Yesterday, 25 March, was the holy day formally called The Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and commonly referred to as Lady Day. It commemorates the day that the angel Gabriel appeared to the Virgin Mary in Nazareth and told her that she was “blessed… among women” and “hast found favour with God” and would conceive and give birth to the Christ, the Son of God. The account can be found in St. Luke’s Gospel, the first chapter, verses 36-38. St. Luke does not provide the calendar date on which Gabriel visited the Blessed Virgin but he does say that it was in the “sixth month” (v. 26), i.e., of Elizabeth’s pregnancy with John the Baptist. Elizabeth conceived shortly after her husband Zacharias had received his visitation from Gabriel while serving in the Temple. Zacharias was of the “course of Abia” the Temple service of which occurred twice in the year, once in the week of the Day of Atonement. That this was the week in which the visitation took place can be inferred from indicators in the text that the Temple was very well attended that day. Also, there is an ancient legend that Zacharias was serving as High Priest on Yom Kippur that is difficult to reconcile with St. Luke’s account but can be explained as an embellishment on the correct detail of it having been Yom Kippur or at least the week thereof that the event took place. Yom Kippur falls in late September to early October, making October the month of John the Baptist’s conception, and March therefore, the sixth month of it. Although the earliest mention of the celebration of the Annunciation goes only back to the sixth century, the fact that the Church regarded it as having occurred on 25 March since the earliest centuries is easily demonstrated. St. Hippolytus of Rome, whose years were 170 to 235 AD, wrote that our Lord was born eight days before the Kalends of January.[1] That is 25 December by our way of reckoning dates.[2] Nine months to the day after 25 March.
There is a type of Protestant who thinks that any amount of honour and attention bestowed on our Lord’s mother takes away from that which is due to Christ Himself. The Annunciation, the Gospel account of it, and its celebration reveal the foolishness of this way of thinking.
Consider the salutation of Gabriel to the Virgin: “Hail, thou that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.” (Lk. 1:28)
The first observation to be made about these words is that the honour bestowed upon Mary here, that she is “highly favoured” or as William Tyndale rendered it “full of grace”, the Lord is with her, and she is “blessed…among women” come from the mouth of an unfallen angel speaking on behalf of God. It could hardly, therefore, detract from the honour due to her Son.
The second observation is that this is the first three lines of the Ave Maria. These are drawn directly from the inspired words of Scripture. The next two lines of the Ave Maria, are Elizabeth’s salutation when Mary visits her immediately after the Annunciation (Lk. 1:42). The only things added to the Scriptural text in the Ave Maria prior to the Sancta Maria portion are the names Mary and Jesus. Remember that the next time you hear someone claim these words are idolatrous.
Now consider the Christological significance of the Annunciation. Objections to honouring Mary often contribute to poor Christology. Some Hyper-Protestants, in their zeal to throw out anything they consider to be tainted with “papist Mariolatry”, object to the title “Mother of God” or “Theotokos” and in doing so embrace the sort of thinking associated with the fifth century Nestorius of Constantinople that was condemned as heretical at the third ecumenical council. Ironically, of course, Nestorius himself had no problem with honouring Mary. His problem with “Theotokos” was that he thought it suggested that Mary was the source of Jesus’ divinity. This is the same problem Hyper-Protestants have with “Mother of God.” “Mary is not the Mother of God” they will say “She is the Mother of Jesus” just as the fifth century Nestorians called Mary the “Christokos” (Christ-bearer) rather than “Theotokos” (God-bearer). The reason these arguments are condemned as heretical is because they introduce division into the Person of Christ. Jesus Christ is One Person. Mary is the Mother of that Person. That Person is both God and Man. Therefore Mary is the Mother of God. This obviously does not mean that Jesus gets His deity from her. The Person Jesus has always existed with and in His Father and the Holy Spirit as God. That Person became Man but was always God. In becoming Man, He gained a Mother. This is a completely unique instance of a Person existing before His Mother, but that does not alter the fact that she is His Mother, or that Mother is her relationship to Him as a Person, and since He that Person is God as well as Man, she is the Mother of God.
Now before you conclude that I have gotten away from my main point think of this question: When did the Incarnation take place? When was the Hypostatic Union formed? When did the Eternally-Begotten Son of God add a complete but anhypostatic[3] human nature, subject to the consequences of the Fall such as mortality except for the taint of sin itself, to His Own Eternal Person and become Man?
The answer, of course, is Lady Day, the day of the Annunciation. The Incarnation did not take place at Christ’s birth on Christmas. By that time His human life had already been growing for nine months. Jesus’ humanity was never not-united to His deity and His Person but was created already in union with Him. Otherwise His humanity would not have been His but someone else’s that He took in a manner similar to possession. The Incarnation, therefore, and Jesus’ conception are one and the same event. Gabriel’s message to the Blessed Virgin was:
Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favour with God. And, behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call his name JESUS. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the Highest: and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of his father David: And he shall reign over the house of Jacob for ever; and of his kingdom there shall be no end. (Lk. 1:30-33).
After inquiring as to how this was possible and receiving the answer that it would be by the power of the Holy Spirit, her response was “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.” (Lk. 1:38) In these words she in submissive obedience consented to being the God-bearer and the miracle was accomplished.
Mary’s response was a significant theme in the writings of the earliest Church Fathers. St. Irenaeus wrote:
In accordance with this design, Mary the Virgin is found obedient, saying, Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to your word. Luke 1:38 But Eve was disobedient; for she did not obey when as yet she was a virgin. And even as she, having indeed a husband, Adam, but being nevertheless as yet a virgin… having become disobedient, was made the cause of death, both to herself and to the entire human race; so also did Mary, having a man betrothed [to her], and being nevertheless a virgin, by yielding obedience, become the cause of salvation, both to herself and the whole human race…And thus also it was that the knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary. For what the virgin Eve had bound fast through unbelief, this did the virgin Mary set free through faith.[4]
This same comparison had earlier been made by Justin Martyr.[5]
While the Hyper-Protestants may rage against this comparison and find in it evidence that “Romanism” had begun to creep into the Church as early as the second century it rests upon Scriptural authority. Mary and Eve are joined in the first and the last books of the Bible.
In the curse on the serpent in Geneses 3:15 reads “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” Who is the woman in this verse?
On the one hand it is obviously Eve. She was the only woman present at the time. On the other hand it has to be Mary because it was Mary who gave birth to Christ, the seed that crushed the head of the serpent even as he bruised His heel on the Cross. So which is it? Clearly both.
Turning to the final book of the Bible, we find in the twelfth chapter of Revelation a woman spoken of again, this time at great length. She is never named but is just called the woman. She has an enemy, however, who is “a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.” (Rev. 12:3) In the chapter he has an army of angels and fights against St. Michael the Archangel and his angels. St. Michael is victorious and the dragon and his angels are cast out of heaven. When this happens the dragon is identified as “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world.” (Rev. 12:9) The same serpent upon whom the curse was pronounced in Genesis 3. Here he is shown, just as Genesis says, to be the enemy of the woman, making war on her and her seed. For the woman “being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered” (Rev. 12:2) and the dragon “stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.” (Rev. 12:4). Here is the seed of the woman promised in Genesis. To make clear that the child is Jesus Christ the next verse reads “And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne.”
Since she gives birth to Jesus Christ, this woman is clearly the Blessed Virgin Mary. As in Genesis 3:15, however, she is also Eve, because it is here in Revelation that the conflict between the woman and the serpent begun in Genesis 3 comes to its final close. This is Mary as the New Eve. Eve, of course, was the wife of Adam, whereas Mary the New Eve is the Mother of Jesus Christ, the New Adam. Note however the first and the last verses of the chapter. In the first she is clothed with the sun, stands on the moon, and has a crown of twelve stars. This alludes to the visions of Joseph in the book of Genesis. The final verse speaks of the dragon making war on the “remnant of her seed” who “keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.” Mary, the New Eve, is not merely Mary as an individual, but Mary as representative of the people of God. The sun, moon, and stars are the symbols of Israel. It is the Church that has the testimony of Jesus Christ. The Church, according to St. Paul in Romans, is the “olive tree” of Israel, with some branches removed for unbelief, and “wild” branches (Gentile believers) grafted in. The Church is described as the bride of Christ of the New Testament. Mary is literally the Mother of Jesus Christ, but as the New Eve she figuratively represents the collective that is the bride of Christ.[6]
The early Fathers clearly had strong Scriptural support for their teaching that the Blessed Virgin was the New Eve, whose obedience played such an integral role in the restoration of that which had fell into ruin through the disobedience of the first Eve. Perhaps we should pay more attention to their interpretation of the Scriptures and less to those whose determination to honour only Christ has become an obsession that would condemn even the Protestant Reformers[7] for honouring her with the honour that the Scriptures give her.
We beseech thee, O Lord, pour thy grace into our hearts; that, as we have known the incarnation of thy Son Jesus Christ by the message of an angel, so by his cross and passion we may be brought unto the glory of his resurrection; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.[8]
[1] St. Hippolytus of Rome, Commentary on Daniel, 4.23.3.
[2] The Romans reckoned backwards from the Kalends of the next month, we reckon forwards from that of the current month.
[3] Without personal identity distinct from the Eternal Personhood of the Son of God. Since Jesus’ human nature was created already united to His Eternal Person it never actually existed in a state of anhypostasia. The term that denotes the actual state of Jesus’ human nature as it has existed from the moment of its creation in union with His deity in His Eternal Person is “enhypostatic.” “Enhypostatic”, “in the person”, is the only state in which Jesus’ human nature has ever actually existed since it was created already in union with His Person. Since “enhypostatic” describes the human nature as united with the divine in Christ, “anhypostatic”, “without person”, is used to speak of the human nature by itself in contexts where it would be difficult to make sense without speaking as if His human nature had existence by itself prior to the Hypostatic Union. The importance of these distinctions and this highly specialized, even for theology, terminology, is their usefulness in avoiding the error of Apollonaris, who taught that Jesus’ human nature was lacking a component which His divine nature made up for (the Logos, he taught, took the place of a human nous or mind), the error of thinking of the Incarnation as either a sort of possession or a fusion of two persons, one divine one human, into one, or the error of thinking of Jesus’ Person as a composition formed by the union of the divine and human natures. In the Incarnation an Eternal Person added a second, created nature to His eternal nature and that second nature was created as His and never belonged to any other person distinct from His Eternal Person. See Eric Mascall, Christ, the Christian and The Church: A Study of the Incarnation and its Consequences (Peabody: Hendrickson Publishers, 2017).
[4] St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, translated by Alexander Roberts and William Rambaut in Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1, edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, III.22.4.
