Good Guys, Bad Guys, and Just War

On 28 February, American Neo-Thomist philosopher Edward Feser posted to his blog a short piece with the title “The U.S. war on Iran is manifestly unjust”.  In this piece he demonstrated that the war on Iran does not meet the criteria to be considered just according to classical Catholic just war theory, focusing on the requirements that there be a just cause and showing that the reasons put forth by the White House for the actions against Iran do not make for a genuine casus belli.  He also briefly talked about the war’s not meeting the requirement that it be conducted under lawful authority because by the terms of American constitutional law the authority to wage war belongs to Congress and not the president.

 

Roman Patriarch Leo XIV is clearly of the same opinion as Feser on this matter.  Some others of the Roman communion who hold to just war theory are less certain.  Among these is R. R. (“Rusty”) Reno, editor of First Things. His argument that it is “unwise to issue confident moral judgments about Operation Epic Fury” was posted on 3 March, three days after Feser’s.  Feser has just contributed a piece to First Things entitled “Does Just War Doctrine Require Moral Certainty?”  In response to those like Reno who disagreed with him, he argues for an affirmative answer to the question asked in his title.  “What has long been the standard teaching in the Catholic just war tradition”, he writes, “is that the probability of a war’s being just is not good enough. The case for the justice of a proposed war must be morally certain. Otherwise, it is morally wrong to initiate the conflict.”  Note his use of the illustration of a hunter shooting into the bush.  Unless the hunter is certain there is no person hiding in or behind the bush that he might hit, to shoot is a reckless and morally wrong act.  The same illustration has been used for decades to answer the argument  that we don’t know when a fetus becomes a person made by those who think women should have the right to murder their unborn offspring.

 

I agree with Feser (and Leo XIV) on this matter.  I wish to point out, however, that he has been arguing mostly the one aspect of the just war question, that of jus ad bellum or when is it just to go to war.  There is also the aspect of jus in bello or what is the right manner in which to conduct war.  These aspects are not independent of each other.  If a war cannot be fought in a manner that is jus in bello then it can never be jus ad bellum.

 

This is often avoided in contemporary discussions of just war because of the uncomfortable question it raises of whether Modern developments in the technology of war have made a jus ad bellum war a practical impossibility.

 

The rules of just war theory or doctrine were hammered out at a time when wars were fought very differently from how they are fought today.  A king who went to war with another kingdom would be expected either to lead the troops into battle himself or delegate the task to his sons, brothers, or other close relatives.  Democratically elected politicians, by contrast, do not fight in the wars for which they vote and are notorious for protecting their own children from conscription.   How did Black Sabbath put it again?  “Politicians hide themselves away/They only started the war/Why should they go out to fight?/They leave that role to the poor.” (1)

 

Furthermore, when St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, et al., were drawing out the principles of just war from Scripture, moral philosophy/theology and reason, those who did the actual fighting and killing in war, generally had to see the people they were killing in order to do so.  This meant, of course, that they were also putting their own lives in jeopardy by going to war.  This was most obviously the case with combat involving swords and other weapons that could not kill beyond the range of the slightly extended arm-length they provided, but even with longer-distance weapons such as bows and arrows, catapults, and cannons you had to see what you were aiming at with your own eyes.

 

This was the way war was fought for most of human history.  Now think of the contrast with today.  Airplanes were first used in combat in World War I.  With World War II, the use of these machines to drop high explosive bombs that could kill large numbers of unseen non-combatants became normative.  By the end of that war, the Americans had developed the first nuclear weapon, the atomic bomb, which they dropped on two Japanese cities killing about 120, 000 people instantly with the death toll growing to about twice that amount by the end of the year due to radiation poisoning and other such injuries.  Mercifully, their use did not become normative, especially since the development of this monstrous technology after the war has exponentially increased its destructive power to the point where it could eliminate humanity and all other life on earth.  In 1957, the Soviet Union conducted the first successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile, and two years later both the Americans and the Soviets had operational ICBM systems in place. By the 1970s, advanced guidance systems that used computers and lasers to direct bombs to their targets were in common use (this evolved out of technology that in a very early stage of development both the Americans and the Nazis had during World War II).  Today, cities can be reduced to rubble and thousands of non-combatants instantly killed, totally unseen by the person who does the destroying and killing with the push of a button, half a world away.

 

This, which, by the way, is what “progress” looks like, a fact which when it sinks in should be sufficient to make a reactionary out of any sane person, was not merely a series of changes to the tools of war.  It changed the very nature of war and in such a way as to raise the question of whether war fought in this manner and with these tools can ever be just.

 

It is a difficult question to answer, not least because however these changes have affected the nature and justice of war, they have not affected in the slightest its necessity.   If a hostile power attacks and invades your country this creates the necessity of your going to war defensively to stop them (blithering rubbish to the contrary from Mennonites, Quakers, and Gandhi be hanged).  To say that something is necessary, however, is not to say that it is just, since necessity and justice are two very different things. If we set the difference between necessity and justice aside and take the position that all defensive wars are just, note that this would obviously not justify the actions of the United States and Israel.

 

In popular American culture the demands of classical just war theory have largely been by-passed by a very different way of thinking about martial ethics.  In this way of thinking, it does not matter so much that a war have a valid casus belli, that it be a means of last resort, that the good that it accomplishes or at least tries to accomplish outweighs the death and destruction it causes and that non-combatants not be made into targets.  What matters is that “we” (the ones going to war) are the “good guys” and that “they” (the ones we are going to war with) are the “bad guys.”

 

This way of looking at things is so puerile if not infantile that it would scarcely be worth addressing if it were not so widespread in the United States (and other countries of the civilization formerly known as Christendom that have had the misfortune of being inundated with American pop culture) and so clearly the predominant way of thinking among those who started this war and its chief apologists.  This is, of course, the way superhero comic books and Hollywood movies tend to portray things and it can hardly be a coincidence that these started to become the staples of American pop culture that they are today around the same time as the rapid advancement of American military technology.  Hollywood and DC (2) cannot be blamed for creating this thinking, however much they may have helped popularize it, because it had been part of the American mindset long before World War II.

 

Indeed, I maintain that it can be traced back to the Calvinism that was the root of Yankee culture.  Now in this instance I am not using the word “Yankee” in the sense it normally has in my country or, for that matter, anywhere else outside of the United States, i.e., as a synonym for “American.”  I am using it rather to refer to the culture of the American northeast which developed out of the colonies settled by Puritans.  In the American Internecine War (1861-1865) this culture went to war with its chief rival, the more traditional and agrarian culture of the American states south of the Mason-Dixon Line which had developed out of colonies that were not so Puritan in nature.  It thoroughly defeated its rival and has dominated American culture on the national level ever since. (3)  By this point in time Yankee culture had become secularized, but it was still at heart a secular Calvinism.

 

While this most often comes up in the context of tracing American capitalism back to the Protestant (more specifically Calvinist) work ethic (4) or of Southern traditionalist conservatives pointing out the deleterious effects of the North’s victory on American society as a whole (5), I believe that it can be shown to also be the source of the “good guys” versus “bad guys” mindset of American culture. 

 

The doctrine that most sets Calvinism apart from other Christians, including other Protestants, is its doctrine of double predestination and election.   This might seem to be an unlikely source of dividing people into “good guys” and “bad guys” since it is closely related in Calvinist theology to what seems at first glance to be the strongest possible affirmation of the orthodox Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin, i.e., that all of Adam’s descendants are tainted with the sin that infected human nature in the Fall and are therefore utterly dependent upon the grace and mercy of God.  In Calvinist theology, especially as formulated against Arminianism (a dissenting subcategory of Calvinism that stresses free will) this is stated as Total Depravity.  From the body of humanity so totally depraved by Original Sin, the doctrine of double predestination states, God in eternity past selected some upon whom to pour His mercy and grace and to bring to final salvation and chose others upon whom to pour His wrath and to punish eternally basing the selection entirely upon His Own pleasure rather than upon anything within the “elect” and the “reprobate” that might distinguish them from each other.

