Christ is Still Victorious

J. Brandon Magoo, the decrepit old geezer who a few years ago under suspicious circumstances highly indicative of chicanery and perhaps a deal with Lucy the gender-confused devil, became the occupant of the building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW in Washington DC that has surprisingly not been renamed in one of the fits of anti-white hysteria that have marked the acceleration of Western Civilization’s descent into the final stages of Spenglerian winter, declared 31 March to be “Transgender Day of Visibility.”  Exactly why he thought this segment of the alphabet soup gang the visibility of which proportionate to its representation in the public has become comically excessive in recent years, needed such a day, escapes me.   Perhaps it is indicative of his eyesight having become so bad with age that he cannot see what is right before his nose.   Lest anyone think I am unfairly picking upon our neighbours to the south who are twice unfortunate, first in being saddled with an ungodly republican form of government, and second in having Magoo as their president, I will point out that the twit who has led His Majesty’s government as prime minister for the last nine years is just as bad and doesn’t have the excuse of extreme old age.  At any rate, Magoo’s choice of date looks very much like it was intended as a kick at his country’s Christians.   For this year, the most important festival of celebration in the Christian Kalendar fell on 31 March.   That is the annual celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ that is the Christian Passover.   In most countries it is called Pascha or some similar word derived from the Greek and Latin words for Passover.  In some countries, not all, with Germanic based languages – English developed out of Anglo-Saxon a dialect of German – it called Easter, Ostern, or some other such cognate, for which reason countries with Germanic languages are infested with the type of Hyper-Protestant who likes to spread the ridiculous conspiracy theory that the Church is not really celebrating the Resurrection on this day but rather worshipping some pagan goddess.   Twits like this would have a harder go at selling such tripe in countries that speak Greek or a Romance language.

 

It is rather amusing that these Hyper-Protestants are able to spin an elaborate conspiracy theory from what they think they know about the name of the festival.   In the lands where a variation of Eastern/Ostern became the popular name of the festival the Church had been celebrating as Pascha for centuries prior the name was taken from the month in which it often fell.   This is the month that we call April.   The Anglo-Saxons called it Eosturmonaþ. (1)   The Venerable Bede may or may not be right about that name having come originally from a Germanic goddess.  He is the sole source attesting to there having been such a goddess.  Whether or not the pagan Anglo-Saxons worshipped such a deity is immaterial.  She was supposedly the goddess of spring and the rising sun – the term east for the direction in which the sun rises has the same derivation – and this is the basis of her association with the month of April.  Eosturmonaþ was the Anglo-Saxon “month of spring.”   This is the association that was undoubtedly foremost in the minds of the Anglo-Saxons after they converted to Christianity and began calling the Christian festival that often falls in that month by its name.  

 

Far from being a paganization of Christianity the borrowing of this name for the Christian Passover was very apt.   While the Son Whose rising we celebrate on Easter is the Son, spelled with an o, of God, He is also according to the Messianic prophecy of Malachi “the Sun of righteousness”.  That is the prophecy that reads “But unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of righteousness arise with healing in his wings; and ye shall go forth, and grow up as calves of the stall.” (Mal. 4:2)   As for spring, into this season in which after months of winter, trees put forth leaves, grass begins to grow, flowers start to appear, animals come out of hibernation and the birds return, God has placed within nature a depiction of resurrection.   Perhaps this is also the reason why the Jewish Passover which prefigures the events that culminated in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ celebrated in the Christian Passover occurred when it did.   The Jewish Passover falls on the 14^th, the Ides, of the month in the Hebrew calendar that since the Babylonian Captivity has been called Nisan.  The original name of this month, the one used in the Pentateuch where the account of the Exodus out of Egypt and the instructions for celebrating Passover are laid out, is Aviv or Abib. (2)   This word means spring.  The name of the city of Tel Aviv in modern Israel means “Hill of Spring.”

 

This is why the Christian Passover is celebrated when it is.   In the early centuries of the Church different regions had different practices with regards to the celebration of Christ’s Resurrection.  Some thought it should be celebrated on the date on which it occurred in the secular calendar regardless of what day of the week it fell upon.  Others thought it should always be celebrated on the day of the week in which it occurred, Sunday.   Some thought it should fall on the same day as the Jewish Passover.   Others thought that the dispensational change needed to be signified by a different date.  In the first ecumenical Council of the Church – a council, to which all the bishops from every region are invited and the rulings of which are subsequently received as binding by the universal Church – which was convened at Nicaea in 325 AD to address the heresy of Arius of Alexandria, who denied that the Son was co-eternal, co-substantial, and co-equal with the Father, it was ruled that the Church would celebrate the Christian Passover on the first Sunday – the day of the week on which the Resurrection took place – after the first full moon – a month in a lunar calendar begins with the new moon and the Ides fall on the full moon so Jesus was crucified on the full moon – on or after the spring equinox, an approximation of the anniversary of the Resurrection.

 

For those for whom all this talk of spring, the moon, etc. smacks of paganism, I strongly recommend, a) reading your Bible more thoroughly – that God gave the lights in the heavens for “signs, and for seasons, and for days and for years” is stated in the Creation account (Gen. 1:14), and the calendar the Israelites used was a lunar calendar in which each month was the length of a moon cycle, and b) reading C. S. Lewis’ God In the Dock.   This is a collection of essays compiled by William Hooper and published after Lewis’ death.  It is largely apologetic in theme and the essays that deal with Christianity and paganism are particularly relevant.  Lewis, in rebuttal of the school of skeptical anthropology that drew inspiration from Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and wrote off Christianity as presenting simply another version of themes that appear throughout pagan mythology, pointed out that by contrast with the figures in these myths, Jesus lived, died, and rose again in history, not in some otherworld and othertime, but in a known place and time in this our world.   He also pointed out that by contrast with mythology, in which a dying and rising again god may be understood as symbolizing such things as nature and fertility and the life cycle, with the events of the Gospel, it is the things in nature that the myths signify that themselves signify Jesus’ Death and Resurrection.    If you are averse to this sort of argument that Jesus is the reality to which myths imperfectly and indirectly point, understand it in terms of the New Testament’s theology of revelation.  God has revealed Himself to all in His Creation, St. Paul explains in the first chapter of Romans.  This is called natural revelation.   It is insufficient to bring anybody to a saving faith but it provides enough light that the ideas that natural man derives from this revelation, whether philosophical or mythological, while they will be marked by numerous errors, will not be entirely devoid of truth.   The ancient Israelites were given a different type of revelation on top of this.  It is called special revelation.  The true God in establishing His Covenant with the Patriarchs and later the nation of Israel gave them a revelation of Himself and His will that no man could come to from natural revelation alone.   That revelation too, however, paled in comparison to God’s ultimate revelation of Himself in the Incarnation.   When St. Paul brings up natural revelation in the first chapter of Romans it is at the beginning of an argument in which he shows that the nations of the world, despite this revelation, fell into the apostasy of idolatry and gross sin, and then shows that the Jews who had been given God’s Law fared no better, but that the whole world, Jew and Gentile alike, are sinful, lacking the righteousness that God requires of them, which righteousness God gives to Jew and Gentile alike freely by His grace in Jesus Christ, through His Death and Resurrection.   This is something to which those who stick up their nose at Easter, the Christian Passover, and insist that we should stick to the Old Testament feast, really ought to give consideration.

