The Tests of Hyper-Protestantism

 

I have addressed various aspects of the problem of Hyper-Protestantism in several essays over the last few years.  I distinguish Hyper-Protestantism from ordinary Protestantism as being that which goes beyond rejecting and opposing errors that are distinctly Roman and rejects things that are genuinely Catholic as well.  That which is distinctly Roman is taught, practiced, or otherwise held only by the Roman Church, that is to say, the communion under the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Rome who is more commonly called the Pope.  That is genuinely Catholic which is the common heritage of all Churches that descended from the Apostolic Church in Jerusalem.  In the fifth century, St. Vincent of Lérins identified three tests of Catholicity that have been widely accepted ever since – Antiquity, Universality, and Consent.  The test of Antiquity means that to be considered truly Catholic something must have demonstrably been part of Christian faith and practice, at least implicitly, since the earliest centuries.  The test of Universality means that something that only ever caught on in one region of the Church or something that became dominant throughout the Church for a limited period before being finally rejected cannot be considered Catholic, but only that which can be found throughout all the ancient Churches in all places and times.  The word consent does not today ordinarily mean what it does in St. Vincent’s test.  The test of Consent is the official approbation of legitimate Church authority.  If something is taught throughout the writings of the Church Fathers, was defined and defended against error by the Church in council, especially an ecumenical council (at the time St. Vincent wrote the Council of Ephesus had just brought the number of these to three, the first two having been Nicaea I and Constantinople I in the previous century, by the  end of the fifth century Chalcedon became the fourth ecumenical council, and three others Constantinople II, Constantinople III, and Nicaea II were generally recognized before the Great Schism at the end of the first millennium), or can otherwise be shown to be “official” Church teaching or practice  it passes the test of Consent.

 

To give a specific example of the difference between that which is Roman and that which is Catholic look at the doctrine of Purgatory and the practice of praying for the faithful departed.

 

Purgatory is a Roman doctrine not a Catholic doctrine.  The Church of Rome teaches it dogmatically, but the other ancient Churches do not.  Since neither the Oriental Orthodox Churches (Coptic Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, etc.) which rejected the Definition of Chalcedon of 451 and so broke with the rest of the Church nor the Assyrian Church of the East which rejected the condemnation of Nestorius in 431 teach Purgatory, this demonstrates that it was not received doctrine prior to the fifth century.  Some specific Eastern Orthodox leaders have taught it, but the Eastern Orthodox Church as a whole has rejected it, and it was a bone of contention during the reunification talks at both the Second Council of Lyon (1274) and the Council of Florence (1438-1445).  Clearly, therefore, Purgatory was not accepted as doctrine by the Catholic Church prior to the Great Schism (1054).    In the Church Fathers, the closest thing to it is found in the writings of Origen and St. Gregory of Nyssa.  These, however, were talking about hell, which their doctrine of Apokatastasis (final universal reconciliation for all) required that they interpret as something similar to what Rome would later call Purgatory. Apokatastasis was formally rejected by the Church in the fifth ecumenical council in the sixth century.  The doctrine of Purgatory, therefore, is distinctly Roman and not genuinely Catholic. 

 

This is not the case with the practice of praying for the faithful departed, however.  It is attested to since the earliest centuries, and an example of it may very well be found in the New Testament itself in II Tim. 1:18.  It is practiced not only by the Church of Rome but by the ancient pre-Reformation Churches that reject Purgatory, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, and the Assyrian Church of the East.  The sixteenth century Reformers who thought it to stand or fall with the doctrine of Purgatory were clearly mistaken. It passes at least the tests of Antiquity and Universality.

 

This brings us to the question of whether there are any tests that we can apply to Protestant doctrines, positions, customs and assertions to determine whether they are Hyper or not.  The answer is yes.  Since St. Vincent offered three tests of Catholicity, I shall identity and discuss three tests of Hyper-Protestantism although more could be listed.  The rejection of things that are Catholic by St. Vincent’s definition as well as those that are distinctly Roman is the definition of Hyper-Protestantism and not one of the tests.

 

The first test of Hyper-Protestantism is the test of Catachresis.  Catachresis means the misuse of terms.  The specific example that is involved in this test is the pejorative use of the word Catholic.  Or, to approach it from another angle, the use of the word Catholic to mean that which is Roman.  This second wording is, perhaps, the better of the two because it reveals how Hyper-Protestantism actually betrays a principle of the Reformation.  The Roman Church claims that St. Peter was given jurisdiction over the Apostles and therefore over the whole Apostolic Church and that this jurisdiction was passed on to his successors in the bishopric of Rome, making the bishop of Rome the universal Patriarch, and the Catholic or whole Church co-extensive with his jurisdiction.   In other words, the Roman Church claims herself to be the Catholic (whole) Church.  The Reformers disputed this claim in the sixteenth century, as did the other four of the ancient patriarchates when the East and West mutually excommunicated each other in 1054.  Since one of those patriarchates is that of Jerusalem, which clearly has the better right to be considered the Mother Church than Rome, and another of those patriarchates is Antioch, which St. Peter also held before that of Rome, and yet a third is Constantinople which itself had claimed universal jurisdiction in the sixth century to have its claims – and all claims of universal jurisdiction – rebutted by Gregory I of Rome, using the same arguments that would later be used against his successors – Rome’s position is built on a foundation of quicksand.  Hyper-Protestantism’s use of the word Catholic, however, conforms to Rome’s position, not that of the Reformers

 

The second test of Hyper-Protestantism is the test of Misprioritization.  This is the elevating of Protestant doctrines to a level of importance higher than the faith common to all Christians as confessed in the ancient Creeds.  There is a secondary type of misprioritization in which even lesser doctrines (eschatological schemes, specific understandings of predestination, and the sort) are elevated above the core truths of the Reformation.  It is the first type that we will focus on here. 

 

There are various ways in which this done.  A common one is to threat the doctrines of the Reformation as if they were incapable of being distorted through exaggeration into heresy.  By contrast, the defenders of orthodoxy in the early Church recognized that any truth could be distorted into heresy by exaggeration and that the path of orthodoxy was the path of balancing and harmonizing different truths.  In those days, the main contested truths had to do with theology proper, the doctrine of God, especially the doctrine of the Trinity, and Christology, the Person of Jesus Christ.  The true and living God is One.  He is also, in a way different from the way in which He is One, Three.  If the Oneness of God is exaggerated, you get Judaism, Islam, and Unitarianism.  If the Threeness of God is exaggerated, you get polytheism.  The orthodox truth lies in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, which harmonized and balances the Oneness and Threeness of God.  If you exaggerate the deity of Jesus Christ, you get such things as Docetism, the idea that Jesus’ humanity was just an appearance and had no material substance, or Apollinarianism, the idea that the divine Logos took the place that is filled by the human mind in other men, making His humanity incomplete.  Conversely, Jesus’ humanity can be exaggerated to as to deny or diminish His deity in ways such as Adoptionism (the idea that He was a man who became God at some point such as His baptism) or Ebionism (the idea that He was merely the greatest of all prophets rather than God Incarnate).  The orthodox truth is that He is fully God and fully Man.  The fifth century demonstrated that this was susceptible of further distortions by exaggerating either His two natures (so as to make Him two Persons occupying the same body, the Son of God and the Son of Man, which is the heresy called Nestorianism) or the unity of His Person so as to deny His two natures (such as in Eutychianism in which Jesus’ humanity is swallowed up into His deity so that only the latter remains) requiring the clarification of the orthodox doctrine of the Hypostatic Union in the Definition of Chalcedon.

 

Now think about that.  If such truths as the Oneness of God, the Threeness of God, the deity of Jesus Christ and His humanity, the Unity of His Person and His two natures can and have been each distorted by exaggeration into heresy, would it not be elevating the doctrines of the Reformation far above these truths to pretend that they cannot be similarly distorted?  Furthermore, would it not be precisely this sort of distortion to say, for example, that Churches which confess the orthodox truths of the ancient Creeds are not expressions of Biblical Christianity because they do not affirm the Reformation doctrine of justification?  Especially if in making such a statement all the ancient Churches are lumped in with Rome even though the worst errors that the Reformers opposed with regards to justification (that the works of sinful human beings have merit in God’s eyes, that they can have merit above and beyond what is required by God, that the keys involve the right to distribute or even sell for a profit this supererogatory merit, etc.) are ones that Rome alone among the ancient Churches fell into.

