Canada’s Greatest Need

 

It is 1 July, the anniversary of the day in 1867 on which the British North America Act came into effect establishing the Confederation of the provinces of Canada – the single province into which Upper and Lower Canada had been united in 1841, now split into two provinces again - New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia into the Dominion of Canada.   Between 1867 and 1905, the provinces of Manitoba, British Columbia, Prince Edward Island, Saskatchewan and Alberta would be added to Confederation, with Newfoundland joining in 1949.   Also part of Canada since 1870 are the territories, originally all the Northwest Territories, with Yukon becoming a distinct territory in 1898 and Nunavut much more recently in 1999.   Until 1982 the anniversary of our country was celebrated as Dominion Day, because it was the day Canada became a Dominion – a term our Fathers of Confederation chose themselves, out of the Bible, as a substitute for their original choice of title “Kingdom” - and which became the designation within the British Empire of a country under the reign of the shared monarch which governed herself through her own Parliament.   When the British Empire evolved into the British Commonwealth the term Commonwealth Realm took on the same meaning within the new arrangement but Canada is still designated a Dominion in what was renamed the "Constitution Act, 1867" in the same year that the holiday was renamed.   Although the change of the name of the founding document was accomplished legally – unlike the change in the name of the holiday which was snuck through Parliament on a hot summer’s Friday with less than a quorum present – traditionalists such as myself still call it the British North America Act, just as we continue to celebrate today as Dominion Day.

 

This year for Dominion Day we shall be looking at our country’s greatest need, something that while it would not make all of the problems that afflict Canada – social, economic, cultural, moral, political, etc. – go away, would provide a large degree of relief in many if not all of these areas.   No, I do not mean a change in our federal premiership for while undoubtedly the present Prime Minister has contributed significantly to making all of our problems worse for the last eight years, there is no guarantee that his successor and replacement would be much or any better.   Our greatest need is for something much deeper than that.  It is for spiritual and religious revival.

 

In North America the word “revival” has had certain associations since the eighteenth century.   Itinerant open-air preaching of the type John Wesley and George Whitefield specialized in, threats of hell-fire and damnation like in the sermons of Jonathan Edwards, all-week camp meetings, tents and the sawdust trail, coming forward to confess Christ and shake the hand of sensationalist and theatrical ball-player turned evangelist Billy Sunday, “I see that hand”, the uncompromising morality and theology of Bob Jones Sr., and most recently Billy Graham and “Just as I Am”.   All of these associations are the outward trappings of a kind of revival that centred around the conversion of either outright unbelievers or those whose Christianity had been merely nominal or formal to an active personal faith in Jesus Christ.   When used in this sense, revival so overlaps evangelism that the distinction between the two is in danger of being lost.   The two, however, are not the same and the difference is an important one.

 

Revival comes from the verb revive which literally means to live again or to bring back to life although we generally use it in the sense of restoring consciousness or energy rather than resurrection.   While passing from spiritual death to new life in Jesus Christ certainly fits the literal definition the concept of revival, which is derived from the Old Testament, is of the restoring to new life of God’s people rather than of individuals.   In the Old Testament, the idea of God’s people as a specific nation, Israel, and the idea of God’s people as a spiritual assembly, the Congregation of the Lord, were to a great degree interchangeable.   This is not the case in the New Testament, in which God’s people are the Church, a spiritual assembly drawn from every kindred, tribe, and nation in which the wall between Israel and the Gentiles has been broken down.   The New Testament is the substance, the Old is the shadow, and so on this side of the Cross and Empty Tomb, revival is primarily the revival of the Church rather than the national societies in which the Church is found.   Paradoxically, however, since the Church is a multi-national society, when revival comes to the Church in a particular national community, the nation experiences a renewal or awakening to some degree as well.

 

When I say, therefore, that revival is Canada’s greatest need, I mean that our country’s greatest need is for the Church to undergo a spiritual reawakening here that will spill over into a renewal of our general society.

