“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.

Justification and the Hierarchy of Truth

I have been working on a sequel to my essay “Catholic and Protestant.”   In that essay I argued that the Anglican Church, contrary to the types of Churchmen who eschew one or the other of these labels, should embrace both, defining Catholic as that which belongs to all the ancient Churches since the earliest Christian antiquity and Protestant by the two fundamental truths of the Reformation, the final authority of the Scriptures as the Word of God and the freeness of the gift of salvation in Jesus Christ which can only be received by faith.  The sequel, which I have given the title “Catholic not Roman” will concentrate more closely on how the errors of Rome rejected in the Reformation were distinct to Rome and late innovations rather than belonging to all the ancient Churches since the earliest times.  The death of California pastor, seminary president, and Bible teacher John F. MacArthur Jr. this week has prompted me to first address the objection that has been raised to a point I made in my first essay.  That point was that it is wrong to describe the recovery of the Pauline doctrine of justification in the Reformation as a recovery of the Gospel because the truths St. Paul himself identified as the Gospel he preached (that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was buried, and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and the testimony of the eyewitnesses he enumerated)[1] were never lost by the Church and are confessed to this day even by Rome in the ancient Creeds.

 

There was a point behind this point and that is that there is a hierarchy of importance to Christian truth.  The truths that are the most important are the Catholic truths.  These are the truths confessed in the ecumenical symbols of the faith – the Apostles’ and Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creeds, and the Quicumque Vult or Athanasian Symbol.  That these outrank justification by faith alone in terms of importance is acknowledged by the formularies of each of the three branches of the Magisterial Reformation.  Our Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571 acknowledge it by placing the Catholic truths in the first eight articles (Article VIII is the reception of the ecumenical symbols) and the Lutheran Book of Concord of 1580 places the three ecumenical symbols at the start before any of the distinctly Lutheran confessions.  

Indeed, I can hardly think of a better way of making the point than how the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 makes it.  This is one of the Three Forms of Unity that the Reformed Church acknowledged as its basic formularies at the pan-Reformed Synod of Dort in 1618-1619.  Its twenty-second question asks “What, then, is necessary for a Christian to believe?” The answer is “All that is promised us in the Gospel, which the articles of our catholic, undoubted Christian faith teach us in summary.”  The next question asks what those articles are and the answer is simply the text of the Apostles’ Creed.  The twenty-fourth through fifty-eighth of the questions and answers probe deeper into the meaning of each of the simple assertions of the Creed.  It is only then in the fifty-ninth question which asks “What does it help you now, that you believe all this?”, that is, the faith confessed in the Apostles’ Creed, that justification by faith alone, the topic of questions fifty-nine through sixty-four is raised.  

It should not require an appeal to the Protestant confessional formularies, however, to make this point.  According to the doctrine of justification by faith alone it is faith in Jesus Christ that is the hand with which a sinner receives everlasting life and the righteousness of God freely given in Jesus Christ.   It is therefore, by the doctrine of justification by faith alone itself, more important to believe in Jesus Christ, to believe what is confessed about Him in the faith of the ancient symbols, than to believe in the doctrine of justification by faith alone itself.

Consider what the Scriptures themselves teach us about the content of saving faith.  The object of saving faith is, of course, Jesus Christ.  The object of faith is the answer to the question of Who is believed.  The content of faith is the answer to the question of what is believed.  St. John tells us at the end of the penultimate chapter of his Gospel “But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name”[2]  The predicate about Jesus in this verse contains two assertions placed in apposition to each other so as to identify them with each other.  The Christ is the Son of God, and the Son of God is the Christ.  Each term brings its own connotations to the overall concept.  Christ is the Greek word corresponding to the Hebrew Messiah.  It literally means Anointed One, and the anointing primarily referred to is that of the kingship of Israel.  Priests were also anointed in the Old Testament and Jesus as the Christ is the High Priest after the order of Melchizedek and in one instance a prophet was anointed in the Old Testament and Jesus is the Prophet that Moses predicted God would send.  First and foremost, however, the Christ or Messiah is the promised heir to David’s throne Who would establish the Kingdom forever.  That the Christ/Messiah would be the Saviour not just of Israel but of the whole world is indicated by the very first prophecy found of Him in the Old Testament in God’s judgement on the serpent in Genesis 3.  The Christ, therefore, is the Saviour Who God had promised He would send the world since the Fall of Man.  Jesus as the Christ is the fulfilment of those promises.