 

How this idea became secularized into the American “good guys” versus “bad guys” mindset may already be apparent.  To make it clearer I will briefly show how the Calvinist doctrine differs from Christian orthodoxy.  Original Sin is sound, orthodox doctrine, taken directly from the fifth chapter of St. Paul’s epistle to the Romans.  Pelagianism (that Adam’s sin isn’t inherited and that people can be righteous before God without His grace) and Semi-Pelagianism (that God’s grace is required for salvation, but that man can make the first step towards God) are both heresies, condemned as such by the universal Church.  This means that all people are sinners (Rom. 3:23).  The division of mankind into the righteous (those cleansed of sin and made righteous before God by His grace given to man in Jesus Christ) and the wicked (those who finally and incurably reject the grace of God) is not something that took place in eternity past but something that will take place on the Last Day.   Until then, God does indeed have those He has “chosen”, who have received His grace, but unlike in the Calvinist concept of the “elect” in orthodox theology being chosen by God does not mean selected to be an elite few who are given God’s grace to enjoy among themselves but being selected to receive His grace that they may assist in bringing it to others.   Think of God’s words to Abra(ha)m the very first time He spoke to him.  “And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” (Gen. 12:2-3)  Far too many people read these verses as if the emphasis was on the words that I did not highlight with italics.  For Abraham, being chosen by God did not mean that he was the exclusive recipient of God’s favour and blessing but that he was a vessel through which it was to flow to everyone else. (6)

By contrast, the Calvinist view of election is that those chosen by God are chosen to be the sole and exclusive recipients of His saving grace and mercy.  In its strictest form, defined by the canons of the Synod of Dort (1618-1619) rather than the Institutes of John Calvin himself, Calvinism teaches that God gave Jesus Christ only to His elect and that Jesus died only for the elect, a doctrine that most Christians rightly regard as blasphemous and heretical.  In Calvinism, the numbers of the elect and reprobate have been fixed from eternity past.  One is either “elect” or “reprobate”, this can never change, and it is in no way based on anything one does.  This is the doctrine of John Winthrop and his followers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who envisioned what would become America as a Puritan “city on a hill” even as the spirit of the Modern Age, the spirit of thinking Satan’s thoughts after him, had already infested his fellow Puritans in England who not long thereafter would, in complete violation of the Scriptural injunctions of SS Peter and Paul, wage what would ultimately be a regicidal war against King Charles I and lay the foundation for the twin evil doctrines of the Modern Age, liberalism (of which Americanism is a variety) and progressivism or leftism (of which Communism is a variety). It is the clear ancestor of the American idea that in war there are “good guys” and “bad guys”, their “goodness” and “badness” being who they are and not so much what they do, a notion that conveniently allows traditional Christian doctrine as to when it is right to go to war and how war can be rightly conducted to be bypassed.

 

That, of course, is the danger of this “good guys” versus “bad guys” approach to war.  The old rules of just war doctrine were carefully thought out to limit when wars can be fought and how they can be fought so as to limit the destruction and death wrought by war.  “Good guys” versus “bad guys”, however, is not such a limiting doctrine.  To the contrary, its tendency is to give carte blanche to the “good guys” when it comes to defeating the “bad guys.”  Look at how that has played out in American history.  In the American Internecine War, the North invaded the South and waged total war against those who from their own stated perspective they regarded as still their brethren and fellow countrymen.  Total war is always unjust by the standards of traditional Christian just war doctrine.  In World War II, FDR unilaterally – he did not inform Sir Winston Churchill of it in advance, and Churchill who had a lot more sense than Roosevelt recognized it to be a bad move although he was forced to go along with FDR’s press release – declared that the Allies would accept nothing less than “unconditional surrender”, a stupid declaration that could only ever have had the result of prolonging the war and increasing rather than limiting its destructiveness.  At the end of that war Truman unconscionably ordered the atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though, contrary to the lies that are told today to justify this action, he knew that Japan was already willing to negotiate a surrender to General MacArthur.  The current head of the United States in an ill-thought out social media rant against Leo XIV said, among other things, “I don’t want a Pope who thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.”  Would it not be more sensible to say that the only country that has ever committed the atrocity of using nuclear weapons in war is the country that should not be trusted with having them?

 

The “good guy” versus “bad guy” mentality leads those who hold it to regard earthly wars as microcosmic versions of a cosmic level struggle between good and evil.  Christians are forbidden to think this way (Eph. 6:12).  There may be a surface level resemblance between this idea of a cosmic struggle between good and evil and the Christian teaching that an angel started a rebellion against God in the spiritual realm, which was brought to earth when Adam and Eve were tempted and fell, but the resemblance does not go much deeper than this.  It is much closer to Eastern dualistic concepts which, when they made their way into the Church in the early centuries through false teachers like Mani, were rejected as heresy.  Christianity – sound, orthodox, Christianity that is – does not teach that good and evil are two opposing forces, the struggle between which basically defines the universe and life within it.  Christianity teaches that there is One God, Who is Good, that other than God, everything that exists has been created by God Who created it good and pronounced it good, that the evil that became present in Creation when Satan and then man used the good gift that is their free will to rebel against God is present not as some force or power or thing that is equal and opposite to goodness, but only in the same way that a hole is present in a wall.

 

Classical just war doctrine, carefully formulated by the Church’s best doctors and theologians from Scriptural principles and moral philosophy to limit the destructive potential of war is really the only option for orthodox Christians.  A pacifism that tells you not merely to turn the cheek to the ἐχθροί (personal enemies) you are commanded to love but to allow the πολέμῐοι (military enemies) of your country to conquer, enslave or kill your family, neighbours and countrymen without fighting back is utterly vile and not to be regarded as a valid option.  The recipe for escalating rather than limiting endless numbers of wars that is the “good guys” versus “bad guys” mindset must also be rejected as repugnant.  This leaves us with classical just war doctrine, of which the United States’ current war against Iran fails all the tests. 

 

Unless the United States can figure out a way to fight a war without using technology that enables them to kill people they can’t see in large numbers from a safe distance far away and to dismiss the civilian casualties as “collateral damage” it is doubtful that any war she fights can ever be considered just again.

 

 (1)   Ozzy Osbourne, Terence Michael Butler, William T. Ward, F. Frank Iommi, “War Pigs”, 1970.

(2)   Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman were introduced in 1938, 1939, and 1941 respectively.  Although Timely introduced Captain America in 1940, it was not until 1961 when the company rebranded as Marvel and Editor-in-chief Stan Lee working with Jack Kirby created the Fantastic Four, soon to be followed by Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk and X-Men that it became the big player in the superhero comics market.

(3)   See Clyde N. Wilson, The Yankee Problem: An American Dilemma, (Columbia SC: Shotwell Publishing, 2016). 

(4)   Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated from 1905 German edition by Talcott Parsons (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1930).

(5)   Note 3, vide supra, and also The Twelve Southerners, I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (New York & London: Harper and Bros, 1930) which is still in print from Louisiana State University Press and pretty much any book by M. E. Bradford.

(6)  The Calvinist view of election is not the only one that could stand correction from this passage.  Unlike previous American military escapades in the Middle East, the current war against Iran has little international support.  The United States’ most conspicuous ally in this war is Israel.  Much of the internal support for the war in the United States has come from Christians, mostly evangelical Protestants, who have a particular version of the “good guys” versus “bad guys” mindset in which Israel is always the “good guy” in a Middle East conflict regardless of the circumstances and her neighbour is always the “bad guy”.

 

This is because the present day state of Israel shares the same name as the people of God in the Old Testament and these evangelicals believe that the Genesis 12 passage – the parts not highlighted in the quotation in the text of this essay – require that Christians give unconditional support to the present day state. 

 

This is an absurd conclusion.  It starts from an interpretation of Genesis 12 that like the Calvinist, regards God’s choosing or electing as being for the sake of the chosen or elect rather than for everyone.  In this case it is the interpretation that this passage, subsequent passages like it, and basically the whole of Old Testament history was all about creating an ethnic group which would enjoy God’s special favour.  The New Testament does not allow for this interpretation.  Galatians 3:16 clearly states that the Seed to Whom the promises to Abraham pertain is Christ.  Since everyone who believes in Christ is united to Christ and therefore in Christ the promises are available to everyone through faith in Jesus Christ.  They are only available through such faith, not through biological descent from Abraham. 

 

This is the clear teaching of the passage which, ironically, those who argue otherwise, claim as their principal proof text.  This passage, which interestingly follows the two chapters which Calvinists like to twist to support their view of election, is Romans 11.  In this chapter Israel, the people of God, is likened to an olive true.  Biological descendants of ancient Israel are described as “natural branches” of the tree. “Natural branches” who do not believe in Jesus Christ are cut out of the tree for their unbelief. Gentiles (from the Latin word for “nation” this is used to mean non-Jews) who believe in Jesus Christ are “wild branches” which are grafted in by faith.  The cut off “natural branches” can be grafted back in again if they believe.  Therefore, those who are in the olive tree that is the true Israel of both Testaments are believing (in Jesus Christ) Jews and believing Gentiles.  Believing Jews and Gentiles, however, make up the Catholic (universal) Church.  Clearly, therefore, this passage cannot support the claim that the Israel of God is a biological nation distinct from the Church which is the fundamental claim of the rubbish theology that underlies the “Christian Zionist” position. 

 

Those who cling to this theology, which, not coincidentally, is primarily to be found in the United States, will no doubt scream “Replacement Theology” at having this obvious truth pointed out, much like how Calvinists scream “Arminian” at anyone who does not accept their claim that God doesn’t love everyone and that Jesus died only for the elect, but this is akin to liberals screaming “racist” at anyone who disagrees with them.  “Replacement theology” would say either that the “wild branches” were grafted in to replace the “natural branches” or that a “wild olive tree” was substituted for the “natural olive tree” but neither of these is the case (that the “wild branches” are not “replacements” of the “natural branches” is evident from the fact that the “natural branches” can be grafted back in).  This is rather “Continuation theology”, that Israel, the olive tree, continues into the Church.   The only “replacement” is the “replacement” of the Old Covenant with the New, a “replacement” that is actually a “fulfillment” of the promises of the Old Covenant, and the replacement of the spiritual leadership of Israel under the New Covenant (the Apostles and their successor bishops leading a ministry of presbyters supported by deacons) from that of the Old Covenant (the Aaronic priesthood, supported by the Levites and led by the chief or high priest) which is what was prophesied by Jesus in the Parable of the Wicked Tenants. 