 

As important as the delivery of the ancient Israelites from Egyptian bondage, to which the Jewish Passover looks back, was, unless it is regarded as a type, foreshadowing the greater deliverance that Jesus Christ would accomplish it is merely the story of one nation, one people.   The Hebrew people, enslaved in an Egypt that had forgotten Joseph, was delivered by the God Who had made a Covenant with their distant ancestors, by sending a series of plagues upon Egypt culminating in the death of the firstborn from which only the Hebrews were spared on that first Passover, prompting Pharaoh to finally give in to God’s message through Moses, and let the people go, or rather drive them out.   Thus a nation was born and to that nation these events will always be specially sacred.   The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, however, was not some tribal deity, but the True and Living God, the Maker of Heaven and Earth, and God had promised the Patriarchs that through them He would bless all the nations of the world.   The Hebrews in the Exodus account represent all the people of the world, their physical bondage in Egypt represents the spiritual bondage to sin that has been the plight of the world since Adam, their deliverance from that slavery on that first Passover represents the redemption from slavery to sin, death, and devil that Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God, the Promised Christ or Messiah, would purchase not just for Israel but for the entire world by dying and rising again from the dead.   There were many facets to this redemption.   The Church Fathers in the first millennium stressed that because the Incarnate Son of God was sinless, death had no claim on Him, and so by dying He entered death’s kingdom not as captive but Conqueror, and liberated those over whom death had lost his claim by taking Jesus.   In the West in the second millennium the vicarious aspect of Christ’s death, that He bore our sins so as to settle our account and make us righteous before God, came to be stressed.   These are two aspects of the same truth which cannot be comprehended in any one single theory.   However we understand the mechanics of His Death for us the story is not complete without His Resurrection.   In His Resurrection the enemy that comes for us all in the end is himself overthrown and destroyed.   This is a victory that ultimately we are to share in.  As John Donne put it: One short sleep past/We wake eternally/And death shall be no more/Death thou shalt die.   In another very real sense our sharing in the victory of Christ’s Resurrection does not await that final day.  St. Paul explains in the sixth chapter of Romans that in out baptism into Christ’s Church we are baptized into Christ’s Death.   Being so joined to Him in His Death, we remain united with Him in His Resurrection and our sharing in His Resurrection life is the new spiritual life into which we are regenerated and in which the Apostle enjoins us to live to God in righteousness.   This is the substance of which the first Passover was the shadow.

 

In discussing Christ’s victory we often speak of the enemy that He defeated, death, as a person.   This is not just a device like the Grim Reaper of folklore that helps us to make tangible the concept of death.   The Apostle in the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us exactly who death personified is: “Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil”. (Heb. 2:14)   It should not surprise us therefore, when agents of the devil act out his impotent rage against all that Easter represents by doing things like declaring a day for something stupid, silly, and nonsensical and making it fall on the same day as Easter.   Nor should we allow it to disturb our peace of mind.   These are the last desperate measures of an already defeated foe and should be regarded as such and as nothing more.

 

Happy Easter!

Christ is Risen!  He is Risen indeed! 

Alleluia!

(1) The letter þ is called a thorn and is pronounced like th.  It is a runic letter.  When printing was invented, rather than make a distinct type form for it, printers often made y do double duty, for itself and for thorn.  In the 1611 edition of the Authorized Bible you will often find "the" and "then" printed as ys for thorns with the other letters in small superscript above them.   For the most part obsolete, this runic addition to the Latin characters that otherwise make up our alphabet, survives in the signs of businesses that have deliberately archaic names like "ye olde shoppe".   The "ye" is not the second person plural pronoun, which would not make sense as the first word in the name of a store, but the definite article spelled with the y version of thorn.

(2) The second letter of the Hebrew alphabet can be pronounced either like a b or a v.  In modern print Hebrew, the pronunciation is indicated by the presence of a dagesh, a dot in the middle of the letter.  If the dagesh is present bet is pronounced like b, if it is absent it is pronounced like v.  The dagesh like all Hebrew diacritical marks including the vowel indicators, is a relatively modern invention absent from ancient Hebrew writings.   This is why some words are transliterated into English both ways.

The Subversion of Anthropology

In my last essay I argued for the de-funding of the social sciences, especially sociology. I also argued that unlike the humanities, which have only relatively recently been corrupted from their original purpose and turned into factories for churning out cultural Maoists, sociology had far left leanings right from the beginning.

Today we will be looking at another social science, this time one of the disciplines where the humanities and the social sciences intersect. This discipline has been dominated by far left thinking for over a century now, but unlike in the case of sociology, this can be traced to a definite moment when the field underwent a hostile takeover, subverting it from its original course. The discipline in question is anthropology.

If you run an internet search for the “father of modern anthropology” or even just the “father of anthropology” the results that will pop up will for the most part name either Claude Lévi-Strauss or Franz Boas. I just ran such a search and Lévi-Strauss was the first and highlighted result.. This is highly amusing in that while both answers are wrong, Lévi-Strauss is even more wrong than Boas, as the latter was already the first chair of the department of anthropology at Columbia University nine years before the former, who died only eleven years ago, was born. Incidentally, no, Claude Lévi-Strauss was not the guy who made blue jeans. Levi was the first name of the jeans guy, not part of a hyphenated family name.

We shall return to Boas momentarily, for Boas was the architect of the left-wing takeover of anthropology in America. I shall defer discussion of Lévi-Strauss and his similar, but later, influence in Europe to another day. First, let it be noted that anthropology is much older than either of them. Arguably – and James M. Redfield, the University of Chicago classic professor, said this very thing – it goes all the way back to Herodotus, the father of history. Even, however, if we limit ourselves to Modern anthropology, it is still older than either Boas or Lévi-Strauss. Nor does the qualifier “American” produce an accurate answer in Boas. Lewis Henry Morgan, the prominent nineteenth century American anthropologist, died in 1881, a few years before Boas even arrived in the United States.

In reality, Modern anthropology goes back to the eighteenth century, the period of the so-called “Enlightenment.” It was in this century that Gerhard Friedrich Müller, a German historian working in Russia, pioneered the scientific collection of data pertaining to specific people groups that is called ethnography and which is the basic field work that informs all branches of anthropology. In the same period the Swedish botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus developed the Modern system of taxonomy, the first to classify human beings and apes together under the category of primates. In 1779 German physician Johann Friedrich Blumenbach took the taxonomy of human beings a step further and classified people into five “races” based on common physiognomic traits. We shall have more to say about this later, but for now note that while Blumenbach was not the first to try and sort people based upon physiognomy, his system of classification was the one which prevailed and became the basis for physical anthropology. Physical or biological anthropology was one of the two main branches of anthropology from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The social anthropology of Sir. E. B. Tyler and Sir James G. Frazer was the other.