 

What it means for Jesus to be the Son of God is established in the first verse of the same Gospel.  The Word was in the beginning, the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  This Person St. John identifies as the Word (Greek Logos), is eternal since He was there in the beginning with God and is Himself God.  St. John’s use of the word Logos/Word here, like the phrase “In the beginning” points back to Genesis, since in the second verse he says that is through the Word that everything that was made was made.  In Genesis 1 God speaks (“Let there be light” for example) all of Creation into existence.  The Word is identified as Jesus in the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel after which the relationship between the Word Who is God and the God Whom the Word is with is spoken of as that of Father and Son.  In a few places St. John modifies “Son” with the Greek word rendered “only-begotten” in the Authorized Bible.  This expression indicates that Jesus is God’s Son in a way no one else is.  All humans and angels are sometimes spoken of as God’s sons by right of creation.  Christians are God’s children by adoption.  Jesus, however, is the only natural Son of God, the kind of Son Who shares the nature of His Father.  That this does not mean there are two Gods is the significance of Jesus’ saying “I and my Father are one”[3] and St. John’s Gospel also identifies the Third Person Who shares in the unity of the Godhead with the Father and Son, the Holy Spirit or Comforter.

 

The words with which St. John identifies the content of saving faith are familiar from elsewhere in the Gospel records.  They are identical with the confession St. Peter made at Caesarea Philippi in response to the question addressed to Jesus’ disciples “but whom say ye that I am?”[4]  Jesus’ immediate response to St. Peter’s confession was to say that St. Peter was blessed, that this revelation had not come to him from “flesh and blood” but from the Father, to declare that He would build His Church which the gates of hell would not overthrow on this rock, and to give St. Peter the keys.[5]  This marked the point where Jesus began teaching His disciples that He would suffer and be crucified and rise again the third day.[6]  These are, of course, the events that make up the content of the Gospel as preached by St. Paul.  That Jesus revealed them in advance to His disciples upon St. Peter’s confession that Jesus is the “Christ, the Son of the Living God” establishes a connection between the two.  For Jesus to be the “Christ, the Son of the Living God” means to be He Who was crucified for us and rose again the third day.  The end or purpose of St. Paul’s proclamation of the Gospel that Jesus died for our sins and was buried and rose again the third day was that those who heard would believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.  This was also the end or purpose of the Gospel Jesus Himself preached, the content of which was that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.[7]  This content pointed to faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God because what the Kingdom of Heaven being at hand meant was that the promises of it had been fulfilled because it was present in His Own Person, the promised Christ.  Jesus preached this Gospel to the Jews who were anticipating the coming of the Christ and the Kingdom of God.  St. Paul preached the Gospel of the death and resurrection of Christ to both Jews and Gentiles because it revealed what it really meant for Jesus to be the Saviour, to be the Saviour of everybody from the bondage of sin which has afflicted the whole world since the Fall rather than a political deliverer of a single nation.

 

There is one other prominent confession of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God and that occurs earlier in St. John’s Gospel in the account of the raising of Lazarus in the eleventh chapter.  It is the confession of St. Martha of Bethany in response to Jesus’ words “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. Believest thou this?”[8]  St. Martha’s confession was the only possible response for someone who believed these words.  Only the Christ, the Son of God could truthfully say He could guarantee resurrection and everlasting life to all who believe in Him.

