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.

Systemic Racism

Is there any racial group in the Dominion of Canada or the United States of America today, about whom you can safely tell insulting jokes in public?

The answer, of course, is yes.

Is it blacks in the United States?

Is it Indians in Canada?

Obviously not. Anyone who were to try it would face severe consequences. He would be publicly denounced and shamed, probably lose his job and career, and maybe even his wife and kids and friends.

If, however, he were to tell such a joke about white people he would almost certainly get away with it.

Go back to the original question and substitute "use derogatory racial slurs" for "tell insulting jokes".

The answer is no different.

Is there any racial group in North America that you can with impunity threaten with violence?

The answer is still white people, although the certainty of your getting away with it has decreased, unless, of course, you are a superstar rapper or a university professor.

If you were to apply for an advertised position only to be told "we cannot consider you, because we need to diversify our staff or labour force", what race would you be?

No, you would not be a black, Indian, or Asian. Any company that would tell a black, Indian, or Asian applicant that their race disqualifies them from consideration, which is what “we cannot consider you because we need to diversify” translates into, would immediately be faced with the threat of crippling anti-discrimination litigation under the Canadian Human Rights Act or the US Civil Rights Act. They would most likely face public humiliation as well.

If you are white, however, they can turn you away on the above-stated grounds with no fear of recrimination.

Is there any racial group in North America or Western Civilization as a whole that is constantly made to be the scapegoat of all social evils in the way Hitler made the Jews into a scapegoat almost a century ago?

Yes, of course there is.

Is it still the Jews?

No, it most certainly is not. People today are generally afraid even to criticize the Jews, much less blame them for all the evils of the world, lest they be accused of anti-Semitism. Unless, of course, they belong to the Islamic faith, in which case they seem to have been granted a special dispensation by the gods of diversity.

Do I really need to point out that once again whites are the group in question?

The fatality rate among healthy black American men is abominably high. The reason is the violent crime and the "gangsta" culture that is destroying their own neighborhoods and communities from the inside out. The blame for it, however, is placed on white racism, especially that which is purportedly prevalent among the American police.

In Canada, a large number of Indian women are either found dead or disappear without a trace and are presumed dead, every year. An inquiry into this was demanded, then commissioned, and, last year, it released its report. The report could not hide the fact that in the vast majority of cases the murderer was also an Indian, usually a family member or someone from within the victim’s own community. Nevertheless, it still, in a classic example of putting two and two together and coming up with something other than four, placed the blame on white racism and called it a "genocide."

The social sciences departments of most universities hardly do anything else but brainwash their students with the “evil white racist” conspiracy theory of history. This is because these departments are composed of nothing but pseudo-disciplines, invented by Marxists, for the very purpose of promoting Marxism’s radically destructive revolutionary agenda.

Most races in North America have advocacy organizations which promote their civil rights and liberties, and speak to the public and lobby the government on behalf of their interests. These organizations are generally considered to be respectable and even venerable. There is one race in North America, however, which is not allowed to have such advocates. Any organization that attempts to speak or lobby on this race’s behalf, will immediately find itself denounced by politicians and bureaucrats, university professors, clergymen, the news and entertainment industry, and all the “respectable” racial advocacy groups, as a hate group. All attempts to speak positively on behalf of this race, are heard by countless people, including many members of the race in question themselves, as negative attacks on other people.

Any guesses as to which race this is?

For decades, the politicians and civil servants in both Canada and the United States, have been actively working to decrease one particular race’s demographic and political strength and influence in both countries, as academic and media progressives have cheered this race’s decline and perhaps eventual demise. This attitude, directed towards any other group, would be regarded as genocidal race hatred.

That’s right, it is the same race yet again.

We have all heard the expression “systemic racism” over and over again since the death of George Floyd. What progressives mean by “systemic” or “institutional” racism is their accusation that white racism is something embedded into the very fabric of Western societies and their institutions and which cannot be eliminated simply by abolishing slavery, ending segregation, or any other historical objective that can be achieved by an act of legislation or a judicial ruling. All sane people recognize that you cannot reason with people who think this way because they are absolutely bonkers.

If we cannot reason with them, for the sake of those they have not yet brainwashed, we ought to be able to answer them. The answer is simply this: the only systemic racism in Western civilization in 2020, is the racism against white people detailed above.

Even More Brief Thoughts on Assorted Matters

- We live in an age of idolatry, in which false gods have been substituted for the true God, and counterfeit goods for true goods. Our age has substituted human rights for natural law, equality for justice, and democracy for constitutional government, and we are the worse for each of these substitutions.

- True constitutional government requires the reign of a royal monarch.

- Friends don’t let friends eat vegetarian.

