Christian Nationalism?

The subject of “Christian Nationalism” has been much discussed as of late.  A friend and classmate from my theological studies in Otterburne in the 1990s has been decrying it all over social media.  His assessment of it relies upon the acceptance of a number of axioms that progressives regard as self-evident but which I correctly consider to be bunkum.  Needless to say I do not share his perspective.  My rejection of my friend’s fatally flawed opposition to Christian Nationalism should not be taken as an endorsement of it.  Quite the contrary.  Recently, the administrator of an Anglican social media forum opened a discussion thread on the subject.  This essay is for the most part an expansion of my response.

 

To answer the question of whether or not nationalism can be Christian in any real, orthodox, sense, we need to first determine what nationalism is.  The best way that I know to do this, is by distinguishing nationalism from something much older than nationalism with which it is often confused.  That something is patriotism. 

 

Patriotism belongs to the category of natural affections.  Think of the love that under ordinary circumstances a child feels for his parents and a parent feels for a child.  These are natural affections, loves that unless something happens to impede them, everyone naturally develops.  The love of home, which the late Sir Roger Scruton called oikophilia, is another such natural affection and one that is very similar to patriotism.  Patriotism derives its name from the Greek word πατρίς (πάτρα in some dialects, such as Homeric Ionic) and its Latin cognate patria, both of which mean “native land” or more literally, since they are themselves derived from the word for father, “fatherland.”  Patriotism is the affection, attachment, and love that one feels for one’s homeland, one’s country, as naturally as one loves one’s parents and offspring.

 

Patriotism, like all natural affections, has been regarded as good and virtuous from time immemorial.  To illustrate, consider the thirtieth verse of the first book of Homer’s epic Iliad which is the verse in which the word πάτρα appears for the first time in Homer.  This appears in the portion of the poem where Homer is providing the background story to the wrath of Achilles which brought all sorts of nastiness upon the Greeks from his breech with Agamemnon until their reconciliation after the death of Patrocles at the hands of Hector which is the main theme of the epic.  Chryses, the priest of Apollo, has come to the Greek encampment to buy the freedom of his daughter whom Agamemnon holds as a war prize.  His graceful address and his offer of an extremely generous ransom has won over all the other Greeks but infuriated Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and Argos and general leader of the Greek expedition against Troy.  Agamemnon responds with an extremely rude and ill-tempered speech in which he orders Chryses away from the encampment and the ships, warning him that if he catches him there again the symbols of his priestly office will not protect him.  Then, to add insult to injury, he adds in verses twenty-nine and thirty the following:

 

τὴν δ᾽ ἐγὼ οὐ λύσω: πρίν μιν καὶ γῆρας ἔπεισιν

ἡμετέρῳ ἐνὶ οἴκῳ ἐν Ἄργεϊ τηλόθι πάτρης

 

This means “but your (daughter) I will not release, until old age finds her also, in our house in Argos far from her fatherland.”  The insult extends into the next verse where it gets much cruder and Agamemnon’s speech into the verse after that but we have arrived at the point. 

 

The words τηλόθι πάτρης, “far from her fatherland” are intended as a particularly cruel twist of the knife here.  Obviously, Agamemnon was going out of his way to say that he will do the exact opposite of what Chryses had requested, but in stressing the distance of his palace from the girl’s homeland he was also saying that he will inflict upon her what he and all the Greeks were themselves suffering at that point in time.  The Iliad is set in the last year of the ten year siege of Troy.  The Greeks had been τηλόθι πάτρης themselves for a long time and were feeling the effects of it, as Agamemnon’s speech as a whole and the bitter strife that would soon thereafter divide him from Achilles demonstrate.

 

Homer’s ability to communicate this in this way rests upon the common understanding between him, his hearers, and his readers down through the generations, that one’s πάτρα is to be loved and cherished and that to be far from it is misery.  

 

So again, patriotism is a natural affection, a feeling of love akin to love for one’s family and home.  This has many implications.  One, is that patriotism has nothing to do with how you think your country compares to other countries.  Patriotism may incline you towards thinking that your country is the best in the world but it is never based on thinking this.  The patriot loves his country because she is his and not because he thinks her to be better than such and such other countries.  Patriotism has nothing to do with whether or not one’s country is “great.”  While children often go through a “my dad can beat up your dad” phase they ordinarily grow out of it.  Someone who persists in talking this way into adulthood does not demonstrate a healthy filial affection but rather a case of arrested development.  The same applies to love of country.

