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.

The Christian Church

Each of the Synoptic Gospels tell how at one point in Jesus ministry, He asked His disciples “Whom do men say that I the Son of man am?” The disciples throw out various answers, including John the Baptist, Elijah, Jeremiah, and other prophets. Jesus then made the question personal: “But whom say ye that I am?”

Simon Peter answers and says “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God”.

St. John does not mention this event in his Gospel, but the Confession of Peter, or rather of the Apostles for St. Peter was speaking for all of them, is omnipresent throughout it. For when we turn to last verses of the second last chapter of that Gospel we read:

And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of His disciples, which are not written in this book: 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. (John 20:30-31)

Here the Evangelist states that the reason he wrote his Gospel, is that his readers might believe the Petrine Confession. Throughout the Gospel of John, everlasting life is promised over one hundred times to those who simply “believe in Jesus”. To believe in Jesus, in the Gospel of John, means to believe that He is the Christ, the Son of God.

In the other Gospels, the Petrine Confession marks a turning point in Jesus’ ministry. It is at this point that Jesus begins to show His disciples:

that He must go unto Jerusalem, and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day. (Matt. 16:21)

The Apostles, through St. Peter, had confessed their faith that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. By telling them about His upcoming Passion, Crucifixion, and Resurrection, He was explaining what His being “the Christ” meant. In the Gospel of John, Jesus’ being “The Christ” means that He is the One, sent by the Father, in order that those that believe in Him would have everlasting life (John 11:21-27, cf. 6:38-40). It was by dying for mankind’s sins and rising again, that Jesus accomplished this, which is why Christ’s death and resurrection comprise the Gospel – the Good News which the Apostles preached (1 Corinthians 15:1-8) and are the chief events in each of the Gospels.

In St. Matthew’s account of the Confession of Peter, there is more told than is mentioned in the other Gospels. St. Matthew records Jesus’ immediate response to the Confession:

Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona: for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. (Matt. 16:17-19)

What is this “Church” Christ promised to build? What is it’s nature? How is it related to the many organizations in Christendom that call themselves “Churches” today? Is one of them the Church Christ built? Are all of them the Church Christ built? Is Christ’s Church something completely different altogether?

The Church in Scripture: God’s Assembly

The New Testament was originally written in Greek. The word in Greek which is translated “Church” in English Bibles is the Greek word ekklesia. The English word “ecclesiastical” meaning “of the Church, pertaining to the Church” is derived from this word. Ekklesia is the cognate noun of a word formed by combining the preposition “ek” which means “out of, from” with the verb “kaleo” which means “to call”. The thought that is expressed by that combination is “to call out”. The noun “ekklesia” then, would refer to a group that has been “called out” of something, for some purpose. Prior to Christian usage, the term was primarily political. An assembly of the citizens of a Greek city-state was called an “ekklesia”. A 4th Century BC comedy, by Aristophanes, for example is entitled the Ekklesiazousai, which is usually either Latinized as Ecclesiazusae or translated into English as “The Assemblywomen”. It is about a group of women, who sneak into the Athenian assembly disguised as their husbands, and vote that all power be turned over to themselves, and then create a comically dystopic socialist state, eliminating private property, arranging for the government to feed everybody from a common trough, and instituting a form of free love, where the men can have any women they like, provided they are fair about it, and sleep with the ugly ones first. (1) The “ekklesia” in this satire is the political assembly of democratic Athens.

When the New Testament uses this word it borrows the concept of “a group of people called together to form an assembly or congregation” without the rest of the political connotations. The New Testament “ekklesia” is not a democratic assembly by any means. Christ is the head of the Church, and rules as an absolute monarch. Other authorities in the Church derive their authority from Christ – not from the “consent of the governed”.

