Christianity - Faith, Tradition, and Religion

 

This week began with the first Sunday in Advent for the part of the world that uses the Gregorian as its civil calendar.   This is the first day in the new ecclesiastical or liturgical year.   The Old Testament reading assigned to Morning Prayer for that day in the revised Table of Lessons (1922) in the Book of Common Prayer is Isaiah 1:1-20.   The older Table of Lessons in the Restoration Book of Common Prayer, which used civil calendar dates rather than liturgical calendar dates, assigned the same reading to Evening Prayer for the eighteenth of November.   Both lectionaries, however, follow the ancient tradition of reading Isaiah in the weeks leading up to Christmas.   The tradition seems appropriate.  The prophecy of the event commemorated on Christmas, the Virgin Birth, and of its theological significance, the Incarnation of God is found in Isaiah (7:14).   This is the book from which Jesus read when He announced in the synagogue of Nazareth at the beginning of His ministry that He was the fulfilment of Messianic prophecy (Luke 4:16-30).   It is full of Messianic prophecy, so much so that it is often called the Fifth Gospel, and is the prophetic book most often quoted in the New Testament.

 

There is an important lesson in this first reading from the Book of Isaiah with regards to a subject that always comes up this time of year.   It begins with a general introduction to the prophecies that follow - that it is the record of the vision given to Isaiah, son of Amoz, concerning the Kingdom of Judah and its capital of Jerusalem, in the days of Uzziah, Johtham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, that is to say, as the Babylonian Captivity that would sweep away the Southern Kingdom was rapidly approaching.   Towards the end of the reading is a plea for repentance (vv. 16-17) followed by this well-known offer of cleansing and forgiveness:

 

Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. (v. 18)

 

Leading up to this is the LORD’s complaint against Judah – they are His children who have rebelled against Him (v. 2), who do not know Him (v. 3), a sinful and corrupt nation of evildoers (v. 4), who have brought upon themselves sickness and desolation (vv. 5-8), comparable to Sodom and Gomorrah (vv 9-10).  Between these complaints and the plea for repentance is the following:

 

To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the LORD: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams , and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats.   When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts?   Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.   Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them.  And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood. (vv.11-15).

 

The religious observances here decried are those instituted by God Himself for Israel in the Mosaic Covenant, commonly called the Law.   Although the idolatry that would shortly bring down the Northern Kingdom – the prophesy of the Virgin Birth was given to Ahaz in the context of telling him that the confederacy between the Syrians and the Northern Kingdom against Judah would fail because these were both about to be conquered by Assyria– would also play a role in Judah’s fall to Babylon, that is not what is in view here.   The point here is that the external, ceremonial, and ritual elements of the very religion that God Himself instituted for Israel are repugnant to God in the absence of righteousness.

 

Lest this be misunderstood, let me make it clear that under the Old Covenant as much as under the New, righteousness in the eyes of God was not something obtained by keeping the Moral law perfectly without ever sinning, which only Jesus Christ ever did (and in His case it was not that He was righteous because He kept the Law but rather He kept the Law because He was righteous) but by humbling oneself before God, acknowledging one’s sin and wrong-doing, and trusting God to fulfil His Promises.   It was Moses, not St. Paul, who first declared that when Abraham believed God, God “counted it to him for righteousness” (Gen. 15:6) and it was Habakkuk who first declared “the just shall live by faith” (Hab. 2:4).   That God Himself cleans those who humble themselves, confess their sins, and trust Him is not only the teaching of the passage in question – consider the eighteenth verse quoted above again (1) – but of the penitential fifty-first Psalm, written by David after Nathan had rebuked him over his sin with Bathsheba.   The themes of this Psalm are closely parallel to those of this passage at the beginning of Isaiah. The Psalmist pleads with God for mercy, (v. 1) and for God to cleanse Him from his sin and iniquity (vv. 2, 7, 9, 10, 14), while confessing his sin (vv. 3-5).   God does not want ritual sacrifice from one with an uncleansed heart (v. 16), the sacrifice God does accept is humility – “a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart”- (v. 17), only after which will God be pleased with ceremonial sacrifice (v. 19).

 

Now, in the light of this passage from Isaiah, let us consider another passage from the Gospel according to St. Matthew.   The first nine verses of the fifteenth chapter of this Gospel tell of an interaction between the Lord Jesus Christ and the scribes and the Pharisees.   The latter ask the Lord why His disciples “transgress the tradition of the elders” because “they wash not their hands when they eat bread” (this is in reference to a ritual washing, not handwashing for the sake of hygiene).   The Lord turns the question on them by asking “Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?”   He goes on to explain that the commandment He refers to is “Honour thy father and mother” – He also makes reference to a similar commandment “He that curseth father or mother, let him die the death”.   The way the Pharisees transgressed this by their tradition, He went on to explain, was by declaring the money that should have gone to supporting their parents – that the support of elderly parents is in view here is implicit – to be a gift:

 

But ye say, Whosoever shall say to his father or his mother, It is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightiest be profited by me; And honour not his father or his mother, he shall be free.   Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition. (vv. 5-6).  

 

This same account can also be found in the seventh chapter of the Gospel according to St. Mark.   This Gospel provides more details that make this interaction a bit clearer.   It specifies that the commandment was evaded by designating the money for parental support as “Corban, that is to say, a gift” which lets us know that a gift to the Temple was in mind here.   Corban is the Latinized spelling (2) of a Hebrew word that was originally used for sacrifices and offerings in the books of Leviticus and Numbers in the Old Testament Law, but which by the time of the New Testament was more often used in the sense of “vow”.   This is how it is used in the passage in question – a vow designating a portion of one’s income as a gift to the Temple treasury.

 

As with our passage from Isaiah, what is rebuked here is the misuse of the Ceremonial Law to excuse disobedience to the Moral Law.   The commandment to “honour thy father and thy mother” is one of the famous Ten given by God to Moses at Mt. Sinai in the twentieth chapter of Exodus and repeated in Moses’ exhortation to the people on the border of the Promised Land in the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy.   The Corban tradition was an interpretive spin on the Ceremonial Law as it pertained to gifts and offerings to the Tabernacle/Temple that seems to have twisted the latter almost beyond recognition.   Nevertheless, the theme of the first chapter of Isaiah, that divinely established external ceremony and ritual are without value when used as substitutes for righteousness clearly comes across here as well, as it does in most if not all of Jesus’ interactions with the Pharisees.   