 

A genuine spiritual awakening of the Church does not have to outwardly resemble the revivals of the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries.   Historically, revivals of this type have been more associated with American expressions of Christianity than with those in Canada although an examination of revivals in the two countries reveals that differences in regional culture are just as important as differences in natural culture in determining the shape of revival.  In the early eighteenth century, before the American and Loyalist traditions broke from each other, with the Loyalist merging with the French Canadian tradition to become the national tradition of the Dominion of Canada, the revival known historically as the Great Awakening took place in both the colonies of New England which would become the core of Yankee culture and in what would become the Maritime Provinces.     In New England the Great Awakening proved to be less a revival of Christianity – the Churches in which it occurred would apostasize into deism, liberalism, and Unitarianism in less than a century – than of Puritanism, the schismatic, extremist, form of Calvinism that spawned that trio of Modern Age evils, liberalism, Americanism and Communism.   This was not the case with the same revival in the Maritimes which remained Loyal.  The difference was, perhaps, due to the less stringently Calvinist character of the revival in the Maritimes.     The Wesleyan revival in England is often credited with having had the opposite effect of the Puritan revival in New England and sparing the United Kingdom from experiencing the sort of bloody, Puritan-inspired, proto-Communist revolution that introduced murderous totalitarian republicanism to France in the late eighteenth century.  In North America, however, in pre-Confederation days, the United States sponsored Methodist revivalist meetings in English Canada for the purpose of generating class strife and undermining the Loyalist establishment.   This undoubtedly added significantly to the suspicion of revivalism already held by the more traditional expressions of Canadian Christianity – French Roman Catholicism, English Anglicanism, and Scottish Presbyterianism – on the grounds that it was unbalanced and placed too much weigh on personal experience.   These suspicions were hardly unfounded.   While John Wesley and George Whitefield had laid an orthodox foundation for the revival movement in the eighteenth century, their influence was eclipsed in the nineteenth century by that of Charles G. Finney, a converted lawyer whose anything-but-orthodox theology resembled the early Church heresy of Pelagianism and who taught a rationalistic, mechanical, doctrine of revival in which it was the automatic outcome of following a prescribed method or technique, prompting B. B. Warfield to harshly, but not inaccurately, say of his theology that “God might be eliminated from it entirely without changing its essential character”.

That notwithstanding, the North American evangelistic style of revival is not entirely foreign to Canada.   The best known distinctive Canadian revival of this sort is likely the one that began in Saskatoon in October of 1971 when Bill McLeod, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist, invited twin evangelists Ralph and Lou Sutra to hold a week and a half of meetings.   By the end of the week the crowds coming to the meetings had swelled to the point that they surpassed the capacity of the Baptist building, were moved to a larger Anglican Church, then to the larger yet Christian and Missionary Alliance building, before the Saskatoon Centennial Auditorium with a capacity of over 2000 had to be rented.   The week and a half, of course, had to be repeatedly extended and in the end went for seven weeks in total.   The revival spread from Saskatoon to the Saskatchewan provincial capital of Regina, then here to Winnipeg, the provincial capital of Manitoba which was McLeod’s home town, eventually spreading across the prairies and into British Columbia.   The story of this revival was told at book length by Kurt E. Koch in Revival Fires in Canada (1973), then again by Saskatoon-born Erwin Lutzer in Flames of Freedom (1976).  Note that this revival began in the prairie province of Saskatchewan, spread east to the prairie province of Manitoba, and made it to the west coast but was largely a prairie phenomenon.   This further illustrates what was said previously about regional cultural differences being as important as national ones.   It does not mean that the prairie provinces are more “American” than the rest of Canada – as a lifelong Manitoban and a lifelong Loyalist Tory, I would very much resent such a suggestion.   The prairies, however, and the American Midwest, share elements of a regional culture that may explain why revivals of this particular form are more common in these regions than elsewhere in both countries.

