Sacraments and Gospel Sacraments

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

(1)   Gen. 3:15.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(18)                       Matt. 10:8.

(19)                       Eph. 5:23.

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

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

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

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

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

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

(26)                       1 Cor. 11:26.

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

Gnostics, Puritans, and the Left

Professor Bruce Charlton, whose writings I very much value and respect, took exception the other day to the meme that identifies the Left with Puritanism. Here is his opening paragraph:

I think it was perhaps Mencius Moldbug who originated the stupid idea - which I have seen repeated in hundreds of different versions - that the current, mainstream, politically correct Left are puritans.

This meme, it would appear to me, is an extreme oversimplification of a concept that can be found in Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, which was first published by the University of Chicago Press in 1952. I note, in passing, that this was twenty-one years prior to the birth of the man who writes under the nom de plume Mencius Moldbug.

In the fourth chapter of The New Science of Politics, Voegelin traced the origins of the secular millennialism of modern mass political movements, i.e., the idea of ushering in a new Golden Age, back to an earlier revival of millennialist eschatology in the teachings of the twelfth century Italian theologian and monk, Joachim of Flora. He set this departure from Augustinianism in the context of a revival of Gnosticism, the largest family of heresies against which the orthodox contended in the early centuries of Christianity. Gnosticism was so named because it maintained that those initiated into its mysteries comprised a spiritual elite who possessed gnosis – detailed special knowledge about matters that are not spelled out in the Scriptures and orthodox Christian tradition. Since this “knowledge” often contradicted orthodox doctrine, Gnosticism was rejected as heresy by the orthodox. In the following chapter, Voegelin examined Puritanism as both an example case of revived Gnosticism and as the first revolutionary modern mass movement.

A very abridged version of Voegelin’s thesis is that sixteenth-seventeenth century Puritanism and twentieth century mass movements such as liberalism and Communism are all modern versions of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. The meme that Professor Charlton dislikes so much seems to be this same thesis simplified further and to the point of extreme inaccuracy.

The question then becomes one of whether this thesis is right or wrong. Professor Charlton goes on to say:

Of course there is a grain of truth, else the idea would have gone nowhere. The grain is that New Left is a descendant of the New England Puritans who emigrated from (mostly) East Anglia, became the Boston Brahmins, founded Harvard etc.

And this class, via various mutations including the Transcendentalists and their circle of radicals Unitarians, abolitionists, feminists etc) evolved into the post Civil War US ruling class; who were the fount of post-middle-1960s New Leftism.

This is true, but there is one glaring omission. For there to be a New Left there had to have first been an Old Left. When we bring that Old Left into the equation we find that there is a lot more than just a “grain” of truth to the identification of Puritanism with the Left. There is a sentence in Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand’s Memoirs From Beyond the Grave that expresses this perfectly. Here it is in the recent English translation by Alex Andriesse of the first twelve books of the Memoirs, published last year by the New York Review of Books:

“The Jacobins were plagiarists; they even plagiarized the sacrifice of Louis XVI from the execution of Charles I” (p. 363 in the edition mentioned, this is found in the second paragraph of the fourth chapter of Book Nine).

The French Revolution was the well-spring of the Old Left. The revolutionary socialist movements of the nineteenth century all looked back to the French Revolution as their inspiration, the Communist League for which Karl Marx wrote his notorious manifesto began as a splinter group of the Jacobin Club that had perpetrated the French Revolution, and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, which introduced the plague of Communism to the world and became the pattern for all subsequent Communist revolutions, was itself patterned on the French Revolution. The French Revolution, in turn, was, as Chateaubriand said, an imitation of the Puritan rebellion against Charles I in the previous century.

The Puritan rebellion against King Charles inspired the Jacobin revolution against King Louis XVI, which in turn inspired all subsequent revolutions. This makes Puritanism the prototype of the revolutionary Left, just as Cromwell’s tyranny was the prototype of the French Reign of Terror and the Soviet and other Communist totalitarian regimes. While it was Puritan actions that the Jacobins and later leftists were imitating, theology similar to that of the Puritans also played a role in the French Revolution, if not as large of a one as in the rebellion in England. William Palmer observed that Jansenism, a heretical movement within the Roman Catholic Church that had a similar predestinarian theology to Calvinism, had become so strong in pre-Revolutionary eighteenth century France, that it was able to resist Rome’s attempts to suppress it, and, indeed, that it had successfully used the French Parliament to thwart the king’s efforts to uphold orthodoxy. (A Treatise on the Church of Christ, Vol I, London, J. G. & F. Rivington, 1838, pp. 324-328) Granted, this happened in the reign of Louis XV fifty years prior to the Revolution but Puritan efforts to turn the English Parliament against their king had also begun long before the accession of Charles I. It is also worth noting that Jean-Paul Marat, the Jacobin pamphleteer whose bloodthirsty words incited the September Massacres, the mass murder of prisoners in which the non-juring Roman Catholic priests were especially targeted and which can be regarded as either the precursor to or the first stage of the Reign of Terror, was raised in a family that had a very similar theology to that of the Puritans. His mother was a Huguenot and his father was a convert to Calvinism.

