The Tests of Hyper-Protestantism

 

I have addressed various aspects of the problem of Hyper-Protestantism in several essays over the last few years.  I distinguish Hyper-Protestantism from ordinary Protestantism as being that which goes beyond rejecting and opposing errors that are distinctly Roman and rejects things that are genuinely Catholic as well.  That which is distinctly Roman is taught, practiced, or otherwise held only by the Roman Church, that is to say, the communion under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Rome who is more commonly called the Pope.  That is genuinely Catholic which is the common heritage of all Churches that descended from the Apostolic Church in Jerusalem.  In the fifth century, St. Vincent of Lérins identified three tests of Catholicity that have been widely accepted ever since – Antiquity, Universality, and Consent.  The test of Antiquity means that to be considered truly Catholic something must have demonstrably been part of Christian faith and practice, at least implicitly, since the earliest centuries.  The test of Universality means that something that only ever caught on in one region of the Church or something that became dominant throughout the Church for a limited period before being finally rejected cannot be considered Catholic, but only that which can be found throughout all the ancient Churches in all places and times.  The word consent does not today ordinarily mean what it does in St. Vincent’s test.  The test of Consent is the official approbation of legitimate Church authority.  If something is taught throughout the writings of the Church Fathers, was defined and defended against error by the Church in council, especially an ecumenical council (at the time St. Vincent wrote the Council of Ephesus had just brought the number of these to three, the first two having been Nicaea I and Constantinople I in the previous century, by the  end of the fifth century Chalcedon became the fourth ecumenical council, and three others Constantinople II, Constantinople III, and Nicaea II were generally recognized before the Great Schism at the end of the first millennium), or can otherwise be shown to be “official” Church teaching or practice  it passes the test of Consent.

 

To give a specific example of the difference between that which is Roman and that which is Catholic look at the doctrine of Purgatory and the practice of praying for the faithful departed.

 

Purgatory is a Roman doctrine not a Catholic doctrine.  The Church of Rome teaches it dogmatically, but the other ancient Churches do not.  Since neither the Oriental Orthodox Churches (Coptic Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, etc.) which rejected the Definition of Chalcedon of 451 and so broke with the rest of the Church nor the Assyrian Church of the East which rejected the condemnation of Nestorius in 431 teach Purgatory, this demonstrates that it was not received doctrine prior to the fifth century.  Some specific Eastern Orthodox leaders have taught it, but the Eastern Orthodox Church as a whole has rejected it, and it was a bone of contention during the reunification talks at both the Second Council of Lyon (1274) and the Council of Florence (1438-1445).  Clearly, therefore, Purgatory was not accepted as doctrine by the Catholic Church prior to the Great Schism (1054).    In the Church Fathers, the closest thing to it is found in the writings of Origen and St. Gregory of Nyssa.  These, however, were talking about hell, which their doctrine of Apokatastasis (final universal reconciliation for all) required that they interpret as something similar to what Rome would later call Purgatory. Apokatastasis was formally rejected by the Church in the fifth ecumenical council in the sixth century.  The doctrine of Purgatory, therefore, is distinctly Roman and not genuinely Catholic. 

 

This is not the case with the practice of praying for the faithful departed, however.  It is attested to since the earliest centuries, and an example of it may very well be found in the New Testament itself in II Tim. 1:18.  It is practiced not only by the Church of Rome but by the ancient pre-Reformation Churches that reject Purgatory, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Assyrian Church of the East.  The sixteenth century Reformers who thought it to stand or fall with the doctrine of Purgatory were clearly mistaken. It passes at least the tests of Antiquity and Universality.

 

This brings us to the question of whether there are any tests that we can apply to Protestant doctrines, positions, customs and assertions to determine whether they are Hyper or not.  The answer is yes.  Since St. Vincent offered three tests of Catholicity, I shall identity and discuss three tests of Hyper-Protestantism although more could be listed.  The rejection of things that are Catholic by St. Vincent’s definition as well as those that are distinctly Roman is the definition of Hyper-Protestantism and not one of the tests.

 

The first test of Hyper-Protestantism is the test of Catachresis.  Catachresis means the misuse of terms.  The specific example that is involved in this test is the pejorative use of the word Catholic.  Or, to approach it from another angle, the use of the word Catholic to mean that which is Roman.  This second wording is, perhaps, the better of the two because it reveals how Hyper-Protestantism actually betrays a principle of the Reformation.  The Roman Church claims that St. Peter was given jurisdiction over the Apostles and therefore over the whole Apostolic Church and that this jurisdiction was passed on to his successors in the bishopric of Rome, making the bishop of Rome the universal Patriarch, and the Catholic or whole Church co-extensive with his jurisdiction.   In other words, the Roman Church claims herself to be the Catholic (whole) Church.  The Reformers disputed this claim in the sixteenth century, as did the other four of the ancient patriarchates when the East and West mutually excommunicated each other in 1054.  Since one of those patriarchates is that of Jerusalem, which clearly has the better right to be considered the Mother Church than Rome, and another of those patriarchates is Antioch, which St. Peter also held before that of Rome, and yet a third is Constantinople which itself had claimed universal jurisdiction in the sixth century to have its claims – and all claims of universal jurisdiction – rebutted by Gregory I of Rome, using the same arguments that would later be used against his successors – Rome’s position is built on a foundation of quicksand.  Hyper-Protestantism’s use of the word Catholic, however, conforms to Rome’s position, not that of the Reformers

 

The second test of Hyper-Protestantism is the test of Misprioritization.  This is the elevating of Protestant doctrines to a level of importance higher than the faith common to all Christians as confessed in the ancient Creeds.  There is a secondary type of misprioritization in which even lesser doctrines (eschatological schemes, specific understandings of predestination, and the sort) are elevated above the core truths of the Reformation.  It is the first type that we will focus on here. 

 

There are various ways in which this done.  A common one is to threat the doctrines of the Reformation as if they were incapable of being distorted through exaggeration into heresy.  By contrast, the defenders of orthodoxy in the early Church recognized that any truth could be distorted into heresy by exaggeration and that the path of orthodoxy was the path of balancing and harmonizing different truths.  In those days, the main contested truths had to do with theology proper, the doctrine of God, especially the doctrine of the Trinity, and Christology, the Person of Jesus Christ.  The true and living God is One.  He is also, in a way different from the way in which He is One, Three.  If the Oneness of God is exaggerated, you get Judaism, Islam, and Unitarianism.  If the Threeness of God is exaggerated, you get polytheism.  The orthodox truth lies in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which harmonized and balances the Oneness and Threeness of God.  If you exaggerate the deity of Jesus Christ, you get such things as Docetism, the idea that Jesus’ humanity was just an appearance and had no material substance, or Apollinarianism, the idea that the divine Logos took the place that is filled by the human mind in other men, making His humanity incomplete.  Conversely, Jesus’ humanity can be exaggerated to as to deny or diminish His deity in ways such as Adoptionism (the idea that He was a man who became God at some point such as His baptism) or Ebionism (the idea that He was merely the greatest of all prophets rather than God Incarnate).  The orthodox truth is that He is fully God and fully Man.  The fifth century demonstrated that this was susceptible of further distortions by exaggerating either His two natures (so as to make Him two Persons occupying the same body, the Son of God and the Son of Man, which is the heresy called Nestorianism) or the unity of His Person so as to deny His two natures (such as in Eutychianism in which Jesus’ humanity is swallowed up into His deity so that only the latter remains) requiring the clarification of the orthodox doctrine of the Hypostatic Union in the Definition of Chalcedon.

