The First Article – God the Father

 

The first observation that needs to be made in commenting on the first Article of the Creed is that a book could be written on the first word alone. (1)   Whether we are speaking of the Apostles’ Creed or the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, the first word is the verb for “believe” in the present tense, active voice, indicative mood, and first person.   In the Nicene Creed in the Greek in which it was originally written this verb is “Πιστεύομεν” which is the plural form meaning “We believe”.   By ancient tradition this is the Creed recited or chanted in the liturgy of the Sacrament of the Eucharist or Holy Communion.   When employed liturgically it becomes “Πιστεύω”, the singular form of the verb meaning “I believe”.   The Latin version follows the liturgical text and uses the singular form of the verb, “Credo”, which is also the form that appears at the beginning of the equivalent Article in the Apostles’ Creed of which the Latin is the standard text.    The word “creed” is itself a derivative of this word which later came to be the term for this type of expression of the Christian faith.   Before “creed” caught on these were generally called “symbols” which is still the main term for them in the Eastern Church.  Symbol is a word in both Greek and Latin that means “sign” or “token” and was applied by the Churches to their basic statements of faith because these were used to distinguish between members of the Church and unbelievers as well as between the orthodox on the one hand and heretics and schismatics on the other.   Orthodox Churchmen could confess the faith, heretics and unbelievers could not.  

 

This is why creed is so appropriate as a substitute or synonym for symbol.   Every religion’s teachings contain elements of both faith – what is to be believed – and practice – what is to be done, but Christianity stands out in that whereas other religions, including the other Abrahamic religions, emphasize practice over belief, Christianity emphasizes belief over practice.   This is true of all Christian Churches, regardless of where they stand on the question of whether St. James interprets St. Paul or St. Paul interprets St. James on the matter of faith and works.  Jesus Christ commissioned His disciples to go into the world with a message to proclaim.   That message, called the Gospel or Good News, is about how He, God’s Son, was sent into the world by God to restore sinners to God’s favour (grace) freely offered through the New Covenant of redemption from sin that He established through His death and resurrection.   With the inauguration of the New Covenant came the institution of a new community or society of faith, the Church, participation in which is open to all, both those who had been part of the national community of the Old Covenant (Jews) and those who had been outside the Old Covenant (Gentiles).    The New Testament prescribes both an external and an internal sign or symbol of membership in this community.   The external symbol is baptism.   The internal sign is the instrument by which the grace proclaimed in the Gospel is received, faith.   Since only God can look on the heart and see faith directly, faith must be confessed.   This is why the Church was right to early recognize the importance of communal confessions of faith and why it is so appropriate that these are called creeds as well as symbols.  

 

The first Article of the Apostles’ Creed is:  Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem, Creatorem caeli et terrae.     In the Book of Common Prayer this is translated as “I believe in God, the Father almighty, Maker of heaven and earth”.   The corresponding first Article of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed is Πιστεύομεν εἰς ἕνα Θεὸν Πατέρα παντοκράτορα, ποιητὴν οὐρανοῦ καὶ γῆς, ὁρατῶν τε πάντων καὶ ἀοράτων.   The liturgical version differs from this, the conciliar version, only in that it places the first word in the singular.   The Book of Common Prayer renders this “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible”.    The Article is basically identical in both versions of the Creed with the Nicene being the more precise specifying that God is ἕνα (one), and that He is the Maker of ὁρατῶν τε πάντων καὶ ἀοράτων (all things visible and invisible) as well as of caeli et terrae or οὐρανοῦ καὶ γῆς (heaven and earth).   Interestingly, the original Nicene Creed published by the First Council of Nicaea (325 AD), spoke of God as “Maker of all things visible and invisible” but did not mention “heaven and earth”.   The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, as revised by the First Council of Constantinople (381 AD), therefore, includes both phrases, the one included in the Apostles’ Creed and the one included in the original Nicene.

 

The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed was not the first time these expressions “heaven and earth” and “visible and invisible” were joined together in reference to God’s act of Creation.   St. Paul used both in the sixteenth verse of the first chapter of his epistle to the Colossian Church.   In the inspired text it was the deity of Jesus Christ, the Son, which the Apostle was stressing.  “For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible”.   Although the Councils that produced this Creed were convened primarily to address a heresy that attacked the deity of Jesus Christ, Arianism, which maintained that Jesus was a lesser divinity, the first created being, rather than the Eternal Son of God, it was in response to a different heresy – or class of heresies – that they borrowed this language from St. Paul and applied it to the Father as Creator.

 

Among the many heresies that plagued the early Church were those that taught that the visible and physical was corrupt and irredeemably so whereas the spiritual and invisible was pure and incorruptible and that therefore only the spiritual was created by the God preached by Jesus Christ while the physical was created by a lesser, evil, divinity they called the Demiurge and equated with the God of the Old Testament.   The heresies that St. Irenaeus of Lyon discussed in his Adversus Haereses (180 AD) are mostly of this nature.   St. Irenaeus, following Justin Martyr, traced their origin to Simon Magus, the converted Samaritan sorcerer whose attempt to purchase the Apostolic power from St. Peter and the ensuing rebuke are recorded in the eighth chapter of the book of Acts.   That the earliest forms of this kind of heresy date back to the first century before the close of the Apostolic era and the canon of the New Testament is attested by the epistles of St. John which speak of sects which had broken away from the Churches and which denied that Christ is come in the flesh.   Today this class of heresies is usually called Gnosticism, although the term is of relatively recent coinage.   St. John called them antichrists.

 

By declaring her faith in God the Father as Maker of “heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible” the orthodox Church affirmed that the God of the New Testament is the same God as the God of the Old Testament and so definitively rejected these heresies which postulated that the two Testaments spoke of two different Gods.

 

The identification of the God of the New Testament with the God of the Old Testament is absolutely essential to the Christian truth concerning God.   The fullest revelation of Himself that God has given to mankind is in the Incarnation of His Son, Jesus Christ, Who in the verse preceding the one cited previously from Colossians, St. Paul declared to be the “image of the invisible God”.   In Jesus Christ, We have a more complete knowledge of Who and What God is than that which can be discerned from the natural revelation of Creation or that which God gave to His Old Testament people in the Law.   It is God’s revelation of Himself in the Incarnation, however, that requires our acceptance of His revelation of Himself in the Old Testament.   When Jesus asked His disciples Whom they said He was and St. Peter answered “the Christ, the Son of the Living God”, Jesus praised His answer, said that it had been revealed to St. Peter not by man but by His Father in Heaven, and declared it to be the rock upon which He would build His Church, Who was the God of Whom St. Peter said Jesus was the Son?   Zeus?  Apollo?  Odin?   Of course not.   It was Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament.

 

The Gospels record Jesus as beginning His public ministry in Galilee by going from town to town, teaching in the synagogues, and preaching that “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand”, a reference to the Kingdom promised and prophesied in the Old Testament.   At the beginning of His most famous Sermon He warned His hearers against thinking that His purpose was to abolish the Law and the Prophets (the Old Testament).  When He healed the lepers He instructed them to see the priests and bring the offering commanded in the Law.   When asked about divorce, Jesus referred to the Genesis Creation account which Marcion and other heretics maintained spoke of a God different from the God Jesus preached.   In a confrontation recorded in the eight chapter of St. John’s Gospel the Jewish leaders asked Jesus if He was greater than Abraham and Who He made Himself out to be.   In His response He said that “it is my Father that honoureth me; of whom ye say, that he is your God”.   Having thus unambiguously identified His Father with the God of the Old Testament, He went on to provoke the Jewish leaders into asking Him “hast thou seen Abraham”, to which He replied by saying “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am”, identifying Himself with Jehovah (2).

 

That Jesus could speak of both Himself and His Father as Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament, attests to the essential unity of God, which is affirmed in this Article of the Nicene Creed in the word ἕνα.   The Father is the One God, in Whose One eternal Being the Son and the Holy Ghost share through their eternal Generation and eternal Procession from the Father respectively.   The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are co-equal and co-eternal, but as the One Who eternally begets the Son and from Whom the Holy Ghost eternally proceeds, the Father is begotten of none and proceeds from none.  (3)  

 

There are several different senses in which God is Father.   Sometimes God is spoken of as Father in a sense that is virtually synonymous with His being Creator.   In recent centuries this sense of God’s Fatherhood has been emphasized to the exclusion of all other senses, especially by liberals who speak of the “universal Fatherhood of God”.   This sense of God’s Fatherhood does appear in the Scriptures – St. Paul uses it in his reasoning with the philosophers at Mars Hill in the seventeenth chapter of the book of Acts – but it is by no means the primary sense of the Fatherhood of God in the Bible.  When Jesus speaks of God as Father, sometimes He qualifies the term with the second person possessive when speaking to His followers, as for example when He instructs us to pray “Our Father…”   That those who are not His followers cannot claim God as Father in this sense is made quite clear in the Johannine writings where Jesus speaks of His enemies as the children of the devil and where the children of God are identified as those who have received Jesus by believing in His name.   Sometimes Jesus speaks of God as “the Father” without a possessive, in which instances the meaning is basically the same as that of “God” and this is the closest that can be found in Jesus’ own words to the universal Fatherhood concept.   Most often, however, Jesus speaks of the Father with the first person possessive pronoun.   As Jesus’ Father, God is Father in a way that He is Father of no other, the way that means that because Jesus is God’s Son, Jesus is God too.   This is the primary meaning of the Fatherhood of God the Father.   Indeed, it is in this sense of Fatherhood that the Father has always been the Father, because He has always been the Father to the Son.   The heretical evangelical teachers who teach Incarnational Sonship and claim to be orthodox Trinitarians because they acknowledge that Jesus was eternally the Word of God, co-equal and co-eternal with the Father and Holy Ghost, even if they claim He became the Son in the Incarnation, should be asked Who they think the Father was before the Incarnation.  

 

When, therefore, the first Article of the Creed begins by affirming belief in God the Father, and concludes by affirming Him as Creator, this ought not to be understood as equating God’s Fatherhood with the fact that He is Creator in a reductionist sort of way.   Each Person of the Trinity was involved in Creation.   The Holy Ghost is specifically referenced in the second verse of Genesis.   When the New Testament speaks of the Son’s involvement in Creation it uses the language of instrumentality.   “All things were made by him”, St. John writes in his Gospel, “and without him was not anything made that was made”.   The word “by” here renders the Greek διά which conveys the idea of intermediacy in place, time and means.  We have already mentioned St. Paul’s similar language in Colossians.   Note that in the passage of the Gospel where St. John writes the above Jesus is spoken of as the Word.   He too is specifically mentioned in Genesis 1 where each act of Creation begins with “And God said”.    Jesus is the Word spoken through which God creates everything.   The Father is identifiable in the Genesis Creation account as the God Who speaks the Word through Whom all things are made and in the second chapter of Genesis Who breathes the breathe of life – the words for “breathe” and “spirit” are identical in the Biblical languages – into man.   Thus, while the entire Holy Trinity participates in Creation, the Father is the principle Agent of Creation, the One Who speaks the Word and breathes the Spirit, and so the act of Creation is particularly ascribed – the theological term for this is “appropriated” – to Him in our Creedal confessions.   It is not this that makes the Father, the Father, however, but His eternal relationship to His Son, about which we shall have more to say, Lord willing, when we look at the Second Article.