The New Testament Church: Organism and Organization

The New Testament uses a number of word pictures to explain the nature of the Church. Three of them in particular are emphasized, which correspond to the three Persons of the Holy Trinity. The Church is:

A) The Family of God (the Father)
B) The Body of Christ
C) The Temple of the Holy Spirit

There has been much discussion in recent centuries over whether the Church is an “organism” or an “organization”. The distinction is somewhat artificial. “Organism” and “organization” are obviously derived from the same root and share the characteristic of being made up of a number of smaller units which have distinct tasks and which must cooperate together for the organism/organization to function. The primary distinction between the two is that an “organism” is considered alive and natural, whereas an organization is regarded as a non-living, artificial structure, that exists to serve the purposes of the people who created it.

It is significant that this discussion, like the somewhat similar sociological discussion about the difference between a “Gemeinschaft” and a “Gesellschaft”, (2) began after the ideology of liberalism, which refuses to see any social body more complex than the individual person as being a living organism, gained influence in the Western world..
If that were all that was involved in this distinction, the Scriptural references to the Church as the “body of Christ” would seem to settle the matter in favour of the Church being an “organism”.

There is more to it than that, however. Those who emphasis that the Church is an organism wish to stress that the Church is a living body and that the people who make up the Church are connected to each other by spiritual ties of relationship, centered around a common faith in Jesus Christ. This is in accordance with New Testament teaching. There is Scriptural support, however, for the idea of the Church as an organization or institution as well. The stress here, would be upon the Church as being orderly and structured, with an established chain of authority. This is also found in the New Testament.

It would be most accurate to say, therefore, that the Church is both an organism and an organization.

The New Testament Church: Both Local and Catholic

In the New Testament the Church is both local and catholic (universal). St. Paul’s epistles were written to local Churches in Rome, Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, Philippi and Thessalonica (he also wrote epistles to individuals such as Timothy, Titus, and Philemon). The second and third chapters of the Revelation of St. John contain letters to seven local Churches in Asia Minor (modern Turkey), the Churches in Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia and Laodicea. The Book of Acts records the ministry of the Apostles, and how they, especially St. Paul, preached the Gospel and planted Churches in various cities throughout the Greek-speaking world of the time.

The New Testament also uses the expression “the Church” in a broader sense to encompass all Christians in all local Churches. In 1 Corinthians 12, for example, where St. Paul describes the Church as Christ’s body, he is clearly speaking of more than just the local Church in Corinth. Consider for example, verse 28:

And God hath set some in the Church, first apostles, secondarily prophets, thirdly teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of healings, helps, governments, diversities of tongues.

The New Testament Church: Visible and Invisible

That local Churches are visible Churches is non-controversial. You can go to a local community, identify such-and-such a Church, point out that it meets at the corner of This Street and That Street, that the Rev. What’s-His-Name is it’s pastor and that John Churchman and Susie Parishioner are members. In the Reformation, however, a debate arose over the nature of the catholic or universal Church. Is it visible or invisible?

The Reformers took the position, formulated most fully by John Calvin in the Institutes of the Christian Religion, that the catholic Church is invisible. What the Reformers meant by saying that the catholic Church was invisible, was that it consists of true believers and only true believers. A person joins the Church the moment they believe the Gospel and everyone who believes the Gospel is a member of the Church even if they are marooned on a desert island and do not have the opportunity of being baptized, worshipping and fellowshipping at a local Church, and taking Communion. Meanwhile, those who are baptized, communicating members of local Churches, if they do not truly believe the Gospel, are not actually part of the catholic Church. Thus the catholic Church is “invisible” in that only God absolutely and accurately knows everybody who is in it, and everybody who is not.

Needless to say, the Roman Catholic Church, disagreed. It insisted that the catholic Church is as visible as the local Church. The Church began as a single local Church in Jerusalem, led by the Apostles themselves, then as the Gospel spread, Christian Churches were founded in other communities. These too were under the authority of the Apostles, who ordained bishops to lead the new local Churches in their absence. A bishop is an “administrator” or “overseer”, which is the literal meaning of the Greek word for bishop, episkopos. To ordain is to consecrate a person for a particular task and delegate to them the authority to do that task, by the laying on of hands.

