The Importance of the Resurrection

Because He lives, I can face tomorrow.
Because He lives, All fear is gone.
Because I know He holds the future,
And life is worth the living just because He lives. – Bill and Gloria Gaither

St. Paul, writing to the Corinthian Church, declared the Christian Gospel to be the message that:

Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures.

In thinking and talking about the Gospel we often focus upon the first event, Christ’s death for our sins, because this is the effective atoning sacrifice by which our sins are taken away and we are reconciled to God. The resurrection is just as much a part of the Gospel, however, and apart from the resurrection there would be no Gospel, i.e. no good news. It is by rising from the dead that Christ triumphed over death and hell. Apart from this triumph, Christ’s death would have seemed an ultimate defeat, as it did to His disciples prior to the resurrection, and it is through the resurrection that we are able to see Christ’s death for what it actually was, His laying down of His life as a sacrifice for our sake.

Christ’s resurrection is the evidence that Jesus Christ was the Son of God as He claimed. It is the sign Jesus Himself pointed to when asked for proof of His authority and divine identity. Early in His ministry, shortly after the wedding at Cana where He performed His first miracle, the turning of water into wine, Jesus went down to Jerusalem with His disciples to celebrate the Passover. There, He drove the moneychangers out of the Temple, an act He would later repeat in the week before His crucifixion. St. John records that the Jews then asked Him “What sign shewest thou unto us, seeing that thou doest these things?” His response was “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” These words would later be brought up against Him when He was brought before the High Priests on the eve of His crucifixion (Matt. 26:61), but, as St. John tells us, He meant “the temple of His body”, a meaning that became clear after His resurrection (Jn. 2:21-22).

Later in His ministry, some of the scribes and Pharisees said to Him “Master, we would see a sign from thee”. His answer, as recorded by St. Matthew, was:

An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it, but the sign of the prophet Jonas: For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale's belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. (Matt. 12:39-40)

Later, the Pharisees came to Him with the Sadducees and asked this same question and received the same answer (Matt. 16:1-4).

In each of these cases, challenged by the Jewish leaders and asked for a sign to prove His divine authority, He pointed to the resurrection and said that it would be the only sign they would be given. St. Paul wrote that Jesus was “declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead” (Rom. 1:4)

The resurrection is still our evidence that Christ was the Son of God as He claimed. While some, like 19th-20th Century anthropologist Sir James Frazer have argued that Christianity adopted the Gospel from myths of a god such as Osiris and Dionysius, who dies and comes back to life, C. S. Lewis pointed out that the pagan myths all take place sometime and somewhere outside of history, whereas the death and resurrection of Christ were events that took place within history, in a specific time and place. (1)

The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ took place in Jerusalem, when Pontius Pilate was prefect of Judaea during the reign of Tiberius Caesar. The credibility of the resurrection as historical fact is strong enough that a number of well-known conversions have taken place because someone set out to investigate or even disprove the historicity of the resurrection and ended up convinced that Jesus Christ had risen indeed. The American Civil War General Lew Wallace, author of the novel Ben-Hur, was converted after he accepted a challenge to investigate the historicity of the resurrection. Albert H. Ross, who as an unbeliever researched the life of Jesus, ended up writing under the pen name Frank Morrison, Who Moved the Stone? a classic apologetic for the historical truth of the resurrection.

The church historian, Philip Schaff wrote:

The Christian church rests on the resurrection of its Founder. Without this fact the church could never have been born, or if born, it would soon have died a natural death. The miracle of the resurrection and the existence of Christianity are so closely connected that they must stand or fall together. (2)

This was the way St. Paul saw things too, and after his declaration of the Gospel in his epistle to the Corinthians, he proceeds to set forth proofs of the resurrection. These include the testimony of over 500 witnesses who saw the risen Christ and most of whom were still alive when the epistle was being written and the testimony of St. Paul himself, who was initially hostile to Christianity but was converted through an encounter with the risen Christ.

It was not just to provide evidence that Jesus was the Son of God that He was raised from the dead. The author of the book of Hebrews tells us that Christ’s resurrection is vital to His role as high priest and intercessor. In the Jewish religion, established in the Old Covenant which God made with Israel at Mt. Sinai after delivering them from bondage in Egypt, the Levite priesthood was to regularly offer sacrifices for the sins of the people. The sacrifices of the Old Covenant, pointed towards the true sacrifice, the only sacrifice which can effectively take away sin, the death of Jesus Christ upon the cross. It was not just the offerings, however, which prefigured Christ, but the priesthood, for Jesus is not only our true sacrifice but our true high priest.

As the author of Hebrews explains the various ways in which the high priesthood of Christ is superior to the Aaronic high priesthood, he states:

And they truly were many priests, because they were not suffered to continue by reason of death: But this man, because he continueth ever, hath an unchangeable priesthood. Wherefore he is able also to save them to the uttermost that come unto God by him, seeing he ever liveth to make intercession for them. (Heb. 7:23-25)

Jesus Christ is our high priest, Who is “set on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens” where He is a minister “of the true tabernacle, which the Lord pitched, and not man” (Heb. 8:1-2). Having offered Himself as the once-and-for-all effective sacrifice upon the cross, He has entered the holy-of-holies in heaven, with His own blood, where He makes intercession for us, pleading the merits of His death and blood on our behalf. For Him to fill this role He must live forever – which means, of course, that He had to be raised from the dead.

The resurrection, therefore, is not just divine testimony to the Person and Work of Jesus Christ, although it is that, but is itself an essential part of salvation. The resurrection makes possible the intercessory work of Jesus Christ as high priest. It is also through the resurrection that the everlasting life Jesus promised to those who believe in Him comes.

St. Paul, after explaining to the Roman Church that we are not justified before God by the works of the law, i.e., our own efforts to meet God’s requirements, but rather that God by His grace, justifies all who believe in Jesus on account of His work of redemption and propitiation, goes on to explain that God’s grace is not an excuse for us to sin but provides, along with justification, liberty from the bondage of sin.

This liberty, St. Paul describes as a spiritual union between the believer and Christ which makes the believer a participant in Christ’s death and resurrection:

How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein? Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. (Rom. 6:2-4)

Justification by grace is not an excuse for sin because those who have been so justified have died to sin. What does this mean?

One of the main concepts we associate with death is that of separation. When someone dies, his family and friends hold a funeral in order to say a final good bye to a loved-one whom they will never see again in this life. Death separates even those joined by the most permanent of human bonds. Before governments set out to destroy the institution of marriage by introducing no-fault, penalty-free, easily attainable divorces, marriage was a union between man and woman that was to last “so long as you both shall live”. The Book of Common Prayer in the order of Holy Matrimony prescribes that the bride and groom pledge their troth by vowing to each other “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, till death do us part.” This union was so important, that only death was to dissolve it.

When St. Paul wrote that the believer, justified in God’s eyes through grace, is “dead to sin”, this is the imagery he was evoking. All people are from their birth “under sin”. This means that our relationship sin is a master-slave relationship. Sin, which has dwelt in our flesh since birth, is our master, and we are its slaves. This is the estate of fallen mankind. The believer in Jesus Christ, however, has been set free from this bondage through death. He has died, terminating his term of slavery to his indwelling sin.

The death of the believer to sin is not a death that the believer has undergone in himself, in his own body. It is the death of Jesus Christ on the cross, in which the believer has been made a participant through his union with Christ in baptism. (3) Just as Christ, Who was without sin Himself, identified with us sinners in His own baptism, then took our sin and bore it to the cross, where He suffered the death penalty we had incurred for us, so we are identified with Him in baptism, in which His death becomes our own. This breaks our relationship of slavery to indwelling sin. Our sinful nature, which St. Paul calls “the flesh” (4), remains with us during our lives on earth, but we are to consider ourselves to have died to it in Christ.

It is not only Christ’s death which we participate in through our union with Him, but His resurrection as well. Our participation in Christ’s death would do us no good if we were not also joined with Him in His resurrection, for that would mean we have been liberated from a condition of slavery to be left in a condition of death. St. Paul makes it clear, however, that the whole point of our having been baptized into Christ’s death is that we would also “walk in newness of life”.

For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection. (v. 5)

There is a double meaning in these verses. The believer will one day be raised from the dead in the literal sense of a bodily resurrection. The believer also possesses a new life in the here and now. These two senses are both present in the passage:

Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him (v. 8)

Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. (v. 11)

St. Paul then goes on to write that because we have been released from slavery to sin through our participation in Christ’s death, we are not to serve sin, but are to present ourselves as servants to God. Grace, therefore, is not an excuse for us to sin, but the foundation of a life of righteousness. The resurrection is central to St. Paul’s argument, because we possess the new life in which we are to serve God in righteousness through our union with Christ and His resurrection.

The resurrection is God’s testimony to the world that Jesus Christ is His Son and that His death paid for our sins, it is Christ’s triumphant victory over sin, death, and hell, it is the risen Christ Who is our ever-living high priest interceding for us in the heavenly tabernacle, and through our union with Christ we partake of His resurrection life, both in the new life in the here and now, and in the resurrection of the just on the last day. St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians that the Christian faith is pointless apart from the resurrection:

And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished. If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable. (1 Cor. 15:17-19)

Our faith, as the Apostle immediately goes on to point out, however, is not in vain because Christ is risen.

He is risen indeed!

Hallelujah!


(1) C. S. Lewis “Myth Become Fact”, in God In the Dock:Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1970), edited by William Hooper. My review of this book can be found here: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2011/05/christianity-in-age-of-unbelief.html


(2) Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Vol. 1, Apostolic Christianity A.D.1-100 (Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 2002) p.108.

(3) Some have maintained that a spiritual baptism is what is referred to in Romans 6. They believe this interpretation is necessary in order to avoid two common errors. The first is that of those who tell a person who believes in Jesus that faith in Jesus is not enough and that he also needs water baptism in order to be saved. The second is that of those who think that the water of baptism confers grace in a mechanical fashion. It is, however, water baptism that St. Paul was referring to in Romans. This should not surprise us. Baptism was the initiatory rite by which people became members of the Church, the visible body of Christ. In the New Testament, after the Apostles preached the Gospel, they baptized those who believed. Thus baptism is identified with the beginning of the Christian life in the New Testament. This does not mean that someone who believes in Christ but for some reason has never been baptized is going to hell. St. Mark quotes Jesus as having said “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned” not “he that is baptized not shall be damned”. Nor does it mean that baptism confers salvation mechanically apart from faith in Christ. St. Paul wrote “For he is not a Jew, which is one outwardly; neither is that circumcision, which is outward in the flesh: But he is a Jew, which is one inwardly; and circumcision is that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter; whose praise is not of men, but of God.” (Rom. 2:28-29) If this can be said of the initiatory sacrament of the Old Covenant, it is reasonable to conclude that the same is true of the initiatory sacrament of the New Covenant.

