The Heresies of John F. MacArthur Jr.

I had not intended to write this essay.  I was only going to share a link through e-mail to a video that the online Christian (Presbyterian) apologist Redeemed Zoomer had made about the Nestorianism of John F. MacArthur Jr.  In what was supposed to be a brief explanation of why I thought the video was important, I mentioned that MacArthur had taught several other false doctrines.  That grew into a full essay so I decided to share that here.  Here is the Redeemed Zoomer video: Is John MacArthur HERETICAL??? - YouTube

 

 

Nestorianism is a heresy that many prominent evangelical leaders of the last century or so have shared with John F. MacArthur Jr.  Several years ago, for example, I pointed out in an essay that an article the late R. C. Sproul had written criticizing Charles Wesley’s hymn “And Can it Be” for the line “that Thou my God shouldst die for me” was based entirely on Nestorian assumptions and reasoning.

 

 

Nestorianism is not the only heresy that John F. MacArthur Jr. has taught over the years.  The only one of his heresies of which he has publically recanted is Incarnational Sonship.  This was his doctrine, shared by J. Oliver Buswell Jr. and Walter Martin among others, that Jesus Christ was eternally the Logos, the Word of God, but that He became the Son of God in the Incarnation.  This is heresy.  Many evangelicals don’t recognize it as such because they think “he’s got three co-equal, co-eternal, Persons, Who are one in essence, that’s the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, this is just quibbling about names and titles.”  This is not the case.  If Jesus is the Son of God only because of the Incarnation, in which He was born of the Virgin without a human father, then the persons of the Father and the Holy Spirit are confused.  This is because in both St. Luke’s nativity account and that of St. Matthew, the Holy Spirit is identified as the Agent in the conception of Jesus by Mary.  If Jesus’ Sonship is due to this then the Holy Spirit is His Father.  The confusion of the Persons of the Trinity is one of the most ancient heresies.  Tertullian addressed it under the label Patripassionism in his second century work Against Praxeas.  Historically it was known as Sabellianism after Sabellius who taught it in the early third century.  Today it is called modalism and is taught by the kind of Pentecostals who call themselves “Unity” or “Oneness” Pentecostals.

The orthodox doctrine is the Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ.  The Father was always the Father because He always had the Son, and the Son was always the Son because He was Son of the Father.  Closely related to the doctrine of Eternal Sonship is the doctrine of the Eternal Generation of the Son.  Jesus Christ is eternally the Son of God because while there never was a time when the Father was without the Son, the Son’s sharing the Godhead, the numerically singular essence/nature/substance of God is derived from the Father in a relational sense that is called Generation because begetting/siring/generation is the closest analogy we have to it.  The implication of the Scriptural references to Jesus as the “only-begotten”, it was articulated by Origen of Alexandria in the third century and was incorporated into the Nicene Creed to combat Arianism in the fourth.  It has been denied by apologist William Craig Lane and theologian Wayne Grudem, although Grudem has apparently since recanted the denial.  MacArthur taught Incarnational Sonship from 1983 until the end of the twentieth century.  He apparently recanted it in 1999, although the article on his website containing the recantation was published in the Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (the flagship publication of complementarianism, the weenie compromise position promoted by John Piper and Wayne Grudem for evangelicals who have enough sense not to fully buy in to feminism and egalitarianism but don’t have the gonads to take a stand for patriarchy) in 2001.  The doctrinal statement of Master’s Seminary has finally been redacted to teach the orthodox view of Eternal Generation and Eternal Sonship.  This was not the case a couple of years ago.  It only took him a quarter of a century after his recantation to do this.

 

 

MacArthur has not recanted to the best of my knowledge for the false teaching over which Bob Jones Jr. of Bob Jones University raised the first red flag in an article for Faith for the Family back in 1986.  This is his teaching that the blood of Jesus Christ has no value in se but merely as a sign or symbol representing the death of Jesus Christ.  The following is from a sermon MacArthur preached in April 1976:

 

 

The term “the blood of Christ” is a metonym that is substitute for another term: “death.” It is the blood of Christ that simply is a metonym for the death of Christ, but it is used because the Hebrews used such a metonym to speak of violent death. Whenever you talk about the blood of somebody being poured out, to the Hebrew that meant violent death. And when you commune with the blood of Christ, it doesn’t mean the literal blood of Christ, that is a metonym for His death; you commune with His death.

Now let me say something that might shake some of you up, but I’ll try to qualify it. There is nothing in the actual blood that is efficacious for sin. Did you get that? The Bible does not teach that the blood of Christ itself has any efficacy for taking away sin, not at all. The actual blood of Christ isn’t the issue. The issue is that His poured out blood was symbolic of His violent death. The death was the thing that paid the price, right? “The wages of sin is” – what? – “death.”

He died for us. It is His death that is the issue. The Hebrews spoke of it as His outpoured blood because that was something that expressed violent death. And they believed, for example, in the Old Testament it said, “The life of the flesh is in the blood.” And so, the pouring out of blood was the significance of death.

And so, when it says here we are communing with the blood of Christ, it does not mean the literal blood of Christ is efficacious, it does not mean the literal blood of Christ is involved; it means we enter into a genuine, vital participation in His death. But it is not the blood; the blood is only the symbol of the poured out life. 

 

 

Do you recognize what is wrong this doctrine (which MacArthur shared with the late Col. Robert B. Thieme Jr. of Berachah Church in Houston, Texas)?

 

 

There are different aspects to the Atoning work of Jesus Christ.  The Scriptures speak of it as a ransom paid for the release of hostages.  This was emphasized in the early Church.  The New Testament and the book of Isaiah also use the language of vicariousness and substitution to speak of Christ dying for us.  This was emphasized in the Reformation and this is what MacArthur emphasizes.  There is nothing wrong with that.  However, when the language of blood specifically is used, it is the Atonement as a sacrifice that is being emphasized. 

Now a blood sacrifice involved more than just killing an animal. In the Old Testament, there are three identifiable elements to animal sacrifices – the slaying, the offering, and the eating.  The first is when the animal brought as an offering was killed at the door of the Tabernacle/Temple. (Lev. 1:3-5) This killing of the animal alone did not make it a sacrificial offering.  Indeed, the priests were not the ones who did the killing unless they were offering the sacrifice for themselves.  The priest would burn the portion of the animal that was to be burned – the fat and fatty portions – on the altar (Lev. 1:8-9).  The priest would also take the blood of the animal and sprinkle it on the altar (Lev. 1:5) which was near the door of the Tabernacle/Temple.  If it were Yom Kippur and he was the High Priest he would take it further into the Holy of Holies and sprinkle the Mercy Seat (Lev. 16:14-15).  It is these actions by the priest that turned what otherwise would have just been the slaying of an animal – which the Israelites were permitted to do themselves in their own homes if they lived too far from the place (Jerusalem) appointed for sacrifice (Deut. 12:15, 21-22) – into a sacrificial offering.  Finally, except for the olah or whole burnt offering which was entirely burned,  the rest of the animal was divided between the portions assigned to the priest (Lev. 7:31-35) and the portions assigned to the ones who had brought the offering and eaten (Lev. 7:15-20, ; Deut. 12:6-7). 

In the epistle to the Hebrews St. Paul, for it is he who wrote that epistle, tells us that Moses was given a vision of Heaven on Mt. Sinai, that the instructions for the Tabernacle and system of worship he was given were imitations of the pattern he had seen there, (Heb. 8:5) and that it was into this Tabernacle made without hands that Jesus Christ, as High Priest after the order of Melchizedek, entered with His own blood to make the one offering that effectively takes away sin (Heb. 9:11-14, 23-28).  This is not symbolic language for the crucifixion.  The crucifixion took place in time and history, in a specific place on a specific date.  It corresponds to the slaying of the animal in the Old Testament sacrifices.  Note that as the OT sacrifices were slain at the door of the Tabernacle, so Jesus was crucified on Calvary outside the walls of Jerusalem.  Of course, His suffering and dying had precisely the vicarious significance with regards to our salvation that MacArthur et al. assign to it.  However, the offering of His blood that makes the whole thing a sacrifice is not something that took place in time and history, in a specific place on a specific date.  This offering occurred once, but in the Holy of Holies of the Tabernacle in Heaven, which is situated in eternity, outside of time and space as we know them because time and space are dimensions of Creation.  The death and the offering of the blood are two very distinct elements in the dispensation of Atonement, this is clear in both Testaments, and MacArthur missed it all.  Astonishingly, he repeated this error in his commentary on Hebrews of all places.