Thus, the visible local Churches of the Apostolic era, were organized into a visible catholic Church, led by the Apostles with the bishops as their representatives in local communities. When the Apostles passed away, the college of bishops succeeded them as the leaders of the catholic Church.

So who was right, the Reformers or the Roman Catholic Church?

It would seem that both were right because they were talking about two different aspects of the catholic Church. The catholic Church of the New Testament is both a visible organized body under the leadership of the Apostles, and an invisible spiritual body whose membership consists of all believers. It could be argued, furthermore, that the errors of both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are largely the result of confusing these two aspects of the Church, a confusion that is inevitable when you deny one of the two aspects.


One Church?

There is a problem that arises, however, when we assert that catholic Church is both invisible/spiritual and visible. The identity of the invisible universal Church is fairly straightforward – it consists of all true Christians. Where do we find the visible universal Church?

It is fairly obvious, when we look around us, that Christian Churches are not all organized into one fellowship. We have Roman Catholic, Ukranian Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, Baptist, Presbyerian, Reformed, Methodist, Mennonite, Pentecostal, United, Churches, etc.

Yet unity is the first mark of the Christian Church. The Nicene Creed states “I believe one, holy, catholic and Apostolic Church”. The Creed’s language, here as everywhere, is Scriptural. When the Creed was drawn up during the Ecumenical Councils of Nicaea (325 AD) and Constantinople (381 AD) the Church was united in both its visible and invisible aspects. It was less than a hundred years after the Council of Constantinople that the first major division in the visible Church took place.

What happened then? Was the Creed no longer true? Where is the unity of Christ’s Church to be found?

It is here that we see that the Roman Catholic position during the Reformation is untenable because it is overly simplistic. The Roman Catholic insisted that because the Church is “one” that it, and no other, must be the “one, holy, catholic, and Apostolic Church”, and for evidence of its claims pointed to its institutional continuity with the Apostolic Church. It’s bishops were the duly ordained successors to the Apostles in an unbroken chain of succession, its Creeds were the Creeds of the undivided Church, and it faithfully practiced the sacraments ordained by Christ.

One major problem with the conclusion the Roman Catholics drew from this is that these things are not uniquely true of the Roman Catholic Church. They are not uniquely true of the Roman Catholic Church today and they were not uniquely true of the Roman Catholic Church 500 years ago either. Each of these things could also have been said of the Oriental Churches (Syrian, Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopian, etc) and of the Eastern Orthodox Churches (Greek, Russian, Serbian Orthodox, etc.) at the dawn of the Reformation. Since the Reformation, it can also be said of the Church of England and by extension the worldwide Anglican Communion, the Methodist Episcopalian Churches, and a number of Scandanavian national Churches that adopted Lutheranism in the 16th Century, such as the Church of Sweden.

None of these Churches were started by people going off and starting up their own sect from scratch. The Oriental Churches became separate from the rest of the Church when they rejected the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD, which the rest of the Church accepted. They accused the rest of the Church of Nestorianism, the rest of the Church accused them of monophysitism, and both sides went their separate ways. Each group subscribed to the Nicene Creed, practiced the sacraments, and was led by bishops in direct Apostolic succession.

Then in 1054 AD, the Latin-speaking Churches of the West and the Greek-speaking Churches of the East, quarreled over the text of the Nicene Creed. The Latin Church had a word in their version (filoque – “and the Son”) which wasn’t in the Greek version. There was also an argument over degree of authority of the bishops. The bishop of Rome was already beginning to claim that as the successor to St. Peter he had authority over all the other bishops, and the Eastern Church wasn’t buying it. So in 1054 the Greek and Latin Churches declared each other to be anathema and went their separate ways. Again, they both subscribed to the same Creeds (with the exception of the one word), practiced the same sacraments, and were led by the same bishops that had led them prior to the Schism.

