Christianity - Faith, Tradition, and Religion

 

This week began with the first Sunday in Advent for the part of the world that uses the Gregorian as its civil calendar.   This is the first day in the new ecclesiastical or liturgical year.   The Old Testament reading assigned to Morning Prayer for that day in the revised Table of Lessons (1922) in the Book of Common Prayer is Isaiah 1:1-20.   The older Table of Lessons in the Restoration Book of Common Prayer, which used civil calendar dates rather than liturgical calendar dates, assigned the same reading to Evening Prayer for the eighteenth of November.   Both lectionaries, however, follow the ancient tradition of reading Isaiah in the weeks leading up to Christmas.   The tradition seems appropriate.  The prophecy of the event commemorated on Christmas, the Virgin Birth, and of its theological significance, the Incarnation of God is found in Isaiah (7:14).   This is the book from which Jesus read when He announced in the synagogue of Nazareth at the beginning of His ministry that He was the fulfilment of Messianic prophecy (Luke 4:16-30).   It is full of Messianic prophecy, so much so that it is often called the Fifth Gospel, and is the prophetic book most often quoted in the New Testament.

 

There is an important lesson in this first reading from the Book of Isaiah with regards to a subject that always comes up this time of year.   It begins with a general introduction to the prophecies that follow - that it is the record of the vision given to Isaiah, son of Amoz, concerning the Kingdom of Judah and its capital of Jerusalem, in the days of Uzziah, Johtham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, that is to say, as the Babylonian Captivity that would sweep away the Southern Kingdom was rapidly approaching.   Towards the end of the reading is a plea for repentance (vv. 16-17) followed by this well-known offer of cleansing and forgiveness:

 

Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. (v. 18)

 

Leading up to this is the LORD’s complaint against Judah – they are His children who have rebelled against Him (v. 2), who do not know Him (v. 3), a sinful and corrupt nation of evildoers (v. 4), who have brought upon themselves sickness and desolation (vv. 5-8), comparable to Sodom and Gomorrah (vv 9-10).  Between these complaints and the plea for repentance is the following:

 

To what purpose is the multitude of your sacrifices unto me? saith the LORD: I am full of the burnt offerings of rams , and the fat of fed beasts; and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of lambs, or of he goats.   When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts?   Bring no more vain oblations; incense is an abomination unto me; the new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies, I cannot away with; it is iniquity, even the solemn meeting.   Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth: they are a trouble unto me; I am weary to bear them.  And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood. (vv.11-15).

 

The religious observances here decried are those instituted by God Himself for Israel in the Mosaic Covenant, commonly called the Law.   Although the idolatry that would shortly bring down the Northern Kingdom – the prophesy of the Virgin Birth was given to Ahaz in the context of telling him that the confederacy between the Syrians and the Northern Kingdom against Judah would fail because these were both about to be conquered by Assyria– would also play a role in Judah’s fall to Babylon, that is not what is in view here.   The point here is that the external, ceremonial, and ritual elements of the very religion that God Himself instituted for Israel are repugnant to God in the absence of righteousness.

 

Lest this be misunderstood, let me make it clear that under the Old Covenant as much as under the New, righteousness in the eyes of God was not something obtained by keeping the Moral law perfectly without ever sinning, which only Jesus Christ ever did (and in His case it was not that He was righteous because He kept the Law but rather He kept the Law because He was righteous) but by humbling oneself before God, acknowledging one’s sin and wrong-doing, and trusting God to fulfil His Promises.   It was Moses, not St. Paul, who first declared that when Abraham believed God, God “counted it to him for righteousness” (Gen. 15:6) and it was Habakkuk who first declared “the just shall live by faith” (Hab. 2:4).   That God Himself cleans those who humble themselves, confess their sins, and trust Him is not only the teaching of the passage in question – consider the eighteenth verse quoted above again (1) – but of the penitential fifty-first Psalm, written by David after Nathan had rebuked him over his sin with Bathsheba.   The themes of this Psalm are closely parallel to those of this passage at the beginning of Isaiah. The Psalmist pleads with God for mercy, (v. 1) and for God to cleanse Him from his sin and iniquity (vv. 2, 7, 9, 10, 14), while confessing his sin (vv. 3-5).   God does not want ritual sacrifice from one with an uncleansed heart (v. 16), the sacrifice God does accept is humility – “a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart”- (v. 17), only after which will God be pleased with ceremonial sacrifice (v. 19).

 

Now, in the light of this passage from Isaiah, let us consider another passage from the Gospel according to St. Matthew.   The first nine verses of the fifteenth chapter of this Gospel tell of an interaction between the Lord Jesus Christ and the scribes and the Pharisees.   The latter ask the Lord why His disciples “transgress the tradition of the elders” because “they wash not their hands when they eat bread” (this is in reference to a ritual washing, not handwashing for the sake of hygiene).   The Lord turns the question on them by asking “Why do ye also transgress the commandment of God by your tradition?”   He goes on to explain that the commandment He refers to is “Honour thy father and mother” – He also makes reference to a similar commandment “He that curseth father or mother, let him die the death”.   The way the Pharisees transgressed this by their tradition, He went on to explain, was by declaring the money that should have gone to supporting their parents – that the support of elderly parents is in view here is implicit – to be a gift:

 

But ye say, Whosoever shall say to his father or his mother, It is a gift, by whatsoever thou mightiest be profited by me; And honour not his father or his mother, he shall be free.   Thus have ye made the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition. (vv. 5-6).  

 

This same account can also be found in the seventh chapter of the Gospel according to St. Mark.   This Gospel provides more details that make this interaction a bit clearer.   It specifies that the commandment was evaded by designating the money for parental support as “Corban, that is to say, a gift” which lets us know that a gift to the Temple was in mind here.   Corban is the Latinized spelling (2) of a Hebrew word that was originally used for sacrifices and offerings in the books of Leviticus and Numbers in the Old Testament Law, but which by the time of the New Testament was more often used in the sense of “vow”.   This is how it is used in the passage in question – a vow designating a portion of one’s income as a gift to the Temple treasury.

 

As with our passage from Isaiah, what is rebuked here is the misuse of the Ceremonial Law to excuse disobedience to the Moral Law.   The commandment to “honour thy father and thy mother” is one of the famous Ten given by God to Moses at Mt. Sinai in the twentieth chapter of Exodus and repeated in Moses’ exhortation to the people on the border of the Promised Land in the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy.   The Corban tradition was an interpretive spin on the Ceremonial Law as it pertained to gifts and offerings to the Tabernacle/Temple that seems to have twisted the latter almost beyond recognition.   Nevertheless, the theme of the first chapter of Isaiah, that divinely established external ceremony and ritual are without value when used as substitutes for righteousness clearly comes across here as well, as it does in most if not all of Jesus’ interactions with the Pharisees.   

 

The Lord speaking through Isaiah rebukes the Kingdom of Judah for practicing the Ceremonial Law that He Himself had given them while living in rebellion against His Moral Law.   In the Gospels of SS Matthew and Mark He rebukes the Pharisees for using part of their traditional interpretation of the Ceremonial Law to annul a Commandment of the Moral Law.   To take the Lord’s words from the Gospel accounts, as many do around this time of year and again in spring as Easter approaches, as an indictment of the Church for establishing festivals like Christmas and Easter in honour of Christ rather than keeping the feasts given by God to the nation Israel in the Old Testament, is to pervert His meaning entirely

 

I encounter people who pervert His meaning in just this way every time Christmas and Easter approach.   The reference to “tradition” in Christ’s words is taken as condemnatory of tradition in general.   It is no such thing, however.   Tradition is derived from traditus – the passive, perfect participle of the Latin verb trado.   Trado means “I hand across, I give over”, traditus therefore means “having been handed across, having been given over”, and its derivative “tradition” simply means that which has been handed down to us by those who have preceded us, often with the implication that it is held by us in trust to be handed down to those who come after.   While bad things can be passed down as well as good, tradition itself is a good thing.   St. Paul tells the Thessalonian Church: “Therefore, brethren, stand fast, and hold the traditions which ye have been taught, whether by word, or our epistle” (II Thess. 2:15).   While he does not use the word “tradition” in I Corinthians 15, when he says “For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3-4) he clearly speaks of the Gospel itself in terms that denote a tradition – something that he had received himself, and had passed on to them.   Those who set Scripture and tradition in opposition to each other, fail to observe that the Scriptures, the Bible in its entirety, are themselves a tradition.   We have the Bible today because the believers who went before us passed it down to us faithfully through multiple generations.