 

From this implication, we can infer further that patriotism is not naturally bellicose.  Since love of country, like love of family and home is natural to humanity, and since it is not based on concepts like “greatness” that measure one’s country against others, it is not threatened by other people loving their other countries nor does it impel one to threaten others.  Patriotism is a great motivation to fight defensively in war, that is to protect one’s country, but it is no motivation to wage aggressive war against others.

 

Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth century lexicographer, famously said “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” (1)  James Boswell, his biographer, from whom we have the account of this and Dr. Johnson’s other table-talk, immediately after recording it explained “But let it be considered, that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest.” (2)  The conversation took place in 1775 in the midst of the controversy that would lead to the American Declaration of Independence the following year.  The year previous, Dr. Johnson had expressed his thoughts on the American rebels-to-be and their gripes in a pamphlet entitled The Patriot.  There is little doubt as to who the scoundrels were to whom Dr. Johnson referred.

 

Although Boswell put it in terms of real versus pretend, patriotism, and this was not a wrong way of describing it, from the standpoint of hindsight it could be said that what had occurred was the emergence of a new thing which was not patriotism as we have described it but which had not yet been given a name of its own and so for a time it shared the name of the age old love of country.   Did Dr. Johnson himself see that there were now two things sharing one name?  In his Dictionary he defined patriotism as “Love of one’s country; zeal for one’s country.”  Most likely he meant this as a single definition, certainly in The Patriot he spoke in Boswell’s terms of real versus pretend, but it is interesting that the two phrases from his definition could be taken as defining the two different “patriotisms” of the time.  Zeal is not the same thing as love.

 

The American Revolution was a war cast from the mold of Lucifer’s rebellion against God.  So was its antecedent, the Puritan rebellion against Charles I, but Crowell et al., had wrapped themselves in the hypocritical piety of their legalistic Calvinism.  The propagandists of the American Revolution such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine (“the infidel Paine”) whose minds were steeped in the skepticism and deism of eighteenth century philosophy had no such recourse and so justified their actions by appealing to the ideals of “Enlightenment” liberalism, a philosophy born out of explicit rejection of the Christian faith of the civilization of the age that preceded the Modern.  Since such justifications had little popular appeal in a day in which the Age’s retreat from Christianity was still in its early years – past infancy, not quite in adolescence yet – their cloak when taking their ideals public was patriotism.  It was not the age-old natural affection patriotism but the new thing that had not yet come into its name but was still borrowing the name of the old patriotism and so rightly decried as a pretender by Dr. Johnson and Boswell.  The term that would become its name was around - Johann Gottfried von Herder had used it in a treatise in 1772 – but had not yet become attached to the thing.  In the French Revolution, born out of the same false ideals as the American and in which the bloody fruit of those ideals was much more naked, opening the eyes of Dr. Johnson’s friend Edmund Burke to the nature of these “armed doctrines”, the name and the thing would find each other.  That name is nationalism.

 

The name nationalism is obviously derived from the word nation.  The word nation comes ultimately from the Latin verb nascor “be born” through its third principal part natus sum, “have been born” (3).  Natio, the noun derived from this verb could mean the act of birth but it also mean a tribe, kin group, or people united by a common birth or line of descent.  It carried this second meaning but not the first into Modern tongues like English where it became nation.  Here we see an indication of a divergence from patriotism.  Patriotism is love directed towards one’s country – a place.  Nationalism is – something, we will consider what momentarily – directed towards one’s people group.

 

This difference should not be exaggerated. The closest natural affection to patriotism is the love of home.  This too is a love of place.  Home, however, is the place where your family is.  Love of family and love of home cannot be separated and similarly patriotism is not a love of the land considered abstractly apart from the people and institutions and way of life. 