 

The answer to both of these questions is yes.  Moreover, it needs to be recognized that the Reformation doctrines are particularly susceptible of being exaggerated and distorted into heresies because of the way they are formulated.  Keep in mind here that the Five Solae are not a sixteenth century formulation but a twentieth century formulation read back onto the sixteenth century.  It was first formulated by German Roman Catholic liberation theologian Johann Baptiste Metz in 1965 but caught on especially among Calvinists who found a five point summary of the Reformation appealing because it made Calvinism (famously summarized in five points, those articulated in the canons of the Synod of Dort in the second decade of the seventeenth century which responded to the five points of the Arminian Remonstrance) seem more normative of Protestantism in general. It should also be noted that one of the Five Solae, Sola Gratia, is not a Reformation distinctive but is a Catholic doctrine recognized as such universally since the (regional) Council of Carthage’s condemnation of Pelagianism was confirmed the third ecumenical council and that the Five Solae do not include the doctrine of assurance which was at least as important to the sixteenth century Reformation, especially the Lutheran side, as any of the Solae.  Nevertheless, Sola Scriptura and Sola Fide were both indisputably central to the Reformation.  Both doctrines, defined properly, are sound.  The Latin word Sola, however, and its English equivalent “alone” is not a word that usually marks a doctrine as having been carefully formulated with an eye to the balanced truth of orthodoxy.

 

Consider Sola Scriptura.  The expression was first used by Dr. Luther just prior to the Diet of Worms (1521) where he famously took his stand on the doctrine. As Dr. Luther used it, however, it did not mean anything remotely close to what later Protestants, especially the Hypers, have taken it to mean.  Dr. Luther taught the Sufficiency, Primacy and Supremacy of the Scriptures, not the idea that each Christian should get his faith and practice directly from the Bible and only from the Bible with no regards whatsoever to what previous Christians have said, thought, and done individually or as the Church.  The expression “Sola Scriptura”, however, especially when not used in a full sentence such as “The Scriptures alone are infallible”, easily suggests this idea of the go-it-alone Christian.  Ironically, it contradicts the very authority it is intended to uphold for Scriptures themselves, St. Paul’s second epistle to the Thessalonians specifically, contain the instruction “Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle” (2 Thess. 2:15).  The traditions, i.e., that which has been passed on or handed down, which they have been taught, are what Christians are instructed here to stand fast and hold, whether the transmission is oral (“by word”) or written (“our epistle”) which latter category is the Scripture, the very designation of which means that which is written.  Note that the Scripture in this verse of the Scriptures is very much not “alone.”  Far better than this expression for explaining the Reformation teaching would be to employ the expressions the Sufficiency, Primacy, and Supremacy of the Scriptures.  Either Primacy or Sufficiency would be a better summary of all that Dr. Luther and the Reformers intended than that most insufficient word “Alone”.   Article VI of our reformed Anglican Church is not entitled “The Scriptures Alone” but “Of the Sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures for Salvation.” It asserts “Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.” (1)

 

Sola Fide, understood correctly, is merely the doctrine St. Paul taught in the fourth chapter of Romans, that being righteous in the eyes of God is a gift God gives by His grace and that for it to be such it has to be by faith and not by works.  St. Paul did not contradict St. James who says that justification is by works but he explained St. James, who does not use the word “grace” in the relevant portion of his epistle, to not be talking about justification before God (Rom. 4:2).   The Reformers were right to re-emphasize St. Paul’s doctrine to correct the heavy over-emphasis on works in late Medieval Roman theology.  Note, however, that St. Paul was able to articulate this doctrine without using the word “alone”.  Note also, that when St. Paul identified the Gospel that he preached, he did not say that it was the doctrine of justification but that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and the testimony of eyewitnesses enumerated by the Apostle (1 Cor. 15:3ff).  Since this is included in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, confessed by all the ancient Churches, and is indeed, central to it, it cannot be legitimately said that the Church ever “lost” the Gospel as is claimed by the idea of restorationism which is common to all the heretical sects that evangelicals grew accustomed to calling cults towards the end of the last century.  Neither Dr. Luther and his associates nor the English Reformers (or the more responsible among the Swiss Reformers) were restorationists but the door which let restorationism and Hyper-Protestantism in was opened by referring to St. Paul’s doctrine of justification, re-articulated with the word alone, as being itself the Gospel.  (2)

 

 

The third test of Hyper-Protestantism is the test of Mendacity.  Hyper-Protestantism is willing to sacrifice truthfulness to the cause of opposing Rome. While some of the better known examples of this predate the internet, the internet meme has greatly exacerbated this tendency of Hyper-Protestantism.  In the last couple of months I have seen Hyper-Protestant memes attacking the Roman Church posted to social media on a daily basis.  I don’t remember a single one of them that did not make some irresponsible and easily rebuttable claim or another.

 

One of these, from a Baptist source, made the claim that the Scriptures do not teach that Mary is the New Eve, that this claim comes from late Medieval Scholasticism, and was invented for the purpose of supporting Rome’s doctrine about Mary being the Co-Redemptrix.  This was a particularly remarkable example because rather than mixing one or two errors into what was otherwise correct this meme did not get a single thing right. 

 

Mary is contrasted with Eve in this way by St. Justin Martyr in Dialogue With Trypho 100 and by St. Irenaeus of Lyon in Against Heresies 3.22.4.  These are both second century sources, written in approximately 150 and 180 respectively.  This identification of Mary with Eve was raised again by Tertullian, the first major theologian to write in Latin, in a treatise written against the Docetic arguments of the Marcionites and Valentinians in the first decade of the third century, On the Flesh of Christ, 17.  It was also one of several Marian themes that appear in the writings of Origen, the most important theologian of the early Alexandrian Church, who was about thirty years younger than Tertullian.  Origen, in whose writings the first extent use of the word Theotokos can be found, wrote about the Perpetual Virginity of Mary and explored the parallels between her and Eve in the commentaries and expository homilies he wrote and gave after his relocation to Caesarea Maritima in 231.  The theme of Mary as the New Eve is also prominent in the homilies of Origen’s most celebrated student, St. Gregory Thaumaturgos, who was born a couple of years after Tertullian wrote the work mentioned above and became Bishop of his native Neocaesarea later that century.  See, for example, the first three of the homilies in the collection Four Homilies, which three have the common topic of the Annunciation and the homily on “The Holy Mother of God, Ever Virgin” which is extent only in Armenian rather than Greek and in which the comparison/contrast between Eve and Mary opens the homily. In the centuries that follow this theme can be found in the extend works of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and basically all the major Church Fathers.  It was a common Patristic idea long before there was any such thing as Scholasticism.

 

Moreover, the idea is derived directly from the Scriptures.  In Genesis 3:15, the first promise of the Messiah in the Old Testament, the expression “the woman” appears.  In the context of Genesis 3, “the woman” has to be Eve.  The Seed of the woman, Who is prophesied to crush the head of the serpent, however, is Christ, so “the woman” of this verse also has to be Mary.  This one expression “the woman” has, therefore, double reference to Eve and to Mary.  We find this again in the twelfth chapter of Revelation.  The woman there is identified as Mary by the fact that she gives birth to Christ (vv. 4-5).  The chapter also, however, stresses the enmity between her and the dragon (vv. 4, 6, 13-17) and when it identifies the dragon the wording points directly back to Genesis 3 “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan” (v. 9). Revelation 12, therefore, places this woman who gave birth to Christ, Mary, in the role of Eve, whose enemy is the serpent.  The identification of Mary with Eve is also the significance of Jesus’ addressing His mother as “Woman” in John 2:4 and 19:26. (3)  In Genesis, this is what Adam calls Eve when God first makes her (Gen. 2:24) and what she is called throughout the Creation/Fall narrative until after the curse, when her name Eve is used for the first time (Gen. 3:20).

 

Note that the New Testament basis for identifying Mary as the New Eve comes from the writings of St. John the Apostle.  This is itself significant because St. Irenaeus grew up under the teaching of St. Polycarp of Smyrna, himself a direct disciple of St. John.  St. Justin Martyr, while not among the direct disciples of St. John in this same way, incorporated Johannine themes into all his writings, wrote and set Dialogue with Trypho in Ephesus, the city where St. John had spent most of the latter part of his life, and is the earliest witness to the Johannine authorship of Revelation.  The earliest Church Fathers to speak of Mary as the New Eve were directly influenced by the Apostle whose New Testament writings provide the Scriptural basis for this idea.

 

Not only does this meme illustrate the lackadaisical attitude towards the truth, at least where Rome is concerned, on the part of Hyper-Protestants, (Luke Skywalker’s line from The Last Jedi, “Amazing, every word of what you just said was wrong” could have been addressed to it), it also illustrates the fittingness of the expression “Hyper-Protestant.”  By accusing an idea, which the slightest amount of real research would have revealed to date to the earliest centuries of Christianity, to have been ubiquitous among the Church Fathers, and to be based in Scripture itself, of having been developed late in Church history to support the least defensible of Rome’s Marian terminology, one never formally dogmatized and which Rome has recently taken steps to walk back, Hyper-Protestants go well beyond what the sixteenth century Reformers themselves had to say against Rome with regards to Mary, which really wasn’t all that much.  Indeed, most of the Reformers, certainly the Lutheran and English Reformers, but even the fathers of the Reformed tradition including Calvin himself, would have to be classified as rank Mariolators if we were to go by the standards of Hyper-Protestantism.

