The Faith, More or Less

 

Adolf von Harnack was a German Lutheran theological and ecclesiastical historian in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  In the last decades of the nineteenth century he wrote a multi-volume work the English title of which is The History of Dogma.  In this work he maintained, among other things, that the Church had gone wrong from pretty much the first generation, that Jesus had preached a simple Gospel of universal love under the universal Fatherhood of God but His followers had buried this under layers of foreign ideas taken from Greek philosophy and so created dogma – the authoritative teachings of the Church in the ancient Creeds, especially the Nicene – and that these layers needed to be stripped away and the simple Gospel recovered.  Harnack believed that in his liberal revisionism he was merely taking Dr. Luther’s Protestant Reformation principles to their logical conclusion.  Apologists for the Roman Catholic Church jumped to agree with him on this last point.

 

One of Harnack’s better known students – I would say his best known except that Dietrich Bonhoeffer also studied under him – the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth later came to disagree with this idea that the Trinity and the other basic tenets – dogmas if you will – of Christian orthodoxy were foreign to the essence of the Christian message and rejecting the liberalism that he had been taught found his way back, for the most part, into Christian orthodoxy. 

 

In the meantime, orthodox Anglican scholars such as the Venerable A. E. Burn, Dean of Salisbury and the Right Reverend E. C. S. Gibson, Bishop of Gloucester, in their works on the history of the ancient Creeds, tore Harnack’s theory to shreds.  Two centuries earlier another orthodox Anglican scholar, the Right Reverend George Bull, Bishop of St. David’s in his Defensio Fidei Nicaenae (1685) had defended Nicene orthodoxy by showing that the truths affirmed in the Ecumenical Councils were consistent with those taught by the Ante-Nicene Fathers.  A rebuttal of Harnack had to go further than this, however, and Burn and Gibson persuasively demonstrated that what was defined, unfolded, and explained in the ancient Creeds was present in the teachings of the Apostles themselves.  While we in the West are accustomed to thinking of the Apostles’ Creed as the baptismal Creed and the Nicene Creed (the expanded version affirmed at Constantinople) as the Eucharistic Creed, both developed out of Western and Eastern baptismal Creeds.  The fourth section of the second chapter (on the Apostles’ Creed) of Gibson’s The Three Creeds (1908) directly addresses Harnack and shows that the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity is inescapably present in the baptismal formula of Matt. 28:19. (1)

 

As mentioned earlier, Roman Catholic apologists in the twentieth century regarded the liberal revisionism of Harnack, Freidrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl as being the developed form of the doctrines of Dr. Luther and Calvin thus agreeing with Harnack’s own assessment.  See, for example, Joseph Wilhelm’s entry “Protestantism” in volume 12 of the 1911 The Catholic Encyclopedia.  This could be regarded as the reverse side of the coin to the idea articulated by John Henry Newman in his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine that the late medieval Roman theology to which the Reformers objected on the grounds that it was not found in the Scriptures (or, the English Reformers at least would add, the writings of the Fathers of the early centuries) was the natural evolution of Scriptural and Patristic teachings.  Newman came to look at it this way just prior to his crossing the Tiber into the Roman Church. 

 

There is a sense in which Harnack was right in regarding revisionist liberalism as an extension of ideas that played out in the Reformation.  Not the doctrines for which Dr. Luther, Zwingli and Calvin became known, but the Renaissance humanist principles that informed them (as they did others who remained in communion with Rome such as Erasmus and More), in particular the principle of ad fontes, (back to the font or source).  The problem was that Harnack and company wanted to go back to a “source” that existed only in their imagination, a “simple” message that predates that of the ancient Creeds and the Scriptures that back them.

 

Harnack and the other liberal revisionists, in other words, sought to streamline the Christian faith by removing from it that which belonged to it from the very beginning but which conflicted with nineteenth and twentieth century Modern rationalist thought.  This was not, after all, as Barth (and later and more completely, Methodist theologian Thomas Oden) was to discover, a more thorough application of the Renaissance/Reformation ad fontes principle.  Rather than returning to the source for clarity, it involved recreating from no evidence whatsoever a “source” that matched the liberals’ idea of what a source, a primitive original version of the Christian faith, should look like.  While it is understandable that Roman apologists would try to argue that Dr. Luther and the other Reformers were doing something similar, in reality liberal revisionism was a form of extreme reductionism.  A more legitimate charge against the Reformers – one which could also be levelled against the Roman Church – would be that of doing the opposite of this.

