A Red(neck) Tory

 The Kalends of January  is upon us once again.  Kalends, from which our word calendar is derived, was the day of the new moon and hence the first day of the month, for the ancient Romans like the ancient Hebrews followed a calendar in which the months lined up with the lunar cycles they represent.  We have gotten off that so the first of the calendar month no longer always lines up with the beginning of the lunar cycle.  The Kalends of January is a significant day in the Church Kalendar because as Hippolytus of Rome wrote in the second century, our Saviour was born eight days before.  Yes, the 25th of December was the acknowledged birthday of our Lord from far earlier in Church history than Modern gainsayers would have you believe and can in fact be deduced from St. Luke's Gospel.  The eighth day after the birth of an ancient Israelite male was, in accordance with the Abrahamic Covenant, the day he was circumcised and so the Kalends of January has long been the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ.  Far more recently it became New Year's Day on the civil calendar.

This is the day each year when, in accordance with a custom I picked up from Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel, I write about myself and where I stand.  I very much miss Reese's column, and for those who are unfamiliar with him, archives of his last few years can be found on Lew Rockwell's website.  If you are interested in his earlier columns and can get your hands on copies at least two collections were published as books, Great Gods of the Potomac and Common Sense for the Eighties.

Lets start with the basics.  I am a Canadian.  I was born a Canadian and I will die a Canadian.  Donald the Orange can take his obnoxious rhetoric about the "51st state" and insert it into a place that is proverbially bereft of sunshine.  I have lived in the province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada all my life.  I am a loyal subject of King Charles III as I was a loyal subject of his late mother, Queen Elizabeth II of blessed memory before him.  I grew up in rural southwestern Manitoba, on a farm near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers, did my first five years of higher education at what is now Providence University College in Otterbourne, about a half hour south of the provincial capital of Winnipeg, to which I then moved where I have lived and worked for a quarter of a century since.  

I often use T. S. Eliot's famous description of himself as a "royalist in politics, Anglo-Catholic in religion, and classicist in literature" to summarize my own political-religious convictions and what I mean when I call myself a Tory. Tory is usually used to indicate a Conservative Party supporter.  I don't apply it to myself in this partisan sense and seldom use the word conservative even in the small-c sense anymore as that term has been co-opted for people whose political ideals of democracy and capitalism come from nineteenth century liberalism, although twisted beyond what an actual nineteenth century liberal would recognize as his own, and whose main political thought seems to be that the United States should be imposing democracy and capitalism in their evolving meanings on the world with bullets and bombs and boots on the grounds.  When I say I am a Tory, I don't mean anything like that, but rather that my convictions are those of Eliot's triad.

Before saying a bit more about these things, I should explain the adjective in the title.  In Canada, traditional Tories like the economist and humourist Stephen Leacock, the philosopher George Grant, and the historian Donald Creighton,  basically the people who Charles Taylor wrote about in Radical Tories, have sometimes been called "Red" due to their criticisms of capitalism having been perceived as indicating a sympathy with socialism.  This perception is based on a false dichotomy, that capitalism and socialism are each the only option to the other.  In Grant's case he sometimes said things that suggested he accepted this dichotomy. I don't.  Nor do I have any sympathy for socialism which I utterly detest.  I have said before and will say again, that socialism is essentially the second worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, Envy, practiced under the pretense of the greatest of the Theological Virtues, Charity or Christian Love.  I put  "Red" in the title of this essay to indicate that it is Leacock, Grant, Creighton, Eugene Forsey et al., who represent the tradition of Toryism that I claim as my own rather than the neoconservatives who think that this tradition  should be replaced by what is called "conservatism" in the United States (see previous paragraph).  The "neck" is added to indicate that I don't have any sympathy with socialism  nor with anything else that could be called progressive and leftist, but rather hold the anti-progressive attitude often associated with the word "redneck."  Think of the lyrics to Charlie Daniel's "Simple Man" for a picture of what that means.

As a Tory I am no republican big or little r but a "royalist in politics" as Eliot put it.  The entire universe is the kingdom of its Creator, God, the King of Kings.  The most basic unit of social organization, the family, traditionally reflects the order of the universe.  The husband-father is king, wife-mother is queen, and the children are subjects.  That is the way the family works best, despite all attempts by "experts" in the social pseudosciences, the progressive brainwashers who have taken over the schools, and the seditious anti-family revolutionaries who dominate the entertainment media to depict this model as dysfunctional and fascist and to try and sell us on alternative models.  The state traditionally reflected the order of the universe as well, and like the family, it functions best when it continues to do so, under the reign of a king.  The totalitarian movements of the last century hated kings.  Every Communist country was a republic and so was Nazi Germany.  By contrast, "Freedom", as the title of a Canadian Tory classic by John Farthing that I would like to see back in print and in the hands of all my countrymen says "Wears a Crown".  I respect Parliament, precisely because it is an ancient institution that is a traditional part of a king's government and not because it conforms to the Modern ideal or idol of democracy.

Turning to  "Anglo-Catholic in religion," the first thing I should say is that while Anglo-Catholicism does accurately denote what my theology has matured into, it does not mean that I think that the English Reformation was a mistake that should be forgotten or undone.  I think that the things which the Anglican Church shares with not just the Roman Catholic Church, but the Eastern Orthodox and all the ancient Churches, especially the Catholic faith confessed in the ancient Creeds, but also the episcopal polity, the priestly ministry, and Sacramental worship are more important than the things that identify us with the Lutherans, Reformed, and other Protestants.   This does not mean that I think the latter to be unimportant, quite the contrary.  When it comes to the two most important things the Reformers fought for, the supremacy of the Scriptures and the freeness of the salvation proclaimed in the Gospel, I am firmly a Protestant.  I have come to see, however, the importance of qualifying these with Catholic truths.  We must indeed hold the Scriptures supreme as the infallible written Word of God (with the Authorized Bible as published in 1611 with the deuterocanon included between the Testaments as the definitive English Bible) but as Hans Boersma and Ron Dart have frequently reminded us the way to listen to them is at the feet of the Church Fathers.  The Gospel does indeed proclaim a salvation that is freely given in Jesus Christ to all who receive it by faith, but the Gospel is the message of Jesus Christ, His death for us and His Resurrection, confessed in faith in each of the ancient Creeds and not the doctrine of justification which, important as it is, is a doctrine about the Gospel, rather than the Gospel itself, and while faith is the appointed means whereby we receive the saving grace of God, the ordinary means by which that saving grace is brought to us that we may so receive it is the Church's two-fold Gospel ministry of proclaimed Word and administered Sacrament.  I can very much do without most other things associated with Protestantism, especially the iconoclasm and the inclination to write off the Church prior to the Reformation.

I was raised culturally Christian in the sense that we celebrated Christmas and Easter and I was made acquainted with the stories of the Bible if not their theological significance.  My mother attended the United Church in Oak River, my father's family had been affiliated with the Anglican Church in Bradwardine which closed around the time I was born.  My paternal grandmother, received the Anglican Journal and the newspaper of the Diocese of Brandon and I would read these whenever I visited her in Rivers.  It was through reading  Christian books from the library that I became aware of the significance of the events celebrated at Christmas and Easter.  In Bethlehem, the Son of God, Who with His Father and the Holy Ghost was and is and ever shall be, God, was born as a baby boy, having become man by uniting a true human nature to His eternal Person.  He did so, that He might save mankind from the bondage to the devil, sin, and death into which we had fallen in the infancy of our race by dying on the Cross for us, the innocent Lamb of God Who "taketh away the sin of the world" and rising again from the grave triumphant over His enemies and ours.  The summer before I entered high school I became a Christian in the sense of a believer who trusts and confesses Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.

At the time I had a rather low view of the Church as an institution.  Liberalism, in the religious sense of minimizing, explaining away, or outright rejecting such basic Christian truths as the deity and bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ in order to accommodate Modern notions, had made heavy inroads into the Anglican Church and all but completely taken over the United  which at some point around that time had elected an openly atheist moderator.  I had nothing but contempt for religious liberalism before becoming a believer and  had even less respect for it after.   For the first fifteen years of my walk as an active believer I attended non-conformist, mostly Baptist, evangelical and fundamentalist services, and thought that such things as church government were adiophora and the only thing about the organized  Church that mattered was the faithfulness of the sermon to the truths of the Christian faith.

When I joined and was confirmed in the Anglican Church, this was not because I had come to tolerate religious liberalism.  I remain firmly of the conviction that liberalism is not a defective form of Christianity but an entirely different religion altogether as J. Greshem Machen demonstrated in his Christianity and Liberalism a century ago.  Nor was it because the Anglican Church had expunged liberalism which sadly she has not, but because I had come to see that my earlier attitude towards  the institution of the Church was neither Scriptural nor supported by history.

Church government, I had come to see, is not adiophora.  The episcopal polity is not only the polity of the Roman Catholic Church, but of all ancient Churches that predate the Reformation, and furthermore, is clearly present in the Scriptures as the polity established by the Apostles themselves, the first bishops in the sense later attached to the word.  Nor was the soundness of the sermon the only thing that mattered.  Until the Reformation, the Sacrament of the Eucharist had been the central focal point of the service, at least as important as the sermon, and this was true not just of Rome but of all the ancient Churches.  

As for the soundness of what was preached and taught, I had come to appreciate that the best and fullest summary of the truths essential to the Christian faith was not the minimalist list of "five fundamentals" drawn up in controversy with liberals in the early twentieth century, or the Protestant confessions which are too narrow doctrinal statements to be considered the basic faith, but the ancient Creeds, especially the Nicene confessed by all the ancient Churches.  When I joined the  Anglican Church I joined a parish where I knew the teaching and preaching to be sound, but  I joined the Anglican Church because she had come out of the Reformation with her episcopal polity and its Apostolic Succession intact, confessed the ancient and Catholic Creeds as her basic faith, and had recovered the centrality of the Eucharist.  This is how I would say that I am "Anglo-Catholic in religion", although such things as the Coverdale Psalter sung to Anglican plainchant, crucifer led processionals and recessionals, clergy and choir in vestments, and candles and bells and incense all strike me as more appropriate to coming before a holy God than "praise and worship" songs in which the most used words are "me" "myself" and "I", which sentiment is what is more commonly associated with Anglo-Catholicism today. 

I would probably replace "literature" with "culture" in Eliot's "classicist in literature."    Classicism is the position that man's creativity as expressed in arts, literature and culture was given him to serve a higher good, that rules govern the exercise of that creativity and the achievement of the good of culture depends on those rules,  and the output is therefore susceptible to objective and not merely subjective evaluation. Classicism, of course, requires that there be such things as classics in works of art. literature and music.  That which is "classic" is regarded by those with Modern, progressive, forward-looking ideas as "old", but this is because in the shallow following of fad-and-fashion that passes for thinking amongst them they cannot distinguish between what is old and what is timeless.  Timelessness is the distinguishing quality of a classic and that is true in music, the visual arts, architecture and the stage as well as literature proper.  Of course it is the passing of time that in most cases reveals a work to have this quality and most often when a new work is instantly proclaimed a classic it is simply a publicity gimmick into which little to no thought has been placed into the meaning of the word.  Still, it is not impossible to recognize a work that will prove to be enduring when it is new.  If care, skill, and knowledge of the craft or art have gone into the making of it these are good indicators.  Better indicators are that the message in the book, song, painting or what have you is addressed to more than just those of the present moment, although it may make reference to the present moment as a medium for conveying the message.  War, for example, is an enduring theme because its danger is ever present even in times of peace.  A work may speak only to a specific war, in which case it will become dated and bound to its own period.  It can, however, by addressing the reality of an immediate conflict speak beyond it to the enduring theme.  The poem "In Flanders' Field" was written in World War I and this is the war of which it immediately speaks but the truths it speaks are enduring and when the poem is recited every Remembrance Day we understand the words to apply to the fallen of all past conflicts.  The best indicator is when the work says something important about the transcendentals, the qualities of Goodness, Beauty and Truth that the thoughtful and reflective have held important in societies and civilizations in all places and all times because they are the ends of created being, and about God in Whom these must ultimately be sought if man is to fulfil the end for which he is created.  Note that the views expressed in this paragraph are not a judgement of popular culture from the standpoint of highbrow culture.  Picasso's paintings and Schoenberg's music are highbrow but utterly devoid of aesthetic value, whereas popular culture, which is not to be  confused with "pop" culture the distinguishing characteristic of which is that it is factory produced for mass consumption, contains much that is good and has produced many classics.   The truths asserted in this paragraph apply to popular culture as well as to highbrow culture.  

