Prejudice not Pride

The other day I encountered someone wearing a button that had the same three words as in my title here, except in reverse order.  The sentiment thereby expressed is widely held and on conspicuous display in this, the month formerly known as June.  It is very much a sentiment of the present day.  It also reveals much this wrong about the present day.

The “prejudice” refered to in the sentiment on the button can be defined as “a negative attitude towards an identifiable group of people.”  It is unlikely that the sort of people who would wear buttons like this or, for that matter, the sort of people who would make buttons like this, know of any other sort of prejudice.  Fifty years ago the definition might have included the idea that the negative attitude is unfair because it is formed with inadequate information about the group in question.  Today, a negative attitude towards groups towards which you are not supposed to have negative attitudes is regarded as a prejudice even if it is informed and those who have built their careers and reputations on combatting prejudice generally support government attempts to suppress the spread of information, even if it is accurate, that could contribute to the forming of such negative attitudes.   This is what the expression “truth is no defence” which sometimes comes up in discussions of “hate speech” is all about.

 

This change in the meaning of the word prejudice that has been observable within my lifetime is small but it is also significant.  There is a much larger difference, however, between prejudice in both of these senses and the sense attached to the word in 1813 when the Jane Austen novel, the title of which is alluded to both by the button and by my own title, was first published.  Even larger is the gap between today’s usage of the word and that of Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France published twenty years before Austen’s novel.  

 

Burke’s Reflections include an extended defence of prejudice which would be unintelligible if the word were taken in its present day meaning.  Prejudice, as Burke used the word, was not necessarily either directed towards people or negative (that prejudice can be connected to its object by the preposition “for” as well as the preposition “against” has largely been forgotten).  Rather it had reference to tapping into the accumulated wisdom of the human race available in tradition as opposed to relying entirely upon one’s individual reason.  “We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason”, Burke wrote, “because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.”  Continuing the thought he said:

 

Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision skeptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.

 

To speak of prejudice as a good thing was uncommon even in Burke’s day.  His contemporary and friend, the lexicographer Samuel Johnson who was immortalized for his table talk by James Boswell, included two definitions under prejudice in his Dictionary, the second of which was “Mischief; detriment; hurt; injury.”  Obviously this is not what Burke was defending and Dr. Johnson himself said of this definition “This sense is only accidental or consequential; a bad thing being called a prejudice, only because prejudice is commonly a bad thing, and is not derived from the original or etymology of the word: it were therefore better to use it less; perhaps prejudice ought never to be applied to any mischief, which does not imply some partiality or prepossession.”  It is in the sense of Dr. Johnson’s first definition of the word that Burke used it.  That definition is:

 

Prepossession; judgment formed beforehand without examination. It is used for prepossession in favour of any thing or against it. (1)

The word prepossession is less familiar than the word it is being used to define, so much so that it does not have its own entry in the same Dictionary, but the meaning of both words is provided in the remainder of the first sentence and it is exactly what the Latin root of prejudice suggests.  Instead of prepossession we are more likely to speak of “preconceived opinion.”  In a court of law this is, of course, a bad thing.  That justice involves listening to the arguments of a case and deciding based upon the facts in evidence rather than pre-judging based on other factors is part of what the ancient depiction of the personification of Justice as wearing a blind-fold is supposed to indicate.  The negative implications of prejudice in a legal context are the original reason for the more general notion in other contexts that prejudice is a bad thing that Dr. Johnson alluded to in his second definition.  What Burke demonstrated was that preconceived opinion has a positive as well as a negative side.  Note how he spoke of “just prejudice”.  That is “just” as in “righteous”, not “just” as in “mere”. 

 

To understand Burke’s argument, it is important to keep in mind what he was arguing against.  Burke’s Reflections was written in response to the destructive violence of the French Revolution.  The worst of that violence was still yet to come at the time he wrote but what he had seen had left a huge impact on him because those perpetrating that violence were doing so in the name of the ideals that he himself had professed as a Whig (classical liberal) in Parliament.  His defence of the virtues of the Age of chivalry and of established, traditional institutions such as the Crown and the Church in Reflections reads like what one would have expected his friend Dr. Johnson, a Tory, to have written had he lived to see the French Revolution and it is likely that Burke as he wrote was asking himself what Dr. Johnson would have said.  Burke was, to borrow and slightly adjust a famous definition from Irving Kristol, a Whig who had been mugged by reality.

 

Burke was addressing not merely the way the revolutionaries had turned ideals into “armed doctrines” but the way of thinking that had brought this about.  The French Revolution came at the end of a century in which Modern philosophers had declared war against tradition in the name of reason.  This was utterly foolish on their part.  Tradition – knowledge and wisdom accumulated and passed down from the past – is what prevents us from having to re-invent the wheel, literally as well as figuratively, in each generation, and this applies to philosophy as much as to anything else.   The temptation to exalt reason, the individual’s capacity for judgement based on the knowledge available to him, over tradition, the capacity of man in the collective whether as family, nation, civilization or the entire race or species to accumulate and pass on knowledge and wisdom for the benefit of those yet to come, however, was one which the thinkers of the eighteenth century found difficult to resist.  It must be resisted, however, if consequences like those of the French Revolution are to be avoided and this requires a healthy share of the instinct the late Sir Roger Scruton spoke of that the good things in life are difficult to build but easy to destroy.