 

Now think about that.  If such truths as the Oneness of God, the Threeness of God, the deity of Jesus Christ and His humanity, the Unity of His Person and His two natures can and have been each distorted by exaggeration into heresy, would it not be elevating the doctrines of the Reformation far above these truths to pretend that they cannot be similarly distorted?  Furthermore, would it not be precisely this sort of distortion to say, for example, that Churches which confess the orthodox truths of the ancient Creeds are not expressions of Biblical Christianity because they do not affirm the Reformation doctrine of justification?  Especially if in making such a statement all the ancient Churches are lumped in with Rome even though the worst errors that the Reformers opposed with regards to justification (that the works of sinful human beings have merit in God’s eyes, that they can have merit above and beyond what is required by God, that the keys involve the right to distribute or even sell for a profit this supererogatory merit, etc.) are ones that Rome alone among the ancient Churches fell into.

 

The answer to both of these questions is yes.  Moreover, it needs to be recognized that the Reformation doctrines are particularly susceptible of being exaggerated and distorted into heresies because of the way they are formulated.  Keep in mind here that the Five Solae are not a sixteenth century formulation but a twentieth century formulation read back onto the sixteenth century.  It was first formulated by German Roman Catholic liberation theologian Johann Baptiste Metz in 1965 but caught on especially among Calvinists who found a five point summary of the Reformation appealing because it made Calvinism (famously summarized in five points, those articulated in the canons of the Synod of Dort in the second decade of the seventeenth century which responded to the five points of the Arminian Remonstrance) seem more normative of Protestantism in general. It should also be noted that one of the Five Solae, Sola Gratia, is not a Reformation distinctive but is a Catholic doctrine recognized as such universally since the (regional) Council of Carthage’s condemnation of Pelagianism was confirmed the third ecumenical council and that the Five Solae do not include the doctrine of assurance which was at least as important to the sixteenth century Reformation, especially the Lutheran side, as any of the Solae.  Nevertheless, Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide were both indisputably central to the Reformation.  Both doctrines, defined properly, are sound.  The Latin word Sola, however, and its English equivalent “alone” is not a word that usually marks a doctrine as having been carefully formulated with an eye to the balanced truth of orthodoxy.

 

Consider Sola Scriptura.  The expression was first used by Dr. Luther just prior to the Diet of Worms (1521) where he famously took his stand on the doctrine. As Dr. Luther used it, however, it did not mean anything remotely close to what later Protestants, especially the Hypers, have taken it to mean.  Dr. Luther taught the Sufficiency, Primacy and Supremacy of the Scriptures, not the idea that each Christian should get his faith and practice directly from the Bible and only from the Bible with no regards whatsoever to what previous Christians have said, thought, and done individually or as the Church.  The expression “Sola Scriptura”, however, especially when not used in a full sentence such as “The Scriptures alone are infallible”, easily suggests this idea of the go-it-alone Christian.  Ironically, it contradicts the very authority it is intended to uphold for Scriptures themselves, St. Paul’s second epistle to the Thessalonians specifically, contain the instruction “Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle” (2 Thess. 2:15).  The traditions, i.e., that which has been passed on or handed down, which they have been taught, are what Christians are instructed here to stand fast and hold, whether the transmission is oral (“by word”) or written (“our epistle”) which latter category is the Scripture, the very designation of which means that which is written.  Note that the Scripture in this verse of the Scriptures is very much not “alone.”  Far better than this expression for explaining the Reformation teaching would be to employ the expressions the Sufficiency, Primacy, and Supremacy of the Scriptures.  Either Primacy or Sufficiency would be a better summary of all that Dr. Luther and the Reformers intended than that most insufficient word “Alone”.   Article VI of our reformed Anglican Church is not entitled “The Scriptures Alone” but “Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation.” It asserts “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.” (1)

 

Sola Fide, understood correctly, is merely the doctrine St. Paul taught in the fourth chapter of Romans, that being righteous in the eyes of God is a gift God gives by His grace and that for it to be such it has to be by faith and not by works.  St. Paul did not contradict St. James who says that justification is by works but he explained St. James, who does not use the word “grace” in the relevant portion of his epistle, to not be talking about justification before God (Rom. 4:2).   The Reformers were right to re-emphasize St. Paul’s doctrine to correct the heavy over-emphasis on works in late Medieval Roman theology.  Note, however, that St. Paul was able to articulate this doctrine without using the word “alone”.  Note also, that when St. Paul identified the Gospel that he preached, he did not say that it was the doctrine of justification but that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and the testimony of eyewitnesses enumerated by the Apostle (1 Cor. 15:3ff).  Since this is included in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, confessed by all the ancient Churches, and is indeed, central to it, it cannot be legitimately said that the Church ever “lost” the Gospel as is claimed by the idea of restorationism which is common to all the heretical sects that evangelicals grew accustomed to calling cults towards the end of the last century.  Neither Dr. Luther and his associates nor the English Reformers (or the more responsible among the Swiss Reformers) were restorationists but the door which let restorationism and Hyper-Protestantism in was opened by referring to St. Paul’s doctrine of justification, re-articulated with the word alone, as being itself the Gospel.  (2)

 

 

The third test of Hyper-Protestantism is the test of Mendacity.  Hyper-Protestantism is willing to sacrifice truthfulness to the cause of opposing Rome. While some of the better known examples of this predate the internet, the internet meme has greatly exacerbated this tendency of Hyper-Protestantism.  In the last couple of months I have seen Hyper-Protestant memes attacking the Roman Church posted to social media on a daily basis.  I don’t remember a single one of them that did not make some irresponsible and easily rebuttable claim or another.

 

One of these, from a Baptist source, made the claim that the Scriptures do not teach that Mary is the New Eve, that this claim comes from late Medieval Scholasticism, and was invented for the purpose of supporting Rome’s doctrine about Mary being the Co-Redemptrix.  This was a particularly remarkable example because rather than mixing one or two errors into what was otherwise correct this meme did not get a single thing right. 

