“Both/And” and “Because…Therefore”

The expression via media has often been used to describe the Anglican position with regards to Catholicism on the one hand and Protestantism on the other.  It is a positive expression that evokes Aristotle’s concept of the golden mean, the path of virtue from which if you veer off in either direction you fall into one of two ditches of opposing vices.  It is misleading, however, in that it suggests that the Anglican position is neither Catholic nor Protestant but something in between.  The classical position of the reformed Ecclesia Anglicana – the English Church, planted early in the first millennium, as reformed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – however, is not a neither/nor but a both/and.  If we are to continue to use the expression, therefore, it needs to be with the explanation that it means our Church is both Catholic and Protestant and not that it is neither one nor the other. 

 

Obviously for the Anglican Church to be Catholic, Catholic cannot be defined by communion with or submission to the Patriarch of Rome commonly called the Pope.  St. Vincent of Lérins in the fifth century defined the faith of the Catholic Church as that “which has been believed everywhere, always, by all”, that is, what the Church as a whole has taught and believed since the Apostles, excluding that which has been unique to one location or to one time period.  In accordance with this principle, the English Reformers looked to the undivided Church of the early centuries as normative when carrying out their reforms.

 

Similarly for the Anglican Church to be Protestant, Protestant cannot mean what it often means in online “Catholic versus Protestant” debates, that is, North American evangelical.  Since North American evangelicalism tends to take as normative the doctrines of dissenting separatist groups that grew out of the Puritan movement that was discontent with the conservatism of the English Reformation and demanded more radical reforms to conform the Church to the model of Calvin’s Geneva it would make little sense to define Anglican Protestantism this way.  We should also be cautious about using the Five Solas to define Anglican Protestantism.  The Five Solas are a twentieth century formulation, drawn up by Calvinists who wanted a five-point summary of the doctrines of the Reformation to correspond to the five-point summary of their doctrine of predestination.  The Anglican Church in the Reformation agreed with the Lutherans and Calvinists that the Bible is the supreme authority to which the Church must conform her doctrine and that the gift of salvation in Jesus Christ is received by faith and not earned by works or merit.  In her Articles of Religion, however, she does not use the type of language found in the fifth article of the Belgic Confession of Faith when expressing the supremacy of Scriptural authority but speaks rather of the sufficiency of Scriptures (1).  In the English version of the eleventh article (the original text of the Articles of Religion was in Latin), sola is rendered as “only” rather than “alone”, which, with the exception of one marginal note, is also how Archbishop Cranmer consistently referred to the doctrine in the homily to which the article points (2).  The distinction, while small, is not insignificant.  “Only” usually excludes others from a class or category while “alone” usually indicates their absence.  Therefore, to convey in English that faith is the sole means whereby we receive the gift of saving grace (3) without suggesting that it exists in a vacuum apart from repentance, love, works and the like in the human heart, the “only” of the Anglican formularies is to be preferred over the “alone” that is usual with other Protestants. 

 

The Anglican Church to which the both Catholic and Protestant via media belongs, it needs to be pointed out, is the orthodox portion of the Anglican Church and not the part that has succumbed to the revisionist theology that is usually called liberalism.  Liberalism, despite naming itself after the virtue of generosity implying a kind of broadmindedness, is neither/nor with regards to Catholicism and Protestantism rather than both/and.  Moreover, it is not neither/nor in the sense the literal meaning of via media implies, the occupation of middle territory between, but neither/nor in the sense that it rejects much that is common to both Catholicism and Protestantism in their classical senses.

 

I have recently read three books which all affirm the “both Catholic and Protestant” understanding of the Anglican tradition.  The first of these is a short monograph entitled The Anglican Way: Evangelical and Catholic which was written by the Reverend Dr. Peter Toon and was first published by Morehouse - Barlow in 1983.  The edition I have is the 2010 edition put out by WIPF & STOCK of Eugene, Oregon.  The second is entitled Reformed Catholic Anglicanism which has multiple contributors and which was edited by Charles F. Camlin, Charles D. Erlandson, and Joshua L. Harper.  It was published by the Anglican Way Institute which is an outreach of the Church of the Holy Communion Cathedral (Reformed Episcopal Church) in Dallas, Texas in 2024.  The third is The Gospel and the Catholic Church by the Most Reverend A. Michael Ramsay, the 100^th Archbishop of Canterbury.  This book was written early in Ramsay’s ministry, long before he became the Anglican Primate, and was first published in 1936 by Longmans and Company.  I read the 2010 edition put out by Hendrickson Publishers of Peabody, Massachusetts.  In the cases of the last two books, it is the e-book editions for Kindle that I have and which I read.