 

As noted earlier, this characteristic of Hyper-Protestantism predates the internet meme.  The late Jack T. Chick, the fundamentalist Baptist publisher from Los Angeles famous for his cartoon tracts – small, rectangular booklets, which tell a story in comic-book style that leads up to an evangelistic appeal – saw his credibility take several blows in the last decades of the twentieth century when he repeatedly published or distributed testimonies/exposes that proved incapable of withstanding serious scrutiny as to their truthfulness.  While not all of these pertained to the Roman Church, the most notorious example was his publication of the testimony of Alberto Rivera, who claimed to be an ex-Jesuit and on the basis of whose testimony, he accused the Roman Church of being behind everything from the creation of Islam to Nazi Germany to the decay of morals in the late twentieth century United States. 

 

Evangelist Ralph Woodrow wrote “It puzzles me how some can be so fanatical against one set of errors—or what they perceive to be errors—only to develop greater errors: becoming judgmental, hateful, and dishonest”.  Woodrow wrote this in the context of explaining why he had withdrawn his best-seller, Babylon Mystery Religion, widely distributed by Chick, from circulation.  His book had drawn its inspiration from The Two Babylons by Alexander Hislop, a nineteenth century minister of the Scottish Free Church (Presbyterian) that tried to trace everything in Roman Catholicism that could not be found in the pages of Scripture (and much that could) back to Nimrod (who built the Tower of Babel/Babylon, the cult of whom Hislop claimed to be the original template of all paganism).  Woodrow, after prayerfully re-examining Hislop’s book and checking its sources, withdrew his own book and wrote The Babylon Connection? a book length rebuttal of his own previous book and his primary source.  A shorter version of his critique of Hislop’s methodology appeared in the Christian Research Journal.

 

With the Vincentian tests of antiquity, universality, and consent, something has to pass all three to be genuinely Catholic.  With these tests of Hyper-Protestantism, Catachresis, Misprioritization and Mendacity, passing any one of them indicates an infection.  Passing all three indicates that the theological disease has reached an advanced stage.

 

(1)   Article VI is quite lengthy, but the first sentence as quoted in the text of this essay is the full content of the Article as far as explaining the subject in the title goes.  The remainder of the Article is a clarification of what is meant by “Holy Scripture”.  Here too, the Article is worded so as to assert only what all Protestants can affirm and not the more extreme position which became more common starting in the seventeenth century.  The canonical books are listed for both Testaments, and the deutero-canonical books are also listed of which the Article merely says “And the other Books (as Hierome saith) the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners; but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine.”  The more extreme version of Protestantism says that these books have no place in the Bible whatsoever, warns people against reading them, and says that they were added to the Bible by the Roman Church in the Council of Trent.

 

This, however, illustrates the third test of Hyper-Protestantism, the devaluing of truth.  It is common today for Roman Catholic apologists to accuse Protestants of taking books out of the Bible, and of Protestant apologists to accuse the Roman Catholic Church of adding them.  Neither of these is entirely right, although the Roman Catholic accusation is closer to the truth.  The deutero-canonical books are, for the most part, (2 Esdras, called “The Fourth Book of Esdras” in Article VI, is the exception) books found in the Septuagint, the Greek translation that the Church received as her Old Testament from the first century but which were never included in the canon recognized by rabbinic Judaism.  If the Roman Catholic Church had “added” them in the sixteenth century, we could expect that Churches that broke fellowship with Rome earlier wold not include them in their Bibles.  This is not the case.  Generally, the further back the schism, the more the deuterocanonical books you find in the Bibles of the other Churches.  The Eastern Orthodox Church which broke with the Roman Catholic in 1054 has 3 and 4 Maccabees, the Prayer of Manasseh, and Psalm 151 in its Bible.  The Oriental Orthodox Churches which broke with the Chalcedonian Churches in the fifth century has these and, in the case of those which use the Tewahedo Bible (Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Churches), Enoch and Jubilees.  The Assyrian Church of the East which uses the Syriac Peshitta as its Bible includes most of the same deutero-canon as the Roman Catholic Church plus Psalm 151 and the Prayer of Manasseh. 

 

What happened in the sixteenth century was that both the Roman Catholic Church and the early Reformers, shifted books from category to category in the Bible.  Dr. Luther left the deuterocanonical books in the Bible but shifted them out of the Old Testament and into a section unfortunately labelled “Apocrypha”, inaccurately using a term that the Church Fathers applied to a different set of writings altogether.  The same was done in the Authorized Bible in 1611 and Article VI reflects the thinking behind this.  The deuterocanonical books are not “canonical” in the sense of being the “canon” or “rule” by which doctrine is proved, but they are not “non-canonical” in the sense of not being included in the Bible altogether.  What the Roman Catholic Church did at Trent was to shift these books into the “canon” in the sense of doctrine-proving books.  The other ancient Churches, while regarding these books as part of the Old Testament, had never regarded them as being equally canonical in this sense.

(2)  Once something other than the Gospel preached by St. Paul, that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures and was buried and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures is identified as the Gospel, even if it be St. Paul’s own doctrine of justification, so as to make the claim that all the Churches that confess that Christ, the second person of the Trinity, incarnate as the God-Man, died for our sins, and was buried, and rose again don’t have the Gospel  if they don’t have that doctrine in its Reformation reformulation, the door is opened to making this same claim about another doctrine so as to exclude others who do also confess the doctrine of justification in its Reformation formulation. 

 

Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the Calvinist Baptist preacher of the nineteenth century, is frequently quoted as having said “Calvinism is the Gospel, and nothing else.”  Other Calvinists have identified the “doctrines of grace” as the Gospel.  These, however, are doctrines pertaining to predestination, a matter about which God keeps His own counsel and which is hardly of the essence of the kerygma His Church is charged with proclaiming to the world.  

 

Recently a Calvinist Baptist friend posted to social media an excerpt from John Wesley’s writings in which he referred to himself as “almost a Christian”.  My friend used to this to try and argue that Wesley was never a Christian and that the Gospel he preached – Wesley was an Arminian – was not the real Gospel.  I had to rebuke him and point out that it was quite clear, even from the excerpt from Wesley that he had included in his post, that the revivalist was talking about his life prior to Aldersgate (where, at a meeting of the Moravians in which Dr. Luther’s preface to Romans was being read, he testified “I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”)

(3)   Jesus also addresses the Samaritan woman, the woman caught in adultery, and Mary Magdalen as “woman” but there was nothing unusual about these instances.  This was not rude in first century Palestine the way it is in the English-speaking world of our day, it was closer to addressing a woman as “ma’am” in our culture.  Jesus’ addressing His mother this way was unusual, however. St. John records Jesus doing so twice, at the very beginning of His ministry and the very end.  The first of these is at the wedding of Cana, where Jesus performed His first miracle.  St. John tells us that this occurred on “the third day” which was to the last of the four days in the previous chapter as the Sunday on which Jesus rose was “the third day” to the Friday on which He was crucified, making this the sixth day.  This, coming as it does at the start of a Gospel which begins by pointing back to Genesis and Creation, is evocative of the sixth day of Creation, the day in which God created man “male and female” and Adam named Eve “woman”.  At the end of His earthly ministry, Jesus’ addresses Mary as “woman” again and tells her to “behold thy son” as He instructs St. John to “behold thy mother”.  Here too is an allusion to the first woman who at the end of the Creation/Fall account in Genesis is given the name Eve because she is the “mother of all living.”   

The Theologians’ Cross

In this essay, written at the request of a colleague and former classmate, we shall be considering the subjects of election and predestination.   This is the first of three planned essays on these subjects.  This one will look at the difference between how the two main continental Protestant traditions have handled a theological dilemma that is at the heart of the predestination/free will debate and will conclude by briefly looking at how our Anglican tradition has handled the same dilemma in its Articles.  A second essay will consider divine foreknowledge and human responsibility from a broader perspective than how these apply in salvation and will look more at pre-Reformation thinking on the subject.  The third essay will be an exegetical consideration of certain relevant chapters of the New Testament.