 

The Lord speaking through Isaiah rebukes the Kingdom of Judah for practicing the Ceremonial Law that He Himself had given them while living in rebellion against His Moral Law.   In the Gospels of SS Matthew and Mark He rebukes the Pharisees for using part of their traditional interpretation of the Ceremonial Law to annul a Commandment of the Moral Law.   To take the Lord’s words from the Gospel accounts, as many do around this time of year and again in spring as Easter approaches, as an indictment of the Church for establishing festivals like Christmas and Easter in honour of Christ rather than keeping the feasts given by God to the nation Israel in the Old Testament, is to pervert His meaning entirely

 

I encounter people who pervert His meaning in just this way every time Christmas and Easter approach.   The reference to “tradition” in Christ’s words is taken as condemnatory of tradition in general.   It is no such thing, however.   Tradition is derived from traditus – the passive, perfect participle of the Latin verb trado.   Trado means “I hand across, I give over”, traditus therefore means “having been handed across, having been given over”, and its derivative “tradition” simply means that which has been handed down to us by those who have preceded us, often with the implication that it is held by us in trust to be handed down to those who come after.   While bad things can be passed down as well as good, tradition itself is a good thing.   St. Paul tells the Thessalonian Church: “Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle” (II Thess. 2:15).   While he does not use the word “tradition” in I Corinthians 15, when he says “For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how 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” (1 Cor. 15:3-4) he clearly speaks of the Gospel itself in terms that denote a tradition – something that he had received himself, and had passed on to them.   Those who set Scripture and tradition in opposition to each other, fail to observe that the Scriptures, the Bible in its entirety, are themselves a tradition.   We have the Bible today because the believers who went before us passed it down to us faithfully through multiple generations.

 

The sort of people who dismiss Christmas and Easter as “man-made traditions” also have a tendency to get hung up on another word – “religion”.    Some of these claim that Christianity is something other than a religion.   Others say that Christianity is a religion and that this is what is wrong with it because Jesus Christ did not intend to found a religion.   Either way, the meaning of the word “religion” has to be tortured to arrive at these ludicrous positions.

 

Christianity is first and foremost a faith.   While other religions are also called faiths, this word is most appropriate for Christianity because Christianity places the sort of emphasis on belief that other religions place on doing.   Central to Christianity is its message about Who Jesus Christ is and what He has done.   As Christianity’s kerygma – the Christian message proclaimed to the world – it is called the Gospel, literally meaning “Good News”, a message to be believed.   As a personal/communal confession of faith it is called the Creed, from the Latin word credo – “I believe” (in the early centuries of Christianity when Greek was still the predominant language spoken by Christians these were called “symbols” or “rules of faith”).   The shortest version of the Creed, the Apostles’, consists of twelve articles.   By contrast, the closest thing to a Creed in Judaism, the religion nearest of kin to Christianity, is the Shema Yisrael, a single article: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD”.   Similarly, the closest equivalent to the Creed in Islam is the Shahada, the first of the five pillars and the only one that pertains to belief rather than practice, which is a lot like the Shema Yisrael:  “There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet”.

 

The emphasis on faith/believing over doing in Christianity comes straight out of the New Testament.   It is particularly prominent in the Fourth Gospel and in the Pauline corpus.   This elevating of believing over doing, does not render doing unimportant.   Every time St. Paul talks about how faith rather than works is the means of receiving the freely given grace (favour) of God in Jesus Christ, he also talks about the importance of good works.   The second chapter of Ephesians is a good example of this because here the verse proclaiming the believer to be God’s “workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works”, (v. 10) immediately follows the proclamation of salvation as a free gift by grace through faith (vv. 8-9).   Similar passages can be found in Romans and Galatians where the discussion of salvation by grace through faith is much more extended.   The most well-known passage in the New Testament stressing the importance of works is that which occurs in the second chapter of the epistle of St. James (vv. 14 to the end).   At the end of the first chapter of this same epistle the word religion appears.   This is the only time this word is used in the New Testament except in reference to Judaism as St. Paul uses it in the first chapter of Galatians.   The Jacobean passage does not disparage religion, the way the people I have been talking about do, but it does re-iterate the point of the passages from Isaiah and the Gospels discussed above that moral doing takes precedence over ceremonial doing.    Here is the passage:

 

If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man’s religion is vain.   Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world. (vv. 26-27).

 

So in the Christianity that the New Testament teaches, believing comes before doing, and moral doing comes before ceremonial doing.   Does that mean that New Testament Christianity is something other than a religion?

 

Not at all.  A comparison of everything established by Jesus Christ for the New Covenant with everything established by God for Israel in the Old Covenant easily demonstrates that the Christianity of the New Testament is a religion, even if that term is used sparingly in the New Testament.

 

Under the Old Covenant, there was an external sign marking one as belonging to God’s people.   Note that in the Old Testament, the concept of “God’s people” was that of a literal, ethnic, nation into which God had entered into Covenant agreement, He to be their God, they to be His people.   The external sign of membership in this nation was circumcision.   This was established in the seventeenth chapter of Genesis.  The previous chapter had seen Abram, who had been promised in his old age that his seed would be as numerous as the stars (15:4-5), sire Ishmael with his wife’s handmaid Hagar.   In the seventeenth chapter, The LORD appears to Abram, tells him that “thou shalt be a father of many nations” (v. 4), changes his name to Abraham because “a father of many nations have I made thee” (v. 5) and then promises that He will give Abraham’s seed the land of Canaan (v. 8) and that as “a token of the covenant betwixt me and you”, (v.  11) Abraham was to circumcise his own foreskin, and that the male children born into Abraham’s house were to be circumcised, (vv. 10, 12-13) and that “the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken his covenant” (v. 14).   Immediately after this God promised the birth of Isaac as the heir of the promise and covenant by Abraham’s wife, whose name was then changed from Sarai to Sarah (vv. 15-21).   Note how the external sign, that would mark the one nation that was to be formed as the people of the Old Covenant, was given in the context of the promise that Abraham would become the father of many nations.

