishment had been sufficient and to forgive and comfort the man, who presumably had since repented.    The picture this paints of excommunicative authority is of a means of corrective discipline, to be applied as a last resort in extreme circumstances, and lifted as soon as repentance makes possible.   This hardly supports the idea that the keys can or should be used to bar people from the Ministries of Word and Sacrament, not as an act of corrective discipline, but as an instrument of public health policy.

 

 

Novelty is not a quality that is valued very highly when it comes to the interpretation of Scripture and doctrine in the Anglican tradition which has long appealed to the Vincentian canon as the gold standard litmus test of catholicity and orthodoxy.    In addition to the novelty of the Right Reverend Phillips’ interpretation of the keys, however, there is another problem in its conflict with Scriptural teaching on a multitude of other issues.

 

One example of this is the Scriptures’ teachings with regards to civil obedience.   If the pastors protesting the bat flu restrictions are at fault their error is in practicing Thoreau/Gandhi/King style civil disobedience, for which there is no Scriptural justification.   Civil obedience is commanded of Christians by St. Paul in the thirteenth chapter of his epistle to the Romans.   There are, however, clear exceptions.   The Book of Daniel in the Old Testament illustrates these.   If the civil authorities require the worship of a false god, believers in the True and Living God are not to obey, as the example of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego who refused to bow to the golden image of Nebuchadnezzar and were thrown into the fiery furnace demonstrates.   If the civil authorities forbid the worship of the True God, believers are not to obey, as the example of Daniel himself in the incident that led to his being cast to the lions shows.   While the latter is the most obviously relevant of the two, I would argue that the first also applies here, in that the kind of trust and obedience the public health orders have been asking of us is the kind that properly belongs to God alone, making an idol out of medical science (George Bernard Shaw said, almost a hundred years ago, that we have not lost faith, we have merely transferred it from God to the General Medical Council, and never has the truth of this been more apparent than at present).   The Lord Himself summed it all up in the twelfth chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel when He said “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s”.  While a general civil obedience is rendering unto Caesar (the civil authority) that which is Caesar’s, obeying when they forbid the worship of the True God or require the worship of a false one, is to render unto Caesar that which is God’s, and that is forbidden of Christians by the Highest Authority.

 

Another example is the Scriptures’ teachings with regards to sickness.     In the Old Testament, the Israelites were told to separate those with leprosy, a far worse disease than the one that is frightening so many today, from the general community, to which they would not be readmitted until such a time as a priest had examined them and found them to have recovered.     There is not a hint anywhere in the Old Testament, that banning all healthy Israelites from the Tabernacle or Temple, let alone confining them to their own dwellings and forbidding them any social interaction with their extended kin, friends, and neighbours, would be an appropriate or acceptable manner of preventing the spread of contagious disease.   This is not surprising as it is an experimental new form of hyper-quarantine, first implemented in totalitarian countries like Red China, which the epidemiologists of what used to be the free world initially, although sadly mistakenly, thought they would never be able to get away with here.   The Old Testament isolation requirements for lepers, of course, had the effect of heaping further suffering upon those already inflicted.   Thus, when Jesus Christ arrived to fulfil the Messianic promise of a New and better Covenant, one of the most prominent signs announcing His identity as the Promised Redeemer was that He allowed the lepers to come near Him and healed them, even, in one notable instance, using tactile contact as the means of healing.   He healed all who came to Him with any affliction and instructed His Apostles to do the same.   The book of Acts records them doing precisely this.   The Jacobean instructions in what is widely believed to be the first book of the New Testament to have been written are “Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: and the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up.”   Rather a far cry from “Is there a nasty cough going around?  Let everyone stay away from the church, lock themselves in their houses, and never see anyone else without wearing a mask”.

 

Given what we have seen in the previous paragraph, is it surprising that in the two millennia of Christian history, which have seen plagues far worse than the bat flu ravage Christian countries and at times all of Christendom, never did the leaders of the Church see their duty, mission, and call in terms of shutting all the local churches down and denying the faithful access to the Word and Sacrament.   Rather they saw it as their duty to keep the churches open, so that in times of great physical peril – much greater than today – access to the source of spiritual health, more important than physical health, was not cut off and hope, therefore, was kept alive, as well as to minister to the physical needs of the sick and dying, even at the risk of their own health and lives.   When cholera hit Canada in 1832 and 1834, for example, John Strachan, who would become the first Bishop of Toronto in 1839 but was at the time the rector of the parish of St. James, refused to flee the city but remained to fulfil his priestly duties, visit the hospitals, minister to the sick and dying, and bury the dead.