[6] Note that the imagery of Rev. 12:1 is also that of a queen. The woman is seen in heaven wearing a crown of stars. The queen of heaven. It is significant to observe that in the books of Kings, the queens are consistently mentioned, unless they figure into the narrative in some other way, as the mothers of their sons rather than the wives of their husbands. The queen mother rather than the queen consort was the more prominent idea of the queen in the Old Testament. Here, and not in the worship of Astarte condemned by Jeremiah, we find the origin of the Regina Coeli title for Mary. Let the Hyper-Protestants fume all they like, it will not change the fact.
[7] The Protestant Reformers, at least the Magisterial Reformers, especially the English and Lutheran, but not excluding the Swiss, all had a Mariology that would be considered way too High by many contemporary Protestants.
[8] Collect for the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin, Book of Common Prayer. —Gerry T. Neal
Last week David Warren wrote “I have long supposed the Devil’s ‘fan base’ is to be found overwhelmingly on the political Left. The cause is obvious: they are the godless parties.” I agree with this. I usually find myself in agreement with what the former editor of The Idler and Ottawa Citizen columnist writes. Usually, not always. I don’t agree with him that St. Peter was given a universal jurisdiction over the other Apostles and the entire Church which has descended to the Patriarch of Rome to this day although I rather admire the way he has handled that office being currently held by someone who is clearly not what the Presbyterian Anne Blythe nee Shirley would have called a “kindred spirit.” Of course this is a relatively new belief of his. He entered the Roman Communion in 2003. Back when I was reading him in print in the 1990s he was still a member of the Anglican Communion to which I currently belong, although at the time alluded to I was attending Non-Conformist meetings of a very Low Church sort. Looking back, it must have been somewhere around the time that he crossed the Tiber that my theology started to develop along the High Church lines that put me on the Canterbury trail by the end of the decade. I also no longer share his current admiration for Donald the Orange, although in the interest of being fair I do admire the dismantling of America’s “deep state” that Warren was praising in the piece quoted above. While Trump initially lost my admiration the moment he first threatened Anschluss against Canada I have since come to see that he is someone who no Christian of any Communion who is familiar with Scripture and Tradition should be supporting because he has formed a cult of followers around himself that make blasphemousclaimsabout him that he has never repudiated, at one point retweeted, and has both made himself and encouraged among his followers. In the most recent example, Paula White, the heretical televangelist whom Trump has appointed the head of his newly created “White House Faith Office” formed ostensibly for the purposes of combatting anti-Christian discrimination, blasphemously said “To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God.” In the early centuries of Christianity, when persecution came from officials of the Roman Empire, it was because Christians refused to accept the claims of divinity that the state cult made for the emperor.
That having been said, I reiterate that I do agree with Warren’s statement about the Devil’s fan base being “overwhelming on the political Left.” In this essay, however, I intend to demonstrate that the Devil’s can sometimes more effectively work through those who are not his fans, those who are not openly on his side. The first step in the demonstration is to ask a question.
If the Devil’s fans are on the Left what are we to make of a “Right” that has largely aligned itself with a cult that worships a false christ?
This is an important question to ask because historically the home of political messianism has been on the Left. The idea that political action is the path of salvation is arguably the defining characteristic of the historical Left. The Right’s historical attitude has been to reject this idea and to regard the various schemes that have been hatched out of it with the appropriate response ranging from skepticism to horror. If it be countered that the “far Right” twentieth century movements Fascism and Nazism both preached a form of political national salvation, the response is that these movements were not related to the historical and traditional Right, did not consider themselves to be on the Right – Nazism stands for “National Socialism” and regarded itself as a revolutionary rather than a reactionary party – rejected all the principles of the historical and traditional Right, formed regimes that resembled those of Communism, and are only considered on the “Right” because the Left has so categorized them.
This “Right” that so blasphemously looks upon Donald the Orange as a “Saviour” is obviously primarily an American phenomenon based in the United States of America. This itself is sufficient to explain its turn to political messianism. The American Right has no relationship with the historical and traditional Right because the United States was founded on the repudiation of the principles of the historical and traditional Right.
The historical and traditional Right was essentially the resistance of Christendom – Christian civilization – to its being replaced with Western Civilization – Modern, liberal, secular civilization. As such, it held the worldview of Christendom, a worldview incompatible with theories of political salvation such as were to become all too numerous in the politics of Modern, liberal, secular, Western Civilization. The struggles and woes of man in this world are a condition from which he cannot extract himself because they are the consequences of Original Sin – he is in exile from Paradise Lost. The State has been given to man, therefore, not to save him from his condition, but to administer earthly justice and enforce the laws made necessary by Original Sin. Although salvation was accomplished by God in this present world in history through the events of the Gospel, and can be partially enjoyed in this present world in Christ’s spiritual kingdom the Church in her “militant” mode, the full enjoyment of salvation, Paradise Regained is to be looked for outside of history, after the event that will bring history to a close, the Second Coming of Jesus Christ to “judge both the quick and the dead.”
The historical and traditional principles of the Right are basically three – one political, one religious, and one that combines the political and the religious. The political principle is royal monarchy. Not just monarchy, the governance of the one. Dictatorship or tyranny, the absolute rule of someone propelled into power by the mob, is a perverse example of that. Royal monarchy or kingship, the reign of someone selected not by popular election but by an established line of secession that places his office above democratic politics, who accedes immediately on the death of the previous Sovereign, but is confirmed in the office by swearing oaths before and to God in the Church. The religious principle is orthodox Christian Churchmanship which is the confession and practice of the orthodox Christian faith of the ancient Creeds, in a Church in organic descent from the Church in Jerusalem, with valid Sacraments administered by the ministerial priesthood governed by bishops in Apostolic succession. The third principle is the union of Church and State, not in the sense of a theocracy in which the Church rules the State or Erastianism in which the State rules the Church, but in the sense of the co-operative relationship between the Christian kings of the first principle, and the orthodox Church of the second principle, in which each exercises their authority in their own sphere to uphold the other in its sphere.
The most legitimate Right is the Right that continues to hold to these principles. The second most legitimate Right is that which defends the other good things that the Left turned to attacking after its war on kings, the Church, and Christendom’s union of Church and State. Any list of such good things would have to be representative as the Left is constantly adding to it. The American Right at its best – and it is far from its best at the moment – can only ever be a version of the second most legitimate Right, because the United States was founded on an explicit repudiation of the first and third principles, by Puritans, freemasons, and deists who had personally repudiated the second.
Does this mean that the United States was founded as a country of the Left?
Yes and no. The United States was built on the foundation of liberalism. While “liberalism” and “the Left” have often been used interchangeably they are not identical. Think of a river, flowing from a spring, from which, near the source, a tributary breaks off. Now, if you think of the spring as the turning away of Modern philosophy from Christianity and the traditions of Christendom, liberalism as the river flowing from it, and the Left as the tributary, you will have the basic idea of the relationship between these things. It should be added that throughout their history the streams of liberalism and the Left have sometimes moved closer to each other and sometimes further apart.
Now, while liberalism’s repudiation of the principles of Christendom and the Right was bad and places it on the Devil’s side along with the Left, the ideas of liberalism were not all bad, and those that were bad were not all bad to the same degree. It was necessary that this be the case for the Devil’s trick to work. For that trick is simply this, to present people with two options, one on the Left that is more or less explicitly evil, the other, a more palatable liberal option that can be marketed as “conservative” and to tell people they have to choose one or the other. I am not thinking primarily of party politics although the American two-party system does provide an illustration of how the trick works. The most recent Democratic presidential candidates have been people who think women have the right to murder their babies, that white people should be made into racial scapegoats for the problems of everyone else, that men who claim to be women are what they claim to be and have a right to be treated as such and that violent criminals should be turned out onto the streets as soon as possible. That is only a sampling of their crazy and evil ideas. They are the Devil’s fan base indeed. So the Republican candidate gets elected.
The Devil has played this trick very effectively in economics. The Left has offered us an option called socialism. Socialism is a scheme of political salvation. It tells us that our woes are all due to economic inequality, that the cause of economic inequality is private ownership, and that salvation is to be attained by eliminating private ownership and replacing it with some form of common or public ownership. Don’t be deceived by its surface appearance for if you look beneath the surface it is clear that this is not some benevolent if sappy “lets care and share” sort of thing but something far more sinister. Where its true face can be seen is in its egalitarianism. A movement that was genuinely about alleviating economic suffering and misery would do so rather than obsessing about the unfairness, real or imagined, of their being “haves” when there are also “have nots.” Eliminating private ownership is a way to harm the “haves” not to help the “have nots.” “Private property”, Simone Weil wrote in The Need for Roots, “is a vital need of the soul.” Socialism therefore reduces to Envy, the hatred of others for their possession of something you desire that is the second worst after Pride of the Seven Deadly Sins. That so many have been fooled into looking no further than the surface and seeing something that looks to them like Christian Love for the poor and disadvantaged should not surprise us. This is another of the Devil’s tricks, the one identified by St. Paul in 2 Corinthians 11:14-15. Today, after about a century of socialism having been given chance after chance to alleviate misery, only to produce more than it alleviated, that trick is less effective.
This brings us to the other economic option that in the Devil’s trick is presented as the alternative to the Left’s bad option of socialism. This is capitalism, the economic system for which liberalism has always advocated although the capitalism of reality and the capitalism of liberal economic theory have never been the same thing. For our purposes here the differences are irrelevant. The key elements common to reality “capitalism” and liberal theory “capitalism” are the private ownership of capital (wealth that can be used to create more wealth), contractual labour, and voluntary economic transactions. Since these are each preferable to their alternatives, capitalism as a whole has been easy to sell to those who see socialism for what it is and capitalism has often been thought of as the economics of the Right despite its association with liberalism. When it comes, however, to all those good things that the Left has declared war on, capitalism, the economy of Big Business, has been very destructive, arguably far more so than socialism. Richard M. Weaver, writing in 1948 identified a few of these goods: “The moral solution is the distributive ownership of small properties. These take the form of independent farms, of local businesses, of homes owned by the occupants, where individual responsibility gives significance to prerogative over property.” (Ideas Have Consequences, 121) He then added “Such ownership provides a range of volition through which one can be a complete person, and it is the abridgment of this volition for which monopoly capitalism must be condemned along with communism.”
Much was made, and rightly so, in the Batflu scare of 2020 to 2022, of the harm the lockdowns and other repressive measures were doing to small businesses that did not have the resources to weather that storm of stupidity the way large conglomerates did. While lockdowns, vaccine passports, and the like, are hardly “capitalist” measures, I wonder which was responsible for eliminating more small businesses, Batflu tyranny or the online global business empire of Donald the Orange’s newfound billionaire bestie Jeff Bezos?
Numerous other examples of this trick of the Devil’s can be produced. One that is particularly germane at the moment is the nationalist opposition to the Left’s dream of world federalism with global citizenship and a battery of international bureaucracies to impose sex reassignment surgery on those few children they have allowed to escape subsidized, near-mandatory, abortion the second they experience a moment of gender confusion anywhere in the world whatever the local laws happen to say about it. The alignment of the Left with the Devil’s values is particularly obvious in this case. As tempting, however, as that makes the nationalist option, it ought to be resisted by the Right.