 

 

In each of these instances MacArthur’s serious doctrinal error are arguably the result of his taking Protestantism too far.  Protestantism, in the sense of the branch of the Christian tradition that emerged from the sixteenth century Reformation, is alright in itself, since the Reformation was a necessary response to real abuses on the part of the Roman ecclesiastical authorities in the late Middle Ages.  When one acts as if the history of orthodox Christianity took a hiatus after the completion of the New Testament canon until All Hallows Eve in 1517 and so sets his Protestantism against the Catholicism that is the general tradition of first millennium Christianity prior to the East-West Schism, then one can go very far astray.  If he looks with suspicion on Catholicism as defined in the previous sentence, then he feels free to ignore the Creed with which Christians around the world have confessed their faith for almost two thousand years when it says that Jesus is “the Only-Begotten Son of God, Begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, Begotten not made.”

 

 

Furthermore he feels free to ignore the rulings of the Ecumenical Councils to which the bishops of the entire Church were invited (whether they attended or not is another matter) to address problems of doctrine and discipline, the decisions of which were received as authoritative by the Church such as the ruling of third Ecumenical Council, that of Ephesus in 431 AD, that it is heresy to reject the term Theotokos, God-Bearer or Mother of God, for Mary, as Nestorius did on the basis that Jesus did not derive His deity from Mary, because in Jesus deity and humanity, while remaining distinct natures, are united in One Person of Whom Mary was Mother.  John MacArthur wrote “It’s heretical to call the blood of Jesus Christ the blood of God, and it demonstrates a failure to understand what theologians have called the hypostatic union, that is the God-man union in Christ.”  Ironically, it is MacArthur’s sentence here which is heretical precisely because he himself fails to understand the hypostatic union a consequence of which is that whatever is the property of Jesus in either of His natures is His property as a Person and can be attributed to Him as such even when speaking of Him in terms of the other nature.  For example, a counterpart in the Scriptures to calling Mary the Mother of God (an equivalent of which also appears in the Scriptures in Luke 1:43) is when Jesus tells Nicodemus “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven” thus identifying Himself by His humanity in the same breathe in which He references His omnipresence. 

 

 

Finally, it is because of His suspicion of the Catholic tradition of the first millennium that MacArthur refuses to acknowledge that Christ’s offering of His blood is not just metynomic language for His death on earth, but is rather referring to the one offering Jesus made in His priestly office in the Heavenly Tabernacle in eternity.  If he acknowledged that, then He would have to admit that it is from that offering in the Heavenly Tabernacle, which being situated in eternity is therefore equidistant to every single point in time in history from Creation until the Last Judgement that the benefits of Christ’s Atonement come to us where we are in space and time.  This would be admitting the foundation of the Catholic understanding of the Eucharist (the first millennium understanding before it got twisted into a caricature of itself in the late Middle Ages) that the earthly offering of bread and wine in the Eucharist is mystically united to Christ’s Heavenly oblation so that when the faithful receive the bread and wine, Christ’s one sacrifice becomes the meal that sustains the new life as Jesus explained in His Bread of Life Discourse in John 6, which completes the correspondence of the New Testament sacrifice with those of the Old Covenant.  Slaying of animal – Crucifixion.  Offering of blood on altar/Mercy Seat – Offering of blood in Heavenly Tabernacle.  Eating of the sacrifice – the Eucharistic meal.

 

 

One might think from this that MacArthur must at least sound in the teachings that were important in the Reformation.  MacArthur certainly sees himself as a champion of Reformation orthodoxy.  When Hank Hanegraaff, Walter Martin’s successor at the Christian Research Institute, joined the Eastern Orthodox Church in 2017 MacArthur acted as if Hanegraaff had converted to Islam or Buddhism or just apostatized.  Hanegraaff, quite capable of defending himself, provided clips from MacArthur’s remarks in his response. By joining the Eastern Orthodox Church, MacArthur felt, Hanegraaff had abandoned or was close to abandoning the Gospel.  Not the Gospel as St. Paul identified it in 1 Corinthians 15, that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and was buried, and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures, of course, because that Gospel is confessed in the Nicene Creed which Eastern Orthodoxy confesses, but the doctrine of justification by faith alone. 

 

 

Justification by faith alone is, of course, a central doctrine if not the central doctrine of the Reformation.  While it was not until the sixteenth century that it was put in that wording it is essentially identical to St. Paul’s doctrine of justification by faith and not by works.  In St. Paul’s epistles, especially Romans, it is stressed that justification is by faith and not by works.  It has to be by faith and not by works, St. Paul argued, because only then can it be by grace, that is, by God’s favour, a gift freely bestowed.  If it were by our works it would be a wage or reward rather than a gift.  This is an important truth and, indeed, in Ephesians 2:8-9 St. Paul says that salvation, which is larger than justification, is a gift of grace by faith and not works.  The importance of this truth should not be minimized, but it does need to be kept in perspective.  It is a truth about what is sometimes called the mechanics of salvation.  The Gospel is the Good News of that salvation proclaimed to the world of sinners, Jew first then Greek.  Its content is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, Who He is and what He did.  The Gospel is all about Jesus Christ.  Justification by faith and not works is about us, what we believe and what we do or rather what we don’t do to receive what Jesus Christ has done.  It is an important truth, but truths in which we are the subject rather than Jesus Christ are not on par with the Gospel truths about Jesus Christ and we ought not to make them out as if they were.  The evangelical Protestant habit of referring to the doctrine of justification by faith alone as if it were itself the Gospel rather a truth about ourselves derived from the Gospel is a very bad one.  Any truth can become a heresy when it is taken out of its proper context.  The proper context for Sola Fide is as the answer to the question “what is the hand with which we reach out and appropriate to ourselves the gift of salvation that God has given to us in Jesus Christ” because this is the role that belongs uniquely to faith. 

 

 

In his negative remarks on Hanegraaff’s chrismation into Eastern Orthodoxy MacArthur treated justification by faith alone as an essential article of faith to which one must formally subscribe to be a Christian.  How much is such subscription worth, however, when you affirm the doctrine formally while stripping it of all real meaning?

 

 

One of John MacArthur’s best known books was The Gospel According to Jesus, first published by Zondervan in 1988.  This book was his response to a real problem afflicting evangelicalism.  MacArthur called the problem “easy believism” but it would have been more accurately called “mass production evangelism” because it was basically large-scale evangelism, designed to get as many conversions as possible no matter how shallow, through a lowest-common denominator approach to the Christian message. Had MacArthur written a book denouncing the factory assembly-line approach to evangelism and its bad “decisionism” theology and tracing it back to the neo-Pelagianism of Charles G. Finney in the early nineteenth century it could have been a very worthy volume.  It would have been a completely different book from The Gospel According to Jesus, however.  Instead, MacArthur’s book retained the basic structure of evangelical decisionism but called for the decision to be defined in the much more demanding terms of total commitment, which arguably merely returned it to the point at which it went wrong in the teachings of Finney.  MacArthur wed this with a type of Dortian Calvinism that is entirely incompatible with it producing theological incoherency.   He is heavily indebted to heretical, liberal, “God is dead” theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer for his thesis, although Bonhoeffer’s  The Cost of Discipleship is not listed in the bibliography, at least in my copy (the 1989 paperback edition), nor is Bonhoeffer listed in the index. There was a revival of interest in Bonhoeffer at the time MacArthur was writing this book, brought about in part by the dishonest promotion of Bonhoeffer as a “martyr.”  A martyr is someone who is put to death for his faith.  Bonhoeffer was not executed for his faith but for his political activities, including his involvement whether actual or merely assumed due to his associations in an assassination plot.  No matter how worthy political activism may be or how deserving of assassination an intended target may happen to be it does not make the person executed for such into a martyr, much less does it transform a heretical theologian into a sound one. Nor did MacArthur succeed in turning Bonhoeffer’s bad theology sound by slapping lipstick on the pig and rebranding it in The Gospel According to Jesus.