 

The Scriptures speak of God’s people, under both Covenants, as having been chosen by Him which is the concept the word “election” denotes.  The verb προορίζω appears in various forms, six times in the New Testament.  This verb is a compound of a Greek preposition meaning “before” and a verb meaning “determine” or “ordain” and is translated by “predestinate” in the Authorized Bible in four out of the six occurrences. (1)  Election and predestination, therefore, are Scriptural concepts and so within the context of orthodox Christian theology, discussion and debate has not been over whether God’s people have been elected and predestined, (2) but over what the implications of these words are especially with regards to how they relate to the matters of divine Sovereignty and human moral responsibility or free will. 

 

“The theologians’ cross” is a translation of the Latin expression crux theologorum.  This expression is used, primarily by Lutheran theologians, to designate a problem that has plagued theologians of all Churches, denominations, and stripes.  The problem is cur alii, alii non, or “why some, not others?” that is, “why are some saved, not others?”  Within the Reformed tradition, that is, the branch of Protestantism that began in Zurich, Switzerland with Ulrich Zwingli at about the same time that the Lutheran tradition began in Wittenberg, Germany with Dr. Martin Luther, two opposite answers to this question have been given.  Calvinism, which takes its name from John Calvin whose became the leader of the Reformation at Geneva about half a decade after Zwingli’s death, says that the answer is the eternal decree of God.  God, before the creation of the world, decided that He would save such-and-such individuals and that He would leave others to suffer damnation, and in both cases His decision was based solely on its pleasing His will so to do and not on anything in either the elect or the reprobate themselves that distinguished the one group from the other.  Arminianism, on the other hand, which began in the generation after Calvin with Jacob Arminius, a student of Calvin’s successor Theodore Beza, says that the answer is to be found in the free will of man, that God did indeed elect and predestine some to salvation, but that this was based on His foreknowledge of who would out of their own free will believe the Gospel and who would not.  Today, an increasing number of theologians can be found willing to answer the question by denying the distinction, despite the sacrifice of orthodoxy involved in doing so. (3)

 

By contrast with both the Calvinist and Arminian sides of the Reformed tradition and the non-orthodox contemporary universalists, the Lutherans who named the problem have also taken the position that it has no answer, or at least no answer that can be known to us in this life.  The Lutherans insist that there are two truths that must be affirmed simultaneously, the universality of God’s saving grace and that salvation is by grace alone.  The crux theologorum arises because by natural human reasoning, these truths taken together ought to add up to universalism and yet they do not.  The Calvinist answer to the dilemma amounts to a denial of universal grace, the Arminian to a denial of grace alone. (4)   The Lutherans maintain, against both sides of the Reformed tradition, that universal grace and grace alone can be affirmed together, because God gives His grace through means, specifically the means of the Gospel in its three modes of Word, baptism, and Communion, and that when God works through means His will is resistible.  Therefore, salvation is entirely the work of God which He completed for the whole world in Jesus Christ and the grace (state of being in favour) thereby purchased He gives to all as a free gift along with the faith which is the appointed means whereby we receive it in the Gospel, but because of the intermediate nature of the communication of grace, we are capable of resisting it and it is our natural inclination in our fallen condition to do so.  God, in the grace He gives through the Gospel, is the sole cause of salvation in those who receive it by faith, man, resisting that grace out of the perverse inclination of his fallen will, is solely responsible for his own damnation in the case of those who are finally and incurably impenitent.  The saved, are not saved because of anything in themselves (even a lesser resistance) that makes them differ from the lost, nor are the damned, damned because God loves them less or has made lesser provision for their salvation, than the saved.  There is, therefore, no answer to the question of what makes the one differ from the other, and this should be treated as a mystery.

 

The Lutheran position on this has much to commend it.  Some questions don’t need answering and given the problems with any answer that has been put forward to this one, leaving it as a mystery is the best option.  A sedes doctrinae can be found for this position in Deuteronomy 29:29 which reads “The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.”  The precise doctrine that sparked the Calvinist-Arminian controversy within the Reformed tradition is the classic example of what can happen if theologians ignore this verse and pry into the secret things that God reserves for Himself.

 

John Calvin’s career as a Reformer spanned about three decades from the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion in 1536 until his death in 1564.  While predestination was not as important in his own theology as it would become in the theology of those who call their view by his name, he did teach a strong double predestination, in which the reprobation of the lost is as much a positive decree based entirely on the pleasure of God’s will as the election of the saved. (5) Jacob Arminius, who was born in 1560 a few years before Calvin’s death, was a protégé of Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor as chief pastor of Geneva.  Beza’s principal theological contribution to the development of Calvinist theology was the doctrine of supralapsarianism.  Supralapsarianism is a doctrine about the order of God’s decrees.  It asserts that God’s decree to save some and damn others, logically but not temporally (because these decrees are from eternity which is outside of time) precedes His decree to create mankind and allow him to fall into sin.  If anything warrants being described as a secret thing belonging unto the Lord our God and hence not to us, it is the order of God’s eternal decrees.  The effect, however, of the doctrine of supralapsarianism is to say that God created people and allowed them to fall into sin in order that He might damn them and have grounds  on which so to do. 

 

Arminius, shortly after being made pastor in Amsterdam in 1587, was tasked by that city’s Ecclesiastical Court with rebutting the anti-Calvinist arguments of one Dirck Coornhert.  Later, after he had become a professor at his alma mater Leiden University in 1603, he became embroiled in a controversy with a senior member of the faculty of theology Franciscus Gomarus that would last the rest of his life.  In both cases, supralapsarianism was at the heart of the controversy.  Arminius had been asked to defend this doctrine against both Coornhert’s attacks and the proposed alternative of infralapsarianism (in which the decree to save and damn, presupposes the fall of man).  Arminius had concluded, however, that the doctrine he was asked to defend was indefensible, and by the time of his falling out with Gomarus at Leiden, he had come to see infralapsarianism as afflicted with many of the same problems as supralapsarianism.  As a consequence, he adopted a modified doctrine of predestination in which election is based on foresight of a positive response to the Gospel. 

 

In 1610, the year after Arminius’ death, his students submitted a protest against the strict predestinarianism of the Dutch Reformed Church.  The protest was entitled the Remonstrance, and consisted of five articles which have since been collectively called Arminianism although not all of them were spelled out in Arminius’ own teachings.  These are conditional election, unlimited atonement, total depravity (that fallen man is lost and sin from which he cannot extract himself but is utterly dependent on the grace of God – Arminians are no Pelagians), prevenient grace (like the Lutheran view of grace but unlike Calvin’s, Arminian prevenient grace is resistible, but unlike the Lutheran view it works by restoring the will’s ability to choose God so that the believer cooperates, although only after grace, in his own conversion), and a questioning of the guarantee of perseverance that soon hardened into the positive affirmation of the possibility of the believer’s apostasy that in wider evangelical circles today is the first if not the only thing the word “Arminian” summons to mind.  The Dutch government sat on the Remonstrance for a surprisingly long time, and in 1618 summoned representatives of the Reformed Churches to meet at Dordrecht to address the matter in what was intended to be the Reformed equivalent of a General Council.   The Synod of Dort met from late 1618 until spring of 1619 and published five canons in response to the Remonstrance.   These are what have ever since been known as the Five Points of Calvinism, for which the acronym TULIP was early coined – Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, Perseverance of the Saints. (6)   

 

This intra-Reformed schism, therefore, and its polarized theological positions, are a direct result of the Reformed tradition’s unwillingness to leave the crux theologorum unanswered and to leave to God the “secret things” that are His. This is a specific example of a general reluctance in practice to acknowledge mysteries that are beyond the explanatory capacity of human reasoning that also manifests itself with regards to other facets of the predestination-free will debate.  This reluctance helps explain the rise of Modern rationalism but is itself somewhat of a mystery in that one would expect a tradition that places such an emphasis on the gap between Sovereign Creator and fallen creature to be more willing than others to acknowledge mysteries beyond its understanding rather than less.  A partial explanation is the influence of Renaissance humanism on the Reformed tradition.  While Renaissance humanism in general, and that of Erasmus in particular, influenced both Dr. Luther and the Reformed tradition, the influence was greater in the Reformed tradition.   Note, however, that this does not mean that the strong predestinarianism of the Reformed tradition came from Erasmus.  Dr. Luther and Erasmus had a famous falling out in 1524-1525 precisely over this matter.  In 1524, Erasmus had published his treatise On the Freedom of the Will which argued for the capacity of the human will to respond positively to grace, and in the following year Dr. Luther had responded with his On the Bondage of the Will which, as the title would suggest, argued that the human will since the Fall has been bound in chains by sin and cannot respond positively to grace until freed to do so by grace itself.  It was more humanism’s general influence that led to the proto-rationalism of the Reformed tradition.   This should not be taken as entirely a negative thing.  In the Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin wrote the single most important contribution to systematic theology since St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica and this too can be largely attributed to the same influence.