Not only is it an indisputable historical fact that Puritanism was the root of the tree of leftism, from which the trunk of Jacobinism sprung, which in turn produced the branches of socialism, Communism, etc. it is also true that political correctness, the element of the New Left that is most often said to be Puritanical, is derived from a Bolshevik practice with a Jacobin antecedent based upon a Puritan precedent. Political correctness as we know it today began on Western academic campuses in the 1960s and spread from there throughout the rest of Western culture. It began as the insistence upon the use of racially sensitive language but quickly expanded to include demands for language that is sensitive in other areas as well. There were, of course, a host of other demands which accompanied these, but the defining essence of political correctness is the insistence upon the use of language that has been stripped of anything that might be perceived as offensive on racial, sexual, etc. grounds. In this the New Left was, consciously, I would argue, imitating the Soviet phenomenon that was the basis of the "Newspeak" depicted in George Orwell's 1984. The Jacobin antecedent of Bolshevik Newspeak, can be seen in the date of the Great Reaction when the Reign of Terror ended and its architect Robespierre was condemned to die by his own guillotine. This date on our calendar is the 27th of July but we remember it historically as the Ninth of Thermidor. Why? Because the Jacobins imposed a completely new calendar upon France, in which years were counted from the deposing of King Louis XVI, and consisted of twelve months which, since they also started from that date did not correspond to the ones on our calendar and were given funny sounding names like Messidor, Thermidor, and Fructidor. The Puritan precedent for this was their insistence on referring to the days of the week as the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. rather than by their usual names, which the Puritans objected to on the grounds of their pagan origins. Orthodox Christians can understand and to varying degrees sympathize with the Puritans' reasons for doing this - less so, with their abolition of Christian holy days - but this was the seed from which the Jacobin calendar which grew into Bolshevik Newspeak and has gone to seed in the New Left's political correctness sprang.

Now let us consider what Professor Charlton finds specifically objectionable in the “Left are Puritans” meme. Here is his explanation:

OK. But to call the New Left puritans is something only a non-Christian could do, for at least two very obvious reasons.

1. A puritan is very religiously Christian, and believes that this should permeate every aspect of social and personal life.

2. A puritan advocates that sex be confined to (a single, permanent) marriage. In other words, a puritan rejects the entirety of the post-sixties sexual revolution.

Since Leftists are not Christian, and since they are (in theory and in practice) sexual revolutionaries; the idea that Leftists are puritans is wrong.

The first thing to be observed in response to this is that the meme which equates leftism with Puritanism is clearly not meant to be understood as saying that Leftists are like Puritans in every detail. Nobody is suggesting that today’s politically correct, woke, social justice warriors walk around in seventeenth century costume with flat topped hats, ruffed doublets, and buckle shoes, speaking Shakespearean English. It is rather a lazy, shorthand, way of saying “the present day left resembles its ideological ancestor Puritanism in such and such specific characteristics.” All that is being asserted is that in some aspect(s) of today's Left, traits of its distant Puritan ancestors have reasserted themselves in an identifiable manner. This cannot be negated merely by pointing out other areas in which the New Left and Puritanism do not resemble each other or even are the exact opposite of each other.

