Christmas Customs and Hyper-Protestant Killjoys

 

Rejoice in the Lord always: and again I say, Rejoice.  – Phil. 4:4

 

In an earlier essay I debunked the neo-Cromwellian, hyper-Protestant claim that Christmas is actually a pagan holiday and demonstrated that it is of Christian origin.   It is the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, which early Church Fathers had calculated to have fallen on the twenty-fifth of December at least a century before the events – the legalization of Christianity, the conversion of Constantine the Great, the making Christianity the official religion of Rome – that the hyper-Protestants believe initiated the syncretism that in their view corrupted Christianity with paganism, and, indeed, before there was even any pagan significance to the date of the twenty-fifth of December.   I also demonstrated that the information that St. Luke provides us about the timing of the birth of Christ in his Gospel – the Annunciation took place in the sixth month of St. Elizabeth’s pregnancy with John the Baptist, which pregnancy began shortly after St. Zechariah was visited by Gabriel in the Temple, which most likely occurred during the week of Yom Kippur if not the exact day – supports the placing of Christ’s birth in December-January.    The exact process by which the Church Fathers calculated more specific dates is not clear, although the date of the Annunciation seems to have been calculated first and some theorize that it had to do with the idea that Christ was conceived on the same day He died.   That the Church Fathers were looking for dates when the Jewish holy days that the events in St. Luke’s chronology fell on or around – Passover for the Annunciation, Hanukkah for the Nativity – matched up with the events on the solar calendar that they approximate (the spring equinox and winter solstice) is perhaps a likelier explanation than the influence of the Jewish concept of “integral age”.   The twenty-fifth of March and December would not line up with the precise date of the solar events by our calculations today, but these were calculated differently back then.   Looking for such convergence does not indicate a pagan influence.   That the sun, moon, and stars were placed in the firmament for “signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years” by God Himself is asserted in the first chapter of the Bible (Gen. 1:14).

 

Having debunked the hyper-Protestant claims about the date of Christmas, let us turn to their claims about the manner in which it is celebrated.   In one sense they seem to be on firmer ground here.  Every place in which Christmas is celebrated has its local customs as to how it is celebrated and many of these seem to have been adopted from traditions that were around before the area was evangelized.   Nevertheless, this hardly makes Christmas “pagan”.  

 

The sort of things we are talking about here are the accidents of Christmas, not its essence.   What makes Christmas Christmas, is not the goose or turkey and pudding, the gift-giving, the holly and mistletoe, the stockings and Yule log, the wreathes and wassail, or any such thing.   It is the Christmas story, which comes directly from Sacred Writ, the early chapters of the Gospels of both SS Matthew and Luke.   Many of the most beloved of Christmas carols either retell the Christmas story in verse or proclaim the theological significance of the events narrated in the story or both.   I am not talking about “Jingle Bells” and “Frosty the Snowman”, obviously, but carols like Charles Wesley and George Whitefield’s “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”, Dr. Martin Luther’s “Silent Night, Holy Night”, and “Adeste Fidelis” and its English translation “O Come All Ye Faithful”.    The very name of the holiday speaks of Christians celebrating the Nativity of Christ by participating in the Holy Sacrament.   Christmas is a contraction of “Christ’s mass”.   Hyper-Protestants will no doubt read every last bit of Romanist doctrine regarding transubstantiation into the word “mass” but this word, taken from the Latin words used to dismiss (another word that we get from the same Latin source) the congregation at the end of the service, simply means a liturgical service in which the Eucharist is celebrated.   Things are defined by their essence, not their accidents.   Christmas is defined by the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, not by the decorations, food, and merry-making.

 

That having been said, if our hyper-Protestant friends persist in objecting some of the food and drink, gifts and games, and decorations having had roots in pre-Christian traditions, then the manner in which these came to be incorporated into the celebration of Christmas needs to be pointed out to them.   This is because hyper-Protestantism is based upon the idea that everything in the pre-Reformation Christian tradition that the hyper-Protestants object to, which is basically everything for which they cannot find an exact Scripture verse either authorizing or commanding it, is something that was imposed upon the unsuspecting Christian laity by an evil clergy out to rob them of their Christian liberty.   This is precisely the opposite of how elements from pre-Christian winter festivals became a part of Christmas celebrations.   It was the people who brought these sorts of things into Christmas, not the Church that imposed them upon the people.   If anything, the Church may have initially tried to dissuade the people from doing this, but tolerated and eventually accepted it on the grounds that these sort of things are not intrinsically pagan, are minor matters, and that what Scripture does not prohibit it permits (the hyper-Protestants operate on the reverse of this, John Calvin’s regulative principle, that what Scripture does not permit it prohibits, which is clearly far less compatible with the Pauline doctrine of Christian liberty).  

 

One of the silliest examples of hyper-Protestant opposition to Christmas traditions with pre-Christian origins has to do with the Christmas tree.   A Christmas tree is an evergreen tree – spruce, pine or the like – that people set up in their homes, usually in the living room, and decorate with stars, angels, tinsel, candles or electric lights, and other ornaments, and under which they place the presents to be opened at Christmas.   It is a relatively recent addition to Christmas traditions and appears to be of Germanic origin.   Dr. Luther is known to have decorated Christmas trees with candles and some have attributed the start of the tradition to him, others trace it back to the pre-Christian Germanic traditions of Yule.   Either way, some hyper-Protestants maintain that it is explicitly condemned in the prophecy of Jeremiah in the Old Testament.    They are referring to a passage found at the beginning of the tenth chapter of Jeremiah - specifically the third and fourth verses.   Here are those verses:

 

For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe.   They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.

 

Now, the hyper-Protestants who interpret these verses as referring to Christmas trees, might have a point if the people who put up Christmas trees erected altars in front of the Christmas trees, offered sacrifices to them and burned incense to them, prayed to them, trusted them to deliver them from their enemies, and did any of that sort of thing.   I don’t know of anyone who does this sort of thing with his Christmas tree, nor do I know of anyone who knows somebody else who does.    

 

The entire passage in which these verses are found – the first sixteen verses of the chapter, make it abundantly clear that what is being talked about is not a custom of erecting a tree and decorating it for festive purposes, but the making of an idol.    Consider the verse that immediately follows the ones quoted above:

 

They are upright as the palm tree, but speak not: they must needs be borne, because they cannot go.   Be not afraid of them; for they cannot do evil, neither also is it in them to do good.  

 

When Jeremiah talks about how they “are upright as the palm tree, but speak not” this very similar to the places in which the Psalmist says of idols “they have mouths, but they speak not” (115:5, 135:16), and when he adds “they must needs be borne, because they cannot go” this brings to mind the verse that says “feet have they, but they walk not” (115:7).   There would have been no need to point anything in this verse out if the decoration of trees for festive purposes were the custom being condemned here.   If that is what the prophet had in mind, those to whom he was addressing the prophecy could have legitimately come back with “Well duh, what’s your point?”    Jeremiah is speaking of images that the heathen make and worship instead of the True and Living God.      In this case they are carved from wood and plated with gold and silver.   The folly of placing faith in the works of men’s own hands, that cannot use the anthropomorphic features they are given by their crafters, and which cannot save their worshippers as the True and Living God can, is the point of all of this.

