Law and Gospel

For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. – John 1:17

If you were to go around asking people if the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament were the same God you would probably come across many who would answer “no”. If you were to then ask them why they thought so the most likely answer you would hear would be “the God of the Old Testament is cruel, vindictive, harsh and punishing, whereas the God of the New Testament is loving and merciful”.

The idea that there is an inconsistency between how God is portrayed in the Old and New Testaments has been around for a long time. In the second century AD Marcion of Sinope taught that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament were different. He taught the Gnostic idea that the God of the Old Testament, the creator of the physical world, was the evil Demiurge and that the God who was the Father of Jesus Christ was the true benevolent God. He rejected the Old Testament as Scripture, and rejected several books of the New Testament as well. He taught docetism, the heresy which states that Jesus only appeared to be a physical, human being. Marcion was ultimately excommunicated from the Church and his views, sometimes called Marcionism, were condemned as heretical.

It was in response to Marcion and other Gnostics who taught similar views that the Church realized that it would have to decide which books the Christian faith considered to be canonical Scriptures and which it didn’t. It was also in response to these heretical ideas that the Church drew up the first paragraph of the Nicene Creed:

I believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.

This was placed at the beginning of the Creed to identify the God Who is the Father of Jesus Christ with the God Who created the heavens and the earth in the Book of Genesis and to make clear that that God was the Creator of both the spiritual and the physical world. Hence the “and of all things visible and invisible”. This is the orthodox, Apostolic, Christian teaching on the subject.

Why was it necessary for the Church to define orthodox doctrine in this way? What did Marcion and the other Gnostic heretics find in Scripture upon which to base their false idea that the God of the Old Testament was different from the God of the New Testament? How can what they found be explained better in a way that is consistent with orthodox Christianity?

The idea that there is a discrepancy between how the Old and New Testaments portray God is based upon the perception that the God of the Old Testament is always punishing people for their sin whereas the God of the New Testament is always forgiving them. This, however, does not do justice to either Testament.

In the Old Testament, God is always showing mercy to people and forgiving them of their sins. It starts at the beginning of Genesis. God had told Adam in the Garden of Eden that he was not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and that the day he ate of that fruit he would die. When Adam and Eve ate of the fruit, God drove them from Paradise, but He showed mercy on them and did not kill them. When Cain murdered his brother Abel and God sent him into exile in punishment, He also showed mercy to Cain and put his seal upon Cain, that no man would do him any harm. The Psalms frequently proclaim that God is slow to anger, merciful, and compassionate, and quick to forgive. The prophets never proclaim judgment upon God’s people without calling them to repent and without proclaiming the hope of a future restoration. The prophet Ezekiel was told to proclaim “As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?” (Ezekiel 33:11). When the prophet Jonah was sent to proclaim God’s judgment upon Ninevah, the capital of the Assyrian Empire, the Ninevites repented and God spared their city.

Meanwhile, the New Testament frequently warns of God’s judgment. The concept of everlasting punishment beyond this life is found in the Old Testament in one verse alone Daniel 12:2: “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” When Psalm 9 says that the wicked shall be turned into hell, it does not use a word meaning a place of everlasting punishment. No such word existed in the Hebrew language. It uses “sheol” which was understood by the Hebrew people in basically the same way that the Greek people understood “hades” – a gloomy, underground place, that everybody goes to, righteous and wicked alike. The concept of hell as we understand it today, everlasting fiery punishment beyond death, is taken from the teachings of Jesus. Outside of Jerusalem, there was a valley called Hinnom. In the Old Testament, this place was cursed because people sacrificed their children in fire to the demon Moloch there. The valley became the garbage dump of Jerusalem and the place where the bodies of criminals were thrown. It was constantly burning. In the period between the Testaments, Jewish rabbis had taken the name of this valley and used it metaphorically to refer to a place of punishment beyond death. Their concept of “Gehenna” was similar to the Roman Catholic concept of Purgatory. People would go there for about a year to be punished and cleansed of their sins then they would go to be with God. Jesus spoke of Gehenna as being “eternal” and “everlasting”. He spoke of it more often than anyone else in the Bible.

If God is depicted as merciful and compassionate and forgiving of sin in the Old Testament and His most severe judgment upon sin is mentioned mostly in the New Testament, then clearly the Gnostic understanding of the God of the Old Testament as harsh and severe and the God of the New Testament as loving and kind is false. Both Testaments portray God as both the just Judge of sin and the merciful and loving Father Who pleads with people to turn back to Him in repentance, trust Him, and be forgiven of their sins. The orthodox teaching of the Church then is in accordance with the Scriptures. The God of the Old Testament is the Father of Jesus Christ.

Where then did the idea that the God of the Old Testament is harsher than the God of the New Testament come from? What is the actual difference between the two Testaments?

When we speak of the “Old Testament” and “New Testament” we are speaking of collections of books. The Old Testament is a collection of Books revered as Scripture, the written Word of God, by Jews and Christians alike. The New Testament is recognized as Scripture by Christians alone. The word “testament” used to mean “covenant”. The two divisions of the Christian Scriptures are called the Old and New Testament, because they are the records of two covenants which God made. The first covenant was made with the Israelite nation at Mt. Sinai. The second covenant was made at the Cross. The new covenant can be said to be universal in the sense that everybody in the world is invited to enter it through faith. It is also a particular covenant, made with the organism/institution called “the Church” which consists of those who believe.

Both covenants arose out of events in which God saved His people. God made His old covenant with Israel after saving them from the condition of slavery in Egypt. He made His new covenant when His Son came down from heaven and became a man and died on the cross for the sins of the world. Both events were acts of grace on the part of God. The New Testament teaches that the second event was foreshadowed in the first:

For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us. (1 Cor. 5:7)

Christ’s sacrifice, which established the new covenant, was what made possible God’s acts of grace in the Old Testament, for Christ is the “Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8) and God, Who exists outside the limits of time and space, looked ahead to Christ’s sacrifice as the justification of His grace to sinners. Now that Christ has come and fully revealed God’s grace to us and accomplished salvation through His death on the cross, God’s new covenant is to be brought to the world through the proclamation of the Gospel, the Good News that God has been gracious and merciful to the sinners of the world by providing His only Son as the Savior through His death of all those who place their faith in Him and by raising Jesus from the dead.

The old covenant, on the other hand, was a covenant in which God promised temporal blessings to His people, particularly the possession of the land He would give them, conditioned upon their obedience to His commandments. In Exodus 19, after the Israelites arrive at Mt. Sinai, God speaks to Moses and tells him:

Thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob, and tell the children of Israel; Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on eagles' wings, and brought you unto myself. Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine: And ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel. (vv. 3-16)

Moses speaks these words to the elders of Israel and the people tell him “All that the LORD hath spoken we will do.” Moses gives God this answer, and God tells the Israelites to sanctify themselves, then comes down onto the mountain to speak to Israel. After warning the people not to come upon the mountain, God gives to Moses the famous ten commandments (20:1-17) then Moses enters the darkness with which God has surrounded His immediate presence and receives more commandments from God. The commandments go on until the end of chapter 23, when God summons Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and seventy elders of Israel to ascend the mountain and worship Him. They offer sacrifices unto God, then go up to meet with God, then Moses is summoned up the mountain again to receive yet more commandments. Moses is up in the mountain for forty days and nights and the list of the commandments he receives runs from chapter 25 to the end of chapter 31, where God gives Moses tablets of stone upon which His commandments were written.

The emphasis in this covenant is clearly upon rules and for this reason the books in which the covenant is recorded are called the Torah – the Law. St. John wrote in the first chapter of Gospel that “the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ”. How is this consistent with what we saw earlier about God’s graciousness in the Old Testament and His judgment in the New?

The God Who made both covenants is holy, just, and sovereign as well as loving, gracious, compassionate and merciful. These characteristics are eternal attributes of His and both are on display in both Testaments. In Christ’s death which is at the heart of the Gospel message it is revealed how God can be both just and merciful at the same time, how God can be “just and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus”. The old covenant places the emphasis on God’s holiness and justice, however, by focusing on rules which tell God’s people what He demands of them. The new covenant emphasizes God’s mercy and grace. For this reason the old covenant, and the sacred books which record that covenant, are sometimes referred to as “the Law”. Similarly, the sacred books which record the life, teachings, works, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ are called “Gospels”. There is grace, which is at the heart of the Gospel message in the former, and law (think of the Sermon on the Mount) in the latter, but the covenants and sections of Scripture which record them, are characterized by their emphasis.

Law and Gospel are the two messages which run throughout Scripture. Law tells us of the holiness and justice of God and lays plain the righteousness which God demands of us. The Gospel tells us of the mercy and grace of God Who made a way for us, who being sinners cannot meet the requirements of the Law, to be given the righteousness the Law demands freely, as a gift through Jesus Christ. The Gospel is the fuller revelation of God which the Law points to.