- As crude in their manner of expression, one-tracked in their thinking, and blasphemously anti-Christian in their idolatrous worship of their own race as white racial nationalists often can be, they are absolutely correct when they say that anti-racist is merely a code word for being anti-white. Anti-racism is the worst form of racism that can exist – racism against one’s own race.

- Only a complete horse’s ass would be a republican, democrat, liberal, progressive, socialist, pacifist, vegetarian, feminist, atheist, tree-hugging eco-nut, anti-racist, admirer of Justin Trudeau, pro-choice activist, government social worker or any sort of social justice warrior.

- Political correctness has so rotted the minds of our politicians that Parliament is seriously considering condemning as an irrational fear and prejudice the concerns of those who consider it imprudent to admit large numbers of immigrants or asylum-seekers who adhere to the religion that converted the Arabic peoples at sword point during the life of its founder, conquered the rest of the Middle East within twenty-five years of his death, was invading Christian Europe from both sides by the end of its first century, and has behaved in the exact same way towards Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and anyone else who had the misfortune to live in proximity to it ever since.

- There is nothing morally wrong with smoking tobacco. It takes a special kind of stupid to think otherwise.

- Isn’t it interesting how those who decry the mixing of religion and politics whenever a conservative evangelical, fundamentalist or traditionalist Catholic or Orthodox leader calls for pornography to be restricted, abortion to be banned, and public morality to be restored to what it was sixty years ago or otherwise expresses a right-of-centre view of public policy seem to have no objections to those wolves in shepherds’ clothing who devote all of their pulpit time to preaching the gospel of environmentalism, denouncing the evils of various sorts of prejudice and discrimination, and calling for more immigration and diversity.

- Liberals, socialists, and neoconservatives are all in favour of high levels of immigration and a lackadaisical approach to border security and the enforcement of immigration law. This is because each sees the immigrants as the means to some selfish end of their own. The Grits see a voting base that will keep them in power perpetually, the NDP sees a pathway to power in potential voters they can lure away from the Grits by offering more government benefits, and the neoconservatives see a supply of cheap labour. All three condemn as “racist” those who want lower levels of immigration, stricter enforcement of border security and immigration laws, and an immigration policy that is based upon our own country’s needs and interests and does not seek to radically transform our country. Yet it is only these “racists” who see immigrants as rational human beings who would not chose to come to our country if they did not see it as being attractive as it is, and that it is therefore as much in the interest of the immigrants we let in as it is of us who are already here that immigration not be the instrument of fast and radical transformation.

- All of the “values” that the Liberal Party identifies as Canadian come with a “Made in the USA” stamp. They are merely the values of the Hollywood left.

Liberalism Exposed by Orlando

“It's just obvious”, Chicago School economist Milton Friedman told Peter Brimelow back in the 1990s, “you can't have free immigration and a welfare state.”

These words are not as well-known as his “there is no such thing as a free lunch” but they ought to be. It is perfectly consistent to be opposed to both open immigration and the welfare state. One can make a rational case for either against the other. To try and have both, however, as all Western ex-nations have sought to do for decades, is to invite every would-be free rider in the world to come to your country and leech off of you.

Friedman, who was a libertarian, would have chosen free immigration over a welfare state. I, a somewhat libertarian, High Tory patriot, would lean towards having neither, while regarding a modest welfare state – much more modest than we have today – as the lesser of the two evils. These are positions that can be intelligently defended. The progressive or left-liberal position that we must have both is not, which is perhaps the reason why progressives, rather than try to intelligently defend the indefensible, instead try to silence everyone else with emotional accusations of being cruel, hard-hearted, inhumane, bigoted, unfeeling and the like.

This is not the only example of progressive liberals simultaneously endorsing two things that are mutually exclusive. If someone were to say “it’s just obvious that you cannot have a culture that affirms and celebrates homosexuality while also being open to Islam” he would be just as right as Friedman was. Once again, a person can argue against both of these things simultaneously without self-contradiction. Or he might make a convincing case for the one that excludes the other. It is those who insist on having both who are writing a prescription for disaster. Once again it is progressive liberals who do this and who denounce anyone who opposes either of their pet causes as being bigoted and unenlightened.

If the folly in this had not already been obvious before, it was certainly exposed for all the world to see by the events in Orlando, Florida this past weekend. In what has been described as the worst such shooting in American history, a twenty-nine year old son of immigrants from Afghanistan, called 9-11 to announce his intentions and his allegiance to the Islamic State and then went into a gay club called the Pulse and shot the place up, killing about fifty people and wounding about fifty others.

Liberals, with the exception of those gay rights groups that have now endorsed the Donald Trump campaign, have learned absolutely nothing from this about the mutual exclusivity of the causes they espouse in the name of such banal drivel as “social justice” and “human rights”. If we do not include US President Barack Obama’s emotional meltdown and hate-filled tirade against Trump the liberal response to the shooting has basically been twofold.