 

 (1)   From a strictly grammatical point of view this first word is the most important word in the Creed.   Grammatically, the subject of the Creeds is the believer (or believers if the plural is used).   The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all placed in the accusative (direct object) case in the Creed, and in the Nicene Creed whatever actions are ascribed to them, with the exception of the verb for “made” when it says that “through Him [Christ] all things were made” are expressed as participles (verbal adjectives) rather than finite verbs.   This form of speaking or writing, in which statements that would in direct discourse contain subjects in the nominative case and ordinary finite verbs are made the predicate of a verb of thinking or speaking, with the verbs converted into infinitives or participles, and what would otherwise be put in the case of the subject is put in the case of the object, is called indirect discourse.   In the Apostles’ Creed this first verb is the only verb connecting the subject, the believer, to the predicate, that which it is asserted the believer believes about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, although it is repeated at the beginning of the  eighth Article about the Holy Spirit.   In the Nicene Creed two other verbs, “we confess” and “we look for” are included after the Articles about the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and the Church to introduce the Articles about baptism and Last Things.

(2)   This is the significance of the present tense.   When Moses asked God for His name He answered “I Am”.   The Hebrew word traditionally transliterated into English as Jehovah when it is not rendered THE LORD in all caps is a variation of this.

(3)  The Quicumque Vult or Athanasian Creed puts it this way: Pater a nullo est factus: nec creatus, nec genitus. Filius a Patre solo est: non factus, nec creatus, sed genitus. Spiritus Sanctus a Patre et Filio: non factus, nec creatus, nec genitus, sed procedens.   In English this is “The Father is made of none; neither created, nor begotten. The Son is of the Father alone; not made, nor created; but begotten. The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son; neither made, nor created, nor begotten; but proceeding”.

The Donatist Dilemma

 

In the early centuries of Christian history the orthodox had to contend with hundreds of heretical and schismatic movements.   Except among apologists and ecclesiastical historians, only a handful of these are remembered by name today.   Gnosticism, the first proponents of which challenged the authority and teachings of the Apostles themselves, was not the name of a specific heretical movement but the collective term for a large class of heretical movements.     Valentinianism, after Valentinus of Alexandria, was one such movement that was widespread in the second century and was the main heresy against which St. Irenaeus of Lyons wrote.   The ideas that the term Gnosticism usually brings to mind today more properly belong to Marcionism, named after Marcion of Sinope.    Historians are divided as to whether Marcionism is properly classified as Gnostic or whether it is best regarded as a heresy that deviated from both Gnosticism and orthodox Christianity.

 

The heresies that are still widely known by name are the major heresies that were addressed by the four earliest ecumenical Councils, the two that put together the most basic and fundamental of Christian Creeds (1) in the fourth century, i.e., the First Council of Nicaea (325 AD) and the First Council of Constantinople (381 AD), and the two that resulted in the Christological clarification of the Definition of Chalcedon in the fifth century, i.e., the Council of Ephesus (431 AD) and the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD).   In one way or another the heresies addressed by these Councils deviated from orthodoxy as to the Person and Nature of Jesus Christ.   Arianism, which takes its name from Arius of Alexandria and which was the principal heresy addressed by the Creed-forming Councils of the fourth century, denied the full deity of Jesus Christ and taught that He was a created being possessed of a lesser divinity than the Father.   Nestorianism, named after Nestorius of Constantinople, the principal heresy addressed by the fifth century Councils, stressed the distinction between the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ to the point where the unity of His Person was compromised.   This latter is a good illustration of the general nature of heresy which is not, as is often supposed, merely “wrong doctrine”.   Heresy is a truth taken out of the context of other equal or more important, balancing truths, and so twisted by exaggeration into an error that is far more dangerous than something that it is merely and entirely false.   G. K. Chesterton in his biography of William Blake (1910) said that “A fad or heresy is the exaltation of something which, even if true, is secondary or temporary in its nature against those things which are essential and eternal, those things which always prove themselves true in the long run”.   T. S. Eliot in After Strange Gods (1933) wrote that “the essential of any important heresy is not simply that it is wrong: it is that it is partly right.”

 

If we were to poll Christians, asking them to name and rank a few of the early heresies, it is unlikely that we would find many for whom Donatism would be at the top of their list.   Indeed, while I hope I am too cynical and am completely wrong in this, I suspect that if we were to instead provide that name and ask people to identify it, many would associate it with Donatello, the fifteenth century Florentine Renaissance sculptor – or the Ninja Turtle who bears his name. 

 

Donatism has nothing to do with either sculptor or Ninja Turtle, of course.   It takes its name from the fourth century figure Donatus Magnus, a priest from the Berber settlement of Casae Nigrae in Numidia, which is now the town of Negrine in Algeria.   With Donatus and his followers, it was not a dispute over doctrine that separated them from the orthodox Church as it was with the aforementioned heresiarchs Valentius, Marcion, Arius and Nestorius and their sects, but rather a dispute over practice.   It would be more accurate therefore to describe Donatism as schismatic rather than heretical, although the schism, as we shall see, eventually corrupted the doctrine of the schismatics.   It deviated from orthopraxis (sound practice), however, in much the same way that heresy deviates from orthodoxy (sound doctrine) – by taking a part of sound practice and emphasizing it to the point that other parts fell by the wayside.    The part of sound practice they so over-emphasized was holiness or separation from the world. (2)

 

The Donatist schism had its origins in the persecution of Christians in the reign of Diocletian.   This was the largest and harshest persecution of Christians in the history of the Roman Empire.   Previous persecutions had usually been local affairs, conducted with the authority or at least toleration of a regional governor.   This one came down from the very top and in theory covered the entire Empire, although in actuality certain regions were far more severely affected than others.   The severity of this persecution made it unpopular which contributed to the Roman Empire’s reversing course ten years after it began and issuing the Edict of Milan which legalized Christianity throughout the Roman Empire and granted it protection against persecution.

 

North Africa was a region that was particularly severely affected by the Great Persecution, as it had been during the lesser persecutions of the previous century.   It was almost, in a sense, the epicentre of the Persecution.   In 302 AD, Diocletian had issued an edict outlawing the Manichaeans, ordering that their leaders be burned along with their books and any of their followers who didn’t recant.   The Manichaeans were the followers of Mani, a third century Persian religious teacher who blended ideas from Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Gnosticism, and whose teachings were noted for their dualism.   Their teachings had spread from the Persian Empire westward and had become particularly influential in the academic centres of Egypt and North Africa. (3)   Diocletian had been persuaded that they were a subversive movement acting on behalf of the Persian Empire to infiltrate and weaken Rome.   Later that year, Diocletian’s ire would fall upon orthodox Christians when St. Romanus, a deacon of the Caesarean Church, denounced the pagan sacrifices that took place in his court at Antioch.   He was already ill-disposed towards Christianity because he blamed Christian members of his court for the failure of his attempts at divination after the Roman victory against the Persians in the Battle of Satala and the renewal of peace with the Sassanid dynasty.   Diocletian was, therefore, already half persuaded when his co-emperor Galerius (4) began to talk him into extending towards orthodox Christianity the same policy he had taken towards Manichaeism – persecution with the end of total extirpation.   While he initially proposed a more moderate persecution, his resistance to Galerius’ proposal was overcome when the two sent away to the oracle at the Temple to Apollo in Didyma and were told that Apollo was silent because of the presence of Christianity in the Empire.   In February of 303 AD, he and his co-emperors began issuing a series of edicts that forbade Christians from assembling to worship and ordered the Christian Scriptures and other Christian literature to be burned, Christian Church buildings to be destroyed, and Christian clergy to be imprisoned and stripped Christians of all the legal rights of Roman citizens.

 

Although all Christians were targeted by this persecution, the clergy - the bishops and priests who led, taught, and officiated in the Churches - were particularly hit hard.   While many of these remained faithful to the point of martyrdom, many others did not.   These handed over their copies of the Bible to the Roman soldiers to be burned.    Often they handed over the names of other Christians as well.   This earned them the label traditores, meaning “those who handed over” which is the root of our word traitor.  (5)

 

Mensurius, who was Bishop of Carthage at the time, removed the Scriptures from the Church building and hid them in his own home, substituting heretical writings in their place for the soldiers to seize.    While he thus cleverly avoided becoming a traditor himself, this act was not exactly impressive to those who contrasted his example unfavourably with that of those who submitted to arrest, torture, and death.   It did not help his image any that the contrast was particularly great with his own predecessor in the See of Carthage, St. Cyprian, who had been martyred in the earlier persecution under Valerian, less than half a century prior to this.   Mensurius then forbade the Carthaginian Church from honouring as martyrs any who initiated their own martyrdom by defiantly turning themselves in to the Roman authorities.    Needless to say, he was far from being the most admired bishop in the Christian Church at the time.  

 

Mensurius died in 311 AD, about six years after the Great Persecution had begun to wane.   The Edict of Milan was still two years away, but North Africa was governed by Maxentius (6) who had already liberated the Christians.   Caecilian, who had served as archdeacon under Mensurius, was chosen as his successor, and among those participating in his consecration was Felix, Bishop of Aptunga.   Immediately this succession met with protest.   Caecilian had been an even more zealous advocate of Mensurius’ position vis-à-vis the voluntary martyrs than Mensurius had been himself and so was most objectionable to those who found that position odious.   These then claimed that his consecration was invalid because of the participation of Felix.   Felix had been absent from his See during the Persecution and so had avoided arrest.   The opponents of Caecilian accused Felix of being a traditor, and maintained that this invalidated the consecration.

 

The matter was appealed to Secundus, Bishop of Tigisis who was the closest Primate (7), and Secundus with the support of 70 other bishops ruled against Caecilian.    These then chose and consecrated Majorinus, who had been a lector in the Carthaginian Church, as bishop.   With two different groups claiming two different individuals to be the validly consecrated holder of the same bishopric, a schism was born.   Each side excommunicated the other, albeit on different grounds.   Those who supported Majorinus as the validly consecrated Bishop of Carthage maintained that those in fellowship with Caecilian were tainted by association with the sins of the traditor alleged against Caecilian himself and against Felix who consecrated him.   Those who supported Caecilian excommunicated those in fellowship with Majorinus on the grounds that their actions were schismatic.   This schism was very much a local affair as outside of North Africa the supporters of Caecilian were a clear supermajority.   The Patriarch of Rome was asked to look into the matter and with the backing of the Roman Synod he ruled in favour of Caecilian in 313 AD, as did the Council of Arles of 314 AD to which the decision was appealed.   These rulings were upheld in the ecumenical Councils later in that century.   Majorinus died two years after his consecration and was succeeded in the schismatic line by Donatus Magnus and so the schism came to take the name of Donatism.

