Justification and the Hierarchy of Truth

I have been working on a sequel to my essay “Catholic and Protestant.”   In that essay I argued that the Anglican Church, contrary to the types of Churchmen who eschew one or the other of these labels, should embrace both, defining Catholic as that which belongs to all the ancient Churches since the earliest Christian antiquity and Protestant by the two fundamental truths of the Reformation, the final authority of the Scriptures as the Word of God and the freeness of the gift of salvation in Jesus Christ which can only be received by faith.  The sequel, which I have given the title “Catholic not Roman” will concentrate more closely on how the errors of Rome rejected in the Reformation were distinct to Rome and late innovations rather than belonging to all the ancient Churches since the earliest times.  The death of California pastor, seminary president, and Bible teacher John F. MacArthur Jr. this week has prompted me to first address the objection that has been raised to a point I made in my first essay.  That point was that it is wrong to describe the recovery of the Pauline doctrine of justification in the Reformation as a recovery of the Gospel because the truths St. Paul himself identified as the Gospel he preached (that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was buried, and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and the testimony of the eyewitnesses he enumerated)[1] were never lost by the Church and are confessed to this day even by Rome in the ancient Creeds.

 

There was a point behind this point and that is that there is a hierarchy of importance to Christian truth.  The truths that are the most important are the Catholic truths.  These are the truths confessed in the ecumenical symbols of the faith – the Apostles’ and Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creeds, and the Quicumque Vult or Athanasian Symbol.  That these outrank justification by faith alone in terms of importance is acknowledged by the formularies of each of the three branches of the Magisterial Reformation.  Our Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of 1571 acknowledge it by placing the Catholic truths in the first eight articles (Article VIII is the reception of the ecumenical symbols) and the Lutheran Book of Concord of 1580 places the three ecumenical symbols at the start before any of the distinctly Lutheran confessions.  

Indeed, I can hardly think of a better way of making the point than how the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563 makes it.  This is one of the Three Forms of Unity that the Reformed Church acknowledged as its basic formularies at the pan-Reformed Synod of Dort in 1618-1619.  Its twenty-second question asks “What, then, is necessary for a Christian to believe?” The answer is “All that is promised us in the Gospel, which the articles of our catholic, undoubted Christian faith teach us in summary.”  The next question asks what those articles are and the answer is simply the text of the Apostles’ Creed.  The twenty-fourth through fifty-eighth of the questions and answers probe deeper into the meaning of each of the simple assertions of the Creed.  It is only then in the fifty-ninth question which asks “What does it help you now, that you believe all this?”, that is, the faith confessed in the Apostles’ Creed, that justification by faith alone, the topic of questions fifty-nine through sixty-four is raised.  

It should not require an appeal to the Protestant confessional formularies, however, to make this point.  According to the doctrine of justification by faith alone it is faith in Jesus Christ that is the hand with which a sinner receives everlasting life and the righteousness of God freely given in Jesus Christ.   It is therefore, by the doctrine of justification by faith alone itself, more important to believe in Jesus Christ, to believe what is confessed about Him in the faith of the ancient symbols, than to believe in the doctrine of justification by faith alone itself.

Consider what the Scriptures themselves teach us about the content of saving faith.  The object of saving faith is, of course, Jesus Christ.  The object of faith is the answer to the question of Who is believed.  The content of faith is the answer to the question of what is believed.  St. John tells us at the end of the penultimate chapter of his Gospel “But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name”[2]  The predicate about Jesus in this verse contains two assertions placed in apposition to each other so as to identify them with each other.  The Christ is the Son of God, and the Son of God is the Christ.  Each term brings its own connotations to the overall concept.  Christ is the Greek word corresponding to the Hebrew Messiah.  It literally means Anointed One, and the anointing primarily referred to is that of the kingship of Israel.  Priests were also anointed in the Old Testament and Jesus as the Christ is the High Priest after the order of Melchizedek and in one instance a prophet was anointed in the Old Testament and Jesus is the Prophet that Moses predicted God would send.  First and foremost, however, the Christ or Messiah is the promised heir to David’s throne Who would establish the Kingdom forever.  That the Christ/Messiah would be the Saviour not just of Israel but of the whole world is indicated by the very first prophecy found of Him in the Old Testament in God’s judgement on the serpent in Genesis 3.  The Christ, therefore, is the Saviour Who God had promised He would send the world since the Fall of Man.  Jesus as the Christ is the fulfilment of those promises.

 

What it means for Jesus to be the Son of God is established in the first verse of the same Gospel.  The Word was in the beginning, the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  This Person St. John identifies as the Word (Greek Logos), is eternal since He was there in the beginning with God and is Himself God.  St. John’s use of the word Logos/Word here, like the phrase “In the beginning” points back to Genesis, since in the second verse he says that is through the Word that everything that was made was made.  In Genesis 1 God speaks (“Let there be light” for example) all of Creation into existence.  The Word is identified as Jesus in the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel after which the relationship between the Word Who is God and the God Whom the Word is with is spoken of as that of Father and Son.  In a few places St. John modifies “Son” with the Greek word rendered “only-begotten” in the Authorized Bible.  This expression indicates that Jesus is God’s Son in a way no one else is.  All humans and angels are sometimes spoken of as God’s sons by right of creation.  Christians are God’s children by adoption.  Jesus, however, is the only natural Son of God, the kind of Son Who shares the nature of His Father.  That this does not mean there are two Gods is the significance of Jesus’ saying “I and my Father are one”[3] and St. John’s Gospel also identifies the Third Person Who shares in the unity of the Godhead with the Father and Son, the Holy Spirit or Comforter.