Now, there is much in the anthropological writings and theories of this period that an orthodox Christian traditionalist can find to disagree with. Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), for example, much like the positivism of sociology founder Auguste Comte, argued that religion was an intermediate stage in man’s progress from myth to science, which argument requires the nonsensical presupposition that efforts to explain and understand creation without recourse to its Creator are superior to those which do make such recourse. Also, the theories of Charles Darwin and his cousin Sir Francis Galton, which are problematic for a similar reason, were extremely influential on nineteenth century anthropology. These problems are miniscule, however, compared with those of Boasian cultural anthropology.

Franz Boas was born in Prussia in 1858 into a family of liberals and radicals, who had supported the early nineteenth century revolutionary movement that was descended from eighteenth century Jacobinism. He shared the leftist views of his family, although it might be slightly anachronistic to call him a Marxist. He studied physics, mathematics, and geography in the universities of Heidelberg, Bonn and Kiel, receiving his doctorate in 1881. He shortly thereafter joined an expedition to Baffin Island. His initial interest was geographic, but the experience converted him into an ethnographer. He briefly returned to Germany and pursued further studies in this field, before permanently re-locating to North America, where he joined the small anthropology department of Clark University in Massachusetts in 1888 and was named its head the following year. In 1896, he became the Assistant Curator of Ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan as well as an anthropology lecturer at Columbia University. In 1899 we was given the position of Professor and made the head of a new, united department of anthropology at Columbia, where he remained until his death in 1942.

Under Boas, Columbia’s new united anthropology department became the first in the United States to offer a doctorate in the field. This gave Boas an unprecedented amount of influence over the discipline of which he made full use. He pushed to make it more professional, as can be seen in his famous dispute with William John McGee over the organizational structure and principles of the American Anthropological Association when it was founded under the latter’s leadership in 1902. While this is hardly ground for criticism in itself, the fact that he was the only one giving out Ph. D's in the field at the time meant that making the discipline more professional translated into filling it with his own disciples. Indeed, by only a little over twelve years after the AAS was formed, it was packed with Boas’ students who comprised a super-majority on its executive board. About the same amount of time later every anthropology department in the United States was headed by someone who had been trained personally by Boas. The first recipient of the doctorate in anthropology he had initiated, Alfred Kroeber, had gone on to become the first Professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Edward Sapir, another of Boas’ students who worked under Kroeber for a time, became Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology at the University of Chicago in the 1920s, before finishing up his career as head of the department of anthropology at Yale in the 1930s. Melville Herskovitz, who founded the first African Studies program in the United States at Northwestern University, was another of Boas’ students. A list of Herskovitz’ classmates while studying under Boas reads like a “Who’s Who” of early twentieth century anthropology, including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Elsie Clews Parsons.

Boas was noted for disparaging the work and ideas of almost every anthropologist who had preceded him. The obvious positive spin that can be placed on this is to say that he was forcing the discipline down a new, more respectable, path by imposing rigorous standards upon it. Those who interpret him in this way point to his opposition to generalization. First the facts must be collected, he would argue, and only then can a general theory be drawn from them. Those who laud this as empirical rigor maintain that he can be criticized only in that that point in time never came, and that an increasing skepticism as to whether it could ever be reached can be traced from the beginning to the end of his career.

The flaw in that interpretation of Boas is that it became apparent by the end of the twentieth century that he had, in fact, encouraged extreme sloppiness – the opposite of rigor – among some of his best known students. The foremost example of this pertains to the work of Margaret Mead.

While Mead’s career spanned most of the twentieth century and included many accomplishments, she is still best known for the book that launched her career and made her famous in 1928 – Coming of Age in Samoa. It was a study, based on field work she had done on the Samoan island of Ta’u, of girls in that society in the age range that corresponds with what we would call adolescence in the West. As she depicted them, these girls passed through this period between childhood and adulthood without any of the emotional and behavioural turmoil associated with this age here, due to the absence of a rigidly enforced sexual morality. For forty years this was the most read book of anthropology

In 1983, New Zealand born anthropologist Derek Freeman, who had taught in Samoa in the 1940s, and later returned to do further anthropological research in the 1960s, published the first of two books he wrote rebutting Mead. Entitled Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth it argued that the society Mead had studied had all the problems she claimed it didn’t and that it was more rigid when it comes to sexual morality than the West rather than less. Mead, Freeman argued, had spent far too little time doing her fieldwork, and had been taken in by girls who deliberately told her tall tales. He had interviewed some of the girls she had spoken to in the 1920s, obviously now decades older and more mature, and they confessed to having done just that. His second book, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead, focused more on this evidence that she had been duped.

Freeman’s books generated a huge amount of controversy. Defenders of Mead, who were mostly cultural anthropologists themselves, argued that the Samoa Freeman knew had underwent a major transformation since Mead had done her field work, that research done elsewhere supported Mead’s conclusions even if her Samoan research was faulty, that the mature Samoan women whom Freeman had interviewed were lying about having lied when they were teenagers, and that Freeman had an ideological axe to grind.

Certainly the latter charge holds true about Mead herself. It is not necessarily what you might think. While her book did indeed seem to have a strong influence over the loosening of sexual mores in the West in the 1950s and 1960s – or at least was cited as making a “scientific” case for it – her primary agenda was quite different from this and the opposite of that which is imputed to Freeman. It is evident from Boas’ foreword to her book what that was. She wished to please her teacher-mentor by providing him with evidence for his favourite ideological axe – the nurture side of the nature versus nurture debate.

The case against Boas is often overstated by sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists, behavioural geneticists and others who lean heavily to the nature side in said debate. Boas was not a nurture absolutist, although he seemed to be moving in that direction towards the end of his career. It was his students who took his position to the extreme of imposing the tabula rasa view of human nature upon the next generation or two of anthropologists – and with help from the behaviouralists in psychology upon the social sciences in general. Nevertheless, his championing of the nurture side in the debate is part and parcel with his feud with the anthropologists who had gone before him. These, especially after Dawin and Galton, stressed nature, sometimes to the apparent exclusion of nurture.

Boas maintained that the primary determining factor in human society and behaviour is culture. This seems to have come more from his left-liberalism than from any actual evidence. A cultural explanation of human behaviour and social institutions lends itself more easily to an ideology that wishes to radically alter these than a hard-wired, universal, biological explanation. Furthermore, and this is especially relevant in light of the nature of the leftism that is currently spewing forth from the social science departments of the universities, it was race as it was being studied by the physical anthropologists to which Boas took particular exception. If Boas was not truly the father of anthropology – except, perhaps, of cultural anthropology if there is any validity to the distinction between it and social anthropology – he was certainly the father of anti-racism.