For one thing, nationalism’s home, like that of political messianism is properly on the Left. Nationalism, historically, was a product of the French Revolution. The Jacobins equated nation with state, and demanded, at the risk of your head if you didn’t comply, that loyalty to king and Church be replaced with loyalty to the nation-state. For another, nationalism like socialism is a vice masquerading as a virtue. The virtue it pretends to be, obviously enough, is patriotism, the love of one’s country. Nationalism, however, is a poor imitation of patriotism. It’s exaggerated and loud boasting about its country, its belligerence towards and bullying of other countries, none of which is characteristic of quiet, irenic, patriotism, betrays a lack of love for one’s country. In a recent and excellent column Charles Coloumbe said much that is true, but when he wrote of Donald the Orange “That the newly restored president deeply loves the United States is, no doubt, true” he was very mistaken. If Donald the Orange deeply loved the United States, he would accept her for what she is warts and all, quietly try to remove the warts without drawing attention to them, and leave the rest of the world alone, rather than loudly proclaim his intention to make her “Great Again” a proclamation that shows that he does not consider her to be great now and that greatness, a measure of strength and size, is the quality he wishes for her, rather than goodness, which is what someone who truly loved her would look for and manage see in her, even underneath her flaws.
In the last example there is a clear third alternative that the Right should chose over both nationalism and the Left’s world federalism/global citizenship/international bureaucracy and that is simple patriotism. Such an alternative is more difficult to identify for the false choice of socialism and capitalism, in part because there are a multitude of acceptable alternatives. The distributism proposed by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, its close American cousin the agrarian economy that the Vanderbilt Twelve associated with the antebellum South which Wendell Berry both promoted and lived, Austrian economist Wilhelm Roepke’s synthesis of these with the liberal free market are just three such. I shall defer further discussion of this point to an essay of its own at a later date. I raise it here to make the point that these choices are false choices. There are other options than socialism and capitalism. There is a better alternative to one-worldism than nationalism. There is a better alternative to democracy than republicanism. We do not have to fall for the Devil’s trick and choose capitalism because socialism is so repugnant or choose nationalism because of all the evil that has been done by one-worldism. Capitalism and nationalism have historically been very destructive of the good things in this world that we on the Right wish to conserve or restore.
Finally, just because the Devil’s “fan base” on the Left, reviles and hates Donald the Orange for the things he gets right such as his refusal to allow his country to overrun by invaders, his banning the mutilation of children, his recognition of only two sexes, and the like, this does not mean that we on the Right should join what has so obviously become a deluded and dangerous cult, that worships the American president, and blasphemously looks upon him as some kind of saviour figure. Out of all these false choices, this is by far the worst.
In the Olivet Discourse Jesus warned that “many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.” (Matt. 24:5) Later He told His disciples how to respond to these “Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not.” (v. 23). It is incumbent upon us to obey our Lord’s words now. False christs, as Gamaliel pointed out to the Sanhredrin in Acts 5, don’t end well, and they bring their followers down with them. Jesus of Nazareth, was shown to be the true Christ, the Son of God, by the fact that the Crucifixion was not His end, He rose again from the dead and ascended into Heaven and is present in His Church to this day. The Trump movement, by contrast, will end like that of any other false christ. The fact that he is president of the United States will only make his fall that much harder. — Gerry T. Neal,
The Kalends of January is upon us once again. Kalends, from which our word calendar is derived, was the day of the new moon and hence the first day of the month, for the ancient Romans like the ancient Hebrews followed a calendar in which the months lined up with the lunar cycles they represent. We have gotten off that so the first of the calendar month no longer always lines up with the beginning of the lunar cycle. The Kalends of January is a significant day in the Church Kalendar because as Hippolytus of Rome wrote in the second century, our Saviour was born eight days before. Yes, the 25th of December was the acknowledged birthday of our Lord from far earlier in Church history than Modern gainsayers would have you believe and can in fact be deduced from St. Luke’s Gospel. The eighth day after the birth of an ancient Israelite male was, in accordance with the Abrahamic Covenant, the day he was circumcised and so the Kalends of January has long been the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ. Far more recently it became New Year’s Day on the civil calendar.
This is the day each year when, in accordance with a custom I picked up from Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel, I write about myself and where I stand. I very much miss Reese’s column, and for those who are unfamiliar with him, archives of his last few years can be found on Lew Rockwell’s website. If you are interested in his earlier columns and can get your hands on copies at least two collections were published as books, Great Gods of the Potomac and Common Sense for the Eighties.
Lets start with the basics. I am a Canadian. I was born a Canadian and I will die a Canadian. Donald the Orange can take his obnoxious rhetoric about the “51st state” and insert it into a place that is proverbially bereft of sunshine. I have lived in the province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada all my life. I am a loyal subject of King Charles III as I was a loyal subject of his late mother, Queen Elizabeth II of blessed memory before him. I grew up in rural southwestern Manitoba, on a farm near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers, did my first five years of higher education at what is now Providence University College in Otterbourne, about a half hour south of the provincial capital of Winnipeg, to which I then moved where I have lived and worked for a quarter of a century since.
I often use T. S. Eliot’s famous description of himself as a “royalist in politics, Anglo-Catholic in religion, and classicist in literature” to summarize my own political-religious convictions and what I mean when I call myself a Tory. Tory is usually used to indicate a Conservative Party supporter. I don’t apply it to myself in this partisan sense and seldom use the word conservative even in the small-c sense anymore as that term has been co-opted for people whose political ideals of democracy and capitalism come from nineteenth century liberalism, although twisted beyond what an actual nineteenth century liberal would recognize as his own, and whose main political thought seems to be that the United States should be imposing democracy and capitalism in their evolving meanings on the world with bullets and bombs and boots on the grounds. When I say I am a Tory, I don’t mean anything like that, but rather that my convictions are those of Eliot’s triad.
Before saying a bit more about these things, I should explain the adjective in the title. In Canada, traditional Tories like the economist and humourist Stephen Leacock, the philosopher George Grant, and the historian Donald Creighton, basically the people who Charles Taylor wrote about in Radical Tories, have sometimes been called “Red” due to their criticisms of capitalism having been perceived as indicating a sympathy with socialism. This perception is based on a false dichotomy, that capitalism and socialism are each the only option to the other. In Grant’s case he sometimes said things that suggested he accepted this dichotomy. I don’t. Nor do I have any sympathy for socialism which I utterly detest. I have said before and will say again, that socialism is essentially the second worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, Envy, practiced under the pretense of the greatest of the Theological Virtues, Charity or Christian Love. I put “Red” in the title of this essay to indicate that it is Leacock, Grant, Creighton, Eugene Forsey et al., who represent the tradition of Toryism that I claim as my own rather than the neoconservatives who think that this tradition should be replaced by what is called “conservatism” in the United States (see previous paragraph). The “neck” is added to indicate that I don’t have any sympathy with socialism nor with anything else that could be called progressive and leftist, but rather hold the anti-progressive attitude often associated with the word “redneck.” Think of the lyrics to Charlie Daniel’s “Simple Man” for a picture of what that means.
As a Tory I am no republican big or little r but a “royalist in politics” as Eliot put it. The entire universe is the kingdom of its Creator, God, the King of Kings. The most basic unit of social organization, the family, traditionally reflects the order of the universe. The husband-father is king, wife-mother is queen, and the children are subjects. That is the way the family works best, despite all attempts by “experts” in the social pseudosciences, the progressive brainwashers who have taken over the schools, and the seditious anti-family revolutionaries who dominate the entertainment media to depict this model as disfunctional and fascist and to try and sell us on alternative models. The state traditionally reflected the order of the universe as well, and like the family, it functions best when it continues to do so, under the reign of a king. The totalitarian movements of the last century hated kings. Every Communist country was a republic and so was Nazi Germany. By contrast, “Freedom”, as the title of a Canadian Tory classic by John Farthing that I would like to see back in print and in the hands of all my countrymen says “Wears a Crown”. I respect Parliament, precisely because it is an ancient institution that is a traditional part of a king’s government and not because it conforms to the Modern ideal or idol of democracy.
Turning to “Anglo-Catholic in religion,” the first thing I should say is that while Anglo-Catholicism does accurately denote what my theology has matured into, it does not mean that I think that the English Reformation was a mistake that should be forgotten or undone. I think that the things which the Anglican Church shares with not just the Roman Catholic Church, but the Eastern Orthodox and all the ancient Churches, especially the Catholic faith confessed in the ancient Creeds, but also the episcopal polity, the priestly ministry, and Sacramental worship are more important than the things that identify us with the Lutherans, Reformed, and other Protestants. This does not mean that I think the latter to be unimportant, quite the contrary. When it comes to the two most important things the Reformers fought for, the supremacy of the Scriptures and the freeness of the salvation proclaimed in the Gospel, I am firmly a Protestant. I have come to see, however, the importance of qualifying these with Catholic truths. We must indeed hold the Scriptures supeme as the infallible written Word of God (with the Authorized Bible as published in 1611 with the deuterocanon included between the Testaments as the definitive English Bible)but as Hans Boersma and Ron Dart have frequently reminded us the way to listen to them is at the feet of the Church Fathers. The Gospel does indeed proclaim a salvation that is freely given in Jesus Christ to all who receive it by faith, but the Gospel is the message of Jesus Christ, His death for us and His Resurrection, confessed in faith in each of the ancient Creeds and not the doctrine of justification which, important as it is, is a doctrine about the Gospel, rather than the Gospel itself, and while faith is the appointed means whereby we receive the saving grace of God, the ordinary means by which that saving grace is brought to us that we may so receive it is the Church’s two-fold Gospel ministry of proclaimed Word and administered Sacrament. I can very much do without most other things associated with Protestantism, especially the iconoclasm and the inclination to write off the Church prior to the Reformation.
I was raised culturally Christian in the sense that we celebrated Christmas and Easter and I was made aquainted with the stories of the Bible if not their theological significance. My mother attended the United Church in Oak River, my father’s family had been affiliated with the Anglican Church in Bradwardine which closed around the time I was born. My paternal grandmother, received the Anglican Journal and the newspaper of the Diocese of Brandon and I would read these whenever I visited her in Rivers. It was through reading Christian books from the library that I became aware of the significance of the events celebrated at Christmas and Easter. In Bethleham, the Son of God, Who with His Father and the Holy Ghost was and is and ever shall be, God, was born as a baby boy, having become man by uniting a true human nature to His eternal Person. He did so, that He might save mankind from the bondage to the devil, sin, and death into which we had fallen in the infancy of our race by dying on the Cross for us, the innocent Lamb of God Who “taketh away the sin of the world” and rising again from the grave triumphant over His enemies and ours. The summer before I entered high school I became a Christian in the sense of a believer who trusts and confesses Jesus Christ as Saviour and Lord.