First, quite predictably, they are blaming the incident on the accessibility of guns in the United States and what they call the American “gun culture” and calling for more restrictions on gun owners. That way, the next time someone declares his loyalty to ISIS and hatred of the United States, and in the name of Allah sets out on a one-man jihad, his efforts will be frustrated and defeated by the fact that he has to obey a law that prevents him from owning guns. Peter Hitchens has already said all that needs to be said about this kind of stupidity when in his reflections on Orlando he observed that America’s gun laws were a lot laxer fifty years ago before these kind of shooting incidents became common place, noting that such shootings also occur in countries with strict gun control like Britain, Germany and Finland while being much rarer in Switzerland. Hitchens argued that “an inquiry into the correlation between drug abuse and violence” would be “the most rational and effective response to the horrific news from Orlando” which suggestion contains far more good sense than all of those coming from the gun-hating lunatics on the left.

Secondly, and again predictably, they have been blaming conservative Christians for the incident. The same people who consider it to be a horrible and unfair generalization to blame the actions of this man on his own religion have no problem blaming it on another one altogether. This is what enlightenment looks like, folks, and it is indistinguishable from what we used to call being just plain crazy.

According to the looney-tune left, Christians are responsible for creating a “culture of homophobia” which drove this young Muslim into a murderous frenzy. He pledged his loyalty to a regime that kills homosexuals by throwing them from rooftops. Islam is the dominant religion in the ten countries in the world where homosexuality is a capital offence. Yet, liberals expect us to believe that the source of his murderous hatred is not his own religion but Christianity, a faith whose adherents are also routinely targeted by ISIS for death.

Who do they think they are fooling?

Liberals maintain that all religions are equal, an idea that can be held only in a mind that regards all religious beliefs as false and therefore takes seriously the beliefs of neither Christians nor Muslims. As Sir Roger Scruton recently explained it “the new ideology of non-discrimination” means “not sounding too certain about anything in case you make people who don’t share your beliefs feel uncomfortable.” Not believing anything himself, the liberal cannot accept that Christians might genuinely believe that God made mankind male and female and gave the sexes to each other in marriage so that we are not therefore free to change this institution to accommodate homosexuals in the way the liberal considers to be reasonable. No can he accept that Muslims might sincerely believe in anything that would prevent their full integration into Western society or lead to a violent clash with Western culture or a portion thereof. Faced with evidence that somebody does actually believe something, he seeks to silence that person and extirpate the belief for, as Sir Roger further explains “What we might have taken to be open-mindedness turns out to be no-mindedness: the absence of beliefs, and a negative reaction to all those who have them.”

Despite their promises of twenty years ago that their campaign for gay rights would not infringe upon anyone else’s rights and certainly not upon the freedom of religion of devout believers, the ink had hardly dried upon the legislation and court rulings that secured their victory in Canada, the United States, and throughout the Western world, before Christians were being dragged into court, fined thousands of dollars, and forced out of their businesses because they would not alter their Christian convictions to suit liberalism.

This is the behaviour of bullies, and bullies are natural cowards. It is not surprising therefore, that much depends upon whose beliefs have come into conflict with liberalism. Liberals are not about to risk the beheadings, bombings, and other messy possibilities that might result from offending believers whose faith has not been three-quarters diluted with liberalism already and includes concepts like jihad. Therefore, when someone does something in the name of Islam that offends them, they take it out on Christians. Which is why today, their response to Orlando looks less like genuine outrage over a horrible atrocity and more like the cynical use of the suffering of one of the groups for which they feign compassion at the hands of another to further kick a defeated foe while he is down.

That’s just how classy they are.

Common Law or Sharia?

Countries within the British family of nations, such as Australia and my own country of Canada, have reason to be thankful for the many priceless civil and social institutions that we have inherited from Great Britain. Through these institutions, we benefit from over a thousand years of civil, social, and political evolution prior to the establishment of our own countries and do not have to attempt to remake the wheel. The parliamentary monarchy form of government is one such priceless institution. The common law is another, one from which even the family prodigal, Uncle Sam, continues to benefit.

The common law is the legal and judicial system that evolved in England in the Middle Ages. Its principles are basically these: there is one law of the land that is embodied in the customs and traditions of the people who live in it, that the Sovereign’s main duty is to uphold and defend this law, that the unity of the law means that the law must be applied in the same way in cases with similar circumstances and so the courts must rule in accordance with past precedents, and that the role of Parliament in the passing of statutory laws is primarily one of tweaking the system when needed. It is a legal system that has served the English-speaking world well and which harmonizes well with our parliamentary system of government. Attempts by politicians to monkey with it have been generally quite ill-conceived and usually ended up working out for the worse.