(4) In Greek this is the word sarx. This word means “flesh” in the ordinary sense of the term, the physical substance of which our bodies are composed. It has the extended meaning of “human nature” and as such is used in passages about the Incarnation which speak of Christ having become flesh. When St. Paul uses it to refer to the fallen, corrupt, sinfulness of human nature he typically does so by contrasting it with the spirit. In Platonic philosophy, the spirit is said to belong to the world of perfect forms and to be trapped in the corrupt body of flesh until death. This concept clearly influences St. Paul’s choice of imagery here, but it is also clear that he does not accept the Platonic dichotomy between a corrupt physical world and an incorruptible spirit world in full, for he speaks of evil in the spiritual world, and goes on in the passage in Romans 6 to urge his readers to present the members of their physical bodies as “instruments of righteousness” to God. Those who did embrace the full Platonic dichotomy and tried to incorporate that with Christian thought, ended up denying the Incarnation, and became the antichrists of whom St. John warned his readers, the Gnostics whose false teachings the orthodox Apostolic school had to contend with in the early centuries of the Church.

The Grace of God

For by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works lest any man should boast – Eph. 2:8-9

God, Who is our Creator and Sovereign Lord, expects and requires many things of us. It is His just right, as our Creator and Sovereign Lord, to expect and require these things of us. First and foremost, He expects us to have faith in Him, to believe what He tells us and to trust Him. It is reasonable and right, that He who is true and does not lie, should expect this of us. Secondly, He expects us to love Him with all of our hearts. This is how He loves us, and it is to His love that we owe every blessing we have ever enjoyed in our lives, those lives, and our very existence. That we should love Him in return is only right. Thirdly, He expects us to obey His commandments. He created us and the world in which we live, He owns us, He is the Master, it is His right to be obeyed. The commandments He gives us are not like the laws of a human tyrant who uses his power for his own gain at the expense of those he rules. The commandments He gives us are few and simple, and are necessary for our own good. He commands us not to murder each other, not to steal each other’s property, not to cheat on our own spouses or with other people’s spouses, not to tell lies about each other, and not to sit around wishing we had what our neighbor has.

Do we meet God’s expectations and requirements?

Sadly, we do not. We have difficulty taking Him at His word, we disbelieve what He says and do not trust Him to take care of us, thinking that we must look out for ourselves rather than rely upon Him. We do evil to each other and then we blame Him for the pain and suffering we have inflicted upon ourselves. We do not love Him wholeheartedly but neglect Him, ignore Him, and think evil of Him. We break His commandments in our hearts and minds, and all too often in our words and deeds as well. In short, we sin.

As sinners, rebels who have rejected His authority and flaunted His laws, God rightly demands that we repent, i.e., that we abandon our bad attitudes, change our mind, turn from our sins to God, bend our knees and necks in submission to His authority, mend our evil ways, making restitution where we have harmed others, humble ourselves, confessing rather than hiding our sins, and meekly ask Him for forgiveness. The repentance God demands from us is a complete repentance, repentance from all our sins not just the ones we consider to be big, serious, or major, repentance from our entire attitude of sinful rebellion. The repentance God requires of us is sincere and true repentance in our hearts, not just a public show of tears. It is to be a repentance of contrition, sorrow for our sinfulness, and not just a repentance of attrition, sorrow for its consequences.

Do we repent completely in this wholehearted and sincere manner?

Alas, our repentance too falls far short of that which the God we have offended is perfectly just in demanding from us who crave His pardon and forgiveness.

If we do not trust God the way we should, if we do not love Him with the love He deserves, if we break His laws rather than obey His commandments and then offer Him what is at best a partial repentance, is there any hope for us who stand under His judgement all our lives and will one day be called before Him to give a final account of everything we have ever thought, said or done?

If we had to depend upon our own efforts to please God then clearly there would be no hope for us. Thankfully, we do not have to depend upon our own efforts. God, the Gospel message declares, has given us a gift, the gift of His Son Jesus Christ. God gave His Son to be our Saviour.

A savior is a person who rescues someone else from a difficulty, hardship, or peril from which they cannot extricate themselves. Imagine you are out on a river in a boat and the boat flips over. You are unable to swim, have neglected to put on your life-saving apparatus, and before you think to grab a hold of it the boat is carried away by the current. Your situation looks hopeless but a man on the bank of the river had seen all this happen and jumps in and swims towards you. He grabs a hold of you, swims to shore, and pulls you out of the water. Had it not been for this man you would have drowned and so he could be rightly called your saviour.

God gave us Jesus to be our Saviour from a peril far worse than drowning. He gave us Jesus to save us from the worst peril possible, our own sinfulness which separates us from God and places us under His condemnation now and for all eternity. It was not by His teachings that Jesus saved us, although He was also our Teacher, because even the best of us falls short of the righteousness contained in His teachings. It was not by His example that Jesus saved us, for none of us lives up to His example. It is by His death that He saved us. Christ’s death was an event could have been our ultimate condemnation. Human beings, blessed with the presence of God’s Son come down from heaven and incarnate as a man, took Him and murdered Him in a brutally cruel manner, by nailing Him to a wooden cross. God, however, used Christ’s crucifixion to accomplish our salvation. It was to die on the cross, that Jesus had come down from heaven in the first place. God placed the sins of the whole world upon Jesus as He hung upon the cross, and Jesus willingly bore those sins for our sake. By doing so, He became the one true sacrifice, the sacrifice which effectively took away the sins of the world. God raised Jesus from the dead, and He ascended into heaven where He is our High Priest, continually pleading the merits of His once-and-for-all sacrifice on our behalf, effectively securing for us pardon for sins, reconciliation with God, justification in the eyes of God, and everlasting life. All of these things are promised to all who believe in Jesus Christ, i.e., who trust Him as the Saviour God has given.

It is in Jesus that we are to trust and it is in Jesus that our hope is to be found.

The New Testament makes it absolutely clear that the salvation which Christ obtained for us by dying for us on the cross is a gift. It comes to us freely in Christ and not in return for our feeble efforts to please God. Our efforts to please God are to be a response of love to the God who has given us this great salvation, not an attempt to pay Him back or earn it. There is a word that is used in the New Testament to express the manner in which God freely gives us salvation. That word is “grace”.

Grace is one of the most important words in the New Testament. St. Paul repeatedly writes that salvation is by grace. What does this word grace mean?

The word that is translated “grace” in the New Testament is the Greek word charis. This is the word from which our English word “charismatic” is derived. The idea of giving or a gift is very much present in this word as in its Greek root. Charismatic, when the word is used in a theological context, points to the concept of spiritual gifts such as those mentioned by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 12. In everyday English when we speak of a leader as being “charismatic” or possessing “charisma” we mean that he has the gift of being able to persuade people to follow him.

A dictionary entry for the word charis in Greek would be very similar to an entry for grace in English. The range of meanings of the two words is very similar and they have been used for synonyms for a very long time because our word grace comes from the Latin word which was used as the equivalent of charis. We often use the word grace in English, to refer to the way a ballet dancer or figure skater seems to generate visual beauty through her movements. One of the meanings of charis was very similar to this. It had the meaning of “that which causes pleasure or delight”, which was its primary meaning in the earliest Greek literature that has come down to us. Thus Homer frequently used the word charis to depict beauty, charm, strength and similar traits which made Achilles and his other heroes attractive. (1)

This is obviously not the meaning that St. Paul intended to convey in the New Testament when he used the word charis to describe the way in which we are saved. Another meaning of charis, as old as the first and which came to be the more usual meaning in later Greek literature, was that of “a kindly disposition towards others” or “favour”, particularly when that favour was expressed in the giving of gifts. A person upon whom a ruler looked kindly and granted permission to be in his presence would be said to be in the ruler’s grace or favour, and it was the word charis that would be used to express this. Charis could refer to the disposition of favour itself, and it could also refer to the gifts given out of that favour, and to the attitude of gratitude or thankfulness on the part of the person who received the gift. (2)

This is the way in which charis is used in passages about salvation in the New Testament. St. Paul uses it, however, in a more limited sense than in earlier Greek literature. Charis, in the sense of the favour of the gods or of human rulers, was a familiar concept to the Greeks but it was not necessarily connected with the idea of being unmerited or undeserved. In fact if one of the Olympian gods or a human king bestowed his charis upon someone, it was usually because that person possessed a quality such as beauty or courage which the god or king admired, i.e., the other kind of charis.

St. Paul and the other New Testament writers limited the meaning of charis to favour which is undeserved or unmerited in his epistles by creating a contrast between charis on the one hand and law and works on the other and by connecting charis with the ideas of love and mercy.

In several epistles St. Paul writes about the contrast between “law” and “grace”, but it is in his epistle to the Church in Rome that he sets forth the contrast in a systematic manner. “Law” refers both to the Mosaic Law, the Covenant God made with Israel at Mt. Sinai and especially the commandments contained in that covenant, and the principle of law. The principle of law is that the law-giving authority issues the rules which those under the law are expected to obey and are held accountable to, that those who obey the rules are considered to be righteous, and those who disobey are judged to be unrighteous and are punished for their trespasses. Works are the efforts of those under a law to meet its requirements.

St. Paul made it clear in his epistle to the Roman church, that law and works cannot make a person righteous in the eyes of God. In the second chapter of Romans, he demonstrated that no one lives up to the standard by which God holds him accountable. The Jews, who received the Law from God, did not live up to it, the Gentiles who did not receive the Law from God, but are held accountable by the law of their conscience, fall short of that law as well. Thus, both Jew and Gentile alike, can only be condemned by the law which is over them and by their works. This indictment of Jew and Gentile proceeds into the third chapter of Romans where it culminates in the declaration that “all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (v. 23)

St. Paul then went on immediately to say “Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus”. The word translated “freely” is the word dorean, an adverb formed from the Greek word for gift. By using this word with charis in this verse, St. Paul places emphasis upon the fact that the favour of God, by which He has given Christ to redeem us, is freely given and comes from the goodness of God’s heart and not in response to any merit in us.