 

The words with which St. John identifies the content of saving faith are familiar from elsewhere in the Gospel records.  They are identical with the confession St. Peter made at Caesarea Philippi in response to the question addressed to Jesus’ disciples “but whom say ye that I am?”[4]  Jesus’ immediate response to St. Peter’s confession was to say that St. Peter was blessed, that this revelation had not come to him from “flesh and blood” but from the Father, to declare that He would build His Church which the gates of hell would not overthrow on this rock, and to give St. Peter the keys.[5]  This marked the point where Jesus began teaching His disciples that He would suffer and be crucified and rise again the third day.[6]  These are, of course, the events that make up the content of the Gospel as preached by St. Paul.  That Jesus revealed them in advance to His disciples upon St. Peter’s confession that Jesus is the “Christ, the Son of the Living God” establishes a connection between the two.  For Jesus to be the “Christ, the Son of the Living God” means to be He Who was crucified for us and rose again the third day.  The end or purpose of St. Paul’s proclamation of the Gospel that Jesus died for our sins and was buried and rose again the third day was that those who heard would believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.  This was also the end or purpose of the Gospel Jesus Himself preached, the content of which was that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.[7]  This content pointed to faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God because what the Kingdom of Heaven being at hand meant was that the promises of it had been fulfilled because it was present in His Own Person, the promised Christ.  Jesus preached this Gospel to the Jews who were anticipating the coming of the Christ and the Kingdom of God.  St. Paul preached the Gospel of the death and resurrection of Christ to both Jews and Gentiles because it revealed what it really meant for Jesus to be the Saviour, to be the Saviour of everybody from the bondage of sin which has afflicted the whole world since the Fall rather than a political deliverer of a single nation.

 

There is one other prominent confession of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God and that occurs earlier in St. John’s Gospel in the account of the raising of Lazarus in the eleventh chapter.  It is the confession of St. Martha of Bethany in response to Jesus’ words “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?”[8]  St. Martha’s confession was the only possible response for someone who believed these words.  Only the Christ, the Son of God could truthfully say He could guarantee resurrection and everlasting life to all who believe in Him.

 

My point, once again, is that what St. John identifies as the content of saving faith – that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and what St. Paul identifies as the Gospel – that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and rose again from the dead the third day – are all confessed in the three ancient ecumenical symbols of the faith.  It is therefore a gross exaggeration of the important of the doctrine of justification by faith alone to say that its formulation in the Reformation was a recovery of a lost Gospel.  The Roman Church, as corrupt and in serious error as she had become by the sixteenth century, still confessed as she confesses to this day, these ancient symbols.

 

This does not mean that justification by faith alone is not important.  It is a truth taught in the Scriptures.  The claim of the Roman apologists that it is only mentioned when St. James denies it[9] is most kindly described as simplistic.  One could just as simplistically respond that the claim is not true because Jesus said (to the ruler of the synagogue seeking healing for his daughter) “Be not afraid, only believe”[10] and that since this appears twice and comes from the mouth of Jesus Himself it negates the verse in St. James’ epistle.   A more serious answer would be to point out that since the Roman Church has re-iterated her official belief in the inerrancy of the Bible at least on matters of doctrine and morals in the second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and her 1992 Catechism she is not free to choose St. James over St. Paul but must find a way to affirm both.  It is insufficient to point out that St. Paul does not use the word “alone” or “only” as it is more accurately rendered in the Authorized Bible[11] because St. James specifies “by works” thus including the very thing excluded by name in St. Paul.  The question, therefore, is which of the two writers explains the other.  The answer is quite clear.  There is nothing in the Jacobean epistle which could be understood as saying “St. Paul said this in Romans and Galatians, but what he meant is this, which does not contradict what I am saying here.”  St. Paul, however, includes just such an explanation of St. James at the beginning of his argument for justification by faith without works in the fourth chapter of Romans.[12]  His explanation is that justification by works, such as is affirmed by St. James, is “not before God.”  St. James, therefore, by the authority of St. Paul, was not talking about the righteousness of God which is given in Jesus Christ to all who believe in Him apart from works.[13]  This is also evident by taking note of what is missing from James 2:14-26.  Such words as “justified”, “faith”, and “works” are common to both this passage and Romans 4, as are the Old Testament references.  The word “grace”, therefore, is conspicuous by its absence from the passage in St. James.

 

Grace is the key concept here.  St. Paul doesn’t just assert that justification is by faith and not works he gives an explanation as to why this is the case.  He writes “Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness”[14] and later “Therefore it is of faith, that it might be by grace; to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed; not to that only which is of the law, but to that also which is of the faith of Abraham; who is the father of us all.”[15]  Grace has a number of connotations, including the love of God revealed in His blessing His creatures, the act of God blessing His creatures, the blessings themselves, and even the thanks offered back to God for His blessings.[16]  When St. Paul says that justification – or salvation in all of its aspects for that matter – is by grace, he is saying that it is a free gift.  That is why it is by faith and not by works.  If it were by works it would not be a gift but a reward, payment, or wage.  Faith, by contrast, is not something offered in exchange or something that merits reward, but merely receives what is given.

 

This is a very important truth and I have not the slightest desire to diminish its importance.  It is possible, however, with any truth to exaggerate it and when this is done that truth becomes distorted.  That is the very nature of heresy – the exaggeration of a truth in such a way that other truths are denied and the exaggerated truth is distorted into error.  

Consider the basic heresies the Church contended against in the early centuries.  Sabellianism[17] exaggerated the unity of God to the point of denying the Threeness of the Persons of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Arianism, the heresy that the first two Ecumenical Councils addressed,[18] was a pendulum swing in the opposite direction that stressed the distinction between the Persons to the point of denying the fundamental unity in being of the Father and the Son and so posited that the Son was a lesser, created, god.[19]  The orthodox response stressed the unity of being between the Father and Son and so the full deity of Jesus Christ but even this could be exaggerated as it was in the teachings of Apollinaris of Laodicea who taught that the Divine Logos took the place of the human nous (mind or reason) in Jesus thus denying that Jesus' humanity was complete.  The Cappadocian Father St. Gregory Nazianzus expressed the orthodox response “That which is not assumed is not redeemed” and the second Ecumenical Council condemned Apollinarism.  Nestorius of Constantinople stressed the distinction between the deity and humanity of Jesus Christ in a way that compromised the unity of His Person.  Nestorius’ orthodox opponent was St. Cyril of Alexandria whose orthodox response was itself exaggerated by Eutyches of Constantinople in a way that erased the distinction between the natures and fused them into one.[20]  In the fourth ecumenical council, the Council of Chalcedon, a supplement to the Nicene Creed was produced that defined the orthodox doctrine of the Hypostatic Union of Jesus Christ – that the Son, Who is eternally God of one nature with the Father and Holy Spirit, in taking to Himself true humanity in the Incarnation, remained the One Person He eternally was and is but with two natures that remained distinct being neither confused, divided, changed or separated.  The monk Pelagius stressed human moral responsibility to the point that he denied the hereditary taint of Original Sin and the need for God’s grace.  The heresies of monothelitism and monoenergism condemned at the sixth ecumenical council[21] were variations of the error of Apollinarism.[22]

 

If the unity of God could be exaggerated into a heresy (Sabellianism) and the deity of Jesus Christ could be exaggerated into a heresy (Apollinarism) then by all means justification by faith alone can be exaggerated into a heresy and those who elevate it above the Catholic truths of the ancient symbols of the faith by saying that its re-formulation in the Reformation was a recovery of the Gospel are at least in danger of doing just that.