 

My point, once again, is that what St. John identifies as the content of saving faith – that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and what St. Paul identifies as the Gospel – that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and rose again from the dead the third day – are all confessed in the three ancient ecumenical symbols of the faith.  It is therefore a gross exaggeration of the important of the doctrine of justification by faith alone to say that its formulation in the Reformation was a recovery of a lost Gospel.  The Roman Church, as corrupt and in serious error as she had become by the sixteenth century, still confessed as she confesses to this day, these ancient symbols.

 

This does not mean that justification by faith alone is not important.  It is a truth taught in the Scriptures.  The claim of the Roman apologists that it is only mentioned when St. James denies it[9] is most kindly described as simplistic.  One could just as simplistically respond that the claim is not true because Jesus said (to the ruler of the synagogue seeking healing for his daughter) “Be not afraid, only believe”[10] and that since this appears twice and comes from the mouth of Jesus Himself it negates the verse in St. James’ epistle.   A more serious answer would be to point out that since the Roman Church has re-iterated her official belief in the inerrancy of the Bible at least on matters of doctrine and morals in the second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and her 1992 Catechism she is not free to choose St. James over St. Paul but must find a way to affirm both.  It is insufficient to point out that St. Paul does not use the word “alone” or “only” as it is more accurately rendered in the Authorized Bible[11] because St. James specifies “by works” thus including the very thing excluded by name in St. Paul.  The question, therefore, is which of the two writers explains the other.  The answer is quite clear.  There is nothing in the Jacobean epistle which could be understood as saying “St. Paul said this in Romans and Galatians, but what he meant is this, which does not contradict what I am saying here.”  St. Paul, however, includes just such an explanation of St. James at the beginning of his argument for justification by faith without works in the fourth chapter of Romans.[12]  His explanation is that justification by works, such as is affirmed by St. James, is “not before God.”  St. James, therefore, by the authority of St. Paul, was not talking about the righteousness of God which is given in Jesus Christ to all who believe in Him apart from works.[13]  This is also evident by taking note of what is missing from James 2:14-26.  Such words as “justified”, “faith”, and “works” are common to both this passage and Romans 4, as are the Old Testament references.  The word “grace”, therefore, is conspicuous by its absence from the passage in St. James.

 

Grace is the key concept here.  St. Paul doesn’t just assert that justification is by faith and not works he gives an explanation as to why this is the case.  He writes “Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness”[14] and later “Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed; not to that only which is of the law, but to that also which is of the faith of Abraham; who is the father of us all.”[15]  Grace has a number of connotations, including the love of God revealed in His blessing His creatures, the act of God blessing His creatures, the blessings themselves, and even the thanks offered back to God for His blessings.[16]  When St. Paul says that justification – or salvation in all of its aspects for that matter – is by grace, he is saying that it is a free gift.  That is why it is by faith and not by works.  If it were by works it would not be a gift but a reward, payment, or wage.  Faith, by contrast, is not something offered in exchange or something that merits reward, but merely receives what is given.

 

This is a very important truth and I have not the slightest desire to diminish its importance.  It is possible, however, with any truth to exaggerate it and when this is done that truth becomes distorted.  That is the very nature of heresy – the exaggeration of a truth in such a way that other truths are denied and the exaggerated truth is distorted into error.  