 

 

In The Gospel According to Jesus, MacArthur affirmed justification by faith alone as an essential article of faith, but gutted it of all its meaning.  Remember that Romans St. Paul argued that justification had to be by faith and not by works so that it might be by grace and therefore a gift rather than a wage.  A gift is something that someone gives and another person receives.  It is not something that one person gives to another in exchange for something else.  MacArthur however wrote “The important truth to grasp is that saving faith is an exchange of all that we are for all that Christ is.” (p. 143).  This does not describe the giving and receiving of a gift but is precisely the sort of transaction that St. Paul says that justification/salvation is not.  In his next sentence MacArthur says “We need to understand that this does not mean we barter for eternal life.”  However, when you say “the water is full of sodium chloride” you cannot clarify your sentence by adding “this does not mean that it is salty” because this is contradicting not explaining yourself and this is the case with MacArthur.  A barter is precisely what MacArthur had described in the first sentence.  Nor is this the only place in this book where he speaks of salvation as a two-way exchange.  Clearly the man who pastors Grace Community Church and whose radio program is entitled Grace to You understands the word grace rather differently from St. Paul.  Since he has difficulty with the entire concept of a gift of grace that is St. Paul’s reason for stressing justification by faith without works it is not surprising that MacArthur’s book is also chock full of statements like this “True faith is humble, submissive, obedience.” (p. 140).  Note that this does not say that true faith is accompanied by humility, submission, and obedience.  It says that true faith is these things.  Basic deductive reasoning here.  If X = Y and Y = Z then X = Z.  Obedience and works are the same thing.  If faith is obedience then faith is works.  If faith is works, then saying that justification is by faith and not works or that justification is by faith alone is utterly meaningless.  It would be one thing if this were a one-time slip of the pen, but is basically what MacArthur argues for throughout the entire book.  Nor is he merely saying what Jesus said when He answered the question of “what shall we do, that we may work the works of God?” with “This is the work of God, that ye believe in him whom he sent.” (Jn. 6:28-29).  Indeed, his intent is clearly the opposite of Jesus’ in this passage. 

 

 

Ironically, much of this book is dedicated to justifying disobedience, disobedience, that is, to Matt. 7:1.  True, as is indicated elsewhere in the New Testament or even in the verses that immediately follow, Jesus did not intent to prohibit all judgement in this verse.  However, statements like “If a person declares he has trusted Christ as Savior [sic], no one challenges his testimony, regardless of how inconsistent his life-style may be with God’s Word” (p. 59) variations of which complaint are found repeatedly in these pages are evidently calling for a kind of judgement that if it is not fall under Jesus’ prohibition, nothing does.

 

 

The title of the second chapter “He Calls for a New Birth” displays just how muddled MacArthur’s theology is in this book.  When Jesus told Nicodemus that he must be born again this was not a call for a new birth.  It was an indicative statement of the necessity of the new birth.  A call for a new birth would take the form of Jesus telling Nicodemus that he requires a new birth from Nicodemus, that Nicodemus is capable of meeting the requirement and needs to undergo such a birth to meet the requirement.  That, however, is not the conversation Nicodemus and Jesus had.  Nicodemus does not understand Jesus’ statement and when he asks for clarification Jesus tells him that the new birth is the work of the Holy Spirit, and is like the wind which blows where it blows, and can be identified by its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it going (Jn. 3:8).  If the new birth is the work of the Holy Spirit, it is not something Jesus calls for from us.  Jesus does identify in this same passage where our responsibility lies and that is to believe in Him.  MacArthur’s attempt to confuse the simplicity of what is conveyed in this part of the interview involves a textbook example of the meaning of eisegesis “In order to look at the bronze snake on the pole, they had to drag themselves to where they could see it.  They were in no position to glance flippantly at the pole and then proceed with lives of rebellion.” (p. 46) Exposition like this makes one wonder what the expositor was smoking at the time he wrote it.  Oddly, MacArthur’s treatment of the new birth in this chapter is very much at odds with his Reformed theology in which regeneration is very much a sovereign act of the Holy Spirit.

 

 

Less oddly, he divorces regeneration from baptism.  With regards to the water of John 3:5 he writes “This has nothing to do with water or baptism – H2O. It cannot be accomplished by a bath” (p. 40).  This comes from his Hyper-Protestantism.  That regeneration is a work that the Holy Spirit accomplishes, that baptism is the sign and seal of this work, and that as a Gospel Sacrament it is used instrumentally to convey the grace it signifies is not merely the Roman understanding but the Catholic understanding of the entire Church of the first millennium.  It is also the understanding of the Lutherans, Anglicans, and even the more orthodox of the Reformed.  Dr. Luther and the English Reformers saw no contradiction between this and their doctrine of justification because there is no contradiction.  There is no contradiction for two reasons, a) Baptism is a Sacrament not a work, and b) the role of Sacraments such as Baptism in salvation is not the same as that of faith.  Faith is the instrument we use to appropriate the gifts God gives us in His grace.  Sacraments and the Church that administers them are like the Word proclaimed the instruments that God uses to give us those gifts.

 

 

If in his error discussed in the previous paragraph MacArthur departs from where the traditions of the Magisterial Reformation are in full agreement with Rome and not only Rome but the entire Catholic tradition when it comes to assurance of salvation he departs from the Reformation tradition on what was one of the most important issues in the Reformation and one on which Dr. Luther and Calvin very much disagreed with Rome.  “Genuine assurance comes from seeing the Holy Spirit’s transforming work in one’s life, not from clinging to the memory of some experience” (p. 23).  This statement is true in what it denies.  Assurance does not come from “clinging to the memory of some experience.”  It is very, very, wrong in what it affirms.  This is because assurance and faith are the same thing.  It says so explicitly in the Bible.  St. Paul in Hebrews 11:1 writes “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  While I am quoting the Authorized Bible and very much hold the position that translations of the last century or so are in general greatly inferior to it in this case where they generally have “assurance” where the Authorized has “substance” or “certainty” in the case of the NASB (the NIV uses “assurance” where the Authorized uses “evidence”) it is helpful in making the meaning of the verse clearer.  Faith is assurance or certainty of its object and content. The Holy Spirit’s transforming work in our lives manifests itself in works.  Saying that assurance comes seeing this transformation, then, is the same thing as saying that we must put our faith in our works.  That assurance is faith, and that faith/assurance is not to be placed in our works or anything else in us but in Jesus Christ as He is proclaimed in the Gospel was Dr. Luther’s position and remains the Lutheran view to this day.  John Calvin taught the same thing.  Both men told their flocks not to look for assurance within themselves but to find it outside themselves in Jesus Christ.  John Calvin famously wrote “But if we are elected in him, we cannot find the certainty of our election in ourselves; and not even in God the Father, if we look at him apart from the Son. Christ, then, is the mirror in which we ought, and in which, without deception, we may contemplate our election. For since it is into his body that the Father has decreed to ingraft those whom from eternity he wished to be his, that he may regard as sons all whom he acknowledges to be his members, if we are in communion with Christ, we have proof sufficiently clear and strong that we are written in the Book of Life.“  (Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.24.5) MacArthur’s Puritanical view of assurance is a greater departure from the Pauline and Reformation doctrine of salvation by faith and not by works than that of Rome.

 

 

MacArthur, in my opinion, missed his true calling.  Instead of teaching the Bible, he should be peddling snake oil or selling used cars.

Be a Protestant BUT NOT A NUT!