Late last month, John Bingham, Religious Affairs editor of the Telegraph reported that the Law Society of England and Wales, the professional association of English solicitors, has been instructing its members on how to draw up wills that comply with sharia, i.e., Islamic law. A day later he reported that this had prompted members of Parliament to demand an inquiry as to the extent to which sharia law has been integrated into the British legal system.

It should be pointed out that this is not the first time Britain has accommodated sharia law. Several years ago it was reported that sharia courts had been established in the United Kingdom for the arbitration of certain kinds of disputes among Britain’s Muslim community. This was made possible by a bill passed by the British Parliament almost twenty years ago that allows for disputes to be mediated by an arbitrator agreed upon by both parties rather than going through litigation before a court of law. Muslims here in Canada attempted to get similar legislation passed in Ontario about a decade ago but then-Ontario premier Dalton McGuinty opted to get rid of all religious based arbitration tribunals rather than to allow sharia tribunals to be established. There is an important difference, however, about this more recent development. While the Arbitration Act brought about the establishment of sharia courts, it did so by basically allowing for any third party, that both sides in a dispute agree upon, to act as an arbitrator under certain general guidelines. The Law Society’s guidelines, however, are for the drawing up of legal documents to be recognized in Her Majesty’s courts.

Perhaps you are asking yourself what the big deal is. Surely Britain’s solicitors will only be drawing up sharia wills for Muslim clients who request them. If a Briton has the right to draw up a will disposing of his possession as he pleases then does it not follow that if he wishes to follow the dictates of sharia in doing so that is up to him?

It is important that we be clear what the cause for concern here actually is. Several voices have been raised in opposition to the introduction of sharia wills that ground their objections on the “sexism” of sharia, its barbarism, or its incompatibility with the objector’s abstract understanding of human rights. Whatever validity these complaints may or may not have, the most important issue here is that if the British courts are to follow the common law tradition most of the time but to follow sharia law when dealing with Muslims then the whole point of having a common law, a law of the land that is the same for everybody, is pretty much defeated. If the common law ceases to be this, then one of the greatest of British institutions will have fallen. A country is an entity composed of a land, its people, and their traditional political, social, cultural and legal institutions. Forty six years ago, the great Tory statesman Enoch Powell warned that through a combination of large-scale immigration and legislation that aggressively favoured new immigrants over native Britons, Great Britain had become a nation “busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.” When sharia law begins to replace common law in Her Majesty’s courts that indicates that the nation has gone beyond piling up logs and is now holding a match to the kindling.

In economics, Gresham’s Law states that bad money drives out good. In this situation, a similar remark could be made about bad law. Introduced into Britain as an alternative to the courts in arbitrating disputes among Muslims, sharia has now entered the British courts as an alternative standard for the drawing up of certain legal documents. It would be naïve in the extreme to think that this is as far as it will go. What will happen when a dispute arises between a Muslim and a non-Muslim and the former wishes it to be settled in accordance with sharia and the latter in accordance with common law?

There are many who would look upon this development and see it as a step towards the transformation of Britain into an Islamic society in which Christians and Jews will face the experience of dhimmitude. Others would condemn such fears as Islamophobia, a term of recent coinage that would seem to denote an irrational fear of Islam. I confess to being among those who consider the former point of view to be by far the more sensible of the two. Words like Islamophobia are a dime a dozen, being coined on what sometimes seems like a daily basis to demonize those who object to rapid, massive, and irrevocable changes being made to the people, culture, institutions and traditions of Western countries. Ironically, those who shout the loudest about the evils of Islamophobia are also those who have the most to lose from Islam gaining strength and power in the Western world. The growth of Islam in the West is incompatible with virtually every other pet project of the progressive left which almost tempts me to cheer it on. Instead, I would remind those who see the crumbling of a thousand years’ worth of barriers between Christendom and the Islamic world as an unmixed positive development of G. K. Chesterton’s principle that would-be reformers who do not know or understand why a fence was erected in the first place, should never be allowed to tear it down. Go out and learn a proper appreciation for what the Frankish armies of Charles Martel accomplished at Tours in 732 A.D. and what the Holy League led by King Jan III Sobieski of Poland achieved at the Gates of Vienna in 1683 A.D. and then maybe you will be in a position to explain, if you still think so, why those who would rather live in a nominally Christian country than an officially Islamic country are displaying an ignorant and irrational form of bigotry.

Do not misunderstand me. We are required to behave justly to the stranger in our midst and indeed to behave justly to all men everywhere. Justice does not require, however, that countries in the British family of nations suspend the common law in favour of sharia when dealing with Muslims. Indeed, I would suggest that it would be far more in accordance with justice that we insist that Muslims in our countries answer to the common law just like everybody else.

It would be both an injustice and a terrible shame if the common law tradition were to be broken in the country that bequeathed it to the rest of us.