 

Previous generations of Church leaders did not see keeping the churches open in times of far worse plagues than this comparatively moderate one as hindering or distorting “the mission of the Gospel in the world, and Christ’s command to the church.”

 

Our former diocesan chief shepherd asks the question “And what is that Gospel?” to which he provides an answer “It is the supreme command of Jesus Christ ‘to love one another as I (Jesus) have loved you’”.

 

This is a very enlightening answer.   Not enlightening in terms of the question asked.   In that regards it is just plain wrong.   It is enlightening in that it reveals much about the source of confusion here.

 

The Gospel is not the command to love one another.   The Gospel is not a commandment of any sort.   It is a message.   As its very name tells us, whether euangelion in Greek, or Gospel – contracted from the Old English “godspel” (“god” = “good” + “spel = “news”) it is Good News.   It is spoken in the indicative mood, not the imperative.   In the ministry of John the Baptist and in Jesus’ own early preaching ministry, when the Gospel was preached only to national Israel and the events around which the Gospel narratives of SS Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are centred had not yet taken place, that Good News was that the “Kingdom of Heaven is at hand”, i.e., the Messianic promises are being fulfilled before your very eyes.   After the Great Commission to take the Gospel to all the nations of the world, the Ascension, the descent of the Holy Ghost on Pentecost to empower the Church, and the preaching of the Gospel to the Gentiles, the Gospel in its mature and universal form was concisely stated by St. Paul in his first epistle to the Corinthians.   It is that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, and was seen by witnesses.

 

That this, and not the New Commandment, is the Gospel cannot be stressed enough.   The New Commandment is not “News” of any sort, Good or otherwise.   That we are commanded to love one another was hardly something unheard of prior to the Incarnation.   When Jesus said the Greatest Commandment was to love God and the second was to “love thy neighbour as thyself” He was quoting commandments already familiar from the Old Testament.   Nor was His statement that the whole of the Law was summed up in these a new revelation.   Indeed, while most often the Gospels place the two greatest commandments in His own mouth, in one notable instance He turned the question back on a lawyer who had been interrogating Him and got the answer He wanted (Luke 10:25-28) demonstrating that the idea was nor original with Him.   The similar “Golden Rule”, which appears in His Sermon on the Mount, is common to the ethical systems of almost all religions, and was notably stated, albeit in its negative “do not” form rather than the positive form Jesus used, by Rabbi Hillel, who died when Jesus was about twelve or thirteen (Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat a, passage 6), and who said of it “that is the entire Torah, and the rest is interpretation”.     There is a kind of theology that sees in the command to love one another the essence of the Christian kerygma and treats everything asserted about Jesus Christ in the ancient Creeds as accidental trappings that can be discarded.  This theology, and note that I am not suggesting that the Right Reverend Phillips holds this theology, merely that his unfortunate wording here expresses a thought that belongs to this theology rather than orthodox Christianity, is nonsense.   If that were true there would have been no need for Christianity.   While there is a difference between the New Commandment and all these earlier commandments to love each other, that difference depends entirely upon the facts of the Gospel as stated by St. Paul.  Apart from that Gospel, the message of Christ’s death and Resurrection, the New Commandment is meaningless.   It is the Gospel that tells us what “as I have loved you” means.   Christ gave the New Commandment on the evening of His betrayal, to His disciples whom He had already told of His upcoming death and Resurrection, but like so many other things He said in St. John’s Gospel, it was these events themselves that made it comprehensible.

 

Isn’t it interesting that the example the New Commandment tells us to follow is that of One Who gave up His life for others?   Isn’t it also interesting that the New Testament repeatedly describes this act as one of “redemption”.   Today, the verb “redeem” and the noun “redemption” are often used in a sense that retains some of their connotations from New Testament usage but omits their original basic meaning.   To redeem meant to purchase someone out of slavery and set him free.   The New Testament writers use these words of the death of Christ to depict that act as one of purchasing freedom for mankind from slavery to sin.   Therefore, the New Commandment tells us that we are to love one another in the same way as He Who gave up His life to restore us to freedom.

 

This is interesting because the Right Reverend Phillips’ interpretation of the New Commandment which he confused with the Gospel itself is that we are to love others by doing the reverse of what Christ did – giving up our freedom for them.