 

I have borrowed the title of this essay, mutatis mutandis, from that of the fourth chapter in Dr. John R. Rice’s book I Am a Fundamentalist (1975).   Dr. Rice wrote that book in the midst of the “second-degree separation” controversy that was dividing fundamentalist against fundamentalist in the 1970s.   It was his answer to those fundamentalists who were on the side of “second-degree separation”.   The chapter in question addresses the issue of riding hobby-horses.   To give an example, he wrote "Some people are strong against apostasy and modernism, but they think a man a modernist if he gives a Christmas present or sends a Christmas greeting card, or observes Easter Sunday and preaches on the resurrection”.   I know just such a nut, although he probably considers himself a charismatic rather than a fundamentalist.   Another example was “There are others who think one is a modernist if he doesn’t drink carrot juice, eat whole wheat bread and wheat germ, if he doesn’t abstain from pork and coffee”.   Personally, I’d be more inclined to think someone a modernist if he did those things, rather than didn’t do them.   At any rate, I describe my position as orthodox rather than fundamentalist.   Doctrinally, the ancient Creeds are the litmus test of orthodoxy, rather than a list of five fundamentals drawn up in the last century.   Since all the fundamentals of fundamentalism are included in the Creeds, orthodoxy can be said to be more than fundamentalism, not less.   With regards to practice, the biggest distinction between orthodoxy and fundamentalism is that orthodoxy rejects the idea of withdrawing from the Church because of error, doctrinal or moral, which idea is historically associated with the heresies of Novatianism and Donatism.   In orthodoxy, separation from heresy and apostasy takes the form of excommunicating the heretics and apostates and the right way of dealing with institutional error is that of a reconquista rather than an exodus.  That having been said, I think the distinction Dr. Rice made between his brand of fundamentalism – I would say that if all fundamentalist Baptists were like him it would be a much better movement except that the biggest problem with Baptist fundamentalism is that most fundamental Baptist preachers are would-be John R. Rices who are pale imitations at best -  almost caricatures – and the kooks, can be applied to Protestants and Hyper-Protestants.

 

On the one hand there is Protestantism.  On the other hand there is Hyper-Protestantism.   Protestantism is good.  Hyper-Protestantism is bad.   The word “Catholic” is a useful shibboleth for distinguishing between a Protestant and a Hyper-Protestant.   “Catholic” is a bad word to the Hyper-Protestant who uses it to mean everything he thinks Protestantism opposes.   The English and Lutheran Reformers never used “Catholic” in this way.   They referred to the errors against which they “protested” as “Romish” or “popish” to indicate that these were recent errors and errors which belonged to a particular Church, the Church governed by the Patriarch of Rome, rather than the Catholic Church, the whole of the Christian Church including all Churches governed by Apostolic bishops.   Indeed, the Patriarch of Rome’s claim to have the supreme governorship over the entire Church, a claim rejected by the Churches under the other Patriarchs since Patristic days, is one of the errors of Rome against which the Reformers protested.   Calling the Roman Church the Catholic Church is tantamount to accepting that error.   Some Protestants today have fallen into the habit of using Catholic for the Roman Church and its members, not out of Hyper-Protestantism but out of the idea that it is respectful to call people what they call themselves.   This is the same flawed reasoning that some use to justify using a person’s stated preference in pronouns rather than those which correspond to that person’s biological sex.   In both cases truth is what one ends up sacrificing in the name of being polite.   Protestants who use Catholic to mean “Roman Catholic” for this reason can usually be distinguished from Hyper-Protestants in that they do not speak the word as if it were a swear word in the way Hyper-Protestants do.

 

Catholic, an intensified compound version of the Greek word for “whole” has been used since at least the beginning of the second century when St. Ignatius of Antioch used it in his Epistle to the Smyrnaeans, to mean the Church in its entirety, the Church everywhere as opposed to the Church in just one location, the Church in Rome, for example, or the Church in Smyrna.   The Catholic faith is the faith confessed by all orthodox Christians, in all orthodox Churches, everywhere, the faith confessed in the Creed.   The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed has the best right to be called the Catholic Creed in that it was accepted by all the ancient Churches before there was any break in fellowship between them and is still accepted by them today, the dispute over the wording that divided East from West notwithstanding.   This Creed was developed by the first two Ecumenical Councils – Councils to which the government of the entire Church, everywhere was invited to participate – in the fourth century, taking an earlier, local form of the Creed, as its template.   The shorter but similarly worded Apostles’ Creed, developed out of the form of the Creed used by the Church in Rome in baptisms at least as early as the second century.   The similarity between the two suggests that the forms out of which both were developed were themselves versions of an earlier template that most likely goes back to the Apostles.  Hints of such a form that pre-dated the writing of the New Testament are dropped from time to time by St. Paul in his epistles and this would explain the antiquity of the origin story from which the Apostles’ Creed derives its name, the origin story being basically true, but referring to the earliest form of the Creed, from which multiple local versions were derived, two of which eventually became the Apostles’ and Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creeds.   In the fifth century, after the third Ecumenical Council but before the fourth, in the period when the fellowship of the ancient Churches was first broken, St. Vincent, a monk in Lerins Abbey on one of the islands of the same name off the coast of the French Riviera, wrote his Commonitorium under the pseudonym “Peregrinus” in which he explored the question of how to distinguish true Catholic doctrine from heresy, famously stating that in the Catholic Church care must be taken to “hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all”.   He is often said to have proposed three tests of Catholicity, but in actuality he proposed four.   The first test is that the doctrine must be derived from the Holy Scriptures.   This first Catholic principle of St. Vincent is identical to the first principle of Protestantism.   The other three tests pertain to the interpretation of Scripture and they are universality (an interpretation is not Catholic if it is only found in one region of the Church), antiquity (an interpretation is not Catholic if it does not go back to the earliest centuries of the Church but is instead of late origin and contained within a particular timespan rather than being taught in all times of the Church) and consent (formal acknowledgement by the authorities of the Church, preferably at the Ecumenical level).

 

None of the doctrines that the early Reformers, English and Lutheran, protested against in the teachings of the Church of Rome are affirmed as articles of faith in the Creed, Apostles’ or Nicene-Constantinopolitan.   With one possible exception, none of the practices of the Roman Church that these Reformers objected to can withstand the Vincentian tests.  

 

We shall return to that possible exception momentarily.   First I wish to observe that Hyper-Protestantism gets the word Protestant as wrong as it gets the word Catholic.   Most Hyper-Protestants use the word Protestant as if the word were synonymous with “Calvinist”.   This is true even of many Hyper-Protestants who would object to being called Calvinists themselves on the grounds that they are Arminians.    Arminianism is to Calvinism what heresy is to orthodox Christianity in general, a defective form.     Of course, what I am calling Calvinism here is not actually Calvinism in the sense of “the teachings of John Calvin”.   John Calvin himself was closer to Lutheranism than to what has been called Calvinism since the seventeenth century.   Dr. Luther would not appreciate hearing that not only because he regarded Calvin’s view of the Eucharist as rank heresy but also because he objected to a movement being named after him in the first place.     Calvin, however, as is clear from his writings, was Lutheran in his views of the extent of the Atonement and assurance of salvation, rather than Calvinist.  John Calvin was to Lutheranism, what Jacob Arminius and his followers were to Calvinism, which ought to be called either Bezism or Dortism, after its true fathers, Theodore Beza and the Reformed Synod of Dort.   Protestant, however, is the general term for all the Christians who threw off the usurped supremacy of the Patriarch of Rome in the sixteenth century.   In the best sense of the word, it is defined only by the doctrines that set the earliest and most conservative of the Reformers apart from Rome rather than by doctrines distinctive of any of the more specific traditions that emerged from the Reformation.   If we have to define Protestantism by the doctrines of a specific tradition, Lutheranism has a better claim to being that tradition than Calvinism, being the original Protestant tradition of which John Calvin’s Calvinism was a deviation, from which deviation Theodore Beza and the Synod of Dort further deviated with their “Calvinism”, of which Arminianism is a yet further deviation.

