The Foundation of the Creed

 

The Creed is Christianity’s most important statement of faith.   By contrast with Confessions like the Lutheran Augsburg Confession, the Reformed Belgic Confession, or our Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion which are lengthy statements of how the Christian faith is understood and taught by particular communions or denominations within Christianity, the Creed is Catholic, which means that it is the statement of the basic faith of all Christians everywhere in all times.   In the earliest centuries of Christianity multiple different versions of it could be found in different regions of the Church.   In the fourth century an Eastern version of the Creed was modified in the First Councils of Nicaea (325 AD) and Constantinople (381 AD) into the Creed that remains the most truly ecumenical (belonging to the whole Church) to this day.  What we call the Apostles’ Creed is a shorter and simpler version that also dates from the earliest centuries.   The name Apostles’ Creed comes from the traditional account of its origin – that it was drawn up on the first Whitsunday, the Christian Pentecost the account of which is given in Acts 2, by the Apostles (including Matthias) themselves with each contributing one of the twelve articles.   This account is ancient – St. Ambrose and Rufinus of Aquileia both made mention of it at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth centuries.   The Apostles’ Creed as we know it today is slightly modified from the version these men knew which is the Creed that was used in baptism by the Church in Rome at least as early as the second century in which it was quoted by St. Irenaeus and Tertullian.   The early attestation to the traditional account indicates that there is likely truth to it, although such truth as there is to it must apply either to the Roman Creed as St. Irenaeus and Tertullian knew it or perhaps more likely to an earlier version that became the template of both the Roman Creed and the Eastern version that was adapted into the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.  

 

Religious liberals in their efforts to purge Christianity of all that is essentially Christian have made much out of the fact that none of the articles in the Creed is an affirmation of the “fundamentalist” view of the Bible.   It is true, of course, that nothing like “and I believe in one Holy Bible, verbally inspired by God, infallible and inerrant in every way” can be found in the Creed.   It is also true, however, that it was never thought necessary to include such an article because it is assumed as underlying every single article that is confessed in the Creed.   What liberals dismiss as the “fundamentalist” view of the Bible is more accurately described as the Catholic view of the Bible – that which has been held by Christians, throughout the whole Church, in all regions and ages, since the Apostles. 

 

Some liberals disparage the “fundamentalist” view of the Bible as being too literalist.   What is excessive literalism to a liberal is not necessarily excessive literalism to a normal, intelligent, Christian, however.   When Psalm 91:4 says “He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust” nobody takes this as proof of God literally having avian characteristics.   If anybody were to interpret this verse that way this would be regarded as excessive literalism or hyper-literalism by every “fundamentalist”.   When, however, the final chapters of each of the Gospels give an account of the tomb of Jesus being found empty on the Sunday after His Crucifixion and of His followers encountering Him in His restored-to-life body, liberals think it excessive literalism to understand these as historical accounts of Jesus having actually come back to life.   To a liberal, any reading of these accounts as meaning anything more than that His disciples felt Him present with them after His Crucifixion is excessively literal.   The reality, of course, is not that the “fundamentalist” interpretation is excessively literal but that the liberal interpretation is insufficiently literal.   The Catholic view of Biblical truth is that it is more than literal, not that it is less than literal.   In addition to the literal sense of the Bible, there is also the typological sense (for example, Moses led Israel up to the border of the Promised Land but could not lead them in, it was Joshua, who had the same name as our Lord and Saviour, who brought them into the Promised Land, illustrating that the Law cannot bring anyone to salvation, only the grace of the Gospel of Jesus Christ can do that), the tropological sense (when a practical moral for everyday living is illustrated from the text), and the anagogical sense (in which truth about the eternal and the beyond is gleaned from texts that literally pertain to the temporal and to this world, somewhat the opposite of “immanentizing the eschaton”).   In traditional hermeneutics and exegesis, however, each of these senses rests upon the foundation that is the literal sense.   Get rid of the literal sense and each other sense collapses.   Therefore, when you hear someone explain these other senses in such a way as to disparage the literal sense, you are not hearing the Catholic understanding of the Bible but rather liberalism trying to pass itself off as Catholicism.

 

Other liberals disparage the “fundamentalist” view of the Bible for its conviction that the Bible is inerrant.   James Barr, for example, a Scottish liberal “Biblical scholar” who a few decades back wrote several anti-fundamentalist diatribes, maintained that the problem with “fundamentalism” was not its literalism but its commitment to inerrancy which led it to adopt interpretations that in his opinion were less literal than the text warranted.     Biblical inerrancy, however, is not just a “fundamentalist” view but the Catholic view of Christianity.   The Christian faith has always rested upon the foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, i.e., the Old and New Testaments.   The books of the New Testament have been regarded since the earliest days of the Church as belonging in the same category into which the Apostolic writers of the New Testament place the books of the Old Testament, books in which God is the Author speaking through the human writers.   God does not make mistakes, the Bible as His written Word is infallible and therefore inerrant.    Those who like Barr claim to find mistakes in the Bible can only do so by elevating some other source of information and making it out to be a more reliable source than the Bible by which the reliability of the Bible can be measured.    They purport, by measuring the Bible against these other standards, to prove it to be less than infallible and therefore merely a collection of human writings.    Their conclusion, however, is the necessary premise for measuring the Bible against some other standard to begin with.   If the Bible is not merely a collection of human writings but what the Church has always maintained it to be, the written Word of God, there can be no more reliable standard against which to weigh it.   Indeed, all other standards against which Modern critics of the Bible purport to measure the Bible, are of admitted human origin and fallibility.   Modern man’s attempt to debunk the infallible truth of God’s Word is just one big ultimate example of the petitio principia fallacy.  

