Maundy Musings

 

Today is Maundy Thursday, the first day of the Great Paschal Triduum.    The name Maundy refers to the ritual footwashing that traditionally takes place on this day.   St. John, who provides the longest account of the evening remembered today of any of the Evangelists, even though he begins his account after the Last Supper, highlighted in all the other Gospels, has ended, tells us that after the Last Supper, Jesus washed His disciples’ feet, then told them:

 

Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well: for so I am.  If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s feet.   For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you. (Jn. 13:13-15)

 

Later in the same chapter St. John records Jesus giving the New Commandment: “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another”.   The Latin word for commandment is mandatum, the source of the word “mandate” that public health officers have made so odious by their abuse of such over the last two years.   It is also the source of the word Maundy as the word for ritual foot-washing.   

 

Footwashing was not the only ritual instituted by Jesus that evening.   The other Evangelists all record the institution of the Eucharist which took place immediately prior to this during the Last Supper.   As St. John begins his account of this evening at the end of the Last Supper he does not record the institution, although earlier in his Gospel as part of his account of the Feeding of the Five Thousand – the only miracle other than the Resurrection found in all four Gospels - he recorded Jesus’ discourse about Himself as the Bread of Life in which the meaning of the Eucharist is expounded at length.  

 

That St. John begins his account of this evening after the Last Supper, so emphasized in the other Gospels, has ended is not surprising.   Eusebius of Caeserea, the Church’s Herodotus, in his Ecclesiastical History records an account by Clement of Alexandria of how copies of the other three Gospels had come into St. John’s hands and he, having proclaimed them faithful and true, wrote his own Gospel with an eye to including material that they had left out.   (Book III, chapter 24).   The Patristic writers specify that St. John included the events that took place between Jesus’ baptism and John the Baptist’s imprisonment – this covers all of the first three chapters of his Gospel and at least part of the fourth.   Other material that St. John includes that the other Evangelists omit are Jesus’ words and deeds in Jerusalem on His visits there prior to the Triumphal Entry, and His lengthy private discourses.   The latter is what we find in his account of the evening of the Last Supper.   After the account of Jesus’ washing the disciples’ feet, commanding them to do likewise, and the subsequent account of Judas’ departure, the New Commandment comes at the beginning of a lengthy discourse that extends through to the end of the seventeenth chapter.   It is generally called the Upper Room Discourse although Jesus and the disciples begin moving from the Upper Room to the Garden of Gethsemane at the end of the fourteenth chapter.   In this discourse Jesus speaks of His coming departure back to the Father, comforts His disciples with the assurance that He will return to take them to the place He is preparing for them in His Father’s house, promises that when He returns to the Father He will send another Comforter, the Holy Spirit, to them, commands them to abide in Him (“I am the true vine”) and expands on the New Commandment.   He warns them of the persecution they will face in the world for His sake, but assures them that He has overcome the world.   He concludes the discourse with a prayer in which He asks the Father to glorify the Son, to keep His disciples from the evil in the world, and that they might be one as the Father and Son are one.

 

One interesting difference between St. John’s account of this evening and those of the other Evangelists cannot be explained by the Fourth Evangelist’s consciously choosing material that had not already been covered.   This is the difference which F. F. Bruce called “the thorniest problem in the New Testament”, namely that St. John seems to date the events of this evening one day earlier than the other Evangelists do.   In the Synoptic Gospels, the Last Supper seems to be the Passover Seder.   In St. John’s Gospel, however, Jesus’ accusers when they bring Jesus from Caiaphas to Pilate, refrain from entering the Roman judgment hall themselves “lest they should be defiled; but that they might eat the Passover.” (18:28).   There is a theological implication to St. John’s timing.   At the beginning of his Gospel he tells of how John the Baptist pointed Jesus out to his followers saying “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world”. (1:29)   By St. John’s dating Jesus’ death on the Cross would have taken place at precisely the moment on the Ides of Nisan when the Passover lamb was slain.

 

The other Evangelists, however, seem to be quite clear on the Last Supper having been the Passover.   St. Mark, for example, begins his account of the Last Supper by saying “And the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the Passover, his disciples said unto him, Where wilt thou that we go and prepare that thou mayest eat the Passover” (14:12) and a few verses later says “And his disciples went forth, and came into the city, and found as he had said unto them: and they made ready the Passover”.   St. Luke tells us that at the Supper Jesus said “With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (22:15) and includes details (e.g. “the cup after supper”, 22:20) that belong specifically to a Passover Seder.

 

So how do we account for this?   Let us begin by taking the liberal explanation, the kind that the Jesus Seminar and similar types, would suggest, i.e., that one or more of the Gospels is unreliable, off the table.   This leaves us with a number of possibilities. 