 

The doctrines of the general Reformation, that is to say what the Reformers positively affirmed rather than merely what they denied in Rome’s teachings, are today commonly summed up in the five solae – sola Scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide, solus Christus, soli Deo Gloria. This is not the best formulation, in my opinion.   It does not date to the Reformation itself, but only to the last century.   It is a Calvinist formulation.   One of the most important teachings of the Reformers is missing from it.   Sola Scriptura can be easily misinterpreted to mean something that Dr. Luther and the English Reformers would have found abhorrent, i.e., the idea that the Bible can and should be privately interpreted in isolation from tradition and the Church.   The other solas can be summed up in a single doctrine – the freeness of salvation as the gift of God.   If I were to come up with a formula summarizing the doctrines of the general Reformation it would be:

 

-          The supremacy of Scripture as the written Word of God

-          The freeness of salvation as the gift of God

-          The Gospel is the assurance of salvation to all who believe it

 

The last of these was absolutely essential to the Reformation.   It was the search for such that led Dr. Luther to the Pauline epistles on justification and to oppose the carrot-on-a-stick approach coupled with the outright sale of salvation to which Rome had stooped at that point in time.   John Calvin was as one with Dr. Luther on this.   Those who would later call themselves “Calvinists” were and are not in accord with either Luther or Calvin but actually offend against this truth worse than Rome.   In their theology the Gospel cannot assure anyone of salvation because Jesus came only to save a handful of pre-selected individuals.   Nobody can really know that he is among the chosen few.   He must constantly look for evidence of his regeneration in his own works, but can draw no lasting comfort, because if he falls away it will demonstrate he was not really regenerate, which remains a possibility until the very end of his life.   Consider what such “Calvinists” as John Piper and John F. MacArthur Jr. have to say about assurance of salvation today.   Both take the position that the Gospel cannot fully assure those who believe it of their own salvation because they must prove their faith to be real to themselves by finding evidence of it in their works, a position explicitly condemned by both Dr. Luther and John Calvin, and solidly rejected in the Lutheran tradition to this day.   MacArthur, who has been unsound on all sorts of other matters, including at one point a key element of Nicene Christology, wrote not one, not two, but three books arguing this point, proving only that he wouldn’t be able to tell the Law from the Gospel if the difference between the two were to take anthropomorphic form and walk up and smack him upside the head.   Piper is more subtle, like the serpent in the Garden.   He merely slips nuggets of the faith-based-on-works error such as “assurance is partially based on objective evidences for Christian truth” into presentations that contain a lot of sounder statements.   The Reformation truth is that while faith is accompanied by the repentance that the Law works in us by convicting us of our sin and by the works that spring from the Christian love worked in us by the love of God received through faith, these accompanying things are not part of the basis of faith which rests on nothing but the Gospel, the objective message that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has saved all who believe in Him by dying for their sins on the Cross and rising from the dead, which message is proclaimed both in Word and Sacrament, and that the faith that rests on that objective Truth is itself the subjective experience of assurance of salvation.   The subjective experience, faith which is assurance (Heb. 11:1), must rest entirely on the solid rock of what is objective, the Gospel, for if it rests partly on that solid rock, and partly on grounds that are themselves subjective, our experiences and works, it will be most unstable indeed.   The Hyper-Protestant Puritanism, that in addition to being regicidal, tyrannical, and opposed to all joy, defected from Calvin’s teachings in precisely this way, and one of its fruit, alongside the evils of the Modern Age – liberalism, Communism, and Americanism – was a psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually crippling dearth of assurance and plague of despair.

 

Nothing in these basic truths of the Reformation conflicts with anything in the Creed.    Nor do they conflict with the teachings, practices, and forms of worship common to all the ancient Churches, i.e., the Catholic tradition.   They place Protestantism in opposition to such late Medieval Roman doctrines as human merit, supererogatory works (the idea that someone other than Jesus can do works over and above what is required of him and so contribute to someone else’s salvation), and the whole general impression Rome was giving that salvation was a reward for dotting all your is and crossing all your ts, but not with the Catholic faith held throughout the Church everywhere, in all ages, since the Apostles.   Basic Protestantism, therefore, is in conflict with Romanism not Catholicism, and since the Catholic faith of the Creed is the basic Christian faith, to be a good Protestant, one must first be a Catholic.   The essential distinction between Hyper-Protestantism and Protestantism is that Hyper-Protestantism opposes what is Catholic and not merely Roman.

 

I do not mean that Hyper-Protestantism rejects the Creed, necessarily, although Hyper-Protestants generally do not hold to the necessity of organizational and organic continuity with the Apostolic Church in Jerusalem, making it rather difficult for them to confess the ninth Article about the “Holy Catholick Church”, at least with a sense that would have been recognized by any Christian anywhere prior to the Reformation.   What I mean is that Hyper-Protestants reject the Catholic tradition wholesale except for elements that they cannot deny are Scriptural.   If there is a traditional practice of the Roman Church that the Hyper-Protestant cannot find a Scriptural text that says you must do it this way, the Hyper-Protestant will say that you must not do it that way, even if there is no Scriptural text forbidding it, and every other ancient Church does it that way, not just the Roman.   This is called the regulative principle.   Although it appears in most of the important Calvinist confessions, it was actually far more typical of Zwingli’s approach than of Calvin’s.   Indeed, while Zwingli had already been practicing it in Zurich for about half a decade before the rise of Anabaptism, the movement of Continental Hyper-Protestant schismatics who took their cue from Zwingli rather than Luther and Calvin but whose radicalism brought about a break with all of the Magisterial Reformers including Zwingli himself, it was the Anabaptists who first articulated it as a stated principle.  It was Conrad Grebel, the founder of the Swiss Brethren, an Anabaptist sect who raised it in arguing for the Anabaptist position on baptism, the argument going that because there is no specific command to baptize infants in the New Testament it must therefore be prohibited.   Grebel pointed to Tertullian, the second to third century apologist, as having taught the regulative principle.  Since it only appeared in Tertullian’s writings after he joined the ultra-rigid Montanists towards the end of his life, this was not exactly a good argument for the principle.   Especially since it is impossible to reconcile that principle with the doctrine of Christian liberty taught by St. Paul in his epistles.

 

The opposite of the regulative principle it the normative principle.   In its simplest, this is the idea that if the Scripture does not forbid you to do something, you are permitted to do it.   There is obviously no conflict between this principle and the Pauline doctrine of Christian liberty.   It can, however, depending upon how it is interpreted in its implications, conflict with the Pauline doctrine of orderly worship and conduct in the Church.   One version of the normative principle, primarily associated with evangelical and especially charismatic worship in the twentieth century, is the idea of eliminating all or almost all formal structure and allowing everyone from the preacher to those providing the music to the congregants in the pew to each do his own thing as he thinks the Holy Ghost is leading.   This sounds like a recipe of chaos and in some instances this is exactly what it produces.   More often, however, the result in practice is that the worship service ends up resembling a performance at a theatre, an evening in a night club, or some other secular activity that in no way resembles a Church service.

 

By contrast there is the version of the normative principle employed by Dr. Luther and the English Reformers.   In this version, the normative principle was applied to the pre-Reformation tradition of the Church and whatever in that tradition was not found to be prohibited by Scripture or to otherwise contradict Scripture was maintained.   This is what is most consistent with both the Pauline doctrine of Christian liberty and the Pauline doctrine of orderly worship and conduct.   In the Anglican Church’s Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1571) it is spelled out in Article XX “Of the Authority of the Church” which reads:

 

The Church hath power to decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority in Controversies of Faith: And yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another. Wherefore, although the Church be a witness and a keeper of holy Writ, yet, as it ought not to decree any thing against the same, so besides the same ought it not to enforce any thing to be believed for necessity of Salvation.

 

In the Lutheran Book of Concord it is found in Lutheranism’s Augsburg Confession (1530) in Article XV “Of Ecclesiastical Usages” in the first section of the Article:

 

Of Usages in the Church they teach that those ought to be observed which may be observed without sin, and which are profitable unto tranquillity and good order in the Church, as particular holy days, festivals, and the like.