 

The error of the Donatists, as we noted at the outset of this discussion, grew out of a matter of practice rather than a matter of doctrine.   When it comes to the actions of the traditores, orthodox Christians and Donatists were in agreement that it was reprehensible to collaborate with the persecutors of the faith by handing over Scriptures, sacred items, and the names of the brethren.   The Donatists, however, in their zeal for the holiness and purity of the Church, good things in themselves, insisted that the betrayal of the traditores forever disqualified them from being restored to their positions of leadership in the Church and thus invalidated their every ministry from administering baptisms to celebrating the Eucharist to, in the case of bishops, ordinations and consecrations of other bishops.   As easy as it is to see where the Donatists were coming from in this, had the Lord Jesus Christ thought the same way, St. Peter would never have been restored to his position as Apostle after he denied Christ three times on the evening of His betrayal and arrest, would never have been empowered to preach the sermon on the first Whitsunday through which  three thousand souls were converted, would never have opened the door to the evangelism of the Gentiles by bringing  the Gospel to Cornelius, and would not have written the two epistles under his name that are part of the Sacred Canon.   Yet even before the denial had taken place, indeed, just before the Lord predicted it, He said unto St. Peter “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren” (Lk. 22:31-32).   After St. Peter had denied Him, and after He had risen from the dead, He called him to feed His sheep three times – one for each denial – and then, prophesying his eventual martyrdom, repeated to him the call to “Follow Me” (Jn. 21:15-19).   The difference between the Lord’s response to St. Peter and the Donatists’ response to the traditores shows us how their emphasis on holiness was at the expense of other elements of orthopraxis such as forgiveness and restoration and thus the equivalent of heresy in practice.   Ultimately, this error in practice translated itself into an error in doctrine, the error that the efficacy of the Church’s Ministries of Word and Sacrament as conduits of the grace of God is dependent upon the spotless purity of the ministers.   The controversy over this was still raging almost a century later when St. Augustine of Hippo, than whom there was no clearer and stronger expositor of the grace of God between St. Clement of Rome and the Reformation, answered the Donatists in his De Baptismo.

 

What message is there in this historical episode for our own day?

 

There are a number of parallels between the Diocletian Persecution and the bat flu madness of the last two years.   There are huge differences too, of course.   Whereas Diocletian and Galerius saw their persecution of Christianity for what it was – a deliberate attempt to extirpate the Christian faith and religion – the governments of the present day deny to themselves that they are doing anything of the sort.  Since they allow Christians and people of other religions to “worship” online, they have convinced themselves that their having forbidden Christians and those of other faiths to meet and assemble in person for much of the last two years is not the same thing as Diocletian’s outlawing of all Christian assembly.   Having convinced themselves of this, they have also persuaded themselves that in having Christian ministers arrested for holding services where their congregations could, well, congregate is not the same thing as when Galerius ordered bishops and priests to be arrested.   They obviously see no similarities between their attempts to prevent the spread of any information that disagrees with their narrow, official, narrative about the bat flu and, indeed, to stomp it out as “misinformation” and the Roman Empire’s efforts to burn all copies of the Christian Scriptures and other sacred literature.   Some would say that because with regards to each of these parallels the difference is that what the Roman Empire did was that much more severe the comparison is therefore inappropriate.   Others will, more astutely, note that this difference is what allows today’s governments to convince themselves that they are not engaged in persecution which self-deception makes what they are doing that much more dangerous than the open persecution of the Roman Empire or in more recent times of the Communist countries.

 

A similar comparison could be made between the response of the Churches to the almost universal medical technocratic tyranny of the bat flu scare and the actions of the traditores.   Again, there are huge differences, but not such as necessarily mean that the Churches of the present day come out favourably in the comparison.   Complying with an order from the state that the Church not assemble is, in one sense, not as extreme a betrayal of the faith as handing over the Scriptures to be burned and handing over the names of other Christians to those seeking to arrest them, but it is a betrayal in that the teachings of the Scriptures, as interpreted by the faithful in all places and all times from the Apostles to the present  (8) is that a state ban on Church assembly is a clear and obvious exception to the Scriptural injunction of civil obedience. (9)    If it is less extreme in this sense, it is greater in that it is far more widespread than that of the traditores was.    The compliance of the Churches with these tyrannical public health orders was almost universal.   The leaders of the Churches have undoubtedly persuaded themselves that they are not guilty of the same thing as the traditores and even that their compliance with this medical totalitarianism is virtuous, an act of sacrifice for the safety and wellbeing of others, especially the most vulnerable among us.    However, just as governments are capable of more and greater oppression and persecution when they have deceived themselves into thinking that they are acting for the public good instead of oppressing and persecuting people, so this self-deception on the part of the Churches compounds rather than mitigates the problem.    Those who regard their sinful betrayal of the faith not as a sinful betrayal of the faith but as a virtuous act of self-sacrifice are incapable of the repentance and confession that the orthodox Churches of the fourth century required from the traditores before their restoration.                                                                                                                                           

 

This leaves anyone who is trying to follow Christ in accordance with what historically and traditionally have been regarded as orthodox faith and orthopraxis and who has not bought into the Great Deception of the bat flu madness caught on the horns of a terrible dilemma.   To anyone trying to follow Christ in this manner, Church is essential not optional.   For almost two years, however, the leadership of the Churches have acted as if the opposite is true.   They have closed their doors, tried to get us to live a lie by pretending that watching a tiny Church service broadcast online and saying the words along with them is a form of assembling together as a Church (it is not), and allowed attendance on occasions that the public health tyrants permitted provided that a stringent list of requirements all arising out of a worldly spirit of fear that would drive the sanctity out of the Church were adhered to.   The Christian leaders who have most conspicuously and admirably resisted the public health tyranny have for the most part come from sects that are either extremely schismatic, enthusiastic (in the theological sense of the word which is not a good thing), heretical – sometimes grossly so – or all of the above.  

 

Should the public health scare ever end, what ought we to do?

 

If we wait for the leaders of our Churches to acknowledge and repent of the sins of betraying the faith and leaving us without the ministry of the Church in any real sense for the duration of the public health scare before resuming fellowship with them we will be waiting a very long time and run the risk of becoming Donatists in spirit, if not in letter.

 

If, on the other hand, we just try to pick up where we had left off in March 2020, forgetting the entire horrible interlude, and pretending that there was no betrayal or apostasy to forgive (since offering forgiveness in the absence of acknowledgement of wrongdoing cheapens forgiveness), we will have traded the Scylla of Donatism for the Charbydis that is its opposite.

 

There is no obvious solution to this dilemma short of the public health scare being brought to an end with the Second Coming of Christ in Glory to judge both the quick and the dead.   Whatever we end up doing, we should devote much prayer and contemplation to the matter.

 

 (1)   The Nicene-Constantinopolitan, the Creed that was put together by and in the first two ecumenical Councils of the early Church, is the most basic and fundamental Christian Creed in that it is the only Creed universally accepted among all the Churches that can claim organic lineage from the Apostolic Church.   This is further attested to by the fact that the addition of a single word – filioque – to the Latin text of this Creed, was the most important doctrinal issue that separated the Eastern Greek-speaking Church from the Western Latin-speaking Church in the eleventh century.   The Apostles’ Creed is shorter and simpler than the Nicene-Constantinopolitan, but it does not seem to have ever been as universally accepted and used as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan.     The traditional account of its origin – that it was composed on the first Whitsunday by the Apostles themselves, with each of the Apostles, St. Matthias having been chosen as Judas Iscariot’s replacement already, contributing one of the twelve lines – is very old.   St. Ambrose of Milan and Rufinus of Aquileia both spoke of it as a well-established account less than a century after the Council of Nicaea.     If true, this would be an incontrovertible argument for the priority of the Apostles’ Creed over the Nicene-Constantinopolitan as the basic Creed of Christianity (not that the two, which are very similar, and could almost be taken for the longer and shorter forms of a singular Creed, contradict each other), but if true, it would be difficult to explain how it fell so quickly out of use in the Greek-speaking Churches of the East.     In its earliest form, the old Roman Symbol used in the baptismal rite of the Church of Rome – in the sense of the Church particular to that city, not in the sense of the “Roman Catholic Church”, i.e., all Churches that remained in communion with the Roman Patriarch after the Great Schism and the Reformation – it predates the Nicene-Constantinopolitan and goes back to at least the early part of the second century.   Nevertheless, although a strong case can be made that it was originally written in Greek – see Rev. John Baron The Greek Origins of the Apostles’ Creed Illustrated by Ancient Documents and Recent Research (1885) for the case that the Greek text of the Creed that Marcellus of Ancyra brought with him to Rome during his exile was the original form – the history of its usage is almost entirely Latin and Western.

(2)   “World” is the word we use in English where the Greek-speaking Church used κόσμος.   In Scriptural and ecclesiastical usage these terms have a positive sense in which they are basically synonyms of “Creation”, i.e., everything God made.   The Latinized transliteration of κόσμος as “cosmos”, a synonym for “universe”, is a secularized equivalent of this.   This positive sense of these words can be narrowed to focus on one aspect of Creation if the context requires it.   For example, the world in “For God so loved the world” in John 3:16 is Creation but with a focus on the people who live in it.    There is also a negative sense in which these words are used by the Scriptures and the Church and this is obviously the sense intended when we speak of holiness as separation from the world.   In this sense, world or κόσμος means the fallen state of Creation, human sin or rebellion against God not merely as it touches each of us as individuals, in which case the word for it would be flesh as a rendition of the Greek σὰρξ in its specialized New Testament usage, but as it permeates and corrupts human organized society.

(3)   Manichaeism had a strong presence in these places both before and after the Persecution. St. Augustine, prior to his conversion to the orthodox Christian faith of his mother, had been associated with the Manichaeans for about a decade.  He had come under their influence as a student at the University of Carthage.   This was about seventy years after Diocletian had ordered Manichaeism rubbed out.

(4)   This was the period of the Roman Tetrachy.   Although Diocletian’s treatment of the Manichaeans and Christians was undoubtedly tyrannical, in one sense he behaved atypically for a despot and divided his power with others.   Two years after becoming emperor in 284 AD, he named one of his cavalry comrades Maximian his co-emperor, assigning the Western Empire to Maximian and governing the Eastern Empire himself.   Seven years later, he named two other co-emperors, Galerius and Constantius to serve as Junior Emperors under him and Maximian.    The Senior Emperors took the title Augustus, the Junior Emperors took the title Caesar. The Tetrarchy was short lived.  Constantius’ son Constantine succeeded his father in 306 and was awarded both imperial titles.    In less than two decades he had consolidated his reign over the whole Roman Empire, although the division between East and West was lasting and would re-assert itself after his reign.   A famous episode in the process of consolidating his rule was the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312 AD in which he defeated Maximian’s successor Maxentius, leaving him the sole Western claimant to the Imperial title.  This was the battle in which in response to a vision he fought under a standard bearing the ☧, the Christian monogram formed by combining X (Chi) with P (Rho) the first two letters of the word Christ.

(5)   While the word “traitor” is derived from traditor(es), the word “tradition” comes from the same source as traditor.   The concept common to both is of something having been handed or given over.   The source is the Latin verb trado “I hand over, surrender”, tradere “to hand over, surrender”, a contraction of the compound formed by combining the preposition trans meaning “across” and the verb do, dare meaning “give”.   This verb takes the form traditus “having been handed over” in its fourth part, the passive perfect participle.   “Tradition”, which preserves the passive voice of this form of the verb, means “that which has been handed over” in the sense of that which has been handed down to us from those who have gone before us and lacks the perjorative connotations of traditor(es) which is formed from the same part of the verb, by modifying it with the suffix that indicates the agent of the action of the otherwise passive form and which is pejorative because the handing over indicated in this case was an act of cowardly betrayal.

