Ordinary Authority, the Apostolic Priesthood, Orthodox Anglicanism and Women’s Ordination

 

The incident of a couple of weeks ago in which Fr. Calvin Robinson, having been invited to address the Mere Anglicanism conference hosted by an ACNA parish in the United States on the subject of how critical theory is contrary to the Gospel and was disinvited from the final panel because in his talk he highlighted feminism’s role in the development of Cultural Marxism and criticized women’s ordination, is still generating much discussion.   Fr. Robinson, if you are unfamiliar with him, is an outspoken conservative Christian commentator from the United Kingdom.   He was denied ordination in the Church of England a few years ago, for his conservative views, but was ordained a deacon in the Free Church of England (the British counterpart to the American Reformed Episcopal Church, it separated from the Church of England in the nineteenth century in protest over the Oxford Movement) then later a priest in the Nordic Catholic Church (a group that left the Lutheran Church of Norway to join the Old Catholics, i.e., the formerly Roman Catholic Churches that rejected Vatican I).   He also had a show on GB News until they dropped him last year in a spasm of political correctness.   The ACNA is the Anglican Church in North America which was founded about fifteen years ago by parishes that separated from the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Anglican Church of Canada (up here the parishes associated with the ACNA go by the name Anglican Network in Canada, ANiC) over the increasing influence of the alphabet soup lobby in the mainline bodies (as seen in same-sex blessings/marriages).   It is recognized by and in full communion with the orthodox provinces of the Anglican Communion (the Global South provinces) although not with the Church of England, the Anglican Church of Canada or the Episcopal Church, the three most apostate Churches within the Anglican Communion.   Parts of the ACNA practice women’s ordination, other parts do not.   The aforementioned Reformed Episcopal Church, for example, which joined the ACNA when it was formed although it had already been separated from the Episcopal Church for over a century, does not.   This the REC has in common with other Anglican jurisdictions that left the Episcopal Church over its apostasy prior to the alphabet soup crisis, such as those which left when James Parker Dees declared the Episcopal Church apostate in 1963 over liberalism as manifested in her refusal to discipline Bishop Pike when he abandoned the faith entirely (the low church Anglican Orthodox Church and the high church Orthodox Anglican Church, originally a single communion) and, rather obviously, those who signed the St. Louis Affirmation of 1977 which declared the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada to have apostatized from Christ’s One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church by introducing women’s ordination (called the Continuing Anglican Churches or the Anglican Continuum in the stricter sense, the broader sense of these terms also includes the REC, AOC, OAC, and other smaller groups that left prior to St. Louis, these were intended to be a single body by the Concerned Churchman of St. Louis who, interestingly enough, called the body they so envisioned the Anglican Church in North America).  (1)  The ACNA calls its policy of allowing different dioceses and parishes to have different viewpoints and practices on the matter of women’s ordination by the expression “dual integrities”.      

 

I don’t have much to add to the discussion of the incident itself.   I rather wish to answer an argument that Dr. Bruce Atkinson has posted in several places.   One of those places is the comments section on Dr. David W. Virtue’s article on the Robinson/Mere Anglicanism affair and it is this version, should there be any differences between this and the versions he has posted elsewhere, to which I shall be responding.    Dr. Atkinson is a psychologist and a founding member of the ACNA.

 

His first section under the heading “On WO” reads:

 

1) The New Testament does not discuss the issue of the sacramental ordination of clergy at all, neither male nor female. What became the tradition of clericalism (a ruling and elite priesthood order) only developed after the Apostles had passed. The closest the NT gets to supporting this is where Paul mentions roles of overseer, elder, and deacon (servant) and a few times he or elders prayed and laid hands on disciples for specific tasks. Hardly the same as what later became the sacrament of ordination. And Jesus was against such a ruling privileged priesthood as evidenced in Mark 10:42-44 and Matthew 23:5-12, and as also evidenced by Peter’s view of the priesthood as being of ALL believers (1 Peter 2:4-5, 9).

 

As I have pointed out many times in the past a case against a distinct priesthood within the Church cannot be made from St. Peter’s remarks about the universal priesthood of all believers.   This is because there was a universal priesthood under both Covenants.   In the book of Exodus, the Israelites, having been led by Moses out of Egypt, arrived at the wilderness of Sinai in the nineteenth chapter.   At the beginning of this chapter, the LORD, speaking to Moses out of the mountain, tells him to tell the Israelites “And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.” (v 6).   This clearly did not preclude the establishment of a more specific priesthood, the Levitical priesthood, within national Israel.   St. Peter, by joining the expressions “royal priesthood” and “holy nation” in 1 Peter 2:9 alludes back to this Old Testament passage.   Since the original did not preclude a more specific priesthood, neither can the New Testament allusion.   Especially since St. Paul speaks of his ministerial work in terms of just such a priesthood.   In Romans 15:16 he writes:

 

That I should be the minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, ministering the gospel of God, that the offering up of the Gentiles might be acceptable, being sanctified by the Holy Ghost.

 

The word “ministering” that is placed in bold in the above quotation is in St. Paul’s Greek “ἱερουργοῦντα” (hierourgounta).  This is the present, active, participle of ἱερουργέω (hierourgeo) which means “to officiate as a priest”, “to perform sacred rites”, “to sacrifice”.   It is formed by combining the basic Greek word for “priest” (St. Peter’s word for “priesthood” in 1 Pet. 2:9 is ἱεράτευμα, hierateuma) with the basic Greek word for “work”.   Indeed, the word λειτουργὸν (leitourgon) that is behind the noun “minister” earlier in the verse has connotations of this as well since the primary meaning of the word, “public servant” in the civic sense, clearly does not apply here.