 

Put into practice, the result was that those things which the Anglican Church and the Lutherans rejected were Roman, that is to say, distinctive of the Roman Church after the Great Schism and often quite later than that, whereas those things which were retained were Catholic, that is, common to all the ancient Church – the Church of Rome, the other four ancient Patriarchates in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and even the Assyrian and Oriental Orthodox Churches the fellowship of which with the larger Church was broken beginning in the fifth century AD.   In the Lutheran and Anglican traditions, Protestantism is a Reformed Catholicism, not the wholesale rejection of Catholicism except for everything that cannot be jettisoned on account of its being undeniably Scriptural that is Hyper-Protestantism.

 

In the Anglican Church there are those who bristle at the thought of our Church being Catholic, despite Catholic being used in only a positive sense in all of the Anglican formularies, including the Book of Common Prayer.   I do not say that these are Hyper-Protestants, although they have several of the traits of Hyper-Protestantism.   They often try to claim that the Articles of Religion can only be read rightly in accordance with as Calvinist interpretation as possible, despite the fact that when the Articles touch on issues where there is a difference of opinion between the continental Protestant traditions, such as Predestination and Election in Article XVII, they are written in such a way that either Lutherans or Calvinists could affirm them (there is no mention of Reprobation, which Calvinists accept and Lutherans reject, in the Article).   The Articles of Religion, like the Anglican Formularies in general, were irenicons, drafted so as to minimize conflict among members of the Church of England, whether it be conflict between those who see the Church as Catholic first and Protestant second and those who see it the other way around, or between those whose Protestantism was more Lutheran and those whose Protestantism was more Calvinist.  The Anglicans who want the Anglican Church to be only Protestant often make arguments that seemingly presuppose the regulative principle, despite the Articles’ affirmation of the normative.   This past weekend I engaged in an online discussion with them on a matter that might seem to be an exception to the rule that the English Reformers rejected only what was Roman and kept all that is Catholic.

 

That matter occurs in Article XXII of the Articles of Religion.  I am not referring to the main subject of that Article which is Purgatory.   Purgatory is a Roman doctrine, not a Catholic doctrine.   While some of the ideas associated with it go back much further, Purgatory itself dates to the end of the twelfth century, the century after the Great Schism, and is not an official doctrine of the Eastern Orthodox Church.   Indeed, the Eastern Orthodox opposed the doctrine following the attempt at reunification in the Second Council of Lyon (1272-1274).  There have been and are different schools within Eastern Orthodoxy that have held different views on the matter.   The ones who came closest to Rome were the seventeenth century prelates such as Peter of Moghilia and Dositheus of Jerusalem who reacted against the “Calvinist” Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Cyril Lucaris, and in doing so produced Confessions that affirmed Purgatory in all but name.  The rejection of the name is more significant than the affirmation of the doctrine as these men were representative only of their own time in this.  Most Eastern Orthodox schools of thought reject the doctrine as well as the name, and interestingly enough there has been a heated on-and-off controversy in the Eastern Church over “Aerial Toll Houses”, a different concept of an intermediate state from that of Purgatory, the most recent flare up in the controversy being in the last century.   The Armenian Apostolic and Coptic Orthodox Churches both reject Purgatory and I suspect this is true of the other Non-Chalcedonian Churches.   Thus, Purgatory does not pass the Vincentian tests of Catholicity and is a distinctly Roman error.   The matter in question is found among those tucked in with Purgatory in this Article.   Here is Article XXII in full:

 

The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints, is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.

 

Note in passing the use of the word “Romish” rather than “Catholic”.  

 

The discussion began with someone sharing the quotation “If you think you need a mediator with Jesus; you don’t know Jesus”.   Now, there is nothing wrong with these words taken in their plain, ordinary, sense.   There is One God, St. Paul declares, and One Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus (1 Tim. 2:5).    You do not need a mediator between yourself and the Mediator.   The man being quoted, however, was James R. White, a Reformed Baptist minister and the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries.   This is a man who never misses an opportunity to throw the Catholic baby out with the Roman bathwater.   A few years ago I thoroughly rebutted his attempt to have it both ways on Nestorianism and “the Mother of God”,  something not uncommon among Calvinists, as well as his embrace of “scientific” textual criticism as applied to the New Testament, the gateway drug to “higher criticism” an error he could easily have avoided had he applied the Vincentian Catholic principle to textual criticism and adopted the position that the true text of the New Testament is the text received by the Church everywhere, always, and by all, with the recognition that in areas of the Church where another language predominates that text may find representation in a “Vulgate” of the dominant language, such as the Latin Vulgate in the Roman Church, and the Authorized Bible in the English Church.   I observed the possibility that by “mediator” White might actually have meant “intermediary”.    Hyper-Protestants reject the Apostolic priesthood of the Church, despite its being there in the New Testament, because they reject the idea of intermediaries between Jesus and the individual believer, condemning themselves in the process because they accept the necessity of preaching, and preachers are intermediaries between Jesus and the individual believer in precisely the same way that Apostolic priests are, not gatekeepers who decide who gets to see Jesus, but stewards appointed to bring Jesus to each individual through their dual ministry of Word and Sacrament.

 

As it turned out, however, the discussion went down a different road than that.   What the person who posted the quote from James White and those who agreed with him were interested in condemning was the practice of asking the saints to pray for them. 

 

Now this is not something that I do myself.   I have never had any interest in doing this, much less a compelling urge to do so. It is, however, something that is done in all the ancient Churches – Roman, Eastern Orthodox, Non-Chalcedonian, and Assyrian – and so cannot be said to be a distinctly Roman practice.   The only case that can be made against it being Catholic is that it can only be traced back for certain to the third century.   In St. Clement of Rome’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, written before the end of the first century, around the time St. John was writing the Book of Revelation, this early Roman bishop and companion of St. Paul talks in what is usually numbered as the fifty sixth chapter about remembering those who, having fallen into sin, had submitted in meekness and humility to the will of God, to God and the saints.   The wording is ambiguous and the saints mentioned here could be the living members of the Church, but especially since everywhere else in the epistle St. Clement refers to these as brethren, this could also be the earliest reference to the practice in question, in which case it most decidedly is Catholic, this earliest of the writings of the Apostolic Fathers having been regularly read in the Churches along with the Sacred texts in the early centuries and considered, although ultimately rejected, for canonical status.   Even if St. Clement is not a first century witness to the practice, the third century predates both the first Ecumenical Council and the rise of Emperor Constantine who is usually regarded as the founder of “Catholicism” by the restorationist type of Hyper-Protestant, the historical illiterate who thinks that the Church apostatized the moment Christianity was legalized (a view these type of Hyper-Protestants share with all the heretical sects they call cults) .    It is recommended by both St. John Chrysostom and St. Augustine in the fourth century, neither of whom was known as an innovator and both of whom would have staunchly rejected it had it been inconsistent with orthodox Christianity as it had come down to them.  Indeed, the idea of the Intercession of the Saints – that the faithful who have gone on to the next life are praying for us in Heaven – that is associated with the practice, and often but not always denied by those who reject it, can be traced back with certainty much earlier than the practice, being frequently mentioned in the Apostolic Fathers.   For that matter, it appears in the Bible itself in Revelation 5:8 where the twenty-four elders are depicted as holding golden vials, filled with odours that are the “prayers of the saints” (if the “saints” here are taken to be the saints on Earth, the image is even stronger, for it suggests that it is the saints in Heaven who bring before the Throne the prayers of the saints on Earth), which raises a few questions about the Scriptural literacy of those who loudly trumpet their belief in “Sola Scriptura” while denying that the faithful departed pray for us.   An even more important doctrine is at stake in this dispute, however, the doctrine of “The Communion of the Saints” that is indisputably Catholic, confessed in the Apostles’ version of the Creed, and held even by those ancient Churches that use only the Nicene and not the Apostles’ Creed.   It was for the sake of this Truth, not the practice itself per se, that when I realized what was being argued, I joined in the argument on the side of the defenders of the practice.