Dr. Martin Luther saw the importance of understanding and distinguishing the purposes of these two messages. He said “Hence, whoever knows well this art of distinguishing between Law and Gospel, him place at the head and call him a doctor of Holy Scripture.” As with so much else of what he taught, here Dr. Luther displayed a superb understanding of the writings of St. Paul in the Scriptures. To attempt to do with the Law what can only be done with the Gospel leads to disaster. This is the message of St. Paul’s epistle to the Galatian Church. The distinction between Law and Gospel became very important to Dr. Luther and his followers and the confessions within the Lutheran tradition display a clarity on the subject that the rest of Christ’s holy, catholic, and apostolic Church can learn from. The fifth article of the 1577 Lutheran Formula of Concord is entitled “Law and Gospel”. In this article the Law is identified as any Scriptural message that “reproves sin” as distinct from the Gospel which proclaims that “Christ has expiated and made satisfaction for all sins, and has obtained and acquired for him, without any merit of his [no merit of the sinner intervening], forgiveness of sins, righteousness that avails before God, and eternal life.”

In the sixth article of the Formula of Concord, entitled “The Third Use of the Law”, three purposes of the Law are given. The first is “that thereby outward discipline might be maintained against wild, disobedient men”. This purpose of the Law is often illustrated by a curb or a fence. It contains human sinfulness and keeps it within bounds. The second purpose of the Law is “that men thereby may be led to the knowledge of their sins”. This use of the Law is illustrated with a mirror. The third use of the Law is that believers “might on this account have a fixed rule according to which they are to regulate and direct their whole life”. This use is illustrated by a roadmap or compass. It shows us what we should be but does not provide us with the ability to be that. For that we need God’s justifying and sanctifying grace, revealed in the Gospel.

All of this is in accordance with the writings of St. Paul under the inspiration of the Holy Ghost. In his epistles to the churches of Rome and Galatia he tells us what the Law cannot do. It cannot justify us, make us righteous in God’s eyes (Romans). Nor can it produce in us the holy life it describes (Galatians). What then was it given for?

In chapter one of his first pastoral epistle to Timothy he writes:

But we know that the law is good, if a man use it lawfully; Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers, For whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine; According to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which was committed to my trust. (vv. 8-11)

What does St. Paul mean when he says that “the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient”? He could be understood as giving the spiritual equivalent of something that is noticeable in everyday life. In every institution, from the family, to the workplace, to society, there are rules. When are rules made? Frequently rules are made by those in authority in an institution when the need for them arises, because someone has been doing something wrong. We see the same thing in Scripture. God gave mankind only one rule in the Garden of Eden. That rule was broken and mankind was expelled from the Garden. Then Cain murdered his brother and before you know it the world was full of murder. God judged the world with the Flood, then He gave a new rule that “if man shed blood, by man shall his blood be shed”. God gives us rules because our sinfulness creates the need for them. If this is what St. Paul had in mind this corresponds with the first use of the Law in the Formula of Concord. St. Augustine, in a passage in his writings which Dr. Luther wrote influenced his coming to understand St. Paul’s doctrine of justification, sees this passage as being a case of the second use of the Law. The lawful use of the law that St. Paul refers to, St. Augustine wrote wrote, was to bring one to Christ to receive God’s righteousness. (1)

It is the second use of the Law that St. Paul emphasizes in his epistles, and which Lutheran theology emphasizes as well. It is the Law that shows us that we are sinners. St. Paul, in the seventh chapter of his epistle to the church in Rome writes:

What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet. (v. 7)

What does he mean by “not known sin”? He cannot mean “not have sinned” for that meaning would clearly contradict what he wrote to Timothy quoted above. He is speaking of his awareness of his own sinfulness which came about through the Law because when the Law spoke his sinful nature produced the very thing which the Law forbade bringing about his awareness of his own sinfulness and the conflict within himself described in the rest of the chapter.

In Galatians St. Paul writes that “the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith” (3:24). The word translated “schoolmaster” here depicts a slave whose job was to watch over the child of the family he served and bring him to his instructors. This is the illustration St. Paul uses to describe the function God intended the Law to serve in Israel up until His revelation of Himself in Christ. While he may have partially had in mind the concept of the author of the book of Hebrews, that Christ and His sacrifice are prefigured in the ceremonies of the Old Testament, the context of the chapter would suggest that he is primarily referring to the Law revealing our sin and hence our need for Christ. This is how St. Augustine understood him in the same passage alluded to above.

In his second epistle to the church in Corinth, in the third chapter, St. Paul refers to the Law as “the ministration of death, written and engraven in stones” and a “ministration of condemnation” (verses 7 and 9 respectively) which he contrasts with the “ministration of the spirit” and the “ministration of righteousness” (verses 8 and 9) which is the new covenant (v. 6), the Gospel. The Law can only condemn people because being sinners we cannot meet its requirements. This revelation of our condition, however, if we do not harder ourselves to us, can humble and break us, making us receptive to the Gospel of God’s grace in Jesus Christ. This use of the Law is itself a work of grace as the hymn writer John Newton clearly understood:

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear -conviction of sin through the Law
And grace my fears relieved (2) - proclamation of forgiveness through the Gospel.

Dr. Robert Preuss put it this way:

Neither contrition nor faith is something we work out for ourselves. The Holy Spirit works both in us. He works contrition through the Law, and exclusively through the Law; and He works faith through the Gospel, and exclusively through the Gospel. The most important distinction between Law and Gospel lies in just this fact. (3)

Thus Law itself, can be a work of grace, but only if the Gospel is also preached and received in faith.

In this we see most clearly how the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are indeed one and the same.


(1) Chapter 16 of St. Augustine’s A Treatise on The Spirit and the Letter.

(2) John Newton, “Amazing Grace”, second stanza.

(3) Robert D. Preuss, Getting Into The Theology of Concord, (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1977), p. 63.

The Righteousness of God and Man

Who is a good person?

This used to be a fairly simple question. Our society had standards which defined certain behavior as right and certain behavior as wrong. A good person was a person who behaved in the right way and a bad person was a person who behaved in the wrong way.

The question has become complicated because there have been radical changes over the half of a century in how our society defines right and wrong. Behavior that was once defined as “wrong” such as sexual intercourse outside of wedlock is now considered, if not to be “right”, to at least be “none of your business”. Meanwhile behavior that nobody would have dreamed of considering to be “wrong” one hundred years ago has jumped to the top of the totem pole of sin. Much of this behavior consists not of outward actions but of inward thought patterns.

Consider, for example, the terms “racism”, “sexism”, and “homophobia”. All of these terms are very recent additions to the English language. Racism entered the English language in the 1930s, sexism and homophobia were first used in the 1960’s, with homophobia not gaining widespread usage until the 1980’s and ‘90’s. All of these terms describe ways of thinking more than they describe ways of acting. Is there any doubt that these are considered to be the greatest of evils in society today – at least by politicians, teachers, the media, and liberal clergy?

Was our society more right in what it deemed to be right and wrong behavior one hundred years ago or today? (1)

In spite of these changes there remains a general concept of a “good person” as someone who is kind, considerate and helpful to others, who obeys the law and pays his taxes, and doesn’t hurt other people. If you were to ask most people if they consider themselves to be a good person you would get answers like “I try to be”, or “I’m as good as the next person”, or if the person is particularly self-righteous “Well I’m better than a lot of other people”.

What these answers demonstrate is the human concept of righteousness. We judge ourselves to be good or bad by comparing ourselves with others. We look at people who commit major violent crimes like murder, robbery, and rape and consider them to be the “bad people”. We look at people in general and judge ourselves to be better than most. We look at someone like Mother Theresa and feel guilty.

We also feel guilty when we take a look at our own behavior and realize that we have not lived up to the moral standards we profess. We then try to justify ourselves by justifying our behavior. We make excuses for ourselves. We concoct nice logical arguments as to why our bad behavior is really right behavior. This is generally our first response if someone else points out our bad behavior to us.

Who does God consider to be a righteous person? Does He judge us in the same way other human beings do or does He have His own standards of righteousness by which He judges us?

The Scriptural answer to this question is, of course, that God holds us accountable to His own standards. He does take our standards into consideration, in judging us, Jesus said:

For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. (Matthew 7:2)

This is the reverse of the way in which we judge ourselves and others. We tend to be easier on ourselves than on other people, excusing and justifying in ourselves, behavior that we would condemn if committed by someone else. Jesus says, however, that God will hold us accountable if we don’t live up to the standards whereby we judge others.

Is there even one among us who has such perfect integrity as to endure such a judgment and be deemed righteous?

In the Sermon in which Jesus made the remark quoted above He tells us what the righteousness which God demands from man looks like.

He said:

For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:20)

The scribes were the teachers of the Law in Israel. The Pharisees were a Jewish sect that dated back to the Maccabean revolt in the 2nd century BC, who stressed purity and strict adherence to the law. When Jesus says that our righteousness must exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees He is setting the bar very high indeed. We should not try to get around this verse by thinking “well, the Pharisees weren’t really that righteous”. To do so would be to miss Jesus’ point altogether.