 

The sort of people who dismiss Christmas and Easter as “man-made traditions” also have a tendency to get hung up on another word – “religion”.    Some of these claim that Christianity is something other than a religion.   Others say that Christianity is a religion and that this is what is wrong with it because Jesus Christ did not intend to found a religion.   Either way, the meaning of the word “religion” has to be tortured to arrive at these ludicrous positions.

 

Christianity is first and foremost a faith.   While other religions are also called faiths, this word is most appropriate for Christianity because Christianity places the sort of emphasis on belief that other religions place on doing.   Central to Christianity is its message about Who Jesus Christ is and what He has done.   As Christianity’s kerygma – the Christian message proclaimed to the world – it is called the Gospel, literally meaning “Good News”, a message to be believed.   As a personal/communal confession of faith it is called the Creed, from the Latin word credo – “I believe” (in the early centuries of Christianity when Greek was still the predominant language spoken by Christians these were called “symbols” or “rules of faith”).   The shortest version of the Creed, the Apostles’, consists of twelve articles.   By contrast, the closest thing to a Creed in Judaism, the religion nearest of kin to Christianity, is the Shema Yisrael, a single article: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD”.   Similarly, the closest equivalent to the Creed in Islam is the Shahada, the first of the five pillars and the only one that pertains to belief rather than practice, which is a lot like the Shema Yisrael:  “There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet”.

 

The emphasis on faith/believing over doing in Christianity comes straight out of the New Testament.   It is particularly prominent in the Fourth Gospel and in the Pauline corpus.   This elevating of believing over doing, does not render doing unimportant.   Every time St. Paul talks about how faith rather than works is the means of receiving the freely given grace (favour) of God in Jesus Christ, he also talks about the importance of good works.   The second chapter of Ephesians is a good example of this because here the verse proclaiming the believer to be God’s “workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works”, (v. 10) immediately follows the proclamation of salvation as a free gift by grace through faith (vv. 8-9).   Similar passages can be found in Romans and Galatians where the discussion of salvation by grace through faith is much more extended.   The most well-known passage in the New Testament stressing the importance of works is that which occurs in the second chapter of the epistle of St. James (vv. 14 to the end).   At the end of the first chapter of this same epistle the word religion appears.   This is the only time this word is used in the New Testament except in reference to Judaism as St. Paul uses it in the first chapter of Galatians.   The Jacobean passage does not disparage religion, the way the people I have been talking about do, but it does re-iterate the point of the passages from Isaiah and the Gospels discussed above that moral doing takes precedence over ceremonial doing.    Here is the passage:

 

If any man among you seem to be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man’s religion is vain.   Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world. (vv. 26-27).

 

So in the Christianity that the New Testament teaches, believing comes before doing, and moral doing comes before ceremonial doing.   Does that mean that New Testament Christianity is something other than a religion?

 

Not at all.  A comparison of everything established by Jesus Christ for the New Covenant with everything established by God for Israel in the Old Covenant easily demonstrates that the Christianity of the New Testament is a religion, even if that term is used sparingly in the New Testament.

 

Under the Old Covenant, there was an external sign marking one as belonging to God’s people.   Note that in the Old Testament, the concept of “God’s people” was that of a literal, ethnic, nation into which God had entered into Covenant agreement, He to be their God, they to be His people.   The external sign of membership in this nation was circumcision.   This was established in the seventeenth chapter of Genesis.  The previous chapter had seen Abram, who had been promised in his old age that his seed would be as numerous as the stars (15:4-5), sire Ishmael with his wife’s handmaid Hagar.   In the seventeenth chapter, The LORD appears to Abram, tells him that “thou shalt be a father of many nations” (v. 4), changes his name to Abraham because “a father of many nations have I made thee” (v. 5) and then promises that He will give Abraham’s seed the land of Canaan (v. 8) and that as “a token of the covenant betwixt me and you”, (v.  11) Abraham was to circumcise his own foreskin, and that the male children born into Abraham’s house were to be circumcised, (vv. 10, 12-13) and that “the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken his covenant” (v. 14).   Immediately after this God promised the birth of Isaac as the heir of the promise and covenant by Abraham’s wife, whose name was then changed from Sarai to Sarah (vv. 15-21).   Note how the external sign, that would mark the one nation that was to be formed as the people of the Old Covenant, was given in the context of the promise that Abraham would become the father of many nations.

 

The New Covenant also has an external sign that marks one as belonging to God’s people under that Covenant.      Under the New Covenant, the concept of “God’s people” is radically different from that in the Old.   It is that of a strictly spiritual people (I Pet. 2:5-10) that would be assembled – the name given to it in Greek is ἐκκλησία the word for assembly – from people called out of every kindred, tribe, and nation, (Rev. 5: 9-10) united as heirs of the promise to Abraham, (Gal. 3:26-29) by faith like Abraham’s, (Gal. 3:6-9) in Abraham’s Seed (singular) Who is Jesus Christ (Gal. 3:16).   As different as this is from the Old Covenant concept, it was, as we saw above, foreseen in the very passages that promised Abraham that he would be a father of many nations, even as a specific Covenant nation was being formed.   The external sign marking one as belonging to this spiritual people of God – the Church – is baptism.   This was a ritual washing that symbolized cleansing from sin.   John the Baptist, the prophesied “voice of one crying in the wilderness” (Is. 40:3), administered baptism to those who came to hear him preach in the wilderness near the river Jordan, confessing and repenting of their sins.   Jesus Himself came and was baptized, and while John the Baptist objected to this on the grounds that it ought to be Jesus baptizing John - Jesus as the “Lamb of God Who taketh away the sin of the world” (Jn. 1:29) had no need of the repentance and cleansing signified by baptism Himself -Jesus said that it was necessary to “fulfill all righteousness”.   As He was baptized, the Holy Spirit descended upon Him like a dove, and the Father spoke from heaven (Matt. 5:16-17, Mk. 1:10-11, Lk. 3:21-22, Jn. 1:32-33)   After He had risen from the dead and prior to His Ascension He commanded His disciples to “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matt. 28:19).

 

That baptism is to the New Covenant what circumcision was to the Old was made plain by St. Paul in his epistle to the Colossians.   In his epistle to the Romans St. Paul had distinguished between external circumcision and Jewishness, and internal circumcision and Jewishness (Rom. 2:28-29), which is another way of making the point discussed above from Isaiah and the Gospels – and which is found in many other places in the Bible – that external religion is an empty shell in the absence of the righteousness of faith.    In the second chapter of his epistle to the Colossians he again mentions a non-literal circumcision by saying that in Christ “ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ:” (v. 11) immediately after which – it is still the same sentence – he says “Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead.” (v. 12).   This interpretation of the significance of baptism – the believer’s union with Jesus Christ, and specifically with His death, burial, and Resurrection – is distinctly Pauline, having been discussed at greater length in the sixth chapter of Romans.   There is no contradiction between this and the interpretation elsewhere in the New Testament that it signifies cleansing from sin – it is through the Gospel events of His death, burial, and Resurrection that Jesus Christ cleanses us from sin.   The important point for our discussion here is that since St. Paul in Colossians then goes on to link the union with Christ in His Resurrection in baptism with having been “quickened” from the state of being “dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh” (v. 13) this entire passage is an equation of baptism with "the circumcision of Christ".

