Vaccine Passports do Not Belong in Church

 

The Right Reverend Peter Carrell is the Bishop of the Anglican diocese of Christchurch in New Zealand.   On the fifth of October, he sent out a tweet that began with the following:

 

Vaccine certificates…work to be done on [e.g.] whether they will be required for church attendance…and will be from November

 

Then, finally remembering how to form a complete and coherent thought, he added the following question:

 

Is there any reason why churches shouldn’t generally go with the flow of this measure for the safety of our nation?

 

By “our nation”, obviously, he means New Zealand whose Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, seemingly an adherent of the Zero Covid cult, imposed a severe lockdown in August after the country had its first case of bat flu since February.    Sadly, sanity appears to be in short supply among the leaders of this, one of our sister Commonwealth Realms, and judging from the bishop’s tweet this applies to the ecclesiastical as well as the political leadership.   Not that an overabundance of it can be found among our leaders in the Dominion of Canada.   Quite the opposite, actually.

 

Note how the bishop’s question is worded.   By asking “is there any reason why churches shouldn’t” rather than “is there any reason why churches should” he makes the use of vaccine certificates to be able to go to church into the default position and places the onus of proof upon those who object to this.    That is the kind of crazy that in vulgar conversation is customarily associated with the feces of the winged mammal widely believed to have been the original host of the coronavirus.

 

The church is the institution established by Jesus Christ through His Apostles for the purpose of ministering His Gospel, the Good News about how He has brought the freely given, forgiving, redeeming, justifying, sanctifying, empowering, and transforming grace of God to us through His Incarnation, Atoning death and Resurrection to all people everywhere through the two-fold ministry of the preached Word and the administered Sacrament.   To turn people away from the ministry of the church, other than as the disciplinary act commanded by the Apostle Paul in cases of extreme, un-repented sin, is to turn people away from Jesus Christ.

 

The sixth chapter of the Gospel according to St. John is one of the most important theological chapters in the entire Bible.     The Discourse on the Bread of Life is foundational to the Sacramental theology of the Eucharist, perhaps even more so than the words of Institution in the Synoptic Gospels, for it is here that the concept of the body and blood of Jesus as the spiritual food that sustains eternal life is to be found.    Right in the middle of this Discourse is a passage vital to Calvinist theology – the most explicit statement in all of Scripture of how those who believe in Christ have been given to Him by the Father in accordance with His eternal purpose and how it is His, that is Christ’s, mission to lose none of them but to raise them up to eternal life on the Last Day (vv. 35 to 40, a passage which is also essential to distinguishing  the New Covenant concept of God’s “elect” from the Old Covenant concept of the same).    One could say that this entire passage, in which the most important themes of Catholicism and Calvinism are seamlessly interwoven as one, is the most Anglican passage in all of Scripture.   It is in this context, that Jesus makes the statement “All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out” (v. 37).   I quote, as always, from the real English Bible, the English Vulgate, the Authorized Bible, which was good enough for King Charles I and is good enough for me, but it is worth noting the Common English, Good News and New International Versions’ renderings in which “I will in no wise cast out” becomes “I won’t send away”, “I will never turn away” and “I will never drive away” respectively.   However worded, the point is clear – Jesus doesn’t send those who come to Him away.    The church, which is supposed to follow His example, ought not to send them away either.

 

The churches have been doing an absolutely terrible job of following Jesus on this since the beginning of the irrational bat flu panic.    When government public health mandarins ordered them to shut their doors for months on end they did so.   When the same odious bureaucrats told them they could re-open but only at a limited capacity, requiring them to pre-register those who would attend and turn all over the capacity limit away, they did so.   When they told them that they could only allow people to attend on condition that they agreed to breathe their recycled carbon dioxide from behind a face diaper that covered their nose and mouth for the duration of the service they did so, thus turning away all who did not think they should have to give up breathing oxygen to hear the Word and receive the Sacrament.   