 

The last century also saw a new branch spring from the roots of the older revivalism.  Pentecostalism was born from the Holiness movement, the branch of Wesleyanism that stressed the most unfortunate false doctrine of perfection in this life, in the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles that began in 1906.   This was a different type of revival that in one very limited sense was closer to the Scriptural concept of revival.   That sense is that it was primarily something that occurred among those who already professed Christian faith, rather than the mass evangelism of the unconverted.   The Holiness movement already taught the idea of a “second blessing” in which the Holy Ghost comes upon a Christian after conversion and eradicates the sin nature.  Pentecostalism modified this concept of a “second blessing” into one in which the Holy Ghost comes upon the individual Christian and bestows upon him the sign-and-wonder working power exercised by the Apostles in the early days of the Church, this “second blessing” – “third blessing” at first, because the original Pentecostals were still Holiness believers – manifesting itself in the gift of tongues and being identical in Pentecostal thought, albeit not in orthodox truth, with baptism of the Holy Ghost.    Since the Pentecostal movement split into multiple schisms pretty much from its inception some of which revived not Christianity but ancient heresies like Sabellianism, those of us who are skeptical towards identifying this as a genuine revival might be pardoned for so being.  The Pentecostal movement developed into a denomination – or rather class of denominations – of its own.  Later in the twentieth century the distinctive doctrines of Pentecostalism and, more relevantly the associated concept of revival, was borrowed by the Charismatic movement that at first was distinguished from Pentecostalism primarily by its taking place in other, more traditional and mainstream, denominations of Christianity.  Eventually it too produced new denominations and out of one of these, John Wimber’s Vineyard Movement which began as a schism from Chuck Smith’s Calvary Chapel, itself a schism from the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, a Pentecostal sect founded by the American celebrity female evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, a string of revivals of the Pentecostal/Charismatic type broke out in the mid-1990s.   One of the first of these, and the one which attracted such international attention that its name is sometimes used synonymously with this entire wave of revival, took place in the provincial capital of Upper Canada.   This was the “Toronto Blessing” that began in what was then called the Toronto Airport Vineyard in January of 1994.   These revivals proved controversial among Christians, even more so than previous versions of this phenomenon.  Hank Hanegraaff, director of the Christian Research Institute took the position that rather than being genuine movements of God they did more harm than good, a position he argued at book length in his 1997 The Counterfeit Revival.   James A. Beverley, a professor at Tyndale Seminary, took a more nuanced approach in his Holy Laughter and the Toronto Blessing: An Investigative Report (1995).   As for myself, I was in my last semester in high school when the Toronto Blessing started and by the time I started my theological studies in the fall of the same year it was spreading.   Here in Winnipeg the phenomenon was dubbed “Prairie Fire” and it was very much the talk of the campus at the time.   I was a skeptic then and am a skeptic now.   I do not mean that I question those who say they experienced God and grew closer to Him through this.   What I mean is that when I compare how revival supposedly manifested itself in the 1990s – laughing, barking like a dog, collapsing, shaking – with how it manifested itself in Saskatoon in 1971 – people coming to faith in Jesus Christ, confessing their sins to the very large congregation and asking for forgiveness, confessing their crimes to the police, abandoning divorce proceedings and restoring their marriages – my impression of what happened in the ‘90s is best expressed in the words of Canadian country and western superstar Shania Twain, “that don’t impress me much”.

 

Which brings me back to the point that led in to this discussion and comparison of these well-known Canadian examples of evangelical and Charismatic revivals.   The genuine spiritual awakening within the Christian Churches that is our country’s greatest need will if it comes not be limited to although it may include these evangelical types of revival.   In Lower Canada, the decline into its lamentable present condition of secularism, welfare-socialism, and a language-based nationalism that is needlessly hostile to the unity of the country and the interests of other Canadians was directly tied to the decline of Roman Catholicism in the province into a surface nominalism, both declines culminating in the “Quiet Revolution” of the 1960s.   Revival there would be more likely to take the form of a mass return of the province’s Roman Catholics to the authority, beliefs, ethical teachings and traditions of their Church.   It would be something along the lines of them all becoming SSPX Latin Mass types, probably sedevacantists too, and finally demanding and obtaining the excommunication of the Trudeau family if not demanding that the Trudeaus be turned over to the Holy Office or Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith or whatever name the Inquisition now goes under with the request that it go Medieval on their derrieres.  