 

Now it ought to go without saying that if baptism is to the New Covenant what circumcision was to the Old then what St. Paul asserted regarding circumcision is also true of baptism - the outward ritual alone does not unite one to Christ spiritually in the absence of inner faith.   The flip-side to this - that faith effects union with Christ even in the absence of external baptism is the obvious implication of Mark 16:16.    Nevertheless, this comparison demonstrates that like the Jewish religion of the Old Testament, New Testament Christianity has an outward ritual that marks one as belonging to the Christian covenant people of God.   This is hardly consistent with the claim that New Testament Christianity is not a religion.

 

The details of the religion given to Israel at Mt. Sinai are outlined in the book of Exodus, and then provided at greater length in the book of Leviticus.   The sacrificial system of Israel in particular is dealt with at great length in Leviticus which is named after the tribe whose priestly duty it was to offer the sacrifices.    This system was the central element of the ceremonial and worship aspect of the Law.    By contrast with circumcision, which took place only once in a Jewish male's life - it could not be repeated even if someone actually wanted a second one - the sacrifices and offerings were an everyday occurrence.   It was a complex system.   There were daily sacrifices that the priests had to make every morning and afternoon.   There were sacrifices that had to be made on set days every year – the most important being those of the Day of Atonement.   Then there were the sacrificial offerings that Israelites were told to bring under specific circumstances.   Some offerings signified thankfulness and praise, others were brought on occasions of sin, guilt or ritual uncleanness.   Provision was made for less expensive offerings for Israelites of lesser means.   While most of the sacrifices involved the offering of animals - bulls, rams, goats, lambs, doves, pigeons, depending upon the economic status of the offeror, these usually had to be male and always had to be without blemish - there were also grain offerings and drink offerings.   The former could be of unbaked flour, olive oil, and frankincense, or of the flour and oil baked into unleavened cakes of bread, or in some cases unground grain.   The drink offerings or libations were part of the shorter account of the Law in Exodus and are mentioned in Leviticus in connection with the sacrifices on set days but the fuller explanation is given in the book of Numbers.   These involved specified amounts of wine that were offered in connection with the other offerings by being poured on the altar.

 

In the New Testament Jesus Christ is presented as the fulfilment of this entire system.   In the epistle to the Hebrews, St. Paul (3) explains at great length how the offering of the blood of animals signified the death of Jesus Christ on the Cross Who through the offering of His body and blood accomplished what animal sacrifice could only point towards - the removal of the guilt of sin that comes between man and God.    He also makes it plain that the death of Jesus Christ terminated the sacrificial system - "there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins" (10:26).    In each of the Synoptic Gospels, however, we find Jesus, at the Last Supper - a Passover Seder - immediately prior to His arrest, trial, and Crucifixion, establishing a second ritual for His disciples under the New Covenant.   He took the unleavened bread of the Passover, gave thanks, and broke it, then distributed it to the Apostles telling them to eat it, saying "This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me" (Lk. 22:19).   He then took the cup of Passover wine - there were four of these by Jewish tradition and the wording in St. Luke's Gospel  suggests that this was the third cup (4) - and told the Apostles to drink of it, saying that "This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you" (Lk. 22:20).   This was the institution of the Sacrament that is variously called the Lord's Supper, Holy Communion, and the Eucharist (this is the Greek word for "thanksgiving").

 

In the Sacrament the body and blood of the Final Sacrifice is given to the faithful as a meal to sustain their spiritual life in the only manner in which such a Sacrifice, the voluntary Sacrifice of Himself by the Man Who is God, could be so offered without being utterly repugnant, that is, through the means of representative elements taken from the non-bloody sacrifices – bread and wine.    That the Sacrament is intended to take the place in the Christian religion that the Levitical sacrifices occupied in the Old Testament religion of the Jews is therefore so blatantly obvious on the face of it that a passage like Colossians 2:11-13 is hardly needed to establish the point.   In the book of Acts we find that the first Church in Jerusalem celebrated this Sacrament, to which the “breaking bread” mentioned at the end of the second chapter refers, on a daily basis.

 

That Jesus Christ in establishing the New Covenant instituted a new external mark of membership in Baptism in the place of Circumcision, and the Sacrament of Holy Communion which looks back to His Crucifixion in the place of the Old Covenant sacrifices that looked forward to it, makes it quite evident that those who sneer at the word “religion”, say that Jesus Christ did not found a religion, and that New Testament Christianity as opposed to the Christianity of the Church of the last two millennia was not a religion, simply do not know what they are talking about.   

 

In my next essay I intend, Lord willing, to show just how nonsensical are the arguments these people make against Christmas specifically.    I will conclude this essay by explaining why the fact that the New Testament does not prescribe a sacred calendar of holy days and feast days to correspond to that established for the Israelites in the Old Covenant does not translate into a prohibition forbidding the Christian Church from doing so.

 

As we saw above, one of the biggest differences between the Old Testament religion and New Testament Christianity, was that the Old Testament religion was given to a specific people in the literal sense of a nation, whose cultural and ethnic identity was largely shaped by that religion, but Christianity was given to all peoples, establishing the Church which was a people only in a spiritual sense, and which was to include members from every tribe and nation.   The Old Testament contained elements that were universal.   It repeatedly declares the God of Israel to be the One, True and Living God, Who is the Creator of the entire world and Ruler of the entire world.   The part of the Mosaic Covenant that is called the Moral Law consists of prohibitions against acts that are mala in se (bad in themselves) either because they harm other people (murder, theft and adultery, for example) or because they fail to give God the honour due Him as the One, True and Living God, Creator and Ruler of the entire world (idolatry, for example, places the creations of man’s own hands, which have mouths, eyes, ears, noses, hands and feet but cannot speak, see, smell, handle or walk, in God’s place).   This is universal in the sense that the acts prohibited, being wrong in themselves, are wrong for everybody.   These elements are reintroduced, often in amplified form, under the New Covenant.    The part of the Old Covenant that is called the Ceremonial Law, however, the calendar of feasts and holy days, the dietary restrictions, and the entire Tabernacle/Temple system of sacrifice and worship was particular.  Its purpose was to shape Israel’s national identity so as to keep the nation holy – separate and distinct – from the other nations that surrounded them.   This purpose was subservient to that of the universal elements of the Old Covenant.   Israel was to be holy, in the sense of being separate and distinct from the nations around it, to help keep it from falling into the idolatry and immoral ways of those nations.    Note how this point underlies the rebukes from Isaiah and the Lord Jesus discussed at the beginning of this essay.   The Old Testament itself testified to the fact that it was not itself the ultimate answer to the problems of sin and idolatry.    It promised that one day God would establish a New Covenant in which all the nations of the world would unite with Israel in the worship of the One True and Living God.

 

Jesus Christ fulfilled that promise by establishing the New Covenant when He offered Himself up as the Final True Atoning Sacrifice on the Cross and rose from the grave as Triumphant Victor over all the spiritual foes of mankind – sin and the devil, death and hell.   When the Apostolic Church met in Jerusalem to decide the controversy over whether Gentile converts to Christianity had to become Jews (be circumcised and told to keep the Mosaic Law) in order to become Christians, they ruled in the negative.   They told the Gentile converts to abstain from idolatry and fornication, instructions taken from the aforementioned universal elements of the Old Covenant.   They also told them to abstain from meat that had been strangled or contained blood, instructions that look back to the Covenant which God made with all mankind through Noah in Genesis that predated the Mosaic Covenant and are thus universal in a slightly different sense.    