 

That having been said, the history of nationalism shows that this difference is important.  If patriotism is the love of home writ large, as in Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” account of it, nationalism is tribalism writ large.  While there is something to be said for the group loyalty of tribalism, that aspects of it need to be suppressed for there to be the rule of law and order necessary for civilization is the fundamental message of Aeschylus’ Oresteia.  It is also the reason for various provisions of the Mosaic Law, most obviously the refuge cities.  This is good reason to be wary of something that is basically tribalism but with the tribe the size of a Modern nation.

 

The history of nationalism demonstrates that it does not belong to the same class or category, natural affections, as patriotism.  From the beginning nationalism has been characterized by a belligerence towards others.  In the American Revolution, when it was still going under the name it borrowed from true patriotism, the belligerence was directed towards the larger society, the British Empire, of which it had been a part.  In the French Revolution, the violence initially directed against the society’s own traditional institutions and upper classes quickly turned on anyone suspected of disloyalty to the Revolution and its leaders and as this “Reign of Terror” started, Revolutionary France declared war on its neighbours who had militarized their borders in an effort to contain the revolution.  While the Reign of Terror ended with the arrest of Robespierre and the dawn of the Thermidor Reaction in July 1794 neither the wars nor the nationalism impelling them ceased with it and a general who had won his initial fame in those wars would before the eighteenth century ended launch the first of the serious of conquests which along with his simultaneous rise to power in the civil government would twice make him Emperor of France.  Among Napoleon’s generals, at least according to a play from the 1830s, (4) was a man named Nicolas Chauvin who refused to give up Napoleon’s imperial cause even after it was clearly over and Napoleon dead, and whose name became synonymous with an imperialistic nationalism that sees other peoples as existing only to be crushed, conquered and subdued by one’s own (although from the second wave of feminism in the middle of the twentieth century it has come to be more commonly used for males with enough self-respect not to buy into feminism’s lies but not enough sense to be subtle about it).  

 

A century after Napoleon’s death an Austrian-born German nationalist would become the leader of a small German socialist party to whose name he would attach the German word for nationalist.  As leader of the National Socialists, he began his rise to power by exploiting Germany’s grievances over the loss of World War I and promised to restore Germany to her glory by building a Reich that would last a thousand years.  Shortly after having won the office of Chancellor in 1933, he secured himself in that office by declaring a state of emergency after an arson in the Reichstag (German parliament building) and using the emergency powers this granted him to transform his office into that of a dictator and Germany into a single-party totalitarian state that resembled nothing so much as the Soviet Union which the Bolsheviks had created in Russia.  Hitler remilitarized Germany then began seizing territory such as his country of birth, Austria, which had historically been German-speaking but never part of the Germany that Otto von Bismarck had forged under the Prussian House of Hohenzollern (at the time she was the centre of her own empire under the Hapsburgs), by bullying and threats and exploiting the fact that the other powers were desperate to avoid the outbreak of a second war.  Then, having made a pact with the Soviet Union to divide Poland between themselves, he invaded that country, launching World War II in which he, like Napoleon before him, conquered most of Europe, before repeating Napoleon’s fatal mistake of trying to seize Russia.

 

Hitler’s nationalism was particularly belligerent against other peoples because it was wed to his belief that the races of humanity were locked into a Darwinian struggle for existence that was a zero-sum game (5) in which there could be only one winner.  While this was unique to National Socialism, in its three centuries nationalism in general has consistently demonstrated a hostile attitude towards other nations that is far removed from the irenic love of country that is true patriotism.  One final detail about Hitler deserves mention here.  On 19 March, 1945 as the Red Army was rapidly approaching Berlin while the American commander disgracefully held back the Western Allies, a little over a month and one week before he and his bride ended their lives in his bunker, Hitler issued the “Destructive Measures on Reich Territory” decree, ordering the destruction of the civil infrastructure of Germany.   Fortunately for the Germans, Albert Speer made sure this insane “Nero Decree” was not carried out.  Hitler had ordered the Germans to reduce their own country to the stone age in order to spite the Russians, but by this point in time he was convinced that the Russians had won the Darwinian struggle and that the Germans, having failed him, had lost and were not worthy to survive.  A nationalist could come to this horrid conclusion.  A patriot never could.