 

The New Covenant also has an external sign that marks one as belonging to God’s people under that Covenant.      Under the New Covenant, the concept of “God’s people” is radically different from that in the Old.   It is that of a strictly spiritual people (I Pet. 2:5-10) that would be assembled – the name given to it in Greek is ἐκκλησία the word for assembly – from people called out of every kindred, tribe, and nation, (Rev. 5: 9-10) united as heirs of the promise to Abraham, (Gal. 3:26-29) by faith like Abraham’s, (Gal. 3:6-9) in Abraham’s Seed (singular) Who is Jesus Christ (Gal. 3:16).   As different as this is from the Old Covenant concept, it was, as we saw above, foreseen in the very passages that promised Abraham that he would be a father of many nations, even as a specific Covenant nation was being formed.   The external sign marking one as belonging to this spiritual people of God – the Church – is baptism.   This was a ritual washing that symbolized cleansing from sin.   John the Baptist, the prophesied “voice of one crying in the wilderness” (Is. 40:3), administered baptism to those who came to hear him preach in the wilderness near the river Jordan, confessing and repenting of their sins.   Jesus Himself came and was baptized, and while John the Baptist objected to this on the grounds that it ought to be Jesus baptizing John - Jesus as the “Lamb of God Who taketh away the sin of the world” (Jn. 1:29) had no need of the repentance and cleansing signified by baptism Himself -Jesus said that it was necessary to “fulfill all righteousness”.   As He was baptized, the Holy Spirit descended upon Him like a dove, and the Father spoke from heaven (Matt. 5:16-17, Mk. 1:10-11, Lk. 3:21-22, Jn. 1:32-33)   After He had risen from the dead and prior to His Ascension He commanded His disciples to “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matt. 28:19).

 

That baptism is to the New Covenant what circumcision was to the Old was made plain by St. Paul in his epistle to the Colossians.   In his epistle to the Romans St. Paul had distinguished between external circumcision and Jewishness, and internal circumcision and Jewishness (Rom. 2:28-29), which is another way of making the point discussed above from Isaiah and the Gospels – and which is found in many other places in the Bible – that external religion is an empty shell in the absence of the righteousness of faith.    In the second chapter of his epistle to the Colossians he again mentions a non-literal circumcision by saying that in Christ “ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ:” (v. 11) immediately after which – it is still the same sentence – he says “Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead.” (v. 12).   This interpretation of the significance of baptism – the believer’s union with Jesus Christ, and specifically with His death, burial, and Resurrection – is distinctly Pauline, having been discussed at greater length in the sixth chapter of Romans.   There is no contradiction between this and the interpretation elsewhere in the New Testament that it signifies cleansing from sin – it is through the Gospel events of His death, burial, and Resurrection that Jesus Christ cleanses us from sin.   The important point for our discussion here is that since St. Paul in Colossians then goes on to link the union with Christ in His Resurrection in baptism with having been “quickened” from the state of being “dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh” (v. 13) this entire passage is an equation of baptism with "the circumcision of Christ".

 

Now it ought to go without saying that if baptism is to the New Covenant what circumcision was to the Old then what St. Paul asserted regarding circumcision is also true of baptism - the outward ritual alone does not unite one to Christ spiritually in the absence of inner faith.   The flip-side to this - that faith effects union with Christ even in the absence of external baptism is the obvious implication of Mark 16:16.    Nevertheless, this comparison demonstrates that like the Jewish religion of the Old Testament, New Testament Christianity has an outward ritual that marks one as belonging to the Christian covenant people of God.   This is hardly consistent with the claim that New Testament Christianity is not a religion.

 

The details of the religion given to Israel at Mt. Sinai are outlined in the book of Exodus, and then provided at greater length in the book of Leviticus.   The sacrificial system of Israel in particular is dealt with at great length in Leviticus which is named after the tribe whose priestly duty it was to offer the sacrifices.    This system was the central element of the ceremonial and worship aspect of the Law.    By contrast with circumcision, which took place only once in a Jewish male's life - it could not be repeated even if someone actually wanted a second one - the sacrifices and offerings were an everyday occurrence.   It was a complex system.   There were daily sacrifices that the priests had to make every morning and afternoon.   There were sacrifices that had to be made on set days every year – the most important being those of the Day of Atonement.   Then there were the sacrificial offerings that Israelites were told to bring under specific circumstances.   Some offerings signified thankfulness and praise, others were brought on occasions of sin, guilt or ritual uncleanness.   Provision was made for less expensive offerings for Israelites of lesser means.   While most of the sacrifices involved the offering of animals - bulls, rams, goats, lambs, doves, pigeons, depending upon the economic status of the offeror, these usually had to be male and always had to be without blemish - there were also grain offerings and drink offerings.   The former could be of unbaked flour, olive oil, and frankincense, or of the flour and oil baked into unleavened cakes of bread, or in some cases unground grain.   The drink offerings or libations were part of the shorter account of the Law in Exodus and are mentioned in Leviticus in connection with the sacrifices on set days but the fuller explanation is given in the book of Numbers.   These involved specified amounts of wine that were offered in connection with the other offerings by being poured on the altar.

 

In the New Testament Jesus Christ is presented as the fulfilment of this entire system.   In the epistle to the Hebrews, St. Paul (3) explains at great length how the offering of the blood of animals signified the death of Jesus Christ on the Cross Who through the offering of His body and blood accomplished what animal sacrifice could only point towards - the removal of the guilt of sin that comes between man and God.    He also makes it plain that the death of Jesus Christ terminated the sacrificial system - "there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins" (10:26).    In each of the Synoptic Gospels, however, we find Jesus, at the Last Supper - a Passover Seder - immediately prior to His arrest, trial, and Crucifixion, establishing a second ritual for His disciples under the New Covenant.   He took the unleavened bread of the Passover, gave thanks, and broke it, then distributed it to the Apostles telling them to eat it, saying "This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me" (Lk. 22:19).   He then took the cup of Passover wine - there were four of these by Jewish tradition and the wording in St. Luke's Gospel  suggests that this was the third cup (4) - and told the Apostles to drink of it, saying that "This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you" (Lk. 22:20).   This was the institution of the Sacrament that is variously called the Lord's Supper, Holy Communion, and the Eucharist (this is the Greek word for "thanksgiving").