After saying the above, Jesus goes on to comment on six Old Testament commandments. Each time His remarks are to the effect that mere conformity to the letter of the commandment is insufficient to meet the requirements of righteousness God demands of people. We are required to be righteous in our hearts, which are only seen by God, and not just in our outward behavior seen by other people. He brings this section of His Sermon to a close by saying:

Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect. (Matthew 5:48)

Jesus then went on to say that it is alms-giving, prayer, and fasting that is done in secret rather than in front of other people that God rewards (Matthew 6:1-18) and that we must make God’s kingdom and righteousness the chief ends of our lives, placing the pursuit of them ahead of concerns about basic human needs such as clothing, food and shelter, warning us that we cannot serve God and money at the same time (Matthew 6:19-34).

As Jesus brought this Sermon to an end, He described the way of righteousness He had been preaching as a straight gate, and a narrow way, leading to life, which few find, as opposed to the wide gate and broad way that leads to destruction. It is a straight and narrow way indeed. There is not a human being other than Himself who has ever walked it. None of the rest of us have come even remotely close. Friedrich Nietzsche was in this limited sense correct when he wrote:

The very word 'Christianity' is a misunderstanding--at bottom there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross. (2)

The Sermon on the Mount is recorded in the Gospel of St. Matthew. The word “Gospel”, from the Old English “godspel” means “glad tidings”, and translates the Greek “euangelion” – “good message” or “good news”. How can a Sermon proclaiming that God requires of us a righteousness which we do not come close to meeting, be considered “Good News”?

The answer lies in the rest of the story. In the very next chapter a leper comes and worships Jesus and says “Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean”, an expression of faith. Jesus heals him. Then a centurion comes and tells Jesus that he has a servant at home suffering from palsy. Jesus says that He will come and heal him and the centurion says that he is not worthy to have Jesus enter his home but that if Jesus just speaks the word his servant would be healed. Jesus commends him for his faith, saying that He had not found such faith in Israel, and grants his request saying “Go thy way; and as thou hast believed, so be it done unto thee”. Later in that same chapter, Jesus and His disciples enter a ship and a tempest arises while Jesus is asleep in the boat. The disciples, in terror awake Him. He rebukes them for their lack of faith – then calms the sea.

Throughout this chapter we see that Jesus rewards faith. In the chapter following Jesus will tell the Pharisees that He is not come to call the righteous but “sinners unto repentance”.

In the New Testament, the righteousness of God is both something God demands of people (as we saw in the Sermon on the Mount) and something God gives to people who trust Him. The righteousness that God demands of us is a righteousness we cannot achieve. When Jesus told the Pharisees that it is the sick that need a physician, not the well, and that He is come to call sinners unto repentance, He was not telling them that they didn’t need Him. He had already given the Sermon which demanded a righteousness higher than their own. They, therefore, were sinners just like the publicans and sinners whom they objected to Jesus eating with.

Earlier, when I described our tendency to make excuses for our bad behavior, I used the word “justify”. The word “justify” means to “declare to be righteous”. When we, having been caught doing something wrong, try to justify ourselves, we try to come up with arguments to convince others and ourselves that we were actually right in doing what is wrong.

God does not engage in that kind of justification in Scripture. He does not call bad actions good. He does not call wrong behavior right.

He does, however, justify sinners. Throughout the Bible, God calls those who trust in Him, righteous. These are not people who meet the standards of righteousness Jesus preached in the Sermon on the Mount. In Genesis 15, God speaks to Abraham, who is old and childless, and tells him that he will have a son and from his son descendants as numberless as the stars in the sky will be born. Abraham believed Him, and according to verse 6, “He counted it to him for righteousness”.

In the Psalms, King David frequently distinguished between the righteous and the wicked and calls upon God to rescue the former and to punish the latter. Yet, in the Psalms King David also expresses a deep sense of his own sinfulness. Psalm 51, for example was written after Nathan the prophet had come to David and exposed his sin in the affair with Bathsheba. David had slept with another man’s wife, gotten her pregnant, then in his attempt to cover up his sin had had her husband killed. Psalm 51 expresses his sorrow and repentance, and calls upon God to have mercy upon him, and to cleanse him from his sin and to create a clean heart within him. In repenting David expresses His faith that God can cleanse him of his sins and make him righteous. The theme of trust in God is a dominant one in the Davidic Psalms. Psalm 16 for example, opens by saying:

Preserve me, O God: for in thee do I put my trust.

Jesus, throughout the Gospels, rebuked unbelief more frequently than He rebuked sin and rewarded faith. St. Luke records a parable in which He compared a Pharisee and a tax collector, who both went to the Temple to pray. The Pharisee prayed this way:

God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican. I fast twice in the week, I give tithes of all that I possess. (Luke 18:11-12)

The tax collector, on the other hand, smote his breast and said:

God be merciful to me a sinner. (v. 13)

It is the tax collector who went home justified, Jesus said, and not the Pharisee.

It is St. Paul in his Epistle to the Church of Rome who provides us with the most detailed account of the righteousness God gives to those who trust in Him through Christ. In the first chapter St. Paul writes that the Gospel of Christ:

[I]s the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. For therein is the righteousness of God revealed from faith to faith: as it is written, The just shall live by faith. (vv. 16-17)

The Gospel of Christ, the good news that Jesus died for our sins, was buried, and rose again from the dead, brings salvation to everyone who believes it, Jew or Greek it is for everybody. The “righteousness of God” revealed in the Gospel, is both God’s personal righteousness, and the righteousness He gives to those who believe.

St. Paul expands upon this by first writing about the wrath of God, God’s anger against man’s unrighteousness, describing the general condition of men as having rejected the revelation of God in His creation, and turned away to worship idols, and commit all sorts of sin (1:18-32) He then goes on to argue in the next two chapters that both Jews and Gentiles are alike condemned, for the Law only justifies those who obey it, that it will condemn those who possess it and do not obey it, and will justify those who obey it even if they have never heard it, but that no one will be justified by the works of the law “for all have sinned and come short of the glory of God”.

It is here that he introduces the concept of justification by grace through faith:

Being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins that are past, through the forbearance of God; To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. (3:24-26)

It is because of the death of Jesus Christ, that God can be righteous Himself, and at the same time declare those who believe in the Savior He has given us, to be righteous as well. Christ’s death satisfies God’s just wrath against sin (this is what propitiation means) so that He can declare those who trust Him to be righteous without compromising His own righteousness. The mechanics of how Christ’s death accomplishes this is not fully explained in Scripture, and is probably beyond human comprehension, but St. Paul and St. Peter do explain that it involves substitution. St. Paul wrote that God “made Him to be sin for us Who knew no sin that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21). St. Peter writes that Christ “Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth… his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.” (1 Peter 2:22, 24). In His death, Jesus took our sins upon Himself, and suffered for us, paying the penalty we owed to God’s justice and satisfying God’s wrath.

St. Paul goes on to explain that our works do not contribute to the righteousness that God gives us through faith. If righteousness in the eyes of God is something we must strive for through our own actions, we would be able to boast if we achieved it. The righteousness of God, however, is a gift freely given to us.

Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? of works? Nay: but by the law of faith. Therefore we conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law. (Rom 3:27-28)

Note that St. Paul writes “without the deeds of the law”. A few verses later he writes:

Now to him that worketh is the reward not reckoned of grace, but of debt. But to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness. (4:4-5)

This is the doctrine of “justification by faith alone”, which was not invented by Martin Luther in the 16th Century, but was clearly taught by St. Paul in the first. It is false to say that St. Paul did not teach sola fide because the word “alone” does not appear modifying the word “faith” in this epistle. The “alone” in “faith alone” means “without works” not “without grace, without Christ, without the Atonement” or anything of the sort, and St. Paul clearly says “without the deeds of the law” and “to him that worketh not”.

What this means is that being righteous in the eyes of God, is not something God dangles before us, like a carrot before a horse, as an end for which we are to strive, in order to keep us on a perpetual treadmill of good works. It is something God has already freely given us in Jesus Christ and we are to simply trust Him (take Him at His word) about it. This righteousness is not something of which we are to boast, but is rather something that should humble us. It is also the only proper foundation for a life of good works. Remember that St. Paul said, quoting the Prophet Habakkuk “the just shall live by faith”?

This means that trusting Jesus Christ as Savior is not a one time act (3) but the ongoing foundation upon which the Christian life of good works is to be lived. We are to live for God based upon the conviction (another word for faith) that Christ has died for us, redeemed us to God, and risen from the dead, and that through this God forgives us of our sins and gives us His righteousness and everlasting life in accordance with His promise in the Gospel to all who believe.

It is only by trusting God in this way that we can come to love Him and it is only through loving Him that we can do works that are pleasing in His sight. Jesus said the first and great commandment is the commandment to love God with all our hearts. St. John says that this is only possible because of His love for us:

We love him, because he first loved us. (1 John 4:9)

We know of this love, because it is revealed to us in Christ, in the Gospel, which we receive through faith.