Remember that Blumenbach had classified people into five races based on physiognomic traits back in 1779. While the nomenclature for these was not constant, these remained the five major races that physical anthropology studied until it become politically incorrect to continue to do so. Population geneticists continue to study them under the label “populations.” The basis of classification is different. A population in population genetics is distinguished by an identifiable degree of shared genetic relatedness, whereas a race in physical anthropology was distinguished based on physiognomy. Nevertheless, compare the populations discussed in the book of late population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza with the races identified by Blumenbach, Cartleton Coon, and John R. Baker, and it is obvious that they are the same groups. Which makes it rather frightening that Cavalli-Sforza insisted that race does not exist and that his work proves it. This is cognitive dissonance on the level of Orwell’s “we have always been at war with Eastasia” which indicates that a sort of totalitarian groupthink is at play here. The origin of that groupthink can clearly be traced to Boas, through his student Ashley Montagu, who wrote Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (1942) and co-authored and later helped revise UNESCO’s “Statement on Race.” (1)

This denial of a basic factual aspect of human nature, combined with the claim that it was socially constructed to serve oppressive ends, and the demand that everybody pay at least lip-service to the denial in the interests of combatting the “oppression” is very familiar today. It is the thought paradigm that produces “wokeness.” We have just seen that it goes back to the Boasian takeover of anthropology a century ago.

This means that it is time to cut anthropology as well as sociology off from the public purse.

(1) Montagu was also the author of The Elephant Man. It is his only work with merit.

The Kingdom of Christ

This is the text of a homily given at Evensong in the Anglican parish of St. Aidan in Winnipeg on Sunday November, 24th, 2013, the Feast of the Reign of Christ The King. The Scripture readings were Zechariah 9: 9-16 and Luke 19: 11-27

We who belong to countries that share in the culture and civilization that is commonly called Western have a very linear way of thinking about time. We conceive of time as a current which flows from a source in the past, through the present, towards a destination in the future. Philosophers have posited various destinations towards which they have suggested history is moving. Karl Marx said that history was moving towards a state of universal communism. More recently Francis Fukuyama argued that a universal, American-style, democratic capitalism was the “end of history”. What these philosophies do not acknowledge is that the Western way of thinking about time and history that made their ideas possible is due to the influence of the Christian faith. Christianity teaches that history began with Creation, was diverted from its original end by the Fall, was redeemed by the Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and is moving towards a final destination, the Kingdom of God.

Apart from Christian divine revelation the idea of time and history as moving in a straight line would not make much sense. The natural world suggests that time has a circular shape. Think of the basic units by which we measure time. A day, in the language of the ancients, is the time it takes for the sun to complete its journey through the sky from the east to the west. In the less picturesque language of the modern scientific worldview it is the period of time it takes for the earth to rotate on its axis. It amounts to the same thing and in both cases it is a circular motion. Likewise a month is the time it takes for the moon to complete its cycle of waxing and waning – or to revolve around the earth. Similar remarks could be made about the year. The seasons are a cycle to which man has attached great significance from earliest times, seeing in them a picture of the cycle of life, from birth in spring, through growth in summer, to maturity in fall, and finally culminating in death in winter, from which the cycle begins again with the rebirth of life in the next spring.

The spiritual conclusions that pagan faiths, enlightened only by natural revelation and not by special revelation, drew from what they observed in nature, were often false, such as the doctrine of the transmigration of the soul through reincarnation. Sir James Frazer, the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Scottish anthropologist, in his notorious The Golden Bough, compared the various myths in which a god dies and is reborn in some way. This myth appears in one form or another throughout Mediterranean and indeed world mythology. It is ordinarily associated with fertility rituals and mysteries. It is clearly a symbolic representation of the natural cycle, of life, death, and rebirth. Frazer tried to explain away the gospel account of the death and resurrection of Christ as yet another version of this meme. C. S. Lewis, the Christian apologist whose death, fifty years ago, was overshadowed by the somewhat more spectacular death of a less interesting persona of whom we have all heard a great deal this weekend, that occurred on the same day, demolished Frazer’s argument by pointing out that Christ’s death and resurrection, unlike that of Osiris or Dionysus, took place not in some “other place” outside of time, but in actual history, in an identifiable place, at an identifiable time. Since the natural cycle of which the pagan mythology was a symbol, was itself used by Christ in the twelfth chapter of John’s Gospel as a picture of His own redemptive work, Lewis argued, the Gospel was true myth. Jesus was and is the reality, of which the earlier myths were mere shadows.

The Christian Church, in developing its liturgical calendar, harmonized the Christian faith’s teleological history, with the cyclical time observed in nature. The Christian year, like any other calendar, is built around the seasons of the cycle of life. Its major festivals take place around the winter and the spring solstices. Its seasons ebb and flow with the rhythms of life. The significance, however that it assigns to days in the calendar is drawn from events of the earthly life of Jesus Christ, which are arranged in the order of linear time so as to reenact and remember these events each year. It begins with Advent, a four week period of anticipation that leads up to Christmas, the festival of the birth of Jesus Christ, the celebration of which continues until Epiphany, the feast of the visit of the magi. In Lent we have a period of penitent reflection leading up to Holy Week, which starts on Palm Sunday with the reenactment of Christ’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem and ends in the celebration and remembrance of the Last Supper, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday, respectively. Ascension Day and Pentecost, commemorate the anniversaries of the ascension of Christ and the sending of the Holy Ghost.

Today is the last Sunday in the Christian calendar. It is the feast day of the Reign of Christ the King. This is a very new addition to the Christian calendar. The feast day was created by Pope Pius XI in 1925, at a time when the nations of the world were falling prey to the personality cults of Mussolini and Lenin, to remind the world of Him Who is king of kings, and lord of lords. It was originally assigned to the last Sunday before All Saints Day, i.e., the last Sunday in October. The Roman Catholic Church reassigned it to the final Sunday of the Christian Year in 1970, after which it was adopted by other liturgical denominations, including our own.

I am not ordinarily a fan of innovations, particularly those of the twentieth century, but in this case I think this was appropriate and unusually well thought out. For this addition to the calendar makes the liturgical cycle culminate in a celebration of the kingdom of Christ – the end towards which Christianity says history is moving, thus completing the harmonization of linear and cyclical time, in the Christian year.

The kingdom of Christ is what the Jews called the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven. It was a Jewish concept before it was a Christian concept. It is the kingdom God promised to Israel through the Old Testament prophets. It was to break another cycle, a less healthy one, the cycle of sin, repentance, restoration, and apostasy told in Old Testament history. The gospel that Jesus preached was that “the kingdom of heaven is at hand”, and the kingdom was the subject, in one way or another, of virtually every sermon He preached, and every parable He told. There are many aspects to the kingdom. It is the reign of Christ from Heaven after His Ascension to sit on the right hand of His Father. It is the Reign of Christ in the heart of the believer and collectively in His earthly body the Church. It is also the coming future kingdom that will be manifested upon earth after the Second Coming.