 

Where the humanist influence on the Reformed tradition can be most seen to impact its approach to the crux theologorum has to do with the means of grace, especially the Sacraments.  In the broader Christian tradition, the expression “means of grace” refers to channels through which God distributes grace to people.   Protestantism takes a narrower view of this concept than other Christian traditions, limiting the grace distributed through the means to saving grace.  This is part of the reason why Protestants generally limit the Sacraments to two (baptism and the Lord’s Supper) or three (if absolution is included), although, as I recently discussed at length, (7) our Anglican Church has the best position on the matter by affirming baptism and the Lord’s Supper as Gospel Sacraments through which saving grace is distributed, without dogmatically rejecting the others affirmed by the broader Christian tradition as being Sacraments in a more general sense.   The Lutherans, helpfully distinguish between two kinds of means of grace, the organa dotika (means of giving, Word and Sacraments) and the organon leptikon (means of receiving, faith).  While the Reformed tradition uses the expression “means of grace” for Word and Sacrament (the Westminster Confession of Faith also names prayer), in their theology only the Word is a means of grace in the sense of an instrument God uses to give saving grace and faith. 

 

In the Heidelberg Catechism, Question 65 is “It is through faith alone that we share in Christ and all his benefits: where then does that faith come from?”  The answer is “The Holy Spirit produces it in our hearts by the preaching of the holy gospel, and confirms it by the use of the holy sacraments.” (8)  Note the distinction.  “Confirm” here is used in its original sense of “strengthen” rather than “verify” but since faith’s reception of grace is in no way dependent on its strength this position nullifies the concept of the Sacraments as an effectual means of grace in Reformed theology.  Orthodox Lutherans argue that Reformed theology by its doctrine of immediate grace nullifies even the Word as an effectual means of grace. (9)  This is because in Reformed theology, conversion is produced by irresistible grace or the effectual call, which is distinguished from the outward call of the Gospel, and which is regarded as a work of the Holy Spirit that is entirely internal to the person on whom it has the effect.  It is the Holy Spirit in the elect, in other words, rather than the Holy Spirit in the Word, who makes the elect believe the Word by the direct exercise of His power within the elect, rather than through the instrument of the Word.

 

The idea in Reformed theology, that the Holy Spirit operates directly on the human spirit, and that the external means of grace are inappropriate tools for Him to use to accomplish His work but are at most external signs testifying to it points to something in Reformed theology that manifests itself elsewhere in Reformed theology, and that is a tendency towards a moderate neo-Gnosticism.  The original heresies to which the term Gnosticism is applied, saw the physical world and the matter of which it is composed, as irredeemably corrupt and the spirit as incorruptible and pristine.   Their idea of salvation was the liberation of the human spirit from what they regarded as its material prison.  The Gnostics derived their ideas from secular philosophy, and in particular from Plato who saw everything in the physical world as an imperfect reflection of a perfect original in the unseen world.  While Plato also clearly influenced the thinking of St. Paul, the Apostle like the orthodox Church Fathers who contended against the Gnostics, recognized both the material and the spiritual as the creation of the One God, the same God of both Covenants, Who was manifest in the flesh in the “mystery of godliness” (1 Tim. 3:16).  While the Reformed tradition’s affirmation of the Nicene Creed and the Definition of Chalcedon prevents it from being outright Gnostic, its rejection of Nicaea II, the theological argument of which, whatever one might think of the practices that the Roman and Eastern Church justify with it, are the reasonable consequences of the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation as articulated and defended in the earlier ecumenical councils, demonstrates an uncomfortableness with regarding the material as the vehicle of the spiritual that approaches Gnosticism without quite crossing the boundary between it and Christianity.  This entered the Reformed tradition through the influence of humanistic philosophy on, especially, Zwingli, and is the reason that tradition, while retaining the language of means of grace with reference to Word and Sacrament, falls short of seeing them as the actual instruments God uses to give His grace.  This in turn is the reason why the Reformed tradition is unwilling to leave the crux theologorum as an unsolvable mystery.

 

Predestination and Election are addressed in Article XVII of our Anglican Articles of Religion.  Although it is a fairly long Article I will quote it in its entirety:

 

Predestination to Life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) he hath constantly decreed by his counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of mankind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation, as vessels made to honour. Wherefore, they which be endued with so excellent a benefit of God be called according to God’s purpose by his Spirit working in due season: they through Grace obey the calling: they be justified freely: they be made sons of God by adoption: they be made like the image of his only-begotten Son Jesus Christ: they walk religiously in good works, and at length, by God’s mercy, they attain to everlasting felicity.

 

As the godly consideration of Predestination, and our Election in Christ, is full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable comfort to godly persons, and such as feel in themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ, mortifying the works of the flesh, and their earthly members, and drawing up their mind to high and heavenly things, as well because it doth greatly establish and confirm their faith of eternal Salvation to be enjoyed through Christ, as because it doth fervently kindle their love towards God: So, for curious and carnal persons, lacking the Spirit of Christ, to have continually before their eyes the sentence of God’s Predestination, is a most dangerous downfall, whereby the Devil doth thrust them either into desperation, or into wretchlessness of most unclean living, no less perilous than desperation.

 

Furthermore, we must receive God’ s promises in such wise, as they be generally set forth to us in holy Scripture: and, in our doings, that Will of God is to be followed, which we have expressly declared unto us in the Word of God.

 

Just as Article XXV on the Sacraments affirms the Protestant view of baptism and the Lord’s Supper as being unique as Sacraments of the Gospel without dogmatically rejecting the other five others affirmed by all the ancient Churches (with a partial exception of the Assyrian Church) as being Sacraments, so this Article affirms only the bare basics that all Christians should be able to affirm about predestination.  There is no mention of reprobation or even of preterition or any other predestination other than predestination to life.  It speaks of those so predestined as “chosen in Christ out of mankind” without commenting on whether that election is based on foresight or unconditional.   Although this Article was written before Jacob Arminius was born – it is a slightly shorter, but substantially the same version of what Archbishop Cranmer had written in the Forty-Two Articles of 1553 – there is nothing in this that Arminians cannot affirm. (10)  Nor is there anything in it that Calvinists cannot affirm, although their attempt in the late Elizabethan period to have the more explicitly Calvinist Lambeth Articles passed demonstrates that this Article did not impose their interpretation to the extent they would have liked (11).  It is more Lutheran than either Calvinist or Arminian, however, belonging to the section of the Articles immediately following the first section (Articles I-VIII) which affirms the most important Christian truths, the Catholic truths.  This section (Articles IX to XVIII) could be described as the “Augustinian” section of the Articles, and in it Archbishop Cranmer clearly drew his inspiration from the Lutherans as can be seen by comparing Articles IX, X, XI and XII/XIII to Articles II, XVII, IV and XX of the Augsburg Confession (and its Apology) respectively.  (12)  In the later section on Sacraments, Archbishop Cranmer was more influenced by the Reformed tradition than the Lutheran when it comes to the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper (his Article XXIX was much toned down in this regards in its revision into the current Article XXVIII in the reign of Elizabeth I) but his language in the last paragraph of his Article XXVI, which became the first paragraph of the current Article XXV, would seem to rule out the idea that Sacraments are merely external witnesses rather than actual instruments of communicating grace. 

 

Therefore, while the Articles do not require that Churchmen take the Lutheran position on the crux theologorum, it is the position they most direct us towards.  Many serious historical and present-day theological conflicts could have been avoided in our Church, if Churchmen had agreed to that position.

 

 

 

 

 

 (1)    When used as verbs, there is no difference in meaning between “predestinate” and “predestine”, “predestinate” being the older form of the verb which more closely corresponds to the cognate noun predestination.  Unlike “predestine”, “predestinate” is also used as an adjective, indicating that the noun it modifies has been predestined.

(2)   The question of whether God’s people are elected as individuals, i.e., Joe was elected qua Joe to be part of God’s covenant people or as a collective, i.e., the entire Church is collectively chosen to be in covenant relationship with God, is a question that arises within the boundaries of orthodoxy because it is a question about the nature of election rather than the fact of election.  Similarly, the difference between the Arminian (conditional election) and Calvinist (unconditional election) views is a difference about the grounds of election among those who hold to individual election.  The recent calling into question to varying degrees of God’s foreknowledge of the outcome of the Final Judgement by “open theists” (Richard Rice, John E. Sanders, Greg Boyd, Clark Pinnock, et al.) does not fall within the bounds of orthodoxy because it rejects the fact of election as well as classical theism and Augustinianism in the general sense in which it was accepted as orthodox against the Pelagian heresy in the early Church.

