Equality and Justice

I recently wrote, as I have done in the past, that equality is an idol that Modern man has substituted for the good that the ancients called justice.  To this it should be added that equality is fundamentally an intellectual shortcut that reveals the laziness of the Modern mind by contrast with the rigour of the ancient.  Justice requires that we consider each person with whom we come into contact and behave towards him as he deserves or, if mercy and benevolence are called for, better.  It is far easier to apply a cookie cutter, one size fits all, standard to everyone and this is the temptation of equality.

 

It never ceases to amaze me how many of those who have no problem recognizing as evil most if not all of the evils spawned by the worship of equality nevertheless bow their knee to the idol itself.

 

One person I know is opposed to abortion, to the agenda of the alphabet soup of alternative gender and sexuality, and to all sorts of other similar things that deserve opposing, for he is an evangelical and whether or not he can identify the Scriptures condemning these evils or articulate the ethical or moral theological argument against them, he is against what evangelicalism is against. 

 

The demand for legal, easily-accessible, and taxypayer-funded abortion, however, arose because certain people thought that their whackadoodle goal of imposing the Procrustean bed of equality on the sexes took precedence over the lives of unborn human beings.  Men and women are not equal and cannot truly be made equal but even the pretense of equality cannot be maintained without neutralizing the huge difference between the sexes in terms of the burden reproduction imposes on each.

 

This same sexual egalitarianism spawned the alphabet soup agenda.  If men and women must be thought of as equal then they must be thought of as being the same for equality means sameness.  If men and women are equal and therefore the same, then why should men not choose men rather than women for their mates or women choose women rather than men?  Or for that matter, if men and women are equal and therefore the same, why can’t a man be a woman or a woman a man?

 

None of these imbecilic ideas could have gained the slightest bit of traction had Modern minds not first been duped into worshipping the idol of equality.

 

Then there is all the evil that has been done in an attempt to achieve economic equality.  Marxists – the bad ones, the followers of Karl rather than Groucho – believed that human unhappiness was caused, not by human sin as it is in reality, but by inequality which itself was caused by property which divided people into unequal classes of “haves” and “have nots” perpetually seeking to oppress and overthrow the other.  Eventually, they maintained, this would give way to a collectivist workers’ paradise in which everything is collectively owned, all are equal, each contributes to his ability and receives in accordance to his need, and everyone is happy.  In an attempt to put this hogwash into practice, totalitarian terror states which murdered 100 000 000 people were established throughout a third of the world in the last century.

 

There are those who would acknowledge all of this but maintain that there are good forms of equality as well as all these bad ones.  These all can be explained, however, and better, without having recourse to the concept of equality.  Take the idea of “equality under the law.”  All the merit in this concept is better expressed as “the law is the same for everybody under it” than as “everyone is the same in the eyes of the law.”  This is because the real point here is the unity of the law and not the sameness of those under it.

Then there is the idea of equality in the Church.  Some get this idea out of St. Paul’s words in Gal. 3:25-28.  The Apostle doesn’t say that all are equal in Christ, he says that all are one in Christ.  His instructions in other epistles on certain matters would be rather difficult to square with this passage if equality is what was intended here.

 

In “Democracy and Equality” I answered the claim that we are equal in “worth” or “value” by observing that these terms, which denote what one can get for a commodity in the market, are rarely applied to human beings in the Bible and never for the purpose of saying that we are all equal in value.  “Dignity” would be a better word than either “worth” or “value”, because it cannot commodify human beings when applied to them.  Rather than thinking of it as something in which we are all equal, however, it would be better to say that there is a kind of base level dignity attached to being human to which individuals add or from which they subtract by their personal merits and demerits.

 

Equality is a concept that is useless at best, dangerous and evil at worst.  It is time to ditch it and return to the good the ancients called justice.  After all “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (Mic. 6:8)

Ordinary Authority, the Apostolic Priesthood, Orthodox Anglicanism and Women’s Ordination

 

The incident of a couple of weeks ago in which Fr. Calvin Robinson, having been invited to address the Mere Anglicanism conference hosted by an ACNA parish in the United States on the subject of how critical theory is contrary to the Gospel and was disinvited from the final panel because in his talk he highlighted feminism’s role in the development of Cultural Marxism and criticized women’s ordination, is still generating much discussion.   Fr. Robinson, if you are unfamiliar with him, is an outspoken conservative Christian commentator from the United Kingdom.   He was denied ordination in the Church of England a few years ago, for his conservative views, but was ordained a deacon in the Free Church of England (the British counterpart to the American Reformed Episcopal Church, it separated from the Church of England in the nineteenth century in protest over the Oxford Movement) then later a priest in the Nordic Catholic Church (a group that left the Lutheran Church of Norway to join the Old Catholics, i.e., the formerly Roman Catholic Churches that rejected Vatican I).   He also had a show on GB News until they dropped him last year in a spasm of political correctness.   The ACNA is the Anglican Church in North America which was founded about fifteen years ago by parishes that separated from the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Anglican Church of Canada (up here the parishes associated with the ACNA go by the name Anglican Network in Canada, ANiC) over the increasing influence of the alphabet soup lobby in the mainline bodies (as seen in same-sex blessings/marriages).   It is recognized by and in full communion with the orthodox provinces of the Anglican Communion (the Global South provinces) although not with the Church of England, the Anglican Church of Canada or the Episcopal Church, the three most apostate Churches within the Anglican Communion.   Parts of the ACNA practice women’s ordination, other parts do not.   The aforementioned Reformed Episcopal Church, for example, which joined the ACNA when it was formed although it had already been separated from the Episcopal Church for over a century, does not.   This the REC has in common with other Anglican jurisdictions that left the Episcopal Church over its apostasy prior to the alphabet soup crisis, such as those which left when James Parker Dees declared the Episcopal Church apostate in 1963 over liberalism as manifested in her refusal to discipline Bishop Pike when he abandoned the faith entirely (the low church Anglican Orthodox Church and the high church Orthodox Anglican Church, originally a single communion) and, rather obviously, those who signed the St. Louis Affirmation of 1977 which declared the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada to have apostatized from Christ’s One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church by introducing women’s ordination (called the Continuing Anglican Churches or the Anglican Continuum in the stricter sense, the broader sense of these terms also includes the REC, AOC, OAC, and other smaller groups that left prior to St. Louis, these were intended to be a single body by the Concerned Churchman of St. Louis who, interestingly enough, called the body they so envisioned the Anglican Church in North America).  (1)  The ACNA calls its policy of allowing different dioceses and parishes to have different viewpoints and practices on the matter of women’s ordination by the expression “dual integrities”.      

 

I don’t have much to add to the discussion of the incident itself.   I rather wish to answer an argument that Dr. Bruce Atkinson has posted in several places.   One of those places is the comments section on Dr. David W. Virtue’s article on the Robinson/Mere Anglicanism affair and it is this version, should there be any differences between this and the versions he has posted elsewhere, to which I shall be responding.    Dr. Atkinson is a psychologist and a founding member of the ACNA.

 

His first section under the heading “On WO” reads:

 

1) The New Testament does not discuss the issue of the sacramental ordination of clergy at all, neither male nor female. What became the tradition of clericalism (a ruling and elite priesthood order) only developed after the Apostles had passed. The closest the NT gets to supporting this is where Paul mentions roles of overseer, elder, and deacon (servant) and a few times he or elders prayed and laid hands on disciples for specific tasks. Hardly the same as what later became the sacrament of ordination. And Jesus was against such a ruling privileged priesthood as evidenced in Mark 10:42-44 and Matthew 23:5-12, and as also evidenced by Peter’s view of the priesthood as being of ALL believers (1 Peter 2:4-5, 9).