In both of these instances, the Churches were the exact same Churches on either side of the divide were the exact same Churches they were before except that now they weren’t in fellowship with each other.

In the 16th Century, King Gustav I of Sweden separated the national Church of Sweden from the Roman Catholic Church in 1526. In England, Parliament separated the national Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church at the behest of King Henry VIII in the Act of Supremacy of 1534, and again in 1558 at the behest of Queen Elizabeth I (the first Act having been repealed during the reign of Mary I. (3) In both cases, the Churches were removed from fellowship with Rome intact, led by the same bishops as before, subscribing to the Ecumenical Creeds, and practicing the sacraments. This all remained true of both of those Churches when they adopted Protestant doctrine later in that century (the Church of Sweden accepted the Augsburg Confession and became Lutheran, the Church of England adopted the Protestant 39 Articles) for basic Protestant doctrine is not in conflict with the Ecumenical Creeds.

So even at the dawn of the Reformation, the things which the Roman Catholic Church pointed to in order to back up its claim to be the one true Church were not uniquely true of the Roman Catholic Church. They were also true of the Eastern and Oriental Churches, both of whose orders and sacraments the Roman Church recognizes as valid. After the Reformation, they remained true of certain Protestant Churches as well. This the Roman Catholic Church has denied, but it has no legitimate basis to do so.

So what does all this tell us about the unity of the catholic Church?

It would seem that the unity of the Church, that quality of the Church whereby we can say that it is “one”, must lie in its invisible, spiritual aspect, rather than its visible aspect. The Roman Catholic denial that the Church is invisible then, is most foolish indeed, for it comes close to being a denial of the one of the four marks of the Church in the Nicene Creed. If the Church is not invisible, united by a spiritual unity that exists in Christ, then it is no longer “one” and cannot be said to have been “one” since 451 AD. Unless, of course, we say that the Church in its visible aspect, is one in the way a tree with many branches is one. That is how the 19th Century Anglican theologian, Sir William Palmer, brilliantly explained the unity of the visible catholic Church. (4). He spoke of the catholic Church as a tree with three branches – Orthodox, Roman, and Anglican. I would be more generous (5) and include the other orthodox (6) Protestant Churches as well, but apart from that I have no quarrel with Palmer’s view.

High or Low?

The above refutation of the Roman Catholic position will not satisfy some evangelical Protestants. Such evangelicals would say that by acknowledging the Ecumenical Creeds as the basic litmus test of orthodoxy, the importance of the practice of the sacraments, and the episcopacy as the legitimate successors to the Apostles, all of which I did in the course of writing that refutation, I have conceded too much to the Roman Catholics. The kind of evangelicals I have in mind tend to see “low Church” ecclesiology as going hand-in-glove with the Reformer’s insistence upon the supreme and final authority of Scripture and therefore being an essential part of Protestant evangelicalism.

Dr. Martin Luther would have disagreed. So would John Wesley. The former was a Roman Catholic monk who attacked corruption in the Church, but who wished to reform it from the inside. The latter was a High Church Anglican priest, who preached the Gospel leading to spiritual revival on both sides of the Atlantic. Dr. Luther shook the dust off of the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith. Wesley, after his famous conversion experience at the Moravian meeting at Aldersgate, stressed the importance of personal conversion to justifying faith in Jesus Christ. These two things – the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith alone and the emphasis on personal conversion – more than anything else define what we call evangelicalism today, and the two evangelical leaders most associated with these concepts had a high view of the Church.

