The Seed of Abraham

It is often thought that the first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis which cover the primordial history of the world from Creation to the confusing of tongues and scattering of nations at the Tower of Babel depict God in relation to the whole of humanity but in the twelfth chapter a narrower focus on His relationship to a single nation begins.   On one level, this is true.   In the first chapter of Genesis we read the account of God creating the universe.   In the second we read the account of His creating our first parents and placing them in the Garden of Eden.   In the third we have the account of the Temptation in the Garden and the Fall of Man.   The fourth begins with the account of Cain and Abel, then introduces Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve, from whom the line of descent that leads to Noah, which genealogy fills the whole of the fifth chapter, begins.  The account of how God sent the Great Deluge to destroy the primordial world for its wickedness, but preserved life, human and animal, through Noah and the ark, then after the Flood made a covenant with Noah and the human race that was to begin anew with him, takes up the sixth through the ninth chapters.   The tenth contains the genealogies of Japheth, Ham, and Shem, Noah’s three sons.   After the account of the scattering of the nations, the eleventh chapter concludes by extending Shem’s genealogy down to Terah and his family, including his son Abram.   The twelfth chapter begins with God’s call to Abram, the first stage in the establishment of His covenant with the man whose name He would change to Abraham.   Here is the account of that call:

 

Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee: And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing:And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. (Gen. 12:1-3)

 

In these verses we see that the apparent narrowing of the narrative to focus on one nation is not the entire story.   God does indeed promise Abram that He will “make of thee a great nation” and the narrative relating His doing just that fills the rest of the Torah or Pentateuch.   The concluding words of the promise to Abram, however, tell us that even here God was no less concerned with the whole world than He was in His earlier interactions with Adam and Noah and Nimrod’s construction crew.

 

There are some who interpret this passage so as to make everything that is promised to “thee”, Abram, a promise that applies to the “great nation” that God will make of Abram.   They further interpret the passage by saying that ancient national Israel has continued in the diaspora Jewish people to be reborn as a nation in the twentieth century, the present national state of Israel.   They then say that the promise to bless whoever blesses and curse whoever curses are promises to the Jewish people and the present state of Israel.   Translated into contemporary geopolitics this becomes the idea that we are required to support the state of Israel in all her conflicts or run the risk of incurring the curse of God.    Those who interpret the promise this way are obviously intent on persuading Christians to support Israel as the argument would not work with unbelievers.  It is most often heard, therefore, as part of a theological package known as “Christian Zionism”.

 

It is my intent in this essay to demonstrate that Christian Zionism is not compatible with the Christian orthodoxy of the New Testament.   First, however, I wish to show how this interpretation is not compatible with the Old Testament. 

 

One does not have to look outside the Book of Genesis itself to make this point.   Genesis makes it clear that the promises God makes to Abram/Abraham (1) do not descend automatically to all of his physical offspring.   Before Isaac was born to Sarah, she had arranged for Abram, as he was at the time, to sire a son, Ishmael, with her handmaid Hagar.   This takes place in the sixteenth chapter of Genesis.   In the twenty-first, after Isaac’s birth, when Sarah demands that Ishmael be driven out, God promises that of Ishmael He will make “a nation, because he is thy seed”, but that it is Isaac who will inherit the promises.   Later, after Sarah dies, Abraham remarries, and his second wife Keturah bears him six sons, but these do not co-inherit with Isaac any more than Ishmael does.   This is recorded in the twenty-fifth chapter, which also records Abraham’s death and burial, and the birth of Isaac and Rebekah’s twin sons, Jacob and Esau.   While they are still in the womb God tells Rebekah that they will become two nations which will strive with each other.   It is with the younger of the twins, Jacob, later renamed Israel, that God makes His Covenant and to Jacob that He confirms the promises that He made to Abraham.

 

Only one of Abraham’s literal sons inherited the promises.   Only one of Isaac’s literal sons inherited the promises.   Therefore, the promises are not automatically conferred by right of physical descent from Abraham.   Not even in the Old Testament.  

 

The events recorded in the remainder of the Torah/Pentateuch did not change this.  In the Book of Exodus, four centuries after the death of Joseph, the descendants of Israel (Jacob) had grown into an ethnos within Egypt, but their fortune had taken a turn for the worse since the days when Joseph was Pharaoh’s favourite and basically the Prime Minister of Egypt.   They were enslaved and cruel measures were taken by the Egyptians to hinder their growth.   Then God raised up a deliverer in the person of Moses, who had been born into the tribe of Levi but had been raised as an adopted member of the Egyptian royal family.   God sends Moses to speak to Pharaoh demanding the release of His people, and ultimately provokes, through a series of increasingly intense plagues, Pharaoh into driving the Israelites out of Egypt.  En route to the land of Canaan, promised by God to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses leads the people to Mt. Sinai, where God enters into a covenant with them as a nation.   This covenant, however, is not like the one God made with the Patriarchs.   Everything that God promised unconditionally to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, which unconditional promises we have just seen did not automatically descend to Abraham and Isaac’s progeny by right of physical descent, were in the Mosaic Covenant promised to Jacob’s descendants as a collective people group, a nation, but on a very much conditional basis.   The condition was that they obeyed all of God’s Commandments.   If they did, they would enjoy the benefits of the promises made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.   If they disobeyed, they would be punished with the opposite of those promises.  This is why this covenant is called the Law.   The remainder of the Old Testament demonstrates that they were unable to meet the requirements of the Law.   This is not because they were uniquely wicked.  No nation would have been able to meet those requirements.   That was not the point of the Law.   The Law demonstrated the need for a New Covenant that operated on a different basis from the Law.   That New Covenant was promised in the prophetic writings of the Old Testament in connection with the promises that God would send them a Saviour from the Davidic line Who, because He would inherit David’s throne, was called the Messiah, meaning “Anointed One”, i.e. king.   The promises of the Messiah expanded on a promise made to all of fallen mankind in the Garden of Eden (Gen. 3:15) and so did not concern one nation alone.

 

Although his story is told in the New Testament, John the Baptist was the last prophet of the Old.   Yes, that sounds weird, I know.  It is helpful to remember that “Testament” means “Covenant” and can refer either to the Old and New Covenants qua Covenants or to the collections of sacred books in which these Covenants respectively predominate.   In both Testaments, in the sense of collections of books, the historical narrative begins prior to the establishment of the Covenant.   The Old Covenant was established at Mt. Sinai but this doesn’t occur in the narrative until the second book, Exodus.   The New Covenant was established at the Cross at the end of each of the Gospels.   In the earlier part of the Gospels, and the account of John the Baptist occurs at the beginning of each, the Old Covenant is still in effect.    That John the Baptist is the last prophet of the Old Testament, meaning the last prophet filling that office in the period before the New Covenant takes over, is what Jesus was talking about when He said “Verily I say unto you, Among them that are born of women there hath not risen a greater than John the Baptist: notwithstanding he that is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he” and “For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John” (Matt. 11:11, 13).   It is also indicated by the fact that Jesus waited until John the Baptist had been imprisoned before He began His public ministry of proclaiming the “Kingdom of Heaven”, i.e., the promised Messianic Kingdom, “is at hand”, i.e., had arrived in the Person of Him, the promised Messiah.   It is significant therefore that John, as the last Old Testament prophet and, according to Jesus, the fulfilment of the prophecy that ends the canonical Old Testament in Malachi 4:5-6 (2), directly addressed the idea that biological descent from Abraham conveyed in itself the promises and blessings to Abraham when he warned the Sadducees and Pharisees:

 

And think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham. (Matt. 3:9)

 

We come now to the New Testament proper.   In the New Testament we find the substance of which the Old Testament was the shadow.   That which was concealed in the Old Testament is revealed in the New.   The New Testament makes it very clear how Abraham was made a blessing to all the families of the world, to whom the promises made to Abraham descend, and how.