It could be argued that the differences so outweigh the similarities as to make any focus on the latter unwarranted. This could lead to an interesting discussion on essence and distinction. If the things Professor Charlton states here about the Puritans are of the essence of Puritanism, its sine qua non, without which there can be no Puritanism, as the Professor seems to think, this would, of course, be a strong argument in his favour. I would point out, however, that neither of these things is distinctive of Puritanism. Both could also be said, with equal truth, about orthodox Anglicans and Roman Catholics who were the Puritans' opponents in the conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The meme that compares Leftism to Puritanism must be based upon something that is distinctive to Puritanism as opposed to Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism otherwise it would make no sense and indeed would likely never have existed – a meme would have compared Leftists to Christians in general instead. Can something that is not distinctive of Puritanism be said to be essential to it>

It seems to me that Professor Charlton is operating under a fundamental misunderstanding of Puritanism's reputation. When the present day Left with its political correctness and its zeal for banning such things as guns, single-use plastics, furs and fox-hunting, soft drinks, etc. is described as being Puritanical the comparison is based upon the Puritans' legendary reputation for being dour, gloomy, repressive, Mrs. Grundy-type busybodies, with sticks stuck permanently up their backsides, perpetually nagging and harassing people with a never-ending list of does and don'ts and basically sucking all the happiness out of life like joy-killing vampires. It would appear from Professor Charlton's arguments that he is under the impression that this reputation arose out of their sexual ethics. It is, perhaps, inevitable that this impression would arise and become the natural assumption in our post-Sexual Revolution permissive age but it is without historical basis. The ethic that says that sex, meaning sexual intercourse, should be confined to a single, permanent, marriage was not distinctive of Puritanism but was held and taught by orthodox Anglicans and Roman Catholics as well. Indeed, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, on this matter “the Old Religion was the more austere.” It cannot, therefore, be the source of the Puritans’ reputation.

The Puritans earned their reputation, not by being sticklers for the basic rules of Christian ethics, but for adding and multiplying other rules, ones which often pertained to small, petty, matters, and which had no basis in the Holy Scriptures and were mostly foreign to the Christian tradition. Take their extremely rigid approach to Sunday keeping for example. Christians, since Apostolic times, have met on Sunday, the first day of the week, in commemoration of the Resurrection, for prayer, teaching, and the Eucharist. This tradition is based upon the precedent set by the practice of the Apostolic Church as recorded in the Book of Acts rather than by Scriptural ordinance in the way keeping the Sabbath, Saturday, had been enjoined upon Israel in the Old Testament. This is in keeping with the doctrine of Christian liberty on such matters that was determined at the Jerusalem Council and emphasized by St. Paul throughout his epistles. Early in Christian history it became common to speak of Sunday as the “Christian Sabbath” and to apply the concept of a “day of rest” to it, but orthodox Christianity wanted to avoid repeating the mistake of the Pharisees, the post-Maccabean Revolt sect within the laity of Second Temple Judaism that tried to promote holiness in national Israel by creating a hedge of auxiliary commandments around the Torah which they interpreted so rigidly that they condemned our Lord for performing healing miracles on the Sabbath. The Puritans, however, went much further than the Pharisees for while the Pharisees’ extra rules were at least extrapolated from the actual prohibition in the Fourth Commandment – “thou shalt do no work” - the Puritans’ rules for Sunday were based on the non-Scriptural “thou shalt have no fun.” They forbade all recreational activities on Sundays and wanted the law to enforce this ban. How can this be an example of believing that Christianity “should permeate every aspect of social and personal life” when it is difficult if not impossible to conceive of an attitude further removed from the teachings of Jesus Christ and His Apostles regarding the Sabbath than this?

In this one example we have seen how the Puritans a) imposed a new prohibition that did not belong to ancient Christian tradition and had no basis in Scripture which it completely contradicted in spirit, b) specifically targeted people’s engaging in harmless recreational activities and enjoying themselves, and c) demanded that their new rule be backed by the power of the state. That is the Puritans’ bad reputation in a nutshell. Sexual ethics had nothing to do with it.

Nor was this the only example of this sort of thing. For those who still think it a stretch to compare the politically correct New Left to the Puritans let us not forget that it was Cromwell’s Puritans who launched the original War on Christmas – and on Easter and every other Christian high holy day as well. It is difficult to reconcile a ban on the holy days which make each year a commemorative and celebratory journey through the events of Christ’s earthly ministry from His Incarnation through His Ascension with a desire for Christianity to “permeate every aspect of social and personal life.” Richard Hooker, who thoroughly refuted the shallow theological justification they gave for taking this position decades before they were in a position to enforce it saw their true motives as being economical – less holy days meant more days to make money – although one cannot help but notice that the holy days the Puritans especially objected to were the seasons of celebration that bring joy and mirth into people’s lives.