 

There is a particular school of evangelicalism that clearly does this.  Note that in this context by “evangelicalism” I mean what was called “the new evangelicalism” in the 1950s when it began as a kind of softer fundamentalism although the “new” or “neo” was eventually dropped by everyone except those who continued to claim the label “fundamentalist” for themselves.  By softer fundamentalism I mean less militant and separatist.  The leaders of this new evangelicalism also claimed that they were more academically and intellectually respectable than the old fundamentalists although I have seen no evidence that would convince me that they were more so than the contributors to The Fundamentals[23] and certain books that were published about the time I was doing my undergraduate work in theology rather laid waste to the idea.[24]  By the 1970s it was evident that the doctrinal drift the old fundamentalists warned would happen in the new evangelicalism was indeed taking place.[25]  In response to the doctrinal, moral and intellectual shallowness of the broader evangelicalism a school of conservative evangelicalism arose around the 1980s and 1990s that called for a renewed commitment to standards.  This school tended to draw its inspiration primarily from the Reformation and the second-generation Calvinism of the English Puritans.

The way these evangelical leaders treated the doctrine of justification by faith alone was very interesting.  They ran it up the flag pole and demanded that everyone salute it.  If someone did not loudly and publicly affirm it his evangelicalism and even his Christianity would be suspect.  No similar allegiance was required for all of the tenets of the ancient symbols and no wonder.  These leaders were almost to the man Nestorians.  This was most evident in their rejection of the honourific Mother of God for the Blessed Virgin[26] although in the case of the late R. C. Sproul it was also expressed in an ill-conceived diatribe against Charles Wesley’s wonderful lyric “Amazing love, how can it be, that Thou my God shouldst die for me.”  Some of them including the late John F. MacArthur Jr. taught Incarnational Sonship, the heresy that Jesus was not the Son of God prior to the Incarnation but became the Son of God in the Incarnation, although MacArthur did recant this early in the new millennium after teaching it for over twenty years, something that cannot be said of “cults” expert Walter Martin who taught the same heresy.[27]  They demanded allegiance to justification by faith alone while themselves teaching serious heresies concerning more important Christological and Trinitarian truths.  Allegiance was all they demanded for justification by faith alone, however, not comprehension or understanding.  When John F. MacArthur Jr’s The Gospel According to Jesus was published[28], it came with glowing endorsements from John Piper, James Montgomery Boice, R. C. Sproul, et al., and even an introduction from J. I. Packer.  Perhaps these Calvinists were too busy cheering MacArthur’s blistering attack on the Dallas Seminary crowd to notice that he still essentially subscribed to Dallas theology himself with regards to the worst elements of that theology and that he had gutted justification by faith alone of all meaning by redefining it so that "faith" is unrecognizable as what is meant by the rather simple concepts of “belief” and “trust” and so as to include in faith the very thing that the Reformation doctrine excludes.  One Calvinist who did notice this was John W. Robbins[29] whose scathing review of this awful book is a must read.[30]

 

This school of evangelicalism both exaggerated the doctrine of justification by faith alone by treating it as more important than such basic truths as the Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ and the Unity of the Person of Christ and distorted the doctrine beyond recognition by redefining faith to mean something other than “belief” and “trust.”  On both counts it is guilty of heresy.[31] 

 

 

 

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[1] 1 Cor. 15:3ff.

[2] Jn. 20:31. Authorized Bible.

[3] Jn. 10:30.

[4] Matt. 16:15.  St. Peter’s confession is in verse 16.

[5] Matt. 16:17-19.  After the Resurrection the keys were given to the Apostles’ collectively Jn. 20:23.

[6] Matt. 16:21.

[7] Matt. 4:17, Mk. 1:14-15.

[8] Jn. 11:25-26.  St. Martha’s confession is in verse 27.

[9] Jas. 2:24.

[10] Mk. 5:36, Lk. 8:50.

[11] The underlying Greek word is an adverb not an adjective.

[12] Rom. 4:1-2.

[13] That St. Paul explains St. James rather than vice versa only makes sense considering the apparent timing of the writings.  Although Galatians is relatively early in St. Paul’s corpus, Romans indicates the time of its writing as during the journey to Jerusalem that culminated in St. Paul’s arrest.  In the book of Acts this is the time period of the 20-21 chapters.  This is approximately 57 AD.  The Epistle of St. James, however, was most likely written before the Council of Jerusalem in 50 AD.  The reason most New Testament scholars think this is that the epistle, written by the man who presided at the Council of Jerusalem, is addressed to a Church that does not seem to have incorporated the Gentiles as of the time of its writing and takes no account of the various issues that the Church had to deal with as a consequence of the incorporation of the Gentiles.

[14] Rom. 4:4-5.

[15] Rom. 4:16.

[16] This is why thanking God before a meal is called “saying grace.”  This double usage of the same word for God giving and man returning thanks indicates the range of meaning of the words used in the original Scriptural Hebrew and Greek, as well as the Latin word from which the English “grace” is derived (the Latin expression that is the equivalent of our “Thank you” is “Gratias tibi ago”).  The Greek word for grace is charis.  Note how this is the main part of the compound word that is the traditional name for the Sacrament of the Lord’s Table, Eucharist.  Eucharist means “Thanksgiving.”

[17] Also known as Patripassionism in the early centuries, today it is more commonly called modalism.  It has been revived in Oneness Pentecostalism.  The feminist theology that replaces Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer” in order to get rid of gender-specific terminology for God is also a move towards Sabellianism because these terms are not the names of Persons but denote functions or roles.

[18] First Council of Nicaea (325 AD), First Council of Constantinople (381 AD), these are the Councils that gave us the Niceno-Constaninopolitan Creed, more commonly called the Nicene Creed.

[19] This heresy has been revised in the teachings of Charles Taze Russell and Judge Rutherford, whose followers are the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, better known as the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

[20] The heresy known as Eutychianism or Monophysitism.  Whether those who were accused of teaching this heresy were guilty or just misunderstood is a matter that historians debate as is the case with Nestorius.  The ideas that are called Nestorianism and Eutychianism, however, depart from the orthodox truth of the Hypostatic Union in opposite directions in a manner rightly condemned, regardless of whether or not the condemnation of those whose names they bear was  historically justified.  Nestorianism and Eutychianism were the subjects addressed by the third and fourth ecumenical councils, the Council of Ephesus (431 AD) and the Council of Chalcedon (451 AD) respectively.