 

One of these is that either the Synoptic Evangelists or St. John do not actual say what they appear to be saying at first glance.   It is not difficult to make the case that St. John does not actually date the death of Jesus to the slaying of the Paschal lamb as he appears to do.    Passover begins on the Ides of Nisan but it lasts a week.   Therefore, St. John in 18:28 could have been talking about a meal later in the week of Passover than the initial Seder.    

 

Another possibility is that Jesus arranged to eat the Passover a day early.   “The day of unleavened bread” that the other Evangelists talk about could possibly refer to the day before Passover when the bedikat chametz, the thorough going over of the home to find and eliminate any leaven, took place, and “when the Passover must be killed” could possibly refer to the time of day rather than the specific date.   While this is a far less plausible explanation of the words of the Synoptic Evangelists than the explanation in the previous paragraph is of St. John’s, it arguably finds support within the Synoptic Gospels themselves in that these record that the chief priests who conspired to take Jesus “by craft, and put him to death” had said “Not on the feast day, lest there be an uproar of the people” (Mk. 14:1-2).  The chief priests would have had to sign off on any request to have an early Passover and this would have provided them with a reason to do so.   If they allowed Jesus to have an early Passover, that would have gotten Him away from the crowd, enabling Judas to bring their posse to arrest Him, all before the Passover actually began.   As it stands, the words of the conspirators just quoted are difficult to reconcile with their actions if the Last Supper took place on the actual Passover as SS Matthew, Mark, and Luke seem to indicate, because that would mean they did precisely what they had agreed not to do. 

 

Interestingly enough, another explanation could be that both the Synoptic Evangelists and St. John mean exactly what they appear to mean and that both are right because there was more than one Ides of Nisan.  Even though that explanation sounds at first like it might come from a movie by Harold Ramis featuring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell we know that at least one sect of Second Temple Judaism, the Essenes, the ascetic mystic sect that left behind the famous scrolls of the Qumran Cave, followed a different calendar from that of other Jews.   They used what they called a Jubilee Calendar, a solar-based pentecontad calendar that placed the Passover on the same day of the week every year.   By the ordinary Jewish lunar calendar, in which each month begins with the new moon, the Passover falls on different days of the week depending upon the year.    While Jesus was not likely to have used the Essenes’ calendar – and it would have put the Passover on a date that fits none of the Gospels if He had - the point is that there were differences among first century Jews about these matters.   The beginning of the month was set by the Sanhedrin which ruled on the basis of witnesses attesting to having seen the new moon.   Discrepancies were not unknown. Rosh Hashanah 22b in the Talmud discusses an incident in which the Boethusians – a sect similar if not identical to the Sadducees – bribed a couple of witnesses to falsify their testimony about the new moon.   Although the Talmud depicts the scheme as failing and the Sanhedrin becoming stricter as to whose testimony they would accept – Rabbi Isaac Lichtenstein, a Messianic Rabbi (1) of the nineteenth century, argued in his New Testament Commentary that the Sadducees had pulled this same stunt the year of the Crucifixion in order to get their way in their famous controversy with the Pharisees over the timing of the Feast of Weeks which would have had the effect of moving Passover by a day as well.   The Pharisees would not have taken this well and with their large popular following would have been able to get away with keeping the Passover the day before where it would have been without the shenanigans.  Since He was to die the next day on the official Passover, Lichtenstein reasoned, Jesus celebrated the Passover with His disciples on the day the Pharisees kept it that year.

 

While this third explanation involves more conjecture than the other two, it is hardly baseless conjecture.   Jesus Christ is the “Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of the world” as John the Baptist said, and our Passover sacrificed for us as St. Paul wrote (1 Cor. 5:7), making it appropriate that His death occur when St. John implies it did at the time of the slaying of the Paschal lamb.   Through this Sacrifice He established the long promised New Covenant as He announced in advance at the Last Supper, as He instituted the Sacrament of the Eucharist, making it appropriate that this take place at the Passover of the Old Covenant, as the Synoptic Gospels say.   The third explanation, which allows for both, seems the best to me.

 

Have a blessed Maundy Thursday.

(1) That is a Rabbi who believed in Jesus as Messiah.

Worse than Infidels

“Take heed”, the Lord Jesus Christ told His disciples “and beware the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” (Matt. 16:6) It was not, as His disciples initially supposed, literal bread against which He was warning them, but the teachings of these first century Jewish sects. The frequency with which He told His disciples not to follow the example of the Pharisees suggests that He recognized in this a temptation to which His followers would be particularly prone.

When, therefore, we consider the Christian duty enjoined upon us by the Great Commission, whether we interpret that commission in a high church sense as speaking of the ministry of Word and Sacrament of the organized Church or in the evangelical sense of the duty of all believers to tell others about the Gospel (1) we ought always to keep in mind as a warning Christ’s declaration:

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves. (Matt. 23:16)

Clearly there is a right and wrong way to evangelize and we ought to be wary of the kind of theology that subordinates all other concerns to the very real need to bring the Gospel to those who have not yet heard it.