 

Anyone seeking a present day equivalent of what Jeremiah was speaking about in the tenth chapter of his book of prophecy may find one in the practice of the many who put their faith in their savings accounts, government social programs, or modern technology for their safety, security, and the solution to their problems.   This is far closer to what Jeremiah was condemning  than the practice of decorating trees to celebrate Christmas.   Idolatry is giving to that which is created, especially the work of man’s own hands, that which belongs only to the Creator.   Decorating a Christmas tree may superficially resemble what Jeremiah was talking about in the third and fourth verses of his tenth chapter if the context is ignored but the resemblance is only superficial.  

 

The hyper-Protestants who think that Christmas trees are condemned by Jeremiah are being incredibly silly indeed.   They have allowed their hatred of the pre-Reformation Christian tradition, the pre-Reformation Church, and anything they associate with these, such as the celebration of Christ’s birth, to blind them to the obvious meaning of passages like Jeremiah 10:3-4 so that they can twist these verses into condemnations of entirely innocent things like Christmas trees that are part of a holy festival that brings joy to people’s hearts.

 

H. L. Mencken once said that Puritanism “is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is happy”.   We are in the third week of Advent, which began with the Sunday that is customarily called Gaudete Sunday.    Gaudete is the plural imperative of a Latin verb that means “to rejoice” and thus is a command to rejoice.    The commandment to “rejoice” is repeated over and over again throughout the Scriptures.   Deut. 32:43; 1 Chr. 16:10, 31; Psalm 2:11, 5:11, 32:12, 33:1; Rom. 12:15, 15:10; Phil. 2:18, 4:4 are but a few examples.   The last mentioned of these, quoted as the epigraph of this essay, is the traditional Introit for the third Sunday of Advent, which is the origin of its name.   God is the Author of joy.  It would be unseasonably uncharitable to speculate as to where Puritanism – the original name for hyper-Protestantism in the English-speaking world- gets the aversion to human joy, happiness, and merry-making that is prominently on display in its condemnation of everything associated with these things in Christian festivals and traditions as “pagan”, but this, at least, is clear - it does not come from God.

The Heresies of the Westminster Confession of Faith

The Westminster Confession of Faith is the principle confession of faith for English Presbyterianism. It is also highly regarded by traditional English Baptists, whose own London Confession of Faith is merely a modified version of the Westminster Confession. (1) In this essay, I shall demonstrate that it deviates from orthodoxy in three significant ways – the canon of Scripture, the application of Scripture, and the very Gospel itself. The last of these is the most important deviation and the one on which I shall focus most attention. I have dealt with the first at greater length elsewhere. (2)

Before proceeding, I ought to lay all my cards on the table and acknowledge my own bias. The men who produced the Westminster Confession in 1646 were men of whom I have an extremely low opinion for historical and political reasons. The Westminster Assembly, from which the Confession takes its name, consisted of 121 Puritans who at the time were engaged in unlawful rebellion and sedition against their king, whom they eventually captured and murdered, justifying their wicked actions with their theology. Puritanism in power, was totalitarian and despotic, and fully earned its much-deserved reputation for legalistic Pharisaism, beauty-hating Philistinism, and general life-sucking, joy-killing, spiritual oppressiveness. Historically, Puritanism was the earliest form of English liberalism. (3) From a bad tree like Puritanism, bad fruit is exactly what I expect to find.

One last preliminary step before examining the Confession itself is to define the standard that I shall be applying to evaluate its errors. When I say that the Confession deviates from orthodoxy, I mean Protestant orthodoxy. Protestant orthodoxy includes small-c catholic orthodoxy. Small-c catholic orthodoxy consists of the basic Scriptural doctrines summed up by the early church in the Apostles’, Nicene-Constantinopolitan, and Athanasian Creeds. This form of orthodoxy is held by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and orthodox Protestant (Anglican, Lutheran, and continental Reformed) Churches, excluding, of course, the portions of these churches that have succumbed to theological liberalism. (4) Protestant orthodoxy also includes the basic truths of the Reformation – that orthodox doctrine is established by the authority of the Scriptures alone (5) and that salvation is a free gift given to mankind on the basis of grace alone, accomplished by Christ alone, and received by faith alone, for which God alone deserves the glory. The orthodox Protestant confessions include the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Anglican Church, the Lutheran Augsburg Confession (1530), Smacald Articles (1537), and Formula of Concord (1577), and the Heidelberg Catechism (1563) and Belgic Confession (1561) of the continental Reformed Church. On two of the three points under consideration, the Westminster Confession departs from the consensus of these older, orthodox, confessions. On the remaining point it departs from a consensus between the Anglican and Lutheran confessions.

Heresy I: The Canon of Scriptures

The third paragraph of the first chapter of the Westminster Confession of Faith reads:

The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon of the Scripture, and therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings.


This was not the viewpoint of the Protestant Reformers, and it is not the position taken in the orthodox Anglican, Lutheran, and continental Reformed confessions. The books that are incorrectly dubbed the Apocrypha here, (6) are the books (7) and additional chapters to books (8) which appear the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures that was supposed to have been produced for Ptolemy II in the 3rd Century BC, but not the Hebrew Masoretic Text. The Masoretic Text is what Rabbinic Judaism has, since some point subsequent to the destruction of the Second Temple, regarded as the canonical text of its Tanakh. The Septuagint is what is quoted as authoritative Scripture in the New Testament, what is quoted as the Old Testament in the earliest extra-Biblical writings of orthodox Christianity, and what was received by the Christian church as its Old Testament. The Protestant Reformers adopted what had been a minority viewpoint in the early church, (9) that the LXX books not found in the Masoretic Text should be regarded as “ecclesiastical books” appointed to be read in churches for instruction and edification but not “canonical books.” N.B. that the “canon” in “canonical books” as used in this context, does not refer to the list of books that belong in the Bible – which includes both the canonical and ecclesiastical books – but the use of the books as a “canon”, i.e., rule or standard, by which orthodox doctrine is established. The Reformers’ position was that the “ecclesiastical books” which were part of what the Christian church had received as its Old Testament Scriptures from the beginning, but whose equality with the “canonical books” was not incontrovertible, were not to be removed from the Scriptures, but were to be treated as a distinct category of books, that would be read liturgically, but could only be used to support doctrines established from the canonical books, never to establish doctrine. (10) Hence, orthodox Protestant Bibles like Lutheran’s German Bible and the Authorized Bible of 1611, include these books, but place them in a separate location between the Old and the New Testament. The Reformers’ position, while it was very much a minority position in the first 1500 years of church history, is still within the bounds of small-c catholic orthodoxy, since it does not remove books from the received Scriptures, and everything in the ecumenical Creeds can be firmly established from the canonical books without recourse to the ecclesiastical. The Westminster Confession’s position is not orthodox, and places those who penned it under the curse of Revelation 22:19.

Heresy II: The Application of Scripture and Christian Liberty

The first paragraph of the twenty-first chapter of the Westminster Confession reads:

The light of nature shows that there is a God, who has lordship and sovereignty over all, is good, and does good unto all, and is therefore to be feared, loved, praised, called upon, trusted in, and served, with all the heart, and with all the soul, and with all the might. But the acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by Himself, and so limited by His own revealed will, that He may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation, or any other way not prescribed in the holy Scripture.