 

In the Sacrament the body and blood of the Final Sacrifice is given to the faithful as a meal to sustain their spiritual life in the only manner in which such a Sacrifice, the voluntary Sacrifice of Himself by the Man Who is God, could be so offered without being utterly repugnant, that is, through the means of representative elements taken from the non-bloody sacrifices – bread and wine.    That the Sacrament is intended to take the place in the Christian religion that the Levitical sacrifices occupied in the Old Testament religion of the Jews is therefore so blatantly obvious on the face of it that a passage like Colossians 2:11-13 is hardly needed to establish the point.   In the book of Acts we find that the first Church in Jerusalem celebrated this Sacrament, to which the “breaking bread” mentioned at the end of the second chapter refers, on a daily basis.

 

That Jesus Christ in establishing the New Covenant instituted a new external mark of membership in Baptism in the place of Circumcision, and the Sacrament of Holy Communion which looks back to His Crucifixion in the place of the Old Covenant sacrifices that looked forward to it, makes it quite evident that those who sneer at the word “religion”, say that Jesus Christ did not found a religion, and that New Testament Christianity as opposed to the Christianity of the Church of the last two millennia was not a religion, simply do not know what they are talking about.   

 

In my next essay I intend, Lord willing, to show just how nonsensical are the arguments these people make against Christmas specifically.    I will conclude this essay by explaining why the fact that the New Testament does not prescribe a sacred calendar of holy days and feast days to correspond to that established for the Israelites in the Old Covenant does not translate into a prohibition forbidding the Christian Church from doing so.

 

As we saw above, one of the biggest differences between the Old Testament religion and New Testament Christianity, was that the Old Testament religion was given to a specific people in the literal sense of a nation, whose cultural and ethnic identity was largely shaped by that religion, but Christianity was given to all peoples, establishing the Church which was a people only in a spiritual sense, and which was to include members from every tribe and nation.   The Old Testament contained elements that were universal.   It repeatedly declares the God of Israel to be the One, True and Living God, Who is the Creator of the entire world and Ruler of the entire world.   The part of the Mosaic Covenant that is called the Moral Law consists of prohibitions against acts that are mala in se (bad in themselves) either because they harm other people (murder, theft and adultery, for example) or because they fail to give God the honour due Him as the One, True and Living God, Creator and Ruler of the entire world (idolatry, for example, places the creations of man’s own hands, which have mouths, eyes, ears, noses, hands and feet but cannot speak, see, smell, handle or walk, in God’s place).   This is universal in the sense that the acts prohibited, being wrong in themselves, are wrong for everybody.   These elements are reintroduced, often in amplified form, under the New Covenant.    The part of the Old Covenant that is called the Ceremonial Law, however, the calendar of feasts and holy days, the dietary restrictions, and the entire Tabernacle/Temple system of sacrifice and worship was particular.  Its purpose was to shape Israel’s national identity so as to keep the nation holy – separate and distinct – from the other nations that surrounded them.   This purpose was subservient to that of the universal elements of the Old Covenant.   Israel was to be holy, in the sense of being separate and distinct from the nations around it, to help keep it from falling into the idolatry and immoral ways of those nations.    Note how this point underlies the rebukes from Isaiah and the Lord Jesus discussed at the beginning of this essay.   The Old Testament itself testified to the fact that it was not itself the ultimate answer to the problems of sin and idolatry.    It promised that one day God would establish a New Covenant in which all the nations of the world would unite with Israel in the worship of the One True and Living God.

 

Jesus Christ fulfilled that promise by establishing the New Covenant when He offered Himself up as the Final True Atoning Sacrifice on the Cross and rose from the grave as Triumphant Victor over all the spiritual foes of mankind – sin and the devil, death and hell.   When the Apostolic Church met in Jerusalem to decide the controversy over whether Gentile converts to Christianity had to become Jews (be circumcised and told to keep the Mosaic Law) in order to become Christians, they ruled in the negative.   They told the Gentile converts to abstain from idolatry and fornication, instructions taken from the aforementioned universal elements of the Old Covenant.   They also told them to abstain from meat that had been strangled or contained blood, instructions that look back to the Covenant which God made with all mankind through Noah in Genesis that predated the Mosaic Covenant and are thus universal in a slightly different sense.    

 

The ruling of the Apostolic Council did not make the controversy go away – St. Paul dealt with it again and again in his epistles, defending the Apostolic position and providing a theological foundation for it in terms of Christian unity (Eph. 2:11-22), liberty, (Gal. 4:1-5:3) and both (Col. 2:16-17).   That Christian liberty meant that Christians were not obligated to keep the Ceremonial Law is what is emphasized in the Pauline epistles.   That it also meant that they were free to do so – at least until they were prevented from doing so by unbelieving Jewish leaders – is evident by St. Paul’s own example in the book of Acts.   In his missionary journeys, he would go to the synagogues to proclaim the Gospel first.   When driven out of the synagogues he would preach to the Gentiles in the market, the Areopagus in Athens, or whatever place was available to him.   In Jerusalem, he like the other Apostles continued to go to the Temple until a mob was stirred up against him by unbelieving Jews from Asia Minor (Acts 20:27-30) leading to his arrest.