 

That this sort of language is not more widely used of the Apostolic ministry in the New Testament is easily explainable.   The Old Testament priesthood was still functioning at the time.   The Book of Acts brings the history of the Church down to a few years prior to the destruction of the Temple.   SS Peter and Paul were both martyred prior to that event.   Most of the New Testament was written prior to that event.   To more promiscuously refer to the ministry of the Church as a priesthood would have invited confusion at that time.   That this did not prevent St. Paul from referring to it as such in this verse is explainable by a) the fact that his ministry was to the Gentiles as stated in this very verse and so unlikely to be confused with the priesthood of national Israel, and by b) the fact that this verse comes towards the end of an epistle in which it is preceded by an extended discussion of the differences between the two Covenants.

 

The very nature of the rite that the Lord commissioned the Apostolic ministry to perform in the Church necessitates that it be thought of as a priesthood.   There were three types of sacrifices (in terms of what was to be offered) the Levitical priesthood was commissioned to offer in the Old Testament.   There was the offering of animals, who were killed and their blood sprinkled, which was involved in any sacrifice having to do with sin and guilt.   These were a type of the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ and were forever fulfilled in Christ’s Sacrifice.   Then there were the offerings of grain/flour/cakes (meat/meal/grain offerings) and of wine (libations).   These three elements are also featured prominently in the Passover meal.   A covenant in the Old Testament would always be sealed by a sacrifice and concluded by both parties to the covenant eating the sacrifice together as a shared meal.   Jesus Christ offered Himself as the Sacrifice that sealed and established the Covenant of redemption from sin.   In instituting the Lord’s Supper, He took the bread and wine of the Passover, the other two elements offered by the old priesthood in sacrifice, and pronounced them to be His Body and Blood, making a way for God’s people to be perpetually sustained by the food of His One Sacrifice.   Just as baptism replaces circumcision as the rite of initiation under the New Covenant, so the Sacrament by which Christ’s One Sacrifice becomes the sustenance of the believers’ spiritual life takes the place of the sacrifices that looked forward to the One Sacrifice, and so the ministry commissioned to administer the Sacrament is a priesthood within the universal priesthood of the Church, as the Levitical priesthood was a priesthood within the universal priesthood of Israel.

 

Dr. Atkinson’s use of terms like “ruling”, “privileged” and “elite” to describe a priesthood within the universal priesthood of the Church is misleading.   The import of Mk 10:42-44 is not that the Church was not to have governors but that her governors were to govern in a spirit of humility.   Pressed to the extreme of hyper-Protestant anti-clericalism, Mk 10:42-44 would condemn St. Paul in defending his Apostolic authority in the Corinthian epistles and the early chapters of Galatians.   The Lord clearly set His Apostles as governors over His Church, just as clearly the need for structure and order in the Church did not die with the Apostles nor did they let their governance end or die with them.   Already in the New Testament we see them placing others in authority under themselves over local Churches as elders/presbyters, and already in the New Testament we see them commissioning others such as SS Timothy and Titus to exercise the same level of governing authority as themselves, including the authority to ordain elders/presbyters and deacons.   The term bishop (overseer/episkopos) would later be used as the title of the Apostles’ co-governors/successors.   In the New Testament this term is used either interchangeably with elder/presbyter or more likely for the presiding elder/presbyter in each locality.  When it is first unmistakably used for the co-governors/successors of the Apostles, in the epistles of St. Ignatius of Antioch, the description suggests that every presiding elder/presbyter was now what SS Timothy and Titus were in the New Testament.   The rapidity and earliness with which this usage became universal and the fact that it first appears in the writings of St. John’s direct disciples may indicate that St. John, the Apostle who survived the others by decades, had merged the two offices towards the end of his life and ministry.    However that may be, the thing traditionally designated by the term bishop, the person who has been given the ordinary authority (vide infra for explanation of this expression) of the Apostles to govern the Church and ordain presbyters and deacons, is clearly already established in the New Testament.   That the Lord’s instructions in Mk. 10:42-44 have not always been obeyed by those in authority in the Church is lamentable, although not, given the fallenness of human nature, very surprising, but the abuse of something does not invalidate the thing itself.  

 

Dr. Atkinson begins the second section of his argument by saying:

 

2) I will never ignore clear scriptural advice; like most members and clergy in ACNA, I am generally against women’s ordination above the level of deacon. What Paul clearly wrote to Timothy (1 Tim 2, cf. Titus 2:3-5) is that he did not allow women to have authority over men in his churches, but he did not condemn the practice nor was it ever called a ‘sin’ anywhere in the NT. He also wrote elsewhere about male headship in the family (1 Cor 11: 3-10, 1 Cor 14:33-35, Eph 5:22-23)

 

If someone in a position of authority were to say “I do not allow you to walk up to your neighbour, poke him in the eyes, tweak his nose, and pull his beard” would you interpret this as a non-condemnation of eye-poking, nose-tweaking and beard-pulling?