At the time I had a rather low view of the Church as an institution. Liberalism, in the religious sense of minimizing, explaining away, or outright rejecting such basic Christian truths as the deity and bodily Resurrection of Jesus Christ in order to accomodate Modern notions, had made heavy inroads into the Anglican Church and all but completely taken over the United which at somepoint around that time had elected an openly atheist moderator. I had nothing but contempt for religious liberalism before becoming a believer and had even less respect for it after. For the first fifteen years of my walk as an active believer I attended non-conformist, mostly Baptist, evangelical and fundamentalist services, and thought that such things as church government were adiophora and the only thing about the organized Church that mattered was the faithfulness of the sermon to the truths of the Christian faith.
When I joined and was confirmed in the Anglican Church, this was not because I had come to tolerate religious liberalism. I remain firmly of the conviction that liberalism is not a defective form of Christianity but an entirely different religion altogether as J. Greshem Machen demonstrated in his Christianity and Liberalism a century ago. Nor was it because the Anglican Church had expunged liberalism which sadly she has not, but because I had come to see that my earlier attitude towards the institution of the Church was neither Scriptural nor supported by history.
Church government, I had come to see, is not adiophora. The episcopal polity is not only the polity of the Roman Catholic Church, but of all ancient Churches that predate the Reformation, and furthermore, is clearly present in the Scriptures as the polity established by the Apostles themselves, the first bishops in the sense later attached to the word. Nor was the soundness of the sermon the only thing that mattered. Until the Reformation, the Sacrament of the Eucharist had been the central focal point of the service, at least as important as the sermon, and this was true not just of Rome but of all the ancient Churches.
As for the soundness of what was preached and taught, I had come to appreciate that the best and fullest summary of the truths essential to the Christian faith was not the minimalist list of “five fundamentals” drawn up in controversy with liberals in the early twentieth century, or the Protestant confessions which are too narrow doctrinal statements to be considered the basic faith, but the ancient Creeds, especially the Nicene confessed by all the ancient Churches. When I joined the Anglican Church I joined a parish where I knew the teaching and preaching to be sound, but I joined the Anglican Church because she had come out of the Reformatation with her episcopal polity and its Apostolic Succession intact, confessed the ancient and Catholic Creeds as her basic faith, and had recovered the centrality of the Eucharist. This is how I would say that I am “Anglo-Catholic in religion”, although such things as the Coverdale Psalter sung to Anglican plainchant, crucifer led processionals and recessionals, clergy and choir in vestments, and candles and bells and incense all strike me as more appropriate to coming before a holy God than “praise and worship” songs in which the most used words are “me” “myself” and “I”, which sentiment is what is more commonly associated with Anglo-Catholicism today.
I would probably replace “literature” with “culture” in Eliot’s “classicist in literature.” Classicism is the position that man’s creativity as expressed in arts, literature and culture was given him to serve a higher good, that rules govern the exercise of that creativity and the achievement of the good of culture depends on those rules, and the output is therefore susceptible to objective and not merely subjective evaluation. Classicism, of course, requires that there be such things as classics in works of art. literature and music. That which is “classic” is regarded by those with Modern, progressive, forward-looking ideas as “old”, but this is because in the shallow following of fad-and-fashion that passes for thinking amongst them they cannot distinguish between what is old and what is timeless. Timelessness is the distinguishing quality of a classic and that is true in music, the visual arts, architecture and the stage as well as literature proper. Of course it is the passing of time that in most cases reveals a work to have this quality and most often when a new work is instantly proclaimed a classic it is simply a publicity gimmick into which little to no thought has been placed into the meaning of the word. Still, it is not impossible to recognize a work that will prove to be enduring when it is new. If care, skill, and knowledge of the craft or art have gone into the making of it these are good indicators. Better indicators are that the message in the book, song, painting or what have you is addressed to more than just those of the present moment, although it may make reference to the present moment as a medium for conveying the message. War, for example, is an enduring theme because its danger is ever present even in times of peace. A work may speak only to a specific war, in which case it will become dated and bound to its own period. It can, however, by addressing the reality of an immediate conflict speak beyond it to the enduring theme. The poem “In Flanders’ Field” was written in World War I and this is the war of which it immediately speaks but the truths it speaks are enduring and when the poem is recited every Remembrance Day we understand the words to apply to the fallen of all past conflicts. The best indicator is when the work says something important about the transcendentals, the qualities of Goodness, Beauty and Truth that the thoughtful and reflective have held important in societies and civilizations in all places and all times because they are the ends of created being, and about God in Whom these must ultimately be sought if man is to fulfil the end for which he is created. Note that the views expressed in this paragraph are not a judgement of popular culture from the standpoint of highbrow culture. Picasso’s paintings and Schoenberg’s music are highbrow but utterly devoid of aesthetic value, whereas popular culture, which is not to be confused with “pop” culture the distinguishing characterstic of which is that it is factory produced for mass consumption, contains much that is good and has produced many classics. The truths asserted in this paragraph apply to popular culture as well as to highbrow culture.
These are the essence of my Toryism. In the case of royalism I have been a royalist all my life, at first instinctually, later in a more informed manner. I arrived at Anglocatholicism through a long spiritual journey that started with an evangelical acceptance of Jesus Christ combined with a fundamentalist rejection of liberalism in religion, and while it may not seem obvious to others to me it is evident that the destination was set from the beginning for the acceptance of Christ implies acceptance of His Church and to fully reject religious liberalism one must reject its seeds in all reforms of the sixteenth century except those that were absolutely necessary. As for classicism, I can say that I have instinctually loathed the opposite of it all my life, having despised non-metrical verse, avant garde art, atonal music and the like from the moment I first encountered it, although active pursuit of the higher and elevating in culture came later, after much resistance of those who encouraged me in that direction, and in part out of sheer cussedness such as when having encountered Mark Twain’s remark that “everyone wants to have read the classics but nobody wants to read them” I responded with “Sez you, Sam Clemens” and set out to read them.
Clearly my Toryism is not what calls itself “conservatism” these days. I am closest to today’s conservatives when it comes to what they are against. I oppose abortion and what is now called “Medical Assistance in Dying” because they are murder (as opposed to killing in self-defence, in defence of others and property, capital punishment, and for one’s country in war, which are not). That, however, may be something I have more in common with the conservatives of yesterday than those of today. I detest the courts turning violent offenders out onto the streets almost the moment they are arrested and making the public provide a supposedly safe supply of hard narcotics to drug addicts in the idea that this will reduce the harm they inflict upon themselves. Ending “catch and release” is not enough, however, over a century’s worth of progressive reforms to the idea of criminal justice needs to be undone and we need to get back to thinking of criminal justice in terms of making the offender pay his debt to society rather than helping the offender recover from the illness of crime. As for drug policy, we need to fish or cut bait as the polite version of the saying goes. Either go back to trusting people to make their own self-medication choices or eliminate the supply of illegal narcotics in a real, rather than half-ass, war on drugs. Either approach would be a vast improvement to the public not-for-profit drug dealing that is the harms reduction model.
I oppose illegal immigration, but unlike most conservatives go further and say that legal immigration is in need of serious reform as well, and the problems are not merely those of the last ten or twenty years or so, but go back to the sixties. I think that the late French Catholic, monarchist Jean Raspail hit the nail on the head in his novel The Camp of the Saints which depicted post-World War II liberalism as leading the civilization formerly known as Christendom to an existential crisis in its enthusiastic preference of “the other” at the expense of its own as reflected in its enthusiastic embrace of immigrants and refugees in numbers too large to be absorbed without endangering the continuity of the civilization. The point is not that racial or cultural “otherness” is an insurmountable roadblock to someone’s becoming a true member of the community, society, country, and civilization they move to, that it is not is also illustrated in Raspail’s book. As Enoch Powell put it “it is a matter of numbers.”
I detest radical feminism, the racial hatred of white people that goes under the name of “anti-racism”, the Year Zero attempts to erase the past that go under the names of “anti-imperialism” and “anti-colonialism,” the movement that in the name of “rights” is now demanding in the most totalitarian way possible that everybody not merely tolerate, not merely accept, but practically worship everyone who is other than cisgender and heterosexual and which insists that everyone pretend that someone who thinks he is a gender other than his biological sex, whether an actual gender or a make believe one, is what he says he is, and basically everything that the word “wokeness” has come to denote. Where I would differ from conservatives is that their opposition to wokeness does not go much further or deeper than criticizing it for deviating from 1950’s and 1960’s, American liberalism. My rejection of the vile race hatred of Ibraham X. Kendi does not mean that I am about to start pretending that Martin Luther King Jr. was a saint rather than a charlatan. I cannot stand the kind of idiot who in the name of feminism tells a neighbouring country that they should have voted otherwise in their last election because they owed it to the other candidate because she is a woman. This is not because I think feminism to be a good thing of which he is a false representative. Each successive wave of “feminism” has gotten crazier and crazier, because its real enemy from the first wave onward has not been the conspiracy of all men to oppress all women that has only ever existed in the fevered brains of those attached to this delusional movement but the reality of human nature that some people are men, others are women, that men and women are different, that these differences are not trivial but fundamental, “vive la différence” as the French say, and that trying to prevent this difference from expressing itself in social organization will inevitably increase rather than decrease the misery and unhappiness of both sexes. “The personal is the political” was the motto of its second wave, a chilling statement that to these harridans there is no aspect of life that should escape the power of the state to remold it to their wishes. For the best takes on feminism I refer you to Stephen Leacock’s “The Woman Question” and to Dr. Johnson’s observation that “nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given her very little.”
I am much further from “conservatives” when it comes to the things they are for. I explained above the things that I as a Tory am for and these things, royal monarchy, Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church in its reformed Anglican expression, and classicism are all deep-rooted and ancient. The things that “conservatives” say they are for are all Modern with roots no deeper than liberalism. They are constantly changing because liberalism is constantly changing and to be a “conservative” today means little more than to be a defender of yesterday’s liberalism against the changes proposed by today’s.
The most consistent things today’s “conservatives” are for are capitalism and technological progress. With regards to technological progress while there have been undeniable benefits to developing newer and fancier tools that can do increasingly more things for us there are obvious detriments as well. That we have given ourselves the ability to destroy ourselves and our world stands out. Having technology do for us what we should be doing for ourselves is another downside that is becoming an increasing problem as technology advances into the AI stage. Thinking is not something we should be outsourcing to machines. The earlier stage in which computers took over the task of doing all calculations in economic transactions had the result that when the computers were down many of the people manning the tills in stores were unable to do the simple math required to make change. A repeat of that with other cognitive functions is most undesirable. I regard the idea that we will eventually solve all our problems by technological advancement with the utmost skepticism. The Scriptures say that idolaters, those who worship the works of their hands come to resemble their false gods (Psalm 135:18). Faith in technological progress is a form of idolatry and it inevitably makes men and their societies resemble machines.