Some today are skeptical of the latter aspect of the kingdom. They think that the spiritual and invisible aspects are all that there is and that the prophesies of the kingdom were all fulfilled in the first century.

This brings us to the parable told in the reading from Luke’s gospel today. According to Dr. Luke this parable was told by Jesus immediately after His encounter with Zaccheus the tax collector in Jericho and just before His entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. This timing, as we are about to see, is crucial to understanding the parable.

This parable is unusual in that it joins two separate stories in one. One of those stories is quite familiar because it is very similar to another parable that Jesus told only a few days later in the Olivet Discourse as recorded by St. Matthew in the twenty-fifth chapter of his gospel. This is the story about the man who goes away, entrusts his money to his servants, then comes back to see how they had used the money.

The stories are not absolutely identical in each telling. A different monetary unit is used in each. In the Luke parable it is minas, in the Matthew parable it is talents. The Matthew parable is the source of our English use of the word “talent” to refer to a gift or ability, based upon the common interpretation of the parable as meaning that at the Last Judgement, men will be held accountable for how they have used the abilities with which they have been entrusted in this life. This interpretation comes from the fact that in Matthew’s parable, the talents are divided unevenly among the servants in accordance with their abilities as judged by their master. This is not the case in the parable recorded by Luke, where the minas are divided evenly among the servants. In Matthew’s parable, the unfaithful servant buries his talent, in Luke’s he hides it away in a napkin. In Luke’s gospel, the other servants respond in shock when the nobleman takes the coin away from the unfaithful servant and gives it to the servant who had made the largest profit, and make a kind of mildly worded protest at this taking from the poor to give to the rich. This is not found in the parable in Matthew, although the nobleman’s response, which could be paraphrased into current idiom as “the rich will get richer, and the poor will get poorer”, is. Needless to say, neither parable is likely to be the favourite parable of those of our brethren who have been deceived by socialism. Otherwise it is basically the same story.

It is the other story, that is joined to this one in the Gospel of Luke, that I wish to focus on. It is a very interesting story, given as the reason for the journey the rich man takes into the far country. He goes there to receive a kingdom. Those, over whom he is to be made king, reject his authority and send representatives after him saying, in the language of the old King James, “we will not have this man to rule over us”. So when he returns, in addition to sorting out the financial doings and misdoings of his servants, he has to respond to this rebellion, which he does by rounding them up, and having them executed for their treason.

What makes this part of the parable so interesting is that Jesus was telling His audience a story that, with one crucial difference, is identical to an episode of history with which his audience would have been well familiar. King Herod the Great, the king who had ordered the slaughter of the innocents after the visit of the magi, had himself died shortly thereafter, naming his son Herod Archelaus his successor in his will. The throne did not automatically go to Archelaus, however, he had to journey to Rome to receive it from Augustus Caesar. As brutal a man as his father, he was not popular, and there was widespread opposition to his rule. He had 3000 of his opponents slaughtered at Passover, before departing for Rome, and when he arrived, Josephus tells us that a delegation of about 50 Jews and Samaritans arrived at approximately the same time, to plead with Caesar not to appoint Archelaus. Caesar did appoint Archelaus the ethnarch over Judea but ten years later removed him from office for his misrule.

The crucial difference between the story Jesus told, and the history to which He was alluding, is that Archelaus was a wicked and brutal king, whereas the king in Jesus’ story, who represents Jesus Himself, was a just king, hated by wicked subjects. Flipping the story around like that was not likely to endear Him to the crowd – especially after He had just befriended Zaccheus, a despised tax collector. So why did He do it?

Dr. Luke provides us with the answer, in verse eleven. They were getting close to Jerusalem, and His disciples thought that the kingdom would immediately appear. Indeed, His triumphal entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday takes place immediately after this. The point of this parable was to tell His disciples that when they saw prophesy being fulfilled before their eyes, the prophesy we heard in the earlier reading from Zechariah about His riding into town on a donkey, that they should not think that He would establish the kingdom then and there. Rather He would be going away to be crowned king, to return later to judge the works of His servants, and to put down opposition to His reign.

The full significance of this only gradually dawned on His disciples. Soon after telling this parable, He rode into Jerusalem to shouts of Hosanna. When, a few days later, in response to His prophecy that “not one stone of this temple will be left unturned”, they asked Him “when shall this be, and what shall be the sign of thy coming”, they showed by so asking that they recognized that despite His triumphal entry on Palm Sunday, His coming as king was yet to come. They assumed that the prophesy of the destruction of the Temple was referring to His Second Coming. After His Ascension into Heaven, they expected that His Second Coming to put down His enemies and establish His kingdom would happen immediately, within their lifetimes. Only after the destruction of the Temple forty years later, did the Church realize that what the disciples had thought to be a single question was actually two, concerning two distinct events, and that they would have to wait yet further for the Second Coming of Christ. Today, the Church is waiting still.

We should not allow the passing of two thousand years cause us to doubt the Second Coming and the future full manifestation of the kingdom. It is still an article of orthodox faith that “He will come again with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead, Whose kingdom shall have no end”. It is appropriate, therefore, that as we prepare to begin again the Christian cycle of worship again with the season of anticipation of the coming of Christ, that we end the old cycle with a celebration of that kingdom to which all of sacred history leads. May our reflections upon the reign of Christ, this final Sunday of the old Christian year, inspire us to wait with the watchful anticipation enjoined upon us by Scripture, for the coming of the King.

The Importance of the Resurrection

Because He lives, I can face tomorrow.
Because He lives, All fear is gone.
Because I know He holds the future,
And life is worth the living just because He lives. – Bill and Gloria Gaither

St. Paul, writing to the Corinthian Church, declared the Christian Gospel to be the message that:

Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.

In thinking and talking about the Gospel we often focus upon the first event, Christ’s death for our sins, because this is the effective atoning sacrifice by which our sins are taken away and we are reconciled to God. The resurrection is just as much a part of the Gospel, however, and apart from the resurrection there would be no Gospel, i.e. no good news. It is by rising from the dead that Christ triumphed over death and hell. Apart from this triumph, Christ’s death would have seemed an ultimate defeat, as it did to His disciples prior to the resurrection, and it is through the resurrection that we are able to see Christ’s death for what it actually was, His laying down of His life as a sacrifice for our sake.

Christ’s resurrection is the evidence that Jesus Christ was the Son of God as He claimed. It is the sign Jesus Himself pointed to when asked for proof of His authority and divine identity. Early in His ministry, shortly after the wedding at Cana where He performed His first miracle, the turning of water into wine, Jesus went down to Jerusalem with His disciples to celebrate the Passover. There, He drove the moneychangers out of the Temple, an act He would later repeat in the week before His crucifixion. St. John records that the Jews then asked Him “What sign shewest thou unto us, seeing that thou doest these things?” His response was “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” These words would later be brought up against Him when He was brought before the High Priests on the eve of His crucifixion (Matt. 26:61), but, as St. John tells us, He meant “the temple of His body”, a meaning that became clear after His resurrection (Jn. 2:21-22).