Consider a popular evangelical response to the present migration situation. For some time now a massive wave of migration has been going on as thousands of people from what used to be called the Third World but which the politically correct word police now insist we call the Global South have been moving into the countries of what used to be Christendom but is now known as Western Civilization. Some are coming claiming to be refugees or asylum seekers, legitimately and illegitimately, some are going through the proper channels to immigrate legally, whereas many others are just swarming in, but refugee or immigrant, legal or illegal, they are coming. A standard evangelical response is to say that we should look upon this as an opportunity and welcome them, because they here are the unevangelized arriving on our doorstep.

There is truth in this response. Yes, these people need the Gospel, yes, most of them have not heard the Gospel, yes, we have a Christian duty to share the Gospel with them, and yes, their having come to where we are certainly makes evangelizing them more convenient for us. This is not the whole side of the story however, and it is going too far to say that because of the evangelism opportunities it creates we ought therefore to welcome this wave of migration as a blessing.

When a country experiences immigration on a large enough scale to noticeably alter the ethnic and cultural composition of the country’s population this will have a number of negative effects on the country. Some of these negative effects will be economical and these will be felt the most by the poorest people in the country as the influx of newcomers increases the labour supply, driving down wages, and increases competition for jobs. This will especially be a problem if the country already has a high rate of unemployment. There are other ways, however, in which large scale, demographic-transforming, immigration negatively affects a country. The trust in one’s neighbours and countrymen, the social capital so essential to a sense of community – a sense of who “we” are – has been demonstrated to be seriously compromised by the diversity that this kind of immigration brings. (2) Furthermore, a country’s most basic rights, freedoms, and legal protections of the same, can be placed in jeopardy by this kind of immigration if the cultural tradition in which these things are rooted is seriously threatened.

These are exactly the negative effects this kind of immigration has been having in my country, the Dominion of Canada. When Canada was founded in Confederation 150 years ago as a self-governing Dominion within the British family of nations, it already was culturally plural with three basic ethnic communities – English-speaking Protestant Loyalists, French-speaking Roman Catholics whose religion, language, and culture had been protected by the British Crown after the Seven Years War and the Indian tribes of various religious persuasions, Christian and otherwise, who had signed treaties with the British Crown. A common allegiance to the British Crown, albeit for different reasons with each group, was the sole factor uniting these different communities – which is the reason why immigrants ever since have had to swear allegiance to the Crown to obtain citizenship. Our parliamentary form of government and our Common Law rights and freedoms are rooted in the cultural tradition attached to the Crown. The Liberal Party of Canada has, since the premierships of Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, waged an assault on that cultural tradition using mass immigration of the type we have been discussing as one of its chief weapons. With the weakening of the British tradition in Canada has come a weakening of our basic rights and freedoms, one which was not successfully repaired by the Liberal Party’s attempts in 1982 to shift these onto the new basis of a written Charter. (3) Since the Liberal Party regained control of Parliament in 2015, it has set immigration targets at a record high, despite Canada’s having an unemployment rate of just under 7% which the Party seems determined to drive even higher with its ill-conceived, economy-killing, environmentalist schemes, such as the carbon tax.

For an evangelical Christian to endorse this sort of thing, just because it makes evangelism more convenient is an act of impiety in the extreme.

Impiety is the name of the sin with which Christ charged the Pharisees when He accused them of getting around the commandment to honour their fathers and mothers by declaring the portion of their wealth that could otherwise have been used to support their parents to be corban, i.e., dedicated to the temple treasury. (Mark 7:1-13) It is, as its name suggests, the opposite of piety, the ancient virtue which consisted of showing proper and dutiful respect and devotion to God and to one’s parents and ancestors. That devotion to God and to one’s parents/ancestors were so closely connected as to be a single virtue is recognized in virtually every ancient tradition – Plato made this the focus of his Euthyphro, the Romans regarded pietas as one of the chief virtues, and C. S. Lewis provided several examples of the same thought recurring in other traditions in the appendix to his The Abolition of Man. (4) In the Hebrew Scriptures, the commandment to “honour thy father and mother”, in addition to being the first commandment with a promise, as St. Paul notes, is placed immediately after the commandments outlining duties to God and before the commandments outlining duties to one’s fellow men, making it possible to link the commandment with the first set. The ancients understood that duty to one’s parents and ancestors involved looking out for the good of their descendants as well and so piety by extension includes devotion to one’s entire family and household. Devotion to the spiritual household – the family of God, the church – and patriotism, devotion to the national family, are further extensions of this duty.