These are the essence of my Toryism.  In the case of royalism I have been a royalist all my life, at first instinctually, later in a more informed manner.  I arrived at Anglo-catholicism through a long spiritual journey that started with an evangelical acceptance of Jesus Christ combined with a fundamentalist rejection of liberalism in religion, and while it may not seem obvious to others to me it is evident that the destination was set from the beginning for the acceptance of Christ implies acceptance of His Church and to fully reject religious liberalism one must reject its seeds in all reforms of the sixteenth century except those that were absolutely necessary.  As for classicism, I can say that I have instinctually loathed the opposite of it all my life, having despised non-metrical verse, avant garde art, atonal music and the like from the moment I first encountered it, although active pursuit of the higher and elevating in culture came later, after much resistance of those who encouraged  me in that direction, and in part out of sheer cussedness such as when having encountered Mark Twain's remark that "everyone wants to have read the classics but nobody wants to read them" I responded with "Sez you, Sam Clemens" and set out to read them.

Clearly my Toryism is not what calls  itself "conservatism" these days.  I am closest to today's conservatives when it comes to what they are against.  I oppose abortion and what is now called "Medical Assistance in Dying" because they are murder (as opposed to killing in self-defence, in defence of others and property, capital punishment, and for one's country in war, which are not).  That, however, may be something I have more in common with the conservatives of yesterday than those of today. I detest the courts turning violent offenders out onto the streets almost the moment they are arrested and making the public provide a supposedly safe supply of hard narcotics to drug addicts in the idea that this will reduce the harm they inflict upon themselves.  Ending "catch and release" is not enough, however, over a century's worth of progressive reforms to the idea of criminal justice needs to be undone and we need to get back to thinking of criminal justice in terms of making the offender pay his debt to society rather than helping the offender recover from the illness of crime.  As for drug policy, we need to fish or cut bait as the polite version of the saying goes.  Either go back to trusting people to make their own self-medication choices or eliminate the supply of illegal narcotics in a real, rather than half-ass, war on drugs.  Either approach would be a vast improvement to the public not-for-profit drug dealing that is the harms reduction model.

 I oppose illegal immigration, but unlike most conservatives go further and say that legal immigration is in need of serious reform as well, and the problems are not merely those of the last ten or twenty years or so, but go back to the sixties.   I think that the late French Catholic, monarchist Jean Raspail hit the nail on the head in his novel The Camp of the Saints which depicted post-World War II liberalism as leading the civilization formerly known as Christendom to an existential crisis in its enthusiastic preference of "the other" at the expense of its own as reflected in its enthusiastic embrace of immigrants and refugees in numbers too large to be absorbed without endangering the continuity of the civilization.  The point is not that racial or cultural "otherness" is an insurmountable roadblock to someone's becoming a true member of the community, society, country, and civilization they move to, that it is not is also illustrated in Raspail's book.  As Enoch Powell put it "it is a matter of numbers."

I detest radical feminism, the racial hatred of white people that goes under the name of "anti-racism", the Year Zero attempts to erase the past that go under the names of "anti-imperialism" and "anti-colonialism," the movement that in the name of "rights" is now demanding in the most totalitarian way possible that everybody not merely tolerate, not merely accept, but practically worship everyone who is other than cisgender and heterosexual and which insists that everyone pretend that someone who thinks he is a gender other than his biological sex, whether an actual gender or a make believe one, is what he says he is, and basically everything that the word "wokeness" has come to denote.  Where I would differ from conservatives is that their opposition to wokeness does not go much further or deeper than criticizing it for deviating from 1950's and 1960's, American liberalism.  My rejection of the vile race hatred of Ibraham X. Kendi does not mean that I am about to start pretending that Martin Luther King Jr. was a saint rather than a charlatan.   I  cannot stand the kind of idiot who in the name of feminism tells a neighbouring country that they should have voted otherwise in their last election because they owed it to the other candidate because she is a woman.  This is not because I think feminism to be a good thing of which he is a false representative.  Each successive wave of "feminism" has gotten crazier and crazier, because its real enemy from the first wave onward has not been the conspiracy of all men to oppress all women that has only ever existed in the fevered brains of those attached to this delusional movement but the reality of human nature that some people are men, others are women, that men and women are different, that these differences are not trivial but fundamental, "vive la différence" as the French say, and that trying to prevent this difference from expressing itself in social organization will inevitably increase rather than decrease the misery and unhappiness of both sexes.  "The personal is the political" was the motto of its second wave, a chilling statement that to these harridans there is no aspect of life that should escape the power of the state to remold it to their wishes.  For the best takes on feminism I refer you to Stephen Leacock's "The Woman Question" and to Dr. Johnson's observation  that "nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given her very little."

I am much further from "conservatives" when it comes to the things they are for.  I explained above the things that I as a Tory am for and these things, royal monarchy, Christ's One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church in its reformed Anglican expression, and classicism are all deep-rooted and ancient.  The things that "conservatives" say they are for are all Modern with roots no deeper than liberalism.  They are constantly changing because liberalism is constantly changing and to be a "conservative" today means little more than to be a defender of yesterday's liberalism against the changes proposed by today's. 

The most consistent things today's "conservatives" are for are capitalism and technological progress. With regards to technological progress while there have been undeniable benefits to developing newer and fancier tools that can do increasingly more things for us there are obvious detriments as well.  That we have given ourselves the ability to destroy ourselves and our world stands out.  Having technology do for us what we should be doing for ourselves is another downside that is becoming an increasing problem as technology advances into the AI stage.  Thinking is not something we should be outsourcing to machines.  The earlier stage in which computers took over the task of doing all calculations in economic transactions had the result that when the computers were down many of the people manning the tills in stores were unable to do the simple math required to make change.  A repeat  of that with other cognitive functions is most undesirable.   I regard the idea that we will eventually solve all our problems by technological advancement with the utmost skepticism.  The Scriptures say that idolaters, those who worship the works of their hands come to resemble their false gods (Psalm 135:18).  Faith in technological progress is a form of idolatry and it inevitably makes men and their societies resemble machines.  

Technological progress is an inseparable part of capitalism.  Capitalism is often confused with economic freedom but the two are not the same.  Economic freedom is a simple concept and a basic good that is far to be preferred to the universal slavery that is socialism, whereas capitalism is a complex system that developed by removing traditional restrictions on usury, applying technological progress to the production of industrial goods, and expanding international trade.  I talked about the downside to technological progress in the previous paragraph.  That large-scale international trade has its disadvantages as well as its advantages (comparative and absolute, in economic jargon) is obvious and until the 1980s, the element of liberal economic theory that conservatives rejected was that such trade should be unrestricted.  American conservatives have of late abandoned the free trade fetish they picked up in that decade.  Canadian conservatives would be wise to follow suit as the disadvantage of being too dependent upon trade with one's neighbour has become glaringly obvious.  Nevermind that the threat of crippling tariffs is attached to demands that we fix problems that we ought to be fixing any way, we should not be so dependent upon trade with the United States that its incoming leader can bully us around like that.  Add David Orchard's The Fight for Canada to the mandatory reading list.  As for usury, it undergirds and runs through the entire capitalist system, which is why that system is incompatible with a sound currency.  Sound money, is money that retains its purchasing power so that people can use it to save for the future, a quality that requires that the currency represents actual wealth, that is, real goods already produced.  Usury, however, turns a country's monetary system into a Ponzi scheme where the currency is backed by debt, wealth that has not yet been produced.  Since usury, like technological progress and international trade, is an essential element of capitalism, capitalism cannot escape this outcome.

Capitalism has been accused of evils of which it is not guilty, such as lowering the standard of living of workers (it raised it) and impoverishing the third world (the incompetent kleptocratic governments brought in by the decolonization and anti-imperialism that leftists love so much did that) but there are plenty of evils of which it can be justly accused. These include the uprooting of families, the decimation of rural communities, the disappearance of the family farm, urbanization and the accompanying evils of increased crime and erosion of trust and social capital that go along with it, the uglification of the countryside which is the real evil that those who claim to care for the earth and the environment ought to be fighting rather than the bogeyman of climate change, the reorganization of society so as to operate like an extended business rather than an extended family, a culture of throwing away and replacing rather than preserving and passing on, and dozens of others of a similar nature to these.  That socialism is an utterly unacceptable evil and economic freedom a good I have always held and always will maintain but this will not stop me from decrying these evils of which capitalism has been the engine and which conservatives, if they stopped for a second to think about what their chosen label implies, ought to realize that they should oppose too. 

The matter that probably best illustrates how I am closest to conservatives in what they oppose and furthest from them in what they are for is education.  Conservatives are opposed to the way schools from the earliest grades to universities have become indoctrination camps for pushing hatred of white people, hatred of Christianity, and hatred of Western countries and their history onto children and for exposing them to sexuality, and especially its more perverse forms, way too early.  I oppose this too.  Most conservatives promote STEM-centred education (science, technology, engineering, mathematics).  That these fields are immune to being turned into vessels for wokeness has of late been proven false, but were that not the case I would dissent from the idea of STEM-centric education because it is based on the idea that the purpose of education is to train children to be more successful cogs in the capitalist machine.  The purpose of education is to civilize children, for we are all essentially born savages and barbarians, so that they might be fit to be free subjects of the king and citizens of the state and for this there is no better education than the kind that starts with the basic trivium (grammar - Latin, Greek and first language, logic, and rhetoric), and builds on these with the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy).  See Dorothy L. Sayers' "The Lost Tools of Learning."  Along with these, the seven classical liberal arts, history should be taught in a way that neither demonizes the builders of civilization and its institutions like "Woke" history, nor interprets the past as one long march towards liberal democracy in the present day like what Herbert Butterfield dubbed "the Whig Interpretation of History" but as John Lukacks' "remembered past" that contains the good and the bad, in which the builders of civilization are presented as they were, a mixture of both, and leaves us free to honour them for their accomplishments and the legacy they have bequeathed us and simply because it is the debt we owe to those who have gone before us, without conscripting them posthumously into the service of Francis Fukuyama's "end of history."  It is best if this is taught in a religious context, preferably with the Church in charge of education rather than the government.

Happy New Year

God Save the King!