In his epistle to the Churches of Galatia, the region of Asia Minor that had been settled by the Celtic Gauls in the 3^rd Century BC, St. Paul discusses the same issue that was formally addressed by the Holy Catholic Church in the Council of Jerusalem recorded in the fifteenth chapter of the Book of Acts.   This issue was whether or not Gentiles, that is, non-Jews, had to become Jews, by being circumcised and agreeing to keep the Mosaic Law with all its ceremonial restrictions, in order to be Christians.   That Gentiles could become Christians was established when St. Peter was sent to Cornelius the Centurion to preach the Gospel, after which he and his household believed, the Holy Ghost came upon them, and they were baptized into the Church at St. Peter’s command.   In the ministry of SS. Paul and Barnabas, who were sent out on their first missionary journey shortly thereafter by the Church in Antioch, the Gentiles proved more receptive to the Gospel than the Jews and joined the Church in droves.   This led to the controversy about whether or not these Gentile converts should be circumcised and made to follow the Mosaic ceremonies.   The Council of Jerusalem after much testimony and deliberation ruled that the answer was no and sent out a letter to that effect.   St. Paul in his epistle went even further than the Council and pronounced an anathema upon those who were troubling the new Christians with their Judaizing claims. (3)

 

It is in the third chapter of his epistle that the Apostle incorporates into his case against the legalistic Judaizers arguments that also decisively demolish ideas that are key to the Christian Zionist position.   Here are the sixth through ninth verses of the chapter:

 

Even as Abraham believed God, and it was accounted to him for righteousness.  Know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed. So then they which be of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham.

 

This passage begins with an allusion to Genesis 15:6, the same verse the Apostle similarly references in the epistle to the Romans, to make the identical point that righteousness before God, which cannot be attained by doing the good works required by the Law for the Law demands flawless obedience of which human sinners are incapable, is, on the basis of Grace, that is, favour freely given, credited to those who trust God for it.   That it is Jesus Christ Who made this possible, by providing His own flawless righteousness to meet the demands of the Law, and by paying for the sins of the world through His propitiatory death, is spelled out shortly after this passage in verse thirteen.   What makes this most relevant to our discussion is that here St. Paul makes a point of saying that it is those who share Abraham’s faith, and so are justified by faith like Abraham, who are the children of Abraham, and that these come from all nations (“the heathen”, here, like “the Gentiles”, means all the other nations of the world).   This is reiterated in verse fourteen.

 

It is at this point that St. Paul’s argument, already devastating to the Christian Zionist position, puts the final nail in its coffin.    In the fifteenth verse he says that covenants, even if they are only between men, once confirmed are neither added to nor annulled.  Then in the sixteenth verse he says this:

 

Now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made. He saith not, And to seeds, as of many; but as of one, And to thy seed, which is Christ.

 

While it might seem to some that the Apostle is taking great liberty with his text here – there are a number of different verses this might be referencing but Gen. 17:7 is the most likely – St. Paul, writing under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, provides God’s own interpretation of his earlier words.   Jesus is the Seed of Abraham.   St. Paul spells it out for us in black and white.   When, only a few verses earlier, he said that those who are “of faith”, that is to say, who have justifying faith like Abraham, are the children of Abraham, they are the children of Abraham because their faith unites them to Jesus Christ, the Seed of Abraham.   This is how justifying faith – or rather saving faith, because salvation in its entirety, justification, sanctification, glorification, positional and practical, is a gift received by faith – works.   It contributes nothing of its own, it receives what God gives us freely, and that which God gives us freely He gives us in Jesus.   When we receive Him by faith, we are united with Him into a corporate body of which He is Head, and we members.   Therefore, what He is in Himself, the Seed of Abraham, we who believe in Him are by virtue of being united with Him in His body.

 

Now, before I proceed to the rest of the chapter, I wish to make and emphasize the point that everything I just said is not something that is new with the New Testament.   Nobody in the Old Testament was saved by his works, much less by his race.   The Old Testament saints were saved by the Grace of God, received through faith, on account of the work of Jesus Christ as Saviour, just like New Testament saints.   The difference, of course, was that the faith of Old Testament saints looked forward to the Saviour that had been promised but with the dawn of the New Testament saving faith has looked back to the Saviour already given.   In the case of the Old Testament saints, salvation by Grace through faith worked through the anticipation of their union with Christ which union was fulfilled in the establishment of the New Covenant at the Cross and of the corporate Body of Christ on the first Whitsunday (the Christian Pentecost) as recorded in the second chapter of the book of Acts.   When the Church was born, the Old Testament saints, whom Jesus had taken to Heaven with Him after releasing them from the Kingdom of Death (Sheol/Hades) when He entered there as conqueror in the Harrowing of Hell, were brought fully into the union, becoming the first members of the Church Triumphant.  

 

Again,  even in the Old Testament, those who were the children of Abraham in the sense acknowledged by God, were so in anticipation of their union with the true Seed of Abraham, Jesus Christ, because they like Abraham looked forward to Him in faith, and not because of physical descent from Abraham.  

 

In the verses that follow after Galatians 3:16, St. Paul, elaborates on the significance of this.   The covenant that God made with Abraham and his Seed, he explains, a covenant based on His own freely given promises, i.e., Grace, precedes the Law.   Since the earlier covenant was confirmed in Christ, the Law which came latter cannot disannul it.  The Law, he explains, was a temporary measure, a schoolmaster or tutor assigned the duty of leading the heirs of the promise to Christ to be justified by faith, after which “we are no longer under a schoolmaster” (v. 25).  

 

What St. Paul says here is the opposite of what the Plymouth Brethren/Scofield Reference Bible/Dallas Theological Seminary school of dispensationalist theology teaches.   This is the theology that gave birth to Christian Zionism.   It teaches that the present Church Age in which Jewish and Gentile believers are one in Jesus Christ is a previously unknown parenthesis in God’s prophetic timeline and that when the Church Age is over the Church will be removed, the Age of Law will resume, and God will return to His real prophetic agenda which is all about national Israel.   St. Paul, however, makes it clear that the Law is the parenthesis in God’s timeline, and that God’s grand plan was always about His promises of blessing freely given in Grace in Jesus Christ to all who believe, regardless of ethnicity.   After telling us that with the coming of the faith of Christ the parenthetical period of Law the tutor is over he concludes his argument with the following:

 

For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.  There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus. And if ye be Christ's, then are ye Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise. (vv. 26-29)

 

Clearly, therefore, St. Paul’s epistle to the Galatians precludes the Christian Zionist interpretation of Genesis 12 as requiring us to support the contemporary state of Israel in any and all conflict with her neighbours.   This would be so even if we were to accept what the Christian Zionists take for granted, i.e., that Jewish identity has not changed from the New Testament to our day.   We would be fools to accept any such thing, however, because that is plainly not the case.

 

Even in the Bible Jewish identity is not a constant.  Judah was the fourth son of Jacob, whose name became that of the tribe of his descendants from whom King David came, then later the name of the Southern Kingdom that remained loyal to the House of David after the schism of the Northern Kingdom which called itself after the whole of the nation, Israel.   Originally, the word that corresponds to our “Jew”, derived from “Judah”, referred to the subjects of the House of David in the Kingdom of Judah, but following the Babylonian exile it was expanded to include all ancient Israelites.   This is the meaning that carries over into the New Testament where for the most part it is synonymous with Hebrew or Israelite, although in the Gospel of John as the narrative progresses it takes on the narrower meaning of the religious leaders in Jerusalem.  