 

Note that “replacement” of this sort took place in Judaism as well.  A parallel error to the one I have been debunking in this note is the error of thinking that what is called Judaism today is the religion of the Old Testament.  This is not the case.  Judaism shares a common history with Christianity before the coming of Christ, but with the coming of Christ the prophecies of the Messiah were fulfilled and the New Covenant established.  The Gospel was to be preached to the Jews first but many of these did not believe and held on to the religion of the Old Testament.  This was eventually taken away from them when the forces of Titus of Rome sacked Jerusalem in AD 70.  The principal elements of the Old Testament religion were the aforementioned Aaronic priesthood, the sacrifices that this priesthood was commanded to offer daily and on special occasions, at first in the Tabernacle, then in the Temple which replaced the Tabernacle and which had to be in a specific place in Jerusalem, and the feasts which by the Mosaic Law had to be celebrated in Jerusalem.   The destruction of the Temple made all that impossible.  The rabbis, originally lay teachers and leaders in late Second Temple Judaism, became the clergy of the new Judaism that arose after the destruction of the Temple.  Synagogue worship, which had developed after the Babylonian Captivity, probably around the time of Ezra himself, elements of which were incorporated into Christianity (the Ministry of the Word portion of the service prior to the Ministry of the Sacrament is largely an adaptation of synagogue worship), took over the central place in the worship of Judaism from Temple worship.  The feasts remained, but obviously they could no longer be kept in strict accordance to the Mosaic Law.  This new Judaism is not, as some Christians mistakenly think, an older parent religion to Christianity, but a younger religion by about forty years.  It too has other Scriptures by which the Scriptures which Jews and Christians have in common are interpreted.  These, consisting of the Mishnah (the codification of what the Second Temple Pharisees called the oral law) and rabbinic commentary on the Mishnah called the Gemara, comprise the Talmud, which was compiled between the third and sixth centuries AD (both in Palestine and Babylon with the Babylonian version which was completed later becoming the authoritative version).  

 

None of this excuses us from our duty to leave peacefully, so far as it depends on us, with all people and to “Give none offence, neither to the Jews, nor to the Gentiles, nor to the church of God” (1 Cor. 10:32).  It shows the folly in thinking that we are under an obligation to God to support the present state that calls herself Israel in all of her conflicts without taking any consideration of who, if anyone, is in the right in the conflict.  Note that thinking we have to oppose the present state of Israel in all of her conflicts is just as much folly and the kind of folly that is usually attached to the “woke” anti-white bigotry in the kind of academic leftism that Americans think is a form of Marxism created by the infiltration of American higher learning by European Communists but which is actually Americanism taken to its totalitarian extreme.  These conflicts should be evaluated by the standards with which we would judge the conflicts of any other states.  Certainly it is not helpful for Christians to be repeating the inane Scripture-twisting rhetoric of the state of Israel’s leaders that treats the nation that is currently located in the heart of what was King Cyrus’ empire as if it were Amalek.

Thoughts for Eastertide

 He is risen!

 

In each of the Gospel portraits of Jesus Christ the events of a single week occupy a sizeable portion of the text.  This is the week which began with His triumphal entry into Jerusalem, riding on a donkey in fulfilment of the prophecy of Zechariah, and thus publicly announcing Himself to the nation as the long-awaited Messiah.  This is the week which ended on the Sabbath in which in the visible world His body lay in the tomb in which Joseph of Arimathea had laid it while in the invisible world He in spirit had entered the other Kingdom of Death not as those who had gone there previously, a captive, but as a Conqueror. (1)  In this week, the week of Creation is recalled and fulfilled.  On the day corresponding to that in which God said “let there be light”, Christ, the Light of the World, announced Himself publicly.  On the day corresponding to that in which God made man in His Own image and so finished His work of Creation which He pronounced good, Jesus Christ just before dying proclaimed the word τετέλεσται (Jn. 19:30) which means “It is finished.”  The work He thereby proclaimed finished was the work of redemption, the work of propitiation, the work of Atonement, the work made necessary by man’s fall into sin.  Then on the day corresponding to that in which God rested from His work of Creation, His body rested in that borrowed tomb.

 

Last week was Holy Week, the week in our liturgical Kalendar devoted to special remembrance of this week of Gospel events.  It began with Palm Sunday, in which palms are waved and hosannas shouted in commemoration of Christ’s Triumphal entry.

 

On Maundy Thursday we were reminded of the Last Supper where the Sacrament of Holy Communion was instituted, where the New Commandment, “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another” (Jn. 13:34), so like those with which the Lord summarized the Law and yet so different at the same time, was given, and where the Lord Himself set the example of this by washing His disciples’ feet, an act ritually re-enacted on the day which takes its name from the Commandment. 

 

On Good Friday the Crucifixion itself was the focus.  In outward appearance, this was the opposite of the Triumph at the beginning of the week.  Instead of “Hosanna”, the crowd cried “crucify Him”, instead of riding into the city He had to carry His cross out of it.  Beneath the outward appearance, of course, this was His true moment of Triumph.  He had told His disciples from the moment St. Peter had confessed “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16) at Caesarea Philippi that this would come, that it was for this purpose that He entered into the world, that this is what it truly meant for Him to be the Christ.  He had not come to bring political deliverance to the Old Testament nation, but to bring deliverance from the slavery into which the Fall of Adam had delivered all mankind, slavery to sin and death, and He could only do this by suffering and dying Himself.  Since St. Anselm, we in the West have tended to think of this primarily in terms of the payment of a debt.  Man owed a debt but had no resources to pay, God had the resources but could not pay the debt qua God, so He became Incarnate as a Man and the God-Man paid the debt on behalf of the world.  In the East, they tend to think of it more in terms of a hostage situation in which Death, man’s enemy, has held him captive and Christ, Who is stronger than Death and over whom Death has not even the usurped claim due to sin, allowing Himself to be taken by Death so that He could destroy Death from the inside and set the captives free.  Both ways of thinking about it are taken from Scripture.  Ultimately, Charles Wesley spoke for Christians East and West when he put it “Amazing love! How can it be, that Thou my God should die for me!”

 

Holy Saturday commemorates both the resting of His body in the Grave and His Descent (as Conqueror) into Hell.  Traditionally, the second of these themes received more emphasis in the liturgy of Holy Saturday.  That this is not the case today (2) is in part due to unfortunate liturgical revisionism that has been influenced by the even more unfortunate theological revisionism which is squeamish about anything having to do with Hell. (3)  The other part is that often the only service on Holy Saturday is the evening vigil which begins with the Holy Saturday themes but moves into the theme of the Resurrection.  The evening of Holy Saturday is, by the reckoning of time established in the week of Creation (4), part of the following day.

 

That following day, of course, is the most important day of celebration in the Christian Kalendar.  In the English-speaking world we call it Easter, similar to how the Germans call it das Ostern.  Those silly and foolish individuals who come creeping out of the woodworks around this time each year to denounce the celebration as “pagan” get most of their mileage out of this name.   Even if, however, their questionable etymology of the word were to be proven correct, their argument is still nonsense because the thing itself, the feast day, was around long before this name got attached to it. 

 

The Hebrew word פסח (Pesach) is the name of the most important feast day of the Old Testament religion.  It is called Passover in English and it is the day on which the Israelites remembered their deliverance from slavery in Egypt as told in the book of Exodus. By the time of the New Testament the Israelites were speaking Aramaic more often than Hebrew and in Aramaic פסח took on a final aleph to become פסחא.  In Greek, the language in which the New Testament was written and the primary language of the Church in the earliest centuries, this was transliterated into Πάσχα and at least as early as the second century this term was used for the Christian feast as well.  It retained this name in the North African/Western part of the Church where Latin superseded Greek as the primary language and in Latin it is spelled Pascha.  To this day, in the vast majority of languages the feast called Easter in English is called Pascha or some variation thereof and even in English we use the adjective “Paschal” to refer to things pertaining to Easter.

 

The history is clear.  The holiday did not begin as a pagan feast named Easter that was appropriated by the Church but as the Christian Passover.  This remains the essence of the feast regardless of what other names derived from the time of year in which it occurs became attached to it later in countries with Germanic languages.

 

Our silly and foolish friends if they are capable of pursuing their case any deeper than the superficial argument about the name may point out that the authorization for the Old Testament Passover, along with detailed instructions as to how to keep it, came directly from God, and ask where the similar authority for a Christian Passover is to be found.  The answer lies in what the New Testament teaches about the relationship between the events commemorated by the Old Testament Passover and those we commemorate in Holy Week leading up to Easter.