 

Christian liberty also means that the Christian Church, in which Jewish and Gentile Christian believers are united, is free as a collective body to make new, distinctly Christian, holy days and festivals.   Those against whom I have been arguing in this essay might dispute this on the grounds of what is called the “regulative principle of worship”, i.e., the idea that Christians are only to observe and practice what is explicitly enjoined upon them in Scripture.   Ironically, the chief theological work of the man who came up with this principle is entitled The Institutes of the Christian Religion.  (5)  It is a principle that would condemn Jesus Christ and His Apostles.   If you think otherwise, show me from the Old Testament where Israelites were commanded to meet and worship in synagogues. (6)

 

In the twentieth chapter of the book of Acts, St. Luke says that the disciples “came together to break bread” on the “first day of the week”, i.e., Sunday.    There is no prescriptive commandment to do this in the New Testament, only this descriptive account of the custom.   The reason for it is not explained, although it can be reasonably deduced.   St. Luke’s extended account of the Sunday service at Troas, in which St. Paul delivers an extremely long sermon, putting Eutychus to sleep and causing him to fall out of a window, would suggest that apart from the inclusion of the Eucharist, the service was modelled after a synagogue service.   Indeed, the portion of traditional Christian liturgical services that includes Scriptural readings, the singing of Psalms, and preaching/teaching is an adaptation of the synagogue model.   The Jewish synagogues met to worship on the Sabbath, which is the seventh day of the week, or Saturday (more precisely, Friday evening to Saturday evening).   There are both practical and theological reasons for the Church meeting on the following day instead.   The theological reason is that this is the day Jesus Christ rose from the dead – hence its having been dubbed “The Lord’s Day” (Rev. 1:10).   The practical reason is that St. Paul’s practice mentioned above, of going to the synagogues in the cities he visited to preach the Gospel until he was kicked out of them, necessitated a different day for the distinctly Christian assembly – the Church – to meet.   That the Church early adopted the practice of meeting on Sunday is also implied by St. Paul’s instruction to the Corinthian Church to take up a collection on that day (I Cor. 16:2).   Clearly the Church in the days of the book of Acts, when led by the Apostles themselves, like the majority of Christians over the two thousand years that followed, held to the “normative principle” – that Christians are free to observe and practice in their worship, whatever is not prohibited them in Scriptures, which principle is manifestly more consistent with the concept of Christian liberty than the “regulative principle”.

 

 (1)  Note also the prophet’s personal experience of this in the sixth chapter, verses 5-7.

(2)   “Corban”, the spelling in the English Bible, is the Latinized transliteration.   The Greek New Testament contains Κορβᾶν, which is, of course, the same Hebrew word spelled out in Greek letters.

(3)   The Pauline authorship of Hebrews is evident in the style of the epistle – note both the structure of the argument and the closing exhortation/salutation – and in the few details about the author given – he was in Italy and had been in bonds (13:24, 10:34, and was a companion of Timothy 13:23).   Hebrews is also the only epistle in the canonical New Testament to which St. Peter could have been alluding when he referred to a Scriptural letter written by St. Paul to the same people to whom he was writing (II Pet. 3:15-16)

(4)   It is interesting that the only one of the Evangelists to allude to such details from the Jewish tradition was the only Gentile of the four.

(5)   This has nothing to do with what I have been arguing in this essay, but in my opinion John Calvin’s most valuable writings are his Commentaries not his Institutes.

(6)   You will find no such commandment.   Synagogues – this is a Greek word that is similar in its basic, non-religious, meaning to that of the Greek word for Church – were likely established before the last book of the Old Testament was written.   Historians generally believe that they originated out of the necessity generated by the destruction of the First Temple at the time of the Babylonian Captivity and the reforms instituted in and following the return in the Ezra-Nehemiah period, but this is not recorded, let alone commanded by God, in the canonical Old Testament.   This is but one of many examples of practices in the tradition of Second Temple Judaism that had no Scriptural ordinance behind them that Jesus and His Apostles nevertheless kept – see the clause to which the fourth note above is a comment for another such example.

Manifestation and Adoration

The Christmas story as we know it comes from two of the canonical Gospels, that of St. Matthew and that of St. Luke.   St. Mark’s Gospel begins with the event which the Eastern Church makes the focus of Epiphany, the Baptism of Christ.   The Fourth Evangelist begins his Gospel with a theological prologue that includes a plain statement of the significance of the Nativity – “and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” – but the narrative portion the Gospel that follows this prologue also begins with the Baptism, or, to be more precise, with John the Baptist pointing Jesus out to His first disciples and relating to them the events of the Baptism, the day after it had occurred.    To get the full Christmas story we need the Gospels of both SS Matthew and Luke, because, although the main participants are the same – the baby Jesus, His Virgin Mother Mary, and her betrothed husband Joseph – as is the location, David’s city of Bethlehem, each Evangelist tells a different party of the story.   For example, whereas St. Luke tells of the Annunciation by Gabriel to the Virgin Mary, it is St. Matthew who tells of the angel visiting Joseph.

 

It is St. Matthew who gives the account of the Adoration of the Magi, which is the principle event commemorated by the Western Church on Epiphany (1).   St. Luke, by contrast, tells of the Adoration of the shepherds.   This is rather interesting due to the difference between the two Evangelists. 

 

St. Luke was a Greek physician who was an associate of St. Paul’s in his missionary journeys.   He is the only Gentile Evangelist, (2) indeed, the only Gentile writer to contribute to the New Testament, or for that matter the whole of canonical Scripture except the portion of Daniel that is told in the first person by King Nebuchadnezzar. (3)   St. Matthew, who was also called Levi, was Jewish.   His Gospel continuously references the Old Testament and presents events in the life of Christ as the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy.   Indeed, after the very Jewish genealogy that he sticks at the beginning of his Gospel, he presents his account of Jesus in such a way that it evokes the story of Israel in the Old Testament (the angel visits Joseph, the namesake of the Old Testament figure noted for receiving revelation in dreams, in a dream, the Holy Family flee to Egypt to escape Herod as Israel fled to Egypt to escape famine, and then return as Israel returned).    If St. John’s purpose in writing his Gospel, as he himself stated it, was that his readers might come to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, and so receive everlasting life, St. Matthew’s purpose appears to have been to present Jesus as the fulfilment of the Jewish Scriptures, and, indeed, it is St. Matthew who records Jesus saying that He came not to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfil them.  