 

His third section, however, begins by saying:

 

3) However… the whole counsel of God provides some mitigating circumstances.

a) The fact that Jesus Himself elevated women (and their roles) above what was regarded as normative in His culture (women were virtual chattel, not even to be spoken to in the street) tells us a lot about the teleological direction we could expect to occur over time in the Kingdom of God by the revelation of scripture made evident by the Holy Spirit. Note Paul’s teaching in Galatians 3:24-29 where egalitarianism is taught as being part of our freedom in Christ versus the Jewish laws and culture. Despite Paul's admonition to Timothy about women's disqualification to have authority over men, Paul was not shy about allowing women to lead where his own welfare (and thus that of the gospel) was concerned (as seen in Romans 16:1-4).

 

This is a common argument but it is no less wrong for being common.   The fact that Jesus elevated women above what was normative in Jewish, and for that matter Roman, culture carries the exact opposite meaning to that which Dr. Atkinson attaches to it.   It makes it all that much more significant that Jesus did not include a woman among the Twelve.    Had He, by treating women as the human beings they are, intended to start the Church on a path that would lead towards women’s ordination He would not have allowed St. Paul to prohibit – his words to St. Timothy are stronger than a mere admonition – women from having authority over men in that way.

 

He continues:

 

b) The issue of Women’s Ordination (WO) is not at all the same as the homosexuality issue where there are absolutely no exceptions in either Old Testament or New Testament that this behavior is an egregious sin that will keep a person out of the Kingdom of God (e.g., 1 Cor 6:9). Rather, the role of women in God’s kingdom on earth has clearly had some exceptions in the Bible, where women have had authority without any divine judgment or criticism being revealed about it. The New Testament reveals that there were women deaconesses and women prophets in NT churches… without any criticism by Paul or other Apostles. And how far should we generalize Peter’s point that the Church consists of the “priesthood of ALL believers”? But I must emphasize that these scriptural exceptions to the rule (like Deborah the judge in the OT) were in fact exceptions.

Therefore, ACNA is not wrong to also have exceptions... but they must be kept relatively rare (to remain exceptions) and never to be turned into a general WO rule (as TEC and the Church of England have done).

 

The issue of Women’s Ordination is related to that of the homosexuality – actually the entire alphabet soup – issue.   I’ll return to that momentarily.   First, I would like to point out how Dr. Atkinson seriously misinterprets the significance of the Scriptural examples of women with authority to which he points.   These are not exceptions to the rule.   They are rather illustrations of a different rule.

 

As orthodox Christians, we believe that God is working in everything that goes on in the world.   We are not Deists who think that God started the world going, like someone winding up a clock, then left it to wind down on its own accord.    God brought Creation into existence ex nihilo and apart from His sustaining its existence it would slip back into nothingness.   The tree in your front lawn, God put there, through multiple different steps including the falling of the seed from which it originally grew, the natural process of growth that He put into the seed, the rain that He caused to fall, etc.   Everything that happens in nature, does so because God is working in and through it in this way.   God is not limited to working in this way.   If He had reason to do so, He could cause a tree to appear out of nowhere in your front lawn without going through all that preliminary motion.   If He did so, this is what we would call a miracle.   God does not work in this direct way unless He has special reason to do so.   His ordinary method of producing a tree in your front laws, is through the means of the seed, the growth, the rain, etc.   A miracle, in which He directly acts without means, is extraordinary.

 

The distinction just made can also be seen in those to whom God delegates authority.   In the Old Testament, God established the Levitical priesthood and the Davidic monarchy.   These were positions of authority that were passed on through the generations in an ordinary manner (David passed his throne to Solomon who passed it to Rehoboam, for example).   This type of authority corresponds to God’s working ordinarily through the means of nature.   There are other examples, however, of God raising up individuals to positions of leadership and authority that correspond to His working extraordinarily through miracles.   The judges are examples of these.   So are the prophets.   Each one was called by God as an individual and given special authority and power.   Since order is one of the more important purposes of structure and ordinary authority there are rules as to how that authority is transmitted.   God is not bound by such rules in raising people up to special authority any more than He is bound by the laws of nature when He performs miracles.   In the New Testament, Jesus gave to the Apostles both ordinary and extraordinary authority when He set them in governance over His Church.   The extraordinary power, such as infallibility when teaching the faith and writing Scripture, could not be passed on to others.   The ordinary authority that they exercised in settling controversies, ordaining presbyters and deacons, and basically governing the Church they passed on to those such as SS Timothy and Titus who succeeded them in governance.   St. Paul’s instructions to St. Timothy in regards to women belong to the rules governing ordinary authority and its transmission.   They do not bind God when it comes to raising up people with special or extraordinary authority like prophets.  

This distinction accounts for Deborah the judge and the prophetesses of both Testaments.    Remember that if someone claims to have received extraordinary authority directly from God, they are to be tested and tried by all the tests of the prophet in both Testaments.

 

This brings us back to the connection between the women’s ordination issue and the alphabet soup issue.   If God raises up a woman as a prophetess or otherwise gives her extraordinary authority that is one thing.   If the rules governing the transmission of ordinary authority in the Church are altered to allow for women’s ordination that is something entirely different.   When that happens it leads to further apostasy.   This is what has happened in the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church of Canada and the Church of England.   That this further apostasy has taken the form of the affirmation of alphabet people, then same-sex blessings, then outright same-sex marriage, and most recently all the garbage that is preceded by the prefix trans is only to be expected.   When you set aside the rules laid down in Scripture for the transmission of the Apostolic ministry of the Church so as to ordain women you do so for a reason.    In this case you do so because you think the rules of Scripture (and tradition for that matter) are incompatible with some higher standard or ideal you are seeking to achieve.    To regard an ideal or standard as higher than the Word of God is itself a serious apostasy.   When the rule set aside is the prohibition against women in positions of ordinary authority, the ideal that is set above the Word of God, and thus made an idol, is the equality of the sexes.   The equality of the sexes, when treated with this exaggerated importance, becomes the interchangeability of the sexes.   If the sexes are treated as interchangeable when it comes to the priesthood/ministry the next step will be for them to be treated as interchangeable in other areas – such as in who one looks for as a mate and ultimately with which sex one identifies.