 

The wisdom that we inherit through tradition in Burke’s argument, while it can be described as prejudice in that its availability precedes the application of reason on the part of the individual to its justification, is not necessarily contrary to reason.  Indeed, the difference between Burke’s “just prejudice” and bigotry in the word’s lexical meaning (as opposed to its common use as pejorative epithet for disagreement with liberalism) is that whereas just prejudice is opinion derived from tradition that has yet to be confirmed by the individual’s use of reason bigotry is opinion that is stubbornly held to even after it has been convincingly rebutted by reason.  That tradition, the source of just prejudices, is self-correcting and flexible by contrast with ideology, which is what you get when you reduce human knowledge to the technical knowledge that you are left with when rationalism’s irrational demand that reason precede all knowledge is complied with, was a key insight of the title essay in Michael Oakeshott’s Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1963), an essay which revisited this theme from Burke’s Reflections from the position of hindsight available in the twentieth century after the rationalism that in Burke’s day was in its infancy had run its course for a couple of centuries.

Prejudice, at least in the sense defended by Burke, is much to be preferred over pride.  Although Aristotle, at least in some English translations, spoke of a “pride” that he considered to be the highest of virtues rather than a vice, the word he used was μεγαλοψυχία which is not an exact equivalent of the English pride.  Indeed, pride is not among the definitions that Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott provide for μεγαλοψυχία in their exhaustive and definitive Greek Lexicon.  Arrogance is provided as a secondary meaning for the occasions when the word is used in a negative sense, but the primary definition is “greatness of soul, highmindness, lordliness”, with the implication of “generosity” and in their intermediate Lexicon “magnanimity” is provided alongside the literal first meaning of “greatness of soul.” In other words, μεγαλοψυχία, while it does include a sense of thinking well of self also includes the idea of being generous to others.  While Aristotle contrasts it with a vice that is sometimes rendered “humility” in translation, the word he used is not the word for the humility praised as a virtue in the New Testament (ταπεινοφροσύνη) but the literal opposite of μεγαλοψυχία, i.e., μικροψυχία, defined by Liddell and Scott as “littleness of soul, meanness of spirit.”   Similarly, μεγαλοψυχία is not among the words used by the New Testament for the pride consistently condemned as a sin.  The main words for pride in the New Testament are ὑπερηφανία which Liddell and Scott define as “arrogance” and when used with an object “contempt towards or for” and ἀλαζονεία which they define as “false pretension, imposture” and “boastfulness” (Koine lexicons usually define it as “arrogance” and “boastfulness”) and τυφόω which is a verb which in classical Greek usually meant to delude (when others were the object) or to be crazy or demented (when self was the object) but which in the New Testament means to be conceited.  In the Authorized Bible, the passive participle of the verb is rendered “lifted up with pride” in 1 Timothy 3:6, the verse which links pride to the fall of the devil.

 

These New Testament words are closer in meaning to the English “pride” than Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία.  So is the word ὕβρις which Aristotle and for that matter the ancient Greeks in general regarded as the worst defect in character.  This word has passed into English as hubris which we ordinarily think of as a synonym for arrogance.  In ancient Greek it was an arrogance that manifested itself in acts of violence, insolence or insult towards others, i.e., the opposite sort of behaviour towards others than that suggested by Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία.  In Greek tragedy, this was most often the “fatal flaw” (Aristotle’s word for which is the same word the New Testament uses as its basic word for “sin”) which brought down the tragic hero.

 

Pride is the English word which translates the Latin Superbia which in Latin theology is consistently identified as the worst of all sins.  It is, for example, always listed either first or last in lists of the Seven Deadly Sins depending upon whether they are listed in descending or ascending order.  In this matter Latin theology is in close agreement with Greek theology.  Evagrius Pontius identified a list of eight vices which was later reproduced by St. John Cassian in his Institutes.  The list is for the most part identical to the Latin Seven Deadly Sins – the lower sins or vices in each include gluttony, anger, avarice, and lust (fornication in Pontius/Cassian).  In this list, which goes from least to worst, the eighth vice was pride, which Cassian described as the most savage vice and the root of all the others.  The New Testament word ὑπερηφανία is used for pride.  The seventh vice, and therefore second worst, was κενοδοξία which is usually rendered in English by “vainglory” (as, for example, the Authorized Bible does in the one New Testament verse in which it appears Phil. 2:3) or by “boasting” and which is almost identical in meaning to pride, the basic difference being that whereas vainglory/ κενοδοξία requires an audience pride/ ὑπερηφανία is something one can have in solitude.  Another way of looking at it is that pride is the internal sin, vainglory its outer expression.  In the Latin Seven Deadly Sins, produced by Gregory the Great’s revising of the earlier list and condensing these two into the single Superbia, Invidia (Envy) is added as the second worst sin and it too is closely connect with pride.  Traditionally Pride and Envy are the sins which first arose in Lucifer’s heart prompting his rebellion against God and are thus literally the source of all other sins.

 

So, no, the button, like the present day, has it backwards.  Prejudice – in Burke’s sense – is preferable by far over Pride.

    

 (1)   Dr. Johnson also included a line criticizing the use of the preposition “to” as the link between prejudice and its object as improper.  Dr. Johnson’s opinion has won out and this usage is mostly if not entirely obsolete.

 

 

The Season of Hubris

 

Behold, this was the iniquity of thy sister Sodom, pride, fulness of bread, and abundance of idleness was in her and in her daughters, neither did she strengthen the hand of the poor and needy.  And they were haughty, and committed abomination before me: therefore I took them away as I saw good. (Ezekiel 16:49-50)

 

A couple of decades ago the degradation of our culture and civilization had only proceeded so far as to devote a parade once a year to honouring the worst of all sins, the sin that brought the judgement of fire and brimstone down upon the cities of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, in the nineteenth chapter of Genesis.   The parade became a day, the day became a week, and now the entire sixth month of the year is dedicated to the celebration of this sin.   This year Captain Airhead, the dolt who for eight years has disgraced the office of Prime Minister of His Majesty’s government in Ottawa, somehow clinging to power despite scandal after scandal each of which should have been career destroying, and who never opens his mouth without sticking his foot in it, informally extended the period to a “season”.