 

Harnack and company thought that the original faith as delivered to the Apostles by Christ must have been something much simpler than the faith as confessed in the ancient Creeds.  In reality, however, the ancient Creeds are about as simple as the Christian faith can get.  Jesus, at the end of St. Matthew’s Gospel, which according to the consensus of ancient writers was the first Gospel written, instructed His disciples to make other disciples of all the nations by baptizing them.  In doing so, He borrowed a rite that the rabbis of late second Temple Judaism had introduced for Gentile converts and adapted it as the rite of entrance into His Church by instructing that the baptism was to be in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.  This was not just a prescription of the words to be said over the person baptized but the content of the faith into which that person was being baptized.  The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost – the Three Persons manifested in His own baptism – as the content of that faith, are divine Persons. The fact that Christianity is a continuation and fulfilment of the Old Testament faith “Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God is one Lord” along with the fact that Jesus spoke of a singular name of the Three Persons tells us that the Three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, are but One God.  This is the Trinity, God as confessed in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.  The first part of the Athanasian Symbol unfolds this truth so as to protect it against pretty much any conceivable error, while the second half like the Definition of Chalcedon (2) does the same for doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ that of necessity belongs to the Trinitarian faith, i.e., that the Eternal Son in the Incarnation, without ceasing to be God, took a full and perfect human nature formed from that of His Virgin Mother and united it with His Eternal Person so that from the moment of the Incarnation, He, remaining the same Person in the Trinity that He always had been, had two complete natures, being fully God and fully Man. Apart from these truths the ancient Symbols contain a brief narrative account of Gospel, the historical events of Christ’s earthly life and ministry from His Incarnation to His Ascension, especially His death for us on the cross and Resurrection, and the most basic of the truths auxiliary to those of the Trinity and the Person of Jesus Christ such as the Second Coming, the Church, and the promise of forgiveness of sins and everlasting life.

 

The history of how these ancient Symbols of the faith came to be in the form in which we have received them is the history of how the basic truths of the faith as entrusted to the Apostles by Christ were defined and unfolded in response to the numerous heresies that arose as Jesus and the Apostles had warned they would.  The process involved the development of precise theological meanings for certain terms.  The Greek words hypostasis and ousia, for example, virtually identical in meaning in the first century had to be differentiated so that hypostasis (person) could indicate what the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are as distinct from each other whereas ousia (essence, substance, being) indicates how they are One.  This enabled the word homoousios (of one being, essence, or substance) which had been used with heretical intent by Paul of Samosata whose teachings blended a Trinitarian heresy similar to that of Sabellianism (modalism) and an Adoptionist heresy regarding the Person of Christ, to become the safeguard of Christ’s true deity against the Arian heresy in the Nicene Creed in the fourth century.  Nothing ended up in these Symbols which did not belong to the “faith once delivered unto the saints” as believed in the Church “everywhere, always, and by all”.

 

The error of the liberal revisionists was to subtract from the deposit of faith.  In the sixteenth century those on both sides of the Reformation controversy had little interest in subtraction.  The Apostles and Nicene Creeds both consist of the same twelve articles, usually worded more elaborately and precisely in the Nicene version.  The Lutheran Augsburg Confession of 1530 contains twenty-eight articles and the Reformed Belgic Confession of Faith of 1561 contains thirty-seven and it is not a matter of their having both merely added the difference between these numbers to the twelve of the Creeds.  The truths of the Creeds are affirmed but summarized in these Confessions and take up considerably less than twelve of each of their sets of articles.  Our own English Articles of Religion, in their final Elizabethan form of 1571 are thirty-nine in number, down from the Edwardian forty-two. (3) The eighth article affirms the ancient Creeds, many of the truths of which were also restated in the articles preceding, but everything after the eighth pertains to other matters either not covered in the ancient Symbols or merely briefly mentioned. 

 

Meanwhile on the other side, in 1564 after the Council of Trent (1545-1563) Roman Patriarch Pius IV published a Creed which, while technically consisting of twelve articles like the earlier Creeds, includes the entire Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as its first article, then goes on to add eleven others which include such fun and exciting things as “that there are truly and properly Seven Sacraments of the New Law, instituted by Jesus Christ our Lord, and necessary for the salvation of mankind, though not all for every one”, “that in the Mass there is offered to God a true, proper, and propitiatory sacrifice for the living and the dead”, “that there is made a conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the Body, and of the whole substance of the wine into the Blood, which conversion the Catholic Church calls Transubstantiation”, “that there is a Purgatory, and that the souls therein detained are helped by the suffrages of the faithful”, “that the saints, reigning together with Christ, are to be honored and invoked, and that they offer prayers to God for us, and that their relics are to be venerated”, “that the images of Christ, of the Mother of God, ever virgin, and also of other Saints, ought to be had and retained, and that due honor and veneration is to be given them”, “that the power of indulgences was left by Christ in the Church, and that the use of them is most wholesome to Christian people” and “the Holy Catholic Apostolic Roman Church as the mother and mistress of all churches”.    

 