This is because patriotism has nothing to do with how one’s country and her people compare to other countries and other people.  It is a love that comes naturally.  Nationalism is concerned with how big and strong and powerful and great its country is and if its country fails the nationalist can easily turn on it as Hitler turned on Germany at the end.  Nationalism is not a love, a natural affection at all.  It is an ideology, a zealous commitment to the idea of one’s country as the greatest and best.  The nationalist will demand that his country be made great again.  Love, however, “envieth not…vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.” (6) The patriot loves his country as she is and if he is a Christian patriot will be far more concerned with his country’s goodness than her greatness.

 

Nationalism then is an artificial substitute for the natural love of country that is patriotism, a substitute that could only have been produced in the Modern Age.  This is because it is the product of the Modern idea of democracy.  The emphasis in the previous sentence is on the word Modern.  Modern democracy is not the same thing as the democracy of ancient Athens.   Nor is it the democracy that is an aspect or element of the traditional institution of parliament that developed long before the Modern Age, although it has grafted itself onto that democracy and corrupted it.  Modern democracy is an idea that comes from Modern liberal philosophy, which philosophy was thought up by Modern men thinking Satan’s thoughts after him. 

 

We have already touched on this in discussing the American Revolution and the origins of nationalism.  Satan became Satan by rebelling against the Sovereign King of all His Creation, God.  He was so full of himself, so proud of his own beauty and other fine qualities – gifts God had given him – that he thought he ought to rule the universe instead of God.  Modern man looked around at Christendom, the Christian civilization into which he had been born, and thought that he could think up a better way of organizing things that would eliminate most or all of human suffering, and rebelled against the civil and ecclesiastical authorities of Christendom.  The semi-Pelagianism that had crept into the Western Church towards the end of the Middle Ages which the Reformation in its theological reforms sought to correct was perhaps the initial impetus for this kind of hubristic thinking, although the Calvinists, the most Augustinian of the Protestants at least in their own conceit, were the first of the Modern rebels.  Pelagianism was the early heresy that rejected Original Sin.  A firm grasp on Original Sin is a preventative for thinking that humanity can achieve its own salvation by political means.  In the Fall, man lost the Paradise in which he had been placed at his creation.  Paradise awaits man, redeemed by God through Jesus Christ, after the Second Coming.  In between, as we struggle against our own sinful tendencies, there will be no elimination of the suffering that is born out of our fallen sinfulness but which, having been borne by Christ Himself to the cross, is the path down which we are called to follow Him.  This does not mean that we are not to try to alleviate the suffering of others, to the contrary, just as He healed the sick and made the lame to walk and gave the blind their sight, so we are commanded to do good to others. (7)  It means that we are not to think that by doing so, much less by outsourcing this work to the government, we can eliminate suffering and create a Paradise in this life.

 

The Modern idea of democracy, again as distinct from the ancient idea of democracy and the democracy that developed historically as part of our traditional parliamentary system, comes directly from liberalism’s belief that it can create an earthly Paradise and that it is justified in following Satan’s example of rebellion in order to do so.   The constituted authorities, the king and the Church, should have eliminated human suffering and made a Paradise.  That they didn’t do so means they need to be torn down and replaced with government by the people in whom sovereignty will now be vested.  That is the idea of Modern democracy, although liberals rarely put it so starkly, and it is utterly Satanic. It is also the idea that had to be thought first, before that artificial inferior substitute for patriotism, nationalism, could arise.  The sovereign people of Modern democracy is the nation of nationalism.

 

Nationalism then, in its historic sense, belongs to the Modern Age’s revolt against Christianity and so can hardly be called Christian.  There is a question, of course, as to whether what those who call themselves Christian Nationalists today mean by nationalism is nationalism in its historic sense.  Just as the first nationalists called themselves patriots so there have been those who have used the word nationalism to mean something closer to patriotism.  From what I have seen of self-designated Christian Nationalists this is not the case with them although that doesn’t immediately translate into their nationalism being the historical type either.  They have taken up the label of nationalist in reaction against the post-World War II movement towards re-orienting everything to an international or global scale with which they associate the increased secularism of the era.

 

While I am in complete agreement with their opposition to secularism and also detest the general way in which the world has been re-organizing itself since World War II, I do think that the Christian Nationalists have overlooked a number of things in coming to their position.  Secularism, while it has gotten much worse in the post-World War II era, is not the product of that era.  The first secular country was the United States of America (8) and the second was the French Republic formed in the French Revolution.   Secularism was joined at birth to nationalism. 