At this point it is necessary to define some terminology. The terms “High Church” and “Low Church” referred originally to two different camps within the Church of England. The popular conception of the difference between the two is that “High Churchmen” wanted the Church of England to be more Catholic, whereas “Low Churchmen” wanted it to be more Protestant. This is not entirely accurate, as the original High Churchmen tended to be Calvinist supporters of the Elizabethan Settlement, the evangelical Wesleys were Arminian High Churchmen, and there were differences, as well as overlap, between the High Church position and that of the Oxford Movement, which started the Anglo-Catholic revival of the 19th Century. However, inaccurate as it may be, the popular conception of the High and Low Church within Anglicanism led to the broader application of these terms in which the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches are said to be “High Church” and non-episcopal, evangelical, free Church Protestants are said to be “Low Church”.

For the purposes of our discussion here, a low view of the Church will be defined as a theology which understands Christianity to be first and foremost a personal faith, a matter between the individual person and God, and which understands the function of the organized Church to be primarily, if not solely, the support of the individual believer in his personal relationship with God. In a low Church ecclesiology, Apostolic authority survives in the writings of the New Testament alone, and in no way in the corporate body which is the Church.

The high view of the Church will be gradually explained as we look at why the low view is wrong.

Errors tend to arise by taking truths to extremes. That is the case with the low view of the Church. In recovering the Pauline doctrine of justification, Dr. Luther correctly taught that each of us are invited to personally put our faith directly in Jesus Christ and His finished work of salvation and to find full assurance of our acceptance with God in Him. The New Testament does not teach, however, that believers are to practice their faith in isolation from other people. Rather, the Christian faith is to be practiced in communion with other believers, as part of the community of faith that is the Church.

The low view of the Church arose in part, because many Protestants drew unnecessary and invalid connections, between the doctrine of personal justification through faith, and the individualism that had arisen in Renaissance humanism and which was already developing into what would become classical liberalism. Liberalism would teach that the individual is all-important and that corporate institutions of society, from the family to the state itself, exist only as voluntary contractual arrangements among sovereign individuals. Low Church ecclesiology could be said to be the theological expression of this false view of the relationship between individual persons and corporate social institutions.

The low view of the Church also has roots in a misunderstanding of another of Dr. Luther’s doctrines.

Here are Dr. Luther’s famous words at the Diet of Worms in 1521, when asked if he would recant his writings:

Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Holy Scriptures or by evident reason-for I can believe neither pope nor councils alone, as it is clear that they have erred repeatedly and contradicted themselves-I consider myself convicted by the testimony of Holy Scripture, which is my basis; my conscience is captive to the Word of God. Thus I cannot and will not recant, because acting against one’s conscience is neither safe nor sound. Here I stand. I can do no other. God help me.

The Latin phrase that is used to identify the position that Dr. Luther took here is sola Scriptura, which means “Scripture alone”. Note, however, where the word “alone” appears in this speech. It does not occur after “Unless I am convinced by the testimony of the Holy Scriptures” but after “I can believe neither pope nor councils”.

What Dr. Luther was emphasizing here, was the absolute authority of the Word of God, over the Church of God. He was not rejecting the importance of tradition, or suggesting that the Church has no authority over believers, or that Church authorities have no legitimate authority. Rather he was saying that all of these authorities are subordinate to the authority of Scripture, because Scripture is the Word of God.

A better phrase to express Dr. Luther’s position, would have been “Scriptura suprema”. The reason the phrase “sola Scriptura” was to express a truth that corresponds to justification by faith. If each of us can find peace with God by personally and directly trusting Jesus Christ as our Savior it follows that all truth necessary for our salvation is contained within the words of the Scriptures. This is what “sola Scriptura” originally meant.

The Church of England stated it like this in the sixth of its Thirty-nine Articles:

Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.

This is a very different concept from the idea that the corporate body of Christ, the Church, has no authority over individual believers.

It is important that we distinguish at this point between institutional authority and authoritative divine revelation. It is Christian doctrine, that God has provided a full revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ and a full written testimony to that revelation in the New Testament. When we speak of the authority of Scripture we speak primarily of its authority as revelation of Jesus Christ and the will of God – how He wants us to live and how we can find forgiveness for our sins through Jesus Christ.

