Hier Stehe Ich!

 Every year since I started Throne, Altar, Liberty I have, on the kalends of January which is the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ on the Church Kalendar and New Year's Day on the civil calendar, posted an essay summarizing where I stand on matters political, religious and cultural, the subjects on which I write.  It is a custom I adopted from one of my own favourite writers, the late Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel.   I have often used Dr. Luther's famous "Here I Stand" as the title in one language or another.   This year it is the German original.  Each year it is a challenge to write this anew because, while I hope my views have matured they have remained basically the same.   Each year I have to resist  the temptation to  just point to T. S Eliot's "Anglo-Catholic in religion, royalist in politics, classicist in literature" and say ditto.   I usually do make reference to Eliot's famous self-description, which I read as a twentieth-century update of the definition of Tory that Dr. Johnson wrote for his dictionary, because it provides a handy frame on which to organize my thoughts.

Before getting into my views I will provide as usual some basic background information about myself.  I am a patriotic citizen of Commonwealth Realm that is the Dominion of Canada and a loyal subject of His Majesty King Charles III as I was all my life prior to his accession of his mother of Blessed Memory, our late Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth II. I love my country's traditional institutions, Loyalist history, and basically everything about Canada that the sniveling twit who currently occupies the Prime Minister's Office either wishes we would forget or is endlessly apologizing for.  I have lived all my life in the province of Manitoba, where I was raised on a farm near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers, where I studied theology for five years at what is now Providence University College - at the time it was Providence College and Theological Seminary - in Otterbourne which is a small college town south of the provincial capital, Winnipeg, where I have lived for the almost quarter of a century since.

Am I, like T. S. Eliot an "Anglo-Catholic in religion"?  If by Anglo-Catholic you mean holding the theology expressed in the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, the admirable collection published by John Henry Parker in the nineteenth century of the writings of the classical Anglican divines of the centuries previous including Lancelot Andrewes, the martyred King Charles I's martyred Archbishop William  Laud and the other Caroline Divines, the scholarly apologist for Trinitarian orthodoxy Bishop George Bull and the Non-Juror George Hickes, I would say yes.     If you mean embracing the views of the Oxford Movement I would be more hesitant.   I think that the most important thing Keble, Newman, Pusey et al.  got right was that the truest and most important establishment of the Church was that by Christ through His Apostles rather than establishment by the state.   I have far less sympathy for the tendency that  manifested itself in some, not all, of them to look Romeward, to regret the Reformation for reasons other than that all schism that harms the visible unity of the Church is regrettable, and to regard the Anglican formularies with a "this will have to do for now" type attitude.   The Vincentian Canon, "that which is believed everywhere, at all times, and by all", and its tests of antiquity (does it go back to the Apostles), universality (is it held throughout the Church in all regions and ages rather than particular to one time and place), and consent (was it affirmed by the Church's leadership in a way that was subsequently received as authoritative throughout the Church) is in my view the right way of determining what is truly Catholic, not whether it has been declared dogma by the Patriarch of Rome or one of the Councils that his adherents have held since the Great Schism between East and West.   I come from a family in which most of my relatives were either United Church (Presbyterian/Methodist) or Anglican, became a believer with an evangelical conversion when I was 15, was baptized by immersion in a Baptist church while a teenager and confirmed in the Anglican Church as an adult.  As my theology matured I came to realize and respect the Symbols handed down from the ancient Church - the Apostles' and Nicene (Constantinopolitan) Creeds and the Athanasian Symbol - as the basic definitions of Scriptural orthodoxy, to recognize that episcopalian Church government is not adiaphora but clearly established in the New Testament (the Apostles governed the whole Church, while it was localized in Jerusalem they exercised the authority Christ gave them to establish the order of deacons, after the Church was scattered they appointed presbyters or elders over the local Churches which seems to be something they borrowed from the synagogues, and as their ministries closed they passed on to others, Scriptural examples of which include SS Timothy and Titus  their government over the Church including the power to ordain the lower  orders), and that the ministers of the Church are priests (St. Paul explicitly states this of himself in the Greek of Romans 15:15) charged not with offering new sacrifices but with feeding the people of God with Christ's One Sacrifice through the Sacramental medium of bread and wine.  Thus I am basically a High Anglican of the pre-Oxford type, with a  Lutheran soteriology, and a fundamentalist-minus-the-separatism approach to basic orthodoxy who regards every article of the ancient Symbols taken literally as fundamental and the Bible as God's written Word, by verbal, plenary inspiration, infallible and inerrant, which we are to believe and obey rather than to subject to "criticism" based on the false notion that because God used human writers to write the book of which He is the Author that it is a human book rather than a divine book.   Criticism based on that false notion makes fools out of those who engage in it, whether it be the higher critics who think that the fact that Moses varied which name for God he used means that his books were slapped together by some editor after the Babylonian Captivity from previously separate sources despite the total lack of anything such as examples of these "sources" in a pre-"redaction" state of the type that would logically constitute actual evidence or the lower or textual critics who think that the most authentic text of the New Testament is not to be found in that that has been handed down in the Church as evidenced by the thousands of manuscripts she has used (these are of the Byzantine text type) but either in small handful of old manuscripts that were not in general use and were particular to one region (the Alexandrian text) or in something slapped together by text critics in the last century which can be found in no manuscript whatsoever (the eclectic text).  Someone who makes the false idea that the Bible is a human book rather than God's book the basis of his study of it will end up drawing unsubstantiated conclusions about it that no competent scholar would similarly draw about actual human books and will end up sounding like a blithering idiot.  So expect me to thump the Authorized (1611) Bible as I tell you that salvation is a free gift that God has given to all us sinners in Jesus Christ, that the only means whereby we can receive it is faith,  that faith is formed in us by the Holy Ghost through the Gospel brought to us in the Word and Sacrament ministered to us by the Church whose Scripturally established governors under her Head, Jesus Christ, are the bishops in whose order the ordinary governing office of the Apostles has continued to this day.

That I am a "royalist in politics" should already be evident from the second paragraph if it is not sufficiently evident from the title of my website.   I will add here that I am also a monarchist.   For some that will be a redundancy, the two terms being for them interchangeable.   It is for the sake of others who distinguish between the two that I add that I am both.   I am a much stronger monarchist than those Canadian conservatives are who are basically liberal democrats but who defend our monarchy because it is our tradition and make its non-interference with their real political ideal the sole basis of their argument.   I have been instinctually a monarchist all my life.   While C. S. Lewis famously said that monarchy is an idea easily debunked but those who debunk it impoverish and bring misery upon themselves (I am paraphrasing from  memory, Lewis said it better than that) I have found as I have studied the matter over the years that monarchy is rationally defensible.   Plato and Aristotle argued that the rule of true kings is the best of simple constitutions and I think their arguments still stand, just as I think that in our age the divisiveness, partisanship, and other evils that attend upon democratically elected government make an ironclad case for hereditary monarchy that makes the unifying figure at the head of the state one who does not owe his office to partisan politics.  Thus I would say that we should be arguing that our monarchy is essential not that it is merely acceptable.   The Canadian Tory classic by John Farthing, Freedom Wears a Crown, makes a strong case for monarchy's essential role in our constitution similar to that frequently made by Eugene Forsey.  I am grateful to Ron Dart for drawing my attention to these men and their books years ago.   I find little to admire in the Modern ideal of democracy and defend instead the institution of Parliament for while Parliament is, of course, a democratic institution it is also a traditional one, a concrete institution that predates the Modern Age and has long proven its worth, which to me outweighs all the flimsy arguments Moderns make for democracy.   Ultimately, I have found a sure and certain foundation for monarchism in orthodox Christianity.   God is the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the absolute Sovereign Ruler of His Creation, i.e., all other than Himself that exists.  In the governance of the universe, we find the ideal form - think Plato here - of government, of which temporal earthly governments are imperfect representations and to which, the greater their conformity, the more their perfection will be.   This is why the most orthodox forms of Christianity - traditional Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, traditional Roman Catholicism, and the better kind of Lutheranism - saw Christian monarchy as the highest form of earthly civilization, and the least orthodox forms that can still be seen as  Christian in some recognizable sense, Puritanism and Anabaptism, are the ones that contradicted the obvious implication of the title "King of Kings" by saying "no king but King Jesus".   