If our righteousness in the eyes of God, if our acceptance by God, depended upon our fulfilling the Great Commandment we would never be accepted by God. God deserves and demands that we love Him wholeheartedly. This we never do in this life and we cannot love Him at all if we strive to love Him in order to be accepted by Him. Love is not something that can be produced upon command. If, however, we trust in Christ, if we believe that God out of the love, kindness, mercy, and grace of His heart, has made us completely acceptable to Him in Christ already, through our faith God will work love for Himself in us. And out of that love will flow works that are pleasing in His sight. It is not those works that make the believe righteous in God’s eyes, however, but the work of Christ.

The traditional Christian distinction between “works of the law” and “works of love” is the fundamental distinction between the works acceptable to God and works that are not – but the distinction is lost if we make “works of love” the basis of our personal acceptance with God. If they are something we must do in order to be accepted by God then they are “works of the law” not “works of love”.



(1) A lengthy answer to this question would sidetrack this essay but my answer is that we have moved away, as a society, from a more right view of right and wrong towards a more wrong view of right and wrong.

(2) Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by H. L. Mencken, The Anti-Christ (Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2006), p. 39.

(3) The evangelical practice of talking about one’s conversion as one’s salvation has pitfalls here. Faith is supposed to look away from the believer, away from his works, and away even from itself, to Christ. The Gospel is that Christ saved those who trust Him through His death on the Cross – not that we are to save ourselves by trusting in Christ. Thus, the familiar evangelical question of “do you know when you were saved” should be answered, by the believer, with “Yes – I was saved when Jesus died on the Cross” not by giving the date of the believer’s conversion. Likewise, the best answer to the evangelical question of “If you were to die tonight, and God were to say to you ‘Why should I let you into Heaven’?” is perhaps not what many evangelicals think it is. The answer is “Because You gave Your Only-Begotten Son to die on the cross for my sins, raised Him from the dead, and promised everlasting life to whoever believes in Him”.

The Sacrifice

Homer’s Iliad is an epic poem, originally written in dactylic hexameter in Greek in the 8th Century BC. It tells a story, set in the tenth year of the Greek siege of Troy, about a falling out between the Greek hero Achilles and the Mycenean King and leader of the Greeks Agamemnon, after Agamemnon dishonored Achilles, which led to Achilles withdrawing with his men from the war. The gods are very active participants in Homer’s account of the war, and Zeus decrees that the Greeks will lose to Hector’s Trojan forces until such time as Achilles is properly honored and returns to the war. Agamemnon seeks to make amends to Achilles, but the hero will not listen until, with the Trojans on the verge of burning the Greek encampment, he allows his friend Patroclus to fight in his armour in his place. Patroclus is killed by Hector at which point Achilles, turning his wrath from Agamemnon to Hector, reenters the battle and slays Hector. The poem ends with King Priam, Hector’s father, ransoming the body of his son from Achilles.

Sacrifice is to be found throughout the Iliad. Greeks and Trojans alike sacrifice to the gods of Olympus. Sacrifice, in the Iliad, is conceived of both as offerings which are the gods just due, and a means of placating the wrath of an angry god. The former concept can be seen in Zeus’ arguments with his wife Hera. Hera is single-mindedly set upon Troy’s destruction and is displeased with Zeus’s decision to temporarily turn the tide of battle in Troy’s favour. Zeus takes the position that since he has already decreed final victory for the Greeks that ought to satisfy Hera and that at any rate Hector deserves honor too. He points out that due to Hector’s conscientious piety the altars of the gods in Troy have never been empty. The second concept can be seen in the first book of the Iliad, where the Greeks return Chryseis, the daughter of Chryses, priest of Apollo, to her father. They also bring a hecatomb (a sacrifice of 100 cattle). The purpose of the sacrifice was to appease Apollo, who had answered his priest’s prayers and sent a plague among the Greeks.

The most disturbing sacrifice in the Iliad, however, is that offered by Achilles himself, at the funeral of Patroclus. At the funeral which occurs in the twenty-third book, Achilles slays twelve captive sons of the Trojan nobility and burns their bodies on the funeral pyre as a sacrifice, fulfilling a vow he made to his deceased friend in the eighteenth book. This is the only human sacrifice to occur in the Iliad.

Whatever the sacrifice – cattle, oxen, wine, captured enemies, and whether offered as a routine pious obligation or as a propitiation on the part of a sinner who has offended a god, sacrifices were perceived as gifts men give to the gods and/or to the departed spirits of their comrades and ancestors.

This kind of sacrificial system was not unique to the ancient Greeks. Indeed, versions of it existed among virtually all ancient peoples and some versions of it survive to this day. This includes the ancient Middle East where the true and living God spoke to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, made a covenant with their descendants the ancient Israelites, and later revealed Himself fully in the person of His Son Jesus Christ.

What does the true and living God think of sacrifice? Does He demand sacrifices from His worshipers or accept them if they are offered?

God’s revelation of Himself begins with the five books the Jews call the Torah and which are also called the Pentateuch. These books are the record of God’s covenant with His people Israel. God had promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that He would make of their descendants a great nation, give them the land into which He had called them, and they would be His people and He would be their God. The first book of the Torah ends with the Israelites in Egypt, the second book of the Torah begins with them still in Egypt, 400 years later, in slavery. God reveals Himself to Moses, an Israelite who had been adopted into Pharaoh’s family, and Moses leads the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt into the wilderness of Sinai. There God makes a covenant with Israel, in which He gives them His commandments, a priest class and religious system to worship Him, and a basic constitution for when they enter the Promised Land.

In the Torah, the God who makes a covenant with Israel, is revealed to be the one true God, the God who created the heavens and earth and all that exists. At the very beginning He is seen as accepting sacrifice from Abel and rejecting the sacrifice of Abel’s brother Cain, which leads to Cain’s jealous fit in which he murders his brother. A few chapters later man has become so corrupt that God sends a Flood to destroy the world, preserving Noah and his family in the ark. After the Flood is over, Noah builds an altar, and offers sacrifices of clean beasts and fowl. God “smelled a sweet savour” – He accepted the sacrifice. God accepts sacrifices from the patriarchs as well.

When Moses goes to Pharaoh to demand that He let God’s people go it is for the express purpose that they might go out into the wilderness and sacrifice to their God. At Mt. Sinai the covenant God makes with Israel is sealed with a sacrifice. It is there that God gives the Israelites, as part of their religious system, a system of sacrifice. The sacrificial system, like most of the ceremonial aspects of God’s covenant with Israel, is recorded in the Book of Leviticus.

How does the Levitical sacrifice system compare to pagan sacrificial systems? There are many similarities. In the Levitical system God ordained sacrifices of animals as well as burnt offerings of grain and other agricultural produce. There were offerings which were to be conducted simply as acts of worship and there were sacrifices that were to be brought by repentant sinners. Then there was the Day of Atonement, to be held each year, in which the High Priest would enter the innermost part of the Tabernacle/Temple with an offering for the sins of the people in general.

There is one very noticeable difference between the sacrificial system established by the Lord and that of many pagan religions, especially those of the other people groups in the Middle East in that era. This is a difference that the Lord emphasizes and which plays a very important role in subsequent Israeli history. The difference is that the Lord condemns the sacrifice of human children as an abomination and a capital crime, whereas Ba’al and Moloch demanded such sacrifices.

There is only one occasion in the Old Testament where God appears to demand a sacrifice of this nature. On that occasion, recorded in Genesis 22, God speaks to Abraham and tells him to take his son Isaac, and go to the region of Moriah and offer Isaac as a burnt offering to the Lord on one of the mountains there. Abraham, obediently set off for Moriah with Isaac and two servants. Leaving his donkey with his servants, he and Isaac took the wood, fire and a knife, and began to climb the mountain. When Isaac noticed that they appeared to have forgotten an essential element of the sacrifice and asked about it, Abraham replied:

“My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering”.

Abraham bound his son, laid him on the altar, then reached for his knife to complete the sacrifice. Here God stopped him and said:

Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me.

Abraham then noticed a ram caught in a thicket behind him which he sacrificed instead.

This is the only occasion where God commands a human sacrifice of anyone in the Old Testament. (1) He commands it, knowing that He will prevent it from actually taking place, in order to test and demonstrate Abraham’s faith.

In contrast, among the peoples of that part of the world in that era, the sacrifice of first-born children to idols was prevalent. References to the practice can be found throughout the Old Testament. It was the practice of the peoples who were living in Canaan before the Israelite invasion under Joshua and Caleb. This is the context in which God’s order to the Israelites to wipe out the peoples of the land of Canaan after He led them out of Egypt and the wilderness must be understood. It is not explicitly stated as the reason, for God does not need to justify Himself to man, but Israel’s failure to follow through on the order, led to her own contamination. The historical and prophetic writings of the Old Testament record that Israel would in periods of repentance and revival, tear down the altars of these idols, but that in periods of backsliding and apostasy they would not only tolerate these practices among the remnants of these peoples but would join in the worship of the idols and the child-sacrifices themselves, which would bring God’s judgment and condemnation.

There was only one actual human sacrifice which God would ever accept. It was a very different kind of human sacrifice than Achilles’ sacrifice of the 12 Trojans to the spirit of Patrocles or of the offering of firstborn children to Moloch. It was not a sacrifice God demanded of people nor was it an offering man made to God. It was the last sacrifice God would ever accept and it lies at the heart of the New Testament.