(3)   In 1987, Swiss Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, best known for his work on theological aesthetics, raised a few eyebrows with his book Dare We Hope? “That All Men Be Saved”? although the book merely raised the hypothetical possibility that all would be saved ultimately without affirming that this must be so.  More recently, David Bentley Hart, a lay Eastern Orthodox theologian who is the brother of two Anglican priests (one of whom crossed the Tiber in both directions) and a doppelganger of the late David Ogden Stiers (if you only know the actor from M*A*S*H or the revived Perry Mason movies you won’t see it, look up an image of him from Doc Hollywood or later in the period when he wore a beard), published That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019).  Note the similarity between Hart’s title and von Balthasar’s and the big difference – Hart’s is an assertion, Balthasar’s was a question.  In his book, Hart declares that everyone will ultimately be saved and that to say otherwise is to make the eternal suffering of the damned the price paid for the everlasting bliss of the saved and to teach a God Who is unworthy of our faith and love.  It would be far beyond the scope of this essay to rebut his thesis which I have brought up only as an illustration of answering the crux theologorum by denying the dilemma.  For a book length rebuttal of universalism (and annihilationism) see The Other Side of the Good News: Confronting the Contemporary Challenge’s to Jesus’ Teaching on Hell (Wheaton: Victor Books, 1992) by Dr. Larry E. Dixon, who was my Greek and theology professor and faculty advisor in the 1990s.  Or, if you are looking for something more recent, try Michael J. McClymond’s two-volume The Devil’s Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018).

(4)   Neither Calvinists nor Arminians necessarily accept this assessment of their views.  The Lutheran assessment of the Arminian position is based on the Arminian view of prevenient grace as enabling the will to choose to respond positively to the Gospel.  The Lutherans argue, correctly, that a positive effect on the will is the result of grace being received through faith produced by grace rather than an intervening secondary cause in producing faith.  They point out, again correctly, that faith, even in other contexts, is not a product of the will.  We say “I trust so-and-so” and “I believe such-and-such” but this is not because we choose to do so, but because so-and-so has persuaded us of his trustworthiness and such-and-such has impressed us with its truth.  With regards to the Gospel, of course, ordinary persuasion is insufficient because man in his fallen condition is disinclined to believe God, but the Holy Spirit is always present in the Gospel working to overcome this. Much of the second volume of Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology is devoted to arguing that Calvinism does not deny the universal aspect of God’s grace.  To give but one example of how his arguments fail to persuade, however, Hodge, in his defence of the Calvinist view of the design of the Atonement – he conspicuously avoids the expression “Limited Atonement” – directs his argument against the claim that the Atonement must apply equally to everyone and in no way have a special reference to the elect.  In reality, of course, what everyone other than Calvinists find objectionable in the Calvinist doctrine, is the denial that there is provision for the salvation of those who will ultimately reject it in the Atonement.

(5)   See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 3.23.

(6)   The order of the canons required adjustment to produce the acronym.  In the order published, it would be ULTIP.

(7)   https://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2025/10/sacraments-and-gospel-sacraments.html

(8)   Richard Hooker in the fifth volume of his Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie had to contend with the absurd contention on the part of Elizabethan era Puritans that the Word was powerless to convert unless “preached” in the sense of exposited in a pulpit address.  Some of these objected to the reading of the Lessons (actual passages from the Scriptures) in the Church on this basis.   Ursinus and the other framers of the Heidelberg Catechism did not intend “by the preaching of the holy gospel” to be understood in this grossly ignorant manner.

(9)    “Because saving grace is particular, according to the teaching of the Calvinists, there are no means of grace for that part of mankind to which the grace of God and the merit of Christ do not extend…But neither do the Calvinists have means of grace for the elect.  Believers are expressly directed by Calvin not to ascertain their predestination from the external Word, that is, from the universal call (universalis vocation) which occurs through the outward Word (per externam praedicationem), but from the special call (specialis vocation), which consists in an inner illumination by the Holy Spirit…But according to the teaching of Calvinism this “inner illumination” is not brought about through the means of grace; it is worked immediately by the Holy Ghost.” Francis Pieper, Christian Dogmatics, Volume III (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1953), 118-122.  Pieper is, of course, a hostile witness to Calvinism, but when he goes on to quote Charles Hodge to prove this point he does not misrepresent him.  Indeed, if anything he understates his case because he elides from his quotation the following “When Christ said to the leper, ‘I will: be thou clean’, nothing intervened between his volition and the effect.  And when he put clay on the eyes of the blind man, and bade him wash in the pool of Siloam, there was nothing in the properties of the clay or of the water that cooperated in the restoration of his sight.” (This is on page 684 of the 1872 edition published by Thomas Nelson in London and Edinburgh, and in New York by Charles Scribner.  Pieper cites it as 634f.  Either he was looking at a different edition or, more likely, he or his English translator wrote a 3 for an 8).  This is sloppy thinking, and worse exegesis on Hodge’s part.  Obviously, Christ’s words expressing His will for the cleansing of the leper, intervened between His volition and the effect to bring about the latter.  In the case of the blind man, while it is true that nothing in the properties of the clay or water contributed to the restoration of his sight, this is entirely beside the point.  While Christ could have just spoken and healed the blind man like He did the leper, in this case He chose the means of mud and the pool of Siloam, and the mud and water were effective means not because of their intrinsic properties, but because He so chose to use them.

(10)                       Despite this, John Wesley removed it from his Twenty-Five Articles for Methodism.  In the century before Wesley, Bishop Andrewes, Archbishop Laud, and other Orthodox Churchman of the Jacobean and Caroline reigns were accused of “Arminianism” by the Hyper-Calvinist Puritans.  A case can be made that this accusation was no more substantial than the ridiculous accusation of popery made by the same people because the Laudians insisted that the Church follow the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer to the letter (if you don’t see why that accusation is ridiculous you are hopeless and I will not waste my time explaining it).  See, however, Samuel D. Fornecker, Bisschop’s Bench, Contours of Arminian Conformity in the Church of England, c. 1674-1742 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022) for an account of Arminian Churchmanship of a slightly later period (Bisschop is the Dutch name of the man more commonly known as Simon Episcopius, who was the leader of the Remonstrants, Arminius’ first generation followers).  Whether their Arminianism was real or merely in the minds of their opponents, these Churchmen subscribed to the Articles of Religion.

(11)                       See my discussion of this here: https://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/ 2023/08/1595-anglicanism-at-crossroads.html

(12)                       Note also the wording of Article XVI.  It suggests the Lutheran rather than the Calvinist view of perseverance, although not strongly enough so that a Calvinist could not affirm the Article.

Semantic Shift and the Decline of Orthodoxy: Part Two – Evangelical and Catholic: Part One of Part Two – Evangelical

In the outline of this series at the end of Part One, I had stated that in the second entry we would look at how shifts in the meaning of “evangelical” and “Catholic” have indicated a move away from orthodoxy. In the writing of this second entry it has become apparent that this will require more than one essay. This, therefore, is Part One of Part Two, in which we will look at “evangelical.” Part Two of Part Two will focus on “Catholic.” There will, of course, be overlap, because both semantic shifts point to the same movement away from orthodoxy in evangelical Protestantism.

In the sixteenth century the Protestant Reformers referred to themselves, their teachings, and their followers as “evangelical”. For this reason, in continental Europe the term evangelical is still largely synonymous with “Protestant.” Before looking at how this word has developed different connotations in the English-speaking world and especially North America, we should consider why the Reformers adopted this term in the first place.

Evangelical is a word formed from the Greek word that is usually translated “Gospel” in the New Testament and which literally means “good news.” The Gospel is the kerygma of the Christian faith - the message of good news that Jesus Christ told His disciples to proclaim to the whole world. St. Paul summarized the content of that message in the fifteenth chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians – that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was buried, and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and the testimony of a long list of eyewitnesses culminating in his own. Stated in its fullest, it includes the entire revealed narrative concerning Jesus Christ from His Incarnation to His Ascension. This is why the books of the New Testament that provide such a narrative are, accordingly, called Gospels.

What, therefore, did the Protestant Reformers mean by calling themselves “evangelical”?

They did not mean to say that they had rediscovered the Gospel after it had been lost. The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and indeed His Incarnation and Ascension, are the very heart of the ecumenical or Catholic Creeds that the Church in both its Greek and Latin divisions, had been affirming since the early centuries of Christianity. In both the baptismal (Apostles’) and Eucharistic (Nicene-Constantinopolitan) Creeds these are the found in the second and longest, of the three paragraphs that make up the Creedal confession.