St. Paul, in his first epistle to Timothy, pronounced the judgement of Christianity upon impiety. Having instructed Timothy to regard elder men in the church as fathers, younger men as brothers, elder women as mothers, and younger women as sisters, he tells him to honour widows, saying that if a widow has children or nephews they should “learn first to shew piety at home, and to requite their parents: for that is good and acceptable before God.” (5:4). Of those in the church who refuse to do this, he writes “But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.” (5:8)

The same judgement applies to those who sanctimoniously cite evangelistic opportunity, as a reason for supporting and welcoming immigration and refugee policies that have harmed and are harming – perhaps irreparably – their countries.


(1) The Great Commission is worded differently in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, St. Matthew’s wording lending itself to the high church or catholic interpretation, St. Mark’s to the low church or evangelical interpretation.
(2) Dr. Robert D. Putnam, Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, and author of the book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, conducted an extensive study on the effects of diversity on social capital. He published his findings in 2007, writing that “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’-that is, to pull in like a turtle” which means that they “tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.” Robert D. Putnam, “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century”, Scandinavian Political Studies, 30:2 (June, 2007), pp. 137-174.
(3) See my “Civil Libertarians of Canada: The Charter is Not Your Friend”: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2015/05/civil-libertarians-of-canada-charter-is.html
(4) C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943), in which the first example under “Duties to Parents, Elders, Ancestors” is “Your father is an image of the Lord of Creation, your mother an image of the Earth. For him who fails to honour them, every work of piety is in vain. This is the first duty.” Hindu. Janet, i. 9 is cited as the source. In this appendix, Lewis is providing examples of what he, borrowing the term from Chinese philosophy, calls the Tao, i.e., universal natural laws underlying traditional moralities.

Contemporary Compassion is not Christian Compassion

When you read or sing the Psalms you cannot help but notice how frequently God is described as being “full of compassion”. In the Authorized Version this expression occurs no less than five times in Psalms 78, 86, 111, 112, and 145. Furthermore, the Psalms are hardly the only place in the Bible where the word compassion is used as an attribute of God. The Synoptic Gospels frequently speak of Jesus being “moved with compassion” or “having compassion” on someone or some group of people.

These are verses which are very difficult for contemporary readers to understand for the reason that the word “compassion” has become completely and utterly debased in our day and age. It has been stripped of all that made “full of compassion” an expression of praise in the Psalms and reduced to a mere sentiment.

Something similar could be said about the word “charity”. In the Authorized Version of St. Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians charity is the greatest of what are traditionally known as the three theological virtues – the other two being faith and hope – of which a famous, extended description is given in the thirteenth chapter. The English word charity is derived, through the French, from the Latin word for this virtue, caritas, which in Latin versions of the Scriptures is frequently used to translate the Greek agape. Today, however, the first thought the English word suggests is that of “giving to the needy” and it seldom expresses anything beyond that. Organizations that provide help and relief to those who are poor, sick, or otherwise in need are called charities. No-one, unless he is reading the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians in the old AV, is likely to associate charity with long-suffering, seemliness, bearing, believing, hoping, and enduring all things, and all the other qualities listed in the fourth through seventh verses, and verse three which reads “ And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing” would be incomprehensible to anyone reading it with the contemporary meaning of charity in mind.

It is for this reason that the translators of most of the more recent English versions of the Holy Scriptures use the word love instead. This can hardly be said to be an improvement, however, as the word love has been as debased as the words charity and compassion. In Greek and Latin, the basic word for love was closely related to the word for friend and Greek had several other words when a more precise concept of love was called for. In English today, the word love would almost never be used of friendships – at least male friendships – thanks mostly to the imposed new acceptance of homosexuality. Sexual love has eclipsed all other concepts of love – and not the exalted eros discussed in Plato’s Symposium, either, but a version of the latter that has been stripped of all of its higher connotations, and reduced to a romantic affection tacked on to animal lust. So substituting love for charity in translations of 1 Corinthians 13 produces no net gain in comprehensibility.

While the decay of the English language is obviously what I have been describing here, it is also the rot and ruin of Western ethical thought and, for that matter, Western thought in general. That thinking and language stand and fall together ought to go without saying. Language is the medium through which we communicate our thoughts and, what is more, words are the very building blocks out of which we build our thoughts in the first place, at least if we are talking about the kind of thinking necessary for a civilized life that goes beyond the merely animal and mechanical. The Cultural Marxists, who have been so effective over the last sixty years or so, in tearing down Western civilization from the inside out, clearly understand this, which is why there is so much emphasis on linguistic theory and literary criticism on the intellectual side of what was accurately called the New Left forty-five years ago, and why their most devastating instruments, such as the phenomenon of so-called “political correctness”, involve the manipulation of language.