 

The Catholic view of the Bible is that God spoke through the human writers of the Old and New Testaments in such a way that the Bible is one book with a single Author and that since that Author can make no mistakes His book is infallible and inerrant.   This is what Jesus Christ Himself claimed for the Scriptures when He declared that “scripture cannot be broken” (Jn. 10:35) and that “till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (Matt. 5:18), when He answered the devil’s temptations with “it is written”, and when He rebuked people like the Sadducees for their ignorance of the Scriptures (Matthew 22:29).   This is what the Apostles claimed for the Scriptures, (2 Tim. 3:16, 2 Pet. 1:21) including their own writings (1 Cor. 14:37, 1 Thess. 2:13-15).   This is what the Church Fathers claimed for the Scriptures beginning at the very beginning with Clement of Rome (1 Clement 45:2-3).   While the Fathers’ belief in the Bible as the inspired and infallible Word of God is more often displayed in their usage of the Bible as the authority for proving doctrine than in discussion of it as a doctrine in its own right notable examples of explicit statement of this faith include St. Irenaeus’s affirmation of the inspiration and perfection of the Bible, (Against Heresies, 2.28:2), St. Justin Marty’s statement of his conviction that no Scripture contradicts another (Dialogue with Trypho, 65), Origen’s comparison of those who think there are such contradictions to those who cannot detect the harmony in music (Commentary on Matthew, 2), and St. Augustine’s running defense of the truth of the Scriptures in his letters to St. Jerome include the statement with regards to the canonical books of Scripture “Of these alone do I most firmly believe that their authors were completely free from error” (Letters, 82).

 

While the Catholic (or “fundamentalist”) view of the Bible is not explicitly affirmed as an article in the Creed this is because it is implicit in all of the articles, each of which affirms a basic truth of the faith that we know to be the faith the Apostles received from Christ because it is recorded as such in the Bible.   It was not left without direct allusion in the ecumenical and conciliar version of the Creed which follows St. Paul’s declaration of the Gospel in 1 Corinthians 15 in affirming of Christ’s resurrection that it was “according to the Scriptures” and which affirms of the Holy Ghost that He “spake by the prophets”.   The verbal, plenary, inspiration, authority, and infallibility of the Bible as God’s written Word, therefore, is the unspoken, unwritten, article that is the very foundation of the Creed.  

 

Earlier we discussed how some liberals use the accusation of excessive literalism in order to evade the truths of orthodox Christianity.    Both excessive and insufficient literalism can lead to serious error or heresy, although in the case of liberalism its insufficient literalism is merely a mask to hide its essential nature which is rank infidelity or unbelief.   The articles of the Creed are helpful in demonstrating the proper limits of literalism.   Each of the articles is a literal truth the denial of the literal truth of which amounts to unbelief in the Christian faith.   The passages which speak these truths are the clearest in the Scriptures.   These are the passages to which the perspicuity of the Scriptures, that is to say their plain clarity so that laymen can understand them, so emphasized by the Reformers and ironically illustrated by the absence of words like perspicuity from the Bible, refer.   Any attempt to use the allegorical, tropological or anagogical senses to explain away the literal meaning of the passages in which the truths of the articles of the Creed are found is a serious abuse of these hermeneutics for these truths are also the truths to which these other senses of Scripture generally point in passages that are less clear.

 

Affirmation of the literal truth of each and all of the articles of the Creed, in both the Apostles’ and Nicene-Constantinopolitan versions, including the unspoken foundational article of the inspiration and infallibility of God’s written Word, remains the best safeguard of orthodox Christian truth against heresy.

And the Word Was Made Flesh

 

St. John is not the first of the Four Evangelists that we usually think of in association with Christmas.   It is St. Matthew and St. Luke who provide us with the narrative of our Lord’s nativity.   St. Luke tells of the census of Caesar Augustus that required Joseph and the Virgin Mary to journey to Bethlehem where they found no room in the inn and so had to lodge in the stable where the Lord Jesus was born.   St. Luke also tells us of the angelic choir who appeared to the shepherds and directed them to where they might find the newborn Messiah.   St. Matthew tells us of the visit of the wise men from the East bringing the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.   It is St. John, however, who plainly states the importance of these events:

 

And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us (Jn. 1:14)

 

This is a theological statement.   It, and the words which immediately follow after in which the Evangelist testifies to his and others (SS Peter and James at the Transfiguration) having beheld the glory of the Word, conclude the extended theological discourse about the Word that serves as a preamble to the fourth Gospel.

 

That the celebration of the birth of our Saviour is a time for deep theological reflection was evidently an opinion shared by the writers of the most familiar and loved of Christmas carols.   Think of these words from what Charles Wesley called his Hymn for Christmas Day later retitled Hark the Herald Angels Sing by George Whitefield:

 

Veil'd in Flesh the Godhead see,
Hail th' incarnate Deity!
Pleas'd as Man with Men t'appear,
Jesus our Emmanuel here.

 

Since the days of Wesley and Whitefield the last two lines have been further revised to “Pleased as Man with Men to dwell/Jesus our Emmanuel” but the import is the same and it is also the same as that of John 1:14 – God came down and took on human flesh and dwelt among us.

 

Or think of the second stanza of Adeste Fideles, known in English as O Come, All Ye Faithful, the composition of which is uncertain but which was first published to our knowledge by John Francis Wade in the eighteenth century (Frederick Oakeley was the translator for the English version):

 

Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine
Gestant puellæ viscera
Deum verum, genitum non factum.

 

Or in English:

 

God of God, light of light,
Lo, he abhors not the Virgin's womb;
Very God, begotten, not created.

 

This is largely taken from the Nicene Creed.   It comes from the section of the Creed that addresses the Arian heresy that the Nicene Council was convened to deal with. (1)   These words were put in to make it absolutely clear that the Jesus in Whom the Church places her faith is God, co-equal and co-eternal, with the Father.   The middle line references the ancient hymn Te Deum Laudamus traditionally attributed to St. Ambrose of Milan.

 

Later in the carol we find this more direct reference to John 1:14:

 

Patris aeterni Verbum caro factum.

 

A literal translation would be “The Word of the Eternal Father made flesh”.   In the usual English version it is rendered:

 

Word of the Father, now in flesh appearing.

 

This, the Incarnation, is the key theological truth of Christmas.   While the Gospel message is focused on the events of Good Friday and Easter, in which Jesus took our sins upon Himself, paid the penalty as our Redeemer, defeated the foes who had long held us captive – sin, the devil, death, hell – and rose triumphant over them from the grave, none of this would have been possible without the events of Christmas, without the Incarnation.   Just as the joy of the empty tomb and the encounters with the risen Lord could not have been had there not first been the sorrow and the suffering of the Cross, so there could have been neither Cross nor empty tomb, had there not first been that birth in the stable in Bethlehem.  The road to Calvary – and what came after – began at the manger.