 

The ruling of the Apostolic Council did not make the controversy go away – St. Paul dealt with it again and again in his epistles, defending the Apostolic position and providing a theological foundation for it in terms of Christian unity (Eph. 2:11-22), liberty, (Gal. 4:1-5:3) and both (Col. 2:16-17).   That Christian liberty meant that Christians were not obligated to keep the Ceremonial Law is what is emphasized in the Pauline epistles.   That it also meant that they were free to do so – at least until they were prevented from doing so by unbelieving Jewish leaders – is evident by St. Paul’s own example in the book of Acts.   In his missionary journeys, he would go to the synagogues to proclaim the Gospel first.   When driven out of the synagogues he would preach to the Gentiles in the market, the Areopagus in Athens, or whatever place was available to him.   In Jerusalem, he like the other Apostles continued to go to the Temple until a mob was stirred up against him by unbelieving Jews from Asia Minor (Acts 20:27-30) leading to his arrest.

 

Christian liberty also means that the Christian Church, in which Jewish and Gentile Christian believers are united, is free as a collective body to make new, distinctly Christian, holy days and festivals.   Those against whom I have been arguing in this essay might dispute this on the grounds of what is called the “regulative principle of worship”, i.e., the idea that Christians are only to observe and practice what is explicitly enjoined upon them in Scripture.   Ironically, the chief theological work of the man who came up with this principle is entitled The Institutes of the Christian Religion.  (5)  It is a principle that would condemn Jesus Christ and His Apostles.   If you think otherwise, show me from the Old Testament where Israelites were commanded to meet and worship in synagogues. (6)

 

In the twentieth chapter of the book of Acts, St. Luke says that the disciples “came together to break bread” on the “first day of the week”, i.e., Sunday.    There is no prescriptive commandment to do this in the New Testament, only this descriptive account of the custom.   The reason for it is not explained, although it can be reasonably deduced.   St. Luke’s extended account of the Sunday service at Troas, in which St. Paul delivers an extremely long sermon, putting Eutychus to sleep and causing him to fall out of a window, would suggest that apart from the inclusion of the Eucharist, the service was modelled after a synagogue service.   Indeed, the portion of traditional Christian liturgical services that includes Scriptural readings, the singing of Psalms, and preaching/teaching is an adaptation of the synagogue model.   The Jewish synagogues met to worship on the Sabbath, which is the seventh day of the week, or Saturday (more precisely, Friday evening to Saturday evening).   There are both practical and theological reasons for the Church meeting on the following day instead.   The theological reason is that this is the day Jesus Christ rose from the dead – hence its having been dubbed “The Lord’s Day” (Rev. 1:10).   The practical reason is that St. Paul’s practice mentioned above, of going to the synagogues in the cities he visited to preach the Gospel until he was kicked out of them, necessitated a different day for the distinctly Christian assembly – the Church – to meet.   That the Church early adopted the practice of meeting on Sunday is also implied by St. Paul’s instruction to the Corinthian Church to take up a collection on that day (I Cor. 16:2).   Clearly the Church in the days of the book of Acts, when led by the Apostles themselves, like the majority of Christians over the two thousand years that followed, held to the “normative principle” – that Christians are free to observe and practice in their worship, whatever is not prohibited them in Scriptures, which principle is manifestly more consistent with the concept of Christian liberty than the “regulative principle”.

 

 (1)  Note also the prophet’s personal experience of this in the sixth chapter, verses 5-7.

(2)   “Corban”, the spelling in the English Bible, is the Latinized transliteration.   The Greek New Testament contains Κορβᾶν, which is, of course, the same Hebrew word spelled out in Greek letters.

(3)   The Pauline authorship of Hebrews is evident in the style of the epistle – note both the structure of the argument and the closing exhortation/salutation – and in the few details about the author given – he was in Italy and had been in bonds (13:24, 10:34, and was a companion of Timothy 13:23).   Hebrews is also the only epistle in the canonical New Testament to which St. Peter could have been alluding when he referred to a Scriptural letter written by St. Paul to the same people to whom he was writing (II Pet. 3:15-16)

(4)   It is interesting that the only one of the Evangelists to allude to such details from the Jewish tradition was the only Gentile of the four.

(5)   This has nothing to do with what I have been arguing in this essay, but in my opinion John Calvin’s most valuable writings are his Commentaries not his Institutes.

(6)   You will find no such commandment.   Synagogues – this is a Greek word that is similar in its basic, non-religious, meaning to that of the Greek word for Church – were likely established before the last book of the Old Testament was written.   Historians generally believe that they originated out of the necessity generated by the destruction of the First Temple at the time of the Babylonian Captivity and the reforms instituted in and following the return in the Ezra-Nehemiah period, but this is not recorded, let alone commanded by God, in the canonical Old Testament.   This is but one of many examples of practices in the tradition of Second Temple Judaism that had no Scriptural ordinance behind them that Jesus and His Apostles nevertheless kept – see the clause to which the fourth note above is a comment for another such example.

A Fatal Confusion

 

Faith, in Christian theology, is not the greatest of virtues – that is charity, or Christian love, but it is the most fundamental in the root meaning of fundamental, that is to say, foundational.   Faith is the foundation upon which the other Christian theological virtues of hope and charity stand.   (1) Indeed, it is the foundation upon which all other Christian experience must be built.   It is the appointed means whereby we receive the grace of God and no other step towards God can be taken apart from the first step of faith.  The Object of faith is the True and Living God.   The content of faith can be articulated in more general or more specific terms as the context of the discussion requires.   At its most specific the content of the Christian faith is the Gospel message, the Christian kerygma about God’s ultimate revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ.   At its most general it is what is asserted about God in the sixth verse of the eleventh chapter of Hebrews, that “He is and that He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him”.  

 

Whether articulated in its most general terms or its most specific, the faith Christianity calls for us to place in God is a confidence that presupposes His Goodness and His Omnipotence.   This has led directly to a long-standing dilemma that skeptics like to pose to Christian believers.  It is known as the problem of evil.   It is sometimes posed as a question, at other times it is worded as a challenging assertion, but however formulated it boils down to the idea that the presence of evil in a world created by and ruled by God is inconsistent with God’s being both Good and Omnipotent.   The challenge to the Christian apologist, therefore, is to answer the question of how evil can be present in a world created by and ruled by a Good and Omnipotent God.    This dilemma has been raised so often that there is even a special word for theological and philosophical answers to the dilemma – theodicy.

 

Christian orthodoxy does have an answer to this question.   The answer is a complex one, however, and we are living in an era that is impatient with complex answers.    For this reason, Christian apologists now offer a simple answer to the question – free will.    This is unfortunate in that this answer, while not wrong, is incomplete and requires the context of the full, complex answer, to make the most sense.  

 

The fuller answer begins with an observation about how evil is present in the world.   In this world there are things which exist in the fullest sense of the word – they exist in themselves, with essences of their own.    There are also things which exist, not in themselves, but as properties or qualities of things which exist in themselves.   Take redness for example.   It does not exist in itself, but as a property of apples, strawberries, wagons, etc.   Christian orthodoxy tells us that while evil is present in the world, it does not exist in either of these senses.   It has no essence of its own.  Nor does it exist as a created property of anything that does.  God did not create evil, either as a thing in itself, or as a property of anything else that He created.   Just as a bruise is a defect in the redness of an apple, so evil is present in the world as a defect in the goodness of moral creatures.  