It is in the sense of someone who holds the views expressed in the previous two paragraphs and not in the common partisan sense of the word that I call myself a Tory.   The words "conservative" and "right-wing" as they are used today, even by most who self-apply them, have had their meaning defined for them by the very liberalism and the Left they purport to oppose.   Liberalism is the spirit of the Modern Age.   It consists of the demand for ever increasing liberty (in the sense of individual autonomy) and equality, despite the fact obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that these two cannot be maximized at the same time.   The universal homogeneity that it demands would if actualized be the ultimate form of totalitarian tyranny in which freedom, the real human good and not liberalism's false ideal of liberty/individual autonomy, would be eliminated entirely.   The Left also worships liberalism's false gods and historically has differed from liberalism primarily in its notion of how to achieve their goal.   A century ago the Left was identified primarily with socialism, the idea that all of man's problems can be traced to economic equality arising out of the private ownership of property and are solvable by eliminating private ownership and replacing it with public ownership.   From the standpoint of orthodox Christianity this is utterly repugnant because it misdiagnoses the human condition (the correct diagnosis is sin), prescribes the wrong medicine (the right medicine is the grace of God freely given to man in Jesus Christ), and is basically the second worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, Envy, disguising itself with the mask of the highest of the Christian virtues, charitable love.   Today, the Left is identified primarily with an expression  arising out of American racial grievance politics, "wokeness".   "Wokeness" is like socialism in that it claims (generally falsely) to be the mouthpiece for the oppressed, but differs from socialism in that it it does not divide people into oppressor/oppressed by economic status (Marx's "haves" and "have nots") but by a legion of personal identities based on such things as race, sex, gender, etc.   Some, such as Dr. Paul Gottfried, have argued on the basis of specific content that today's Left is something totally different from the Left of a century ago, from the standpoint of orthodox Christianity there is a discernable continuity in the Left.   Whether it speaks in terms of economics or in the terms of race and sex, the Left is an entirely destructive movement, driven by hatred of civilization as it historically has existed for not living up to the false and self-contradictory ideals of liberalism, that, whenever it has succeeded in tearing something down, has never been able to build anything good let alone better on the ashes of the good if not perfect that it destroyed.   The orthodox Christian must condemn this utterly because it clearly displays the spirit of Satan who operates out of the same hatred directed towards God.   Therefore I describe my orthodox Christian monarchist views as Tory and reactionary (in John Lukacs' sense of the term, basically someone willing to think outside the Modern box, not by embracing the nihilism of post-Modernism but rather the good in the pre-Modern), preferring these terms over conservative which for the most part denotes a false opposition to liberalism and Left defined entirely by liberalism and the Left.

As for being a "classicist in literature" I think that if we take this to  mean someone who seeks to learn from Matthew Arnold's "the best that has been thought and said" this is a goal that someone with the views expressed above can recognize as most worthy to pursue with regards not just to literature and reading, but to the other elements of culture such as music and the visual arts as well.   It is also a difficult one to consistently follow as many are the enticements, more so today than ever before, to distract one from the classical heights of the Great Books and the Great Tradition into the murky swamps of corporate, mass-manufactured, pop culture.   I have striven to follow this goal on and off again - it makes an excellent resolution for those who do that sort of thing today - with varying degrees of success at resisting the distractions.   Perversely, I have found stubborn contrariness has often been a great motivator in this regards.   I read Mark Twain's remark that a "classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read" years ago and thought to myself "Sez you, Sam Clemens" and set out to read nothing but classics, persisting in this for several months.   Similarly, Thomas Fleming, the former editor of Chronicles Magazine several times enriched my reading habits with remarks about about books nobody was familiar with today prompting a "Sez you, Tom Fleming" response.   Today, as the Left in its "woke" form as described in the previous paragraph has laid siege to the Great Books and the Great Tradition it is more important than ever to reacquaint ourselves with "the best that has been thought and said".   This is a far better and ultimately more effective way of resisting wokeness than generating and posting any number of anti-woke internet memes could ever be.   So I resolve today once again to seek to elevate my reading, listening and viewing habits in 2024 and  encourage you to do the same.

Happy New Year!

God Save the King!

An English Rose not a Dutch TULIP

The Church of England and the other national Churches descended from her is a Reformed Catholic Church.   From the English Reformation on Anglicans have disagreed among themselves as to which word should be stressed.   High Churchmen stress the Catholic, Low Churchmen stress the Reformed.  I am a High Churchman and stress the Catholicity of the Anglican Church.   By this I do not mean that I stress what the Anglican Church has in common with the Roman Church, but what the Anglican Church shares with all the Churches organically descended from the first Church in Jerusalem - the Catholic faith confessed in the ancient Creeds especially the Nicene-Constantinopolitan, the Apostolic government and priesthood, the Gospel Sacraments, liturgical worship, and the doctrines, practices, customs and traditions that are the heritage of all Christians in all Churches.    Now Anglican High Churchmanship underwent a change in the nineteenth century due to the Oxford or Tractarian Movement of the 1830s.   The pre-Tractarian High Churchmen generally called themselves “Orthodox”, did not regard the English Reformation as a regrettable mistake, had no problem identifying as Protestant as well as Catholic, and had little to no interest in reintroducing practices jettisoned in the English Reformation, let alone new ones that Rome had introduced in the Council of Trent.   After the Oxford Movement many High Churchmen preferred the term "Anglo-Catholic", saw the English Reformation as something to be regretted, avoided the term Protestant, and introduced liturgical reforms based on Rome’s Tridentine model.   Although my own High Churchmanship is far closer to that of the older pre-Tractarian model, I don’t agree with the judgement that a certain school of Low Churchmen have been making as of late that the Oxford Movement was a disastrous betrayal of Anglicanism.   I think that despite a tendency among some of the Tractarians to embrace as Catholic what was merely Roman, the reverse error of the Hyper-Protestants who reject as Roman what is truly Catholic, the Oxford Movement was overall more for the good than otherwise.

 

In saying that the Anglican Church is Reformed Catholic I do not mean that it is a compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism, a middle ground that is neither the one nor the other, which is the image that the familiar expression via media unfortunately tends to conjure up.   The Anglican tradition is both fully Protestant and fully Catholic.   It is however a via media within both Protestantism and Catholicism.   The Anglican expression of Catholicism is not entirely that of the Roman Church nor that of the Eastern Orthodox but is somewhere between the two.   Our Episcopal hierarchical structure is closer to that of the Eastern Orthodox, for example, but we confess the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed with the filioque clause.   As a via media within Protestantism, it is often said that Anglicanism is a via media between Wittenberg and Geneva, meaning between the Lutheran and Calvinist expressions of Protestantism.   I don’t think anybody would be foolish enough to think us closer to Zurich.  