 

In defending all of this obeying man rather than God and rendering unto Caesar the things that are God’s, the ecclesiastical leadership have trotted out a number of arguments, each entirely specious.    The thirteenth chapter of the epistle to the Romans in which St. Paul enjoins civil obedience upon believers and teaches the divine right of kings (that civil government has authority from God to act as His ministers in the punishment of evil) has been constantly trotted out.   Those who bring up this passage fail to mention that in the examples of Daniel and his friends Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, the Scripture provides us with clear exceptions to the rule of civil obedience, in Daniel’s case when government forbids the worship of the True God, in his friends’ case when government demands the worship of false gods.    Nor do they discuss how the passage in Romans limits legitimate government authority – if the civil government has been given a sword by God for punishing evil, then it must wield that sword in punishing what God says is evil, not whatever it sees fit to punish.   With these public health orders, governments have been punishing things that are not only not mala in se (literally bad in themselves, meaning intrinsically criminal apart from statutory law) but are indeed bona in se (good in themselves) and essential for healthy social and communal life, which is a clear abuse of the sword of the thirteenth of Romans, screaming out to heaven for vengeance.

 

Then there is the twisting of the Christian ethic with regards to loving others beyond all recognition.   Jesus, when asked which was the Greatest Commandment of the Law (the Old Covenant), said that it was to love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength and that the second, which was like unto it, was to love your neighbour as yourself.   At the Last Supper on the night in which He was betrayed and arrested, He told His disciples that He was leaving them with a New Commandment to love one another as He had loved them, which clearly has a self-sacrificial implication that was explicitly spelled out when He said that “greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”.

 

What does this look like in a time of plague?

 

For two thousand years it has been commonly understood that in times of plague the highest form of living out this ethic was when the healthy, at the potential jeopardy of their own health and lives, attended upon the sick and ministered to their needs.   The way the Right Reverend John Strachan, first Bishop of Toronto, ministered to the sick and dying in that city during the choleric outbreaks of the nineteenth century is a classic example of this.

 

Contrast that with today when we are constantly being told that the loving thing to do is for healthy people to avoid all social contact with other healthy people until such time, if ever, that the government sees fit to allow them to socialize again.    What is being called “love” in this perverse inversion of the historical understanding of the Christian ethic is far closer to fear.   The words of St. John from his first epistle might be appropriate at this point “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment.   He that feareth is not made perfect in love”. (4:18).

 

As bad as churches closing their doors, limiting their numbers, requiring those Satanic masks, and the like has been, for churches to join the vaccine passport campaign would be a whole new level of apostasy.    Throughout the irrational bat flu panic governments have acted as if constitutional limits on their powers and protections of the rights and freedoms of the governed do not exist in a public health emergency and they are allowed to do whatever they want.   In terms of what the constitutional law of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth Realms such as the Dominion of Canada and New Zealand actually says, they are completely wrong in thinking this, of course, but they might be right in a practical sense in that so long as people are more afraid of the object of the public health scare than of losing their freedoms to tyranny and courts are willing to give government a lot of leeway, they can pretty much get away with doing whatever they want.   This is a part of human nature every tyrannical and totalitarian regime has known and exploited.   

 

Initially, perhaps, our governments were acting in bona fide, or the closest thing to good faith that politicians are actually of, and panicking themselves and not knowing what else to do, tried whatever their public health “experts” suggested.   What we are now seeing is far more sinister than this.    Having exhausted the public’s patience with lockdowns after lockdowns and having mostly achieved their initial vaccination targets only to discover that new waves of the virus keep coming, they are blaming their failure to do what no government has ever been able to do in the past, i.e., stop a virus, on those who have not been vaccinated to the satisfaction of the government.  