 

As I have pointed out many times in the past a case against a distinct priesthood within the Church cannot be made from St. Peter’s remarks about the universal priesthood of all believers.   This is because there was a universal priesthood under both Covenants.   In the book of Exodus, the Israelites, having been led by Moses out of Egypt, arrived at the wilderness of Sinai in the nineteenth chapter.   At the beginning of this chapter, the LORD, speaking to Moses out of the mountain, tells him to tell the Israelites “And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation.” (v 6).   This clearly did not preclude the establishment of a more specific priesthood, the Levitical priesthood, within national Israel.   St. Peter, by joining the expressions “royal priesthood” and “holy nation” in 1 Peter 2:9 alludes back to this Old Testament passage.   Since the original did not preclude a more specific priesthood, neither can the New Testament allusion.   Especially since St. Paul speaks of his ministerial work in terms of just such a priesthood.   In Romans 15:16 he writes:

 

That I should be the minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, ministering the gospel of God, that the offering up of the Gentiles might be acceptable, being sanctified by the Holy Ghost.

 

The word “ministering” that is placed in bold in the above quotation is in St. Paul’s Greek “ἱερουργοῦντα” (hierourgounta).  This is the present, active, participle of ἱερουργέω (hierourgeo) which means “to officiate as a priest”, “to perform sacred rites”, “to sacrifice”.   It is formed by combining the basic Greek word for “priest” (St. Peter’s word for “priesthood” in 1 Pet. 2:9 is ἱεράτευμα, hierateuma) with the basic Greek word for “work”.   Indeed, the word λειτουργὸν (leitourgon) that is behind the noun “minister” earlier in the verse has connotations of this as well since the primary meaning of the word, “public servant” in the civic sense, clearly does not apply here.

 

That this sort of language is not more widely used of the Apostolic ministry in the New Testament is easily explainable.   The Old Testament priesthood was still functioning at the time.   The Book of Acts brings the history of the Church down to a few years prior to the destruction of the Temple.   SS Peter and Paul were both martyred prior to that event.   Most of the New Testament was written prior to that event.   To more promiscuously refer to the ministry of the Church as a priesthood would have invited confusion at that time.   That this did not prevent St. Paul from referring to it as such in this verse is explainable by a) the fact that his ministry was to the Gentiles as stated in this very verse and so unlikely to be confused with the priesthood of national Israel, and by b) the fact that this verse comes towards the end of an epistle in which it is preceded by an extended discussion of the differences between the two Covenants.

 

The very nature of the rite that the Lord commissioned the Apostolic ministry to perform in the Church necessitates that it be thought of as a priesthood.   There were three types of sacrifices (in terms of what was to be offered) the Levitical priesthood was commissioned to offer in the Old Testament.   There was the offering of animals, who were killed and their blood sprinkled, which was involved in any sacrifice having to do with sin and guilt.   These were a type of the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ and were forever fulfilled in Christ’s Sacrifice.   Then there were the offerings of grain/flour/cakes (meat/meal/grain offerings) and of wine (libations).   These three elements are also featured prominently in the Passover meal.   A covenant in the Old Testament would always be sealed by a sacrifice and concluded by both parties to the covenant eating the sacrifice together as a shared meal.   Jesus Christ offered Himself as the Sacrifice that sealed and established the Covenant of redemption from sin.   In instituting the Lord’s Supper, He took the bread and wine of the Passover, the other two elements offered by the old priesthood in sacrifice, and pronounced them to be His Body and Blood, making a way for God’s people to be perpetually sustained by the food of His One Sacrifice.   Just as baptism replaces circumcision as the rite of initiation under the New Covenant, so the Sacrament by which Christ’s One Sacrifice becomes the sustenance of the believers’ spiritual life takes the place of the sacrifices that looked forward to the One Sacrifice, and so the ministry commissioned to administer the Sacrament is a priesthood within the universal priesthood of the Church, as the Levitical priesthood was a priesthood within the universal priesthood of Israel.

 

Dr. Atkinson’s use of terms like “ruling”, “privileged” and “elite” to describe a priesthood within the universal priesthood of the Church is misleading.   The import of Mk 10:42-44 is not that the Church was not to have governors but that her governors were to govern in a spirit of humility.   Pressed to the extreme of hyper-Protestant anti-clericalism, Mk 10:42-44 would condemn St. Paul in defending his Apostolic authority in the Corinthian epistles and the early chapters of Galatians.   The Lord clearly set His Apostles as governors over His Church, just as clearly the need for structure and order in the Church did not die with the Apostles nor did they let their governance end or die with them.   Already in the New Testament we see them placing others in authority under themselves over local Churches as elders/presbyters, and already in the New Testament we see them commissioning others such as SS Timothy and Titus to exercise the same level of governing authority as themselves, including the authority to ordain elders/presbyters and deacons.   The term bishop (overseer/episkopos) would later be used as the title of the Apostles’ co-governors/successors.   In the New Testament this term is used either interchangeably with elder/presbyter or more likely for the presiding elder/presbyter in each locality.  When it is first unmistakably used for the co-governors/successors of the Apostles, in the epistles of St. Ignatius of Antioch, the description suggests that every presiding elder/presbyter was now what SS Timothy and Titus were in the New Testament.   The rapidity and earliness with which this usage became universal and the fact that it first appears in the writings of St. John’s direct disciples may indicate that St. John, the Apostle who survived the others by decades, had merged the two offices towards the end of his life and ministry.    However that may be, the thing traditionally designated by the term bishop, the person who has been given the ordinary authority (vide infra for explanation of this expression) of the Apostles to govern the Church and ordain presbyters and deacons, is clearly already established in the New Testament.   That the Lord’s instructions in Mk. 10:42-44 have not always been obeyed by those in authority in the Church is lamentable, although not, given the fallenness of human nature, very surprising, but the abuse of something does not invalidate the thing itself.  

 

Dr. Atkinson begins the second section of his argument by saying:

 

2) I will never ignore clear scriptural advice; like most members and clergy in ACNA, I am generally against women’s ordination above the level of deacon. What Paul clearly wrote to Timothy (1 Tim 2, cf. Titus 2:3-5) is that he did not allow women to have authority over men in his churches, but he did not condemn the practice nor was it ever called a ‘sin’ anywhere in the NT. He also wrote elsewhere about male headship in the family (1 Cor 11: 3-10, 1 Cor 14:33-35, Eph 5:22-23)

 

If someone in a position of authority were to say “I do not allow you to walk up to your neighbour, poke him in the eyes, tweak his nose, and pull his beard” would you interpret this as a non-condemnation of eye-poking, nose-tweaking and beard-pulling?

 

His third section, however, begins by saying:

 

3) However… the whole counsel of God provides some mitigating circumstances.

a) The fact that Jesus Himself elevated women (and their roles) above what was regarded as normative in His culture (women were virtual chattel, not even to be spoken to in the street) tells us a lot about the teleological direction we could expect to occur over time in the Kingdom of God by the revelation of scripture made evident by the Holy Spirit. Note Paul’s teaching in Galatians 3:24-29 where egalitarianism is taught as being part of our freedom in Christ versus the Jewish laws and culture. Despite Paul's admonition to Timothy about women's disqualification to have authority over men, Paul was not shy about allowing women to lead where his own welfare (and thus that of the gospel) was concerned (as seen in Romans 16:1-4).

 

This is a common argument but it is no less wrong for being common.   The fact that Jesus elevated women above what was normative in Jewish, and for that matter Roman, culture carries the exact opposite meaning to that which Dr. Atkinson attaches to it.   It makes it all that much more significant that Jesus did not include a woman among the Twelve.    Had He, by treating women as the human beings they are, intended to start the Church on a path that would lead towards women’s ordination He would not have allowed St. Paul to prohibit – his words to St. Timothy are stronger than a mere admonition – women from having authority over men in that way.

 

He continues:

 

b) The issue of Women’s Ordination (WO) is not at all the same as the homosexuality issue where there are absolutely no exceptions in either Old Testament or New Testament that this behavior is an egregious sin that will keep a person out of the Kingdom of God (e.g., 1 Cor 6:9). Rather, the role of women in God’s kingdom on earth has clearly had some exceptions in the Bible, where women have had authority without any divine judgment or criticism being revealed about it. The New Testament reveals that there were women deaconesses and women prophets in NT churches… without any criticism by Paul or other Apostles. And how far should we generalize Peter’s point that the Church consists of the “priesthood of ALL believers”? But I must emphasize that these scriptural exceptions to the rule (like Deborah the judge in the OT) were in fact exceptions.