[21] The Third Council of Constantinople (680-681 AD).  The fifth ecumenical council had been the Second Council of Constantinople (553 AD) which was more about reaffirming and clarifying the decisions of the previous councils than anything else.  It did condemn the writings of older theologians, primarily Theodore of Mopsuestia (who died shortly before the Council of Ephesus) although the errors were for the most part one’s that had already been dealt with.  The seventh ecumenical council, the Second Council of Nicaea (787) was the last council received as ecumenical before the Great Schism – and thus the last true ecumenical council.  It condemned iconoclasm, which has more to do with practice than doctrine, although there was a doctrinal element.  In this case the error was less an exaggeration of a truth than a failure to see one, namely, that Incarnation meant that what God stressed to Israel in Deuteronomy, that at Sinai they had heard the voice of God but not seen His similitude, could no longer be said under the New Covenant because God had become visible by assuming humanity as expressed by the Lord Himself in the words He addressed to St. Philip in John 14:9 “he who has seen me has seen the Father.”

[22] Monothelitism denied that Jesus had a human will.  Monoenergism was the idea that everything that Jesus did in both of His natures was done through the same divine energy.

[23] A. C. Dixon, Louis Meyer, R. A. Torrey eds. The Fundamentals: A Testimony To The Truth, 12 volumes (Chicago: Testimony Publishing Company, 1910-1915), since 1917 published as 4 volumes. 

[24]David F. Wells, No Place for Truth, or, Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology (Grand Rapids: William B Eerdmans, 1993) and  Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994).

[25] See the criticism of such in Harold Lindsell The Battle for the Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1976) and Francis Schaeffer The Great Evangelical Disaster (Wheaton: Crossway, 1984).

[26] The denial that Mary is the Mother of God is a denial that Jesus is God.  Attempts to evade this, by saying for example, that she was the mother of His human nature, reduce to nonsense.  The mother-son relationship is a relationship of persons not natures.  While it is obvious that Mary gave birth to Jesus in His humanity and that He did not get His deity from her (Anabaptist heresiarch Menno Simons denied that His humanity came from her), Her Son is God, making her the Mother of God, which is essentially the meaning of the phrase St. Elizabeth uses of her, “mother of my Lord” in Luke 1:43.  The sixteenth century Reformers, who all had a High Mariology, would be appalled at the direction evangelicalism has taken since their day. 

[27] That so many evangelicals who did not teach Incarnational Sonship themselves nevertheless defended MacArthur from the charge of heresy when he taught it reveals just how poor a grasp of orthodox Trinitarian doctrine they had.  The Holy Spirit is identified in the Gospels of SS Matthew and Luke as the Agent of Jesus’ conception.  If Jesus Sonship is derived from the Incarnation this would make the Holy Spirit His Father.  This confuses the Persons of the Father and the Holy Spirit ala Sabellianism.  Furthermore, if Jesus was not the Son prior to His Incarnation, the Father was not the Father prior to the Incarnation, because for Him to be the Father requires that He have a Son.  Since the Father is eternally the Father, the Son is eternally the Son, precisely as is confessed in the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Symbol.

[28] John F. MacArthur Jr. The Gospel According to Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988).

[29] John W. Robbins was to Gordon H. Clark what Greg Bahsen was to Cornelius Van Til.

[30] https://www.trinityfoundation.org/ journal.php?id=193 

[31] It also tended to view justification by faith alone as being opposed to the sacraments as means of grace.  The sacraments as means of grace is Catholic and not merely Roman, being the doctrine of all the ancient Churches.  That this truth is not in conflict with justification by faith alone can be illustrated by the fact that in the giving of a gift there are two hands involved, the hand of the giver and the hand of the receiver.  The sacraments are the hand of the Giver (God working through His Church), faith is the hand of the receiver.

 

A Cause Neither Lost nor Gained

“If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph” – T. S. Eliot

Has that strange sound from beneath the high altar of St. James’ Anglican Cathedral in Toronto finally ceased?

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

The forty-second General Synod of the Canadian branch of the Ecclesia Anglicana convened in Vancouver, British Columbia on the tenth of July. Prominent on the agenda was a motion to alter the canon governing holy matrimony to allow for the performance of same-sex marriages. Canon law requires that such a motion pass two consecutive General Synods. At each of these Synods it must receive a two-thirds supermajority from the lay delegates, from the clergy, and from the episcopal college. It received this, albeit through some questionable shenanigans, at the last General Synod in Richmond Hill, Upper Canada, three years ago. This year, however, while it received 80.9 percent of the lay vote, and 73.2 percent of the clerical vote, it was defeated in the House of Bishops who gave it only 62.2 percent, with fourteen bishops voting against the motion, and two abstaining.

It was this motion to which I alluded when I suggested in the concluding paragraph of my Dominion Day essay that John Strachan, first Bishop of Toronto, was probably spinning in his grave. While it is good that the motion was defeated it is important that we recognize that although this was a defeat, of sorts, for liberalism it was not a triumph for orthodoxy. Had orthodoxy triumphed we would be talking about a liberal motion that never made it past its first round through Synod because it was voted down by lay, clerical, and episcopal supermajorities larger than those required to pass it. The reason it is important to recognize this is because the temptation for the orthodox faithful in the Anglican Church of Canada will be to look upon this as the end of a decades long battle of which they are already weary. This is not the end, but rather the beginning. The liberals may not have had the numbers to overcome the constitutional roadblocks that were wisely placed in the way of quick and easy changes to canon law but they clearly outnumber the orthodox and they are not giving up. Indeed, it is quite apparent that they came to Synod with their Plan B already in place in the event they lost the vote. Their Plan B is basically to treat canon law in the same way in which they have long treated the Holy Scriptures, the Creeds, and the traditions of the Church – as texts that can mean anything, which is another way of saying they mean nothing, and therefore mean whatever they want them to mean. It is this sort of thinking, rather than the mere symptom which is their desire to redefine marriage to suit the alphabet soup crowd, that is the essence of the cancer of liberalism that has been eating away at the Church.