Toxic Niceness and the Corruption of Contemporary Christianity

 The Modern Age, the zeitgeist of which has long been known as liberalism, has driven the wedge of secularism between much of the society, culture(s) and civilization of what was once Christendom and the Christian faith and religion.    If the influence of liberalism extended only to the temporal this would be bad enough but it has permeated the Christian Churches and sects as well.   Over the last century and a half the word liberal developed a special connotation in the Churches and sects where it denoted people who saw the narratives of the Bible as belonging to the same category as Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tales, that is to say, stories valued for their utility in teaching life lessons to children rather than for their truth, people who saw no inconsistency in calling themselves Christians and going to church every Sunday even though they did not believe in the supernatural assertions made about Jesus Christ in the ancient Creeds.   Liberals, in the theological sense, often cloaked their unbelief in ways they thought were clever.   For example, they would say that they believed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ “in the sense” that He lived on in the hearts of His followers.   This meant that they did not believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ as that phrase had been understood by everyone from the Apostles through the middle of the nineteenth century, i.e., that Jesus Christ, after He had been crucified and buried, returned to life in His body, left the Tomb, and walked and talked among His disciples again, before ascending physically to Heaven.   Perhaps the theological liberals thought that those who continued to hold to this traditional belief in this traditional understanding were so much less sophisticated than themselves that they, the traditionalists, would never catch on to how this re-interpretation of the event made their profession of belief into one of unbelief.   If so, theological liberals are well-named for that is the same attitude that more generic liberals take to non-liberals in general. 

 

In his Christianity and Liberalism (1923), J. Gresham Machen, then Professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, contrasted traditional, orthodox, Christianity with theological liberalism and drew the inescapable conclusion that they are two separate religions.   This same assessment was more recently asserted by retired Anglican priest Rev. George Eves in the title of his Two Religions, One Church.   Indeed, it has long been a bit of a puzzle as to why liberals continue to see themselves as belonging to the Christian faith.   A partial answer can be found by considering the matter in terms of the Aristotelian distinction between essence and accidents.    Orthodox or conservative Christians consider the articles of faith in the ancient Creeds to be the essence of Christianity.   This is true even of conservative Protestants who belong to non-liturgical, non-sacramental, sects who might shudder at that wording as being too “Catholic” for their liking.   The doctrines that they regard as essentials or fundamentals of Christianity rather than distinctions of their denominations are ones that either can be found as articles in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds or which express the basic unspoken belief underlying the Creeds that the Christian Scriptures are authoritative special revelation from God.   Fundamentalism, for example, in its original form - an inter-denominational co-operative effort of conservatives fighting the encroaching liberalism - identified “five fundamentals” as being particularly under attack by liberalism at the time and as forming a basis for their contra-liberal ecumenical efforts.   Originally taken from a 1910 Presbyterian declaration, these have been formulated in a myriad of ways, each slightly different from the others, but basically, the first is a strongly worded affirmation of Scriptural authority, usually using words like inspiration or inerrancy, and the other four are affirmations about Jesus Christ all of which can be found in the articles of the Creeds – usually His deity, Virgin Birth, Resurrection, and Second Coming.  This can be criticized from a more conservative or orthodox position as being too reductionist – the Apostles’ Creed, the simplest of the ancient Creeds, famously consists of twelve articles, one for each of the men from whom its title is derived – but my point is that conservatives, whether traditionalist or “fundamentalist”, all recognize the articles that make up what we call “the faith” as essential to Christianity.  Liberals, by contrast, see all such articles of faith more as Aristotelean accidents, external trappings that can be discarded without altering the essence of Christianity.

 

The conservatives, obviously, are right.   One of the things that has made Christianity distinct among the religions of the world from the very beginning is that Christianity, more than any other religion, is a faith, a community held together by a set of common beliefs and defined by those beliefs.   This is true even if we limit the comparison to the monotheistic religions that look to Abraham as a spiritual patriarch.   What is believed is and always has been far more important to Christianity than to either Judaism or Islam.   It is ludicrous therefore to take that which has historically defined Christianity and make it out to be her disposable outward trappings rather than her very essence.   It becomes even more ludicrous when we turn to the question that necessarily arises out of this observation about liberalism, the question of what they regard as the essence of Christianity, if they see the articles of faith as her accidents.

 

The answer, of course, is that for liberals it is Christianity’s ethical or moral message that is her essence.   Note that the first obvious immediate effect of making Christianity into an ethical message cloaked in the external trappings of a supernatural belief system is to radically decrease the difference between Christianity and other religions.   This is so for two reasons.   The first is that which we have already observed about Christianity being distinct from other religions, even the other Abrahamic monotheistic religions, in prioritizing belief.   In Christianity what is believed comes first, what is done comes second.  In every other religion what is done takes precedence over what is believed.   A theory of Christianity that makes her ethical message her essence and her article of faith her accidents eliminates this distinction.   The other reason is that Christianity’s ethical message has never been her most distinctive element.   In explanation, let us start by limiting the comparison to the Abrahamic monotheistic religions and more narrowly to Christianity and Judaism.   In His ethical teachings, that is to say, His teachings that pertained to how people were to behave and live their lives, Jesus Christ taught the Mosaic Law as an absolutely authoritative text.    While this is often missed by those who superficially read the “ye have heard it said…but I say unto ye” contrasts in His most famous Sermon and gloss over the warning He gave at the beginning not to take His words as contradicting and setting aside the Mosaic Law, it is nevertheless the case.   The difference between the ethical teachings of Christianity and the ethical teachings of Judaism could be said to be the difference between the Mosaic Law as taught and interpreted by Jesus Christ and the Mosaic law as taught and interpreted by the rabbis (originally the lay teachers of Pharisees, a sect within Second Temple Judaism the clergy of which were the Levitical priests, these took on a more clerical role in post-Temple Judaism).   Without wanting to make this difference less than it actually is, for most of the last two thousand years had you told either Jews or Christians that the most important and essential differences between the teachings of their two religions lay in the realm of ethics they would have thought you belonged in a nut house.   Broadening the comparison, while certainly instances can be pointed to where different religions take opposing positions on particular ethical issues, a good case can be made that of all the different areas that religious teachings address this is the one where they have the most in common.   See the appendix to C. S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man (1943).

 

That liberalism’s making  Christianity’s ethical teachings into her essence and her articles of faith into her accidents radically reduces the difference between Christianity and other religions is something that is appalling to Christians who believe in Him Who said “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” and of Whom St. Peter said by the power of of the Holy Ghost “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” but appealing to religious liberals qua liberals.   Liberalism, not just religious liberalism but liberalism in general, has long been obsessed with the idea that it can create a better world in which all people live in peace and harmony and that differences between people – originally and especially religious, but also differences of race, ethnicity, sex, etc. – are stumbling blocks on the path to this man-made Paradise that they need to clear out of the road.   Even today’s “woke” left, which on the surface seems like a movement deliberately trying to do the opposite of this, to create a world of disharmony and strife by magnifying said differences to the nth degree, is, in fact, another variation on this same liberal theme, one that is distinguished by the tactic it shares with Nazism and Communism of othering and scapegoating, of placing all the blame for disharmony and strife and basically the world being anything other than an earthly Paradise on specific groups, religious (Christians), racial (whites), etc.

 

Liberalism, as argued three paragraphs ago, is wrong that Christianity’s ethical teachings are her essence rather than her articles of faith.   This error is compounded by the fact that religious liberalism’s ethical teachings are radically different from what Christianity has taught about ethics and morals for the last two thousand years.   Liberalism explains this by claiming that Jesus Christ’s original ethical teachings were corrupted by His disciples and especially by the Apostle Paul into something that conformed more closely to those of Judaism and/or the Greek philosophers.   The only historical evidence we have, however, is of the Jesus Whose teachings as recorded in the Gospels harmonize with those of St. Paul in his epistles, and not of the hypothetical Jesus with radically different teachings postulated by liberalism.

 

Exactly what liberalism claims the “true” ethical teachings of Jesus were has changed over the course of the century and a half that religious liberalism has been afflicting the denominations of Christianity.   Generally, however, the values of the ethical teachings of religious liberalism’s “historical Jesus" line up closely with those espoused and promoted by political liberalism at any given moment in time.   This has remained constant, even though the values that political and religious liberalism promote together frequently change.   There is one other constant, however, and that is the idea that Jesus’s teachings essentially boil down to “be nice to each other”.  

 

This particular idea requires special attention because a) it has spread beyond the kind of religious liberalism described above and can be found espoused even by some who would usually be considered conservative or orthodox and b) it correlates with a problematic phenomenon in the broader society.   This is the phenomenon in which such an exaggerated value is placed on such things as being positive and non-confrontational, always smiling and acting cheerful, and the like, that they either a) hinder or outright prevent a host of other things of equal or superior value, such as truth and honesty or b) serve as an outward, superficial, mask of thoughtfulness towards others behind which those who are exceptionally self-centered and who delight in controlling and/or hurting others hide.    Feminist writers – I think that Elizabeth Hilts, the author of a series of books giving exceptionally bad advice to women was probably the first – have been referring to this phenomenon as it pertains to the first of the two identified drawbacks at least insofar as it affects women as “toxic niceness” for decades.   Such writers, in my opinion, speak from the perspective of a repugnant solipsism that tends to blind them from seeing anything outside the perceived victimhood of their own sex and which renders their idea of which truths are suppressed by excessive niceness highly inaccurate.   Nevertheless, since the phenomenon is real and affects both sexes rather than merely the one, we shall borrow their term for it as a better one could hardly be coined.   We shall concentrate, however, on the second drawback.

 

That toxic niceness, this cult of excessive and unbalanced positivity, can serve as a cloak of hypocrisy over a particularly vicious form of nastiness is quite evident.    Indeed, it is almost axiomatic to say that the sort of people who are always acting upbeat, who always wear a big smile plastered on their faces, who try never to say anything that isn’t positive turn out, if you get to know them at all, to be the biggest jerks and jackasses.   Who is not familiar with the kind of person who smiles and acts like your best friend to your face but who stabs you the moment your back is turned?   Or the sort of person who never confronts anybody, who never goes to someone and says “Hey, I have a problem with what you just said/did”, and who may sometimes go around bragging about what a non-confrontational person he is, but who is constantly running with complaints about everyone to those in positions of power and authority as fast as his tale can tattle.   

 

Here in the Dominion of Canada we have in recent decades allowed toxic niceness to permeate the culture to the point that we are all suffocating from it.   My province calls itself “friendly Manitoba”, an expression that can be found on the license plates of our automobiles.   Yet Winnipeg, the city in which I live is a city in which it is notoriously difficult to change lanes when you need to do so because other drivers will speed up or slow down – whichever it takes – to prevent you from doing so.   Just last week I heard a radio station, I forget which one, in which an advertisement referred to our city as the place where turn signals are optional.  In Winnipeg, if you signal that you need to change lanes and there are vehicles behind you, they will immediately pull into the lane you wish to move into and speed up – all without signaling themselves – so that you either have to aggressively beat them into the lane or wait for them all to pass you, even if this means missing your turn or illegally brining your car to a stop in the middle of the street.    This is one of the most inconsiderate, jerkish, ways of driving that can be conceived short of something criminal and cartoonish like driving down the sidewalk and stamping out a tally of the number of pedestrians you knock down on the side of your car.   Yet it is typical of the drivers in the capital of “friendly Manitoba”.   This example is topped, however, by that of the current Prime Minister of Canada who could be said to be the poster boy for toxic niceness.   He won his first election on a platform of empty positivity which he contrasted with the supposed negativity of the previous government.   He borrowed the phrase “sunny ways” from Sir Wilfred Laurier as his motto.   He carefully crafted this image of a smiling, upbeat, positive person who is all about caring and listening and being inclusive.   Beneath it all, however, he quickly proved to be a truly nasty jerk and bully, a real υἱός τῆς κῠνός with an abnormally low level of toleration for those who disagree with him, who saw the caring and compassion of other Canadians as a means for him to exploit to rob Canadians of their basic civil rights and liberties and seize more power for himself.