This is what is known as the “regulative principle of worship” – that true worship of God should include nothing beyond what we are specifically commanded to do in the Scriptures. It is easy to overlook the heresy in this principle. The way it is formulated it sounds good and true – until we compare it to the opposite principle, the “normative principle of worship”, which states that Christian churches are permitted to worship in any way that is not specifically prohibited in the Scriptures. As Richard Hooker put it “Whatsoever Christ hath commanded for ever to be kept in his Church, the same we take not upon us to abrogate; and whatsoever our laws have thereunto added besides, of such quality we hope it is, as no lawe of Christ doth any where condemn.” (11) When this comparison is made it becomes abundantly clear what is lacking in the regulative principle – Christian liberty as taught by St. Paul in Romans 14, I Corinthians 10, the book of Galatians, and, indeed, practically every epistle he wrote. The doctrine of Christian liberty is the basis of the normative principle, which is also the consensus of the Anglican and Lutheran confessions. (12) The continental Reformed confessions are widely believed to dissent from this consensus. Article 32 of the Belgic Confession, for example, is generally regarded as a statement of the regulative principle. The principle is much more explicit in the Westminster Confession, however. When the Belgic Confession declares that churches “ought always to guard against deviating from what Christ, our only Master,has ordained for us” and goes on to say “Therefore we reject all human innovations and all laws imposed on us, in our worship of God, which bind and force our consciences in any way. So we accept only what is proper to maintain harmony and unity and to keep all in obedience to God” this is not as out of harmony with the Anglican and Lutheran position as the Westminister Confession’s “He may not be worshipped…any other way not prescribed in the holy Scripture.”


Heresy III: The Gospel


The eighteenth chapter of the Westminster Confession is entitled “Of Assurance of Grace and Salvation.” It consists of four paragraphs. The first of these observes that while unregenerate hypocrites may have “false hopes and carnal presumptions of being in the favour of God, and estate of salvation”, nevertheless true believers “may, in this life, be certainly assured that they are in the state of grace, and may rejoice in the hope of the glory of God, which hope shall never make them ashamed.” That this is true is clearly stated in the Scriptures (1 John 5:13). It is a Scriptural truth that had long been buried under legalistic late Medieval theology and the recovery of this truth lay at the heart of the much needed Reformation of the sixteenth century. However, in the second and third paragraphs the Westminster Confession retreats from the Scriptural truths of the Reformation and indeed from the Gospel itself: The second paragraph reads:

This certainty is not a bare conjectural and probable persuasion grounded upon a fallible hope; but an infallible assurance of faith founded upon the divine truth of the promises of salvation, the inward evidence of those graces unto which these promises are made, the testimony of the Spirit of adoption witnessing with our spirits that we are the children of God, which Spirit is the earnest of our inheritance, whereby we are sealed to the day of redemption.

The third paragraph begins by saying:

This infallible assurance does not so belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer may wait long, and conflict with many difficulties, before he be partaker of it: yet, being enabled by the Spirit to know the things which are freely given him of God, he may, without extraordinary revelation in the right use of ordinary means, attain thereunto.

If the second paragraph had ended with the words “the divine truth of the promises of salvation” it would have been perfectly sound. It did not end there, however, and by making the “inward evidence” part of the foundation of assurance in addition to the truth of God’s promises, hopelessly confuses the objective basis of assurance with its subjective experience. Consequently, the Confession proceeds to separate assurance from faith, in direct contradiction to Scripture (Hebrews 11:1), the teachings of Dr. Martin Luther, John Calvin, the sixteenth century English Reformers, as well as all of the Lutheran Confessions, the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism. (13)

The Reformers knew that a true and infallible assurance of salvation could only be built upon ground that is firm, solid and unmovable and must therefore be founded upon the Gospel promises of salvation alone. The believer is not to look inward at his own faith, feelings, works, life, and experience, all of which vary, for evidence of his salvation, but to look outward through his faith to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to find his assurance there. His subjective experience of this assurance is his faith in the promises of the Gospel, that is to say his taking those promises to himself as being true on the grounds of the infallible reliability of the God Who made them. It is not a feeling, an emotional experience, or a conclusion to be arrived at through self-examination and reasoning. It is taking God at His Word, i.e., faith. This is what the Reformers meant when they said that assurance is the essence of saving faith. It did not mean that the believer’s experience of assurance could never be clouded by doubt, but that the only sound way to dispel those clouds is by looking outward at Jesus Christ, as He is presented to us in the Gospel, and never inwardly at ourselves. The inner witness of the Holy Spirit is not a ministry of providing additional, internal evidence of our salvation but of establishing, strengthening, and supporting our faith in Jesus Christ through the means of the Gospel.

By retreating from this doctrine, the Westminster Confession retreated from the Gospel itself. The New Testament Gospel, properly understood, is exactly what its name in both English and Greek suggests. (14) It is not a set of instructions or commandments that we follow in order to save ourselves. It is God’s good news or glad tidings to a world of men and women lost in their sins and trespasses about how He has given them a Saviour Who has done everything necessary to save them. It is all about Jesus, (15) Who He is - the Christ, the Son of the Living God (John 20:31), and what He has done - died for our sins, was buried, and rose again the third day (1 Corinthians 15:1-8). In the Gospel, justification (being proclaimed righteous in the court of divine justice) and everlasting life are proclaimed to be gifts, given in Christ freely to everyone who believes in Him (Jn.3:14-18 4:7-26, 5:24, 6:27, 29, 35-40; Rom 3:24-26, 4:3-5, 6:23; Eph. 2:8-9). The Gospel presents a triumphant Saviour, Who has accomplished a finished salvation, that is sure and certain, to the sinners whom it invites to trust that Saviour. It is a perversion of that Gospel to tell people that they must look partly to Christ, and partly to something in themselves, in order to find peace and hope. (16)

Conclusion

In the first two of the heresies we have looked at, Puritanism’s Westminster Confession took the teachings of the sixteenth century Reformers, that the ecclesiastical books from the LXX should not be appealed to in order to establish doctrine and that doctrine was to be established on the authority of Scripture alone, to extremes that were much further than the sixteenth century Magisterial Reformers were willing to go, by removing the ecclesiastical books from the Bible altogether, and compromising Christian liberty by insisting that everything be removed from Christian worship as popish, man-made inventions, that was not specifically authorized by Scripture even if it was not forbidden in Scripture either. In the third of the heresies, the Puritan Confession stepped backward from the Reformation into the darkness of legalistic uncertainty against which Luther and Calvin had protested.

(1) The Second London Confession of 1689, that is, that replaced the London Confession of 1644 which predated the Westminster Confession by two years. The Congregationalists had modified the Westminster Confession to incorporate their views of church government in the Savoy Declaration (1658), the Second London Confession modified it further to incorporate the Baptist view of baptism. In North America, the Philadelphia Confession of Faith of 1742 was a reissue of the Second London Confession, with two new articles, and thus also a slightly revised version of the Westminster Confession.

(2) In the essay “What Books Make Up the Bible?”: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.ca/2018/03/what-books-make-up-bible.html

(3) After the English Civil War, the murder of King Charles I, the interregnum and the despotic dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell, and the Restoration of the monarchy and Church of England, the Puritan side in these conflicts developed into the Whig party in Parliament, the first liberal party, whereas the Royalists became the Tories.