Indeed, the breakdown of the vote reveals that the path that lies ahead for the orthodox faithful will not be an easy one. The duty of the orthodox, when a portion of the Church has fallen into grievous error, is to win those who have strayed back to the truth. This is never easy, but it is much more difficult when those who have fallen away have the larger numbers, and especially when they are a majority even among the bishops, those to whom the specific duty of safeguarding the faith had been passed on by the Apostles. It is interesting that the motion received a larger percentage of the lay vote than the clerical vote. Twenty-one years ago Rev. George R. Eves in a book which addressed the growing divide between liberalism and orthodoxy in the Anglican Church of Canada at a time when the battle over same-sex affirmation/blessing/marriage was in its early stages (1) observed that the clergy were a lot more liberal, both theologically and politically, than the laity. If the vote at General Synod accurately reflects the thinking of clergy and laity today – and this is a big if, since it may simply suggest that liberals had control of the lay delegate selection process – then this would appear no longer to be the case. The laity are the largest segment of the Church and if they are also now the most liberal it will be that much harder to reclaim the Church for orthodoxy.

In light of this, the orthodox faithful would do well to remember the words of our Lord and Saviour as recorded in Luke 18:27 “The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.”

The fight for orthodox Christian truth has being going on since the very founding of the Church – the Apostles first encounter with Simon Magus, to whom the Fathers of the second and third centuries traced the origin of the heresy of Gnosticism, (2) is recorded in the eighth chapter of the Book of Acts – and will continue, according to prophesies made by both Jesus Christ and His Apostles, until the Second Coming. Explicit warnings against false doctrines and/or exhortations to remain true to the Apostolic faith are found in almost every book of the New Testament. With regards to the outcome of this ongoing war and the battles within it the faithful have both the assurance of the Lord Jesus Christ that the gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church built upon the Apostolic faith (Matt. 16:15-19) and the warnings given to particular Churches about the judgment that will come if they fall away from the faith. The letters to the angels – which in this somewhat singular use of the term means bishops – of the seven Churches of Asia Minor in the second and third chapters of Revelation are a particularly good example of this. Note the warning to the bishop of Ephesus: (3)

Remember therefore from whence thou art fallen, and repent, and do the first works; or else I will come unto thee quickly, and will remove thy candlestick out of his place, except thou repent (Rev. 2:5)

The falling away that is addressed here was less than the abandonment of the faith for which the term apostasy is usually reserved. Had the Ephesians been guilty of apostasy the warning would hardly have been lesser.

The assurance of Matthew 16 and the warnings of Revelation 2-3 do not contradict each other. The former is made to the catholic Church, the latter to particular Churches. The gates of hell, of which heresy and apostasy are weapons, shall never prevail against the catholic Church, that is to say, the entire or whole Church, but particular Churches within the catholic Church - and, sadly, Church history demonstrates that this is as true of entire dioceses and provinces as it is of individual parishes – can fall to heresy or apostasy. Fortunately, the same history also provides examples of particular Churches that have been recovered from heresy. (4) The orthodox must be ever vigilant for the “faith once delivered unto the saints” but must not succumb to despair when error appears to be in the ascendancy. The present situation in the worldwide Anglican Communion is a particular smaller-scale illustration of this point. However much the Church of England, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the Episcopal Church in the United States have been permeated by the leaven of liberalism, orthodoxy prevails in most of the other provinces of the wider Anglican Communion.

There are those who would object to depicting the marriage debate as one between orthodoxy and heresy. The grounds for this objection, when it is based on something more than mere squeamishness over the use of strong language, have only the most superficial sort of validity. That same-sex marriage has never been formally condemned as a heresy by an ecumenical Council is due entirely to the fact that up until the last twenty to thirty years or so nobody would have ever dreamed that the need for such an anathema might arise. That the Creeds do not contain a line to the effect of “and I believe in one holy, sacred, matrimony between man and woman” is not because this is something about which there has been no “quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus” consensus among the faithful, but because like many other truths about which the Scriptures are clear this one would be out of place there. Creeds, as the formal affirmations of the Church’s faith, are not intended to be comprehensive lists of all the truths she adheres to but of those upon which she rests her confidence in God’s grace. (5)

There is, however, a sense in which the objectors are right, but to the opposite effect of what they intend. The ancient heresies were affirmations of the Christian faith that deviated from orthodoxy on some essential point because of an overemphasis upon another. Sabellianism emphasized the unity of God to the point of denying the Trinity, whereas Tritheism was the reverse of this. Arianism denied the full deity of Jesus Christ, whereas Docetism and Apollinarism denied His full humanity. If this is what heresy is, liberalism is something much worse. Keep in mind the point made earlier about the push for same-sex marriage being merely a symptom. (6) The disease to which it points is a way of thinking in which individual wish-fulfilment is the highest good, truth can be discovered or created by majority vote, and every affirmation of the Creed, every tradition of the Church, and every statement of Scripture is open to an infinite number of re-interpretations to bring it in accordance with these ideas. Heresy affirms the Christian faith while distorting its truths, liberalism denies the Christian faith under the guise of an affirmation. It is far more dangerous than any mere heresy.

This does not make our duty to contend for the orthodox faith against liberalism any less than against heresy. If anything, the duty is greater. The same Scriptural warnings apply – but mercifully, so do the Scriptural promises.


(1) The book entitled Two Religions – One Church: Division and Destiny in the Anglican Church of Canada was self-published by Rev. Eves in 1998 and has just been revised and updated for this year’s General Synod. The updated version is available here: https://georgereves.com/books/two-religions-one-church/

(2) St. Justin Martyr, Apologia Prima, 26, St. Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, I.23. St. Hippolytus of Rome, Refutatio Omnium Haeresium, IV.51 and VI.2, 4-15.

(3) At the time the Book of Revelation was written, this would have been St. Timothy, the same St. Timothy whom St. Paul recruited to join his evangelistic mission from the Church in Lystra in Acts 16 and to whom he later wrote two canonical epistles. Since St. Timothy was bishop of Ephesus until his death in 97 AD, he would have been the one addressed regardless of whether St. John’s exile to Patmos took place under Nero or Domitian.

(4) Take the history of the orthodox Church’s struggle with Arianism in the third and fourth centuries, for example. Several provinces which accepted or leaned towards the heresy condemned by the first ecumenical Council in 325 AD were later brought back into communion with the orthodox Church. There was a period, however, not long after the Nicene Council, when the Arians very much appeared to have the upper hand.