 

The two largest Protestant denominations in Canada are according to the latest statistics still the United Church of Canada and the Anglican Church of Canada.   These are what have become of the two main Canadian Christian traditions other than French Roman Catholicism from before Confederation.   The United Church of Canada was formed in 1925 by the strange wedding of Presbyterianism with Methodism.   Until 1955 Canadian Anglicanism was still formally part of the Mother Church of the Anglican Communion, the Church of England, but in 1955 the Church’s ecclesiastical provinces in the Dominion of Canada were federated into the Anglican Church of Canada  in a process that rather resembled how the country was formed in Confederation.   That these are still the largest denominations other than the Roman Catholic Church may seem surprising to those familiar with the work in the sociology of religion done by the University of Lethbridge’s Reginald W. Bibby.   In a number of books, including Fragmented Gods (1987) and Unknown Gods (1993), Bibby has analyzed the decline of religion in Canada and one of his observations has been that Churches that remain conservative or orthodox retain their membership and even grow better than those that embrace liberalism.   Yet liberalism has so permeated the United Church that there is not much of anything else left and it has heavily infiltrated the Anglican Church as well although not quite to the same extent yet.   Part of the explanation, no doubt, is the gap between what people identify as their religion on surveys and their actual active involvement in the Church.   The vast majority of my relatives are either United Church or Anglican in affiliation but this does not mean that you will find most of them in the pew regularly or in some cases ever.   In one of Sir Kingsley Amis’ novels he says of a character that he always filled in the blank on forms for religion with “C of E” to indicate the Church whose door he never darkened and whose services he never attended.  This gap is much larger for the United Church and Anglican Church than for denominations in which liberalism is not such a problem.   Another part of the explanation is that conservative or orthodox Churches are divided over a large number of denominations no one of which is as large as the United or Anglican.

 

Liberalism in this context means a Church’s accommodation of her beliefs and teachings to ideas that spring from rationalist presuppositions that it is popularly but mistakenly assumed have been confirmed by science or some other form of Modern inquiry, the idea that science and Modern inquiry in general have the potential to confirm such presuppositions being itself a mistaken assumption.   It varies in extent and degree with the most severe being the kind that regards the supernatural or miraculous as primitive superstitious ideas that have been debunked by Modern technique and so rejects all the tenets of the Christian faith confessed in the ancient Creeds or reinterprets them in such a way that to confess them with the new interpretation would be to confess unbelief rather than faith.   It is a thought poison that kills Churches and the larger societies in which those Churches are found.   Since this is the disease killing the two Churches representing the Christian traditions other than the Roman Catholic that have played the most significant roles in our country’s history, the revival we need is a revival that brings these Churches back to life with an uncompromisingly orthodox adherence to and proclamation of essential Christian Truth against Modern and rationalistic ideas.

 

In the 1830s, the Church of England underwent a revival led by men seeking precisely this, to combat the encroaching influence of rationalism, Modernism, and liberalism.   This revival was very influential in pre-Confederation Canadian Anglicanism.   It began with a sermon entitled “National Apostasy” preached by the Rev. John Keble against the Reform Act from the University Pulpit at St. Mary’s, Oxford on 14 July, 1833.   It was spread through a series of “Tracts for the Times” published from 1833 to 1841.   The leaders of this revival, such as Keble, Edward B. Pousey, and John Henry Newman were associated with Oxford University.   Accordingly, the revival is known as “The Oxford Movement” or alternately the Tractarian Movement after the publications.   The Movement promoted primitive – in the positive sense of belonging to the early centuries of Christianity – orthodox Christianity, the practice of reading the Scriptures while sitting at the feet of the Fathers (1), frequent – and by this they meant daily not weekly – participation in Holy Communion, practical holiness, a renewed recognition of the authority established in the Church by Jesus Christ through His Apostles and that this and not that bestowed by the state is the Church’s true authority and establishment, and worshipping God liturgically in the “beauty of holiness” (Psalm 96:9).   Calvinists saw all this as a betrayal of the Reformation and were, unfortunately, given plenty of ammunition for making this accusation by Newman’s crossing the Tiber and receiving a cardinal’s cap.   They missed the point, as Calvinists usually do.   It was not the heritage of the Reformation, at least the English Reformation, that the Tractarians fought against but rationalism, liberalism, and Modernism, and they believed that the best way to combat these things was to renew their Church’s connection with the pre-Modern heritage and tradition of the entire Church.  