It is foreshadowed in the account of the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22. Note that Abraham told Isaac that “God will provide himself a lamb”. After God stops him from sacrificing Isaac, it is a ram that Abraham finds and sacrifices, not a lamb. It would be centuries later that God would provide that lamb Abraham spoke of.

John the Baptist pointed Him out in John 1:29 where, seeing Jesus coming to him, he said “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world.”

Christ’s death on the Cross was a sacrifice – the final sacrifice, the last blood sacrifice God would accept, and the only one which would ever be truly effective in taking away people’s sins. St. Paul, writing to the Church in Ephesus, wrote:

And walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour. (Ephesians 5:2)

Writing to the Church in Rome, St. Paul wrote that God set forth Christ “to be a propitiation through faith in his blood” (3:25). A propitiation is a sacrifice that appeases the wrath of a deity, that turns away the deity’s anger against a sinner, and makes that deity pleased with the sinner again.

It is the author of the Book of Hebrews who gives us the fullest picture of Jesus Christ as the true sacrifice. The Book of Hebrews depicts the Tabernacle/Temple, priesthood, and sacrifices of the Old Covenant as shadow-pictures of Christ, Who is the true High Priest (3:1, 4:14-15, 5:1-10), without sin of His own, Who offered up Himself as the one true sacrifice once and for all (7:27) and so was able to enter the true Holy of Holies, in the eternal Tabernacle in Heaven with His own blood to take away the sins of the world (9). Christ’s sacrifice is forever (10:12), perfects those who are sanctified, i.e., set apart as belonging to God, by it (10:14) and has therefore done away with offerings for sin because it has accomplished remission of sins (10:17-18).

What makes this sacrifice different from the human sacrifices which God condemned in the Old Testament?

For one thing Jesus was the only truly innocent victim. Other human beings have “all sinned and come short of the glory of God”. Offering one person, tainted with the guilt of sin, cannot atone for the offences of other sinners. At the Cross, however, God “made Him to be sin for us, Who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him” (Col. 5:21)

Then there was the fact that Jesus’ sacrifice was a voluntary sacrifice. The prophet Isaiah, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, looked ahead through the centuries and wrote of Christ:

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth. (Isaiah 53:7)

In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus, hours away from the Crucifixion, prayed “Father, if Thou be willing, remove this cup from Me” but submitted to the will of His Father “nevertheless not My will, but Thine, be done” (Luke 22:42). He did not fight back, or allow His disciples to fight back, when Judas brought the priests and temple guards to arrest Him.

Finally, and most importantly, Jesus’ sacrifice was not something that men offered to God, or that God demanded of men. While pagans had a concept of sacrifice as propitiation for sins, the way they understood it to work was that when they had offended the gods, they would offer them a gift, to butter them up, and appease their anger. Tragically, God’s own people often tended to think of it this way as well. This is why there are so many passages in the Prophetic writings where God tells Israel that He doesn’t want their sacrifices – that He wants faith and humility, mercy and justice, instead. This is why King David, in Psalm 51, composed after Nathan had come and exposed his sin in the affair of Bathsheba, wrote:

For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. (vv. 16-17)

Instead of being something men offer to God, Christ’s sacrifice is God’s gift to man. We have all sinned. We all sin. We have nothing we can offer God to make up for our sin, to make things right between us and God. God, however, being loving and gracious, chose to make us right with Himself. The sacrifice necessary, to make things right between man and God, was not something we could give to God. It was something He had to give to us.

Although Jesus was condemned to die by the chief priests of Israel, those priests did not condemn Him with the purpose of offering Him as a sacrifice. Jesus, as the book of Hebrews tells us, was both the priest and the sacrifice. He offered Himself to God as the final propitiatory sacrifice to reconcile man to God. God declared His acceptance of the sacrifice by raising Christ from the dead and seating Him at the right hand of the Father in Heaven.

It is important that we remember that Jesus was Himself divine. This is vitally important to contemplation of Christ’s sacrifice for at least two reasons. First, the sacrifice of Christ was not just the sacrifice of an innocent man. It was the sacrifice of a Man Who was also God. The Person offered up to God on the altar of the Cross was God Himself, and therefore of infinite worth. That is why His sacrifice is once and for all. Secondly, since Jesus was God Himself, this sacrifice was not something God demanded from or received from human beings. This was a sacrifice, in which God offered up Himself as a sacrifice to Himself, on our behalf. That is why this sacrifice, unlike any other, takes away the sins of the world.

When Jesus died the veil dividing the Holy of Holies, the innermost part of the Temple which signified the direct presence of God with His people, from the rest of the Temple was torn in two from the top to the bottom. It is man’s sin that barred him from access to God’s presence. Christ’s death took that sin away and we are now invited, through faith in Christ and His sacrifice, to boldly enter the presence of God Most High.

Christ’s sacrifice sealed a New Covenant between God and man, a covenant in which everyone who believes in the Savior God has given are now part of God’s people, a covenant in which obedience to God is to flow out of love, not in order to earn God’s acceptance, but out of faith that we are already accepted by God through Christ. The only sacrifices that God will accept from His people today are the “broken spirit” and “broken and contrite heart” that David wrote about and the sacrifice St. Paul wrote about in Romans 12:1:

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service.


(1) Judges 11 is not an exception. There the judge Jephthah makes a rash promise to sacrifice the first thing that comes to meet him when he returns from his victory over the Ammonite. It turns out to be his daughter. There is a debate about whether Jephthah actually literally sacrificed her or fulfilled his vow in another way, by placing her in service to God in the Tabernacle. Whatever the case, if he did literally sacrifice her it was in clear violation of the Mosaic Law. There is no indication that God accepted such a sacrifice.

This and That No. 6

My next essay, on the topic of Christ's atonement, is almost finished and will be posted in the next couple of days. Although the topic is appropriate for Good Friday, I am writing and posting it now because I doubt that I will have the time to do so during Holy Week.

In Canadian political news, the opposition parties have united against the proposed budget for this year, so it looks like we will be going into yet another election. What this essentially means for me is that I will get another chance to decide which is stronger - my dislike for Stephen Harper and his ministers, or my absolute loathing of everything the other parties stand for. If the latter is stronger, I will vote Conservative. If the former is stronger, I will take the stand of Evelyn Waugh, who after World War II:

[R]efused to vote in parliamentary elections, on grounds of conscientious objection. He maintained that it was disloyal presumption for a subject to advise the sovereign, even in the most indirect way, on the choice of ministers... (Christopher Sykes, Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, Penguin Books, 1977, p. 395)

While I have been a conservative all my life, I do not believe conservatism necessarily means support for the Conservative Party. A belief in salvation through politics is the defining characteristic of the Left. "If only our revolution succeeds, if only our party wins, if only our policies are enacted, if only our programs received more funding - then we could recreate Paradise on earth." While conservatism is an ideology in the sense of "any reasonably coherent body of moral, economic, social and cultural ideas that has a solid and well known reference to politics and political power" (Robert Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality, Transaction Publishers, 2002, p. 15), true conservatism is anti-ideology when ideology means a political substitute for religion which promises salvation in the form of an earthly Paradise, in return for faith in and loyalty to party and platform. True conservatism is based on the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. Man is fallen, and can only find spiritual salvation through God's grace in Christ. While good government, just laws, personal liberty are all good things, they are not ultimate goods and can never solve all of man's problems, let alone his central problem of sin.

It is important for Canada's conservatives to remember that as we enter yet another election. There is no salvation in politics - even "Conservative" politics. That is what conservatism is all about - resisting the save-the-world, do-gooders, who preach a political salvation, and resisting the temptation to turn our own political ideas into just such a religion-substitute. Our ultimate hope must lie, not in who wins the next election, but in He Who died for us.

The Centre of Christianity

What is the essence of Christianity, the heart of the Christian message, the sine qua non of the Christian faith?

Many people today would answer this question with an ethical statement. “We should be kind to others”, would be a fairly standard example of this kind of answer.

Is this the correct answer?

Before answering that question we should ponder another question. Why do so many people think that the essence of Christianity is an ethical message about being good or kind to other people?

One answer to that question might be “Because Jesus taught us to be kind to other people”. That is true. In His most famous Sermon Jesus said “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.” (Matt. 7:12) Since most people would prefer that others were kind to them this could be paraphrased as “be good and kind to other people.” Does this lie at the absolute centre of Jesus’ message though?

There is an implication of the idea that “being good to others” is at the heart of Jesus’ message that has perhaps not occurred to many of those who would give a knee-jerk “yes” answer to that last question. If, “being good to others” was central to Jesus’ message, with everything else He taught being peripheral, then Christ’s message would be an anthropocentric message, man-centred, rather than a theocentric message, God-centred.

This implication actually points us to the reason why so many people conceive of the Christian message as being basically ethical. There has been a revolution in Western thought over the last 500-800 years.