(4) For the last thousand years, of course, the Eastern churches have disagreed that the Western churches hold to this kind of orthodoxy, and vice-versa, each regarding the other as being in excommunicable heresy. The disagreement is over a difference between the Greek and Latin texts of the second Creed. It does not pertain to any of the matters we will be looking at here however.

(5) This is the true meaning of sola Scriptura – “by Scripture alone.” The idea that Scriptures can and should be interpreted privately without regard to the Creeds, the ecumenical Councils, and the teachings of the Fathers and Doctors of the church, is more properly called “solo Scriptura”. The former is the doctrine of orthodox Protestants, the latter of radical Protestant extremists.

(6) The term Apocrypha dates back to the early church, and the Westminster Confession’s statement would be correct if it were referring to the same books the Church Fathers were talking about. The Church Fathers, however, used the term to refer to a completely different class of writings.

(7) Tobit, Judith, I and II Maccabees, Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon, and the books that are called III and IV Esdras in Bibles in which Ezra and Nehemiah are titled I and II Esdras, and I and II Esdras in the Bibles that use the titles Ezra and Nehemiah.

(8) The Song of the Three Children, the story of Susannah and the Elders and the story of Bel and the Dragon, from the Book of Daniel, additional chapters to the Book of Esther, the Prayer of Manasseh which is appended sometimes to II Chronicles and sometimes to the Psalms in ancient manuscripts, Baruch which was considered part of the Book of Jeremiah in the first few centuries of the Church but was later treated as a separate book, and the Epistle of Jeremiah.

(9) As discussed in my previous essay, referenced above in footnote 2, this was originally a regional viewpoint in Alexandria, Egypt, of which St. Athanasius was the most orthodox voice, but which later found limited support outside Alexandria in St. Jerome, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, and Rufinus of Aquileia.

(10) Note the very different tone of Article 6 of the Belgic Confession. “The church may certainly read these books and learn from them as far as they agree with the canonical books” is not of the same spirit as “therefore are of no authority in the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved, or made use of, than other human writings.”

(11) Richard Hooker, Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie, Book III, xi, 13.

(12) Article XX of the Thirty-Nine Articles and Article XV of the Augsburg Confession.

(13) Article IV of Luther’s Augsburg Confession reads “Also they [the “our churches” mentioned in Article I - GTN] teach that men cannot be justified before God by their own strength, merits, or works, but are freely justified for Christ's sake, through faith, when they believe that they are received into favor, and that their sins are forgiven for Christ's sake, who, by His death, has made satisfaction for our sins. This faith God imputes for righteousness in His sight.” Philip Melanchthon, commenting on this Article in his Defense of the Augsburg Confession, wrote: “But that faith which justifies is not merely a knowledge of history, [not merely this, that I know the stories of Christ's birth, suffering, etc. (that even the devils know,)] but it is to assent to the promise of God, in which, for Christ's sake, the remission of sins and justification are freely offered. [It is the certainty or the certain trust in the heart, when, with my whole heart, I regard the promises of God as certain and true, through which there are offered me, without my merit, the forgiveness of sins, grace, and all salvation, through Christ the Mediator.]” (brackets and parentheses are part of the translation) Similarly, in the Solid Declaration of the Formula of Concord we read: “This faith is a gift of God, by which we truly learn to know Christ, our Redeemer, in the Word of the Gospel, and trust in Him, that for the sake of His obedience alone we have the forgiveness of sins by grace, are regarded as godly and righteous by God the father, and are eternally saved.” (III.x) The Lutheran tradition never departed Luther’s teachings on this in the way that Puritanism and the Westminster Confession departed from Calvin’s. Therefore we find the same equation of faith and assurance in C. F. W. Walther’s The Proper Distinction Between Law and Gospel, (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1928), Francis Pieper’s 4 volume Christliche Dogmatik, (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1917-1924), John Theodore Mueller’s 1 volume Christian Dogmatics, an epitome of Pieper’s work published in English by the same publisher in 1934, and Robert D. Preuss’s Getting into the Theology of Concord (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1977). That John Calvin agreed with the Lutheran position is attested in numerous places in his own writings. In the Institutes of the Christian Religion, he famously wrote “In one word, he only is a true believer who, firmly persuaded that God is reconciled, and is a kind Father to him, hopes everything from his kindness, who, trusting to the promises of the divine favor, with undoubting confidence anticipates salvation” (III.ii.16) Similarly, in his Commentary on 2 Corinthians, he writes “In the second place, it serves to prove the assurance of faith, as to which the Sorbonnic sophists have made us stagger, nay more, have altogether rooted out from the minds of men. They charge with rashness all that are persuaded that they are the members of Christ, and have Him remaining in them, for they bid us be satisfied with a “moral conjecture,” as they call it — that is, with a mere opinion so that our consciences remain constantly in suspense, and in a state of perplexity. But what does Paul say here? He declares, that all are reprobates, who doubt whether they profess Christ and are a part of His body. Let us, therefore, reckon that alone to be right faith, which leads us to repose in safety in the favor of God, with no wavering opinion, but with a firm and steadfast assurance.” Amusingly, it is in his remarks on 2 Corinthians 13:5 that this is found. This verse was and is a favorite proof-text of the Westminster Puritans and the vast majority of theologians who would identify as “Calvinist” for the idea that believers need to be constantly examining themselves for evidence of their salvation. Calvin himself, understood correctly, that in this verse St. Paul was calling on his readers, not to look for evidence of their salvation in themselves, but to look to their own saving faith as evidence of the work of God in his, that is to say, St. Paul’s, ministry. The idea that we must look to ourselves for evidence of our own salvation was condemned by Calvin, who, in arguing against “semi-Papists” who taught that we must ever alternate between hope and fear, as we alternately look at Christ and ourselves, insisted that “If you look to yourself damnation is certain” and that we ought only to consider ourselves in our union with Christ. (Institutes, III.ii.24) In another famous passage from his Institutes he declared “But if we are elected in him, we cannot find the certainty of our election in ourselves; and not even in God the Father, if we look at him apart from the Son. Christ, then, is the mirror in which we ought, and in which, without deception, we may contemplate our election.” (III.xxiv.5) The Heidelberg Catechism is in full agreement with Luther and Calvin. Its answer to Question 21, “What is true faith?” is: “True faith is not only a sure knowledge by which I hold as true all that God has revealed to us in Scripture; it is also a wholehearted trust, which the Holy Spirit creates in me by the gospel, that God has freely granted, not only to others but to me also, forgiveness of sins, eternal righteousness, and salvation. These are gifts of sheer grace, granted solely by Christ’s merit.” Nor is there any departure from this doctrine in the Belgic Confession. The Canons of the Synod of Dort (1618-19) however, depart from the consensus of Lutheran and early Calvinist orthodoxy in the same way the Westminster Confession does. For an excellent discussion of how this deviation from Reformational orthodoxy took place see R. T. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). For a presentation and defense of the original Reformation doctrine against the Puritan heresy written from a Calvinist viewpoint see Prof. David J. Engelsma, The Gift of Assurance, (South Holland, Illinois: Evangelism Committee of the Protestant Reformed Church, 2009). Engelsma aptly condemns the Puritan heresy in the following words: “The Puritan doctrine of assurance is a form of salvation by works. A doctrine of works is necessarily also a doctrine of doubt.” (p. 12)

(14) Gospel is a contraction of the Old English “godspel”, formed from adding good (originally spelled with one long o) to spel, which meant story, message, or tidings. The Greek εὐαγγέλιον is formed the same way and with the same meaning.