 

Of course we could also back the story up and point out that just as women’s ordination has led to the alphabet soup problems of today, so the path to women’s ordination was one the Church set upon when it took that first false step of breaking with the Catholic (in the Vincentian sense) consensus against artificial contraception in Resolution 15 of the 1930 Lambeth Conference which passed because supposedly conservative evangelicals failed to support the conservative Anglo-Catholics in their opposition to the Resolution (for the Biblical case against birth control, see Charles D. Provan’s The Bible and Birth Control, Zimmer Printing, 1989, for an interesting discussion, albeit from a Darwinian perspective, of why affordable, effective, contraception for females led, counter-intuitively, to the ramping up of the feminist demand for abortion and the skyrocketing of single-motherhood, see Dr. Lionel Tiger’s The Decline of Males, St. Martin’s Press, 1999).   That is, however, a topic for another time.

 

(1)    Lest you get the impression that the mainline Anglican Churches in England, Canada, and the United States are entirely apostate, I assure you there are orthodox parishes left in each.  On both sides of the pond, there are parishes within the mainline Anglican Communion that indicate their adherence to the full orthodoxy affirmed at St. Louis by affiliating with Forward in Faith or Forward in Faith North America.   In the Anglican Church of Canada there are parishes that indicate their ACNA type orthodoxy by affiliating with the Anglican Communion Alliance.   My own parish is one affiliated with the Anglican Communion Alliance and personally, while I disagree with separatism as a solution to apostasy, I could sign my full agreement with the Principles of Doctrine and Principles of Morality sections of the St. Louis Affirmation.  

If We Must Take Away Guns From People Start With the Police

This Monday the police in Lethbridge, Alberta, made total jackasses out of themselves. I would make a remark about how prone Canadian police are to doing this but it seems to be universal and not just limited to the Dominion.

Monday, due to the pun that can be made out of the date – “May the 4th be with you” – rather than it having any significance in the history of the popular motion picture franchise, was Star Wars Day. There is a Star Wars theme restaurant in Lethbridge called the Coco Vanilla Galactic Cantina. On “Star Wars Day” they asked one of their employees, a nineteen year old girl, to wear Storm Trooper armour and stand outside the restaurant greeting people. To complete the costume they gave her a plastic gun.

A couple of brain-dead idiots called 9-11 and reported her. Presumably they had to ask somebody to look up the number for them. The police showed up to investigate and, being even more stupid than their informants, pulled their guns on her, yelled at her, forced her to the ground, and handcuffed her. They released her without charging her, possibly after checking to see whether or not plastic toys are on Captain Airhead’s new list of prohibited guns.

I would suspect that they had been raiding the evidence locker had Captain Airhead not legalized marijuana a couple of years ago.

According to the Lethbridge Police Service they are conducting an internal investigation into “whether the officers acted appropriately within the scope of their training and LPS policies and procedures.” Since such an investigation requires what Dame Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poiroit called the “little grey cells”, and I doubt that Chief Scott Woods could find two such to rub together in his entire staff, I’ll spare him the time and trouble. No they did not.

All of this raises the question of why, since Captain Airhead and other progressives are so bent on harassing hunters, farmers, and other law-abiding gun owners in order to pretend to be doing something about gun violence, they allow the police to continue to carry the handguns that were forbidden to Her Majesty’s average, ordinary, law-abiding subjects long ago.

Since we inherited our Common Law, judicial system, and Westminster System of parliamentary monarchy from the United Kingdom it is fair to ask why we follow the American example rather than the British when it comes to arming the police. In the United Kingdom, bobbies traditionally do not carry guns, and with the exception of Northern Ireland, for reasons which probably do not need to be stated, and specially trained armed officers who are not the regular constabulary, this remains true to this day. Note that this dates back long before the very recent period in which most guns were taken way from the general populace in the UK and Canada. It was never, therefore, a matter of the police having been able to enforce the law without guns because there were no guns in the communities they patrolled.

The main reason for this has to do with the way in which the role and duty of a policeman have been traditionally understood in the British system of law and government, which, I would again remind you, is the system we have inherited here in Canada. The policeman is not there to impose the will of the state on people by force. That is the function of the police in a police state. The policeman’s role and duty is to uphold the Law and maintain the Queen’s peace. The law the policeman upholds is the Common Law, which although it can be modified by the Sovereign legislative power of the Queen-in-Parliament, is not the will of the state being imposed from the top down, but is rather the natural law as discovered and casuistically interpreted through the accumulation of case precedents in the courts. The police maintain the Queen’s peace by being the local presence of her authority to uphold this Law within the community and the reminder of our duty to bring disputes which we cannot settle on our own before this Law for arbitration rather than breaking the peace with violence. Carrying a gun while on regular patrol duty was traditionally seen as being incompatible with this role.