A few verses after this, in the fourth chapter of Romans, the incompatibility of works and grace is declared:

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. (vv. 4-5)

In other words, if the state of being justified, of being righteous in the eyes of God, is something which we receive as the result of our works, it is a reward for our behaviour. Grace would have nothing to do with it, because our justification would be our just due under the law. God would owe it to us. Justification in the eyes of God does not come to us in this way. It is freely given in Jesus Christ to all who believe in Him as their Savior.

The other way in which the fact that God’s grace or favour is given freely and not merited or deserved can be seen in the New Testament is in the way the idea of grace is connected with the ideas of love and mercy.

St. John writes frequently about God’s love. In his Gospel he records Jesus saying “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life”. In this most famous of Biblical verses, God’s love is identified as the reason that God gave us His Son. This means that God’s love is the source of His grace. Now the word love can often mean a feeling of affection that arises in one’s heart because of the attractive qualities of the object of one’s love. This is not the case with the love of God. In his first epistle, St. John wrote that “God is love”, i.e., that love is the very essence of His nature. God’s love arises out of His own good nature and not out of some love-worthy quality in us. The word St. John uses for love in the verses cited is agape, a word which was already distinct from other loves such as philia and eros, but which took on a special meaning in the teachings of Jesus, the writings of the New Testament, and the early church. It refers to a kind of goodness of heart in which one is concerned for the well-being of others and willing to give of oneself to see to their well-being.

To Titus, St. Paul wrote “Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us” (Tit. 3:5). Mercy or pity, refers to compassion for those who are in need and suffering, and acts taken out of that compassion to alleviate the suffering and meet the need.

God’s grace, love, and mercy are three different aspects of the goodness of God, which compels Him to bestow good gifts upon sinners who do not deserve it, including the gift of our Saviour Jesus Christ, Who took our sins upon Himself, that we might be reconciled to God and justified in His sight.

God’s grace is not an excuse for us to forget about pleasing God by trusting Him, loving Him, obeying Him, and repenting of our sins. “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid.” (Rom. 6:1-2) Our hope and our faith are not to rest, however, in our efforts to please God (3), but in God Himself, in His grace, and in the gift of a Saviour He has given us in His grace, our Lord Jesus Christ.

(1) In Greek mythology, there was a trio of goddesses who were calles the Charites – the Graces. Each of these was a personification of something which was the cause of pleasure or delight. Thalia personified abundance, Euphrosyne personified joy, and Aglaea personified beauty. Note however, that the things they personified were also considered to be divine gifts. The ideas of charis/grace as “that which causes delight or pleasure” and charis/grace as “gift-giving favour” were never entirely separate from each other.

(2) When we refer to the act of thanking God before a meal as “saying grace” we are echoing the use of charis as gratitude.

(3) The word grace, as I explained in the text of this essay, can refer both to the act of giving and to the gift given. The gift of God that saves us in the sense of reconciling us to God, pardoning our sins, and making us righteous in His eyes, is Jesus Christ our Saviour. God has also given, to those who believe in Jesus Christ, the gift of the Holy Spirit by Whom we are united with Christ, partaking through our baptismal union with Him in His death and resurrection life, and with other believers in the body of Christ. The Holy Spirit indwells our hearts and empowers us to live the new life. All of this is part of grace as well. Our faith and our hope of everlasting life and justification must rest in Jesus Christ, what He has done for us on the cross, and His gospel promises. It is Christ and His sacrifice that made it possible for the transforming and sanctifying grace of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

The Repentance God Requires

God requires or demand certain things from man. This does not fit with an idea of God that is very popular today. In that concept all God ever does is love and give. Now, God as He has revealed Himself to us in Christ is certainly a God of love and of grace. He is also, however, a God Who requires much of us. Nobody made that clearer than Christ Himself, Who in His Sermon on the Mount explained that formal, outward, conformity to the letter of God’s Law is not enough to meet God’s requirements – He demands that we obey Him internally, in our hearts as well as in our outward actions. God then, loves us and freely gives us His blessings out of His love, but He also requires and demands things from us. There are two possible errors to fall into here. One is to think that God’s love and grace depend upon our meeting His requirements. The other is to think that God’s love and grace negate our obligation to meet His requirements.

What does God require of man?

His first requirement, before all others, is faith, that is that we believe in Him and in His goodness to us. The author of the book of Hebrews tells us “But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” If we do not start with faith, we can never please God, we can never meet any of His requirements. In the book of Genesis, the beginning of man’s fall was when the serpent persuaded Eve to disbelieve what God had told her. Unbelief is the first step in sin and disobedience, likewise faith is the first step in obeying God.

Faith is also the means whereby we receive God’s love and grace. It is vitally important that we understand that this is a separate function of faith from faith’s being the first of God’s requirements. God’s love and grace are given to us in Christ. Christ is presented to us, in the preaching of the Gospel and in the sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, as the Saviour God has freely given us out of the love of His heart. (1) We are promised that whoever believes in Him is cleansed from all sin and justified by His propitiatory sacrifice and possesses in Him everlasting life. When we receive the gift of love and grace God has given us in Christ through faith, we do not receive it because by believing we have met one of God’s requirements. We receive it because that is the only way this freely given gift can be received.

Faith is the only means whereby we can receive God’s gift of love and grace in Jesus Christ. It is not the only thing God requires or demands of us. (2) After faith, God requires that we love and obey Him. Love arises out of faith, and obedience, true obedience, flows out of love.

None of us meets any of these requirements perfectly, or even comes close to it, because we are fallen, sinful creatures. If our salvation were not a free gift, given to us in Christ, and received through faith, but were something we had to obtain by meeting God’s requirements, none of us would ever make it.

There is another requirement God has for man. This is a requirement which takes man’s fallen condition into consideration. Faith, love, and obedience were all required of man before man fell, before man needed the salvation which is freely given him in Christ. The next requirement is one which is there because man has sinned and rebelled against God. It is a requirement that is only ever placed upon sinners, as the proper thing to do once one has sinned.

That requirement is repentance.

What is repentance?

The primary Greek word translated “repentance” in the New Testament is the word metanoia. This word is a compound formed by adding the prefix meta, which in this case means “after”, and the noun nous which refers to the intellect, the faculty of thought. The main verb for “repent” is a virtually identical word, using the verb form of nous, which means to think. The resulting concept is that of “thinking again” or an “after thought”. Metanoia is often defined as a “change of mind”. (3)

Just as the words “salvation” and “save” do not automatically refer to God’s actions to rescue us from sin and condemnation, but can be used with reference to any kind of rescue, such as a fireman who saves a child from a burning house, so the Greek words for repentance and repent can be used in any situation in which someone changes their mind and do not have to refer to the repentance of a sinner.

When these words are used to describe the act God requires from someone who has sinned, they refer to a more specific kind of change of mind - the act of thinking over something you have done, coming to the realization that you should not have done it and that it is has offended God and perhaps other people, asking forgiveness of God and other people, and determining not to repeat this act in the future.

Other Scriptural concepts which are closely connected with the idea of repentance are the concepts of sorrow, confession, brokenness, contrition, and humility.

We often think of repentance in terms of “being sorry”. The emotion of sorrow is related to repentance but it falls short of being repentance. We all know how much easier it is to be sorry over something we have done than to commit ourselves to not doing it again. St. Paul, in his second epistle to the Church in Corinth wrote:

For though I made you sorry with a letter, I do not repent, though I did repent: for I perceive that the same epistle hath made you sorry, though it were but for a season. Now I rejoice, not that ye were made sorry, but that ye sorrowed to repentance: for ye were made sorry after a godly manner, that ye might receive damage by us in nothing. For godly sorrow worketh repentance to salvation not to be repented of: but the sorrow of the world worketh death. (2 Cor. 7:8-10, bold represents italics in Authorized Version)

In this cunning play on words, St. Paul acknowledges that his previous epistle had made the Corinthians sorry, but he did not repent of that, because their sorrow brought about repentance. Sorrow and repentance are not the same thing, but the right kind of sorrow, godly sorrow, leads to repentance, to a mending of ways. There is both a right and a wrong kind of sorrow.

Dr. Johnson wrote:

The completion and sum of repentance is a change of life. That sorrow which dictates no caution, that fear which does not quicken our escape, that austerity which fails to rectify our affections, are vain and unavailing. But sorrow and tenor must naturally precede reformation: for what other cause can produce it? He, therefore, that feels himself alarmed by his conscience, anxious for the attainment of a better state, and afflicted by the memory of his past faults, may justly conclude that the great work of repentance is begun, and hope by retirement and prayer, the natural and religious means of strengthening his conviction, to impress upon his mind such a sense of the divine presence as may overpower the blandishments of secular delights, and enable him to advance from one degree of holiness to another, till death shall set him free from doubt and contest, misery and temptation. (4)


The idea of confession is the idea of owning up to and acknowledging our sins, rather than trying to hide them and cover them up. The latter comes much easier to us. Note that in Genesis Adam and Eve’s first thought, after sinning, was to cover up their nakedness and to hide from God. Fallen human nature has not changed since.

St. John tells us:

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 Jn. 1:8-9)

Confession here, is placed in opposition to denial and self-deception. The word translated “confess” is another compound word, which combines the word for “same” with the word for “speak”. Its primary meaning is to verbally agree with another person. These verses occur in a context in which St. John is contrasting light and truth with darkness and deception. We walk in the darkness of self-deception when we deny our sinfulness, but if we confess our sins, i.e., if we do not hide from what the light of God’s truth reveals about our sinfulness but openly acknowledge it, God faithfully forgives us. This confession of our sin before God is a key element of repentance.

In Psalm 51, which King David wrote to express his repentance before God over his sin with Bathsheba, he wrote:

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. (v. 17)

In the Scriptures, as in everyday language, “broken” seldom describes a desirable or good thing. The opposite of broken, i.e., being whole is usually connected with that which is desirable and good. This verse is an exception, because it is talking about the state of someone who has already been broken by sin. Before there can be healing, there must be further brokenness. It is human pride which leads us to cover up and hide our sins, rather than to confess them, or worse, to harden our hearts, stiffen our necks, and justify our actions. What is needed is for the sinner’s heart and spirit to be broken in repentance and humility, rather than hardened in pride. This is what David is referring to here.