 

If that defect is there, and it is, and God did not put it there, which He did not, the only explanation of its presence that is consistent with orthodoxy is that it is there due to the free will of moral creatures.   Free will, in this sense of the expression, means the ability to make moral choices.     Free will is itself good, rather than evil, because without it, no creature could be a moral creature who chooses rightly.    The ability to choose rightly, however, is also the ability to choose wrongly.   The good end of a created world populated by creatures that are morally good required that they be created with this ability, good itself, but which carries with it the potential for evil.

 

One problem with the short answer is the expression “free will” itself.   It must be carefully explained, as in the above theodicy, because it can be understood differently, and if it is so understood differently, this merely raises new dilemmas rather than resolving the old one.    Anyone who is familiar with the history of either theology or philosophy knows that “free will” is an expression that has never been used without controversy.   It should be noted, though, that many of those controversies do not directly affect what we have been discussing here.  Theological debates over free will, especially those that can be traced back to the dispute between St. Augustine and Pelagius, have often been about the degree to which the Fall has impaired the freedom of human moral agency.   Since this pertains to the state of things after evil entered into Creation it need not be brought into the discussion of how evil entered in the first place although it often is.

 

One particular dilemma that the free will theodicy raises when free will is not carefully explained is the one that appears in a common follow-up challenge that certain skeptics often pose in response.     “How can we say that God gave mankind free will”, such skeptics ask us, “when He threatens to punish certain choices as sin?”

 

Those who pose this dilemma confuse two different kind of freedom that pertain to our will and our choices.      When we speak of the freedom of our will in a moral context we can mean one of two things.   We could be speaking of our agency – that we have the power and ability when confronted with choices, to think rationally about them and make real choices that are genuinely our own, instead of pre-programmed, automatic, responses.   We could also, however, be speaking of our right to choose – that when confronted with certain types of choices, we own our own decisions and upon choosing will face only whatever consequences, positive or negative, necessarily follow from our choice by nature and not punitive consequences imposed upon us by an authority that is displeased with our choice.    When Christian apologists use free will in our answer to the problem of evil, it is freedom in the former sense of agency that is intended.   When skeptics respond by pointing to God’s punishment of sin as being inconsistent with free will, they use freedom in the latter sense of right.   While it is tempting to dismiss this as a dishonest bait-and-switch tactic, it may in many cases reflect genuine confusion with regards to these categories of freedom.   I have certainly encountered many Christian apologists who in their articulation of the free will theodicy have employed language that suggests that they are as confused about the matter as these skeptics.

 

Christianity has never taught that God gave mankind the second kind of freedom, freedom in the sense of right, in an absolute, unlimited, manner.   To say that He did would be the equivalent of saying that God abdicated His Sovereignty as Ruler over the world He created.    Indeed, the orthodox answer to the problem of evil dilemma is not complete without the assertion that however much evil may be present in the world, God as the Sovereign Omnipotent Ruler of all will ultimately judge and punish it.     What Christianity does teach is that God gave mankind the second kind of freedom subject only to the limits of His Own Sovereign Rule.    Where God has not forbidden something as a sin – and, contrary to what is often thought, these are few in number, largely common-sensical, and simple to understand – or placed upon us a duty to do something – these are even fewer - man is free to make his own choices in the second sense, that is to say, without divinely-imposed punitive consequences.    

 

Today, a different sort of controversy has arisen in which the arguments of one side confuse freedom as agency with freedom as right.    Whereas the skeptics alluded to above point to rules God has imposed in His Sovereign Authority limiting man’s freedom as right in order to counter an argument made about man’s freedom as agency, in this new controversy man’s freedom as agency is being used to deny that government tyranny is infringing upon man’s freedom as right.

 

Before looking at the specifics of this, let us note where government authority fits in to the picture in Christian orthodoxy. 

 

Human government, Christianity teaches, obtains its authority from God.   This, however, is an argument for limited government, not for autocratic government that passes whatever laws it likes.   If God has given the civil power a sword to punish evil, then it is authorized to wield that sword in the punishment of what God says is evil not whatever it wants to punish and is required, therefore, to respect the freedom that God has given to mankind.    Where the Modern Age went wrong was in regarding the Divine Right of Kings as the opposite of constitutional, limited, government, rather than its theological basis.   Modern man has substituted secular ideologies as that foundation and these, even liberalism with all of its social contracts, natural rights, and individualism, eventually degenerate into totalitarianism and tyranny.

 

Now let us look at the controversy of the day which has to do with forced vaccination.      As this summer ends and we move into fall governments have been introducing measures aimed at coercing and compelling people who have not yet been fully vaccinated for the bat flu to get vaccinated.   These measures include mandates and vaccine passports.   The former are decrees that say that everyone working in a particular sector must either be fully vaccinated by a certain date or submit to frequent testing.   Governments have been imposing these mandates on their own employees and in some cases on private employers and have been encouraging other private employers to impose such mandates on their own companies.   Vaccine passports are certificates or smartphone codes that governments are requiring that people show to prove that they have been vaccinated to be able to travel by air or train or to gain access to restaurants, museums, movie theatres, and many other places declared by the government to be “non-essential”.    These mandates and passports are a form of coercive force.   Through them, the government is telling people that they must either agree to be vaccinated or be barred from full participation in society.    Governments, and others who support these measures, respond to the objection that they are violating people’s right to choose whether or not some foreign substance is injected into their body by saying “it’s their choice, but there will be consequences if they choose not be vaccinated”.

 

The consequences referred to are not the natural consequences, whatever these may be, positive or negative, of the choice to reject a vaccine, but punitive consequences imposed by the state.    Since governments are essentially holding people’s jobs, livelihoods, and most basic freedoms hostage until they agree to be vaccinated, those who maintain that this is not a violation of the freedom to accept or reject medical treatment would seem to be saying that unless the government actually removes a person’s agency, by, for example, strapping someone to a table and sticking a needle into him, it has not violated his right to choose.  This obviously confuses freedom as agency with freedom as right and in a way that strips the latter of any real meaning.

 

What makes this even worse is that the freedom/right that is at stake in this controversy, each person’s ownership of the ultimate choice over whether or not a medical treatment or procedure is administered to his body, is not one that we have traditionally enjoyed merely by default due to the absence of law limiting it.   Rather it is a right that has been positively stated and specifically acknowledged, and enshrined both in constitutional law and international agreement.   If government is allowed to pretend that it has not violated this well-recognized right because its coercion has fallen short of eliminating agency altogether then is no other right or freedom the trampling over of which in pursuit of its ends it could not or would not similarly excuse.  This is tyranny, plain and simple.

 

Whether in theology and philosophy or in politics, the distinction between the different categories of freedom that apply to the human will is an important one that should be recognized and respected.   Agency should never be confused with right, or vice versa.

 

(1)   Hope and charity, as Christian virtues, have different meanings from those of their more conventional uses.   In the case of hope, the meanings are almost the exact opposite of each other.   Hope, in the conventional sense, is an uncertain but desired anticipation, but in the Christian theological sense, is a confident, assured, expectation.   It is in their theological senses, of course, that I mean when I say that hope and charity are built on the foundation of faith.

 

                                                                                                                                                                                           

Christ Has Died, Christ is Risen, Christ Will Come Again!