By including these items in a new Creed, the making of which was forbidden by the Council of Ephesus, the third of the general Councils that the same Creed claims to “receive and profess”, Rome declared them to be de fide, that is to say, to be of the essence of the faith and so required to be believed for salvation.   Now, the question of whether any or all of these things are de fide is different to that of whether they are true.   For a doctrine to be de fide it must also true, but a doctrine does not have to be de fide to be true.   To go through each of the additional articles of the Profession of Pius IV and examine them as to their truth value would be a too lengthy diversion here.  One of them is clearly false from a historical point of view – the Church from which all other churches after the persecution following the martyrdom of St. Stephen are descended, was situated in Jerusalem not Rome, so if any Church deserves the honour of being called the Mother of all Churches it is the Church of Jerusalem.  We do not need to show that the others are similarly false to show that none of them are de fide.  At least two of them, Purgatory and Indulgences, fail the Vincentian test of Catholicity (believed “everywhere, always, and by all”) and have never been confessed by any of the other ancient Churches whose communion with Rome was broken prior to the second millennium and while the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist does pass the test of Catholicity, the account of the Real Presence to which the term Transubstantiation refers does not, owing far more to the Medieval rediscovery of Aristotle than to the Scriptures and the Fathers of the first millennium.   At an even more fundamental level, none of these things can be shown to have belonged to the original deposit of the “faith once delivered unto the saints” either explicitly or implicitly in the same way as the Eternal Generation of the Son or the consubstantiality of the Father and the Son.  That Rome was willing to declare these things to be de fide, as in later Councils she would declare such other things as the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary and the infallibility of the Roman Patriarch, lends much weight to the accusation that the authority she claims for herself goes way beyond the Catholic truth that the Church has authority to define the faith by explaining the original deposit in such a way as to protect it against heresy and that she believes she has the power to just add to the deposit of faith by her own fiat.

 

Neither the Lutherans nor the Reformed officially made such claims for the extra-Creedal doctrines in their Confessions, although sometimes in practice certain of their theologians and preachers have acted like they did.  Calvinist preachers of various denominational stripes have been known to say that the “doctrines of grace”, by which they mean the doctrines of the Synod of Dort (1618-1619) – total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and the perseverance of the saints -, are the Gospel, as if a rigid predestinarianism in which God has arbitrarily picked out a handful of people to receive His mercy and nobody else ever has any real opportunity to escape condemnation could possibly be accurately described as “Good News.”  The Lutheran claim that “justification by faith alone is the article upon which the Church stands or falls”, while more defensible than the Calvinist equation of predestinarianism with the Gospel, (4) makes a doctrine about Christian faith more important that the truths that are the essential content of Christian faith.

Although our English Articles of Religion are, in terms of article count, longer than either the Lutheran Augsburg or Reformed Belgic Confessions, there is no extra-Creedal doctrine that defines Anglicanism the way TULIP defines Dortian Calvinism or Sola Fide defines Lutheranism (not in the sense that it is distinct to Lutheranism – the Reformed and Anglican Churches also affirm it – but it is more associated with Lutheranism, in the theology of which it is more central).  In part this is because the Articles of Religion – in their final, Elizabethan form at least, if the same cannot exactly be said about such predecessors as the Henrician Ten Articles or the Edwardian Forty-Two – were formulated with the end in mind of achieving the peace and unity in the English Church that Queen Elizabeth and Archbishop Parker sought rather than in the polemical spirit that drove the Continental Protestant Confessions (and, for that matter, the Creed of Pius IV and the Council of Trent).  In part it is because the English Reformers, much more so than their Continental counterparts, were determined to preserve the Catholicity of the English Church, to remove only the blatant late Medieval abuses in their reforms, and, while affirming the supremacy of the Scriptures as the Word of God above ecclesiastical authority and tradition like other Protestants, to look to the Fathers of the early centuries and Councils for the orthodox interpretation of the Scriptures.  This is reflected in all the formularies to come out of the English Reformation of which the Articles are but one.  These define the Anglican faith as the Catholic faith of the ancient Creeds. (5)  The (interrogative) Apostles’ Creed is the faith into which one is baptized in the service of the Book of Common Prayer.  The Apostles’ Creed is also the faith confessed in the daily offices of prayer (except on those to which the Athanasian Symbol is assigned), the Nicene Creed is the faith confessed in the service of Holy Communion.  To avoid any confusion on this matter, the Articles are entitled Articles of Religion and not Confession of Faith.

 

The English Reformers had it right, I believe.  The twelve articles which comprise the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, developed in the same early centuries in the West and East respectively out of the baptismal Creeds of Rome and probably Jerusalem, arguably themselves variants of a proto-Creed perhaps dating back to the Apostles, certainly ultimately derived from the formula with which Jesus Himself commissioned His Church to baptize the nations, are the Christian faith.  The Definition of Chalcedon provided further clarity on the Person and Two Natures of Jesus Christ to guard against latter heresies, the Athanasian Symbol provides the fullest exposition of the Trinity, but everything in the Definition of Chalcedon and the Athanasian Symbol is either explicit or implicit in the Creeds, just as everything in the twelve articles of the Creeds is either explicit or implicit in the original deposit of the “faith once delivered unto the saints” as recorded in the Scriptures.  To subtract from this faith the way liberal revisionists like Harnack did is to create a new religion that is less than Christianity.  To add to it by declaring other things, true or false, that are neither explicit nor implicit in the ancient Creeds to be of the essence of the faith in the way Pius IV and the Council of Trent did is to arrogantly claim authority far in excess of that given to the Church.  Nothing else resembles this error of the papacy so much as the attitude of those who treat the doctrines of the Reformation, or worse of five-point Calvinism, as if they were on par with the truths of the ancient Symbols. 

 

 (1)   Gibson’s book is part of the Oxford Library of Practical Theology edited by W. C. E. Newbolt and Darwell Stone.  Burn contributed separate volumes on each of the Creeds to the same series.  The material in these naturally overlaps that in his earlier An Introduction to The Creeds and the Te Deum (1899).