That brings me to the topic of this essay, which is another claim made by the same school of Low Churchmen referred to in the first paragraph.   In my last essay which was on the topic of Hyper-Protestantism I addressed certain similarities between this school and the Hyper-Protestants.   Here I wish to address their claim that true Anglicanism is not just Protestant generally, but Reformed in the sense of the specific form of Protestant theology that the word Reformed denotes in denominational titles such as Dutch Reformed or Reformed Baptist.   That type of theology is often called Calvinist, although this is misleading, and it is usually contrasted with Arminianism, which is even more misleading, and most misleading of all it is claimed that Arminianism is a close relative of Romanism.   Why these things are misleading will become clear when I give some background history to Reformed theology.   First, however, I clarify that what I will be arguing against is the claim that the Articles of Religion, which in their final form were adopted by the Church of England in 1571 as part of the Elizabethan Settlement, are distinctly Calvinist, not as opposed to Arminianism which did not exist in 1571, but as opposed to Lutheranism.    While this claim has some validity when it comes to the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, it is completely false when it comes to soteriology which is where our focus will be, and is utterly laughable when it comes to any other topic.

 

Thomas Cranmer, who was consecrated and installed as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1533 during the reign of Henry VIII was the principal leader of the English Reformation until the reign of Mary in which he was removed from office and executed.   An even more conservative Reformer than Dr. Luther, at the beginning of the English Reformation he was a Christian humanist of the same type as Erasmus and his reforms took the Patristic period rather than what was going on in continental Protestantism as their model.   Over the course of his career he became more influenced by the continental Protestants, at first the German Lutherans, then towards the end of his life, the Calvinists.   When, after the brief interruption of the English Reformation during the reign of Mary, Elizabeth I acceded the throne, the English Reformation took an even more conservative turn.   In 1559 she ordered the Black Rubric excised from the Book of Common Prayer.   This had been inserted into the Order for Holy Communion in the second Edwardian Prayer Book (1552) as an attempt at compromise between Scottish Calvinist Reformer John Knox’s argument that Communion should be received sitting and Cranmer’s conservative defence of kneeling, but it ended up more radical than either Cranmer or Knox, by asserting the Zwinglian view of the Sacrament (mere memorialism).   When it was eventually re-inserted into the Prayer Book it was in the Restoration edition (1662) and with the Zwinglian language excised.   In 1563, Archbishop Matthew Parker led Convocation in revising the Forty-Two Articles of Religion that Cranmer had drafted towards the end of Edward’s reign.   After a few more tweaks they become the Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571.   The Article on the Lord’s Supper excludes both the Roman doctrine of Transubstantiation and Zwinglian memorialism.   While what it affirms sounds closer to Calvin’s view than any other continental Reformer, it needs to be compared with how the same Article read in the Forty-Two Articles.   Language that specifically excluded the Lutheran view was omitted from the final version.   That language reads:

 

Forasmuch as the truth of man’s nature requires that the body of one and the self-same man cannot be at one time in diverse places, but must needs be in some one certain place, the body of Christ cannot be present at one time in many and diverse places. Because (as Holy Scripture does teach) Christ was taken up into heaven, and there shall continue unto the end of the world, a faithful man ought not, either to believe or openly to confess the real and bodily presence (as they term it) of Christ’s flesh and blood in the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.

 

These words explicitly state the Calvinist position and include the reasoning that is the basis of the Lutheran accusation that Calvinists are crypto-Nestorians.   They were excised from the final version that became cemented as the official Anglican doctrine in the Elizabethan Settlement.   In their place was put the following:

 

The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is Faith.

 

The result was that in the Thirty-Nine Articles, Article XXVIII  (it was Article XXIX in the Forty-Two Articles) either a) affirmed a milder, more watered down, version of the Calvinist doctrine or b) was deliberately made ambiguous enough to allow for both Lutheran and Calvinist interpretations and exclude only the Roman and Zwinglian.   The overall tenour of the Elizabethan Settlement, which was to minimize divisive stances so as to maintain peace in the realm and Church, and the fact that if Parker et al. wished the Article to endorse the Calvinist position over the Lutheran they could have left it unedited, suggests that b) is the correct understanding here.

 

It was during the reign of Elizabeth that a decidedly Calvinist element arose in the English Church that called for reforms that greatly exceeded those of the Settlement.   These are historically remembered as the Puritans and towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign Richard Hooker provided an Anglican answer to their arguments, especially as expressed by Thomas Cartwright, in his Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie.   In the Jacobean and Carolinian reigns, the next generation of Puritans became more extreme both in their Calvinism and their demands.   They accused Orthodox Churchmen like Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, who oversaw the translation of the Authorized Bible in King James I’s reign, and Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, of Arminianism for opposing their excessive preaching of predestination although it is highly unlikely that either man, both of whom tended to ignore contemporary theologians of narrow schools in favour of the Church fathers, was influenced much or at all by Jacob Arminius and his followers.   They also accused the same of being closet papists.   Here we see the first instance of this Calvinist linking of Arminianism with Romanism that has resurfaced in the contemporary school that I am addressing.   The second accusation was also ludicrous.   Andrewes, in his responses to Cardinal Bellarmine, and Laud in his published Conversation with the Jesuit Fischer, were the closest thing the Church of England had to the scholastics who had arisen in the Lutheran and Reformed Churches (think Johann Gerhard and Martin Chemnitz for the Lutherans, Zacharias Ursinus and Francis Turretin for the Reformed) to answer the new arguments from a new generation of Roman apologists such as said Cardinal Bellarmine who were armed with the re-articulation of Roman doctrine that had come out of the Council of Trent.   At any rate, the Puritans became so extreme that they, having taken control of Parliament, fought a civil war against King Charles I, captured, illegally tried, and murdered him, then established an interregnum under the protectorate of the tyrannical Oliver Cromwell who in his quest to rob the English people of all joy cancelled Christmas and Easter, shut down the theatres, outlawed games, sports, and other amusements outside of religious services on Sundays (the only day of the week people weren’t working), stripped the Churches of artwork and organs, imposed a legalism that out-Phariseed the Pharisees, and basically did everything in his power to prove H. L. Mencken right when he defined Puritanism as “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy”.   Their revolt against their king would become the inspiration towards the end of the next century of the French Revolution which in turn became the model for all subsequent Communist revolutions.   Since the Puritanical party in Parliament became the Whigs after the Restoration and Puritanism in North America developed into the Yankee culture of New England, Puritanism can be said to be the source of the major evils of the Modern Age – liberalism, Americanism, and Communism.   Whether consciously or not, the Puritan revolt against King Charles I was itself modelled after an earlier such revolt.   As Dr. Johnson put it “the first Whig was the devil”.

 

After the Restoration, which was when the British, sick to death of Puritanism, restored Charles II to his rightful throne, and restored the Church of England to the pre-Puritan status quo, the Puritan Calvinists divided among themselves into the Nonconformists, those unwilling to accept the restored Church of England who left and formed schismatic sects, and those for whom the restored Church of England was acceptable, who became the first Low Churchmen or as they were called at the time, Evangelicals (this was one of the first, if not the first, use of this term with a narrower sense than “Protestant”).   In the eighteenth century, Arminian Low Churchmen first began to appear due to the influence of John Wesley, and these introduced a new emphasis on experience into Evangelicalism.   The embrace of strict, academic, Reformed theology by many evangelicals in the Twentieth Century is, perhaps, a reaction to what became an over-emphasis on experience in the revivalist heritage of evangelicalism, and what we are seeing in this new school of Low Church Calvinism may be the Anglican expression of this phenomenon.