 

As can be seen in the Scriptural passage that I have used as the epigraph for this essay there are several sins for which God’s judgement fell on Sodom.   Until a few generations ago, however, reference to the sin of Sodom in the singular would not likely have caused confusion because the name of the city was associated with a single sin of a sexual nature, the sin highlighted by St. Jude in his reference to the judgement on the cities in his epistle and which appears in the list in the Ezekiel passage as the last item referenced.  While this sin is, obviously, a huge part of what is being celebrated this month, it is not this sin that I am talking about but the first sin in Ezekiel’s list, the sin after which the celebration has been named.

 

I have often made the observation that when the name of this celebration was reduced to Pride, they abandoned the lesser of two sins – sins of a sexual nature fall under the heading of the least of the Seven Deadly Sins, Lust – and kept the worst of all, Pride.

 

Pride is the worst sin of all.   The concept of the Seven Deadly Sins goes back to the fourth century of Christianity.   St. Evagrius Ponticus was a disciple of the Cappadocian Fathers, first of St. Basil the Great then of St. Gregory Nazianzus whom he followed to Constantinople on the eve of the Second Ecumenical Council before withdrawing first to Jerusalem then later to Egypt, to live a monastic life.   In Egypt, he encountered the teachings of the Alexandrian Neoplatonist monks who, dividing the human being into body, soul, and mind, identified for each a trio of λογισμοί – literally, this is the plural of “calculation”, but is probably better rendered “thoughts” in this context – that influenced the components in bad ways.   This made for nine in total, which were arranged in a hierarchy proceeding from those which afflicted the body to those which afflicted the mind, with the ones affecting the body being the lowest and least, the ones affecting the mind being the worst.   St. Evagrius reduced this to a list of eight sins or rather vices if we distinguish between sins as acts and vices as behavioural patterns or habits.   St. John Cassian, who brought the monastic movement out of the deserts of Egypt by founding a monastery in Gaul or France as it is today, popularized St. Evagrius’ list in his writings.   It was further revised around 590 AD by St. Gregory the Great, Bishop of Rome, in his commentary on Job entitled The Book of Morals.    Technically, St. Gregory retained a list of eight sins because he separated Pride from what he called the “seven principal sins”, declaring Pride to be the source from which these seven flow.   The seven were Vainglory, Envy, Wrath, Melancholy, Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust.   This was later revised so that Vainglory was folded up into Pride and Melancholy was replaced with Sloth, producing the list that found its way into St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologicae and Dante’s Divine Comedy in which the seven levels of Purgatory correspond to the seven.   This is the list that we know as the Seven Deadly Sins to this day.  The order represents their ranking.   In The Book of Morals they are listed in descending order from worst to least, in the later revised version they would be listed in ascending order.  Although his criteria for determining the hierarchy of sin differed from that of the Neoplatonists the result was largely the same.   Subsequent lists of the Seven Deadly Sins have varied the order.   Sometimes they are listed in ascending order, sometimes in descending, other times whether in ascending or descending order there are slight changes in the ranking reflecting differences of opinion as to what is worse than what.   Consistently, however, from the Neoplatonists and St. Evagrius to St. Gregory the Great to Dante to us today, Pride has been considered the worst of all.

 

While the Seven Deadly Sins are a later theological construct and so are not listed as such in the Bible it is difficult to argue with the contention that the ranking of Pride as the worst of all sins is Biblical.   A search of the Bible for a use of the word that is positive or even neutral yields little in the way of fruit.   The first occurrence of the word and the only occurrence in the Pentateuch is found in Leviticus 26:19 in which the LORD, telling the Israelites what He will do to them if they do not obey His commandments, says that “I will break the pride of your power”.   In the historical books, David’s brother claims to know David’s Pride (1 Sam. 17:28)  in what is clearly not intended as a compliment and Pride is what King Hezekiah has to repent and humble himself from (2 Chron. 32:26) .   In the Psalms Pride is consistently the characteristic of the wicked (10:2,4; 36:11; 59:12).   In Proverbs Pride is hated by the LORD and those who fear Him (8:13), brings with it shame (11:2), contention (13:10), destruction and a fall (16:18), is in the mouth of the foolish (14:3) and will bring him low (29:23).   In the Prophets Pride is something that brings the judgement of God upon a people whether it be Israel (Is. 28:1, 3 – Ephraim, from which tribe the ruling dynasty of the Northern Kingdom came, is used here as it often is to signify the schismatic Kingdom as a whole), Moab (Is. 16:6), or Judah (Jer. 13:9).  In the book of Daniel it is what brings judgement on Nebuchadnezzar (5:20). There is only one verse in the Old Testament in which the word Pride could possibly be taken in a sense less negative than those we have already looked at.   We shall consider it after looking at the New Testament references which are few.   In the New Testament, Pride is absolutely, unambiguously evil.   In Mark 7:22 it is one of the evil things that come from within a man and defile him.   In 1 John 2:16 the “pride of life” is one of the three things that make up “the world” in the sense of the system organized against God.   In 1 Tim. 3:6 St. Paul warns St. Timothy against the ordination of a novice “lest being lifted up with pride he fall into the condemnation of the devil”.   Here the Apostle associates Pride with the devil, a traditional association which is the reason why the one verse in the Old Testament that could possibly be taken as neutral probably should not be so taken.   The verse is Job 41:15 which begins with “his scales are his pride”.   His in this passage refers to Leviathan.   Leviathan was the name of a creature conceived of as a sea serpent or sea dragon.   When the Old Testament speaks of him it is invariably speaking about Satan.   The enemy of God makes his first appearance as a serpent in Genesis.   In Revelation the Dragon is identified as that serpent of old, the devil and Satan.   In Isaiah 27:1 Leviathan the sea serpent is clearly Satan.  There is no reason to think that the Leviathan of Job is any different, especially when the chapter goes on to describe him as “king over all the children of pride” (Job 41:34), and the structure of the book as a whole rather demands that a reference to Satan be made precisely at this point.   The reference to his Pride in verse 15, therefore, cannot be taken as an exception to the rule that Pride is always a bad thing in the Bible.