 

Also overlooked is a fact pertaining to progressive liberalism’s aggressive push after World War II to dissolve national identities, or at least those of the civilization formerly known as Christendom, both by submerging them in larger identities and breaking them down through large scale immigration.   While this is on the surface obviously an overreaction to Hitler, on a deeper level, one of which the progressive liberals themselves are almost certainly not consciously aware, an attempt to fill a void created by Modern liberalism.

 

In Christendom – Christian civilization – allegiance was not directed inwards, towards the people as a group, but upwards, ultimately to God in Heaven, but along the way to the sovereign, the king, in the civil sphere, and to the Catholic – universal – Church in the religious sphere, which spheres while distinct, overlapped.   

 

The king in Christendom, whether he reigned over a single realm or a vast empire, was what he is in the New Testament – God’s minister, to whom Christians are commanded to submit and to honour (1 Pet. 2:13, 17) and for whom they are commanded to offer supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks (1 Tim. 2:1-3). (9)  As God’s minister, he represented in the civil sphere that was his realm, the universal government of the King of Kings, which is a much higher sense of representational government than that of representational democracy. 

 

The Church was called Catholic for a number of reasons, the one of which that is germane in this context being that she transcended the boundaries of realm, empire, and nation and was a universal institution that was one wherever she was found.  In every kingdom and empire, she had One Lord in the sense of a divine Master higher than any earthly authority.  No matter where she was she confessed One Faith in the words of the ancient Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.  Anyone from any country anywhere in the world could join her through her One Baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  While this concept did not disappear in the sixteenth century Reformation at the beginning of the Modern Age, neither did it pass through that period unscathed, especially in external practice.  On both sides of the Reformation divide, other things came to took precedence over the aforementioned matters in which the unity and Catholicity of the Church are to be found. (10)  A tremendous blow was dealt to the external unity of the Church and in the separation that followed, between the followers of the papacy and the Protestants, between the Lutherans and the Reformed, and between all of the above and the myriad of smaller separatist groups, each communion developed an inward gaze in which its own identity and distinct doctrines were regarded, in practice at least, as more important than the One Lord, Faith, and Baptism.

 

Mercifully, the office and institution of king survived the Modern Age in several countries, including my own, and forces aligned against the Catholic Church will, as Christ has promised, never prevail.  The position of both king and Church was weakened from what it was in Christendom, however, by the spread of the now ubiquitous notion of popular sovereignty and the fracturing of the Church into denominationalism which both involved a re-orienting of the gaze away from that which is higher, upward, and beyond, internally towards self, albeit in these examples the self of the group rather than of the individual person, the inward focus on which was also developing at the same time, all of these in accordance with the general shift from the theocentric outlook of Christendom to the Modern anthropocentric one.  It is that which pulls us out of ourselves and directs us to that which is higher and beyond ourselves that civilizes us, however, and this general inward reorientation of outlook of the Modern Age, by weakening these upward influences has created a vacuum into which different types of civilization-threatening barbarism enter.  The extreme nationalism of the World War II era was one such barbarism.  After the war, progressive liberals, realizing the need for a higher allegiance but, being progressive liberals, unwilling to turn to God, king, and Church, attempted to create various artificial substitutes in international, regional, and even world-level associations, organizations, and quasi-governmental bodies, but the soulless, toxic, bureaucratism that accompanied these at every level proved this to be but another form of barbarism.

 

So-called Christian Nationalism is a response to this other type of barbarism.  Unfortunately, it is no solution because it is enmeshed itself in the Modern way of thinking that produced the problem.  This is evident, not merely in its embrace of nationalism, the Modern artificial substitute for natural patriotism.  It is also evident in the kind of Christianity that it weds to nationalism.  While not all Christian Nationalists are evangelicals the form of Christianity that went into making Christian Nationalism is evangelicalism, not as Dr. Luther and the Reformers used this word nor as it was historically used in the Church of England nor as it is used in Europe today, but evangelicalism in a distinctly North American sense of the word, which evangelicalism, for all that it has to commend itself, has a very unhealthy tendency to confuse Christianity with Americanism.  Americanism, however, is a variant of liberalism, the ideology that drives the Modern Age’s movement away from God and Christianity. 