Nowhere in the world, outside of England during the brief period of Cromwell’s dictatorship, was Puritanism’s influence greater than in colonial English-speaking North America, especially New England, and that influence has been lasting. From the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, itinerant preachers travelled across North America holding special revival services. The preaching in these services was evangelistic and revivalistic, meaning that it called upon unbelievers to become Christians and upon lukewarm or backslidden Christians to repent and practice their faith more seriously and more fervently. Such preaching was also very moralistic and the revivalists in their sermons targeted a long list of sins that one would have a difficult time identifying as such from the Scriptures – playing card games, smoking tobacco, dancing, attending theatrical plays, etc. While other movements, such as the Wesleyan holiness movement, contributed to all of this, its Puritan roots can hardly be denied. Puritan preachers played a leading role in the first wave of revivalism, the Great Awakening, and the non-conformist and dissenting sects that the Puritans had founded were the primary denominations, other than the Methodists, involved in the revivals. The preaching against dancing and the theatre certainly goes back to the Puritans – who infamously shut down London’s theatres, including William Shakespeare’s old Globe Theatre, in 1642 – and while the same cannot be said for every one of these extra-Scriptural “sins,” the general idea behind them all, that something that brings earthly pleasure to people should be suspected of being sinful and probably outright banned, is clearly derived from the same assumptions that led to the original Puritan ban on Sunday recreational activities which, as King James and King Charles both noted in their royal proclamations opposing such bans, amounted to complete bans on recreational activities for the majority of the people.

The revivalist movement often combined its moralism with support for social reform causes that would have been considered progressive in their own day. There is one example of this that is particularly interesting in light of what we are discussing. In the nineteenth century, revivalists became the driving force behind the mislabelled Temperance Movement – mislabelled because “temperance” is the name for the virtue of self-control and implies moderation – by preaching that all consumption of alcoholic beverages in inherently sinful. This is the traditional view of Islam not of Christianity. Indeed, not only does this create a new “sin” not identified as such in the Scriptures it flatly contradicts the Scriptures, Old and New Testaments, including the teachings, commandments, and example of Jesus Christ and His Apostles. The original Puritans had not gone this far – to quote C. S. Lewis “they were not teetotallers; bishops, not beer, were their special aversion” - but there is obviously a reason why within Christendom this movement only ever caught on among the non-conformist sects of North America. After a century of activism, the Temperance Movement succeeded in getting Prohibition – a ban on the production, sale, and consumption of alcohol - passed in both the United States and the Dominion of Canada. As an experiment in moral and social engineering it was a notorious failure.

The Temperance Movement was inseparably intertwined with the suffragette movement, the first wave of feminism that was lobbying to extend the voting franchise to women, and both movements achieved their goals almost simultaneously. The victory of the suffragettes proved more lasting than that of the Temperance Movement and it laid the foundation for the second wave of feminism a few decades and another World War later. The second wave of feminism was as intertwined with the Sexual Revolution as the first wave was with the Temperance Movement. Had Puritanism not laid the foundation for the kind of revivalism that spawned the Temperance Movement, the suffragette movement would never have had the latter to join forces with and may have been less successful in its own goal, and thus failed to pave the way for second wave feminism and the Sexual Revolution.

I have belaboured this point long enough. The people who once locked a man in the stocks for kissing his own wife on his own threshold when he returned from a long sea voyage on Sunday earned their well-deserved reputation for being legalistic killjoys and the fact that they claimed religious motives for doing so in no way invalidates a comparison with the secular ban-happy left-wing control freaks of our own day. Especially when we remember that these schismatic enthusiasts, who objected to the liturgical affirmation of the Nicene Creed but demanded that clergy be made to subscribe to every iota of Theodore Beza’s interpretation of Calvin’s Institutes, who started with a Korah-like rebellion against the Apostolic ministry of the Church and ended by stretching forth their hand against God’s anointed king and shedding his blood, were the original inspiration for the Jacobins and Bolsheviks.

Perhaps we should dust off our copies of Eric Voegelin and give him another read. Anyone who has studied early Church history knows that some of the Gnostics were ascetics who preached and practiced a very austere morality whereas others were hedonistic libertines. These opposite extremes in ethics and behaviour were both derived from the same heretical starting point. It is not so surprising, if Puritanism is revived form of Gnosticism, that it would evolve into a movement with both a permissive and a censorious streak. I will close with C. S. Lewis’ amusing description of progressives who combine both of these traits from a book that came out the same year as The New Science of Politics. In the very first paragraph of the The Voyage of the Dawn Treader we are introduced to Eustace Scrubb and his parents. The latter, whom Eustace addresses by their first names presumably at their own encouragement and whom we find out in the next book in the series send their son to an extremely progressive school called Experiment House that is co-educational, discourages reading the Bible, and is not in any way conducive to any real learning, are the progressives in view:

They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on the beds and the windows were always open.