(6)   Vide supra, note 4.

(7)   The Bishop of Carthage was also the Primate of North Africa but for obvious reasons could not adjudicate this case.   Secundus was Primate of Numidia.

(8)   This is the test of Catholicity – ecumenicity, antiquity, and consent - proposed by St. Vincent of Lerins in his famous canon – “quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est” (“whatever is believed everywhere, always, and by all”) in Commonitorium 2:6.

(9)   The examples of Daniel when forbidden by Darius to pray to the true God in the sixth chapter of Daniel, and of the Apostles when forbidden by the Sanhredrin to preach and teach in the name of Jesus in the fourth and fifth chapters of Acts, set the Scriptural precedent followed by the Churches that continued to meet during the persecutions including the Diocletian.

Orthodoxy and Literalism

A century ago the fundamentalist-modernist controversy broke out across all Protestant denominations. This was very different from previous theological controversies. In the early centuries of the Church the orthodox Church Fathers defended the Apostolic faith against various sorts of heresies but these latter were distortions of the truth rather than outright denials of it. Nestorians separated the natures of Christ, monophysitists confused them, and in response the Council of Chalcedon condemned both heresies and articulated, in its famous Definition, the orthodox doctrine of the hypostatic union – that full deity and full humanity are, without being confused with each other, inseparably joined in the one Person of Jesus Christ. Other controversies, would later arise among those who accepted Nicene orthodoxy, over fine points of theological interpretation. The fundamentalist-modernist controversy was not like either of those.

What was called modernism them but is usually called liberalism today, was not a new theological “tribe” that had suddenly popped up among the faithful. Instead, it was unbelief articulated as theology. Rationalistic philosophy had persuaded many people that the laws of nature were inviolable, that events such as virgins giving birth, men walking on water and multiplying a handful of loaves of bread so that they can feed thousands, and the dead returning to life, did not and could not happen. Modernism was the result of people being convinced of the rationalist position but unwilling to give up their profession of the Christian religion and so accordingly they developed a theology in which unbelief was disguised as belief, through the means of non-literalism. Thus, while unbelief is the proper term for their idea that the body of Jesus Christ remained in the grave and rotted, they instead spoke of their belief in a “non-literal” Resurrection. Similarly they asserted their belief in a “divinity of Christ” but not in the literal, Jesus Christ was the Creator of the universe, Who as the Son of God shared the nature of the Father and Holy Spirit with Whom He existed from all eternity, sense of orthodox Christianity. H. Richard Niebuhr – the brother of the better known Reinhold Niebuhr – aptly summed up the message of liberal Protestantism as “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” (1) It was in no way a form of Christianity but a different religion altogether as Presbyterian theologian, J. Gresham Machen, observed:

In the sphere of religion, in particular, the present time is a time of conflict; the great redemptive religion which has always been known as Christianity is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only the more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of traditional Christian terminology. This modern non-redemptive religion is called “modernism” or “liberalism.” (2)

It is important, therefore, when examining the weaknesses of fundamentalist literalism from the perspective of historical and traditional Christian orthodoxy – small-o orthodoxy, that is, the Apostolic doctrine of Christ upheld by the Church Fathers in the early, undivided, Church – that we recognize that the objections that orthodoxy might raise to fundamentalist literalism are not the same ones that liberalism raises. There are today those who hold to a kind of pseudo-orthodoxy. These are people, often ex-evangelical Protestants, who belong to traditional, liturgical, denominations, and who emphasize the fact that literalism is not the traditional, orthodox, interpretation of the Scriptures in order to advance non-literal interpretations of the Scriptures that are considerably further removed from traditional orthodoxy than fundamentalist literalism. An example of this would be the kind of semi-Marcionism that does not exclude the Old Testament from the canon, as Marcion of Sinope and his followers did, but allegorizes away the parts of the Old Testament to which Marcion objected, claiming an inconsistency between the behaviour of the YHWH depicted in a literal reading of these books with that of the Father God proclaimed by Jesus in the New Testament.

When traditional orthodoxy departs from the strict literalism of fundamentalism it is in the opposite direction to that of liberalism. Liberalism rejects the literal truth of the Scriptures out of unbelief, traditional orthodoxy asserts that the truth of the Scriptures cannot and must not be reduced to the literal. Another way of putting this is to say that unlike liberalism, orthodoxy is more than literalism – not less.

The orthodox interpretation of Scripture is a multi-layered edifice to which the literal reading is the foundation. That is to say, the genuine literal reading and not a hyper-literal reading, i.e., one that ignores the presence of metaphor and other figures of speech in the Scriptural text. St. Thomas Aquinas explained that:

The author of Holy Writ is God, in whose power it is to signify His meaning, not by words only (as man also can do), but also by things themselves. So whereas in every other science things are signified by words, this science has the property, that the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification. Therefore the first signification whereby words signify things belongs to the first sense, the historical or literal. That signification whereby things signified by words have themselves also a signification is called the spiritual sense, which is based on the literal and presupposes it. (3)

St. Thomas went on to divide the spiritual sense into three kinds – the allegorical, moral, (4) and anagogical (5) senses. These, together with the literal sense, comprise the quadriga, the fourfold sense of Scriptures, that had been taught and recognized by theologians from the Church Fathers through the Reformation. The first of the three spiritual senses – more commonly called typological as all three are allegories of one sort or another – is itself spelled out in the New Testament. This is the sense in which the institutions, people, and events of the Old Testament are understood as types of Jesus Christ and His New Covenant. This spiritual sense cannot be rejected without also rejecting the book of Hebrews in its literal sense, especially chapters nine and ten. It is also very much evident in use in the way the Old Testament is quoted throughout the New. As St. Augustine of Hippo famously put it “the New Testament is hidden in the Old, The Old Testament is unveiled in the New.” (6)

In orthodoxy, however, the literal interpretation was always the primary interpretation. It was recognized that the spiritual interpretation could very easily run to all sorts of excesses, extremes and fanaticisms if not tried down by literal. Dr. Martin Luther formulated this into the rule that “no allegory, tropology, or anagogy is valid, unless that same truth is explicitly stated literally somewhere else. Otherwise, Scripture would become a laughing matter.” (7)

The other continental Protestant Reformers were not as orthodox as Luther. Calvin in particular disparaged the quadriga and argued that the Scriptures had only one meaning, the literal. He thereby laid the foundation for both Puritanism and fundamentalism. Puritanism was the extremist form of Calvinist theology that the Marian exiles brought back to England in the sixteenth century after the accession of Elizabeth I. It insisted upon using the regulative (8) rather than the normative (9) principle in holding Christian tradition accountable to the Scriptures and turned seditious, regicidal, tyrannical, and genocidal when it found its pharisaical sabbatarianism and its schemes to purge England of such “popery” as Christmas and Easter to be opposed by the king. William Perkins, an early Puritan who remained within the Church of England and mercifully, for his sake, did not live to see Puritanism at its ugliest, said in a post-humously published work that there “is onelie one sense, and the same is the literall.” (10) Note, however, that those such as Calvin and Perkins who insisted in theory that the literal was the only sense, in practice often simply collapsed the other senses into the literal.

It is evident that the branch of Protestant theology that produced the fruit of Puritanism and later fundamentalism deviated from the orthodox understanding of the Scriptures in its literalism, and that this deviancy was an act of reduction – the act of collapsing the edifice which was the spiritual interpretation of the Scriptures in all three of its traditional aspects into its foundation, the literal meaning. Liberalism, far from seeking to rebuild the edifice, commits an act of further demolition that attacks the very foundation itself, by positing “non-literal” meanings of the Resurrection that leave Jesus in His tomb.

For those seeking a more wholesome form of Christianity than literalist fundamentalism, traditional orthodoxy, which recognizes that the God Who through human writers penned His communication to man in the words of the Scriptures, also wrote His message on the events recorded therein, is the right direction to look, rather than liberalism. You will find it in the opposite direction of liberalism.

(1) H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America, (New York: Harper & Row, 1937) p. 193.
(2) J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, (New York: MacMillan, 1923), p. 2.
(3) St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I.I.10.
(4) Also called the tropological sense – this is the lesson we are to take from the Scriptural narrative as to how we should behave.
(5) Also called the eschatological sense – in which things and events of this temporal world, recorded in the Scriptures, are understood to signify things and events that belong to eternity.
(6) St. Augustine, Questionum in Heptateuchum, II.73. “quamquam et in Vetere Novum lateat, et in Novo Vetus pateat.”
(7) Quoted by Alister E. McGrath, Christian Theology: An Introduction, 25th Anniversary, 6th Ed. (Oxford: Wiley/Blackwell, 1993, 2017), p. 118. Although McGrath provides no bibliographic data for this quotation, merely dating it to 1515, it seems to be a translation from Luther’s commentary on the Psalter.
(8) The regulative principle is the idea that only those practices explicitly authorized in the Scriptures are to be followed. It was aptly refuted from the Scriptures and reason by Richard Hooker in his Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie.
(9) The normative principle is the idea that any practice that is not forbidden by the Scriptures is to be allowed. This is in accordance with the Pauline doctrine of Christian liberty and is superbly defended in the work mentioned in the footnote above.
(10) William Perkins, The arte of prophecying, or, A treatise concerning the sacred and onely true manner and methode of preaching, (1607). Spelling is as in the original.

Creation and Evolution

The doctrine of creation is a non-negotiable element of the Christian faith. By the doctrine of creation, I mean that which is asserted in the first section of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed:

I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

In the Creed, as in the first verse of the first chapter of Genesis, the doctrine is properly formulated as a statement about God. It is not, whatever its implications for these matters might be, a statement about the age of the earth, the pre-history of mankind, or the interpretation of the fossil record. God is the subject, and what is predicated of Him is that He made everything else that exists.

The Creed asserts this of God the Father. Jesus Christ, as God the Son, is not part of the “all things visible and invisible” made by God the Father, but as the “only-begotten Son of God” shares the Father’s eternal nature and existence, thus the Creed asserts of Him that He is “begotten of the Father before all worlds” and that He is “begotten, not made”. It moreover identifies His role in Creation by saying of Him, in accordance with the third verse of the Gospel according to St. John and the sixteenth verse of St. Paul’s epistle to the Colossians “by whom all things were made”. So all things were made by God the Father, by or through, Jesus Christ the Son.

God the Holy Ghost, like Jesus Christ the Son, is not created but rather shares the eternal nature and being of God the Father from Whom He “proceedeth”, and therefore is “worshipped and glorified” with the Father and the Son.

The Nicene Creed is the most truly authoritative and “catholic” in the sense of belonging to the whole Church, of the ancient creeds or any other Christian confessions of faith. It is accepted by all the churches who can claim organic and organizational descent from the early undivided Church that formulated it, who traditionally recite it as part of the liturgy in the celebration of the sacrament of the Eucharist, and it is also accepted by the most orthodox of the sects and denominations of more recent founding. It was drawn up by the early, orthodox, Church to be a definitive statement of the faith taught by Christ’s Apostles, made in response to the myriad of heretical challenges to that faith that had sprung up in the first three centuries of Christian history. At the heart of these controversies was the Apostolic doctrine of Christ. The Docetists denied Christ’s humanity, the Arians denied His deity, and in one way or another each of these heresies denied what the Apostles had taught about Who Jesus Christ is. In these early heretical movements false teachings, of one sort or another, regarding creation, went hand in glove with their false teachings about the Person and Nature of Christ.