Later in His ministry, some of the scribes and Pharisees said to Him “Master, we would see a sign from thee”. His answer, as recorded by St. Matthew, was:

An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas: For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. (Matt. 12:39-40)

Later, the Pharisees came to Him with the Sadducees and asked this same question and received the same answer (Matt. 16:1-4).

In each of these cases, challenged by the Jewish leaders and asked for a sign to prove His divine authority, He pointed to the resurrection and said that it would be the only sign they would be given. St. Paul wrote that Jesus was “declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead” (Rom. 1:4)

The resurrection is still our evidence that Christ was the Son of God as He claimed. While some, like 19th-20th Century anthropologist Sir James Frazer have argued that Christianity adopted the Gospel from myths of a god such as Osiris and Dionysius, who dies and comes back to life, C. S. Lewis pointed out that the pagan myths all take place sometime and somewhere outside of history, whereas the death and resurrection of Christ were events that took place within history, in a specific time and place. (1)

The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ took place in Jerusalem, when Pontius Pilate was prefect of Judaea during the reign of Tiberius Caesar. The credibility of the resurrection as historical fact is strong enough that a number of well-known conversions have taken place because someone set out to investigate or even disprove the historicity of the resurrection and ended up convinced that Jesus Christ had risen indeed. The American Civil War General Lew Wallace, author of the novel Ben-Hur, was converted after he accepted a challenge to investigate the historicity of the resurrection. Albert H. Ross, who as an unbeliever researched the life of Jesus, ended up writing under the pen name Frank Morrison, Who Moved the Stone? a classic apologetic for the historical truth of the resurrection.

The church historian, Philip Schaff wrote:

The Christian church rests on the resurrection of its Founder. Without this fact the church could never have been born, or if born, it would soon have died a natural death. The miracle of the resurrection and the existence of Christianity are so closely connected that they must stand or fall together. (2)

This was the way St. Paul saw things too, and after his declaration of the Gospel in his epistle to the Corinthians, he proceeds to set forth proofs of the resurrection. These include the testimony of over 500 witnesses who saw the risen Christ and most of whom were still alive when the epistle was being written and the testimony of St. Paul himself, who was initially hostile to Christianity but was converted through an encounter with the risen Christ.

It was not just to provide evidence that Jesus was the Son of God that He was raised from the dead. The author of the book of Hebrews tells us that Christ’s resurrection is vital to His role as high priest and intercessor. In the Jewish religion, established in the Old Covenant which God made with Israel at Mt. Sinai after delivering them from bondage in Egypt, the Levite priesthood was to regularly offer sacrifices for the sins of the people. The sacrifices of the Old Covenant, pointed towards the true sacrifice, the only sacrifice which can effectively take away sin, the death of Jesus Christ upon the cross. It was not just the offerings, however, which prefigured Christ, but the priesthood, for Jesus is not only our true sacrifice but our true high priest.

As the author of Hebrews explains the various ways in which the high priesthood of Christ is superior to the Aaronic high priesthood, he states:

And they truly were many priests, because they were not suffered to continue by reason of death: But this man, because he continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood. Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them. (Heb. 7:23-25)

Jesus Christ is our high priest, Who is “set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens” where He is a minister “of the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man” (Heb. 8:1-2). Having offered Himself as the once-and-for-all effective sacrifice upon the cross, He has entered the holy-of-holies in heaven, with His own blood, where He makes intercession for us, pleading the merits of His death and blood on our behalf. For Him to fill this role He must live forever – which means, of course, that He had to be raised from the dead.

The resurrection, therefore, is not just divine testimony to the Person and Work of Jesus Christ, although it is that, but is itself an essential part of salvation. The resurrection makes possible the intercessory work of Jesus Christ as high priest. It is also through the resurrection that the everlasting life Jesus promised to those who believe in Him comes.

St. Paul, after explaining to the Roman Church that we are not justified before God by the works of the law, i.e., our own efforts to meet God’s requirements, but rather that God by His grace, justifies all who believe in Jesus on account of His work of redemption and propitiation, goes on to explain that God’s grace is not an excuse for us to sin but provides, along with justification, liberty from the bondage of sin.

This liberty, St. Paul describes as a spiritual union between the believer and Christ which makes the believer a participant in Christ’s death and resurrection:

How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. (Rom. 6:2-4)

Justification by grace is not an excuse for sin because those who have been so justified have died to sin. What does this mean?

One of the main concepts we associate with death is that of separation. When someone dies, his family and friends hold a funeral in order to say a final good bye to a loved-one whom they will never see again in this life. Death separates even those joined by the most permanent of human bonds. Before governments set out to destroy the institution of marriage by introducing no-fault, penalty-free, easily attainable divorces, marriage was a union between man and woman that was to last “so long as you both shall live”. The Book of Common Prayer in the order of Holy Matrimony prescribes that the bride and groom pledge their troth by vowing to each other “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part.” This union was so important, that only death was to dissolve it.

When St. Paul wrote that the believer, justified in God’s eyes through grace, is “dead to sin”, this is the imagery he was evoking. All people are from their birth “under sin”. This means that our relationship sin is a master-slave relationship. Sin, which has dwelt in our flesh since birth, is our master, and we are its slaves. This is the estate of fallen mankind. The believer in Jesus Christ, however, has been set free from this bondage through death. He has died, terminating his term of slavery to his indwelling sin.

The death of the believer to sin is not a death that the believer has undergone in himself, in his own body. It is the death of Jesus Christ on the cross, in which the believer has been made a participant through his union with Christ in baptism. (3) Just as Christ, Who was without sin Himself, identified with us sinners in His own baptism, then took our sin and bore it to the cross, where He suffered the death penalty we had incurred for us, so we are identified with Him in baptism, in which His death becomes our own. This breaks our relationship of slavery to indwelling sin. Our sinful nature, which St. Paul calls “the flesh” (4), remains with us during our lives on earth, but we are to consider ourselves to have died to it in Christ.

It is not only Christ’s death which we participate in through our union with Him, but His resurrection as well. Our participation in Christ’s death would do us no good if we were not also joined with Him in His resurrection, for that would mean we have been liberated from a condition of slavery to be left in a condition of death. St. Paul makes it clear, however, that the whole point of our having been baptized into Christ’s death is that we would also “walk in newness of life”.

For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection. (v. 5)

There is a double meaning in these verses. The believer will one day be raised from the dead in the literal sense of a bodily resurrection. The believer also possesses a new life in the here and now. These two senses are both present in the passage:

Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him (v. 8)

Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. (v. 11)

St. Paul then goes on to write that because we have been released from slavery to sin through our participation in Christ’s death, we are not to serve sin, but are to present ourselves as servants to God. Grace, therefore, is not an excuse for us to sin, but the foundation of a life of righteousness. The resurrection is central to St. Paul’s argument, because we possess the new life in which we are to serve God in righteousness through our union with Christ and His resurrection.