(5) Peter Toon made this point with regards to other truths. “Neither the Apostles’ nor the Nicene Creeds mention hell or Satan. To add to either of these the words, “and in one devil, tempter and enemy of souls; and in damnation to hell everlasting,” would sound odd; belief in Satan and hell is of a different nature than belief in God and heaven. The contents of the creeds point to realities which are to lay hold upon us and grip us in faith and love: Satan and hell are to be avoided, not greeted.” Austin Farrer said something that was very similar in Saving Belief: A Discussion of Essentials, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1964.

(6) An even more serious symptom is evident in the apology retiring primate Fred Hiltz made on behalf of the Church to Canadian aboriginals at General Synod and in some of the articles regarding dialogue with the Jewish community that have appeared in recent issues of the Anglican Journal. While dialogue and better relations between these communities can hardly be viewed as a bad thing per se, liberalism is willing to sacrifice the truths of the Christian faith to achieve these goals. One such truth is that there is only one true and living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The idols of pagans – whether we are talking about the gods such as Zeus and Odin that European peoples worshipped prior to converting to Christianity, the gods that North American aboriginals worshipped before being evangelized, or other pagan deities of other peoples – are demons. Another such truth is that the saving grace of the one true God is only available through the Redeemer He has provided for the fallen race of mankind, His Son Jesus Christ. Liberals appear to be willing to sacrifice both of these truths to achieve “reconciliation” with the aboriginals, and the second of these truths to achieve dialogue with the Jews. Stephen Roney, who is a member of the Roman Church, has pointed out how a denial of these truths is latent in Hiltz’s apology. For why the second truth should not sacrificed to the goal of better dialogue with the Jews see the chapter on evangelizing the Jews in Suicide - The Decline and Fall of the Anglican Church of Canada?, written by the “Anglican Billy Graham” Dr. Marney Patterson and published by Cambridge Publishing House in Cambridge, Ontario in 1999.

Some Modern Ancient Heresies

The late Modern Age was a period that saw Western Civilization gradually abandon the Christian religion and replace it with the secular religion of liberalism. Indeed, the very label Western Civilization indicates this change. Formerly it had been Christendom – Christian civilization. Not coincidentally, the same period saw large segments of the Christian Church abandon orthodoxy – the sound doctrines of the faith as taught by Christ and His Apostles, written in the Holy Scriptures, and formulated in the ecumenical Creeds of the early undivided Church. Many nominally Christian Churches now reject as literal truth virtually every statement in the basic Apostles’ Creed, let alone the more precise Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed or the comprehensive Athanasian Creed, and teach instead that these were mythological embellishments of the Christian message the only essential content of which is its ethical teachings, by which, such Churches always seem to mean, an interpretation of Christian ethics that supports a progressive, left-wing, political and social agenda. This kind of “theology” was once named Modernism after the Age which spawned it but is now generally called by the same name as that Age’s secular faith, liberalism.

Unsurprisingly, the Age that has seen this retreat from orthodoxy has seen also the rebirth of many of the heresies against which the orthodox Fathers successfully contended in the early centuries of Christianity. The sixteenth century saw the much needed reform of many corruptions and superstitions that had gradually risen in connection with the papacy’s usurpation of supremacy over the entire Church, itself a departure from primitive orthodoxy, but not all of the Reformers shared the same conservative respect for the primitive orthodoxy of the first five centuries as Dr. Luther and the English Reformers. The doctrine of Sola Scriptura was understood, by many of the more radical Reformers, as meaning that the individual should interpret the Bible for himself with disregard to the consensus of the early Church. Unsurprisingly, a tendency towards Nestorianism manifested itself among Calvin’s followers, and some really radical versions of Anabaptism rejected Trinitarianism.

One of the early heresies that has been reborn and which now seems to be ubiquitous is Manichaeism. This system of belief takes its name from its third century Persian founder, Mani, who incorporated elements of Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism into his teachings. For a decade in his youth, prior to his conversion to orthodox Christianity, St. Augustine was an adherent of this sect against which several of his treatises were written (De duabus animabus, Contra Faustum, Contra Fortunatum, De Natura Boni, among others). The doctrine for which it is primarily remembered is dualism – the idea that the forces of light and the forces of darkness are more or less equal principles between which the world is locked in a perpetual struggle. This is an idea that can be found everywhere today – it is a dominant theme in the Star War motion picture saga and, indeed, is quite prevalent in the fantasy genre of fiction in general. More problematic is its presence in the Church. There are, indeed, many who think that it is sound Christian doctrine.

The error of dualism, which I dealt with in a previous essay entitled The Nature and Origin of Evil, is not in the assertion that there are evil spiritual forces present in the world but in the degree of significance it attaches to these and to evil itself. There are those who in the interest of promoting morality, purity, and holiness constantly harp on the danger of treating evil lightly and, in the sense in which they are speaking they do have a point. Yet there is a greater danger in making evil more important than it really is. The fourteenth chapter of the book of Isaiah contains a “proverb against the king of Babylon” and traditionally Christianity has seen the segment of that proverb that begins at verse twelve with the words “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” as addressing through the spiritual entity standing behind the king of Babylon, an interpretation that can be supported by our Lord’s words in the eighteenth verse of the tenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke. Therefore, when Isaiah writes:

For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. (vv. 13-14)

this has been understood as referring, at least on one level, to the sin that led to the downfall of the devil. Note that the dualism, which places the forces of evil on the same level as the forces of good, gives the devil precisely the honour that he in his Pride sought to usurp according to the traditional interpretation of this passage.

Orthodox Christian doctrine, however, teaches us that there is only One Being Who is eternal – in the sense of having neither beginning nor end -, infinite, all-powerful, and omnipresent. This Being, God, is also Good. Goodness, therefore, as an attribute of God, is itself eternal. It follows from this that Goodness does not require its opposite, evil, either to exist itself, or, much less, to balance it, as some of the more perverse versions of Dualism suggest.