This past Sunday was the most important holy festival in the Christian calendar.   Set by the Council of Nicaea to fall on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the spring equinox, (1) it celebrates the Resurrection of Our Lord and Saviour and is variously called Pascha (the Christian Passover), Easter and Resurrection Sunday.    The previous week was Holy Week, which began with Palm Sunday, the commemoration of Jesus’ formal triumphant entry into Jerusalem on a donkey in fulfilment of prophecy, and which ended with the Great Paschal Triduum.   On the evening of Maundy Thursday we remembered the Last Supper, in which the Lord washed His disciples’ feet, instituted the Sacrament of the Eucharist, and was betrayed by Judas leading directly to the event remembered on Good Friday, His Crucifixion at the hands of ungodly men in which He bore the sins of the world for which offered up His own shed blood and death as Atonement.    Good Friday was followed by Holy Saturday, the day of the Easter Vigil in memory of the period of His body’s entombment and His descent as Conqueror into the underworld where He smashed the gates of Hell to smithereens.  The Vigil, the Triduum, and all of Holy Week found their culmination in Easter itself and the new dawn of the Resurrection.

 

Did your church choose to mark this Easter by meeting at midnight, with the church draped in black and its air thick with sulfurous incense, and chanting obscenities within an inverted pentagram while raping and killing a naked virgin on an altar before a statue of Baphomet?

 

I very much suspect that for most of you – I would hope for all of you – that the answer is “no”.   Nevertheless, I ask this offensive question in order to make a point.

 

If your church turned people away from the celebration of the Resurrection, limited those who it permitted to attend its Easter services, told those that did come that they had to cover their faces, that they could not sing Alleluia in praise of the Risen One, at least without wearing a mask, forbade hugs and handshakes and any other form of normal human contact, and told the majority of its parishioners that they would have to watch the few allowed to meet on the internet and  pretend that they were participating by following along at home, this was no less odious a blasphemous mockery than the kind of despicable rite described above.

 

Churches that have enacted these so-called “safety protocols” have done so at the behest of public health officials.   In other words they have deemed, contrary to the Apostles, it better to obey man than to obey God.    They have chosen to walk not by faith but by fear – fear of the very enemy that Christ taught His disciples not to fear.

 

Of the enemies that assail mankind, body and soul, the last that shall be destroyed, St. Paul tells us, is death.   While it is the last enemy to be destroyed it is the also the first to have been defeated.   The chapter in which St. Paul declares death to be the last enemy to be destroyed is the fifteenth of his first epistle to the Corinthians, a chapter devoted to the connection between Christ’s defeat of death in His Own Resurrection and the final destruction of death in the Final Resurrection.   The Christian believer is promised repeatedly throughout the Scriptures that he will share in the resurrection life of His Saviour, both in the sense of spiritual regeneration in this life and in the sense of bodily resurrection on the Last Day.   The Christian’s hope of his own future resurrection is built upon his faith in Christ and His historical Resurrection.

 

Since Easter is the celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, His historical triumph over death, which we are to trust in as our own triumph over death and the foundation of our hope of future resurrection, to celebrate Easter while cowering behind a facemask is to deny by our actions the faith we profess with our lips and to make a grotesque mockery of it.    These masks are symbols of irrational fear generated by media hype over a new virus/respiratory disease and of how that fear has caused us to give medical doctors and public health officials the kind of trust and obedience which we owe to God alone.   Giving these medical doctors and public health officials our trust and obedience is tantamount to placing our faith in the spirit that motivates and energizes them.   Since they have declared commerce, including commerce in narcotics and liquor but excluding small, locally-owned, family retailers and restaurants, to be essential, while forbidding family gatherings and worship services for the larger part of a year as non-essential, and have been holding  our constitutional rights and freedoms and the resumption of normal, human, social existence hostage in order to blackmail us all into allowing them to inject us with an experimental new form of gene therapy developed from research using the cells of butchered babies, it is fairly obvious who that spirit is don’t you think?

 

The Christ Who rose from the grave on the first Easter ascended to the right hand of His Father.   One day He will return.   When He came the first time, He did so in humility, to be our Saviour.   The second time He will come in glory “to judge both the quick and the dead”.   On that day, when the blood of His enemies flows as high as the horses’ bridles, what can those who are now forbidding participation in His pubic worship, fellowship in His Church, and denying access to His Sacraments to all but those who register in advance and agree to cover their faces in fear, expect to receive from Him?    Shall they be welcomed to partake of the Wedding Supper of the Paschal Lamb?   Or shall they be forced to drink from the cup filled with the vintage of the winepress of God’s wrath?

 

Christ is Risen!

Happy Easter!

 

 (1)   The Resurrection occurred on the Sunday after the Jewish Passover.   The Jewish Passover fell on the Ides (the full moon at the middle of a lunar month) of Nisan, also called Aviv, the spring month in the Jewish calendar.   Hence the method of calculating its anniversary.

 

 

Advent

It is Advent Sunday, the first day in the liturgical calendar for Western Christians, and the first of the four Sundays of Advent, the period that begins now and ends with the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord and Saviour on Christmas.   It is, like the longer period of Lent that leads up to Easter or Pascha, the Christian Passover celebrating our Lord's Glorious Resurrection, a period for penitence and sober reflection.   I should say, that is what the period of Advent traditionally has been in the Church.   There is now a secular Christmas which falls on the same day as the celebration of the birth of Christ, and with it a secular Advent that is more-or-less the opposite of what Advent is all about in the Church.   Secular Advent comes in a long and a short version.   The short version is that which is evident in the secular version of Advent calendars.   An Advent calendar is the kind where you count down the days to Christmas by opening a door, eating a candy, or some such thing.   Religious Advent calendars begin with Advent Sunday which may, as this year, fall in November (the 27th is the earliest it can fall).   Secular Advent calendars typically begin on December 1st.   That is the short version of secular Advent.   The long version starts when the Christmas decorations go up.   This was remarkably early this year.   I  saw a house in Winnipeg's West End - that is the name of the section of town, not an accurate description of its location - lit up as if they were in competition with Clark Griswold, back in September.

Secular Advent, as stated above, is typically the opposite in tone and spirit to what Advent is supposed to be in the Church.   It is more of an extended version of secular Christmas, with parties and gift-giving and the like, and thus resembles Carnival, the pre-Lent festive season for those of the Roman Communion that corresponds to the more reserved Anglican Shrovetide, more than it does Lent itself.   That is what has been the norm for decades.   It does not look like it will be the case this year.   Grinches all around the world have seized the opportunity of the mass hysteria generated by media hype about the Wuhan bat flu to steal both the secular and the Christian Christmas, taking Advent to boot.   Here in the Dominion of Canada the chief Grinch has been Captain Airhead, who managed to retain his position as Her Majesty's First Minister last year despite being hit by at least three scandals any one of which would have taken down anybody who did not belong to the Canadian equivalent of the Kennedy family, but the provincial premiers, especially our own premier in Manitoba, Brian Pallister,  who cannot seem to make up his mind as to whether he is a rectal orifice or a squirt bottle used to clean the same, has come close to surpassing Captain Airhead in his Grinchiness.   He shut down the small businesses that depend upon the Christmas shopping rush to balance their books for at least a month in that very period, then, when they complained that they were being treated unfairly, instead of doing something that would actually help, ordered the larger stores to seal off everything except food and a few other "essentials", thus giving all the  business in the province for other items to Amazon.   He ordered the Churches to close and seems determined to make those Churches that have insisted upon their constitutionally guaranteed freedom of worship in defiance of his orders into scapegoats for the failure of his restrictions to produce the desired effect of lower case numbers.   I shall, Deus Vult, be addressing that scapegoating at greater length later this week , but note that this unconstitutional and totalitarian ban on in-person Church services includes even drive-in services where everyone remains in their own car in the parking lot and which cannot possibly contribute to the spread of this or any other disease.    He even had the nerve to lecture Lower Canada's premier François Legault over the latter's less Grinchy policy with regards to family gatherings over Christmas.   Sadly, Mr. Legault's response was merely to say that Mr. Pallister did not seem to be aware of the precautions surrounding the Christmas exception in his province, rather than the "va te faire foutre" that the situation seemed to call for.   Mr. Pallister is not content with trying to steal Christmas from Manitobans, he wants to steal it from other Canadians too.