 

According to the New Testament, most especially the book of Hebrews, the Old Testament consists of types which prefigure or foreshadow the Gospel.  The blood sacrifices of the Levitical system were types of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world.   The earthly Tabernacle/Temple was a figure of the Heavenly Tabernacle made without human hands.  Other examples, not spelled out the way these were in Hebrews, are just as clear.  Moses, for example, the Law-Giver, was allowed to lead the Israelites up to the Promised Land but he was not allowed to lead them in, that role was given to Joshua (5) in which can be seen prefigured everything St. Paul had to say, which was a lot, about how the Law cannot make one righteous before God, only the grace brought by Jesus Christ can do that.

 

The Old Testament Passover commemorated Israel’s deliverance from Egypt.  Israel had gone down into Egypt during the years of famine in which Joseph was the highest official in the land under Pharaoh whose favour he enjoyed.  They remained there four hundred years after which another Pharaoh, who feared rather than favoured the growing nation, had them enslaved.  Moses, Hebrew born but adopted into Pharaoh’s family, met God in the wilderness Who told him that He was sending him to Pharaoh to plead for Israel’s deliverance.  Multiple times Moses and his brother Aaron entered Pharaoh’s court with God’s demand that His people be set free, each time Pharaoh refused and a new plague fell upon Egypt.  In the final plague, the angel of death was sent to take the firstborn of every family in Egypt – only they, to whose door posts and lintels the blood of the Passover lamb had been applied, i.e., the Israelites, were spared.  Pharaoh then commanded Moses to take the Israelites and leave, only to change his mind again once they were gone and pursue them with his army to the Red Sea.  God opened a pathway for the Israelites through the Red Sea, then brought the waters down on the Egyptian army.

 

This entire event forged Old Testament Israel’s identity as a nation.  It also prefigured another, greater, deliverance.  The salvation of which the Exodus was but a type was not a deliverance from physical servitude but of spiritual servitude to sin.  Nor was it merely the deliverance of a nation but of the entire world.  This is the salvation accomplished by Jesus Christ on the Cross which event took place on the Old Testament Passover.

 

Since that of which the Old Testament redemption of Israel was a shadow has come to pass, we who believe in Jesus Christ look back to that rather than to the shadow.  That there would be an annual Christian Passover celebrating Christ’s redemption of mankind was settled very early in the Church.  When it is first mentioned as such in the writings of the second century, it is treated as having been long established.  This would imply that it is Apostolic in origin and, indeed, the Apostles were barely in their grave before a dispute arose not over whether there should be a Christian Passover but over when it should be held. (6) Those who held the Quartodeciman position argued that the Christian Passover should fall on the same day as the Jewish Passover (the fourteenth of Aviv/Nisan on the Hebrew calendar), others held that it should fall on the Sunday after.  Although the sides in the controversy tended to fall along regional and ethnic lines, there is clearly an underlying theological issue here of whether the Crucifixion or the Resurrection takes precedence.  The first ecumenical council of the Church, which met at Nicaea in 325 to address the heresy of Arianism, also ruled on this matter.  Ruling against the Quartodecimans the council determined that the Christian Passover would be held on the Sunday that follows the first full moon on or after the spring equinox. (7) 

 

The ruling of Nicaea I made it clear that the Christian Passover would be a commemoration of the Resurrection rather than of the Crucifixion although by this time Holy Week was starting to take shape with Good Friday being already firmly established. (8)   In this, can be seen a parallel to the decision made by the Apostles that the Church would meet on Sundays rather than on the Sabbath (Saturday).  That this decision was made, we know from the New Testament in which the Church is depicted as meeting on Sunday (Acts 20:7, 1 Cor. 16:2). Although neither the decision itself nor the occasion for it are recorded, the reason why Sunday as opposed to say Monday or Wednesday, was selected is quite obvious.  The Sunday after Christ was crucified on the Old Testament Passover, the women among His disciples went to the tomb to complete the burial which had been done in haste due to the onset of the Sabbath.  They found the stone that sealed the tomb rolled away, the grave clothes in which He had been buried folded up and empty, and an angel there to tell them that He was not there, He was risen.

 

The importance of Christ’s Resurrection cannot be overstated.  St. Paul explains it exquisitely in the fifteenth chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians.   Against those who took the Sadducees’ position that there will be no Final Resurrection, He argued that if the dead do not rise then Christ is not risen, and if Christ is not risen we are without hope, but that since Christ is risen, then we know that the dead will all rise.  We are all dead in the first Adam because the sin by which he brought death into the world passed from him to all of us bringing death along with it.  Christ underwent death for us that He might remove the sting of death which is sin.  His victory over this final enemy is our victory, in Him, the last Adam, we are made alive.  His Resurrection was the firstfruits of the Resurrection in which we one day will all fully share even as we are to participate in it even now by walking in newness of life by faith.  His Resurrection, while in the same body in which He had died – He displayed the scars in His hands and side to His disciples – was not to the same life that He had left behind in dying, but to a new and higher kind of life which death can never touch.

 

In this we have a clue as to why the day of the week on which Christ rose was so important to the early Church that they set it both as their weekly day of corporate worship and the annual Christian Passover.  In the New Testament it is called the “first day” with reference to the week that follows.  The early Christians, however, also called it the “eighth day” in reference to the week which preceded it.  The week signifies the week of Creation, and, as we have seen above, this was especially true of the week of Jesus’ life and ministry on which the Gospels concentrate, the week we remember in Holy Week. What then does the eighth day that follows the seven which signify the Old Creation signify?

 

One early Christian writer described it as “a beginning of another world” (9).  St. Augustine argued that the Sabbath day of rest of the Decalogue was but a figure of the eternal rest to which the eighth day, revealed to the Christians in the Gospel, looks forward. (10)  The eighth day, then, is the day which comes after the seven of the Old Creation, the day of the New Creation, the life of which Jesus entered in His Resurrection, and in which we can share even before our own resurrection on the Last Day because we participate in His life as members of His mystical body, the Church.

 

How appropriate and how utterly unpagan is that annual Lord’s Day of Lord’s days, the Christian Passover of Easter in which after the reflection on our sin and mortality in Lent, culminating in our remembrance of the week which led from the Triumphal entry to Golgotha and the tomb, on the eighth day we joyously proclaim He is risen!

He is risen indeed.

 

Alleluia!

 

 (1)   The two Kingdoms of Death are the Grave in the collective sense, the place where the body is placed, and Sheol/Hades/Hell, where the spirits of the dead go.  When Jesus died on the Cross, His divine nature remained united to both His body in the Grave and His human spirit in Hades.  Jesus’s death, like any other human death, separated His human body from His human soul.  It could not separate either from His deity.  The Hypostatic Union in which the Eternal Son of God received a full and flawless human nature into His Eternal Person in the womb of the Virgin Mary the moment she said “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word” (Lk. 1:38) can never be broken.

(2)   In the West.  In the East, the Descent into Hell is still very much the focus of the liturgy of Holy Saturday.  Due to the difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendars, of course, the Eastern Holy Saturday and the Western Holy Saturday do not fall on the same day.

(3)   The Hell in the Descent into Hell, is the Hell referenced in note 1, vide supra, and not Gehenna, the place to which those who render themselves incurably wicked by rejecting Jesus Christ will be condemned at the Last Judgement.  That Christ did indeed descend there as confessed in the Apostles’ Creed is Scriptural despite the claim of certain evangelicals to the contrary.  St. Peter, in his sermon on the first Whitsunday (Christian Pentecost), quoted Psalm 16:10 and applied it to the Resurrection of Jesus Christ (Acts 2:25-31).  If the Resurrection fulfils “thou wilt not leave my soul in hell”, then Hell, again Sheol/Hades, is clearly where it was prior to the Resurrection.  There is no conflict here with Christ’s words to the dying thief “Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise” (Lk. 23:43).  Paradise is wherever Jesus Christ is.  On the original Holy Saturday, Hell itself was Paradise.

(4)   “And the evening and the morning were the first day” (Gen. 1:5)  It is because of this pattern in the Creation account that days in the sacred Kalendar of Christianity are counted sunset to sunset, as they are in the corresponding sacred calendars of Judaism and Islam, regardless of how days in the civil calendar are counted (midnight to midnight).  In the Bible itself, this is the one of three ways of counting days, and certainly the primary way in the Old Testament.  The other two are to count from sunrise to sunrise (morning/evening rather than evening/morning) and to count from midnight (only St. John does the latter, which is why the hours during the Crucifixion account in his Gospel differ from those in the Synoptics, which count from sunrise).

(5)   Joshua is the English spelling of a Hebrew name which, taken from Hebrew into Aramaic then Greek, becomes the name of which Jesus is the English spelling.

(6)   According to Eusebius the controversy broke out as early as the time of St. Polycarp, the bishop of Smyrna in what is now Turkey and personal disciple of St. John the Apostle who was martyred around the middle of the second century.