(2)   Although the Athanasian Symbol and the Definition of Chalcedon are both sometimes called Creeds, neither begins with “I/We believe” and so these are not Creeds in the proper sense.  Symbol is the Anglicization of the Greek word that was first used for these sort of faith formulations.  The Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds are, like the Athanasian Symbol and Definition of Chalcedon, Symbols, but the Athanasian Symbol and Definition of Chalcedon are not properly Creeds.

(3)   The very Calvinistic Irish Articles of Religion of 1615, drawn up primarily by Archbishop Ussher (at the time Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin and not yet a bishop), number 104.  This is the longest in terms of article number of which I am aware. Longest in terms of article number does not translate into longest in in terms of total content.  The Presbyterian Westminster Confession of Faith, which is not organized into articles, is longer. In 1523 Zwingli put out “The Sixty-Seven Articles”.  This however, was not the same sort of thing as either the English or Irish Articles or the Lutheran and Reformed Confessions but a personal statement, drawn up as part of his defence before the Zurich city council after he had been charged with heresy and many of the sixty-seven are short sentences joined together in larger divisions which in other Confessions would constitute a single article.  The last of the sixty-seven is an invitation to ask him questions about various topics.

(4)   The best defence of the statement would be to examine how St. John uses St. Peter’s Confession in his Gospel.  St. Peter’s Confession was that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of the Living God” in His response to which Jesus said “thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” (Matt. 16:16, 18)  That the confession and not St. Peter personally, is this foundation rock, is evident in the Greek of rock which is feminine whereas St. Peter’s name is masculine.  In St. John’s Gospel, this very Confession is identified by the Evangelist as what one must believe to have everlasting life (Jn. 20:31).  Earlier in his narrative, Martha makes the same confession in response to Jesus’ asking her if she believed His statement “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.” (Jn. 11:25-26, Martha’s answer in 27).  What Dr. Luther called “justification by faith alone” is the truth explained by St. Paul in the fourth chapter of Romans that being right with God is not something that we earn by works, but is a gift given by grace in Jesus Christ and received by us by faith.  St. Paul did not use the word “alone” in expressing this and many objected to Dr. Luther’s use of it on the grounds that St. James did use it  (Jas. 2:24) and negated it, although these failed to note that in doing so St. James asserted that justification was by precisely the thing St. Paul said it was not by and that the only reasonable way of harmonizing the two is to recognize that St. James was not talking about justification by grace (a word conspicuous by its absence from his second chapter which incorporates all of the other main terms of the fourth chapter of Romans) which is more or less what St. Paul himself said in the second verse of Romans 4 (frequently those who point to James 2:24 in this way claim that it is the only occurrence of “faith alone” in the Scriptures, ignoring or ignorant of Mark 5:36 in which it is stated by Jesus Himself positively in the imperative mood as a command).  All that the doctrine means is that for salvation to be a free gift of grace – which all Churches, even the Roman, acknowledge it to be – then faith must perform its role as the hand which receives that gift with no assistance from works.   The best Roman Patriarch of living memory, Benedict XVI, acknowledged that Dr. Luther was right about this.  At any rate, outside of St. Paul’s epistles, this is most emphasized in the Johannine writings, especially the fourth Gospel in which Jesus Himself and the Evangelist repeatedly promise everlasting life to everyone who believes in Jesus.  The exchange in the eleventh chapter between Martha and Jesus, associates Jesus’ being able to make this promise with His being Whom St. Peter confessed Him to be, which brings us back to that confession being the rock upon which Christ would build His Church and upon which it stands.

(5)   To be fair to the Reformed, one of their Forms of Unity (formularies), their Heidelberg Catechism of 1563, primarily the work of Zacharias Ursinus also clearly identifies the Gospel and the Christian faith with the faith of the Apostles’ Creed in Q and A 22 and 23.

“Both/And” and “Because…Therefore”

The expression via media has often been used to describe the Anglican position with regards to Catholicism on the one hand and Protestantism on the other.  It is a positive expression that evokes Aristotle’s concept of the golden mean, the path of virtue from which if you veer off in either direction you fall into one of two ditches of opposing vices.  It is misleading, however, in that it suggests that the Anglican position is neither Catholic nor Protestant but something in between.  The classical position of the reformed Ecclesia Anglicana – the English Church, planted early in the first millennium, as reformed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – however, is not a neither/nor but a both/and.  If we are to continue to use the expression, therefore, it needs to be with the explanation that it means our Church is both Catholic and Protestant and not that it is neither one nor the other. 

 

Obviously for the Anglican Church to be Catholic, Catholic cannot be defined by communion with or submission to the Patriarch of Rome commonly called the Pope.  St. Vincent of Lérins in the fifth century defined the faith of the Catholic Church as that “which has been believed everywhere, always, by all”, that is, what the Church as a whole has taught and believed since the Apostles, excluding that which has been unique to one location or to one time period.  In accordance with this principle, the English Reformers looked to the undivided Church of the early centuries as normative when carrying out their reforms.