 

Shortly after the events recorded in the book of Acts and the writing of most of the books of the New Testament – all except those by St. John – an event took place which had been predicted by Jesus that radically altered the nature of Jewish identity.   To suppress a Jewish revolt, the Roman Empire sacked Jerusalem, destroyed the Temple, dispersed the Jews, and abolished their national identity as it was at the beginning of the first century.   With the destruction of their national identity, they were left with a religious identity.   Yet at the same time, and for the same reason, the religion which God had given Israel through Moses was no longer available to them.  Without the Temple, the sacrifices could no longer be offered.   The Levitical priesthood ceased to be the spiritual leaders of the people, even in the nominal sense that had lingered after the Herodian corruption of the priesthood.    The centre of Jewish worship shifted from the destroyed Temple to the synagogue and with it the spiritual leadership of Judaism shifted from the Levitical priesthood to the teachers of the synagogue.   These were the scribes, scholars, and lay teachers, mostly from the sect of Second Temple Judaism known as the Pharisees, who under the title rabbi became the new clergy of this new Judaism.  The rabbis were scholars not just of the Tanakh – what we call the Old Testament – but even more so the oral traditions that they would start to write down as the Mishnah which along with their own commentary on it, the Gemara, forms the Talmud.   The rabbis notoriously disagreed on almost everything, a fact to which the Talmud bears abundant witness.   On one thing, however, they agreed.   They agreed that Jesus of Nazareth was not the Christ. 

 

The New Testament is absolutely clear as to what that constitutes:

 

Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son. (1 John 2:22)

 

Christian Zionists, although they usually have a very elaborate concept of the Antichrist, shy away from applying this term to rabbinic Judaism even though it meets the New Testament definition of the word.   Many of them have no problem applying the label to a particular Christian bishop who, although guilty of exceeding his jurisdiction and perverting a number of doctrines, has not yet denied Jesus.  

 

Note that while rabbinic Judaism most definitely is antichrist by the scriptural definition of 1 John 2:22 this is not grounds for harbouring hatred towards individual adherents of this religion.   Our attitude towards them should be one of pity towards those bound by the shackles of false religion and of prayer that they would be enlightened by the Holy Ghost to see in Jesus the true Christ Who is their only salvation.   The same attitude, in other words, that we take towards the Mussulmen or adherents of any other false religion.

 

Judaism, both the Old Testament religion of Moses of which Christianity is the true spiritual heir, and the post-Temple rabbinic religion that also lays claim to being the heir of the Old Testament religion but which rejects the Christ Who is the fulfilment of the Old Testament, admits converts.   While post-Temple Judaism has not exactly been characterized by a zealous mission to convert the world, converts have not been unknown either.   Ironically, considering the absurd claim of many Christian Zionists that the Palestinians are the descendants of the enemies of Israel in the Old Testament, one group that was converted to Judaism in the second century BC was the Edomites.   A few of the better known stories in the Talmud feature Gentiles who go to Rabbis Hillel and Shammai, the two most prominent rabbis of the early first century, challenging them with questions and promising to convert if given a satisfactory answer.   In the eighth century AD the king of Khazaria, a Turkish realm in the southern part of what is now the Ukraine, asked Christianity, Islam, and Judaism to send representatives to explain the tenets of their religions, and in the end, converted to Judaism and made his entire kingdom convert with him.   In the twentieth century there were a number of celebrity conversions to Judaism – Marilyn Monroe, Ivanka Trump and Elizabeth Taylor to give just three examples.   This places the Christian Zionist in the absurd position of maintaining that Marilyn Monroe, in order to marry the playwright Arthur Miller whom she divorced five years later, obtained a God-given right to a portion of the Holy Land by converting to a religion that meets the Scriptural definition of antichrist for rejecting God’s Son as Christ.

 

None of this means that the opposite of Christian Zionism, the idea of those who insist that we are under some sort of obligation to support the Palestinians are right.   In my next essay, Lord willing, I shall discuss the masses cheering on Hamas, look at their infantile mentality, and show that it comes from a far more perverse source than the banal “anti-Semitism” the neo-conservatives have been mindlessly yammering about.

 

(1)   Genesis 12:1-3 contain just the first set of these promises, to which more are added later in the chapter in verse 7, then in verses 14-17 of the thirteenth chapter after Abram and Lot part ways, then in the fifteenth chapter in which God formally enters into covenant with Abram, then in the seventeenth chapter in which God changes Abram’s name to Abraham and promises that he will be “a father of many nations” (not just one), and that his wife Sarai, whose name is also changed to Sarah, will give birth to an heir despite their old age, and adds circumcision as the sacramental sign to the covenant between Him and Abraham, then again in the twenty-second chapter after God tests Abraham’s faith in the matter of the command to sacrifice Isaac

(2)   John’s own denial that he was Elijah (Jn. 1:21) does not contradict Jesus as it may seem.   John was addressing a party sent from Jerusalem that thought of Elijah in terms of the historical personage sent back to earth.   John was right to say that this is not who he was.   Jesus’ words in Matthew 11:14, affirming that John was the fulfilment of this prophecy, mean that this prophecy was not to be taken as literally as that.

(3)   The epistle was clearly written in the midst of the controversy.   Whether it was written before or after the Council, which took place towards the end of the fifth decade of the first century, cannot be determined with certainty, although the absence of reference to the Council might be taken as indicating that the epistle was written first.

The Second Article – God the Son

 The first Article of the Creed, as we have seen, is an affirmation of faith in God the Father, the Creator of all things.   The second Article is an affirmation of faith in God the Son.   It is the first of six Articles that pertain to the Son before the affirmation of faith in God the Holy Spirit in the eight Article.   Since the Creed consists of twelve Articles in total, this means that half of them concern God the Son.

 

In the Apostles’ Creed the second Article is “et in Iesum Christum, Filium Eius unicum, Dominus nostrum” which in the English of the Book of Common Prayer is “And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord”.   In the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed the second Article is “Καὶ εἰς ἕνα Κύριον Ἰησοῦν Χριστόν, τὸν Υἱὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ τὸν μονογενῆ, τὸν ἐκ τοῦ Πατρὸς γεννηθέντα πρὸ πάντων τῶν αἰώνων.”    In this series we shall treat what is ordinarily considered the third Article of the conciliar Creed to be part of the second.   This is “φῶς ἐκ φωτός, Θεὸν ἀληθινὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ ἀληθινοῦ, γεννηθέντα οὐ ποιηθέντα, ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί· δι' οὗ τὰ πάντα ἐγένετο.”    Taken together, these are rendered in the Book of Common Prayer as  “And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made.”   Note that in the Greek of the Creed the words “Θεὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ” do not precede “φῶς ἐκ φωτός”.   Here the Book of Common Prayer follows the Latin which has “Deum de Deo” before “lumen de lumine”.   This is one of two places where the Latin text of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed inserts something that is not present in the original Greek, the other being the famously controversial Filoque in the Article about the Holy Spirit.  This is less controversial than the Filoque which played a key role in the dispute which led to the Greek and Latin Churches breaking Communion with each other because here the Latin interpolation does not express anything about which the Latin and Greek Churches are in theological disagreement.   Indeed, “Θεὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ” appeared in the original Nicene Creed of 325 AD but was dropped when the Creed was revised at the First Council of Constantinople of 381 AD.   Redundancy seems to have been the reason for its having been removed.   In the original Nicene Creed the words “μονογενῆ, τοὐτέστιν ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας τοῦ Πατρός, Θεὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ” followed “begotten of the Father” and preceded “Light of Light”.   The First Council of Constantinople (381 AD) in revising the Creed moved the μονογενῆ and placed it in attributive position to “the Son of God”.   The remainder of these words which assert nothing that was not stated more precisely later in the same Article (1) were replaced with “before all worlds”.   Nobody really knows how “Deum de Deo” made its way back into the Latin version of the Creed.   It is also present in the Armenian version of the Creed but so are all the other words that were removed from the original Nicene Creed in the Constantinopolitan revision and this version also expands the “through whom all things were made” so as to repeat the “heaven and earth” and “visible and invisible” clauses of the first Article.

 

The first Article of the Creed, as we saw in our discussion of the same, established continuity between the faith we confess as Christians and the faith of Old Testament Israel by asserting our belief that the One God, the Father, is Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.   In this second Article, the faith we confess diverges from that of others who claim continuity with the Old Testament religion.   We believe in Jesus Christ.