God demands repentance from all men everywhere (Acts. 17:30) because we have all sinned. In both Testaments, however, it is primarily God’s own people who are called to repentance.

If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. (2. Chron. 7:14)

In the Old Testament, there is a cyclical pattern where God’s people turn away from Him to idols and wickedness, God in judgement sends their enemies against them as a scourge, they repent, and then God forgives and restores them.

When Christ came, the message which John the Baptist preached, then Jesus, and then His Apostles when He commissioned and sent them out, was “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand”. This message was addressed to those who were God’s people under the Old Covenant. The kingdom of heaven promised by God through the prophets was at hand, in the person of Christ the promised Messiah. This call to repentance was a call for God’s Covenant people to repent of their sins and receive their Messiah.

Through His death and resurrection, Christ took away our sins, and established the New Covenant in which all who believe the Gospel, all who trust Jesus Christ as Saviour, become God’s Covenant people, His Church. All people everywhere are still called to repent, and this call is especially addressed to God’s Church.

The call to repentance is reflected in the liturgy of the Church. The Book of Common Prayer includes the following General Confession in the order for Morning and Evening Prayer:

ALMIGHTY and most merciful Father, We have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep, We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts, We have offended against thy holy laws, We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou them, O God, which confess their faults. Restore thou them that are penitent; According to thy promises declared unto mankind in Christ Jesu our Lord. And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake, That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.

The need for a humble, repentant attitude is also stressed in the order for Holy Communion. The Book of Common Prayer is the official order of services for the Anglican Church but it draws on and reflects the historical, traditional, liturgy of the broader Christian Church as well.

We must remember, however, that God’s demand that we repent, calls us to do more than just say the words of Confession in services of public worship. In calling Israel to repent, the prophet Joel called upon them to “rend your heart, and not your garments”. It is in our hearts that true repentance must take place.

As with all other things God demands of us, we will not perfectly meet His requirements in this life. We do not trust Him fully, we do not love Him with our whole hearts, We do not obey Him completely, and alas, our repentance, in contrast to that spoken of by St. Paul, often needs to be repented of. Our sinfulness keeps us from meeting God’s requirements in such a way that could bear up and be seen to be faultless under scrutiny. Thankfully, God has given us a perfect Saviour in Whom to trust, and we are to place our faith in Him rather than in our own efforts to meet God’s requirements.

(1) The sacraments are often called the “means of grace”. This can be misleading. They do not share the role of faith, which is the means of receiving the grace God gives us in Christ. They share the role of preaching, which role is to convey the grace of God in Christ in the Gospel, to those who receive it through faith. They are, indeed, another means of preaching the Gospel. St. Augustine describes the sacraments as the union of the Word and a physical element. The role of the physical element is as a vessel to convey the Word, which makes the Word more real to us, perhaps because it reaches the senses of sight and touch, as well as of hearing.
.
(2) This is how we must understand “sola fide” or “faith alone”. It does not mean that faith is the only thing God demands of us. It means that God’s saving grace in Christ comes to us through faith alone. Faith, as the means of receiving salvation, is not a requirement in the sense of a condition. A condition is something which you do in order to obtain something which you receive in exchange for your fulfilling the condition. Grace, by definition, is free, and can have no conditions. Faith is the empty hand that receives the gift. It is a requirement in the sense that it is something which God demands from us as His right. As a requirement in this sense it is the first of many requirements.

(3) Interestingly, the English word looks like it has a similar derivation, the addition of re meaning again, to the French penser meaning “to think”, but this is not in fact its actual etymology.

(4) Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, 110.

Obeying God

“He that honoureth his father shall have a long life; and he that is obedient unto the Lord shall be a comfort to his mother.” – Ecclesiasticus 3:6

“Trust and obey, for there’s no other way
To be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.” – John H. Sammis

Obedience is a character trait which does not come easily to human beings. As children we have to be trained to obey our parents, our teachers, and other authority figures, and we resist that training every step of the way. We have a strong inclination to rebel against authority and break the rules. This inclination is what theologians call “Original Sin”. The Holy Scriptures just call it “sin” and St. John defines it as lawlessness, i.e., the rejection of all authority and law over oneself.

The institutions of traditional society stressed the importance of obedience. In the family, children were to obey parents, in the classroom they were to obey their teachers. All members of society were expected to obey the laws of the land as enforced by the Queen’s police. Most importantly, the Church taught obedience to the commandments of God Himself.

Today, however, these institutions are finding it more and more difficult to instill obedience to traditional authorities. Indeed, various popular educational and psychological theories seem designed to discourage parents and teachers from even attempting to do so. Child protection agencies and governments seem determined to strip parents of their authority and their right to back that authority up with discipline.

Behind all of this there is a philosophy which has gradually permeated Western societies over the last few centuries. This philosophy asserts that people as individuals own their own selves and that therefore the only legitimate authority over them is that which they have voluntarily consented to. The name of this philosophy is liberalism.

Where traditional social institutions sought to contain the ill effects of that human condition known as sin and to cultivate the obedience to lawful authority necessary for human societies to thrive, liberalism encourages the sinful attitude of rebellion and undermines traditional authority. While liberalism, as a social and political philosophy, is only a few centuries old, the attitude behind it is much older. Indeed, Samuel Johnson, the 18th Century lexicographer and moralist, correctly identified the source of that attitude when he said “The first Whig was the devil”. The devil rebelled against God, in his pride asserting his own will against that of his Creator and Sovereign.

Sadly, the devil’s liberal attitude has permeated even the Church of Jesus Christ. It is now common, even in Churches which profess doctrinal orthodoxy, for people to respond to a Scriptural command by saying “Yes, but I think…”

This is the exact opposite of the attitude the Holy Scriptures enjoin upon us. A search of the Scriptures for the words “obey” and “obedience” reveals that God expects and requires obedience from all people, but especially from the people He has identified as His own and called by His name. This was true under the Old Covenant and it is true under the New Covenant, although there is a major difference in how God commands obedience in the two Covenants.

The New Testament also commands Christians to obey all the traditional social authorities. Children are told to obey their parents (Eph. 6:1, Col. 3:20), servants are told to obey their masters wholeheartedly out of fear of God (Eph. 6:5-6,Col. 3:22), wives are told to submit to their husbands (Ephesians 5:22-23, 1 Peter 3:1), and all believers are told in several places to obey the civil authorities who are identified as God’s ministers (Rom. 13:1-7, Titus 3:1, Hebrews 13:17). Submission to and obedience to these authorities is treated consistently, in the New Testament, as part of the obedience we owe God. There is not the slightest sympathy with Whiggish thought anywhere in the Apostolic writings. Of course there are also commands to those entrusted with authority not to abuse it – fathers are told not to provoke their children (Eph. 6:4), Husbands are told to love their wives as Christ loves His Church (Eph. 5:25-28), masters are reminded that they too have a Master and are told not to threaten their servants (Eph. 6:9).

The Whig concept of self-ownership was thought out by John Locke in the 18th Century. It was the foundation of his theory of natural rights. Locke conceived of rights as claims or title deeds to property, with the right to one’s own property as the basis of all other rights. Property ownership, however, is not universal and Locke was looking for universal natural rights which belong to each person. Thus, he argued, individuals who have no other property, have at least their own selves as their own, their lives and their liberty.

The Holy Scriptures declare, however, that the earth and everything in it, belongs to God. The Psalmist says “The earth is the LORD's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein” (Psalm 24:1) “Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine”, God declares, in Ezekiel 18:4. He then goes on to say “the soul that sinneth, it shall die”, an assertion of His right as the owners of all souls to punish the soul that disobeys.

Rather than belonging to ourselves, therefore, we belong to God. This is true of all human beings by virtue of the fact that He is the Creator and Ruler of all things. It is true of Christian believers in a special way, however. In addition to being His by right of Creation we are also His by right of purchase, for He purchased us with the price of the blood of His Son Jesus Christ (Acts 20:28, 1 Cor. 6:19-20, 1 Pet. 1:18-19, Rev. 5:9). All people, as God’s creation, subjects, and property owe Him our obedience. He is entitled to our obedience, He has a right to it, and we do not have a right to withhold it. As Christians we owe Him our obedience because He has purchased us, redeemed us from the slave-market of sin, and brought us into servitude to His Son, which servitude is true freedom (Rom. 6:17-18).

Under the Old Covenant, God’s people Israel owed God obedience because He had redeemed them out of their slavery in the land of Egypt. After bringing them out of Egypt He made His covenant with them at Mt. Sinai. The terms of the Covenant were that He would give them the land He had promised to their forefathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and would be their God, and they would be His people. They were to obey the commandments He would give them, which terms they agreed to in the sacrifice that sealed the Covenant. They would be blessed in the land if they did so obey, they would be punished and even driven from the land if they disobeyed (Exod. 19:3-8, Deut. 11:27-28). When driven from the land, they were to remember their God, return to Him, and obey His commandments and He would restore them (Deut. 30:1-5).

Much of the Old Testament consists of the history of the Israelites under this covenant, their disobedience, their judgement, their repentance, and their restoration. Towards the end of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, when the Assyrians and Babylonians would take God’s people captive and remove them from the Promised Land, God sent prophets who prophesied the great judgement God was about to send upon His people, but promised that God would one day break this cycle, would send them a Savior, and make a new and better Covenant, in which He would write His laws upon the hearts of His people rather than upon tablets of stone (Jer. 31:31-34). That New Covenant was established by the blood of Jesus Christ, shed on the cross (Matt. 26:28, Mk. 14:24, Luke 22:20).