 

These examples from the broader culture and society show how beneath an excessive emphasis on being nice the worst sorts of nastiness can be hiding.   What is true of toxic niceness in the broader culture is also true, perhaps even more so, of the reduction of Christianity or at least her ethical message to the idea that we ought to “be nice”.  

 

How anyone ever got the idea that Christianity was all about being nice is beyond me.   Those who use the word “Christlike” as if it were a synonym for “nice” are especially befuddling.   Have they never read the twenty-third chapter of the Gospel according to St. Matthew in which the dear Lord gives a harangue, almost the length of the chapter, directed against the scribes and Pharisees in which He repeatedly calls them “hypocrites” “fools” “brood of vipers” and the like, likens them to “whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness” and threatens them with hellfire and damnation?   Ironically, if any of the sort of people I have in mind were to hear anyone today talk like this the first thing they would say would be that he is not being very “Christlike”.   It does not seem from this chapter that being nice was top priority with the Lord Jesus.   Nor would the incident recorded two chapters previously in which, having arrived at the Temple after His Triumphal Entry, He overturned the tables of the moneychangers and dove merchants and drove them all out (St. John in his Gospel records a similar incident that took place prior to the start of Jesus’ preaching ministry in which He drove the merchants out of the temple with a scourge) suggest that following Jesus’ example means being nice all the time.

 

Jesus did not tell His disciples to be nice, a word that does not appear in the Authorized Bible and which in other versions appears only in the Old Testament in reference to things, words, and situations rather than people.   Indeed, the very appeal of niceness to so many today, whether they be professing Christians or just members of the broader society, is that unlike those things which Jesus did enjoin upon His disciples, such as a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees (Matt. 5:20) and to love one another (Jn. 13:34), niceness is neither difficult nor does it cost its practitioner anything.   It is the ideal virtue for the virtue signaler, the sort of person who likes to go around showing off how good of a person he is with cheap, shallow, and empty forms of goodness that either come with no cost or have a cost that he can easily export to others, in order to gain the praise, credit, and applause of other people.   The sort of person, in other words, who does the same thing Jesus rebuked the Pharisees for doing in Matthew 23:4-5.

 

When He comes again in His glory to judge both the quick and the dead, what will He say to those who are promoting toxic niceness in His name?

Orthodoxy and Literalism

A century ago the fundamentalist-modernist controversy broke out across all Protestant denominations. This was very different from previous theological controversies. In the early centuries of the Church the orthodox Church Fathers defended the Apostolic faith against various sorts of heresies but these latter were distortions of the truth rather than outright denials of it. Nestorians separated the natures of Christ, monophysitists confused them, and in response the Council of Chalcedon condemned both heresies and articulated, in its famous Definition, the orthodox doctrine of the hypostatic union – that full deity and full humanity are, without being confused with each other, inseparably joined in the one Person of Jesus Christ. Other controversies, would later arise among those who accepted Nicene orthodoxy, over fine points of theological interpretation. The fundamentalist-modernist controversy was not like either of those.

What was called modernism them but is usually called liberalism today, was not a new theological “tribe” that had suddenly popped up among the faithful. Instead, it was unbelief articulated as theology. Rationalistic philosophy had persuaded many people that the laws of nature were inviolable, that events such as virgins giving birth, men walking on water and multiplying a handful of loaves of bread so that they can feed thousands, and the dead returning to life, did not and could not happen. Modernism was the result of people being convinced of the rationalist position but unwilling to give up their profession of the Christian religion and so accordingly they developed a theology in which unbelief was disguised as belief, through the means of non-literalism. Thus, while unbelief is the proper term for their idea that the body of Jesus Christ remained in the grave and rotted, they instead spoke of their belief in a “non-literal” Resurrection. Similarly they asserted their belief in a “divinity of Christ” but not in the literal, Jesus Christ was the Creator of the universe, Who as the Son of God shared the nature of the Father and Holy Spirit with Whom He existed from all eternity, sense of orthodox Christianity. H. Richard Niebuhr – the brother of the better known Reinhold Niebuhr – aptly summed up the message of liberal Protestantism as “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” (1) It was in no way a form of Christianity but a different religion altogether as Presbyterian theologian, J. Gresham Machen, observed:

In the sphere of religion, in particular, the present time is a time of conflict; the great redemptive religion which has always been known as Christianity is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only the more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology. This modern non-redemptive religion is called “modernism” or “liberalism.” (2)

It is important, therefore, when examining the weaknesses of fundamentalist literalism from the perspective of historical and traditional Christian orthodoxy – small-o orthodoxy, that is, the Apostolic doctrine of Christ upheld by the Church Fathers in the early, undivided, Church – that we recognize that the objections that orthodoxy might raise to fundamentalist literalism are not the same ones that liberalism raises. There are today those who hold to a kind of pseudo-orthodoxy. These are people, often ex-evangelical Protestants, who belong to traditional, liturgical, denominations, and who emphasize the fact that literalism is not the traditional, orthodox, interpretation of the Scriptures in order to advance non-literal interpretations of the Scriptures that are considerably further removed from traditional orthodoxy than fundamentalist literalism. An example of this would be the kind of semi-Marcionism that does not exclude the Old Testament from the canon, as Marcion of Sinope and his followers did, but allegorizes away the parts of the Old Testament to which Marcion objected, claiming an inconsistency between the behaviour of the YHWH depicted in a literal reading of these books with that of the Father God proclaimed by Jesus in the New Testament.

When traditional orthodoxy departs from the strict literalism of fundamentalism it is in the opposite direction to that of liberalism. Liberalism rejects the literal truth of the Scriptures out of unbelief, traditional orthodoxy asserts that the truth of the Scriptures cannot and must not be reduced to the literal. Another way of putting this is to say that unlike liberalism, orthodoxy is more than literalism – not less.

The orthodox interpretation of Scripture is a multi-layered edifice to which the literal reading is the foundation. That is to say, the genuine literal reading and not a hyper-literal reading, i.e., one that ignores the presence of metaphor and other figures of speech in the Scriptural text. St. Thomas Aquinas explained that:

The author of Holy Writ is God, in whose power it is to signify His meaning, not by words only (as man also can do), but also by things themselves. So whereas in every other science things are signified by words, this science has the property, that the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification. Therefore the first signification whereby words signify things belongs to the first sense, the historical or literal. That signification whereby things signified by words have themselves also a signification is called the spiritual sense, which is based on the literal and presupposes it. (3)

St. Thomas went on to divide the spiritual sense into three kinds – the allegorical, moral, (4) and anagogical (5) senses. These, together with the literal sense, comprise the quadriga, the fourfold sense of Scriptures, that had been taught and recognized by theologians from the Church Fathers through the Reformation. The first of the three spiritual senses – more commonly called typological as all three are allegories of one sort or another – is itself spelled out in the New Testament. This is the sense in which the institutions, people, and events of the Old Testament are understood as types of Jesus Christ and His New Covenant. This spiritual sense cannot be rejected without also rejecting the book of Hebrews in its literal sense, especially chapters nine and ten. It is also very much evident in use in the way the Old Testament is quoted throughout the New. As St. Augustine of Hippo famously put it “the New Testament is hidden in the Old, The Old Testament is unveiled in the New.” (6)

In orthodoxy, however, the literal interpretation was always the primary interpretation. It was recognized that the spiritual interpretation could very easily run to all sorts of excesses, extremes and fanaticisms if not tried down by literal. Dr. Martin Luther formulated this into the rule that “no allegory, tropology, or anagogy is valid, unless that same truth is explicitly stated literally somewhere else. Otherwise, Scripture would become a laughing matter.” (7)

The other continental Protestant Reformers were not as orthodox as Luther. Calvin in particular disparaged the quadriga and argued that the Scriptures had only one meaning, the literal. He thereby laid the foundation for both Puritanism and fundamentalism. Puritanism was the extremist form of Calvinist theology that the Marian exiles brought back to England in the sixteenth century after the accession of Elizabeth I. It insisted upon using the regulative (8) rather than the normative (9) principle in holding Christian tradition accountable to the Scriptures and turned seditious, regicidal, tyrannical, and genocidal when it found its pharisaical sabbatarianism and its schemes to purge England of such “popery” as Christmas and Easter to be opposed by the king. William Perkins, an early Puritan who remained within the Church of England and mercifully, for his sake, did not live to see Puritanism at its ugliest, said in a post-humously published work that there “is onelie one sense, and the same is the literall.” (10) Note, however, that those such as Calvin and Perkins who insisted in theory that the literal was the only sense, in practice often simply collapsed the other senses into the literal.

It is evident that the branch of Protestant theology that produced the fruit of Puritanism and later fundamentalism deviated from the orthodox understanding of the Scriptures in its literalism, and that this deviancy was an act of reduction – the act of collapsing the edifice which was the spiritual interpretation of the Scriptures in all three of its traditional aspects into its foundation, the literal meaning. Liberalism, far from seeking to rebuild the edifice, commits an act of further demolition that attacks the very foundation itself, by positing “non-literal” meanings of the Resurrection that leave Jesus in His tomb.

For those seeking a more wholesome form of Christianity than literalist fundamentalism, traditional orthodoxy, which recognizes that the God Who through human writers penned His communication to man in the words of the Scriptures, also wrote His message on the events recorded therein, is the right direction to look, rather than liberalism. You will find it in the opposite direction of liberalism.

(1) H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America, (New York: Harper & Row, 1937) p. 193.
(2) J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, (New York: MacMillan, 1923), p. 2.
(3) St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I.I.10.
(4) Also called the tropological sense – this is the lesson we are to take from the Scriptural narrative as to how we should behave.
(5) Also called the eschatological sense – in which things and events of this temporal world, recorded in the Scriptures, are understood to signify things and events that belong to eternity.
(6) St. Augustine, Questionum in Heptateuchum, II.73. “quamquam et in Vetere Novum lateat, et in Novo Vetus pateat.”
(7) Quoted by Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, 25th Anniversary, 6th Ed. (Oxford: Wiley/Blackwell, 1993, 2017), p. 118. Although McGrath provides no bibliographic data for this quotation, merely dating it to 1515, it seems to be a translation from Luther’s commentary on the Psalter.
(8) The regulative principle is the idea that only those practices explicitly authorized in the Scriptures are to be followed. It was aptly refuted from the Scriptures and reason by Richard Hooker in his Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie.
(9) The normative principle is the idea that any practice that is not forbidden by the Scriptures is to be allowed. This is in accordance with the Pauline doctrine of Christian liberty and is superbly defended in the work mentioned in the footnote above.
(10) William Perkins, The arte of prophecying, or, A treatise concerning the sacred and onely true manner and methode of preaching, (1607). Spelling is as in the original.