 

Now he does go on to support his argument with evidence from St. Paul:

 

In 1 Corinthians chapter 9, Paul outlines the many ways in which he sacrifices his own self, his rights and privileges, his freedom in Christ, in order to effectively witness to the love of Christ.  “I have become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some,” he said (1 Corinthians 9.22)

 

For the Christian disciple, the effective demonstration and proclamation of the love of God for all people must take precedence over any personal demand or freedom.

 

St. Paul wrote his epistles to the Corinthian Church at a time when some had cast aspersions on his authority as an Apostle.   A principle theme of both letters was to answer his detractors and establish confidence in this authority.   This is what the Apostle is obviously concerned with through most of the ninth chapter of 1 Corinthians.   In the first verse he gives his Apostolic credentials, in the second he declares that if he is not an Apostle to others he certainly is to the Corinthians for they are the seal of his Apostleship.   He then goes on to talk about all the privileges and freedoms which he has as much as any of the other Apostles but which he refrains from for the sake of the work.   The main point in all of this is that he, as a spiritual minister, is entitled to pecuniary support from them, but has refrained from claiming his right to the same.   This is spelled out quite plainly in verses seven to fifteen

 

I wonder what St. Paul himself would have thought if someone from the Corinthian Church had written back to him and said that two thousand years in the future, someone would take his words about giving up the financial support to which he was entitled, so as to more effectively carry out the ministry of preaching the Gospel to which he was called and which he is bound by necessity to preach, as evidence that the entire Church should shut down, close its doors, and bar people from coming to hear said Gospel preached.   I suspect he would be livid.   I doubt very much that he would be any more impressed by the same application being made of his words later in the chapter, about meeting every type of person to whom he is sent in their own walk of life so as to more effectively share the Gospel with them.

 

His Retired Grace then refers to another quotation from a different pastor – again unnamed, but this time it was Heinrich Hildebrand of the Church of God in Aylmer, Upper Canada.  Hildebrand had said “We are here to fight for God, we are here to defend the vulnerable.”

 

I could have told you what the bishop’s response to this would have been without having read it myself.  However, here he is in his own words:

 

Surely the vulnerable we need to be worried about are those being exposed to the COVID-19 virus by persons not following the public health orders.   Surely it is those languishing on ventilators in ICUs in hospitals across our country who are the most vulnerable!

 

I guess it all depends upon how we answer the question “vulnerable to what?”   Even if, however, the answer is “the bat flu”, the Right Reverend Phillips’ thinking appears to be rather muddled on the subject.   Those most vulnerable to the virus are not those who are exposed to it but those with complicating factors such as age, obesity, a compromised immune system, and other chronic conditions that make this virus more than just the non-lethal respiratory annoyance it is to the vast majority who contract it.   When such people, the actual most vulnerable, have come into contact with the virus it has seldom been because of “persons not following the public health orders”.   That is a lie, invented by arrogant politicians and public health officials such as those of our own province, in order to create a scapegoat for the failure of their own policies.  The fact of the matter is that the worst and most lethal outbreaks have taken place in nursing homes where the virus spread got in and spread without any health order violations in spite of such places have been locked down quicker and stricter than anywhere else.

 

The bat flu, however, is not the only answer to the question “vulnerable to what?”    Suppose that we supply “the public health orders themselves” as the answer to that question.   We then get a very different picture of who the most vulnerable are.

 

Yes, public health orders hurt people.   The kind of public health orders that have been enacted to slow or prevent the spread of the bat flu are especially harmful.   This has been acknowledged by the World Health Organization, and even by our provincial chief public health officer.   Take the mental health crisis for example.   The Canadian Mental Health Association reported last December about how the “second wave of the pandemic has intensified feelings of stress and anxiety, causing alarming levels of despair, suicidal thoughts and hopelessness in the Canadian population.”   It would have been more accurate for them to attribute this to the “second wave of lockdowns”.    Viruses don’t have this effect.   Mendacious media scaremongering might contribute to it, but overall this is exactly the sort of thing one would expect to see among people who have had all their social and community events cancelled for a year, have been forbidden any social interaction with their friends, and have been told their businesses or jobs are non-essential and must shut down.   Public health orders are the primary cause of this problem.   People are not meant to live this way, it goes against the social nature that God gave us, and when you force people to live in these conditions there will be disastrous consequences.

