Hic Sto

It is January 1st, the octave day of Christmas, and the Feast of the Circumcision of our Lord. It is my tradition at this time of the year, one that I borrowed from the late Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel, to write a full disclosure to my readership of my positions and prejudices at this time. Being a man of very conservative views and instincts, these have not changed much since I began writing and so, needless to say, there is always overlap between pieces of this kind, although I try to make my wording fresh each year. This year I have reused the title of the first of these essays but in Latin rather than English.

Allow me to begin with the title of this website - Throne, Altar, Liberty. This title is an affirmation of my belief in and loyalty to the institutions of classical Toryism - royal monarchy and the small-c catholic church. It also affirms my belief in personal freedom which is widely thought of as a classical liberal value. There is significance in the order of these words. "Throne and Altar", which are to Toryism what "blood and soil" are to nationalism, are placed before "Liberty" because I am a Tory first and a small-l-libertarian second. This ranking also reflects my conviction, contrary to the theories of liberalism, that a stable and peaceful social and civil order in which the aforementioned institutions are secure and firmly established is the foundation upon which personal liberty must be built and the environment in which it can flourish. I reject in its entirety, as obviously contrary-to-fact, mindless nonsense and drivel, the liberal theory that man's "natural" state is an individual existence outside of such an order and that his freedom stems from this state. I even more vehemently reject the liberal notion that democracy is the safeguard of liberty, and hold instead to the sane and sober judgement of the ancient philosophers, compared with whom the moderns are mediocre thinkers at best and more often than not contemptible fools, that democracy is the wellspring of tyranny. I respect our parliamentary form of government, not because it is democratic, but because it is an ancient, time-honoured, institution with prescriptive authority. I regard republicanism, in the Roman-American-modern sense of "kingless government" with utter abhorrence, although I accept the ancient Greek ideal that the Latin res publica originally denoted, that good government is that which serves the good of the public interest of the commonwealth. I have been thoroughly royalist by instinct all my life, and like my hero, Dr. Johnson, I combine the Jacobite view of royal authority with loyalty to the present reigning House.

I came to faith in Jesus Christ when I was fifteen, was baptized by immersion while I was a teenager, and confirmed by an Anglican bishop as an adult. I had five years of formal education in theology at what is now Providence University College In Otterburne, Manitoba and have continued to study theology informally ever since. As my theology has matured I have embraced primitive small-c catholicism and small-o orthodoxy, i.e., the teachings of the early Apostolic church, before the schism between the Greek and Latin churches. This is the faith which St. Vincent of Lerins said was held "everywhere, always, and by all" in the undivided catholic (whole) church, and of which Bishop Lancelot Andrewes said the boundary of was determined by "One canon reduced to writing by God himself, two testaments, three creeds, four general councils, five centuries, and the series of Fathers in that period – the centuries that is, before Constantine, and two after." In the schism, the Greek and Latin churches each maintained that she was the holy, catholic church confessed in the Creeds, from which the other had broken away in schism. Schism, however, is something that occurs within a particular church or between particular churches within the catholic church. Both sides, by identifying themselves as the whole of what they prior to the schism were clearly only a part, became guilty of schism. The true catholic church contains both and is fully present in all particular churches wherever there is organic, organizational continuity with the Apostolic church, the ecumenical Creeds are faithfully confessed, the Word, both Law and Gospel is proclaimed, and the Gospel Sacraments (Baptism and the Eucharist) are dutifully administered. The small-c catholic, small-o orthodox faith, as confessed in the Apostles', Nicene-Constantinopolitan and Athanasian Creeds is entirely consistent with the great evangelical truths of the Protestant Reformation - that the Holy Scriptures as the infallible written Word of God are the final authority by which all church teachings and practices are to be judged, and that since human beings, due to the Fall of Man into Original Sin are incapable of producing the righteousness that our Holy and Just Creator requires of us as revealed in His Law, our only salvation is that which has been freely given us by God in His Only-Begotten Son, Our Lord and Redeemer, Jesus Christ and which we receive by faith. Indeed, these latter truths are implicit in the Creeds, a true understanding of which requires them.

I grew up on a farm in southwestern Manitoba, to which I attribute my lifelong bias towards rural simplicity against urban cosmopolitanism, a bias I have maintained despite having lived in the province's capital city of Winnipeg for two decades. Manitoba is a province of the Dominion of Canada. I love my country, and its true history, heritage, traditions, and institutions. At the time of the American Revolution, when the thirteen colonies that became the United States of America rebelled against the British Crown, Parliament and Empire, and built their republic on the foundation of classical liberalism, other British colonies such as those in the Maritimes and the newly acquired French-speaking, Catholic colony called Canada, chose to remain loyal. Loyalists from the thirteen colonies, facing persecution in the new republic, fled to these northern provinces. In the century that followed the American republic frequently threatened invasion and conquest, and actually attempted to make good on those threats in the War of 1812, in which the English and French subjects again remained loyal, and fought alongside the Imperial army to successfully repel the Yankee invaders. Shortly after the Yankees waged a bloody war of annihilation against their more civilized Southern brethren, the provinces of British North America began the process of Confederation into a single country, which would be built upon the foundation of its Loyalist history, retain rather than severe its ties to Britain and the rest of the Empire, to be governed by its own Parliament, modelled after that in Westminster, under the common Crown. This was the beginning, not only of the country, the Dominion of Canada, but of the evolution of the British Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations. We had a strong sense of who we were as a country in our national identity based upon our Loyalist history and heritage which served us well in two World Wars. Sadly, much of this has been forgotten by Canadians today. This national amnesia has been actively and aggressively encouraged by the Liberal Party of Canada. For a century the Grits have proclaimed themselves to be the party of Canadian nationalism, while doing everything in their power to make Canadians forget the history and heritage that make us who we are as a country, such as stripping our national symbols of all that would remind us of that history and heritage. This was done because the Liberals see our Loyalist history and heritage as roadblocks standing in the way of their perpetual hold on power. The only consistent value the Liberal Party has ever had is its own power. It is the embodiment of everything I loathe and detest.

I am very much a man of the right if we speak of the right with the meaning that was attached to it when it was first used in a political sense in the eighteenth century - essentially, as the continental European equivalent of seventeenth century British Toryism. As a man of this right, I recognize a large gulf between myself and much of what is considered right-wing today. I do not mean right-wing as liberals dishonestly use the term, i.e., with connotations of fascism and national socialism, twentieth century movements that were modern to the core, had little to nothing in common with the historical right, and which were identical in almost every way to their overtly left-wing counterpart, that international conspiracy by atheistic, materialistic, totalitarian thugs against order, freedom, religion, decency and civilization in general that was known as Communism. I mean the soi-disant right of the day. David Warren once wisely reflected that "Toryism is the political expression of a religious view of life" and that "Conservatism is an attempt to maintain Toryism after you have lost your faith." Mainstream North American conservatism today is little more than a form of classical liberalism. When joined to the prefix "neo-" it denotes a particularly obnoxious form of classical liberalism that seeks to remake the entire world, by military force if necessary, into the image of American, technocratic capitalism and democracy. The North American "religious right" bears far too close a resemblance to Puritanism, the fanatical blend of Pharisaism and Philistinism that was the original enemy of the British Tories and got the ball of modern liberalism rolling in the first place, for my liking. The more radical self-identified right, the "alternative" right, is a blend of populism and nationalism, civic nationalism in the "lite" version, overt racial nationalism in the "hard." While I have the traditional Tory distaste for populism and nationalism, both of which are based on the modern notion of popular sovereignty, a Satanic notion dreamed up by liberals to challenge the sovereignty of the king in the commonwealth, the episcopate in the church, and God in the universe, I have a great deal of sympathy with the "alternative" right when it speaks truths about race, sex, and immigration that mainstream "conservatism" has been afraid to speak for decades.

My disappointment in the shortcomings of mainstream contemporary conservatism and other modern "rights", however, pales in comparison to my loathing of the forces of progress and modernity and my disgust at the state of folly and depravity into which they have plunged what used to be Christian civilization. Any explanation of what I stand for would be incomplete without an explanation of what I stand against and why.

Liberalism, the self-appointed ideological champion of personal freedom, rejected the ancient understanding of the good that is freedom which was best expressed by King Charles I just prior to his martyrdom as consisting "in having of Government; those Laws, by which their Life and their goods may be most their own" and redefined it in terms of the absence of restraints and limitations on the fulfilment of the desires and wishes of the individual will. Yet the more liberalism succeeds in removing traditional limitations from individual wish-fulfilment, the more its redefined liberty comes to resemble tyranny, freedom's perpetual foe and opposite. When liberalism speaks in terms of the rights and freedoms of women, the aged, and the infirm, it is to promote legal abortion on demand and euthanasia, thus displaying a callous devaluation of human life that is remarkably similar to that of the Nazis and Communists. George Grant hit the nail on the head thirty years ago when he described the judges who struck down abortion laws as having "used the language of North American liberalism to say yes to the very core of fascist thought—the triumph of the will."

Then there are liberalism's offspring, progressivism and the left, which together with their parent make up the unholy counterfeit trinity of the Modern Age. Progressivism is modern man's humanistic confidence in our species' unlimited ability, guided by liberalism's ideals of freedom and equality, to employ reason and science to better the human condition. The left is progressivism translated into political activism, the movement that seeks through political means to put progressivism's faith in human self-improvement into practice. While no sane person would ever oppose improvement that actually is improvement the spiritual blindness that is at the heart of the refusal of liberalism, progressivism, and the left to acknowledge either the limitations that God has placed upon us in nature, both ours and that of the world around us, or the limitations we have placed upon ourselves through our sinfulness is sufficient explanation for why progressive "improvements" are so often counterfeit or chimerical, why they not infrequently make things worse rather than better, and why when they actually do involve genuine improvements they usually come with a cost that has not been taken into consideration and may very well be too high. Liberalism, progressivism, and the left, viewed as they actually are rather than as they present themselves, are simply the efforts of Fallen man, refusing to acknowledge his exile from Paradise or to return by the appointed means of Grace, to reclaim what he has lost through force. Their substitution of equality for justice, human rights for natural law in which duties are antecedent to all rights, and democracy for royal authority exercised for the public good of the commonwealth, is simply idolatry, the ancient error of replacing God with mundane goods, higher goods with lower goods, and, in this case, genuine goods with counterfeit ones. Their dismissal of the wisdom of the ancients is what C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield dubbed "chronological snobbery" and their self-congratulatory exaltation of modern achievements is what the ancients called hubris.

Liberalism, progressivism, and the left are as morally bankrupt as they are spiritually blind. This is not a commentary on the actions or lifestyles of individual progressives but rather on their ethical thinking. They hated the old rules because of the limitations these placed on the fulfilment of individual desires and so they replaced them with new ones. Yet the old rules were, for the most part, few, simple, and clear and straightforward. These are the marks of good rules. The new rules are numerous, and far too frequently vague and hazy. These are the marks of bad rules. Worse, the new rules seem to be designed to function as weapons in the hands of anyone who wishes to take offence at the words and acts of others. This is most obvious when it comes to the new rules drawn up by liberalism's granddaughter feminism to replace the Christian sexual ethic. The latter was clear and easy to understand - either marry a spouse and be faithful or be celibate, all other alternatives are prohibited. Human difficulty in following this in practice never arose out of any problem in understanding it. The same can not be said of the rules of this new era of ex post facto withdrawal of consent.