(15) When John the Baptist and Jesus Himself preached a message they called a Gospel the content of that message was “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand”. This version of the Gospel was addressed to national Israel and meant that the Kingdom of God promised in the Old Testament prophets had finally arrived. This too, was all about Jesus because it was in the Person of Jesus, as Christ the King, that the Kingdom of Heaven was present.

(16) In Westminster Puritanism the “decisionism” that pervades contemporary evangelicalism has its genesis. While the immediate ancestor of evangelical decisionism is the nineteenth century American evangelist Charles Finney, whose teachings the Puritans would have – rightly – regarded as hopelessly tainted with Pelagianism, Puritanism itself took the first step in transforming saving faith from the receptive response to the Gospel of simple belief or trust into an act of the will. Hence their departure from the Reformers on the matter of assurance. In Puritan doctrine, saving faith was not distinguished from other faith merely by its object, Jesus Christ as presented in the Gospel. It also differed from ordinary belief, according to the Puritans, by including the element of repentance, which they defined as the sinner’s decision to abandon his sinful ways and to obey God’s commandments. This was a compound error. It confused both repentance and faith with their results, and reverses the Reformers’ teaching about repentance and faith, namely that it was the presence of faith that made the difference between saving and non-saving repentance rather than the other way around. In Luther’s theology, repentance could refer either to contrition, which was not necessarily saving, or the entirety of conversion which included both contrition and faith in Jesus Christ. Apart from faith in the Gospel, contrition could not save. Furthermore, contrition was not an act of the will. It was the realization that one’s sins had earned for one’s self the just condemnation of God and was itself a product of believing God, in this case believing what He says in the Law. The Law, properly used, was an instrument of grace, preparing men for the reception of the Gospel, by destroying their confidence in their own goodness and revealing to them their hopeless lost estate of sinfulness and therefore their need for the salvation proclaimed in the Gospel. Contrition, by itself, was a repentance that could not save, because salvation is proclaimed in the Gospel of Jesus Christ and received by faith in that Gospel, not by faith in the Law. It was the addition of faith in Jesus Christ as revealed in the Gospel, that turned contrition into saving repentance, i.e., conversion. The hymn writer, John Newton, described the way God’s grace works through the Law and Gospel to produce conversion in the famous words “’twas grace that taught my heart to fear [contrition produced by the Law], and grace my fear relieved [faith produced by the Gospel].” Conversion, with its two elements of contrition and faith, was not a term limited to the initial reception of salvation, as it usually is in contemporary evangelicalism, but referred to the ongoing ministry of the Law and Gospel in the hearts of believers throughout their lives, and the moving of the will to abandon sin and obey God’s commandments was not part of conversion, but its outcome. If the Gospel promises do not speak to the impenitent, as the Reformers taught, this was not because the decision to change one’s ways was either a co-condition with belief of receiving salvation or a part of saving faith, but because impenitence, the stubborn refusal to consider changing ones ways, comes from self-satisfaction, the considering of self to be good enough and not needing change, which attitude contradicts the message of both the Law and the Gospel. Such self-satisfaction and confidence in one’s own goodness had to be broken down in the heart before faith in the Gospel could form there. The Reformers warned, however, against the danger of placing faith in our own contrition that ought to be placed in Christ alone. See Dr. Martin Luther, Prelude on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, (1520), in particular the section on the Sacrament of Penance. Note especially “Beware, then, of putting your trust, in your own contrition and of ascribing the forgiveness of sins to your own sorrow. God does not have respect to you because of that, but because of the faith by which you have believed His threatenings and promises, and which wrought such sorrow within you. Thus we owe whatever of good there may be in our penance, not to our scrupulous enumeration of sins, but to the truth of God and to our faith. All other things are the works and fruits of this, which follow of their own accord, and do not make a man good, but are done by a man already made good through faith in the truth of God” (4:9) See also Preuss’s excellent summary of this subject in Chapter XII, “The Work of The Law and Gospel: Repentance”, pages 62-63 of Getting Into the Formula of Concord.

Thoughts on the Times

Smoking Stupidity

The solons who govern the city of Winnipeg in which I reside have, in their inscrutable wisdom, ruled, that as of April 1st, no one is to be allowed to smoke in outdoor patios where food and beverages are served. Although set to come into effect on April Fool’s Day, sadly, this fascist bylaw, is no joke. This latest and most absurd assault, in the neopuritan war on tobacco, is, like previous ones, based on the myth of harmful and deadly second-hand smoke. Undoubtedly, many if not most of the dingbats championing this ban are the same people applauding the federal Liberals’ decision, also coming into effect this year, to legalize the recreational smoking of the flowers and leaves of non-industrial hemp. Tobacco smoking can over time be damaging to the health of the body. The risk is much higher for cigarette smokers than for those who smoke tobacco the way God intended it in pipes and cigars, although this distinction and difference means nothing to the Mrs. Grundys of the Winnipeg City Council. Cannabis smoking damages the health of the mind. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Heed my advice if you wish to stay sane;
If you smoke, smoke Old Toby and not Mary Jane.

Remember S. Charles, King and Martyr

Yesterday was the Feast of King Charles the Martyr, murdered by the regicidal and heretical, Puritan sect 369 years ago. The December 2017 edition of the American Region Edition of SKCM News, the Magazine of the Society of King Charles the Martyr, contains this item:

BBC History magazine has published a seventeenth-century recipe for drinking chocolate. Charles I enjoyed the beverage, but Oliver Cromwell banned it, deeming it sinful. (p. 3)

Yet further evidence, as if more were needed, that Puritanism is evil. In addition to being Pharisees, the Puritans were also Philistines and in the Interregnum, they broke up King Charles’ impressive collection of art and sold most of it off. The Telegraph reports that with the help of the Royal Martyr’s namesake, the present Prince of Wales, the Royal Academy of Arts has reassembled the collection for the first time in almost four centuries, for a special show commemorating the Academy’s 250th anniversary.

Some Quotes from a Church Father

St. Irenaeus was a second century Church Father. He was born and raised in Smyrna, in what is now Turkey, when St. Polycarp, who had been the disciple of St. John the Apostle, was bishop there. Later he served, first as presbyter (priest) then as bishop, in what is now Lyon in France. He is most remembered as a defender of Apostolic orthodoxy against the various Gnostic sects that taught that the God of the Old Testament Who created the heavens and the earth was an inferior deity, the Demiurge, and not the Father of the New Testament. Eric Voegelin argued, in The New Science of Politics, that in Calvinist Puritanism, Gnosticism had been revived and had evolved into the spirit of the Modern Age.

St. Irenaeus wrote a five-book treatise against the Gnostics which in Latin is titled Adversus Haereses. The first book outlines the teachings of several varieties of Gnosticism, focusing primarily on the Valentinian sect. In the second paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of this book can be found this remark about a different Gnostic sect, the followers of Saturninus:

Many of those, too, who belong to his school, abstain from animal food, and draw away multitudes by a feigned temperance of this kind.