 

I will defer further discussion of the second and third books to future essays and focus on Toon’s for the remainder of this one.  The author of this book was an Anglican priest and theology professor originally from the Diocese of Liverpool who ministered in the United States for the last eighteen years of his life, where he led the American version of the Prayer Book Society.  Other books of his that I have read in the last two years are his Knowing God Through Liturgy which is a sort of devotional guide to the Book of Common Prayer and his Neither Archaic nor Obsolete: The Language of Common Prayer and Public Worship co-written with Louis R. Tarsitano which defends the ongoing use of the Elizabethan language of the Prayer Book against the recent trend for “updated” liturgy (I found his argument for retaining the singular pronoun for addressing God as more theologically proper than using the numerically generic “you” quite compelling). I have also recently read the 2012 Gedenkschrift (4) that Roberta Bayer edited entitled Reformed and Catholic: Essays in Honor (sic) of Peter Toon.  Just how important the theme of the book under consideration here was to Toon is indicated by the fact that the title of this memorial collection was chosen to evoke its subtitle.

 

The book is not a long one.  Its ninety-four pages are divided into a preface and two introductory chapters, followed by Part One: The Evangel, which has two chapters, Part Two: Catholicity, which has two chapters, and Epilogue which in its listing in the Table of Contents confusingly looks like a third chapter to Part Two, and two Appendices. 

 

In the first chapter in the introductory section entitled “God’s Call” Toon expresses the both/and approach to Anglicanism in terms of the Church’s call:

 

In other words, the call of God to the Episcopal Church in these times, when the one Church of God is sadly divided, is that it should be simultaneously evangelical and catholic.  This does not mean that she is to be evangelical in her preaching and catholic in her liturgy.  It is not a matter of being sometimes evangelical and sometimes catholic.  The Church is called to be catholic and evangelical all the time in all that she is and does. (p. 11)

 

For the remainder of the chapter Toon elaborates on this by talking about how an evangelicalism that neglects “the wholeness of the one Church in space and time. The beauty of Liturgy, the symbolic power of sacraments, the depth of spirituality, and the episcopate as a sign of unity” (p. 12) and a Catholicity in which “the treasure of the Gospel is lost somewhere in thick layers of tradition which reach back into the dim past” (ibid) both fall short. “There must always be the primacy of Jesus Christ, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (p. 13) he reminds us, for “Without him there is no Gospel and without him there is no Catholicity” (ibid).  “What we have to guard against” he writes “is the rejection of either the achievement of Christ in creating the Gospel or the continuing achievement of Christ in ruling and directing the Church throughout history” (p. 14).

 

The two chapters in the first part, “The Evangel”, are entitled “By Grace Alone” and “By Faith Alone.”  Clearly, the sixteenth century Reformation takes precedence over the North American revival experience in defining the word “Evangelical” for Toon. (5)  He begins the first chapter by asking “Have you been accosted by an enthusiast who asks you, ‘Are you saved?’” (p. 29) and says:

 

If you are a baptized Christian then you ought to say: ‘In Christ Jesus my salvation is completed and complete; because of the indwelling Spirit in my heart I am in the process of being saved; and, because Jesus Christ rose from the dead and will return from heaven at the end of the age to raise the dead, I look forward to salvation at the end of the age.’  

 

From this staring point, in which the fullness of Gospel salvation is contrasted with the North American evangelical tendency to think of salvation as a single event within the experience of the individual Christian, Toon proceeds to contrast North American evangelicalism’s individualistic understanding of salvation with the way “The Kingdom of God, a phrase much on the lips of Jesus, can be seen and presented only in this-worldly terms: the bringing of justice into human affairs” (p. 30) that is characteristic of liberal “Christianity”.  Toon notes, however, that the reduction of the Christian message to a certain type of political and social activism that is so evident on the part of the World Council of Churches, is matched by the way American evangelicals tend to identify the opposite kind of political and social activism with their understanding of Christianity.  Both, he says, need a deeper understanding of the basic human problem of which the full salvation proclaimed in the Gospel is the solution, “a weakness, a fundamental gone-wrong-ness which in both the individual and in society” (p. 32) which in classical theological language is called “Original Sin.”  Toon writes:

 

The human race was created by God to enjoy spiritual union and communion with himself.  Where this does not exist then there is a fundamental problem.  For the human being is made to enjoy a relationship both with his Creator and with the creatures whom God has made.  Only with right relationships with God, with human beings and with creation can a person find wholeness or salvation.

 

These relationships are broken by the problem with the human condition that is Original Sin or gone-wrongness or, as Toon also suggests, the classical concept of hubris understood in a corporate sense as affecting the entire race.

 

Having identified what we need saving from, Toon then goes on to talk about the right language with which the Church needs to present the Gospel of salvation.  I opened this essay by talking about how the Anglican via media needs to be understood as both/and with regards to Catholicism and Protestantism rather than neither/nor and this is the topic of Toon’s book as a whole. (6) Here, Toon draws another such distinction without noting the parallel.  I found it to be a particularly excellent way of explaining the distinction between the way the Gospel should be proclaimed and the mistaken way in which it often is so I provide a lengthy quotation of it:

 

This mistake can best be illustrated by considering two types of sentences.  The first type we may call an ‘if…then’ statement.  Here are several examples.  Speaking to a child at table we say, ‘If you eat your meat and potatoes, then you can have some ice cream’.  To a child at school we say, ‘If you pass your examinations, then we will buy you a bike’.  To a young person starting work we say, ‘If you do your work well then we will see that you get promotion’.  Finally, we all are familiar with the politician who says, ‘If you vote for me then I will do for you what you want me to do’.