 

There are some who like to tell us that “Logos” in John 1:14, and the entire Johannine preamble to which it belongs, should not have been translated “Word” in English.   The English word “Word”, they tell us, does not do justice to the Greek word.   While they are partly right in that the Greek word has a lot more meaning to unpack than is suggested by its English equivalent it is very wrong to say that any word other than “Word” could properly render Logos in the Gospel of St. John.   To render it otherwise, as Reason perhaps, or Logic, might bring out some of the philosophical implications of Logos, but would lose the significance that St. John himself attached to Logos in using it to identify Him Who became Incarnate and was born of the Virgin.   The very first words of the preamble “En archei” are an obvious allusion to the first words of Genesis – “in the beginning”.   After asserting of the Logos that He was with God and that He was God – two Persons, co-equal, co-eternal – , and repeating for emphasis that He was in the beginning with God, the very next thing St. John says of the Logos is “panta di’ autou egeneto kai choris auto egeneto oude hen ho gegonen”.  The Authorized Bible faithfully and accurately renders that as “All things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made”.   This too alludes to the first chapter of Genesis. 

 

The first verse of Genesis says “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth”.   This introduces us explicitly to the Father, the God with Whom, the Logos/Word was in the beginning according to John 1:1.   God the Son, the Logos/Word through Whom all things were made is implicit in the verse.   The Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Ghost, is introduced to us in the second verse “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.”   Then in the third verse He Who was implicit in the first is brought out into the open and introduced to us explicitly “And God said, Let there be light: and there was light”.

 

These words “And God said” occur throughout the Creation account.   The sixth verse “And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.”   The ninth verse “And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.” The eleventh verse “And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.”   Verses fourteen to fifteen “ And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.”   The twentieth verse “And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.”   The twenty fourth verse: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.”   Finally the twenty-sixth verse “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

 

When St. John says of the Word, “all things were made by him, and without him was not anything made that was made”, this summarizes the entire first chapter of Genesis.  God the Father created all things by speaking them into existence.   God the Son is the living Word thus spoken through Whom the Father created all things. This is Who St. John tells us “was made flesh and dwelt among us”.     So, as usual, the translators of the Authorized Bible got it right, and the preachers who like to think they are a lot smarter than they actually are have it wrong.   (2) Word, and only Word, is the right word for Logos in the English of John 1:1-14.

 

The All-Powerful Word of God, Who was with God the Father from the beginning, and sharing His divine essence is Himself God, became flesh and dwelt among us.   He was, as He Himself told Nicodemus in John 3:16, God’s gift to us – the first Christmas gift.

The response that this calls for from us is that of the refrain of Adeste Fideles:

 

O come, let us adore Him

O come, let us adore Him

O come, let us adore Him

Christ the Lord.

 

Merry Christmas!

 

 

 

 

 (1)   Speaking of the Nicene Council, the sixth century Church historian Theodorus Lector in his Historia Tripartita lists the Right Reverend Nicholas, Bishop of Myra as having been in attendance.   Yes, that is the Saint Nicholas.  According to later legends, he slapped either Arius himself or one of the heresiarch’s followers in the face at the Council.

(2)   Preachers who think they are a lot smarter than they actually are tend to come out of the woodworks at this time of the year.   There are those who like to tell us that Jesus couldn’t have been born in December and that the Church borrowed a pagan holiday when she made December 25^th Christmas.   Hippolytus of Rome, who died almost a century prior to the first Council of Nicaea wrote that Jesus was born eight days before the kalends of January, and a December birth is the implication of the account of the angel’s visit to Zechariah in St. Luke’s Gospel.  Zechariah was of the division of Abijah that served in the Temple during the week of Yom Kippur in September/October.  The sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, therefore, would have been March/April, when the conception of Jesus took place, making His birth in December/January.   Then there are those who claim Jeremiah 10 forbids Christmas trees.   These might have a point if anyone burned incense to a Christmas tree, offered it a sacrifice, or prayed to it, but as this is not what is typically done with Christmas trees, which are decorations not idols, these preachers merely prove themselves to be Pharisaical clowns of the worst sort.

The Heretical Pitfalls of Hyper-Protestantism

 

One of the interesting things about Hyper-Protestantism, which is distinguished from the Protestantism of the Magisterial Reformation by its opposition to and rejection of what is Catholic, that is to say, belonging to the faith, religion, tradition, and practice held since the earliest centuries by all the ancient Churches descended organically from the Church of Jerusalem, rather than merely the errors distinctive to the Roman Church that sparked the Reformation, is its obsession with Marian doctrine.   Hyper-Protestants often act as if they thought Rome's teaching with regards to Mary is her most serious error rather than the soteriological issues at the heart of the Reformation.   At some point in the future I plan, if the Lord so wills, to show how the English and Lutheran Reformers and even John Calvin held certain Marian doctrines that would be considered "popish"  by Hyper-Protestants.   For today, however, I wish to explore how this obsession with contradicting everything Rome - and in many cases all the ancient Churches - says about Mary often leads them into serious Christological heresy.

 

One person who commented on my earlier essay "Be a Protestant - BUT NOT A NUT!" insisted that the ancient Church was wrong in condemning Nestorianism as a heresy.   Nestorianism was condemned in the Third Ecumenical Council, the Council of Ephesus, which took place in 431 AD.   Nestorius was the Archbishop of Constantinople at the time.   While this See had not yet been made a Patriarchate - that would come twenty years later when St. Anatolius held the office - it had been given the second place of honour after Rome by canon of the Second Ecumenical Council held in Constantinople in 381 AD and was en route to becoming the fifth See of the ancient Pentarchy.   Nestorius, in other words, was in a very influential position, making error on his part all the more serious.