Bishop Strachan and the Soul of Canada

On July 1st, 1867, the British North America Act went into effect and the Dominion of Canada was born, consisting, at the time, of the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, but which would eventually grow to include all the provinces and territories under the sovereignty of the British Crown in continental North America. Four months later, on the Feast of All Saints, a man who had called for the confederation of British North America decades before the political realities of the 1860s spurred our statesmen into action on the matter, went to his eternal reward. That man was the Right Reverend John Strachan, the first Anglican Bishop of Toronto. For much of the half century prior to Confederation Strachan had been the spiritual and intellectual leader of Upper Canada. He was also the very embodiment of Toryism in its pure, undiluted form. A much watered-down version of this same Toryism inspired and drove the Fathers of Confederation, a fact that the Liberal Party has always resented, which resentment has been behind their relentless efforts to undo Confederation and re-make the country into their own, warped, image. In these efforts, they have been all too lamentably successful.

John Strachan was born in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1778, while the American Revolution was underway. (1) When he was fourteen, his father died in an accident at the local granite quarry of which he was the overseer, and the support of his mother and sisters fell upon him. He was able, through tutoring and teaching, to both provide that support and to fund his own studies in divinity at the University of Aberdeen. After a number of disappointments in his efforts to improve his situation in Scotland, he was told that an academy had been founded in Kingston, Upper Canada with the intention that it would grow into a college, and that the principalship of the school was offered to him. He accepted the offer and crossed the Atlantic only to discover that the school was just theoretical. Nevertheless, he found a patron in the Hon. Richard Cartwright, the United Empire Loyalist from Albany, New York who had rebuilt his family’s fortune as a businessman in Kingston, and served as a judge and legislator in the province. Cartwright made Strachan the tutor of his eldest sons, and soon other leading Loyalist families put their sons under his tutelage as well.

One of the Loyalists who sent his sons to study under Strachan was Dr. John Stuart, the founding rector of the Anglican parish in Kingston that would eventually evolve into St. George’s Cathedral (the basis of the fictional St. Nicholas’ Cathedral that features in Robertson Davies’ Salterton trilogy). It was Dr. Stuart who persuaded Strachan to seek ordination in the Church of England. Strachan had come from a family that was mixed religiously, and while the theology he had been taught in Aberdeen was that of his mother’s Presbyterianism, he was more drawn to the non-juring, Scottish Episcopal Church of his father, and would become a staunch advocate of the beliefs, practices, and rights of that Church’s English counterpart. In 1803 he was ordained a deacon in the Church of England, by Dr. Jacob Mountain, the first bishop of the diocese of Quebec, which at the time included all of the Anglican Churches in what is now Quebec and Ontario. The following year he was ordained a priest. His first assignment was to the mission church in Cornwall.

His entering into Holy Orders ought not to be considered a change in careers. He certainly did not see it that way himself and, if anything, his educational efforts increased after his ordination. This is entirely in keeping with his philosophy of education, in which the Church was the institution best suited to provide a sound education on a solid religious foundation. Accordingly, one of the first things he did upon taking up the ministry in Cornwall was to establish a grammar school which quickly achieved distinction. His student roster resembles a Who’s Who of the next generation of judicial, executive, legislative, and ecclesiastical leadership of Upper Canada. The school was basically a traditional, British, parochial grammar school – a classics based curriculum, daily prayer services, and an emphasis on character formation, especially the instillation of a sense of civic and religious duty – but with a larger role for what we would today call STEM classes. The non-existent academy that had lured him to Canada he thus ended up creating himself.

It was during his ministry in Cornwall that he met and married Ann, the daughter of the local physician, and the young widow of Montreal businessman Andrew McGill. He also became a close friend of his wife’s brother-in-law from her first marriage, James McGill, and convinced him to bequeath his large estate for the purpose of founding of a college. This, of course, is how McGill University came to be. Strachan was named a trustee of the college in McGill’s will and was intended by McGill to be the school’s first principal, although his commitments in Upper Canada ultimately prevented him from taking this position in Lower Canada.