 

In Canada, the Right Reverend John Strachan who was consecrated the first Bishop of Toronto in 1839, while the Oxford Movement revival was underway, and who died the year of Confederation after a long career in which he arguably did more than any other single person to shape the form of Upper Canadian Anglicanism, was a man very much in sympathy with the Oxford Movement and expressed as much in his correspondence with John Henry Newman although strangely, considering his admirable and fierce opposition to Americanism, it was the Right Reverend John Henry Hobart, Episcopal Bishop of New York who had first influenced him in this direction before the Oxford Movement even began (Hobart died in 1830).   The Oxford Movement’s influence in Upper Canadian Anglicanism did not end with Bishop Strachan’s death but continued to spread.  John Charles Roper, who had studied in Keble College – founded in 1870 and named after John Keble – at Oxford, became the Professor of Divinity at Trinity College, the last of the many schools Bishop Strachan had founded, in 1886 and in this capacity promoted the vision of the Oxford Movement as he did as rector of the parish of St. Thomas.   He would later be consecrated Bishop of British Columbia before being translated to the See of Ottawa where he would serve for a quarter of a century and would become the Metropolitan Archbishop over the Ecclesiastical Province.   So yes, the Oxford Movement, the Anglican Catholic Revival, was very influential in the development of the Anglican Church of Canada and this influence can still be seen in the architecture, vestments, and practice of regular Communion even in parishes that would not wish to identify with the Oxford Movement.

 

The problem is that just as the sawdust trail, camp meetings, etc. were merely the outward trappings of the North American evangelistic revivals and not the inner essence which was the preaching of the Gospel and conversion of unbelievers, so the forms, rituals, etc. were the outward trappings of the Anglican Catholic Revival and not the inner essence, which was the renewal of the Church’s spiritual connection with the ancient, pre-Schism, Church to renew her to stand against the errors of Modernity.   I say this not to disparage these outward trappings – smells and bells are far more to my taste and liking than making “worship” as indistinguishable from a nightclub as possible, but because our  Anglican Church of Canada, I am afraid, has not been near as faithful to the inner essence of the Oxford Revival as it has to the outward trappings.   This is why our Church is in desperate need of the same kind of revival as is needed by the United Church – a revival of belief in the truths of Christianity as confessed in the ancient Creeds and taught by the Church Fathers rather than some watered down and explained away with rationalistic gibber gabber version of the same, and a revival of the courage to proclaim these truths, to proclaim Christ Crucified, in an uncompromising manner, rather than to preach social justice, recycling, cutting carbon emissions, the racist idea that racism is the worst of evils and that all whites are guilty of it and everybody else is the victim of it, gender ideology and the whole alphabet people agenda, and all the other garbage that apostate ministers fill their sermons with when they won’t preach Christ.  

 

Churches that preach every sort of liberal and left-wing clap trap imaginable but not Christ bleed members and die.  Their message does not meet the basic needs of the souls of men, it does not touch the human heart, and it does not have the blessing of the Holy Ghost.   When Churches commit suicide in this way, the larger society becomes increasingly secular.  When this happens, the country’s civil religion, for lack of a better expression, can become similarly corrupted, and a healthy patriotic respect for national traditions, institutions, and history be eroded and replaced with a cult of national self-loathing, endless apologies for the actions of our founders and past leaders as judged by the standards of today rather than their day, a disgusting violation of both the fifth and the ninth commandments in which our ancestors who are no longer around to defend themselves are defamed with an ugly lie in which the humanitarian educational efforts of the Churches and State are portrayed as “genocide”, and this sort of thing.