 

Mary is contrasted with Eve in this way by St. Justin Martyr in Dialogue With Trypho 100 and by St. Irenaeus of Lyon in Against Heresies 3.22.4.  These are both second century sources, written in approximately 150 and 180 respectively.  This identification of Mary with Eve was raised again by Tertullian, the first major theologian to write in Latin, in a treatise written against the Docetic arguments of the Marcionites and Valentinians in the first decade of the third century, On the Flesh of Christ, 17.  It was also one of several Marian themes that appear in the writings of Origen, the most important theologian of the early Alexandrian Church, who was about thirty years younger than Tertullian.  Origen, in whose writings the first extent use of the word Theotokos can be found, wrote about the Perpetual Virginity of Mary and explored the parallels between her and Eve in the commentaries and expository homilies he wrote and gave after his relocation to Caesarea Maritima in 231.  The theme of Mary as the New Eve is also prominent in the homilies of Origen’s most celebrated student, St. Gregory Thaumaturgos, who was born a couple of years after Tertullian wrote the work mentioned above and became Bishop of his native Neocaesarea later that century.  See, for example, the first three of the homilies in the collection Four Homilies, which three have the common topic of the Annunciation and the homily on “The Holy Mother of God, Ever Virgin” which is extent only in Armenian rather than Greek and in which the comparison/contrast between Eve and Mary opens the homily. In the centuries that follow this theme can be found in the extend works of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and basically all the major Church Fathers.  It was a common Patristic idea long before there was any such thing as Scholasticism.

 

Moreover, the idea is derived directly from the Scriptures.  In Genesis 3:15, the first promise of the Messiah in the Old Testament, the expression “the woman” appears.  In the context of Genesis 3, “the woman” has to be Eve.  The Seed of the woman, Who is prophesied to crush the head of the serpent, however, is Christ, so “the woman” of this verse also has to be Mary.  This one expression “the woman” has, therefore, double reference to Eve and to Mary.  We find this again in the twelfth chapter of Revelation.  The woman there is identified as Mary by the fact that she gives birth to Christ (vv. 4-5).  The chapter also, however, stresses the enmity between her and the dragon (vv. 4, 6, 13-17) and when it identifies the dragon the wording points directly back to Genesis 3 “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan” (v. 9). Revelation 12, therefore, places this woman who gave birth to Christ, Mary, in the role of Eve, whose enemy is the serpent.  The identification of Mary with Eve is also the significance of Jesus’ addressing His mother as “Woman” in John 2:4 and 19:26. (3)  In Genesis, this is what Adam calls Eve when God first makes her (Gen. 2:24) and what she is called throughout the Creation/Fall narrative until after the curse, when her name Eve is used for the first time (Gen. 3:20).

 

Note that the New Testament basis for identifying Mary as the New Eve comes from the writings of St. John the Apostle.  This is itself significant because St. Irenaeus grew up under the teaching of St. Polycarp of Smyrna, himself a direct disciple of St. John.  St. Justin Martyr, while not among the direct disciples of St. John in this same way, incorporated Johannine themes into all his writings, wrote and set Dialogue with Trypho in Ephesus, the city where St. John had spent most of the latter part of his life, and is the earliest witness to the Johannine authorship of Revelation.  The earliest Church Fathers to speak of Mary as the New Eve were directly influenced by the Apostle whose New Testament writings provide the Scriptural basis for this idea.

 

Not only does this meme illustrate the lackadaisical attitude towards the truth, at least where Rome is concerned, on the part of Hyper-Protestants, (Luke Skywalker’s line from The Last Jedi, “Amazing, every word of what you just said was wrong” could have been addressed to it), it also illustrates the fittingness of the expression “Hyper-Protestant.”  By accusing an idea, which the slightest amount of real research would have revealed to date to the earliest centuries of Christianity, to have been ubiquitous among the Church Fathers, and to be based in Scripture itself, of having been developed late in Church history to support the least defensible of Rome’s Marian terminology, one never formally dogmatized and which Rome has recently taken steps to walk back, Hyper-Protestants go well beyond what the sixteenth century Reformers themselves had to say against Rome with regards to Mary, which really wasn’t all that much.  Indeed, most of the Reformers, certainly the Lutheran and English Reformers, but even the fathers of the Reformed tradition including Calvin himself, would have to be classified as rank Mariolators if we were to go by the standards of Hyper-Protestantism.

 

As noted earlier, this characteristic of Hyper-Protestantism predates the internet meme.  The late Jack T. Chick, the fundamentalist Baptist publisher from Los Angeles famous for his cartoon tracts – small, rectangular booklets, which tell a story in comic-book style that leads up to an evangelistic appeal – saw his credibility take several blows in the last decades of the twentieth century when he repeatedly published or distributed testimonies/exposes that proved incapable of withstanding serious scrutiny as to their truthfulness.  While not all of these pertained to the Roman Church, the most notorious example was his publication of the testimony of Alberto Rivera, who claimed to be an ex-Jesuit and on the basis of whose testimony, he accused the Roman Church of being behind everything from the creation of Islam to Nazi Germany to the decay of morals in the late twentieth century United States. 

 

Evangelist Ralph Woodrow wrote “It puzzles me how some can be so fanatical against one set of errors—or what they perceive to be errors—only to develop greater errors: becoming judgmental, hateful, and dishonest”.  Woodrow wrote this in the context of explaining why he had withdrawn his best-seller, Babylon Mystery Religion, widely distributed by Chick, from circulation.  His book had drawn its inspiration from The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop, a nineteenth century minister of the Scottish Free Church (Presbyterian) that tried to trace everything in Roman Catholicism that could not be found in the pages of Scripture (and much that could) back to Nimrod (who built the Tower of Babel/Babylon, the cult of whom Hislop claimed to be the original template of all paganism).  Woodrow, after prayerfully re-examining Hislop’s book and checking its sources, withdrew his own book and wrote The Babylon Connection? a book length rebuttal of his own previous book and his primary source.  A shorter version of his critique of Hislop’s methodology appeared in the Christian Research Journal.

 

With the Vincentian tests of antiquity, universality, and consent, something has to pass all three to be genuinely Catholic.  With these tests of Hyper-Protestantism, Catachresis, Misprioritization and Mendacity, passing any one of them indicates an infection.  Passing all three indicates that the theological disease has reached an advanced stage.

 

(1)   Article VI is quite lengthy, but the first sentence as quoted in the text of this essay is the full content of the Article as far as explaining the subject in the title goes.  The remainder of the Article is a clarification of what is meant by “Holy Scripture”.  Here too, the Article is worded so as to assert only what all Protestants can affirm and not the more extreme position which became more common starting in the seventeenth century.  The canonical books are listed for both Testaments, and the deutero-canonical books are also listed of which the Article merely says “And the other Books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.”  The more extreme version of Protestantism says that these books have no place in the Bible whatsoever, warns people against reading them, and says that they were added to the Bible by the Roman Church in the Council of Trent.

 

This, however, illustrates the third test of Hyper-Protestantism, the devaluing of truth.  It is common today for Roman Catholic apologists to accuse Protestants of taking books out of the Bible, and of Protestant apologists to accuse the Roman Catholic Church of adding them.  Neither of these is entirely right, although the Roman Catholic accusation is closer to the truth.  The deutero-canonical books are, for the most part, (2 Esdras, called “The Fourth Book of Esdras” in Article VI, is the exception) books found in the Septuagint, the Greek translation that the Church received as her Old Testament from the first century but which were never included in the canon recognized by rabbinic Judaism.  If the Roman Catholic Church had “added” them in the sixteenth century, we could expect that Churches that broke fellowship with Rome earlier wold not include them in their Bibles.  This is not the case.  Generally, the further back the schism, the more the deuterocanonical books you find in the Bibles of the other Churches.  The Eastern Orthodox Church which broke with the Roman Catholic in 1054 has 3 and 4 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh, and Psalm 151 in its Bible.  The Oriental Orthodox Churches which broke with the Chalcedonian Churches in the fifth century has these and, in the case of those which use the Tewahedo Bible (Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Churches), Enoch and Jubilees.  The Assyrian Church of the East which uses the Syriac Peshitta as its Bible includes most of the same deutero-canon as the Roman Catholic Church plus Psalm 151 and the Prayer of Manasseh. 