In 325 AD, the first ecumenical council of the Church since the council of Jerusalem recorded in the Book of Acts was convened at Nicaea in what is now Turkey, to address the controversy surrounding the teachings of Arius. Arius, a theologian in Alexandria, Egypt had taught that the Son of God was neither of the same substance as the Father, nor eternal. This had been condemned as heresy locally, at a regional council called by the Alexandrian Patriarch Alexander four years previously. By this time the heresy could not be contained regionally and so with the assistance of the deacon, Athanasius, who would later become his successor, Alexander made the case against Arianism at Nicaea. The council also condemned Arianism, and affirmed that the Son was “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father”. The confession of faith drafted and adopted at this council was the original version of the Nicene Creed, which was revised and expanded into the form still used in the East today, at the Council of Constantinople in 381 AD and then into the form used in the West by the Third Council of Toledo in 589 AD.

The Arian controversy was primarily Christological, about the Person and Nature of Jesus Christ, but it also concerned the doctrine of creation in that by denying that Christ was eternal Arius made Him part of creation rather than Creator. This is why the Creed affirms that it is by Christ that all things were made and makes the distinction “begotten not made”. (1)

In the century prior to the Arian controversy another challenge to Apostolic orthodoxy had come from Marcion of Sinope. Marcion believed that the Old and New Testaments spoke of different Gods. The God of the New Testament, he taught, was the Supreme God, loving and God, whereas the God of the Old Testament was the lesser deity of wrath and vengeance, the Demiurge. The latter, he taught, created the physical world, which was entirely corrupt and evil, whereas the true God belonged to the higher, spiritual world. Christ, he taught, was pure spirit who took on the mere appearance of a man. This denial of the Incarnation, identical to the spirit of the antichrist of which St. John had written in the New Testament (2) was therefore inseparably connected to a denial of the doctrine of creation. These heretical teachings, to which the affirmation that God the Father is the “Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible” was orthodoxy’s response, were shared by the various sects and movements that are collectively referred to as “Gnosticism”.

This name given to these early foes of Apostolic orthodoxy is significant. It is derived from gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge. In Gnostic doctrine, salvation was usually conceived of as a process of enlightenment whereby the “divine spark” in man was liberated from its prison of corrupt matter through the achievement of gnosis or knowledge. In orthodox Christianity, salvation is equated with knowledge as well. In orthodox Christianity, this knowledge is the knowledge of God, through Jesus Christ, (3) to be proclaimed to the world in the Gospel and received through faith and the prison from which it ultimately liberates us is both spiritual and physical, the prison of sin and death. This saving knowledge is available to man precisely through that which the Gnostics denied, the Incarnation of Jesus Christ. (4) The secret “knowledge” claimed by the Gnostics, the orthodox Church Fathers declared to be the “false knowledge” of which St. Paul wrote to Timothy. (5)

What makes this significant is that once again today it is widely denied, in the name of “knowledge”, that God, the Father Almighty, is “Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible”. We use the Latin equivalent to speak of this new “gnosis” and so call it “science”.

The new Gnostics are in many ways the mirror image of their predecessors. They do not demonize the physical world the way the Gnostics of old did, on the contrary they make it out to be the only world that exists, or at any rate the only world which can be known or is worth knowing. Salvation, to the new Gnostics, lies not in our liberation from the physical world but in our control over it.

Evolution is the name of the Demiurge to whom the new Gnostics ascribe the creation of the physical world - or at least the living things in it – rather than the true and living God. Just as the Christian doctrine of creation can only be properly understood as a statement about God – that God the Father, created everything that exists, through Jesus Christ the Son – rather than a statement about the age of the earth or the fossil record, so the Gnostic doctrine of evolution must be understood as a denial of the Christian doctrine - as the assertion that we, through the process of natural selection “made ourselves” in a world where order arises out of chaos by chance - rather than merely a set of observations, such as those made by Charles Darwin, about how species have adapted in order to survive.

The Church’s response to this challenge has been disappointing. Some theologians have reinterpreted the Christian teaching on creation to accommodate evolution – examples of this include theistic evolution, the Day-Age theory, and progressive creationism. Others have rejected evolution but in its place have accepted what they ironically call a “literal” understanding of the book of Genesis that includes interpretations that would never have occurred to anyone prior to the last 150 years, such as the idea that the “waters above the firmament” were some kind of vapour canopy that made the entire planet a tropical region prior to the Deluge. What the accommodationists and the “scientific creationists” have in common is that both have bowed their knees to the modern pagan idol of Science, accepted that false god’s claims to be the ultimate arbiter of what is true, and interpreted the words of the true and living God accordingly.

Science, however, in the modern sense of the word, has neither the right nor the ability to determine what is true and what is false. It is not about truth at all. Modern science, stripped of its exalted status, is merely the process of accumulating observations about the physical world, postulating theories on the basis of those observations, and conducting experiments to test those theories. The purpose of this process is not to arrive at truth. In the nineteenth century it was thought that to be scientific a theory had to be verifiable, that is to say, that it had to be able to be demonstrated true through experimentation. In the twentieth century, however, it came to be accepted, through the arguments of Sir Karl Popper, that to be scientific a theory must be falsifiable which means that it must be vulnerable to being shown to be false by further experimentation. This new understanding of what makes a theory scientific was intended to safeguard the integrity of the experimentation process against the formulation of theories that could not be overthrown regardless of the outcome of the experiment. Nevertheless it demonstrates that science is no reliable standard by which to judge truth, for by the standards of logic that which is falsifiable must also be false..

This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the history of modern science, the end of which has never been truth but power. “Knowledge is power”, Sir Francis Bacon said, and while he was speaking of the knowledge and power of God, he extended it to human knowledge by saying that it is by examining the world around us and learning about causes and effects that we will be able to bend nature to our will and produce the effects we desire. This is the true nature of what we have called “science” ever since. The true litmus test of whether a theory is scientific is not whether it is verifiable or falsifiable, but its utility. If science can produce a vehicle that can transport us through the air from one side of the world to the other in a fraction of the time it would have previously taken us then science has fulfilled its purpose and been of use to us regardless of whether the hypotheses with which it was working to produce the vehicle are later debunked.

Modern man in his neo-Gnosticism tends to equate utility with truth and justice. He looks at all that modern science has given us and concludes that since it has in so many ways enhanced our lives therefore everything it tells us is true and everything it does is right. This is a dangerous error. Truth and justice are immutable standards, external and transcendent, that impose limits upon man’s will and hold him accountable. Utilitarian science, however, recognizes no external limits upon man’s will in its endless search for newer ways to bend the world to that will. It is the duty of orthodox Christianity to insist upon these limits and to remind man that he is but a creature, a part of creation, subject to and accountable to the Creator in Whose image he was made.

This means re-affirming our faith in “one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible” against the new Gnosticism, that equates the utility of modern science with truth and justice, and declares that we through the process of natural selection (6), created ourselves, a theory which, like others of its era, (7) is merely man’s self-justification of his attempt to seat himself upon the throne of his Creator.

(1) The verb beget means to sire, to carry out a father’s role in reproduction. A father begets, a mother conceives and gives birth. Ordinarily, the word begotten suggests a point in time, a beginning. Fathers and mothers, however, in begetting and conceiving children, pass on their own nature to them. Eternity, having neither a beginning nor an end, is part of the nature of God, which Christ shares with His Father. Therefore when the Creed speaks of Christ as being begotten, this denotes an eternal relationship rather than an event in time.

(2) “And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.” (1 John 4:3)

(3) John 17:3 “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent.”

(4) John 1:18, John 14: 8-9

(5) 1 Tim. 6:20

(6) The basic idea of natural selection, that a species adapts to a changing environment through the spread of traits that enhance its ability to fit in and survive and the disappearance of traits that hinder such, is merely an observation about the nature of life in the world. It is when it is expanded into an all-sufficient explanation of how we got here, with life supposedly developing from non-living material then gradually evolving into higher life forms, and ultimately us, that is becomes patently absurd.

(7) Such theories include positivism, the idea of progress, and the Whig theory of history.

War and Peace: Part Three

The concept of just war has been an important part of the discussion of war and peace in the Western tradition of thought. The concept, stated simply, is that only under certain circumstances and conditions is it right to fight a war. Late in pre-Christian classical antiquity, the Roman senator and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero, inspired in part by ideas from earlier philosophers like Plato, gave a basic outline of these conditions. A few centuries later the influential Western church father, St. Augustine of Hippo, articulated a similar view from a Christian perspective. In the late middle ages, St. Thomas Aquinas drew upon St. Augustine, to present a systematic defense of the concept of just war in his Summa Theologica. To be just, he wrote, a war must meet three conditions – it must be declared and conducted by legitimately constituted authorities, it must have a just cause, and it must be fought with the right intentions of the heart. An idea common to all these thinkers, was that only those whose intent was to establish a secure peace, could fight a war justly. They saw the concept of just war, not as an instrument to enable and justify warmongers, but as a means of limiting and lessening the horrors of war.


The Augustinian and Thomistic concept of just war has not been universally accepted by all Christians. Indeed, many of St. Augustine’s arguments for just war occur in letters in which he is responding to the idea that the Christian religion forbids all wars, indicating that this idea was in circulation at the time. While it would be accurate to say that the Augustinian/Thomistic concept of just war has been the mainstream view of orthodox Christianity throughout history, the idea that war is always wrong, never justifiable, and always forbidden, has also had a strong voice within Christianity. It is has historically been a minority voice, an opposition voice, in the small-o-orthodox and small-c-catholic tradition (1) and the official, majority voice of some of the radical, but still Trinitarian sects. (2)

Which view is most consistent with the teachings of Jesus Christ, His Apostles, and the Holy Scriptures?

I have framed the question in those terms deliberately, because I wish to discuss the conflict between the view that war is sometimes justified and the view that it can never be justified, as a disagreement amongst orthodox, Trinitarian, Christians. Of course this disagreement is not merely an in-house debate between Christians. It a broader ethical debate, that includes Christian believers, those of other faiths, and unbelievers alike. What orthodox, Trinitarian, Christians on both sides of the debate have in common, however, is a high view of the teachings of Jesus Christ, His Apostles, and the Holy Scriptures (3) and therefore, although the general principles over which the broader debate is carried out interest us, the question, ultimately, for the orthodox Christian is which side is Apostolic, Biblical, and Christian.

The answer to our question, ultimately hinges upon the interpretation of certain key New Testament texts and the consistency of either position with the general ethical principles taught in the New Testament. Before we look at these texts and principles, however, there are two other questions that we need to answer. What do the Hebrew Scriptures teach about war? What is the view of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Tanakh, found in the teachings of Jesus Christ, His Apostles, and the New Testament Scriptures?