The resurrection is God’s testimony to the world that Jesus Christ is His Son and that His death paid for our sins, it is Christ’s triumphant victory over sin, death, and hell, it is the risen Christ Who is our ever-living high priest interceding for us in the heavenly tabernacle, and through our union with Christ we partake of His resurrection life, both in the new life in the here and now, and in the resurrection of the just on the last day. St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians that the Christian faith is pointless apart from the resurrection:

And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. (1 Cor. 15:17-19)

Our faith, as the Apostle immediately goes on to point out, however, is not in vain because Christ is risen.

He is risen indeed!

Hallelujah!


(1) C. S. Lewis “Myth Become Fact”, in God In the Dock:Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1970), edited by William Hooper. My review of this book can be found here: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2011/05/christianity-in-age-of-unbelief.html


(2) Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Vol. 1, Apostolic Christianity A.D.1-100 (Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2002) p.108.

(3) Some have maintained that a spiritual baptism is what is referred to in Romans 6. They believe this interpretation is necessary in order to avoid two common errors. The first is that of those who tell a person who believes in Jesus that faith in Jesus is not enough and that he also needs water baptism in order to be saved. The second is that of those who think that the water of baptism confers grace in a mechanical fashion. It is, however, water baptism that St. Paul was referring to in Romans. This should not surprise us. Baptism was the initiatory rite by which people became members of the Church, the visible body of Christ. In the New Testament, after the Apostles preached the Gospel, they baptized those who believed. Thus baptism is identified with the beginning of the Christian life in the New Testament. This does not mean that someone who believes in Christ but for some reason has never been baptized is going to hell. St. Mark quotes Jesus as having said “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned” not “he that is baptized not shall be damned”. Nor does it mean that baptism confers salvation mechanically apart from faith in Christ. St. Paul wrote “For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.” (Rom. 2:28-29) If this can be said of the initiatory sacrament of the Old Covenant, it is reasonable to conclude that the same is true of the initiatory sacrament of the New Covenant.

(4) In Greek this is the word sarx. This word means “flesh” in the ordinary sense of the term, the physical substance of which our bodies are composed. It has the extended meaning of “human nature” and as such is used in passages about the Incarnation which speak of Christ having become flesh. When St. Paul uses it to refer to the fallen, corrupt, sinfulness of human nature he typically does so by contrasting it with the spirit. In Platonic philosophy, the spirit is said to belong to the world of perfect forms and to be trapped in the corrupt body of flesh until death. This concept clearly influences St. Paul’s choice of imagery here, but it is also clear that he does not accept the Platonic dichotomy between a corrupt physical world and an incorruptible spirit world in full, for he speaks of evil in the spiritual world, and goes on in the passage in Romans 6 to urge his readers to present the members of their physical bodies as “instruments of righteousness” to God. Those who did embrace the full Platonic dichotomy and tried to incorporate that with Christian thought, ended up denying the Incarnation, and became the antichrists of whom St. John warned his readers, the Gnostics whose false teachings the orthodox Apostolic school had to contend with in the early centuries of the Church.

Christianity in the Age of Unbelief

God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics by C. S. Lewis, edited by Walter Hooper, Grand Rapids, Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1970, 360 pp.

Other than the Bible itself and books containing stories for children taken from the Biblical narratives the first Christian literature I remember reading was written by C. S. Lewis. I didn’t realize that it was Christian literature at the time. My mother, who loved fantasy novels, suggested that I read C. S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia when I was a boy. I did so and would re-read them several times as a child, a teenager, and as an adult. While I recognized by the end of the last book that Aslan was supposed to be God the various ways in which the Christian message is re-told through these novels was largely lost on me upon my first reading of these books.

It was years later, after learning about Who Jesus was (the God-Man), and the significance of His death on the cross as payment for our sins, and coming to faith in Him in my 15th year, that I re-read these novels and finally appreciated them for what they were. I would read much more of C. S. Lewis in the years after that. While a high school student I read his Screwtape Letters and his Mere Christianity, and these too would become books that I would re-read from time to time over the years. It was not until after college that I finally got around to reading his space trilogy, which like the Narnia series addresses serious topics through the medium of fiction (albeit in a very different way). I have also read several other of his non-fiction books including Of This and Other Worlds, Surprised by Joy, Letters to Malcolm, The Abolition of Man and A Grief Observed.

A couple of weeks before Easter this year, I came across a copy of God in the Dock in the library. I had heard of this book in the past but had never read it before, so I took it out and read it for the first time. This is not a book which C. S. Lewis wrote as a book. It is a compilation of various essays, speeches, radio addresses, and letters, pertaining to Christianity.

Some of these I had read in different contexts in the past. Most of them, however, I was reading for the first time. The collection was brought together into a book and edited, after Lewis’ death, by Walter Hooper, who was Lewis’ private secretary late in his life, and who became a trustee and the literary adviser to his estate. (1) It was published for the first time in 1970.

The title of the collection is drawn from the title of one of the essays in the book. This was an essay Lewis wrote in response to a request that he “write about the difficulties which a man must face in trying to present the Christian Faith to modern unbelievers”. After discussing a number of barriers to faith, such as a skepticism towards history (but not pre-history because that is labeled “science”) and linguistic barriers brought about through the change in meaning of a number of English words, Lewis brings up the matter of sin. He writes that “Apart from this linguistic difficulty, the greatest barrier I have met is the almost total absence from the minds of my audience of any sense of sin”. (p. 243) This he contrasts with the sense of guilt that existed everywhere when Christianity was born.

Lewis writes:

The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a reasonable defence for being the god who permits war, poverty, and disease, he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God’s acquittal. But the important thing is that Man is on the Bench and God is in the Dock. (p. 244)

This modern arrogance has not gone away since the day Lewis wrote those words. If anything, it has deepened and gotten worse. It permeates the writings, for example, of Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. We have become so autocentric, both as individual persons and as a species, that we now think of God as Someone Who if He exists at all exists to make sure that reality caters to our every whim. When something goes wrong we blame God for failing to do “His job”. The thought that God is Sovereign Lord over His creation, that we exist because of His will and to do His will, and that we are therefore accountable to Him and not the other way around, seldom crosses our mind.

It should, however, and it ought to disturb our complacent thoughts. At the end of the Book of Job in the Old Testament, God gives a furious rebuke to Job over his human arrogance. That arrogance had been expressed in far less presumptuous and far more respectful language than our own.

How does one present the claims of Christianity to people who believe that we have the right to hold God accountable to man-made standards? Lewis ends his essay by admitting that he has not found a solution to this problem.