Mr. Pallister, whose inability to think outside the lockdown box when it comes to the bat flu evinces his lack of understanding the meaning or perhaps even of having read Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Read Death, shows by his efforts to steal Christmas that he  has failed to grasp the lesson of Dr. Seuss's story about the Grinch as well.   In the end, despite all the Grinch's efforts, Christmas came "it came just the same".   It is perhaps too much to hope that Mr. Pallister's small heart will grow three sizes when this very thing happens this year.  Denied his annual vacation in Costa Rica because of bat flu travel restrictions he seems determined to make everybody as miserable as he is.   Those who do not understand the purpose of penitential seasons like Advent and Lent might conclude from this that he has restored the original spirit of the period.

They would be wrong, of course, because gloom and misery do not add up to penitence.   Indeed, they are even more a part of despair than they are a part of penitence or repentance.   Despair, you might recall, was in medieval moral theology, the mortal sin opposite to the theological virtue of hope and amounted to the repudiation of the latter.   In its most extreme form it was the belief that one had sinned beyond the capacity of God's grace and mercy and expressed itself in suicide.   The mental anguish that tormented the eighteenth century poet and Olney hymn writer William Cowper in the latter years of his life, from which he received release only shortly before he was allowed to die in the peace of assurance of God's forgiveness, was pretty much the textbook example.   In is a recurring subject throughout Shakespeare, the ending of Romeo and Juliet being the most obvious example although it is expressed best in all that King Lear says after he enters, in the third and last scene of Act V, carrying the dead body of Cordelia, the only one of his daughters, as he realized too late, who had been truly loving, devoted, and loyal.   Despair is so serious a sin because it precludes repentance.   Penitence or repentance, always includes hope.

True penitence or repentance involves a sober reflection upon one's own mortality and that which is ultimately the cause of the dread which the inevitability of one's own death inspires, one's sin.    "It is appointed unto man once to die", St. Paul wrote to the Hebrews, "but after this the judgement."   The Greek word translated repentance is often given the definition "change of mind".   It is, in fact, formed by adding a preposition which when used in compounds has the meaning "again" to a word referring to thought.    The image is of looking upon one's thoughts, words, and deeds of the past and recognizing how far short of God's will, whether expressed in the Ten Commandments or the Greatest and Second Greatest Commandments to which our Lord pointed, we have fallen.   The basic Greek word for sin in the New Testament, the same used by Aristotle in his works of literary/theatrical criticism/theory to denote the "fatal flaw" of a tragic hero, means literally to miss the mark, to fall short of the bull's eye.   This sort of reflection falls short of being repentance, however, and leads to despair, if it is not joined to faith and hope.

This is why seasons of penitence are always seasons which look forward to a faith and hope inspiring event.   Lent looks forward to the remembrance of the events whereby sin and death were defeated, the Crucifixion, in which Our Saviour allowed Himself to be unjustly executed by wicked men, that He might offer Himself up as the One true sacrifice that takes away the sins of the world, and the Resurrection in which His triumph over sin, death, and the very gates of hell, was declared to the world.   Advent looks forward to His birth, and what His birth signifies, the Incarnation, God coming down to earth and becoming man that He might lift man up to God.     Faith rests upon God's revelation of Himself and His love and saving mercy to the world in these events and it is faith which gives birth to hope, which is but faith looking forward, and charity or Christian love, which is but faith in action.   Repentance prepares our hearts to receive God's saving revelation of Himself in faith.

So, denied the shopping, partying, and revelry of secular Advent this year by Satan-possessed politicians and doctors determined to preserve our mere existence by forbidding us to truly live our lives, let us reflect in the true spirit of the season, on our sinfulness and mortality, repent, and embrace in faith and hope the "dawn of redeeming grace", to borrow Dr. Luther's words, in the events remembered at Christmas.   If we do so, Christmas will come just the same despite the efforts of politicians and physicians to prevent it.

Grace and Sacrament

In the Reformation of the sixteenth century, one of the key theological issues over which the Reformers and the papal hierarchy in Rome contended, was the doctrine of justification, God’s declaration of a man to be righteous in His eyes. The Roman Catholic Church and the Reformers agreed that justification was by grace on God’s part. Where they disagreed was over how man receives the grace of God. The Reformers insisted that man received the grace of God and was justified thereby through faith alone. At the Council of Trent, the Roman Catholic Church declared this view to be anathema and said that justification was by faith and works of love.

I believe that the Roman Catholic Church made a terrible mistake in pronouncing this anathema at Trent and that in doing so they failed to uphold the doctrine of the Apostles, as recorded in the New Testament, explained by the Church Fathers, and traditionally held by the Church. In condemning the doctrine of justification by faith alone they pointed out that the New Testament does not qualify the word faith with the word alone in speaking of justification except to express disagreement in James 2:24. As true as this observation is it avoids the fact that when the Reformers spoke of “faith alone”, alone was shorthand for “and not by works.” It excludes works as a means along with faith of receiving grace. This is precisely what St. Paul the Apostle taught. It is the major theme of his epistles to the Romans and Galatians and is mentioned in one way or another in most of his other epistles. In Romans 4, where St. Paul answers James by asserting that the type of justification he wrote about, i.e., by works, was something to boast about and therefore not “before God” (v. 2) he declares that by faith God justifies the person who “worketh not” (v. 5), an extremely strong wording of this doctrine that approaches the border of antinomianism. The Roman Catholic argument that St. Paul was talking about “works of the law” rather than “works of love” defeats the very distinction it tries to make, because the difference between works of the law and works of love is precisely that the former are done with the motivation of earning justification from God for oneself whereas the latter are done with the motivation of pleasing the God one loves rather than obtaining something for oneself. Such works are impossible if they are also necessary alongside faith for receiving the grace of justification.

The error of Trent is one of confusing ends with means or, to use an analogy that was once common, putting the cart before the horse. Means are the methods and tools we utilize to achieve ends which in turn are the goals, goods, and purposes we seek to accomplish. Works are not the means whereby we either achieve or receive the end of our justification and salvation. Rather, salvation which includes justification, is the means whereby God takes us from our fallen, broken condition, and makes us into a new creation which responds to Him with works of love. To repeat, works are not our means for achieving the end of our salvation, rather our works are the end for which salvation is God’s means. St. Paul could not have stated this more clearly than he did in Ephesians 2:8-10.

This understanding is fundamental to the very idea of salvation by grace. For to say that salvation is by grace is to say that salvation is a gift, something that God bestows upon us freely rather than in exchange for something. Something that is a freely given gift can only be received, rather than worked for, because if it is worked for it is a reward or wage rather than a gift, a point St. Paul spells out for us in Romans 4. The understanding that salvation is the means and our works the ends is also vital to the realization that salvation entails more than a divine “fire insurance” policy, that it is a divine rescue mission in which we are lifted out of our fallen estate in which the image of God is broken and marred by sin and brought into a place where restored, we can once again reflect His goodness and grace, as we were created to do.

Rome was clearly in serious error on this point, although it needs to be said that their error was well-intentioned. They wished to guard against the danger of license, i.e., the idea that because one is saved by grace one can therefore feel free to sin without consequence. As good as that intention was it is no solution to the error rebuked by St. Paul in Romans 6 to fall into the error that the entire epistle argues against.