 

Their claim that Anglicanism in her Articles of Religion is specifically Reformed in the sense of Calvinist is not born out by an examination of the Articles.   It is also rather anachronistic because what they mean by Reformed theology or Calvinism had not yet been formulated in the way we know it today at the time the Articles received royal assent.   This may seem a strange thing to say, since John Calvin died in 1564, but what is called Calvinism today was formulated over sixty years after his death in response to a dissenting movement that had arisen within the Reformed tradition.   Theodore Beza, Calvin’s prize pupil and his successor in Geneva, had articulated a version of the doctrine of predestination that anyone with an ounce of humanity had to reject.   Impiously inquiring into the secret counsels of God, which is arrogant and forbidden to humanity, he had come up with the doctrine of supralapsarianism.   That is a big word that basically means that God first chose people to damn to hell, then decided to let them fall into sin so He would have grounds to damn them.  In 1582 – eleven years after the Articles of Religion – a Dutch Reformed student by the name of Jakob Hermanszoon, better known by the Latin version of his name Jacob Arminius, came to Geneva to study under Beza.   Later that decade he was ordained a pastor in Amsterdam and was asked by the Ecclesiastical Council there to defend Beza’s doctrine of supralapsarianism against Dirck Coornhert who had rejected it.   Arminius attempted to do this but found that he could not honestly do so and began to develop a modified form of Reformed theology that emphasized free will rather than predestination.   He died in 1609 and the following year, the year before the Authorized Bible was published in England, his followers published The Five Articles of Remonstrance, stating their views on election, predestination, and free will.   In 1618, the Dutch Reformed Church convened the Synod of Dort to answer this document and the following year published its Canons, of which there were five, one for each Article of Remonstrance.   These have ever since been called the Five Points of Calvinism and are usually placed in a slightly different order than they appear in the Canons of Dort so as to make the acronym TULIP – Total Depravity (or Inability), Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and Perseverance of the Saints.

 

Just in case you failed to pick up on that, the five points regarded as definitive of Calvinism today, were formulated in 1618-1619 in response to Arminianism, itself a response to supralapsarianism, a doctrine first taught by Calvin’s successor rather than Calvin himself.   Arminianism, therefore, rather than being a “sister of Romanism”, is most closely related within the various schools of Christian theology, to Calvinism itself.   Calvinism versus Arminianism, is an in-the-family dispute within the Reformed branch of Protestantism.   Calvinism and Arminianism disagree on all five points – that is kind of the point – although in other areas, they are closer to each other, than to any other form of Christianity, including the other Protestant traditions.   The five points also separate Calvinism from the other Protestant traditions.

 

Before looking at our Anglican Articles note how Lutheranism and Calvinism, agree and disagree on these matters.   Lutheranism and Calvinism are both monergistic (salvation is entirely the work of God not a cooperative effort between God and the one being saved) and Augustinian, and so both can affirm the first point of Calvinism at least if it is understood as the Augustinian concept of Original Sin, that the Fall so affected human nature as to make man utterly helpless in the matter of his own salvation and dependent utterly on the Grace of God.   Calvinists sometimes elaborate this in ways other Christians cannot affirm, such as claiming that the Image of God was wiped out by Original Sin.  Lutherans can also affirm unconditional election, but they reject double predestination which includes the concept of reprobation (predestination to hell) which Calvinism affirms.   So there is agreement between Lutheranism and Calvinism on one and a half points of Calvinism.   On the other points there is disagreement.   Lutherans most definitely do not believe in Limited Atonement – it conflicts with their understanding of the Gospel as a proclamation of Objective Justification accomplished for all human beings in Christ, that each human being must receive by faith for it to be validated as his own Subjective Justification.   Nor do they believe in Irresistible Grace.   God’s will, when worked through His Own power directly, is irresistible, but when God works through intermediate means, other wills can resist His own.   In the case of salvation, the salvation God accomplished for the world in Jesus Christ is brought to individuals through the intermediate means of the Gospel, which in both forms, Word and Sacrament, has in itself sufficient Grace to produce faith in the human heart, but because that Grace is conveyed through intermediate means, it is resistible rather than irresistible.   If someone believes it is entirely due to the Grace in the Gospel, he adds nothing of his own to it, if someone remains in unbelief, this is entirely due to his own resistance, and there is no answer, no simple one at any rate, to the question of cur alii, alii non (why some, not others).   On Perseverance both Lutherans and Calvinists affirm that the elect will persevere to the end and receive final salvation, but Calvinists combine this with the concept of perpetual justification – that after one is initially justified, this justification persists and is not lost through subsequent sin, a doctrine that among Baptists and Plymouth Brethren is often affirmed without Perseverance – and Lutherans do not, teaching that someone who commits Mortal Sin after initial justification loses it until he repents and is forgiven.

 

So where do our Articles stand on all of this?

 

Well, unsurprisingly the only points directly addressed are the first two, on which Lutherans and Calvinists mostly agree.   Articles IX and X, “Of Original or Birth Sin” and “Of Free-Will” respectively, affirm the Augustinian view of these things against the Pelagian.   Article XVII is entitled “Of Predestination and Election”.   Here it is 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.

 

Note there is no affirmation of Reprobation in this Article.   Lutherans as well as Calvinists can confess it.   Indeed, the second paragraph can almost be taken as an affirmation of the Lutheran understanding of the doctrine against the Calvinist.   Compare what it says about the doctrine being a comfort for the godly and not something to be excessively and indiscriminately preached because it can have a deleterious effect on the ungodly with Article XI of the Formula of Concord.   Paragraph 89 of the Solid Declaration of that Article reads:

 

Moreover, this doctrine gives no one a cause either for despondency or for a shameless, dissolute life, namely, when men are taught that they must seek eternal election in Christ and His holy Gospel, as in the Book of Life, which excludes no penitent sinner, but beckons and calls all the poor, heavy-laden, and troubled sinners [who are disturbed by the sense of God’s wrath], to repentance and the knowledge of their sins and to faith in Christ, and promises the Holy Ghost for purification and renewal, 90 and thus gives the most enduring consolation to all troubled, afflicted men, that they know that their salvation is not placed in their own hands,-for otherwise they would lose it much more easily than was the case with Adam and Eve in paradise, yea, every hour and moment,-but in the gracious election of God, which He has revealed to us in Christ, out of whose hand no man shall pluck us, John 10:28; 2 Tim. 2:19.

 

Limited Atonement (or Particular Redemption), the idea that Jesus died only for the elect is not affirmed in the Thirty-Nine Articles, and indeed, Limited Atonement contradicts both Articles II and XXXI.   Article II, which is about the “Word or Son of God, which was made very Man” ends with the affirmation that He “truly suffered, was crucified, dead and buried, to reconcile his Father to us, and to be a sacrifice, not only for original guilt, but also for all actual sins of men” and Article XXXI, “Of the one Oblation of Christ finished upon the Cross” reads:

 

The Offering of Christ once made is that perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction, for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual; and there is none other satisfaction for sin, but that alone. Wherefore the sacrifices of Masses, in the which it was commonly said, that the Priest did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables, and dangerous deceits.

 

There is no affirmation of Irresistible Grace (or Effectual Calling for Calvinists who are allergic to TULIPs) in the Articles and it is not consistent with the language used of the Sacraments in Article XXV:

 

Sacraments ordained of Christ be not only badges or tokens of Christian men’s profession, but rather they be certain sure witnesses, and effectual signs of grace, and God’s good will towards us, by the which he doth work invisibly in us, and doth not only quicken, but also strengthen and confirm our Faith in him.