 

Who is Jesus Christ?

 

Jesus is the Name of this Second Person Whom we confess alongside God the Father.   St. Luke in his Gospel tells of the Annunciation, the visit the angel Gabriel paid to the Virgin Mary to tell her that she was favoured by God in that she would bear a child Who would be God’s Son.  Gabriel told her that her Son was to be given the name Jesus.     St. Matthew in his Gospel records that at some point after this Joseph of Nazareth to whom Mary was espoused was visited by an angel in a dream who told him to marry Mary and raise her child Who was the Son of God.   Joseph is also told to give the child the name Jesus and is given a reason for the name “for he shall save his people from their sins” (Matt. 1:21).   This is what the name Jesus means.   It was a common name among the Jews because it was the name of an important figure in the Old Testament.    יְהוֹשֻׁעַ‎ which when put directly into English from Hebrew is traditionally rendered Joshua was the name of one of Moses’ lieutenants, who led the Israelites into battle against various enemies when they were en route from Egypt to the Promised Land, who was one of the spies Moses sent into the Promised Land and the only one other than Caleb who proved to be faithful, and who was chosen to lead the people into the Promised Land after Moses death.   The book narrating the conquest of Canaan bears his name.    The book of Numbers tells us that his name was originally Oshea but that Moses changed it to Jehoshua or Joshua.   Oshea means “salvation”.   J(eh)oshua means “Jehovah is salvation”.    Jesus is this Name after it has been transliterated from Hebrew into Aramaic, then from Aramaic into Greek, then from Greek into Latin, and finally Anglicized by the removal of inflection and rendering Latin’s consonantal I as J.   It is in the divine Person Who bears this name in the New Testament that its meaning is truly fulfilled.   The Old Testament Joshua prefigured Him.  Through Joshua, God brought His people out of the wilderness in which they had been wandering due to their disobedience and into the Promised Land.   Indeed, in the fact that Moses, through whom the Law was given and whose name often signifies that Law, led the people in the wilderness but could not lead them across the Jordan into the Promised Land, which was reserved for Joshua, we see illustrated in the Old Testament that key theme of the New, that the Law cannot take a person from the wildness of sin and bring him into the Promised Land of peace with God, only Jesus can do that.   Jesus is Jehovah come into the world to save His people and the world from sin by taking that sin away on the Cross.

 

Christ is said or written together with Jesus so often that many assume it to be His surname.   It is more accurately thought of as a title.   As with the name Jesus it is the Anglicization of the Latin spelling of a Greek word that represents a Hebrew original.   In this case, however, the Greek word is a translation rather than a transliteration of the Hebrew.   The Hebrew word is מָשִׁיחַ which is rendered directly into English as Messiah.   This word means “Anointed One”.   In the Old Testament the kings of Israel were anointed with oil.    So were the high priests and, on at least one occasion, prophets.  Samuel was instructed by God to anoint first Saul, then David, as king with oil.   David would not harm Saul because he was “the LORD’s anointed”.   While every king of Israel and every high priest was a small-m “messiah” or small-c “christ”, the big-M Messiah or big-C Christ was the promised King who would arise out of the House of David to restore and redeem Israel.   Promises of this Redeemer-King can be found throughout the Old Testament but especially in the writings of the prophets who arose to warn Israel and Judah and call them to repentance in the period just before and during the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions that took the northern and southern kingdoms captive respectively.   In the prophetic writings it is promised that the future King will not merely restore Israel to what she was under David and Solomon but will usher in a Golden Age in which all nations will acknowledge His kingdom which will last forever, a New Covenant will be written in the hearts of man rather than on tablets of stone, and the curse on Creation due to man’s sin will finally be lifted.  

 

The Gospel Jesus preached to Israel from the beginning of His earthly ministry was “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand”.    “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” can be paraphrased as “the promises are fulfilled, the Kingdom is present among you now”.   Jesus could proclaim such a Gospel because the Kingdom was present in the Person of Himself, the King.    He explained to them, however, in His teachings, that His Kingdom was spiritual rather than political and that it was bondage to sin that He came to deliver them and the world from rather than from the Roman Empire.   That He, Jesus, is “the Christ, the Son of the Living God” was the sole article in the very first Christian confession or creed.  This was the confession made by St. Peter in response to a query from the Lord first about Whom His disciples said that He was.   Jesus praised the confession as revelation from His Father in Heaven and declared that He would build His Church upon this rock, then began to explain to His disciples that He would be crucified and rise again the third day.   Later, just before He raised her brother Lazarus, Martha made the same confession as St. Peter in response to Jesus’ asking her whether she believed His assertion that “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” (John 11:25-27).   These interactions show that the Christ, the promised King of the House of David, the High Priest after the Order of Melchizedek, the Prophet greater than Moses, was the One Who gives everlasting life to all who believe in Him and that to do so He had to die Himself then rise again. 

 

In the confession of St. Peter and Martha, “the Christ” and “the Son of God” are placed in apposition which is a way of saying that the two expressions refer to the same Person without needing an extra word to link or equate them.   In the Psalms of David there are a number of verses in which the LORD speaks to or about the Messiah as His Son.    The Old and New Testaments use the expression “son of God” with several different meaning.   In the book of Job, the “sons of God” who assemble in His court are usually understood to be the angels.  In St. Paul’s sermon at Mars Hill he spoke of all people as being God’s children.   In the Old Testament the nation Israel is sometimes spoken of as God’s son and in the Johannine literature of the New Testament believers in Jesus are said to be children of God.   When either Testament speaks of Jesus, the Christ, as the Son of God, however, He is not spoken of as being One Son among many, but as God’s Only Son.   Similarly, when Jesus speaks of God the Father, He sometimes speaks of Him as His Father and He sometimes speaks of Him to His disciples as “your Father”, but He never speaks of God as “Our Father” so as to make His Sonship identical with that of His disciples.   While the Lord’s Prayer begins with “Our Father” this is not Jesus including Himself with His disciples in “Our” and joining them in a common prayer but prescribing this form of prayer to them.    The way in which Jesus is God’s Son, therefore, is unique to Himself and not shared with any other.

 

Everything in the portion of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed that we are considering alongside the second Article of the Apostles’ Creed that is not also found in the second Article is there for the purpose of clarifying precisely what it means that Jesus is the Son of God.   This was at the heart of the controversy over which the two first Ecumenical Councils, the ones which gave us the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, were convened.   A priest in Alexandria named Arius taught that Jesus was the first creation of God, Who had a beginning before which He was not, that God had created Him out of nothing with a similar but not identical nature to His Own, and then through Him had created all other things.    When his heresy began to spill out and infect other dioceses and provinces outside of Alexandria, the First Council of Nicaea was convened to deal with the controversy.   The orthodox side, led nominally by Arius’ own bishop, the Patriarch Alexander I of Alexandria, but in actuality by his archdeacon Athanasius, prevailed, the Arian positions were anathematized, and the Council published the original Nicene Creed, but the controversy continued long after with the Arians at times having the upper hand (Athanasius, who succeeded Alexander as Patriarch of Alexandra, was temporarily deposed of his See for seven years and was sent into exile on five separate occasions), making necessary the First Council of Constantinople which revised the Creed into the form we know today and condemned Arianism as heresy.