 

The controversy began with the use of the term Θεοτόκος (Theotokos) as an honourific title for the Virgin Mary.    Theotokos is Greek for "God-bearer".   In English it is generally rendered as "Mother of God".   The controversy over the title was older than Nestorius and Nestorius entered the controversy with the intention of being a peacemaker.   He proposed that the Virgin Mary be called the Christokos ("Christ-bearer").   Unfortunately for him, this was one of those cases where the compromise fell on ground belonging to one of the two sides (think of the Sunday School/Bible camp skit in which various people walk along a fence, with God and Satan each calling them to come over to their side, some choosing God, some Satan, until the last person, indecisively sits on the fence, only to be claimed by Satan, the owner of the fence).   By proposing the alternative title, Nestorius sided with those who rejected Theotokos, and as a consequence became forever associated with their ideas.   Those ideas included a serious Christological error.

 

Consider the following syllogism:

 

Premise A: Jesus is God.

Premise B: Mary is the Mother of Jesus.

Therefore:

Conclusion (C): Mary is the Mother of God.

 

This is a valid syllogism, meaning that if the premises are true the conclusion must be true as well, and so the conclusion cannot be rejected on the grounds of logical invalidity.    Those who reject the conclusion, therefore, must argue against the truth of either the Major or the Minor Premise.   They generally do not want to argue against the Major Premise by denying the deity of Jesus Christ.    Therefore they try to argue against the Minor Premise, that Mary is the Mother of Jesus.

 

Now, obviously they try to do so in a more subtle way than by an outright denial that would make them sound completely stupid.    What they try to do is to separate Jesus' human nature from His Person.   "Mary is the mother only of Jesus' human nature" they say.   

 

Do you see what they have done there?

 

In saying that Mary is the mother only of Jesus human nature they want you to think of His human nature in opposition to His divine nature.   That way they can come across as standing up for the truth against some unnamed heresy that says that Jesus got His divine nature from His human mother.   There is a reason, however, that this heresy is unnamed.  Nobody has ever taught it.   Nobody who calls Mary the Theotokos or the Mother of God thinks these terms mean that Mary was prior to God, that Jesus derives His deity from her, that she is the Mother of the Father or the Holy Ghost or any other such stupid things that opponents of these terms read into them.   Unnecessarily guarding against an error that nobody teaches is an easy way of falling into error yourself.   This is exactly what has happened here.

 

In actuality, when they say that Mary is the mother only of Jesus' human nature, this is not as opposed to her being the mother of His divine nature, but as opposed to her being the Mother of Jesus the Person.   Mother is a relational term.   It denotes how one person relates to another.   This is its primary use and meaning, and any implications it may have about the "nature" of either mother or child are entirely secondary.

 

By the reasoning the opponents of Theotokos use they should also be claiming that God the Father is not the Father of Jesus but only of His divine nature.   They do not usually say this, however, because the huge flaw in the argument is a bit more obvious when worded this way.

 

With other human beings a mother and father each contribute half of the genes their child inherits.   Each could, therefore, be said to contribute half of the child's nature, at least in its physical aspects - I don't wish to get into the ancient theological debate between Tertullian's traducianism and St. Jerome's creationism (of each individual's soul not of the world), now, maybe some other time.   We would never say, however, that someone's father is not that person's father but only the father of half of his genes, nor would we say such a thing, mutatis mutandis, about his mother.   A father is the father of his son as a whole person, not just the part of his son he contributed.   A mother is the mother of her daughter as a whole person, not just the part she contributed.

 

Now with Jesus we do not have a case of His Father contributing half of His genetic material and His Mother contributing the other half.   Jesus is One Person, with Two Natures, Fully God and Fully Man.   His divine nature comes entirely from His Father.   His human nature comes from His Mother.   This, however, does not mean that what we have just said about a father being the father of his child as a whole person, and a mother being the mother of her child as a whole person, rather than each being merely the father and mother of what they have contributed to their child does not apply with regards to Jesus.   Those who claim otherwise, seem to think it is sufficient to point to Jesus’ uniqueness as the Only Person born of a Virgin, or the Only Person with two natures, divine and human, and say see, Mary is mother only of His human nature not of Him as a Person, as if such a conclusion somehow inevitably followed from these observations. This is not, however, a conclusion that logically, inevitably, or naturally follows from Jesus’ being unique in these ways.

 

One objection that was raised that requires an answer is the following from someone posting under the name “Jason Anderson”.  He writes:

 

How can a mother of a pre-existent being be the mother of the personality that always existed? She can't.

 

Jesus was, of course, pre-existent.   Indeed, He is eternal.   He had no beginning.  There never was a moment before He existed.   The problem with drawing Mr. Anderson’s conclusion from this is that if his reasoning were sound it would also work against God being the Father of Jesus.   If Someone Who is pre-existent, Someone Who is eternal, Someone to Whom there is no “before”, cannot have a Mother, neither can He have a Father.    God the Father, however, is the Father of Jesus.   Furthermore, He is the Father of Jesus not merely by adoption, as the Adoptionist heresy would have, much less the Father of Jesus by creation, since Jesus is uncreated.   Jesus is the “Only-Begotten” Son of the Father, that is to say, the natural Son of the Father, the Son Who has the same nature as His Father which He gets from His Father.   Since both Father and Son are co-eternal, this does not mean the Father is temporally prior to the Son.   Theologically we refer to the way Jesus is begotten of the Father as “Eternal Generation”.   Unlike with a human father and a human son, the begetting or generation is not a moment in time to which there was a before when only the father and not the son existed, but is the eternal relationship between Father and Son.  

 

Now, before you raise the objection that Jesus’ relationship with Mary is not like this, that it had a beginning in time, that Jesus is eternal and Mary a created being, allow me to say that my argument is not that Jesus’ relationship to His Mother is identical to His relationship with His Father, obviously it is not, but rather my argument is that if a pre-existent, indeed, eternal Person can have a Father in this one way, eternal generation, then it is possible for the same pre-existent, eternal Person to have a Mother in another way.   That way, of course, is by Incarnation.   Jesus, the eternal Son of God, became Man by taking human nature and permanently uniting it to His Own eternal divine nature.   He did so, not by entering someone and taking possession of their body, but through the miraculous conception wrought by the Holy Ghost.    As St. Ambrose - and later John Francis Wade - put it, He “abhorred not the Virgin’s womb”.   He entered this world as Man, in other words, by being born into it.   By doing so, He Who was and is eternal, gained a Mother.   The Mother-Son relationship here is unique in that the Son existed before the Mother, not in that the Mother is Mother only of one of her Son’s natures rather than of her Son Himself.   The first uniqueness, the one that is actually true of Jesus’ relationship with the Virgin Mary, is a mystery.   The second is an absolute absurdity.