 

Remember, Grace that is conveyed through intermediate means is Grace that can be resisted.    Now, for the final petal in the TULIP, let us turn to Article XVI “Of Sin After Baptism”.  This Article reads:

 

Not every deadly sin willingly committed after Baptism is sin against the Holy Ghost, and unpardonable. Wherefore the grant of repentance is not to be denied to such as fall into sin after Baptism. After we have received the Holy Ghost, we may depart from grace given, and fall into sin, and by the grace of God we may arise again, and amend our lives. And therefore they are to be condemned, which say, they can no more sin as long as they live here, or deny the place of forgiveness to such as truly repent.

 

The language here strongly suggests the Lutheran position without explicitly affirming it against the Calvinist.   Note the words “deadly sin willingly committed after Baptism”.   This is the concept of Mortal Sin as it is understood in Lutheran theology.   Calvinist theology does not allow for a concept of Mortal Sin which is probably why the expression is avoided.   The possibility of departing from grace is affirmed, although in such a way that it is only the heresy of those who say that once you become a Christian you cannot sin again that can be definitely said  to be denied here rather than the Calvinist doctrine of perpetual justification.   What is most strongly affirmed, that repentance and forgiveness are available to those who sin after Baptism, is believed by all orthodox Christians, and what is condemned, earthly sinless perfectionism and the unavailability of forgiveness, are ideas asserted only by the looniest of wing-nuts.   Overall, the Article reads as a statement of the Lutheran view, worded carefully so as not to offend Calvinists.

 

From what we have just seen, those who would say that the Articles of Religion are Reformed in the sense of Calvinist as opposed to Lutheran, are clearly in the wrong when it comes to soteriology.   The Articles lean Lutheran, but in such a way as to not exclude Calvinists.  On the Lord’s Supper, they lean Calvinist, but in such a way as to not exclude Lutherans.   On Church government they are clearly not Calvinist – they affirm the Episcopal government shared by every Church everywhere before the sixteenth century, retained by the Anglican Church and by some Lutherans.   On the very matter of deciding what from the pre-Reformation tradition can be retained and what must be jettisoned they affirm in Article XX the normative principle which they share with the Lutheran Augsburg Confession rather than the regulative principle of the Calvinists and Anabaptists.

 

Those Low Churchmen who think the only true Anglicans are Five Point Calvinists clearly haven’t got a clue what they are talking about.

 

 

 

 

Via Media Inter Vias Medias

 The Anglican form of the Christian faith has often been described as a via media or “middle road.”   This is usually taken to be a compliment, a positive evaluation, one which evokes Aristotle’s idea of virtue as the path that lies between two extremes of vice.   In the case of the Anglican faith, its middle way is customarily said to fall between Catholicism and Protestantism.   

 

The roots of this way of explaining the Anglican faith can be found in the English Reformation.   In its fullest sense, the English Reformation is a period of history that can be said to have begun prior to Luther when the Christian version of Renaissance humanism spread to England and gave rise to scholastic criticism of ecclesiastical abuses and stretched all the way to the Restoration in which Charles II was brought back to his throne and the episcopal order was brought back to the Church of England.    The traditional and historical formularies of the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion – the Coverdale Psalter, Cranmer’s English liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer, the Articles of Religion, the Authorized Version of the Holy Bible, etc. – all came out of the long English Reformation. 

 

There are two important events which intersect this period.   The first is the reign of Mary (1553-1558) which saw the Church of England temporarily brought back under papal rule.   The second is the Council of Trent (1545-1563) in which the papacy and its adherents responded to the continental Reformation.   Note that the years of the first event are contained entirely within those of the second.   Both events had a tremendous impact on the course of the English Reformation.   Apart from them it is unlikely that the trajectory of the English Reformation would ever have been thought of in terms of a middle way and instead the English Reformation would have been simply regarded as being the slowest moving, most cautious and conservative, part of the same Protestant Reformation that was occurring in continental Europe.

 

In the Council of Trent, however, Rome had launched the Counter Reformation, in which she reformed herself with regards to many of the most grievous examples of complaints against her that were of the nature of moral corruption, but doubled down on the doctrines to which the Reformers had objected, working out a comprehensive theological defence of such doctrines (1) and beginning an aggressive campaign aimed at bringing the Protestants back under the papal yoke.  Meanwhile the persecutions of the reign of Mary had radicalized a certain kind of English Protestant, both by hardening him against the oppression of Rome and by driving him into exile in Geneva where he came under the influence of republican Calvinists.   Thus the Puritan was born.  When the Church of England reintroduced the earlier reforms in the reign of Elizabeth I, it was therefore assaulted on two sides, from the new Roman Catholic apologists armed with Tridentine ammunition and from the Puritans.   This forced her to clarify her own position, which naturally took the form of a via media between these two extremes.   Officially, this position was defined by the Elizabethan Settlement, but the post-Mary, post-Trent period also saw the most skilled apologists that the Church of England has ever known work out the theological case for her stance.   The foremost example of these was Richard Hooker whose extensive articulation and defence of the basic principles of the Church was written against Puritanism’s extreme claims.   Following shortly after Hooker, Bishop Lancelot Andrewes defended the same against Tridentine theology and its Jesuit apologists such as Cardinal Bellarmine, in the reign of James I.

 

While there is much to commend the via media method of explaining the Anglican faith it has one major drawback.   The expression itself, taken in its most literal sense, suggests that Anglicanism is neither Catholic nor Protestant.   The middle space between any two locations lies neither in the one nor the other.   Yet this is close to being the opposite of what many – probably most - people who use the expression via media mean by it.    What they would mean by the via media is that the Anglican faith reject the either/or dichotomy between Catholicism and Protestantism that came out of the continental Protestant Reformation and choses instead to be both Catholic and Protestant.   While the image of middle territory is sometimes used in a both/and sense, in ordinary usage this does not escape the sense of neither/nor, for it means being partially on the one side, partially on the other, like the overlapping region in a Venn Diagram.  This is hardly a satisfying image for those traditional Anglicans who would insist that our faith and Church are both fully Catholic and fully Protestant.  (2)

 

I would suggest, therefore, that it would be helpful when referring to traditional, orthodox, Anglicanism as the via media between Catholicism and Protestantism that we add the explanation that we are using this expression in a special sense that means fully both/and rather than partially both/and or neither/nor.    Furthermore I would suggest that we also add that our faith’s full Catholicism and full Protestantism are viae mediae themselves.   Which finally brings us to what the title of this essay asserts – that as a via media between Catholicism and Protestantism, Anglicanism is a via media between two other viae mediae.

 

To explain what I mean by this, I would first note that the Right Reverend Peter Robinson, the presiding bishop of a continuing Anglican communion, the United Episcopal Church of North America, has often said that if Anglicanism is a via media, it is a via media between Wittenberg and Geneva, that is to say, between Lutheranism and Calvinism.   In his article from eight years ago, entitled The Reformed Face of Anglicanism, he discussed how Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s own theological journey left its mark on the Church of England.   When Cranmer initially embraced the doctrines of the continental Protestant Reformation it was in the form of Lutheranism, but, according to Robinson, he later moved in the direction of a moderate Calvinism.    The Anglican liturgy, he says, reflects Cranmer’s early Lutheranism, but the Articles of Religion reflect his later, moderate Calvinism.   