 

The verses we looked at in the previous paragraph are verses that use words rendered “Pride” in our Authorized Bible.  The related adjective “proud” is used slightly more often than the noun.   The noun can be found in 46 verses, the adjective in 47, but these support the picture of Pride that one gets from the verses that use the noun.   Several of them, for example, use the adjective as a substantive, “the proud”, who might as well be called “the wicked” as they are always referred to as people whom God “resisteth” or hath otherwise set Himself against.   Needless to say verses that use synonyms that are translated “haughty”, “arrogant”, and the like, provide additional support.

 

Now it might be argued that all of this merely proves that Pride is bad, not that it is the worst of evils.   The traditional view that it is the worst of sins was derived in a number of ways.   To the Neoplatonists it was the worst because it was the ultimate sin of the mind, the sins of the mind being worse than the sins of the soul, which in turn are worse than the sins of the body, because the mind is higher than the soul which is higher than the body.   For St. Gregory the Great it was the worst because it offended the most against Love.   One can only image what St. Gregory would have thought if he could have looked ahead in time to the day when multitudes would march under the banner of Pride chanting the tautological mantra “love is love”.   Scripturally, Pride’s being the worst of sins is derived from it literally being the Original Sin, the source of all others.   There are two ways in which this is the case.   The one, clearly found in the Bible, is that Pride led to the Fall of Man.   The serpent’s temptation of Eve in the Garden was temptation to Pride.   “Ye shall be as gods”, i.e., like God Himself.   That the serpent – the serpent of old who is the Devil and Satan – would tempt man with Pride, provides support for the traditional view that Pride is what was behind his own Fall.   In the traditional view, the devil started out as Lucifer, a high ranking angel in heaven, who became the first liberal, or Whig to use Dr. Johnson’s parlance, urging his fellow angels to support him in his rebellious bid to overthrow the Sovereign King of the universe, God, and establish a cosmic democratic republic with him as its head.   His rebellion failed but the Cosmic Cromwell became the cruel tyrant of all who followed him in rejecting the King of the universe, setting the pattern for all subsequent human liberal democratic republicanism.   There is no explicit account of the origin of Satan in the Old Testament as there is of the Fall of Man but it is inferred from passages in Isaiah and Ezekiel where human rulers are spoken to in such a way as to suggest that the supernatural evil behind them is who is truly being addressed.   The explicit account is found in the twelfth chapter of the book of Revelation.   The point is that Pride is believed to have been what motivated the rebellion.   This is based on St. Paul’s words to St. Timothy and what can be inferred from Isaiah 14.

 

In the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek made by seventy Jewish scholars for Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt and which became the Christian Old Testament,  the Wisdom of Solomon says that “through envy of the devil came death into the world: and they that do hold of his side do find it” (Wis. 2:24).   This is not discussing the cause of Satan’s Fall but his motivation in tempting man.   Envy, however, is closely related to Pride.   It refers to hating someone else for having something you don’t or being something you aren’t so much that you seek to destroy that person. In the standard list of the Seven Deadly Sins it stands next to Pride.     On the one end of the list are the vices which are classic Aristotelian vices – ordinary human appetites indulged in to excess.   Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, and Sloth fall into this category.   On the other end of the list are the vices that are Satanic in nature.   Pride and Envy fall into this category.  Wrath either belongs with Pride and Envy or is the middle ground between the two categories.   Some have produced lists in which Avarice rather than Envy stands next to Pride.   I suspect this to be the result of crackpot left-wing ideas infiltrating theological circles.   Avarice is the vice associated with capitalism.   Envy is the vice associated with socialism.   One can be a businessman, or at least one used to be able to be a businessman in the days before globalism, multi-national corporations, tech giants and media conglomerates, without succumbing to Avarice.   One cannot be a socialist without embracing Envy for Envy is the essence of socialism, its sine qua non, the spirit that moves it and motivates it.