Furthermore, while Goodness does not require evil for its own existence, the same is not true in reverse. Evil, if it can be said to exist – and something that is neither eternal nor created by God can hardly be said to exist in the most proper meaning of the word existence – exists as a defect in the Goodness of Creation. God, Who is Good Himself and in Whom there is no evil, created all that is and He imparted Goodness to all that He created. “And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” (Gen. 1:31) God imparted this Goodness to His Creation in two tiers. The lower level of created Goodness is that of inanimate objects and irrational life forms which serve the Good for which they are created automatically and whose nature is such that they lack the power to do otherwise. The higher level of created Goodness, voluntary Goodness, is that of angels and human beings, who were created with reason, the power to recognize the Good for which they exist, and will, the power to choose that Good for themselves. This higher level of created Goodness could not exist without either reason or will, and created reason and will are therefore themselves Goods, because they serve the end of voluntary Goodness. The power to choose the Good for oneself, however, at least in a state of Innocence rather than Perfection, which was the initial state of angels and human beings, is also the power to choose what is not Good. Or, more precisely, it is the power to choose wrongly, by choosing what to mistaken reason appears to be the greater Good, but which as the object of wrong choice loses even the lesser Goodness upon which the miscalculation was based. In the case of Lucifer and the angels who followed him in his rebellion, and in the case of our first parents in the Garden of Eden, this is exactly what happened, and in each case the result was that the created Goodness of their nature was broken.

That is all that evil is – broken Goodness. Not a force in this world, equal to, opposite, and independent of Goodness, but the damaged condition of created Goodness itself. Just as speed, the ability to move fast, denotes an actual power which human beings possess but slowness is merely a term for a deficiency in that power, so is evil to the Goodness of Creation.

Note that what I have said here applies also to Truth and Beauty which, like Goodness, are eternal attributes of God, which He imparted as properties to all that He made. (1) Falsehood and ugliness, like evil, are neither things in themselves, nor real properties which exist in other things, but are present merely as defects in the Truth and Beauty of Creation. Note what some of the most famous orthodox writers of the early part of the last century had to say about the kind of falsehood, heresy, with which we are concerned here. G. K. Chesterton, writing for The Daily News on June 26, 1909 said “Every heresy is a truth taught out of proportion” and in America on November 9, 1935 “A heresy is always a half-truth turned into a whole false¬hood.” T. S. Eliot wrote:

Furthermore, the essential of any important heresy is not simply that it is wrong: it is that it is partly right. It is characteristic of the more interesting heretics, in the context in which I use the term, that they have an exceptionally acute perception, or profound insight, of some part of the truth; an insight more important often than the inferences of those who are aware of more but less acutely aware of anything. So far as we are able to redress the balance, effect the compensation, ourselves, we may find such authors of the greatest value. If we value them as they value themselves we shall go astray. And in the present state of affairs, with the low degree of education to be expected of public and of reviewers, we are more likely to go wrong than right; we must remember too, that an heresy is apt to have a seductive simplicity, to make a direct and persuasive appeal to intellect and emotions, and to be altogether more plausible than the truth. (2)

These insights into the nature of heresy are particularly helpful in understanding another ancient heresy which has even more thoroughly permeated Modern Western thought than Manichaeism. This is the heresy of Pelagianism. This heresy was named after Pelagius a fifth century monk from somewhere in the British Isles, probably Ireland, who lived and taught in Rome. St. Augustine of Hippo and St. Jerome were the primary champions of orthodoxy in the fight against this heresy, which was first condemned in the Council of Carthage, a regional synod of the African Church, in 418 AD, but which condemnation was upheld by the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD. This Council, convened to address the Nestorian controversy, was the third ecumenical Council and as such spoke with the authority of the entire orthodox Church, eastern and western. Pelagianism is ordinarily thought of as a denial of Original Sin. Think back to our explanation of the origin and nature of evil. Original Sin is the doctrine, clearly taught by St. Paul in the fifth chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, that after the Goodness of human nature was broken by Adam’s sin in the Garden of Eden, it was passed down to us in that broken condition. Since one of the implications of Original Sin is the idea, fundamental to orthodox Christianity, that we cannot save ourselves but must rely entirely upon the grace of God given to us in Jesus Christ, an implication of Pelagianism’s denial of Original Sin is the idea that we can save ourselves, an idea clearly present in the Modern concept of progress. However, to go back to the insights into the nature of heresy that we borrowed from Chesterton and Eliot, if Pelagianism is “truth taught out of proportion” then it is the truth of Free Will that Pelagianism exaggerates.

We have already set forward the doctrine of Free Will without naming it as such in our discussion of the origin of evil. It is the power which God gave to rational beings such as men and angels to perceive the Good with their reason and to choose it with their will. (3) While this power is what made evil a possibility and in practice a reality, it is itself a Good because the end it serves, which could not be achieved without it, is Good, which Good, as we have already seen, is the higher order of Created Goodness that is voluntarily chosen. This is a truth that orthodox Christianity holds simultaneously with that of Original Sin. There is a degree of tension between the two truths since an obvious implication of Original Sin is that Free Will along with human Goodness was damaged in the Fall. Orthodox Christians have disagreed as to the extent of the damage however. The Pelagian view, that the Fall did not damage man’s ability to choose Good unassisted by God’s grace, and the Semi-Pelagian view, that after the Fall man retains the ability to initiate the choice of Good but requires the grace of God to complete it, have both been rejected as heresy by orthodox Christianity, but this still leaves a large spectrum of degrees of damage that fall within the scope of orthodoxy, and some of the most unedifying theological conflicts of the Modern Age have been the direct result of attempts to limit that scope even further.

Free Will in orthodox Christianity is not unlimited. It is the power to choose Good or evil, not the right to decide for ourselves what is Good. Goodness is what it is, it is the role of reason to perceive it, and the will is supposed to follow the lead of reason. In the post-modernism of today – if we have not actually arrived at a post-post-modernism – liberalism has arrived at the point where freedom is regarded by many liberals as being so absolute that it is not subject to the limitations even of reality. This is Pelagianism taken to the nth degree, for Pelagius himself would never have dreamed of asserting a freedom of our will that places limitations on the authority of God as Sovereign Ruler over all His Creation, to issue laws, reward obedience, and punish disobedience.

The history of liberalism, from the Whiggism of the seventeenth century to the present day madness described in the previous paragraph, has been one of the progressive removal of limitations, real or perceived, on the freedom of the will. In other words, it is the history of Pelagianism going to seed. The Whig Interpretation of History, which was prevalent in the history books of the nineteenth century and which lingers on still despite having been ably refuted by Herbert Butterfield in 1931 almost a decade before the Modern Age was brought to its conclusion when the rival totalitarianisms of Communism and National Socialism plunged the world into the Second World War, maintains that this period was also a period in which, through the efforts of reformers and revolutionaries, political rights and freedoms gradually increased and tyranny receded. That this is utter nonsense is most evident in the fact that today’s uber-Pelagian liberalism with its absolute freedom of the will from the constraints of reality is one side of a coin the other side of which is the soft totalitarianism of politically correct thought control. If this seems paradoxical, consider the implications of George Grant’s wise judgement on the American and Canadian Supreme Courts after they had struck down their respective nations’ abortion laws in Roe v. Wade and R. v. Morganthaler, that they had “used the language of North American liberalism to say yes to the very core of fascist thought—the triumph of the will.”