Evangelicalism is Not Enough

Evangelical is an adjective which, by its literal definition, should apply to all Christians. Five hundred years ago, however, it became a popular way of identifying distinguishing one group of Christians, those who upheld the doctrines of the final authority of the Scriptures and justification by faith alone, from others. It became, in other words, a synonym for Protestant. Since that time, especially in the English-speaking world and particularly in North America, it has come to be used to distinguish a certain kind of Protestant from others. This is partially because some Protestants now deny the doctrines of justification by faith alone and the final authority of Scriptures but it is also because in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the meaning of the word evangelical changed. In these centuries an evangelical came to be distinguished from other Christians more by a particular experience – a conversion in which he has made a decision for Jesus – than by particular doctrines. Today, there are those who call themselves evangelicals on the basis of their conversion experiences who do not hold to the doctrines of Reformation evangelicalism.

What Does Evangelical Mean?

The word evangelical has two parts One of those parts is the suffix –ical. This suffix converts other parts of speech into adjectives, words which ascribe qualities to nouns, pronouns, and other substantives. An adjective formed with the suffix –ical, ascribes the qualities of the word to which the suffix is added, to the noun which it modifies. Evangelical, therefore, ascribes the qualities contained in the word “evangel” to the nouns it modifies.

Evangel is not a word we use in English, except as part of compound words like evangelical. It is the Latinized form of the Greek word euangelion. In euangelion, the prefix eu-, which means “good” is added to the word angelion, which means “news” or “message”, to get the simple meaning “good news”. It can refer to good news of any sort but it also has a more specific meaning, because it is the name given to the message of Christianity. When it is used in this sense, it is usually rendered in English as “gospel”. It is the Christian message, the gospel, that the evangel in words like evangelical and evangelist, refers to.

What is the Christian gospel?

Jesus of Nazareth, after being baptized by John the Baptist, went out into the wilderness to fast, pray, and be tempted for forty days, and when He returned began a ministry of preaching, teaching, and healing. He called the message He preached “the gospel of the Kingdom.” The message was that “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Later, after Jesus died, rose again, and ascended to Heaven, His Apostles also called the message they preached “the gospel”. St. Paul, in the fifteenth chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthian church identified the Apostolic gospel as the message 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.”

While Jesus’ gospel of the Kingdom and the Apostolic gospel of Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection have different content, both messages are ultimately about the same thing – Jesus and the mission He came into this world to accomplish. That is why the first four books of the Christian Scriptures, each of which is an account of Jesus, His ministry, His teachings, and His death and resurrection, are also called gospels.

Jesus preached the gospel that “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” to God’s covenant people, Israel. The way He formulated His gospel it would not have meant much to anyone other than the Jews. They were the ones to whom the promise of the Kingdom of God had been given. They were God’s people. God had made promises to their patriarchs, delivered them from slavery in Egypt, made a covenant with them, and then brought them into the land of Canaan which He had promised them. In that land and under that covenant, they entered into a cyclical pattern of rebellion and idolatry, followed by judgement, repentance, restoration, and then a falling away again from which they were not able to break free. Eventually, God’s prophets warned them of a judgement in which they would be removed from the land God have given them. These warnings were tempered with promises that God would restore them and that He would break the cycle Himself. He would send them a Saviour-King, from the line of David, Who would establish the Kingdom of God and rule in justice and mercy forever. When this happened God would make a new covenant in which He would write His laws on the hearts of His people rather than upon tablets of stone. When Jesus preached “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” He was telling God’s people that these promise were about to be fulfilled. That is why it was “good news”.

The Kingdom of Heaven was at hand because He Jesus, was Himself the promised Saviour-King, the Messiah, the Christ. At one point in Jesus’ ministry, He asked His disciples first Who men said that He was, and then Who they said that He was. In response St. Peter, speaking for the Apostles, said that Jesus was “the Christ, the Son of the living God”. Jesus confirmed this and then began to tell His disciples that He was about to go to Jerusalem, where He would be put to death and would rise again on the third day. By telling them this after their confession of faith that He was the Christ, He linked His death and resurrection with His being the Christ. They had recognized Him as the Messiah, now He was explaining to them what it meant for Him to be the Messiah. The Christ was come to deliver God’s people from more than just the political oppression that was the consequence of their rebellion. He was come to deliver them from the sin which brought about the judgement in the first place. His death would be the sacrifice that would take away the sin of the world once and for all, reconciling man to God, bringing forgiveness, righteousness, and everlasting life.

Once these events had taken place, the Apostles had encountered the Risen Christ and witnessed His Ascension into Heaven, and the Holy Ghost had come upon them at Pentecost, they began to proclaim the “good news” of His death and resurrection, bringing remission of sins and everlasting life to those who believe. At first they preached this message to Jews in Jerusalem and the surrounding region. Then they took the message to the Gentiles as well. While “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” was good news to the Jews, the message that God had given His Son to be the Saviour of the world, through His death for our sins, and that He had raised Him from the dead to be a Living Saviour to all who put their trust in Him, was good news for everybody, and “the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believeth, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek”. (Rom 1:16).

If the evangel is the Christian gospel, the message that God has given the world a Saviour, His only-begotten Son Jesus Christ, Who took away our sins by dying for us on the cross, and Who was raised from the dead to life eternal which we are invited to share through faith in Him, then evangelical should simply be a synonym for Christian.

Reformation Evangelicalism

Evangelical is not used as a synonym for Christian, however, but as a way of distinguishing one kind of Christian from another. This began five centuries ago at the time of the Reformation. There were many factors that contributed to the Reformation, including the rise of the nation-state in the late-medieval/Renaissance period which created a demand for national churches and the cultural divide between countries with more Germanic languages and cultures and those with more Latin languages and cultures, the former tending to become Protestant and the latter tending to remain Roman Catholic. Ultimately, however, the Reformation was a response to theological and ecclesiastical corruption in the late medieval church.

By this time the clarity of the gospel message had become obscured. The fathers of the Church had correctly understood the nature of the Church. It was not just a collection of individual believers, but an organic community, with a corporate identity, whose members were joined to one another to make a whole in a way similar to how the organs in a body work together to make a whole. It was even more than this, however, because it was, as St. Paul had written, the body of Christ Himself and thus the continuation of His Incarnation on earth. The Church fathers built their ecclesiology and indeed their entire theology around the doctrine of the Incarnation, which doctrine was under heavy attack from the false teachers known as the Gnostics in the early centuries of the Church. There was nothing wrong with any of this but by the sixteenth century, although the Church continued to teach that Jesus Christ had obtained salvation for fallen, sinful, man through His death on the cross and resurrection, Scriptural teaching on how that salvation comes to us personally had come to be neglected through the emphasis on the corporate, organic, Church. In that neglect, some rather horrible theology regarding personal salvation had developed.

In this late medieval theology, the sacraments of the Church were treated as steps on the road to salvation. The promise of heaven at the end kept people on the road, as did the threat of hell if they abandoned it. This theology offered a false hope to those who thought that by being members of the church and doing all the right things they would eventually make it to heaven and denied to others, under deep conviction of their sin and need for God’s forgiveness, the assurance of the latter available in the gospel to all who believe. To make matters worse, it told people that while they would go to heaven if they were baptized church members, who confessed all their sins and did the proper penance, regularly partook of the Eucharist and underwent the last rites, they would have to spend a period of time in purgatory first. There were ways of shortening this period, for oneself and for one’s deceased love ones, according to this theology, all of which were available in exchange for giving money to the Church.

On All Hallows’ Eve in the year 1517, an Augustinian monk, Dr. Martin Luther, nailed a document consisting of ninety-five theses, objecting to the sale of indulgences, on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, at the university of which Dr. Luther was a professor. Luther had become a monk, after being nearly struck by lightning in a storm. Under deep conviction of sin, he was unable to find peace through confession and penance. At the University of Wittenberg, however, where he was required to study and teach the Bible, he found assurance of his salvation when he realized that the Bible, especially the epistles of St. Paul, clearly taught that God justifies people, i.e., declares them to be righteous, not because they deserve it or have earned it with their works, but as an act of undeserved kindness, made possible through the gift of God’s Son to be our Saviour through His atoning death and resurrection, and that this justification is available through faith in Jesus Christ. Luther called this the doctrine of justification by faith alone, not meaning by the word alone – or sola - that faith justifies a man upon its own merits, apart from the grace of God and the atonement of Christ, but rather what St. Paul meant when he wrote “without works.”

Luther’s attacks upon the sale of indulgences – which Pope Leo X was using to fund the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica – brought him into conflict with Church authorities. He defended his position with the teachings of the Scriptures and insisted that his opponents do the same, refusing to recant his teachings unless they could show him from the Bible where he was wrong. That the Bible, God’s own written Word, was the final and supreme authority over the teachings, traditions, and councils of the Church, became, alongside justification by faith alone, the doctrinal foundation of Luther’s theology and of the Reformation. Luther did not want to found a new sect but to reform the existing Church. In 1521, however, he was excommunicated by a papal bull and summoned before a diet of the Holy Roman Empire assembled at Worms. There he was asked to recant which he refused to do. The division between Lutheran and his followers and the papacy became permanent and grew into the largest division in Church history since the Great Schism which divided the Greek and the Latin Churches.

Luther and his followers were called Lutherans by the Roman Catholic Church, to Luther’s own displeasure. The term Lutheran came to apply to a more specific kind of theology after disagreements arose between Luther and the other Reformers and the term “Protestant” came to be applied to all the Reformation churches in general. The term Luther and the other Reformers preferred for their movement, however, was evangelical. This was the first use of the term evangelical to distinguish one kind of Christian from another. Used this way, as it still is in parts of continental Europe, evangelical is synonymous with Protestant.

The central tenets of evangelicalism, then, when it first emerged as a movement within Christianity, were the supreme authority of the Holy Scriptures and justification by faith alone. Since the Reformation, especially in the last two centuries, many within Protestant churches have moved away from these two doctrines – although not necessarily back towards the late medieval theology the Reformers objected to. This is one reason why the term evangelical is now used to distinguish certain Protestants from others. The supreme authority of the Bible and justification by faith alone remain the central doctrinal tenets of evangelicalism. In the last half of the Twentieth Century, however, some who still call themselves evangelicals have compromised one or both of these doctrines. The reason they have been able to claim the label evangelical while compromising these Reformation doctrines is the other reason why the term evangelical now refers to some Protestants and not others. In eighteenth century England and even more so nineteenth century America, evangelicalism became a movement within Protestantism, a movement that still held to the final authority of the Bible and justification by faith alone but which now had a new emphasis on a certain kind of experience that distinguished it from other Protestants.

The Strength of Reformation Evangelicalism

Reformation evangelicalism’s biggest strength was its clear understanding of the New Testament’s teaching regarding personal salvation. In the Gospel of John everlasting life is repeatedly promised to those who believe in Jesus. The way these promises are worded, the interpretation “yes, it is necessary that you believe in Jesus, but if you don’t also meet these other conditions you will not have everlasting life even if you believe in Jesus” would violate the text. St. Paul repeatedly states that works do not play a part in our justification before God. “Therefore, by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight” (Rom 3:20), “Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law” (Rom 3:28) “But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness.” (Rom. 4:5). In the epistle of Galatians, especially the third chapter, he makes it clear that this is not true only of initial justification but of the ongoing work of the Spirit in the lives of Christians as well. Nor can these plain meaning of these verses be escaped by arguing that they are talking only about the “works of the law”, that another kind of works, “the works of love” are necessary conditions in addition to faith, because making the “works of love” into conditions which must be met in order for us to be accepted by God eliminates any meaningful distinction between them and “works of the law”. Even the absence of baptism, the rite by which new believers publicly identified with the faith and were brought into the Church (Acts 2:41, 8:12, 36-38, 9:18, 10:47-48), which St. Peter associated with the remission of sins (Acts 2:38, 1 Peter 3:21) and St. Paul associated with the believer’s union with Christ (Rom. 6:3-4), is not an absolutely essential requirement in addition to faith in Jesus according to St. Mark’s account of the Great Commission (Mark 16:16).