 

What happened in the sixteenth century was that both the Roman Catholic Church and the early Reformers, shifted books from category to category in the Bible.  Dr. Luther left the deuterocanonical books in the Bible but shifted them out of the Old Testament and into a section unfortunately labelled “Apocrypha”, inaccurately using a term that the Church Fathers applied to a different set of writings altogether.  The same was done in the Authorized Bible in 1611 and Article VI reflects the thinking behind this.  The deuterocanonical books are not “canonical” in the sense of being the “canon” or “rule” by which doctrine is proved, but they are not “non-canonical” in the sense of not being included in the Bible altogether.  What the Roman Catholic Church did at Trent was to shift these books into the “canon” in the sense of doctrine-proving books.  The other ancient Churches, while regarding these books as part of the Old Testament, had never regarded them as being equally canonical in this sense.

(2)  Once something other than the Gospel preached by St. Paul, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures and was buried and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures is identified as the Gospel, even if it be St. Paul’s own doctrine of justification, so as to make the claim that all the Churches that confess that Christ, the second person of the Trinity, incarnate as the God-Man, died for our sins, and was buried, and rose again don’t have the Gospel  if they don’t have that doctrine in its Reformation reformulation, the door is opened to making this same claim about another doctrine so as to exclude others who do also confess the doctrine of justification in its Reformation formulation. 

 

Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the Calvinist Baptist preacher of the nineteenth century, is frequently quoted as having said “Calvinism is the Gospel, and nothing else.”  Other Calvinists have identified the “doctrines of grace” as the Gospel.  These, however, are doctrines pertaining to predestination, a matter about which God keeps His own counsel and which is hardly of the essence of the kerygma His Church is charged with proclaiming to the world.  

 

Recently a Calvinist Baptist friend posted to social media an excerpt from John Wesley’s writings in which he referred to himself as “almost a Christian”.  My friend used to this to try and argue that Wesley was never a Christian and that the Gospel he preached – Wesley was an Arminian – was not the real Gospel.  I had to rebuke him and point out that it was quite clear, even from the excerpt from Wesley that he had included in his post, that the revivalist was talking about his life prior to Aldersgate (where, at a meeting of the Moravians in which Dr. Luther’s preface to Romans was being read, he testified “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”)

(3)   Jesus also addresses the Samaritan woman, the woman caught in adultery, and Mary Magdalen as “woman” but there was nothing unusual about these instances.  This was not rude in first century Palestine the way it is in the English-speaking world of our day, it was closer to addressing a woman as “ma’am” in our culture.  Jesus’ addressing His mother this way was unusual, however. St. John records Jesus doing so twice, at the very beginning of His ministry and the very end.  The first of these is at the wedding of Cana, where Jesus performed His first miracle.  St. John tells us that this occurred on “the third day” which was to the last of the four days in the previous chapter as the Sunday on which Jesus rose was “the third day” to the Friday on which He was crucified, making this the sixth day.  This, coming as it does at the start of a Gospel which begins by pointing back to Genesis and Creation, is evocative of the sixth day of Creation, the day in which God created man “male and female” and Adam named Eve “woman”.  At the end of His earthly ministry, Jesus’ addresses Mary as “woman” again and tells her to “behold thy son” as He instructs St. John to “behold thy mother”.  Here too is an allusion to the first woman who at the end of the Creation/Fall account in Genesis is given the name Eve because she is the “mother of all living.”   

Some Belated Reflections on Lady Day

Yesterday, 25 March, was the holy day formally called The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and commonly referred to as Lady Day.  It commemorates the day that the angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary in Nazareth and told her that she was “blessed… among women” and “hast found favour with God” and would conceive and give birth to the Christ, the Son of God.  The account can be found in St. Luke’s Gospel, the first chapter, verses 36-38.  St. Luke does not provide the calendar date on which Gabriel visited the Blessed Virgin but he does say that it was in the “sixth month” (v. 26), i.e., of Elizabeth’s pregnancy with John the Baptist.  Elizabeth conceived shortly after her husband Zacharias had received his visitation from Gabriel while serving in the Temple.  Zacharias was of the “course of Abia” the Temple service of which occurred twice in the year, once in the week of the Day of Atonement.  That this was the week in which the visitation took place can be inferred from indicators in the text that the Temple was very well attended that day.  Also, there is an ancient legend that Zacharias was serving as High Priest on Yom Kippur that is difficult to reconcile with St. Luke’s account but can be explained as an embellishment on the correct detail of it having been Yom Kippur or at least the week thereof that the event took place.  Yom Kippur falls in late September to early October, making October the month of John the Baptist’s conception, and March therefore, the sixth month of it.  Although the earliest mention of the celebration of the Annunciation goes only back to the sixth century, the fact that the Church regarded it as having occurred on 25 March since the earliest centuries is easily demonstrated.  St. Hippolytus of Rome, whose years were 170 to 235 AD, wrote that our Lord was born eight days before the Kalends of January.[1]  That is 25 December by our way of reckoning dates.[2]  Nine months to the day after 25 March.

 

There is a type of Protestant who thinks that any amount of honour and attention bestowed on our Lord’s mother takes away from that which is due to Christ Himself.  The Annunciation, the Gospel account of it, and its celebration reveal the foolishness of this way of thinking.

 

Consider the salutation of Gabriel to the Virgin: “Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.” (Lk. 1:28)

 

The first observation to be made about these words is that the honour bestowed upon Mary here, that she is “highly favoured” or as William Tyndale rendered it “full of grace”, the Lord is with her, and she is “blessed…among women” come from the mouth of an unfallen angel speaking on behalf of God.  It could hardly, therefore, detract from the honour due to her Son.

 

The second observation is that this is the first three lines of the Ave Maria.  These are drawn directly from the inspired words of Scripture.   The next two lines of the Ave Maria, are Elizabeth’s salutation when Mary visits her immediately after the Annunciation (Lk. 1:42).  The only things added to the Scriptural text in the Ave Maria prior to the Sancta Maria portion are the names Mary and Jesus.  Remember that the next time you hear someone claim these words are idolatrous.