 

Many would say that there is a good Pride and a bad Pride and that everything said above pertains to the bad Pride.   This is an Aristotelian concept, at least if we regard Pride as a proper translation of μεγαλοψυχία from book four of his Nicomachean Ethics.   That this is a proper translation is rather doubtful.   Liddell and Scott give as their first definition of it “greatness of soul, highmindedness, lordliness” and even “generosity”.   “Greatness of soul” is what you get when you split the word into its components and literally translate each of them.  Unfortunately, what you get when you transliterate the word is megalopsychia, which sounds like it describes a mental condition that will get you locked up in an asylum for the criminally insane.    This is not the word translated Pride in the New Testament.   In Mark 7:22 the word is ὑπερηφανία, in 1 John 2:12 it is ἀλαζονεία, in 1 Timothy 3:6 the phrase in which it occurs is in Greek the single word τυφωθείς.   ὑπερηφανία, a compound formed from the word for “over” and the word for “shine”, basically means self-promoting arrogance.   This is the word that is used for Pride in the early Greek versions of what would become the Seven Deadly Sins.   Its adjectival form occurs five times in the New Testament, in three instances being used substantively to mean “the proud” and in the other two used as “proud” in lists of attributive adjectives, all of which are negative.  The primary meaning of ἀλαζονεία is “false pretension, imposture” from which the meaning of “boastfulness” is derived, which is its meaning in the Scriptural text.   Τυφωθείς, rendered “being lifted up with pride” in the Authorized Bible, is a passive aorist participle form of the verb τυφόω which in the active voice means to “delude”, but when it is used in the passive voice indicates that the subject of the verb is “crazy, demented”.   Liddell and Scott give as more specific versions of the passive meaning “demented, rendered vain” and “filled with insane arrogance”.  Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία does not appear in the New Testament and it would be difficult to take the word as he uses and describes it as a synonym for any of the New Testament words for Pride, although it would also be difficult to argue that it is consistent with humility, which both Testaments stress is something God insists upon among the faithful.   Liddell and Scott do give a second definition, noting that the word can be used in a bad sense, in which case they render it “arrogance”, which of course, would be a synonym for the New Testament words for Pride.   Those today who would distinguish between a good Pride and a bad Pride seldom have anything like what Aristotle meant by μεγαλοψυχία in mind.   What they think of good Pride is something along the lines of “an honest and non-inflated sense of achievement or accomplishment” or “thinking well, but not too highly, of oneself”.

 

The Pride that our civilization has decided in its apostasy and decadence to celebrate every June, however, bears no resemblance to either these more modest redefinitions of Pride or to Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία.   Observe the way in which those who celebrate Pride now demand that everyone else do so as well.   Public figures, even if they do not actively speak against Pride but merely do not speak in favour of it, do not march in its parades, do not wave its flag perverted from the sign God gave the world as a token of His Covenant never to send a world-destroying Flood again in defiance of Him and ignorance of its full implications (1), and are basically deemed insufficiently supportive, find themselves in a position eerily similar to the person in the Soviet Union who was the first to stop clapping after one of Stalin’s boring harangues.   This “you must support us or be destroyed” attitude is hardly consistent with either a modest rather than inflated positive feeling about yourself and your accomplishments or Aristotle’s μεγαλοψυχία which can be translated “generosity” or “magnitude”, i.e., the opposite of the attitude in question.   It is, however, very consistent with another Greek word that is often associated with Aristotle, albeit with his writings on rhetoric and Greek tragedy more than his Ethics.   This is the word ὕβρις.   Transliterated as hubris this word continues to be used in English today.

 

The primary meaning of ὕβρις provided by Liddell and Scott is “wanton violence, insolence”.   They provide an explanation of this definition in which they clarify that the violence arises out of the Pride of strength or of passion.   Think of someone who thinks that because he is strong he can walk all over those who are weaker – a bully would be a good example – and you have a pretty good picture of what is meant by it.   Aristotle identified it as foremost example of a character flaw – interestingly he used a word that has the basic meaning of “failure, fault” that in the New Testament is the primary word for sin – that in tragedy, brings about the fall of the hero.   ὕβρις is not used often in the New Testament.  It occurs three times and in our Authorized Bible is translated “hurt”, “harm” and “reproaches”, i.e., designating the acts that spring from the attitude rather than the attitude itself.    In the LXX, however, it is frequently used for Pride.   It is used alongside ὑπερηφανία in Leviticus 26:19 when the LORD says that He will break the “pride of your power”.   Rather fittingly considering its association with a fall in Aristotle and popular ancient Greek thought it is also used in the LXX of Proverbs 16:18 and is the Pride those who fear the Lord are enjoined to hate in Proverbs 8:13.

 

This word so appropriately describes the attitude that is on display in the celebrations of Pride that I humbly suggest it be used instead to clarify more precisely what is being celebrated.

 (1)   The “bow” in “rainbow” is not the bow you tie around your neck or in the strings of your shoes but the “bow” that an archer uses.   The Latin word for bow is arcus, from which the words archer, arch, and arc are derived.  Arch is an architectural device that shares the shape of the weapon which is also the shape of the sign that appears in the sky after it rains.   An arc is a curve in geometry.  The kind of artificial rainbow that is sometimes produced by passing light through a prism is often called an arc.  Welding arcs and electrical arcs are also so-named for their curved, bow-like, shape.   When Genesis records the LORD’s covenant with Noah and His placing His “bow” in the sky as His promise never to destroy the world in a Flood again, the word for “bow” is קֶשֶׁת which denotes the weapon and which like its English equivalents is derived from a verb meaning “bend”.   The significance of this sign is that LORD was hanging up His bow, i.e., putting it away never to use it again.   Also implied, however, in the use of the image of a weapon as the sign, is a warning not to behave in the way that brought the judgement of the Deluge in the first place. 