 

Before the second Ecumenical Council produced the final version of the Creed there were numerous attempts by Arian groups and other similar heresies to revise the Nicene Creed to their liking.   An account of these can be found in the Historia Ecclesiastica of Socrates Scholasticus, the fifth century Christian historian who picked up where Eusebius of Caesarea, the “Christian Herodotus” left off. (2)  The word in the Nicene Creed to which the most objections were made was ὁμοούσιον which means “of the same essence”.   The heretical revisions replaced this word with such alternatives as ὁμοιούσιον which means “of a similar essence” and ὅμοιον which means “similar” in a more general sense.   There are many today who consider such disputes to be hairsplitting but the orthodox side was right to stand its ground and insist upon ὁμοούσιον because that one iota that separates ὁμοούσιον from ὁμοιούσιον is the difference between the Son being God and the Son being a creature, the closest to God of all creatures, but a creature nonetheless.   The word ὁμοούσιον captures what it is that makes Jesus’ Sonship distinct from that of all lesser beings who are in some lesser sense children of God.   Human beings in general and angels are “sons of God” in the sense that they are His creatures but this does not make them God.   Christians are children of God through regeneration (John 1:12-13) and adoption (Rom. 8:15) but this does not make them God.   In creation, living things reproduce after their own kind.   A cat gives birth to a cat, a dog sires another dog, a bird lays an egg and when it hatches it is another bird that comes out, etc.   A man has a son and that son is a man like his father.   This is the sense in which Jesus is God’s Son and in this sense of the word God has only the One Son, the Son Who is God as His Father is God.    ὁμοούσιον was the best word for this because it guarded against the Arian heresy that Jesus is of a similar but different and lesser nature to God the Father without lending any support to the Sabellian heresy which stresses the unity in nature of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to the point that it denies the distinction between the Persons.

 

There is another way in which the Creed expresses the truth that Jesus’ Sonship to the Father is the kind of Sonship that means that He like His Father is God and this is the word “begotten”.   In the English text of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed this word appears three times.   The first of these is when it says that Jesus Christ is “the only-begotten Son of God”.   Here “only-begotten” is the translation of τὸν μονογενῆ, the same word that is translated this way in the Authorized Bible in John 3:16.   In the last century or so a consensus has arisen among New Testament Greek scholars this is a mistranslation based upon a mistaken etymology and that this word is better understood as meaning “unique” or “one of a kind”.   This consensus is wrong, but even if it were correct it would not apply to the other two instances of “begotten” for in these the word γεννηθέντα is used which is the aorist passive participle of the verb which means “beget”.   While this verb when used of the relationship between two created beings signifies that the begetter existed before the begotten when used of the Eternal Uncreated Father and His Eternal Uncreated Son it indicates the priority of the Father in the sense that He is the Source of the Son and the Son comes from Him but not priority in any temporal sense.   That there never was a time before the Father had His Son is, indeed, what the two uses of “begotten” signify, the first by saying that the Son was begotten of the Father “before all worlds”, that is to say, before Creation, of which time is a dimension, the second by saying that “begotten” does not mean “created”.   Theologically, this truth is usually referred to as the “eternal generation” of the Son, although the term filiation is also used.

 

These truths, that Jesus as the Son comes from the Father in such a way that What the Father is, God, He, the Son, is also are simply stated in each of the expressions “God of God”, “Light of Light” and “Very God of Very God”.

 

In this Article of the Creed we also affirm the Son’s Lordship.   Saying that Jesus Christ is Lord can be another way of affirming His deity.   To avoid profaning the divine Name, the custom had developed in the Hebrew tradition of saying the word that means “Lord” instead when reading the Old Testament text.    When the Old Testament was translated into the Greek Septuagint this custom influenced the translators to put κύριος in the place of the divine Name and this practice persists into our English translation where the divine Name is transliterated as Jehovah or Jah in only a small handful of instances but otherwise rendered LORD spelled in all capitals to distinguish where the Name of God is what is indicated from places where אֲדֹנָי appears in the Hebrew text in which cases only the L is capitalized.  When the New Testament calls Jesus κύριος, sometimes this word has the weight that it has in the LXX when it stands in for the Name of God, at other times it is used in a more literal sense of “Ruler” or “Master”.   These meanings overlap, of course – Jesus as God is the Ultimate Sovereign Ruler of all – but there is a real distinction.  Generally, when Jesus is declared to be Lord in a confessional sort of way (Rom. 10:9) the emphasis is upon His deity, when is spoken of as Lord in a more personal sort of way, the emphasis is upon His authority in His relationship with His disciples.    In the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed the word “Lord” is qualified by the number “One”.  This is directly parallel to how the Creed declares God to be One in the first Article about the Father.    In the Nicene Creed, therefore, the emphasis in affirming Jesus’ Lordship is upon His deity.   The Apostles’ Creed, however, which qualifies the word “Lord” with the possessive “our”, places the emphasis in His Lordship upon His relationship of authority to we who confess Him as such.   The two versions of the Creed, therefore, complement each other, and present both aspects of Jesus’ Lordship as it is found in the New Testament.

 

The final affirmation in this portion of the Creed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan version is “through whom all things were made”.   This wording identifies the Son’s role in Creation in terms of instrumentality or means.  The Son is the instrument through Whom the Father created all things.   This is what we find asserted by St. John in the third verse of His Gospel “all things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made”.   This follows shortly after St. John’s introduction of Jesus as “the Word” Who was “in the beginning” with God and Who “was God”.  This alludes to the first chapter of Genesis which also starts with the words “in the beginning” and in which God creates all things through the means of His Word.

 

The second Article is all about the deity of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.   We shall, Lord willing, next look at the third Article, in which the focus shifts to His humanity, God the Son become Man.

  ,

 

 

 (1)   “τοὐτέστιν ἐκ τῆς οὐσίας τοῦ Πατρός” is asserted with more precision as “ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί” and  “Θεὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ” as “Θεὸν ἀληθινὸν ἐκ Θεοῦ ἀληθινοῦ”.

(2)   Eusebius was present at the Council of Nicaea as Bishop of Caesarea but finished writing his History just prior to the Council and concluded his narrative with the triumph of Constantine over his rivals.

 

 

Equality is not Justice and Justice is not Equality

Western civilization in its classical and Christian manifestations saw the Good as being the chief end for which human beings, individually and as a collective whole, were to strive. Goodness, like the closely related ideas of Truth and Beauty, was what it was in itself rather than whatever we decided it to be, and it was something we were to seek after and discover. Justice, the condition and act of being and doing what is right, was the particular aspect of Goodness that was the end for which man organized his societies politically, that is to say under law and government.

Today, Western civilization has passed through its Modern era into what is called the Postmodern age, although Übermodern would probably be a more apt term for it as it takes the traits of the modern and magnifies them to the nth degree. In these eras, Justice has been supplanted by a usurper. The name of this usurper is Equality although it sometimes tries to steal the name of Justice as well as its position. Whenever, for example, you hear “Justice” spoken of with “Social” as a modifier then you can be sure that it is this modern Pretender that is being spoken of and not true and legitimate Justice.

The superficial similarities between Equality and certain aspects of Justice are such that the differences between the two need to be made absolutely clear so as to avoid confusion. Equality is the idea that in some way or another people either are or ought to be all the same and therefore should be treated the same way. Justice is the idea that all people ought to be treated right.

It is easy to see how the confusion between the two concepts can arise. If we start with Justice’s assertion that all people ought to be treated right we can see that it is saying in a sense that all people ought to be treated the same way, that is to say, rightly. It is when we start with Equality’s assertion that all people ought to be treated the same way that a problem becomes apparent because we cannot from this assertion derive any sense of the idea that all people should be treated right. This is because treating people right and treating people the same are not identical concepts. Often to treat two people right means to treat each differently.

Allow me to illustrate what I mean by this. If you were to come across a stranger in need and welcome him into your home, treating him as if he were a member of your family, your actions would meet with widespread acclamation and you would find yourself toasted for your generosity, liberality, warm-hearted humanity, and countless other virtues. If, however, your own father, who begat you and lovingly raised you, who provided you with everything you need and gave you your start in life, were to come to you and you were to turn him aside and treat him as a perfect stranger, you would find yourself rightly condemned as a cold-blooded ingrate. In the latter instance as in the former you will have treated people the same way whether they were family members or strangers. In the second instance, however, you will not have done right by doing so.