Later, of yet another Gnostic sect, the Encratites, he writes:

Some of those reckoned among them have also introduced abstinence from animal food, thus proving themselves ungrateful to God, who formed all things. (I.28.1)

Sadly, there has been a great deal of ignorance of and indifference to the Patristic writings among Western Protestants for the last century or so which perhaps explains the revival and popularity of the Gnostic heresy of vegan vegetarianism in our day and age.

A Quote From Our Friends Down Under

The Australian traditionalist and reactionary group Sydney Trads, in its “The Year in Review: 2017, Year of the Hate Hoax, the Heckler’s Veto and the Persecuted ‘Oppressor’”, included the following:

2017 was the year of Schrodinger’s ethnicity: Whites apparently exist as an identifiable category if they are being attacked, mocked, ridiculed or blamed for something, but also do not exist as a legitimate category of self-identification when a representative defends their interests as a group.

That is liberalism’s essential self-contradiction on race all summed up in a nutshell. Nicely done.

Justin Trudeau’s Nightmare

In the 1860s, the Fathers of Confederation formed a new country out of the provinces of British North America, giving it the title of Dominion and the name of Canada. The new country was to be a federation of provinces, with a parliamentary government modeled after the Westminster parliament, under the monarchy shared with Great Britain and the rest of the British Empire. The Fathers of Confederation looked to the federal system to overcome the difficulties of British Protestants and French Catholics living together in one country and to the monarchy as the source of continuity and unity, envisioned the evolution of the British Empire itself into a federation in which Canada would play a senior role, and tried to protect their country from the gravitational pull of the republic to their south with a national economic program of protective tariffs and internal trade facilitated by the construction of a transcontinental railroad. From that time to today, the Liberal Party of Canada has been the anti-Confederation party, the party that has sought to belittle the accomplishments of the Fathers of Confederation and Canada’s Loyalist heritage, to line the pockets of its financial backers through increased trade with the United States up to the point of continental economic integration, to weaken our parliamentary constitution and give autocratic power to the Prime Minister and Cabinet, to replace our traditional national symbols with ones of their own manufacture and to seriously undermine our traditional Common Law rights and freedoms. The Liberal Party found out in 1891 and again in 1911 that presenting their naked agenda to Canadians at election time was a losing strategy and evolved the strategy of pandering and grievance mongering that worked much better for them in the twentieth century. The strategy consists of telling identifiable groups that the Old Canada of Confederation had treated them unfairly but that if they would give their support to the Liberals, the Liberals would fix the situation and give them a bag of taxpayer-supplied goodies.

At first it was French Canadians that Liberals focused on, telling them that all the Britishness of the Canada of a Confederation was an unfair reminder of their defeat at the Plains of Abraham. This was nonsense – French Canadians knew full well that the protection of the British Crown had secured their language, religion, and culture for them when the Puritan Americans had wanted to take them away from them and their leaders were fully involved in the Confederation talks, helping shape the Dominion. The Liberal strategy had an unintended consequence – the emergence of the Quebec nationalist separatism that threatened to divide the country.

When this happened the Liberals adjusted their strategy. They now told a broad, “rainbow coalition” of different races, religions, and ethnic groups that they had been unfairly “excluded” from the Old Canada of Confederation, but would receive redress in the New Canada of the Liberal Party. To ensure that the coalition was as large as possible they revamped the immigration system, bringing in the race-neutral points system of 1965 as our “official” immigration policy, but this was merely a cover for their true policy of exploiting the loopholes to the points system (the largest of these being “family reunification”) to make Canada as ethnically diverse as possible as quickly as possible. They, of course, silenced anybody who pointed out the obvious drawbacks to this by calling him a “racist.”

This was done largely during the premiership of Pierre Trudeau. Now, in the premiership of Justin Trudeau, the Liberal coalition has been expanded to include minority sexual orientations and gender identities as well.

This strategy has always been a divisive one, first pitting French Canadians against English Canadians, then pitting a coalition of racial, religious, and ethnic minorities against European Christian Canadians, and maximizing diversity in total disregard to the fact that this is the way to generate ethnic and racial strife and conflict rather than harmony. It has been quite clear for some time now that the Liberal coalition cannot hold together for long. Earlier in the premiership of the second Trudeau it seemed likely that the breaking point would be between Muslims and the alphabet soupers, both of whose causes the Prime Minister was loudly, vehemently, and recklessly championing despite the obvious contradiction between the two. Now, however, a different fracture has become evident.

Earlier this month, the Prime Minister shamelessly turned the occasion of a young Muslim girl in Toronto, Khawlah Noman’s, claim that she had been attacked by a man who cut her hijab with scissors, into an opportunity to grandstand, get his name and picture in the press yet again, and lecture Canadians about how horribly “Islamophobic” we all are. It later turned out that, like the vast majority of highly publicized “hate crimes”, the incident was a hoax and had not occurred after all. Those who have been waiting for Trudeau to return to his taxpayer-funded soap box and eat crow have been listening to crickets chirp and watching the tumbleweeds drift by ever since.

This weekend, however, protests were held all across Canada by the Asian communities of cities such as Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, and Regina. It turns out that it was an Asian man whom the girl had falsely accused – a detail that was not widely reported by the press as it conflicts with their narrative in which bigotry and bigotry-inspired-violence are the exclusive domain of white, heterosexual, Christian males. The protests were aimed at Trudeau, insisting that the hoax, and his gullible swallowing it without waiting for a full investigation, constituted a “hate crime” against them. While I have little sympathy for the protestors, as their claim that they were being scapegoated and discriminated against is ludicrous seeing that the school division, the federal and provincial governments, the leaders of the opposition, and the news media all went out of their way to avoid drawing attention to the fact that the girl had accused one of their ethnicity, there is something deeply satisfying in seeing Trudeau’s coalition fall apart, and its members turn on him.

The Other War On Christmas

The war on Christmas, as that expression is usually understood, denotes the recent North American phenomenon in which progressive forces, in the name of diversity, tolerance, multiculturalism and all those other words which serve little other purpose than to hide the spirit of Stalinist totalitarianism behind a smiley face, have sought to re-brand Christmas into a generic “holiday season”. This war is conducted on many fronts and with varying degrees of intensity, ranging from the replacement of the traditional “Merry Christmas” greeting with “Happy Holidays” or something similar to the more heavy-handed attempts by lobby groups and civil liberties organizations to drive nativity scenes and any other Christmas imagery that has a direct and obvious connection to Christianity from the public square. Back in the 1990s, Peter Brimelow and John O’Sullivan began a war against Christmas contest in National Review, to see who could find the most outrageous example of an attempt to suppress the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and put a cheap generic imitation in its place and Brimelow has continued this tradition on his immigration reform website VDare. VDare has done an excellent job of documenting this sort of thing and so we will here turn to look at the other war on Christmas, i.e., that conducted by those who consider themselves to be the faithful, against Christmas, in the name of what they consider to be a sound interpretation of the Bible.



The roots of this other war on Christmas go back to the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. The Reformation began as a response to corruption in the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Leo X had authorized a campaign in which indulgences would be offered in return for funds that would go to the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica. This crass effort to sell the grace of God, offended Dr. Martin Luther of the University of Wittenberg, who challenged not only the vulgar indulgence peddling of Johann Tetzel, but the theology that lay behind the very idea of indulgences, on the grounds of the Pauline doctrine of justification by grace through faith, and, when summoned by the Church to defend himself against charges of heresy, insisted that it is to the Holy Scriptures, as the written Word of God, that the teachings and traditions of the Church must be held accountable.