The Hebrew Scriptures are not silent on the subject, and they were the sacred canon of the faith community to which Jesus and the Apostles belonged. Therefore, we need to know what they teach about war, and what Jesus and His Apostles thought and said about the Hebrew Scriptures, in order to make sense of their own teachings about war. Jesus Himself stated, that His view of the Tanakh is vital to our understanding of the passage in His teachings which is most crucial to the debate over just war v. non-resistance.

What does the Tanakh Say About War?

Let us consider what the Hebrew Scriptures have to say about war and then look at what Jesus and His Apostles had to say about the Hebrew Scriptures.

Jewish people call their Scriptures the Tanakh, a word formed from the acronym of Torah, Nevi’im, and Ketuvim, which are the three sections into which they divide the books that Christians call the Old Testament. The Torah, which means “the teachings” and is usually translated The Law, is the foundation of the Tanakh and the Jewish faith. It consists of the five books of Moses, Genesis – Deuteronomy. The Book of Genesis introduces the God of Israel as the Creator of the whole universe and all mankind, and then the patriarchs of the House of Israel, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to whom God made promises. It sets the stage for the book of Exodus, which tells the history of how God saved the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt and made a covenant with them at Mt. Sinai. The details of that covenant are recorded in Exodus and Leviticus. The book of Numbers tells the history of how the Israelites wandered in the desert under Moses leadership for forty years because of their disobedience and distrust. Finally, the book of Deuteronomy records the final speeches Moses gave to the Israelites, before his death and the beginning of their conquest of the land God had promised them.

In Genesis, the chapters before the calling of Abraham, include the account of the first murder, of Abel by Cain, and God’s judgement of Cain for this evil. Then it tells of how the world became full of corruption and violence, which God judged by sending a flood to destroy the world, saving only Noah and the inhabitants of the ark. After the flood, He declared that He would hold man and beast accountable, for the shedding of man’s blood, saying “Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed” (9:6) A lesson the pre-Abrahamic chapters of the Book of Genesis appear to be teaching, is that God holds human life sacred (4), detests violence and bloodshed, but authorizes mankind to act as His agent in punishing violence with death. Is this lesson maintained throughout the Torah and the rest of the Tanakh?

The answer is an unmistakable yes. When God establishes His covenant with Israel at Mt. Sinai in the Book of Exodus, the first commandments He hands down are the famous Ten Commandments. These begin with religious duties, and end with civil duties. The first of the civil duties (5) is the commandment “thou shalt not kill” (Exodus 20:13). When, however, God shortly thereafter lists the punishments that are to be made, death is the prescribed penalty for murder, (21:12), smiting his father and mother (21:15) , kidnapping (21:16) and cursing his parents (21:17) (6). It is even the penalty for an ox owner whose ox gores someone to death if the owner knows the ox is dangerous and does not take appropriate measures to keep him from goring (21:29). It is the prescribed penalty for several other offenses as well.

It should be obvious, therefore, that the carrying out of the penalty of death for these offenses was not considered to be a violation of “thou shalt not kill”, for the penalty was prescribed by the very code which contained the commandment against killing. This was not regarded as a contradiction, because the commandment against killing was a general commandment, personal obedience to which was demanded of all, whereas the judgements of death were to be administered by those to whom God had deputized the authority to pass such judgements, i.e., the community, the Israelite nation, and its representative leaders (7). The judgements of death within the Sinaitic code are a specific example, of the general rule laid down by God in the Book of Genesis after the Flood – that “Whoso” – whichever person acting in his own capacity- “sheds blood, by man” – the community, in its existential representatives – “shall his blood be shed.”

Just war and the death penalty are closely related matters. Those who oppose the idea of just war tend to oppose capital punishment as well, and on the same grounds, just as support for the idea of just war and the death penalty tend to go together. This is so for a very logical reason – if the organized community, in its existential representative leadership, has the legitimate authority to use lethal force in the punishment of heinous crimes then it surely has the legitimate authority to use lethal force in conflicts with other societies in which its peace and security and the wellbeing of its people are threatened.

The Hebrew Scriptures would seem to agree with that logic. In the Book of Exodus, after God delivered the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt, before they arrived at Mt. Sinai they were attacked by the Amalekites. Joshua led them into the battle of Rephidim, which they won. During their forty year trek through the wilderness, they were attacked by Canaanite and Amorite kings, usually after being refused permission to pass through their territory, and each time they win and seize the territory of their enemies. These victories are attributed to God’s having been on their side, and at the end of the Book of Numbers, just before their arrival at the River Jordan, Moses received a commandment from God to attack and crush the Midianites, and he assembles a twelve-thousand man army to do so. The reason given for this war was that the Midianites had sent their prostitutes to seduce the Israelites into idol-worship bringing a plague upon them. It is clearly implied that God approved of Israel’s defending herself when attacked in the wilderness and it is outright stated that He ordered her to avenge herself against the Midianites.

In the Book of Deuteronomy, in Moses’ final speeches to Israel on the bank of River Jordan just before his death, he gives them two distinct sets of instructions with regards to war. One of these, which is found in the twentieth chapter of Deuteronomy, is a general set of instructions about how they are to conduct themselves in war. The first instruction in this set is that they were to go into war trusting in God rather than in their own strength or numbers. They were to demonstrate this faith in God by having their officers announce than anyone with any excuse for not fighting, even if it was mere cowardice, was to go home. Earlier in the Torah, they had incurred the anger of God by doing the opposite of this, by shrinking back from the conquest of Canaan because of reports of the strength of the peoples who dwelt there (Numbers 13-14). Their forty years wandering in the wilderness was punishment for this. Later in the Tanakh, King David would again incur the judgement of God for violating these instructions by taking a census (II Samuel 24, I Chronicles 21), and it is notable that the idea that Israel and her kings should trust in the Lord rather than in the strength of their fortresses and the numbers of their armies is a recurring theme in the Davidic Psalms. The second instruction in the general principles of war laid down in Deuteronomy, was that when they went against a city, they were to first make an offer of peace. If that offer was accepted, they were to abide by it, and accept tribute from the people of that city. If the offer was rejected, then they could go to war with the city. The third instruction was that they were not to use fruit-bearing trees in war, only trees that did not produce edible fruit.

The second set of instructions, pertained specifically to the conquest of Canaan that the Israelites were about to undertake. This was to be an exception to the second instruction in the general set. They were not to make peace with the seven nations on the other side of the Jordan – the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. They were to show no mercy to them. They were to utterly destroy them, to cut them off from the land, to enter into no treaties with them, and to have no social interaction with them. This set of instructions is repeated several times throughout Deuteronomy, but in the twentieth chapter it is clearly identified as being an exception to the normal rule, and as such a reason is given for it. These nations commit abominable practices in the worship of their idols and God did not want His people to be tainted by these abominations. The Israelites are told that in doing this, they would not only be coming into possession of the land which God had promised them, but they would be the agents of the wrath of God against these nations for their abominable practices. (8)

The Israelites did not follow these instructions. The history of the conquest is told in the Book of Joshua and the first chapters of the Book of Judges which picks up the history at the death of Joshua. In Joshua, the Hivites of Gibeon, trick Joshua into signing a treaty with them by pretending they came from a far off land. In the first chapter of Judges it tells of how most of the tribes made treaties with the Canaanites and Amorites and accepted tribute from them, and at the beginning of the second chapter God pronounces His displeasure with this disobedience, saying that the survivors of these nations would become a thorn in the Israelite’s side, and that their idols would be a snare to them. The rest of Judges tells how in the period before the establishment of the kingdom, the Israelites were seduced into worshipping the idols of these nations, how God would send Mesopotamian, Moabite, Canaanite, and Philistine enemies to enslave them, and then, when they had repented, raise up judges, leaders who combined the role of magistrate and military commander, to fight these enemies and liberate the Israelites. God actively assisted the judges in war, as He did Joshua during the conquest.

The concept of war that the Hebrew Scriptures appear to teach, is therefore a complex one. From the prehistory in the Book of Genesis, and the promises about the Messiah, the New Covenant, and the Kingdom of God in the writings of the prophets, comes the idea that war, violence, and bloodshed are not ideal, that they entered God’s creation through the sin of mankind, and that in the Kingdom of God, they will be eliminated and peace and justice established. King David was forbidden to build God’s Temple because he was a man of war (II Samuel 7, I Chronicles 22:7-8, 28:3) and so the task fell to King Solomon, whose reign was an unusually long period of peace (I Chronicles 22:9-10). This has two sides to it. It was not an expression of divine disapproval of David’s wars. The wars King David fought, a continuation of the wars against the Philistines that had plagued Israel from the time of the judges through the reign of Saul, were the necessary means to the end of the established peace during the reign of Solomon, and David certainly had God’s approbation for fighting them. Nevertheless, the fact that the martial nature of his reign made it inappropriate for him, rather than his son who reigned in peace, to build the Temple, suggests that even wars that God approves or even commands, taint a person. They are not unjust, but they render a person unclean, an idea also suggested by the requirement in Deuteronomy for ritual purification after killing someone in battle. God’s people are not prohibited from fighting wars, indeed, they are sometimes commanded to do so, but rules are laid down for the conduct of war in the Deuteronomic Code, the first and foremost of which is that they are to trust in God for their victory, rather than in their strength and numbers, which is one expression of a major theme throughout the Tanakh, that God’s people are to trust in God for their safety, security, and salvation.

This teaching is clearly more compatible with the classical just war theory taught by Cicero than with the idea of non-resistance or pacifism.

What did Jesus Say About the Hebrew Scriptures?

This leads us to the question of what view of the Hebrew Scriptures is found in the teachings of Jesus Christ and His Apostles. For if Jesus and His Apostles taught pacifism or non-resistance, as is sometimes alleged, then their teachings would seem to be inconsistent with the Hebrew Scriptures, and if that is the case the nature of that inconsistency will need to be explained.

There have been those, who have seen the teachings of Jesus and those of the Hebrew Scriptures as mutually exclusive and contradictory. Sometimes, those who see things this way prefer the teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures over those of Jesus. Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, approved of the Hebrew Scriptures as teaching a “master morality”, similar to that of the pre-Socratic Greeks, while He disparaged the teachings of Christ, as well as those of Euripides and Plato’s Socrates as “slave morality.” (9)

More often, however, it has been the other way around, with people who purport to be followers of Christ, rejecting the Hebrew Scriptures in whole or in part as being barbaric. This idea is not something that has just popped up in modern times, but has been around since almost the beginning of Christianity. Marcion, a second century bishop in Asia Minor taught that the God of the Old Testament was not the God Whom Jesus Christ spoke of as His Father, but was rather the evil Demiurge. This was a common doctrine among the Gnostics of the early Christian centuries, including Mani the third century Persian, whose teachings St. Augustine of Hippo was a follower of before his conversion to Christianity. Faustus of Mileve, a Manichean bishop, pointed to the wars of Moses as evidence of this claim (10).