This, by the way, is the difference between the image and the reality of Equality. Equality projects the image of treating strangers like they were family, but its reality is the treating of family members as if they were strangers.

Equality is sometimes confused with the idea that within a country the law should be the same for all people, governors and governed alike. This idea is a fundamental principle of our legal tradition. Although the principle is often spoken of as isonomy or “equality under law” there is an important difference between it and the concept of Equality. The difference is that whereas the latter asserts that all the people under the law are the same, the principle asserts that the law is the same for all people. This is not a matter of semantics. When we say that the law is the same for all people we are saying that the law is one and it is this, the unity of the law, that is the essence of the principle. To assert that it is the people, who are many, that are the same is to assert nonsense.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident”, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the preamble to the American Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal.” No greater statement of utter tripe and poppycock has ever been penned. To say that all men are created equal is to say that all men are created the same. Apart from the most peripheral and trivial of matters – that we are all born and all die, that we all have two eyes, one nose, one mouth, two arms, two legs, ten fingers, ten toes, etc. - this is patently untrue. In matters of ability, both physical and mental, personality, quality, and character human beings are like the proverbial snowflake – no two are identical. Nor would any sane person want them to be.

“We are all equal”, those who have been conditioned to accept without question the doctrine of Equality might object to my reasoning above, “in terms of our worth or value.” While that sounds very nice and may give us warm, fuzzy, tingly feelings inside, it does not bear up under scrutiny. The words “worth” and “value” are marketplace words. They can refer to the amount that you are willing to pay for something if you are a prospective buyer, or the amount that you are willing to receive in exchange for something if you are a prospective seller. They can also refer to the intrinsic qualities of the objects upon which the buyer and seller base their decision as to how much they are willing to pay or accept. (1) To say that all people are of equal value, therefore, is either to reduce all people to the level of commodities for sale in the marketplace, which is hardly in keeping with the humanitarianism professed by most egalitarians who in other contexts would most strenuously object to the objectification of people, or to assert them to be equal in terms of some intrinsic quality that is unobservable to ordinary human beings for in all observable intrinsic qualities people are definitely not equal.

That unobservable intrinsic quality is sometimes further described as being our “worth in God’s eyes”. This is tautological, providing us with no new information about what that quality might be, for if it is unobservable to the human eye, who else can see it but God? More importantly, one would be hard pressed to find evidence for this concept in authoritative divine revelation.

The God Who revealed Himself in the words of the Christian Scriptures and in the Person of Jesus Christ is a God of Justice not of Equality. While He holds men accountable to the single standard which is His Law, He holds them accountable in varying degrees in accordance with whether they have received His Law in full or only partly through their consciences. (2) He has given men One mediator through Whom grace, mercy, and salvation can be received because it is only through the cross of Jesus Christ that He can be “just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus.” (3) In the Church which is His body, there is “neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female”, not because these distinctions are unimportant or are to be eliminated but because “ye are all one in Christ Jesus”. (4) As with the concept of the “one law for all” in our legal tradition, it is unity – the unity of God’s Law, His Gospel, and His Church and, of course, of the One True and Living God Himself – that is taught in those passages and verses that are sometimes misconstrued as teaching egalitarianism. The God of the Christian Scriptures created people differently, giving each their own abilities, qualities, talents, and gifts, and while He holds all people accountable to one Law, He holds each person accountable for the use made of what was given him in particular. That is the difference between Justice and Equality.

(1) The difference between these two meanings of value is what Oscar Wilde alluded to in his famous quip about the cynic who “knows the price of everything and the value of nothing”.
(2) Romans 2
(3) Romans 3:26
(4) Galatians 3:28

The Difference Between Being a Do-Gooder and Doing Good

One of the best known of Jesus’ parables is recounted by St. Luke in the tenth chapter of his Gospel, verses twenty-five through thirty-seven. The passage begins with a lawyer asking Jesus the question “Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?” Even though St. Luke tells us that the lawyer was not asking this in good faith but in an attempt, rather, to trip Jesus up, the Lord does not respond as you or I would probably be tempted to do to one of the barristers, solicitors, and attorneys in general of our own day by saying “Fat chance that someone in your line of work will ever make it”. No, Jesus passed on this opportunity to tell an excellent lawyer joke (1) and instead turned the question around and asked the lawyer what the Torah had to say about it. The lawyer answers this by quoting the two verses that Jesus Himself would quote when asked which is the greatest commandment, and Jesus commended this answer, but the lawyer then came back with a second question “Who is my neighbour?” It is then that Jesus relates the parable in which a man is robbed, stripped, and left to die on the road from Jericho to Jerusalem, and is left there by a priest and a Levite who happen to pass by but is rescued by a passing Samaritan who treats his wounds and takes him to an inn to take care of him. This parable has come to be known as the Parable of the Good Samaritan.

I would like to tell a different parable that begins in the same way Jesus’ did, but takes a rather different turn towards the end, hoping, that in doing so, I am not committing a terrible act of blasphemy. Here it goes.

A man is on his way from Jericho to Jerusalem when he is beset by thieves, robbers, and cutthroats, relieved of his possessions, and left bloody, wounded, and mangled on the side of the road. Shortly thereafter a priest comes along, followed a little later by a Levite, and both avert their eyes and walk on the other side of the road, rather than trying to help the poor soul. Then the Samaritan comes along. He is outraged at the plight of his fellow man and the callousness shown by the priest and Levite. In Jerusalem, Jericho, and all the surrounding communities he circulates a petition demanding that highways be made safer for travelers and that legislation be passed forcing people to stop and help the victims of highway robberies or face a heavy fine or possibly a lashing and prison time. He calls for the establishment of a public fund to take care of those victimized by highway crime and for taxes to be imposed on the priests and Levites to pay for this fund. He makes a nuisance of himself lobbying for these reforms before the Sanhedrin and in the courts of Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate and King Herod. Eventually, word of his crusade reaches Rome, and a committee of Senators invites him to come and present his case for highway security and social programs for robbery victims before Caesar himself. Meanwhile, the man who was robbed remains on the side of the road and dies.

This, of course, is the Parable of the Do-Gooder Samaritan.

It is one of the curiosities of the English language that the expression “do-gooder” does not refer to people who actually “do good”. Indeed, the expression is one of ironic contempt that suggests that there is a disconnect between the good the person to which it is applied thinks he is doing and the actual outcome of his actions. Sometimes it is just a matter of ineffectiveness in which the do-gooder has good intentions and a noble goal but fails to actually accomplish anything. Often, however, the do-gooder might accomplish harm either instead of the good he intends or which is greater than and outweighs the smaller good he actually achieves. A do-gooder typically displays naivety of one kind or another, ranging from a simple lack of the experience and know-how necessary to accomplish his lofty goals to a kind of tunnel vision in which he is so focused upon achieving one particular ideal that he is blinded to the negative consequences of his attempts to achieve it.

We usually associate the idea of a do-gooder with that of a social and moral crusader. A crusader of this type is someone who attempts to bring about a particular end either by persuading the government to pass legislation or by organizing private citizens to take action. The interesting thing about this methodology is that it distributes the cost of accomplishing a desired goal among many people, either the organized private citizens or the taxpayers as a whole, and can sometimes lead to the blame being distributed if something goes wrong as well. Meanwhile, the crusader or do-gooder gets the full credit if something good is actually accomplished. This may or may not justify an attitude of cynicism towards the motives of the reformer but it is worth taking note of and contrasting with the example of the Good Samaritan of Jesus’ parable, who when leaving the robbed man with the innkeeper told the latter to add the cost of any additional assistance that might be required to his bill.