If we go back to the roots of Western civilization in ancient Athens, Socrates laid the intellectual foundation for two millennia of Western thought when he re-focused Greek thought away from questions about the substance of the material world, which had been the focus of earlier Greek philosophers such as Thales of Miletus, Anaximander, Empedocles of Agrigentum, and Heraclitus of Ephesus. Socrates, focused on questions about things which transcended the material world. “What is courage?” “What is justice?” “What is virtue?” He searched for answers to these questions insisting that a valid answer would be one which would apply universally to all examples of these things. Socrates’ student Plato, through whose writings his teacher is known to us today, developed out of Socrates search for universals, the idea that the material world is an imperfect, shadowy reflection of reality. Reality, according to Plato consisted of perfect, eternal, immaterial, universals which he called eidoi (usually translated “Forms”) and which man could only contemplate through the use of reason. Plato’s own pupil, Aristotle, differed from Plato in that he taught that man approached transcendent universals though particulars that one experiences empirically in this world, but agreed with his teacher that the transcendent universals themselves, are the subject of the highest, truest, and most important knowledge.

This concept of the Athenian philosophers, that things which are invisible, eternal, perfect, and beyond the world available to the senses but imperfectly represented in that world, was the foundation of Western thought for millennia. It provided the intellectual framework within which Christian theology was developed.

Then, over the last several centuries, modern philosophers began to reorient Western thought away from the universal, the invisible, the transcendent, towards the physical world. In the 14th Century, William of Occam taught a form of nominalism (the denial of the existence of metaphysical universals). In the 17th Century, René Descartes tried to develop a rational belief system in which nothing was “known” unless he could logically demonstrate it from something of which he was absolutely certain. His search for such certainty turned inward until he reasoned that since he couldn’t doubt that he was doubting, his mental activity and hence his existence, were certainties. It was a brilliant solution to his problem – brilliant, but autocentric. Immanuel Kant, in the 18th Century taught that our knowledge was subjective, that we can only ever know phenomena (external things as they appear to us) because we play an active role in how we perceive things, therefore noumena (things “as they are in themselves”, this is the term which in classical philosophy includes everything beyond the world available to the senses) are forever outside our knowledge. In the 19th Century, Auguste Comte, one of the first sociologists, argued for positivism, the idea that we can only know that which we can experience, observe, and empirically test in the material world. He taught a progressive theory of the history of human knowledge in which theology and metaphysics are primitive stages prior to the “positive” approach of modern science. In the early 20th Century an extreme version of this doctrine called “logical positivism” became popular in intellectual circles.

This reorientation of Western thought away from the transcendent, invisible, and eternal to the imminent, visible, and temporal both contributed to and was the result of the birth of modern science with all of its blessings and curses. It has also led to a way of referring to the physical world as the “real world” that is popular among parents who wish to encourage their kids to focus on their education and get good jobs, among people who have come to regard life as a long bitter struggle to sustain one’s physical existence, and various others. It has further led to a popular misconception of the relationship between the scientific and the possible. Since scientists express the summaries of their observations as “laws” many people have gotten the wrong impression that a scientific law means “such-and-such has to happen in this way under all circumstances” rather than “such-and-such has always happened in this way in our observations and experiments so there is a high probability that it will continue to always happen this way in the future”.

This in turn has led to a bias against the possibility of the supernatural, of miracles. Thus, people who had adopted these modern perspectives, and who therefore read the Gospels and dismissed the possibility of the Virgin Birth, the turning of the water into wine, the healing miracles, the calming of the storm and walking on water, the raising of Lazarus, the feeding of the 5000, and the Resurrection, but who still wished to think of themselves as Christians, had to look for an essence of Christianity which relegated all of the supernatural aspects of the Gospels to outward religious trappings of the Christian message. This left them with the ethical teachings of Jesus Christ.

Did Jesus Christ make ethics the heart of His message however? Do those who see Jesus as primarily an ethical teacher even understand His ethical teachings?

“Love thy neighbor as thyself” Jesus is often quoted as saying. He did say that, but He was not introducing anything new. He was quoting Leviticus 19:18. Furthermore, He made it explicitly clear that “love thy neighbor as thyself” is not the highest principle of His ethical system. It is only the second greatest commandment. The greatest is to “love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, with all thy mind, and with all thy strength”. Loving God, takes precedence over loving man, in Christ’s ethical teachings. This precludes “being kind to other people” from being central to Christ’s teachings. It is important but it is not the most important thing.

Jesus said of these commandments “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets”. What does this mean? “The law and the prophets” are what Christians call “the Old Testament” and what Jews call the Tanakh (from the acronym of the initials of the Hebrew words for Law, Prophets, and Writings). When Jesus says that “on these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” He is saying that the Old Testament is summarized in these two commandments. He is also saying that someone who truly loves God and his neighbor, will keep all the commandments of the Old Testament.

That is something that people who think Jesus’ teachings can be summarized in “be nice to one another” are not likely to be very comfortable with. The Old Testament contains all sorts of commandments that such people usually don’t like. They like to think that the point of Jesus’ teachings was to do away with the Old Testament commandments and replace them with “be nice to each other”. Jesus Himself, however, warned people against interpreting His words this way:

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 5:17-19)

These words occur in the Sermon on the Mount just prior to the section where Jesus quotes six Old Testament rules and demonstrates that the standard of righteousness God requires goes beyond the mere, literal, sense of the commandments. The commandment against murder, Jesus says, means that “whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire.” The commandment against adultery, Jesus says, is broken even by lustful thoughts. The Old Testament includes civil law provisions for divorce and swearing oaths, but the righteousness God demands of people, Jesus said, requires that you do not divorce your wife unless she has been unfaithful and that you speak the truth at all times so that an oath is redundant and unnecessary. The Old Testament includes instructions for civil judges as to how to dispense justice and commands love for one’s neighbor. Jesus adds that one is not to take the former into his own hands and avenge oneself and that love should be extended even to one’s enemies.

The “love” Jesus preached, then, goes beyond the bland “kindness” and “niceness” that the modern liberal reads into it. Jesus’ ethical teachings are extremely demanding. Furthermore, they are filled with threats of judgment and Hell. This is exactly the sort of thing that people who think Christianity is about “being nice to others” don’t like, but Jesus talked about these subjects more than anybody else in the Bible.

After Jesus’ baptism, and his 40 day fast in the wilderness, the Gospels record that He began His preaching/teaching ministry. The message, the Gospels record Him preaching throughout Galilee is “Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” What did that mean?

The kingdom of heaven is what the Jews were waiting for. The Old Testament records the covenant God made with the people of Israel, and the history of how they would be unfaithful, God would judge them, they would repent, and He would restore them. The prophetic literature of the Old Testament records the words of the prophets addressed to Israel and Judah (and sometimes to the surrounding nations) in the last days of the divided Kingdom, in the time of the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions that wiped out Israel’s political sovereignty. The prophets spoke of this as God’s judgment on Israel for unfaithfulness, idolatry, and a lack of mercy and justice. The prophetic pronouncements of judgment and condemnation, however, were tempered with a message of hope. God will not be angry with His people forever. He will establish His kingdom on earth, He will establish a New Covenant in which He will write His laws, not on tablets of stone but upon the hearts of His people, He will send a Redeemer.

“The kingdom of heaven is at hand” meant that that promised time had arrived at long last. Therefore, Israel was called upon to repent and to “believe the gospel (“good news”, in this case meaning that the long-awaited kingdom is finally here). At the end of His earthly ministry, Jesus made it explicit what He meant by “the kingdom of heaven is at hand”, when He rode into Jerusalem on the Sunday before Passover on a donkey. He was the promised Redeemer. He was the Messiah. He was the Christ. That was His message.

This had been present in His teachings all along. He said things no ordinary teacher of ethics would ever have said. In the portion of the Sermon on the Mount referred to above, where He expounded on the meaning of 6 commandments in the Old Testament, He used a formula “You have heard that it was said…but I say unto you” which placed His own teachings on the level of the writings He had declared to be authoritative Scripture. At the very end of that same Sermon, just before He compares His teachings to a rock, and people who do what He says to a man who builds a house on the rock rather than on the sinking foundation of sand, He said:

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity. (Matt. 7:21-23)

Do you recognize the significance of this? Jesus is saying in these words that He will be the one who will pronounce the final judgment upon men. He was saying that He was Himself God come down from Heaven to live amongst His people.

This lay at the heart of everything He said, and everything He did, from His telling the man with palsy whom He healed “Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee” to when He promised the rich young ruler that he would have treasure in heaven if he gave up everything he had and followed Jesus, statements no ordinary teacher could have made without committing blasphemy. He accepted men’s worship, commended those who displayed faith in Him and rewarded that faith, and rebuked those who did not believe, including on several occasions, His own disciples.

When He presented Himself in Jerusalem openly as the Messiah, initially the masses welcomed Him, crying out “Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.” By the end of the week, they were demanding His blood from Pilate, crying out “Crucify Him”. That too, lies at the heart of His message.

Jesus at one point asked His disciples Who men said that He was. They gave various answers and He then asked them Who they said He was. Peter answered “the Christ, the Son of the living God”, which answer Jesus commended. He then began telling His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem, where He would be put to death, and three days later He would rise again.