 

Now consider the Christological significance of the Annunciation.  Objections to honouring Mary often contribute to poor Christology.  Some Hyper-Protestants, in their zeal to throw out anything they consider to be tainted with “papist Mariolatry”, object to the title “Mother of God” or “Theotokos” and in doing so embrace the sort of thinking associated with the fifth century Nestorius of Constantinople that was condemned as heretical at the third ecumenical council.  Ironically, of course, Nestorius himself had no problem with honouring Mary.  His problem with “Theotokos” was that he thought it suggested that Mary was the source of Jesus’ divinity.  This is the same problem Hyper-Protestants have with “Mother of God.”  “Mary is not the Mother of God” they will say “She is the Mother of Jesus” just as the fifth century Nestorians called Mary the “Christokos” (Christ-bearer) rather than “Theotokos” (God-bearer).  The reason these arguments are condemned as heretical is because they introduce division into the Person of Christ.  Jesus Christ is One Person.  Mary is the Mother of that Person.  That Person is both God and Man.  Therefore Mary is the Mother of God.  This obviously does not mean that Jesus gets His deity from her.  The Person Jesus has always existed with and in His Father and the Holy Spirit as God.  That Person became Man but was always God.  In becoming Man, He gained a Mother.  This is a completely unique instance of a Person existing before His Mother, but that does not alter the fact that she is His Mother, or that Mother is her relationship to Him as a Person, and since He that Person is God as well as Man, she is the Mother of God.

 

Now before you conclude that I have gotten away from my main point think of this question: When did the Incarnation take place?  When was the Hypostatic Union formed?  When did the Eternally-Begotten Son of God add a complete but anhypostatic[3] human nature, subject to the consequences of the Fall such as mortality except for the taint of sin itself, to His Own Eternal Person and become Man?

 

The answer, of course, is Lady Day, the day of the Annunciation.  The Incarnation did not take place at Christ’s birth on Christmas.  By that time His human life had already been growing for nine months.  Jesus’ humanity was never not-united to His deity and His Person but was created already in union with Him.  Otherwise His humanity would not have been His but someone else’s that He took in a manner similar to possession.  The Incarnation, therefore, and Jesus’ conception are one and the same event.  Gabriel’s message to the Blessed Virgin was:

 

Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end. (Lk. 1:30-33).

 

After inquiring as to how this was possible and receiving the answer that it would be by the power of the Holy Spirit, her response was “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.” (Lk. 1:38)  In these words she in submissive obedience consented to being the God-bearer and the miracle was accomplished.

 

Mary’s response was a significant theme in the writings of the earliest Church Fathers.  St. Irenaeus wrote:

 

In accordance with this design, Mary the Virgin is found obedient, saying, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to your word. Luke 1:38 But Eve was disobedient; for she did not obey when as yet she was a virgin. And even as she, having indeed a husband, Adam, but being nevertheless as yet a virgin… having become disobedient, was made the cause of death, both to herself and to the entire human race; so also did Mary, having a man betrothed [to her], and being nevertheless a virgin, by yielding obedience, become the cause of salvation, both to herself and the whole human race…And thus also it was that the knot of Eve's disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary. For what the virgin Eve had bound fast through unbelief, this did the virgin Mary set free through faith.[4]

 

This same comparison had earlier been made by Justin Martyr.[5]

 

While the Hyper-Protestants may rage against this comparison and find in it evidence that “Romanism” had begun to creep into the Church as early as the second century it rests upon Scriptural authority.  Mary and Eve are joined in the first and the last books of the Bible.

 

In the curse on the serpent in Geneses 3:15 reads “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”  Who is the woman in this verse?

 

On the one hand it is obviously Eve.  She was the only woman present at the time.  On the other hand it has to be Mary because it was Mary who gave birth to Christ, the seed that crushed the head of the serpent even as he bruised His heel on the Cross.  So which is it?  Clearly both.

Turning to the final book of the Bible, we find in the twelfth chapter of Revelation a woman spoken of again, this time at great length.  She is never named but is just called the woman.  She has an enemy, however, who is “a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.” (Rev. 12:3) In the chapter he has an army of angels and fights against St. Michael the Archangel and his angels.  St. Michael is victorious and the dragon and his angels are cast out of heaven.  When this happens the dragon is identified as “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world.” (Rev. 12:9)  The same serpent upon whom the curse was pronounced in Genesis 3.  Here he is shown, just as Genesis says, to be the enemy of the woman, making war on her and her seed.  For the woman “being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered” (Rev. 12:2) and the dragon “stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.” (Rev. 12:4).  Here is the seed of the woman promised in Genesis.  To make clear that the child is Jesus Christ the next verse reads “And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne.”

 

Since she gives birth to Jesus Christ, this woman is clearly the Blessed Virgin Mary.  As in Genesis 3:15, however, she is also Eve, because it is here in Revelation that the conflict between the woman and the serpent begun in Genesis 3 comes to its final close.  This is Mary as the New Eve.  Eve, of course, was the wife of Adam, whereas Mary the New Eve is the Mother of Jesus Christ, the New Adam.  Note however the first and the last verses of the chapter.  In the first she is clothed with the sun, stands on the moon, and has a crown of twelve stars.  This alludes to the visions of Joseph in the book of Genesis.  The final verse speaks of the dragon making war on the “remnant of her seed” who “keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.”  Mary, the New Eve, is not merely Mary as an individual, but Mary as representative of the people of God.  The sun, moon, and stars are the symbols of Israel.  It is the Church that has the testimony of Jesus Christ.  The Church, according to St. Paul in Romans, is the “olive tree” of Israel, with some branches removed for unbelief, and “wild” branches (Gentile believers) grafted in.  The Church is described as the bride of Christ of the New Testament.  Mary is literally the Mother of Jesus Christ, but as the New Eve she figuratively represents the collective that is the bride of Christ.[6]

 

The early Fathers clearly had strong Scriptural support for their teaching that the Blessed Virgin was the New Eve, whose obedience played such an integral role in the restoration of that which had fell into ruin through the disobedience of the first Eve.  Perhaps we should pay more attention to their interpretation of the Scriptures and less to those whose determination to honour only Christ has become an obsession that would condemn even the Protestant Reformers[7] for honouring her with the honour that the Scriptures give her.

 

We beseech thee, O Lord, pour thy grace into our hearts; that, as we have known the incarnation of thy Son Jesus Christ by the message of an angel, so by his cross and passion we may be brought unto the glory of his resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.[8]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] St. Hippolytus of Rome, Commentary on Daniel, 4.23.3.

[2] The Romans reckoned backwards from the Kalends of the next month, we reckon forwards from that of the current month.

[3] Without personal identity distinct from the Eternal Personhood of the Son of God.  Since Jesus’ human nature was created already united to His Eternal Person it never actually existed in a state of anhypostasia.  The term that denotes the actual state of Jesus’ human nature as it has existed from the moment of its creation in union with His deity in His Eternal Person is “enhypostatic.”  “Enhypostatic”, “in the person”, is the only state in which Jesus’ human nature has ever actually existed since it was created already in union with His Person. Since “enhypostatic” describes the human nature as united with the divine in Christ, “anhypostatic”, “without person”, is used to speak of the human nature by itself in contexts where it would be difficult to make sense without speaking as if His human nature had existence by itself prior to the Hypostatic Union.  The importance of these distinctions and this highly specialized, even for theology, terminology, is their usefulness in avoiding the error of Apollonaris, who taught that Jesus’ human nature was lacking a component which His divine nature made up for (the Logos, he taught, took the place of a human nous or mind), the error of thinking of the Incarnation as either a sort of possession or a fusion of two persons, one divine one human, into one, or the error of thinking of Jesus’ Person as a composition formed by the union of the divine and human natures.  In the Incarnation an Eternal Person added a second, created nature to His eternal nature and that second nature was created as His and never belonged to any other person distinct from His Eternal Person.  See Eric Mascall, Christ, the Christian and The Church: A Study of the Incarnation and its Consequences (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2017).