The reason the earliest Reformers, the Magisterial Reformers – Dr. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Thomas Cranmer, et. al., - began referring to their teachings as evangelical was because of their emphasis on the Pauline explanation of why the Gospel is just that, “Good News”, for the whole world. In this, they did not see themselves as recovering something that had been long buried beneath the accumulation of centuries of tradition. They saw their understanding of the Gospel as being consistent with rather than opposed to the traditional doctrine of the Catholic Church. They saw their opposition as being the papacy – the patriarch of Rome who had usurped jurisdiction far beyond the legitimate confines of his own ecclesiastical province in clear violations of the canons of the early Councils – and his followers. They called the papal doctrines that they opposed “Roman” rather than “Catholic”, insisting that they were fairly recent inventions of the papacy rather than part of the faith that was “quod ubique, quod semper, et quod ab omnibus creditum est” (“that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all”) and therefore “Catholic” as defined by St. Vincent of Lerins.

So what is the Pauline explanation of why the Gospel is “Good News”?

The answer to this is spelled out for us by St. Paul in his epistle to the Romans. In this epistle, he declares that the Gospel is “the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” because “therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, the just shall live by faith” (1:16-17). He then spends the next three and a half chapters explaining what this means, which explanation culminates in another summary statement of the Gospel, that Christ “was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification.” (4:25).

St. Paul begins his explanation with an indictment of the nations of the world for turning away from God to idols, which resulted in their being given over to a depraved mind and wicked practices. He rests this indictment upon God’s having given a sufficient revelation of Himself and His character, including His wrath against wicked and unrighteous behaviour, in His creation as to render all men without an excuse (1:18-32). He then shows that national Israel derives no special advantage in this regard from her having received God’s written Law because unless she obeys the Law it will only condemn her (chapter 2). The “day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God” is coming, he warns, and on that day He will “render to every man according to His deeds”, whether good or bad, regardless of whether they be Jew or Gentile and a hypothetical Gentile who lacks the written Law but nevertheless does what is right according to it, will be better off than a Jew, who boasts of the Law, but does not obey it. However, this hypothetical Gentile does not exist, because neither Jews nor Gentiles maintain the righteousness that God requires of man in His Law. With a string of quotations from the Old Testament, St. Paul draws his indictment of the entire world, Jew and Gentile, alike to a close by stating plainly that all have sinned, there is none righteous, that the whole world is guilty before God, and that therefore “by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight.” No one will be pronounced righteous by God, on account of his having done what is right.

While so far this sounds more like bad – even terrible - news than good, St. Paul then immediately declares that “now”, that is, in the Gospel, “the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and prophets.” The ‘righteousness of God” so manifested, however, is not the righteousness of God’s wrath against “all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men”, however, but the righteousness by which God counts as righteous all those who believe in Jesus Christ. This is the significance of the Gospel – Christ’s death is both a redemption (a price paid to free someone from bondage, in this case bondage to sin and death) and a propitiation (an offering which satisfies the offended justice of God against sinners) and therefore the grounds upon which God can so credit sinners who believe in Jesus with righteousness without compromising His own justice. (3:22-28).

In his next chapter St. Paul explains justification further by considering the example of Abraham. In the fifteenth chapter of Genesis, God comes to Abram – he would not become Abraham until two chapters later when circumcision was established as the sign of the covenant - in a vision and tells him “Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward.” This is in reference to Abram’s having just turned down the reward offered him by Bera, king of Sodom, for recovering all that had been taken by Chederlaomer of Elam and his confederates when the latter defeated the kings of the Plain of Jordan in the Battle of Siddim. Abram’s response was to ask God what He would give him, hinting heavily as to what he wanted it to be by twice mentioning that he was without child and that his servant, Eliezer of Damascus was his steward and heir. God makes him the promise he is looking for and tells him that “he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels” shall be his heir and that his seed shall be as the stars of heaven in number. Moses then says of Abram that “he believed in the LORD; and he counted it to him for righteousness.”

St. Paul draws two important conclusions from this. He uses the fact that this took place prior to Abraham’s circumcision to make the point that just as Jew and Gentile are alike sinners, so they are justified before God in the same way, by faith, and that Abraham is the father of all who follow him in being justified by faith, whether circumcised Jews or uncircumcised Gentiles. Before going into this, however, he makes it clear that works are no part of justification in the eyes of God. If Abraham was justified by works, he says, “he hath whereof to glory, but not before God”. That God credited Abraham’s faith to him as righteousness was an act of grace on God’s part – grace meaning favour that is freely bestowed upon its recipients. The justification of sinners in the eyes of God is always an act of grace – and therefore it can never be by works for “to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt.”

The Pauline doctrine of justification by faith without works became one of the five famous Solas in which the Reformers summed up their evangelical doctrine. Specifically, it became Sola Fide – by faith alone. In his Lectures on the Psalms of Ascent Dr. Luther declared of this doctrine: “quia isto articulo stante stat Ecclesia, ruente ruit Ecclesia” - “because if that article stands, the Church stands, if it collapses, so collapses the Church.” It accordingly was made prominent in the confessions of all the Churches of the Magisterial Reformation – Article XI of the Anglican Church’s Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, Article IV of the Lutheran Augsburg Confession and Article XXIII of the Reformed Belgic Confession. Against this doctrine, the Romanists asserted a) that it violated Catholic consensus, b) that it added a word “alone” which is never used by St. Paul to qualify “faith” in his writings on justification, and c) that the qualification of justifying faith by “alone” is in fact denied by St. James in the twenty-fourth verse of the second chapter of his epistle.

I will defer discussion of the first of these objections to Part Two of Part Two for while it pertains to a significant difference between the sixteenth century evangelicalism of the Magisterial Reformation and subsequent evangelicalisms, that difference has to do with their understanding of the Catholic tradition, namely that whereas the Reformers denied that any such break with Catholic consensus had taken place, the later evangelicals affirmed it. The second objection is entirely specious as the “alone” in “faith alone” means “and not by works” which is stated repeatedly and in much stronger language than this by St. Paul in Romans: 3:28; 4:4-8 (note the especially strong wording of verses 5 “to him that worketh not” and 8 “without works”); 9:30-32; and 10:4-10. Similar statements can be found throughout the entire corpus of Pauline literature. As for the third objection, it is quite evident that the Jacobean use of the terms “justification”, “faith” and “works” cannot be the same as the Pauline use of these same terms, for if the two Apostles were using all of these words with the same meaning, they directly contradicted each other. It is entirely defensible to maintain that all three words have different meanings in St. James than they do in St. Paul. It is certain, however, at least for anyone who believes in the verbal, plenary, inspiration of the entire New Testament, which all orthodox Christians do, that St. James means something different by the word “justification” than St. Paul and that the justification that he writes about is not justification before God. St. Paul himself tells us that in the second verse of the fourth chapter of Romans. (1)

It was because of their insistence on the primacy of the doctrine of justification by faith and not works that the sixteenth century Reformers called themselves “evangelical.” For it meant that the Gospel was just that – the message of the Good News of a salvation already accomplished and completed to be proclaimed to the world in the hearing and believing of which the salvation so proclaimed is personally appropriated by the believer and not a set of instructions as to how people are to save themselves.

Is it not evident that what is called “evangelical” today is radically different from this?

Consider the average “evangelical” formulation of the Gospel today. There are many variations, of course, but they all tend to follow this three part pattern. The first part is to present people with the Scriptural truth that all of us are sinners and cannot achieve the righteousness which God requires of us through our own works. The second part is to present the Gospel message itself – that God has given us His Only-Begotten Son to be our Saviour, Who died for our sins on the cross and rose again from the dead. So far this is in accordance with Scripture, Catholic orthodoxy, and the evangelical doctrines of the Reformers. The first part is what the Reformers called the message of the Law, the second part the message of the Gospel. The third part of the contemporary evangelical formulation, however, is to present the step – or steps, this detail is where all the variation comes in – that the individual must take to personally appropriate the offered salvation.