Therefore, ACNA is not wrong to also have exceptions... but they must be kept relatively rare (to remain exceptions) and never to be turned into a general WO rule (as TEC and the Church of England have done).

 

The issue of Women’s Ordination is related to that of the homosexuality – actually the entire alphabet soup – issue.   I’ll return to that momentarily.   First, I would like to point out how Dr. Atkinson seriously misinterprets the significance of the Scriptural examples of women with authority to which he points.   These are not exceptions to the rule.   They are rather illustrations of a different rule.

 

As orthodox Christians, we believe that God is working in everything that goes on in the world.   We are not Deists who think that God started the world going, like someone winding up a clock, then left it to wind down on its own accord.    God brought Creation into existence ex nihilo and apart from His sustaining its existence it would slip back into nothingness.   The tree in your front lawn, God put there, through multiple different steps including the falling of the seed from which it originally grew, the natural process of growth that He put into the seed, the rain that He caused to fall, etc.   Everything that happens in nature, does so because God is working in and through it in this way.   God is not limited to working in this way.   If He had reason to do so, He could cause a tree to appear out of nowhere in your front lawn without going through all that preliminary motion.   If He did so, this is what we would call a miracle.   God does not work in this direct way unless He has special reason to do so.   His ordinary method of producing a tree in your front laws, is through the means of the seed, the growth, the rain, etc.   A miracle, in which He directly acts without means, is extraordinary.

 

The distinction just made can also be seen in those to whom God delegates authority.   In the Old Testament, God established the Levitical priesthood and the Davidic monarchy.   These were positions of authority that were passed on through the generations in an ordinary manner (David passed his throne to Solomon who passed it to Rehoboam, for example).   This type of authority corresponds to God’s working ordinarily through the means of nature.   There are other examples, however, of God raising up individuals to positions of leadership and authority that correspond to His working extraordinarily through miracles.   The judges are examples of these.   So are the prophets.   Each one was called by God as an individual and given special authority and power.   Since order is one of the more important purposes of structure and ordinary authority there are rules as to how that authority is transmitted.   God is not bound by such rules in raising people up to special authority any more than He is bound by the laws of nature when He performs miracles.   In the New Testament, Jesus gave to the Apostles both ordinary and extraordinary authority when He set them in governance over His Church.   The extraordinary power, such as infallibility when teaching the faith and writing Scripture, could not be passed on to others.   The ordinary authority that they exercised in settling controversies, ordaining presbyters and deacons, and basically governing the Church they passed on to those such as SS Timothy and Titus who succeeded them in governance.   St. Paul’s instructions to St. Timothy in regards to women belong to the rules governing ordinary authority and its transmission.   They do not bind God when it comes to raising up people with special or extraordinary authority like prophets.  

This distinction accounts for Deborah the judge and the prophetesses of both Testaments.    Remember that if someone claims to have received extraordinary authority directly from God, they are to be tested and tried by all the tests of the prophet in both Testaments.

 

This brings us back to the connection between the women’s ordination issue and the alphabet soup issue.   If God raises up a woman as a prophetess or otherwise gives her extraordinary authority that is one thing.   If the rules governing the transmission of ordinary authority in the Church are altered to allow for women’s ordination that is something entirely different.   When that happens it leads to further apostasy.   This is what has happened in the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church of Canada and the Church of England.   That this further apostasy has taken the form of the affirmation of alphabet people, then same-sex blessings, then outright same-sex marriage, and most recently all the garbage that is preceded by the prefix trans is only to be expected.   When you set aside the rules laid down in Scripture for the transmission of the Apostolic ministry of the Church so as to ordain women you do so for a reason.    In this case you do so because you think the rules of Scripture (and tradition for that matter) are incompatible with some higher standard or ideal you are seeking to achieve.    To regard an ideal or standard as higher than the Word of God is itself a serious apostasy.   When the rule set aside is the prohibition against women in positions of ordinary authority, the ideal that is set above the Word of God, and thus made an idol, is the equality of the sexes.   The equality of the sexes, when treated with this exaggerated importance, becomes the interchangeability of the sexes.   If the sexes are treated as interchangeable when it comes to the priesthood/ministry the next step will be for them to be treated as interchangeable in other areas – such as in who one looks for as a mate and ultimately with which sex one identifies.

 

Of course we could also back the story up and point out that just as women’s ordination has led to the alphabet soup problems of today, so the path to women’s ordination was one the Church set upon when it took that first false step of breaking with the Catholic (in the Vincentian sense) consensus against artificial contraception in Resolution 15 of the 1930 Lambeth Conference which passed because supposedly conservative evangelicals failed to support the conservative Anglo-Catholics in their opposition to the Resolution (for the Biblical case against birth control, see Charles D. Provan’s The Bible and Birth Control, Zimmer Printing, 1989, for an interesting discussion, albeit from a Darwinian perspective, of why affordable, effective, contraception for females led, counter-intuitively, to the ramping up of the feminist demand for abortion and the skyrocketing of single-motherhood, see Dr. Lionel Tiger’s The Decline of Males, St. Martin’s Press, 1999).   That is, however, a topic for another time.

 

(1)    Lest you get the impression that the mainline Anglican Churches in England, Canada, and the United States are entirely apostate, I assure you there are orthodox parishes left in each.  On both sides of the pond, there are parishes within the mainline Anglican Communion that indicate their adherence to the full orthodoxy affirmed at St. Louis by affiliating with Forward in Faith or Forward in Faith North America.   In the Anglican Church of Canada there are parishes that indicate their ACNA type orthodoxy by affiliating with the Anglican Communion Alliance.   My own parish is one affiliated with the Anglican Communion Alliance and personally, while I disagree with separatism as a solution to apostasy, I could sign my full agreement with the Principles of Doctrine and Principles of Morality sections of the St. Louis Affirmation.  

A Shameful Surrender

 Do you remember the War on Drugs?

 

It was Richard Nixon who thought up the idea back in 1971 and while Nixon was, contrary to the impression you might have received from the typical Hollywood portrayal of the man, one of the better American presidents, this was not one of his better ideas.   The idea was that the American federal government would commit a tremendous amount of resources and effort into stomping out the international drug trade.  They would treat the drug cartels as if they were a hostile country that had attacked the United States.   Other Western countries were expected to support the “leader of the free world” in this effort and, to varying degrees, they did.  Fifty years have gone by and the drug trade is still alive and kicking, even despite the constraints on international travel over the last year and a half.    The War on Drugs, in other words has been a total failure.

 

This ought not to surprise us.   When governments declare “war” on anything other than another country, whether it be drugs, crime, terrorism, hate, or the bat flu virus, the “enemy” is never defeated and the war goes on forever.   This is because such “wars” are largely excuses by governments to expand their powers, escape constitutional limitations that irk them, and spend a lot of money and, therefore, governments have no motivation to win.   

 

The War on Drugs was a particularly inexcusable failure in that it came only a few decades after the spectacular failure of Prohibition and repeated all of its mistakes.   In both cases, by forbidding a particular trade, government merely made it more profitable because those willing to take the risk of selling were able to charge much more, and more dangerous for the general public, because those undertaking such a venture were heavily armed, organized crime syndicates for whom competition for the illegal trade and its high profit margins resembled war in the literal sense of the word.

 

There was one significant difference between the War on Drugs and Prohibition, however, one that ensured that the former, even though the commodities involved were less popular, would be an even greater failure. 

 

Prohibition was the culmination of a movement that had been building for about a century which had a clear, if misguided, vision.   The Temperance movement was one of the by-products of the nineteenth century North American revivalism that had grown out of the eighteenth century Methodist movement.   Ironically, considering that its name refers to the Christian virtue that means “moderation” or “self-control”, it took the moral stance that all consumption of alcoholic beverages is sinful, a further irony considering that this is the moral position that is traditional to Islam, not the one that is traditional to both Christianity and Judaism, which latter is much more consistent with the literal meaning of the name of the movement.   This is, perhaps, only what is to be expected from a movement led primarily by individuals who gloried in their lack of theological education. The Temperance movement had the support not only of religious zealots who took this stance, but of manufacturers who thought, not without reason although there are equally strong counterarguments, that it would make for a more industrious workforce, and of the feminist movement, then in its first wave, the women’s suffragettes.   Here in the Dominion of Canada, the shorter-lived experiment in Prohibition was directly tied to giving women the vote, as Stephen Leacock amusingly discussed in essays on both of those historical blunders.   However, whatever might be said against Prohibition and the movement behind it, they were unambiguous and clear.   They were against the consumption of alcoholic beverages and so, when they got their way, a law was passed – a constitutional amendment in the case of the United States – forbidding all alcoholic beverages and only alcoholic beverages.