 

Since our bishop emeritus made use of the superlative degree of comparison in his own remarks about those vulnerable to the bat flu, I think it is fair game for me to do the same in my remarks about those vulnerable to the public health orders.   Yes, some people are more vulnerable to the ill-effects of public health orders than others.   Somebody who is single and lives alone will be more adversely affected by an order forbidding get-togethers with all except his own household than somebody who has a happy domestic life.   Somebody who is in an abusive and unhappy relationship will be worse off because of a stay-at-home order than somebody who is happily married.   Those who are independently wealthy, whose jobs can be done from home, and whose businesses are in no danger of being declared “non-essential” will not have the kind of hardships that lockdowns impose on those about whom none of these things can be said.    Since the beginning of the bat flu scare the people who have been most likely to shoot their mouths off about how this never-before-tried experimental universal quarantine is “necessary” to fight a virus milder than most of those that caused pandemics in the last century, to lecture the rest of us about how unquestioning obedience to these orders is the loving thing to do and how expressing concern about economic devastation and the rapid evaporation of civil rights and liberties and their constitutional protections is somehow “selfish”, have been the people on the “least affected” side of each of these spectrums for whom the lockdowns have been mostly an inconvenience.

 

I will close with an observation that is related to the previous paragraph but is not specifically in response to our former bishop’s article.  I note the irony that the clergymen who have been the most vocal in support of the public health orders have been the ones who preach the most about “social justice”.  Indeed, I cannot think of a single dissenter from among their ranks.   The dark irony of this is not just found in the fact that the public health orders, shutting down restaurant dining rooms and indoor public places like libraries and limiting homeless shelter capacities were put into effect before winter ended last year and again just before winter started having absolutely brutal consequences for the very poorest members of our society, while everyone who keeps droning on about “social justice” was glad to be ordered to stay home in their own warm bed.   It can also be found in the fact that the economic result of the public health orders and the lockdown experiment has been to greatly enrich the multi-billionaires of the social media tech companies, internet delivery services, and the hopelessly corrupt pharmaceutical industry while bankrupting and driving out of business all the little guys, whose entire life’s work, and often the life’s work of their parents and grandparents before them has been wiped out through no fault of their own, but by the arrogance of some health bureaucrat who arbitrarily ruled their livelihood to be “non-essential”.   This is accomplishing an economic transition to societies in which small, individually or family owned farms and businesses are unfeasible, and everyone must either sell their labour to some giant, multinational, corporation to survive, or live off of a government allowance.   This is what Hilaire Belloc called “the Servile State” 109 years ago.   At the time, the expression “social justice” was still in its infancy and to those who believed in it in its original sense, the Servile State depicted by Belloc was pretty much the opposite of what they called and strove for, the worst possible of worlds.   Today’s “social justice” clergy have been calling for “universal basic income”, citing the pandemic and the “necessary” public health response to it as demonstrating the need for this measure, the most immediate effect of which would be to greatly accelerate the transition to the Servile State.    Of course what they mean by “social justice” includes such things as Critical Race Theory, the inalienable right of biological males to participate in female sports, and every other notion of this type that left-wing academics have dreamed up and their students have uncritically accepted and regurgitated under the delusion that by doing so they are thinking for themselves, but precious little to do with anything that the expression meant a century ago.   Should any of them be interested in the original version, I recommend to them the essay by that grand old Canadian economist, political scientist, wit, and Anglican layman, Stephen Leacock entitled “The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice”.   I wonder what Leacock would have had to say about people who consider it to be an expression of Christian love to wish government control, greater and more intrusive than any extended or even dreamed of by the totalitarian regimes of his own day – he died in 1944 when Stalin and Hitler were both still in power - on their neighbours?

 

 

Following Christ in a Time of Plague

The following essay was inspired by a blog post written by a member of the leadership team in my parish.   Since this man has been a friend for about a decade and his post inspired me to write the exact opposite of what he had written, I shall do him the courtesy of leaving out his name.   