Leo Strauss, the German-Jewish émigré who became a godfather of sorts to American neoconservatives, and George Grant, Canada’s greatest conservative thinker and patriot of the old British Canada as she was before the evil Trudeau gang first got their hands on her, were among those who a generation or two ago observed that Western ethical thought had taken a turn for the worse in the twentieth century, as modern Western man had come to think in terms of “values” rather than “virtues”, and traced this shift back to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche in the nineteenth century. Virtues were central to the old, pre-modern, Western tradition of ethical thinking, with roots in both the ancient Athens of Plato and Aristotle and Jerusalem, birthplace of Christianity. Virtues, were praiseworthy habits of behaviour, that manifested themselves in praiseworthy acts or deed, and which presupposed the existence of an established, transcendent, hierarchical order of good, that was not created by man, but to which man must conform himself through the cultivation of virtue, to achieve happiness. Nietzsche believed that the ideas of the modern philosophers who had preceded him and the discoveries of modern science had rendered belief in this order impossible and had left man with two paths open to him, that of a “last man”, content to live out his mediocre existence as a cog in the great societal machine modernity is building, or that of an “overman” who will create a new set of values to fill the void left by the collapse of the old order. That we have come to speak of values rather than virtues, demonstrates how pervasive the Nietzschean version of modern thought has been. Virtues, point to an unchanging order beyond ourselves, values we create for ourselves.

This can clearly be seen in the “Canadian values” of the Trudeau Liberals. People have been driven from their careers, in Canada, for expressing ideas on immigration and multiculturalism that were no different from those held by Stephen Leacock, Conservative economist, social critic and humourist, W. L. Mackenzie King, Liberal Prime Minister, and J. S. Woodsworth, Methodist clergyman and founder of the CCF, the predecessor to today’s NDP, on the grounds that these ideas are contrary to “Canadian values”. “Canadian values”, therefore, have little to do with what real Canadians thought or think, but are rather what Pierre Trudeau decided and declared they would be.

Social conservatives, tend to express their opposition to abortion, divorce, homosexuality, and the like as a defence of “family values.” George Grant, himself an outspoken opponent of this kind of moral decay, argued that this was a mistake, because it is self-defeating to use the language by which the modern replacement for the old moral order has been effected, to defend the old order.

If the replacement of virtues, grounded in a transcendent order, with man-created values, was a step down the stairway of moral and ethical decay, their further replacement with sentiments, of the sorts represented by the current meanings of “compassion”, “charity” and “love”, was a slide down the bannister in comparison.

When the Psalmist says that God is “full of compassion” he is not singing about God’s feelings so much as about His actions. Similarly, whenever the Gospel writers speak of Jesus “having compassion” or being “moved by compassion” they are describing something He does, whether it be healing the sick (Matt. 14:14), casting out a demon (Mk. 5:19), or feeding the multitude (Mk. 8:2). Compassion in the Bible is that within God which motivates Him to act in a benevolent way towards people. It is far more, then, than a mere feeling. This is further evident in the way the Scriptures enjoin compassion upon men. They are clearly telling people how to act, not how to feel, because it would be pointless to do the latter, as feelings cannot be produced at will or in obedience to commands.

Today, however, the word compassion denotes a feeling. Worse, it is a feeling for which people demand and expect all of the praise and credit that is due to a virtue. Jesus in His earthly ministry condemned the hypocrisy of the Pharisees. In His famous Sermon on the Mount, after going through three pairs of Old Testament verses and expounding them in such a way as to show that the righteousness God demands of people is an internal righteousness and not just an external adherence to His Commandments, Jesus warned those assembled to hear Him against practicing their alms “before men, to be seen of them”, as the hypocrites do, drawing an amusing hyperbolic picture of a hypocritical Pharisee walking into the synagogue blowing a trumpet to announce that he was giving alms, but to give their alms in secret, for “thy Father which seeth in secret Himself shall reward thee openly.” What He was here condemning in the Pharisees, was doing something good – giving alms, for the wrong reason – to be praised by men. The Pharisee who was blowing his own horn, was at least doing the alms-giving for which he received the praise he wanted. Today, the “caring” and “compassionate” expect credit for shedding a few tears for the plight of the unfortunate and having warm fuzzy feelings towards them, whether or not they actually do anything to alleviate their condition. The Pharisees had nothing on them when it comes to hypocrisy.

Perhaps, however, I am being too hard on them. When you look at what has actually been done in the name of the huggy-feely type of compassion these days, you will find that much of it falls into two basic categories. One of these is harm done under the guise of helping, such as all the “poverty relief” money that was funnelled into the support of Third World Marxist guerillas in the twentieth century by the kind of churches who have reduced the “Christian” message to nothing but the debased, sentimental, kind of compassion by getting rid of more trivial aspects of the faith, such as the idea that the Son of the true and living God, came down to earth from heaven, was born a man by the Virgin Mary, died on the cross to take away the sins of the world and reconcile fallen man to God, descended to hell, shattering its gates and releasing the captive spirits of the saints, before rising in triumph from the grave and ascending back into heaven, to sit at His Father’s right hand. The other is to make other people pay the costs of your supposed “compassion” while you get all the credit. Most, if not all, government policies and programs that are labelled “compassionate” are examples of this.