 

All of this makes the difference between St. Matthew’s account of the Nativity and St. Luke’s more striking.   It is St. Luke, the Gentile physician, writing a very Western, eyewitness based, account of the life of Christ, who provides us with all the most Jewish details of the Nativity and the events surrounding it.   St. Luke sticks the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary in the middle of his account of the conception and birth of John the Baptist, to St. Elizabeth, the cousin of the Virgin Mary, and wife of St. Zacharias, a priest serving in the Temple, an account which resembles in many details, Moses’ account of the conception and birth of Isaac to Abraham and Sarah.   St. Luke follows up his account of the Nativity itself, with an account of the fulfilment of the post-natal requirements of the Jewish faith, the Circumcision of Christ on the eighth day when He was given the name Jesus, and the Presentation in the Temple on the completion of His Mother’s purification period on the fortieth day.   The only details from the Roman world that make it into St. Luke’s account of all of this are who the Emperor and local officials were at the time, and the census ordered by Caesar Augustus that was the reason why the Holy Family made the trip to Bethlehem.     It is to St. Matthew, the Evangelist who emphasizes Jesus as the fulfilment of the Jewish Scriptures and their prophecy of a Messiah that we must turn to find an account of Gentiles who feature into the story in any way other than remote, background, details.

 

Although this is striking and interesting it is not counter intuitive.   For the Adoration of the Magi itself has long been understood by orthodox Christians to be the fulfilment of Messianic prophecy – specifically that of the sixtieth chapter of Isaiah.   The second last verse of the chapter immediately prior to this hand declared “And the Redeemer shall come to Zion, and unto them that turn from transgression in Jacob, saith the LORD.”     The sixtieth chapter begins with the following passage:

 

Arise, shine; for thy light is come, and the glory of the LORD is risen upon thee.  For, behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: but the LORD shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee.  And the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.   Lift up thine eyes round about, and see: all they gather themselves together, they come to thee: thy sons shall come from far, and thy daughters shall be nursed at thy side.  Then thou shalt see, and flow together, and thine heart shall fear, and be enlarged; because the abundance of the sea shall be converted unto thee, the forces of the Gentiles shall come unto thee.   The multitude of camels shall cover thee, the dromedaries of Midian and Ephah, all they from Sheba shall come; they shall bring gold and incense; and they shall show forth the praises of the LORD.   (vv 1-6)

 

It is not difficult to see why the Church has long seen a specific foreshadowing of the Adoration of the Magi in these verses, as well, of course, as the more general concept of the Gentiles coming to faith in the True and Living God.   The coming of Christ into the world is likened to a light shining in the darkness in the prologue to St. John’s Gospel, and the Adoration of the Magi was certainly a matter of the Gentiles coming to that light bringing gold and (frank)incense and myrrh.   The Isaiah passage, interestingly enough, is almost certainly the source of the tradition that identifies the Magi as kings.   While it would be reading too much into these verses to say that they prove this tradition conclusively, they should be sufficient to answer those who argue that because St. Matthew does not describe them as such in the second chapter of his Gospel, the tradition is therefore wrong.   St. Matthew describes them as magoi, the plural of magos, which, like its Latin equivalent magi, plural of magus, is borrowed from the ancient languages of what is now Iraq and Iran.    This word is rendered “wise men” in St. Matthew’s Gospel in the Authorized Bible, otherwise it is generally rendered “sorcerer”, being obviously the root of the English words magic and magician.   In the lands of its origin it was the designation of an ancient class or order, which was first and foremost priestly, but whose members studied philosophy, astrology, and medicine among other things.   The wise men of Babylon and Persia, depicted in the book of Daniel as advisers to the kings of those empires, were of this order and the Gospel account of the wise men following a star to the Holy Land to worship the newborn King of the Jews would suggest these were of that order as well.  (4)   If the tradition that says they were also the kings of the Isaiah passage is correct, they would therefore have been philosopher-kings.

 

While the Eastern and Western branches of the Church have developed different traditions concerning the Magi, there is a general consensus as to the significance of the event.   The Adoration of the Magi in St. Matthew’s Gospel is the complement of the Adoration of the Shepherds in St. Luke’s Gospel.   The Shepherds as representatives of the Jews and the Magi as representatives of the Gentiles both came to pay homage to Him Who came to be the Redeemer of the entire world and in Whose Church, Jew and Gentile would be united in one body of worshippers.   Or rather, to the put the emphasis where it belongs, in these events, Christ, as the fulfilment of the ancient promises of redemption, was made manifest to the Jews and Gentiles for the very first time.

 

 

This is the significance of the name of the day commemorating the event.  The term epiphany in colloquial use refers to a moment of realization or awareness.   “I had an epiphany” is the common expression.  Originally, however, as a Greek word it had the meaning of a manifestation or appearance.   While the two meanings are clearly related, the current vernacular meaning represents a shift in focus from that which is made manifest to the person who experiences the manifestation.   It is, of course, with the original meaning and perspective, that the term was first applied to the festival.   The Collect for today in the Book of Common Prayer begins with the words “O God, who by the leading of a star didst manifest thy only-begotten Son to the Gentiles” and, indeed, the BCP gives as an alternative name for the day “The Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles”.

 

The coming of Christ into the world two thousand years ago was a manifestation, as both Isaiah and St. John tell us, of a light shining in a darkness.   The darkness, St. John tells, us “comprehended it not”.  That is as true today as it was then.   St. John also tells us, however, that “as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name” and that too is just as true today.

 

May the light of Christ shine upon you and may you in faith receive Him this Epiphanytide.

(1)   The Eastern Church includes the Adoration of the Magi within Christmas proper, as artistic depictions of the Nativity tend to do.   In most of the Eastern Church, due to the difference in calendars, Christmas Eve falls on the same day that the Western Church celebrates Epiphany.   The Western Church makes the Adoration of the Magi the focus of Epiphany, which falls on the day after the Twelve days of Christmas.   The Baptism of the Lord, which the Eastern Church commemorates on Epiphany, is also associated with Epiphany in the West, as is the Wedding of Cana, but the Baptism is traditionally assigned a day later in the Octave of Epiphany. 