(7)   This calculation formula translates the date of Passover in the Hebrew lunar calendar (Aviv/Nisan is the month of spring, the fourteenth is the Ides or full moon of the month) into an approximation in the solar calendar.

(8)   The commemoration of the Crucifixion on the Friday prior to Pascha/Easter is referenced as early as Tertullian.  The name “Good Friday”, of course, came much later. Note that this was no concession to the Quartodecimans.  The 14 of Aviv/Nisan in the Hebrew calendar, like the dates on the civil calendar, move across the week from year to year.  Commemorating the Crucifixion on the Friday before Easter, follows from commemorating the Resurrection on the day of the week on which it occurred.

(9)   The Epistle of Barnabas, 15.

(10)                       St. Augustine, Letter 55, 12-13.

A Heretical Meme

I recently saw a meme that read “We are not saved because we believe, we believe because we are saved.”  The person who posted the meme was a Calvinist who presumably thought that the meme was a nugget of theological truth about God’s sovereignty in salvation.  Internet memes, however, are merely the democratization of the sound-byte and sound-bytes do not gain in accuracy and truthfulness by being created by the average Joe rather than by the corporate media.  In this case, the meme is heretical.  It is heretical even by the standards of Calvinism.

 

The meme basically asserts that salvation is the cause of faith, rather than faith the cause of salvation.  This, however, mutatis mutandis, is what orthodox Christianity asserts about works rather than faith.  Protestantism, of which Calvinism is a strand, is particularly insistent upon this point.  To assert the same about faith, therefore, is to eliminate the distinction between faith and works and to make faith into a work.  The entire point of the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith, however, is that justification is by grace (a gift) rather than by works (a wage earned), and that justification can be by grace because it is by faith, since faith is not a work.

 

That faith is the cause and salvation the effect is clearly stated in multiple verses.  Any one of these can be quoted to demonstrate the point.  I will quote Romans 5:1 “Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”   If faith were the effect, this wording would be nonsense.

 

The question is what kind of cause is faith?  The answer to this question brings clarity to many other questions concerning grace and salvation.

That there are multiple kinds of causes was recognized two and a half millennia ago by Aristotle in the second book of his Physics.  He identified four types of causes and provided several examples of each.  Subsequent writers have usually thought it best to provide a single illustration for all four causes.  We will follow this example and use a bookshelf as our illustration.  The bookshelf is, of course, the effect.

 

The first cause Aristotle identified was the material cause.  This is the stuff from which the final product is taken and made.  In the case of our bookshelf, the material cause is wood.

 

Aristotle’s second cause is the formal cause.  This is the idea of the product.  The person who took the wood and put it together to assemble our bookshelf did so in accordance with an idea of what the bookshelf should look like.  If he is a designer, he may have come up with the idea himself and sketched it out.  If the bookshelf is of the self-assemble type, someone else did this and printed it out in the schematic/instructions that came in the box with the pieces.

 

In these first two causes we have the basic Aristotelean concept that everything in creation has both form and matter.

 

Aristotle’s third cause, he called the primary source.  It is more usually called the efficient cause or the Agent.  This is the person who took the matter and made a concrete example of the form, or, if you want to put the other way, who took the form and shaped the matter.  In the case of our bookshelf this is the person who built it.  That could be us, if we bought the ready-to-assemble type that a particular Swedish furniture store is famous for, or, if we bought it pre-assembled, it was the craftsman who put it together in his shop or the factory as the case may be.

 

Aristotle’s final cause, in the sense of the fourth out of the four, is the final cause, in the sense of the end or telos.  This is the purpose or reason, for which the Agent, applies form to matter and vice versa, to produce the effect.  The final cause of our bookshelf is, of course, to store books.

 

The Reformer John Calvin is not ordinarily thought of as an Aristotelean.  Aristotle was “the Philosopher” to St. Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth century Dominican Scholastic whose Summa Theologica significantly shaped the late Medieval theology to which Calvin and his associates objected, especially its popular form the abuses of which were often very far from what the Angelic Doctor wrote, although the Reformers found it in their interests to minimize this distinction.  For Calvin, the great theologian was St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Augustine was a Platonist.  Calvin, however, who like the Father of Latin theology, Tertullian, approached the study of Scripture and God with a legal education as his background, was also like his second-to-third century predecessor in regarding secular philosophy with disdain and suspicion.  This makes his application of Aristotle’s causes to salvation all the more interesting.

 

In the fourteenth chapter of the third book of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin identifies “the mercy of the Heavenly Father and his freely given love toward us” as the efficient cause of our salvation.  Christ, Calvin says, is the material cause and our faith the formal cause.  Obviously he would not be on board with “I believe because I am saved.”  All three of these causes, Calvin said, were found in one sentence in John 3:16.  The fourth cause he identified as “the proof of divine justice” and the “praise of God’s goodness.”

 

Calvin clearly did not understand these causes properly.  Since the efficient cause is the Agent it would have been better to identify God Himself as the efficient cause of our salvation.  Or, to be more precise, Jesus Christ, God the Son Incarnate, is the efficient cause or Agent of our salvation, which is why we call Him Saviour.  That in turn means that the material cause should be more precisely identified as the events of the Gospel, especially the Atoning death of Jesus Christ.  To be fair to Calvin, he did write “Surely the material cause is Christ, with his obedience, through which he acquired righteousness for us.”

 

In his identification of faith as the formal cause of our salvation he wrote “What shall we say is the formal or instrumental cause but faith?”  There is a basic misunderstanding here, because instrumental cause and formal cause are not the same thing.  Calvin was correct to identify faith as the instrumental cause of our salvation – or rather an instrumental cause – but not in identifying it as the formal cause.  This is somewhat surprising when we consider what the formal cause of our salvation actually is.  If we understand formal cause to mean what Aristotle meant by it, then applied to salvation, the formal cause must be God’s eternal design.  One would expect John Calvin of all people to have gotten this right.

 

Aristotle did not speak of an instrumental cause, but the concept is simple enough to understand.  Think back to our bookshelf illustration.  The instrumental cause would be the hammer, screwdriver, Allen wrench, and whatever other tools the efficient cause used in putting the bookshelf together.  The instrumental cause, therefore, is not synonymous with the formal cause, but a subcategory of the efficient cause.  

 

Faith is indeed an instrumental cause of our salvation but not in the way the Allen wrench is an instrumental cause of our self-assembled Swedish bookshelf.  The equivalent of that kind of instrumental cause in the order of salvation would be the cross.  Faith as an instrumental cause of our salvation corresponds more with the delivery truck that brings a pre-assembled bookshelf to us.

 

Here the Lutheran dogmaticians are particularly helpful.  That salvation is a gift of God, the New Testament is absolutely clear on and all Christians affirm.  It is a gift that was given to the world in a general sense in the Incarnation and the events of the life and death of the Incarnate Son of God, something that we especially remember at this time of year.  It also has to be given in a more particular sense to each of us personally and here the Lutheran dogmaticians identify two different types of means through which this is accomplished.  There are the media or organa dotika, the means or instruments of giving.  These are the means through which God gives His saving grace to us.  Then there is the medium or organon leptikon, the means or instrument of receiving.  This is the hand with which we receive the gift of saving grace.   The ministry of the Gospel, which God has entrusted to His Church in the modes of Word and Sacrament, is the means through which God gives us His saving grace.  Faith is the organon leptikon, the means by which we receive it.  It is in this sense that it is the instrumental cause of our salvation.

So yes, whereas when it comes to salvation and works salvation is the cause and works the effect, when it comes to faith and salvation faith is the cause, the instrument of receiving cause, and salvation the effect.  The meme is heretical by the standards of all forms of orthodox Christianity, including orthodox Calvinism.

 

Perhaps the lesson to be learned here is that theology should not be done by meme.

Sacraments and Gospel Sacraments

In my last essay I resumed the series of essays on the Article of the Creed which I had begun in 2023.  I had left off with Article Nine - The Holy Catholick Church and picked it up again with Article Ten - Baptism and Forgiveness.  In this essay, I relegated a discussion of Sacraments, the broader category to which baptism belongs, to the twenty-sixth note.  Since this is a topic which deserves an essay of its own I shall now revisit it.

 

When God, in fulfilment of the promises of redemption that He had made since man first fell into sin (1) send His Only-Begotten Son to become Incarnate as a sinless Man and to defeat the enemies that held us captive and to atone for our sins by His death on the cross and then raised Him from the dead, even though Rome governed the ancient world at the time the lingua franca was Greek.  Therefore in the Church, the society which Jesus Christ had reconstituted out of ancient Israel, making it into a Catholic (of the “whole” world) society rather than an ethnic nation and placing His Apostles as the governing ministers over it, Greek was the original ecclesiastical language.  The New Testament, with the exception of a non-extent “Hebrew” (2) original of St. Matthew’s Gospel, was written in Greek.  The confessions of the basic faith that we now call Creeds from the Latin word for “believe” were originally called Symbols from the Greek word for “token” or “watchword.” (3)  The Church’s rites were originally called Mysteries, as they continue to be called in the Churches of the East. 