Consider the basic heresies the Church contended against in the early centuries.  Sabellianism[17] exaggerated the unity of God to the point of denying the Threeness of the Persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Arianism, the heresy that the first two Ecumenical Councils addressed,[18] was a pendulum swing in the opposite direction that stressed the distinction between the Persons to the point of denying the fundamental unity in being of the Father and the Son and so posited that the Son was a lesser, created, god.[19]  The orthodox response stressed the unity of being between the Father and Son and so the full deity of Jesus Christ but even this could be exaggerated as it was in the teachings of Apollinaris of Laodicea who taught that the Divine Logos took the place of the human nous (mind or reason) in Jesus thus denying that Jesus' humanity was complete.  The Cappadocian Father St. Gregory Nazianzus expressed the orthodox response “That which is not assumed is not redeemed” and the second Ecumenical Council condemned Apollinarism.  Nestorius of Constantinople stressed the distinction between the deity and humanity of Jesus Christ in a way that compromised the unity of His Person.  Nestorius’ orthodox opponent was St. Cyril of Alexandria whose orthodox response was itself exaggerated by Eutyches of Constantinople in a way that erased the distinction between the natures and fused them into one.[20]  In the fourth ecumenical council, the Council of Chalcedon, a supplement to the Nicene Creed was produced that defined the orthodox doctrine of the Hypostatic Union of Jesus Christ – that the Son, Who is eternally God of one nature with the Father and Holy Spirit, in taking to Himself true humanity in the Incarnation, remained the One Person He eternally was and is but with two natures that remained distinct being neither confused, divided, changed or separated.  The monk Pelagius stressed human moral responsibility to the point that he denied the hereditary taint of Original Sin and the need for God’s grace.  The heresies of monothelitism and monoenergism condemned at the sixth ecumenical council[21] were variations of the error of Apollinarism.[22]

 

If the unity of God could be exaggerated into a heresy (Sabellianism) and the deity of Jesus Christ could be exaggerated into a heresy (Apollinarism) then by all means justification by faith alone can be exaggerated into a heresy and those who elevate it above the Catholic truths of the ancient symbols of the faith by saying that its re-formulation in the Reformation was a recovery of the Gospel are at least in danger of doing just that.

 

There is a particular school of evangelicalism that clearly does this.  Note that in this context by “evangelicalism” I mean what was called “the new evangelicalism” in the 1950s when it began as a kind of softer fundamentalism although the “new” or “neo” was eventually dropped by everyone except those who continued to claim the label “fundamentalist” for themselves.  By softer fundamentalism I mean less militant and separatist.  The leaders of this new evangelicalism also claimed that they were more academically and intellectually respectable than the old fundamentalists although I have seen no evidence that would convince me that they were more so than the contributors to The Fundamentals[23] and certain books that were published about the time I was doing my undergraduate work in theology rather laid waste to the idea.[24]  By the 1970s it was evident that the doctrinal drift the old fundamentalists warned would happen in the new evangelicalism was indeed taking place.[25]  In response to the doctrinal, moral and intellectual shallowness of the broader evangelicalism a school of conservative evangelicalism arose around the 1980s and 1990s that called for a renewed commitment to standards.  This school tended to draw its inspiration primarily from the Reformation and the second-generation Calvinism of the English Puritans.

The way these evangelical leaders treated the doctrine of justification by faith alone was very interesting.  They ran it up the flag pole and demanded that everyone salute it.  If someone did not loudly and publicly affirm it his evangelicalism and even his Christianity would be suspect.  No similar allegiance was required for all of the tenets of the ancient symbols and no wonder.  These leaders were almost to the man Nestorians.  This was most evident in their rejection of the honourific Mother of God for the Blessed Virgin[26] although in the case of the late R. C. Sproul it was also expressed in an ill-conceived diatribe against Charles Wesley’s wonderful lyric “Amazing love, how can it be, that Thou my God shouldst die for me.”  Some of them including the late John F. MacArthur Jr. taught Incarnational Sonship, the heresy that Jesus was not the Son of God prior to the Incarnation but became the Son of God in the Incarnation, although MacArthur did recant this early in the new millennium after teaching it for over twenty years, something that cannot be said of “cults” expert Walter Martin who taught the same heresy.[27]  They demanded allegiance to justification by faith alone while themselves teaching serious heresies concerning more important Christological and Trinitarian truths.  Allegiance was all they demanded for justification by faith alone, however, not comprehension or understanding.  When John F. MacArthur Jr’s The Gospel According to Jesus was published[28], it came with glowing endorsements from John Piper, James Montgomery Boice, R. C. Sproul, et al., and even an introduction from J. I. Packer.  Perhaps these Calvinists were too busy cheering MacArthur’s blistering attack on the Dallas Seminary crowd to notice that he still essentially subscribed to Dallas theology himself with regards to the worst elements of that theology and that he had gutted justification by faith alone of all meaning by redefining it so that "faith" is unrecognizable as what is meant by the rather simple concepts of “belief” and “trust” and so as to include in faith the very thing that the Reformation doctrine excludes.  One Calvinist who did notice this was John W. Robbins[29] whose scathing review of this awful book is a must read.[30]