 

This form of statement, with the understanding it encapsulates is necessary for human society.  But we make a major mistake if we present or understand the Gospel of God on this basis.  In other words, if we make ‘believe’ or ‘repent and believe’ into a condition which we ourselves must fulfil by ourselves in order to get the rewards of God’s salvation, then we pervert the Gospel! It is far better to think of the promise of salvation from God, as it is described in the New Testament as being of the structure, ‘because…therefore’.  Here are a couple of examples, ‘Because there is a free national health service, go into hospital for your operation’; and ‘because the day is warm and the sand is clean go and bathe in the sea’.  So the message of salvation is something like this: ‘Because Jesus Christ died for your sins and rose for your acceptance with God, therefore you are saved’.  And, ‘Because God has provided salvation for you in Jesus Christ, therefore you are to believe and to receive this salvation’. And, “Because God loves you and will love you, therefore you are to accept his love’.

 

You can see the difference between the ‘if…then’ and the ‘because…therefore’ approach.  The first encourages us to think that we can do something to contribute to our salvation, while the second reminds us that salvation is, from beginning to end, the gift of God; and the gift is not earned but rather gratefully received and accepted.  We do not ourselves offer to God our religion, our good works, our pious thoughts, and our good endeavours so that he will accept us.  Rather we gratefully receive.  We believe God and his promises concerning salvation, and then, out of sheer amazement and gratitude to him for his wonderful salvation, we live a life of love towards him and our neighbour. (pp. 32-33)

 

Toon is absolutely correct that this is the way in which the Gospel ought to be presented and what he has captured here is really what the Reformation was all about.  He follows this up by applying it to repentance in which he provides a helpful illustration of the true purpose of repentance – telling people that they are forgiven will not be understood and appreciated if they do not recognize and accept that they have done something wrong for which they need forgiveness. (7)

 

In the first chapter, “The Anglican Experience” of the second part of the book, Toon gives his account of Catholicity.  He begins by objecting to the Roman Catholic Church “calling itself ‘the Catholic Church’”, i.e., sans Roman,  because “Catholicity is not confined to that community” (p. 63).  He then provides a “brief word study” of the words “ekklesia” (literally “assembly”, it became the name of the Christian society and therefore “Church” in English) and “catholic” (Gr. katholikos), correctly noting that “catholic” is first applied to ekklesia by St. Ignatius of Antioch in the early second century and that as applied to the Church it came to have the primary connotations of universality (“the world-wide Church in contrast to the local congregation”) and orthodoxy (the faith of the world-wide Church as opposed to the heresies of separatist sects). (p. 63-64).  “To receive and accept the Church as it has existed, and as it has believed, taught, confessed, and worshipped, is the beginnings of true Catholicity” he writes. 

 

In subsequent sections he fleshes this out.  He reminds us “that it was the catholic Church, with its imperfections, that gave recognition to what we now call the canon of the New Testament” (p. 66) and while his claims for the Church in this regards are far more modest than those of the Latin and Greek Churches, he adds:

 

Parallel developments in the Church in this same general period of time included the general recognition of the threefold ministry of bishop, presbyter (=priest) and deacon, the centrality of the Eucharist as the main act of worship on the Lord’s Day, the creation of creeds (e.g. the Apostles’ and Nicene) and the recognition of apostolic tradition (having reference to both the succession of sound teaching and to the historical, personal, succession of bishops). (ibid).

 

He warns against claiming too much from history, pointing to the example of Roman Catholicism as doing this by seeing in the historical development of the See of Rome into the papacy ruling the entire episcopate and the dogmatization of the Immaculate Conception and Bodily Assumption of Mary proof of divine approbation of the same and argues for the Church’s indefectibility rather than infallibility. (pp. 67-68)   Then, in discussing how the Church of England’s Catholicity is reformed, i.e., from “deviant and exaggerated developments and expressions” (p. 68) that had entered the Church in the period prior to the Reformation, he lists twelve examples of elements of the Catholic tradition that the English Reformers made a point of retaining, in some cases even when their Continental counterparts did not.  The list can be found on pages 68-69, I won’t reproduce it here, but will merely note that it is basically an expansion of everything mentioned in the previous block quote.