 

This is why a revival of sound, orthodox, Christianity in our Churches is what Canada needs the most.

 

Happy Dominion Day!

God Save the King!

 

(1)   This wording is not original with me.   Hans Boersma used a variation of it in a recent article, I have encountered other variations of it in the writings of Ron Dart, and I am fairly certain elsewhere, although exactly where eludes me at the moment.

 

What Would the Non-Jurors Do?

Rodney Howard-Browne is not exactly my idea of a sound theologian. Those who would have recognized his name prior to the events of this week would have remembered this South African born evangelist-pastor primarily as a leading figure in the “Laughing Revival” of the 1990s. A Canadian manifestation of this, the so-called “Toronto Blessing”, began in January of 1994, during my last semester of high school and was the subject of much discussion that fall when I began my theological studies in Otterburne. My attitude towards the phenomenon at the time could have been summed up in the words of Shania Twain “that don’t impress me much.” It has not changed much since.

That having been said, I must say that I felt a certain degree of admiration for Howard-Browne this week when I read about his having been arrested and charged with “unlawful assembly” for holding services in defiance of Hillsborough County, Florida’s “safer at home” order.

Note that I said “a certain degree of admiration”. It is not an unqualified admiration. I am not a believer in Henry David Thoreau’s doctrine of civil disobedience, nor do I hold in high esteem those practitioners of the same that have been elevated to sainthood if not apotheosized in the last generation or two, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

That having been said, the state has no legitimate authority to suspend worship services and tell Churches to close. Some might point to the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans, in which the Apostle enjoins us to be “subject unto the higher powers”, meaning the civil authorities, because they are “ordained of God” and the “minister of God to thee for good” as saying otherwise, but to do so would be to twist the meaning of the Scriptures. Does anyone seriously believe that St. Paul was telling the Church in Rome that if Emperor Nero ordered them to renounce their faith, disband, and never meet together as a Church again that they were to obey? Obviously that is not the case.

All across what used to be Christendom, Churches and sects are closed because an insane mass panic over the flu’s bigger, tougher, second cousin, twice-removed on its mother’s side has persuaded everyone to blindly trust politicians and public health officials, both of which groups are at the present high on the biggest power trip that I have witnessed in my entire life, and hence are completely unworthy of the trust they demand from us. Those politicians and public health officials have decided that to save us from the big, bad, coronavirus, they need to lock us in our houses, take away our basic freedoms of peaceful assembly, association, and religion, and dehumanize us by conditioning us to fear human contact and non-virtual social interaction. They are, in other words, doing evil of the kind and on the scale that is only ever done by those who are convinced that they are doing good.

There have been some “Christian” commentators who have spoken out in favour of the – hopefully – temporary closing of the Churches and sects. Rod Dreher, author of Crunchy Cons, How Dante Can Save Your Life, and The Benedict Option, who blogs at The American Conservative, has been commenting on the coronavirus for a couple of months now. His way of looking at the whole thing is very different from my own. He describes his approach as one of prudence rather than panic, although he has failed to convince me that the line between the cardinal virtue and the irrational, fear-driven, mob mentality falls where he thinks it does. Two weeks ago he expressed relief when his Eastern Orthodox Archbishop ordered the laity to stay away from the Liturgy, offering a justification from Eastern Orthodox theology that seems a bit bizarre when we consider that the lit in Liturgy comes from the same root as the word laity. I wonder if this was something like how the Anglican Church of Canada gave us a theological justification for Communion in one kind prior to the closing of the dioceses altogether even though this flatly contradicted Article XXX of the Articles of Religion. More recently he expressed his support for his Archbishop’s essentially cancelling Easter. Needless to say he does not think very highly of those pastors who have continued to hold services. He castigates Christians who argue that to refrain from our duty of coming together to worship as the Body of Christ during this pandemic is to allow ourselves to be governed by fear rather than to walk by faith, accusing them of being selfish and judgmental towards their brethren who support the anti-COVID measures, apparently without any sense of the irony of his own shrill, hysterical, self-righteous, and judgmental tone.