The essays that comprise this book argue as a whole for the validity of Christian faith and morality in the age when God is “in the dock”. They are not all strictly works of apologetics, in the sense of writings addressed to unbelievers to convince them of the truth of Christianity. The essay that immediately precedes “God in the dock” proper in the compilation, for example, is entitled “Priestesses in the Church?” It addresses the subject of the ordination of women as priests in the Church of England, which is not exactly a topic one would expect to come up in the context of defending the Christian faith against skepticism. Lewis, however, who is taking the con position on the subject, does so by making the argument that the proposed changes would “make us much more rational ‘but not near so much like a Church’” (p. 235) (2) This is related to an apologetic defence of the Christian faith in the sense that it is fairly pointless to defend the Christian faith against modernity if you have brought so much modernity into the Church that the “Christian faith” is no longer distinguishable from it.

God in the Dock displays both the strengths and the weaknesses of this type of book. As an example of the latter, there is much repetition, especially among the essays on the subject of miracles, a topic on which Lewis also wrote a monograph. This should not detract from the book for an avid Lewis fan but it might be a good reason not to use this book to introduce someone who has never read C. S. Lewis before to his writings.

One of the strengths, of posthumously published compilations, however, is that a good editor can take a writer’s essays and distill the best of them into a volume that becomes a mine lode of golden nuggets of wisdom.

In this collection we find the ultimate answer to the anti-Paul nonsense that one hears in certain circles. In an essay entitled “Modern Translations of the Bible”, originally written as the preface to J. B. Phillips’ Letters To Young Churches: A Translation of the New Testament Epistles, Lewis writes:

A most astonishing misconception has long dominated the modern mind on the subject of St Paul. It is to this effect: that Jesus preached a kindly and simple religion (found in the Gospels) and that St Paul afterwards corrupted it into a cruel and complicated religion (found in the Epistles). This is really quite untenable. All the most terrifying texts come from the mouth of Our Lord: all the texts on which we can base such warrant as we have for hoping that all men will be saved come from St Paul. If it could be proved that St Paul altered the teaching of his Master in any way, he altered it in exactly the opposite way to that which is popularly supposed. (p. 232)

This is very true, and Lewis goes on to point out that while the life, death and resurrection of Christ – the content of the “gospel” came first, of the writings of the New Testament it is St. Paul’s epistles which present the Christian Church’s first reflections upon the significance of the gospel. The “Gospels” came later to provide an account of Who the Jesus that St. Paul wrote and preached about was, what He did, and what He taught.

Some of Lewis’ essays in this book have become even more timely in the decades since his death in 1963 (3). His “Humanitarian Theory of Punishment”, for example, defends the traditional view of legal punishment as being based on the fact that the offender deserves it, against the modern “humanitarian” view that punishment should be to help, heal, and fix the offender. Lewis argues, that “this doctrine, merciful though it appears, really means that each one of us, from the moment he breaks the law, is deprived of the rights of a human being”.

It is in this essay that Lewis writes the following:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals. But to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we ‘ought to have known better’, is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image.
(p. 292)

This argument is valid against the Nanny State as a whole as much as against the humanitarian theory of punishment, and it is not surprising therefore that four chapters later we find an essay entitled “Is Progress Possible? Willing Slaves of the Welfare State”.

Greg Epstein, secular humanist chaplain at Harvard University, and one of the aggressively evangelistic new school of atheists, recently published a book entitled Good Without God which argues for a morality grounded in humanism rather than faith in a supreme Being. Long before Epstein came along, however, C. S. Lewis opened his essay “Man or Rabbit”, which is the twelth chapter in Part One of God in the Dock with the question “Can’t you lead a good life without believing in Christianity?” That is the topic he had been assigned. Lewis, however, challenged the question itself. Our belief or unbelief in Christianity, should be based not upon the question of whether it helps us be good people, but upon the question of whether or not it is true.

In this book, we find some of Lewis’ most compelling arguments as to why we can and should believe Christianity to be true. In defending the believability of Christian miracles, Lewis goes beyond pointing out that the position that “science has debunked miracles” is based upon a faulty understanding of the nature of science and science’s laws. He points out that the specific miracles claimed by Christianity, such as the turning of water into wine, the healing of the sick, and the multiplication of loaves and fishes, are all examples of things that God does all the time in Creation, through natural process. “The miracles done by God incarnate, living as a man in Palestine, perform the very same things as this wholesale activity, but at a different speed and on a smaller scale” (p. 29). This is in contrast to the kind of miracles found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, transformations that are completely arbitrary. Those the Lord refused to do:

Bread is not made of stones, as the Devil once suggested to Our Lord in vain. A little bread is made into much bread. The Son will do nothing but what He sees the Father do. (p. 30)

Christianity, then, is not just another example of mythology, no different from the stories of the Egyptians, Greeks, Norsemen, and other pagans.

We should not, however, go too far in the other direction in separating Christianity from mythology altogether. Christianity, Lewis argues, is true mythology. This is his answer to those, like Scottish anthropologist Sir James Frazer whose Golden Bough presented parallels between Christianity and the mythology of fertility cults, in order to make a case for positivism (which holds that religion is a step in the progression of mankind from primitive magic to science). Yes, pagan mythologies involved a dying god who comes back to life, a symbol of grain, which is buried, and brings forth new life.

There is a huge difference, however, between these stories and the Biblical account of the death and resurrection of Christ. The latter happened within human history. It happened to a specific person, in a specific place, at a specific time, under the nose of the authorities of the Roman Empire.

Lewis points out that the Gospels do not use the death and resurrection of Christ, the way pagan fertility religions do. The connection between His death and resurrection and the seed being planted is there, but it is not dwelt upon, and in fact is reversed. Christ makes the seed symbolic of Himself, not the other way around.

Lewis also points out that the naturalistic, fertility religion, which featured the dying-and-reviving corn king, was absent from the Jewish faith. Yet it was among the Jews, that the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ took place. Lewis writes:

Well, that is almost inexplicable except on one hypothesis. How if the corn king is not mentioned in that Book, because He is here of whom the corn king was an image? How if the representation is absent, because here, at last, the thing represented is present? If the shadows are absent because the thing of which they were shadows is here? The corn itself is in its far-off way an imitation of the supernatural reality; the thing dying, and coming to life again, descending and re-ascending beyond all nature. The principle is there in nature because it was first there in God Himself. (p. 84)

The author of the book of Hebrews in the New Testament points out how the sacrifices, priests, and tabernacle/temple of the Old Testament faith, were symbols of Jesus Christ, the true Priest after the order of Melchizedek, Who offered the true sacrifice of His own blood once and for all, in the true Holy of Holies. If God was preparing the Jews for the coming of Christ, by giving them this symbolism, then would it not be reasonable to expect that He Who commanded His Gospel to be preached to all nations, would have been preparing them to receive the message as well?

In Christ then, mythology comes true, just as the true meaning of the sacrifices of Israel was finally unfolded in Him.



(1) Hooper is also now an Anglican priest.

(2) The quotation marks within the quote are there because he is paraphrasing Charles Bingley from Pride and Prejudice.

(3) He died on the same day J. F. K. was assassinated. Aldous Huxley died the same day as well.