This New Testament truth, and the related Johannine truth that by believing in Jesus Christ one can know that one has everlasting life (1 John 5:9-13), were made presented with absolute clarity in the teachings of Martin Luther and John Calvin, who taught that justification by faith alone, sola fide, was the article upon which the Church of Christ stands or falls, and that assurance was of the very essence of justifying faith.

If Reformation evangelicalism’s greatest strength was in the area of personal salvation there was a corresponding weakness in the area of the church as a collective body. The emphasis upon personal salvation led to the idea of Christianity as a private religion, a one-on-one relationship with God, and as a result Scriptural teaching about the church as a community of faith, as the collective object of God’s grace, began to suffer. The emphasis upon the Bible as the final authority led to the creeds, the writings of the Church fathers, and the church’s history of interpreting and applying the Scriptures, to be neglected and even dismissed. One result of this was that a heresy that plagued the early church returned in the nineteenth century to reshape evangelicalism.

The Evangelicalism of the Eighteenth Century

In the eighteenth century, revivals broke out in Europe, and especially in England and her colonies in North America. Out of these revivals, a new evangelicalism arose as a movement within Protestantism, rather than synonymous with Protestantism as sixteenth century evangelicalism was. Among the most important leaders in these revivals and the new evangelical movement were John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, and Jonathan Edwards. The Wesleys and Whitefield were Anglican priests, but Jonathan Edwards was a minister in the non-conformist Congregationalist Church. John and Charles Wesley were Arminians, Whitefield and Edwards were Calvinists. What crossed the lines of these rather significant theological and denominational differences to create a distinct movement within Protestantism was a common emphasis upon a personal conversion experience.

This was a new emphasis. Not that previous evangelicals – or previous Christians in general – had denied the necessity of conversion. Nobody is born a believer so obviously to be a believer at some point one must be converted, i.e., become a believer. Earlier evangelicals, however, emphasized the content and object of faith, rather than the experience of conversion. The gospel, to Luther and Calvin, was not a set of instructions as to how a person can “get saved”, and both men would have considered that terminology to be an expression of damnable heresy. The gospel, was a message of good news, about how God has acted to save sinners, in the giving of His Son through His Incarnation, Atoning Death, and Resurrection. Jesus is the Saviour, it is by dying for us on the cross that He saved us. The benefits of this salvation come to us through faith, but faith is not our contribution to our own salvation. It is the appointed means of receiving salvation and is generated within us by the Holy Spirit through the means of the gospel message itself, as conveyed to us through the preaching of the Word and through the sacraments. The gospel directs our faith away from ourselves, our deeds, our experience, and even our faith itself, to Jesus Christ, His deeds, and His promises.

Reformation evangelicalism, in other words, whether Lutheran or Calvinist, had a monergistic doctrine of salvation. In salvation, God is the sole actor, the sole worker. Man contributes nothing to his salvation, he only receives it. Later, nineteenth century evangelicalism would depart from this entirely and embrace a synergistic view of salvation, in which God and man are co-workers, in which man makes a decision to be saved. Although the evangelical movement would continue to affirm “justification by faith alone”, its adoption of synergism stripped this doctrine of much of its meaning and power.

Eighteenth century evangelicalism had not yet departed this far from Reformation theology. It was a step in that direction both because it placed a new emphasis upon experience and because some of its leaders, the Wesleys, held to Arminianism which is a moderate form of synergism. John Wesley’s own testimony of conversion, however, is not of his having “made a decision for Jesus” but of going to a meeting where Luther’s preface to the Epistle of Romans was read where:

while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death (1)

Charles G. Finney – the Father of Modern Evangelicalism

What we call “evangelicalism” today, is a movement that began in the nineteenth century. It’s most distinctive characteristic is the preaching, in vulgar language and style, of the gospel to mass crowds of people. It is the most fitting expression of Christianity for an era of cheapness, vulgarity, mass production, mass society, and mass democracy. Such a movement could only have been born in one place.

The father of modern evangelicalism, was an American named Charles Grandison Finney. As a young lawyer working in New York, Finney came under conviction of sin in 1821 and headed out into the woods determined that “I will give my heart to God, or I never will come down from there.” After undergoing an experience which he described as a baptism of the Holy Spirit in which “I could feel the impression, like a wave of electricity, going through and through me. Indeed it seemed to come in waves of liquid love, for I could not express it in any other way” he returned to his law office the next morning to tell his client “I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead his cause and cannot plead yours.” After a brief period of training he was ordained by the Presbyterian Church – despite his contempt for the distinctive of Presbyterian theology – and became an itinerant evangelist.

Finney thought of the gospel more as an ultimatum than a message of good news about what God has done for us in Christ out of His love and grace. His sermons challenged his hearers to make a decision or take a stand for Jesus and provided them with the opportunity to do so there on the spot in the form of an altar call, an evangelistic method which he popularized.

While there is nothing wrong with prophetic ultimatums and calls to repentance, which in many cases are sorely needed, in Finney’s case his evangelistic methodology reflected deep theological error.

Finney was a professor of theology at Oberlin College, which he served as president from 1851 to 1865. His lectures on theology given at the college were later collected and published as his Systematic Theology. In these lectures there is the kind of emphasis upon God as law-giver, administrator, and judge that we would expect from a former lawyer. There are 34 lectures in the 1878 expanded edition, the first third of which pertain to moral law and government, and obedience and disobedience to it, in one way or another. The thirteenth and fourteenth lectures are about the atonement. The doctrine of the atonement taught by Finney is not that of orthodox Reformation evangelicalism.

Finney taught what is called the “governmental theory of the atonement”. In this theory, Christ’s death does not pay the penalty for the sins of the world or offer full satisfaction to God’s offended honour and justice. Indeed, Finney denied that Christ’s death could do either. He did not believe that either guilt or righteousness could be transferred from one person to another. He argued that Christ’s death could not have satisfied retributive justice against sin because “To suppose, therefore, that Christ suffered in amount, all that was due to the elect, is to suppose that He suffered an eternal punishment multiplied by the whole number of the elect.” (2) Instead, he wrote, “The atonement of Christ was intended as a satisfaction of public justice”. What he means by this, is that God was willing to pardon repentant sinners, but not if it created the impression that His law could be broken with impunity. The atonement was necessary to show that God did not pardon sinners lightly and without cost. In this theory, our sins were not imputed to Christ, He did not pay the full penalty for them, but He rather died as a representative of sinners, with this death being accepted instead of the full satisfaction of justice, to ensure that the pardon of sinners did not undermine God’s law and create anarchy.

The problems with this doctrine are multitude. It is a rationalistic doctrine, that draws its conclusions from human reasoning. It is also blasphemous. The reason, according to orthodox theology, that Christ’s suffering and death upon the cross could completely satisfy God’s retributive justice against all the sins of the whole world, is because the Person doing the suffering and dying is Himself eternal and infinite. To deny the infinite value of Christ’s atoning death is to deny the infinite value of His eternal Person. The orthodox doctrine of Christ’s atonement as penal substitution and satisfaction explains how God can save sinners without compromising either His justice and holiness on the one hand or His love and mercy on the other. Finney’s theory does not do so, but instead says that God out of His benevolence is quite willing to set aside the demands of His justice and holiness to pardon sinners, but requires an atonement for utilitarian, pragmatic reasons.

This doctrine suggests a weak view of God’s holiness and justice. A weak view of God’s holiness and justice usually goes hand-in-glove with a weak view of man’s sinfulness. That is the case with Finney. The sixteenth lecture in his Systematic Theology is entitled “Moral Depravity.” The term depravity, he says, “implies deterioration, or fall from a former state of moral or physical perfection”. (3) He distinguishes between physical depravity – disease – and moral depravity. The latter he says “is the depravity of free will, not of the faculty itself, but of its free action.” What this means, as Finney goes on to make clear, is that moral depravity means sinful choices and actions, not a sinful nature. “Moral depravity cannot consist in any attribute of nature or constitution, nor in any lapsed and fallen state of nature; for this is physical and not moral depravity.” (4)

This is a major heresy. Orthodox Christian doctrine teaches that man was created with a good nature in God’s own image but that when man sinned his nature was corrupted and that fallen, sinful, nature has been passed on to all subsequent generations of men. What Finney taught is virtually identical to the heresy of Pelagianism taught by and named after fourth-fifth century Celtic monk, Pelagius. Pelagius denied original sin and taught that man retains the capacity to reject sin and choose God by the power of his own will. Pelagius was opposed in his own day by St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, and his doctrine has been consistently rejected by orthodox Christians. Finney’s Pelagianism was certainly a departure from Reformation evangelicalism. Luther and Calvin were both Augustinians and in their theology, as in St. Augustine’s, the fact that man since the fall is sinful by nature and unable, therefore, to produce anything from his own will that is untainted by sin and acceptable to God is connected to the fact that salvation is by God’s grace alone like the two sides of a single coin.

The evangelical movement has not followed Finney in his denial that man’s nature and the faculty of his will are corrupted by sin. The influence of Finney’s Pelagianism, however, is quite visible in evangelicalism. Indeed, it can be seen in the distinguishing characterstic of modern evangelicalism.

“Born Again” Christianity

The third chapter of the Gospel according to St. John begins with the account of how Nicodemus, a Pharisee and a religious leader, came to Jesus and was told “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus did not understand what this meant and asked Jesus how a man could re-enter the womb to be born a second time? Jesus answer was:

Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. (vv. 5-8)

Note carefully what Jesus says about the new birth here. The new birth which is necessary for one to enter the Kingdom is not a second physical birth but a spiritual birth. The spiritual birth is brought about by the Holy Spirit. Man can observe the effects of the spiritual birth but has no influence over when and where it occurs.

While the teachings of Reformation evangelicalism are consistent with what Jesus said here, the teachings of nineteenth and twentieth century evangelicalism are not. Contemporary evangelicalism is also called “born-again Christianity” but in its teachings, being born again is something you decide to do. There are countless evangelical books and tracts with titles like “how to be born again.” But “how to be born again” is precisely the question Nicodemus had asked only to receive the answer from Jesus, that being born again was not something he could do or have any control over, but was entirely the work of the Holy Spirit.

Many find this to be a threatening doctrine. If regeneration – theology’s technical term for the new birth – is essential to one’s entering the Kingdom of God, and is also a sovereign act of the Holy Spirit over which one has no control whatsoever, does this not mean that we are left with the uncertain hope that we will be among those God sovereignly choses to regenerate?

If that was where Jesus had left it that would be the case. In His response to Nicodemus’ next question “How can these things be?” He offers a certain assurance of salvation to anyone who is looking for one. He says:

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God so loved the world, that gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (vv. 14-16)

This has been called “the gospel in a nutshell”. God loved the world, and showed that love by giving the world His Son Jesus, Who would be crucified in order that everyone who believes in Him will not perish eternally, but have everlasting life. This is a testimony of hope and promise, presenting people with a Saviour in Whom to believe, and assuring them of everlasting life if they do believe. Nicodemus, and anyone else who believes this gospel, has in the gospel God’s word that he as a believer has everlasting life in Christ.