Dr. Luther had nothing against Christmas, or against most of the traditions of the Church for that matter, but the ball he started rolling picked up momentum which carried it much further than he had ever intended. The Reformation divided Western Europe, in which nation-states had begun to develop in the earlier Renaissance period. Of these, for the most part those with a Latin-based language, like French, Italian, and Spanish, remained Roman Catholic while the national churches in the northern states, with German-based languages, tended to follow one or the other of the Protestant Reformers. There were Protestants, however, who were convinced that Luther, Calvin, and even Zwingle had not gone far enough, who condemned Christendom and its traditions and institutions as hopelessly corrupt, denouncing both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant national churches and who formed sects in which only those whom they considered to be pure in doctrine and lifestyle were welcome, regarding their own sects as God’s elect remnant, and everyone else as being corrupt.



Protestant sectarianism continued to develop further and further away from the mainstream of Christian tradition and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, radical Protestant sects developed, like the Rutherfordian Russellites and the Armstrongists which went so far as to reject Nicene Trinitarian orthodoxy itself, generally reviving one or another of the ancient heresies in the process. Both the Russellites and the Armstrongists condemned Christmas as a pagan invention of the “Catholic Church” which in their view was a counterfeit church created by Emperor Constantine in the fourth century.



This same anti-Christmas view had developed in radical Protestantism much earlier than this, however, by individuals who did not go so far as to reject the Trinity. In the sixteenth century, many of the English Protestants who had introduced moderate reforms in the Church of England during the reign of Edward VI, fled to Switzerland during the reign of the Catholic Mary, and there became much more radical in their Calvinism. When these returned to England, during the reign of Elizabeth I, who had restored the Edwardian reforms, they found these did not go far enough to please them. They demanded that every practice and institution from the pre-Reformation tradition of the Church for which they could not find a text in the Holy Scriptures commanding or authorizing its use be removed from the Church as superstition and popery. Against these fanatics, who came to be known as Puritans, the theologian Richard Hooker, defended the Elizabethan Church of England in his eight volume Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, arguing that the Church was at liberty to retain whatever traditional practices and institutions were not explicitly forbidden or condemned in the Holy Scriptures, a view far more compatible with the Pauline doctrine of Christian liberty than that of the Puritans, although the latter liked to think of themselves as the champions of Christian liberty against a “legalistic” Church. When neither Elizabeth I, nor her Stuart successors James I and Charles I, were willing to give in to their demands, they became increasingly seditious and in the 1640s their rebellion against King Charles I broke out into the English Civil War. They captured the king, had him put on trial before a Parliament from which all but their own supporters had been removed by military force, and executed him. They installed their general, Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector of Britain, whose tyrannical regime lasted until his death in 1658, shortly after which the crown was restored to Charles II.


During his mercifully brief dictatorship, Cromwell sought to remove everything that brought the slightest amount of colour, light, and earthly happiness into people's lives. He banned games and amusements on Sundays - the only day of the week people were not working from dawn to dusk, stripped the churches of ornamentation and beautiful organ music, forcing everyone to listen to horrible extra long sermons all Sunday morning, shut down theatres, and outlawed Christmas as pagan.

What was Cromwell's problem? Dr. Seuss once speculated concerning a fictional character who bore a remarkable resemblance to Cromwell "It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight. It could be his head wasn't screwed on just right. But I think that the most likely reason of all may have been that his heart was two sizes too small." In the case of the real-life, seventeenth century Grinch, Cromwell, whatever role his head and shoes might have played, the problem was that his heart, soul, and spirit had been shrunk, frozen, and killed by a form of extreme Calvinism that combined a Pharisaical spirit regarding religion with a philistine attitude to culture in what was the most repulsive and vile, hell-spawned theology to claim the name of Christianity in vain, until theological modernism began to be spewed forth from the German schools of higher criticism and the North American "social gospel" movement in the nineteenth century.


Unfortunately, the spirit of Cromwellian Puritanism has survived in the misguided zealots who come out every year at this time to inform us that the first five verses of Jeremiah 10 condemn Christmas trees, even though anyone with an IQ over thirty can see that the reference to removing a tree from the forest and decking it with silver and gold is describing the construction of an idol, not something that is purely celebratory and decorative in purpose and function. They also like to remind us that December 25th was the day in which the Romans celebrated the birth of Sol Invictus at the conclusion of the pagan festival of lights, Saturnalia, concluding through some leap of reasoning that it was therefore pagan and idolatrous for the Church to have set the feast day celebrating the birth of the Son of the Living God on this same day. This sort of reasoning, however, would also condemn St. John the Apostle for introducing Jesus as the "Logos" in his Gospel. The idea of the Logos, the Divine Word or Reason, comes right out of pagan Greek philosophy. As the Hellenized first century Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria pointed out, there was a parallel concept in the "memra", the personalized Word or Wisdom of God of the Targum, the Aramaic rabbinic commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures, and it is quite in keeping with the New Testament concept that Christ abolished the division between Jews and Gentiles in establishing His Covenant and His Church, to understand the Logos of the Gospel to draw from both the Greek and Jewish antecedents. Interestingly, the Jews then, as now, also celebrated a "Festival of Lights", around the winter solstice, commemorating the rededication of the Temple, after its desecration by Antiochus Epiphanes and the Maccabean revolt that ensued. Jesus, according to the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John, went to Jerusalem for this festival, also called the Feast of the Dedication or Hanukkah, even though this feast would be regarded as extra-scriptural by Puritan theology which does not accept the First and Second books of Maccabees as Holy Scriptures. If there is nothing wrong with St. John synthesizing the Greek logos and the Jewish memra in his doctrine of the pre-incarnate Christ as the Word Who was in the beginning with God, and Who was God, and through Whom all things were made, then there is nothing wrong with the Church deciding to celebrate the birth of God's Son, at a time of year which coincides with both the Roman and the Jewish festivals of lights. Indeed, it seems most appropriate.

There is a connection between the two wars on Christmas in that Puritanism, as Eric Voegelin pointed out, was an early stage of the modern revival of Gnosticism, of which the progressive liberalism of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries are later stages. You can read all about that in Voegelin's The New Science of Politics. The original Gnostics, I would note, were the anti-Christs that St. John referred to in his epistles, who denied the doctrine of Christ, specifically the Incarnation, which, of course, is the theological event commemorated in Christmas. The war on Christmas, in its Puritan and progressive liberal forms, is ultimately a war on the Apostolic doctrine of Christ as defended and articulated by the orthodox in the Trinitarian confession of the Council of Nicaea.

So, let me conclude by wishing you all a very Merry Christmas in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Puritanism, Theocracy, and Social Conservatism

Was Canada a theocratic state, scarcely different from the Ayatollah’s Iran, until 2005?

That does not sound like a description of the Canada of ten years ago as I remember it, nor can I think of anyone who was alive and living in Canada back then who does remember it that way. There are those, however, who appear to be suggesting that such was the case.