On the night before His crucifixion, at the Last Supper He took bread and after blessing and breaking it, He gave it to His disciples saying “Take, eat; this is My body”, then took the cup and after giving thanks said:

Drink ye all of it; For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. (Matt. 26:27-28)

The “new testament” is the new covenant that was promised by the Prophets. What Jesus was saying here as He commissioned the Eucharist, was that He Himself, would be the sacrifice that would establish the new covenant. His sacrifice would do what no other sacrifice could. It would take away the sins of the world, making peace between God and man, a peace into which all people everywhere are invited to participate through faith.

Jesus Christ Himself, then, is the centre of Christianity. Christianity is about Who Jesus is, about His sacrificial death on the cross, and about His Resurrection from the dead. The Resurrection is the evidence which confirms that Christ is Who He claimed to be.

The Athenian philosophers 400 years before Christ came to earth, argued that true wisdom lies in contemplating the transcendent, the perfect, and the eternal, the things which lie beyond the world we know through our senses. The sort of things they had in mind were universals which correspond to categories of physical particulars. God, of course, is also beyond the world we experience through our senses. He does not, however, correspond to a category in the physical world. How then is He to be known to us? In the pagan cultures of two millennia ago, people made statues of their deities and worshipped their deities through these statues. This practice, called idolatry, is forbidden in the Ten Commandments and condemned throughout Scripture.

St. Paul writing in Colossians 1:15 refers to Jesus as “the image of the invisible God”. The word translated “image” there is the Greek word eikon, from which the English word icon is derived. Jesus is what no idol could ever be. He is the perfect image, the perfect representation, of the true and living, invisible God, because He is God incarnate as a true man.

God’s revelation of Himself to man in Christ, particularly the redeeming love revealed in the death and Resurrection of Christ, is what Christianity is all about.

This and That No. 5

First with regards to my last essay, note that tomorrow is the "International Women's Day", a holiday started by the socialists 100 years ago. Today's essay, "Moral Sanity and Abortion" was written for the occasion. I'm sure the socialists, progressives, and feminists will all appreciate the sentiment. ;)

With the exception of Richard Weaver who is quoted in the first paragraph, and Pope Paul VI, everyone quoted in the last essay was a Canadian. Dr. Lionel Tiger, a graduate of McGill University, was born and raised in Montreal.

Tomorrow is also Shrove Tuesday, which is the last day before Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday is the first day of the penitential season of Lent in the Christian calendar, leading up to Holy Week. This brings us to the close of the period I have allotted to myself for political essays this year. Alas, I have not run out of essays. I still have an essay on war that I am working on, as well as one on free speech. I also had planned on reviewing Eric Voegelin's The New Science of Politics, Robert Nisbet's The Quest For Community, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn's Liberty or Equality, Leo Strauss's Natural Right and History and Thomas Molnar's Utopia: The Perennial Heresy this year, mostly as an excuse to re-read this conservative classics. I still intend to write and post these essays this year, but my focus will be on theological topics from the beginning of Lent through to Trinity Sunday (June 19th this year). At which point I will switch to cultural and art topics, tentatively beginning with a review of T. S. Eliot's Notes Toward a Definition of Culture.

Early last week I wrote an e-mail to Jason Kenney, our Minister of Immigration and Multiculturalism. At the end of the week before that, Dr. Srdja Trifkovic, the brilliant Serbian-American scholar who is the foreign-affairs editor of Chronicles Magazine, and the author of such books as the excellent and informative The Sword of the Prophet: Islam; Theology, History and Impact on the World and Defeating Jihad: How the War on Terror May Yet Be Won In Spite of Ourselves, was prohibited from entering Canada where he was scheduled to speak at a meeting on the campus of the University of British Columbia. This was not just a case of over-zealous border guards. The decision to ban Dr. Trifkovic from Canada had come down from the Ministry. The same Ministry that continues to uphold the liberal immigration policies set in place in this country by the Pearson and Trudeau administrations in the 1960's, which I have criticized here. These liberal immigration policies, to say nothing of our refugee policies, pose a major security risk to this country. Dr. Trifkovic posed no threat to this country. You can read his account of the incident here, and Diana Johnstone's comments here.

It would appear that the only time Kenney's Ministry is willing to prevent people from entering the country is when they are speakers with controversial views that some group or another objects to. A couple of years ago George Galloway, the British Labour MP, was banned from coming to Canada. I don't particularly care for George Galloway, nor do I agree with much, if anything, of what he has to say. The reasons given by the government were as absurd as the reasons they have given for banning Dr. Trifkovic. Granted, the government of a sovereign country has the right and authority to ban whoever it wants, except its own people. It is an error, however, to use that authority to keep controversial speakers out, while allowing hordes of immigrants in. It should be the other way around.

Moral Sanity and Abortion

There is perhaps no topic that better illustrates Richard Weaver’s statement that “modern man has become a moral idiot” than the topic of abortion. The arguments made by virtually everybody except the Roman Catholic Church on this topic display a complete inability to grasp basic ethical principles let alone to reason properly and form sound ethical conclusions.

The word “abort” is a verb which has as its object a procedure. To abort something is to stop it prematurely, before it has run its course. When we speak of “abortion” we refer to the act of prematurely stopping a pregnancy which in ordinary circumstances must lead to the death of the developing foetus.

Here the Roman Catholic Church draws a distinction. The Roman Catholic Church says that the term “abortion” is properly applied only to procedures which are undertaken with the purpose of ending a pregnancy. A process that is undertaken for another purpose, such as surgery to save a pregnant mother’s life, that has as a secondary consequence the termination of the pregnancy is not an abortion. Upon initially hearing of this distinction, some might argue that this is purely semantic, splitting hairs, and allowing on the one hand what is forbidden on the other, similar to how the Roman Church’s stance on “annulment” and “divorce” is often seen.

That is not the case here. Here the Roman Catholic Church is applying fundamental ethical principles.

It is right to do good to others. Saving someone’s life is a good example of doing good to others. It is wrong to do harm to others unjustly. Taking someone’s life unjustly is pretty much the supreme example of this. The qualifier “unjustly” is necessary because we live in a fallen world, where people do evil to others, which sometimes requires that they be harmed to stop them from doing evil to oneself or to another person (this is called self-defense and it is recognizably just) and sometimes requires that the community in its law-making and enforcing capacity administer justice by inflicting upon a law-breaker the harm he has done to others. This must always be an act of the community carried out by those holding lawfully constituted authority to administer justice.

What happens when doing good to others results in harm to a third party? Here is where we must be careful. We do not want to carelessly overlook the harm our intended good to one person or group of persons may inflict upon a third party, much less to dismiss or justify that harm, by our intended good.

Thus, in the case of a doctor who is contemplating surgery to save the life of a pregnant mother who recognizes that the surgery will likely or surely also result in the termination of the pregnancy, the doctor must not thoughtlessly reason “well, I’m doing good by saving the mother’s life, therefore it is sad but alright that the foetus will probably die as a result”. This is a situation that the doctor and the expecting parents must consider together and what makes it permissible for them to go ahead with the surgery is the fact that the death of the foetus is probably inevitable either way. If the mother will die if the pregnancy continues to full term then the foetus will almost certainly die too. Therefore, it is permissible and just to save the mother’s life even with the knowledge that doing so will almost certainly mean death for the foetus.

It would certainly not be right, however, for a couple who wish to terminate a pregnancy for other motivations, to ask a doctor to falsely declare the expectant mother’s life to be in danger for the purpose of justifying a procedure that will result in the death of the foetus. Nor would it be right for the doctor to comply with such a request.

It is certainly not right for a society to declare that abortion must be available to any woman who wants it, legally, and at the society’s expense on the grounds that some mothers find their lives endangered by their pregnancies. A morally sane person can see that a moral dilemma exists in a case where the mother’s life is endangered by pregnancy and that the decision to save the mother’s life, while just, cannot be arrived at lightly. This must not be used to justify terminating pregnancies in other situations. There the moral dilemma does not exist because abortion is just plain wrong.

There are areas where a strong case can be made both for “this behavior is right” and “this behavior is wrong”. This is not one of them. To terminate a pregnancy is to terminate a human life. As mentioned above, terminating a human life can in certain circumstances be justified. If you accidentally kill someone, and there is no way you could have prevented the accident, if it is not the result of negligence of some sort, you are not morally culpable for the death. If someone is attacking you or others and he cannot be stopped in any other way than by killing him you are justified in taking his life. If someone has murdered somebody else then the lawful authorities of the community are justified in imposing death as a penalty upon the murderer. If a state of war exists between your country and another country and you are called upon to do your duty to your country by fighting for her in war, your killing the soldiers of your country’s enemy on the battlefield is not murder on your part. Abortion does not fall within any of these categories of “justifiable homicide”.

It must therefore fall within the category of “murder”. That is the only conclusion available for a morally sane person.

The arguments people use to avoid this conclusion are quite revealing.

There is the “what if the mother’s life is in danger” argument which we have already addressed. There is also the “rape” argument.