 

In referring to her rites as Mysteries the Church used this word in a way that was both similar to and yet the exact opposite of how Greek speaking pagans used it.  Mystery is the Greek word for secret.  In Greek paganism, the cults of certain divinities and heroes kept their teachings and rites hidden from those not initiated into the cult, and so these religions and their rites were called Mysteries.  When the Church borrowed this word for her own use, the similarity was in the fact that it designated her rites as it had the rites of the pagans.  The contrast, however, that the Church used the word to mean that in her rites those things which would otherwise be secret to man and known only to God are revealed and made known.  This is a continuation of how St. Paul uses the word in his epistles. (4) Therefore, we find in a work addressed to the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius in the middle of the second century providing a philosophical defense of Christianity, an account of the two most important rites of the Christian faith. (5)

 

The Latin Fathers referred to what the Greek Fathers called Mysteries as Sacraments.  This word, which is derived from the Latin word for holy and which if defined by its etymological components would literally mean “that which makes holy,” was used by the ancient Romans for vows and oaths, and specifically for the oath of allegiance that a Roman soldier was required to make to Caesar.  Tertullian, who was born around the time St. Justin Martyr wrote his First Apology, and who lived in Carthage, was the first theologian to write in Latin, and it was he who chose the word Sacrament as the Latin designation of the Church’s rites. (6)  He seems to have had the military use of the word in mind (7) and chose the word to indicate the rites through which Christians pledge allegiance to Christ.

The Church therefore, in designating her rites by these Greek and Latin words, gave to these words new meanings that while related to how they had been used previously, were nevertheless distinct in their ecclesiastical usage.  This terminology was established quite early. 

 

In the eleventh century, the Greek-speaking Eastern Church and the Latin-speaking Western Church formally entered into schism when the Western Patriarch of Rome, aka the Pope, and the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, formally excommunicated each other.  By the time the Reformation occurred in the sixteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church had come to dogmatically declare that there were seven Sacraments – Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Eucharist, Penance, Holy Matrimony, Holy Orders, and Extreme Unction.  The Eastern Orthodox Church, while she had made no dogmatic pronunciation as to the number of Mysteries – and she still has not to this day – acknowledged seven.  These, although there are a few differences with regards to names and practices, are the same as the seven Sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church.  The same seven are recognized by the Oriental Orthodox Churches which refused to accept the Definition of Chalcedon in the fifth century. (8)  The Assyrian Church of the East, which refused to accept the condemnation of Nestorius of Constantinople at the third ecumenical council earlier in the fifth century also recognizes seven Sacraments, but only five of these are identical to those of the other Churches.  Like the Eastern Orthodox their form of confirmation, Chrismation, takes place immediately after baptism, unlike the Eastern Orthodox they do not count it as a distinct Mystery, nor do they recognize Marriage as a Sacrament like the other Churches. Holy Leaven and the Sign of the Cross are the other their other two Sacraments.

 

In 1520, Dr. Martin Luther published his On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, a treatise on the Sacraments.  The title, of course, likens the Patriarch of Rome’s usurped universal jurisdiction over the Catholic Church to Nebuchadnezzar’s conquest of Israel in the Old Testament (9) and the work includes some of the best anti-papal invective from a man who was a true master of what Auberon Waugh dubbed the “vituperative arts.”   In his introductory letter he wrote “To begin. I must deny that there are seven Sacraments, and must lay it down, for the time being, that there are only three, baptism, penance, and the bread, and that by the Court of Rome all these have been brought into miserable bondage, and the Church despoiled of all her liberty.” (10)  Nine years later, in his Large Catechism, Dr. Luther included sections on two of these, Holy Baptism and the Sacrament of the Altar, and in the section on Holy Baptism wrote “And here you see that Baptism, both in its power and signification, comprehends also the third Sacrament, which has been called repentance as it is really nothing else than Baptism. For what else is repentance but an earnest attack upon the old man [that his lusts be restrained] and entering upon a new life? Therefore, if you live in repentance, you walk in Baptism, which not only signifies such a new life, but also produces, begins, and exercises it.” (11)  Later Lutheran theologians favoured the term Absolution over Penance for the same Sacrament.  John Calvin in his Institute of the Christian Religion argued that there were only two Sacraments, Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. (12)  The Reformed Church has consistently held this position since.  

 

Before looking at the position our Anglican Church took, it is worth observing here that this dogmatic rejection of four or five of the previously acknowledged Sacraments is in a way untypical of Dr. Luther and Calvin.  The Reformation of which both men were prominent leaders was a response to Roman corruption.  The sixteenth century which saw the Reformation had begun with Rodrigo Borgia (father of, among others, the infamous Cesare and Lucretia) enthroned in Rome as Pope Alexander VI.  Dr. Luther’s first act as a Reformer was to oppose to the sale of indulgences in his 95 Theses of All Hallows’ Eve, 1517.  When it came to doctrinal controversy, therefore, the more conservative and responsible of the Reformers, into which category both Dr. Luther and Calvin belong, usually focused on errors that were distinctive to Rome in her corrupt condition.  These errors were novelties introduced after the East-West Schism such as Purgatory or the merit of human works.  They rarely opposed what was genuinely Catholic, that is, belonging to the whole ancient Church rather than just late Medieval Rome.  (13)  Here they dogmatically rejected as Sacraments four to five of the seven rites, universally acknowledged as such by the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox Churches. 

 

In this case, appearances are slightly deceiving.  The tests of Catholicity are antiquity, universality, and consent. (14)  While the seven Sacraments pass the test of universality, the test of antiquity is another story.  The two Sacraments acknowledged by all Protestant Churches, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, are those most consistently and most universally accepted as Sacraments in the Church since the most ancient times, but there was nothing remotely resembling a consensus as to the number of Sacraments in the first millennium.  While the Fathers usually acknowledged other Sacraments than baptism and the Lord’s Supper, they did not have a set list as to what these other Sacraments were and did not limit themselves to the five other Sacraments that most of the ancient Churches came to recognize.  If the Protestant Reformers broke with the informal consensus of the Churches on the seven Sacraments by reducing the number to two to three, the Church Fathers tended to depart from that later consensus in the opposite direction by acknowledging Sacraments that totalled far more than seven in number. 

 

When it comes to the test of antiquity, therefore, the idea of the seven Sacraments can be said to fail the test but in a way that does not lend support to the reduction of the number to two or three by Dr. Luther and Calvin.  The Father whose writings exerted the most influence over the Reformers was undoubtedly St. Augustine of Hippo, but while St. Augustine nowhere in his writings provides a list of seven Sacraments, neither does he ever say that there are only two Sacraments.  To the contrary, all seven of the Sacraments that the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox Churches would later acknowledge are individually spoken of in his writings where he either calls them Sacraments or speaks of them in such a way as to leave no doubt that he thought of them as such (15), as are close to three hundred other things. (16)  In his Sacramental theology anything material could serve as a Sacrament by being a vessel for the revelation of God and the grace that accompanies the revelation of God.  In this his thinking was closer to Eastern Orthodoxy which unlike Rome does not dogmatically limit the Sacraments to the acknowledged seven.  He also clearly saw baptism and the Eucharist as special Sacraments, far more important than the others due to their institution by Christ Himself.  This is the part of his teachings on the matter that the Protestant Reformers picked up on.  The Anglican position, to which we shall shortly turn our attention, is more genuinely Augustinian than those of the continental Reformation.  

 

The fact that all of the ancient Churches came to acknowledge seven Sacraments and that with the exception of the Assyrian Church of the East, they were all the same seven Sacraments, demonstrates that while the list itself cannot pass the test of antiquity, the seeds that eventually bore such consistent fruit had to have been planted in antiquity.  This means that while the seven Sacraments fall slightly short of the full Catholicity they would have possessed had this consensus on the seven been arrived at in antiquity, the dogmatic manner in which Dr. Luther and Calvin rejected four or five of the seven is completely unjustifiable.  To be fair, however, what any ancient Church other than the Roman Catholic taught regarding the Sacraments was likely the farthest thing from their minds when they wrote.  One of the consequences of the schisms that divided the Greek speaking East from the Latin speaking West in the eleventh century and which had divided the Levant and further East from the European Church in the fifth century, was that there was very limited contact between these ancient Churches, something that did not change until centuries after the Reformation.  In the West, Peter Lombard had spelled out the idea of the seven Sacraments in the fourth book of his Sentences written around the middle of the twelfth century, (17) and Rome had acknowledged these with increasing degrees of dogmatism starting with the Fourth Lateran Council in the early thirteenth century.  To the Reformers in the sixteenth century, therefore, looking at it through a lens that obscured non-Western theology and theological history, the seven Sacraments appeared to be novel, something cooked up by the Scholastics and unknown to the Fathers.