Before He gives these assuring words, Jesus explains what they have to do with being born again. Believing is not something we do in order to be born again. Faith is not an act of the will. It is a conviction brought about by testimony – as St. Paul explains “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Rom. 10:17) We can resist convicting testimony by the force of our will but we cannot generate faith at will. Jesus tells Nicodemus, that people find it difficult to believe Him when He testifies of things within their common sphere of experience – earthly things. How then will they be able to believe Him if He testifies of things outside of their experience, heavenly things, which only He as the One Who came down from heaven has firsthand experience of? The answer is that the Holy Spirit must convict people of the truth of His testimony. That is the only way they can believe. That is what the new birth is. The person who believes the gospel of Jesus Christ and in believing finds assurance of salvation has been born again.

The idea that the new birth is a decision we make comes from the Pelagian heresy of Charles G. Finney. In his lecture on “Moral Depravity” in his Systematic Theology, he says that the Bible calls upon unregenerate men to “repent, to make to themselves a new heart” and in his next lecture “Regeneration” he asserts that there are three agents in the new birth – the Holy Spirit, “the sinner changing his ultimate choice, intention, preference, or in changing from selfishness to love or benevolence; or, in other words, in turning from the supreme choice of self-gratification, to the supreme love of God and the equal love of his neighbor” (5), and other agents “one or more human beings concerned in persuading the sinner to turn.” Finney begins this lecture by saying that the reason orthodox theologians attribute the new birth to the Holy Spirit alone is because of their “dogma of constitutional moral depravity”, i.e., the Scriptural and orthodox doctrine of Original Sin, thus grounding his doctrine of decisional regeneration – the distinctive mark of contemporary evangelicalism – in his Pelagianism.

Shallow Conversions and Distorted Gospels

It has been observed from the beginning of the revivalist era that many who “make decisions for Christ” show little to no interest in any Christianity that goes beyond this initial experience. This is to be expected when the gospel message has been distorted. The doctrine that the new birth is a decision we make, an act of our will, is itself a major distortion of the gospel as we have seen. In evangelicalism that teaches this doctrine, a further distortion of the gospel has arisen in the evangelical lingo that has developed as a substitute for the Scriptural invitation to “believe in” Jesus Christ. Examples of this lingo include “give your heart to the Lord”, “invite Jesus into your heart”, “accept Jesus Christ as your personal Saviour”, and “make a commitment to Christ.” While some of these expressions are loosely based upon Scriptural texts each of them calls for an act of the will, none of them clearly says to believe in Jesus Christ rather than in our own efforts to save ourselves, and the differences between these expressions generates endless confusion.

Many evangelical leaders have recognized that there is a problem here and that the gospel as presented by mainstream evangelicalism is badly distorted. Some of these have called the evangelical movement to return to the evangelical theology of the Reformation. Others however, have proposed solutions that make the problem worse and distort the gospel further.

A classic example of this was the book The Gospel According to Jesus which came out in 1988. The author of this book, John F. MacArthur Jr., is the pastor of the non-denominational, evangelical megachurch Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, a popular radio Bible teacher, and the President of Master’s College and Seminary. The book’s main concerns that today’s evangelicalism is not presenting the gospel accurately and is producing many false conversions are legitimate concerns. MacArthur correctly identified the symptoms of the problem:

Listen to the typical gospel presentation nowadays. You’ll hear sinners entreated with words like “accept Jesus Christ as personal Saviour”; “ask Jesus into your heart”; “invite Christ into your life”: or “make a decision for Christ.” You may be so accustomed to hearing those phrases that it will surprise you to learn none of them is based on biblical terminology. They are the products of a diluted gospel. It is not the gospel according to Jesus. (6)

He did not, however, diagnose the problem correctly. He did not attribute this diluted gospel to the shift towards an experience-defined evangelicalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but instead blamed it upon the theology of Dallas Theological Seminary founder Lewis Sperry Chafer, in particular Chafer’s distinction, based upon 1 Corinthians 2-3, between “spiritual” and “carnal” Christians.

Having failed to diagnose the true cause of the problem, he proposes a solution that is worse than the disease. He redefined faith so as to eliminate the Pauline distinction between faith and works. Traditionally, theologians have broken down faith, which in the Bible is an internal conviction of the reality and trustworthiness of God (Heb 11:1, 6), into three parts – notitia, assensus, and fiducia. Notitia means understanding, assensus means agreement or assent, and fiducia means trust. MacArthur, however, redefined fiducia to mean obedience. He wrote that it is “a volitional element…which is the determination of the will to obey truth.” (7). Since obedience is the same thing as works, by redefining fiducia in this way, MacArthur smuggled works into faith, undermining the Pauline/Reformational doctrine of justification, and oblitering the Scriptural distinction between the way of salvation and the effects of salvation. Furthermore, by saying that fiducia is a “volitional element” he contradicted his own earlier assertion – on the same page –“that faith is not something conjured up by the human will but is a sovereignly granted gift of God” and essentially endorsed the Pelagian heresy of Charles Finney which is the true source of the problem he was trying to fix!

MacArthur is correct, of course, that the grace of God is transformational, that God is not content to pardon and forgive sinners while leaving them in bondage to sin. God’s grace transforms sinners into saints. This is a lifetime process, however, that is not complete until the believer enters the presence of the Lord. Furthermore, God’s grace operates in us by way of the means of His Word. His Word contains both Law and Gospel. The Law tells us what God demands of us, the Gospel tells us what God has freely given us. The Law shows us our sinful condition and our need of God’s grace. The Gospel tells us that God has given us everything we need in Jesus Christ. The Gospel tells us that everything God has given to us in Jesus Christ is ours through faith, which faith the Gospel itself is the means of generating. St. Paul in the epistle to the Galatian Church tells us that just as the Gospel and not the Law is the effective means of our justification – our being declared righteous by God – so the Gospel and not the Law is the effective means of our sanctification – the process whereby God transforms us from sinners into saints. What God demands of us in the Law, He gives us in the Gospel. While MacArthur accuses others of the heresy of antinominianism, by reading all of the demands Jesus made of His followers into the word “believe” in His Gospel promises, MacArthur is himself guilty of heresy of Galatianism, the mixing of Law and Gospel. Galatianism is a worse heresy than antinomianism because it compromises both the righteous demands of God in His Law and the freeness of His grace in the Gospel.

In The Gospel According To Jesus, MacArthur said little about assurance of salvation. What he did say is only half correct. He was right that contemporary evangelicalism may give many the false assurance that they are right with God because they have “made a decision”. He was wrong, however, to assert that “Genuine assurance comes from seeing the Holy Spirit’s transforming work in one’s life.” (8) This was the Puritans’ doctrine of assurance. (9) It is also the mistake of those turned away by Christ at the judgement in Matthew 7:21-23, of the goats in Matthew 25:31-46, and of the Pharisee in Luke 18:10-14. Those who Jesus says will come to Him at the judgement saying “Lord, Lord” – clearly they believed in “Lordship Salvation”- will point to the works they did in Jesus’ name, the goats believe that they have done the works of mercy and are surprised to hear Jesus say that they have not, and the Pharisee attributes the ways in which he differs from the publican, not to himself, but to God.

There are two parts to assurance, an objective part and a subjective part. Subjectively assurance is the experience of being certain of one’s salvation, objectively assurance is that which that certainty is based upon. Objective assurance should not itself be something subjective. One’s experience, whether it be a one-time event such as conversion or a lifetime of good works, is subjective. Scripturally, the Gospel itself is our objective assurance. The Gospel tells us that God has given us a Saviour in Christ and promises everlasting life to everyone who believes. Scripturally, therefore, the subjective experience of certainty of salvation comes by believing the Gospel for ourselves. It is indistinguishable from saving faith, as the Protestant Reformers correctly taught.

Evangelicalism, Fundamentalism, and Scriptural Authority

When in the nineteenth century, the distinguishing characteristic of evangelicalism ceased to be the doctrines of the Reformation and became a conversion experience in which a person made a decision for Jesus, this prepared the way for the erosion of orthodox doctrine in evangelicalism in the late twentieth century.

In the nineteenth century, while North American evangelicalism was re-defining itself around the doctrine of decisional regeneration, the Bible itself and the orthodox teachings of historical Christianity were being challenged in European academia. In the universities, it had become fashionable to think of theology as an intermediate stage in the development of human knowledge, superior to primitive mythology and superstition, but inferior to a scientific materialism in which the world is explained without acknowledging any reality beyond what is immediately available to reason and the senses. In the nineteenth century this sort of thinking began to seep into theological seminaries where it brought about a rationalistic rewriting of Christian theology. According to this new rationalistic “Christianity” the Bible was not actual revelation from God but a fallible record of man’s thoughts about God, Jesus was “divine” in the sense that there is a spark of the divine in all of us but He was not the eternal, omnipotent, Son of God come down from heaven to save mankind, the Gospel accounts of His birth and miracles were embellishments of His life which the early Christians borrowed from pagan mythology to deify Him, His Resurrection was not a literal event that actually occurred but a literary way of describing His disciples’ feeling that He was still with them in their hearts, and that stripped of all this mythological accoutrement, the real essence of Christianity is that under the Fatherhood of God all men are brothers, who ought to love and be nice to one another and to seek an end to social injustice caused by an inequitable division of the earth’s resources. This new theology was called modernism or liberalism and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it spread throughout the Protestant denominations in Europe and in North America.

Orthodox Protestants resisted the influx of this unbelief disguised as faith into their churches. In 1910, the evangelical Bible Institute of Los Angeles (now Biola University) published the first of twelve volumes entitled The Fundamentals: A Testimony of the Truth. Edited by A. C. Dixon and R. A. Torrey, these volumes consisted of essays by conservative Protestants defending the authority, inspiration, and inerrancy of the Holy Scriptures and the historical, traditional, and Biblical doctrines of the Christian faith concerning the deity, incarnation, Virgin Birth, miracles, atoning death, and bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and critiquing liberalism and various other modern isms that were then in conflict with Scriptural orthodoxy. The contributors included Presbyterians, Anglicans, Methodists and Baptists from the United States, Britain, and Canada. The title of these pamphlets, later re-issued as a four volume hardback set, is one of the reasons why the cross-denominational, conservative Protestant movement in opposition to the growing liberalism in the early decades of the twentieth century came to be known as “fundamentalism”.

Fundamentalism was unsuccessful in its efforts to prevent a liberal takeover of the leadership of the mainline Protestant denominations and their seminaries. In fact the liberals became so powerful in the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America that in the mid 1930’s they were able to defrock conservative theologian J. Gresham Machen. When Princeton Theological Seminary, the prestigious school at which Machen taught, began to move in a liberal direction in the late 1920’s, Machen protested and with several other conservative professors and students, left to found Westminster Theological Seminary. A couple of years later he organized the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions for conservative Presbyterians who did not want to support missionaries who were promoting liberalism instead of Christianity. At the next meeting of the General Assembly of PCUSA he, and all the other members of the IBPFM were stripped of their ministerial credentials. Machen then led a conservative separatist movement out of the PCUSA that formed the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

This began to happen in other denominations as well and in the 1930’s and 1940’s, fundamentalism evolved from a cross-denominational attempt to prevent liberalism from taking over the mainline Protestant denominations into a separatist movement. Not everyone who held to fundamentalist beliefs was happy with this new separatism, however, and in the 1950’s the separatists and the non-separatists went their separate ways. The separatists continued to call themselves fundamentalists while the non-separatists announced the beginning of a “new evangelicalism.” While this was the non-separatists own coinage, it was the fundamentalists who latched on to it as a term of opprobrium against the non-separatists. The “new evangelicals” themselves preferred to just call themselves “evangelicals”. (10)

The new evangelicals believed that fundamentalism’s separatism would make the movement increasingly isolated, self-righteous, and bitter, and the fundamentalists believed that the new evangelicalism would grow in its accommodation of liberalism to the point that the two would be scarcely indistinguishable. Each group was correct in its predictions about the other group.