Although the new morality is touted as being more "rational" than the old, the idea that the mind should govern the body and reason control the passions was essential to the old morality. Vices such as Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust were what occurred when natural human appetites were allowed to rule our behaviour and consequently run to excess. Virtues such as Temperance and Chastity were the habits, cultivated over a lifetime, of curbing these same appetites and allowing them to be governed by our reason. The new morality, however, has clearly elevated emotion over reason, and mind over body. The new cardinal virtues are feelings such as compassion, sympathy, and empathy. Profess to act based on one of these and your deeds will be lauded, no matter how much harm they objectively do. Make your decision based on cold, hard, facts and logic and you will be condemned, no matter how much good you objectively do. How else except by the elevation of the feeling of "compassion" over all rational considerations can we explain the progressives' determination to disregard the well-being of their own countries and civilization in order to throw out the welcome mat to the Third-world invasion thinly disguised as a refugee crisis that has in recent years materialized out of the pages of Jean Raspail's Camp of the Saints? How other than by a perverse setting of the body over the mind can the neo-Puritan demonization of tobacco, which can only hurt the body, at the same time and by the same people, who exalt and glorify marijuana which destroys the mind, be explained?

Yes, moral bankruptcy is the only way to describe this new morality that proclaims itself rational even as it places reason under the heel of feeling, and which pats itself on the back for emancipating man while binding him with rules that are petty and tyrannical in nature.

The liberal, progressive, left is at its worst when it thinks it is at its best. It congratulates itself on its opposition to "racism" and zealously hunts down all expressions of racial self-interest on the part of white people, however peaceful and benign, but it turns a blind eye to overt racial hatred and violence when these are directed towards white people. It strains out the gnat of Avarice within capitalism while swallowing the camel of Envy that is socialism and pretending that it tastes like charity. (1) It cynically uses the cause of preserving the environment, a worthy cause in itself albeit one that is often very ill-informed by pseudoscience, to justify destroying an industry upon which countless livelihoods depend and artificially raising the cost of living with a tax that hurts those least able to afford it the most, so that it can turn around and offer a rebate conveniently timed to arrive just before the next Dominion election.

This year I resolve to be firmer in my opposition to the left than ever before.

Happy New Year,
God Save the Queen


(1) The Seven Deadly Sins were never considered to be equal. Avarice (Greed), Gluttony, Lust and Sloth were the lesser of the Seven. They are purely human failings being natural human appetites indulged in to excess. Anger occupies the middle area, and Pride and Envy were the worst of the Seven. These are the Satanic sins which led to the devil's fall. In commiting them man imitates the devil. Envy is the hatred of others and desire to tear them down because they possess something you do not. Envy toward the haves rather than charity towards the have nots is the essence of true socialism, which of course is more than just the government relief programs that are often loosely labelled as such. It is the worst of sins hypocritically pretending to be the highest of virtues. The lesser sin of Avarice, by contrast, is in no way essential to the ownership of property, laws securing the same, and the general common sense truth that in ordinary circumstances the individual, head of the household, business manager and civil government are the ones best suited to look out for the interests of the individual, family, business, and country respectively, all of which have been fundamental elements of civilization from time immemorial. It is more reasonable to see a hint of Avarice in the doctrine of laissez-faire but this, after all, was a doctrine dreamed up by the liberals of the eighteenth century.

Liberalism Has Not Improved With Age

Liberalism is the spirit which has animated the civilization that was once Christendom for at least the last two and a half centuries. It was born at the dawn of the Age that is called Modern and its conquest of what it has renamed Western Civilization was more or less complete by the end of the Second World War. It has many facets; from the standpoint of epistemology – the theory of knowledge itself - for example, it could be described as a naïve faith in man’s ability to arrive at truth through his own reason, assisted only by the findings of experimental science. Essentially, however, it is a theory about the nature of man, his society, and his freedom.

According to liberalism, man is first and foremost, an individual being. His individuality belongs to his intrinsic nature and comes before his belonging to any larger social group, be it his nation, or on a smaller scale his local community, or even his family. These latter are external to human nature as constructions formed by individuals for their advantage as individuals. The essence of man’s individuality, liberalism further declares, is his freedom which is defined in liberalism as the individual’s sovereign rule over his own self. The purpose of government, in liberal theory, is to safeguard the freedom of the individual by protecting his rights, i.e., those regions of his self-dominion that are formally recognized and guaranteed against assault from other sovereign individuals.

When liberalism began, its proponents thought that by articulating this theory they were laying the foundation of an edifice that would protect against the ancient evil of tyranny which men have struggled against throughout human history. The ancient Greek word tyrannos originally referred to someone who had obtained power through means other than the prescribed constitutional order, in other words a usurper. By the time classical Athenian civilization had reached its height the term had taken on other connotations, that of a ruler who governs autocratically, not recognizing the constraints of law, constitution, or even basic morality and decency, and in a way that is oppressive towards his people. It is not too hard to see the connection between the original concept and the later one – someone who seized power in an unorthodox way is more likely to rule in a harsh, autocratic, manner than someone who has come to a position of authority legitimately – and so we might define tyranny as power that is usurped, unrestrained, and oppressively harsh. The liberals of the so-called Age of Enlightenment, made frequent accusations of tyranny against the medieval Church, the feudal aristocracy, and especially kings. They believed that these institutions had a tendency towards tyranny which their theories would check, thus providing for government that is more restrained and responsible.

History, however, tells another story. Today, in the age of liberalism triumphant, there is scarcely an area of our everyday lives over which elected legislative assemblies and the armies of bureaucrats and regulators at their beck and call would hesitate to assert some degree of control. They may not always literally march into a man’s house and business and boss him around, as home safety inspectors and Child and Family Services social workers do, but they have nevertheless made their government virtually omnipresent in a way that any feudal king would have rightly regarded as tyrannical. Indeed, in virtually every way the size of government can be measured, from the number of ministries and civil workers to the extent of the government expenditure and how much it takes out of everyone’s pockets in taxes, government is very much larger now, than before liberalism got its hands on it. As High Tory journalist Sir Peregrine Worsthorne put it about ten years ago “with remarkable rapidity, from being a doctrine designed to take government off the backs of the people, liberalism has become a doctrine designed to put it back again.” (1)

Libertarians maintain that this is because today’s liberalism is not really liberalism at all but a democratic socialism that has stolen liberalism’s identity. From this point of view, the classical liberalism endorsed by the libertarian and contemporary democratic socialist liberalism are the opposite of each other. Historically, however, democratic socialism sprang forth as a budding branch from off of the trunk of the tree of liberalism itself and draws ultimately from the same root in “Enlightenment” philosophy that liberalism does. Tellingly, the nineteenth century liberal, John Stuart Mill, whose On Liberty is highly regarded by libertarians as a classical liberal defence of the freedom of the individual against state tyranny, himself came to accept some of the elements of socialism.

If the libertarians deplore today’s liberalism while praising that of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Red Tories do the exact opposite. Red Tories are, for the most part, a Canadian phenomenon. They profess to subscribe to the same older school of conservatism that Canada inherited from Britain as this writer, namely High Toryism – the conservatism that is monarchist, communitarian, traditionalist, and favours a strong institutional church in a healthy working relationship with the sovereign. Unlike this writer, the Red Tories also have a strong affection for many left-of-centre causes and political views. According to the Red Tories, liberalism matured between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, corrected some of the excesses of its individualism, and by adopting an expansive view of the role of the state in bringing about ameliorative social changes moved closer to the classical and Tory concept of the common good.

The Red Tory and the libertarian have both misassessed the situation, in my opinion. The contemporary progressive, democratic socialist, type of liberal has not moved closer to the Tory vision of the common good. The concept of a hierarchical social order, itself part of the larger hierarchical “chain of being” starting from the throne of God Himself, was essential to the Tory vision of the common good, whereas the contemporary liberal justifies his expansion of the role and jurisdiction of the state by means of egalitarian ends. In the Tory view of the common good, the society whose common good government is supposed to serve, includes past and future generations as well as the present. Liberals may sometimes acknowledge the need to take future generations into consideration but since that acknowledgement is not joined with a similar regard for past generations, as liberals tend to look at those who have gone before them with the smug, condescending attitude that C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield dubbed “chronological snobbery” , it amounts to nothing for it is only by showing proper reverence and consideration for our ancestors – the virtue the Romans called pietas – that we can truly include future generations in the common good.

The libertarian is also wrong in that the contemporary liberal has not so much subverted the essence of liberalism and replaced it with something different but rather brought to fruition the tyranny the seeds of which have always been there within liberalism. From the beginning, liberals believed that the threat of tyranny came from kings, aristocrats and the Church and sought to transfer all real power into the hand of institutions and officials that were representative, elected, and democratic. These latter, however, have a far greater propensity for tyranny than the former, albeit a soft tyranny that disguises itself as concern for the well-being of those it tyrannizes, which disguise makes it all the more deadly.

The liberals believed that in their doctrine of human rights they were setting up roadblocks to the abuse of power. Instead, they were clearing the path for the multiplication of such abuses. A right is a claim to something on the part of a person or a group within a society which claim is formally recognized by the society. It is one thing for a society to formally recognize a man’s claim to security of his person and property against the violence of others, be they private citizens or the state. The justice of such a right is evident to all sane people, and it imposes no heavy burden upon either society as a whole or the members of whom it is composed. It is a different story completely when a society, in multiplying the rights that it recognizes, loses sight of the distinction between what someone may desire for himself and what he can reasonably and rightly claim for himself.

Take, for example, the rights that are defined as such in the Canadian Human Rights Act of 1977 and the American bill on which it was modelled, the US Civil Rights Act of 1964, the passing of which acts of legislation are celebrated by liberals across North America as milestones in the path towards social justice and progress. In these bills, the governments of Canada and the United States formally recognized as rights, claims to protection against discrimination on the part of racial, ethnic, and religious minorities as well as women. In recognizing such claims as rights, the governments of Canada and the United States had to forbid discrimination against women and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. Discrimination is something that takes place internally, in the mind or heart. By forbidding discrimination, the liberal governments of Canada and the United States had extended the jurisdiction of law into the realm of the inner thoughts and private conscience. Liberals had objected to the laws establishing the Roman Catholic Church in feudal Europe and the Anglican Church in Tudor England on the grounds that these violated men’s freedom of conscience, but these laws pertained only to public religion, the organized communal expression of faith, and did not presume to tell people what they had to believe or think in their own hearts as liberals themselves are now doing with anti-discrimination legislation. Anti-discrimination legislation, by the way, violates more than one traditional safeguard against the abuse of power. Because such law is classified as civil rather than criminal, there is no presumption of innocence for the accused, and since what he is accused of takes place in the heart, which human judges cannot see, there is no way for the accused to establish his innocence.