 

In the second chapter of this section entitled “Pertinent Examples” he provides extended discussion of the topics of “Bishops”, “the Liturgy of the Eucharist” and “Visible Unity”.  I disagree with his saying under the first heading that “A careful reading of the New Testament reveals that it does not describe or prescribe a single pattern of ordained ministry in the apostolic churches” (p. 76) as it seems quite clear to me that the three-fold ministry is present in the New Testament where it is originally Apostles, presbyters, and deacons, with St. Timothy and St. Titus later assuming the governing role of the Apostles in the office to which the title of bishop (overseer) would very shortly after become attached. (8)  Toon argues for the plene esse view of the episcopate that bishops are necessary for the fullness of the Church, but their absence doesn’t necessarily de-church a body (pp. 77-79) to which I have no objection. (9)  Under the second heading, he begins by observing that the basic structure of the Eucharistic liturgy goes back to the earliest days of Church history and by providing a list of its basic elements (p. 80).  He then draws out the significance of it all – that it is as the very name Eucharist indicates “a great thanksgiving to the Father for all he has done and is doing”, an anamnesis, “the living and effective sign of the sacrifice of Christ, accomplished once for all on the Cross of Calvary”, which includes “an invocation of the Holy Spirit”, and is “the communion of the faithful” (p. 81).  He notes how “the doctrine of Christ presented in the Nicene Creed” is fundamental “to the structure, content and ethos of the developed Eucharist celebrated in the Church over the centuries” (p, 82) and observes that the significance of the Sursum Corda (the vesicles and responses that introduce the Sacramental portion of the liturgy) and shortly thereafter the introduction to the Sanctus is that “we are invited to share in Christ’s heavenly worship through our union with, and in, him” (p. 82).  He reminds us that worship is not supposed to be something we do privately in our pews but is a corporate act (p. 83).

 

Overall it is an excellent introduction to the evangelicalism and Catholicity of the (orthodox) Anglican tradition.

 

(1)   There is also a noticeable difference between how the distinction between the canonical books and the “Apocrypha” is handled in the Thirty-Nine Articles and how it is handled in the Belgic Confession in both of which the relevant article is the sixth.

(2)   Cranmer’s original version of the article just names the doctrine and refers to the homily, the Elizabethan revision provides an account of the doctrine.  In both versions the homily is called “The Homily of Justification”.  The homily referred to is the third in the first (1547) Certain Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches, more commonly called Book of Homilies, and its actual title is “A Sermon of the Salvation of Mankind by Only Christ Our Saviour from Sin and Death Everlasting.”

(3)   This does not contradict the idea of Sacraments as means of grace.  Sacraments are means by which grace is given, faith is the means by which it is received.  Dr. Luther likened faith to the empty hand which receives a gift.  Sacraments, in this analogy, are hands of the Giver not the recipient.  Sacraments share the role of the Word, of which St. Augustine of Hippo said they were a visual form, not the role of faith.

(4)  The same thing as a Festschrift (a collection of essays in honour of somebody) but published posthumously.

(5)   Toon’s background, prior to his entering the Church of England and her ministry was Methodist.  He began his ministry in the Diocese of Liverpool, the first bishop of which was the very Calvinistic evangelical J. C. Ryle about whom Toon co-wrote a biography.

(6)   Toon saw the both/and approach as different from the via media rather than a different interpretation of it.

(7)   Repentance has far too often been preached in a way that blasphemes the character of God.  Have you ever heard a sermon in which sinners were encouraged to soften the heart of God with their tears or heard of such a sermon?  That this misrepresents the character of God can be seen in the Parable of the Prodigal Son.  While the title character when he determines to return home devises a speech “Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants” he is forgiven by his father before he utters a word of it “But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him”.  The son’s contrition did not produce the mercy and forgiveness in his father’s heart – it was already there.  What it did do was move him to seek his father where forgiveness was already awaiting him.  The error that attributes more to repentance than this goes back very early but this does not make it less of an error.  As early as the Apostolic Fathers the question of whether serious sins after baptism can be forgiven arose.  One answer was that they could, but only once.  That this would mean that the Jesus Who commanded His disciples to forgive up to 70 times 7 (and He did not mean that they were free to not forgive the 491^st time as the Puritan preacher in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights thought) was less forgiving than He required His sinful disciples to be did not seem to occur to such as the author of the Shephard of Hermas.  A more common answer was that they could be forgiven, but that only after a lifetime of repentance and that the forgiveness was less certain than that offered in initial baptism.  This was based on a misreading of the tenth chapter of Hebrews.  The antiquity of these views does not make them Catholic – remember, there are two other tests. The second of these wrong answers produced bad fruit such as the deferral of baptism until the deathbed (Emperor Constantine is a notable example of this) and ultimately the Catholic tradition rejected these bad ideas and a better understanding of grace prevailed.  Satisfaction for sins after baptism is not made by us in our always far from what it should be repentance.  It was made once for all by the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross.  This Sacrifice is the source of the grace conveyed in the one-time Sacrament of baptism.  It is also the source of the grace conveyed in the repeated Eucharist.  Since it is the same once-for-all Sacrifice the believer confessing his sins in accordance with John 1:9 can be as sure of forgiveness of his post-baptismal sins as of that of his pre-baptismal sins.  Scottish Barthian theologian T. F. Torrance in his doctoral dissertation The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers was quite critical of the Fathers of the second and third centuries for the weakness of their understanding of grace  However, the words from Edmund Burke about accumulated wisdom and the self-correcting power of tradition that Russell Kirk liked to quote seem appropriate here “the individual is foolish…but the species is wise” and just as orthodox Trinitarianism triumphed over Arianism by the end of the fourth century so grace ultimately prevailed around the same time as well.