(2)   Some dispute that St. Luke was a Gentile, but they do not have a very strong case.   

(3)   The Book of Job, if written by the title character as has traditionally been believed, was not written by a descendant of Abraham but by one of his contemporaries.   This predates, however, the distinction between Hebrews/Jews and Gentiles and so demonstrating Job not to have been the former does not place him in the latter category.  

(4)   By the time the events of the book of Daniel and St. Matthew’s Gospel took place, these priests had adopted the religion of Zoroastrianism, founded by one of their own, Zoroaster, or to use his name in his own tongue, Zarathustra, not to be confused with the Nietzsche character by the same name.   It was from this religion that the heresiarch Mani borrowed the dualism that bears his name in the third century.

 

 

 

 

War and Peace: Part One

War is an act which comes naturally to man. We have fought wars since the dawn of time and will do so to the very end. It is in our blood, irresistibly calling us to take up arms and do battle with one another.

For as long as men have fought wars, men have talked about wars. Every nation that has recorded its history has given a prominent place in that history to the battles it has fought and won. The gallantry of soldiers has long been the subject matter of poets and songwriters. Centuries before Herodotus and Thucydides wrote their historical accounts of the Greco-Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, Homer had immortalized the heroes of the Trojan War in his epic poem The Illiad. The Hebrew Scriptures are also full of accounts of war: the book of Joshua tells of the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites after their wandering in the wilderness, the subsequent historical books tell of the wars the Israelites fought, first under the leadership of judges, then of their kings, against the invading forces of surrounding nations, and finally of how the ancient empires of Assyria and Babylon invaded and conquered the divided kingdom. When the book of Exodus tells of God’s miraculous intervention to rescue the Israelites from the pursuing armies of a vengeful Pharaoh, Israel’s response of praise to God is in the form of the song of Moses, which lauds Him as a military hero:

I will sing unto the LORD, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea. The LORD is my strength and song, and he is become my salvation: he is my God, and I will prepare him an habitation; my father's God, and I will exalt him. The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name. (Exodus 15:1-3, the song continues to verse 19)

What was true of ancient civilizations has been true of every society and every civilization since. Accounts of war continue to occupy a large amount of space in our history books. In the early 20th Century, the first World War inspired the verse of soldier-poets such as the British Rupert Brooke and our own Canadian John McCrae. If less poetry has been written about subsequent wars this is not because we have lost our fascination with war. It is because creative minds now tend to express that fascination through newer media.

War, however, has not been the only topic on the minds, tongues, and pens of our historians, poets, and other writers from time immemorial. For as long as men have been fighting wars, and thinking and talking about the wars we fight, we have also been thinking and talking about peace.

Plato’s last dialogue was The Laws, written around 360 BC. (1) In this dialogue an Athenian stranger joins a Cretan named Cleinias, and a Lacedaemonian named Megillus, on a pilgrimage from the Cretan capital of Knossos to the cave of Zeus. The Athenian stranger is unnamed but he behaves the way Socrates does in Plato’s other dialogues. (2) The dialogue begins with him asking the other two whether their laws are said to have been authored by a god or a man. After hearing their answer he proposes that they spend their journey informing him about their laws and political institutions. They agree to this, and the first question the Athenian stranger puts to them is “why the law has ordained that you shall have common meals and gymnastic exercises, and wear arms.” Cleinias answers that the reason is obvious, that “these regulations have been made with a view to war.” The Cretan legislator, he explains, believes that “in reality every city is in a natural state of war with every other, not indeed proclaimed by heralds, but everlasting” and for that reason “all institutions, private as well as public, were arranged by him with a view to war.” Needless to say, his Spartan companion agreed wholeheartedly with this assessment.

The Athenian stranger, however, proceeds to interrogate his companions further. After establishing that there is a struggle between the good and the bad, not just between cities, but families, individuals, and even within the individual himself, the Athenian stranger asks Cleinias:

Now, which would be the better judge-one who destroyed the bad and appointed the good to govern themselves; or one who, while allowing the good to govern, let the bad live, and made them voluntarily submit? Or third, I suppose, in the scale of excellence might be placed a judge, who, finding the family distracted, not only did not destroy any one, but reconciled them to one another for ever after, and gave them laws which they mutually observed, and was able to keep them friends.

The answer, he receives, is that “The last would be by far the best sort of judge and legislator.” The Athenian stranger then points out that the goal of laws, established by this sort of governor, would be the opposite of war. From here he proceeds to ask a series of questions that culminate in the declaration that:

[W]ar, whether external or civil, is not the best, and the need of either is to be deprecated; but peace with one another, and good will, are best. Nor is the victory of the state over itself to be regarded as a really good thing, but as a necessity; a man might as well say that the body was in the best state when sick and purged by medicine, forgetting that there is also a state of the body which needs no purge. And in like manner no one can be a true statesman, whether he aims at the happiness of the individual or state, who looks only, or first of all, to external warfare; nor will he ever be a sound legislator who orders peace for the sake of war, and not war for the sake of peace.

In the first century BC, Rome, which had become the ruler of the Mediterranean world with its final triumphs over Carthage and Macedon in the second century BC, saw its generals fight a series of civil wars for control of the republic and its empire. Alliances were formed and broken, and it ultimately culminated in the rise of Octavian to the imperial throne in 27 BC. He set about to bring order and peace to the Roman Empire. Upon his return to Rome after consolidating his rule, the Ara Pacis Augustae – Altar of the Augustan Peace – was commissioned, built and consecrated. The Pax Romana had begun. It would last for two centuries.

What Augustus Caesar had accomplished in the Pax Romana, was more or less what Plato had been talking about in his Laws – the civil organization of a society – or in this case a world empire - including its martial institutions and activities, towards the end of peace. As an example of this kind of politically constructed peace, the Pax Romana was exemplary and it has inspired numerous imitations since. It could not and did not last forever, however. The Hebrew prophets, envisioned a different sort of peace.