Liberals, blind to the damage they have done to our traditional standards of justice and to the fact that they have benefited nobody so much as those operating the thoroughly corrupt minority grievance shakedown rackets, continue to press forward, adding more and more groups to the list of those with the “right” not to be discriminated against. Last year liberals succeeded in having the “right” of same-sex couples to “marry” recognized across North America, this year it is the “right” of males who think they are female and females who think they are male to use public facilities designated for the use of the sex they identify with that liberals feel must overrule the thousands of reasonable objections most people have to such nonsense.

All of this is plainly a huge abuse of government power, even when it is carried out with a smiley face, by nice, cheerful, types who tell us that they are doing it all with our own wellbeing at heart. It is, however, completely consistent with basic liberal principles. If freedom is the self-determination of the individual, and government exists to safeguard freedom by protecting the individual’s rights, then the more rights the government protects, the freer people will become. That is the logic of liberalism, even if the ensuing “freedom” has come more and more each day to resemble the inside of a prison run by a madman.

While John Locke, John Stuart Mill, (2) Adam Smith, and the other fathers of liberalism would probably not recognize themselves in the liberalism of today, what we are seeing was nevertheless present in their doctrines in germinal form. That doctrine has now grown to full maturity, and it has certainly not improved with age. Perhaps it is time, that instead of looking back for guidance to the earliest generation of liberals, as the right-liberals who call themselves conservatives today suggest, we look instead to those like Richard Hooker and Archbishop Laud, Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson, Lords Falkland and Salisbury, Benjamin Disraeli and Sir Walter Scott, and more recently Michael Oakeshott, Maurice Cowling and Roger Scruton who, drawing from wisdom more ancient than that of liberalism and its Modern Age, have directed us towards order, tradition, and stability as the true safeguards against tyranny and apart from which there can be no real freedom.


(1) Peregrine Worsthorne, "Liberalism failed to set us free. Indeed it enslaved us.", The Guardian, June 21, 2006, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/jun/21/comment.politics2
(2) Maurice Cowling, the High Tory historian, wrote that John Stuart Mill himself, “may be accused of more than a touch of something resembling moral totalitarianism” and that Mill’s liberalism was ”no less than Marxism, is intolerant of competition” going on to say that “jealousy, and a carefully disguised intolerance, are important features of Mill’s intellectual personality.” Maurice Cowling, Mill and Liberalism, 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963, 1990), pp. xlviii and xlvix.

A Man of 2015

It is only just that we award credit to those to whom credit is due and a certain amount of credit is due to Justin Trudeau. It is less than a month since the Shiny Pony became Canada’s shiny new Prime Minister and he is already living down to our lowest expectations. It is too early, perhaps, to declare him to be our worst Prime Minister ever. It will take him longer than this to break his father’s record in that respect. He is well on the way to getting there, however.

On November 4th, David Johnson, who as Governor General is the Queen’s Canadian viceroy, swore in Trudeau and the thirty people selected to be the Crown Ministers who, along with the Prime Minister, will make up the Cabinet. Fifteen of these were men and fifteen were women because the new Prime Minister had decided it was important that the Cabinet have an equal number of penises and vaginas. “Gender balanced” was the way he described it. At one time it was understood that people have sexes and words have genders, but no longer.

Now, if a Prime Minister were to submit to the Crown a list of choices for Ministerial appointments that consisted entirely of men, he would, of course, be denounced as sexist. Let’s think about that for a moment. If we assume, for the sake of argument, that the word sexist actually means something and is not just a verbal weapon used by liberals, progressives, and social justice warriors – a rather dubious assumption - what is it about a list of appointees that consists solely of men that would make it sexist?

Those who are capable of intelligent and sane thought would answer that it is the fact that those on the list were chosen on the basis of their sex, or, to put it a bit more precisely, that sex was a criterion in the selecting of those who would be on the list. If this, however, is what makes a list that contains only men sexist, then Justin Trudeau’s “gender balanced” Cabinet is also sexist, because sex is just as much a criterion for selection in the one as it is in the other.

This conclusion can be avoided by saying that it is not the use of sex as a criterion of selection, per se, that would make an all-male Cabinet sexist, but rather the fact that it is men who are chosen, but to say this would be a more overt admission of misandry than most progressives, except perhaps the most radical of feminists, are usually comfortable with because they like to operate under the delusion that they are morally and intellectually superior to other people. Similarly, American anti-racist liberals are unlikely to admit that in the fall of 2008, Barack Obama became the first person to be elected President of the United States on the grounds of his skin colour, and that they were the ones to so choose him on those grounds.

When asked why he choose a “gender balanced” Cabinet, Justin Trudeau answered “because it’s 2015”. While it is good to know that our Prime Minister is capable of reading the date on a calendar, showing a level of intellectual achievement of which he had previously given no indication, what is implied in his answer is the idea that in 2015 we have attained some sort of enlightenment that previous generations lacked so that of course we now know that it is absolutely vital for the health of our country that half of its Cabinet Ministers – at least – be women. Almost a century ago Owen Barfield and C. S. Lewis coined a term for this way of thinking. They called it “chronological snobbery” and if there were an award for the most chronological snobbish remark of the year, “because it’s 2015” would certainly deserve to win it. Ironically, however, Mr. Trudeau’s chronological snobbery is itself clearly behind the times. It is indeed, 2015, the year in which the most recent quantum leap forward in the socially progressive enlightenment of mankind took place. I refer, of course, to the apogynosis of Bruce into Caitlyn Jenner. The earth-shattering consequences of this event are still unfolding in school divisions across North America as tough decisions have to be made about who should be allowed to enter which washroom or locker room, a question which was not a significant puzzler up until now. Even feminist icon Germaine Greer has come under the wrath of the next generation of more-enlightened-than-thou social justice warriors who recently circulated a petition to have her invitation to lecture at Cardiff University revoked on the grounds of her “transphobia”. Yet Mr. Trudeau’s choices for lady Cabinet Ministers are all cis female to the best of my knowledge. That is so 2014!

Now given the events of this weekend perhaps it is time we questioned whether the kind of attitude that comes out in expressions like “because it is 2015” is really what we want in our leaders. Friday, November 13th, proved to be a very unlucky day indeed for the residents of Paris when, on that evening, ISIS launched a multipronged terrorist attack on their city that has left 129 dead, so far, and almost 400 wounded. At least one of those who carried out this act of jihad on behalf of the Islamic State had entered Europe claiming to be a Syrian refugee.

One of the first things Justin Trudeau did after winning the federal election last month was to announce that he would be withdrawing our bombers from the campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. This, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing, but Trudeau is doing it for all the wrong reasons. Throughout the entirety of his political career he has demonstrated a sappy and juvenile naivety about terrorism, Islam, geopolitics, war, and all things military. In a speech this March, explaining his opposition to the previous government’s intention of expanding Canada’s military efforts against ISIS into Syria, he gave as one of his reasons that such a mission “could very well result in Assad consolidating his grip on power in Syria.” As obnoxious as the previous government’s hawkishness could be, at times, at least Stephen Harper could tell the difference between an enemy of Canada and of all Western civilization, like ISIS, and a regime that, however unpleasant it may be, is no enemy. A month ago, just before the election, Trudeau said that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “irresponsible and harmful” in the Middle East, when, in fact, Putin has demonstrated far better sense with regards to that region than any other world leader. In his election campaign Trudeau promised to bring 25, 000 “Syrian refugees” into Canada by the end of the year and a representative of his office told the press, this weekend, that the Paris attack has not altered his intention to follow through on this. Why let a small thing like a terrorist attack ruin a perfectly bad idea?

What the attack on Paris is telling us, if we have the ears to hear, is that if Justin Trudeau is a man of 2015, what the countries of the West do not need, is the leadership of men of 2015. What we rather need is the leadership of men of 732. Whether there are any of that vintage yet to be found remains to be seen.

Orthodoxy is More Than Fundamentalism - Not Less!

Throughout the history of the Christian Church several labels – including “Christian” itself – were initially coined as terms of opprobrium by the enemies of those labelled but were later appropriated by the labelled and worn as badges of honour until eventually their original negative sense was forgotten. Sometimes this pattern is reversed, however, and one notable example of this is the term “fundamentalist”. This word was coined by Curtis Lee Laws, the editor of the Northern Baptist newspaper The Watchman-Examiner in 1920, as a self-descriptive label for Christians who “still cling to the great fundamentals and who mean to do battle royal for the fundamentals.” The term caught on among Protestants, especially in denominations that were descended from the English Calvinist non-conformist groups and among those that had arisen out of or been heavily influenced by the evangelical revival movement of the preceding two centuries.

Today the term is still in use but its meaning has changed. There are still Protestant groups who self-identify as fundamentalist. For these groups the term still has the same meaning it had in the 1920’s and ‘30’s but with the added concept of ecclesiastical separation from those who reject the fundamentals. There is some overlap with the groups who identify as “evangelical”, but self-identifying fundamentalists would regard most of these (whom they would call “new evangelical” or “neo-evangelical”) as compromising because they are less separatist and more willing to accommodate liberalism. Those who would identify themselves as evangelical rather than fundamentalist often use the term fundamentalist to mean those who hold to theological concepts like dispensationalism and its accompanying pre-millenial eschatology and neo-Puritan ethics (don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t dance, etc.) although none of these things is technically part of the meaning of fundamentalism for those who identify as fundamentalists. Outside of evangelicalism, other Christian theologians often have hazier ideas as to what fundamentalists actually believe. I read a Roman Catholic apologist once who said that fundamentalism was basically Calvinist. In fact, the majority of fundamentalists are probably better described as Arminian, except perhaps on the issue of eternal security. The most Calvinist of theologians, strict 5 point Reformed types, usually don’t like to think of themselves as fundamentalists because they identify fundamentalism with dispensationalism which is at odds with their own covenant theology.

Far more common than any of these meanings, however, for most people today, the term fundamentalist has come to have the meaning which progressive academics, clergy, and commentators have attached to it, namely that of “religious extremist”. Thus terrorists waging jihad against the West are now called “Islamic terrorists” and the followers of Rabbi Kahane are now “Jewish fundamentalists”.