If this is what modern “compassion” looks like in action, perhaps it were better that it be nothing more than a feeling after all.

Sin and Hypocrisy

Modern, progressive, thought is fundamentally and diametrically opposed to the doctrine of original sin. The most basic element of progressive thought is the idea that human evil and suffering is caused, not by a flaw in human nature, but by flaws in the organization of society, and that by correcting these flaws, man can build for himself Paradise upon earth. The doctrine of original sin, on the other hand, teaches that man is a fallen being, that the evils he commits and suffers arise out of his own flawed nature, and that he cannot break his own exile from Paradise but must trust in the grace and mercy of God. These two ideas are mutually incompatible and it is the latter, the doctrine of orthodox Christianity and an essential component of conservative thought, which most accurately describes man as he is in the world as it is.

The doctrine of original sin is predicated of man as a collective being. (1) It is the collective sin of our race, in which we each have an equal share. It is the same for any one person as it is for the next. Personal sin, on the other hand, refers to the sins which we each commit as individual persons. While one of the implications of original sin, is that each of us is guilty of personal sin, personal sin differs from person to person and is never exactly the same for any two individual people. Your personal sins are the sins which you have committed and for which you are accountable, whereas mine are the sins which I have committed and for which I am accountable.

If original sin is the realistic rain on the utopian parade of progressivism, personal sin is not exactly a popular concept with modern thought either. It is not that modern people think of themselves as perfect. That is far from being the case. “I’m not perfect” or “nobody’s perfect” are phrases that can be found on virtually everybody’s lips from time to time. Modern people do not like to think of their flaws and failings in terms of sin, however. In part this is because sin is a word with religious associations which seem antiquated to the modern secular mind. It is also because the word sin suggests the idea that one is responsible for one’s actions, and therefore guilty of one’s wrongdoing, for which one can and will be held accountable.

To be fair to modern man, these have never been popular ideas, at least when applied to one’s own self. Consider the words of Adam and Eve in response to God’s questioning in the Garden after the fall in the third chapter of Genesis. However one reads these chapters, literally or figuratively, the point is clearly there that passing the buck is as old as sin.

That having been said, sin is clearly one of those concepts that modern man considers himself too advanced to believe in anymore. Forty years ago a book was published that asked the question “Whatever Became of Sin?” (2) The author was Dr. Karl Menninger, a renowned psychiatrist and the co-founder with his father and brother, of the famous psychiatric clinic and foundation that bear their family name. According to Dr. Menninger, the concept of sin has been on the wane, first because as the modern state developed assuming much of the functions previously performed by the church, much socially undesirable behaviour was moved from the category of sin into the category of crime, and second because with the development of modern medical science, and particularly psychiatry, sinful behaviour has been further reclassified into the category of disease and its symptoms. Another factor he identified was the development of modern ways of regarding society as being collectively responsible for the erring actions of individuals.

Menninger did not see all of these developments as being entirely or even mostly negative – except perhaps the evolution of the modern state of which he wrote with an almost anarchist, individualist contempt. He nevertheless made the case that we still needed the concept of sin. Indeed, he wrote that it was “the only hopeful view.” (3) His reasoning was that since the world was still full of evil, we need the concept of sin, which allows responsibility for evil to be assigned but which also offers the possibilities of repentance, atonement, grace and forgiveness, to retain our sanity.

If the concept of sin has gone out of fashion as a way of thinking about and describing human behaviour that is undesirable and wrong, the same cannot be said of the concept of hypocrisy. The words hypocrisy and hypocrite are doing very well indeed, especially as terms of abuse for those who still hold to the old-fashioned ideas of sin and righteousness.

Hypocrisy is a charge which secular society and unbelievers like to throw against the Christian church and against Christian believers, perhaps without full comprehension of what it is that they are accusing Christians and the church. Often it seems as if those leveling the charge seem to think that the definition of a hypocrite is “a religious person who commits a sin.” This is not what the word means at all.

Hypocrisy was originally a Greek word. It was formed by adding the prefix hypo, which means under, to the verb krino, which means to separate, decide, distinguish or pass judgement. In the old Ionic dialect used by Homer, this compound originally meant to reply or to give an answer. In the later Attic dialect however, i.e., that spoken in Athens at the height of its classical civilization in the period before, during, and just after the Peloponnesian War, the word had been adopted as a technical term for use in the theatre. In this period, when Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were writing their great tragedies for the Athenian stage, the word hypocrisis referred to the work of actors in performing these plays. This usage evolved from the original meaning of the word because it literally described what an actor was doing in the play’s dialogue – answering or replying to the other speakers.