 

The War on Drugs was pretty much the opposite of this.   It did not begin with a grassroots movement that built up momentum over a century – it started out by executive proclamation from the highest office in the United States of America.    It was not a clear and unambiguous moral project.   Confusion and complications arise the moment one attempts to identify the enemy in this “war”.

 

What is a drug?

 

Is there a difference between the kind of drugs sold by a drugstore (pharmacy) and those sold by a drug dealer?

 

The best answer to the first question is to say that a drug is any substance that is non-essential (thus excluding food, water, and air) that is deliberately consumed in one way or another for its effect on bodily and/or mental functions.

 

Using that answer as our account of the meaning of the word drug, the answer to the second question must be no.   There can be distinctions made between the two categories of drugs but there is no essential differences.    One distinction is between medicinal and recreational use.   Those who use drugs medicinally do so for a therapeutic purpose such as the alleviation of pain, the treatment of an injury, or the curing of a disease.    Those who use drugs recreationally do so for the experience they produce, usually a kind of euphoria called a “high”.   This distinction correlates with that between pharmaceutical drugs and illegal narcotics but the correlation is not exact  nor is the distinction absolute.   Many people use prescription and over-the-counter pharmaceutical medicine for recreational purposes and narcotics often have medicinal functions (opioids and cocaine are pain killers, for example).   Ultimately, the distinction between pharmaceutical drugs and narcotics is that the former are legal, even if their use is sometimes limited by government (some can only be purchased with a physician’s prescription), and the latter are not.

 

The obviously artificial nature of this distinction is a large part of the case that many make for the legalization of narcotics.      This is not the only case that can be made from this, however.   Someone who thinks that the goal of the War on Drugs – the elimination of the drug trade, the bondage of addiction, and the ruin of lives that goes along with these – to be a good one, even if he may think the “War” itself to be ill-advised, doomed to failure, the cause of more evils than it prevents, and an excuse for government aggrandizement – could argue that efforts to keep people, especially children, from falling prey to the lure of drugs, are contradicted by the presence of the legal pharmaceutical industry, that advertises its products on billboards, radio, television, and the internet, which advertising conveys, in essence, the same message as illegal drug pushers, i.e., use our product and your suffering will cease and you will find happiness.

 

Related to the above point about the contradictory mixed-messages being sent by the legal pharmaceutical industry and those fighting the War on (illegal) Drugs, is the fact that the fifty years since Nixon declared the latter have also seen a massive rise in the number of young children being prescribed dangerous mind-altering stimulants such as methylphenidate and amphetamine.   Oddly, these have been prescribed for diagnoses of hyperactivity, which is characterized by the inability to stay still and focus due to excess energy, something one would think ought to be the last thing in the world to be treated by stimulants (amphetamine is the drug that is sold on the street as “speed”).   Some have posited a link between the rise in medicating children in this way and the new phenomenon of school shootings which popped up in the same period, just as others have noted a similar correlation between mind-altering medication and mass shootings in general.   Whatever the truth may be with regards to such allegations – Politifact maintains that the first is false, which is a strong if not infallible indicator that it is in fact mostly true - it can certainly be said that this new propensity for prescribing stimulants to children, which looks suspiciously like the result of the takeover of public education by radical feminists who bullied the medical profession into treating the condition of being a normal young boy as pathological, sends a message that contradicts that of those waging the War on Drugs.

 

Given the massive contradictions we have just seen between the legal and tolerated advertisement campaigns of the huge pharmaceutical industry and the recent fad of prescribing stimulants to children on the one hand and the War on the Drugs on the other, it can hardly be surprising that the latter turned out to be something less than a success.  

 

When the War on Drugs began, the main drugs that were regarded as problematic were substances that occur naturally in the coca plant and certain kinds of hemp and poppies.   Experimental synthetic drugs were gaining popularity however – the 1960s saw the LSD craze – and this indication that the use and abuse of recreational drugs was becoming a bigger problem as were turning to newer, more dangerous substances, was likely what inspired the Nixon administration to launch the war to begin with.     Surely, however, the radical shift in the cultural climate towards the major drugs of fifty years ago has to be chalked up as a major loss in that war.

 

Today, the use of marijuana, the most widely used of the drugs obtainable from hemp, is depicted as normal, non-problematic, and even commendatory on television and the movies.      The drug itself is now generally depicted in popular culture as being harmless and benign.   The most dangerous of its known harmful effects are seldom if ever discussed.   Increasingly, popular culture has been trying to normalize cocaine use as well.

 

This shift in cultural attitude wrought by the entertainment media has begun to manifest itself politically.   Here in Canada, the Liberal government kept Captain Airhead’s election promise of 2015 and legalized marijuana.   There have been some indications, that they are considering doing the same for harder drugs such as cocaine.   There are growing movements for similar legalization south of the border. 

 

Meanwhile, the increase in the use of more dangerous synthetic drugs has had all sorts of ill social effects.   The synthetic opioid fentanyl, for example, while technically a legal painkiller if prescribed, has led, through its recreational misuse, to an alarming increase in deaths by opioid overdose.   This is due to such factors as the small amount needed to produce a lethal overdose and its being mixed with other drugs, especially heroin.   The opioid crisis in Canada began early in 2016.   This was shortly after the premiership of Captain Airhead began. Draw your own conclusions about that.  

 

Another disturbing trend has to do with methamphetamine.   Methamphetamine, like its cousin amphetamine mentioned above, is a synthetic substance derived from the naturally occurring Chinese medicine ephedrine.  Ephedrine used to be marketed as a weight-loss supplement and can still be found, in small doses, in some decongestants although a synthetic form is more commonly used.  Fifty years ago, the biggest problem with methamphetamine was its abuse in pill form, especially by long distance truck drivers who used it for its fatigue combating properties.   In recent decades, however, the crystalized version of the drug, which is used in much the same way as crack cocaine, has been increasingly replacing the latter as the hard drug of choice, especially among younger recreational drug users.    There are a number of explanations for this, among them that crystal meth produces a longer lasting high than crack – hours as opposed to minutes, and that it can be homemade from the synthetic ephedrine in over-the-counter decongestants.    The reason this switch is of concern to the general public is because of the effects crystal meth produces in its users.   It has the tendency to induce paranoia.  Consequently, as younger drug users have turned to crystal meth as their drug of preference, we have seen the rise of the brand new phenomenon of people walking down the street, minding their own business, and being verbally and physically assaulted, in some cases murdered, by complete strangers for no reason outside of the assailant’s drug-addled mind.    Isn’t progress grand?

 

When we consider how much worse the drug situation is today than at the beginning of the War on Drugs – and much more could be said about it than the highlights given above – the behaviour of our governments over the last year or so appears that much more irresponsible.    

 

For one thing, the insane, totalitarian, lockdowns they imposed, starting early last year, in order to slow the spread of the bat flu virus, have caused substance abuse, addiction and overdoses to skyrocket.    This was a completely predictable consequence of the loneliness and cabin fever generated by this prolonged, artificial, social isolation as well as the loss of jobs, businesses and savings.   The authorities acknowledge that overdoses and other drug-related problems have gotten much worse over the last year and a half, but they place the blame on the virus rather than on the wrongness of their actions in response to the virus.