Another underlying reason can be found in the fact that the qualities that we look for in recruiting police officers largely overlap those that incline people towards violent criminal activity. Much like the military, the police force serves the important sociological function of diverting the aggression of the young and strong into the service and defence of society and away from outlets such as crime which attack and harm it. (1) This is the most positive way of making this point. A more negative way would be to say that the police are the segment of the criminal element of society that has been enlisted by the state to keep the rest of their own kind in check as a sort of legitimate protection racket.

You can find an illustration of this negative spin in Anthony Burgess’ dystopic 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. In this novel, an allegory of the orthodox Christian doctrine that freedom of choice is essential to true goodness, the main character Alex, is the leader of a gang of teenage thugs who go on an extremely violent crime spree. After perpetrating a home invasion in which he beats to death the wealthy woman who owns the house, his “droogs” turn on him and he is arrested. He obtains early release from prison after volunteering for the experimental Ludovico Technique, which removes his ability to commit violence, even in self-defense, by programming him to experience agonizing pain every time a violent thought enters his mind. He finds that he is no longer the predator but the prey, and among the first to prey upon him are his old gang mates, who are now policemen.

Whichever spin we prefer to put on this, the positive or the negative, the fact remains that we recruit the police largely on the basis of traits which, otherwise directed, contribute to a propensity for criminal behaviour. These are traits that are at their peak in adolescence to young adulthood and tend to soften with age, experience, and wisdom. This is why an unfortunate side effect of the necessity of a police force, is the phenomenon of police throwing their weight around, bullying, brutalizing, and harassing people. This is another good reason for not sending them out on patrol with firearms. While the police involved in such behaviour are generally younger, immature, inexperienced, rookies, by the time they have gained enough maturity, experience, and wisdom that they can be trusted to carry guns without doing something stupid, like pulling them on a teenager, engaged in Star Wars cosplay as part of her job, they should have learned how to uphold the law’s authority without them.

There are reasons why our police, like those of the republic to our south, carry guns, rather than following the established tradition of the country from which we inherited our constitution, law, and civilized, ordered, liberty. Chief among these is the fact that when our country was first established, the agency that was tasked with enforcing the law in the large chunk of territory that was still being settled and organized into provinces, had a military as well as a police function. Indeed, this agency which eventually became the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was responsible for military intelligence in the Dominion up until the formation of CSIS in 1984. That the agency originally had a military as well as a police function can still be seen in the Red Serge, the traditional ceremonial dress uniform of the Mounties. This uniform clearly has its origins in the traditional uniform of the British army, from which the informal nickname “red coats” was derived, rather than that of the bobby.

The RCMP has no military functions now, however, and neither do any of our provincial or city and municipal police forces. Nevertheless, they still carry firearms. The firearms they carry are handguns, which have been illegal for the civilian populace to carry for years. The handguns the police carry are typically semi-automatics. The semi-automatic re-loading feature is the only feature of the battery of guns that Captain Airhead has just banned that has anything to do with anything other than the outward look of the weapons. Note that outside of the Liberal Party itself, and the further-left parties, Liberal gun grabs receive more support from the police, or at least the higher officials who speak on behalf of the police, than from anyone else in Canada. You might recall that seven years ago, the Mounties took advantage of the flood situation in High River, Alberta, to raid people’s homes and confiscate whatever guns they found there.

The police – or the leadership of the police – do not like farmers and hunters and collectors owning guns, even as they carry semi-automatic pistols with them at all times. Perhaps the time has come to demand that it be done unto them as they would have done unto us. Tyrants, from Critias in ancient Athens to Hitler and Stalin in the twentieth century, have always insisted upon an armed security force and an unarmed populace. An armed populace and an unarmed police would be far more consistent with the principles of civilization and ordered liberty enshrined in our constitution and Common Law.


(1) I remember there being an interesting discussion of this in one of those books that were popular in the 1960s, written by ethologists and anthropologists who took what they had observed of social behaviour among animals and applied it to human social behaviour from a Darwinian perspective. These were precursors to the books on sociobiology which Edward O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins put out in the 1970s and those on evolutionary psychology by John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, Stephen Pinker, et al., which began appearing in the 1990s. It was either Konrad Lorenz’ On Aggression (1963, English translation 1966) or one of Lionel Tiger’s books, Men in Groups (1969) or The Imperial Animal (with Robin Fox, 1971), but I don’t recall exactly which one and would have to dig through my library to locate my copies before I could hunt through them for the passage I have in mind. While I don’t accept the Darwinian presuppositions and framework of these authors, I recall that I largely agreed with whichever author it was on this particular point. I also remember reading feminist attacks on these authors – one of these was in Betty Friedan’s The Second Stage (1981) – because they had explained differences in behaviour between the sexes as arising out innate differences. At the time, the feminist argument for feminizing the police and armed forces was that no such innate differences existed and that therefore to avoid discrimination and to be fair men and women needed to be equally represented. Later feminists who embraced innate differences, would argue for the same policy but on the grounds that the police and armed forces needed to be feminized to dilute male aggression and create a police and army that were more caring, sensitive, etc. We have now had women in the police and the military for quite some time, and the effect has certainly not been that which the latter group of feminists predicted. While this might have come as a surprise to the feminists and even to people like Lorenz, Tiger, and Fox who took it for granted that aggression was predominately male, it would not have shocked Rudyard Kipling, who versified his own observations about the greater aggression of the female in 1911.