 

That these people have not been vaccinated could, of course, be viewed as another failure of government – they failed to convince these people that the vaccines were safe enough and the virus dangerous enough for the risk associated with remaining unvaccinated to outweigh the risk of receiving the vaccines.    Perhaps it never occurred to them that all of their efforts to keep people from hearing any information about the vaccines that was not positive and to demonize anyone who communicated such information make their own position less convincing rather than more convincing to anyone whose ability to think rationally has not been paralyzed by mass fear.   Or that their bizarre attitude of “I’m vaccinated but you’re not being vaccinated puts me at risk” sends the message that they do not themselves really believe that these vaccines work.  

 

Whatever is the case, they are now trying to compel where they failed to convince.   The vaccine passport system punishes people for making what is a valid, legally protected, choice not to allow something to be injected into their bodies that they have not been properly persuaded is worth whatever risks might be associated with it.   This is a completely unacceptable form of state bullying that evokes the whole “show me your papers” imagery frequently found in dystopic literature and film inspired by such historical totalitarian regimes as the Third Reich and the Soviet Union.    Churches were wrong to turn people away from Jesus in compliance with the earlier public health measures.   For them to do so in compliance with the vaccine passport system would be to fully align themselves with Christianity’s opposite.

 

That brings me to a point that I raised at Dr. Adrian Hilton’s Archbishop Cramner blog in the comments section to a post entitled “Should you need a Covid vaccination certificate to attend church?”    This post, Dr. Hilton’s response to the Right Reverend Carrell’s tweet, is well worth reading in its entirety.   He gives the right answer, the negative answer, to the question in his title, and closes with the appropriate sentiment “There is neither clean nor unclear, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus”.

 

To his excellent arguments I added the following comment, which I will close this essay by reproducing here:

 

It does not matter how one interprets the Book of Revelation. One could be a dispensationalist, who thinks that the Beast is a specific individual who will be revealed after the elect have been raptured. One could be a preterist who thinks that the Beast was an individual/system of the first century and that all Biblical prophecy was fulfilled in the year 70. Or one could hold to any of the positions in between that are more in keeping with how the Book has traditionally understood. Either way, it is obvious the Beast is not a figure to be emulated. Requiring people to show a vaccine certificate to be able to conduct an economic transaction is eerily close to the Beast's requiring his mark to buy and sell, as even some Roman Catholics, like John Zmirak a month or so ago at The Stream, are starting to observe. Requiring it for church attendance would be even worse. We are to follow Christ not Antichrist. Jesus' example was clear. When He came across lepers, He did not avoid them, but touched and healed them. Go thou and do likewise.

Romans 13 and State-Ordered Church Closures

 The thirteenth chapter of St. Paul's epistle to the Romans poses a problem for those who profess the Christian faith and also subscribe to either the doctrine of civil disobedience as taught by Henry David Thoreau in the nineteenth century and exemplified by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. in the twentieth or to any other version of Whiggism, for that matter, including the founding ideology of the American republic.    This dilemma has inspired a number of very creative attempts at interpreting the passage to  say other than what it says.   Perhaps my favourite of these is the one thing that says St. Paul was being sarcastic.

I do not have this difficulty myself.   I have always thought Thoreau to be an overrated nincompoop, am not part of the idolatrous cult that worships Gandhi and King, do not believe in civil disobedience, and wholeheartedly agree with Dr. Johnson that "the first Whig was the devil."    I therefore accept the New Testament passage at face value, as enjoining civil obedience upon Christians and teaching the "divine right of kings".  As you have probably deduced from the title of this essay it is the first of these two items that is our primary concern here.   Therefore, I shall discuss the second first to get it out of the way.