A more genuine paradox is perhaps to be found in the fact that the Whigs who started the ball rolling on all of this were originally Puritans, i.e., fanatical Calvinists. Calvinism is ordinarily thought of as erring in the exact opposite direction of Pelagianism by taking Original Sin to the extreme of teaching that it annihilates utterly the Image of God in man and by denying, at least in effect, Free Will. How Whiggism developed from this to the opposite error is difficult to explain but the fact that it did is undeniable. The answer may simply be that to depart from orthodox truth in one area, opens one up to other heresies, even if they seem to be miles removed from your original position. Samuel Johnson had some interesting observations about the direction in which their political ideas pointed. Boswell records the following incident which had been related to him by Dr. John Douglas, Bishop of Salisbury:

One day when dining at old Mr. Langton's, where Miss Roberts, his niece, was one of the company, Johnson, with his usual complacent attention to the fair sex, took her by the hand and said, “My dear, I hope you are a Jacobite.” Old Mr. Langton, who, though a high and steady Tory, was attached to the present Royal Family, seemed offended, and asked Johnson, with great warmth, what he could mean by putting such a question to his niece! “Why, Sir, (said Johnson) I meant no offence to your niece, I meant her a great compliment. A Jacobite, Sir, believes in the divine right of Kings. He that believes in the divine right of Kings believes in a Divinity. A Jacobite believes in the divine right of Bishops. He that believes in the divine right of Bishops believes in the divine authority of the Christian religion. Therefore, Sir, a Jacobite is neither an Atheist nor a Deist. That cannot be said of a Whig; for Whiggism is a negation of all principle.” (4)

The principles that Dr. Johnson ascribes to the “Jacobite” here are the principles of seventeenth century Toryism, and also the principles of civil and ecclesiastical government to which all orthodox Christian believers, if they wish to be consistent with the teachings of their faith, must subscribe. The Jacobites were the Tories who were so true to these principles that they remained loyal to King James II and his heirs after 1688, (5) as opposed to today’s Conservatives, who claim the name and mantle of the Tories while showing little evidence of being acquainted with their principles, let alone subscribing to them. The relevant point, however, is that Whiggism, the original liberalism, was in its rejection of these political principles, a step away from Christian orthodoxy and, while the first Whigs were fanatical Calvinists, by the next century, in which Dr. Johnson lived, many of them had taken further steps towards Deism or even Atheism. If we consider how Unitarianism, a non-Trinitarian sect built on a foundation of theological liberalism, developed in New England out of the colony’s original strict Puritanism, then perhaps it will be less surprising that the political expression of Calvinist Puritanism eventually developed into an extreme version of Pelagianism.

Indeed, the root of the problem with Puritanism and what made it the well-spring of so much revived ancient heresy, can be found in its Calvinism. To return to a point made at the beginning of this essay, John Calvin, like Dr. Luther and the English Reformers held that the Holy Scriptures as God’s Written Word held supreme authority over the teachings and traditions of the Church. There was a difference, however, in how Calvin understood this truth and how Dr. Luther and the English Reformers understood it. Dr. Luther and the English Reformers believed – correctly – that they shared this truth with the Fathers of the early, undivided, Church and that while the Scriptures must have the final say, we need to pay respectful attention to how the Church Fathers understood them. This was not entirely untrue of John Calvin, but it was much less true of him than of these other Reformers, and it would become even less true among his followers, especially the English Puritans. The idea developed among them that the individual believer, aided only by the Holy Spirit, should mine the truth of Scripture for himself, and ignore what other Christians – prior to Calvin – had to say about it.

This goes a long way towards explaining why there has been such leanings towards ancient heresies like Nestorianism (6) in the Calvinist tradition. In it can also be seen the seeds of the perverse Modern attitude that C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield so aptly dubbed “chronological snobbery.” If we, who live in the present, have better access to the truth the Holy Spirit conveys through the Scriptures when we apply to them directly without consulting the exegesis of the Fathers of the Church, then chronological snobbery, “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited” (7) necessarily follows.

By contrast, Dr. Daniel Waterland, the early eighteenth century champion of orthodoxy against the revived Arianism of Dr. Samuel Clarke, wrote:

Having taken a view of the moderns in relation to the Creed, we may now enter upon a detail of the ancients and their testimonies, by which the moderns must be tried. (8)

Dr. Waterland was speaking with regards to the question of the age and authorship of the Athanasian Creed, but it we would apply this principle, that the moderns must be tried by the testimonies of the ancients, more broadly, we would find in it a curative to chronological snobbery, and the many heresies of our own age.

(1) The philosophical way of saying this is to say that these are the Transcendentals – the properties of Being itself.

(2) T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy, Faber & Faber, 1934, pp. 24-25.

(3) See Richard Hooker’s excellent discussion of this in chapters VII through IX of Book I of his Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie.

(4) James Boswell, Life of Johnson, July 14, 1763.

(5) Dr. Johnson held these principles all his life but upon the accession of George III accepted the Hanoverian Succession as having attained legitimacy through prescription. Boswell inserts the anecdote from Douglas at the point in his narrative where he notes this fact.

(6) Thomas F. Torrance in his book Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, Downers Grove, IVP Academic, 2009, argued that the doctrine of Limited Atonement, implied, although not directly worded as such, by the Second Main Point of Doctrine of the Canons of the Synod of Dort (1618-1619) had Nestorian implications. Nestorianism cannot be imputed to John Calvin himself, because of this, for it is clear from his writings that he taught an Unlimited Atonement, but others, especially of the Lutheran tradition, have found evidence of Nestorianism in his doctrine of the Eucharist. That the late R. C. Sproul was guilty of outright and open Nestorianism, I demonstrated here: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2016/03/from-scylla-of-patripassianism-into.html.

(7) C. S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1966 p, 207.

(8) Daniel Waterland, A Critical History of the Athanasian Creed: A New Edition, Revised and Corrected by the Rev. J. R. King, Oxford and London, James Parker And Co., 1870, p. 20.