 

Nationalism, we observed earlier, is tribalism writ large, and tribalism is very much an apt description of Christian Nationalism’s approach to the various social, moral, and cultural problems that have arisen in our countries due to the transformation of Christendom into secular, liberal, Western Civilization over the course of the Modern Age.  That approach is to treat these as battlegrounds in a power struggle between groups, with our group, Christians, on the one side and some other group or groups on the other side, and to regard the government as an instrument (and an instrument in battle is called a weapon) with which to defeat the other group.

 

Interestingly, this way of looking at things has certain things in common with the thinking of the progressive liberals who abhor Christian Nationalism.  Progressive liberals as well, and all the more so the more the progressive takes dominance over the liberal in their thinking, tend to see everything in terms of power struggles between groups.   For Christians, however, this way of looking at things ought to be anathema.  Eph. 6:12 tells us that our struggle in this world is not against other people, but against the spiritual powers of darkness in this world.  Moreover, in this the Christian Nationalist approach bears more than a passing resemblance to the error at the heart of all progressive thinking, the belief in a political salvation.  Indeed, I would say that the resemblance to progressive salvation-through-political-means is far deeper than whatever surface similarity there may be between the Christian Nationalist idea of the role of government and the classical Tory view, of necessity more reactionary than conservative in the current political climate, that in my view is the closest thing there is to a translation of orthodox Christianity into the language of civil politics.  Where Christian Nationalism and Toryism bear a superficial resemblance is that we both reject the liberal notion of the separation of Church and State.  This liberal idea, the root from which all forms of secularism sprang, began as an argument for limiting the powers of the State but inevitably became an argument for limiting the influence of the Church while exponentially expanding that of the State.  Classical Toryism rejected this idea as an assault on the order of Christendom in which the king and the Church had distinct roles, distinct tasks to do, distinct spheres in which to do those tasks, and distinct powers with which to do them.  The king was not the instrument of the Church, he was to do his job rather than the Church’s. The Church was not the instrument of the king, she was to do her job rather than the king’s.  If both did their jobs well, it would work for the good of the other, because ultimately their roles, tasks, spheres, and powers came from God and were complementary.  Christian Nationalism, by contrast, which, incorporates liberalism through the Americanism it blends with its Christianity, rejects liberalism’s separation of Church and State, not in favour of the old order but of one in which the State is the instrument of the Church.

 

This has further diminished the Christianity of a movement, the Christianity of which was already diminished by being blended with Americanism.  The attitude that is visibly on display in the movement looks a lot more like hubris than humility.  Apart from being the very opposite of Christ’s own example and what He enjoins upon His followers and apart from being utterly unappealing and ugly in itself, this is counterproductive if we regard one of the challenges that Modern liberal secularism has created to be the re-evangelism of our civilization.  Look back to the early centuries of the Church when, facing the hostility of both the culture of the pagan Roman Empire and of those Jews who did not recognize Jesus as the Messiah, the early Christians first set about the task of evangelizing the ancient world.  They did so, not by political activism and organization, but by imitating Christ’s example and obeying His command to take up their cross in humility and follow Him to the point of martyrdom.

 

In Canada as in the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth Realms, I have said often in the last few years that we are fortunate to have as our hereditary Sovereign a man who chose to modify his coronation service so that being welcomed into Westminster Abbey with the words “Your Majesty, as children of the Kingdom of God we welcome you in the name of the King of Kings” he responded with “In his name, and after his example, I come not to be served but to serve.”  I have noted the huge contrast between this and the attitude of the egomaniacal narcissist around which the MAGA cult, which overlaps Christian Nationalism to a large degree, especially in the United States, is centred.  Last week, as Western Christians celebrated the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and as Eastern Christians on the Julian calendar entered their Holy Week in preparation for the celebration of the Resurrection, and as the aforementioned Yankee narcissist thought it appropriate to mark the occasion with a threat to destroy an entire civilization in war, (11) many infected with the Christian Nationalism we have been discussing attacked His Majesty in a most unchristian manner.  As the king himself was observing the Sacred Triduum from the Maundy Thursday service at St. Asaph Cathedral in Wales to the celebration of Easter in the traditional Matins service at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle, these “Christian” Nationalists attacked him for not recording a video Easter message.   The words “not recording a video” are the operative words here.  He did issue an Easter greeting on the social media platform formerly known as twitter.  He wished Christians around the Commonwealth a “Happy Easter” and gave the simple but powerful message “He is risen!”