Another contrast between do-gooders and people like the Good Samaritan who actually do good is that the latter are concerned with personally doing the right thing whereas the former are obsessed with improving everybody else. This leaves other people with the impression that the do-gooder is a self-satisfied, self-righteous, better-than-thou type of person, an impression that is in no way lessened when he enlists the help of the government in accomplishing his goals. All sorts of ridiculous legislation that is far more of an obnoxious nuisance to most people than it is a benefit can be attributed to this cause in the last century alone. Some of this legislation, like Prohibition, the biggest single effect of which was to make the mob rich and powerful, was long ago discredited and rescinded. Other such legislation, no-less discredited, for some reason remains on the books. Canadian and American federal drug laws are a prime example. Other laws that were initiated by do-gooders and which harass people more than they help them are laws which prohibit people from driving when their blood alcohol level is above an arbitrary percentage point regardless of whether they are capable of driving safely in that condition or not, laws which jack up the price of tobacco, prohibit smoking sections in restaurants and drive smokers out into the cold whenever they want a puff or two, laws that prevent an employer from offering a man a high enough wage to support his wife and children lest a single woman be discriminated against, and laws that ensure that that an employer, if he wishes to remain free of harassing lawsuits, will hire a certain percentage of ethnic and racial minorities regardless of their qualifications. Any legislation associated with the concept of human rights can be regarded as falling within the category we are discussing.

Ultimately though, the worst thing about being a do-gooder is that it is a cop out of the ethical or moral life. It is far easier, to sign up for some “save the world” cause or the other – take your pick, they are a dime a dozen – and try to fix other people, than it is to try and do the right thing yourself, to cultivate the virtues and good character, and to seek after the good, the true, and the beautiful. The latter is the hard work of a lifetime and the rewards, while enduring, take longer to appear whereas the former is easy and the rewards are instantly gratifying.

(1) Have you heard the one about the dispute between God and the devil over the fence between Heaven and Hell? The fence was run down and it was the devil's turn to have it fixed. He, being the blighter he is, did nothing about it. God pointed out his negligence and he replied "So sue me". When God said that He might do just that the devil came back with "Oh yeah. Where are you going to find a lawyer?".

Sin and Hypocrisy

Modern, progressive, thought is fundamentally and diametrically opposed to the doctrine of original sin. The most basic element of progressive thought is the idea that human evil and suffering is caused, not by a flaw in human nature, but by flaws in the organization of society, and that by correcting these flaws, man can build for himself Paradise upon earth. The doctrine of original sin, on the other hand, teaches that man is a fallen being, that the evils he commits and suffers arise out of his own flawed nature, and that he cannot break his own exile from Paradise but must trust in the grace and mercy of God. These two ideas are mutually incompatible and it is the latter, the doctrine of orthodox Christianity and an essential component of conservative thought, which most accurately describes man as he is in the world as it is.

The doctrine of original sin is predicated of man as a collective being. (1) It is the collective sin of our race, in which we each have an equal share. It is the same for any one person as it is for the next. Personal sin, on the other hand, refers to the sins which we each commit as individual persons. While one of the implications of original sin, is that each of us is guilty of personal sin, personal sin differs from person to person and is never exactly the same for any two individual people. Your personal sins are the sins which you have committed and for which you are accountable, whereas mine are the sins which I have committed and for which I am accountable.

If original sin is the realistic rain on the utopian parade of progressivism, personal sin is not exactly a popular concept with modern thought either. It is not that modern people think of themselves as perfect. That is far from being the case. “I’m not perfect” or “nobody’s perfect” are phrases that can be found on virtually everybody’s lips from time to time. Modern people do not like to think of their flaws and failings in terms of sin, however. In part this is because sin is a word with religious associations which seem antiquated to the modern secular mind. It is also because the word sin suggests the idea that one is responsible for one’s actions, and therefore guilty of one’s wrongdoing, for which one can and will be held accountable.

To be fair to modern man, these have never been popular ideas, at least when applied to one’s own self. Consider the words of Adam and Eve in response to God’s questioning in the Garden after the fall in the third chapter of Genesis. However one reads these chapters, literally or figuratively, the point is clearly there that passing the buck is as old as sin.

That having been said, sin is clearly one of those concepts that modern man considers himself too advanced to believe in anymore. Forty years ago a book was published that asked the question “Whatever Became of Sin?” (2) The author was Dr. Karl Menninger, a renowned psychiatrist and the co-founder with his father and brother, of the famous psychiatric clinic and foundation that bear their family name. According to Dr. Menninger, the concept of sin has been on the wane, first because as the modern state developed assuming much of the functions previously performed by the church, much socially undesirable behaviour was moved from the category of sin into the category of crime, and second because with the development of modern medical science, and particularly psychiatry, sinful behaviour has been further reclassified into the category of disease and its symptoms. Another factor he identified was the development of modern ways of regarding society as being collectively responsible for the erring actions of individuals.

Menninger did not see all of these developments as being entirely or even mostly negative – except perhaps the evolution of the modern state of which he wrote with an almost anarchist, individualist contempt. He nevertheless made the case that we still needed the concept of sin. Indeed, he wrote that it was “the only hopeful view.” (3) His reasoning was that since the world was still full of evil, we need the concept of sin, which allows responsibility for evil to be assigned but which also offers the possibilities of repentance, atonement, grace and forgiveness, to retain our sanity.

If the concept of sin has gone out of fashion as a way of thinking about and describing human behaviour that is undesirable and wrong, the same cannot be said of the concept of hypocrisy. The words hypocrisy and hypocrite are doing very well indeed, especially as terms of abuse for those who still hold to the old-fashioned ideas of sin and righteousness.

Hypocrisy is a charge which secular society and unbelievers like to throw against the Christian church and against Christian believers, perhaps without full comprehension of what it is that they are accusing Christians and the church. Often it seems as if those leveling the charge seem to think that the definition of a hypocrite is “a religious person who commits a sin.” This is not what the word means at all.

Hypocrisy was originally a Greek word. It was formed by adding the prefix hypo, which means under, to the verb krino, which means to separate, decide, distinguish or pass judgement. In the old Ionic dialect used by Homer, this compound originally meant to reply or to give an answer. In the later Attic dialect however, i.e., that spoken in Athens at the height of its classical civilization in the period before, during, and just after the Peloponnesian War, the word had been adopted as a technical term for use in the theatre. In this period, when Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were writing their great tragedies for the Athenian stage, the word hypocrisis referred to the work of actors in performing these plays. This usage evolved from the original meaning of the word because it literally described what an actor was doing in the play’s dialogue – answering or replying to the other speakers.

In English, we do not speak of the performing of a role on stage as hypocrisy, nor do we speak of the performers as hypocrites. Instead we use the words acting and actor to describe these things. The meaning of our English word hypocrisy is a metaphorical extension of the idea of acting. An actor is someone who pretends to be someone he is not, the character he is assigned in the play in which he is performing. A hypocrite is also someone who plays a role. He is someone who pretends to be more righteous or virtuous than he actually is. This is what Jesus Christ meant when He denounced the scribes and Pharisees, calling them hypocrites. Christ may not have been the first to use the word in this way but it is through His use that it became the word’s primary meaning.

If hypocrisy is putting on an act of being more righteous than you actually are is secular society’s charge that the church is full of hypocrisy accurate?

Sadly, it often is. Individual Christians and the organized church are frequently guilty of hiding their sins and putting on a front of righteousness. That such would be the case is indirectly suggested by the words of Jesus Himself. He would hardly have gone to such lengths to warn His disciples against the leaven of the scribes and Pharisees if He did not think them susceptible to that leaven. Where the charge falls short of hitting its mark is in the unspoken assumption that there is less hypocrisy outside the church than there is inside it.

In my first semester at Providence College there was a class that if I remember correctly was mandatory for all freshmen that was kind of an introductory course to apologetics and evangelism. Part of the course dealt with common excuses given for rejecting the gospel. When our professor, Stan Hamm, asked us how we would respond to someone who says “the church is full of hypocrites”, I blurted out “there is always room for more!”