It is fundamentalism in the original sense of the term which we will be considering here and its relationship with theological orthodoxy. When Curtis Laws coined the term the phase “the fundamentals” was already being widely discussed. Ten years previously the Bible Institute of Los Angeles had begun to print a series of pamphlets under the title The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth. It ran to twelve volumes by the time it was done five years later (it was later re-issued in a four volume hardbound edition) and consisted of essays by learned men from various denominations including Presbyterian (James Orr, B. B. Warfield, A. T. Pierson, Charles R. Erdman), Anglican (Dyson Hague, W. H. Griffith Thomas, J. C. Ryle), Baptist (A. C. Dixon, E. Y. Mullins), Plymouth Brethren (Algernon Pollack) and Methodist (Arno C. Gaebelein), mostly Americans but with some Canadian and British contributors. The contributors were clergy, for the most part, often clergy who did double duty as academic professors as well. The pamphlets argued in defence of the authority and truth of the Holy Bible as the Word of God and for historical Christian doctrines such as the Trinity, the deity of Jesus Christ, His Incarnation and Virgin Birth, the Atonement and Resurrection, Justification by Faith and the Second Coming against various modern ideas and movements. The same year that these pamphlets, edited by R. A. Torrey and A. C. Dixon began to be published, five doctrines were identified as essential to the faith at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, USA. The five doctrines were 1) the inerrancy of the Holy Scriptures, 2) the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, 3) the substitutionary atonement, 4) the bodily resurrection of Christ and 5) that Christ’s miracles as recorded in Scripture were historic and genuine. These were very similar to a five point statement made at the Niagara Bible Conference in 1895, an abridged version of their earlier fourteen point statement of 1878. In the five points of 1895 the deity of Christ was the second point, the virgin birth and substitutionary atonement were the third and fourth points, and the fifth point included both the bodily resurrection and the second coming. These two statements gave birth to the idea of the “Five Points of Fundamentalism” and to perpetual confusion as to the formulation of those five points.

The publication of The Fundamentals, the statements by the Niagara Bible Conference and the Presbyterian General Assembly, and the entire fundamentalist movement in general arose in response to a specific problem – the growth of unbelief, formulated as doctrine, in the Protestant denominations. This formulated unbelief was known as modernism or (theological) liberalism. Either term is apt because it was a product of the Modern Age and the predominant ideology of that Age which is liberalism. The Modern Age was an Age of rebellion against tradition and authority, which liberalism regarded as shackles that robbed people of their freedom and blinders that kept from them the light of reason and science. Needless to say, this type of thinking, which had gradually grown up in the academic world as Renaissance humanism, the rationalism of the “Age of Reason”, and the “Enlightenment” took the university further and further away from its medieval, theocentric, Christian roots, eventually produced the attitude that C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield dubbed “chronological snobbery”, i.e., the attitude that says “its well enough for people of past ages, who didn’t know any better, to believe in things like miracles and the virgin birth, but people like me in this enlightened, modern, age in which we live cannot be expected to believe such things”. When this attitude is held by a clergyman or theological professor it takes the form of theological liberalism, which regards the virgin birth of Jesus Christ as a story His disciples later made up (or borrowed from pagan mythology) and says the same thing about His deity or uses the term “divinity” instead of deity, meaning by such a term a concept like “the spark of divinity that is in all of us”, borrowed from the early Gnostic heretics. The Apostles said that Jesus rose from the dead, the liberals taught, because they could feel Him living on inside themselves the way you or I might continue to still feel the presence of a loved one who has passed away. The essential message of Christianity, modernism taught, was that we should love all people and treat them fairly and justly, reading modern egalitarianism into the concepts of “fairness” and “justice”, and all that stuff about the Son of God, coming down from heaven, being born of a virgin, dying for our sins, and rising triumphant over sin and death, was just window dressing. All of that was unnecessary anyway, liberalism taught, because the whole concept of “sin” comes from an outdated and barbaric understanding of morality that we have outgrown in modern times.

With garbage like this coming to be taught from the pulpit there was a clear need for something like fundamentalism to reaffirm and fight for the truths that Christians had historically and traditionally believed which the modernists or liberals were denying.

The fundamentalists believed they were contending for sound or orthodox doctrine against heresy and unbelief. There are those who would say that this is ironic because fundamentalism did not itself represent what has historically and traditionally been considered orthodoxy within Christianity. There are a number of different reasons given for this charge. One would be that the denominations most heavily represented in fundamentalism are those that arose out of the English Dissenting or Non-Conformist Movements and their counterparts in continental Europe, i.e., the churches traditionally considered the Radical or left wing of the Protestant Reformation. Another would be that the Bible Conference movement which produced the first formulation of what became the Five Points of Fundamentalism was a platform for the dispensationalist version of pre-millennialism.

These arguments, when coming from the traditionally orthodox in the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican and Lutheran Churches, have much truth to them which we will consider shortly. Sometimes, however, you will find these arguments on the lips of those who are less interested in defending traditional orthodoxy than in bashing fundamentalism from a position of clear and obvious sympathy for either theological liberalism or the opponents of fundamentalism (and evangelicalism) in the present culture war. It is difficult to credit such people with good faith and the appropriate response is to say that traditional Christian orthodoxy is more than fundamentalism not less than fundamentalism. Or, to put it another way, when traditional Christian orthodoxy approaches and criticizes fundamentalism it is from the direction opposite to that of theological, political and cultural liberalism.

Each of the five points of fundamentalism, whichever formulation is used, is affirmed by traditional Christian orthodoxy. The deity, virgin birth, substitutionary atonement, bodily resurrection, and second coming of Christ are affirmed in the Creeds of the early, undivided, Church, which are the classical statements of traditional orthodox faith. If traditional orthodoxy is to be distinguished from fundamentalism on these points, it is that traditional orthodoxy prefers a more precise, as well as more aesthetically pleasing, formulation of these doctrines. Rather than say “I believe…in the deity of Jesus Christ”, for example, the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed declares the orthodox belief in “one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, Begotten of the Father before all worlds; God, of God; Light, of Light; Very God, of very God; Begotten, not made; Being of one substance with the Father; Through whom all things were made”. Whereas liberalism denies the doctrines affirmed as fundamental by fundamentalism, or affirms them nominally but in such a way as to deny them in actuality by stripping them of their substance, traditional orthodoxy expresses them in a fuller, more complete, way.

Liberalism regards fundamentalism as clinging to outdated ideas, to superstitious beliefs about virgins giving birth and the dead rising, that we, so much wiser than our forebears, know better than to believe today. If traditional orthodoxy finds fault with fundamentalism it is for a completely different set of reasons.

Traditional orthodoxy might fault fundamentalism, for example, for being too reductionist. The ecumenical Creeds are the classical formulation of orthodoxy and there is a lot more in each of these than is in the five points of fundamentalism. The Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds have a Trinitarian structure, with one section for each of the Three Persons, and the first section of the Athanasian Creed spells out the doctrine of the Trinity at length. The Holy Trinity is not listed as one of the points of fundamentalism, nor do they mention the Father and the Holy Spirit. This does not mean that fundamentalists did not believe in the Holy Trinity, on the contrary, they were and are Trinitarians, but it does mean that the orthodox Creeds are a more complete statement of the “fundamentals” of Christianity than the five points of fundamentalism.

It is the first of the five points, however, which is the most contentious, both for liberals and the traditionally orthodox, but for different reasons. Liberals ridicule the idea of the inerrancy of Scripture because they don’t believe the Bible to be the Word of God and think it to be chock full of historical and scientific errors, superstitions that sophisticated, rational, educated, modern people know better than to believe in these days, and fanciful myths and legends, no different from those of other primitive peoples and probably ripped off from them. This point of view is not shared by the traditionally orthodox.

Where traditional orthodoxy has a problem with the first point of fundamentalism is in the fact that it is placed first, before anything is said about Christ. This, to the traditionally orthodox, says that fundamentalism takes the Bible as its starting point and tries to demonstrate Christ from the Bible. This, in the orthodox point of view, is a mistake because Jesus Christ, the Living Word of God, is the full and perfect revelation of God to man. He is to be our starting point. It is because Christ taught that the Scriptures are the authoritative Word of God that we are to accept them as such. Our theology, in other words, is supposed to be Christocentric rather than Bibliocentric.

This does not mean that traditional orthodoxy rejects the inerrancy of Scripture. Inerrancy, it is true, is a term of recent usage and is not, therefore, part of the traditional language used by the Christian Church in speaking of the Scriptures. The concept the word represents, however, is clearly implicit in the orthodox view of the Bible. The Church did not claim, from the time of Christ and His Apostles, in the writings of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, East and West, down to modern times, that the Bible was a set of merely human writings that could be right or wrong in what it teaches. No, the Church, following Christ’s own example, taught throughout the ages that the Bible is the written Word of God, that the person hearing the words of Scripture is hearing God speak through His prophets and apostles. The traditional orthodox view is that the Bible is the written Word of God, not a merely human book as liberalism teaches, or something that becomes the Word of God when we experience God through it as neo-orthodoxy (actually a form of liberalism rather than of orthodoxy) taught. In this it agrees with fundamentalism and inerrancy is implicit in this view because if the Bible is the written Word of God, if its words are a communication from God to man, then to say that the Bible is in error in what it asserts or teaches is to say that God is in error.

To understand what the doctrine of inerrancy means and does not mean requires a great deal of common sense, a commodity which is sadly in short supply in our day and age. It means only that the Bible is inerrant in what it asserts and teaches. It does not mean that because a sentence is found in the Bible it must therefore be taken as true in every possible sense without reference to its context,. Joshua 2:4-5 includes the words “There came men unto me, but I wist not whence they were: And it came to pass about the time of shutting of the gate, when it was dark, that the men went out: whither the men went I wot not: pursue after them quickly; for ye shall overtake them.” These words were not true, they were a lie told by Rahab to the men of the king of Jericho to protect Joshua’s spies. The words are in the Bible, but Biblical inerrancy does not mean that they are true, because the Bible does not assert that they are true but rather tells us that they are a lie.

Nor does Biblical inerrancy mean that the Bible must measure up to modern, man made, standards of technical precision. Here is an example of what I mean. The Bible frequently refers to the sun as rising in the east and setting in the West. On a couple of occasions it refers to God performing miracles in which the sun either stops in its movement across the sky or even moves backwards. Modern science tells us that the phenomenon (appearance) of the sun moving across the sky from the east to the west is actually caused by the motion of the earth as it rotates on its axis. Therefore, a technically precise way of saying “the sun rose” would be to say “the rotation of the earth on its axis caused the sun to become visible on the eastern horizon”. This does not mean that the Bible is in error in referring to the sun rising. The Bible is God’s verbal communication to man. If God is going to communicate to men verbally He must speak the language men use and the language which men use is phenomenal language and not the language of technical precision. The language of technical precision is not a measuring stick to which the language of phenomenon is to be held up and judged to be “right” or “wrong”. Only pedantic fools of the type of whom the character of Sheldon Cooper on television’s “The Big Bang Theory” is a hilarious caricature would insist otherwise.

Unfortunately it is not just arrogant atheists, humanists, and materialists who are such pedantic fools. Fundamentalists have often outdone them by coming up with bizarre interpretations of the phenomenal language of the Bible – such as the reference to the firmament and the waters above it in the creation account – in order to make the claim that it is a technically precise account of what the world was like at creation (but is no longer). This is unnecessary for the reasons given in the preceding paragraph and by doing so the fundamentalists have done exactly what they accuse theistic evolutionists of doing, i.e., reading the text in a way that nobody prior to Darwin would ever have dreamed of doing.