 

This school of evangelicalism both exaggerated the doctrine of justification by faith alone by treating it as more important than such basic truths as the Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ and the Unity of the Person of Christ and distorted the doctrine beyond recognition by redefining faith to mean something other than “belief” and “trust.”  On both counts it is guilty of heresy.[31] 

 

 

 

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[1] 1 Cor. 15:3ff.

[2] Jn. 20:31. Authorized Bible.

[3] Jn. 10:30.

[4] Matt. 16:15.  St. Peter’s confession is in verse 16.

[5] Matt. 16:17-19.  After the Resurrection the keys were given to the Apostles’ collectively Jn. 20:23.

[6] Matt. 16:21.

[7] Matt. 4:17, Mk. 1:14-15.

[8] Jn. 11:25-26.  St. Martha’s confession is in verse 27.

[9] Jas. 2:24.

[10] Mk. 5:36, Lk. 8:50.

[11] The underlying Greek word is an adverb not an adjective.

[12] Rom. 4:1-2.

[13] That St. Paul explains St. James rather than vice versa only makes sense considering the apparent timing of the writings.  Although Galatians is relatively early in St. Paul’s corpus, Romans indicates the time of its writing as during the journey to Jerusalem that culminated in St. Paul’s arrest.  In the book of Acts this is the time period of the 20-21 chapters.  This is approximately 57 AD.  The Epistle of St. James, however, was most likely written before the Council of Jerusalem in 50 AD.  The reason most New Testament scholars think this is that the epistle, written by the man who presided at the Council of Jerusalem, is addressed to a Church that does not seem to have incorporated the Gentiles as of the time of its writing and takes no account of the various issues that the Church had to deal with as a consequence of the incorporation of the Gentiles.

[14] Rom. 4:4-5.

[15] Rom. 4:16.

[16] This is why thanking God before a meal is called “saying grace.”  This double usage of the same word for God giving and man returning thanks indicates the range of meaning of the words used in the original Scriptural Hebrew and Greek, as well as the Latin word from which the English “grace” is derived (the Latin expression that is the equivalent of our “Thank you” is “Gratias tibi ago”).  The Greek word for grace is charis.  Note how this is the main part of the compound word that is the traditional name for the Sacrament of the Lord’s Table, Eucharist.  Eucharist means “Thanksgiving.”

[17] Also known as Patripassionism in the early centuries, today it is more commonly called modalism.  It has been revived in Oneness Pentecostalism.  The feminist theology that replaces Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” in order to get rid of gender-specific terminology for God is also a move towards Sabellianism because these terms are not the names of Persons but denote functions or roles.

[18] First Council of Nicaea (325 AD), First Council of Constantinople (381 AD), these are the Councils that gave us the Niceno-Constaninopolitan Creed, more commonly called the Nicene Creed.

[19] This heresy has been revised in the teachings of Charles Taze Russell and Judge Rutherford, whose followers are the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, better known as the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

[20] The heresy known as Eutychianism or Monophysitism.  Whether those who were accused of teaching this heresy were guilty or just misunderstood is a matter that historians debate as is the case with Nestorius.  The ideas that are called Nestorianism and Eutychianism, however, depart from the orthodox truth of the Hypostatic Union in opposite directions in a manner rightly condemned, regardless of whether or not the condemnation of those whose names they bear was  historically justified.  Nestorianism and Eutychianism were the subjects addressed by the third and fourth ecumenical councils, the Council of Ephesus (431 AD) and the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD) respectively.