(8)   The thing, the three-fold ministry of the Christian Church corresponding to the three-fold ministry of the Old Testament Church (High Priest/Priest/Levite), is present in the New Testament.  The only reason there is any dispute about this is due to the words that name the three orders and even there presbyter and deacon when used for offices in the ministry (the words can just mean “elder” and “servant” in a general sense) refer to the same offices to which they have traditionally been applied.  What is disputed is whether episkopos (literally overseer) or bishop is used of the office of the presiding presbyter who shares in the Apostolic governance as in the later tradition (SS Timothy and Titus as examples) or of all presbyters (as its usage in the epistles to SS Timothy and Titus would suggest).  Either way, however, the governing office itself is present in the New Testament and if the word that would become its title was not yet restricted to it in the New Testament this in no way invalidates the later usage of the term since it had to be called something and “overseer” certainly describes the role.

(9)  The alternate views are that the episcopate is esse (no Church without it) and bene esse (it is better if the Church has it but a Church can be a Church even in the fullest sense without it).  Plene esse is how most High Churchmen understood it prior to the Oxford Movement.  The only caveat I would offer is that for a Church to be a Church but in a less than full sense because it lacks the Apostolic episcopate it must have an organic connection to the Church of Jerusalem.  While bishops in Apostolic Succession are one form of organic connection and so every Church with them has an organic connection they are not the only such connection. A Church planted as an extension of an older Church (and so on back to the Church of Jerusalem) does not lose this organic connection although it sustains an injury if it loses its bishops such as occurred with the (German) Lutheran and Reformed Churches in the Reformation.

Some Modern Ancient Heresies

The late Modern Age was a period that saw Western Civilization gradually abandon the Christian religion and replace it with the secular religion of liberalism. Indeed, the very label Western Civilization indicates this change. Formerly it had been Christendom – Christian civilization. Not coincidentally, the same period saw large segments of the Christian Church abandon orthodoxy – the sound doctrines of the faith as taught by Christ and His Apostles, written in the Holy Scriptures, and formulated in the ecumenical Creeds of the early undivided Church. Many nominally Christian Churches now reject as literal truth virtually every statement in the basic Apostles’ Creed, let alone the more precise Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed or the comprehensive Athanasian Creed, and teach instead that these were mythological embellishments of the Christian message the only essential content of which is its ethical teachings, by which, such Churches always seem to mean, an interpretation of Christian ethics that supports a progressive, left-wing, political and social agenda. This kind of “theology” was once named Modernism after the Age which spawned it but is now generally called by the same name as that Age’s secular faith, liberalism.

Unsurprisingly, the Age that has seen this retreat from orthodoxy has seen also the rebirth of many of the heresies against which the orthodox Fathers successfully contended in the early centuries of Christianity. The sixteenth century saw the much needed reform of many corruptions and superstitions that had gradually risen in connection with the papacy’s usurpation of supremacy over the entire Church, itself a departure from primitive orthodoxy, but not all of the Reformers shared the same conservative respect for the primitive orthodoxy of the first five centuries as Dr. Luther and the English Reformers. The doctrine of Sola Scriptura was understood, by many of the more radical Reformers, as meaning that the individual should interpret the Bible for himself with disregard to the consensus of the early Church. Unsurprisingly, a tendency towards Nestorianism manifested itself among Calvin’s followers, and some really radical versions of Anabaptism rejected Trinitarianism.

One of the early heresies that has been reborn and which now seems to be ubiquitous is Manichaeism. This system of belief takes its name from its third century Persian founder, Mani, who incorporated elements of Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism into his teachings. For a decade in his youth, prior to his conversion to orthodox Christianity, St. Augustine was an adherent of this sect against which several of his treatises were written (De duabus animabus, Contra Faustum, Contra Fortunatum, De Natura Boni, among others). The doctrine for which it is primarily remembered is dualism – the idea that the forces of light and the forces of darkness are more or less equal principles between which the world is locked in a perpetual struggle. This is an idea that can be found everywhere today – it is a dominant theme in the Star War motion picture saga and, indeed, is quite prevalent in the fantasy genre of fiction in general. More problematic is its presence in the Church. There are, indeed, many who think that it is sound Christian doctrine.