This brings us to one final difference between orthodoxy and fundamentalism which we will consider. Orthodoxy and fundamentalism both teach that the Holy Bible is the Word of God and as such is authoritative and true in all it asserts and teaches. Fundamentalism, however, insists that the Bible be interpreted as literally as possible. Orthodoxy, on the other hand, insists that the Bible be interpreted as traditionally as possible. Sometimes the traditional interpretation of the Bible is a literal interpretation. The other points of fundamentalism are good examples of this. Traditional orthodoxy does not allow for an understanding of the deity of Jesus Christ that is any less than that He was fully God come in the flesh as true man. It does not allow for crossed fingers when affirming belief that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary. It does not allow for the idea that Jesus rose from the dead “in the sense” that His disciples felt Him living on in their hearts. Orthodoxy is more than fundamentalism, not less, and saying truthfully that the orthodox way of interpreting the Scriptures is traditional rather than literal does not lend support to such attempts to hide sheer unbelief behind the guise of faith.

The difference between the literal and the traditional way, the fundamentalist and the orthodox, ways of interpreting the Scriptures is this. The fundamentalist, literal, approach accepts modern, rationalist, and individualist presuppositions. It sees the indwelling of the Holy Spirit spoken of in the New Testament as referring primarily or even exclusively to the individual believer. It therefore sees the Holy Spirit’s ministry of guidance and truth (John 16:13) in the same way. Unlike the modern charismatics, who have a similar individualistic view of the matter but who emphasize an experiential relationship, fundamentalists insist that there is a rational formula, method, or technique for arriving at the proper interpretation of Scriptures, which is the literal method. Ironically, the fundamentalist view violates a literal understanding of I Peter 1:20.

Orthodoxy is not so individualistic. The orthodox view does not reject that the Holy Spirit comes upon and indwells believers individually. The rite of confirmation would make very little sense otherwise. In orthodoxy, however, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit refers primarily to the Church as the collective Body of Christ and it is that collective body that is the primary recipient of the ministry of guidance into truth.

This does not mean that the correct interpretation of the Scriptures is what the authorities of the Church at any given particular time say it is. This was the arrogant position taken by the corrupt ecclesiastical officials whose abuse of their position by using a bad theology of salvation developed in the late Middle Ages to prey upon people’s fear of hell and purgatory to extort money from them prompted the response of the Protestant Reformers whose assertion of the supremacy of Scriptural authority, in the unfortunate terminology of Sola Scriptura, eventually led to the fundamentalist position. The Church as the collective Body of Christ, includes not just believers alive today (the Church Militant), but past generations who have passed into the presence of Christ (the Church Triumphant) as well. If the Church as the collective whole of the Body of Christ is the recipient of Christ’s promise that the Spirit of Truth would guide us into all truth then these past generations must be included as well. What this means is that for the Church today to be led into truth and not slide into error it must listen carefully to how past generations of Christians have understood the Scriptures.

There is no formula for doing this. The idea that everything can be reduced to a formula or technique is the great heresy of the Modern Age in philosophy, science and politics as well as in theology and religion. There are principles to guide us, however, one of these being the classical canon found in the Commonitory of St. Vincent of Lerins, which is that we should hold to “that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all.” These are not absolute terms, otherwise we would be looking for an extremely low, lowest common denominator, but it means that we should listen to what has been persistently taught, throughout the whole Church and not just in one branch, arm, sect, or locality, from the earliest times. To do so, will not lead us anywhere close to modernism, liberalism, neo-orthodoxy, or any of the various other forms of latter day unbelief, but will give us a fuller understanding of the truth than that which is found in fundamentalism.

Yes, It Is the Twenty-First Century. So What?

The local left-liberal newspaper, the Winnipeg Free Press, recently ran an article on the angst, humanists, atheists, and agnostics were feeling over the Christian faith of Devon Clunis, the chief of the Winnipeg Police Force. Several people wrote to the editor to comment on this. One of the letters printed on November 12th, attributed to the pseudonym “OBSERVER6” asked “Why, in the 21st century, are these practices still around?” The practices in question were those of offering Bibles to police recruits and using material prepared by John C. Maxwell in leadership seminars.

OBSERVER6’s remark is a variation of words that are frequently used by progressive, forward-thinking people as a one-size fits all answer to everything they find objectionable. Those words are “this is the twenty-first century”. The number of situations in which progressives seem to think this is an unanswerable argument is astonishing.

Do you still believe the teachings of the Christian faith? If so, do you allow your Christian faith to affect how you live your life in every aspect, publicly as well as privately, including professionally and politically? “Get with the program”, the progressive says, “This is the twenty-first century” as if the truth of Christianity and the validity of Christ’s claims as Lord over the entirety of the lives of His believers are determined by the date on the calendar.

Do you think that men are men and women are women, that it is more meaningful and more important to be a man or a woman than it is to be an “individual”, that men and women are different and complementary rather than equal and interchangeable, and that men are made by God and nature for women and women for men? If so, you are really out of step with the times and the progressive will say to you “This is the twenty-first century.”

I could go on giving other examples but I think you get the idea.

As an argument “This is the twenty-first century” makes little sense. Whether a person ought to believe the teachings of Christianity or not does not depend upon what year, decade, century or even millennium it is. It depends upon whether or not those teachings are true. Did Jesus of Nazareth, after being crucified by the Romans to appease the Jewish mob, rise from the dead? If so, this validates His claim to be the Christ, the Son of God come down from Heaven to save mankind, which in turn validates everything else He ever said. As it so happens, the evidence that Jesus of Nazareth did indeed rise from the dead is very strong – strong enough that more than one, convinced skeptic who set out to disprove it ended up converting. The empty tomb that prevented the account of the Resurrection from being snuffed out by the Romans and Jewish leaders in the first century, the transformation of the Apostles from the men who fled at Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion into men who went to their deaths as martyrs for their conviction that He had risen from the tomb, the five hundred plus eyewitnesses that St. Paul could refer to as being still alive when he wrote his first epistle to the Corinthian church, and indeed the conversion of St. Paul himself, from a man hostile to the faith to its foremost proponent due to an encounter with the Risen Christ, provide a very strong case indeed for the truth and historicity of the Resurrection of Christ. The truth and historicity of the Resurrection and of Christianity itself do not diminish the longer in time we are removed from the event. Indeed, the truth that the Son of God came down from heaven, lived among us, was crucified and rose again, cannot help but be the most important truth in human history and will remain that way throughout human history. Indeed, the fact that we are in the twenty-first century since these events took place – note that we date the centuries from these events – makes it more important than ever that we believe these truths and live our lives accordingly because one of the things Jesus said, that is verified by His being the Son of God, which in turn is verified by His having risen from the dead, is that He will come back to judge the living and the dead, and event which inevitably grows nearer the further removed from His Ascension that we get.

When progressives say “this is the twenty-first century” to dismiss Christianity, traditional ethics, private property, the differences between the sexes, monarchy, the survival of Caucasian ethnicity, and everything else from the past that they despise, they are clearly not making a valid argument as far as sound reasoning goes. They are expressing an attitude, an attitude held by all progressives, and by far too many who would not consider themselves to be progressive. Thanks to C. S. Lewis we have a term for that attitude – “chronological snobbery”.

In Surprised by Joy Lewis tells how he himself had held this attitude in his earlier days, how he had dismissed old ideas and customs as belonging to older and therefore outdated periods. He was cured of the attitude by his friend Owen Barfield who demolished all the assumptions it rests upon. Lewis described chronological snobbery as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited”.

Now it is true, to an extent, that we have more knowledge in the sense of accumulated information available to us in the present than was available in the past. I say “to an extent” because information is lost as well as accumulated with the passing of time. This fact, however, calls for a very different attitude than that of chronological snobbery. . The knowledge that we have available today that was not available in the past is knowledge of the past – the knowledge of what has been thought and said, done and accomplished, discovered and accumulated, by all the generations that have preceded us. This ought to command an attitude of respect towards the past – not an attitude of “who cares what they thought in the past, we know so much more today.”

Of course people thought things in the past that are not true. People continue to think things today that are not true. I do not mean the things that have held over from previous ages that are dismissed with “this is the twenty-first century” but ideas that are modern, progressive, and in keeping with the prevalent spirit of the present age. An ideas being new and modern, is no guarantee of its being true, and an ideas being old and unfashionable is no guarantee of its being false.

Indeed, if it were to come down to a question of the presumption of truth, with regards to ideas that cannot be demonstrated to be false, then the presumption of truth ought to go to ideas that are older in the sense of having been held for long periods of time in the past (as opposed to older in the sense of having been thought up millennia ago and discarded in the first generation) rather than to ideas that are new and innovative. Their having endured the passing of ages past, is an argument in their favour, rather than against them.

So the next time some progressive tries to dismiss a timeless truth as being outdated by the fact that it is "the twenty-first century" congratulate him on being able to read the date on the calendar and ask "So what?"

Man and Machine: Part Three

They Have Brains, and They Think Not; Hearts Have They, and They Feel Not

Their idols are silver and gold, even the work of men's hands.
They have mouths, and speak not: eyes have they, and see not.
They have ears, and hear not: noses have they, and smell not.
They have hands, and handle not; feet have they, and walk not: neither speak they through their throat.
They that make them are like unto them; and so are all such as put their trust in them. (Psalm 115: 4-8,from the Great Bible Psalter in the Book of Common Prayer)

Man began to measure time, by noting the position of the sun in the sky. He improved his time-telling technique with the invention of tools such as sundials and hourglasses. In the Middle Ages he invented a device that would not just assist him in measuring time, but would actually keep track of time for him through its own internal workings. It would, as long as it was maintained properly, operate on its own. This device is the clock. As man’s technology advanced in the Modern Age, he developed more machines that could be turned on and would then proceed to do what they were designed to do with little-to-no further input from man. Their function is built into them and, apart from a breakdown of some sort, will be fulfilled each time they run.

These machines accomplish their function without thinking about it. Rational thought is still a property of living human beings, and not of machines. Future situations where this is no longer the case is one of the staples of the dystopic side of the science fiction genre. Usually, the scenario involves the machine gaining sentience and turning against its maker. Since science fiction is a pop culture expression of the modern spirit, the spirit of the age in which man turns his back on his Creator and attempts through his conquest of nature to build a new world in accordance with the values he has chosen, it is fitting that it would express such fears that man’s creation would in turn do the same, much as the Titan king Saturn in ancient mythology feared that his son would rise up to depose him, the way he had deposed his father Uranus. Perhaps the first example of the expression of this fear is Mary Shelley’s early nineteenth century science-horror novel Frankenstein, although it is not a machine, but life in a monstrous creature, that Dr. Victor Frankenstein creates. The idea of robots with artificial intelligence, rebelling against mankind was such a popular theme in early robot fiction, that Isaac Asimov deliberately set out to do the opposite, to depict robots incapable of turning against a mankind and the popular fear of the robotic as irrational. Probably the best known example of the sci-fi meme of machines that turn against man is to be found in director James Cameron’s 1984 film The Terminator and its various sequels and spinoffs. This film depicted an assassin cyborg, sent back in time from a future where a military computer system Skynet had gained consciousness and declared war on humanity.