 

In 1521, King Henry VIII, whose Parliament would later pass the 1534 Act of Supremacy rejecting the claims of any foreign powers to jurisdiction in England, including that of the Patriarch of Rome over the Church in England, wrote a rebuttal of Dr. Luther’s On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church which he entitled The Assertion of the Seven Sacraments.  After his death, although Archbishop Cranmer et al., were able to introduce reforms of a more Protestant nature into the Anglican Church during the short reign of Edward VI, Henry’s conservatism mercifully had a lingering influence on the English Reformers that is reflected in their more sober approach.  After the Church of England was temporarily brought back under papal jurisdiction during the reign of Mary Tudor, Queen Elizabeth I restored the previous reforms.  It was during her reign that most of the Anglican formularies took the shape in which they have been known ever since.  Among these was the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, modified from Archbishop Cranmer’s Forty-Two Articles.

 

Article XXV, “Of the Sacraments”, says the following:

 

SACRAMENTS ordained of Christ be not only badges or tokens of Christian men's profession, but rather they be certain sure witnesses, and effectual signs of grace, and God's good will towards us, by the which he doth work invisibly in us, and doth not only quicken, but also strengthen and confirm our Faith in him.

There are two Sacraments ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel, that is to say, Baptism, and the Supper of the Lord.

Those five commonly called Sacraments, that is to say, Confirmation, Penance, Orders, Matrimony, and extreme Unction, are not to be counted for Sacraments of the Gospel, being such as have grown partly of the corrupt following of the Apostles, partly are states of life allowed in the Scriptures; but yet have not like nature of Sacraments with Baptism, and the Lord's Supper, for that they have not any visible sign or ceremony ordained of God.

The Sacraments were not ordained of Christ to be gazed upon, or to be carried about, but that we should duly use them. And in such only as worthily receive the same they have a wholesome effect or operation: but they that receive them unworthily purchase to themselves damnation, as Saint Paul saith.

 

This is a far more Augustinian approach to the Sacraments than that taken by either the Lutherans or the Reformed.  It avoids the dogmatism with which Dr. Luther and Calvin had proclaimed Confirmation, Orders, Matrimony, and extreme Unction, and in Calvin’s case Penance, not to be Sacraments.  St. Augustine had regarded all of these as Sacraments, albeit not all of them in the form in which they were known at the Reformation.  What the Roman Catholic Church called “extreme Unction”, for example, he would have known as the anointing of the sick, as it continued to be known in all the ancient Churches other than Rome because only Rome had perverted it from a rite the end of which was healing into a rite the end of which was preparation for imminent death.  Article XXV does, however, set baptism and the Lord’s Supper apart as being unique, and this too is Augustinian.

 

The expression the Article uses for baptism and the Lord’s Supper, “Sacraments of the Gospel,” is a particularly good one for explaining how the two are unique.  The Article derives this expression from what it asserts in the previous paragraph “There are two Sacraments ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel, that is to say, Baptism, and the Supper of the Lord.”  There is a better reason than this, however, for saying that Baptism and the Lord’s Supper are uniquely Sacraments of the Gospel.  Indeed, that they are unique in the way specified can be challenged from Scripture.  Jesus gave to His Apostles both ordinary and extraordinary authority and power.  The ordinary authority is that vested in their office as governors of the Church and passed on to those they later admitted to that governance.  The extraordinary authority was that which was unique to them and which they could not transmit to others.  The anointing of the sick, instructions for which are given in the fifth chapter of the epistle of St. James, being a rite, exercises ordinary authority.  The Apostles also employed extraordinary authority in healing.  The instructions Jesus gave to the Apostles on their first commission included “Heal the sick” (18) and while the other things associated with this instruction suggest the use of extraordinary authority, that the ordinary authority exercised in the anointing of the sick was also included cannot be ruled out and if it was this is a record of Jesus establishing the anointing of the sick in the Gospel.

 

Indeed, to return briefly to what we deduced earlier from the fact that the ancient Churches had all, with the partial exception of the Assyrians, arrived at the same seven Sacraments, that while these cannot be found listed as such prior to the second millennium, the seeds that produced these lists must have been ancient, we do not have to look very far to find those seeds.  The reason the ancient Churches independently arrived at these seven out of the much larger number of Sacraments that can be found in the Fathers is that these seven are from the New Testament.  We have descriptive accounts of Confirmation in Acts 8 and 19, and it is listed a one of the basics of the faith in the sixth chapter of Hebrews.  The Gospels may not record Jesus telling His Apostles to ordain but they do record His ordination of them, and their ordination of others is documented in the book of Acts, and the St. Paul’s Pastoral Epistles include instructions with regards to ordination.  Jesus’s promise of the keys of the kingdom to St. Peter in Matthew 16, and to all the Apostles in Matthew 18 and after His Resurrection in John 20, mean that Absolution, which is the exercise of one of these keys and which was the original of what existed in a corrupted state in Medieval Roman theology as Penance was instituted by Christ in the Gospels which is why Dr. Luther retained it, restored to its primitive condition, as a Sacrament.  We noted the Scriptural origins of the Anointing of the Sick in the previous paragraph.  That marriage was instituted in Creation is one of the arguments Dr. Luther used against its being considered a Sacrament.  However, in the New Testament, Jesus declared its sanctity when challenged by the Pharisees asking about divorce and arguably sanctified it further by performing His first miracle at the Wedding in Cana.  It is the only one of the “commonly called Sacraments” that is actually called by the Greek counterpart of this word in the New Testament, and while St. Paul was probably using the word in the sense of “secret” rather than “rite,” he does immediately add “but I speak concerning Christ and his Church” (19), which making of the marriage union into a figure of the union between Christ and His Church essentially makes it into a visible sign of an invisible grace, the very Augustinian definition of a Sacrament. (20)  The seven Sacraments recognized by the Roman Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox Churches, and five of which are among the seven recognized by the Assyrian Church of the East, are, therefore, distinguishable from other rites and ceremonies in that the New Testament speaks of them either prescriptively (Baptism, Communion, Absolution, Ordination, Anointing of the Sick) or descriptively in a way that establishes their importance (Confirmation, Marriage).  The singling out of Baptism and Communion from these, merely on the grounds that they were instituted by Christ Himself in the Gospels is much shakier, since this is also true of Absolution, and is possibly true of the Anointing of the Sick.

 

There is, however, something about baptism and the Eucharist that warrants their being distinguished from the others, and as “Sacraments of the Gospel”.  This is the fact that these two are visual depictions of the Gospel itself in a way that cannot be said of the others.  Absolution can be said to be a verbal proclamation of the promise of forgives in the Gospel (21) but not, at least in its essence, (22) a verbal depiction of the Gospel.   St. Augustine said of baptism “The word is added to the element, and there results the Sacrament, as if itself also a kind of visible word.” (23)  In context, St. Augustine was talking about how the Word of the Gospel, attached to the water of baptism, washes away sin when received in faith, and how the water, the vessel of the Word, visually depicts this washing.  The water of baptism always depicts the washing away of sins and when the mode of immersion is used, this depicts the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The main blessings of which baptism is the organon dotikon (giving instrument, the hand God uses to give) according to the New Testament, are the washing away of sins and union with Christ in His death and resurrection, and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are also the central and summary events of the Gospel. (24)  While immersion is not absolutely essential to the Sacrament – as early as the Didache, which is first to second century, the Church made allowance for other modes if insufficient water was available for immersion – when it is used, it depicts both of the main Gospel blessings associated with the Sacrament, and the Gospel events in which Christ procured those blessings. (25)  The Eucharist also contains a visual depiction of the Gospel.  The bread and wine are proclaimed to be the Body and Blood of Christ, broken and shed for us, and St. Paul declared of the Sacrament “For as often as ye eat this bread, and drink this cup, ye do shew the Lord’s death till he come.” (26)

 

The laying on of hands and anointing of oil which are the visual parts of Confirmation, Ordination, and the Anointing of the Sick, do not depict the events of the Gospel like this.  Marriage depicts the union of Christ with his Church and while this union could not occur without the Gospel it is not itself the Gospel.  Absolution proclaims the forgiveness promised in the Gospel to the repentant but it does so verbally rather than visually.  Only Baptism and the Eucharist visually depict the events of the Gospel.  This is why they are uniquely Gospel Sacraments.  This is why the New Testament depicts these as God’s ordinary means, alongside the proclaimed word of the Gospel, of bestowing saving grace on believers. (27)

 

When the Church initially adopted the Greek word Mystery and the Latin word Sacrament these were at first basically synonyms for “rite” although modified slightly to be Church specific.  This is the broadest sense of the word and in this sense it is pointless to argue about how many there are.  The Church Fathers, especially St. Augustine of Hippo, developed a narrower theological meaning of Sacraments but did not narrow the number, St. Augustine himself identifying over three hundred throughout his entire corpus.  In the second millennium, all the ancient pre-Reformation Churches formally acknowledged seven Sacraments, for the most part the same seven Sacraments with only a slight variation on the part of the one Church that differed.  These seven can be distinguished from others by the fact that they are all either prescribed or otherwise treated as very important in the New Testament.  The Church of Rome in the second millennium perverted and corrupted a few of the Sacraments and Dr. Luther and John Calvin in exposing these perversions and corruptions unwisely argued that four or five of them were not Sacraments at all.  The English Church, while she followed Dr. Luther and Calvin in rejecting the Roman perversions and corruptions, did not follow them in dogmatically rejecting as Sacraments the others, but instead carefully worded her Confession so as to distinguish Baptism and the Lord’s Supper as Gospel Sacraments.  In this, she returned more closely to St. Augustine’s position than the Lutherans or Reformed.  More importantly, her decision to distinguish Baptism and the Lord’s Supper from other Sacraments as Gospel Sacraments is justified, less by the claim that they are the only two instituted by Christ than by the fact that these two are identified along with the proclaiming of the Gospel as means of grace and modes of the Gospel in the New Testament.

