Worship on Earth as it is Where?
The Church
is the society of faith that Jesus Christ founded through His Apostles on the
first Whitsunday (the Christian Pentecost, the successor to Succoth the Jewish
Pentecost) when in accordance with His promise given on the eve of the events
through which He established the New Covenant that would become the basis of
that society, the Father sent down the Holy Ghost upon His disciples, uniting
them into one body, with Christ as the head.
Into this one organic body, was joined the Old Testament Church, the
Congregation of the Lord within national Israel, whose faith looked forward to
the coming of Jesus Christ and who were taken by Him, from Hades, the Kingdom
of Death, in His Triumphant descent there after His Crucifixion, and brought by
Him into Heaven when He ascended back there after His Resurrection. The Church does many things when she meets
as a community but first and foremost among them she worships her God. In this, the Church on earth, or the Church
Militant as she is called, unites with the Church in Heaven, also known as the
Church Triumphant.
Throughout her
history those who have led, organized, and structured her corporate worship
have been guided by the principle that our worship on Earth should resemble
than in Heaven. It is a Scriptural
principle. The Book of Hebrews
discusses at length how the elaborate religious system given to national Israel
in the Mosaic Covenant was patterned on Heavenly worship, the Earthly
Tabernacle (the tent that was the antecedent of the Temple in the days when
Israel was wandering in the wilderness before entering the Promised Land), for
example, was patterned on the Heavenly Tabernacle. Indeed, Hebrews uses language strongly
suggestive of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to describe the relationship between
the Earthly Tabernacle and the Heavenly Tabernacle. Since Hebrews also uses this kind of
language to describe the relationship between the Old Covenant and the New the
only reasonable conclusion is that if the worship of the Old Testament Church
was to be patterned after worship in Heaven, how much more ought the worship of
the New Testament Church to be patterned after the same. Now the Bible gives us a few glimpses of
worship in Heaven. These are generally
found in visions in the prophetic and apocalyptic literature. The sixth chapter of Isaiah is the classic
Old Testament example. The vision of
St. John in the fourth and fifth chapters of Revelation is the classic New
Testament example. In these chapters we
find a lot of praying, a lot of singing, a lot of incense, an altar and a lot
of kneeling. The Scriptural depiction
of worship, in other words, is quite “High Church”. Indeed, since the book of Hebrews tells us
that Jesus, in His role of High Priest, entered the Heavenly Holy of Holies
with His blood, which unlike that of the Old Testament bulls and goats
effectively purges of sin and the New Testament elsewhere tells us that Jesus
on the eve of His Crucifixion commissioned the Lord’s Supper to be celebrated
in His Church until His Second Coming, which was practiced daily in the first
Church in Jerusalem and which is Sacramentally united with Jesus’ offering of
Himself, the way the pre-Reformation Churches – not just the Roman, but the
Greek, Coptic, Armenian, Assyrian and other ancient Churches as well – made
this the central focus of their corporate worship is also very Scriptural.
In the Reformation, Rome’s abuses with
regards to the Sacrament and her neglect of the preaching ministry, led many of
the Reformers to de-emphasize the Sacrament and make the sermon the central
focus of their corporate worship. The
more extreme wing of the Reformation confused the New Testament ideas of a
preaching ministry in the Church,
which is a didactic ministry, teaching the faithful, with that of evangelistic
preaching, which is the Church’s external
ministry of proclaiming the Gospel to the world, and worse, developed
unhealthy ideas about the preaching ministry, such as that the Word is inert
and lifeless unless it is explained in a sermon, which are susceptible to the
same charges of idolatry that the Reformers themselves made against Rome’s late
Medieval views of the Sacrament. More
to my point, however, the glimpses the Scriptures provide us of worship in
Heaven do not mention a Heavenly pulpit, and, indeed, the closest thing to a
sermon in Heaven I can think of in the Bible, is the reference to the
everlasting Gospel in Revelation 14:6.
The same verse, however, specifies that while the angel carrying it is
flying in the midst of Heaven, it is to be preached “unto them that dwell on
the earth”. Curiously, the Bible does
make mention of a sermon that was preached to an otherworldly
congregation. St. Peter, in the
nineteenth verse of the third chapter of his first Catholic Epistle, talks
about how Jesus “went and preached unto the spirits in prison”. There is, of course, a lot of debate about
what St. Peter meant by this. Did he
mean that Jesus preached the liberty He had just purchased them to the Old
Testament saints when He descended into Hades?
Or that He preached to those who would be left in the Kingdom of Death
when He took His saints with Him to Heaven?
If the latter, as the verses following might suggest, to what end? We cannot answer these questions dogmatically,
interesting though the long-standing discussion of them be. My point, with regards to sermon-centric
worship, is best expressed in another question. Whoever thought that worship on Earth as it
is in Hell was a good idea?