It was only a few years after conservatives left the PCUSA to form the Orthodox Presbyterian Church that the conservatives themselves split, and a faction went off from the Orthodox Presbyterian Church to form the Bible Presbyterian Church. This happened among other fundamentalist denominations as well. After the fundamentalists and the new evangelicals fell out with each other, fundamentalist debated the degrees of separation among themselves – and this had nothing to do with Kevin Bacon. Should a fundamentalist separate only from heresy or should he separate from those who are orthodox and do not themselves separate from heresy? The latter is second degree separation and the debate did not stop there but went on to third and fourth degree separation as well. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a younger generation of fundamentalists such as Jerry Falwell that sought closer ties with the more conservative among evangelicals were dubbed “pseudo-fundamentalists” because they were not separatist enough.

Among the new evangelicals, however, doctrinal drift quickly set it. In the 1960’s and 19070’s, several evangelical leaders began to question the full inerrancy of the Bible. This became a significant enough problem that in 1984, in his last book published before his death later that year, Francis Schaffer described evangelicalism as a “house divided” on the watershed issue of Biblical inerrancy. Schaeffer wrote:

There is only one way to describe those who no longer hold to a full view of Scripture. Although many of these would like to retain the evangelical name for themselves, the only accurate way to describe this view is that it is a form of neo-orthodox existential theology. The heart of neo-orthodox existential theology is that the Bible gives us a quarry out of which to have religious experience, but that the Bible contains mistakes where it touches that which is verifiable—namely history and science. But unhappily we must say that in some circles this concept now has come into some of that which is called evangelicalism. In short, in these circles the neo-orthodox existential theology is being taught under the name of evangelicalism. (11)

This is only the beginning of evangelicalism’s doctrinal compromise and accommodation to an increasingly anti-Christian zeitgeist. In his fifth chapter, Schaeffer discusses how many evangelicals have adopted a “socialist mentality”, allowed humanism to seep into their thinking during their academic studies instead of insisting that Christ is Lord of all including the humanities, and accommodated to “the world spirit of this age” in the “whole area of marriage, family, sexual morality, feminism, homosexuality, and divorce”. (12). Evangelical compromise in these areas has gotten much worse in the almost thirty years since Schaeffer identified these problems.

What Schaeffer was decrying here, the acceptance of the ill-named neo-orthodox view of Scripture by those who call themselves evangelicals and the subsequent infiltration of evangelicalism by all sorts of unbiblical ideas was made possible by the shift in the nineteenth century away from defining “evangelical” by the doctrines of the Reformation to defining it by a conversion experience. If an evangelical is someone who has made a decision for Jesus then someone who can testify to having made such a decision is an evangelical even if he believes the Bible is not the Word of God but only contains the Word of God.

Balance Needed

Evangelicalism began in the Reformation as a necessary response to the way Scriptural teaching about personal salvation by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ had been obscured and corrupted in late medieval theology. Then evangelicalism’s focus shifted from doctrine to experience in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the twentieth century, evangelicalism became part of the fundamentalist movement that fought for the Bible and theological orthodoxy when liberalism began to sweep the Protestant churches then left the fundamentalist movement when fundamentalism adopted an unhealthy separatist mentality. Since then many within evangelicalism have abandoned Scriptural authority and orthodox doctrine a development made possible by the fact that evangelicalism is now largely defined by a shared experience – a decision for Christ – rather than by shared beliefs.

Why had Scriptural teaching about personal salvation become corrupted in the late medieval church making the evangelical Reformation necessary?

It had become corrupted through neglect because theology had focused for centuries upon the church as the collective object of God’s grace. The idea of the church as a collective object of God’s grace was not a wrong idea. It was and is a Scriptural truth. It was wrong, however, to focus so much on one truth that other truths are distorted or lost.

The evangelical Reformers recovered those distorted and lost truths. There is a tendency, however, when a movement is built upon the recovery of neglected truths for that movement to then emphasize those recovered truths to the neglect of the truth that was originally overemphasized. That has gradually happened in evangelicalism and it is one of the reasons the problems we have been looking at have popped up.

The Bible, as the written Word of God Himself, has authority over the traditions and institutional authority of the church. Church tradition, implicitly acknowledges this by its recognition of the Bible as the written Word of God. The Reformers were right to proclaim the supreme authority of the Scriptures. The Latin expression “sola Scriptura” however, had unfortunate connotations. Luther and Calvin had not intended to teach their followers that the ecumenical Creeds, the Patristic writings, and the canons of the church councils should be ignored. It was neglect of the lessons contained in these very things that allowed the Pelagian heresy to resurface and to have such an influence over the evangelical movement.

Salvation is the gift of God, given to us in the Person and Work of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which we personally receive by believing in Jesus. This is taught throughout the New Testament. Martin Luther was right to say that this is the article by which the church stands or falls. The church, however, is not just a collective term for individuals who have believed in Jesus.

The church in the New Testament has a corporate identity. It is an organic community, whose members are joined to one another to make a whole the way the organs in a body are linked to make a whole. Indeed, according to St. Paul it is the body of Christ Himself. The fathers of the church were correct to understand the church and its sacraments to be extensions of the principle of incarnation. The Incarnation was the miraculous event in which God the Son came down from Heaven and was born a Man, Jesus Christ. Through this miracle, God Who is Spirit, was manifest in the flesh. After Jesus ascended back to Heaven, the Father sent down the Holy Spirit to collectively indwell Christ’s disciples and unite them into His body the church, in which His presence on earth is continued. In the sacraments ordained by Christ – baptism and the Eucharist – God’s Word is joined to physical elements – water, bread, wine – which become vessels of the Word. As the invisible God was made manifest in the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, so His Word is made tangible by being joined to the water of baptism and the bread and wine of Communion.

Unfortunately, much of evangelicalism, in its emphasis on personal salvation, has lost sight of these truths or even rejected them altogether, associating them with the errors of Rome. As a result, evangelical ecclesiology tends to show the strong influence of the liberal individualism of the modern age. Evangelicals and fundamentalists tend to separate the church as an organized institution from the church as the mystic body of Christ. The latter they tend to see as individuals who share a common faith in Jesus Christ (in Reformation evangelicalism) or who have made a decision for Jesus (in nineteenth century evangelicalism), and the former, the organized, institutional, church they tend to see as a human construction, created by individual believers to facilitate common worship and the spread of the gospel. Hence the willingness to separate from the organized, institutional church and abandon it to heresy among twentieth century fundamentalists. Prior to the evangelical movement separatist movements from the established church had generally been led by non-Trinitarian heretics.

What evangelicalism desperately needs is to abandon the influence of Finney’s Pelagianism, return to the Scriptural doctrines of the Reformation, and to balance these doctrines with a renewed emphasis upon those truths within the larger tradition of Christianity that it has neglected since its legitimate protest against the errors of Rome.

(1) http://www.ccel.org/ccel/wesley/journal.vi.ii.xvi.html

(2) Charles Finney, Finney’s Systematic Theology: The Complete & Newly Expanded 1878 Edition, (Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1994), p. 219

(3) Ibid, p. 243.

(4) Ibid.

(5) Ibid, p. 274.

(6) John F. MacArthur Jr., The Gospel According to Jesus: What Does Jesus Mean When He Says “Follow Me”?, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1988), p. 21. At the time MacArthur wrote this book he denied the eternal Sonship of Christ. In 1999 he announced that he had changed his mind and now believed in the eternal Sonship. In his previous understanding he had distinguished between Christ’s deity and His Sonship. The problem with that view is that Christ’s eternal Sonship is an essential element of the doctrine of the Trinity. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are eternal, the Son is not created but is eternally begotten of the Father, whereas the Holy Spirit is neither created nor begotten, but proceeds  (whether from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son is a point of contention between the Eastern and Western Church – the eternal Sonship of Christ is not). MacArthur, upon changing his views, still did not seem to appreciate how serious an error his previous position was.

(7) Ibid, p. 173.

(8) Ibid, p. 23.

(9) The Puritans were a group of English Calvinists who were not satisfied with the reforms in the Church of England and demanded that the episcopacy be abolished and that Anglican rituals and practices be stripped of everything coming from the Catholic tradition that could not be shown to be commanded by the New Testament. They were also republicans with a tendency towards sedition. In the seventeenth century they deposed King Charles I of England in the English Civil War, and installed the dictator Oliver Cromwell as regnant governor of England. Anthony M. Ludovici described the Puritans as a class of merchants, enriched in the sixteenth century with lands expropriated from the Church by King Henry VIII, who deposed King Charles because he opposed their plans to replace beautiful, rural, English villages with ugly, industrial, cities and turn their fellow Englishmen into wage-slaves in their factories. Anthony M. Ludovici, A Defence of Aristocracy: A Textbook For Tories (London: Constable and Company, 1915, 1933) pp. 103-236. According to Ludovici the reason the Puritans wanted church services to be free of liturgical beauty and to consist of long, boring, sermons, and sought to ban all entertainment on Sundays, was to make the day of rest so miserable that the workers would be glad to return to the factories. Calvinism, like the Reformer it was named after, placed a strong emphasis upon the doctrines of election and predestination – that God had chosen in eternity past whom He would save and predestined His elect for heaven. Calvin like Luther, had taught that assurance of salvation was to be found by looking away from oneself to the promises of God in Christ. He wrote “But if we are elected in him, we cannot find the certainty of our election in ourselves; and not even in God the Father, if we look at him apart from the Son. Christ, then, is the mirror in which we ought, and in which, without deception, we may contemplate our election. For since it is into his body that the Father has decreed to ingraft those whom from eternity he wished to be his, that he may regard as sons all whom he acknowledges to be his members, if we are in communion with Christ, we have proof sufficiently clear and strong that we are written in the Book of Life”. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, III:24:5. The Puritans, however, had abandoned Calvin’s teachings on assurance and taught that the Christian must seek evidence of his election through rigorous self-examination. Needless to say, this teaching generated more doubt that assurance and in many cases drove people insane (the poet William Cowper being a famous example of this).

(10) The history of fundamentalism, evangelicalism, and their divergence from each other is told by historian George M. Marsden in his Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980) and his Reforming Fundamentalism: Fuller Seminar and the New Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995). For the same history from perspectives within the fundamentalist movement see George W. Dollar’s A History of Fundamentalism in America (Greenville: Bob Jones University Press, 1973) and The Fight For Fundamentalism: American Fundamentalism 1973-1983 (self-published, 1983) and David Beale, In Pursuit of Purity: American Fundamentalism since 1850 (Greenville: Bob Jones University Press, 1986).

(11) Francis A. Schaeffer, The Great Evangelical Disaster (Westchester, Illinois: Crossway Books, 1984) pp. 49-50)

(12) Ibid, p. 130.