Technological progress is an inseparable part of capitalism. Capitalism is often confused with economic freedom but the two are not the same. Economic freedom is a simple concept and a basic good that is far to be preferred to the universal slavery that is socialism, whereas capitalism is a complex system that developed by removing traditional restrictions on usury, applying technological progress to the production of industrial goods, and expanding international trade. I talked about the downside to technological progress in the previous paragraph. That large-scale international trade has its disadvantages as well as its advantages (comparative and absolute, in economic jargon) is obvious and until the 1980s, the element of liberal economic theory that conservatives rejected was that such trade should be unrestricted. American conservatives have of late abandoned the free trade fetish they picked up in that decade. Canadian conservatives would be wise to follow suit as the disadvantage of being too dependent upon trade with one’s neighbour has become glaringly obvious. Nevermind that the threat of crippling tariffs is attached to demands that we fix problems that we ought to be fixing any way, we should not be so dependent upon trade with the United States that its incoming leader can bully us around like that. Add David Orchard’s The Fight for Canada to the mandatory reading list. As for usury, it undergirds and runs through the entire capitalist system, which is why that system is incompatible with a sound currency. Sound money, is money that retains its purchasing power so that people can use it to save for the future, a quality that requires that the currency represents actual wealth, that is, real goods already produced. Usury, however, turns a country’s monetary system into a Ponzi scheme where the currency is backed by debt, wealth that has not yet been produced. Since usury, like technological progress and international trade, is an essential element of capitalism, capitalism cannot escape this outcome.
Capitalism has been accused of evils of which it is not guilty, such as lowering the standard of living of workers (it raised it) and impoverishing the third world (the incompetent kleptocratic governments brought in by the decolonization and anti-imperialism that leftists love so much did that) but there are plenty of evils of which it can be justly accused. These include the uprooting of families, the decimation of rural communities, the disappearance of the family farm, urbanization and the accompanying evils of increased crime and erosion of trust and social capital that go along with it, the uglification of the countryside which is the real evil that those who claim to care for the earth and the environment ought to be fighting rather than the bogeyman of climate change, the reorganization of society so as to operate like an extended business rather than an extended family, a culture of throwing away and replacing rather than preserving and passing on, and dozens of others of a similar nature to these. That socialism is an utterly unacceptable evil and economic freedom a good I have always held and always will maintain but this will not stop me from decrying these evils of which capitalism has been the engine and which conservatives, if they stopped for a second to think about what their chosen label implies, ought to realize that they should oppose too.
The matter that probably best illustrates how I am closest to conservatives in what they oppose and furthest from them in what they are for is education. Conservatives are opposed to the way schools from the earliest grades to universities have become indoctrination camps for pushing hatred of white people, hatred of Christianity, and hatred of Western countries and their history onto children and for exposing them to sexuality, and especially its more perverse forms, way too early. I oppose this too. Most conservatives promote STEM-centred education (science, technology, engineering, mathematics). That these fields are immune to being turned into vessels for wokeness has of late been proven false, but were that not the case I would dissent from the idea of STEM-centric education because it is based on the idea that the purpose of education is to train children to be more successful cogs in the capitalist machine. The purpose of education is to civilize children, for we are all essentially born savages and barbarians, so that they might be fit to be free subjects of the king and citizens of the state and for this there is no better education than the kind that starts with the basic trivium (grammar – Latin, Greek and first language, logic, and rhetoric), and builds on these with the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy). See Dorothy L. Sayers’ “The Lost Tools of Learning.” Along with these, the seven classical liberal arts, history should be taught in a way that neither demonizes the builders of civilization and its institutions like “Woke” history, nor interprets the past as one long march towards liberal democracy in the present day like what Herbert Butterfield dubbed “the Whig Interpretation of History” but as John Lukacks’ “remembered past” that contains the good and the bad, in which the builders of civilization are presented as they were, a mixture of both, and leaves us free to honour them for their accomplishments and the legacy they have bequeathed us and simply because it is the debt we owe to those who have gone before us, without conscripting them posthumously into the service of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history.” It is best if this is taught in a religious context, preferably with the Church in charge of education rather than the government. — Gerry T. Neal
About a week ago I received an e-mail from the Campaign Life Coalition, the organization that is probably best known for organizing the annual March for Life, informing me that the Canadian Anti-Hate Network had placed them on some list where they were labelled “Far Right.” They seemed rather upset about this fact and announced that they were considering legal action. While I certainly support their suing the pants off of the bozos at the CAHN, I do think that getting all worked up about this is the wrong frame of mind to have on the matter. A better approach would be to consider it a badge of honour and to advertise the fact. They could put up a notice on their website, for example, saying something to the effect of “honoured to be labelled ‘Far Right’ by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network since 2024.” If everyone similarly labelled and listed by the CAHN, its American parent organization the Southern Poverty Law Center (sic), the Anti-Defamation League, and other such self-righteous and self-appointed watchdogs of the hygiene of public opinion on all matters with even a light appearance of touching on the current progressive creed of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity were to respond in such a manner it would greatly diminish the power that such labelling and listing has to stifle thought and expression and to destroy people’s lives.
A couple of months ago David Warren said that the expression “Far Right” is “media-speak for what is to the right of the Far Left.” He was absolutely right about that, as he usually is about most matters. See his piece from last month entitled “Annals of far-righteousness” for more sage insight from the editor of the sadly long defunct Idler on this silly expression that the Left is currently throwing around as if it were the latest entry on a “build your vocabulary” list to which they are all subscribed and so are putting into every sentence whether it belongs there or not.
By labelling Campaign Life “Far Right”, the CAHN said a lot more about their organization and the people who do what passes for thinking in it than they said about the Campaign Life Coalition. The Campaign Life Coalition is a social conservative lobby. By social conservative, I mean approaching issues that pertain to morality and the family from a perspective that is traditional in the context of the tradition of the civilization formerly known as Christendom. While they address a range of such issues, one in particular is obviously the focus of their efforts, and that is abortion. They would call themselves a pro-life advocacy group. While I share their position I prefer the negative phrasing, anti-abortion, to the positive pro-life. Abortion is murder, as any person capable of sane reasoning must be aware if he thinks about the matter. It is therefore a bad thing and the right thing to do is to oppose it, to be “anti” it. The expression pro-life could be taken to imply support for the con side in the capital punishment debate. The right position with regards to this debate, however, when it comes to basic principles, is the pro position. This is because for some crimes, such as murder of which abortion is an example, justice requires the death penalty. Admittedly, there are good practical reasons for not taking the principled position at the present time. Basically, the sort of people who would have the power of life and death if the death penalty were reinstated – master deceivers of any and every party who have tricked the masses into voting them into public office, bureaucrats who think that degrees in such worthless and soul-destroying subjects as human resources, corporate management, and public administration have bestowed omniscience and omnicompetence upon them, and the sorry lot of fools, activists, and miscreants who currently occupy His Majesty’s bench throughout the Dominion – should never be trusted with that power. My point, however, is that for Campaign Life’s opposition to abortion to be considered “far” anything, the one doing the considering must be coming from a pretty extreme standpoint.
The CAHN, like most of the large legacy media companies in Canada, is very much a part of the culture of political thought shared by the Liberal party under its current leadership and the New Democrats. When it comes to abortion this culture is about as extreme as it gets. They have opposed the introduction of any restrictions on abortion. Three years ago, for example, they defeated a private member’s bill introduced by Cathay Wagantall, the MP for Yorkton-Melville, that would have banned sex-selective abortion, even though ideologically they might have been expected to support it on the grounds of their loudly trumpeted opposition to sexual discrimination of which sex-selective abortion is obviously an example. But no, the Left voted as a block to defeat the bill because their belief in the noxious concept of “reproductive rights” – that mothers have the right of life and death over their children prior to birth – was such that they would not allow that “right” to be limited even to prevent discrimination. Since the idea of reproductive rights is itself discriminatory in that it awards a right of power over others, and the ultimate power at that, to one sex, this was a case of opposing a measure against one type of sexual discrimination in order to support another type, on the part of people who claim to oppose all discrimination.
Let us return now to the distinction between the positive terminology of being pro-life and the negative terminology of being anti-abortion and consider the position of the Left in terms of life and death. Almost thirty years ago Pope John Paul II spoke of the culture war of the time in terms of a struggle between the “culture of life” and the “culture of death.” Since then, liberalism and the Left have embraced the culture of death with gusto and nowhere is this more openly on display than in the present government in Ottawa which shortly after it first came to power in 2015 introduced an aggressive euthanasia program which it has been expanding ever since. Euthanasia, like abortion, is a form of murder. The return of the Liberals to power in 2015 coincided in year with the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Carter v. Canada (Attorney General) that the prohibition of physician assisted suicide violated Charter rights. The Liberals took this ruling as licence to run amok and make physician assisted suicide available in situations that no other society had previously regarded as appropriate for it. Even more controversially, they began pushing it on people, suggesting it to those who had not asked for it as an alternative to the medical treatment they were seeking. The program is called MAID, for Medical Assistance in Dying. If government programs had theme songs it would be appropriate for this one to share the theme song of a historical fiction franchise the name of which is also a four letter acronym beginning with M, M*A*S*H. The theme song, the lyrics of which were used only in the 1970 film version starring the late Donald Sutherland, is entitled “Suicide is Painless.” From the standpoint of those who support and are subsidized by the government that introduced this vile program, sane, rational, and moral opposition to murdering the innocent (abortion) and those whose need is for long term care, medical or otherwise (euthanasia) must indeed appear to be “extreme.”
Again, Campaign Life should consider it an honour to be considered “Far Right” by people like that.