The State?
I prefer
the term Tory to the term conservative as a description of my political views,
even if that always requires an explanation that I do not mean “big-C party
Conservative” by the term, but Tory as Dr. Johnson defined it in his Dictionary, a pre-Burke conservative if
you will. Today, the word conservative
in its small-c sense, is mostly understood in its American sense, which is
basically the older, nineteenth-century kind of liberal. I don’t disassociate myself from this out of
a preference for the newer, twentieth and twenty-first century types of
liberalism over the older. Quite the
contrary, the older type of liberalism is far to be preferred over the
newer. I disassociate myself from it
because the older type of conservatism, the British Toryism in which Canada’s
original conservatism has its roots, is to be preferred over either type of
liberalism.
Some explain the difference
between a Tory and an American type conservative by saying that the Tory has a
high view of the state, the American conservative a low view of the state. While this is not entirely wrong – Dr.
Johnson’s Dictionary mentioned
earlier defines a Tory as “One who adheres to the antient constitution of the
state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the Church of England, opposed to a
whig” – it can be very misleading, because “the state” has several different
connotations.
The basic error of
liberalism – classical liberalism – pertains to human freedom. Classical liberalism was the theory that
man’s natural condition is to be an individual, autonomous with no social
connections to others, that this natural condition is what it means to be free,
that society and the state were organized by individuals on a voluntary
contractual basis in order to mutually protect their individual freedom, and
that when society and the state fail to do this individuals have the right and
responsibility to replace them with ones that do. Liberalism was wrong about each and every
one of these points, failing to see that man’s natural is social not individual
– an individual outside of society is not a human being in his natural
condition – that society and the state are extensions of the family, the basic
natural social unit, rather than extensions of the marketplace based on the
model of a commercial enterprise, and that attempts to replace old states and
societies with new ones, almost always result in tyranny rather than greater
freedom.
Nor did the liberals
understand how their view of things depersonalizes people. “The individual” is not Bob or Joe or Mary
or Sam or Sally or Anne or Herschel or Marcus or George or Bill or Leroy or
Susie, each a person on his own earthly pilgrimage, distinct but not
disconnected from others, but a faceless, nameless, carbon copy of everyone
else, identifiable only by the rights and freedoms that he shares equally with
each other individual, in other words, a number. When our primary term for speaking about
government is the abstract notion of “the state” this tends to depersonalize
government in the same way liberal autonomous individualism depersonalizes
people. In twentieth century
liberalism, which envisioned a larger role for government than the earlier
classical liberalism, and in that offshoot of liberalism that has gone by the
name “the Left” or “progressivism”, “the state” is very impersonal, a faceless
bureaucracy which views those it governs as numbers rather than people, a
collective but a collective of autonomous individuals rather than an organic
society/community. I would say that the
traditional Tory view of “the state” in this sense of the word is even lower
than that of an American style, classical liberal, neoconservative.
What the Tory does have a high view of is
government in the sense of traditional, time-proven, concrete governing
institutions, particularly the monarchy and Parliament. Note that Dr. Johnson spoke not of “One who
adheres to the state” but “One who adheres to the antient constitution of the
state”. What monarchy and Parliament,
which complement each other, have in common, is that they are both very
personal ways of thinking about government.
The king reigns as father/patriarch over his kingdom(s), an extension of
his family, as his governing office is an extension of the family as the model
of society and state. Parliament is the
where the representatives of the governed meet to have their say in the laws
under which they live and how their taxes are spent. The conversation between these two personal
governing institutions has contributed greatly to the most worthy
accomplishments of our civilization, and both have long proven their worth, so
it is of these that I prefer to say that I as a Tory have a high view, rather
than the impersonal state. I have a
higher view of the monarchy than of Parliament, and not merely because those
who currently occupy the seats of Parliament leave much to be desired, but for
the very Tory reason that if the Church should be worshipping on Earth as in
Heaven, government ought to be modelled after the Heavenly pattern as
well. God is the King of Kings, and
governs the universe without the aid of elected representatives. Monarchy is the essential form of
government. Parliament accommodates the
model to our human condition.
Capitalism or Socialism?