 

The controversy was entirely manufactured on the part of His Majesty’s “Christian” critics. Although he recorded a video for Easter last year, it has not become an established royal tradition for the monarch to do so as it has to record one for Christmas.  The king’s critics complained that he had sent a message to Muslims wishing them a happy Ramadan and accused him of everything from abandoning his role as Defender of the Faith to being a crypto-Muslim.  Anybody who took the time to compare – in good faith, mind you – what the king said to his Muslim subjects and what he said at Easter this year and last, would recognize that the fundamental difference between a greeting addressed to Muslims and a Christian message such as “The abiding message of Easter is that God so loved the world — the whole world — that He sent His Son to live among us to show us how to love one another, and to lay down His own life for others in a love that proved stronger than death” from last year’s video or this year’s more simple “He is risen” shows the utter stupidity of these accusations and conspiracy theories.

 

Through all this His Majesty has shown a far better understanding of how a Christian king ought to act towards his subjects of another religion than how these “Christians” have shown of the honour and submission Christianity requires of us towards our temporal king regardless of his personal religion.  The title “Defender of the Faith” was originally conferred on the king for writing a treatise defending the seven sacraments against the criticisms of Dr. Luther in his Babylonian Captivity.  Within the same reign, it was redefined to mean one who defended the Church in his realm against foreign claims of jurisdiction, including that of the foreign power that had bestowed the title in the first place.  Over the course of the century that followed it came to include the defence of the reforms made to that Church in subsequent reigns.  Today, His Majesty’s critics think that it should be given a tribalistic interpretation that has little if any connection to its historical development and which is fundamentally at odds with the basic nature and duty of the office of king, to reign over his realm from a position above partisanship representing law and justice for all.  Whatever corrections from the standpoint of orthodox theology, His Majesty’s views of the relationship between Christianity and other religions might be better off for, they are far preferable to those of the critics who interpret any remarks about Islam that are not bellicose and condemnatory as “promotion” or “preference.” (12)

While not all of these critics would identify as Christian Nationalists they are generally people who have allowed the Christian Nationalist perspective to influence their thinking just as Christian Nationalism has allowed the fundamentally anti-Christian Modern ideologies that it has embraced to warp its version of Christianity.  Followers of Christ should avoid such a movement.  We should love our countries as patriots, honour, pray for, and submit to our earthly king if we are fortunate enough to have one as Scripture enjoins, place the orthodox faith of the Creeds of the early centuries when the Church was undivided ahead of sectarian emphases on lesser matters that pit Christian against Christian and Christians against everyone else in “struggles against flesh and blood”, and take up our cross and follow our Lord’s example of humility rather than hubris.

 

(1)  It is usually misquoted with the definite rather than indefinite article.

(2)   James Boswell, Life of Johnson, April 7, 1775.

(3)   This is a deponent verb – it doesn’t have the regular active voice forms, and has only three principal parts, the third being what would be the fourth in a regular verb (the perfect passive participle).

(4)   Charles-Theodore and Jean-Hippolyte Cogniard, The Tricolour Cockade, 1831.  Whether Chauvin existed or was a fiction created by the Cogniards is a matter of dispute.

(5)   In game theory a zero-sum game is one in which the gains of the one player equally match the losses of the other player so that together they cancel each other out to produce the net sum of zero.

(6)   1 Cor. 13:4.

(7)   Compare the works which Isaiah prophesied that Christ would do Is. 61:1-3 with those for which Christ said He would reward His sheep in Matt. 25:34-40.

(8)   Progressive liberals in my country, Canada, both amuse and disgust me when they say foolish things about secularism distinguishing us from the United States.  Secularism is the American tradition, not ours.

(9)   These instructions from SS Peter and Paul, were not written to Christians living under a Christian king, the king in question was the Roman Caesar and specifically Nero whose reign encompassed the period in which the Apostles were writing. 