 

The Anointed One

 

Today is the day before Palm Sunday.   Palm Sunday is the first day of Holy Week, the week that ends with the Paschal Triduum – Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday, in commemoration of the Last Supper/Betrayal, the Passion and Death of Jesus Christ, and the Entombment/Harrowing of Hell respectively – leading up to the Christian Passover, the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ on Easter Sunday.   The Sunday prior to these events was the day in which Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the colt of a donkey while the crowds strewed the path before Him with palm branches – hence “Palm Sunday” – and cried “Hosanna, Blessed is He that cometh in the Name of the Lord.”   The traditional name for this – the Triumphal Entry – strikes the modern ear as ironic considering the timing of the events of Holy Week but that is not the intent behind the name.   A triumph was when a general or emperor returned from war and entered the city with much pomp and ceremony, parading his troops and the spoils of war before the populace.   While obviously not the exact equivalent, a triumph was the closest analogy in the terminology of earthly cities and kingdoms for what was going on that first Palm Sunday as the King of Kings entered the City of David.   This was the fulfilment of the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9.   This was Jesus publicly and officially presenting Himself to national Israel as the Promised Redeemer – the Christ, the Messiah, or, to render both of these words by their literal English meaning, the Anointed One.   

 

That Jesus was the Christ was not news to His disciples.   Some of these had heard this from John the Baptist before Jesus’ ministry had even begun.   He had been teaching them since St. Peter’s confession that He was “the Christ, the Son of the Living God” that His upcoming Death and Resurrection were essential to His being the Messiah although this did not really sink in until after they encountered the Risen Lord.   Indeed, “The Kingdom of God is at hand”, the Gospel He had been preaching throughout His earthly Ministry, was another way of saying that He was the Christ.   The Promised Kingdom was at hand, that is, present, here, among you right now, because He, the Christ, had come.   By entering the city in this way, however, as Zechariah had long ago foretold, He confronted Israel as a collective whole, with His claims as their Anointed One.

 

It is what took place the day before the Triumphal Entry, however, that makes this a particularly appropriate time for a discussion of what it meant for Jesus to be the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One.   For on that day Jesus was anointed in the literal sense of the word.    This was the day when Jesus, Who had been living in Ephraim since a conspiracy against Him had arisen following the raising of Lazarus, and Who having set out for Jerusalem, telling His disciples that the journey would end in His Death and Resurrection and having passed through Jericho where He had opened the eyes of the blind men and supped with the repentant tax collector Zacchaeus, arrived at Bethany.   A supper was held in His honour.   SS Matthew and Mark tell us that it was held at the home of one Simon the Leper.    St. John tells us that Lazarus sat at the table with Jesus, possibly indicating that either he and Simon the Leper were one and the same or that they were closely related, and that a large crowd showed up to see both Jesus and Lazarus.   St. John also tells us that Lazarus’ sister Martha served the meal, and his other sister Mary was the one who anointed Jesus.   She took an alabaster box containing a pound of very expensive ointment made from the perfume spikenard, broke the box (St. Mark), poured it on His head (SS Matthew and Mark) and feet (St. John) and wiped His feet with her hair.   This provoked an angry reaction from Judas Iscariot, who, along with at least one other disciple (SS Matthew and Mark) asked why the ointment had not been sold and the money given to the poor.   St. John, who is the only Evangelist to identify Judas by name as the disciple who complained, also gives an explanation for this odd expression of indignation, that Judas was the treasurer and a thief.   Jesus’ response was to say “Let her alone: against the day of my burying hath she kept this.  For the poor always ye have with you; but me ye have not always” (John 12:7-8).   SS Matthew and Mark add His proclamation that “Wheresover this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, there shall this, that this woman hath done, be told for a memorial of her”. (Matt. 26:13)

 

Interestingly, this was the second time that Jesus was anointed in this way.   The seventh chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel ends with an account of Jesus having been invited to supper at the home of a Pharisee named Simon.   A woman who is described as a “sinner” – this is generally taken to mean prostitute here – comes to the house and weeps, washes Jesus’ feet with her tears and wipes them with her hair, before anointing His feet with ointment, here too from an alabaster box.   This results in a conversation of an entirely different sort.   Jesus gives Simon, who had thought to himself “This man, if he were a prophet, would have known who and what manner of woman this is that toucheth him: for she is a sinner”, a parable explaining that the more one is forgiven, the greater one’s love for the forgiver.   He concludes the episode by telling the woman “Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace”.   There are some who think that St. Luke was describing the same event as the other Evangelists but this is as implausible as the interpretation of those who think that SS Matthew and Mark were recounting a third anointing different from that told by St. John. (1)  The first verse of the eighth chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel makes it clear that the anointing he had just described occurred very early in Jesus’ ministry, two to three years before the anointing described by the other Evangelists, and almost certainly took place in Galilee.  (2)   (3)

 

Those who hold the implausible interpretation that SS Matthew and Mark were describing a different anointing from St. John, one that took place in the same town and with the same following conversation, four days later, often do so for a theological reason.   As the Christ – the Anointed One – Jesus was the prophesied descendant of David Who would inherit his kingdom and rule it forever.   When Saul was chosen by God for the kingship of Israel, Samuel informed him of the fact by taking a vial of oil, pouring it upon his head, and saying “Is it not because the LORD hath anointed thee to be captain over his inheritance” (1 Sam 10:1).   Later, when God rejects Saul because of his disobedience, and chooses David, Samuel similarly anointed him (1 Sam 16:13).   The title Messiah or Christ is primarily a reference to Jesus’ Kingship.   It was not just kings that were traditionally anointed with oil, however.   Priests were also inducted into their office with an anointment by oil (Ex. 40:13, 15) as were the Tabernacle/Temple in which they ministered and all the holy objects found within (Ex 40:9-11).     Elijah was also instructed to anoint Elisha, his successor, as a prophet. (4) Jesus, as the Messiah, is Prophet, Priest, and King in One, which many see as reason for believing that He was anointed three times.