The expression, “Far Right”, is, of course, nonsense. It is derived from the concept of political thought as a spectrum between a right and a left pole. The closer to the one pole you are, the further right you are, and the closer to the other pole, the further left you are. This is a concept that originated on this continent, in the United States where the right pole was identified classical liberalism (individualism, limited government, capitalism) and the left pole was identified with the opposite of this (collectivism, a larger state, socialism). By this standard, the more of a classical liberal one is, the further to the right one is. Indeed, in some presentations of this spectrum that I have seen, a form of anarcho-capitalism in which there is no state is the furthest position to the right. Yet those who throw the label “Far Right” around clearly wish to associate in their hearers’ minds those they so label with National Socialism (Nazism). National Socialism, however, was obviously not an extreme form of classical liberalism and on each of the points contrasted was aligned with the left pole. National Socialism was a European rather than a North American phenomenon, and in Europe the expressions “Right” and “Left” had taken on political meaning long before the idea of a political spectrum arose. This is because they were taken, not from a hypothetical spectrum, but the location of where certain people stood in the French Chamber of Deputies in the period of the French Revolution. Supporters of the Revolution were to the left of the speaker, its opponents were on the right. The “Right” therefore, in French political usage took on the meaning of the supporters of the ancient regime of the Bourbon monarchy, the Roman Catholic Church, and the feudal aristocracy and of counterrevolutionary efforts such as the Thermidorian Reaction and this meaning became the European meaning, mutatis mutandis (the Hapsburgs in Austria rather than the Bourbons for example). It was basically the continental equivalent of the Toryism that picked up the mantle of the Cavaliers in England after the Restoration and fought for the rights of the Crown and the established and episcopal Church of England. National Socialism, which opposed the traditional order of Throne and Altar as much as Communism did, bore no more resemblance to the classical European Right than it did to the American “Right” of classical liberal republicanism. This is because it was clearly a species of the Left, the European and American meanings of which are much closer to each other than the European and American meanings of Right are to each other. The expression “Far Right”, therefore, should, in both classical European and American usage, indicate distance from National Socialism rather than proximity to it.
The Left’s determination to make “Far Right” mean, contrary to the inescapable conclusion of the reasoning of the previous paragraph, “National Socialist”, and to slap that label on anyone who with opinions similar or identical to those which conservatives and liberals held in common back when the actual National Socialists were around, to the extent that that it is not merely slinging mud is an attempt to cover up the failure, moral bankruptcy, and intellectual shallowness of the extreme position on race and racial matters in which they have gradually ensnared themselves in the post-World War II period to the point where they are incapable of extracting themselves today. It makes no difference to the Left if those they so slur are individuals or organizations like Campaign Life that advocate solely for positions on issues that are not fundamentally racial in nature. Once again the labelling says more about the labeler than the labeled and the CAHN is built on the foundation of that extreme position on race.
To understand the nature of the position the Left has sold itself to in the present day and which it amusingly calls “anti-racism” it is best to go back to how the neo-orthodox Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth summed up the evil of the racialism of the actual National Socialists. He called it the “idolatry of race and nation.” Idolatry is what happens when man turns away from the true and living God Who created all things including man and worships and serves instead false gods of his own construction. Through worshipping and serving these false gods he inevitably ends up worshipping and serving devils (1 Cor. 10:20) and darkening his intellect and corrupting his moral character (Rom. 1:20-32). Christianity called mankind out of the darkness of idolatry to turn “to God from idols to serve the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come.” (1 Thess.1:9) It is hardly a coincidence that National Socialism arose in a culture that had been moving away from the orthodox Christian faith for centuries both philosophically and theologically (theological liberalism or Modernism, which re-interprets Christian doctrine to accommodate the unbelief generated by the speculations of “Enlightenment” philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, was born in German universities and seminaries through the teachings of men like Friedrich Schleiermacher and Adolf von Harnack). When men retreat from the liberating faith in the true God and His Son they bind themselves in slavery to idols and the chosen idols of the National Socialists were the Aryan race and German nation. This does not mean that race and nation, which God created (Acts 17:30) are bad things, but rather that the National Socialists put them in the place of God where they do not belong, and in doing so bound themselves and their society to slavery to these idols and through them to devils.
The Left of today has hardly returned to the true and living God and is as much in bondage to idols as National Socialism was. What it wishes to conceal is that the idols it serves are one and the same as those National Socialism served. Like the National Socialists they worship at the altar of race and nation. There is a difference, of course, in that whereas the National Socialists made idols out of their own race and their own nation, the Left has made idols out of every race except one and every nation except the nations of that race, which is for the most part their own. Moreover, they are actively engaged in offering that one race and its nations up as human sacrifices to idols of (other) races and nations. This is the true nature of what the Left calls anti-racism. It is a worse form of this idolatry than that practiced by the National Socialists. Implicit within the Commandment to honour our fathers and our mothers is the duty to honour our ancestors. The Second Greatest Commandment, according to the Lord Jesus, is the Commandment to love our neighbours as ourselves. Neighbours means those in proximity to us, and placing the interests and the good of people far distant from us over that of people in proximity to us both in the literal special sense and in the sense of familial, cultural, religious and other such proximities, is the opposite of fulfilling this Commandment no matter how hard someone tries to twist the Parable of the Good Samaritan to teach otherwise. From this it follows that the idolatry of the race and nation of the other that requires the sacrifice of one’s own race and nation is a far worse idolatry of race and nation than making an idol of one’s own race and nation. It can be safely predicted, therefore, that unless the anti-racist Left is stopped and its power and influence broken history will one day look back on its crimes as dwarfing those of the Third Reich as true history already does look back on the crimes of Communism.
To avoid the anti-racist Left’s idolatry of other races and nations without falling into an idolatry of one’s own race and nation we must turn back “to God from idols to serve the living and true God; and to wait for his Son from heaven, whom he raised from the dead, even Jesus, which delivered us from the wrath to come.” The call to do so, although religious in nature rather than political, is a reactionary one, a call to turn back the clock. The irony, therefore, is that to avoid both forms of racial idolatry by taking this step is to move in the direction of the “Far Right” at least in the classical European sense of Right. The irony is due entirely to the Left’s misusage of language. In neither American nor European usage does it make sense to think of ideological racialism, as the terminus of rightward motion. The more one moves to the Right in the American sense – or at least the historical American sense – the greater importance one places on the individual and the less on the collective, including the collective of race. In the classical European sense of the Right, political loyalty is to the Sovereign rather than to the nation or race, whose office is that of the minister of God in temporal matters, and whose duties as the minister of God include being the protector of the Church, which is Catholic, which is to say universal, a body membership in which is open through baptism to every kindred and tribe and nation and to which all from every kindred and tribe and nation are invited and called to join. The further one moves to this Right, the less likely one is to make idols out of race and nation, or for that matter to make an idol out of the individual which is the temptation in the American classical liberal Right.
The classical European Right is, in my informed opinion, the only political position compatible with orthodox Christian faith and it is my own position, albeit in its traditional British Tory form that we inherited in Canada as our traditional Right, which has sadly been almost entirely subverted by neoconservatives who prefer the American Right and who themselves have been subverted by people for whom the principles of neither Right are sacred. The traditional British-Canadian form of the classical European Right shares with the classical liberalism of the American Right a higher regard for personal rights and freedoms than in its traditional continental form. If holding this position makes me “Far Right” in the eyes of those whose opinion I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for, such as the dingbats in the Prime Minister’s Office or the CAHN, then I gladly own the label. My advice to the Campaign Life Coalition is to do the same.
If invocation of the saints were my regular practice, I could think of no better way of closing this essay than with “Colonel Sibthorp, pray for us.” Posted by Gerry T. Neal
Hier Stehe Ich! (“Here I Stand (I Can Do No Other”) — Martin Luther
Every year since I started Throne, Altar, Liberty I have, on the kalends of January which is the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ on the Church Kalendar and New Year’s Day on the civil calendar, posted an essay summarizing where I stand on matters political, religious and cultural, the subjects on which I write. It is a custom I adopted from one of my own favourite writers, the late Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel. I have often used Dr. Luther’s famous “Here I Stand” as the title in one language or another. This year it is the German original. Each year it is a challenge to write this anew because, while I hope my views have matured they have remained basically the same. Each year I have to resist the temptation to just point to T. S Eliot’s “Anglo-Catholic in religion, royalist in politics, classicist in literature” and say ditto. I usually do make reference to Eliot’s famous self-description, which I read as a twentieth-century update of the definition of Tory that Dr. Johnson wrote for his dictionary, because it provides a handy frame on which to organize my thoughts.
Before getting into my views I will provide as usual some basic background information about myself. I am a patriotic citizen of Commonwealth Realm that is the Dominion of Canada and a loyal subject of His Majesty King Charles III as I was all my life prior to his accession of his mother of Blessed Memory, our late Sovereign Lady Queen Elizabeth II. I love my country’s traditional institutions, Loyalist history, and basically everything about Canada that the sniveling twit who currently occupies the Prime Minister’s Office either wishes we would forget or is endlessly apologizing for. I have lived all my life in the province of Manitoba, where I was raised on a farm near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers, where I studied theology for five years at what is now Providence University College – at the time it was Providence College and Theological Seminary – in Otterbourne which is a small college town south of the provincial capital, Winnipeg, where I have lived for the almost quarter of a century since.
Am I, like T. S. Eliot an “Anglo-Catholic in religion”? If by Anglo-Catholic you mean holding the theology expressed in the Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology, the admirable collection published by John Henry Parker in the nineteenth century of the writings of the classical Anglican divines of the centuries previous including Lancelot Andrewes, the martyred King Charles I’s martyred Archbishop William Laud and the other Caroline Divines, the scholarly apologist for Trinitarian orthodoxy Bishop George Bull and the Non-Juror George Hickes, I would say yes. If you mean embracing the views of the Oxford Movement I would be more hesitant. I think that the most important thing Keble, Newman, Pusey et al. got right was that the truest and most important establishment of the Church was that by Christ through His Apostles rather than establishment by the state. I have far less sympathy for the tendency that manifested itself in some, not all, of them to look Romeward, to regret the Reformation for reasons other than that all schism that harms the visible unity of the Church is regrettable, and to regard the Anglican formularies with a “this will have to do for now” type attitude.
The Vincentian Canon, “that which is believed everywhere, at all times, and by all”, and its tests of antiquity (does it go back to the Apostles), universality (is it held throughout the Church in all regions and ages rather than particular to one time and place), and consent (was it affirmed by the Church’s leadership in a way that was subsequently received as authoritative throughout the Church) is in my view the right way of determining what is truly Catholic, not whether it has been declared dogma by the Patriarch of Rome or one of the Councils that his adherents have held since the Great Schism between East and West. I come from a family in which most of my relatives were either United Church (Presbyterian/Methodist) or Anglican, became a believer with an evangelical conversion when I was 15, was baptized by immersion in a Baptist church while a teenager and confirmed in the Anglican Church as an adult. As my theology matured I came to realize and respect the Symbols handed down from the ancient Church – the Apostles’ and Nicene (Constantinopolitan) Creeds and the Athanasian Symbol – as the basic definitions of Scriptural orthodoxy, to recognize that episcopalian Church government is not adiaphora but clearly established in the New Testament (the Apostles governed the whole Church, while it was localized in Jerusalem they exercised the authority Christ gave them to establish the order of deacons, after the Church was scattered they appointed presbyters or elders over the local Churches which seems to be something they borrowed from the synagogues, and as their ministries closed they passed on to others, Scriptural examples of which include SS Timothy and Titus their government over the Church including the power to ordain the lower orders), and that the ministers of the Church are priests (St. Paul explicitly states this of himself in the Greek of Romans 15:15) charged not with offering new sacrifices but with feeding the people of God with Christ’s One Sacrifice through the Sacramental medium of bread and wine.