(10)                       On the one side, they doubled down on their insistence that the papacy was given universal jurisdiction over the Church that had previously played a role in dividing the Eastern Church from the Western Church.  By declaring the Church to be absent where the jurisdiction of the pope is not acknowledged, they elevated the papacy above the One Lord, Faith, and Baptism.  On the other side, the doctrines that would later be somewhat inaccurately summarized as the Five Solas, were similarly elevated.

(11)                       This man, who regained his office as head of the New Rome and its beastly empire in a campaign that saw him take a gunshot to the head, drop to the ground as if it had taken him out, then, since it had only grazed his ear, bounce back up fighting (Rev. 13:3), has since outdone this by posting a blasphemous picture of himself as if he were Jesus on the Eastern Pascha (Easter) of the Julian calendar.  This was done in the midst of a controversy between himself and the current Roman Patriarch over the pope’s opposition to his war in Iran.

(12)                       His Majesty’s critics have circulated a meme quoting a speech he gave as Prince of Wales in 1993.  The meme is rather mendacious as it implies the words are recent.  The quotation, “More than this, Islam can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is the poorer for having lost” should be read in the context of the entire speech entitled “Islam and the West”.  In that context, it is about the pre-Modern holistic – he used the word “integrated” - view of Creation.  In the same speech, and shortly thereafter, he said “At the core of Christianity, there still lies an integral view of the sanctity of the world, and a clear sense of the trusteeship and responsibility given to us for our natural surroundings.”  Note how he said the West “gradually lost this integrated vision of the world”.  It was “with Copernicus and Descartes and the coming of the scientific revolution”, in other words, the very anthropocentric view of the world succeeding the theocentric view of pre-Modern Christian civilization that I have criticised as liberalism repeatedly in the text of this essay. 

 

While some might not like the way he treats the pre-Modern integrated view of Creation as common to all religions, I would point out that Christianity’s claims to uniqueness have never rested on this point, but upon God’s having visited His Creation in a unique manner by becoming Man in the Incarnation, and upon His having accomplished the salvation of the world from human sin through His having died for us and rose again, none of which is questioned or even the matter at hand here.  That all religions contain truth, is in fact, the teaching of orthodox Christianity.  This is because religions are derived from natural revelation (the kind St. Paul talks about in the first chapter of Romans).  Christianity’s claims to uniqueness pertain to special revelation, the historical special revelation of the Gospel. 

 

St. Justin Martyr in the second century argued that the Divine Logos, which in the preamble to St. John’s Gospel is identified with God and specifically the Person of the Trinity Who became incarnate as Jesus Christ, had planted seeds of Himself throughout the nations prior to His Incarnation, that these had born fruit as philosophy, and that to the extent the ancient philosophers followed the Logos they could be regarded as Christian.  The opposite view, that pre-Christian philosophy contained nothing of value to Christianity could also be found if inconsistently practiced, most notably in Tertullian, but it is difficult to read the New Testament in the original Greek and side with Tertullian. 

 

Where I would respectfully disagree with the speech, which remember was given over thirty years ago, is that, while his overall argument that no one group has a monopoly on either truth or extremism is substantially accurate, the idea of holy war is, in my opinion, more integral to the essential theology of Islam than most other religions.  His Majesty did say, at the beginning of those remarks, that he was not an expert on the subject, however, and I would point out that those who are so quick today to jump on anything positive said in the direction of Islam usually do so for reasons that are less rooted in the differences between Christianity and Islam than they are in the United States’ post-Cold War conflict with the Islamic world.  This conflict arose in part out of the United States’ arrogant belief that she could do whatever she wanted anywhere in the world with impunity, in part out of the United States’ being the spearhead of Modern, materialistic, liberalism, in part out of her having armed and trained the more militant factions of Islam to use against the Soviets in Afghanistan at the end of the Cold War, and in part by much of Christianity in the United States having been deformed by heretical notions, such as the idea that the religion which shares a common pre-Gospel history with Christianity but which is explicitly built on the rejection of Jesus as the Christ, the Middle-Eastern state constructed by adherents of which religion has a vested interest in destabilizing the countries mostly populated by Muslims in the region, is owed some type of allegiance by Christians.

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.