 

As it so happens, they are right about Jesus having been anointed thrice, once for each Office, but there is no need to separate the anointing recounted by SS Matthew and Mark from that told by St. John to find these three anointings.   St. Peter in his sermon to Cornelius the centurion in mentions another:

 

How God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Ghost and with power: who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil; for God was with him.   (Acts 10:38)

 

While St. Peter could have had an eternal anointing outside of time and history in mind, (5) the reference to the baptism of John immediately prior to this verse makes it more likely that he was speaking about what had happened when John had baptized Jesus, when the Holy Spirit visibly descended upon Him.   

 

If we take that to be the right interpretation of St. Peter’s words then the Gospels do indeed record three anointings of Jesus and this is the only one that is mentioned in all four Gospels, being narrated by the Evangelists themselves in the case of the Synoptics, and by John the Baptist to his disciples in the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel.

 

If, furthermore, we take the three anointings to correspond to the three Offices of the Christ, then this one is clearly the anointing that pertains to the Office of Prophet.      A prophet is someone who speaks the Word of God.   Jesus exercised the duties of this Office from the onset of His public ministry in Galilee, a ministry of proclaiming the Gospel that the Kingdom was at hand, and calling on the people to repent and believe, which He accompanied and complemented by the healings and other miracles He performed exactly as St. Peter said.  As the Christ Jesus was more than just a prophet, He was The Prophet, that is, the One of Whom Moses said “The LORD thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken” (Deut. 18:15).   St. Peter and St. Stephen the martyred deacon, both make this identification in Acts 3 and 7 respectively.    Moses, as a prophet, had given to Israel the Old Covenant, the Law.   Jesus, as Prophet, brought the New Covenant.   The first four chapters of St. Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews, about the superior revelation God has given in His Son, to that which He gave through the prophets of old, comparing Him to Moses specifically in the third chapter, are an extended discussion of just this very truth.

 

At the end of the fourth chapter of Hebrews, St. Paul switches to a discussion of Jesus as Priest which goes on into the tenth chapter of the epistle.  This would be the Office most logically to be related to the anointing of the seventh chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke.   A priest is someone who, by contrast with a king whose vocation pertains to civil government, a farmer, who obtains his living from the land, or the butcher, baker and candlestick maker the work of each of which is oriented towards the market, serves in things which are considered holy or sacred, words which basically mean separated unto God from all of those secular or mundane matters to which everyone else attends.   The primary duty of a priest is to offer sacrifices to God on behalf of the people for the forgiveness of their sins.   The woman who anoints Jesus’ feet in St. Luke’s Gospel is identified as a sinful woman.  Before anointing His feet she weeps over Him – a sign of repentance.   The conversation that follows is all about the forgiveness of sin, and the account concludes with Jesus proclaiming her forgiveness, or, to put it in priestly terminology, pronounces her Absolution.   This is an exercise of His Priestly Office.   St. Paul in Hebrews goes into great length about Jesus’ priesthood.   He contrasts it with the Aaronic priesthood established for Israel in the Mosaic Covenant.  The priests of the latter had to offer sacrifices for their own sins as well as those of the people, the blood of bulls and goats which they offered could not actually take sins away, and the priests had to be continually replaced because they continually died.   Jesus, however, is a High Priest “after the order of Melchisedec”, i.e., the mysterious priest-king of Salem in the Book of Genesis.   It is not the earthly Tabernacle that He entered as High Priest, but the heavenly one upon which the earthly was patterned.   Having died and risen again, He lives forever and continues in the Office of Priest forever.   He is without sin Himself, although having undergone temptation he can sympathize with sinners.   He entered the heavenly Tabernacle once with one offering – His own blood – which effectively takes away all sins once and for all and secures the salvation of all who come to God through Him in faith.

 

This leaves for the anointing at Bethany the Office of King.   This makes perfect sense as it took place on the eve of the Triumphal Entry.   Here is Zechariah’s prophecy of that event:

 

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee: he is just and having salvation; lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt the foal of an ass. (Zech. 9:9)

 

In His Triumphal Entry, Jesus presented Himself to the nation as the promised King of this verse and the first thing He is recorded doing upon entering the city in the Synoptic Gospels is to exercise His Kingly authority by driving the merchants and moneychangers out of the Temple.    His Kingdom is a prominent theme of His teachings for the rest of that week.   The mid-week Discourse given at the Mount of Olives, for example, is about both the siege of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple as a judgement upon Israel for rejecting their King and about His Coming in judgement on the whole world at the end of time (see especially Matt. 25:31-46, where He first refers to Himself as the Son of Man, then for the remainder of the account of the Final Judgement as “the King”).   By the end of the week the chief priests and Pharisees who have captured Him with Judas’ help, condemned Him at an illegal and rigged Sanhedrin trial, and brought Him before Roman Governor Pontius Pilate are able to persuade the crowd to turn on Him, demand His Crucifixion, and the release of Barabbas instead.    Neither these, nor even at the time His own closest disciples to whom He had been explaining it ever since St. Peter’s confession of Him as the Christ, understood that the road to His Kingdom passed through the Cross.   To Pilate, however, He explained that His Kingdom was not of this world and Pilate, on the superscription over the Cross declared Him to be “the King of the Jews”.