There are similarities and differences between the two Covenants. The Old Covenant was made with a particular nation, the entire world was to be invited to enter the New Covenant through the proclamation of the Gospel, and under the New Covenant the people of God are those who accept that invitation by believing in Jesus Christ. The Book of Hebrews tells us that the Old Covenant was a shadow image of the New Covenant. Just as a picture is inferior to the real thing it represents, so the Old Covenant was an inferior representation of the New. The Aaronic High Priesthood was an image of the High Priesthood of Christ. The Tabernacle and later the Temple, were pictures of the Tabernacle of God in heaven. The sacrifices of the Old Covenant, repeatedly offered on the altars of Israel for the sins of the people, could never take away those sins, but they pointed to the one sacrifice of Christ. That sacrifice, was Christ’s death on the Cross, and the Book of Hebrews tells us how that one sacrifice, the blood of which, Christ as High Priest brought into the heavenly Holy of Holies, once and for all effectively took away the sins of the world.

The New Covenant is also superior to the Old Covenant in the way it calls God’s people to obedience. The Old Covenant, was based upon the principle of Law – do and be blessed and live, do not and be cursed and die. Law demands obedience, but it cannot change the hearts of fallen people, whose sinful natures rebel against the Law. The Law, therefore, can only condemn and is a curse to those who are under it (2 Cor. 3:7-9, Gal. 3:10) The New Covenant, offers the blessings of God freely, as a gift to be received by faith, and calls upon believers to respond to God in obedience out of love. “If ye love Me”, Jesus said “Keep My commandments” (Jn. 14:15). With the everlasting life, pardon for sin, and justification, offered freely in the Gospel to believers on the basis of Christ’s effective sacrifice, God also promises the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, to provide the power for believers to overcome sin and obey Christ’s commandments.

That the New Covenant promises the indwelling Holy Spirit and His power to help us obey Christ’s commandments is all the more important because the standard Christ calls us to is higher than that found in the Law. There are 613 commandments in the Mosaic Law. The best known of these are the Ten Commandments, which are the Law's basic commandments of which the others are largely just applications of the principles contained in the Ten to particular situations. Jesus, however, when asked which commandment was most important, condensed the entire Law even further into two commandments, Deuteronomy 6:5’s “And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might”, and Leviticus 19:8’s “thou shalt love they neighbor as thyself”. “On these two commandments” Jesus said “hang all the law and the prophets” (Matt. 22:40). Note that Jesus did not say that His message was contained in those two commandments, which is how these verses are often misread. He said that the Law and Prophets – the Old Testament – was summarized in these two commandments. Shortly before His crucifixion, Jesus gave His Church a new commandment, which is similar to these two in that it uses the verb love. It is found in the 13th chapter of St. John’s Gospel:

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. (34)

As with all other aspects of the New Covenant, this new commandment is superior to the two which Jesus said summarize the Old. The phrase “as I have loved you” has a double meaning here. The first meaning is “in the manner in which I loved you”. Later that same night, the night of the Last Supper, Jesus repeated the new commandment and immediately after said “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (Jn. 15:13). This is what Jesus was about to do for the world and especially for His believers and disciples. Jesus therefore, in giving this new commandment, was calling His disciples to a higher love than that demanded by the Law. Earlier, Jesus had challenged His followers by saying “Whosoever will come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me” (Mk. 8:34).

The cross mentioned in that verse does not mean, as it is often interpreted as meaning today, any sort of burden a believer may have to bear. No one hearing Jesus speak would have understood Him that way. To “take up the cross” was to do what Jesus Himself did, when He bore His literal cross of wood down the Via Dolorosa to Calvary. In calling upon prospective disciples to take up their cross, Jesus was literally telling them they needed to be ready to die for Him.

The new commandment is a restatement of this call, which again displays how the New Covenant is superior to the Old. In the call to take up the cross, Jesus was speaking to people under the Old Covenant, under the Law, and the call is stated in terms of an absolute demand, a price that the prospective disciple must pay for the privilege of following Christ. In the new commandment, given on the eve of His crucifixion, it is restated in terms of grace, rather than law. The other meaning of “as I have loved you” is “because I have loved you”. Under the New Covenant, we are called to take up our cross, and be prepared to love each other the way Christ loved us, by laying down our lives for each other, not as a cost to be paid for discipleship, but as an expression of our love for Christ in response to His love for us.

This then, is the standard Christ calls us to, to love each other, with the same kind of love He showed for us when He died on the cross, a love that includes a willingness to lay down our own lives for each other. This is the commandment we are called to obey, a commandment which expresses a standard higher than all the commandments contained in the Law and the Prophets. We are to obey this commandment, not in order to obtain God’s blessing which is given to us freely by grace, but as an expression of our love for God in response to His love for us (1 Jn 4:19). In this life, in which we still have our sinful natures, we will not obey it perfectly, and by grace our standing before God does not depend upon our obedience, but in Christ we are given the power to obey, which the Law could never give to those who were under it.

Let us seek to avail ourselves of that power so as to give to God, out of love for Him, the obedience to which He is entitled.

The Folly of Feminism

Nature provides some animals with weapons with which to fight their enemies – horns, claws, teeth, etc. Other animals and plants she provides with alternative defences which dissuade their would-be-predators from attacking, defences such as colours and smells which tell the would-be predator not to waste its time. Sometimes these colours or smells indicate that the life-form is poisonous and inedible. Other life-forms have colour defences that are a bit more sneaky, such as spots which mimic the appearance of eyes to make it seem to the predator that it is being looked at when it is not.

Feminism, one of the most prominent errors of the modern age, is an ideology with a built-in defence that is similar to that of plant and animals with colour defences. The natural enemy of feminism is the traditional social order built upon the patriarchal family. Since feminism is a movement which purports to speak for women, to champion their rights and demand justice for them, however, an attack upon that movement often bears the appearance of an attack on the fairer sex. To attack women runs contrary to the principles of those who believe in, defend, and uphold the traditional order, particularly those principles enshrined in the laudable system of courtly behaviour that we call chivalry.

Yet attack feminism we must. All around us we see the deleterious effects which feminism has had upon our families, communities, and societies. Marriages which are less binding than business contracts and divorces which are easy to come by. Children being raised without the presence, protection, and provision of a father even though their father is living and might desperately wish to be a father to his children. Thousands of unborn human lives being terminated each year in the name of a woman’s “right to choose”. These outrages and countless others have been caused in whole or in part by the feminist movement. (1)

How can we criticize and challenge this movement while being true to the principles of chivalry?

To do so we must be aware that while feminism calls itself “the women’s movement” it is at its core an extremely misogynistic movement. (2)

Now to many that might seem to be strange accusation. The misandry of the feminist movement is plain to see in its use of rhetoric that equates all men with rapists and wife-beaters, in its support for sexual harassment accusations against men for nothing more than complimenting a woman on her looks, and in the countless humiliations that it demands men undergo in the name of “gender sensitivity”. It is not unusual to hear feminism being spoken of as anti-male. We don’t often hear it accused of being anti-female.

Yet the accusation is true.

The institutions that feminism has attacked, such as marriage and the traditional family, exist for the good of both men and women and the attack on these institutions hurts both men and women. Yet if one of the sexes benefits more than the other from these institutions and is hurt more than the other when they are weakened and collapse, surely it is the female sex rather than the male sex. By attacking these institutions, then, feminism hurts women even more than it hurts men.

This is true even without taking into consideration the trauma many women undergo as the result of having an abortion or the heartbreak others face when they find that they can no longer conceive a child because they allowed themselves to be convinced by feminist rhetoric that a career is more important than motherhood and so spent their optimal child-bearing years climbing the corporate ladder.

Feminism is also misogynistic in a deeper, more fundamental way, than in the harmful effects it has on women. Feminism, in its most basic ideas, is a hatred of women qua women, and a desire to replace both women and men with “individuals” whose biological sex is among their secondary, accidental properties rather than their primary, essential, characteristics. The female characteristics which define women as women are particularly hateful to the feminist movement because they stand in the way of its achieving this goal.

Let us consider what those characteristics are and how feminism hates them.

The human species is divided into two sexes, male and female. This division of mankind into man and woman is more basic, more fundamental, more important than any other distinctions, biological or cultural. It is the nature of sex that the two sexes have a complementary relationship with each other. Men are inwardly drawn towards forming a sexual union with women, and vice versa, and it is out of this union of the sexes that the species is propagated. Thus the survival of the family, the community, the society, the nation, the country, the race, and the species all depend upon the union of the sexes.

Human beings are not the only sexual species, and biologically the definition of female that applies across the board, is that the female is the sex which produces the larger gamete. Genetically, we can distinguish the human sexes by a single chromosome pair. The female has a pair of X chromosomes, whereas the male has one X chromosome paired with a Y chromosome. Even without the help of such scientifically precise definitions, however, people know how to distinguish between men and women.

The most important differences between men and women have to do with reproduction. Men have an external sexual organ which is placed inside the complementary female sexual organ in the act of copulation. During this act the male gamete is transferred to the woman’s body where it fertilizes the female gamete. Conception takes place within the woman’s body, the fertilized egg implants itself in the woman’s womb, and she becomes pregnant. She then bears the child for a period of nine months as it grows inside her, drawing its nourishment from her body. Then she gives birth to the baby. The child is born helpless to survive on its own and unable at first to consume solid food. The woman’s mammary glands secrete a milk that nourishes the baby until it can be weaned off of its mother’s milk.

So far these are the plain facts and are, as such, indisputable. There is also an inescapable conclusion to be drawn from these facts – that pregnancy, childbirth, and the raising of children necessarily involve a larger investment on the part of women than on the part of men. There is one other conclusion which logically follows from this:

Since women have a larger biological role in the production and raising of children then men it follows that in the internal inclinations which influence thought patterns and behavior women will have a corresponding bent towards motherhood.

That this is not only a logical conclusion but actual fact, all normal people acknowledge. It is a problem for feminists, however, because it interferes with their vision of an egalitarian society, free of prescribed gender roles. (3) If women are themselves naturally inclined to make choices that prioritize motherhood and childrearing then a society in which women occupy half the seats in parliament, are half of the corporate CEOs, and half of every other position down the ladder, will never be chosen freely by either sex. Thus an important feminist writer said:

No women should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. (4)

This is the conclusion that feminism logically points to. Feminism’s goals cannot be achieved if women choose to become mothers and make the raising of their children their priority. Women’s own nature inclines them towards this choice, therefore feminism, to progress towards its goals, must take that choice away.