A scenario in which machines gain consciousness and turn against their creators is not the only way in which a future different from the present status quo of thinking human beings and unthinking machines can be depicted. The other alternative is to present a future in which mankind has lost the capacity for rational thought. To a limited extent, this scenario is used in stories which depict a general populace that is oppressed by being prevented from perceiving the world as it is, whether through the brainwashing of a police state as in George Orwell’s 1984, or living out their lives in a simulated reality generated by now dominant machines, as in the Wachowski Brothers’ popular The Matrix trilogy. This scenario is more fully utilized by Pixar Studio’s 2008 computer animated film WALL-E, in which, the earth having become a giant garbage dump, mankind has gone on an interstellar cruise, leaving robots such as the title character to clean up his mess. The cruise spaceships take care of all their passengers needs and schedule their daily routine so that they live out their lives in a kind of pleasure-induced trance.

Fanciful, as the scenarios depicted in these works of fiction are, the ideas contained in their general themes, the idea of machinery taking over the world and the idea of man himself becoming more like an unthinking, unfeeling machine, are worth reflecting upon. Do these represent valid concerns about the direction in which modern technology is taking us?

The question is a legitimate one. Originally tools were invented by man to assist him in doing his work, to lighten his load. In the Modern Age man began to develop machines that would not so much assist him as do his work for him. Initially, the work machines were invented to take over from men was mostly physical labour. As far back as the Renaissance, however, Blaise Pascal had invented a functioning calculator that could perform simple arithmetic. In the twentieth century, this branch of technology, that of machines that do mathematics, solve problems, and otherwise take over tasks for which man used his brain instead of his hands, really took off. Computers began as large machines, used for military purposes and by scientists for calculation in their research, but within decades of their invention smaller, personal models for use in the home were invented, and by the end of the century portable “laptop” models were available. As the size of computers shrank, the number of functions they could perform increased, and in the last few decades computer technology has been incorporated into all other kinds of technology and into every aspect of our lives. Telephone communication is now mostly done through small, mobile, telephones with built-in computer functions allowing access to the internet and all sorts of other functions. Automobiles now have built-in computers that remind you of things you may have forgotten, that inform you when your car needs maintenance, that help mechanics diagnose problems, and which in some cases help you plan your route and even park your car for you. Everything from agriculture to medicine is computerized these days.

The incorporation of the computer into so many different aspects of our lives has inevitably and radically altered the way we live them and the societies in which we live them. While these changes have enriched our lives in many ways, there are also many ways in which they are cause for concern. The more we build machines to do our work for us, the more we become dependent upon those machines. The more dependent upon machines we are, the more serious is the difficulty we will find ourselves in if those machines break down or if for some other reason they are not available to us and we must again do the work for ourselves. This is a danger that gets progressively worse because the more collectively dependent upon machines we become, the less likely we are to pass on to future generations the skills and know how necessary to do the tasks that machines do for us. When we start to rely upon machines to do tasks that are part of rational thought, like making calculations, solving logical problems, or even making decisions, we run the risk of allowing our very thought processes to atrophy. If you doubt that is the case, then observe what happens at the till of a coffee shop or grocery store when the computer system crashes and the person behind the till is required to calculate your change manually.

If through the development of robotic and computer technology which performs an ever increasing number of man’s mental tasks for him man is creating machinery after his own image, the surrender of these tasks to the machine and allowing of our own mental powers to atrophy would seem to be making man ever more like a machine. This is not the only way in which this is true. As we develop our technology through modern science, we increasingly organize our societies according to the principles of technology, and human existence becomes more and more mechanical.

As Jacques Ellul put it about sixty years ago “No social, human, or spiritual fact is so important as the fact of technique in the modern world.” (1) While Ellul meant something more than just the mechanical by “technique” – he meant every application of reason towards the goal of efficiency – the mechanical is certainly included and in explaining why technique is more than machine, he wrote “the machine is the most obvious, massive, and impressive example of technique, and historically the first…Technique certainly began with the machine. It is quite true that all the rest developed out of mechanics; it is quite true also that without the machine the world of technique would not exist.” (2) As a principle of social organization, the technical is radically different from anything that had preceded it. It meant that all of society would now be directed, not towards a vision of the Good, such as that represented in the culture of the countryside and organic community or that represented in the laws and civilization of the city, but towards maximum efficiency to be achieved by knowledge and reason harnessed in the service of the will to dominate.

If technique became the primary principle of social organization in a kind of technical revolution and if technique began with the machine which remains the most impressive example of technique, it follows that a society completely touched by and organized by technique could to some degree or another be described as mechanical. Owen Barfield, in a book we will shortly take a closer look at, said of the machine “The whole point of a machine is, that, for as long as it goes on moving, it ‘goes on by itself’ without mans’ participation.” (3) While obviously a human society in which man does not participate is a contradiction in terms, when Barfield says that a machine moves without man’s participation he is speaking of man as someone external to the machine. The men in a society that has become mechanical are not analogous to the man who owns a clock but to the gears and cogs within it. In saying that a society has become mechanical we are saying that the society has been organized so that to a certain degree the motion within it men within it, including that of the men who live within it, has become automatic, determined by routines and patterns established by planners with technical efficiency as their end. That human activity ought to be in harmony with the natural rhythms of life, which are instead interrupted and trampled upon by technical efficiency is a theme that runs throughout the writings of poet, novelist, essayist and farmer Wendell Berry. Surely the best word to describe activity that is out of sync with life and driven by ends to which such harmony is irrelevant, is mechanical.

That the more man becomes dependent upon the machine the more like the machine he becomes himself and that the more dependent upon technology human society becomes the more mechanical it becomes itself is something that was predictable long before the modern experiment. The basis of the prediction is right there in the eighth verse of the one hundred and fifteenth Psalm quoted in the epigram to this essay. “They that make them [idols] are like unto them; and so are all such as put their trust in them.” Modern man has made idols out of his machines and technology, and having put his trust in these idols, has come to resemble them.

The idols of which the Psalmist wrote, were images made of stone or metal that represented the various deities the pagan nations worshipped. The making and worship of idols was a practice forbidden to the Israelites in the second of the Ten Commandments. The point of the psalmist’s mockery of pagan idolatry is that man-made idols, rather than being the hosts of powerful deities, are just lifeless images. The craftsmen who built them gave them the appearance of having mouths, eyes, ears, noses, hands and feet, but these were merely appearances. The idols were dead stone, dead metal, and by making and putting their faith in them, men became like them, killing their spirits by focusing on these idols the attention and worship due to the true and living God, thus cutting themselves off from the Source of life.

The idols men build today are in one sense more impressive than statues of Chemosh, Ba’al, Moloch, Dagon and Astarte. They are designed to actually do things, from moving goods and people to calculating complex equations. It is not just hands and mouths, modern man has given his idols, but brains and hearts as well, in the computers that direct their functions, and the sources from which the power that keeps the machines in motion circulates. Yet despite this greater resemblance to living beings, it is still just an artificial imitation. To paraphrase the psalmist, they have brains and they think not, hearts have they, and they feel not. Unlike Dr. Frankenstein, modern man has been unable to give life to his creation and in transferring his faith from God to the machines his science has enabled him to build and the techniques his reason has enabled him to devise, he has again broken his connection with the Source of his life, and come to resemble his moving but lifeless creation.

There is another aspect to the idolatry in modern science and technology that is worth contemplation. Earlier I had quoted Owen Barfield’s remark that the point of a machine is that it moves by itself without man’s participation. This remark was made in the context of a paragraph in which Barfield was arguing that the machine is the model by which the modern mind conceives the universe. In the next paragraph he explained that this is not how science itself conceives of nature, but rather the conception that science has created in the minds of ordinary people. This is part of a larger argument that modern man, by confusing his conception of the world with the world as it is in itself, is committing a form of idolatry.

This argument is part of a book entitled Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, which out of all of Barfield’s books is the one most likely to be remembered today. (4) The book begins with a discussion of the Kantian difference between things as they appear and things as they are in themselves. The difference, of course, is that the way things appear always involves the interpretations of our senses and minds. What is called “post-modern” thought has taken this difference and run with it in a most unhealthy direction, but the argument Barfield made is very different. Noting that the appearances involve a collective interpretation – whether an individual perceives things correctly or wrongly is generally judged by holding his interpretation up to the standard of the collective perception – Barfield argued against the positivist belief that ancient man and modern man live in the same world but that modern man’s perception, understanding, and explanation of that world is better, more in line with the world as it actually is, than the ancients. Instead, he argued, it would be more accurate to say that ancient and modern man do not live in the same world, because the world they live in is the ever changing world of appearances. Man’s role in generating this world of appearances, he called participation, and the way man participates in the world of appearances and even his recognition of his own participation, changes with his thoughts through time. In earlier eras man recognized that the world they saw, was something in which they participated themselves, as did the unseen that lay beyond the appearances. In the modern, scientific era, recognition of man’s participation has been pushed back to a second and even third degree of awareness, whereas recognition of the reality of anything beyond the appearances other than that which appears in scientific hypotheses is mostly absent.

The difference between the ancient and the modern perception of the world is not, Barfield therefore argued, that primitive man sought the same kind of understanding that modern science seeks but through a less developed mythology that “peopled the world” with spirits. Rather the modern perception has come about through a change in thought about the nature and purpose of science.

Plato, Barfield reminded us, recognized three levels of knowledge – the first and lowest being sensory observation, the third and highest being intellectual perception of the divine ideas, with geometry or mathematics as the intermediate level. What we call science today corresponds with the second level. The purpose of scientific hypotheses was to “save the appearances” (5), i.e., to provide a working explanation of what is observed in the first level of knowledge. This working explanation was understood to be man’s own creation and not to be confused with the truth, or the world as it is.

This understanding has largely been lost. The knowledge obtainable by science, Barfield explains by analogy, is “dashboard knowledge” rather than “engine knowledge”, i.e., a knowledge of how to drive a car rather than knowledge of its internal workings. (6) Sir Francis Bacon understood this when he declared knowledge to be power. There may still be an understanding of this among scientists themselves. Plato and Aristotle, however, believed that a knowledge of truth, of the permanent, unchanging, reality beyond the world of appearances was also accessible to man and with the evaporation of this belief, the idea that scientific hypotheses themselves can explain the reality beyond the appearances became the vogue among scientists and among the general public this became the idea that the explanations of scientific hypotheses are the reality beyond appearances. Since scientific hypotheses are themselves part of the world of appearances, the confusion of scientific hypotheses with the world as it is, the idea that nothing other than scientific explanations lie beyond the appearances, is a form of idolatry, Barfield reasoned, because it is an attribution of ultimate reality to what is merely an image.