Thus I am basically a High Anglican of the pre-Oxford type, with a Lutheran soteriology, and a fundamentalist-minus-the-separatism approach to basic orthodoxy who regards every article of the ancient Symbols taken literally as fundamental and the Bible as God’s written Word, by verbal, plenary inspiration, infallible and inerrant, which we are to believe and obey rather than to subject to “criticism” based on the false notion that because God used human writers to write the book of which He is the Author that it is a human book rather than a divine book. Criticism based on that false notion makes fools out of those who engage in it, whether it be the higher critics who think that the fact that Moses varied which name for God he used means that his books were slapped together by some editor after the Babylonian Captivity from previously separate sources despite the total lack of anything such as examples of these “sources” in a pre-“redaction” state of the type that would logically constitute actual evidence or the lower or textual critics who think that the most authentic text of the New Testament is not to be found in that that has been handed down in the Church as evidenced by the thousands of manuscripts she has used (these are of the Byzantine text type) but either in small handful of old manuscripts that were not in general use and were particular to one region (the Alexandrian text) or in something slapped together by text critics in the last century which can be found in no manuscript whatsoever (the eclectic text). Someone who makes the false idea that the Bible is a human book rather than God’s book the basis of his study of it will end up drawing unsubstantiated conclusions about it that no competent scholar would similarly draw about actual human books and will end up sounding like a blithering idiot. So expect me to thump the Authorized (1611) Bible as I tell you that salvation is a free gift that God has given to all us sinners in Jesus Christ, that the only means whereby we can receive it is faith, that faith is formed in us by the Holy Ghost through the Gospel brought to us in the Word and Sacrament ministered to us by the Church whose Scripturally established governors under her Head, Jesus Christ, are the bishops in whose order the ordinary governing office of the Apostles has continued to this day.
That I am a “royalist in politics” should already be evident from the second paragraph if it is not sufficiently evident from the title of my website. I will add here that I am also a monarchist. For some that will be a redundancy, the two terms being for them interchangeable. It is for the sake of others who distinguish between the two that I add that I am both. I am a much stronger monarchist than those Canadian conservatives are who are basically liberal democrats but who defend our monarchy because it is our tradition and make its non-interference with their real political ideal the sole basis of their argument. I have been instinctually a monarchist all my life. While C. S. Lewis famously said that monarchy is an idea easily debunked but those who debunk it impoverish and bring misery upon themselves (I am paraphrasing from memory, Lewis said it better than that) I have found as I have studied the matter over the years that monarchy is rationally defensible. Plato and Aristotle argued that the rule of true kings is the best of simple constitutions and I think their arguments still stand, just as I think that in our age the divisiveness, partisanship, and other evils that attend upon democratically elected government make an ironclad case for hereditary monarchy that makes the unifying figure at the head of the state one who does not owe his office to partisan politics. Thus I would say that we should be arguing that our monarchy is essential not that it is merely acceptable. The Canadian Tory classic by John Farthing, Freedom Wears a Crown, makes a strong case for monarchy’s essential role in our constitution similar to that frequently made by Eugene Forsey.
I am grateful to Ron Dart for drawing my attention to these men and their books years ago. I find little to admire in the Modern ideal of democracy and defend instead the institution of Parliament for while Parliament is, of course, a democratic institution it is also a traditional one, a concrete institution that predates the Modern Age and has long proven its worth, which to me outweighs all the flimsy arguments Moderns make for democracy. Ultimately, I have found a sure and certain foundation for monarchism in orthodox Christianity. God is the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, the absolute Sovereign Ruler of His Creation, i.e., all other than Himself that exists. In the governance of the universe, we find the ideal form – think Plato here – of government, of which temporal earthly governments are imperfect representations and to which, the greater their conformity, the more their perfection will be. This is why the most orthodox forms of Christianity – traditional Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, traditional Roman Catholicism, and the better kind of Lutheranism – saw Christian monarchy as the highest form of earthly civilization, and the least orthodox forms that can still be seen as Christian in some recognizable sense, Puritanism and Anabaptism, are the ones that contradicted the obvious implication of the title “King of Kings” by saying “no king but King Jesus”.
It is in the sense of someone who holds the views expressed in the previous two paragraphs and not in the common partisan sense of the word that I call myself a Tory. The words “conservative” and “right-wing” as they are used today, even by most who self-apply them, have had their meaning defined for them by the very liberalism and the Left they purport to oppose. Liberalism is the spirit of the Modern Age. It consists of the demand for ever increasing liberty (in the sense of individual autonomy) and equality, despite the fact obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that these two cannot be maximized at the same time. The universal homogeneity that it demands would if actualized be the ultimate form of totalitarian tyranny in which freedom, the real human good and not liberalism’s false ideal of liberty/individual autonomy, would be eliminated entirely. The Left also worships liberalism’s false gods and historically has differed from liberalism primarily in its notion of how to achieve their goal. A century ago the Left was identified primarily with socialism, the idea that all of man’s problems can be traced to economic equality arising out of the private ownership of property and are solvable by eliminating private ownership and replacing it with public ownership. From the standpoint of orthodox Christianity this is utterly repugnant because it misdiagnoses the human condition (the correct diagnosis is sin), prescribes the wrong medicine (the right medicine is the grace of God freely given to man in Jesus Christ), and is basically the second worst of the Seven Deadly Sins, Envy, disguising itself with the mask of the highest of the Christian virtues, charitable love.
Today, the Left is identified primarily with an expression arising out of American racial grievance politics, “wokeness”. “Wokeness” is like socialism in that it claims (generally falsely) to be the mouthpiece for the oppressed, but differs from socialism in that it it does not divide people into oppressor/oppressed by economic status (Marx’s “haves” and “have nots”) but by a legion of personal identities based on such things as race, sex, gender, etc. Some, such as Dr. Paul Gottfried, have argued on the basis of specific content that today’s Left is something totally different from the Left of a century ago, from the standpoint of orthodox Christianity there is a discernable continuity in the Left. Whether it speaks in terms of economics or in the terms of race and sex, the Left is an entirely destructive movement, driven by hatred of civilization as it historically has existed for not living up to the false and self-contradictory ideals of liberalism, that, whenever it has succeeded in tearing something down, has never been able to build anything good let alone better on the ashes of the good if not perfect that it destroyed. The orthodox Christian must condemn this utterly because it clearly displays the spirit of Satan who operates out of the same hatred directed towards God. Therefore I describe my orthodox Christian monarchist views as Tory and reactionary (in John Lukacs’ sense of the term, basically someone willing to think outside the Modern box, not by embracing the nihilism of post-Modernism but rather the good in the pre-Modern), preferring these terms over conservative which for the most part denotes a false opposition to liberalism and Left defined entirely by liberalism and the Left.
As for being a “classicist in literature” I think that if we take this to mean someone who seeks to learn from Matthew Arnold’s “the best that has been thought and said” this is a goal that someone with the views expressed above can recognize as most worthy to pursue with regards not just to literature and reading, but to the other elements of culture such as music and the visual arts as well. It is also a difficult one to consistently follow as many are the enticements, more so today than ever before, to distract one from the classical heights of the Great Books and the Great Tradition into the murky swamps of corporate, mass-manufactured, pop culture. I have striven to follow this goal on and off again – it makes an excellent resolution for those who do that sort of thing today – with varying degrees of success at resisting the distractions. Perversely, I have found stubborn contrariness has often been a great motivator in this regards.
I read Mark Twain’s remark that a “classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read” years ago and thought to myself “Sez you, Sam Clemens” and set out to read nothing but classics, persisting in this for several months. Similarly, Thomas Fleming, the former editor of Chronicles Magazine several times enriched my reading habits with remarks about about books nobody was familiar with today prompting a “Sez you, Tom Fleming” response. Today, as the Left in its “woke” form as described in the previous paragraph has laid siege to the Great Books and the Great Tradition it is more important than ever to reacquaint ourselves with “the best that has been thought and said”. This is a far better and ultimately more effective way of resisting wokeness than generating and posting any number of anti-woke internet memes could ever be. So I resolve today once again to seek to elevate my reading, listening and viewing habits in 2024 and encourage you to do the same.
Through science, technology, and industry we have achieved a very high standard of living, measured in terms of material prosperity, in Western Civilization since the beginning of the Modern Age and especially the last two centuries. Prosperity in itself is not a bad thing. We have a tendency, however, in our fallen sinfulness to respond to prosperity inappropriately. The inappropriate way to respond to prosperity is to look at it with self-satisfaction, thinking that it is due entirely and only to our own effort and ingenuity, and to forget God, from Whom all blessings flow, as the doxology says. There is a lot of sin in this attitude, especially the sin of ingratitude. This sin is an invitation to God to take away His blessings and curse us instead. It is a sin of which we have been most guilty as a civilization. That we have been so guilty and have forgotten our God is evident in how we now refer to ourselves as Western Civilization rather than Christendom – Christian Civilization.
The appropriate thing for us to do would be to repent. These familiar words were spoken by the Lord to King Solomon on the occasion of the completion and consecration of the Temple but the message contained within them is one that we would do well to apply to ourselves today:
If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. (2 Chron. 7:14)
Now, imagine a man who in his prosperity becomes self-satisfied and forgets God. His conscience keeps nagging at him but unwilling to humble himself, pray, seek God, and repent, he misinterprets his guilty feelings and concludes that his prosperity is the problem and not his ingratitude and his having forgotten God. In an attempt to assuage this misdirected guilt, he decides to sacrifice his prosperity to an idol. He does so, however, in such a way, that it is his children more than himself who end up suffering.
What ought we to think of such a man? Does he deserve commendation for trying to make things right, albeit in an ill-informed and ineffective way? Or does he deserve rebuke for piling further errors and sins upon his initial sin of forgetting God?
“Thou art the man” as the prophet Nathan said to King David in 2 Samuel 12:7 after telling a story that prompted the king to unknowingly condemn himself in the affair of Bathsheba. Or rather, we all “art the man”. For this is precisely what we as a civilization have done or are in the process of doing.
For centuries, ever since the start of the Modern Age, Western Civilization has been turning its back on its heritage from Christendom. Indeed, the conversion of the Christian civilization of Christendom into the secular civilization of the West could be said to have been the ultimate goal of liberalism, the spirit that drove the Modern Age, all along. The liberal project and the Modern Age were more or less complete with the end of the Second World War and since that time Westerners have been abandoning the Church and her God in droves. In the same post-World War II era we have reaped the harvest in material prosperity sown through centuries of scientific discoveries. These were made possible because at the dawn of Modern science people still believed in the God Who created the world and that therefore there is order in the world He created to be discovered. This is the basis of all true scientific discovery.