 

Then there is the way in which our governments have been sending the biggest contradictory message to that of the War on Drugs to date this year.   Much effort was devoted in the War on Drugs in trying to keep children from getting involved with drugs in the first place by persuading them to resist pressure from their peers, i.e., other children trying to talk them into taking drugs (the message applied to other situations in which children pressure other children into doing something wrong as well, of course).    This year, however, we have seen a top down effort, led by governments, but also involving media companies – news, entertainment and social – aimed at pressuring all of us into taking the latest products of the pharmaceutical industry, and then pressuring everyone else (our peers) into doing so as well.    How, exactly, do we expect to have any credibility in the future, when we tell kids to resist the pressure to try marijuana, heroin, crack, ecstasy, crystal meth or the like, when we are now telling them that they, and everybody else, needs to shut up with their objections and reasonable questions and take an experimental new form of vaccine, despite the ill-effects, both those that are already known and the long-term ones that we might not know about yet, that provides an inferior immunity to that which contracting the virus provides, against a virus which the vast majority of people survive and which poses only the most minimal of risks to the young and healthy?   

 

Up until now, Western governments have been fighting Nixon’s War on Drugs with LBJ’s tactics.    Had they truly been committed to defeating this industry they would have gone after the pharmaceutical industry and all the legal dope pushers in the medical profession.    Now it would appear that they have raised the white flag and surrendered altogether.

The White Inferiority Complex

 

For decades, hurling the epithet “racist” was the liberal’s go-to method of acknowledging anyone who disagreed with him from a standpoint somewhere to his right. In this same period this method served its purpose of discouraging disagreement with progressive liberalism well. Those who belonged to the mainstream of whatever was considered to be conservatism at the time, which was generally what had been considered liberalism a decade or so earlier, were, for some reason that has never really been explained, particularly sensitive to this accusation, and every time the liberal used this dreaded word they would rush to be the first to throw whoever was on the receiving end of the accusation under the bus. 

Eventually, however, this word lost most of its bite. It had simply been used too often and against too many people. When everyone is a racist, nobody is a racist, and people stop caring when you call somebody a racist. While it made something of a comeback this year, when used with the modifier “systemic”, for a few years now it has been largely replaced in liberal usage with “white supremacist.”

By trading the worn out “racist” for the fresh “white supremacist”, liberals exchanged an insult that had lost most of its meaning through overuse for one that was more powerful than the original had ever been, but in doing so they made themselves look absurd. For one thing white supremacist has a much narrower range of meaning than racist, with connotations of ideology, zeal, commitment, and activism that the word racist does not. There are very few actual white supremacists left and when liberals try to use this expression in the way they used to use racist they invite ridicule upon themselves. 

There is another aspect to the absurdity of the charge of white supremacism being flung around like so much monkey excrement. It is quite evident to anybody with open eyes that if any sort of bad racial thought presently infests the minds of the white people of Western Civilization it is not a sense of superiority over others, much less a feeling of supremacy over others, but rather a sort of inferiority complex. 

What other explanation can there be for the fact that even though the United States, after its Supreme Court abolished all de jure discrimination against blacks, established de jure discrimination against whites in 1964, and Canada, the United Kingdom, and all other Western countries decided to follow this foolish American precedent, and for over a generation anti-white discrimination has been the only established racism in Western Civilization, nevertheless white people have been willing to affirm the proposition that Western countries are “white supremacist” and that they therefore enjoy “privilege” on the basis of their skin colour? 

How else do we explain all the white people who are enthusiastic supporters of Black Lives Matter? BLM, despite the organization’s innocuous if also truistic and banal name, is not about a positive agenda of promoting the security and well-being of black people. Abortion rates have been disproportionately high among black people for decades, but BLM couldn’t care less about all the black lives lost to abortion. They are, in fact, allied to the pro-abortion, feminist cause. Nor does BLM care about all the black lives taken by black perpetrators of violent crime. Blacks are overrepresented among both the perpetrators and the victims of violent crime in general, which has been the case for as long as statistics have been kept about this sort of thing and shows no sign of ceasing to be the case any time soon, and this overrepresentation is even larger for homicide. The inevitable and natural corollary of this is that blacks are also overrepresented among crime suspects, arrests, convictions, and incarcerations. The black lives lost to black crime are not black lives that matter to BLM. BLM cares only about blaming the overrepresentation of blacks among suspects, arrests, etc., on the racism of white police. For this is what BLM is truly about – spreading hatred of police officers, Western Civilization in general but with a focus on the United States, and especially of white people. 

It makes about as much sense, therefore, for white people to support BLM as it would for black people to go around wearing white robes with pointy hoods. Yet this year, in which BLM has, ahem, removed its mask and revealed its true colours like never before, it would have been difficult not to notice the prominent participation of whites in the record-breaking wave of race riots and the “Year Zero” Cultural Maoist assault on historical monuments and statues. That is even without taking into account the lionizers of BLM and its cause among white newspaper and television commentators, white university professors, white clergymen, white corporate executives, white celebrities, and white politicians. 

There is a name for this sort of inferiority complex. It is called liberalism. While there are many different liberalisms with many different meanings, the one that I have in mind here is that of the liberal whom Robert Frost defined as “a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.” Although I must say that when the poet penned that worthy diagnosis it probably never occurred to him that the disease would progress to the point where those infected actively take up arms against their own side. 

This, however, is the stage of the condition in which we find ourselves today and it may very well prove to be the terminal stage. 

Today, whether they seriously believe it to be true or not, a sizeable portion of whites are willing to affirm that racism is a moral offence for which light-skinned people of European ancestry bear a unique guilt, that they are guilty of it even if they are not conscious of having thought a racist thought, said a racist word, or committed a racist act, that this unconscious racism supposedly built into the very fabric of society is worse than the overt racial hatred that is often directed against whites by blacks and others with an anti-white axe to grind, and that it is their moral duty, therefore, to express contrition or shame whenever any non-white person chooses to take offence at something they have said or done or merely the fact that they are living and breathing, and to ignore or excuse explicit expressions of racial animus directed against them, even when these are violent in tone. 

Western liberalism has clearly undergone a mutation from when its humanitarian and universalist ideals merely generated a blindness to the legitimate particular interests of Western nations and peoples. It now actively opposes those interests. 

Think about the implications of the ubiquitous calls to end “systemic racism.” Many, perhaps most, white people have been jumping on board this bandwagon. Perhaps they do not understand that “systemic racism” is a technical term, from neo-Marxist Critical Race Theory, and that it designates this idea of an embedded racism which all white people and only white people are guilty of whether they are conscious of racist thought and actions or not. Perhaps they think it means institutional policies and practices that explicitly discriminate on racial grounds. If the latter is what they think, however, then they are mistaken if they think that racism of this sort, other than the kind that is directed against them, exists in Western countries today. This crusade against “systemic racism” in the Critical Race Theory sense of the term can only have the result, if successful, of making the explicit discrimination against white people that has been institutionalized in all Western countries since the ‘60’s and ‘70s of the last century, worse. 

There is a far worse manifestation of this mutant strain of the liberalism virus. Taken together, a number of liberal policies that have been in place in most if not all Western countries for over four decades, constitute an existential threat to white people. One of these policies is the use of large scale immigration from non-Western countries to offset the declining fertility that has been produced by, among other factors, the anti-natalism of social liberalism’s pro-contraception, pro-abortion, views. The result of this policy having been in place for decades has been the massive demographic transformation of Western societies to the point where in several countries that in living memory were almost entirely white, whites are on the verge of dropping to minority status. When you add to this the introduction in the same time frame of the aforementioned anti-white institutional discrimination, and the vilification of whites in the news media, popular education, and the revisionist educational curriculum, what you end up with is a recipe for a sort of self-inflicted genocide. Indeed, for decades now, Critical Race Theorists such as the late Noel Ignatiev have couched their anti-white ideas in explicitly genocidal language such as “the abolition of the white race”. When called out over this they have defended their rhetoric by saying that the “white race” they are talking about is a social construct, but their arguments have a rather hollow ring to them when we consider that these people would be the first to cry genocide if the same language were used about any other race and that the activist movement that has been built upon the foundation of their theory has translated such rhetoric into even cruder terms and actions that are not so easily explained away. These same people insist that “it is okay to be white” is a dangerous and offensive racist slogan. 

Yet despite all of this, liberalism has been largely successful at convincing a large segment of the white population to regard anyone who dares to speak out against this suicidal combination of policies as being a bigger and more real threat than that combination itself. Indeed, there are several liberal organizations in North America that do nothing else except identify those who speak out against white liberalism’s racial suicide pact and wage a campaign of character assassination against them. 