 

My parish, like all other Churches, sectarian congregations, and sacred communities of other religions for that matter, are presently forbidden to meet in person here in the province of Manitoba, in violation of three of what the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms identify as “fundamental freedoms” and, indeed, in violation of the entire Common Law tradition of justice and liberty that has been the bedrock upon which the Dominion of Canada was built since Confederation.   This insane government overreach, which evokes memories of the persecution of religious communities in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Red China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba and North Vietnam, is called a “Code Red” lockdown, and has been ordered by the public health mandarin, because he and the premier don’t like the fact that the dishonest media concentration on rising numbers of people who test positive for the Wuhan bat flu, regardless of the facts that the tests used are not diagnostic tools and that the majority of the “cases” are people who are not sick in any conventional sense of the term, make them look bad.   Most people are incapable of distinguishing between what the media says and reality and therefore have been duped into thinking that the tearing apart of the fabric of society, dissolving of communities, eroding of social capital, and brainwashing us all into fearing ordinary human contact and distrusting our friends, relatives, and neighbours outside of an extremely small so-called “bubble” of contacts is somehow “necessary.”   The isolation this causes, is not merely an experience we don’t enjoy, something unpleasant, but is downright harmful to our social, moral, spiritual, psychological, and yes, as everyone who knows the meaning of mens sana in corpore sano is aware, physical wellbeing.   Anybody capable of distinguishing between the bare facts and the slant imposed upon them by alarmist adjectives in the news and drawing rational conclusions from the facts will know, regardless of what “most of us” may or may not agree upon, that these measures are by no means precautions necessitated by the spread of a virus which for the portion of the population under 70 and in good health is less dangerous than the seasonal flu and for the portion of the population that is most at risk, that is to say those over 70 and with two or more serious chronic health conditions, these measures are quite evidently not effective at protecting since that portion of the population has been under lockdown since spring.   Furthermore and more importantly, not only are the lockdown measures not necessary, they are not good.   (1)

 

It is not just disappointing, then, but actually rather disgusting, to see so many people, including professing Christians and even Church leaders, so determined to load the burden of these restrictions upon their family, friends, neighbours, strangers and countrymen in general, as if they were not familiar with our Lord’s warning to His disciples about imitating the Pharisees in loading burdens upon others.  

 

For much of the last nine months, but especially since the new lockdown was gradually introduced over October and November, I have struggled to reconcile how professing Christians could so callously disregard not only the civil rights and basic freedoms of their neighbours, but their needs as social and spiritual beings as well.  Jesus told us that to love our neighbours as ourselves was the Second Greatest Commandment after that which tells us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength.   It is one thing to say that the voluntary sacrificing of our personal rights and freedoms in the name of keeping our neighbours “safe” is a fulfilment of this Commandment, it is quite another thing to say that sacrificing the rights and freedoms of our family, friends and neighbours is such a fulfilment.   Supporting public health orders that impose maximal restrictions on everybody’s freedom of association, assembly, and religion is doing the latter.   To mistake sacrificing the rights and freedoms of others, which is what support for these public health orders amounts to, for the voluntary sacrificing of your own rights and freedoms, and patting yourself on the back about how much you love your neighbour, is to give the text of the Second Greatest Commandment merely the most superficial of readings.

 

There is a popular but very wrong and misguided notion that says that to insist upon and stand up for our rights and freedoms is to act selfishly and that to blindly support and obey every rule and restriction that is enacted in the name of public health is to put the common good ahead of our own.   While it is true that at the experiential level rights and freedoms are things that we primarily enjoy on an individual basis it is entirely wrong to say that insisting upon them and standing up for them is selfish.   Once again, voluntarily agreeing to limit the expression of our rights and freedoms for the sake of others may very well be the loving thing to do, but supporting government action that limits those rights and freedoms, not just for us as individuals but for everyone in society, is the very opposite of a loving act.   Our Lord summarized the message of His Sermon on the Mount in the Golden Rule, which states “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you; do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.”   That is the rule worded positively, in terms of what we are supposed to do.   It is a coin with a reverse side, which expresses the same thing negatively, in terms of what we are not supposed to do.   Rabbi Hillel the Elder famously gave the negative form of this as “That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow, this is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary” (Shabbat 31a in the Babylonian Talmud).   If supporting government measures that restrict to the point of taking away completely the rights and freedoms of all members of our society does not constitute doing to your fellows what is despicable to you, it is difficult to conceive of what would.