In 1812 Strachan accepted the post of rector of the Anglican parish in York. At the time the future city of Toronto was just a small town, but an important one, being the capital of Upper Canada. Sir Isaac Brock, the Lieutenant Governor of the province, appointed him the chaplain to the military garrison stationed at York at the same time that he assumed the rectorship. This was immediately prior to the outbreak of war. The grasping and covetous Yankees, believing that all of North America was destined to belong to their republic, declared war on the British Empire on the assumption that her preoccupation with the Napoleonic war in Europe, would render British North America vulnerable to their plans of conquest. At the cost of much bloodshed, they were proven to be mistaken as the Canadians took up arms and fought alongside the Imperial army and such Indian allies as the Ojibwas and the Iroquois Confederacy to repel the invaders who arrogantly saw themselves as liberators. In all of this, Strachan played a major role, not only through his role as military chaplain and by using his pulpit to promote patriotic Loyalism, but as the main organizer of the “Loyal and Patriotic Society of Upper Canada”, to raise support for the relief of the wounded, widows, and orphans. He also had the unfortunate task of having to negotiate terms in 1813 when American forces overwhelmed the defenders of York and forced the Imperial troops to retreat to Kingston. He was able to secure the release of the starving, sick, and wounded militia men who had been taken prisoner, but was unable, due to the inability of the American general to control his men, to completely prevent the burning and looting of York. (2) Had he not already been a man of strong Loyalist, royalist, and Tory principles, firmly and fundamentally opposed to liberalism, republicanism, and everything else the United States stood for, this experience would have made him one, and it steeled him in these convictions.

After the war Strachan found himself fighting the forces of liberal, secular, American republicanism in the domestic form of the subversive Reform movement – the movement from which the Liberal Party of Canada, eventually sprung. The Reform movement, created by pamphleteers and yellow journalists, had as its initial goal the transformation of Canada into a Yankee style republic, but when they found that this would not sell – the republican revolution attempted by William Lyon Mackenzie in 1837 received little support and was easily defeated (3) – they moderated this into a demand for “responsible government.” This consisted of a two-fold transfer of power – first, from the Imperial to the provincial government, second from the executive branch of the provincial government to the legislative assembly. Even in this modified version, the Reformers, like the American Revolutionaries before them, followed in the footsteps of the seventeenth century Puritan Whigs, who had usurped the authority, rights, and privileges of the Crown because they saw the concentration of power in the elected assembly which they were able to control as the easiest path to shoving their radical agenda down everyone else’s throats. “Responsible government” is a nonsensical phrase – unfettered democracy is, and always has been, the least responsible form of government, and the well-spring of all tyranny. (4)

Strachan had been appointed to the Executive and Legislative Councils of Upper Canada in 1815 and 1820 respectively. He was not the first or only clergyman to serve in this capacity, but his presence there was regarded as intolerable by the Reformers. Nor did the fact that many of his former pupils also served on these Councils reconcile the Reformers to his presence.

When Upper Canada had been separated from Lower Canada in the late eighteenth century, the Crown had set aside land for the support of “Protestant clergy” with the obvious intent of establishing the English parochial system in the former. Strachan was a strong believer and defender of the original intent of the Clergy Reserves, whereas the Reform Movement took the position that the legislature should confiscate the land, sell it off, and use the proceeds to support – secular – education. Others did not go as far as this, but wanted the Reserves divided between the Church of England and the Presbyterian Kirk of Scotland. Still others wished to divide the Reserves further, including the non-conformist and enthusiastic sects as well.

Strachan, as we have seen, was a pioneer in the development of Upper Canadian education. This was related to his support for the re-creation of the parochial system because he believed firmly that schools administered by the Church, with a sound, orthodox, religious foundation for learning, were the best way to elevate and refine a culture, and civilize a society. He held this to be true of higher education as well and in 1827 around the time that he was made Archdeacon of York he obtained a Royal Charter along with an endowment of land for King’s College, an Anglican university of which he would serve as the president. The Reformers demanded that the university be confiscated and secularized.

The Reformers won in each these battles and it is worth noting that similar struggles were taking place in the United Kingdom at the same time. The Warden, the first of Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire, tells the story of a saintly clergyman, whose income as warden of an almhouse supported by a land bequest dating back centuries, comes under attack by a newspaper editor bent on reform, who makes up for what he lacks in the way of brains and information with an overabundance of self-important ideals. While the story is fictional, Trollope drew from real situations and people in writing his novels, and there are obvious parallels between this and the Clergy Reserves fight in Upper Canada. Not long after the battle for King’s College in Canada, liberal reformers in Britain successfully used their strength in Parliament to force secularizing reforms on Oxford University, diverting much of its endowments from their intended purposes in theological education, and weakening the school’s ties to the Church by making religious services and subscription to the Thirty-Nine Articles optional. (5) This helps to illustrate the sad point that George Grant made in Lament for a Nation that our vulnerability to Americanization despite our Tory Fathers best efforts to shield us against it is largely due to liberal rot having already set in throughout the British Empire, including the mother country herself.