The wide variety of ways in which this step is presented is itself a huge problem because it generates confusion. Expressions such as “invite Jesus into your heart”, “accept Jesus Christ as your Saviour”, “make a commitment to Christ”, etc. are manifestly NOT different ways of saying the same thing and if one attempts to argue otherwise he is likely to end up proving merely that none of them mean anything at all. Moreover, to make these things into steps that one must take to appropriate Christ’s salvation AFTER one has heard and believed the Gospel is to teach salvation by works. As Orthodox Presbyterian Bible scholar Dr. Edward F. Hills put it:

And this would imply that we are saved not by believing but by a receiving which is different from believing, by a "yielding" to Christ perhaps, or a "surrendering" to Him, or a "turning over of our lives" to Him. But all this is salvation by works and contrary to the Bible. For the Scriptures plainly teach that to receive Christ as Saviour is to believe on Him. (The King James Version Defended, 4th edition, 1984, p. 184, bold indicating italics in original)

Sometimes, however, the step is presented as to “believe in Jesus Christ” or to “trust Jesus Christ” which expressions do mean the same thing. As the late Missouri Lutheran pastor John M. Drickamer put it:

What is faith? Faith is belief and faith is trust. Faith is believing the facts of the Gospel: God the Son, died for my sin and rose again from the dead; for His sake God has forgiven all my sins, so that I will not be damned to hell but welcomed into heaven forever. Faith is trusting God that this forgiveness is real because of Christ. There is no difference between faith as belief and faith as trust. Trusting a person to drive safely is the same as believing that he is a safe driver. (What is the Gospel? It is Finished, 1991, p. 2)

It is, of course, true to say that faith – believing the Gospel, trusting Jesus Christ – is how we appropriate the salvation God freely gives to ourselves. This is the role assigned to faith in God’s order of salvation. As the Right Reverend Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, nineteenth century Bishop of Lincoln, helpfully explained, St. Paul represents our faith neither as the principal cause, meritorious cause, efficient cause nor instrumental cause in God’s hand of our justification, for these are, respectively, God’s mercy, Christ’s death, the gracious operation of God the Holy Ghost, and the Holy Sacraments and Ministry of the Word, but rather:

He represents Faith as the instrument on our side, by which we rely on God’s word, and appeal to Him for mercy, and receive a grant of pardon, and a title to the Evangelical promises from God. (The New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in the Original Greek: With Notes by Christopher Wordsworth D.D., Part III – St. Paul’s Epistles, 1859, p. 200)

To present the appropriation of salvation by faith as a step to be taken after one has heard the Gospel and been persuaded of its truth is a distortion, however. Faith is precisely the condition of the heart that ensues from being persuaded of the truth of the Gospel and not a further step, an act of the will, to be taken in response to said persuasion. The Gospel, properly presented, as the sixteenth century Evangelical Reformers understood, directs the repentant sinner’s focus away from himself and makes it to rest in faith upon Jesus Christ, the Only-Begotten Son of God, crucified for us and risen again. By presenting faith as a step to be taken by an act of the will after one has been persuaded of the truth of the Gospel, contemporary Evangelical Gospel formulae redirect that focus onto ourselves.

In the English-speaking world, the term “evangelical” has come to refer to the subcategory of Protestants who present the Gospel in this way. It has taken on this meaning through a series of historical steps. The first of these took place in the seventeenth century when the Dortian Calvinists who did not separate from the Church of England after the Restoration began to use the label “evangelical” for their own party within the Church. Thus “evangelical” became, for a time, synonymous with “Calvinist”, which was a more limited usage than in the sixteenth century when it included all branches of Magisterial Protestantism. In the eighteenth century, however, there was a further shift in the meaning of the term when it came to be associated with the revival movement represented by both George Whitefield (Calvinist) and John Wesley (Arminian). Since Wesley differed from Whitefield on precisely the doctrines by which the seventeenth century Anglican evangelicals had designated their party, this demonstrates that in the eighteenth century the label evangelical had come to distinguish its referents more by a common experience than by a common doctrine. This became even more obvious in the early nineteenth century, a period in which the most prominent American evangelical preacher was Charles G. Finney. Finney’s doctrine was heretical by the standards of Calvinists and Arminians alike. Indeed, it was heretical by much broader standards than these. Finney came very close to Pelagianism, if he was not actually a true Pelagian, in his rejection of Original Sin. This placed him outside the orthodoxy of all three branches of the Magisterial Reformation – see Article IX of the Articles of Religion, Article II of the Augsburg Confession, and Article III of the Belgic Confession. Indeed, it placed him outside of the orthodoxy of Christ’s One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church for Pelagianism was condemned as heresy in the early centuries long before the Greek, Latin and English branches of the Church broke fellowship with each other. (2) It was with Finney, however, that the term evangelical finally arrived at a meaning recognizable as that of the present day. Having an identifiable conversion experience, understood primarily in terms of a change in one’s life and behaviour, came to be the distinguishing mark of the evangelical.

Moreover, Finney seems to have been the first to have translated the Gospel into the language of technique. By the language of technique, I mean the kind of language used in an instruction manual. A series of steps explaining the irreducible minimum of the correct procedure towards achieving a particular end. This language is the language of modern science and technology, and the product of rationalism. By the last century it had so permeated every field of knowledge that it came under the heavy critique of such thinkers as Michael Oakeshott, Jacques Ellul and George Grant. In the nineteenth century is was most evident in the writings of Charles Finney with regards to the conversion of sinners, leading to the criticism that his theology of evangelism was so mechanical and anthropocentric that, in B. B. Warfield’s words, “God might be eliminated from it entirely without essentially changing its character.” The contemporary evangelical presentation of the Gospel discussed above, while not as susceptible to the charge of having made God irrelevant, nevertheless has its discernible origins in his mechanical, technical, approach to making converts.

In the sixteenth century, evangelical designated the doctrine of justification by faith and not works, the doctrine that God, through events of the Gospel, the death for our sins and resurrection of His Son Jesus Christ, had accomplished the salvation of the world so that all who believe in Jesus Christ as He is proclaimed in the Gospel are pardoned of their sins and credited with a righteousness that is given to them freely rather than earned through their efforts. It was primarily doctrinal – about the truths which God has revealed in the Gospel in His Word – rather than experiential. Through the changes this term underwent between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, this was reversed and it became primarily experiential rather than doctrinal – about our experiences rather than about the truths of God as revealed in His Word.

This itself is an indication of a move away from orthodoxy. The truths which God has revealed in His Word are stable and unchanging. Human experience is ever shifting and changing. Remember the illustration with which Christ ended His famous Sermon on the Mount. God’s truths are a safe foundation to build upon. Personal experience is not. This does not mean that experience is not important, but it very much means that sound doctrine must take primacy over personal experience. When this is reversed in the basic meaning of an important theological label it does not speak well of the orthodoxy of the movement bearing that label. Note that none of this should be taken as meaning any particular individual values personal experience over sound doctrine merely because he calls himself an evangelical.

This change also indicates a shift in the ranking of the doctrines of salvation. The sixteenth century evangelical Reformers awarded the primacy to justification. The Romanists, as we shall discuss in Part Two of Part Two, maintained that this was a departure from Catholic orthodoxy which granted sanctification equality with justification, if not awarding it the primacy. Contemporary evangelicalism, going back to Finney, and some might argue even to Wesley, would seem to award the primacy to regeneration, at least in practice. In doing so, however, they have radically changed the meaning of the new birth. Whenever the new birth is mentioned in the Scriptures it is described as a sovereign act of God (John 1:13; 3:8), operating through His instrumental means of His Word (James 1:18; 1 Peter 1:23) and baptism (Romans 6:3-5; Colossians 2:12, Titus 3:5), independent of the will of the recipients. In contemporary evangelical theology the new birth is depicted as an experience that you can bring about by following a prescribed set of steps. This is pretty much the complete opposite of how it is presented in the Scriptures. We shall look at this further in Part Two of Part Two.

(1) Note also that the word “grace” does not appear in St. James’ discussion of justification. Whatever St. James means by “justification” it is by works and not by grace and ergo not the same “justification” of which St. Paul writes in Romans.

(2) There are some who would maintain that the Greek branch of the Church – the Eastern Orthodox – is Pelagian or Semi-Pelagian. Those who take this position are generally either strong Calvinists who mean it as a criticism of Eastern Orthodoxy or the type of person I referred to in Semantic Shift and the Decline of Orthodoxy: Part One – Orthodoxy when I said “there is also a type of convert who is drawn to the Eastern Church because its unfamiliarity to most Westerners allows him to selectively draw from minority voices within that tradition and present them as if they were the mainstream of that tradition in order to create the impression that ideas of his that would be considered liberal neo-Protestantism in the West are really the ancient views of this venerable Church.” Either way, what they are saying is a distortion of the fact that the Eastern and Western branches of the Church were beginning to diverge already in the days of St. Augustine and that the Eastern Church never embraced Augustinianism. This does not mean that it accepted a form of Pelagianism or dissented from the condemnation of such as heresy by the pre-Schismatic Church. The kind of reasoning that would equate non-Augustinianism with Pelagianism or semi-Pelagianism is the same kind that argues that if you are not a Calvinist then you must be an Arminian or vice versa. It is invalid in either case. The Greek Church’s problem with Augustinianism was not with the idea that we have all inherited a broken, fallen, sinful nature from Adam. It was with the idea that we have inherited his guilt for the specific sin committed by Adam and Eve. Pelagianism requires the denial of the former as well as the latter. These ideas can be distinguished as “Original Sin” and “Original Guilt” although the lack of consistent usage has led to much confusion.