On a somewhat similar note Simone Weil wrote:

Idolatry comes from the fact that, while thirsting for absolute good, we do not possess the power of supernatural attention and we have not the patience to allow it to develop. Lacking idols, it often happens that we have to labour every day, or nearly every day, in the void. We cannot do so without supernatural bread. Idolatry is thus a vital necessity in the cave. Even with the best of us it is inevitable that it should set narrow limits for mind and heart. (7)

The cave she refers to is Plato’s, i.e., Plato’s allegory illustrating the difference between the realm of appearances as opposed to the realm of true Forms. Those who see only things as they appear in the physical realm, Plato said, were like prisoners chained in a cave, who see nothing but shadows cast from a fire behind them upon a wall, and mistake that for reality. Surely nobody in the history of the world could be better described as “in the cave” than modern man who in his positivism has rejected the metaphysical and theological, and sees nothing beyond the appearances than the scientific explanations he devises for them, who mistakes what Barfield’s most famous student and friend, borrowing from the same Platonic allegory, called “the Shadowlands” for the ultimate reality.

If we consider this alongside what we have already discussed about modern man’s having made idols out of his machines it would appear that modern man is engaged in multiple, related, layers of idolatry. First he made idols out his images of the world and his scientific explanations of them, then, with the power over nature his science obtained for him, he created machines, to do his will and to do his work for him, upon which he became dependent and in which he placed his faith, turning his machines into idols too.

The more man’s technology advances, the more of an idol he makes it. The more of a technolator he becomes, the more mechanical his life and society becomes, and the more he begins to resemble his own soulless, lifeless, creations.


(1) Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), p. 3. This is a translation by John Wilkinson of La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle, completed in 1950 and published in Paris by Librairie Armand Colin in 1954.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry (New York and London: Hartcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957, 1965), p. 51.

(4) Barfield himself is probably more likely to be remembered today for his association with C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams than for his own writings.

(5) This phrase, translating the Greek sozein ta phainomena (σῴζειν τὰ φαινόμενα), was borrowed by Barfield from the commentary by Simplicius of Cilicia on Aristotle. It is more frequently rendered “saving the phenomena”. Barfield preferred the translation appearances because the transliteration phenomena has taken on weaker connotations.

(6) Barfield, p. 55.

(7) Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1952), p. 109, a translation by Arthur Wills of La Pesanteur et la grâce, first published in Paris by Librairie Plon in 1947. Weil died in 1943. This book is not something she wrote for publication, but was posthumously compiled from her notebooks by her friend Gustave Thibon.

Gospel Promises and Assurance

What was the Reformation in the 16th Century AD all about?

You will get different answers to that question depending upon who you ask and what their emphases are.

An historian, especially one with materialistic presuppositions who seeks explanations of religious events in secular concerns, might say that the division in the Western Church was brought about by the invention of the printing press (which made the Scriptures and learning available to a wider number of people) and the emergence of the nation-state in the late Medieval/Renaissance periods which weakened the authority of the papacy.

An ecclesiastical historian would point to corruption and abuses in the Church, such as simony, the selling of indulgences, etc. to which both the Reformation and Counter-Reformation were responses.

A Protestant theologian would stress the doctrinal issues – particularly the five Latin solas summarizing Protestant theology : sola Scriptura – the Bible alone is the final authority, sola gratia – salvation is by grace alone, sola fide – justification by faith alone, solus Christus – Christ alone is the Savior, soli Deo Gloria – to God alone be the glory.

A conservative historian might argue that the Reformation was one step, an ecclesiastical step, in a general decline in respect for authority in the Western world that began with Renaissance humanism and developed into liberalism in the 18th and 19th centuries, and post-modernism in the 20th and 21st centuries.

A reactionary Roman Catholic might argue for a version of the latter which makes the Reformation the cause of the decline (see Hilaire Belloc’s The Crisis of Civilization for an example of this approach).

Someone who highly values Christian unity might argue that cultural differences were the primary cause of the Reformation. Northern peoples, especially those who spoke Germanic languages, tended to become Protestants, whereas southern peoples, especially those who spoke Romance languages (languages that evolved from dialects of Latin) tended to retain their ties to the papacy.

These different answers do not necessarily contradict each of the others. They reflect different perspectives as to what is most important and different historical contexts within which to place the Reformation.

Dr. Martin Luther, the central figure of the Reformation, would undoubtedly have stressed “justification by faith alone” as lying at the heart of the matter. This was the article, Luther said, upon which “the church stands or falls”. Even here, however, there is a different way of looking at. “Justification by faith alone” is St. Paul’s doctrine stated in the language of systematic theology, an objective intellectual discipline. For Luther however, this doctrine had a very personal, subjective significance. St. Paul’s doctrine came to him, as refreshing good news, as the answer to a long, personal, agonizing struggle for assurance of salvation. There is a sense then in which we can say that assurance of salvation is what the Reformation was really all about.

Can a person know that their sins are forgiven, that they acceptable and righteous in the eyes of God, that have everlasting life and that they will be with the Lord eternally?

The Scriptural answer to this question, particularly in the Johannine writings where it is stated explicitly, is yes.

These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God; that ye may know that ye have eternal life, and that ye may believe on the name of the Son of God. ( 1 John 5:13)

Unfortunately, the answer which Christ’s holy, catholic, and apostolic church has given to this question, has not always matched Scripture’s answer, in every time and place. Hence the Reformers’ emphasis on “sola Scriptura”.(1) While St. Augustine championed the doctrines of God’s justifying grace against the Pelagian heresy, which taught that man could initiate his own return to God through his own will, St. Augustine unfortunately also taught that except from special personal revelation to saints, a believer cannot know that he will be eternally saved, although he can through faith have an assurance of forgiveness of his sins in the present. Final salvation, St. Augustine taught, required that one end their life in a state of grace, and while we can know that we are in a present state of grace if we are walking with Christ by faith, we cannot know that we will persevere to the end. This doctrine unfortunately prevailed in the church for centuries and still prevails in certain parts of Christ’s church.

Note however, that the Roman Catholics and others who hold to St. Augustine’s doctrine on assurance, are not necessarily the furthest people in Christ’s Church from the Biblical, Johannine doctrine of assurance. Among Protestants, there are many who identify themselves as followers of John Calvin, who express their belief in the doctrines of justification by faith alone and in assurance of salvation, who nevertheless teach these doctrines in such away as to undermine faith and assurance in actual experience of the Christian life.

How can the doctrines of justification by faith and the believer’s assurance of salvation by preached and taught in such away as to undermine faith and assurance?

By separating faith and assurance and making the believer’s subjective experience the basis of assurance.

The Gospel message, consists of objective facts about God’s love and graciousness to sinners, revealed in His gift of a Savior, His Son Jesus Christ, in Christ’s death for the sins of the world which completed the work of salvation, and God’s raising Jesus from the dead. The Gospel invites all sinners to believe in Jesus and promises everlasting life to all who do.

Christian faith consists of believing this message, of trusting in Jesus Christ, the Savior God has given. Christian faith then, is based upon something objective and external to the believer.

The Puritans, English-speaking Calvinists influenced by the teachings of Theodore Beza and William Perkins, would affirm that. They would, however, say that faith and assurance are two different parts of the Christian experience and that the latter must be based in part upon evidence in one’s life of the transforming work of the Holy Spirit that distinguishes someone with true faith from someone with “temporary faith”. (2)

Needless to say, the Puritans were not noted for their strong assurance of salvation.

John Calvin himself, taught no such doctrine. He, like Martin Luther, taught that the subjective experience of faith in Jesus Christ and the subjective experience of assurance of salvation were one and the same experience, and therefore both have as their sole basis, the external, objective, redemption accomplished for the believer in Christ and transmitted to the believer through promises of God in the Gospel. This is the doctrine of Scripture:

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1)

This verse is difficult for people in our modern era because of the positivist assumptions that under-gird the materialistic, scientific worldview that has become dominant in the Western world. Positivism is the notion that knowledge and certainty come through the scientific method which has evolved from primitive “theology” and “metaphysics”. The necessary conclusion of this worldview is that certainty pertains only that which is observable to the senses or demonstrated through reason. This conclusion was explicitly stated in the “logical positivism” of the early 20th Century. While philosophy has moved on from here (3) these concepts still widely prevail in the worldview of the society to which we belong (4). Certain well-meaning Christian responses to this materialistic trend, such as Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of faith as a “leap in the dark” have been less than helpful in illuminating the relationship between Christian faith and certainty.

The Christian message stands in contrast to modern materialism, scientism, and positivism. Christianity teaches the Incarnation – that the eternal Word of God “became flesh and dwelt among us”. In other words God, Who transcends the physical universe which is His creation, has made Himself known to us by becoming One of us, living among us, and most importantly dying for us and rising again. What God has revealed of Himself in Jesus, is more certain than that which see with our own eyes. Faith is not a leap in the dark but our reception of God’s revelation of Himself. What God has revealed of Himself is absolutely true and certain and therefore more reliable than our own deductions, no matter how impeccable our logic, or our own observations.

Thus, when the New Testament speaks of the believer’s “hope” it does not use the word “hope” the way we use it today. Today we use the word “hope” to describe the situation of wishing something to happen but of being uncertain that it will happen. In the Bible, however, the believer’s hope is a confident expectation based upon the promises of One Who is eternally trustworthy.

In the order for the burial of the dead in the Book of Common Prayer it prescribes the following to be said at the graveside:

Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to receive unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed: we therefore commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change our mortal body, that it may be like unto his glorious body, according to the mighty working, whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself.

“Sure and certain hope”. While this phrase would be an oxymoron if “hope” were taken to mean what we usually mean by it, it expresses a wonderful Biblical truth when “hope” is used the way the Bible uses the word. Faith is the “substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen”. What God has promised in Jesus Christ to all who believe, we can be certain of simply by believing God.

What has God promised in Jesus Christ to those who believe?

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth My word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life. (John 5:24)

Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on Me hath everlasting life. (John 6:47)

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. ( John 11:25-26)

Some try to argue against the assuring testimony of these verses by saying “Yes, these verses say faith is necessary, but other verses teach that we have to do other things in order to obtain eternal life”. These promises, however, (there are over 100 of them in John’s Gospel), are worded in a way that does not allow for that argument. Take John 3:16 for example. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that Whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life”. If someone can believe in Jesus but fail to have everlasting life because they did not do something else required elsewhere in Scripture, then how can John 3:16 be said to be true? “Whosoever believeth” excludes the concept of “except for those that don’t do this, that, and the other thing”.

God’s promises of everlasting life in Christ to all who believe need to be understood in the context of the Gospel revelation of Who Christ is, the significance of His death on the cross, and the demonstration of the truth of Christ’s claims in His glorious resurrection, otherwise these promises would be completely unbelievable. We should also consider exactly what it is that Christ is offering. What is everlasting life?