Liberalism is usually wrong about everything and it is certainly wrong about this. The West does not have a “white supremacist” problem in this day and age. What it is suffering from is rather that many, perhaps most, white people have become infected with a sick-minded racial inferiority complex in which they regard their skin colour as a badge of racial guilt which can only be atoned for through racial suicide. You will be waiting a long time, however, for liberals to acknowledge this. That would mean admitting that liberalism is the problem. Liberals would sooner demonize all those who share their own skin colour than admit that liberalism could be wrong.

The Father

It is Father's Day. It is a wonder we are still allowed to celebrate it. Feminism long ago identified the enemy it wished to destroy as patriarchy - "father authority". Today, feminism is triumphant, and patriarchy, despite Steven Goldberg's thesis, (1) is all but dead. Perhaps the iconoclasts presently engaged in tearing down history have not gotten around to Father's Day yet. Or perhaps the feminists are satisfied with having stripped fatherhood of its essential meaning by destroying its authority and are content to let the vestigial honour remain. The latter suggestion is unlikely. It is not in the nature of feminism or any other leftist movement to refrain from utterly humiliating and debasing its defeated foes.

The feminist assault on the authority of earthly fathers is and always has been ultimately aimed at the highest fatherly authority of all, that of God. Feminism, like the anti-racism (actually "anti-white" racism) that has recently exploded into a tsunami that threatens to sweep away all of Western Civilization, has historically come in both "liberal" and "radical" (far Left or Marxist) forms, of which the radical, in both cases, is now in the ascendancy, but liberal and radical alike are descended from the Puritan rebels of the seventeenth century, the Whigs, and as Samuel Johnson famously put it "the first Whig was the devil." There is much in the way of witty and wise comebacks to feminism which can be gleaned from the words of Dr. Johnson, by the way, despite the fact of it not yet having been in its infancy when he walked the streets of London. His conversation with the bluestocking Mrs. Knowles as recorded by Boswell is one example. His words to Dr. Taylor "Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little" are another. A paraphrase of the latter is the conclusion to which Stephen Leacock argued in "The Woman Question", written in 1915 on the eve of women's suffrage - and Prohibition - but still, in my opinion, the best commentary on the women's movement ever written. Feminism is not actually the subject of my essay, however, so lest it be permanently sidetracked I shall give one more quotation, this time from Fran Lebowitz who said "Women who insist upon having the same options as men would do well to consider the option of being the strong silent type" and move on to the Fatherhood of God.

In the early stages of liberalism's "long march" through the Churches, it looked like the Fatherhood of God was all that they intended to leave intact of orthodox Christian doctrine. In reality, this was misleading, not because the Modernists were more orthodox than they seemed, but because they had reduced the Fatherhood of God to a single facet, that which corresponds to the "universal brotherhood of man." This is a Scriptural aspect of the Fatherhood of God, to be sure, but it is not the whole of it. Indeed, the most unequivocal statement that all people are the children of God in all of Scripture is to be found in St. Paul's address to the Stoics and Epicureans at Mars Hill in Acts 17. In the twenty-eighth verse of the chapter he quotes first from Epimenides of Crete, then from either Aratus of Soli or Cleanthes of Assos. It is the second quotation, which, ironically, regardless of which of the two Stoic philosophers who both said it that the Apostle had in mind, was originally addressed to Zeus, that asserts that we are all God's offspring. Ordinarily, the Scriptures speak in terms of "Creator" and "creation" - or "creature" in the older English - to refer to this aspect of God's Fatherhood, and it is not what was highlighted in the teachings of Jesus Christ. Ironically, the same liberals who seemed bent on reducing the Christian kerygma to the Fatherhood of God, and the Fatherhood of God to this one aspect of it, also embraced the theories by which Darwin and others sought to explain the existence of man without God, thus undermining the fragment of Christian faith to which they still clung. Today, the "Fatherhood of God" is no longer in vogue among liberal theologians due to its gender specificity. It has become far too common to hear gender neutral re-formulations of the Trinitarian benediction such as Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer, although this is not as bad as the "Father/Mother" stuff that pops up in certain circles.

In Christian dogmatics and systematic theology (2) the subcategory of Theology Proper that pertains to God the Father is called Patriology or sometimes Paterology, never Patrology which is a less common synonym for Patristics, that is, the study of the writings of the Fathers of the Church. It is the counterpart of Christology and Pneumatology. Often dogmaticians and theologians willl omit Patriology, not because they regard the Father as being of less importance than the Son and Holy Ghost but because they find it much harder to distinguish this part of Theology Proper from the whole. The very first thing the Apostles' Creed affirms is "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth." Similarly, the Nicene Creed begins with "I believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible." It is the full deity of the Son and the Holy Ghost that the Church Fathers had to defend against the heretics, not the deity of the Father. The closest thing to a heretical attack on the deity of the Father was the Gnostic, especially Marcionite, attempt to distinguish the Father from the Old Testament Jehovah and equate the latter with their concept of an evil demiurge. The expansion of the opening affirmation of the Apostles' Creed into that of the Nicene was the Nicene Fathers' answer.

Jesus explicitly identified His Father as the Old Testament Jehovah in John 8:54 "it is my Father that honoureth me; of whom ye say, that he is your God." In the Old Testament, Fatherhood is frequently used to denote the relationship between Jehovah and national Israel. The most striking example of this is in the fourth chapter of Exodus. Here, after He has finally persuaded Moses to go to Pharaoh and speak for Him, and Moses has taken leave of his father-in-law and gotten ready to return to Egypt, God tells him that after he has performed all the signs and Pharoah has still refused to let Israel go, he, Moses, is to say "Thus saith the Lord, Israel is my son, even my firstborn: And I say unto thee, Let my son go, that he may serve me: and if thou refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay thy son, even thy firstborn." (vv. 22-23) Here the contest between Jehovah and Pharaoh is set up as the King of Kings, demanding the release of the son whom a lesser king holds hostage, and obtaining that release only through taking the firstborn of the lesser, rebellious, king. In the New Testament, of course, we find that all of this foreshadowed what would take place on the last Passover of the old age. Again, the King of Kings would demand that a lesser, rebellious, king, in this case Satan, would release his captives, in this case the entire world held in bondage through sin. Here, however, God does not obtain the release through the death of the rebel's son, but through the sacrifice of His Own, His Only-Begotten Son, whereby all those who are so set free - redeemed, in the literal sense of the term - are elevated to sonship through adoption.

In all of this, multiple facets of God's Fatherhood can be seen. It means one thing when we say that God is Father of all and that we are "all his offspring." This means basically that God is our Creator Who continues to care for us as His creation. It means another thing when the Scriptures say that God is the Father of Israel and that Israel is His "first-born son", to which image from Exodus, the rest of the Old Testament, especially the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah, makes frequent reference. This is a metaphorical way of denoting the more intimate relationship that existed between God and Israel than between God and the general world, It possibly also, although this is not explicitly spelled out, includes an allusion to the circumstances by which Israel came into being (that Abraham had physical descendants at all was due to the direct miraculous intervention of God). It means yet another thing for God to be the Father of Jesus Christ. In the previous senses, the "Fatherhood" of God applies to all Three Persons of the Holy Trinity, with special reference to the First Person only through appropriation in the theological sense of the term. When we speak of God as the Father of Jesus Christ, however, we are referring to an internal relationship within the Trinity. It is paradoxically the most literal and the most metaphorical sense in which God is Father. Jesus is the "Only-Begotten Son" of the Father, meaning the Only Person of Whom it can be said that He is God's Son in the most literal sense of a Son Who comes from the Father naturally and so shares His own nature. (3) Yet this is metaphorical because the "begetting" or "siring" referred to is not the physical act, requiring a mother, and taking place within time so as to have a before and after. The Son comes from the Father and shares the Father's nature, but to share the Father's nature is to be eternal, with neither beginning nor end, and so the begetting of the Son is also eternal. It means yet another thing for God to be the Father of those who have been redeemed by Christ. The Scriptures speak of this in terms both of regeneration and adoption. God is the Father of the redeemed by regeneration in that through the working of the Holy Spirit He imparts new spiritual life to people who had been born spiritually dead through Original Sin. He is the Father of the redeemed through adoption because He joins the redeemed to His Son in the mystical Body of His Church in which they share in the privileges of the Sonship of the Head.