Not all feminists were willing to take their doctrine to that natural conclusion. Betty Friedan, for example, the author of The Feminine Mystique, the founder and first president of NOW, and the person who took the interview with Simone de Beauvoir from which the above quotation was taken, famously disagreed and indeed, wrote an entire book in which she expressed her disagreement.(5) Note however that while Friedan was gracious enough to concede that women could be wives and mothers if that was their own choice she continued to rank the pursuit of a career outside the home as more important than motherhood and remained for the rest of her life a leader in the movement which demanded free, accessible, and legal abortion and free daycare, paid for by the taxpayer, to make it easier for women to put such careers first.

To de Beauvoir, motherhood was an unacceptable choice which should be taken away from women. To Friedan, motherhood was an acceptable choice, but an inferior one to a career in the business world. Neither was happy with women as they were naturally – biologically made to bear and raise children and psychologically inclined so to do. In this we see the deep misogynistic nature of feminism.

Opponents of feminism are often accused of making the mistake of treating the social norms of the 1940’s and 1950’s as set-in-stone universals. There is a degree of justice to this accusation. The 1950’s ideal, of the husband/father earning the family’s bread in an office or factory, while the wife/mother stays at home and cleans and cooks while raising the children, was a quite recent development. In the early days of industrial capitalism women frequently had to work in factories out of necessity – one set of wages alone was not sufficient to keep a family sheltered, clothed, and fed. In the early 1900’s, the achievement of the family wage, whereby a husband was able to support a stay at home wife and children on a single paycheck, was considered to be a sign of social progress. Ironically, the earlier women’s movement, which the women’s liberation movement of the 1960’s and subsequent feminists lay claim to being the successors to, campaigned for this wage.

While the 1950’s ideal family is not a universal model for all mankind it does reflect social universals which are based upon the intrinsic nature of men and women. The primary role of women in any society is to bear and raise children and whatever else they do, in the home or out of it, tends to be subservient to this role. Men, on the other hand, are expected to protect their wives and children, to provide for their material needs, and to be the voice of law and authority. These are the core essentials of the male and female roles – the way they look in practice will vary from society to society, and will also change within a society as economic and other factors change. The division of labour between male and female that is appropriate to a hunter-gatherer society will not be appropriate to an advanced agricultural society, nor will the division of labour appropriate to an agrarian society be appropriate to an industrial society. In whatever form the roles for male and female occur, however, the more they conform to the essentials given above, the better off the society will be, and the further from those essentials they get, the worse off the society will be.

In noting that the specifics of what is expected of men and women change while the core essentials – hopefully – remain intact, because the nature upon which they are based does not change, an interesting observation can be made about how the labour expected of men has changed which sheds some interesting light on the nature of feminism.

Modernism has turned work into a necessary evil for most men. While an argument can be made that work has always been a necessary evil and that this fact was recognized in such ancient texts as Genesis 3:17-19, what I mean here is that a mitigating factor has been removed by modernism. That factor is the sense of vocation.

A “vocation” is the sense that one has been called to or assigned one’s labour by God, the universe, and/or nature and that in performing one’s work one is therefore fulfilling the purpose for which one exists. A sense of vocation allows a man to perform his work as a good in and of itself rather than merely as a means towards a good end. Modernism has, for most men, eroded this sense of vocation. The modern age is an age of materialism. The message of materialism is that the physical world, immediately available to the senses, is either all that there is, or all that we can be sure of, and that therefore we must orient our lives entirely towards the physical world, finding the good and happiness, if they are to be found, in the physical world. This message has become ubiquitous throughout the Western world in the modern age and the economic systems that have developed in the Western world in that era – including both capitalism and socialism – developed to reflect that materialism.

This has had devastating consequences for men’s sense of vocation. If the material world is all that exists – or must be practically treated as such – then the end or purpose for work must be contained within the physical world. The result is that work is no longer something which a person is called to do by a higher Being or to fill a higher purpose but something which is performed solely for the end of obtaining the money needed to sustain one’s existence and support one’s family. There are a few exceptions, such as the clergy, where a sense of vocation remains but otherwise, for most men in the modern economy work has become “the old grind”.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and one way in which many have sought to fill the vacuum left by the absence of vocation is with careerism. A career is not just a job but a way of systematically organizing one’s employment over the course of one’s life so as to rise the economic and social ladders and achieve a place of relative wealth and power. A career is a poor substitute for a vocation. It easily becomes an idol and many are the men who have sacrificed the things which make work bearable in the modern economy – marriage, wife, and family – for their careers, only to realize that the rewards of wealth and power are no compensation for these losses.

What modernism has taken away from most men it cannot take away from women. Motherhood is intrinsic to women in such a way that no amount of materialistic dogma can strip that sense of vocation from it. This is why if you wish to find someone on this planet who displays genuine happiness, contentment, satisfaction and fulfillment, your best bet is to look for a woman who has just given birth, and if you wish to find someone who loudly proclaims that they possess those things while all other indicators suggest otherwise, you look for a woman has chosen an ambitious career over motherhood.

Feminism tells women that they need to be independent individuals, who ignore what society traditionally expects of them, who do not allow themselves to be defined by their biology, and who determine for themselves “what it means to be a woman”, recommending that they do the latter by opting for an ambitious career in aggressive competition with men rather than being a mother. It tells women that they should voluntarily abandon a natural, fulfilling vocation in favour of something that is an unsatisfactory substitute for vocation in the lives of most men.

Surely only an intense hatred of women qua women could be behind such a suggestion.

With feminism’s true anti-woman nature exposed, the call can now go forth to those knights-errant in whose chest the flame of chivalry still burns, if indeed any still exist in this cold, materialist, age, to take up arms and rescue the damsels in distress from the misogynistic dragon of feminism. (6) We will now wrap up this essay up by considering two of the many lies with which this subtle serpent hopes to deceive the Eves of our present day to their own destruction and in so doing bring ruin to our societies and civilization.

The first is the lie that traditional sexual morality was unfair to women, that the overthrow of that morality in the sexual revolution has benefitted women, and that women should embrace promiscuity and experimentation. (7)

At first it seems incredible that anyone could actually believe this. Traditional sexual morality declared that sexual intercourse was to be reserved for the marriage bed and was wrong outside of wedlock for male and female alike. These rules could hardly be considered unfair to women. If anything, they were drawn up explicitly to ensure that women are treated fairly. By restricting sexual intercourse to marriage, in which a man and woman have pledged themselves to each other for life, the rules declare that men are not to take advantage of women by sleeping with them if they are not willing and committed to helping raise the children that may result.

This is not where feminism claims to find the unfairness. The traditional code of sexual behaviour included more than just the “no sex outside marriage” rule. There were prescribed roles for men and women – men were to woo women and women were to accept or reject their advances. They were not supposed to accept men’s attentions too quickly, much less be the first to show interest. The importance of pre-marital chastity was more impressed upon women then upon men, women were more harshly judged for breaking the rules than men, and the burden of responsibility for waiting until marriage was made to weigh more upon women then upon men.

This is what feminists call “the double standard”. They have frequently exaggerated it, (8) but more importantly they have missed the whole point. If society traditionally treated female observance of the rules of sexual conduct as being more important than male observance of such rules it was not in order to deny girls a privilege of “having fun” given to boys. It was because the natural consequences of disobeying the rules are harder on women than on men. It is women, not men, who get pregnant. It is therefore, more important for a woman, that the man she allows to potentially impregnate her be bonded to her in a life-time agreement to live and raise their children together, than it is important for a man, that the woman he sleeps with be in such a relationship with him. This does not mean that it is not important for a man at all – it is better for a man to have all his children with his wife than for him to have them with multiple women scattered all over town – just that it is more important for a woman. Whatever the feminists might say about the so-called “double standard” it existed for the benefit of women and not for the benefit of men at the expense of women.

The leaders of the feminist movement insisted that traditional sexual ethics and the “double standard” be done away with. In its place, they supported the sexual revolution and its idea that so long as it is mutually consensual and between adults, all sexual intercourse should be not only legal, but also free from social and moral judgement. Women, the feminists declared, should not only be free to, but should be encouraged, to be sexually aggressive, to initiate relationships, and to have multiple partners outside of marriage. To ensure that their ability to do so is not impeded by practical considerations, the feminist movement demanded cheap and effective birth control, legal and easily attainable abortion, and government daycare centres.

How has all that worked out?

The sexual revolution has damaged society and harmed women in particular. The removal of the stigma from single motherhood has not removed the hardships of single motherhood which the stigma existed to warn women against in the first place. Open female promiscuity has not led to a greater respect for women on the part of men – quite the opposite. Now that cohabiting with unmarried lovers has become socially acceptable women have discovered that live-in boyfriends are far more likely to abuse them than husbands.

One of the most observable results of the sexual revolution is that sex has become a very big business. Prostitution and pornography have been around since the beginning of time but since the sexual revolution the line between them and mainstream commerce seems to have been erased. Simone de Beauvoir had written that women were historically treated as “the second sex.” What she meant by that was that everything was defined from a male perspective, in which men were the default, the norm, and women were “the other”. Men were the subject, women the object. In this brave new world of big business sex which feminism and the sexual revolution have opened up for us, however, women are not so much objects as commodities.

There is a very real sense in which we can say that the exploitation of women did not truly begin until the sexual revolution opened the door for it.

The second feminist lie is the idea that for women to be excluded from any profession is unjust discrimination which denies women their due rights. An inevitable conclusion, if this idea is accepted, is that women should be allowed to serve in the armed forces in combat situations. Indeed, the feminist would even go further and say that it is not so much a matter of women “being allowed” to do so, as that it is their natural right to do so. If it is women’s natural right to fight as combat soldiers, the reasoning continues, the only reason they would be denied this right is to deny them career opportunities which they need to be fully equally with men.

As logical as that line of reasoning is, it not the reason why most societies throughout history have found the idea of sending women into combat repugnant. Women have been assigned by nature the role of growing new lives in their bodies, giving birth to them, then nurturing them with their milk. War, which deals in death and destruction, is the exact opposite of that. To send women out to fight in war is like ordering a doctor to spread illness or hiring a teacher to promote ignorance. Furthermore, to send women out to fight is to deliberately place them in harm’s way, and to do that is to do the opposite of the role nature has assigned men – to protect and provide for their women and children.