[21] The Third Council of Constantinople (680-681 AD).  The fifth ecumenical council had been the Second Council of Constantinople (553 AD) which was more about reaffirming and clarifying the decisions of the previous councils than anything else.  It did condemn the writings of older theologians, primarily Theodore of Mopsuestia (who died shortly before the Council of Ephesus) although the errors were for the most part one’s that had already been dealt with.  The seventh ecumenical council, the Second Council of Nicaea (787) was the last council received as ecumenical before the Great Schism – and thus the last true ecumenical council.  It condemned iconoclasm, which has more to do with practice than doctrine, although there was a doctrinal element.  In this case the error was less an exaggeration of a truth than a failure to see one, namely, that Incarnation meant that what God stressed to Israel in Deuteronomy, that at Sinai they had heard the voice of God but not seen His similitude, could no longer be said under the New Covenant because God had become visible by assuming humanity as expressed by the Lord Himself in the words He addressed to St. Philip in John 14:9 “he who has seen me has seen the Father.”

[22] Monothelitism denied that Jesus had a human will.  Monoenergism was the idea that everything that Jesus did in both of His natures was done through the same divine energy.

[23] A. C. Dixon, Louis Meyer, R. A. Torrey eds. The Fundamentals: A Testimony To The Truth, 12 volumes (Chicago: Testimony Publishing Company, 1910-1915), since 1917 published as 4 volumes. 

[24]David F. Wells, No Place for Truth, or, Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids: William B Eerdmans, 1993) and  Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994).

[25] See the criticism of such in Harold Lindsell The Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976) and Francis Schaeffer The Great Evangelical Disaster (Wheaton: Crossway, 1984).

[26] The denial that Mary is the Mother of God is a denial that Jesus is God.  Attempts to evade this, by saying for example, that she was the mother of His human nature, reduce to nonsense.  The mother-son relationship is a relationship of persons not natures.  While it is obvious that Mary gave birth to Jesus in His humanity and that He did not get His deity from her (Anabaptist heresiarch Menno Simons denied that His humanity came from her), Her Son is God, making her the Mother of God, which is essentially the meaning of the phrase St. Elizabeth uses of her, “mother of my Lord” in Luke 1:43.  The sixteenth century Reformers, who all had a High Mariology, would be appalled at the direction evangelicalism has taken since their day. 

[27] That so many evangelicals who did not teach Incarnational Sonship themselves nevertheless defended MacArthur from the charge of heresy when he taught it reveals just how poor a grasp of orthodox Trinitarian doctrine they had.  The Holy Spirit is identified in the Gospels of SS Matthew and Luke as the Agent of Jesus’ conception.  If Jesus Sonship is derived from the Incarnation this would make the Holy Spirit His Father.  This confuses the Persons of the Father and the Holy Spirit ala Sabellianism.  Furthermore, if Jesus was not the Son prior to His Incarnation, the Father was not the Father prior to the Incarnation, because for Him to be the Father requires that He have a Son.  Since the Father is eternally the Father, the Son is eternally the Son, precisely as is confessed in the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Symbol.

[28] John F. MacArthur Jr. The Gospel According to Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988).

[29] John W. Robbins was to Gordon H. Clark what Greg Bahsen was to Cornelius Van Til.

[30] https://www.trinityfoundation.org/ journal.php?id=193 

[31] It also tended to view justification by faith alone as being opposed to the sacraments as means of grace.  The sacraments as means of grace is Catholic and not merely Roman, being the doctrine of all the ancient Churches.  That this truth is not in conflict with justification by faith alone can be illustrated by the fact that in the giving of a gift there are two hands involved, the hand of the giver and the hand of the receiver.  The sacraments are the hand of the Giver (God working through His Church), faith is the hand of the receiver.