The divine right of kings is a doctrine that is widely misunderstood.    This is undoubtedly due to the fact that its opponents, the Whigs to whom we have already alluded and their myriad of ideological descendants, have written most of our history books since the late eighteenth century.   Although Herbert Butterfield  exposed the fundamental fallacies of their method of interpreting history , id est to take the progressive liberal values of the present and interpret the past as movement towards those values with people cast in the role of hero or villain according as they are perceived to have advanced or fought to retard the march of progress, in a short volume first published in 1931, with a few notable exceptions such as the dean of Canadian historians Donald G. Creighton and the Hungarian-American Catholic historian John Lukacs, the Whigs have continued to dominate the field.  Most people, therefore, first encounter the divine right of kings in the caricature of its foes.   The doctrine does not mean that God gives kings unlimited, autocratic, power to rule their subjects as they see fit.   It means precisely the opposite of this, that because the king's office is vested with authority the recognized ultimate source of which is God, the exercise of that authority is a sacred duty and vocation for which God holds him strictly accountable and he is therefore by no means free to abuse his authority by tyrannizing his subjects.   Should any of you have been reading my essays since the beginning you may recall that the first posted here, "The Divine Right of Kings versus the Tyranny of the People", made the case that contrary to the Modern belief that freedom and democracy go together, it is democracy and not divine-right kingship, the internal logic of which leads inevitably to tyranny and totalitarianism.   If government exists by the will of the people, whatever that nonsensical phrase which attributes to a collective something that only individuals possess is taken as meaning, and to serve that will, then it need not recognize any limits on what it does to the people it governs, provided that is what the people want.   That this is where the internal logic of democracy ultimately leads was recognized as a problem long ago.   Alexis de Tocqueville in his famous commentary on Democracy in America (1835, 1840), warned about the "tyranny of the majority" and the twentieth century attempt to get around this by redefining the principle of democracy from "whatever the majority wants" to "whatever we all agree upon" was no improvement in this regards for it ultimately means that everybody must be forced to agree and dissent not tolerated, tyranny in its most extreme, totalitarian, form.    The ancient wise men, such as Plato and Aristotle, knew that democracy is the mother of tyranny.   The Whiggish attempt to circumvent the destiny of democratic tyranny by moderating democracy with liberalism, the recognition of individual rights as a limitation on even democratic government , was doomed to failure.   The evidence of that failure now surrounds us.   All it took for elected politicians to shatter completely the fetters placed upon them by constitutional protections of rights and freedoms was for the public to be persuaded that it was "necessary" to "save lives".   Democracy, far from being held back from evolving into its tyrannical, totalitarian form, by liberalism, broke liberalism's bonds like they were made of straw.    Indeed, it broke not only liberalism but the older safeguards of freedom that predated the rise of Modern Whiggery.   Parliamentary control over government spending, a safeguard of freedom the roots of which go back to the Magna Carta, was attacked in both Parliament and our provincial legislatures as both levels of government sought to be released from this oversight in order to deal with the pandemic.   The distinction between public and private, another safeguard of freedom which goes back to the feudal recognition that "every man's home is his castle", was obliterated by the public health mandarins' demands for technology-enhanced total surveillance of everyone to facilitate "contact tracing" in the name of keeping us safe.   These and other examples of pre-Modern safeguards of liberty, belong to the ancient ideal of constitutional government, with which the divine right of kings is consistent and compatible, and which can be summed up as the idea that the civil authority itself is subject to and bound by the law.   Indeed, the divine right of kings properly understood, and not as the Whigs caricatured it, requires the ideal of constitutional government, which is why monarchs are required as part of their sacred coronation oath to vow to uphold and protect the law.   Democracy, as we have seen from the events of this year, is not consistent with this ancient ideal, and indeed, it could be said that democracy in Modern thought has usurped the place of constitutional government in pre-Modern thought (remember that tyranny and usurpation were originally one and the same concept).