[4] St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, translated by Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1, edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, III.22.4.

[5] St. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 100.

[6] Note that the imagery of Rev. 12:1 is also that of a queen.  The woman is seen in heaven wearing a crown of stars.  The queen of heaven.  It is significant to observe that in the books of Kings, the queens are consistently mentioned, unless they figure into the narrative in some other way, as the mothers of their sons rather than the wives of their husbands.  The queen mother rather than the queen consort was the more prominent idea of the queen in the Old Testament.  Here, and not in the worship of Astarte condemned by Jeremiah, we find the origin of the Regina Coeli title for Mary.  Let the Hyper-Protestants fume all they like, it will not change the fact.

[7] The Protestant Reformers, at least the Magisterial Reformers, especially the English and Lutheran, but not excluding the Swiss, all had a Mariology that would be considered way too High by many contemporary Protestants.

[8] Collect for the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin, Book of Common Prayer.

Scripture is Tradition

Recently a meme was posted to an Anglican group on Facebook that asserted that everything in the Book of Common Prayer was either taken directly from Scripture or could be proven from Scripture and that nothing was taken from tradition.  In response I pointed out the obvious flaw in this assertion.  The Bible did not just drop down from Heaven complete at the time of the Reformation.  It was passed down from generation to generation in the Church for sixteen centuries from the Apostles.  The Old Testament portion of the Scriptures had been received by the Christian Church in the period of the Apostles after having been passed down from generation to generation in ancient Israel.  In the case of some of the books of the Old Testament this stretched back almost as long before Christ as the Reformation was after.  The word for something that is received by being passed down from generation to generation is tradition.  The Latin verb trado, tradere means “to hand over” and its fourth principal part, the passive perfect participle which would mean “having been handed over” is traditus –a –um, from which tradition is obviously derived.  In the Diocletian Persecution of the early fourth century those who handed over their copies of the Scriptures and/or other Christians to the persecutors were called traditores, which is also derived from this Latin word, and which is the source of our word traitor.  It makes a big difference what is handed over, to whom it is handed over, and why.  Something that is handed over or passed down from generation to generation as a priceless heritage is a tradition.  This is, usually, a good thing.  Handing over someone to be persecuted or sacred books to be burned is a bad thing.  The point, of course, is that the Bible itself as something handed down from generation to generation, is a tradition.  Therefore, to assert that the Book of Common Prayer takes from Scripture but not tradition is to commit a fallacy.

 

The person who posted the meme responded by pointing out that memes by their very nature have to be short.  If the meme were revised to accurately acknowledge that what was excluded from the BCP was not tradition in general, but a certain kind of tradition that conflicts with the Bible, it would be too long and not pithy enough to be effective as a meme.  While that is certainly true it works better as an argument against social media memes than it does as a counter to my argument.  Social media memes are essentially the democratization of the sound byte.  Democratizing things seldom if ever improves them, usually it does quite the opposite.

 

The meme poster maintained that the word tradition by itself is acceptable short hand for the idea of traditions that conflict with and contradict the Scriptures.  This usage itself, however, is unscriptural.

Those who hold this view of tradition as a man-made rival that is hostile to the authority of the God-given Scriptures inevitably fall back on a single incident recorded by both SS Matthew and Mark in the fifteenth and seventh chapters of their respective Gospels.  In this incident, the Pharisees ask Jesus why His disciples violate the “tradition of the elders” by not washing their hands (a washing for ceremonial rather than hygienic purposes is in view here) before eating bread.  Jesus responded by asking them why they violate the commandment of God by their tradition.  The commandment He then specifies is the commandment to “honour thy father and thy mother” and the tradition by which they were violating the commandment was the tradition of corban, that is, of dedicating something for sacred use in the Temple.  The accusation was that they were allowing people to get out of their obligation to honour their parents by taking care of them when they are old by allowing them to declare all their possessions to be corban.  The problem with the way those who pit Scripture and tradition against each other try to use this passage is that Jesus does not condemn tradition qua tradition, or even the tradition of men qua the tradition of men, in it.  He does not even condemn the specific tradition in question which tradition is itself drawn from Scripture in which corban is one of the basic Hebrew words for gift, offering, or sacrifice.  What He condemned was its misuse to evade one’s duty to do what God has commanded.  Indeed, just as it is not tradition, man-made tradition, or the specific corban tradition that Jesus condemned but its misuse, so what is contrasted with the misuse of tradition is not “the Scriptures” in general but the narrower “the commandment of God.”  Even “the word of God” in Mark 7:13 is best understood as meaning “the commandment of God” which appears twice in verses 9-9.  Note that what we call the Ten Commandments in English were called in Hebrew by an expression that means “the Ten Words” as does the Greek word into which it was translated in the Septuagint and which is the root of our own Decalogue.   The point of this passage has to do with priorities not some troglodytic message like “Bible good, tradition bad.”  There is nothing wrong with dedicating something to God’s use but there is something wrong with doing so in order to evade one’s duty to one’s parents.  In this, as in most of Jesus’ rebukes to the Pharisees, His most basic criticism was that their priorities were wrong, that they scrupulously tithed the tiniest of seeds, while ignoring judgement, mercy, and faith, that they strained out a gnat while swallowing a camel (Matt. 23:23-24).

 

The Lord Jesus’ actions bespeak a very different attitude towards tradition than that which is sometimes read into His rebuke of the Pharisees. While He preached on a mountain (Matt. 5-7) and from a boat (Lk. 5:1-3), His most frequent place of preaching and teaching was the synagogue (Mk. 1:21-28, Lk. 4:16-37, Jn. 6:59) which the Gospels say He regularly attended.  The synagogue was the local meeting place for Scripture reading, Psalm singing, prayer and teaching.  The synagogue in this sense of the word was an extra-Scriptural tradition.  There are no instructions for establishing any such institution in the Old Testament.  The word appears in the Septuagint but as a translation of Hebrew words depicting all of Israel as an assembly or congregation.  In the eighth chapter of St. John’s Gospel Jesus is said to have gone to Jerusalem for the feast of dedication (Hanukah) which was not one of the feasts instituted in the Law of Moses or anywhere else in the books regarded as canonical by both Jews and Christians but celebrates the rededication of the Temple after the Maccabean revolt against Antiochus Epiphanes who defiled it in events recorded in the books of Maccabees which are found in the LXX but not the Hebrew Old Testament.  St. Luke’s account of the Last Supper and the institution of the Eucharist depict elements of the traditional Passover Seder.  These elements were not prescribed in the Torah but are recognizable from the Jewish tradition today.  How far that tradition had developed into what it is today by the first century is unknown but what is clear is that Jesus had no objection to observing the traditions of His people merely because they were extra-Scriptural or man-made.  It was the abuse and misuse of tradition and not tradition itself that incurred His rebuke.