In English, we do not speak of the performing of a role on stage as hypocrisy, nor do we speak of the performers as hypocrites. Instead we use the words acting and actor to describe these things. The meaning of our English word hypocrisy is a metaphorical extension of the idea of acting. An actor is someone who pretends to be someone he is not, the character he is assigned in the play in which he is performing. A hypocrite is also someone who plays a role. He is someone who pretends to be more righteous or virtuous than he actually is. This is what Jesus Christ meant when He denounced the scribes and Pharisees, calling them hypocrites. Christ may not have been the first to use the word in this way but it is through His use that it became the word’s primary meaning.

If hypocrisy is putting on an act of being more righteous than you actually are is secular society’s charge that the church is full of hypocrisy accurate?

Sadly, it often is. Individual Christians and the organized church are frequently guilty of hiding their sins and putting on a front of righteousness. That such would be the case is indirectly suggested by the words of Jesus Himself. He would hardly have gone to such lengths to warn His disciples against the leaven of the scribes and Pharisees if He did not think them susceptible to that leaven. Where the charge falls short of hitting its mark is in the unspoken assumption that there is less hypocrisy outside the church than there is inside it.

In my first semester at Providence College there was a class that if I remember correctly was mandatory for all freshmen that was kind of an introductory course to apologetics and evangelism. Part of the course dealt with common excuses given for rejecting the gospel. When our professor, Stan Hamm, asked us how we would respond to someone who says “the church is full of hypocrites”, I blurted out “there is always room for more!”

While I had obviously said that as a wiseass remark, it does actually answer the excuse in a way. Hypocrisy, the pretence of being a better person than one actually is, is a ubiquitous trait of humanity, not just of the religious and it is often best exemplified by those who use the hypocrisy of the church as an excuse to avoid believing the gospel themselves. Indeed, in using the hypocrisy of the church as an excuse for not joining it, one is implicitly claiming to be non-hypocritical, to be completely transparent, open, and honest, which is itself almost certainly a pretence, and therefore, arguably the ultimate form of hypocrisy, being a hypocrite about not being a hypocrite.

In fact, an argument can be made that there is far less hypocrisy within the church than there is outside it. Those who level accusations of hypocrisy against the church when Christians are caught in sin often seem to assume that Christians purport to be sinlessly perfect and demand that others be as well. Yet the very opposite is the case. By the terms of orthodox Christian doctrine, one cannot be a Christian without confessing oneself to be a sinner.

Think about it. A popular method of sharing the gospel, among North American evangelicals, presents the way of salvation as the ABCs of Christianity. While this is not a sterling example of Christian orthodoxy – it distorts the gospel by presenting it as a series of steps that you have to follow in order to obtain salvation rather than a message of good news about how God has given us salvation in Jesus Christ – the A, in the ABCs, always stands for admitting that you are a sinner. (4)

In more traditional Protestant theology, divine revelation is regarded as being divided into two messages, Law and Gospel. The Law tells us what God demands of us, the Gospel tells us what God in His grace has done for us in Jesus Christ. The practical function of the Law is to show us our need for the Gospel – to show us that we are sinners, who cannot meet God’s righteous demands, and must therefore trust in the salvation God has provided in Christ.

In liturgical churches, a general confession and absolution of sin is made every time the Mass is celebrated. In the traditional order of the Latin Mass this was the very first thing that was done after the asperges, before even the introit. In the Anglican Book of Common Prayer it is the first part of the eucharistic liturgy following the readings and the sermon. A general confession of sin is also made in the liturgy of the divine office and the private confession and absolution of specific sins is also encouraged by many churches, most obviously the Roman.

Christianity, in other words, is all about acknowledging one’s sins and trusting in God’s forgiveness. To the extent, therefore, that a person believes in and practices this religion of confession of sin and reception of divine forgiveness through faith, he is likely to be less of hypocrite rather than more of one.

Hypocrisy, let me reiterate, is more than just falling short of the moral standards one believes in or which are taught by the religion to which one belongs. The word that best describes that is actually the word with the discussion of which we began this essay, i.e., sin. (5) That confession of sin is one of the most fundamental elements of Christianity is the best answer to the charge that the Christian church is uniquely hypocritical, for hypocrisy is pretending to a righteousness one does not possess, a universal human trait that is lessened, somewhat, by Christianity’s requirement that one confess one’s sins.

To be fair, those to whom hypocrisy is the first thing that comes to mind when the church is mentioned could respond to the preceding argument by saying that it is the preachy attitude of the church combined with the sins of its members that they consider to be hypocritical. A response like this could be a legitimate complaint about the manner in which Christian moral truths are sometimes presented. It could also be a complaint that would be made regardless of the manner in which the message is presented because of a notion that as long as the church and its members are themselves imperfect people they have no right to proclaim moral truths.