At the heart of each of these three conflicts can be seen the same basic clash of ideals. The Reformers were motivated by a liberal ideal that had first been enunciated by the Anabaptists and one extreme branch of the Puritans and which later was enshrined in the Constitution of the American republic, the doctrine of separation of Church and State. This is a false ideal from the perspective of both sound theology and sound politics. The reasons why it is bad theology are too long to get into here. (6) Politically it is unsound because it reduces religion to a matter of personal choice and hinders if not outright prevents its being the force for social and civil good that it is supposed to be. Strachan understood this and fought for Church establishment on sound, orthodox, principles. He lost each of these battles – he resigned his positions on the Executive and Legislative Councils, was forced by the legislative assembly to sell the Clergy Reserves, and saw King’s College confiscated by the legislative assembly and secularized into the University of Toronto. In both cases the legislative assembly grossly exceeded their authority thus illustrating what I said earlier about democracy being the well-spring of tyranny for the confiscation of endowed property and the perversion of educational institutions into the opposite of what their founder intended constitutes a form of tyranny. They got away with it because the Imperial government, not wanting to risk another American revolution so soon after the first one, was unwilling to check the provincial legislature when it stepped out of bounds. Nevertheless, while the Reformers defeated Strachan’s vision of Church establishment, they fell short of achieving their own goal of separation of Church and State which goes beyond mere non-establishment. (7)

Strachan’s response to these losses is most admirable and shows tremendous character. After the legislative robbery of King’s College, he raised the funds to create a new Anglican university, Trinity College, for which he obtained a second Royal Charter! In 1839 the Church of England in the Canadas had grown sufficiently that is was deemed appropriate to divide the Diocese of Quebec and form the Diocese of Toronto of which he was consecrated the first Bishop. He continued to promote the growth of the ministry of the English Church, and despite the loss of the Clergy Reserves was successful enough to warrant the formation of two more Dioceses out of his own, the Diocese of Huron in 1857 and the Diocese of Ontario in 1862. Even before his efforts to create an established, parochial, system failed, he had the foresight to plan for a day when the Church would have to govern and support itself apart from Royal patronage, and in 1851 formed the first Diocesan Synod, setting the precedent that would be followed by the Anglican Church throughout the Dominion of Canada.

If Bishop Strachan, the orthodox Churchman who stood for “Apostolic Order and Evangelical Truth” can see the huge leap away from both that the Anglican Church of Canada is planning on taking in its next General Synod, he is undoubtedly spinning in his tomb, beneath the High Altar of St. James, the parish he pastored in Toronto the building of which, having to be rebuilt due to fire, re-opened as his Cathedral upon his return from his consecration at Lambeth Palace in 1839. This is all the more true if he can also see how Papa Doc and Baby Doc Trudeau have done their worst to turn the Dominion of Canada that had just come into being prior to his departure from this life into a crummy, Communist, Third World, dunghole and how the educational system of Canada, that he put so much thought and effort into, and which at its height produced such minds as Marshall McLuhan, George Grant, Harold Innis, Robertson Davies, Northrop Frye, Donald Creighton and Eugene Forsey has so decayed that it is now churning out unreflective morons who buy wholly in to the militant “wokeness” that has come to infest our country and fail to recognize it for what it is, a cruel totalitarianism that is far closer in spirit than anything else in Canada today to the regime against which we and the rest of the British family of nations bravely went to war in 1939. Whereas Bishop Strachan fought for Canada’s soul, today’s progressives have sold it.

Happy Dominion Day
God Save the Queen!

(1) For the biographical details included in this essay I consulted Alexander Neil Bethune, Memoir of the Right Reverend John Strachan, D. D., L.L.D., First Bishop of Toronto, Toronto, Henry Rowsell, 1870. The author had attended Strachan’s Grammar School in Cornwall, later became a divinity student under him, was appointed chaplain by Strachan upon his elevation to the episcopacy, then later archdeacon, and was chosen and consecrated by Strachan as coadjutor bishop in his final days, and thus ultimately succeeded him as bishop of Toronto.