 

This is entirely in keeping with the attitude towards tradition found in the Old Testament (Psalm 11;3, Prov. 22:28-29).  St. Paul in his earliest epistles tells the Thessalonian Church to “stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle” (2 Thess. 2:15) and to withdraw from any brother who does not walk “after the tradition which he received of us” (2 Thess. 3:6).  In his first epistle to the Corinthians he depicted the Gospel message itself as a tradition “For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received” (1 Cor. 15:3).

 

2 Thessalonians 2:15 reads like it was written to combat precisely the kind of ideas that I am addressing here.  That tradition is not something to be regarded as bad or suspect in itself is evident from his instructions to the Thessalonians to adhere to the traditions they had been taught.  My point that the Scriptures themselves are tradition is also present in the verse in the words “or our epistle.”  That something in tradition is not necessarily bad because it is not in the Scriptures is the only reasonable deduction from the words “hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle.”

 

The false pitting of Scripture and tradition against each other belongs to the type of thinking that I call Hyper-Protestantism.  The ordinary Protestantism of Dr. Luther and his associates, the English Reformers, and even John Calvin much of the time at least when he is allowed to speak for himself rather than when he is interpreted by those who claim to be his followers, is conservative in its approach to tradition.  Tradition, the handing down of that which is valued from generation to generation, is in itself a good thing.  Attacking it, which is inevitably for the motive of setting up something of your own creation in its place, is a bad thing.  Bad things can be handed down along with good things.  When something bad is passed down this is a bad tradition and bad traditions are always man-made rather than coming from God.  It does not follow from this, however, that everything man-made is bad.  Indeed, the erroneous conclusion that everything man-made is bad is completely debunked by the example of Jesus Who Himself observed man-made traditions such as Hanukkah and synagogue attendance.  When bad things slip in to an otherwise good tradition these should be identified and removed in the interest of preserving the tradition as a whole.  This is precisely what the conservative Reformers were trying to do.  Dr. Luther, Archbishop Cranmer, and John Calvin on his good days, did not want to abolish or overthrow the Catholic tradition.  They wanted to excise certain bad things that had crept in to the Western branch of that tradition.  These were mostly recent innovations that had popped up after the Great Schism of the eleventh century.  The claims of the Roman Patriarchate to supremacy over the entire Church are an exception to that, obviously, because these were one of the factors that produced the Schism.  The sale of indulgences, by contrast, which set off the Reformation by arousing the righteous ire of Dr. Luther in the 95 Theses in 1517 was very recent at the time, although it grew out of seeds that had been planted in the first Crusade, a few decades after the formalization of the Schism.  Dr. Luther et al. did not see in these things reason to get rid of the Catholic tradition as a whole, or even as a reason to jettison everything that entered the Western branch of that tradition after the Schism (1).  They saw them as impurities that needed to be removed from the stream of tradition and the best way of cleansing the water to be to go back to the source.  In this they showed themselves to be Renaissance humanists for this is an application of the ad fontes principle behind the Renaissance revival of the study of classical antiquity.  The best result of the application of this principle to cleaning up the stream of Christian tradition where the waters had gotten muddied was with regards to the freeness of salvation.  That salvation, in the sense of forgiveness of sin, freedom from its bondage, and restoration to peace with God and everlasting life in His kingdom, is a gift of God’s grace, freely given to mankind in Jesus Christ, is essential to the Gospel message, attested throughout the New Testament, most strongly in the Johannine and Pauline writings, although it is clearly there in the others, even the Jacobean epistle (Jas. 1:17-18).  This truth has always been there in the Catholic tradition but it was particularly covered up by the mud that had entered the Roman branch of that stream and so was in most need of being cleaned up.  Classical Protestantism cleaned the mud off of this truth.  Hyper-Protestantism, as an inevitable consequence of pitting Scripture and tradition against each other, (2) has formulized and crystalized it, raising the question of whether this truth was better off with mud on it in the living water of tradition or cleaned off but embedded in dead crystal.

 

Hyper-Protestantism goes beyond classical Protestantism’s objections to errors of Roman innovation and opposes itself to the Catholic tradition claiming to be standing for Scripture in doing so.  Ironically what the meme that inspired this essay asserts about the BCP, that everything in it is either taken from Scripture directly or can be proven from Scripture, can for the most part be said about the Catholic tradition.  The errors of Roman innovation are not part of the Catholic tradition.  They have not been held everywhere, in all the ancient Churches, since the Apostolic era but are distinct to the Roman Church and, except for the Roman distinctions that contributed to the Schism, are post-Schism in origin.  The doctrine of Purgatory, for example, is a Roman distinctive.  The Eastern Church has never taught it and refused to ratify the Second Council of Lyon (1274) and the Council of Florence (1431-1449) both of which had healing the Schism as their purpose, in part because of the affirmation of Purgatory by these councils which are wrongly considered to be ecumenical by Rome and which are the occasions by which this innovation became official Roman dogma.  Protestant objections to Purgatory, therefore, are to a Roman innovation, and not to something that belongs to Catholic tradition.  Hyper-Protestant opposition to iconography, by contrast, opposes something that genuinely belongs to the Catholic tradition.  Iconoclasm had been condemned by the Second Council of Nicaea despite its having been promoted by a series of Byzantine Emperors and a pro-iconoclasm council (Hieria in 754) convened under their sponsorship.  This council was held in 787, prior to the Schism, and was received by the entire Church, East and West, as the seventh ecumenical council.  It is therefore a genuine part of the Catholic tradition.  The Hyper-Protestants say this doesn’t matter and that icons are idols condemned by the Second Commandment.  If the Second Commandment means what the Hyper-Protestants claim it means, however, then it also condemns the Ark of the Covenant that God commanded to be made shortly after giving the Ten Commandments, the tablets of which were to be kept in said Ark.  The distinction between what violates the Second Commandment and what does not is made in the Old Testament by the account of the brass serpent of Moses.  In the twenty-first chapter of Numbers, the Israelites, after grumbling against God and Moses for the umpteenth time, were smitten with a plague of fiery serpents that poisoned them with their bite.  Moses intervened for them, God told him to make a brass serpent and put it on a pole, and everyone who looked at it would be healed.  From the New Testament we know that this was a type of Christ (Jn. 3:14-15).  While this involved making an image of something “in the earth beneath” it did not violate the Second Commandment.  This is because the purpose in making it was not to make a “god” to be worshipped.  When, centuries later, the Israelites did start worshipping it as a “god” it then became an idol in violation of the Second Commandment and King Hezekiah ordered it destroyed (2 Kings 18:4).  The lesson from this is that the making of likenesses is not itself a violation of the Second Commandment without the intent to treat such likenesses as gods.  The Scriptures, therefore, clearly do not support the Hyper-Protestant understanding of the Second Commandment.  This is the closest that Hyper-Protestantism comes to finding something in the Catholic tradition that is in violation of Scripture.  Most often it operates on the obviously fallacious assumption that something that is not commanded in Scripture is therefore in violation of it.  It treats prayers for the dead, for example, as being in violation of Scripture even though they are nowhere prohibited in it and the parenthetical part of 2 Tim. 1:16-18 is probably an example of it.  In some cases it treats parts of the Catholic tradition that are clearly taken from the Scriptures as being in violation of the Scriptures.  This is most obvious with matters pertaining to the Virgin Mary.  The words of the Ave Maria come directly from the first chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke (vv. 28, 42), in which she is also called “the mother of my Lord” (v. 43) which is obviously the equivalent of Theotokos/Mother of God which cannot be rejected without being guilty of the Christological heresy of Nestorianism.  Even the title Regina Coeli comes from the Bible.  I’m not talking about the pagan practice condemned in Jeremiah 7, but the first verse of Revelation 12.  No argument that the woman in Revelation 12 is not Mary can withstand scrutiny.  The woman gives birth to Jesus and so is obviously Mary. (3)   While the Church of Rome has undeniably taken things way too far with regards to the Blessed Virgin, confusing the entire Catholic tradition of Mariology with Mariolatry as Hyper-Protestants tend to do, is not the answer. (4)  Nor, to conclude this point, do these matters which Hyper-Protestants often seem to object to in the Catholic tradition more than they do the Roman innovations that classical Protestantism objected to, comprise more than a fraction of the Catholic tradition.  Most of the traditional Catholic liturgy, Eastern or Western, is taken directly from the Bible, as is the traditional faith confessed in the ancient Creeds, and the traditional episcopal form of Church polity.