 

Similarly for the Anglican Church to be Protestant, Protestant cannot mean what it often means in online “Catholic versus Protestant” debates, that is, North American evangelical.  Since North American evangelicalism tends to take as normative the doctrines of dissenting separatist groups that grew out of the Puritan movement that was discontent with the conservatism of the English Reformation and demanded more radical reforms to conform the Church to the model of Calvin’s Geneva it would make little sense to define Anglican Protestantism this way.  We should also be cautious about using the Five Solas to define Anglican Protestantism.  The Five Solas are a twentieth century formulation, drawn up by Calvinists who wanted a five-point summary of the doctrines of the Reformation to correspond to the five-point summary of their doctrine of predestination.  The Anglican Church in the Reformation agreed with the Lutherans and Calvinists that the Bible is the supreme authority to which the Church must conform her doctrine and that the gift of salvation in Jesus Christ is received by faith and not earned by works or merit.  In her Articles of Religion, however, she does not use the type of language found in the fifth article of the Belgic Confession of Faith when expressing the supremacy of Scriptural authority but speaks rather of the sufficiency of Scriptures (1).  In the English version of the eleventh article (the original text of the Articles of Religion was in Latin), sola is rendered as “only” rather than “alone”, which, with the exception of one marginal note, is also how Archbishop Cranmer consistently referred to the doctrine in the homily to which the article points (2).  The distinction, while small, is not insignificant.  “Only” usually excludes others from a class or category while “alone” usually indicates their absence.  Therefore, to convey in English that faith is the sole means whereby we receive the gift of saving grace (3) without suggesting that it exists in a vacuum apart from repentance, love, works and the like in the human heart, the “only” of the Anglican formularies is to be preferred over the “alone” that is usual with other Protestants. 

 

The Anglican Church to which the both Catholic and Protestant via media belongs, it needs to be pointed out, is the orthodox portion of the Anglican Church and not the part that has succumbed to the revisionist theology that is usually called liberalism.  Liberalism, despite naming itself after the virtue of generosity implying a kind of broadmindedness, is neither/nor with regards to Catholicism and Protestantism rather than both/and.  Moreover, it is not neither/nor in the sense the literal meaning of via media implies, the occupation of middle territory between, but neither/nor in the sense that it rejects much that is common to both Catholicism and Protestantism in their classical senses.

 

I have recently read three books which all affirm the “both Catholic and Protestant” understanding of the Anglican tradition.  The first of these is a short monograph entitled The Anglican Way: Evangelical and Catholic which was written by the Reverend Dr. Peter Toon and was first published by Morehouse - Barlow in 1983.  The edition I have is the 2010 edition put out by WIPF & STOCK of Eugene, Oregon.  The second is entitled Reformed Catholic Anglicanism which has multiple contributors and which was edited by Charles F. Camlin, Charles D. Erlandson, and Joshua L. Harper.  It was published by the Anglican Way Institute which is an outreach of the Church of the Holy Communion Cathedral (Reformed Episcopal Church) in Dallas, Texas in 2024.  The third is The Gospel and the Catholic Church by the Most Reverend A. Michael Ramsay, the 100^th Archbishop of Canterbury.  This book was written early in Ramsay’s ministry, long before he became the Anglican Primate, and was first published in 1936 by Longmans and Company.  I read the 2010 edition put out by Hendrickson Publishers of Peabody, Massachusetts.  In the cases of the last two books, it is the e-book editions for Kindle that I have and which I read.

 

I will defer further discussion of the second and third books to future essays and focus on Toon’s for the remainder of this one.  The author of this book was an Anglican priest and theology professor originally from the Diocese of Liverpool who ministered in the United States for the last eighteen years of his life, where he led the American version of the Prayer Book Society.  Other books of his that I have read in the last two years are his Knowing God Through Liturgy which is a sort of devotional guide to the Book of Common Prayer and his Neither Archaic nor Obsolete: The Language of Common Prayer and Public Worship co-written with Louis R. Tarsitano which defends the ongoing use of the Elizabethan language of the Prayer Book against the recent trend for “updated” liturgy (I found his argument for retaining the singular pronoun for addressing God as more theologically proper than using the numerically generic “you” quite compelling). I have also recently read the 2012 Gedenkschrift (4) that Roberta Bayer edited entitled Reformed and Catholic: Essays in Honor (sic) of Peter Toon.  Just how important the theme of the book under consideration here was to Toon is indicated by the fact that the title of this memorial collection was chosen to evoke its subtitle.

 

The book is not a long one.  Its ninety-four pages are divided into a preface and two introductory chapters, followed by Part One: The Evangel, which has two chapters, Part Two: Catholicity, which has two chapters, and Epilogue which in its listing in the Table of Contents confusingly looks like a third chapter to Part Two, and two Appendices. 