If, however, imperfect people and institutions are disqualified from preaching moral truths, then nobody is left to preach them. Imperfect preachers are the only kind available. About twenty years ago I read a book, lent to me by my pastor at the time, in which the author made this point in a way that I have never forgotten. The author, Dr. R. C. Sproul of Ligonier Ministries, wrote:

No minister is worthy of his calling. Every preacher is vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy. In fact, the more faithful a preacher is to the Word of God in his preaching, the more liable he is to the charge of hypocrisy. Why? Because the more faithful a man is to the Word of God, the higher the message is that he will preach. The higher the message, the further he will be from obeying it himself. (6)

Dr. Sproul is a well-known Reformed theologian, that is, a Calvinist. Calvinism, like all human attempts at understanding God, has its strengths and weaknesses. The holiness of God, that which sets Him above and apart from sinful man, which makes His grace amazing indeed, is one of the areas in which Calvinism tends to be strong and this was the subject of the book. This paragraph about the imperfection of preachers, and how the better they are at doing their job, the further they themselves are from that which they preach, comes at the end of a chapter based upon the propher Isaiah’s experience in the sixth chapter of the book bearing his name. Summoned into the presence of God, He declared God to be thrice holy, and himself to be undone. Yet, when God asked who would go and speak His message, the man of “unclean lips” volunteered and God accepted his service.

A few years ago I ran across another book whose author tackled the question of which is preferable, an imperfect testimony to moral truth or no testimony at all, and argued for the former. Among the points Jeremy Lott made in the provocatively titled In Defense of Hypocrisy, were that accusations of hypocrisy are often also examples of it, that many things that we would probably classify as examples of hypocrisy don’t actually meet the criteria for inclusion in that category, and that other things which are hypocrisies we are actually better off with than without. Examples of the latter would be the variations on “looking the other way” that are necessary for unwritten rules to work. In his sixth chapter, he made a compelling case for the idea that society is far more tolerable when unwritten rules – which often contradict the written rules, hence the need for the hypocrisy – are in operation, than when everything is done strictly by the book.

What I found to be the most interesting argument in the book, however, was an argument in the fourth chapter about religious hypocrisy, in which Lott traced the antihypocrisy movement back to its Founder, Who was, of course, also the Founder of the institution most often accused of hypocrisy. If the church has often been guilty of distorting Christ’s message and failing abysmally to follow His teachings – and, being composed of sinful human beings, of course, it has – the antihypocrisy movement has not done any better. Indeed, it has inverted His condemnation of hypocrisy. Whereas Jesus condemned the Pharisees for not living up to the standards of the Mosaic Law they preached, contemporary antihypocrites condemn the preaching of moral standards that one cannot live up to. Or as Lott put it “the bone that he couldn’t swallow was that they were far too self-serving in their reading, not necessarily that they were too demanding”. (7)

To make his point, he asked a fascinating “what if” question:

If the teachers of the law had ceased to teach and the priests had locked up the temple, would the preacher from Nazareth have said, Well, at least they aren’t being hypocrites? Not unless he suddenly decided to depart from the tone and tenor of everything he’d ever said in public. The Jesus of the Gospels would have raged against them twice as hard for abandoning even the trappings of religion. (8)

This reasoning seems iron-clad to me, especially when one considers that Jesus, while condemning the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, told His listeners they still had to respect their authority and obey the Law they taught (Matthew 23:2-3).

The contemporary antihypocrites, whose objection is to the preaching of moral standards rather than the failing to live up to them, would presumably not look askance at the disappearance of the concept of sin. If, however, Dr. Menninger was correct in regarding the concept of sin as the only way of thinking about evil in the world that provides us with hope, and if Jeremy Lott is correct in arguing that some kinds of hypocrisy actually make society more tolerable, we have good reason to regard the moral thinking of today as being greatly inferior to that of about seventy years ago. Perhaps it is time we turn back the clock.

(1) http://www.thronealtarliberty.blogspot.ca/2013/09/original-sin-and-free-will.html

(2) Karl Menninger, M.D., Whatever Became Of Sin? (New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1973).

(3) Ibid., p. 188.

(4) The B is for believe, but the C varies, in some versions being call upon the Lord, in others confess Christ, in yet others commit yourself to Christ.

(5) The technical term for the study of the concept of sin is hamartiology. This comes from the most basic Greek word for sin, hamartia. Its verbal cognate, hamartano was the word the Greeks used for falling short of your target when throwing a spear, and thus by extension, failing to meet your goals.

(6) R. C. Sproul, The Holiness of God (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, 1985, 1993), p. 50.

(7) Jeremy Lott, In Defense of Hypocrisy: Picking Sides in the War on Virtue (Nashville: Nelson Current, 2006) p. 108.

(8) Ibid. Bold indicates italics in original.