A word here about, well, words, is in order.   Those on the other side of the debate consistently spoke of the practice of asking the faithful departed for their prayers as “praying to the saints”.   I consistently referred to it as asking for their prayers.   I would not have been comfortable making the arguments I made, even in defence of the Truth confessed in the Creed, using the same language as the other side.   The English word “pray”, comes to us through French, from a Latin word meaning “ask, beg, request, entreat” and in earlier centuries was used in a more general sense.   “I pray thee”, contracted to “prithee” used to be a common synonym for “please” and was used with requests made of other people.   For most people, however, “pray” has long ceased to be a synonym for “ask” in general, and is now limited to requests made as acts of worship.   This being the case, I would say that the word should be reserved for requests made directly to God, and not used of the act of requesting that others pray for  you.    There are two entirely different arguments here depending upon whether we follow that rule or not.   One is an argument about whether we should make the same kind of requests of the faithful departed that we make of God, in which case the right is on the side of those who say no, we should not.   The other is an argument about whether we should make the same kind of requests of the faithful departed that we make of other living Christians.   It is in regards to this second argument that I would say that since the practice is Catholic and not just Roman and based on “the Communion of the Saints” confessed in the Creed a strong burden of proof must be placed on those who say it isn’t allowed to prove their case from the Scriptures, which I do not think they can do.   I will note that the language of “praying to the saints” is sometimes used by defenders of the practice among those Churches who practice it, undermining their own position in my opinion.   It has been my observation, however, that this language is far more likely to be used by less-informed lay people in these Churches than in official ecclesiastical statements.   On a related note, the frequent heard accusation by Hyper-Protestants against the Roman Church, and sometimes the other ancient Churches, that they pray more to Mary and the saints than to God, has no validity with regards to prayers used in public worship, although it may sometimes be warranted in the case of private practice, just as private Protestants may distort things in private in a way unsanctioned by their Church or sect.    In Eastern Orthodoxy, one of the most popular prayers, if not the most popular, is a prayer addressed to Jesus – it is actually called “The Jesus Prayer” - and virtually indistinguishable from the one that in evangelical circles is often substituted for “believe” in presentations of the Gospel and treated as if it were a magical incantation the reciting of which mechanically transforms one into a Christian.  The act of asking the Saints or Mary to grant something in their own power is not sanctioned by any Church and is, of course, idolatry.   This is not to say that it is not superstitiously done by the ignorant, but the only requests directed towards anyone other than God in the liturgies of any of the ancient Churches are requests for prayer.

 

When I raised the point of the difference between praying to someone and asking them to pray for you in the debate someone pointed out that Article XXII speaks of “invocation of Saints” and argued that “invocation” is a broader term and includes all forms of address not just prayer.   My response was to point out that in that case technically the Article forbids asking living Christians to pray for us as well.   For, as the type of Hyper-Protestant who does not understand how language works and that a word can have a narrower as well as a wider meaning and so condemns the use of “Saint” as a title likes to point out, all Christians are Saints in the most basic sense of the word.

 

So what about Article XXII?   Do the  Articles of Religion depart from the normative principle affirmed in Article XXII by condemning a practice “invocation of Saints” that is truly Catholic rather than merely Roman?

 

As the saying goes “it’s complicated”.   The Articles affirm the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds as well as the Athanasian (more an annotated version of the Apostles’ than a distinct Creed in its own right) in Article VIII saying these are “proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture”.   Thus, they cannot mean in Article XXII that the doctrine of the “Communion of the Saints” confessed in the Apostles’ Creed is “grounded upon no warranty of Scripture” when they seemingly impugn the practice based on this doctrine.     This raises the question of whether the practice and the doctrine can be so separated that one can affirm one without the other.   If they cannot, then either the Articles contradict themselves, a possibility as they, not being Holy Scripture, are not infallible, something those Anglicans which insist so strongly on their Protestantism might try to remember, or, as the wording of the Article allows, the “fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God” is not “invocation of Saints” per se but the “Romish doctrine” concerning it.   John Henry Newman tried to make this last argument with regards to the main subject of the Article, Purgatory, in the last of the Tracts for the Times before he crossed the Tiber.   His argument was not particularly convincing, although it could possibly be made more strongly for “invocation of Saints” than for Purgatory based on invocation being Catholic and Purgatory distinctly Roman, potentially allowing for “the Romish doctrine” about “invocation of Saints” being asking them to intercede for those in Purgatory.   I’m not going to press that interpretation as it seems highly unlikely that this is what was meant in the days of the Elizabethan Settlement by those who came up with the final draft of the Articles.   Historically it was not until the Tractarians that High Churchmen thought to understand the Article in any way other than as completely forbidding the practice as demonstrated by it being a point of contention between the Non-Jurors and the Eastern Orthodox in the unsuccessful attempt to bring the two into communion in the early eighteenth century, about a century before the Oxford Movement.   Neither, however, am I going to say that the Articles do contradict themselves.   Rather, I am going to take the position that Article XXII as an exercise of that “power to decree Rites or Ceremonies” affirmed of the Church in the same Article that affirms the Normative Principle and as thus binding upon the province of the Holy Catholic Church that is the Anglican Church in terms of practice and not an authoritative statement dictating what we are to think about the practice, a position quite in keeping with the spirit of the court of Elizabeth I, who understood well that her God-given authority to regulate the Church for the sake of the peace of her realm was limited to the public exercise of religion and did not extend to the private consciences of men, something monarchs reigning by divine right understand a lot better than politicians elected by the mob.   In keeping with this position on Article XXII which is in accordance with my own non-participation in this practice as a member of the Anglican Church, I shall now discuss the matter of whether or not the practice violates Scriptural prohibitions and/or principles.   My position is that it does not.  

 

 

Now, in the debate last weekend, those on the other side were arguing for something and not just against something.   What they were arguing for was that Jesus Christ is the only Mediator, that His One Sacrifice is sufficient and that nothing anyone else does can add anything to it, that He is accessible through prayer to all believers and that we don’t need to go through anyone else to get to Him, and that we should not direct towards creatures that which belongs to God alone.   With none of this, did I, or anyone else on my side of the debate, disagree, and indeed, I, and I would assume everyone on both sides, would affirm all of this.   Those on my side were also arguing for something, and not just the practice of asking the faithful in Heaven to pray for you, but a truth we confess every time we confess the Apostles’ Creed.

 

Before I even entered this conversation, others on the side that I took had already asked the other side whether or not they ever asked members of their parishes to pray for them.   The point of the question, of course, was that if asking the faithful departed to pray for you somehow takes away from Christ’s sole Mediatorship, implies a deficiency in His Sacrifice, or suggest the idea that we need to go through someone else to get to Jesus, then this is also true of asking living believers to pray for us.   This point is entirely valid, and I further observed that it cuts both ways.   If in asking another Christian for prayer we do so in a way that transgresses by inappropriately offering to our fellow Christian the prayer that we should be addressing to God alone we have transgressed regardless of whether that fellow Christian is alive or dead.   If, on the other hand, we ask other Christians for their prayers in accordance with the Scriptures, then it is Scriptural regardless of whether the other Christians are part of the Church Militant – the Church on earth – or the Church Triumphant – the Church in Heaven.