 

In addition to the thought-provoking question just addressed, Mr. Anderson provides us with a further illustration of the extremes to which the fanatical, anti-Catholicism of the Hyper-Protestant can take one.   He claims that Jesus “disowned” Mary three times.    Now, before looking at the passages he points to in order to back up this claim and seeing how he twists these Scriptures I am going to point out the gross Christological and Soteriological heresy he has committed by making this claim.   Jesus is both God and Man.   As Man, He is Perfect Man.   He is the Second Adam, Who succeeded where the first Adam failed.   He “was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin” (Heb. 4:15).   His sinlessness is essential to His being our Saviour.   “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.” (2 Cor. 5:21)  “For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit” (1 Pet. 3:18).   If Jesus disowned Mary, however, He broke the Fifth Commandment.   That would mean that He was not without sin, and could not be our Saviour.   Mr. Anderson, by taking his anti-Catholic fanaticism so far as to try to throw dirt on Mary because Rome gives her too much honour ended up throwing dirt on Jesus and committing soul-damning heresy in the process.

 

His attempt to back up this claim from Scripture demonstrates his “exegesis” – it is really eisegesis, the reading into a text of ideas that are not there – to be as bad as his theology.   The three occasions are the Wedding at Cana in the second chapter of St. John’s Gospel, the account of Jesus’ identification of those who do the will of God as His mother and brethren at the end of the third chapter of St. Mark’s Gospel, and when He passed Mary into St. John’s care on the Cross in the nineteenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel.    In his interpretation of the second of these, the one from St. Mark’s Gospel, Mr. Anderson attempts to guard against the obvious conclusion of his claim by providing a “justification” of Jesus’ “disowning” His Mother.    Even if, however, we accepted his interpretation of these events, it would not work as such a justification.   One of the examples of these supposed disownings took place prior to the events of Mark 3.   The Wedding at Cana took place before Jesus began His public ministry after the arrest of John the Baptist.   The events at the end of Mark 3 take place after the ordination and first commissioning of the Twelve Apostles earlier in that chapter which took place after His public ministry was underway.

 

There is no disowning in any of these passages.   Jesus’ words at the end of Mark 3 are for the sake of the multitude He was addressing.   He doesn’t say anything, positive or negative, about His biological relatives.   He asks who His mother and brethren are, then answers by pointing to His disciples, and saying that these are His mother and brethren, and that whoever does the will of God is His brother, sister, and mother.    This is an ecclesiological statement.   The Church is the family of God is what He is saying here.   Mr. Anderson bases his interpretation of this on the fact that the occasion of Jesus’ saying this was His Mother and brethren having come and sent for Him.   Earlier in the chapter, in verse 21, we read that “when his friends heard of it, they went out to lay hold on him: for they said, He is beside himself” and while this might be referring to the people of Nazareth in general it is not unreasonable to see the visit of Mary and His brethren as the unfolding of this.   If that is the case, however, most reasonable people would look at this and in the parlance of our day call it a misguided intervention.   No such action was needed, but it was done out of love.   Mr. Anderson, however, calls it a “kidnapping plot” and a “gubpowder (sic) plot”, “treachery” and an “attempt to be Judas before the time of Judas”, basically a violent criminal conspiracy against Jesus, that would justify His disowning them.   This, however, comes from his own twisted mind.  It is not there in the text.

 

Nor is there a disowning of Mary in the second chapter of St. John’s Gospel.   The words that Mr. Anderson takes as a disowning, the English of which can unfortunately come across as rude even though it is not so in the original, are in the original Greek: Τί ἐμοὶ καὶ σοί, γύναι.   A word for word literal rendition of this is “What to me and to you, woman?”    John Calvin took this to be a rebuke, but does not go so far as to read a disowning into it like Mr. Anderson does.  He said that it has the same force as the Latin Quid tibi mecum, which, while not entirely wrong, is not the whole story.   It is in fact a common idiom in Greek and Hebrew – it occurs several times in the Old Testament - as well as Latin.  Calvin likely had in mind the version of it that appears a couple of times in Plautus’ Menaechmi.   This is the play that inspired Shakespeare’s A Comedy of Errors.   It is about twins and mistaken identities.  The idiom, with the additional words est rei (Latin is not quite as economical with its words as Greek) has the meaning of “what business have I got with you?”   In the second scene of the third act it is spoken by the one Menaechmus to Peniculus who had addressed him thinking he was speaking to the Menaechmus he knew, the twin of the other.  This illustrates the sort of situation, or at least a farcical version of the sort of situation, in which this idiom is used as a rebuke.  As a rebuke, it is generally addressed to someone who you don’t know or don’t know very well who has been unduly intrusive.   This doesn’t fit the context of John 2 at all, making it really strange that John Calvin seemed to think this was the use in play here. The meaning that does fit here is “what does that have to do with me?” and in fact in this case it means “What does that have to do with us?”     Spoken in response to Mary’s having told Him that the wedding party had run out of wine, it means “why is that our concern?”  They were not, in other words, the hosts of the event, and were not responsible for the wine supply.  Note that neither this point, nor His hour not yet having come – a reference to His public ministry not having started yet – prevent Him from actually rectifying the situation, nor do they prevent Mary from understanding that He would do so as evinced by her instructions to the servants in the following verse.   Both her and His actions would be inexplicably odd if His words had the meaning Mr. Anderson reads into them.