 

In the first chapter in the introductory section entitled “God’s Call” Toon expresses the both/and approach to Anglicanism in terms of the Church’s call:

 

In other words, the call of God to the Episcopal Church in these times, when the one Church of God is sadly divided, is that it should be simultaneously evangelical and catholic.  This does not mean that she is to be evangelical in her preaching and catholic in her liturgy.  It is not a matter of being sometimes evangelical and sometimes catholic.  The Church is called to be catholic and evangelical all the time in all that she is and does. (p. 11)

 

For the remainder of the chapter Toon elaborates on this by talking about how an evangelicalism that neglects “the wholeness of the one Church in space and time. The beauty of Liturgy, the symbolic power of sacraments, the depth of spirituality, and the episcopate as a sign of unity” (p. 12) and a Catholicity in which “the treasure of the Gospel is lost somewhere in thick layers of tradition which reach back into the dim past” (ibid) both fall short. “There must always be the primacy of Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (p. 13) he reminds us, for “Without him there is no Gospel and without him there is no Catholicity” (ibid).  “What we have to guard against” he writes “is the rejection of either the achievement of Christ in creating the Gospel or the continuing achievement of Christ in ruling and directing the Church throughout history” (p. 14).

 

The two chapters in the first part, “The Evangel”, are entitled “By Grace Alone” and “By Faith Alone.”  Clearly, the sixteenth century Reformation takes precedence over the North American revival experience in defining the word “Evangelical” for Toon. (5)  He begins the first chapter by asking “Have you been accosted by an enthusiast who asks you, ‘Are you saved?’” (p. 29) and says:

 

If you are a baptized Christian then you ought to say: ‘In Christ Jesus my salvation is completed and complete; because of the indwelling Spirit in my heart I am in the process of being saved; and, because Jesus Christ rose from the dead and will return from heaven at the end of the age to raise the dead, I look forward to salvation at the end of the age.’  

 

From this staring point, in which the fullness of Gospel salvation is contrasted with the North American evangelical tendency to think of salvation as a single event within the experience of the individual Christian, Toon proceeds to contrast North American evangelicalism’s individualistic understanding of salvation with the way “The Kingdom of God, a phrase much on the lips of Jesus, can be seen and presented only in this-worldly terms: the bringing of justice into human affairs” (p. 30) that is characteristic of liberal “Christianity”.  Toon notes, however, that the reduction of the Christian message to a certain type of political and social activism that is so evident on the part of the World Council of Churches, is matched by the way American evangelicals tend to identify the opposite kind of political and social activism with their understanding of Christianity.  Both, he says, need a deeper understanding of the basic human problem of which the full salvation proclaimed in the Gospel is the solution, “a weakness, a fundamental gone-wrong-ness which in both the individual and in society” (p. 32) which in classical theological language is called “Original Sin.”  Toon writes:

 

The human race was created by God to enjoy spiritual union and communion with himself.  Where this does not exist then there is a fundamental problem.  For the human being is made to enjoy a relationship both with his Creator and with the creatures whom God has made.  Only with right relationships with God, with human beings and with creation can a person find wholeness or salvation.

 

These relationships are broken by the problem with the human condition that is Original Sin or gone-wrongness or, as Toon also suggests, the classical concept of hubris understood in a corporate sense as affecting the entire race.

 

Having identified what we need saving from, Toon then goes on to talk about the right language with which the Church needs to present the Gospel of salvation.  I opened this essay by talking about how the Anglican via media needs to be understood as both/and with regards to Catholicism and Protestantism rather than neither/nor and this is the topic of Toon’s book as a whole. (6) Here, Toon draws another such distinction without noting the parallel.  I found it to be a particularly excellent way of explaining the distinction between the way the Gospel should be proclaimed and the mistaken way in which it often is so I provide a lengthy quotation of it:

 

This mistake can best be illustrated by considering two types of sentences.  The first type we may call an ‘if…then’ statement.  Here are several examples.  Speaking to a child at table we say, ‘If you eat your meat and potatoes, then you can have some ice cream’.  To a child at school we say, ‘If you pass your examinations, then we will buy you a bike’.  To a young person starting work we say, ‘If you do your work well then we will see that you get promotion’.  Finally, we all are familiar with the politician who says, ‘If you vote for me then I will do for you what you want me to do’.

 

This form of statement, with the understanding it encapsulates is necessary for human society.  But we make a major mistake if we present or understand the Gospel of God on this basis.  In other words, if we make ‘believe’ or ‘repent and believe’ into a condition which we ourselves must fulfil by ourselves in order to get the rewards of God’s salvation, then we pervert the Gospel! It is far better to think of the promise of salvation from God, as it is described in the New Testament as being of the structure, ‘because…therefore’.  Here are a couple of examples, ‘Because there is a free national health service, go into hospital for your operation’; and ‘because the day is warm and the sand is clean go and bathe in the sea’.  So the message of salvation is something like this: ‘Because Jesus Christ died for your sins and rose for your acceptance with God, therefore you are saved’.  And, ‘Because God has provided salvation for you in Jesus Christ, therefore you are to believe and to receive this salvation’. And, “Because God loves you and will love you, therefore you are to accept his love’.