This and That No. 5

First with regards to my last essay, note that tomorrow is the "International Women's Day", a holiday started by the socialists 100 years ago. Today's essay, "Moral Sanity and Abortion" was written for the occasion. I'm sure the socialists, progressives, and feminists will all appreciate the sentiment. ;)

With the exception of Richard Weaver who is quoted in the first paragraph, and Pope Paul VI, everyone quoted in the last essay was a Canadian. Dr. Lionel Tiger, a graduate of McGill University, was born and raised in Montreal.

Tomorrow is also Shrove Tuesday, which is the last day before Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday is the first day of the penitential season of Lent in the Christian calendar, leading up to Holy Week. This brings us to the close of the period I have allotted to myself for political essays this year. Alas, I have not run out of essays. I still have an essay on war that I am working on, as well as one on free speech. I also had planned on reviewing Eric Voegelin's The New Science of Politics, Robert Nisbet's The Quest For Community, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn's Liberty or Equality, Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History and Thomas Molnar's Utopia: The Perennial Heresy this year, mostly as an excuse to re-read this conservative classics. I still intend to write and post these essays this year, but my focus will be on theological topics from the beginning of Lent through to Trinity Sunday (June 19th this year). At which point I will switch to cultural and art topics, tentatively beginning with a review of T. S. Eliot's Notes Toward a Definition of Culture.

Early last week I wrote an e-mail to Jason Kenney, our Minister of Immigration and Multiculturalism. At the end of the week before that, Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, the brilliant Serbian-American scholar who is the foreign-affairs editor of Chronicles Magazine, and the author of such books as the excellent and informative The Sword of the Prophet: Islam; Theology, History and Impact on the World and Defeating Jihad: How the War on Terror May Yet Be Won In Spite of Ourselves, was prohibited from entering Canada where he was scheduled to speak at a meeting on the campus of the University of British Columbia. This was not just a case of over-zealous border guards. The decision to ban Dr. Trifkovic from Canada had come down from the Ministry. The same Ministry that continues to uphold the liberal immigration policies set in place in this country by the Pearson and Trudeau administrations in the 1960's, which I have criticized here. These liberal immigration policies, to say nothing of our refugee policies, pose a major security risk to this country. Dr. Trifkovic posed no threat to this country. You can read his account of the incident here, and Diana Johnstone's comments here.

It would appear that the only time Kenney's Ministry is willing to prevent people from entering the country is when they are speakers with controversial views that some group or another objects to. A couple of years ago George Galloway, the British Labour MP, was banned from coming to Canada. I don't particularly care for George Galloway, nor do I agree with much, if anything, of what he has to say. The reasons given by the government were as absurd as the reasons they have given for banning Dr. Trifkovic. Granted, the government of a sovereign country has the right and authority to ban whoever it wants, except its own people. It is an error, however, to use that authority to keep controversial speakers out, while allowing hordes of immigrants in. It should be the other way around.

Moral Sanity and Abortion

There is perhaps no topic that better illustrates Richard Weaver’s statement that “modern man has become a moral idiot” than the topic of abortion. The arguments made by virtually everybody except the Roman Catholic Church on this topic display a complete inability to grasp basic ethical principles let alone to reason properly and form sound ethical conclusions.

The word “abort” is a verb which has as its object a procedure. To abort something is to stop it prematurely, before it has run its course. When we speak of “abortion” we refer to the act of prematurely stopping a pregnancy which in ordinary circumstances must lead to the death of the developing foetus.

Here the Roman Catholic Church draws a distinction. The Roman Catholic Church says that the term “abortion” is properly applied only to procedures which are undertaken with the purpose of ending a pregnancy. A process that is undertaken for another purpose, such as surgery to save a pregnant mother’s life, that has as a secondary consequence the termination of the pregnancy is not an abortion. Upon initially hearing of this distinction, some might argue that this is purely semantic, splitting hairs, and allowing on the one hand what is forbidden on the other, similar to how the Roman Church’s stance on “annulment” and “divorce” is often seen.

That is not the case here. Here the Roman Catholic Church is applying fundamental ethical principles.

It is right to do good to others. Saving someone’s life is a good example of doing good to others. It is wrong to do harm to others unjustly. Taking someone’s life unjustly is pretty much the supreme example of this. The qualifier “unjustly” is necessary because we live in a fallen world, where people do evil to others, which sometimes requires that they be harmed to stop them from doing evil to oneself or to another person (this is called self-defense and it is recognizably just) and sometimes requires that the community in its law-making and enforcing capacity administer justice by inflicting upon a law-breaker the harm he has done to others. This must always be an act of the community carried out by those holding lawfully constituted authority to administer justice.

What happens when doing good to others results in harm to a third party? Here is where we must be careful. We do not want to carelessly overlook the harm our intended good to one person or group of persons may inflict upon a third party, much less to dismiss or justify that harm, by our intended good.

Thus, in the case of a doctor who is contemplating surgery to save the life of a pregnant mother who recognizes that the surgery will likely or surely also result in the termination of the pregnancy, the doctor must not thoughtlessly reason “well, I’m doing good by saving the mother’s life, therefore it is sad but alright that the foetus will probably die as a result”. This is a situation that the doctor and the expecting parents must consider together and what makes it permissible for them to go ahead with the surgery is the fact that the death of the foetus is probably inevitable either way. If the mother will die if the pregnancy continues to full term then the foetus will almost certainly die too. Therefore, it is permissible and just to save the mother’s life even with the knowledge that doing so will almost certainly mean death for the foetus.