The prophetic writings within the Hebrew Scriptures contain rebukes of idolatry and wickedness in the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, warnings of the divine judgement that would befall these kingdoms in the form of the invading Assyrians and Babylonians, and promises of restoration both immediate, under Cyrus and the Persians, and ultimate, with the coming of the Messiah, establishment of the New Covenant, and the kingdom of God on earth. These promises include a vision of future peace. The prophet Isaiah, for example, proclaimed that in the last days all the peoples of the world would come to the Lord’s house, to learn of His ways and be judged by Him, and said that:

they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. (Isaiah 2:4)

Isaiah calls the Messiah the Prince of Peace (9:6) and in another famous passage describes the peace of His reign as extending even to the animal kingdom:

The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea. (11:6-9)

This vision of peace is eschatological, i.e., it describes events that are to be directly accomplished by God Himself, in a future beyond the history of this present world. The Scriptures, Hebrew and Christian, also contain warnings about attempts to counterfeit God’s eschatological peace by human means within history (Daniel 8:25, 1 Thess. 5:3). Nevertheless, in the Psalms, the sacred song book of Jews and Christians alike, we are told to seek and pursue peace (34:14) and to pray for the peace of Jerusalem (122:6). The Psalmist expresses his faith that the Lord will bless His people with peace (29:11) and that the end of the perfect man is peace (37:37).

With the Hebrew Scriptures, which became the Old Testament, Christianity inherited both the vision of an eschatological peace to be established by God in His eternal kingdom, and the exhortations to pursue peace in this world. Peace is also a theme of the Christian Scriptures.

In St. Luke’s account of the birth of Christ, after the angelic herald announces the birth of the Messiah to the shepherds, the angel host proclaim the glory of God by saying “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” (2:14) In the Beatitudes, the blessings which begin Jesus’ most famous Sermon, He proclaimed a blessing upon “the peacemakers”, saying that they shall be called the “children of God” (Matthew 5:9). St. John records how Jesus, speaking to His Apostles at the Last Supper, said “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid”. (14:27). St. Paul, wrote to the church in Rome that the Kingdom of God is “not meat and drink; but righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost” (14:17) and that they therefore ought to “follow after the things which make for peace” (14:19). To the church in Ephesus, he described the unity of Jew and Gentile in the church, as a peace established by Christ (2:14-15, cf. Col. 1:20) and he wrote to the Corinthian church (2 Cor. 13:11) that they ought to live in peace.

It is customary for Jews to greet each other with the blessing “Shalom Aleichem” which means “peace to you”. (3) This is an ancient tradition, with roots in the Hebrew Scriptures, which was well established by the first century AD. Jesus Himself uses it (Lk. 24:36, Jn. 20:19, 21, 26), along with a similar blessing “go in peace” at the departing of ways. It can be found opening or closing almost every New Testament epistle, usually with grace and in some cases mercy and or love, added to the blessing, and it is part of Jesus’ salutation to the churches of Asia Minor in the Book of Revelation. The liturgical salutation Pax Vobis (4) and the Kiss of Peace or Sharing of the Peace in the Eucharist are Christian variations of this Jewish custom.

The hope of peace has other Christian liturgical expressions as well. Within the Anglican tradition, for example, the Collect of the Day is followed by a Collect for Peace in the order of both Morning and Evening Prayer. The Mattins Collect for Peace is:

O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom: Defend us thy humble servants in all assaults of our enemies; that we, surely trusting in thy defence, may not fear the power of our adversaries; through the might of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (5)

The Collect for Peace in Evensong is:

O God, from whom all holy desires, all good counsels, and all just works do proceed: Give unto thy servants that peace which the world cannot give; that our hearts may be set to obey thy commandments, and also that by thee we being defended from the fear of our enemies may pass our time in rest and quietness; through the merits of Jesus Christ our Saviour. Amen.

It should be obvious, from the examples given of the ways in which peace has been talked about in the Jewish and Christian tradition, and even the examples from Plato and Roman history, that peace is more than just “the absence of war”. War and peace are the opposites of each other but there are different ways in which things can be opposites. Male and female are opposites in a complementary way that differs from the way east and west are opposites. Both of these differ from how light and darkness are opposites. We tend to think of war and peace as having the same relationship with each other as light and darkness have, and it is easier to explain peace by referring to war than it is to explain war by referring to peace. Nevertheless, as we have seen peace has traditionally been spoken of as a positive good, towards the achievement of which a state ought to order its laws and institutions, which we ought in goodwill to wish towards our fellow man, and which will be ultimately established by God in the next world. All of this suggests that it would be more appropriate to think of peace as something substantial and not just a term invented to denote the absence of something else.

The words that are traditionally used for peace would also suggest this. In both Hebrew and Latin, the word used for such an agreement is also used to refer to a general state of wellbeing. Both the Hebrew and the Latin words for peace have a double meaning. They can refer to an agreement of friendship between two peoples, a covenant or a treaty. They can also refer to a state of health, soundness, wellbeing, tranquility, or calmness. The English word peace has both of these meanings as well. This points to a widely recognized relationship between harmonious agreement among people and internal wellbeing and health.

There are those who detect a contradiction in the ongoing discussion of war and peace. We say that peace is something which is good and desirable, we express our goodwill towards others by wishing it upon them, we pray for it and look to God to bestow it upon us in His eternal kingdom. We also erect monuments to warriors, sing the praises of feats of bravery in war, and regularly honour those have fought our country’s wars for us. Does the way we talk about war contradict the way we talk about peace?

We will consider that question in War and Peace: Part Two, in which we will take a look at other parts of the traditional discussion of war and peace, in particular the dialogue about the justness of war.


(1) Quotations from Plato’s The Laws are taken from the Benjamin Jowett translation. All quotations come from Book One of the dialogue.

(2) Socrates was, of course, an Athenian.

(3) The customary response is to invert the two words and say “Aleichem Shalom”.

(4) The literal way of saying “Shalom Aleichem” in Latin. Pax Vobiscum is also used, in which the meaning is slightly altered to “peace be with you”.

(5) Both Collects are taken from the 1962 Canadian edition of the Book of Common Prayer.