 

As for the final reference from the nineteenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, Mr. Anderson’s interpretation of the passage is literally the opposite of how it has been universally understood, that is to say, as the loving expression of a dying Son concerned that His Mother be provided for and asking a trusted and beloved friend to take care of her for Him.    The universal understanding is the correct one.    The language used is the language of adoption, not the language of disowning.     Here is Mr. Anderson: “and at the cross in John "man behold THY mother, woman behold THY son" (i.e. you can have her if you want her, I disown her for a 3rd time)”.    Here by contrast is John Calvin: “The Evangelist here mentions incidentally, that while Christ obeyed God the Father, he did not fail to perform the duty which he owed, as a son, towards his mother… Yet, if we attend to the time and place when these things happened, Christ's affection for his mother was worthy of admiration.”     Calvin’s is a far less tortured and much more natural reading of this text.   An even more natural reading is to emphasize the affection over the duty.  

 

It is one thing to say that we should not give to the Blessed Virgin Mary the honour and worship due only to her Son Jesus Christ Who, with the Father and Holy Ghost, is God.   All orthodox Christians should be able to agree on this.   Even the Romanists are not likely to disagree with it as worded, even if we Protestants suspect their practice to sometimes be in violation of it.   It is another thing to hate Rome so much as to take the furthest possible position from hers, even if it means disagreeing not just with Rome but with all the ancient Churches, rejecting the right judgement of the universal Church that Nestorius had committed heresy, and twisting and torturing the Scriptures beyond recognition, in support of a claim, that Jesus disowned His Mother, that contains within itself a blasphemous imputation of sin, specifically the violation of the Fifth Commandment, to the sinless Saviour of the world and is thus a worse heresy than that of Nestorius, who not wanting to ascribe too much honour to the Blessed Virgin ended up dividing the Person of her Son, Who in  His One Person is both fully God and fully Man.

 

It is okay to be a Protestant.   When Rome says or does something that goes against what the Scriptures teach, as faithful and orthodox Churches everywhere have understood them to teach since the days of the Church Fathers, then you can and should follow Scripture first, and the universal tradition second, rather than Rome.   The path of Hyper-Protestantism, however, is one which if followed, leads into pits of error worse than the errors of Rome.   It is best to avoid it at all costs.

Back to the Church Fathers

The Rebirth of Orthodoxy: Signs of New Life in Christianity by Thomas C. Oden, San Fransisco, HarperCollins Publishers, 2003, 212 pages, US $24.95, CAN $38.95

Orthodoxy, that is to say the doctrines that were taught and defended as sound by the Apostolic and Patristic Church in its early, undivided, state, and which have continued to be held by the various branches which have sprung from the single trunk stem of that Church down through the centuries, has been under attack in Protestantism for the last two centuries. As modernity brought a wave of secularism into Western philosophy and science, turning the efforts of these disciplines towards the finding of naturalistic and materialistic explanations of the universe that excluded the need for divine revelation from God, a growing segment of Protestantism responded with attempts to accommodate this modern way of thinking in Christianity.

It began in the seminaries, in which the academic study of the Bible ceased to be training for the expository preaching of authoritative texts and became instead the source of imaginative theories that explained away the text, and undermined its authority. The source criticism of the Graf-Wellhaussen documentary hypothesis, which tried to isolate the hypothetical original documents that the Torah was supposedly patched together from by a post-Exilic redactor, was followed by various forms of form criticism that sought to reconstruct the oral tradition that preceded the written canon. From the latter came such pursuits as the “quest for the historical Jesus”, based upon the neo-Gnostic assumption that the historical Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of faith could be distinguished from each other, and “demythologizing”, which tried to distill the kerygma, the basic message of the Gospels, from the “myths” in which it was contained. (1)

While this was going on, in the theological departments of the seminaries, men like Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl were developing a new theology in which the doctrines which historically, traditionally, and Scripturally, were the central defining content of the Christian faith – the Trinity of One God in Three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the deity and humanity of Jesus Christ, united in One Person in the Incarnation, His death as the Atoning sacrifice for the sins of humanity, His Exaltation, beginning with His triumphant Resurrection from the dead and continuing through His Ascension into Heaven, His sitting at the right hand of the Father, to culminate at the end of time with His return to judge both the living and the dead – were redefined or jettisoned altogether as being peripheral. This new “modernist” or “liberal” theology tended to reduce Christian theology proper to a vague concept of God as loving Father of all, Christian soteriology to a simple universalism, Christian eschatology to the idea that the Kingdom of God would be established on earth through leftist social and political action (2) and Christian ethics to the bland idea that we should be nice to each other.

The result of all of this was the advent of the Modern Churchman, brilliantly spoofed by Evelyn Waugh in his first novel Decline and Fall, who “who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief.”

These developments provoked a number of responses. One of the earliest was that of Danish Lutheran theologian and existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who responded by denouncing the rationalism that the liberal theologians were seeking to accommodate and insisting that Christianity was not to be based upon reasoned argument but to be entered by a leap of faith.

The first organized response, however, was that of fundamentalism. Influenced heavily by 18th-19th Century evangelical revivalism and the 19th Century theology of dispensational premillenialism that had begun in the Plymouth Brethren and spread among other Protestant denominations through the Scofield Reference Bible, fundamentalism was an inter-denominational movement that sought to define the fundamentals of the faith (3) and to aggressively defend them against liberal or modernist attacks.

The next major response to theological liberalism was that of neo-orthodoxy. Neo-orthodoxy began in Switzerland with Karl Barth and Emil Brunner and was spread in the United States by the Niebuhr brothers, Reinhold and Richard, and by Paul Tillich. (4) Neo-orthodoxy rejected the liberal project of adapting Christianity to Enlightenment rationalism and insisted that Christian truth was a revelation from God. Unlike fundamentalism, however, it did not identify that revelation with the words of Holy Scripture but with the believer’s personal encounter with God in the reading of the Scriptures. It was always questionable therefore, whether neo-orthodoxy was a return to orthodoxy from the heterodoxy of liberalism or an attempt to replace the old orthodoxy with a new, different one.

A similar question has been asked on the American political and cultural right, over the last thirty years, about a group of thinkers who had started out on the left as part of the “New York Intellectuals”, become Cold War liberals after World War II, and then re-aligned themselves with the conservative movement after the rise of the New Left in the 1960s. The members of this group are commonly known as the neo-conservatives and those, who have called the authenticity of their conservative conversion into question, and re-asserted the canons of classical Burkean conservative thought in the distinctly American form it was given by Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver decades ago, are known as the paleoconservatives.