When the divine right of kings is stated within the context of moral theology rather than political philosophy it is pretty much what you find in the thirteenth chapter of Romans.   St. Paul says that the civil authority, the "higher powers" in the Authorized Bible, are "ordained by God" and, switching to the singular, are "the minister of God to thee for good".   More specifically "he beareth not the sword in vain; for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil."  Some might object that this is a generic "divine right of civil authority" that contains no endorsement with regards to specific constitutional forms.   I will grant that, but point out that the Scriptures as a whole are hardly silent on the latter subject.   If you turn to the passage that "Christian" republicans use as their chief proof-text, the eighth chapter of I Samuel, and read it through, note first that a democratic republic was not what Israel had prior to this chapter and second that every single negative thing Samuel is instructed to tell the Israelites about what the king they have asked for will be like, has historically also been true of republican and democratic governments, and, indeed, democracies and republics have been historically much harder on their people in the way of taxes than kings ever were.   You will find good kings and bad kings in the Bible, and God Himself is identified as the King of kings.   You will not find a good republic or democracy mentioned in the Bible and, indeed, in the numerous examples from Genesis to Revelation of the people getting together to demand something, either of their governors or of God, it far more often than not displeased God, Who not infrequently punished them by giving them exactly what they asked for.

Now, let us turn back to the civil obedience enjoined upon Christians in this passage.    Does this passage require that the Christian Church close its doors and cease meeting together when the state orders it to?   Is there any way I can answer that question with "no" that does not require a clever re-interpretation of the passage like the ones I referred to and rejected at the beginning of the essay?

The answer to the first question is "no" and the answer to the second question is "yes".

The reason the answer to the first question is no is because it involves a situation that is an obvious exception to the general rule.   It is an obvious exception for two reasons.

The first is that if the civil obedience St. Paul enjoined upon Christians involved shutting the Church down and not meeting if so ordered by the state, then Christianity would not have survived the first century.   Christianity began within the Roman Empire and while the Empire was for the most part quite tolerant when it came to religion in various locations the Roman authorities became hostile to the Christian faith, usually when enemies of the faith went to them and accused Christianity of being a subversive political movement.   That Christianity is nothing of the sort is evinced by the passage we are considering, whose author likely had the false accusations against the Church in mind when he penned it.   However, at various times the accusations against Christianity reached to the very highest level and a general persecution of the Christians was ordered by a Caesar.   If St. Paul did not mean meeting together as a Church to be an exception to civil obedience if forbidden, then all a hostile Caesar would have needed to do was forbid the Church to ever meet again and it would have had to have dissolved permanently.   The Roman authorities did, in fact, outlaw Christianity at various times, and the Church had to meet in secret.   This was not "civil disobedience" in the Thoreau/Gandhi/King sense of defiantly breaking the law to challenge injustice.   It was simply not obeying a civil order that would  have required them to disobey a command from the Highest Authority.

This brings us to the second reason, which is that this very type of scenario occurs in the Scriptures and the way the Scriptures deal with these scenarios makes it clear that an exception to civil obedience is to be found here.

These examples can be found in both Testaments.   The Book of Daniel in the Old Testament is set in the period of the Babylonian Captivity.   You might recall from the Book of Jeremiah that when the Babylonians sacked Jerusalem and carried everyone away captive, the Lord's instructions through the prophet were that they were to go away, be good subjects of the Babylonian king, and they would live and one day He would return them to the Promised Land.   Daniel and his three friends were among the youth of the Hebrew nobility who were taken captive.   Being devout, they set out to obey the Lord's command and be good Babylonian citizens.   At various points in the book, however, they were required to do something that would break the Law of God.   In the third chapter, for example, Nebuchadnezzar ordered a giant gold idol to be erected in the plain of Dura and commanded all of his high officials to fall down and worship it.   Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego, Daniel's three friends who had been raised to such positions at the end of the second chapter as part of Daniel's reward for revealing and interpreting the king's dream (of a giant image with a gold head interpreted to be Nebuchadnezzar himself, presumably the inspiration for his misguided actions in this incident, and the reason, although the text doesn't spell it out, why the image is widely thought to have been of the king himself) were among those so commanded but, since this would be the idolatry forbidden by the Second Commandment, they did not worship the image, and were cast into a fiery furnace as punishment, from which they were miraculously delivered.   Later in the book, in the sixth chapter after the Persians have conquered Babylon, and Daniel is promoted to an even higher position, other officials envious of him persuade Darius to make a decree forbidding anyone to make a petition to any other God or man except himself for the period of a month.   When Daniel continues, despite the edict, to pray to the Lord three times a day, he is accused, and thrown into a den of lions.  Like his friends he is miraculously spared.