Dreher, who believes that “social distancing” and the other measures being imposed upon us to fight COVID are necessary, views the entire question as being that of a choice between human lives and the economy. Framed that way, the only moral answer to the question is to choose human lives. As I argued in my last two essays, however, this is the wrong way of framing the question. The non-economic cost of the anti-COVID measures needs to be factored into the equation. Instilling in people a fear of meeting with each other, shaking hands, hugging, and human contact in general is a way of killing social capital, robbing us of our sense of community. One would think that Dreher of all people, whose first book was very communitarian, would understand this point. The telephone, Skype, live-streamed liturgy, and other technological replacements for community are not adequate substitutes, especially not over extended periods of time. Conditioning the entire populace to look upon them as if they were is an extremely dangerous thing to do. Especially when this conditioning goes hand-in-glove with a request that we give up our basic freedoms of peaceful assembly, association, and religion. Moreover, it is quite evident that Dreher hasn’t got a clue about what the real cost of sacrificing the economy would be. As true as the words in the title he borrowed from Flannery O’Connor are, this is not a choice between poverty and death. It is a choice between the death of billions, which will be the Malthusian consequence of shutting down all but the “essential” sector of every national economy for too long, overloading that sector, causing it collapse under the strain, and creating a worldwide depression worse than that of the 1930s, and the death of the thousands or, at worst, millions who might die from COVID-19, apart from these measures. It is the choice, in other words, between what is potentially another Spanish flu and what could potentially be a global-scale Holodomor.

Given his point of view, it is perhaps understandable that Dreher has been taking the stance that Christians should regard the forsaking of Church assembly, voluntarily or involuntarily, as a self-denying sacrifice for the sake of others. I cannot help but wonder, however, what he would be saying if some world leader were to arise and tell us that the COVID-19 pandemic can be contained, but to do so we will all have to stay at home, except for essential purchases such as groceries, and that to ensure we do this everyone will be required to receive a mark on his right hand or forehead authorizing him to take part in permitted market transactions. Would he tell us it is our Christian duty to submit to the mark as a sacrifice to save lives or would he tell us, as St. John does, that anyone who submits to the mark will be permanently cut off from the Covenant of Grace?

Earlier this week, the Manitoba Public Health Officer ordered all “non-essential” services to close from April 1st to April 14th. The Right Reverend Geoffrey Woodcroft, Bishop of the Diocese of Rupert’s Land in a directive on March 31st, remarked that “While several social service agencies were exempt, Churches specifically are not exempt.” Services had already been suspended as of March 16th by an earlier directive from His Grace. Some parishes, including my own, had switched to online services, either live-streamed or pre-recorded until the lifting of the interdict. Whether even this, inadequate, substitute for gathering together and worshiping will be available during the next two weeks under the limitations of the new directive remains to be seen.*

I bring this up not to criticize my bishop but to draw attention to what is implied by the Manitoba provincial government’s order. If “non-essential” services must close, and Churches are not exempted from that, then Churches are clearly deemed to be “non-essential” by the government. This is not a point of view which orthodox Christians are allowed to share. In my last essay I pointed out that the government’s distinction between “essential” and “non-essential” when it comes to businesses is a fraudulent one and that it is even worse that the government is treating our fundamental freedoms as if they were “non-essential.” If it is not the state’s place to tell anybody that the business he depends upon for his living is “non-essential”, and it is not, and it is not the state’s place to tell us that our freedoms of assembly, association, religion, belief, etc. are “non-essential”, and it is not, it is certainly not the state’s place to tell us that Christ’s Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church is non-essential.

We live in an age in which our thinking about the proper authority of the Church and the state within their own spheres and in relation to each other has been fogged by the triumph of liberalism and its presuppositions derived from a secularization of the heretical view of Church and state held by the Anabaptists and the disestablishmentarian branch of Puritanism. This was not the case four, or even three, centuries ago.