The Book of Genesis opens with an account of the creation of the world, and the creation and fall of mankind. It tells how man was created by God, and placed in the Garden of Eden. In that Garden, God provided man with “every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food” (Gen. 2:9). The verse that tells us this goes on to say that in the midst of the Garden, God placed two trees, the tree of life, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God told man that he could freely eat of every tree of the Garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Man was forbidden to eat from that tree, and told that the day he did he would surely die.

In the next chapter, the man and woman were tempted and ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. God, mercifully did not slay them on the spot, but He drove them out of the Garden of Eden “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever” (3:22).

However literally we choose to read this part of the book of Genesis, it is more than the fable or just-so story, that skeptics make it out to be. It depicts man as having been given a choice between a knowledge that was forbidden man and everlasting life. Man could have one but not the other and man chose foolishly. He was led into this choice through unbelief, through mistrust in God, through believing the serpent’s lie that God was withholding this knowledge from man, not for man’s own good, but for selfish reasons.

It was for man’s own good, however, that the knowledge was forbidden. Only God could have that kind of knowledge without possessing sin in His own heart. Man could only possess it by sin, and that sin rendered man unfit for everlasting life.

God, however, loved man, and in His mercy, not only did not slay man, but promised that He Himself would set right what man had made wrong, and would make it possible for man to have everlasting life. The first hint of this is in the curse on the serpent where God says that the seed of the woman “shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel”. From this first hint in the earliest chapters of Genesis, the picture develops throughout the Old Testament, of the redeemer that God would one day send to save His people and establish His kingdom. The clearest picture would be found in the writings of the prophet Isaiah:

He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment: and who shall declare his generation? for he was cut off out of the land of the living: for the transgression of my people was he stricken. And he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death; because he had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief: when thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in his hand. He shall see of the travail of his soul, and shall be satisfied: by his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many; for he shall bear their iniquities. (Isaiah 53:3-11)

Depicted here, is the Lord’s suffering servant, Who is willingly led to suffer and die, and upon Whom the sins of God’s people are placed, satisfying God, and bringing peace, healing and justification.

The promised redeemer of God’s people was called the Messiah, which means “the Anointed One”. In Greek, Messiah is translated “Christos”. We call Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus Christ, because the Christ was Who Jesus claimed to be. Jesus identified His role as the Christ, or Messiah, with that of the suffering servant of Isaiah. When He asked His disciples who they said that He was, and St. Peter declared “the Christ, the Son of the Living God”, it was then that Jesus began teaching them that He must go up to Jerusalem, be put to death on the cross, and raised from the dead on the third day. His disciples did not understand this until after these events had taken place because it was not common to think of the Messiah in terms of the suffering servant. To Jesus, however, the cross was central to His identity as the Christ. It was by means of His death on the cross that He paid for the sins of the world. This is how Jesus is able to fulfil His promise of everlasting life to all who believe in Him. His death on the cross took away the barrier to man’s having everlasting life – man’s sin.

Jesus’ resurrection is the evidence that Jesus is Who He claimed to be. When the scribes and Pharisees demanded a sign from Him, He declared that none would be given them except “the sign of the prophet Jonah”, referring to His resurrection (Matt. 12:38-40). St. Paul wrote that Jesus was “declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead” (Rom. 1:4). Christ’s life, death, and resurrection “was not done in a corner” as St. Paul testified to King Agrippa (Acts 26:26). St. Paul summed up the abundant eyewitness testimony that existed to Christ’s resurrection in the fifteenth chapter of his first epistle to the Church in Corinth.

It is in this context of the Gospel message that Jesus’ promises of everlasting life to all who believe in Him are both understandable and believable. Jesus is demonstrated by His resurrection to be the Christ, the Son of God, the Savior that God gave to the world, Whose death on the Cross paid for the sins of the world so that those who believe in Jesus will have everlasting life. Salvation then, in the sense of our being rescued from our sin condition and given everlasting life, is something that God has done for us out of the love and goodness of His heart, and not something that we are to accomplish for ourselves through our own efforts. We can therefore be certain of our everlasting life by simply trusting in what God has done for us in Jesus.

This certainty is the foundation of the Christian life. If we do not believe that our acceptance with God has been accomplished for us by Christ, that we can do nothing to add to it, and that we are to simply trust in Jesus, then we must always be trying to earn our acceptance with God by our own efforts. Such efforts can never please God, however, because they are not done out of the God-centered motive of seeking to please the God we love, but out of the self-centered motive of seeking to obtain God’s favour for ourselves, and because they are an insult to God by offering to pay for something He has already given us freely in Christ.

“The just shall live by faith” the prophet Habakkuk and St. Paul the Apostle both write. This means more than just that we possess everlasting life and the righteousness of God through faith. It means that those who God considers to be just or righteous, i.e. those who trust in God, are to live their lives on the basis of faith. The life Christ prescribes for His followers is very demanding. He demands that His followers be perfectly righteous in their heart and not just in their outward behavior (Matt 5:20-48) and that we place the pursuit of God’s kingdom and righteousness before even essential worldly needs like food, shelter, and clothing (Matt 6:25-44). He demands that we deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Him. He meant that literally, not metaphorically. The person who “took up his cross” was the person condemned to die by crucifixion, who had to carry his cross to the place of execution. When Jesus said that His disciples must take up their cross and follow Him, He was challenging them to give up their lives and die for Him.

Apart from faith in Christ, His death for our sins, and His promise of everlasting life to all who trust Him for it, these demands are pure Law, an insurmountable obstacle preventing us from approaching God, for there is no way we can come close to meeting these demands through our own efforts. When looked at through faith in Christ, however, these demands take on a new light. When we trust God’s promises of everlasting life in Christ to all who believe, we can walk the path Christ has laid before us in confidence because our acceptance with God does not depend upon it.

We who are evangelical Protestants affirm our belief in the doctrines of justification by faith alone and the believer’s assurance of salvation and often accuse the rest of the Christian church of muddling up the Gospel with rituals and good works. While these accusations are often accurate we need to be aware that we ourselves are frequently guilty of the same thing.

In the tradition of evangelical revivalism, for example, the Gospel is frequently preached as an ultimatum that challenges sinners to “make a decision for Jesus”. What that decision consists of differs from evangelist to evangelist, sermon to sermon. Sometimes it is “accept Jesus Christ as your personal Savior”, sometimes it is “invite Jesus to come into your heart (or life)”, sometimes it is “give your heart (or life) to the Lord”. Two things are notable about these different ways of presenting the “decision for Christ”. First, each of them can suggest a very different concept from each of the others. Second, none of them necessarily means “believe in Jesus Christ”.

This is very different from the New Testament, where the Gospel is literally a message of “good news” about Jesus Christ, Who He is, what He did for us on the Cross, and His resurrection and promise of everlasting life to all who believe. In the New Testament the Gospel is a message to be believed not a challenge to “make a decision”.

There are two potential dangers in decisional evangelism. The first is that it can produce shallow conversions combined with a cocky, arrogant form of “assurance” which seems to be more faith in one’s decision than in Jesus Christ and His saving work. The second is that it can lead to people responding to invitation after invitation, altar call after altar call, making decision after decision, each time hoping that “this time it will work” and never coming to the full assurance of hope.

Some well-meaning evangelical theologians and pastors, try to warn people against the first danger by telling them that they need to have “heart faith” instead of just “head faith” or “mental assent”. This is not necessarily wrong but it can be misleading. What is the difference between “head faith” and “heart faith”?

The only legitimate difference between the two is if “head faith” is taken to mean believing a set of facts that have no personal significance to the person believing them, whereas “heart faith” is taken to mean believing a set of facts that are of tremendous personal significance to the person believing them. This is the difference between believing that Jesus Christ died and rose again as historical facts, and believing that Jesus Christ died and rose again and through doing so redeemed me from sin and obtained for me everlasting life. The difference between the two is really a difference in what is believed not a difference in where or how it is believed.

Other ways in which theologians and pastors try to distinguish between “the right kind of faith” and “the wrong kind of faith” are “trusting a person” as opposed to “believing facts”, and “believing in” as opposed to “believing that”. While these distinctions can sometimes clarify for a person what it means to believe in Jesus they can also be misleading.

These distinctions are foreign to the Bible and to common sense. To trust a person, means to believe certain facts about that person, i.e. that he is reliable and will keep his word. In the Gospel according to St. John “believing in” Jesus means “believing that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God”. When the Bible speaks of the heart, it speaks of the inner person, and the contrast is always with the outside, particularly one’s words, and not with the mind or intellect. “[M]an looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart” (1 Sam. 16:7), “This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me” (Matt 15:8, quoting Isaiah 29:13), “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” (Rom 10:9) (5)

Pastors and theologians who speak this way are well-meaning, but the danger is that they re-create the Puritan problem of trapping people in the question of “do I have the right kind of faith?” This question is a bottomless pit because it focuses one on one’s own faith which is the surest way of making faith disappear. As A. A. Hodge put it:

The man who is talking about his love unceasingly has no love; the man who is talking about his faith unceasingly has no faith: the two things cannot go together. When you love, what are you thinking about? Are you not thinking about the object of your love? And when you believe, what are you thinking about? Why, the object that you believe. Suppose you ask yourself, 'Am I believing?' Why, of course you are not believing when you are thinking of believing. No human being believes except when he thinks about Christ. (6)

Decisional evangelism and calls for introspection as to whether one has “the right kind of faith” are versions of the same subtle mistake – the mistake of turning faith itself into a work, which leads people to focus their faith on their faith, instead of on Jesus Christ. Faith, however, received God’s favour, which is freely given. It does not earn God’s favour. Faith does not plead its own merits to God, but rests upon the promises God has made to in the Gospel of Jesus Christ to those who believe.


(1) I would argue that “suprema Scriptura” would more accurately express Luther and Calvin’s doctrine than “sola Scriptura”, and that the latter phrase has had unfortunate consequences in Protestantism, but that is a subject for another essay.

(2) Max Weber argued that this is the source of the Protestant work ethic which developed into capitalism, the belief that material prosperity through hard work is an indication of one’s election. This (the Puritan doctrine, not Max Weber’s sociological analysis) seems rather inconsistent with Christ’s teachings about not serving both God and mammon.

(3) This does not mean that philosophy has moved back to classical and Scriptural truth. The logical positivism of the early 20th century was abandoned when the 19th century view of scientific theory as “that which is verifiable” was replaced by the 20th century view of scientific theory as “that which is falsifiable”, largely associated with the work of liberal philosopher Sir Karl Popper. A connection can be drawn between this and the birth of the ultra-relativistic nihilism of post-modernism, although I would not wish to impute the latter to Popper and his writings.

(4) Since logical positivism represents an outdated stage in the decline of Western appreciation for metaphysical truth which has lingering influences to this day, I recommend an old, but not outdated book, to those looking for a response to it. That is Owen Barfield’s The Rediscovery of Meaning: And Other Essays, published in 1977 by Wesleyan University Press.


(5) See Gordon H. Clark, Faith and Saving Faith (Trinity Foundation: Jefferson, MD, 1990).

(6) A. A. Hodge, “Assurance and Humility”.