 

At that point, Bishop Robinson’s concept of Anglicanism as a via media between Lutheranism and Calvinism seemed to amount to being Lutheran in practice and mild Calvinist in doctrine.   That the Church of England, as it emerged from the English Reformation, was officially, albeit moderately, Calvinist in theology is the point of his essay.   His arguments that Anglican theology was moderately Calvinist as opposed to Lutheran, at least insofar as the official Articles are concerned, are not particularly convincing in that the points he mentions are mostly ones on which Calvinism and Lutheranism are agreed (“centrality of Scripture”, “monergistic position on Justification”), and on the one mentioned point where there is a disagreement between Lutheranism and Calvinism,  “predestination and election”,  the official Articles are clearly closer to Lutheranism than Calvinism.   The essential difference between Lutheranism (3) and Calvinism on this doctrine is that Lutheranism rejects reprobation, and there is no mention of reprobation anywhere in the Seventeenth Article.   Interestingly, Bishop Robinson, by mentioning that the Lambeth Articles, which contained the concept of double predestination but were not made official, having been rejected by the Queen, provides indirect testimony that the official theology of Anglicanism is closer to Lutheranism than Calvinism on this issue.  

 

His essay of three years later entitled “The Middle Way” is much better in this regards.   Here, he stresses the relationship between the Articles of Religion and the Confession of Augsburg, making the Articles therefore basically Lutheran in theology but which “can and do strike off on their own occasionally, such as in Articles 28 and 29 concerning the Eucharist, which are clearly Reformed.”   This is a much more accurate account of the theology of the Articles.   Interestingly, John Calvin’s own theology was – and, I would argue, consciously so on Calvin’s part – itself a via media between Lutheranism and Zwinglianism.  (4)  This is worth noting here particularly because many would consider the most obvious example of this to be the very subject on which Bishop Robinson identifies the doctrine of the Articles as being Reformed.  (5)

 

If Bishop Robinson is right, and I think he is, that the Anglican Church’s Protestantism is a via media between Wittenberg and Geneva, then as a special sort of  fully both/and via media between Catholicism and Protestantism it is a via media inter vias medias, because Anglicanism’s Catholicism is obviously itself a via media between Rome and Constantinople.

 

In the English Reformation, the Anglican Church in many ways reverted to the Catholicism of the early centuries of Church history that predated the Romanism against which the Reformers protested.  (6)  This meant returning to many doctrines, practices, and structures which in the Eastern Orthodox Church had persisted from the earlier Catholicism all along.  

 

The rejection of papal supremacy is only the most obvious example of this.   By retaining the three-fold clerical order clearly established by the Apostles in the New Testament, (7) but rejecting the claims of the Patriarch of Rome to supremacy over the entire Church, the Anglican Church returned to what the old Catholicism had asserted against prelates interfering in the jurisdiction of others in the canons of the ecumenical Councils, and which had remained the position of the Eastern Church all along, most notably reiterated in the East/West Schism of 1054 AD.   In the Anglican Communion, the Archbishop of Canterbury is, like the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople in the Eastern Church, considered primus inter pares, which is the honour the early Church had awarded to the Patriarch of Rome before he elevated himself above all other bishops, declared himself infallible, and transformed his office into the papacy.

 

Other examples in which Anglican reforms returned to early Church practices that had been retained in Eastern Orthodoxy all along include allowing the clergy to marry and distributing the Eucharist in both kinds to the laity.

 

In other areas, however, Anglicanism continued to follow the Latin interpretation of the Catholic tradition.   The most obvious example of this can be found in Cranmer’s translation of the Nicene Creed which asserts of the Holy Ghost that He “proceedeth from the Father and the Son”, thus including the filioque which played such an important role in the Great Schism.   The use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist is another example.   A further example, can be found in what we have seen of Anglicanism’s Protestantism.  If Anglican Protestantism is a via media between Lutheranism and Calvinism it is a via media between two forms of Augustinianism.   St. Augustine of Hippo had a much larger influence over the theology of the Western Church than of the Eastern Church and, indeed, the Eastern theologians frequently identify St. Augustine as the source of all that they consider to be the errors of the Western tradition.

 

So we see that as a special kind of via media between Catholicism and Protestantism that is fully both at the same time, Anglicanism is a via media between two other viae mediae in the more literal sense – a Catholicism that falls between that of the Western and Eastern traditions and a Protestantism that is somewhere between Lutheranism and Calvinism.

 

(1) (1)   This aspect of the Council of Trent had an effect on Anglicanism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism.    The reason for this should be evident.   It created the need for Anglican, Lutheran and Calvinist theologians to develop a theological response, not just to what the first generation Reformers had perceived as Rome’s doctrinal errors, but to the more elaborate Tridentine theological framework.    In Lutheranism and Calvinism, this response became what is known as Protestant scholasticism.   In the same period, Anglicanism worked out its own theological answer to Trent, examples of which can be seen in Bishop Lancelot Andrewes’ Responsio ad Apologiam Cardinalis Bellarmini (1610) and Archbishop William Laud’s A Relation of the Conference Between William Laud, Late Lord Archbishop of Canterbury and Mr. Fisher the Jesuit, By the Command of King James (1639).   Doctrinally, Andrewes’ and Laud’s responses are similar to those of the Protestant scholastics, but methodologically they are quite different.   Like the writings of earlier Anglican apologists such as Bishop Jewell and Richard Hooker, these are saturated with Patristic citations.   For Andrewes and Laud, a sufficient defence of Anglican Protestantism against the claims of Rome and Tridentine theology required demonstrating that the Church Fathers were on their side.

(2)   (2) A more fitting image is the one that Dr. Ron Dart has used to contrast the Anglican approach with that of the more schismatic versions of Protestantism.   The image is of a garden – the Catholic tradition – which has weeds in it – the errors and abuses of fifteenth-sixteenth century Rome.   You can either destroy the garden altogether because of the weeds – the approach of schismatic Protestantism – or you can weed the garden – the approach of the English Reformers.   You can hear Ron Dart explain this in his short video “Is the Anglican Way Protestant? Via Media” here, but I would also recommend reading his self-published 2017 book Erasmus: Wild Bird.   The third and fourth chapters which discuss the relationship between Erasmus and English Christianity are particularly relevant.

(3)   (3) The Lutheran tradition as a whole rejects the idea of double predestination, which includes the idea of reprobation, i.e., a predestination to damnation.   Calvinists maintain that on this point Luther himself was a Calvinist rather than a Lutheran.   They may be correct about this.   My own reading of Luther and Calvin and the traditions that bear their names, suggests that the Calvinist tradition, especially the English Calvinist tradition, deviated earlier and further from Calvin, than the Lutheran tradition ever deviated from Luther.   Calvin reads like a Lutheran rather than a Calvinist on far more issues – assurance of salvation and the extent of the atonement being two that immediately come to mind – than Luther reads like a Calvinist, but of course that can hardly be said to constitute evidence that the reverse is never the case.

(4)   (4) The Lutheran and Reformed traditions diverged due to differences of interpretation between Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli of Zurich, the first major leader of the Swiss Reformation and the first theologian of the Reformed tradition.   John Calvin, the French lawyer who was recruited by William Farel to lead the Reformation in Geneva, became the most influential leader of the Swiss Reformation and lent his name to the entire Reformed tradition.   In saying that his theology was a via media between Luther and Zwingli, I mean that with regards to several of the points of contention between Zwingli and Luther he took what was basically Zwingli’s position but modified in a way that moved it closer to the views of Luther and Melanchthon.  