While this idea has been around for a very long time it has been officially condemned by the Church from the very beginning. By the very beginning I mean the Apostles themselves in the New Testament. St. John the Apostle, in his first and second epistles, warned that deceivers, whom he called “antichrists”, had entered the Church, claiming to have been sent by the Apostles but denying the doctrine of Christ. (11) The “doctrine of Christ” which they denied, was that “Christ was come in the flesh”. Since the Gnostics believed that the material world was intrinsically evil, having been created, in their doctrine, by the evil Demiurge that they identified with the Old Testament YHWH, they taught the doctrine of docetism, that the purely spiritual Christ only appeared to be human, to suffer, and to die, i.e., they denied that “Christ was come in the flesh.” Therefore, the early Church was clearly in line with the teaching of the Apostles, when they excommunicated Marcion, condemned the teachings of the Gnostics, and began the Nicene Creed, that would become the standard of orthodoxy throughout the Christian Church, by declaring “I believe in One God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.”

The view of the Hebrew Scriptures that is found in the recorded teachings of Jesus Christ in the Gospels is very different from that of the Gnostics. After His baptism and before His public ministry, the Synoptic Gospels record that He went into the wilderness to fast, where He was tempted by the devil. His responded to each of the devil’s three temptations by quoting from the Tanakh. When He returned from the wilderness, He began an itinerant ministry in which He would travel, mostly through Galilee, preaching a message He called the Gospel, i.e. Good News, of the Kingdom. That message was that the Kingdom of God had come, and that God’s people Israel were to respond with repentance and faith. The Kingdom of God that He referred to was that predicted by the Old Testament prophets and throughout His teaching ministry it would become clear that what He meant by saying that the Kingdom was at hand, was that He Himself was the Christ, the Messiah promised in those writings. St. Luke records that towards the beginning of His ministry, Jesus went to the town of Nazareth in which He had been raised, and gave the Scriptural reading in the synagogue on the Sabbath. (12) He read from the sixty-first chapter of Isaiah, and after the reading announced that “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.”

Jesus connected belief in the Tanakh with belief in Himself. St. John, in the fifth chapter of his Gospel records that after healing a man at the pool of Bethesda, He was persecuted for healing on the Sabbath. In His response to those who persecuted Him, He pointed to witnesses that would, in accordance with the Torah’s requirement that testimony be established in the mouth of two or three witnesses, bear witness of Himself. The witnesses were John the Baptist, His own works, and His Father. He then went on to explain that the Old Testament was the testimony of His Father about Himself:

Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me… Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father: there is one that accuseth you, even Moses, in whom ye trust. For had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me; for he wrote of me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye believe my words? (vv. 39, 45-47).

In the parable of Dives and Lazarus, Jesus placed this same argument in the mouth of Abraham. In the parable, which Jesus addressed to the Pharisees at some point after the events recorded in the eleventh chapter of St. John’s Gospel (13), the rich man asks Abraham that Lazarus be sent to his father’s house to warn his five brothers and Abraham tells him “They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them”, and when Dives pleads that they will repent if someone comes to them from the dead, Abraham says “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead.”

Jesus treated the Hebrew Scriptures as authoritative in His disputes with His enemies. He rebuked the Pharisees for abusing human tradition to circumvent obedience to the commandments of Scripture (Matthew 15:3-6), and told the Sadducees, who only accepted the Torah and not the rest of the Tanakh as Scripture and as a result did not believe in such things as an afterlife and the resurrection (14) that they “err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God” (Matthew 22:29) and went on to argue against their disbelief in the resurrection, on the basis of the tense of a verb in Exodus, one of the books they did accept.

Jesus unmistakably regarded the Hebrew Scriptures as the authoritative Word of God and treated faith in those Scriptures and faith in Himself as inseparable.

Does the New Covenant Contain a Higher Standard Than the Old?

This is acknowledged in a number of traditions that are Trinitarian, orthodox about the Person and Work of Christ, but which teach that Jesus taught an ethic of pacifism or non-resistance. These traditions acknowledge the Hebrew Scriptures to be as much the Word of God as the Christian Scriptures but maintain that Jesus taught a higher ethical standard than that contained in the Law of Moses, that has superseded the Law of Moses, and that this higher ethical standard contains the principle of non-resistance.

The Christian Scriptures do contain a number of ideas that seem to lend weight to this teaching. The very name we traditionally give to the Christian Scriptures is one of them. “New Testament” means “New Covenant”, and we call the Christian Scriptures this, because Jesus, as He instituted the Holy Eucharist at His final Passover seder with His Apostles, on the eve of His Crucifixion, took the cup and said “this is my blood of the New Testament which is shed for many for the remission of sins.” This refers back to the promise in the Old Testament prophets that God would establish a New Covenant with His people, in which His law would be written upon their hearts, rather than upon tablets of stone. This New Covenant is based upon an act of salvation, which took place on the anniversary of God’s deliverance of His people from slavery in Egypt, to which that earlier act of salvation pointed – the Son of God’s offering Himself up as the one, true, and perfect sacrifice that takes away the sins of the world and makes His people right with God.

This salvation is available, the New Testament teaches, to all people, Jew and Gentile alike, who will receive it by faith, and so, under the New Covenant, all believers comprise the people of God. It is not that God replaced His people of the Old Covenant with a new people as is taught in the doctrine known as Replacement Theology, or that He has two different peoples at the same time as is taught in the doctrine known as Dispensationalism, but that, as St. Paul explained in the eleventh chapter of his epistle to the Romans, God’s people is like an olive tree, into which God has grafted believing Gentiles like branches from a wild olive tree, while breaking off some of the natural branches due to unbelief.

The establishment of the New Covenant has changed some of the things God requires of His people. The ceremonial requirements of the Old Covenant – circumcision, dietary restrictions, the keeping of the Old Testament holy days are no longer required under the New. These requirements had been part of the Old Covenant, not because they commanded things which were intrinsically righteous or forbade things that were intrinsically sinful, but to distinguish Israel as being set apart from other nations for God. Throughout the New Testament, the fact that these are no longer requirements is connected with the integration of Jewish and Gentile believers into one Church with one faith, one Lord, one baptism. The dietary restrictions were lifted in a vision God sent St. Peter, in the tenth chapter of Acts, the vision that persuades him to preach the Gospel to the Gentile Cornelius. The Apostles ruled, in the first ecumenical council of the Church in the fifteenth chapter of Acts, that circumcision was no longer a requirement. The occasion that necessitated the calling of this council was the conversion of Gentiles and the need to incorporate them into the Church. In the second chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians, he wrote about how the Jews and Gentiles had been made one in the Church, through Christ’s death, which has broken down the wall that divided them – the “law of commandments contained in ordinances”.

Yet it is also clear that the ethical requirements of God’s people under the Old Covenant have continued into the New Covenant. We do not achieve salvation through our efforts to meet these requirements, but nobody achieved salvation that way under the Old Covenant either. Our having been justified before God by His grace through Christ does not give us permission to sin but is rather the reason we are to avoid sin (15). The difference between God’s ethical requirements under the two Covenants is that in the Old Covenant they were an external standard, a list of dos and don’ts, written in stone, whereas in the New Covenant God’s requirements would be an internal standard that God would write upon the very hearts of His people (16). This refers to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of believers, that began with His descent upon the Church on Pentecost as recorded in the second chapter of Acts.

As an effective means of producing righteousness, the internal indwelling of the Spirit of God in the hearts of believers to actively change them, and produce repentance and obedience, is a superior law to an external standard that merely threatens and promises, as St. Paul argued in his epistle to the Galatians. Does that mean that the content of what is defined as right and wrong has also changed, that God’s people under the New Covenant are held to a stricter standard, and that now they are forbidden to participate in war even for defensive purposes?

Resist Not Evil

Those who think so, find their strongest supporting evidence in the Sermon on the Mount, recorded in the fifth through seventh chapters of the Gospel According to St. Matthew. In the Beatitudes, the blessings which open the Sermon, Jesus declared “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.” (5:9) The most important passage, however, is the following:

Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away. Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so? (vv. 38-47)

The idea that Christ forbade His followers from participating in wars takes a number of different forms. One of these, the doctrine of nonresistance, derives its name from the words “resist not evil” in this passage. Nonresistance is more than just opposition to war, it is an ethical philosophy that holds that even in the interests of self-defense one should not respond to violence with violence. Those who believe in this idea, regard it as a higher ethical standard than that which allows people to fight back in their own defense, because the person who submits to violence without responding in kind is not lowering himself to the level of his attacker.

Is this what Jesus meant?

The verses in question follow a format in which Jesus introduces a quotation with “Ye have heard that it hath been said” and then, following the quotation, introduces His own remarks with “But I say unto you”. This occurs a total of six times in this section of the Sermon on the Mount, and the six “Ye have heard…But I say” constructions, are divided into three pairs each of which has a common idea. In the first pair, for example, the quotations are straight from the Ten Commandments, the commandments against murder and adultery, and the common idea to Jesus’ commentary on these commandments is that it is not enough to keep them outwardly, one must keep them internally as well.

It is a mistake, however, to think that Jesus is here replacing the Old Testament Law with a “higher standard”. Jesus Himself warned against interpreting His words this way. Following the Beatitudes, and the verses where He tells His followers they are the salt and light of the world, Jesus introduces this section of the Sermon by saying:

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven. (vv. 17-20)

This introduction was necessary, because the “Ye have heard it said….But I say unto you” construction could easily be taken as a form of contradiction, i.e., “The Scriptures say this, but don’t mind them, do this instead”. In this warning, Jesus says it is a mistake to read His words that way. The Hebrew Scriptures – the “law and the prophets” are the established, authoritative, Word of God, and He has not come to abolish them.

He had, however, come to fulfil them. Now the Christian Scriptures as a whole teach that Jesus fulfilled the Hebrew Scriptures in a number of ways – He fulfilled the prophesies of the coming Messiah, He offered Himself up as the ultimate sacrifice to which the Old Testament sacrifices pointed, etc. This is not what Jesus was talking about when He said “I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.” (17) The word translated “fulfil” here is pleroo, which means “to cause to be full” or to “fill up.” This is a way of saying that He is going to explain the full meaning of the Law, that He is going to fill it up with meaning the way you fill up a cup with water.

So in these three pairs of “Ye have heard it said…But I say unto you” constructions, He is not contradicting the Old Testament, but explaining it. His overall point, as He immediately goes on to explain, is that the righteousness God requires is a greater righteousness than that of the scribes and Pharisees. The first pair make the point that the righteousness God demands involves internal obedience to His ethical commandments and well as external obedience. The second pair make a similar point about the civil provisions of the Law. While the Law contains civil provisions for divorce and the swearing of oaths in court, God’s righteousness requires marital fidelity and truthfulness on all occasions.

What point was He making in the third pair, which is the pair we are considering?

The point which He was making is that God has not given to us, as private persons, the authority to punish evil that He has given to lawfully constituted authorities, and that we are not to assume that authority unto ourselves.

The first quotation “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth”, in the Old Testament law, was the standard that the civil authorities of the commonwealth of Israel were to use in administering justice. It was not a license for private individuals to hunt down those who have wronged them and to exact personal revenge. To interpret “Resist not evil…” as a revolutionary command to abolish the death penalty and the Lex Talionis in general would violate Jesus warning against thinking that He is come to abolish the Law and the Prophets. So, therefore, would interpreting “Resist not evil” as forbidding the civil authorities to engage in war. His point must therefore have been that these civil penalties are not to be privately administered in revenge.