While I had obviously said that as a wiseass remark, it does actually answer the excuse in a way. Hypocrisy, the pretence of being a better person than one actually is, is a ubiquitous trait of humanity, not just of the religious and it is often best exemplified by those who use the hypocrisy of the church as an excuse to avoid believing the gospel themselves. Indeed, in using the hypocrisy of the church as an excuse for not joining it, one is implicitly claiming to be non-hypocritical, to be completely transparent, open, and honest, which is itself almost certainly a pretence, and therefore, arguably the ultimate form of hypocrisy, being a hypocrite about not being a hypocrite.

In fact, an argument can be made that there is far less hypocrisy within the church than there is outside it. Those who level accusations of hypocrisy against the church when Christians are caught in sin often seem to assume that Christians purport to be sinlessly perfect and demand that others be as well. Yet the very opposite is the case. By the terms of orthodox Christian doctrine, one cannot be a Christian without confessing oneself to be a sinner.

Think about it. A popular method of sharing the gospel, among North American evangelicals, presents the way of salvation as the ABCs of Christianity. While this is not a sterling example of Christian orthodoxy – it distorts the gospel by presenting it as a series of steps that you have to follow in order to obtain salvation rather than a message of good news about how God has given us salvation in Jesus Christ – the A, in the ABCs, always stands for admitting that you are a sinner. (4)

In more traditional Protestant theology, divine revelation is regarded as being divided into two messages, Law and Gospel. The Law tells us what God demands of us, the Gospel tells us what God in His grace has done for us in Jesus Christ. The practical function of the Law is to show us our need for the Gospel – to show us that we are sinners, who cannot meet God’s righteous demands, and must therefore trust in the salvation God has provided in Christ.

In liturgical churches, a general confession and absolution of sin is made every time the Mass is celebrated. In the traditional order of the Latin Mass this was the very first thing that was done after the asperges, before even the introit. In the Anglican Book of Common Prayer it is the first part of the eucharistic liturgy following the readings and the sermon. A general confession of sin is also made in the liturgy of the divine office and the private confession and absolution of specific sins is also encouraged by many churches, most obviously the Roman.

Christianity, in other words, is all about acknowledging one’s sins and trusting in God’s forgiveness. To the extent, therefore, that a person believes in and practices this religion of confession of sin and reception of divine forgiveness through faith, he is likely to be less of hypocrite rather than more of one.

Hypocrisy, let me reiterate, is more than just falling short of the moral standards one believes in or which are taught by the religion to which one belongs. The word that best describes that is actually the word with the discussion of which we began this essay, i.e., sin. (5) That confession of sin is one of the most fundamental elements of Christianity is the best answer to the charge that the Christian church is uniquely hypocritical, for hypocrisy is pretending to a righteousness one does not possess, a universal human trait that is lessened, somewhat, by Christianity’s requirement that one confess one’s sins.

To be fair, those to whom hypocrisy is the first thing that comes to mind when the church is mentioned could respond to the preceding argument by saying that it is the preachy attitude of the church combined with the sins of its members that they consider to be hypocritical. A response like this could be a legitimate complaint about the manner in which Christian moral truths are sometimes presented. It could also be a complaint that would be made regardless of the manner in which the message is presented because of a notion that as long as the church and its members are themselves imperfect people they have no right to proclaim moral truths.

If, however, imperfect people and institutions are disqualified from preaching moral truths, then nobody is left to preach them. Imperfect preachers are the only kind available. About twenty years ago I read a book, lent to me by my pastor at the time, in which the author made this point in a way that I have never forgotten. The author, Dr. R. C. Sproul of Ligonier Ministries, wrote:

No minister is worthy of his calling. Every preacher is vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy. In fact, the more faithful a preacher is to the Word of God in his preaching, the more liable he is to the charge of hypocrisy. Why? Because the more faithful a man is to the Word of God, the higher the message is that he will preach. The higher the message, the further he will be from obeying it himself. (6)

Dr. Sproul is a well-known Reformed theologian, that is, a Calvinist. Calvinism, like all human attempts at understanding God, has its strengths and weaknesses. The holiness of God, that which sets Him above and apart from sinful man, which makes His grace amazing indeed, is one of the areas in which Calvinism tends to be strong and this was the subject of the book. This paragraph about the imperfection of preachers, and how the better they are at doing their job, the further they themselves are from that which they preach, comes at the end of a chapter based upon the propher Isaiah’s experience in the sixth chapter of the book bearing his name. Summoned into the presence of God, He declared God to be thrice holy, and himself to be undone. Yet, when God asked who would go and speak His message, the man of “unclean lips” volunteered and God accepted his service.

A few years ago I ran across another book whose author tackled the question of which is preferable, an imperfect testimony to moral truth or no testimony at all, and argued for the former. Among the points Jeremy Lott made in the provocatively titled In Defense of Hypocrisy, were that accusations of hypocrisy are often also examples of it, that many things that we would probably classify as examples of hypocrisy don’t actually meet the criteria for inclusion in that category, and that other things which are hypocrisies we are actually better off with than without. Examples of the latter would be the variations on “looking the other way” that are necessary for unwritten rules to work. In his sixth chapter, he made a compelling case for the idea that society is far more tolerable when unwritten rules – which often contradict the written rules, hence the need for the hypocrisy – are in operation, than when everything is done strictly by the book.

What I found to be the most interesting argument in the book, however, was an argument in the fourth chapter about religious hypocrisy, in which Lott traced the antihypocrisy movement back to its Founder, Who was, of course, also the Founder of the institution most often accused of hypocrisy. If the church has often been guilty of distorting Christ’s message and failing abysmally to follow His teachings – and, being composed of sinful human beings, of course, it has – the antihypocrisy movement has not done any better. Indeed, it has inverted His condemnation of hypocrisy. Whereas Jesus condemned the Pharisees for not living up to the standards of the Mosaic Law they preached, contemporary antihypocrites condemn the preaching of moral standards that one cannot live up to. Or as Lott put it “the bone that he couldn’t swallow was that they were far too self-serving in their reading, not necessarily that they were too demanding”. (7)

To make his point, he asked a fascinating “what if” question:

If the teachers of the law had ceased to teach and the priests had locked up the temple, would the preacher from Nazareth have said, Well, at least they aren’t being hypocrites? Not unless he suddenly decided to depart from the tone and tenor of everything he’d ever said in public. The Jesus of the Gospels would have raged against them twice as hard for abandoning even the trappings of religion. (8)

This reasoning seems iron-clad to me, especially when one considers that Jesus, while condemning the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, told His listeners they still had to respect their authority and obey the Law they taught (Matthew 23:2-3).

The contemporary antihypocrites, whose objection is to the preaching of moral standards rather than the failing to live up to them, would presumably not look askance at the disappearance of the concept of sin. If, however, Dr. Menninger was correct in regarding the concept of sin as the only way of thinking about evil in the world that provides us with hope, and if Jeremy Lott is correct in arguing that some kinds of hypocrisy actually make society more tolerable, we have good reason to regard the moral thinking of today as being greatly inferior to that of about seventy years ago. Perhaps it is time we turn back the clock.

(1) http://www.thronealtarliberty.blogspot.ca/2013/09/original-sin-and-free-will.html

(2) Karl Menninger, M.D., Whatever Became Of Sin? (New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1973).

(3) Ibid., p. 188.

(4) The B is for believe, but the C varies, in some versions being call upon the Lord, in others confess Christ, in yet others commit yourself to Christ.

(5) The technical term for the study of the concept of sin is hamartiology. This comes from the most basic Greek word for sin, hamartia. Its verbal cognate, hamartano was the word the Greeks used for falling short of your target when throwing a spear, and thus by extension, failing to meet your goals.

(6) R. C. Sproul, The Holiness of God (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, 1985, 1993), p. 50.

(7) Jeremy Lott, In Defense of Hypocrisy: Picking Sides in the War on Virtue (Nashville: Nelson Current, 2006) p. 108.

(8) Ibid. Bold indicates italics in original.