 

You can see the difference between the ‘if…then’ and the ‘because…therefore’ approach.  The first encourages us to think that we can do something to contribute to our salvation, while the second reminds us that salvation is, from beginning to end, the gift of God; and the gift is not earned but rather gratefully received and accepted.  We do not ourselves offer to God our religion, our good works, our pious thoughts, and our good endeavours so that he will accept us.  Rather we gratefully receive.  We believe God and his promises concerning salvation, and then, out of sheer amazement and gratitude to him for his wonderful salvation, we live a life of love towards him and our neighbour. (pp. 32-33)

 

Toon is absolutely correct that this is the way in which the Gospel ought to be presented and what he has captured here is really what the Reformation was all about.  He follows this up by applying it to repentance in which he provides a helpful illustration of the true purpose of repentance – telling people that they are forgiven will not be understood and appreciated if they do not recognize and accept that they have done something wrong for which they need forgiveness. (7)

 

In the first chapter, “The Anglican Experience” of the second part of the book, Toon gives his account of Catholicity.  He begins by objecting to the Roman Catholic Church “calling itself ‘the Catholic Church’”, i.e., sans Roman,  because “Catholicity is not confined to that community” (p. 63).  He then provides a “brief word study” of the words “ekklesia” (literally “assembly”, it became the name of the Christian society and therefore “Church” in English) and “catholic” (Gr. katholikos), correctly noting that “catholic” is first applied to ekklesia by St. Ignatius of Antioch in the early second century and that as applied to the Church it came to have the primary connotations of universality (“the world-wide Church in contrast to the local congregation”) and orthodoxy (the faith of the world-wide Church as opposed to the heresies of separatist sects). (p. 63-64).  “To receive and accept the Church as it has existed, and as it has believed, taught, confessed, and worshipped, is the beginnings of true Catholicity” he writes. 

 

In subsequent sections he fleshes this out.  He reminds us “that it was the catholic Church, with its imperfections, that gave recognition to what we now call the canon of the New Testament” (p. 66) and while his claims for the Church in this regards are far more modest than those of the Latin and Greek Churches, he adds:

 

Parallel developments in the Church in this same general period of time included the general recognition of the threefold ministry of bishop, presbyter (=priest) and deacon, the centrality of the Eucharist as the main act of worship on the Lord’s Day, the creation of creeds (e.g. the Apostles’ and Nicene) and the recognition of apostolic tradition (having reference to both the succession of sound teaching and to the historical, personal, succession of bishops). (ibid).

 

He warns against claiming too much from history, pointing to the example of Roman Catholicism as doing this by seeing in the historical development of the See of Rome into the papacy ruling the entire episcopate and the dogmatization of the Immaculate Conception and Bodily Assumption of Mary proof of divine approbation of the same and argues for the Church’s indefectibility rather than infallibility. (pp. 67-68)   Then, in discussing how the Church of England’s Catholicity is reformed, i.e., from “deviant and exaggerated developments and expressions” (p. 68) that had entered the Church in the period prior to the Reformation, he lists twelve examples of elements of the Catholic tradition that the English Reformers made a point of retaining, in some cases even when their Continental counterparts did not.  The list can be found on pages 68-69, I won’t reproduce it here, but will merely note that it is basically an expansion of everything mentioned in the previous block quote.

 

In the second chapter of this section entitled “Pertinent Examples” he provides extended discussion of the topics of “Bishops”, “the Liturgy of the Eucharist” and “Visible Unity”.  I disagree with his saying under the first heading that “A careful reading of the New Testament reveals that it does not describe or prescribe a single pattern of ordained ministry in the apostolic churches” (p. 76) as it seems quite clear to me that the three-fold ministry is present in the New Testament where it is originally Apostles, presbyters, and deacons, with St. Timothy and St. Titus later assuming the governing role of the Apostles in the office to which the title of bishop (overseer) would very shortly after become attached. (8)  Toon argues for the plene esse view of the episcopate that bishops are necessary for the fullness of the Church, but their absence doesn’t necessarily de-church a body (pp. 77-79) to which I have no objection. (9)  Under the second heading, he begins by observing that the basic structure of the Eucharistic liturgy goes back to the earliest days of Church history and by providing a list of its basic elements (p. 80).  He then draws out the significance of it all – that it is as the very name Eucharist indicates “a great thanksgiving to the Father for all he has done and is doing”, an anamnesis, “the living and effective sign of the sacrifice of Christ, accomplished once for all on the Cross of Calvary”, which includes “an invocation of the Holy Spirit”, and is “the communion of the faithful” (p. 81).  He notes how “the doctrine of Christ presented in the Nicene Creed” is fundamental “to the structure, content and ethos of the developed Eucharist celebrated in the Church over the centuries” (p, 82) and observes that the significance of the Sursum Corda (the vesicles and responses that introduce the Sacramental portion of the liturgy) and shortly thereafter the introduction to the Sanctus is that “we are invited to share in Christ’s heavenly worship through our union with, and in, him” (p. 82).  He reminds us that worship is not supposed to be something we do privately in our pews but is a corporate act (p. 83).

 

Overall it is an excellent introduction to the evangelicalism and Catholicity of the (orthodox) Anglican tradition.

 

(1)   There is also a noticeable difference between how the distinction between the canonical books and the “Apocrypha” is handled in the Thirty-Nine Articles and how it is handled in the Belgic Confession in both of which the relevant article is the sixth.