The second quotation is only partially taken from the Old Testament. “Thou shalt love thy neighbour” is taken from Leviticus 19:18. The second part of the quotation, “and hate thine enemy” is not found there. Exactly what Jesus was quoting there we do not know. It may have been an interpretive gloss on the first part of the quotation but we have no written record of it. At any rate, it is not from the Tanakh, which is why when Jesus went on to tell His followers to do the exact opposite, He was not contradicting the Law or the Prophets.

While Leviticus 19:18 does not include a commandment to hate your enemies, it does include more than just the words “love thy neighbour”. Here is the whole verse:

Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself: I am the LORD.

In its original Old Testament context, then, “love thy neighbour” was thought of as the opposite of seeking vengeance and holding grudges. The word Jesus uses for “enemy” in both the non-Levitical part of the quotation and in His commandment to “love thy enemies”, is not the word ordinarily used to refer to one’s enemy in war (18), but rather the word echthros. This word refers to a personal enemy, usually someone who was once a friend but with whom one is now at odds.

Note the significance of this. The part of the quotation which is not taken from Leviticus 19:18, “hate thine enemy”, actually contradicts the verse. The use of the term echthros, that ordinarily refers to a personal enemy, someone in your own community with whom you have had a falling out, as the object of a command to hate, conveys the opposite meaning of Leviticus’ command to not avenge yourself or hold a grudge against “the children of thy people”. Therefore, when Jesus told His followers to “love thine enemies” He was emphasizing the Levitical commandment against personal vengeance and grudge-holding.

In this final pair of “Ye have heard it said…But I say unto you” constructions, then, Jesus was telling His followers not to seek personal revenge, not to hold grudges against people. Other interpretations, that He was forbidding the death penalty and war, are not consistent with His statement that He is not come to abolish the Law or the Prophets but to fulfil them.

Then Would My Servants Fight

Another statement of Jesus, frequently cited as evidence that Christ taught nonresistance to His followers, is His declaration to Pilate that “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight”, found in the eighteenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel. The “if…then” kind of argument Jesus was making, relies on the opposite of that which follows the “then” being true. “Then would my servants” fight, only works as an argument for “My kingdom is not of this world” if His servants did not fight.

The problem with using this as an argument for nonresistance is that the argument only works if this declaration is cut short after the word fight. (19) The full declaration reads:

My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.

Read in its entirety, Jesus’ argument does not require absolute nonresistance from His followers to demonstrate that His Kingdom is not of this world, just that His servant not fight to prevent His arrest and trial.

St. Peter had, in fact, attempted to fight to prevent His arrest, and Jesus had stopped him from doing so. This is recorded in all four Gospels, and St. Matthew records Jesus saying the following to St. Peter:

Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword. (v. 26:52)

This verse too, is cited in support of nonresistance, but the two verses that follow demonstrate that the reason Jesus stopped St. Peter is that His arrest and trial are necessary parts of God’s plan.

These verses show that Christ taught that His followers are not to use force to establish His kingdom on earth. A similar point was made by St. Paul in his epistle to the Ephesian Church. He wrote:

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. (6:12)

In its immediate context, which describes the spiritual armour of God, it is clear that when this verse refers says “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood” by “we” it means the Church qua the Church, and not believers acting in some other capacity, as policemen or soldiers, for example.

Military Duty Was Not Forbidden To Earliest Believers

These verses do not teach that civil governments are forbidden from using force to maintain law and order or to defend the security and peace of their countries, or that Christ’s followers are forbidden to serve as soldiers or policeman. It would be very surprising if it did, considering the number of places in the New Testament where it explicitly identifies the civil authorities as God’s servants, acting with authority given them by God, and enjoining Christians to pray for the civil authorities and to be good, dutiful, citizens (for example, Romans 13, 1 Timothy 2:2, 1 Peter 2:13, 17).

In fact the exact opposite of the idea, held by those who teach nonresistance, that Christ’s followers were forbidden to serve as soldiers or policemen is the case.

When St. Augustine argued that just war was consistent with the teachings of Christianity, liked to point to the soldiers who came to be baptized by John the Baptist, and were told “be content with your wages” (Luke 3:14) rather than “find a new career.” In St. Matthew’s Gospel, the chapter immediately after the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount, tells of a Roman centurion who comes to Jesus and asks Him to heal his servant. Jesus commends the man for His faith, saying to those present “Verily I say unto you, I have not found so great faith, no, not in Israel” and fulfils his request. He does not condemn the man for his military career or require that he abandon it. Later, in the tenth chapter of the Book of Acts, another centurion, Cornelius, is described as a “devout man, and one that feared God with all his house, which gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God always.” Upon the instructions of an angel, he sends away for St. Peter, who comes, preaches the Gospel to Cornelius and his household, and, when they have believed and received the Holy Ghost, and baptizes them. Again, there is no mention of an expectation that Cornelius would abandon his military career.

A Higher Standard?

The fact of the matter is that there is one thing, and only one thing, in Jesus’ teachings that suggests that He has imposed a higher standard on His followers than that contained in the Old Testament. Jesus, when asked what the greatest commandment was, said:

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. (Matt. 22:36-40)

Many read this passage as if Jesus said that “these two commandments summarize the new ethical teachings I am giving you” but that is not what He said. He said that the entire Tanakh, the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, hang on these commandments. In the upper room, after the Last Supper, Jesus did give a new commandment to His disciples:

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. (Jn. 13:34)

Like the two commandments that summarize the Old Testament, the verb in the new commandment for the Church is love. This commandment does, in fact, raise the standard from that of the Old Testament. “Love thy neighbour as thyself” does not tell people to place the needs of others ahead of themselves, only on par with themselves. The statement “as I have loved you” in the new commandment, has a double meaning. It means both “because I have loved you”, which provides Christ’s followers with the motivation to keep the commandment, and “in the way I have loved you”, which implies that the love is to be self-sacrificial. Later, Christ makes this point explicit, when He repeats and explains the commandment:

This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. (15:12-13)

Does the new commandment contain the idea of nonresistance?

Look at it this way. Suppose that a foreign enemy has determined to conquer the country in which you live, and it is a merciless, barbarian, foe. Its modus operandi is to pillage, rape, and enslave, and to lay waste to the countryside. The call to arms, to fight off this invader goes out. Which person, do you think, better demonstrates the kind of “love for one another” in which a man lays down his life for his friends? The man who answers the call to arms and goes out to fight the barbarian horde, willing to sacrifice his own life, for the good of his wife, children, relatives, friends, neighbours, and countrymen? Or the man who recites “resist not evil” to justify allowing his wife to be raped, his children enslaved, and his brothers, friends, and neighbours to be killed?

Nonresistance does not look very much like a “higher ethical standard” when considered in that light, now, does it?

(1) The tradition of churches that hold to the faith expressed in the creeds of the undivided church.

(2) During the Reformation, for example, the Anabaptists were radical reformers, who like the Puritans in England, went much further than the mainstream Reformers – Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, Knox, etc. - while remaining Trinitarians. The Anabaptists preached an ethics of non-resistance that they claimed to be based on Christ’s teachings and example, and this remains the official doctrine of churches in the Anabaptist tradition, such as the Mennonites and Hutterites, to this day.

(3) Someone without a high view of the teachings of Jesus Christ, His Apostles, and the Holy Scriptures, is, of course, not an orthodox Christian.

(4) Note the second part of Genesis 9:6 “for in the image of God made he man” and its broader context 9:1-7.

(5) The duty to honour one’s parents is a religious duty not a civil duty. This is seen more clearly in the numbering schemes of the Jews, Eastern Orthodox, and most Protestants, than in the Augustinian scheme accepted by the Roman Catholics and Lutherans. In the Augustinian scheme, the commandment against murder is the fifth commandment. In the other schemes, the commandment to honour one’s parents is the fifth commandment – five religious duties, five civil duties. This may not make sense to many people today, because the division of the commandments that is more obvious to the modern mind is into the commandments ending in the Sabbath commandment, and the commandments after. The last six commandment include instructions as to how to behave towards other people, the first four do not. Nevertheless, to the ancient mind, the duty to honour one’s parents would have gone together with the duty to honour God/the gods. Giving proper respect to God or the gods and to one’s ancestors was considered to be a single moral virtue – pietas, or piety.

(6) See previous note.

(7) Not “representative” in the sense of democratic/republican theory, but in the sense of what Eric Voeglin called “existential representation”, i.e., the way a government represents its community/society/city/nation by acting for it, making decisions for it, on the historical stage. See The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 36-51.

(8) Leviticus 18 gives a description of these abominable practices. While the bulk of the description pertains to various types of sexual immorality, note especially verse 21 “And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Molech, neither shalt thou profane the name of thy God: I am the LORD.”

(9) Nietzsche argued that in every language, the words used to describe that which is praiseworthy, were originally terms coined, used, and defined by the strong, the master class, to describe their own characteristics, while the words used to denote the opposite concept, originally referred to the characteristics of those whom the master class subjected, the weak, the slaves. Thus such things as physical strength and beauty, strength of will, and courage were “good”, whereas their opposites were “bad”. Then, he argued, there was a change, and the meanings of “good” and “bad” were inverted, to create a morality that favoured the weak over the strong. He argued this most fully in Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals, although a version of this concept was present in his earliest book The Birth of Tragedy.

(10) As noted in Part Two, one of the times in which St. Augustine defended the concept of just war, was in the context of refuting this position, in Contra Faustus.

(11) I John 2:18-26, 4:1-3, II John 7-11.

(12) This was a liturgical Scriptural reading, a practice that carried over into the Church from the synagogue.

(13) Although the parable is recorded in the Gospel According to St. Luke, which does not record the raising of Lazarus, it is obvious that the parable was given after that event. St. John records that after Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, the chief priests and Pharisees did not respond by believing in Jesus, but began their conspiracy to kill Him. They did not believe – “though one rose from the dead”. This is the whole point of the parable. Note that Dives, who is described by Jesus as being dressed in purple and fine linen – the robes of the high priest - has five brothers who live in his father’s house. The leader of the conspiracy to kill Jesus, according to St. John, was Caiaphas. Caiaphas, the high priest, was the son-in-law of Annas, a previous high priest, who, although he had been removed from office by the Romans, still had tremendous influence. Annas had five sons, who, like their brother-in-law Caiaphas, all held the office of high priest.

(14) The House of Annas, referred to in the previous note, were Sadducees. Note that in the parable Abraham speaks of “Moses and the prophets”.

(15) Romans 6.

(16) Jeremiah 31:31-35, Hebrews 8:7-11, 10:15-17

(17) Although it would be included in His statement “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” The Greek word represented by “fulfilled” here is ginomai, which means “to become” or “to come to pass”.

(18) Polemos is the Greek word for war. The adjective, polemios, -a, -on, which is built off of its stem, means “of war” or “hostile”. In its substantive use, i.e., as a noun, the adjective polemios means enemy, and its plural form, hoi polemioi means “the enemy.”

(19) Examples of nonresistance advocates who use the truncated version of this verse to support their arguments include: Harold S. Martin, “The Christian and Nonresistance” , BRF Witness: Volume 3. Number 1, 1968 and “A Christian Declaration On Peace, War and Military Service”, August 22, 1953, General Conference of the Mennonite Church USA,