If Rome, to prevent against license, erred in adding works to faith as the means of receiving grace and salvation when in fact salvation is the means to the end of works, a tendency developed on the Protestant side of the Reformation divide to err by limiting the channels by which God’s grace comes to us that we might receive it by faith. I do not mean that they erred in saying that Jesus Christ is the only Saviour and that salvation is only found in Him. On this truth, Rome and the Reformers were in agreement. Jesus is Himself our salvation, and everything from His Incarnation through His Miraculous Conception by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, through His Life and Teachings, Passion, Death, Burial, Descent into Hell, and Resurrection to His Ascension back into Heaven to sit at the right hand of the Father, is God’s loving, gracious, and merciful, gift of salvation to us. The channels of grace to which I refer are the means by which God’s gift to us in Jesus is brought to us that we may respond in faith and receive it..

I began my Christian walk with an evangelical conversion experience when I was fifteen. I began to attend and was baptized in a church in which the Word, written and spoken, was stressed as the channel by which God’s salvation in Christ comes to us that we might receive it by faith. This was how I had been brought to my conversion, having read the Gospel message about how God had given us His Son to suffer and die for our sins and then raised Him from the dead in Christian literature and heard it preached on Christian radio. Furthermore, this teaching is very much in accordance with St. Paul’s statement that “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God” (Rom. 10:17).

St. Paul makes it clear in the context in which he says this that the role of the Word is essential. The Apostle does not say, however, that there are no other channels that supplement the spoken or written Word. That there were, in fact, other such channels was suggested to me early in my Christian walk by a story in one of L. M. Montgomery’s Chronicles of Avonlea anthologies, about a fallen woman on her deathbed who was unable to grasp the concept of God as a loving Father, freely forgiving her of her sins in Christ, no matter how the minister tried to explain it to her, until his nephew arrived and expressed the message in a language she could understand, that of the violin. A year or so after reading that story I read Johnny Cash’s autobiography Man in Black, in which he testified to more or less the same thing, that the Gospel message which spoke to his brother through preaching, had to come to him through the vessel of Gospel music. Perhaps the prominence of music in the services of virtually all Christian worship traditions also testifies to this.

The idea that the spoken or written Word is the sole means whereby Christ is brought to us that we might believe in Him is in conflict with St. John’s declaration in the first chapter of his Gospel that “the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us” (Jn. 1:14). The Word of which the Apostle speaks is Jesus Himself, the Living Word of God. If the Living Word of God had to put on flesh and live amongst men as a Man in order to reveal His Father to us is it reasonable to expect the written Word, the testimony of His disciples to Who He was and what He did, to bring Him to us without also being “made flesh” in a sense? For this is precisely what the church has traditionally said its mysteries or sacraments do.

St. Augustine of Hippo said that a sacrament is formed by the combination of the Word with a physical element so that the physical element, the water of baptism and the bread and wine of Holy Communion becomes a vessel in which the Word and the grace it contains is conveyed. The sacraments are administered, of course, by the church which was established by Christ through His Apostles and said by St. Paul to be the body of Christ. In his first epistle to the Corinthians St. Paul elaborates on that concept, explaining that the church is an organic collective whole, the members of which, with their distinct gifts and offices, are like unto the organs in the body with Christ Himself as the head. Earlier in the same epistle, he says “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” (1 Cor. 3:16) Note that the King James Version just quoted uses distinct forms for the singular and plural second person pronouns as does the original Greek, and that the plural is used here. As temple of God is in the singular, the second person plural is a collective plural and so the verse expresses, with a different metaphor, the same basic concept that the church is a collective whole, collectively indwelt by the Spirit of God sent upon the church at Pentecost. The clear implication of all of this is that the church was established as a continuation of what began in the Incarnation. In Jesus Christ, the Living Word of God was made flesh and after He ascended back into heaven, He sent His Spirit to indwell the church that it might continue His ministry as His physical presence here on earth, and in the mysteries or sacraments of the church the written Word of God is likewise “made flesh” so as to be brought to the believer in a tangible way, that supplements and complements the mere reading, speaking and preaching of the Word.

The versions of Protestantism that rejected this understanding – and not all did, of course – and made the reading and preaching of the Word the sole channel by which God’s gift of grace to us in Christ is to be brought to us to be believed, had good intentions in doing so, just as Rome had good intentions in declaring its anathema on sola fide. These Protestants wished to guard against the danger of misplaced faith, of putting one’s trust in the church and its sacraments rather than in God and the Saviour He has given us in His love, mercy, and grace. This is a real danger and when a person falls into this error, making the church and its sacraments into steps one must climb to approach Christ, they can actually become a wall that keeps him from Christ. This danger must be warned against like that of license which Rome sought to avoid, but just as it is a mistake to stick the cart of works before the horse of salvation, confusing means with ends, so it is a mistake to throw the baby of Incarnational and sacramental theology, out with the bathwater.

If Rome, by declaring anathema the Pauline doctrine that grace is received by faith and not by works and that works are the end to which salvation is the means and not the other way around, brought its own curse down upon its own head, advanced Protestantism impoverished itself, by making preaching and reading the Word the sole channel of grace. For grace is not something we need once and receive once but something in which we are in constant need of. Faith is not, as much of North American evangelicalism unfortunately seems to think, a single act or decision, but a heartfelt response of confidence and trust in God and His grace as given to us in our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ that is ongoing and continual. Faith is formed in us by the very grace it receives, and since faith can weaken and falter, it is in constant need of being replenished and strengthened. This, of course, means that the believer needs to continually read and hear the Word, which is why the liturgy of the Word is an important part of the traditional worship of the church but how much more is the believer’s faith strengthened and replenished when the ministry of the Word is supplemented and complemented by the sacraments in which the church “makes the Word” flesh?

All of this has been on my mind recently as I prepared for and received confirmation by our bishop, in the orthodox Anglican church I have been attending for several years now. This was not a repudiation for me, of the church in which I began my Christian walk for the ministry of which I will always be grateful, but an embracing of the multiple ways in which God’s grace in Christ has been made available to the believer in the wider tradition of Christianity.

Confirmation, the ancient rite in which the bishop lays his hands on the believer’s head and prays over him for strengthening by the Holy Spirit as the believer reaffirms his baptismal vows of repentance and faith, is not considered by the Anglican Church to be a sacrament in the same sense as baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The Anglican Church differs from the Greek and Latin Churches in this for it, rightly I believe, reserves the term sacrament in its strictest sense for the rites actually ordained by Christ Himself. It recognizes a sacramental quality to the rite, however, and if as we have been discussing, the purpose of a sacrament is to make the written Word flesh so that the believer can receive it in ways other than by hearing and reading, then all aspects of the life of the church have a sacramental quality in one way or another to them. The calendar of the Christian year makes the Gospel story flesh, by re-enacting and celebrating Christ’s life and ministry, from the anticipation of His coming in Advent to His reign as Christ the King. The Gospel is made flesh in the images and decorations of the church, and, as L. M. Montgomery’s fictional story and Johnny Cash’s actual testimony referred to earlier tell us, music can tell the story in a language which can reach those who could not otherwise understand it.

This points to the truth upon which I will conclude these reflections. Just as salvation, in its fullest sense, is much more than “fire insurance” but is the rescuing of people from the brokenness of sin and restoring them to a harmonious relationship with God out of which works of Christian love grow as fruit so grace, in its fullest sense, embraces more than the giving of salvation but every other gift that God gives us as well, from the gifts of what the Calvinist divines call “Common Grace”, such as the rain which Christ said His Father sends upon righteous and wicked alike, to the superabundant blessings of God for the believer (Rom. 8:32). “The heavens declare the glory of God”, the Psalmist says and according to St. Paul the invisible things of God have been clearly seen from creation, “being understood by the things that are made” (Rom. 1:20). There is a very real sense in which all of the world and life itself is a sacrament, making flesh the Word of God, and conveying the grace therein to all who will receive it by faith.