It would certainly not be right, however, for a couple who wish to terminate a pregnancy for other motivations, to ask a doctor to falsely declare the expectant mother’s life to be in danger for the purpose of justifying a procedure that will result in the death of the foetus. Nor would it be right for the doctor to comply with such a request.

It is certainly not right for a society to declare that abortion must be available to any woman who wants it, legally, and at the society’s expense on the grounds that some mothers find their lives endangered by their pregnancies. A morally sane person can see that a moral dilemma exists in a case where the mother’s life is endangered by pregnancy and that the decision to save the mother’s life, while just, cannot be arrived at lightly. This must not be used to justify terminating pregnancies in other situations. There the moral dilemma does not exist because abortion is just plain wrong.

There are areas where a strong case can be made both for “this behavior is right” and “this behavior is wrong”. This is not one of them. To terminate a pregnancy is to terminate a human life. As mentioned above, terminating a human life can in certain circumstances be justified. If you accidentally kill someone, and there is no way you could have prevented the accident, if it is not the result of negligence of some sort, you are not morally culpable for the death. If someone is attacking you or others and he cannot be stopped in any other way than by killing him you are justified in taking his life. If someone has murdered somebody else then the lawful authorities of the community are justified in imposing death as a penalty upon the murderer. If a state of war exists between your country and another country and you are called upon to do your duty to your country by fighting for her in war, your killing the soldiers of your country’s enemy on the battlefield is not murder on your part. Abortion does not fall within any of these categories of “justifiable homicide”.

It must therefore fall within the category of “murder”. That is the only conclusion available for a morally sane person.

The arguments people use to avoid this conclusion are quite revealing.

There is the “what if the mother’s life is in danger” argument which we have already addressed. There is also the “rape” argument.

“Rape is sexual intercourse that is forced upon a person against their consent. If a woman gets pregnant as a result of a rape, how can it be just to force her to go through 9 months of pregnancy and to nurture and raise the child of the man who raped her?” The answer, of course, is that it is not just, but neither is it just to allow her to have an abortion for this reason. The human life growing within her – which is an outgrowth of her own life as well as that of her rapist – bears no culpability for his father’s guilt. She will not have to nurture and raise the child after the pregnancy if she does not wish to do so as she can give the baby up to adoption. The pregnancy will undoubtedly be traumatic for her as a constant reminder of the event which caused the pregnancy. An abortion will be traumatic as well and possibly even more so than carrying the pregnancy to term. Unfortunately, there is no just outcome to this scenario.

Like the case of the expecting mother whose life is endangered by her pregnancy, however, this is an extreme scenario. The vast majority of abortions, legal or illegal, are not done for reasons like these. If society were to decide that of the various unjust solutions to the problem of a woman pregnant due to rape the least unjust is to allow the woman to have an abortion that would still not warrant making abortion legal, easily accessible, and paid for by the government, to all women.

Some try to argue for liberal abortion laws by questioning who qualifies as a “person”. This argument can take on a number of forms. There is the form which says “the law defines personhood as beginning at birth”. All that proves, however, is that progressive liberals drew up the law. Neither truth nor fact can be generated by legislation. If human personhood begins at conception then no amount of laws saying that it begins at birth will change that fact. (1)

Another form of the argument is the agnostic form – “We cannot know when personhood begins”. While I don’t accept that as being valid, let us assume for a moment that it is. Ted Byfield irrefutably answered this argument decades ago. He wrote:

Here is a problem in “values” of the type that modern social studied teachers are encouraged to pose. Several men are out in the woods hunting. Suddenly one of them sees something move in the bush. At last he rejoiced, a deer. Then a warning flashes through his mind. That might not be a deer. That might be one of the other hunters. Question for the class: Should the hunter fire at the thing if there’s a chance it’s another human being? The approved answer is no. (2)

Mr. Byfield went on to explain that he had raised this scenario on a CBC television program where he put it to Dr. Henry Morganthaler! He said “the tape was killed, the program was never run, and I was never invited back”.

The point that Mr. Byfield had made was that it is not enough for the advocates of legal, open-access abortion, to cast doubt upon the status of a developing foetus as a “person” or “human being”. They have to prove that the foetus is not either of those things to make the case for legal abortion.

Having established that, we do not need to depend upon the burden of doubt. It is ridiculous to assert that we cannot know whether or not the foetus is a human being. Leave terms like “human being” and “person”, which have apparently become plastic and malleable in recent decades, and nonsensical rhetorical categories like “potential human being” aside. The foetus is unquestionably a human life. When a human sperm fertilizes a human egg, a zygote is formed which possesses a full set of human chromosomes, a mix from its father and mother which are unique to itself. The process of growth through cell division and replication begins immediately. This is a new life, a unique life, and a human life, from the moment of conception. All scientific facts support this.

That should settle the question for anyone possessed of a modicum of moral sanity. The foetus is a life and is identifiably human, terminating its life falls within none of the categories of justifiable homicide, therefore abortion must be murder. The “pro-choice” movement however argues that “a woman has the right to control her own body”.

It is here that the progressive liberals believes that they have made their own irrefutable argument. The argument is worded in such a way that a denial would have to take the form of “no, a woman does not have the right to control her own body” which would seem to suggest that someone else does, making that women as a class are under the perpetual control of that someone else.

There is a question here, that is desperately looking for an answer. Why does “abortion must be legally accessible to all women” logically proceed from the assertion “a woman has the right to control her own body”? Or to put it another way, why does a woman’s having the right to control her own body mean that she has the absolute right to the final decision of whether another human life lives or dies?