Taken together, these facets show the many ways in which God is Father, a truth about God so basic that it is the first and most fundamental affirmation of the Creeds.

The enemy of God, through his earthly feminist agents may attack the authority of earthly fathers, aiming through them at that of God the Father, but the latter he can never overthrow. This is how we know that feminism, seemingly triumphant in our own day, is ultimately a defeated foe.

Thanks be to God.

Happy Father's Day


(1) Steven Goldberg was chair of the Department of Sociology at City College of New York until he retired about twelve years ago. He was one of the very few in his discipline to be a true scientist rather than an agent of Marxist indoctrination. In his The inevitability of Patriarchy (1973), later expanded into Why Men Rule (1993), he argued that human nature made the abolition of patriarchy impossible. Note, however, that he was not using "patriarchy" in the root sense of "father authority" but in the sense of males being on average higher up the heirarchy of power and status than females.


(2) Dogmatics is the exposition of the articles of faith contained in the ecumenical Creeds and, for the Churches of the Magisterial Reformation, their particular Confessions. Systematic theology is the complement to Biblical theology, the latter examining doctrine in its Scriptural context, the former organizing it according to theme or topic. In practice, dogmatics and systematic theology are virtually identical. Francis Pieper's Christian Dogmatics (Lutheran) is the same type of work as Charles Hodge's Systematic Theology (Presbyterian/Reformed). The categories into which both assign doctrines are indistinguishable.

(3) The Holy Ghost also shares The Father's nature but not as a Son. Spirit, in Hebrew and Greek, is the same word as breathe. Jesus is the Son of God through His eternal begetting, the Holy Ghost is the breathe of God.

“Social” Injustice

I was a theology student back in the 1990s when I first noticed how many liberals or progressives seemed to think nothing of casually throwing the accusation of “racist” against other people. Even liberals or progressives who were also professing Christians and presumably acquainted with the Ninth Commandment, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.” At the same time I was becoming increasingly aware of the fact that the label “racist” had the power to destroy a person. Being labelled a “racist” could cost a person everything – his livelihood, career, reputation, social standing, friends, and in some cases, family. It did not sit well with me that a word that had this kind of destructive power could be thrown around so lightly with little to no consequences to the person doing the throwing. Especially, since there was no acceptable defence against the accusation. Anything anyone might say in his defence, from a simple denial to making reference to friends of other races, was taken as being itself evidence of guilt. This was a disgusting repudiation of the idea of the presumption of innocence, similar to feminism’s demand that women who accuse men of rape or other forms of sexual assault should be automatically and uncritically believed.

If anti-racists had too much power and too little responsibility then, twenty to twenty-five years ago, it is much, much, worse today. This is true even though the only time that comes immediately to my recollection in which someone actually faced discipline for an unsubstantiated accusation of racism occurred this very week when Jagmeet Singh, the federal leader of the socialist party, was ejected from the House of Commons for calling a member of the Bloc Quebecois a racist. Sadly, his suspension was only for the rest of the day.

Despite Singh’s slap-on-the-wrist, the power mixed with unaccountability of progressive anti-racists is much worse today than it was when I was a student. Back then, most people still understood racism in terms of overt acts – calling someone a derogatory slur, turning someone down for employment because of his skin colour, outright stating that you don’t like such-and-such a race. The concept of institutional racism was around but for many the expression did not convey what the Cultural Marxists intended. Instead it suggested such things as slavery, segregation, and other laws and policies that had treated specific groups negatively in an overt way. What the Cultural Marxists had intended by the term, was a “racism” that was unconscious, that was built into institutions but not in an overt way like segregation, a “racism” in the guilt of which all the members of the race which supposedly benefits share whether they know and acknowledge it or not.

Like I said, that idea was already around when I was a student, although at the time it was largely contained within the campuses of academia. It has obviously become much more powerful since. Today anyone with any sort of civil or ecclesiastical authority is expected to confess the “systemic racism” of his country, and many have lost their position or been threatened with the loss of it for denying “systemic racism.” This is partly a matter of all the students whose heads were being stuffed with that drivel decades ago now being in positions of influence outside of academia. The change in terminology also likely contributed to it. “Systemic racism” does not as easily bring to mind the slain dragons of slavery and segregation as “institutional racism” and is thus easier to sell as a present day problem.

Whether it is called “institutional” or “systemic” however, it is still nonsense. It is parallel to the theory in feminism that argues that rape is not primarily a criminal act of sexual violence by a specific man against a specific woman but an instrument whereby men as a class dominate women as a class in the guilt of which all men share. No, I am not making that up. You can find it in Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will (1975). A related theory reasons that because power is not equally distributed between males and females, and inequality of power apparently nullifies consent, therefore all heterosexual intercourse is rape. Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse (1987) was widely interpreted as teaching a form of this theory, although she approached a similar conclusion through a much less syllogistic avenue of cultural critique. Clearly related to this last theory is the theory that women are naturally lesbians and that heterosexuality is itself a false social construct created by the patriarchy to oppress women.

Whether we are talking about the mental flatulence that feminism has produced in its rapid descent into total lunacy as outlined in the previous paragraph, or anti-racism’s equally kooky idea that all whites are guilty of a kind of unconscious “racism” because property rights, the rule of law, and every other fundamental element of Western Civilization supposedly have a built-in bias that favours them against other races, we are talking about theories that are fundamentally and deeply unjust, even though their proponents claim to be advocates of “social justice.” Feminist theory and the theory of systemic racism allow feminists and anti-racists to make blanket accusations of crimes of oppression against all men as a group and all white people as a group. Intersectionality theory compounds the guilt for those who are both male and white. Individual men, individual white people, and even individual white men, according to these theories are guilty, even though they may not be conscious of it. This, however, is to declare huge numbers of people to be guilty, in the admitted absence of mens rea.

Mens rea, which is literally translated “guilty mind”, is consciousness of committing a crime. While ignorance of the law is no excuse, criminal culpability requires mens rea. This, like the presumption of innocence, is a fundamental principle of Common Law justice. So, for that matter, is the principle that laws, especially those defining new offences, ought not to be applied retroactively. This principle is being torn to shreds by those who are presently demanding that we raze all monuments to the ground, erase all history, and start again from Year Zero, because they have judged the past to be guilty of failing to live up to their freshly coined standards.

These new standards, furthermore, are expressed in terminology coined by Cultural Marxists, whose modus operandi is to identify a group within society as being oppressed, coin a term, usually ending in –ism or –phobia, and assign it the meaning of an irrational and pathological prejudice against the group in question, and then apply it to any attitude, action, or even word that members of the group or even a single member of the group, claims to personally experience as the –ism or –phobia, and then heap tons of moral condemnation upon anyone and everyone, past and present, to whom those attitudes, actions, and words could be attributed. Since the experience of the “victim” is held to be incontrovertible, the extension of each of these neologisms is infinite. Anything a “person of colour” experiences as “racism” is held to therefore be “racism”, anything that a woman experiences as “sexism” is held to therefore be “sexism”, etc. Cultural Marxism is an outright assault on yet more principles of Common Law justice. It places the accuser beyond cross-examination and weighs the scales heavily in his favour and holds people responsible for what it itself claims to consider to be irrational pathologies.

Common Law justice is not perfect, nor has anyone ever claimed that it was. No human system of justice is ever perfect. It is far better, however, than anything that has gone by the name “justice” in any country that has been foolish enough to allow itself to be governed by a form of Marxism. Like all long-standing, traditional institutions, it corrects itself over time, which a rigid ideology like Marxism simply cannot do. It is far closer to true justice, than any form of Marxist justice, Cultural or otherwise, can ever be.

Therefore, when feminists, anti-racists, and the like tell you that what they are demanding is a form of justice, don’t believe them. It is injustice that they are demanding.