(5)   (5) That Calvin’s view of the Eucharist is mediatory to Luther’s and Zwingli’s does not necessarily depend upon the identification of Zwingli’s understanding of the Eucharist with memorialism.   Memorialism is the view that denies the Real Presence in the Eucharist, and asserts that the Lord’s Supper is only a symbolic memorial of Christ’s sacrifice.   Although Zwingli is widely thought to have taught this, this has not been incontrovertibly established to be the case.   Memorialism has only ever been the official doctrine of the sects that separated from the Churches of the Magisterial Reformation.   The latter all affirm the Real Presence.   All of Protestantism concurred in rejecting the Romanist doctrine of transubstantiation – that when the celebrant pronounces the words of institution the substance of the bread and wine is replaced with that of the Body and Blood of Christ producing a “real absence” of the bread and wine in all but appearance.   In rejecting the Roman error, however, the Anglican, Lutheran, and Reformed traditions all steered clear of falling into the opposite error of memorialism, and affirmed the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist.   The understanding of what the Real Presence meant differed from tradition to tradition. Lutheranism declared that while the Body and Blood did not magically replace the bread and wine, they were nevertheless literally present and were received by the participants in the same way that the bread and wine were themselves received.   The Reformed leaders rejected the Lutheran interpretation and maintained that the Real Presence is “spiritual” “mystical” or “heavenly.”   This, of course, invited the Lutheran response of saying that the distinction between this and the memorialist outright rejection of the Real Presence was mere semantics.   This was arguably accurate with regards to Zwingli, for whom the spiritual presence of Christ in the Eucharist seemed hardly distinguishable from His presence among the faithful on non-sacramental occasions, but there was no consensus among the Reformed leaders as to what these terms themselves signified.   Calvin took a slight but significant step away from Zwingli towards Luther in asserting that the Sacrament itself was the instrumental means whereby the “spiritual” Real Presence was communicated to the faithful.   Bishop Robinson is, of course, correct to say that the Thirty Nine Articles take the Reformed position – “The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the means whereby the Body of Christ is received and eaten in the Supper is Faith.”    Note, however, that the phrase “an heavenly and spiritual manner” can be understood either as an answer to the question of “how” Christ is present in the Sacrament or an assertion that God has not given us the answer to this question and that it would be impious on our part to try and answer it.    The latter is how Archbishop Laud explained the Anglican position in his response to the Jesuit Fisher, referred to above in note one.   The Roman and Lutheran positions, different as they are, he maintained, both make the same mistake of trying to provide a detailed explanation of what God has left a mystery.   Ironically, the Puritans, who regarded themselves as followers of Calvin, accused him of trying to smuggle Romanism back into the Anglican Church by teaching the Real Presence.   The Anglican view of the Real Presence as he defended it to Fisher, however, was indistinguishable from Calvin’s own.

(6)  (6) The Church of England, like the Churches of the continental Magisterial Reformation, but unlike the separatist sects, rejected Rome’s equation of Roman with Catholic.   To illustrate the distinction between the two in terms of doctrine, the Apostles and Nicene Creeds are Catholic, the doctrines of papal supremacy and infallibility are Roman.   In the Reformation and post-Reformation Anglican Church the key to understanding what is Catholic has been the Vincentian Canon, i.e., St. Vincent of Lerin’s remark in his Commonitorium (434) that the Catholic faith is that which – obviously, within the context of the Church rather than the world – “quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus, creditum est” or “has been believed everwhere, always, and by all.”   Bishop Lancelot Andrewes’ remark “One canon reduced to writing by God Himself, two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, five centuries, and the series of Fathers in that period – the centuries, that is, before Constantine, and the two after, determine the boundary of our faith” can be taken as traditional Anglicanism’s footnote commentary on the Vincentian Canon.

(7)  (7) The Apostles themselves were the first and highest order, established by Christ Himself.  They established the other two, of the presbyters (elders) and deacons.   While the followers of Calvin introduced confusion regarding this matter by pointing to the fact that the Scriptures use the term which in subsequent eras of the Church was applied to the highest order, bishops (episcopoi in Greek, literally “overseers” or “administrators”), interchangeably with presbyters, there very epistles in which this interchangeable usage occurs rebuts the Calvinist interpretation.   Those are the epistles written to Timothy and Titus, in which St. Paul gave these individuals instructions regarding the ordination of presbyters/bishops and deacons.   This demonstrates that Timothy and Titus themselves belonged to an order above the presbyters/bishops and deacons which had the power of ordaining the lower orders.   This was the order of the Apostles themselves, to which Timothy and Titus had been elevated.   Timothy and Titus are not addressed by the title – Apostle – which was used for all previous members of this order, which is perhaps the first indication that it had been decided that while the order would continue the title would be reserved for the individuals who had been directly commissioned by Christ.   This decision is what created the need for another title, and it was quickly decided – before the first century was even over – that rather than coin another one, the alternate title for presbyters would from then on be reserved for the order that had begun as the Apostles.   Anyone who thinks that because the term was used to refer to one thing in the New Testament but to a different thing in subsequent generations, the latter usage is therefore somehow “wrong” should read I Samuel 9:9.   If the same thing can be called by one name in one period and a different one in a later, as the Scriptures there assert without passing any moral judgement on the change in usage, then it stands to reason that there can be no Scriptural objection to a single word meaning one thing in one period and another in a later.

Gospel Truths of Christ’s Early Life and the Beginning of His Earthly Ministry

Of the Christian festivals, Christmas and Easter tend to overshadow all the rest. This is understandable as these feasts commemorate the foundational truths of the Incarnation of the Son of God and His Resurrection from the dead. The fundamental importance of these truths, however, is no reason to overlook the other events in Christ’s life that the Church has traditionally seen fit to honour for these events have significance in the economy of salvation and the unveiling of God’s revelation of Himself to the world that is well worth our consideration.

The period following immediately after Christmas and preceding the Lenten preparation for Easter includes several feast days which honour events in Christ’s early life as well as the event which marked the beginning of His earthly public ministry. The Epiphany on January 6th is the most important of these and every Sunday until the beginning of Lent (1) is identified simply as the first, second, etc. Sunday after Epiphany. Epiphany is very closely tied to Christmas – in the Eastern Church, they are one and the same feast, and even in the West, where Epiphany is the Twelfth Day of Christmas, the event which it points back to, the visit of the Magi to the infant Christ is inseparable from the rest of the Christmas narrative. The visit of these Gentile wise men from the East who had been watching for the star of “he that is born King of the Jews” points to the truth that the Lord Jesus, while He was indeed the Messiah, the deliver promised to national Israel through the prophets, was the Redeemer also of all the nations of the world.

Prior to the Epiphany there is another event from Christ’s early life that is honoured on January 1st. In the secular calendar this is New Year’s Day but in the Western liturgical calendar it is the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord falling, as it does, on the octave day of Christmas, i.e., the number of days after Christmas on which a Jewish boy would be circumcised after his birth in accordance with the commandment given to Abraham (Gen. 17:12). The telling of this event occupies the space of a single verse in the entire Scriptures, the twenty-first verse of the second chapter of the Gospel According to St. Luke which reads:

And when eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the child, his name was called Jesus, which was so named of the Angel before he was conceived in the womb.

For the significance of this event in the economy of salvation, however, we must turn to the book of Galatians. Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, beautifully explained this in a sermon preached before King James I at Whitehall on Christmas Day 1609 (2) on the text Galatians 4:4, 5:

When the fullness of time was come, God sent His Son, made of a woman, made under the Law. That He might redeem them that were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption of sons.