 

 

 

 

(1)   Gen. 3:15.

(2)   By “Hebrew”, the early Fathers who refer to this pre-Greek Gospel of Matthew, probably meant Aramaic.

(3)   Literally, the word meant “thrown together”, and came to have the meaning by which it was associated with the Christian rules of faith, by the practice of breaking a coin, a piece of pottery, or some such thing into two pieces when an agreement or contract was made, and giving both parties a piece so as to identify themselves as the parties to the agreement by bringing the pieces back together.  Its use as a designation of the Christian Creed is due to Christians using it to identify each other as belonging to the common faith.

(4)   See, for example, Rom. 16:25-26, 1 Cor. 15:51-52, Eph. 1:9-10, 3:3-9, Col. 1:25-27.

(5)   St. Justin Martyr, First Apology, 61 (baptism), 65-66 (Eucharist).

(6)   As the first theologian to write in Latin, the “Father of Latin Theology”, Tertullian was the one who chose the Latin terms used in discussion of many other theological topics, most notably the Trinity.

(7)    Tertullian, On Idolatry, 19.  In this chapter Tertullian contrasts the human (the oath to Caesar) with the divine (baptism) and argues that the oaths are mutually contradictory.  Although the Church as a whole did not accept this assessment she did adopt his terminology.  This work is usually dated to around the middle of the first decade of the third century, shortly after Tertullian wrote On Baptism and before he wrote Against Marcion, in both of which other works the word Sacrament is frequently used.

(8)   These are the Coptic Orthodox Church, the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Syriac Orthodox or Jacobite Church.  In the twentieth century branches of the last two became autocephalous as the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church (the “Syrian” in the title refers to the liturgical language, this Church is based in India).

(9)   Just in case the title was too subtle, Dr. Luther wrote in the letter introducing the treatise “I now know and am sure that the Papacy is the kingdom of Babylon, and the power of Nimrod the mighty hunter.”

(10)                       Dr. Martin Luther, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, 1.18.

(11)                       Dr. Martin Luther, The Large Catechism, “Holy Baptism”, 74-75.  The reference to repentance or penance as “the third Sacrament” places it third after baptism and the Eucharist.  In On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church Dr. Luther had listed them in the order baptism, penance, Eucharist in his introductory letter, but his actual discussion of each went in the order Eucharist, baptism, penance.

(12)                       John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 4.19.

(13)                       The only other examples that stand out in which the Lutherans and Reformed rejected something that was genuinely Catholic are their adopting new models of ecclesiastical government in the place of the historic episcopacy that had governed all the ancient Churches since the Apostles (this was only true of the German Lutherans, the Scandinavian Lutherans retained the historic episcopacy) and the rejection of the Second Council of Nicaea, the seventh of the councils universally received as ecumenical prior to the Schism.  In the first case this was an adjustment to the situation in which they found themselves and not due to deliberate schism on their part (see William Palmer, A Treatise on the Church of Christ, Volume I, London: J. G. F. Rivington, 1834, pp. 361-382). 

(14)                       St. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitory, 2.6.

(15)                       St. Augustine called marriage a Sacrament in Marriage and Concupiscence, 1.10.11.  In his Answer to Petilian the Donatist, 2.105.239 he referred to the “sacrament of chrism… which is indeed holy as among the class of visible signs, like baptism itself” which is a reference to confirmation as it is still practiced in the East.  He referred to ordination as a Sacrament in On the Good of Marriage 24.32.

(16)                       A comprehensive list would be tiresome. Representative of the sort of other things St. Augustine saw as Sacraments are the Sign of the Cross, (Sermon 81) the Lord’s Prayer, (Letter 130), and exorcism (Sermon 227, “On Holy Easter Sunday On the Sacraments of the Faithful”).

(17)                       Peter Lombard’s four books of Sentences are something between a glorified florilegium and a work of systematic theology.  St. Augustine was his primary Patristic source and, ironically, the development of Augustinian theology that led directly to the Reformation can be traced through St. Thomas Aquinas to Lombard.  John Calvin did his best to conceal his dependence on Lombard in his Institutes, but in the end failed.  In addition to the fact that his Institutes, like every Scholastic summa, follow the structure that Lombard gave to systematic theology, the Master of Sentences is one of Calvin’s most quoted sources, and his deep respect comes through despite the thin veil of contempt he tried to drape it with.

(18)                       Matt. 10:8.

(19)                       Eph. 5:23.

(20)                       St. Augustine, On the Catechizing of the Uninstructed, 26.

(21)                       See Francis Pieper’s discussion of this under the heading “The Means of Grace in the Form of Absolution” in Christian Dogmatics, Vol. 3. (St. Louis, Missouri: Concordia Publishing House, 1953), 189-203.  Pieper is in error in thinking that the potestas clavium was given to all believers rather than to the Apostles as the governing ministers of the Church.  This error, the opposite of the Patriarch of Rome’s error in claiming that it was given exclusively to St. Peter rather than all the Apostles, was originally Dr. Luther’s. Both errors contain an element of truth.  It is true that there is a resemblance between the believer informally sharing the Gospel with an unbeliever and the formal proclamation of Absolution, but it is also true that there is a difference.  Dr. Luther exaggerated the resemblance, the Roman Patriarch exaggerates the difference.

(22)                       Our priests, when proclaiming the Absolution after the General Confession, usually make an outward Sign of the Cross which does visually depict the central event of the Gospel, but this is merely a wholesome tradition, it is not essential to the Absolution itself.  It is not mentioned in connection to the Keys in the Gospels, nor is it even prescribed in the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer.

(23)                       St. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 80.3.

(24)                       1 Cor. 15:3-4.

(25)                       The Eastern Orthodox Church, the Assyrian Church of the East, and the Oriental Orthodox Churches all use triple immersion as their normative mode of baptism, even when administered in infancy which is usually the case.  While none of these regard the mode as essential, of the ancient Churches only the Roman Catholic departed from the primitive consensus as to immersion as the preferred mode. Although Dr. Luther expressed a preference for the mode of immersion, the Lutherans never made it their normative practice. When our Anglican Church threw off Rome’s shackles, Archbishop Cranmer did try to restore the primitive preference, including in the first (1549) edition of the Book of Common Prayer, the rubric “Then the prieste shall take the childe in his hands, and aske the name. And naming the childe, shall dyppe it in the water thryse, First dypping the ryght syde: Seconde the left syde: The thryd tyme dippyng the face towards the fonte: So it be diseretly and warely done, saying” although provision was made for pouring “if the childe be weake.”  In the 1552 edition, he retained the preference for immersion, but reduced it to a single dip, with the same provision for pouring.  This has been retained in all subsequent editions of the Book of Common Prayer, although in practice the pouring the rubric provides as an option has been normative over the immersion the rubric sets as the preference.  The usager faction among the non-jurors sought to restore the primitive triple immersion practice of the 1549 BCP in the early eighteenth century.

(26)                       1 Cor. 11:26.

(27)                      That the proclaimed word of the Gospel is the means of bestowing faith and through faith grace, is found in Rom. 10:12-15.  Earlier the same epistle depicts baptism as the means through which the believer is united to Jesus Christ in His death and resurrection (Rom. 6:3-5) and consistently is depicted by the New Testament as the means of someone becoming a believer (Matt. 28:19, Mk. 16:15-16, Gal. 3:26-27), just as the Lord’s Supper is depicted as the means whereby the new life bestowed in the new birth of baptism is fed with the food of Christ’s one sufficient sacrifice.  In John 6:53-58, part of a larger discourse in which Jesus Christ identifies Himself as the Bread of Life and in which faith is the means whereby the believer feeds on the Bread of Life, Jesus makes what His interlocutors had already found to be a hard saying (v. 52), harder by adding the concept of drinking His blood to that of eating His flesh.  Faith remains the organon leptikon (instrument of receiving) here, as it had been earlier in the discourse,  but the introduction of this new concept of drinking His blood, creates an allusion to the Eucharist as the organon dotikon that could only be missed by wilful blindness.  For 1 Jn. 5:6-8 as referring to the proclaimed Word, Baptism, and the Eucharist as the three modes of the Gospel see Kurt E. Marquart, The Saving Truth: Doctrine for Laypeople, Vol I of Truth, Salvatory and Churchly: Works of Kurt E. Marquart (Fort Wayne: Luther Academy, 2016), 84.