Those few of us who still believe in the old order of things and in the principles of chivalry are opposed to the idea of placing women in harm’s way by sending them out to fight in battle. Feminists insist that for women to have equal rights they must be so sent into the midst of gunfire and explosions. It is a sad commentary, on the modern ideal of equality, that it can make people so foolish as to believe that it is the feminists who have the best interests of women at heart.



(1) “To be blunt, feminism ranks as the most radical and potentially corrosive movement of our time—one that, not unlike a virulent computer virus, is steadily erasing all of our accumulated thoughts and knowledge.” This statement was made by the late Dr. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese in the entry entitled “feminism” found on pages 306-307 American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia, (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2006). Dr. Fox-Genovese was at one time a feminist herself, and the author of an interesting inside critique of feminism, Feminism Without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). As the subtitle indicates she was unhappy with the strain of liberal individualism which pervaded much of feminism. A few years after that she joined the Roman Catholic Church and became a social and political conservative. Roughly around that time she published a book entitled Feminism Is Not the Story of My Life": How Today's Feminist Elite Has Lost Touch with the Real Concerns of Women (New York: Nan A. Talese, 1996) which criticized the leadership of the feminist movement for, among other things, speaking only for the interests of white, middle-class, suburban women and interpreting their interests as being those of all women. This was published ten years before she wrote the entry on feminism quoted above, which can be taken as her final word on the subject, as she died the year after it was published.

(2) As Svein Sellanraa has recently put it: “In a word – and this is the central paradox of an ideology that has now become so closely intertwined with womanhood that those who oppose it are often said to be “against women” – feminists hate femininity” http://orthosphere.org/2012/02/19/sluts-and-double-standards/

(3) In the 1960’s and 1970’s, feminists adamantly denied that there were any essential differences between the male and the female mind and personality and that such differences as were observable were the result of social conditioning. One still hears this position today, although studies in how the male and female brain develop differently have made it much less tenable. Different forms of feminism have also emerged which differ from each other on this matter. Carol Gilligan, in In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1982) wrote “At a time when efforts are being made to eradicate discrimination between the sexes in the search for social equality and justice, the differences between the sexes are being rediscovered in the social sciences”. (p. 6) In this book, Gilligan argued that psychological theory, especially that of Sigmund Freud and Lawrence Kohlberg, displays a sexual bias which she also finds in literature, religion, and mythology, in defining the male as the norm. Doing so, she argued, makes the female into the deviant, and this is an injustice that can only be rectified by recognizing that men and women look at things differently and that both ways are equally valid. While this might sound at first, like an affirmation of the different innate natures of male and female, which the traditional social order was built upon, it is in fact something quite different, a denial of the universal and the objective in reason and science. Gilligan’s book became a foundational text for “difference feminism”, i.e., the kind of feminism which argues that yes, men and women are different, but that science, reason, literature, the arts, politics, and religion have all been unfairly slanted towards the male, and must now be reconstructed to include and reflect the female. This kind of feminism is quite postmodern in its subjectivity as well as totalitarian in its social engineering and has thus found itself an enemy within the feminist camp, in such feminists as Christina Hoff Sommers, Cathy Young, and Camille Paglia, who believe in classical liberalism, which is based upon the idea that universal and objective truth is available through the pursuit of reason and science. Both versions of feminism are, of course, hostile to the idea that the traditional social order, with distinct roles for men and women, is reflective of innate differences between the sexes, which universal and therefore part of objective truth. It is noteworthy that Gilligan left open the question of the origin of the different voices she was hearing, suggesting, in a kind of anti-Nietzschean way that female voice has added value because of the injustices women have experienced in the past.

(3) Simone de Beauvoir, interview in Saturday Review, June 14, 1975. Simone de Beauvoir was the author of many books including the feminist The Second Sex, first published in 1949. She was an existentialist, atheist, leftist, and the live-in girlfriend and doormat of Jean Paul Sartre.

(4) The Second Stage, (New York: Abacus, 1983). Note the similarity between the title and that of the book mentioned in the preceding footnote. It is probably not a coincidence.

(5) In reality, in the oppressive thought climate of the day, dominated by a rigid left-wing orthodoxy, the strongest challenges to feminism are most likely to come from women, just as the most poignant critiques of liberal immigration policies seem to come from people who are themselves immigrants. An example of such a challenge can be found in F. Carolyn Graglia’s Domestic Tranquility: A Brief Against Feminism (Dallas: Spence Publishing Company, 1998).

(6) By “traditional sexual morality”, I mean, of course the traditional sexual ethics of the Western world before the sexual revolution, i.e., those derived from the teachings of the Christian faith and classical philosophy.

(7) There is the claim, for example, that before feminism and the sexual revolution, promiscuity was condemned in women while celebrated and cheered among men. This claim is only valid if conversations in the locker rooms of adolescent male athletes are regarded as being indicative of the normative values of a society. Some feminists have claimed that the Western literary canon is full of male characters who are admired for their multiple seductions of women. While there are some characters who seem to fit this description, such as Ian Fleming’s James Bond, this character type seems to be more often used as an example of what not to do than as a role model to follow. This is certainly the case for Lothario in “The Fair Penitent”. Perhaps the most obvious example is of Don Juan. Like Lothario, and Casanova who was a real person, Don Juan’s name has become synonymous with womanizer. It is difficult to argue that he is portrayed as an admirable role model when every version of his story ends with him being dragged down to hell. The most famous version is the opera Don Giovanni with a libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte set to music by W. A. Mozart. Leporello in his aria, “Madamina, il catalogo è questo” may sound like he is boasting of his master’s conquests, but this is only if you listen to it by itself, out of context. In context, he is trying to convince Donna Elvira that Giovanni is not worthy of her.

The Demon Idol of Equality

The word idol comes from a Greek word meaning “image”. An idol, in the most literal sense, is a physical image of a god used in worship. The word idol is also used to refer to any deity worshipped by man other than the true and living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Who became incarnate as Man in the person of His Son Jesus Christ. This meaning of the word idol is derived from the first, and there is yet another meaning which is derived from the second one. In the third sense of the word, an idol is anything which is given the honour, worship, praise, faith and obedience that is due to God alone, regardless of whether that thing is literally conceived of as a god or not. We sometimes speak of fanatical believers in economic liberalism, for example, as “marketolators”, because the faith they place in the free market often seems to be the kind which would be more appropriately placed in God, although they obviously do not believe the forces of supply and demand to be a living, sentient being that can answer their prayers.

The wickedness of idolatry is a major theme of the Old Testament. The Ten Commandments declare that the Israelites are to have no other god than The LORD and that they are not to make or bow down to idols. The Book of Genesis takes the things worshipped as deities in pagan religions and systematically declares them to be part of the creation of the one true God. In the plagues sent against Pharaoh and Egypt in the Book of Exodus, the God of Israel is revealed to be sovereign over the deities of Egypt. The Israelites are frequently warned against participating in the idolatrous worship of the peoples in the lands surrounding them. Daniel’s friends Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego were miraculously saved from the furnace by God when they faithfully refused to bow down to the image Nebuchadnezzar had made of himself. When God’s judgement fell upon Israel it was frequently due to their turning to idols.

Some gruesome practices were associated with literal idol worship, including human sacrifice. Ordinarily this involved the sacrifice of enemies captured in war, which was horrible enough, but in some cases it went a step further. The heathen deity Moloch, worshipped by several people groups in the Near East, demanded that his worshippers sacrifice their own children to him. The Bible contrasts Moloch with the true God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Only once did the Lord demand such a sacrifice, to test the faith and obedience of Abraham, and He prevented Abraham from actually carrying out the sacrifice. In the New Testament, in the light of which the Old Testament must be understood, God gives His own Son to be the final, sufficient, and efficient sacrifice that takes away the sin of the world and propitiates divine wrath.

While all idol worship was forbidden to the Israelites, the worship of Moloch was singled out for specific condemnation in Leviticus. Disregard for these warnings brought quick and severe judgement upon Israel, and the sacrifice of children to Moloch so defiled the spot where it took place that a curse was pronounced upon it (2 Kings 23:10) and its name Tophet, and indeed the name of the valley in which it was located, Hinnom, became symbols of being utterly and absolutely cursed and under God’s wrath.

The most literal kind of idol worship is not very common these days, although idolatry, in the sense of placing ones faith in, worshipping, and serving something other than the true and living God, remains widespread and one of the root causes of other sins. Presbyterian pastor Timothy Keller, in his book Counterfeit Gods, (1) discusses some of the more popular forms of idolatry out there today. One idol that he does not discuss however, is the Moloch of modern times, the contemporary false god who requires that his worshippers sacrifice their children. That idol is a devil indeed – the demon idol of equality.

A tremendous amount of blood has been shed in the worship of this false god since the beginning of the modern age. Equality was one of the counterfeit trinity to whom the French Revolutionaries offered up their libations of blood – fraternity and liberty being the other two. It was in the name of social, political, and economic equality that most revolutions of the 19th Century were carried out. In the 20th Century, attempts to build an egalitarian society brought about such horrors as Lenin’s, Stalin’s and Mao’s state-induced famines, the prison camps of the GULAG, and Pol Pot’s systematic slaughter of the educated, religious, and middle classes of Cambodia.

Now some idols are inherently evil whereas others are things which are good in their proper place but become idols and evil by being made to be more important than they really are. Which kind is equality?

It would be unfair to condemn equality as being inherently evil just because evil, even evil of the sort mentioned above, has been committed in its name. Evil has been done in the name of virtually every good cause that has ever existed. To demonstrate that there is something inherently wrong with equality we would have to demonstrate that the evil committed in its name was a natural and necessary consequence of the idea of equality itself.

That such a relationship exists between equality and certain kinds of evil is a theme that has long existed in traditional folklore. In ancient Greece, for example, the legend of the hero Theseus, tells of how his mother sent him to his father’s kingdom in Athens, and on the way he entered into a number of adventures. In one of those adventures, he encountered the giant Procrustes, who offered hospitality to travelers, but insisted that they be made to fit the bed he had constructed. If they were too short, he stretched them. If they were too tall, he cut something off. Several lessons are contained in this legend, including a warning against the folly of trying to force people to fit a model they do not naturally conform to. That egalitarianism is an attempt to do just that was made clear by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., in his short story “Harrison Bergeron”, a modern day retelling of the Procrustean legend. The story is set in a futuristic version of the United States, where a bureaucracy makes sure all the citizens are fully equal, by handicapping anyone who possesses an advantage which others do not have. (2)

What is recognized in this tradition of story-telling is that people are not naturally equal and that attempts to make them equal against their nature, do violence to them.