Commenting on the phrase “made under the Law” Andrewes said:

And when did He this? When was He “made under the Law?” Even then when He was circumcised. For this doth St. Paul testify in the third of the next chapter, “Behold, I Paul testify unto you whosoever is circumcised,” factus est debitor universae Legis, “he becomes a debtor to the whole Law.” At His Circumcision then He entered bon anew with us; and in sign that so He did He shed then a few drops of His blood, whereby He signed the bond as it were, and gave those few drops then, tanquam arrham universi sanguinis effundendi, ‘as a pledge or earnest,’ that “when the fullness of time came,” ‘He would be ready to shed all the rest;’ as He did….Well, this He did undertake for us at His circumcision, and therefore then and not till then He had His Name given Him, the name of Jesus, a Saviour. For then took He on Him the obligation to save us. And look, what then at His Circumcision He undertook, at His Passion He paid even to the full: and having paid it, delevit chirographum, “cancelled the sentence of the Law” that till then was of record and stood in full force against us.

It was an event brief in the telling but packed with significance.

Immediately after his mention of the circumcision, St. Luke’s Gospel jumps ahead thirty-three days to the day when, in accordance with the instructions in the twelfth chapter of Leviticus, His mother’s post-natal purification period being ended, He was brought to the Temple in Jerusalem, presented as the first-born son, and an offering made on His behalf. As with the circumcision, in this event Christ fulfilled a requirement of the Law albeit as a passive participant. The account tells of two encounters that took place during this visit to the Temple in which elderly servants of the Lord, Simeon and Anna the Prophetess recognized the infant Jesus as the promised Messiah. This event has been celebrated since ancient times on the fortieth day after Christmas, February 2nd in a Feast that has many names. In the East it is called Hypapante, a Greek word which means “meeting” and clearly emphasizes the encounters with Simeon and Anna. In the West it is known as the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, the Purification of St. Mary the Virgin, or more commonly, Candlemas, from the ancient custom of bringing candles to church to be blessed on this day. The candles signify light, the relevance of which to this particular Feast is to be found in the canticle Nunc Dimmitis which Simeon proclaimed upon taking the infant Messiah in his arms. He declared the Child to be “a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.” Note how the significance we observed in the visit of the Magi reappears here in the words of Simeon. Christ said of Himself that He is the “light of the world” (John 8:12; 9:5), and He called His disciples to be the same (Matt. 5:14). This is a theme of all of these Feasts which receives a particular emphasis in that of the Presentation.

Christ’s birth, circumcision, the visitation of the Magi, and His presentation in the Temple, commemorated in the West on Christmas, New Year’s, Epiphany and Candlemas respectively, are all we are told in Scripture about the infancy of Christ and, except for the account of His visit to the Temple when twelve, all that the Scriptures tell us about His earthly life prior to the beginning of His public ministry. The event which marked the beginning of His earthly ministry is also commemorated in this time period. It too is traditionally associated with Epiphany. The name Epiphany comes from the Greek word for “manifestation” a word that is very appropriate for the way it has been applied by the Church to both the Visit of the Magi and the Baptism of the Lord – and, in the East, to His birth. The Baptism of the Lord was appointed to be celebrated along with the Visit of the Magi on Epiphany itself by the early Church and this continues to be the Eastern custom. In the West it may be celebrated on the Epiphany or in the following octave, usually on the next Sunday or Monday. It commemorates an event which is told in all four Gospels and which has great revelatory and soteriological significance.

The revelatory significance of the Baptism is, of course, Trinitarian. For while there are references to the Word/Son of God and the Spirit of God throughout the Old Testament, beginning with the Creation account, it is at the Baptism that all Three Persons appear manifest together in their distinctiveness, relationships, and essential unity. The Father speaks from Heaven, identifying His Son and declaring Himself to be well pleased with Him, as the Holy Spirit visually descends from the Father upon the Son.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew records that when Jesus went to John the Baptist to be baptized, John initially refused, objecting that “I have need to be baptized of thee, and comest thou to me?” To understand his objection, we must understand the nature of his message and ministry. John the Baptist had been preaching in the wilderness, proclaiming that the long awaited Kingdom of Heaven was at hand and calling upon Israel to repent of their sins. The baptism that he administered in the Jordan River was a symbol of that repentance. Those who received his baptism confessed their sins as they did so and John himself said of his baptism “I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance.” Jesus had no sin of which He needed to repent. Hence John’s objection – the impeccable Jesus ought to be the One administering baptism rather than taking the place of a penitent sinner and receiving it. Jesus’ answer was “Suffer it to be so now: for thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.” What did He mean by this?

Jesus’ earthly ministry ended with His being betrayed, arrested, and then crucified. He had committed no sin, much less a crime worthy of capital punishment. He had told His disciples that this would happen, however, and after His Resurrection He explained to them why it happened, which they in turn passed on to us. St. Peter wrote:

Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps: Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth: Who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously: Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed. (I Peter 2:21-24)

Or, in the more concise words of St. Paul, “he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” (II Corinthians 5:21)

This was the mission on which He had been sent into the world – to take the place of sinners as the spotless sacrifice that would satisfy the offended justice of God and restore fallen man to God’s favour bringing forgives and pardon, reconciliation and peace. Just as His ministry ended, so it began, with Him taking the place of sinners in undergoing John’s baptism. This is what He meant when He said “thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.” Everything which God’s Law required, Jesus fulfilled perfectly on behalf of the rest of mankind whose sins prevented us from meeting the requirements. This included the ceremonial requirements fulfilled by His circumcision and presentation in the Temple, the moral requirements fulfilled by His life of perfect obedience, and finally, the full payment of the penalty that had been incurred by those who had not been able to meet these other requirements, i.e., everybody else. Under the Law, repentance was the condition for forgiveness of sin. The prophet Ezekiel spelled it out this way:

The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him. But if the wicked will turn from all his sins that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die. All his transgressions that he hath committed, they shall not be mentioned unto him: in his righteousness that he hath done he shall live. Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord GOD: and not that he should return from his ways, and live? (Ezekiel 18:20-23).

Fallen human nature being what it is, however, we are as incapable of repenting so perfectly as to never sin again as were incapable of producing perfect obedience to the Law in the first place. When Christ took the place of the repentant sinner and underwent the baptism of John He signified that He undertook to make good for human failure with regards to this requirement of the Law as well. This, of course, no more excuses us from the responsibility to sincerely confess our sins and strive to repent of them any more than Christ’s perfect obedience gives us a license to disobey God but it places repentance like obedience on a completely different basis under the Gospel than it was under the Law. Under the Gospel God freely gives to man in Christ everything which He required of man under the Law. The message of the Law is “do and live”, the message of the Gospel is “it is done, believe and live” and our doing, under the Gospel, flows out of the life that we receive by believing. Under the Law God required that a sinner completely turn around and change his ways in order to be forgiven. Under the Gospel God gives to the sinner who believes in Jesus Christ a full pardon of all his sins and along with the pardon He gives the Holy Spirit Whose ministries of regeneration and sanctification gradually produce over the course of our lives the transformation of mind and behaviour that God required of the sinner under the Law. We are to repent of our sins and obey God to the best of our ability, but under the Gospel we are to place no confidence whatsoever in our own repentance or obedience but to confess our best efforts at either to fall far short of what God requires and to place all of our faith in Christ and His perfect and sufficient merits.

That Christ came under the Law and met all of its requirements perfectly so as to place us in a new standing with God under the Gospel, a standing of grace, is a theme which, like that of Christ as “light of the world” runs through all of these events of His early life and ministry. These are very important themes indeed and it is well that the Church honours these events annually giving us opportunity to contemplate them.

(1) Or, in the older liturgical calendar prior the revisions of the last century, until Shrovetide, the two and a half weeks prior to Ash Wednesday.
(2) This is the fourth in the first volume of Lancelot Andrewes, Ninety-Six Sermons, compiled and edited by Bishops William Laud and John Buckeridge at the command of King Charles I following Andrewes death and first published in 1629.