What these questions reveal is that “a woman’s right to control her own body” is not the definitive, irrefutable, argument that the “pro-choice” movement wants it to be. As George and Sheila Grant put it:

When the argument for easy abortion is made on the basis of rights, it clearly rests on the weighing of the rights of some against the rights of others. The right of a woman to have an abortion can only be made law by denying to another member of our species the right to exist. The right of women to freedom, privacy and other good things is put higher than the right of the foetus to continued existence. (3)

Or, as the old adage puts it, “your right to swing your first ends where my nose begins”.

What this means is that no person’s rights are so absolute that they are not limited by the rights of others. Now since that argument must apply to the right of the foetus to life as well, does that leave us in limbo, in a stalemate where the rights of women and the rights of foeti perpetually cancel each other out?

The “pro-choice” answer is to state that the rights of a mature, rational, woman must take precedence over the rights of a developing foetus. At first glance this seems to make sense, although this Nietzschean exaltation of the rights of the strong over the rights of the weak is oddly inconsistent with the egalitarianism that most members of the feminist and “pro-choice” movements claim to believe in. If we look at it more closely, however, we realize that there is another factor that needs to be considered in addition to the status of those whose rights have come into potential conflict. That is the nature of the rights themselves. In the case of the foetus, the right in question is the right to survive, the right to live, the right to exist. In the case of the woman, the right in question is a right to decide and to act. Surely the former must take precedence over the latter in a rational hierarchy of rights, regardless of the status of the rights-bearer.

It is clear that sound, reasonable thinking about ethics, supported by biological science, is on the pro-life side in the abortion debate. Why then, is the other side winning and what could possibly draw someone to hold such an obviously wrong position?

This question became all the more puzzling to me several years ago when I read Dr. Lionel Tiger’s The Decline of Males for the first time. In that book, Dr. Tiger, who is the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, in describing the effects of the invention of the birth control pill, wrote the following:

It is impossible to overestimate the impact of the contraceptive pill on human arrangements. The most striking display of this is the baffling historical fact that after the pill became available in the mid-1960’s, the pressure for liberal abortion intensified worldwide. This is remarkably, even profoundly, counterintuitive. It is also an implacable historical reality. Only after women could control their reproduction excellently did they need more and more safe abortions. (4)

Counterintuitive is an understatement. The invention of effective oral contraception meant that women no longer required the cooperation of men if they wished to have heterosexual intercourse without getting pregnant. You would normally expect that this would have decreased whatever demand for abortion there was. Instead it increased it. I had not considered how strange this was until Dr. Tiger pointed out the obvious.

Dr. Tiger’s explanation is that the increase in female control over fertility, meant a decrease in male confidence in their own paternity, and hence a lesser willingness on the part of men to stay with the women they impregnated, leading to the demand for abortion. This may have something to do with it – one would think, though, that if oral contraception created mistrust of women on the part of men it would take the form of suspicion they were taking the pill in secret and blaming the lack of offspring on male infertility than in an increase in the age-old fear of being cuckolded.

I’m more inclined to think that it is all about power. That is usually what lies behind demands that are couched in the terminology of rights. If the pill is regarded as a means of empowering women – it gave them more control over their fertility than they had ever possessed in the past – then what would be the next step in that empowerment process? Proclaiming that women have the right to decide to terminate their pregnancies. Such a right would inherently grant women unilateral decision-making authority over the survival of the human species – a tremendous blackmail tool and source of power.

Most women themselves probably would not have thought of it in those terms. Political radicals who seek to exploit issues pertaining to women to achieve their revolutionary goals, including power for themselves, would have thought of it this way, though.

Interestingly, however one wishes to explain the strange historical fact Dr. Tiger pointed out, it confirms the warnings which Pope Paul VI gave in Humanae Vitae about the consequences of artificial contraception. He warned, in that famous 1968 encyclical, that artificial birth control “could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards” and:

forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection. (5)

The position taken by Paul VI in Humane Vitae was the position of the entire Christian Church – Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant until very recently. In the four decades since the encyclical came out, Paul VI’s warnings have materialized. In Canada today, there are no legal restrictions on abortion and it is provided free to whoever wants it by the government out of our tax dollars.

It is best not to speculate on what the next exciting step on this road of progress free of all traditional ethical and moral restraints, will be. I’m sure we’ll find out, to our disgust and dismay, before too long.



(1) Similarly, no amount of legislation saying that a union between a man and a man, or a union between a woman and a woman, is a marriage, will ever make it so. The progressive liberal’s seeming faith in the ability of government to generate fact and truth by legal fiat is a superstition.

(2) Ted Byfield, “The question that got me thrown off a TV program”, originally his back page column for the July 25, 1980 issue of The Alberta Report, reprinted on page 105 of The Book of Ted: Epistles From an Unrepentant Redneck (Keystone Press: Edmonton, 1988)

(3) George P. Grant with Sheila Grant, “Abortion and Rights”, originally published as part of The Right To Birth: Some Christian Views on Abortion edited by Eugene Fairweather and Ian Gentles and published in 1976 by the Anglican Book Centre in Toronto, subsequently republished in Technology and Justice, a collection of Grant’s essays published by Anansi, also out of Toronto, in 1986, where it can be found on pages 117 to 130, this particular quotation coming from page 117.

(4) Lionel Tiger, The Decline of Males, (Golden Books: New York, 1999), p. 35. Bold indicates italics in the original.

(5) http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae_en.html