The authority of the Church is different in nature. It is institutional authority. It too, however, comes from God and we know this upon the authority of the New Testament.

The fifteenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles begins by telling us that certain men had come to the Church in Antioch from Judaea telling the Gentile converts that they needed to be circumcised in order to be saved. Sts. Paul and Barnabus then went to Jerusalem to ask the Apostles for a ruling on the matter. A council was called, of the Apostles and the elders, and after much argument, and hearing the testimony of St. Peter then of Sts. Paul and Barnabus, St. James convinced the Council to write letters to the Gentile believers, and send emissaries telling them that they would not burden them with the Law of Moses, but just that they avoid meats offered to idols, blood, things strangled, and fornication.

A number of things are clear from this. First, the Apostolic Council relied upon revelation from the Holy Spirit to make their decision. Divine revelation, therefore, is a higher authority than the Church. Second, the Apostolic Council clearly believed they had the authority and right to make this decision. Finally, the New Testament endorses that belief.

Did that authority die with the Apostles and the completion of the New Testament canon?

The New Testament itself gives no indication that that would be the case. What does the history of the early Church tell us?

In the early centuries, the doctrine of Christ was challenged by a number of false teachers, just as Christ warned the Apostles, and just as the Apostles warned the Churches in the New Testament epistles.

What was the Church’s response?

A number of specific bishops contended against particular heresies (St. Athanasias against Arianism for example), but ultimately the Church had to call ecumenical councils, pattered after the Apostolic Council of Acts 15, in order to authoritatively settle these matters. It was in these Councils that Arianism, Docetism, Pelagianism and all sorts of other isms were declared heretical, and the orthodox doctrines of the Trinity and the Person of Christ were defined. The ultimate statement of Christian orthodoxy, the Nicene Creed, was the product of these Councils.

This would seem to be rather clear evidence that the Apostolic authority of the Church, survived the death of the Apostles.

Why is all of this important?

It is important, because as the low view of the Church spread throughout Protestantism, those ancient heresies have been reborn. Arianism and modalism have been revived by sects who use arguments invented by low Church Protestants in order to attack doctrines like the Trinity and the deity of Christ that orthodox evangelicals would understand as being essential to Christianity. Outright Pelagianism was revived by Charles G. Finney in the 19th Century, yet he is regarded as a hero rather than a heretic throughout evangelical circles. If the Church did not succeed to the authority of the Apostles, why should we accept the declarations of its Councils that Arianism, modalism, and Pelagianism are heresies and not sound doctrine? Because they are unscriptural? Who are you to say so? Why is your interpretation of the Bible more trustworthy than Charles Taze Russell’s?

Thus, attacking the authority of the Church in the name of “the sole authority of Scripture”, ends up undermining faith in the authority of Scripture. For if everybody’s interpretation of the Bible is valid, which must be the inevitable conclusion if the interpretation of the Bible is a personal matter between the individual believer and the Holy Spirit, then nobody’s interpretation of the Bible is valid. Here we find one of the most important reasons for the decay of faith in Biblical authority in recent centuries.

So far, in defending the high view of the Church I have expressed that view in terms of the Apostolic institutional authority of the Church as a corporate body. The authority of the Church and authority within the Church are different matters, although they are obviously connected to each other. Upholding the authority of the family would be a rather meaningless gesture if one did not also uphold parental authority within the family.

Today, the nonsensical false notion expressed by an eighteenth century liberal that “governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed” has become widespread. This is not, however, where authority comes from, as attested to by both common sense observations and Scripture. Within the family, parents are not voted into their positions of authority by their children. Their authority within the family must come from another source.