The error of dualism, which I dealt with in a previous essay entitled The Nature and Origin of Evil, is not in the assertion that there are evil spiritual forces present in the world but in the degree of significance it attaches to these and to evil itself. There are those who in the interest of promoting morality, purity, and holiness constantly harp on the danger of treating evil lightly and, in the sense in which they are speaking they do have a point. Yet there is a greater danger in making evil more important than it really is. The fourteenth chapter of the book of Isaiah contains a “proverb against the king of Babylon” and traditionally Christianity has seen the segment of that proverb that begins at verse twelve with the words “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” as addressing through the spiritual entity standing behind the king of Babylon, an interpretation that can be supported by our Lord’s words in the eighteenth verse of the tenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke. Therefore, when Isaiah writes:

For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. (vv. 13-14)

this has been understood as referring, at least on one level, to the sin that led to the downfall of the devil. Note that the dualism, which places the forces of evil on the same level as the forces of good, gives the devil precisely the honour that he in his Pride sought to usurp according to the traditional interpretation of this passage.

Orthodox Christian doctrine, however, teaches us that there is only One Being Who is eternal – in the sense of having neither beginning nor end -, infinite, all-powerful, and omnipresent. This Being, God, is also Good. Goodness, therefore, as an attribute of God, is itself eternal. It follows from this that Goodness does not require its opposite, evil, either to exist itself, or, much less, to balance it, as some of the more perverse versions of Dualism suggest.

Furthermore, while Goodness does not require evil for its own existence, the same is not true in reverse. Evil, if it can be said to exist – and something that is neither eternal nor created by God can hardly be said to exist in the most proper meaning of the word existence – exists as a defect in the Goodness of Creation. God, Who is Good Himself and in Whom there is no evil, created all that is and He imparted Goodness to all that He created. “And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” (Gen. 1:31) God imparted this Goodness to His Creation in two tiers. The lower level of created Goodness is that of inanimate objects and irrational life forms which serve the Good for which they are created automatically and whose nature is such that they lack the power to do otherwise. The higher level of created Goodness, voluntary Goodness, is that of angels and human beings, who were created with reason, the power to recognize the Good for which they exist, and will, the power to choose that Good for themselves. This higher level of created Goodness could not exist without either reason or will, and created reason and will are therefore themselves Goods, because they serve the end of voluntary Goodness. The power to choose the Good for oneself, however, at least in a state of Innocence rather than Perfection, which was the initial state of angels and human beings, is also the power to choose what is not Good. Or, more precisely, it is the power to choose wrongly, by choosing what to mistaken reason appears to be the greater Good, but which as the object of wrong choice loses even the lesser Goodness upon which the miscalculation was based. In the case of Lucifer and the angels who followed him in his rebellion, and in the case of our first parents in the Garden of Eden, this is exactly what happened, and in each case the result was that the created Goodness of their nature was broken.

That is all that evil is – broken Goodness. Not a force in this world, equal to, opposite, and independent of Goodness, but the damaged condition of created Goodness itself. Just as speed, the ability to move fast, denotes an actual power which human beings possess but slowness is merely a term for a deficiency in that power, so is evil to the Goodness of Creation.

Note that what I have said here applies also to Truth and Beauty which, like Goodness, are eternal attributes of God, which He imparted as properties to all that He made. (1) Falsehood and ugliness, like evil, are neither things in themselves, nor real properties which exist in other things, but are present merely as defects in the Truth and Beauty of Creation. Note what some of the most famous orthodox writers of the early part of the last century had to say about the kind of falsehood, heresy, with which we are concerned here. G. K. Chesterton, writing for The Daily News on June 26, 1909 said “Every heresy is a truth taught out of proportion” and in America on November 9, 1935 “A heresy is always a half-truth turned into a whole false¬hood.” T. S. Eliot wrote:

Furthermore, the essential of any important heresy is not simply that it is wrong: it is that it is partly right. It is characteristic of the more interesting heretics, in the context in which I use the term, that they have an exceptionally acute perception, or profound insight, of some part of the truth; an insight more important often than the inferences of those who are aware of more but less acutely aware of anything. So far as we are able to redress the balance, effect the compensation, ourselves, we may find such authors of the greatest value. If we value them as they value themselves we shall go astray. And in the present state of affairs, with the low degree of education to be expected of public and of reviewers, we are more likely to go wrong than right; we must remember too, that an heresy is apt to have a seductive simplicity, to make a direct and persuasive appeal to intellect and emotions, and to be altogether more plausible than the truth. (2)