This is the opposite, of the sentiment Thomas Jefferson famously expressed in the preamble to the American Declaration of Independence “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” If we reflect upon it, however, it is not difficult to see that reality is better reflected in the tradition warning us against the egalitarian ideal than in Jefferson’s wartime propaganda. It is not at all self-evident that all men are created equal, indeed, it is self-evident that they are not.

Some men are tall others are short, and while it is possible to find two or more men of equal height, it would not be true to say that all men in general are “equal” in terms of height. What is true of height is also true of weight, and of strength, intelligence, beauty, talent, and all other such measurable traits. In none of them is there a general equality and when two people can be found to be equal in any one trait, it is very unlikely that they will be equal in many of the other traits as well.

Now some might come to Jefferson’s defense by saying “that isn’t what he meant, he wasn’t talking about equality with regards to measurable qualities, but equality with regards to intrinsic worth or value and possession of natural rights”. The problem is, that while it is undoubtedly true that Jefferson had some such concept in mind, it is also true that this concept of equality is in no way “self-evident”, but can only be arrived at through revelation, philosophical deduction, or speculation.

As a matter of fact, this concept of equality is not true at all but is a perversion of the concept of justice. To be just to people, to treat them right, is to give them that which is due them. If justice, a virtue which men are supposed to practice, is giving each person their due, it necessarily follows that there are things which people are due, or entitled to. Those things are what we refer to when we speak of somebody’s “rights”. The idea that people have rights is therefore a necessary part of the concept of justice. What is not a necessary part of the concept of justice is the idea that what Person A is entitled to is identical or equal to what Person B is entitled to. Indeed, the idea which equates justice and equality and declares that what one person is entitled to, the next person must be entitled to as well, makes no sense. If two people enter into an enterprise together, in which one person contributes 80% of the investment and his partner contributes 20%, justice requires, not that they split the profits equally, but that they divide them in proportion to their investment. If peoples’ rights, in accordance with justice, can be said to be equal, they are equal only in the sense that no person is any more or any less entitled to what is his own than any other person, not in the sense that any one person is entitled to the same status, wealth, and power as every other person. As Edmund Burke put it “In this partnership [of civil society] all men have equal rights, but not to equal things”.

One form of justice is legal justice, in which a judge settles disputes between two or more parties or hears accusations of criminal wrongdoing and passes judgement on the basis of the evidence. This kind of justice is traditionally depicted as being blind. This is to indicate that in the administration of this kind of justice, only the facts of the case should be considered, and not the rank or wealth of the parties. The idea that justice should be impartial has been around since ancient times and it can also be expressed as an ideal of equality – the ideal that all people be equal in the eyes of the law. It may be best not to express the ancient concept of impartial justice in this way, however. The administration of legal justice is imperfect because it must be administered by human beings who are imperfect. When the ideal of justice is expressed in terms of equality this creates a temptation for people to blame the imperfections in human justice, not on the imperfection of the human heart, but on differences of rank and wealth between people in a society, and to demand that these differences be eliminated.

Attempts to level society in this way, however, can never bring about the perfect justice hoped for, because they misdiagnose the cause of injustice for which there is no human cure. Attempts to create a just society by artificially engineering equality are themselves acts of injustice, often injustice on a large scale. Hence the warnings against the egalitarian ideal in traditional folklore.

The ideal of equality is a favorite tool of revolutionaries. A revolution is an attempt to alter the order of society by force. Revolutionaries may be sincere in their belief that they can bring about a better world, although more often than not they are just interested in seizing power for themselves. If they are sincere, they are deluded, because evil and suffering are part of the human estate which they are powerless to change, which is why revolutions typically produce nothing but massive amounts of violence and misery.

Revolutions typically draw their supporters from the young and naïve. The idea of equality lends itself to fomenting revolutions because it presents as ideal a condition which is completely foreign to human nature and which is therefore tailor made to generate discontent.

Equality is not something like which is good in itself, but which becomes bad when we make an idol out of it. It was itself a perversion of something good, justice, before we ever made it into an idol. After we made it into an idol, it quickly became the new Moloch.

Consider the doctrine of racial equality, which has become official dogma in the Western world in the decades following World War II. In those decades white liberals in Western governments have introduced liberal immigration policies encouraging mass immigration from non-white countries, laws against racial discrimination which are selectively enforced against whites alone, and de jure discrimination policies in favour of non-whites which are euphemistically called “affirmative action”. They also began a major propaganda campaign in the media (news and entertainment) and the public education system designed to teach people that the greatest evil in the world is “racism” and that “racism” is committed solely or primarily by white people. Opposition to all of this was discouraged by quick accusations of “racism” against anyone who dared open their mouth, and in some cases by laws against “hate speech” which are never enforced against violently anti-white language but only against white people.

During that same period the fertility rates of white people groups dropped below the level needed to sustain their populations and have remained that low ever since.

What all of this amounts to is the collective sacrifice of their children on the part of white people. White people are not having the children they should be having to sustain their population. They have introduced policies that artificially handicap what children they do have to benefit other peoples’ children. They are indoctrinating their children with an ideology that renders them helpless against the hatred of other people by instilling in them a sense of collective guilt for the “racism” of their ancestors.

In the name of what god is this sacrifice of the future well-being of the children of an entire race taking place?

It is taking place in the name of racial equality. The anti-racist movement has had “racial equality” as its ideal from the beginning. Just as equality is not the same thing as justice, but is a perversion of the concept, so racial equality is not the same thing as racial justice, the idea that different races should treat each other fairly, justly, and well, but is a perversion of that concept and one which, as we have just seen, is itself the source of a major injustice against future generations of white people. (3)

Another example of how the idol of equality demands the sacrifice of children can be found in the feminist movement. The feminist movement counts as its first wave the suffragist movement which sought the vote for women. The second wave began in the 1960’s as a demand for full social and economic equality between men and women. Second-wave feminism had two wings – a radical wing, which was formed by women who had joined other radical left-wing movements and were unhappy with the way the male radicals treated them, and a more mainstream liberal wing. The demands of the two wings of feminism were often quite different, but one area where they overlapped, was in the demand for legal, unrestricted, and free and easy access to abortion. This has remained a central demand of feminism in all of its subsequent waves, albeit one which the movement has long achieved as the Supreme Courts of the United States and Canada gave in to this demand decades ago.

Abortion is the deliberate termination of pregnancy resulting in death to the unborn fetus. While ethicists debate the personhood of the fetus, by splitting hairs over the definition of “person”, it is undeniable that the fetus is a) living and b) human – it possesses a full set of human chromosomes from the moment the sperm fertilizes the egg. Abortion is therefore the termination of a human life. Since it does not fall into any justifiable category of homicide it clearly belongs in the category of murder. Why is the demand for something this awful so central to the feminist cause?

It is central to the feminist cause, because feminism’s ideal is “equality of the sexes”. This ideal is contrary to human nature, however. Human beings are a sexual species – we are divided into two sexes, and it is through the union of the two sexes that we reproduce. The burden of reproduction does not fall upon both sexes equally, however. Pregnancy occurs within a woman’s body and lasts for nine months. After birth, a human child is helpless to fend for itself and must be looked after for years. The mother’s body is designed to produce milk to nourish the child in its initial state of helplessness before it can be weaned and move on to solid food.

Human societies have traditionally insisted that men share this burden with women, by marrying the women who bear their children and providing for them. Feminism, however, demands a different solution. Feminism demands that women be fully independent of men in a society in which they are fully equal with men politically, socially, and economically. Such a society cannot exist so long as women bear the burden of pregnancy and childbirth as a consequence of sexual activity. Thus the central place abortion has held in feminism’s demands.

Progressives today, treat the victories of the feminist and anti-racist movements in the last six decades as if they were the greatest human achievements of all time, upon which the future happiness of humanity depends. The reality is that both movements, by demanding equality rather than true justice and making equality into an ultimate good, have set up the worst kind of idol possible, the kind which demands the sacrifice of its worshippers’ children.

The Letter of Jeremiah warned the inhabitants of Jersusalem who were about to be taken captive by Nebuchadnezzar into Babylon, against the idols they will find there. These idols should not be feared because they are not true gods, the letter explains, they cannot raise up a king, or send rain upon men, or redress a wrong. The letter ends by saying that these idols “shall be a reproach in the country” and that:

“Better therefore is the just man that hath none idols: for he shall be far from reproach.” (verse 73, Authorized Version)

The idol of equality is our reproach in the modern Western world.

(1) Timothy Keller, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters (New York: Dutton Adult, 2009)

(2) The first paragraph reads “The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.” The title character has the misfortune to be born with all of these advantages. The short story was originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science in October 1961, and was later republished in the Vonnegut anthology Welcome to the Monkey House.

(3) Racial equality is also a nonsensical concept. No two individuals are absolutely equal, i.e., equal in every respect. If two individuals are equal in height, they will be unequal in some other area such as weight. The same thing is true of groups as well, racial and otherwise. In the comparison of groups it is averages which matter and the averages of different groups vary. This does not mean that one group is absolutely superior to any or all others. There are areas in which one group is stronger and another weaker and areas in which it is the other way around. The dogma of racial equality hinders intelligent discussion of this matter. In 1989, J. Philippe Rushton, a psychology professor at the University of Western Ontario, presented a paper to the American Association for the Advancement of Science entitled “Evolutionary Biology and Heritable Traits (With Reference to Oriental-White-Black Differences)”. In this paper, and in his later book Race, Evolution and Behavior: A Life History Perspective, originally published by Transaction Publishers in 1995, subsequently expanded and republished by the Charles Darwin Research Institute, Rushton argued that racial differences could be explained by the r/k selection theory. He was demonized by the press, denounced by the government of Ontario, and even investigated by the Ontario police. The anger his paper, address, and book generated, was not due to his theory, which was, after all, only an explanatory hypothesis, but rather due to the facts that theory purported to explain, i.e., the existence of racial differences. Lost in the controversy was the simple truth that whether or not his theory was right or wrong, the differences it attempted to explain are real and well-documented, and that vilifying Rushton would do absolutely nothing to change that fact.