“Rape is sexual intercourse that is forced upon a person against their consent. If a woman gets pregnant as a result of a rape, how can it be just to force her to go through 9 months of pregnancy and to nurture and raise the child of the man who raped her?” The answer, of course, is that it is not just, but neither is it just to allow her to have an abortion for this reason. The human life growing within her – which is an outgrowth of her own life as well as that of her rapist – bears no culpability for his father’s guilt. She will not have to nurture and raise the child after the pregnancy if she does not wish to do so as she can give the baby up to adoption. The pregnancy will undoubtedly be traumatic for her as a constant reminder of the event which caused the pregnancy. An abortion will be traumatic as well and possibly even more so than carrying the pregnancy to term. Unfortunately, there is no just outcome to this scenario.

Like the case of the expecting mother whose life is endangered by her pregnancy, however, this is an extreme scenario. The vast majority of abortions, legal or illegal, are not done for reasons like these. If society were to decide that of the various unjust solutions to the problem of a woman pregnant due to rape the least unjust is to allow the woman to have an abortion that would still not warrant making abortion legal, easily accessible, and paid for by the government, to all women.

Some try to argue for liberal abortion laws by questioning who qualifies as a “person”. This argument can take on a number of forms. There is the form which says “the law defines personhood as beginning at birth”. All that proves, however, is that progressive liberals drew up the law. Neither truth nor fact can be generated by legislation. If human personhood begins at conception then no amount of laws saying that it begins at birth will change that fact. (1)

Another form of the argument is the agnostic form – “We cannot know when personhood begins”. While I don’t accept that as being valid, let us assume for a moment that it is. Ted Byfield irrefutably answered this argument decades ago. He wrote:

Here is a problem in “values” of the type that modern social studied teachers are encouraged to pose. Several men are out in the woods hunting. Suddenly one of them sees something move in the bush. At last he rejoiced, a deer. Then a warning flashes through his mind. That might not be a deer. That might be one of the other hunters. Question for the class: Should the hunter fire at the thing if there’s a chance it’s another human being? The approved answer is no. (2)

Mr. Byfield went on to explain that he had raised this scenario on a CBC television program where he put it to Dr. Henry Morganthaler! He said “the tape was killed, the program was never run, and I was never invited back”.

The point that Mr. Byfield had made was that it is not enough for the advocates of legal, open-access abortion, to cast doubt upon the status of a developing foetus as a “person” or “human being”. They have to prove that the foetus is not either of those things to make the case for legal abortion.

Having established that, we do not need to depend upon the burden of doubt. It is ridiculous to assert that we cannot know whether or not the foetus is a human being. Leave terms like “human being” and “person”, which have apparently become plastic and malleable in recent decades, and nonsensical rhetorical categories like “potential human being” aside. The foetus is unquestionably a human life. When a human sperm fertilizes a human egg, a zygote is formed which possesses a full set of human chromosomes, a mix from its father and mother which are unique to itself. The process of growth through cell division and replication begins immediately. This is a new life, a unique life, and a human life, from the moment of conception. All scientific facts support this.

That should settle the question for anyone possessed of a modicum of moral sanity. The foetus is a life and is identifiably human, terminating its life falls within none of the categories of justifiable homicide, therefore abortion must be murder. The “pro-choice” movement however argues that “a woman has the right to control her own body”.

It is here that the progressive liberals believes that they have made their own irrefutable argument. The argument is worded in such a way that a denial would have to take the form of “no, a woman does not have the right to control her own body” which would seem to suggest that someone else does, making that women as a class are under the perpetual control of that someone else.

There is a question here, that is desperately looking for an answer. Why does “abortion must be legally accessible to all women” logically proceed from the assertion “a woman has the right to control her own body”? Or to put it another way, why does a woman’s having the right to control her own body mean that she has the absolute right to the final decision of whether another human life lives or dies?

What these questions reveal is that “a woman’s right to control her own body” is not the definitive, irrefutable, argument that the “pro-choice” movement wants it to be. As George and Sheila Grant put it:

When the argument for easy abortion is made on the basis of rights, it clearly rests on the weighing of the rights of some against the rights of others. The right of a woman to have an abortion can only be made law by denying to another member of our species the right to exist. The right of women to freedom, privacy and other good things is put higher than the right of the foetus to continued existence. (3)

Or, as the old adage puts it, “your right to swing your first ends where my nose begins”.

What this means is that no person’s rights are so absolute that they are not limited by the rights of others. Now since that argument must apply to the right of the foetus to life as well, does that leave us in limbo, in a stalemate where the rights of women and the rights of foeti perpetually cancel each other out?

The “pro-choice” answer is to state that the rights of a mature, rational, woman must take precedence over the rights of a developing foetus. At first glance this seems to make sense, although this Nietzschean exaltation of the rights of the strong over the rights of the weak is oddly inconsistent with the egalitarianism that most members of the feminist and “pro-choice” movements claim to believe in. If we look at it more closely, however, we realize that there is another factor that needs to be considered in addition to the status of those whose rights have come into potential conflict. That is the nature of the rights themselves. In the case of the foetus, the right in question is the right to survive, the right to live, the right to exist. In the case of the woman, the right in question is a right to decide and to act. Surely the former must take precedence over the latter in a rational hierarchy of rights, regardless of the status of the rights-bearer.

It is clear that sound, reasonable thinking about ethics, supported by biological science, is on the pro-life side in the abortion debate. Why then, is the other side winning and what could possibly draw someone to hold such an obviously wrong position?

This question became all the more puzzling to me several years ago when I read Dr. Lionel Tiger’s The Decline of Males for the first time. In that book, Dr. Tiger, who is the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, in describing the effects of the invention of the birth control pill, wrote the following:

It is impossible to overestimate the impact of the contraceptive pill on human arrangements. The most striking display of this is the baffling historical fact that after the pill became available in the mid-1960’s, the pressure for liberal abortion intensified worldwide. This is remarkably, even profoundly, counterintuitive. It is also an implacable historical reality. Only after women could control their reproduction excellently did they need more and more safe abortions. (4)

Counterintuitive is an understatement. The invention of effective oral contraception meant that women no longer required the cooperation of men if they wished to have heterosexual intercourse without getting pregnant. You would normally expect that this would have decreased whatever demand for abortion there was. Instead it increased it. I had not considered how strange this was until Dr. Tiger pointed out the obvious.

Dr. Tiger’s explanation is that the increase in female control over fertility, meant a decrease in male confidence in their own paternity, and hence a lesser willingness on the part of men to stay with the women they impregnated, leading to the demand for abortion. This may have something to do with it – one would think, though, that if oral contraception created mistrust of women on the part of men it would take the form of suspicion they were taking the pill in secret and blaming the lack of offspring on male infertility than in an increase in the age-old fear of being cuckolded.

I’m more inclined to think that it is all about power. That is usually what lies behind demands that are couched in the terminology of rights. If the pill is regarded as a means of empowering women – it gave them more control over their fertility than they had ever possessed in the past – then what would be the next step in that empowerment process? Proclaiming that women have the right to decide to terminate their pregnancies. Such a right would inherently grant women unilateral decision-making authority over the survival of the human species – a tremendous blackmail tool and source of power.

Most women themselves probably would not have thought of it in those terms. Political radicals who seek to exploit issues pertaining to women to achieve their revolutionary goals, including power for themselves, would have thought of it this way, though.

Interestingly, however one wishes to explain the strange historical fact Dr. Tiger pointed out, it confirms the warnings which Pope Paul VI gave in Humanae Vitae about the consequences of artificial contraception. He warned, in that famous 1968 encyclical, that artificial birth control “could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards” and:

forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection. (5)

The position taken by Paul VI in Humane Vitae was the position of the entire Christian Church – Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant until very recently. In the four decades since the encyclical came out, Paul VI’s warnings have materialized. In Canada today, there are no legal restrictions on abortion and it is provided free to whoever wants it by the government out of our tax dollars.

It is best not to speculate on what the next exciting step on this road of progress free of all traditional ethical and moral restraints, will be. I’m sure we’ll find out, to our disgust and dismay, before too long.



(1) Similarly, no amount of legislation saying that a union between a man and a man, or a union between a woman and a woman, is a marriage, will ever make it so. The progressive liberal’s seeming faith in the ability of government to generate fact and truth by legal fiat is a superstition.

(2) Ted Byfield, “The question that got me thrown off a TV program”, originally his back page column for the July 25, 1980 issue of The Alberta Report, reprinted on page 105 of The Book of Ted: Epistles From an Unrepentant Redneck (Keystone Press: Edmonton, 1988)

(3) George P. Grant with Sheila Grant, “Abortion and Rights”, originally published as part of The Right To Birth: Some Christian Views on Abortion edited by Eugene Fairweather and Ian Gentles and published in 1976 by the Anglican Book Centre in Toronto, subsequently republished in Technology and Justice, a collection of Grant’s essays published by Anansi, also out of Toronto, in 1986, where it can be found on pages 117 to 130, this particular quotation coming from page 117.

(4) Lionel Tiger, The Decline of Males, (Golden Books: New York, 1999), p. 35. Bold indicates italics in the original.

(5) http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/paul_vi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae_en.html