These insights into the nature of heresy are particularly helpful in understanding another ancient heresy which has even more thoroughly permeated Modern Western thought than Manichaeism. This is the heresy of Pelagianism. This heresy was named after Pelagius a fifth century monk from somewhere in the British Isles, probably Ireland, who lived and taught in Rome. St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Jerome were the primary champions of orthodoxy in the fight against this heresy, which was first condemned in the Council of Carthage, a regional synod of the African Church, in 418 AD, but which condemnation was upheld by the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD. This Council, convened to address the Nestorian controversy, was the third ecumenical Council and as such spoke with the authority of the entire orthodox Church, eastern and western. Pelagianism is ordinarily thought of as a denial of Original Sin. Think back to our explanation of the origin and nature of evil. Original Sin is the doctrine, clearly taught by St. Paul in the fifth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, that after the Goodness of human nature was broken by Adam’s sin in the Garden of Eden, it was passed down to us in that broken condition. Since one of the implications of Original Sin is the idea, fundamental to orthodox Christianity, that we cannot save ourselves but must rely entirely upon the grace of God given to us in Jesus Christ, an implication of Pelagianism’s denial of Original Sin is the idea that we can save ourselves, an idea clearly present in the Modern concept of progress. However, to go back to the insights into the nature of heresy that we borrowed from Chesterton and Eliot, if Pelagianism is “truth taught out of proportion” then it is the truth of Free Will that Pelagianism exaggerates.

We have already set forward the doctrine of Free Will without naming it as such in our discussion of the origin of evil. It is the power which God gave to rational beings such as men and angels to perceive the Good with their reason and to choose it with their will. (3) While this power is what made evil a possibility and in practice a reality, it is itself a Good because the end it serves, which could not be achieved without it, is Good, which Good, as we have already seen, is the higher order of Created Goodness that is voluntarily chosen. This is a truth that orthodox Christianity holds simultaneously with that of Original Sin. There is a degree of tension between the two truths since an obvious implication of Original Sin is that Free Will along with human Goodness was damaged in the Fall. Orthodox Christians have disagreed as to the extent of the damage however. The Pelagian view, that the Fall did not damage man’s ability to choose Good unassisted by God’s grace, and the Semi-Pelagian view, that after the Fall man retains the ability to initiate the choice of Good but requires the grace of God to complete it, have both been rejected as heresy by orthodox Christianity, but this still leaves a large spectrum of degrees of damage that fall within the scope of orthodoxy, and some of the most unedifying theological conflicts of the Modern Age have been the direct result of attempts to limit that scope even further.

Free Will in orthodox Christianity is not unlimited. It is the power to choose Good or evil, not the right to decide for ourselves what is Good. Goodness is what it is, it is the role of reason to perceive it, and the will is supposed to follow the lead of reason. In the post-modernism of today – if we have not actually arrived at a post-post-modernism – liberalism has arrived at the point where freedom is regarded by many liberals as being so absolute that it is not subject to the limitations even of reality. This is Pelagianism taken to the nth degree, for Pelagius himself would never have dreamed of asserting a freedom of our will that places limitations on the authority of God as Sovereign Ruler over all His Creation, to issue laws, reward obedience, and punish disobedience.

The history of liberalism, from the Whiggism of the seventeenth century to the present day madness described in the previous paragraph, has been one of the progressive removal of limitations, real or perceived, on the freedom of the will. In other words, it is the history of Pelagianism going to seed. The Whig Interpretation of History, which was prevalent in the history books of the nineteenth century and which lingers on still despite having been ably refuted by Herbert Butterfield in 1931 almost a decade before the Modern Age was brought to its conclusion when the rival totalitarianisms of Communism and National Socialism plunged the world into the Second World War, maintains that this period was also a period in which, through the efforts of reformers and revolutionaries, political rights and freedoms gradually increased and tyranny receded. That this is utter nonsense is most evident in the fact that today’s uber-Pelagian liberalism with its absolute freedom of the will from the constraints of reality is one side of a coin the other side of which is the soft totalitarianism of politically correct thought control. If this seems paradoxical, consider the implications of George Grant’s wise judgement on the American and Canadian Supreme Courts after they had struck down their respective nations’ abortion laws in Roe v. Wade and R. v. Morganthaler, that they had “used the language of North American liberalism to say yes to the very core of fascist thought—the triumph of the will.”

A more genuine paradox is perhaps to be found in the fact that the Whigs who started the ball rolling on all of this were originally Puritans, i.e., fanatical Calvinists. Calvinism is ordinarily thought of as erring in the exact opposite direction of Pelagianism by taking Original Sin to the extreme of teaching that it annihilates utterly the Image of God in man and by denying, at least in effect, Free Will. How Whiggism developed from this to the opposite error is difficult to explain but the fact that it did is undeniable. The answer may simply be that to depart from orthodox truth in one area, opens one up to other heresies, even if they seem to be miles removed from your original position. Samuel Johnson had some interesting observations about the direction in which their political ideas pointed. Boswell records the following incident which had been related to him by Dr. John Douglas, Bishop of Salisbury:

One day when dining at old Mr. Langton's, where Miss Roberts, his niece, was one of the company, Johnson, with his usual complacent attention to the fair sex, took her by the hand and said, “My dear, I hope you are a Jacobite.” Old Mr. Langton, who, though a high and steady Tory, was attached to the present Royal Family, seemed offended, and asked Johnson, with great warmth, what he could mean by putting such a question to his niece! “Why, Sir, (said Johnson) I meant no offence to your niece, I meant her a great compliment. A Jacobite, Sir, believes in the divine right of Kings. He that believes in the divine right of Kings believes in a Divinity. A Jacobite believes in the divine right of Bishops. He that believes in the divine right of Bishops believes in the divine authority of the Christian religion. Therefore, Sir, a Jacobite is neither an Atheist nor a Deist. That cannot be said of a Whig; for Whiggism is a negation of all principle.” (4)

The principles that Dr. Johnson ascribes to the “Jacobite” here are the principles of seventeenth century Toryism, and also the principles of civil and ecclesiastical government to which all orthodox Christian believers, if they wish to be consistent with the teachings of their faith, must subscribe. The Jacobites were the Tories who were so true to these principles that they remained loyal to King James II and his heirs after 1688, (5) as opposed to today’s Conservatives, who claim the name and mantle of the Tories while showing little evidence of being acquainted with their principles, let alone subscribing to them. The relevant point, however, is that Whiggism, the original liberalism, was in its rejection of these political principles, a step away from Christian orthodoxy and, while the first Whigs were fanatical Calvinists, by the next century, in which Dr. Johnson lived, many of them had taken further steps towards Deism or even Atheism. If we consider how Unitarianism, a non-Trinitarian sect built on a foundation of theological liberalism, developed in New England out of the colony’s original strict Puritanism, then perhaps it will be less surprising that the political expression of Calvinist Puritanism eventually developed into an extreme version of Pelagianism.

Indeed, the root of the problem with Puritanism and what made it the well-spring of so much revived ancient heresy, can be found in its Calvinism. To return to a point made at the beginning of this essay, John Calvin, like Dr. Luther and the English Reformers held that the Holy Scriptures as God’s Written Word held supreme authority over the teachings and traditions of the Church. There was a difference, however, in how Calvin understood this truth and how Dr. Luther and the English Reformers understood it. Dr. Luther and the English Reformers believed – correctly – that they shared this truth with the Fathers of the early, undivided, Church and that while the Scriptures must have the final say, we need to pay respectful attention to how the Church Fathers understood them. This was not entirely untrue of John Calvin, but it was much less true of him than of these other Reformers, and it would become even less true among his followers, especially the English Puritans. The idea developed among them that the individual believer, aided only by the Holy Spirit, should mine the truth of Scripture for himself, and ignore what other Christians – prior to Calvin – had to say about it.

This goes a long way towards explaining why there has been such leanings towards ancient heresies like Nestorianism (6) in the Calvinist tradition. In it can also be seen the seeds of the perverse Modern attitude that C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield so aptly dubbed “chronological snobbery.” If we, who live in the present, have better access to the truth the Holy Spirit conveys through the Scriptures when we apply to them directly without consulting the exegesis of the Fathers of the Church, then chronological snobbery, “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited” (7) necessarily follows.

By contrast, Dr. Daniel Waterland, the early eighteenth century champion of orthodoxy against the revived Arianism of Dr. Samuel Clarke, wrote:

Having taken a view of the moderns in relation to the Creed, we may now enter upon a detail of the ancients and their testimonies, by which the moderns must be tried. (8)

Dr. Waterland was speaking with regards to the question of the age and authorship of the Athanasian Creed, but it we would apply this principle, that the moderns must be tried by the testimonies of the ancients, more broadly, we would find in it a curative to chronological snobbery, and the many heresies of our own age.

(1) The philosophical way of saying this is to say that these are the Transcendentals – the properties of Being itself.

(2) T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, Faber & Faber, 1934, pp. 24-25.

(3) See Richard Hooker’s excellent discussion of this in chapters VII through IX of Book I of his Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie.

(4) James Boswell, Life of Johnson, July 14, 1763.

(5) Dr. Johnson held these principles all his life but upon the accession of George III accepted the Hanoverian Succession as having attained legitimacy through prescription. Boswell inserts the anecdote from Douglas at the point in his narrative where he notes this fact.

(6) Thomas F. Torrance in his book Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, Downers Grove, IVP Academic, 2009, argued that the doctrine of Limited Atonement, implied, although not directly worded as such, by the Second Main Point of Doctrine of the Canons of the Synod of Dort (1618-1619) had Nestorian implications. Nestorianism cannot be imputed to John Calvin himself, because of this, for it is clear from his writings that he taught an Unlimited Atonement, but others, especially of the Lutheran tradition, have found evidence of Nestorianism in his doctrine of the Eucharist. That the late R. C. Sproul was guilty of outright and open Nestorianism, I demonstrated here: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2016/03/from-scylla-of-patripassianism-into.html.

(7) C. S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1966 p, 207.

(8) Daniel Waterland, A Critical History of the Athanasian Creed: A New Edition, Revised and Corrected by the Rev. J. R. King, Oxford and London, James Parker And Co., 1870, p. 20.