The second  example, you will note, is closer to the scenario we are contemplating because rather than requiring something wrong, idolatry, as was the case with the first example, it involves the forbidding of a duty owed to God.

In the New Testament, after the Ascension the disciples of Jesus wait in Jerusalem as commanded until the Day of Pentecost, when the Holy Ghost comes upon them and empowers them.   St. Peter preaches a bold sermon to the crowd and about three thousand are converted and baptized.  These continue to meet on a daily basis in the Jewish Temple and, for their specifically Christian fellowship, involving the Apostles' teaching, the Eucharist ("breaking of bread") and prayer, from house to house, as there were no buildings assigned to the purpose and consecrated for it as of yet.   Daily their numbers increased.   Evidently they did not believe in the Satanic lies of "social distancing" and "limiting gatherings" but this was because they put their faith in God, living two millennia before George Bernard Shaw could sadly but accurately say "We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession".   In the third chapter of Acts, SS Peter and John heal a man born lame at the gate of the Temple.  This leads to another sermon by St. Peter in Solomon's porch.   Five thousand are converted but the Apostles are arrested.   Brought before the chief priests the next day, they preach to them as well.   The Jewish authorities forbid them to preach and teach in the name of Jesus and their answer is "Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you more than unto God, judge ye.  For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard".  In the fifth chapter, after they have continued their ministry and the Church has continued to grow, the Apostles are imprisoned, miraculously set free, and, after they have resumed their teaching the next day, brought before the Sanhedrin.  Their answer to the council began with the words "We ought rather to obey God rather than men."

It is these words that express the response of the faithful when those in authority forbid the practice of the Christian religion.   

So clearly a command from the state not to meet as the Church is an exception to the civil obedience commanded of Christians by St. Paul in the epistle to the Romans.    This does not mean that when the state orders the Church to close, as it has done this year, that we ought to conduct sit-ins, or behave in any of the other ways that have come to be associated with civil disobedience.   When refusing to obey orders of this nature it must be with the attitude that this is an exception to a general rule that is necessary because to obey such orders would be to disobey the very Higher Authority that enjoined civil obedience upon us through St. Paul's words.

There is no Church if she does not meet.   This is something that those whose ecclesiology begins and ends with "the Church is the people not the building" overlook.   Yes, the Church is the people and not the building in which they meet.   The individualist spin so often put on this phrase has no warrant in Scripture.  The very name given to the Body of Christ in the New Testament, ekklesia, is the Greek word for "assembly".   It is people, but people joined together as an assembly or congregation, not people apart from each other doing their own thing on an individual basis.   When the state orders the  Church not to meet - and remember in the first days of the Church they met daily not once a week - it is commanding the Church not to be the Church.   When it tells the Church we can meet but only "virtually" not "in-person" it is commanding us to live a lie.   For that is what being apart, mutually watching an online video, and calling it "being together" is.   It is pretending that this artificial "virtual space" that exists only as an image on our computer screens is reality.   That is an incredibly dangerous road down which to go.

It has been very disappointing, therefore, that this year, the Churches have with few exceptions, chosen to obey man rather than God on this matter.   Medical doctors, who belong to the profession with the least respect for privacy, rights, and freedoms, and therefore ought never to be trusted with any sort of civil authority, have been handed dictatorial powers because of a virus that they have been allowed to blow completely out of proportion, and they have ordered Churches to close, to offer virtual services only, and, in the brief respite from this over the summer, to limit their numbers, forbid congregations from singing, require them to register in advance, sit in designated places, and muzzle their faces.   It is very sad that most Churches have followed these evil orders, despite their being a clear exception to the rule of civil obedience, while those following the Apostles in saying "we ought rather to obey God than men" have been mostly the separatist sects and outright heretics.

God save the Queen and may He punish the politicians who do evil in her name!