In 1688, the Right Reverend William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, was imprisoned in the Tower of London by the order of King James II, along with Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wales, John Lake, Bishop of Chichester, William Lloyd, Bishop of St. Asaph, Jonathan Trelawney, Bishop of Bristol, Francis Turner, Bishop of Ely, and Thomas White, Bishop of Peterborough. The issue was that these prelates had refused to publish the king’s 1687 Declaration of Indulgence and had sent a petition to the king, explaining their opposition to it.

There were two elements to their opposition to the Declaration, its content and its legality. The Declaration relaxed the strictest of the Church establishment laws in two ways, first, by allowing private worship for Roman Catholics and Non-conformist Protestants, second, by suspending the Test Act, which required that all who hold public office belong to the Church of England. Today, most would find it difficult to understand why this was problematic, and regard it in a positive light, as moving towards freedom of religion. The second part, the suspension of the Test Act, was the reason why they viewed it so differently in the seventeenth century.

James II was a Roman Catholic. His father, Charles I, had been falsely accused by the Puritans in the English Civil War, of trying to bring the English Church back under the jurisdiction of Rome, as Mary Tudor had done. This, ironically, led to James becoming a Roman Catholic, because when the Puritans murdered his father after an illegal trial, he spent the interregnum in France where he was first exposed to and attracted to Romanism. He “crossed the Tiber” as the saying goes, during the reign of his brother Charles II. As king, he had the right to set aside the Test Act requirements for individuals. Suspending it entirely, however, was regarded as a step towards packing the government with Roman Catholics, as well as an illegal infringement on the rights of the Parliament that passed the Act.

The bishops were tried and acquitted. Parliament then invited William III, Prince of Orange, who had married James’ daughter Mary, to come over, depose his father-in-law, and take his place as king. This accomplished, Parliament then required the clergy of the Church of England to swear an oath of allegiance to the new king.

For five of the seven bishops – Lloyd (1) and Trelawney are the exceptions – as well as four other bishops, and over three hundred priests, this was a problem. If the king had overstepped his divine right by trying to overturn an Act of Parliament, Parliament had overstepped its authority by deposing the king. Furthermore, it had no right to command the clergy to commit an immoral act – to swear an oath, which contradicted the oath they had already sworn to James II and his heirs. They refused to swear the new oath, for which reason history remembers them as the “non-jurors”, and were deprived of their livings.

New bishops were appointed to their sees, turning what was already a political and a moral dilemma, into a theological one. The non-jurors maintained, and they had the weight of the consensus of Catholic antiquity behind them, that Parliament had no legitimate power to depose a bishop, that a bishop so deposed remained the legitimate bishop, and that the bishop put in his place was illegitimately consecrated and schismatic. George Hickes, who as a priest had refused the new oath, was later consecrated a bishop by the non-juring bishops, and become the de facto leader of the group after the death of Archbishop Sancroft, explained these principles at length in a posthumously published book entitled The Constitution of the Catholick Church and the Consequences of Schism. Briefly summarized, it was that the Church and the State were two distinct realms, whose membership overlapped, in the former of which the bishops were the governors and kings as members were subject to them, in the latter of which kings were the governors and bishops as members were subject to them, each government having its own sword to enforce its authority, the bishops having the power of excommunication, the king’s sword being somewhat more literal, but neither had the right to depose the other, or to intrude into the other’s sphere of authority.

The non-jurors had a much clearer understanding than the vast majority of people today, of the distinction between Royal authority, Parliamentary authority, and Ecclesiastical authority, and stood up for the rights of each when infringed upon by one of the others at the cost to themselves of prison, deprivation and poverty. What would they think of today’s totalitarian health bureaucrats ordering Churches to close and “Christian” writers like Dreher who cheer them on?

(1) There were two bishops named William Lloyd. The Bishop of Norwich by that name did become a non-juror, but he was not one of the seven who had signed the petition against the Declaration of Indulgence.

* Update: On April 1st, His Grace updated this directive. He began by saying "In light of further information received from Minister Friesen’s Office and interview on CHVN Radio, it is clear that live-streaming celebration of worship is permissible. I therefore encourage you to continue the practice of live-streaming as you were, because they offer a much needed pastoral response and relief to our people."