The Final Destination of Progress

A teacher in Kelowna, British Columbia has just been given a three-day suspension for some things that occurred in the 2018/2019 school year. The offences involved showing a Grade 8 class clips from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and South Park. To my surprise, the objection to the videos appears to have been entirely based on the old-fashioned grounds that they contained sexual and scatological references that were inappropriate to be shown to children at that age. It is rather refreshing to learn that there is a principal or school board out there somewhere that still cares about such things. I was expecting to read that the complaint about the South Park video had to do with some snowflake kid being triggered by some -ism or -phobia or another. As crass, crude, profane, blasphemous, and vulgar as Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s popular show undoubtedly is, it also has the merit of being the furthest thing from woke that is currently on the air.

In an old episode of the cartoon – it was the second last episode of the third season and the last to air before the year 2000 – Eric Cartman gets a colon infection which causes rectal bleeding. Cartman, interprets this as his having gotten his “period” and mocks the other boys for not having gotten theirs yet. Since the other boys are just as ignorant of the facts of biology as Cartman, they take his mockery seriously. Kenny gets the infection as well and, interpreting it the same way as Cartman, accidentally kills himself by turning a tampon into a suppository. Kyle just fakes it, and this leaves the more honest Stan out. At the end of the episode, God shows up at a change-of-the-millennium, New Year’s concert in Las Vegas, and offers mankind the opportunity to ask Him one question. Stan wastes the opportunity by asking Him why he has not had his period yet. God explains to Stan what the educational system of the state of Colorado had failed to do – that only girls get periods. He then returns to heaven, promising to answer another question in another two thousand years.

While the Y2K theme would seem to make this twenty year old episode rather dated, it has nevertheless become timely and topical due to the spot of bother that J. K. Rowling has recently found herself in.

Rowling is, in case there is anybody who doesn’t know, the author of a bestselling series of fantasy novels about a wizard-in-training named Harry Potter. In one sense she could be said to follow in the tradition of George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams. She is a professing Christian, who utilizes the fantasy genre, and sometimes expresses her faith through her writing (this is most evident in the final volume of the Harry Potter series). Unlike Lewis and Williams, whose centre-right, reactionary, and traditionalist views also came across in their novels, she is left-of-centre in her views.

Ironically, in a way her left-of-centre views make her much more vulnerable to the charges that have been levelled against her than either Lewis or Williams would have been had the vocabulary to express those charges existed in their day. This is because in today’s left of intersectionality and wokeness and Critical Theory, the name of the game is “who is the wokest of them all?” with everybody closely watching everybody else’s every word, so as to be able to pounce at the slightest detected deviation from the ever-evolving, politically correct, party line and be the first to declare “I’m more woke than thou” and thus control the herd which immediately closes ranks and marches lockstep in shaming and excluding the offender, who may or may not be readmitted after a sufficient display of contrition. Those of us who don’t care to play this game, and/or are militantly anti-woke, simply aren’t vulnerable to this kind of in-group control. The “cancel culture” which the left uses against its open opponents, is a related but different phenomenon. It works by applying the pressure described above, not to the left’s enemies directly, but to people around them who do care about their woke status.

So what did Rowling do to turn the woke mob against her?

In a tweet on June 6th, she made reference to an article that had appeared on Devex with the title “Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 world for people who menstruate.” Now, somebody like myself would have no sympathy whatsoever for the point of view expressed in an article with such a title. This is not true of Rowling, who merely poked fun at the absurd wording at the end of the title. She said “‘People who menstruate.’ I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?” The word, of course, is “women.”

Twenty years ago the main running gag for an entire episode of South Park worked because the equation “people who menstruate = women”, which is obviously true, was still uncontroversial. Today, merely pointing it out has brought a howling mob with pitchforks and torches to Rowling’s doorstep, accusing her of witchcraft – oops, I mean “transphobia” – and demanding that she be burnt at the stake.

By saying that “women” is the word for “people who menstruate”, you see, she categorized “people who menstruate” but who self-identity as men as women, and excluded from the category of “women” people who do not menstruate but who self-identify as women. Today’s woke left considers this to be a kind of pathology. Even when it comes from those like J. K. Rowling who are feminists, that is, adherents of the movement which until recently was understood to advocate on behalf of those who are biologically female. (1)

This is not the first time this particular turf war between these factions of left-wing identity politics has occurred. Six years ago, the Canadian Museum of Human Rights here in Winnipeg, which is now, amusingly, facing accusations of racism, was attacked by a transgender advocate who went by the name of Athena Thiessen in the pages of the Winnipeg Free Press for inviting Germaine Greer to speak. Germaine Greer is the Australian feminist who became famous for her 1970 book The Female Eunuch. She preached a form of feminism that was far more heterosexually sex-positive and involved far less male-bashing, than the sort Andrea Dworkin was preaching, and was therefore much more popular. Nevertheless, her progressive credentials were impeccable until the trans-activists objected to her strongly worded viewpoint that only people with double X chromosomes and born with female anatomy were women and that any opinion to the contrary undermined feminism.

More recently – last year as a matter of fact – transgender activists again went to war with a famous feminist, this time Camille Paglia of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. They protested her lectures and tried to get her fired, mostly on the grounds of a few paragraphs from an interview she gave the neo-conservative Weekly Standard two years previously. She had said:

Although I describe myself as transgender (I was donning flamboyant male costumes from early childhood on), I am highly skeptical about the current transgender wave, which I think has been produced by far more complicated psychological and sociological factors than current gender discourse allows. Furthermore, I condemn the escalating prescription of puberty blockers (whose long-term effects are unknown) for children. I regard this practice as a criminal violation of human rights.

It is certainly ironic how liberals who posture as defenders of science when it comes to global warming (a sentimental myth unsupported by evidence) flee all reference to biology when it comes to gender. Biology has been programmatically excluded from women's studies and gender studies programs for almost 50 years now. Thus very few current gender studies professors and theorists, here and abroad, are intellectually or scientifically prepared to teach their subjects.

The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one's birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.

Some might object to this example in that Paglia has long had the reputation of being a feminist who despises all other feminists, and that while she is a registered Democrat, her political views are libertarian rather than progressive liberal, and often right-libertarian at that. Nevertheless, it is still an example of the trans lobby attempting to destroy someone for saying something that anyone would have been laughed to scorn for disagreeing with up until a few years ago.

In their attack on Rowling, the trans lobby has garnered a lot more support than in these previous examples. The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, The Huffington Post, and hosts of other media outlets joined in the condemnation. They even trotted out the actors who made their names playing Rowling’s characters to denounce, or at least disagree, with her.

Perhaps you are wondering how we arrived at the point where people can be widely condemned as “ignorant” and having an irrational pathology for which they bear moral culpability (2) simply for speaking the truth that biologically female persons and only biologically female persons are women. While this subject warrants an entire essay of its own, I will provide a brief explanation here.

Decades ago, progressives began attacking the basic presupposition of all previous Western thought, that our ideas and the words in which we express them, are subject to and accountable to, things as they are. Even in the field of ethics, which holds human behaviour as it is accountable to human behaviour as it ought to be, the standard of human behaviour as it ought to be was regarded as part of the larger order of things as they are. Approaching the subject from different angles in the language and social sciences departments of the universities simultaneously, they developed theories that interpreted this presupposition as being oppressive. Instead, they argued, things as they are must be subject to words and ideas, which in turn ought to be subject to one’s personal self-definition and experience.

After decades of brainwashing young and ignorant university students with these nonsensical theories, they are now spilling out into the real world, and we are being told that if someone defines or experiences himself as female, our words and thoughts must be made to conform to this, rather than to the male anatomy that he was born with.

In other words, we have arrived at the point where if we want a solid grasp on reality, we would do better to ignore the TV news and most newspapers and magazines and turn to twenty year old re-runs of South Park.

This is what progress looks like and the final end of progress is now in view. That end is where the entire world has been transformed into an insane asylum. In theology, the word for that is hell.

(1) Although this writer takes the side of such feminists as Rowling, Greer, and Paglia against the trans lobby in this essay, he disagrees with feminism in all its forms and is an unapologetic supporter of patriarchy in the root meaning of that word - father authority.

(2) The idea of someone bearing moral culpability for his own irrational pathology is itself a contradiction. This contradiction is inherent in the definition of every -ism and -phobia coined by progressives to pathologize and demonize their enemies. For this reason, all of these words are without real meaning.