There is a
popular notion that unless one has no opinion on economics at all one must be either
a capitalist or a socialist. Those who
have studied economic theory will point out that that this is a little like the
dilemma posed in the question “Did you walk to work or take a bagged lunch?” –
a capitalist, in the terms of economic theory, is someone who owns and lives
off of capital, whereas a socialist is someone who believes in the idea of
socialism. Since, however, for most
people, the term capitalist now means “someone who believes in capitalism” we
will move on. A more nuanced version of
the popular nation postulates a spectrum with capitalism, in the sense of pure
laissez-faire with no government involvement in the market whatsoever as the
right pole, and pure socialism, where the government not only controls but owns
everything, as the left pole, with most people falling somewhere between and being
identified as capitalists or socialists depending upon the pole to which they
are the closest. The terms “left” and “right”
in popular North American usage have been strongly shaped by this concept even
though their original usage in Europe was quite different – the “left” were the
supporters of the French Revolution, which, although it was the template of all
subsequent Communist revolutions, was not a socialist undertaking per se, and
the “right” were the Roman Catholic royalists, the continental equivalent of
the English Tories. To complicate
matters there is the expression “far right” which is usually used to suggest
the idea of Nazism, which makes no sense with either the old continental
European or the new North American usage, although the less commonly used “far
left” for Communists makes sense with both.
The conservatives who think civilization began with the dawn of Modern
liberalism and have little interest in conserving anything other than classical
liberalism tend to accept this idea of a socialist-capitalist, left-right,
economic spectrum and to identify as capitalists. This makes sense because it is liberalism
they are trying to conserve and the Adam Smith-David Ricardo-Frédéric Bastiat
theory of laissez-faire that we commonly identify as capitalism is more
properly called economic liberalism.
With us Tories it is a bit more complicated and this has led, in my
country, the Dominion of Canada, to the idea held by some that classical conservatives
or Tories, unlike American neoconservatives, are closer to socialism than to
capitalism. To come to this conclusion, however, one
must accept the American notion of a socialist-capitalist economic spectrum and
the idea contained within it that any move away from laissez-faire is a move in
the direction of socialism. That idea
is nonsense and does tremendous violence to the historical meaning of the word
socialism. Historically, several
different socialist movements, popped up at about the same time. What they all had in common was a) the idea
that the private ownership of property, meaning capital, any form of wealth that
generates an income for its owner by producing something that can be sold in
the market is the source of all social evils because it divides society into
classes, some of which own property, others of which must sell their labour to
the propertied classes in order to make a living, and b) the idea that the
remedy is some sort of collective ownership of property. In the Marxist version of socialism, this
collective ownership was conceived of as by the state, after it had been seized
in violent revolution by the proletariat (factory workers). In other versions of socialism, such as that
of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the state was viewed as unnecessary – Proudhon, as
well as being a socialist, was the first anarchist - and collective ownership
was conceived of more in terms of workers’ co-operatives. Socialism, in both its diagnosis of the cause
of social ills and in its proposed remedy, is fundamentally at odds with orthodox
Christianity, which tells us that sin, the condition of the human heart as the
result of the Fall of Man is the cause of social ills, and that the only remedy
for sin is the grace of God, obtained for mankind by Jesus Christ through His
Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection, and brought to mankind by His Church
in its two-fold Gospel Ministry of Word and Sacrament. From the perspective of orthodox
Christianity, socialism, therefore, is an attempt to bypass the Cross and to
regain Paradise through human political and social endeavours. Even worse than that it is Envy, the second
worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, made to wear the mask of Charity, the highest
of the Theological Virtues, and institutionalized. It is therefore utterly condemned by
orthodox Christianity and Toryism, the political expression of orthodox
Christianity, in its rejection of laissez-faire liberalism does not step in the
direction of socialism. Even when
Toryism supports state social programs for the relief of poverty, unemployment,
and the like, as it did under Disraeli in the United Kingdom in the Victorian
era and as it historically did in Canada, it was not for socialist reasons, not
because it believed that inequality was the cause of all social ills and wealth
redistribution society’s panacea, but for counter-socialism reasons, because it
did not want poverty, unemployment, etc. to because the opportunity for
recruitment to the cause of socialism which it correctly saw as a destructive
force that unchained leads to greater misery, especially for those whom it
claims to want to help.
The main way in
which Toryism has historically envisioned a larger economic role for government
than laissez-faire liberalism has been that the Tory recognizes the genuine
economic interests of the entire realm, such as the need for domestic
production of essential goods so as to not be dependent upon external supplies
that may be cut off in an emergency, along with the economic interests of local
communities, families, and individuals.
Adam Smith argued that individuals are the most competent people to look
out for their own economic interests rather than governments, especially
distant ones, and Toryism doesn’t dispute this as a general principle –
obviously there are exceptions. Rather
it agrees with this principle and adds that families are the most competent at
looking out for their interests as families, and communities for their
interests at communities – this is what the idea of subsidiarity, rooted in
Christian social theory, is all about.
Toryism doesn’t accept Smith’s claim that individuals looking out for
their own interests will automatically result in these other interests taking
care of themselves, much less those of the entire realm. The government, although incompetent at
making economic decisions for individuals qua
individuals, or families qua
families, communities qua communities,
for that matter, is generally as an
institution, the best suited for making economic decisions for the realm.