 

The other side always answered the question with yes.     They justified the inconsistency in their position by saying that the New Testament tells us as Christians to ask our living brethren for their prayers.   This, while not wrong exactly, is a bit misleading.   In the New Testament you find St. Paul requesting the prayers of the Roman Christians (Rom. 15:30), the Colossians (Col. 4:3), and the Thessalonians (1 Thess. 5:25, 2 Thess. 3:1).   You find him telling several different groups of Christians that they are always in his prayers (Rom. 1:8-9, Col. 1:9-10, Phil. 1:3-4).   There is St. James’ instructions to pray for one another (Jas. 5:16).   There are also general instructions to pray for all Christians (Eph. 6:18) or even more generally, all people of all sorts (1 Tim. 2:1) as well as instructions to bear one another’s burdens (Gal. 6:2) and to encourage and build one another up (1 Thess. 5:11).    Those opposed to asking the faithful departed for their prayers say that nowhere in all of these passages is there an example of someone asking the departed for their prayers or an instruction to ask the departed specifically for their prayers.   With regards to the second point, however, nowhere are we told not to ask the departed faithful for their prayers.   With regards to the first, while obviously those to whom St. Paul wrote requesting prayer were living at the time, he did not tell them to stop praying for him when their earthly sojourn was over and they departed to be with Christ.   No, I am being neither facetious nor flippant.  Those who are opposed to asking the faithful departed for their prayers are generally also opposed to praying for the faithful departed.   Praying for the faithful departed is another practice that is Catholic – shared by all the ancient Churches, not just Rome.  St. James’ instructions to pray for one another can be reasonably taken to exclude the departed as those for whom the prayer is to be offered because he is not talking about prayers in general but specifically about prayer for healing.   However, prayers for the faithful departed are clearly not prohibited in the New Testament because St. Paul offers up just such a prayer for Onesiphorus in 2 Tim. 1:18.   For that matter, every prayer in the New Testament that resulted in a resurrection was obviously a prayer for the departed.   If this aspect of Catholic practice, prayers for the faithful departed, can be proven by the New Testament, and in case you failed to notice I just proved it from the New Testament, then the other side of the same coin, asking the faithful departed for their prayers can hardly be excluded simply because there is neither example nor instructions for it specifically can be found.   I emphasize the word specifically because the burden on those opposed to asking the departed for their prayers is actually heavier than that which the normative principle implies.   Their burden is to prove that the faithful departed, the Church Militant, are excluded from the general instructions to bear one another’s burdens, encourage, and build one another up, in all of which praying for one another in a more general sense than in James is included.

 

This is a burden of proof they cannot meet.  Indeed, their assumption that the faithful departed are automatically excluded from the New Testament’s instructions to Christians to pray for one another and bear their burdens, is an assumption that contradicts the entire New Testament on the subject of the union between believers with Christ and through Christ each other in the Church, a union that cannot be broken by death.   The faithful departed, including the Old Testament saints, are depicted by St. Paul in Hebrews 12  as “so great a cloud of witnesses” on account of which we should “lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us” so that we may “run with patience the race that is set before us”.   Later in the same chapter when the Apostle uses Mt. Sinai and Mt. Zion as symbols of the Law and Gospel covenants respectively, he tells his Hebrew Christian readers “ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, To the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect” (vv. 22-23) which would be an incredibly strange way of wording it if he thought death to be an impassible barrier between the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant.   Not only are the faithful departed depicted as a “cloud of witnesses” encompassing us, but believers in their earthly sojourn are depicted as having already joined them in Heaven, “And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:6)

 

The New Testament teaches that on the first Whitsunday (the Christian Pentecost), the Holy Ghost came down from Heaven and united the disciples with Jesus Christ, Who had died, descended as Conqueror into Hell (the Kingdom of death), rose again from the dead, and ascended to Heaven where He sat down at the right hand of God the Father.   This union formed the Church, a united body in which Jesus Christ is Head, and all who are baptized into the Christian faith are members.   In the establishment of the Church the Old Testament saints, that is, those in the Old Testament who were not just members of the Covenant nation of Israel physically, but were also members of the spiritual Congregation of the Lord, who had been awaiting their redemption in the Kingdom of death, were released by Jesus Christ, and taken up to Heaven with Him when He returned there, were also joined that all of God’s saints in all ages would be part of the one Body of Christ.   In the Church, each individual Christian is united with Jesus Christ, and through Jesus Christ with each other.   Jesus Christ having already conquered death, believers being described as having “passed from death unto life” (past tense) and having “everlasting life” (present tense) in this life (Jn. 5:24), death cannot break this union and divide those who have departed this world from those who remain.   In Jesus Christ and to Jesus Christ, all believers are alive eternally:

 

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.  (Jn. 11:25-26)

 

After all, as He said to the Sadducees in rebuking their denial of the resurrection, “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Mk. 12:27).

 

This is what the Communion of the Saints that we confess in the Apostles’ Creed is all about.

 

Those who condemn the practice of asking the Church Triumphant to pray with you and for you just as you might ask the person sitting in the pew next to you to do so seem to have a much harder time in affirming this New Testament truth as those of us who do not wish to throw the Catholic baby out with the Roman bathwater have in affirming the truth of Jesus’ sole Mediatorship – even Rome affirms this – which they think, mistakenly, they are safeguarding.   That is a pretty strong indicator that they are the ones in error here.  

 

Another such indicator is how quickly they descend into vulgar abuse when they cannot answer questions.   Unable to answer how their position is consistent with the New Testament teaching that all believers are one in Him to Whom there is no living and dead, they resort to accusations of occult superstition.   Asking the departed faithful to pray for you, they say, violates the Old Testament prohibitions against such things as necromancy, witchcraft, séances and the like.   Anybody who knows anything about these practices knows that they are worlds removed from asking the faithful departed for their prayers.   The practices condemned in the Old Testament involve summoning the spirits of the dead as if they were your personal slaves, either to obtain information from them, use them to manipulate the natural world in a supernatural way, or both.   There is no acknowledgement of God in these practices, the spirits of the dead qua spirits of the dead are invoked, the power to summon them is thought to be inherent in either the ritual used or the summonor, and the power to do what the summonor wants or tell him what he wants is thought to belong to the spirit.   Suggesting that the Catholic practice falls into this category is just a cheap insult.   The type one would expect from the sort of person who speaks of ecclesiastical bodies which confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, in the words of the ancient Creeds, as possessing the “spirit of Antichrist”.

 

The New Testament tells us who “Antichrist” is.   “Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ?” St. John writes in 1 John 2:22, “He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son.”   The Patriarch of Rome has been guilty of overstepping the boundaries of his jurisdiction, usurping a supremacy over the entire Church, and teaching various errors, among them his own infallibility, but as someone who confesses the faith of Jesus Christ in the orthodox form of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and governs a Church that confesses this, the Apostles’ and the Athanasian Creeds, he cannot be the Antichrist.   What does it say about Hyper-Protestants that whenever they use the word “Antichrist” it is in association with the Roman Patriarch and his Church?

 

Indeed, there is another type of Hyper-Protestant than the Calvinist type I have been addressing.   In addition to identifying the Patriarch of Rome as the “Antichrist” and the Church he governs as “Mystery Babylon”, this type insists that that adherents of another world religion that literally fits the description of the Antichrist in 1 John 2:22 in that it, like Christianity, claims to have inherited the mantle of the Old Testament religion but departs from Christianity on precisely the point that it denies “that Jesus is the Christ”, cannot be criticized without incurring the curse of Genesis 12:3, as if St. Paul had not identified for Christians once and for all Who the Seed of Abraham is in Galatians 3:16.   I know Hyper-Protestants of this type who cannot stand to hear anything negative, no matter how true, said about this other world religion and its adherents, but who believe and regurgitate every last piece of  conspiratorial drivel they hear, not only about the Patriarch of Rome and his Church, but about all the ancient Churches so that basically, while believing nothing but good about people who deny that Jesus is the Christ, they write off the vast majority of people in the world today and who have ever lived who confess that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, their Lord and Saviour, since the majority of people in the world today and who have ever lived who confess Jesus as Christ, Son of God, Lord and Saviour, have belonged to the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and other ancient Churches.   These same Hyper-Protestants claim to be Spirit-filled and Spirit-led Christians.   One would think that if the Spirit that filled and led them were the Holy Ghost, He would convict them of the sin of participating in the last socially acceptable bigotry (except the genocidal anti-white racial hatred currently being displayed by “anti-racist” academics and activists), anti-Catholic bigotry.

 

Be a Protestant, but don’t be a Hyper-Protestant nut!