That was the year that Parliament, led by the Liberal government of Paul Martin, passed the Civil Marriage Act that made “marriages” available to same-sex couples across Canada. This had more or less been accomplished by the courts on a province-by-province basis in the year or two preceding the bill which standardized it. It was, of course, a controversial move - both on the part of the courts and Parliament – and remains so to this day. Many who opposed this change being made would like to see it reversed today. Progressives who supported the change have been known to describe the position of their opponents as theocratic.

Now think about that for a second. If it is theocratic to take the position that marriage is a union of a man and a woman, that it was wrong to re-define it otherwise, and that it ought to be changed back, then this means that our country was a theocracy for most of its history, up until about ten years ago. Similarly, if it is theocratic to say that abortion is murder and ought to be against the law, then our country was theocratic until 1988, especially prior to 1969.

Canada, of course, was not a theocracy prior to these changes, nor has she ever been a theocracy. A theocracy is a form of government in which a deity is the acknowledged head of state, the priests are the ruling class, and laws of religion are also the law of the land. Canada’s head of state is Queen Elizabeth II and neither we nor Great Britain have ever regarded her or her predecessors as a divine being in the way the Japanese used to think of their emperors or the Roman Empire her Caesars. Clergy may run for public office in Canada, have often done so and have often been successful, but nobody holds public office here by right of being a priest. The law of the land consists of the Constitution of Canada, the Common Law, and laws enacted by Parliament. Since we are not now and never have been a theocracy it is therefore not theocratic to oppose the sweeping changes to the traditional moral, social, and cultural order of Canada of the last half century and to seek to undo those changes.

Another accusation, similar to that of theocracy, that is frequently levelled at those who remain loyal to the old, traditional social, moral, and cultural norms is that of Puritanism. This charge often comes from the left wing of conservatism, from those who would consider themselves to be “progressive conservatives” and who, knowing a little bit about the history of English conservatism know that the Puritans were the radical enemies of the Tories or conservatives in the seventeenth century. What this accusation really means, therefore, is that those who oppose changes such as liberalized abortion laws and the redefinition of marriage and are therefore thought of and think of themselves as “social conservatives” are not true to conservative tradition and principles.

What this fails to take into proper consideration is the nature of the conflict between the Tories and the Puritans. It was hardly the case that the Puritans wanted a Christian society based upon the teachings of the Bible whereas the Tories were defending a secular order in which Church and State were kept rigorously separate. The Tories fought on behalf of European Christendom’s traditional alliance of throne and altar – or at least the modern English variation of this alliance that had come out of the English Reformation and the Elizabethan Settlement of the sixteenth century. That is about as far from secularism as you can get!

The English Reformation had begun with an Act of Parliament that declared the king to be the highest earthly authority over the Church in England which was, of course, the same thing as declaring that the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, had no authority over the English Church. This ultimately had the effect of breaking the communion between Canterbury and Rome, and the Church in England became the Church of England. The Elizabethan Settlement at the end of the sixteenth century was the official answer to both Roman Catholics who sought to put the English Church back under papal authority – and had briefly succeeded in the reign of Mary I – and strict Calvinists who wanted a more thorough Reformation that would strip the English Church of every last vestige of Catholicism. The Settlement declared mandatory attendance at the services of the Church of England, which Church was given a moderate Calvinist confession in the Thirty-Nine Articles, and which would conduct its services in the English vernacular, but which would retain its Catholic hierarchy and structure and as much of its rituals, ceremonies, and traditions as were consistent with its Protestant confession. The Calvinists who wished for a more thorough Reformation were the Puritans.

One thing the Church of England retained from the pre-Reformation tradition was the traditional Christian understanding that in the here and now we are living in exile from Paradise and will not be restored to Paradise until the Second Coming of Christ brings history to an end. In the here and now the taint of Original Sin will always be with us, and so, to meet human needs that arise out of Sin, God has appointed the civil government and the Church to two distinct and limited roles. To meet our need for protection from the violence of Sin in others, the civil government has been appointed to the task of passing and enforcing laws against evil acts like murder and theft. To meet our need for confession and forgiveness of Sin in ourselves, the Church has been appointed to proclaim in Word and Sacrament the forgiveness of God given to us in the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ. In this traditional understanding it was recognized that these were limited roles and that neither of these institutions had either the ability or the responsibility to do what only Christ Himself will do at His Second Coming – restore Paradise.

The Puritans rejected this sensible and traditional way of looking at things. Their doctrine taught them to look upon the king and the priestly hierarchy of the Church as tyrants colluding together in the oppression of the people and to consider themselves to be God’s chosen, godly, few, called upon either to separate from the irredeemable corruption of Church and State or to wage war against it and establish the Kingdom of God on earth. They rejected the tradition of understanding and teaching the Scriptures that had developed from the Church Fathers to the Reformation as being a construction of the conspiracy between king and priest and substituted for it a demagogic method of interpreting the Scriptures in which every condemnation of the enemies of God was applied to the king and priest while every promise to God’s holy elect was applied to themselves.

This doctrine was a tree that bore much fruit, none of it good. The Puritans became politically seditious, going to war with the king and committing regicide in the 1640s, and later leading the republican revolution in the American colonies in the 1760s. They rejected the tradition of Christian liberty that had been built on the foundation laid by St. Paul in his epistles, in which Christians were free do whatever was not explicitly condemned as a sin in Scriptures and thus had liberty in matters of food and drink. It is place they recreated the ethical system of the Pharisees, placing excessive emphasis upon Sabbath keeping, and railing against games, dancing and other “amusements” which no Scripture condemns either explicitly or by general principle, while justifying, for the sake of the merchant trader class from whom they drew their numbers, the grasping rapacity which is both explicitly and repeatedly condemned in Scriptures. Hand-in-glove with the Puritans’ Pharisaism in morality went their Philistinism in art and culture. They objected strenuously to music and drama and when in power they closed the theatres, got rid of the art collection of King Charles I, and removed organs, tapestries, artwork, and everything of beauty that they thought detracted from their perverse ideal of “simplicity” in the churches.

In Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, the Elizabethan divine Richard Hooker defended the Church of England and the Elizabethan Settlement from Puritan attacks. Puritanism reduced to the idea that whatever in the tradition of Christendom could not be shown to be commanded by the Bible must be eradicated and forbidden. Hooker argued instead, for the principle that everything in the tradition of Christendom that could not be shown to be forbidden by the Bible, ought to be permitted to be retained. While the Puritans condemned the king and the priests as being “tyrants”, their own system had far less room for freedom. Hooker wisely saw that tradition and freedom stood and fell together, along with the civil and ecclesiastical order. This insight became the keystone of the Tory position in their fight against Puritanism.

The Tories fought on behalf of tradition and freedom and the civil and ecclesiastical order. The Puritans fought to overthrow the civil and ecclesiastical order and regarded tradition as the enemy of freedom. So where is the spirit of Puritanism to be found today? Among those who continue to affirm the traditional social and moral standards that until very recently were recognized as being those of our own culture and society, who were raised themselves under those standards and who wish for their own children and grandchildren to be raised under the same standards? Or among the progressives who rail against tradition as the enemy of liberty, who have turned the public schools into indoctrination centres to re-educate children in case they have been taught the traditional social and moral standards by their parents and churches, who try to use the human rights tribunals to silence all dissent from their revolution, and who have radically changed the nature of one of the most basic of social institutions from what it has been from time immemorial to make it conform to a rigid doctrine of egalitarianism?