Is there also a paleo-orthodoxy in Christian theology?

Yes, as a matter of fact there is and the man who is its leader is Thomas Clark Oden, a United Methodist minister and the professor of theology and ethics at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. Like the neo-orthodox, Oden started out as a liberal. Indeed, as we shall see momentarily, that is something of an understatement. He grew disillusioned with liberalism, and, after rejecting the modern assumptions it is based upon, turned to the doctrines that have been considered orthodox by Christians since the early centuries of Christianity. In his 2003 book, The Rebirth of Orthodoxy, he writes:

Since 1979 I have used the term paleo-orthodoxy for the orthodoxy that holds steadfast to classic consensual teaching, in order to make it clear that the ancient consensus of faith is starkly distinguished from neo-orthodoxy. The “paleo” stratum of orthodoxy is its oldest layer. For Christians this means that which is apostolic and patristic. For Jews it means that which is rabbinic and midrashic. These two branches of the “paleo” stratum developed side by side during the same timeframe and within the same language world. (p. 34, bold indicates italics in original)

The Rebirth of Orthodoxy is the story of how, in the late 20th Century, Christianity and Judaism both experienced a renewal of interest in the ancient teachings of their respective faiths. As a Christian theologian, he focuses on this renewal within Christianity, but points out certain parallels with what is happening in Judaism. Ironically, the writings of each faith in the period he has in mind, treats the other faith with invective that would make that used by the Reformers against the Reformers against the papacy and vice-versa seem relatively mild in comparison, but that never comes up. Perhaps that is just as well.

Oden begins his story by setting the stage with an account of the death of modernity. The idea of the modern age, as the third age of Western civilization to follow classical antiquity and medieval Christendom, goes back to the Renaissance which is usually thought of as the beginning of that age. In the second half of the 20th Century it became widely accepted that the modern age was ending or had come to an end, some even arguing that it had ended as early as the Second World War. Oden concurs with this, although the modern age of which he writes is an abridged version that begins with the French Revolution and ends with the collapse of Communism in 1989. It was in this period that Marx, Nietzsche, Darwin and Freud introduced their destructive ideas and by the end of this period these ideas and ideologies had been largely discredited. In discussing the collapse of modernity and its ideologies Oden helpfully identifies the arrogant attitude which characterizes so much modern thought. This attitude, which he calls modern chauvinism, assumes “the intrinsic inferiority of all premodern ideas and texts, and the intrinsic superiority of all modern methods of investigation” (p. 8).

The irony of modern chauvinism is that while modern ideologies, such as the ones mentioned, had only a very brief lifespan before they were dated, discredited, and bankrupt, traditional faith communities, such as the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and evangelical forms of Christianity have survived the crisis of modernity and even thrived. The same can not be said for the liberalism that embraced modernity. Wherever it has been adopted it has lead to empty pews, dwindling and aging congregations, and ultimately the closing of parishes.

Oden’s story, however, is not just about how much more persistent and durable traditional, orthodox forms of faith are compared to modern ideas. It is about a rediscovery of ancient orthodoxy that is concurrent with the collapse of modernity and which is taking place not only among Roman Catholics, evangelicals, and others who have remained faithful to their traditional beliefs but also in denominations that have gone liberal.

Indeed, the tenth chapter of the book, entitled “Recentering the Mainline” is all about renewal and confessing movements within the mainline Protestant denominations, i.e., the denominations in which liberalism prevailed for most of the 20th Century. Oden lists and in his endnotes provides contact information for such movements within the Episcopalian (Anglican), Presbyterian, United Methodist, United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, American Baptist, United Church of Canada and Lutheran denominations, as well as a number of organizations that seek to coordinate the confessional movements in various denominations. He encourages the faithful in such denominations with the example of his own denomination, the United Methodist Church, which in its General Conference in 2000 AD affirmed a number of orthodox doctrines, practices, and moral stances that would have been unheard of at previous such assemblies.

The “rebirth of orthodoxy” of which he writes, however, is not just a returning to the traditional roots of a particular denomination. The orthodoxy that is being rediscovered is that of the early centuries of the Church, an orthodoxy which part of the common heritage of all Christian denominations. It is, in other words, an ecumenical orthodoxy.

For much of the 20th Century an ecumenical orthodoxy would have been a contradiction in terms. For the ecumenical movement was anything but orthodoxy. It sought Christian unity at the expense of Christian truth, and by aligning itself with modern ideas and practices and radical and revolutionary causes, generated more division than it did unity. For this reason, Oden calls the ecumenism of the orthodox “the new ecumenism” – this is the title of his fifth chapter – to distinguish it from what he calls the old ecumenism, i.e., the ecumenism of the World and National Councils of Churches. Of course the identification of these ecumenisms as “new” and “old” relative to each other is only valid within the context of recent history – in the larger context of the entire history of the Christian Church, Oden’s “new ecumenism” is much older, for it is based upon the unity in orthodox teaching and practice of the ancient, undivided, Church.

Early in the book, Oden defines orthodoxy as “integrated biblical teaching as interpreted in its most consensual classic period.” (p. 29) If the hallmark of a good definition is that it brings clarity to the meaning of the word being defined, Oden deserves a failing grade for that one. Thankfully, he does not leave it at that but explains what he means. Orthodoxy is a tradition that begins with the Scriptures, a canon of sacred texts accepted as authoritative by the faithful and continues with the interpretation and understanding of those texts, the confession of beliefs drawn from those texts, and the living out of those beliefs in the lives of the faithful, all under the direction of the Holy Spirit. That it takes place under the direction of the Holy Spirit – the Comforter Whom Jesus had promised would guide His Church into all truth – is the most important part of this, because without it, Oden’s repeated, annoying, use of the word consensual would suggest the ludicrous idea that truth is something that is determined by democratic vote.