The Scriptures also clearly teach that the authority of civil government comes from God. St. Paul’s words in Romans 13 cannot be legitimately read any other way. The doctrine of the divine right of kings is the plain teaching of the New Testament. Liberal, democratic, propaganda would have us believe that this doctrine leads to tyranny. It does not. Legitimate authority can be abused, but the idea that a ruler holds his authority by divine ordination does not logically translate into a licence for that ruler to oppress his people. If a ruler gets his authority from God, he is also accountable to God for how he uses it, something else which is clearly taught in the Scriptures.

It is actually the “bottom up” theory of authority which leads to tyranny. A ruler ordained by God is held accountable to a higher authority. A democratic government derives its authority from “the will of the people”. “The will of the people” is just a fancy way of saying “the force of numbers”. Democracy is a form of “might makes right” and it is no coincidence that as democracy has become the dominant principle of government over the last few centuries, governments have become far more intrusive into the private lives of their people than they ever were before. Democratic governments, do not flinch at sending their bureaucratic henchmen to invade the homes and businesses of ordinary people, and boss them around in every area of their lives. No king, governing by divine right, would ever have dreamed he had the authority and right to do such a thing.

If true civil authority is “top down” from God, one would certainly expect the same to be true of ecclesiastical authority, and that is precisely what the New Testament teaches. Christ, commissioned His twelve Apostles and gave them authority over His Church. As the Church grew, the Apostles ordained others to assist them in the leadership of the Church. Ordination in the New Testament consisted of the Apostles laying their hands on people to signify that they were conferring authority on these people, either for specific tasks (as is the case with the establishment of the deacons in Acts 6) or to lead specific Churches in the Apostles absence. In his pastoral epistles, St. Paul taught those he had ordained in this way, like Timothy, to do the same to leaders they would in turn train up to assist them. Ecclesiastical authority, was to be passed on from those who possessed it by direct commission from Christ, the Apostles, to others, through the laying on of hands.

It is possible to overemphasize this. Some teach that if a Church does not have bishops in a clear, unbroken line of succession, going back to the Apostles, that it is not really a Church. That is going too far. The Gospels record that at one point St. John told Jesus “Master, we saw one casting out devils in Thy name; and we forbad him, because he followeth not with us” and was told “Forbid him not: for he that is not against us is for us.” In one sense, all that is necessary for the Church to be present is for two or more believers to gather in the name of Jesus, for Christ promises His presence wherever that happens.

Among Protestants today, however, even among those who consider themselves to be conservative evangelicals, we are far more likely to encounter a low view of the Church and of the ecclesiastical authority passed on by ordination than the opposite error.





(1) Auberon Waugh wrote in the October 3rd, 1975 issue of The New Statesman: “It is a waste of time to make jokes about the women’s movement, partly because there is no way for the most febrile jester to improve on his raw material, partly because Aristophanes made all the best jokes on this subject 2,366 years ago in Ecclesiazusae.”

(2) This discussion began with Ferdinand Tönnies’ 1887 treatise on the subject, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. The terms are often translated “community” and “society”, although this is an oversimplification.

(3) It is a bit different in the case of the Methodist Church. The first Methodist bishop was Thomas Coke. Coke was ordained by John Wesley, who was a priest within the Church of England. Wesley had been ordained a bishop by Erasmus of Arcadia, a Greek Orthodox Bishop, in order to validate the orders, because the bishops of his own Church were refusing to ordain clergy for the New World at that time.

(4) Sir William Palmer A Treatise on the Church of Christ: Designed Chiefly for the Use of Students in Theology (London: J.G.F. & J. Rivington, 1838).

(5) This word is chosen to avoid the use of the word “liberal” and not to imply sympathy with the hybrid of postmodernism and Christianity taught by Brian Mclaren.

(6) By “orthodox” I mean adhering to the doctrines of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. That means actually adhering to the doctrines. Reciting them with mental reservations like “well, His body is still in the grave, but I suppose we could say He rose again, because He is living in His disciples hearts” at the part that says “and the third day He rose again from the dead, according to the Scriptures”, does not count.