 

When, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, the most famous student of the said Rabbi Hillel’s grandson Gamaliel who went on to become an Apostle of our Lord, St. Paul, in his first epistle to the Church in Corinth instructed them to be careful in how they exercised their Christian liberty so as not to be as stumbling block to those of weaker conscience and to put the good of others ahead of their own good, he clearly meant that they should voluntarily limit and restrict their freedom for the sake of others, not that they should write Caesar and ask him to do it for them and everybody else, nor that they should become Caesar’s cheering section if he did so of  his own accord.   When it came to limiting the freedom of others, St. Paul’s thoughts on that can be found in his epistle to the Galatians, in which the very first anathema sit (actually anathema esto since St. Paul wrote in Greek not Latin) was pronounced on those who presumed so to do.    It is worth pointing out that in I Corinthians the recommended voluntarily imposed limits on freedom involved eating meat of dubious origins and in Galatians the limitations on others that were condemned involved forcing people to cut off their foreskins and to stop eating bacon.   Locking people away in their own houses for months, even if they are healthy, without even the pretence of a criminal charge, let alone trial and conviction, forbidding them any sort of healthy social contact, ordering the businesses in which their life’s work, and possibly that of several generations of their family, is all tied up, and upon which they depend for their living to close and this sort of thing goes far beyond what St. Paul condemned in the legalists troubling the Galatians.    What would he have thought if he had foreseen that some would take his plea to the Corinthians to exercise their liberty prudently and wisely and seek the good of others as an argument for supporting imposed limitations of this nature?

 

I suspect the answer would be close to what St. Peter had to say about those who misused St. Paul’s epistles in his own day “As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction.”  (II Peter 3:16)

 

That Jesus demonstrated by His own life what love looks like is most certainly true.   Indeed, His life was a demonstration of what a love that goes beyond the love spoken of in the Greatest and the Second Greatest Commandments looks like.   Remember, those Commandments He said, were the summary of the Law, i.e., that which God rightly requires of us.   A self-sacrificial love, such as Jesus demonstrated by allowing Himself to be unjustly condemned, tortured, and brutally killed for the sake of us all, goes far beyond that, and it is Jesus’ example that Christians are commanded to follow.   To suggest, however, that support and obedience for the lockdown measures is what that kind of love looks like today, is to say something that could only be true in some sort of parallel world where everything is the opposite of our own.

 

Think about it.   In the time of our Lord’s earthly ministry, the disease that everybody feared, for which everybody who contracted it was excluded from the community and forced to announce themselves as “unclean” lest any unwary traveler come too close, was leprosy.   Jesus encountered several lepers at various points in His ministry, each encounter ending with the healing of the leper.   One particular encounter stands out, however, which is related in all three of the Synoptic Gospels.   In St. Matthew’s Gospel it follows immediately after the Sermon on the Mount.   After He comes down from the mountain a great multitude follows Him and a leper comes to Him, worships Him, and says “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.”   He answered, not just in word but in deed:

 

And Jesus put forth his hand, and touched him, saying, I will; be thou clean. And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.

He did not warn the leper to stay a safe distance away.   He did not warn His disciples to stay a safe distance away.   He did not stay a safe distance away Himself.   He “put forth His hand, and touched him.”

 

In 1832, the plague of cholera hit the city that is now called Toronto.   It killed a twelfth of the population.    It was, in other words, a plague that makes the one that has been generating an insane amount of panic this year, look small and pathetic in comparison.   While droves fled the city, John Stachan, the Anglican archdeacon of York who seven years later would become the first Bishop of the Diocese of Toronto, remained, personally attended to the sick, volunteered on the wagons that collected dead bodies, conducted the burials, and arranged for support for those orphaned and widowed by the plague.   He did precisely the same thing when the “second wave” of cholera hit two years later.

 

What does following Jesus’ example of self-sacrificing love for others look like in a time of plague?  Is it what soon-to-be Bishop Strachan did in 1832?   Or is it lecturing other Christians on how abiding by rules that destroy the economy, bankrupt small family businesses and enlarge the market share of big box chains and online corporations like Amazon, tear the fabric of society to pieces, dissolve communities, exhaust social capital, eliminate third places (2), keep families apart, close Churches, encourage distrust of neighbours, and accustom us to accepting severe government limitations on everyone’s basic rights and freedoms, all without accomplishing the stated purpose of saving lives, for the people most at risk and who have been under lockdown much longer are dying anyway and to their number are being added the underreported but rising numbers of suicides, murders, addiction-related deaths and other deaths caused by the lockdowns themselves, somehow serves the “common good”?

 

Go thou and do likewise.

 

(1)   For Christian insights drawn from Plato’s distinction in the Timaeus between “The Good” and “The Necessary” see the Notebooks of Simone Weil.

(2)   Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You Through the Day, 1989.