(2) The following year, the Yanks experienced payback when the Imperial forces burned the city they had built on the marshy territory between the Potomac River and Tiber Creek. However, since most Americans rightly consider the swamp gas that is still emitted from the goings on in that city to be the source of a major part of their woes, perhaps we should think of this not so much in terms of payback but as doing them a favour.

(3) Mackenzie went into exile but later returned and was elected to the legislative assembly. His attempt at violent revolution ought to have barred him from even running for public office. Ideally, the ban would have extended to his descendants as well. His grandson and namesake, became Canada’s longest-serving Prime Minister and was also Canada’s third or fourth worst Prime Minister after the two Trudeaus, and possibly Pearson, depending upon which you consider to be worst, the treasonous betrayal of your country to both the Americans and the Soviets simultaneously (Pearson) or sabotaging our system of king/queen-in-Parliament and granting near dictatorial power to the Prime Minister’s Office (Mackenzie King). Any one of the notorious Black Donnellys of Kingston, even if they had been guilty of ten times the crimes of which their neighbours accused them before lynching them in 1880, would have made a better Prime Minister than any of these contemptible, lowlife, creeps.

(4) The most responsible form of government, is the traditional mixed king/queen-in-Parliament system, which still survives in Britain and Canada although badly damaged by the efforts towards democratic absolutism of liberals in both countries in the seventeenth and twentieth centuries respectively. The Whig Interpretation of History maintains that this system emerged from the triumph of the Puritans over the Stuarts in the seventeenth century, but this is nonsense. It is the Stuarts who were the champions of the balanced, responsible, Westminster system against the Puritans and the Whigs who sought to subvert it. Also nonsense is the Liberal “Authorized Version” of Canadian history which re-writes our story from one of noble Loyalism into a version of the American struggle for independence. That the majority of Canadian historians teach the Liberal version lends it no credibility. It is merely more evidence that the Liberal Party of Canada operates like the Communist Party of North Korea, where only the Kim-approved official version of Korean history is allowed to be taught. Which is one reason why aspersions cast by the Canadian Historical Association on the “academic merit” of the work of others ought to be treated as nothing more than a laughable joke. For real Canadian history the best writers were Donald Creighton and W. L. Morton.

(5) See the second volume of Edward Meyrick Goulburn’s extensive biography of John William Burgon, for an account of how Burgon, later the Dean of Chichester Cathedral but at the time the vicar of the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin – the position held by John Henry Newman before his defection across the Tiber – fought, heroically but unsuccessfully, against these reforms. The biography was published by John Murray of London in 1892.

(6) I shall, Deus Vult, address this issue in full in a later essay. The orthodox view of the matter is that the Church and State are distinct kingdoms, under God, with their own sphere of authority. As members of the Church, baptized kings like other Christians, are subject to the authority of the Apostolic ministry, as members of the State, Bishops, like other subject-citizens, are subject to the authority of the king. Bishops govern the Church through the ministry of the keys, kings govern the State through the ministry of the sword. Church and State are complementary and distinct, but not separate. See George Hickes, The Constitution of the Catholick Church and the Nature and Consequences of Schism, 1716, especially the 42 propositions in the section found on pages 62 to 129, as well as the section on Church and State, Part V, found in the second volume of William Palmer’s A Treatise on the Church of Christ Designed Chiefly for the Use of Students of Theology, London, J. G. & F. Rivington, 1838.

(7) Liberal writers such as Michael Harris and Warren Kinsella have sometimes claimed that separation of Church and State is a Canadian value. If this is not just a simple matter of confusing our history and tradition with that of the United States, then they presumably have the outcome of the battles over the Church Reserves and King’s College in mind. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that non-establishment is the full equivalent of separation of Church and State, which it is not. This still would not make the separation of Church and State a Canadian value. By Canada, the Liberal writers mean the Dominion of Canada, the country founded by the Confederation of British North America. The above battles affected only Upper Canada – Ontario. They did not affect the other provinces of British North America, not even Lower Canada – Quebec – in which the Roman Catholic Church was firmly established and remained so until the Quiet Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. Quebec’s controversial Bill 21, just passed, does indeed seem to have created a separation of Church and State, but only in the province of Quebec. Warren Kinsella in a recent column condemned it as fascist. Whether he is right or wrong is a subject for another time, although I will say that in my opinion Quebec would have been better off going the route of undoing the Quiet Revolution and re-establishing the Roman Church than taking the path of complete secularization. I merely wish to point out the extremely amusing irony of the self-contradictory position Kinsella has taken.