 

That is only to be expected.  The written Word of God comes to us via the route of having been passed down in the Church from generation to generation and so is itself a tradition rather than a something-other-than-tradition to be set against tradition.  Since it is the Word of God it is infallible and therefore the yardstick against which everything else in the tradition is to be measured but this should not be done in the hostile-to-tradition manner of Hyper-Protestantism.  Our attitude should be that what is in the Catholic, not merely Roman but genuinely Catholic in the Vicentian sense, (5) tradition is wholesome, good, and true unless disproven by the Scriptures, rather than that is suspect until proven by them.

 

(1)   John Calvins’s magnus opus was the Institutes of Christian Religion, the first edition of which was published in 1536.  His own account of this work was that it began as a type of catechism based on the Apostles’ Creed.  The Apostle’s Creed, however, like the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, consists of twelve articles arranged in three sections, in accordance with the Persons of the Trinity.  Calvin’s Institutes consist of four books, the subjects of which correspond to those of Peter Lombard’s four books of Sentences.  Lombard’s Sentences were one of the most important texts in Medieval Scholasticism because from Alexander of Hales in the thirteenth century onward they were the text books used for dogmatics or systematic theology in the universities and writing a commentary on them was a requirement of graduation.  Dogmatic theology as a discipline has largely followed the Sentences in its structure, is organization and classification of topics, ever since.  Calvin in his Institutes, which quote Lombard over a hundred times albeit often in a hostile manner, was no exception and it is perhaps more significant in his case because like Tertullian his training had been in law.  It is also worthy of noting that his explanation of the Atonement takes the satisfaction model of the other father of Scholasticism, St. Anselm of Canterbury to the next stage of development beyond that of St. Thomas Aquinas.  Calvin’s Hyper-Protestant fan club will, of course, say that he found his explanation of the Atonement in the pages of Scripture and it can certainly be supported from the Scriptures.  So, however, can the classical and Patristic model with which the Eastern Church has explained the Atonement since the first millennium and which Gustaf Aulén who named it the Christus Victor model argued was Dr. Luther’s.  Indeed, the easiest model of Atonement to prove from the Scriptures, provided one doesn’t press the metaphor on the point of to whom the payment is made, is probably Origen’s ransom model.  Obviously John Calvin got his understanding of the Atonement from the New Testament, and just as obviously he did not get it by reading the New Testament for himself for the first time without ever having received any prior teaching.  Regardless of to what extent he was willing to acknowledge it himself his understanding of the New Testament on the Atonement was heavily influenced by St. Anselm and St. Thomas.  Even the doctrine of predestination with which his name is permanently associated shows the influence of a tradition of interpreting St. Paul that flows from St. Augustine through Peter Lombard and St. Thomas Aquinas.

(2)  The title essay in Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962) and the essay in the same volume entitled “The Tower of Babel” are essential reading if one wishes to understand why this consequence is inevitable even though Oakeshott was writing from the perspective of political philosophy rather than theology.  The principle is the same.  Traditions, Oakeshott explained, are living and include both the kind of information that can be summarized and put down on paper as a formula and the kind of information that cannot.  Rationalism, treats the second kind of information as unimportant and discards it, taking the first kind of information and formulizing it.  So crystalized, this information which had been part of something living in the tradition, becomes a dead ideology.  The discarded type of information is not unimportant at all.  The difference is the same as that between someone who prepares a meal with nothing but the instructions in a recipe book to go by and someone who prepares the same meal after having been taught how to do it by a master chef. Hyper-Protestantism is this same approach that Oakeshott calls rationalism applied to the Christian tradition.  It separate the Scriptures, the living Word of God, from the living tradition of the Christian Church.  Then it takes the truths it wishes to emphasize from the Scriptures and formulizes them.  Think about the difference between the ancient Creeds and the Protestant Confessions.  The Creeds are as alive as the tradition to which they belong.  They contain the basic Christian faith and when they are liturgically recited in the Church the “I believe” of each individual member joins with that of each other, and with those of Christians past and yet to come, to form the collective “we believe” of Christ’s Church.  The Protestant Confessions, by contrast, are longer, contain secondary and tertiary doctrines as well as the basic faith, and express them in the form of a numbered list that gives the impression that one is supposed to go through it checking each item off.  Now consider the significance of this for the truth of the freeness of salvation.  The Protestant Confessions each express this truth clearly but contradict it by their checklist format.  The ancient Creeds don’t articulate it per se, but neither do they in any way, by direct expression or by format, contradict it, and this truth is implicit in what is confessed about Jesus Christ in the Creeds.

(3)  Since Revelation is a highly symbolic book she is also more than Mary, or rather Mary as the symbol or representative of something else.  That she is Mary as the second Eve, the fulfilment of the prophecy of Genesis 3:15 in which “the woman” is both Eve and Mary, is clear from the entire chapter in which her nemesis is the dragon, “that old serpent.”  The imagery of the first and last verses would suggest that Mary, the New Eve, appears as the symbolic representative of the people of God.  The imagery of the first verse is that of Joseph’s dream, indicating Israel, and that of the last verse, is of the Church which has “the testimony of Jesus Christ.”

(4)  It also conflicts with the high Mariology of most of the Protestant Reformers.

(5) “Now in the Catholic Church itself we take the greatest care to hold that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all. That is truly and properly 'Catholic,' as is shown by the very force and meaning of the word, which comprehends everything almost universally. We shall hold to this rule if we follow universality, antiquity, and consent.” – St. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium, 2.6.