How truth is determined, is the subject of his eleventh and final chapter. In this chapter, he tells us about St. Vincent, the fifth century monk who after much travelling throughout the Christian world and dialoguing with a broad spectrum of Christian leaders and believers, withdrew to a monastery at Lerins, shortly after the Council of Ephesus, where he wrote his Commonitory. In this work, St. Vincent wrote that in distinguishing the true faith from heresy, recourse must first be taken to the Scriptures, then to the tradition of the Church. In this context he gave his famous rule about what to do when the correct interpretation of Scripture is in dispute: Quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est, that we should hold to whatever is believed everywhere, always, and by all. (5)

This was not, as Oden points out, an invention of St. Vincent, but rather something that was commonly understood among the various Christians he had discussed the matter with during his travels. It put forward three criteria for a doctrine to be considered orthodox – universality, that it was held by the whole Church and not just by those within a certain region; Apostolic antiquity, that it had been taught since the earliest days of the Church, and Conciliar consent, that it had been affirmed by the ecumenical Councils of the Church. If a Council had not determined a doctrinal issue one way or the other, Oden suggests that the writings of the Church fathers, in particular those of the great doctors Sts. Athanasius, Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome and Gregory the Great, are a guide to the consensus of the ancient Church.

In an earlier chapter, the seventh, Oden had discussed various scholarly projects underway regarding the earliest interpretation of the Scriptures in both the Christian and Jewish traditions, including the Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture that he himself was editing. This return to the texts, tradition, and methodology of classic Christianity is not just an academic exercise. Oden portrays it as being transforming and revitalizing, both for individual believers and for denominations, and uses his own experience as an illustration. As mentioned earlier, he had started out as a liberal. The son of radical parents, he says that he “learned my agnosticism from Nietzsche, my social views from radical Methodists and existentialists, and my theology (God help me, I confess) from Alan Watts.” (p. 84). After pointing out that he and Hillary Rodham Clinton had largely had the same education, early ideals, and influences he writes that when he looks now at her “persistent situational ethics, political messianism, statist social idealism, and pragmatic toughness” he sees “mirrored the self I was a few decades ago”. (p. 85) He credits a mentor and colleague of his at Drew University, Will Herberg (6) for steering him towards orthodoxy. Herberg challenged Oden to study the fathers of the Christian tradition, citing his own experience of studying the early texts of his own faith, the Talmud and Midrashim after his disillusionment with his early Communism, telling him that he “would remain theologically uneducated until I had studied carefully Athanasius, Ambrose, Basil and Cyril of Alexandria” and that until he did he was “not a theologian except in name, even if remunerated as one”. (p. 87)

Herberg’s challenge clearly bore fruit. Oden took him up on his challenge, and through reading the early fathers and conversations with orthodox believers, went from being the kind of person just described to being someone who believes, lives, and teaches the faith once delivered unto the saints.

There were some places where I could not see eye to eye with the author. The largest of these concerns the “fairness revolution”, which is Oden’s general label for the egalitarian movements that have wrought tremendous social changes in living memory. Oden gives the civil rights movement, the so-called women’s movement (feminism), the papal apology for the Crusades, and the struggle over “unconventional lifestyles” in the Boy Scouts, as examples of this fairness revolution. Oden is not blind to the many glaring problems with this revolution, and is particularly critical of its tendency to produce a form of modern chauvinism, in which past generations are condemned for not sharing the current generation’s supposed commitment to fairness. He is also not unaware that the fairness revolution has had some pretty bad consequences:

A dependency population within a welfare state has become a fixed reality. Victimization has become a game. Women suffer more, not less, from divorce and economic instability. Family cohesion has diminished. The children of the fairness revolution are paying an extremely high price in family disorder, adolescent suicide rates, neuroses, and chronic anxiety. (p. 12)

Nevertheless, Oden seems unable to go all the way to the only tenable conclusion about the fairness revolution – that it was from day one, completely worthless and execrable and that it never had any better goal than an insane vision of a society restructured so as to be driven by what is the equivalent of the infantile whine of “it’s not fair, it’s not fair, Johnny’s got a bigger piece of cake than I do, you like Suzie better than you like me, wah, wah, it’s not fair.” Instead, he devotes an entire chapter to arguing that the goals of the fairness revolution are laudable, come from classical Christian orthodoxy, and that the problem with the revolution is its reliance upon secular and governmental agencies to accomplish its ends.

It seems to me that in this part of the book, Oden is confusing, on the basis of a partial surface resemblance, two things that are essentially different and incompatible with each other, classic Christian catholicity in which all people everywhere are welcome to partake of the unity of one Lord, one faith, one baptism one the one hand and late modern ideals of fairness on the other.

That being said, he at least does not treat the fairness revolution with the uncritical adoration it receives from most academics and clergymen. Furthermore that is only one chapter out of eleven, in what is otherwise an excellent, encouraging, and inspirational book. I enjoyed reading it and recommend it for others.



(1) The history of the19th Century “quest for the historical Jesus” was told by famous missionary Albert Schweitzer in his early 20th Century work by that title. Demythologizing is most associated with Rudolf Bultmann, New Testament professor at the University of Marburg. Both men were German Lutherans.

(2) This blend of post-millenialism and socialism was called the “Social Gospel”. Its first major proponent was Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist pastor in New York. Today, the concepts of “Social Gospel” and “social justice” are virtually synonymous and interchangeable. In Rauschenbusch’s day, however, “social justice” was a Roman Catholic concept, that taught by Pope Leo XIII in “Rerum Novarum”, which condemned socialism even more harshly than it did liberalism (capitalism).

(3) The term “fundamentalism” was coined by Baptist Curtis Lee Laws, and was popularized by The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, a series of apologetical essays defending the authority of Scripture and the historic doctrines of the faith by conservative theologians of various denominations, that was published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. The movement was by nature and necessity reductionist. The most popular list of fundamentals contained five – the Inerrancy of Scripture and the Deity, Virgin Birth, Substitutionary Death, and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ. This brought the movement criticism from conservative Protestants that would otherwise have been in sympathy with it.

(4) German Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer was also a noted neo-orthodox theologian.

(5) Within the community of believers, that is.

(6) This is the same Will Herberg who wrote Protestant, Catholic, Jew and was Religion Editor of William F. Buckley Jr.’s National Review. His own experience, of an early Communist radicalism followed by disillusion, a turn to the right, and a rediscovery of traditional faith – in his case Judaism – was not uncommon among Buckley’s early staff.