 

These three anointed Offices, each of which can be associated with one of the three anointings of Jesus mentioned in the New Testament, is an indispensable part of what it means for Jesus to be the Christ, the Anointed One.    Were He not the Prophet Who proclaimed the grace of God as Moses had delivered the Law, the High Priest Who offered Himself up as the Sacrifice that took away the sins of the world before entering the Heavenly Tabernacle with His Own Blood, and the King Who will judge the world, both the quick and the dead, and rule eternally, He would not have been able to say to Martha:

 

I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.   (Jn. 11:25-26)

 

Jesus asked Martha whether she believed this and in response received her confession of the same truth which when confessed by St. Peter, prompted His declaration that “upon this rock I will build my church” (Matt. 16:18) and which St. John declares to be the faith that brings everlasting life (Jn. 20:31):

 

Yea Lord: I believe that thou art the Christ, the Son of God, which should come into the world. (Jn. 11:27).

 

If anyone does not believe this going in to Holy Week, let us pray that they come to believe it by the end of Week that they may fully enter into the joy of the Resurrection of the Anointed One on Easter Sunday.

 

(1)   Those who think that SS Matthew and Mark are describing a third anointing do so because both of these Evangelists recount the anointing immediately after talking about a meeting of the chief priests at Caiaphas’ palace where they conspired to put Jesus to death by craft.   This meeting took place two days before the Passover.   The Evangelists do not say that the supper at Bethany took place later that day.   Immediately after they tell about the supper at Bethany, they tell about Judas going to the conspiring chief priests and striking his deal to betray Jesus into their hands for thirty pieces of silver.   Since the account of Judas’ betrayal is obviously part of the same episode in the Evangelists’ narrative as the account of the meeting of the chief priests, the placing of the account of the supper in between the two includes it as well within the same episode, which only makes sense if it is being done to explain Judas’ betrayal.    This further identifies the supper with the one recounted by St. John, in which Judas is named as the disciple who receives Jesus’ rebuke, although the anointing being followed by an identical exchange in all three Evangelists, an exchange the nature of which makes it extremely unlikely to have occurred more than once, let alone twice in four days, ought to make it sufficiently clear that SS Matthew, Mark, and John all record the same incident.

(2)   Those who think that St. Luke was talking about the same incident as the other Evangelists despite his placing it two to three years earlier, think it too much of a coincidence that that women in both occurrences bring the ointment in alabaster boxes, and that the host of both suppers was named Simon.   Neither of these is a particularly unlikely coincidence.  Perfume and ointment containers in this time and region were typically made of calcite alabaster also called Egyptian alabaster.   As for the two Simons, this was the most popular name in Judea at the time.  It was the Hellenized form of Simeon, the name of one of Jacob’s sons and the tribe of Israel that he begat.   The twelve Apostles had two Simons among them, just as they had two Jameses and two Judases, these names also being those of Israel’s patriarchs (James is the Latinized form of Jacob, Israel’s original name, and Judas or Jude is a form of Judah).   In the Book of Acts, St. Peter – a Simon – confronts another Simon, Simon Magus in Samaria in the eight chapter, then at the end of the next chapter lodges with another Simon, Simon the Tanner, in Joppa.

(3)   The Church of Rome, in what looks like a failed attempt to simplify matters that instead complicated them much further, has traditionally followed Pope Gregory the Great in maintaining that all four Gospel accounts, whether they describe one anointing or two, involved the same woman, and that this woman was Mary Magdalene.    The Eastern Church has followed the Greek Fathers in maintaining that Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany were two different women and that the sinful woman of St. Luke’s Gospel was a third.   While the Roman interpretation is not impossible, the Eastern tradition seems to fit the Scriptural texts better.   The surname of Mary Magdalene suggests that Magdala, on the Sea of Galilee was her home town.    While this might make it easier to identify her with the sinful woman in St. Luke’s Gospel, as the most natural understanding of the text is that she was from the same community as Simon the Pharisee which appears to have been in Galilee, it makes it unlikely that she is the same person as Mary of Bethany, who lived with her brother and sister in Bethany, a town in Judaea that was a short distance from Jerusalem.    Mary Magdalen is mentioned in all four Gospels – in St. Luke’s she is mentioned by name two verses after the account of Jesus’ anointing by the sinful woman in Galilee – which, while they don’t tell us a whole lot about her, tell us that Jesus cast seven devils out of her, that she was one of the women who followed Jesus with the Apostles’ and ministered to Him, that she was a witness to the Crucifixion and Burial, and that she was the first to encounter the Risen Christ.   Mary of Bethany, like her two siblings, is mentioned by name only in the Gospels of SS Luke and John.   Both Evangelists depict her at home with her sister Martha with Jesus dropping in to see them, which is almost the opposite of how Mary Magdalen is depicted.   It is possible, of course, that the East and West have each latched on to half of the right interpretation and that Mary Magdalen was the woman in St. Luke’s account – his not identifying her despite mentioning her by name immediately after being, perhaps, explained by the rather delicate nature of what is said about her in the account of the anointing – and Mary of Bethany the woman in the other anointing in the three other Gospels.   The coincidence of both women being Marys is no more unusual than both hosts being Simons, note 2, vide supra.   Mary, derived from Miriam (Moses’ sister), was as common a name as Simon.

(4)   There are no general instructions for anointing prophets as there are for anointing priests, and Elisha is the only specific example given of such a practice by contrast with the kings for whom anointing upon accession was the standard practice.   This is only to be expected, however.   Priest and king were ordinary offices of the established civil order.   Prophet – at least with regards to the named prophets whose words are recorded, the schools of prophets mentioned in the books of Samuel and Kings may have operated differently - was an extraordinary office to which God directly called the individual.

(5)   This interpretation better first the anointing mentioned in the Forty-Fifth Psalm and quoted by St. Paul in Hebrews 1:9.   Such an eternal anointing should not be counted with the others as a fourth, but would rather be The Anointing, to which the title Christ and the three temporal anointings associated with His Offices all point.    

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.