This is compromised, of course, if the
person selected to lead His Majesty’s government as Prime Minister is an incompetent
dolt, imbecile, and moron. The
government of Sir John A. Macdonald, protecting fledgling Canadian industries
with tariffs while investing heavily in the production of the railroad that
would facilitate east-west commerce, uniting Canada and preventing her from
being swallowed up piecemeal by her neighbor to the south is an example of government
making the best sort of economic decisions for the realm. Unfortunately, His Majesty’s government is
currently led by the classic example of the other kind of Prime Minister.
Which Branch of the Modern Tree?
Not so long
ago, when the fashionable, progressive, forward-thinking, and up-to-date began
to tell us that boys or men who thought they were girls or women and girls or
women who thought they were boys or men should be treated as if they were what
they thought and said they were instead of what they actually were in reality,
rather than indulge this nonsense we ought instead to have treated those making
this absurd suggestion the way we had hitherto treated those who thought they
were something other than what they were, that is to say, called those fellows
in the white uniforms with the butterfly nets to come and take them away that
they might have a nice long rest in a place where they would be no harm to
themselves or others. Instead we left
them among the general populace where they proceeded to wreak maximum
harm.
It had seemed, at one time, that
this madness had peaked when people started introducing themselves by their
“preferred pronouns” rather than their names but, as is usual when one makes
the mistake of thinking things can’t get any worse, they did. The past few years have seen a major
backlash finally starting to take shape against the aggressive promotion of
this gender craziness in the schools, and no, I don’t mean the post-secondary
institutions that have long been home to every wacky fad under the sun, I am
talking about elementary schools. It
seems that teachers, with the backing of school board administrators, have
taken to treating every instance in which a boy says that he is a girl, or a
girl says that she is a boy, as a serious case of gender dysphoria rather than the
passing phase it would otherwise be in most cases and responded with “gender
affirmation” which is a euphemism for indulging and encouraging gender
confusion – and forcing everyone else in the classroom to go along with it. To top it off, they have been keeping all of
this secret from the parents.
The state of California in the United States
has just taken this to the next level, as a bill has passed in its legislative
assembly that would essentially make “gender affirmation” a requirement for
parents to retain custody of their children. It is worth bringing up at this point that there
is a very similar and closely related euphemism to “gender affirmation” and
that is “gender affirming care”, which refers to using hormones and surgery to
make someone who thinks they are of the other sex physically resemble that
sex. The same lunatics that I have been
talking about, think it appropriate to offer this “care” to prepubescent
children. In every single instance
where this is done – every single instance – it is a case of child abuse. Period!
It is this aggressive war on the
sexual innocence of childhood and the rights and authority of parents that has sparked
the backlash on the part of parents who have had enough and are fighting back. Some jurisdictions, like the state of
Florida in the United States, and the provinces of New Brunswick and
Saskatchewan here in Canada, have responded by requiring schools to notify
parents when this sort of thing is going on. The government in my own province of Manitoba
has promised to do this if they are re-elected next month. That,
I would say, is the very least they ought to do. I think that teachers that twist the minds
of young kids in this way ought to be severely punished – a case can be made
for bringing back the stocks and/or public flogging to do this.
The progressives, including both Captain
Airhead, Prime Minister of Canada, and J. Brandon Magoo, President of the
United States, have denounced the policy of informing parents as if it were
placing kids in mortal danger.
Progressive spin-doctors have even coined a new expression “forced
outing” with which to vilify the sensible idea that teachers should not be
allowed to continue to get away with this ultra-creepy business of sexualizing
little kids and encouraging them to keep it a secret from their parents.
Those whose conservatism seeks primarily or
solely to conserve the older stage of the Modern liberal tradition tend to view
this sort of progressive cultural extremism as a form of Marxism or Communism. There is truth in this perspective in that
sort of thinking among progressives in academe that leads them to embrace such
nonsense can be traced back to academic Marxism’s post-World War I reinvention
of itself along cultural rather than economic lines, albeit through the detour
of a few prominent post-World War II thinkers who were heirs of Marx only in
the sense of following in his footsteps as intellectual revolutionaries rather
than that of having derived their ideas from his in any substantial way. The phenomenon itself – the idea that one has
the right to self-identify as a “gender” other than one’s biological sex, to
expect or even demand that others acknowledge this self-identification and
affirm it to be true, and even to force reality itself in the form of one’s
biological sex to bend to this self-identification – does not come from Marx,
and those countries that had the misfortune of having been taken over by
regimes dedicated to his evil ideas seem to have been partly compensated for
this by being inoculated against this sort of thing. This is the autonomous individual of Locke,
Mill, and the other classical liberals taken to the nth degree and it is the
countries where liberalism has had the most influence that have proven the most
vulnerable to this gender insanity.