(2)   Cranmer’s original version of the article just names the doctrine and refers to the homily, the Elizabethan revision provides an account of the doctrine.  In both versions the homily is called “The Homily of Justification”.  The homily referred to is the third in the first (1547) Certain Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches, more commonly called Book of Homilies, and its actual title is “A Sermon of the Salvation of Mankind by Only Christ Our Saviour from Sin and Death Everlasting.”

(3)   This does not contradict the idea of Sacraments as means of grace.  Sacraments are means by which grace is given, faith is the means by which it is received.  Dr. Luther likened faith to the empty hand which receives a gift.  Sacraments, in this analogy, are hands of the Giver not the recipient.  Sacraments share the role of the Word, of which St. Augustine of Hippo said they were a visual form, not the role of faith.

(4)  The same thing as a Festschrift (a collection of essays in honour of somebody) but published posthumously.

(5)   Toon’s background, prior to his entering the Church of England and her ministry was Methodist.  He began his ministry in the Diocese of Liverpool, the first bishop of which was the very Calvinistic evangelical J. C. Ryle about whom Toon co-wrote a biography.

(6)   Toon saw the both/and approach as different from the via media rather than a different interpretation of it.

(7)   Repentance has far too often been preached in a way that blasphemes the character of God.  Have you ever heard a sermon in which sinners were encouraged to soften the heart of God with their tears or heard of such a sermon?  That this misrepresents the character of God can be seen in the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  While the title character when he determines to return home devises a speech “Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants” he is forgiven by his father before he utters a word of it “But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him”.  The son’s contrition did not produce the mercy and forgiveness in his father’s heart – it was already there.  What it did do was move him to seek his father where forgiveness was already awaiting him.  The error that attributes more to repentance than this goes back very early but this does not make it less of an error.  As early as the Apostolic Fathers the question of whether serious sins after baptism can be forgiven arose.  One answer was that they could, but only once.  That this would mean that the Jesus Who commanded His disciples to forgive up to 70 times 7 (and He did not mean that they were free to not forgive the 491^st time as the Puritan preacher in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights thought) was less forgiving than He required His sinful disciples to be did not seem to occur to such as the author of the Shephard of Hermas.  A more common answer was that they could be forgiven, but that only after a lifetime of repentance and that the forgiveness was less certain than that offered in initial baptism.  This was based on a misreading of the tenth chapter of Hebrews.  The antiquity of these views does not make them Catholic – remember, there are two other tests. The second of these wrong answers produced bad fruit such as the deferral of baptism until the deathbed (Emperor Constantine is a notable example of this) and ultimately the Catholic tradition rejected these bad ideas and a better understanding of grace prevailed.  Satisfaction for sins after baptism is not made by us in our always far from what it should be repentance.  It was made once for all by the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross.  This Sacrifice is the source of the grace conveyed in the one-time Sacrament of baptism.  It is also the source of the grace conveyed in the repeated Eucharist.  Since it is the same once-for-all Sacrifice the believer confessing his sins in accordance with John 1:9 can be as sure of forgiveness of his post-baptismal sins as of that of his pre-baptismal sins.  Scottish Barthian theologian T. F. Torrance in his doctoral dissertation The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers was quite critical of the Fathers of the second and third centuries for the weakness of their understanding of grace  However, the words from Edmund Burke about accumulated wisdom and the self-correcting power of tradition that Russell Kirk liked to quote seem appropriate here “the individual is foolish…but the species is wise” and just as orthodox Trinitarianism triumphed over Arianism by the end of the fourth century so grace ultimately prevailed around the same time as well.

(8)   The thing, the three-fold ministry of the Christian Church corresponding to the three-fold ministry of the Old Testament Church (High Priest/Priest/Levite), is present in the New Testament.  The only reason there is any dispute about this is due to the words that name the three orders and even there presbyter and deacon when used for offices in the ministry (the words can just mean “elder” and “servant” in a general sense) refer to the same offices to which they have traditionally been applied.  What is disputed is whether episkopos (literally overseer) or bishop is used of the office of the presiding presbyter who shares in the Apostolic governance as in the later tradition (SS Timothy and Titus as examples) or of all presbyters (as its usage in the epistles to SS Timothy and Titus would suggest).  Either way, however, the governing office itself is present in the New Testament and if the word that would become its title was not yet restricted to it in the New Testament this in no way invalidates the later usage of the term since it had to be called something and “overseer” certainly describes the role.

(9)  The alternate views are that the episcopate is esse (no Church without it) and bene esse (it is better if the Church has it but a Church can be a Church even in the fullest sense without it).  Plene esse is how most High Churchmen understood it prior to the Oxford Movement.  The only caveat I would offer is that for a Church to be a Church but in a less than full sense because it lacks the Apostolic episcopate it must have an organic connection to the Church of Jerusalem.  While bishops in Apostolic Succession are one form of organic connection and so every Church with them has an organic connection they are not the only such connection. A Church planted as an extension of an older Church (and so on back to the Church of Jerusalem) does not lose this organic connection although it sustains an injury if it loses its bishops such as occurred with the (German) Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Reformation.

The Tests of Hyper-Protestantism

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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