Collectively, we feel guilty for abandoning God, but we have not been willing, at least not yet, to return to Him on a civilizational scale. Sensing that we have incurred divine displeasure, but not willing to admit to ourselves that our apostasy from Christianity and forgetting the True and Living God is the problem, we have instead blamed our material prosperity and the means by which we attained it. By means, I don’t mean science, which we have been so far unwilling to blame because we have transferred our faith in God onto it and turned it into an idol, but rather our industry, aided and enhanced by science.
Just as we have transferred our guilt for having forgotten God in our material prosperity onto the industry that we put into attaining that prosperity, which so laden with transferred guilt we usually call capitalism after the name godless left-wing philosophers and economists gave to human industry when they bogeyfied it in their efforts to promote their Satanic alternative, socialism, the institutionalization of the Deadly Sin of Envy, so we have transferred the sense of impending judgement from God for abandoning Him, onto industry. We have done this by inventing the crackpot idea that such things as burning fuels to heat our homes in winter, cook our food and get about from place to place, and even raising livestock to feed ourselves, are releasing too much carbon dioxide, methane, etc. into the atmosphere and that this is leading to an impending man-made climate apocalypse in which temperatures rise (or plummet depending on which false prophet of doom is talking), polar ice caps melt, the coasts are inundated from rising sea levels, and extreme weather events increase in frequency and intensity.
To prevent this climactic apocalypse, we have convinced ourselves, we must appease the pagan nature deities we have offended with sacrifice. We must sacrifice our efficient gasoline-powered vehicles and agree to drive ridiculously expensive electric vehicles, even when travelling long distance in Canada in the dead of winter. We must sacrifice heating our homes in winter and grow accustomed to wearing enough layers to make Eskimoes look like Hawaiian hula girls in comparison indoors all winter long. We must sacrifice the hope of affordable living and watch the cost of everything go up and up and up. We must sacrifice the future of the generations who will come after us
Those of us who express skepticism towards all this are mocked as “science deniers” even though this new false religion is not scientific in the slightest. Carbon dioxide, which is to plant life what oxygen is to ours, treated as a pollutant? The seas rising from all that floating ice melting? You would have to have failed elementary school science to accept this nonsense. It is certainly incredible to anyone with a basic knowledge of history and who grasps the concept of cause and effect. The Little Ice Age ended in the middle of the nineteenth century. When an Ice Age ends a warming period begins. This is one of the causes of the boom in human industry at the end of the Modern Age, not its effect. It is a good thing too, for humans, animals, plants and basically all life on earth, because live thrives more in warmer periods than colder ones. Anyone who isn’t a total airhead knows this.
Speaking of total airheads, Captain Airhead, whose premiership here in the Dominion of Canada was already too old in the afternoon of his first day in office, has been using that office as a pulpit to preach this false climate religion for the duration of the time he has been in it. Recently, in response to his popularity having plunged lower than the Judecca, he granted a three year exemption on his carbon tax for those who heat their homes with oil, which, as it turns out, benefits Liberal voters in Atlantic Canada and hardly anyone else. Faced with demands from across Canada that he grant further exemptions, he has so far resisted, and with the help of the Lower Canadian separatists, defeated the Conservative motion in the House, backed by the socialists, for a general home heating exemption. Hopefully this will speed his departure and the day we can find a better Prime Minister to lead His Majesty’s government in Ottawa. The point, of course, is that by granting even that partial exemption, for nakedly political purposes, Captain Airhead by his actions admitted what he still denies with his words, that the world is not facing imminent destruction because of too much carbon dioxide.
Captain Airhead’s climate religion and its doomsday scenario have been proven false let us turn to the words of St. Peter and hearing what the true religion has to say about the coming judgement:
But the heavens and the earth, which are now, by the same word are kept in store, reserved unto fire against the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men. But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness, Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat? Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness. Wherefore, beloved, seeing that ye look for such things, be diligent that ye may be found of him in peace, without spot, and blameless. (2 Peter 3:7-14)
It may be today, it may be a thousand years from now, we don’t know, but when God has appointed it to happen, it will happen, and there is nothing we can do that will prevent it. Instead of trying to do the impossible, prevent it, we should rather prepare ourselves for it, by doing what the Apostle recommends in the above passage, the avoidance of which is as we have seen, the source of this false climate religion. For if we turn back in repentance to the God we have forgotten, we can look forward to His coming again in fiery judgement with faith and hope and peace and sing, in the words of gospel songwriter Jim Hill:
What a day that will be When my Jesus I shall see And I look upon his face The one who saved me by his grace When he takes me by the hand And leads me through the Promised Land What a day, glorious day that will be! — Gerry T. Neal
Following the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel, in which the terrorist organization not only unleashed the predictable barrage of largely ineffective rockets on the Jewish state, but penetrated the barrier between Gaza and Israel with a large force that killed about 1500 people and took about 150 hostage, we were treated to the disgusting spectacle of progressives gathering en masse in cities and academic campuses around the West, not to protest these despicable acts, but to cheer them on. This was immediately denounced as a display of anti-Semitism, mostly by neoconservatives many of whom called for such demonstrations to be banned. While I don’t have much better an opinion of these demonstrators than the neocons have this call to criminalize the demonstrations is extremely foolish. There is already too much suppression of the expression of thought and opinion, we do not need to add any more. I don’t agree that this is an expression of anti-Semitism either. This essay will explain why.
A discussion of this sort requires that we define anti-Semitism at some point so we might as well get that out of the way. H. L. Mencken said that “an anti-Semite is someone who dislikes the Jews more than is absolutely necessary”. That is amusing, at least to those who do not have a politically correct pole permanently lodged up their rectums, but not particularly helpful. Joe Sobran said that “an anti-Semite used to be someone who didn’t like the Jews. Now he is someone the Jews don’t like”. This is more helpful as an explanation of the neoconservative use of the term than of what it really means.
Most people, I suspect, use it to mean any dislike of the Jews for any reason. The late rabbinical scholar, Jacob Neusner, objected to this promiscuous use of the term. In an article entitled “Sorting Out Jew-Haters” that appeared in the March 1995 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture he gave this account of anti-Semitism:
According to anti-Semitism, Jews are a separate species within humanity, peculiarly wicked, responsible for the evil of the human condition. A political philosophy formulated in the world of late 19th-century Germany and Austria, anti- Semitism formed the ideological foundation of political parties and served as the basis for public policy. It provided an account of life and how the Jews corrupt it. It offered a history of Western civilization and how the Jews pervert it. It formulated a theory of the world’s future and how the Jews propose to conquer it. People make sense of the world lay appealing to anti-Semitism, and in World War II, millions of Germans willingly gave their lives for the realization of their country’s belief in an anti-Semitic ideal of national life and culture.
The term, he argued, should be reserved for Jew hatred of the type that fully meets this description, and to apply it to lesser prejudices trivializes it.
Now, you might be thinking that what we are seeing meets Neusner’s requirements to be called anti-Semitism. The rallies that we have been talking about, after all, are not just in support of the Palestinian people, but of Hamas, the terrorist organization dedicated to the elimination of Israel, and of its actions on 7 October. Why would anyone support such an organization and such behaviour unless their mind was in the grips of the sort of hatred described in the paragraph from Neusner’s article quoted above?
There are a couple of obvious problems with that way of thinking.
The first is that if these progressives, academic and otherwise, were motivated by anti-Semitic hatred we would expect that their support for violent, murderous, organizations and their behaviour would be limited to Hamas and other similar groups. This is not the case. The progressive activist crowd has a long history of supporting violent, murderous, groups. In the post-World War II era of the last century, for example, they supported every Communist group available from the Stalinists to the Maoists to Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Communism killed 100 million people in the twentieth century. Pol Pot’s group murdered about 2 million people, a quarter of the population of Cambodia. Yet Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguistics professor who became the guru of the student activist wing of the left and who is regarded by most neoconservatives as a self-loathing Jew for his support of the Palestinians, decades ago was defending Pol Pot and claiming that the accounts of the “killing fields” were American propaganda. My old friend Reaksa Himm, whose account of seeing his family slaughtered by these brutes and being left for dead himself, was published as The Tears of My Soul: He Survived Cambodia’s Killing Fields, His Family Didn’t, Could He Forgive? in 2003, would no doubt have a few things to say about that. Then, of course, there are the countless progressive students who thought it “cool” to wear t-shirts or put posters up in their dorm room bearing the image of vile Communist terrorist and mass murderer Ernesto “Che” Guevara. So, no, this sort of stupidity on the Left, is not all about the Jews.
The second problem is that even when progressive bile is directed towards Israel as it is in these pro-Hamas demonstrations it is not against Jews qua Jews. There is an element of racial hatred in it but that racial hatred is not directed against Jews as distinct from everyone else. It is directed against Jews as white people. Some might object to that statement on the grounds that not all Jews are white, Jewishness being primarily a religious identity. Others, including some Jews who hate whites and Christians and some whites who don’t like Jews, would make the polar opposite objection that in their opinion no Jews are white. These wildly differing objections aside, my statement is nevertheless true. The hatred the immature, idiotic, Left is displaying towards Israel is the same hatred they display towards all Western countries, i.e. countries that lay claim to the heritage of Greco-Roman, Christian, white European, civilization, and to the extent that there is a racial element it is that which is on display almost ubiquitously on university campuses in the form of the claim that “whiteness” is a cultural and civilizational cancer that must be “abolished”. The language used against Israel is the same language used against Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and basically any country and society settled and built by Europeans as an extension of Western civilization. The only difference is that in this case the settlers were Jews rather than Christians.
It is not therefore a case of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism and its counterpart Zionism began around the same time in the nineteenth century. Both were the result of “Enlightenment” philosophy’s war against God, revelation, religion and faith. For centuries Christians and Jews had been at odds over a religious issue. We, rightly, believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah promised in the Old Testament. They, wrongly, reject Jesus as the Christ. This was not an insurmountable divide. Any Jew could become a Christian by believing that Jesus is the Christ and being baptized into the Church. The “Enlightenment” brought about a loss of faith on both sides but this did not eliminate the divide. Instead, post-Christian Gentiles and secular Jews began to regard their division as being based on biological racial differences. Division on this basis is insurmountable. You cannot change your race. At least, you couldn’t until the whole “I’m whatever gender, sex, race, species, I want to be” garbage started up in the last few years. The expression of this idea of an insurmountable race divide was anti-Semitism on the part of post-Christian Gentile Europeans and Zionism on the part of secular Jews. In the early days of both movements they supported each other. Each believed that the racial differences between Jew and Gentile prevented them from living in peace together, therefore the solution was for them to live in peace apart. Whatever else might be said about this way of thinking it is clear that the animosity directed towards the Jews of Israel on the part of the pro-Hamas progressive demonstrators is not this anti-Semitism. It is based, indeed, on the very opposite concept – that the Jews are fundamentally one with other Western Europeans rather than being fundamentally divided from them by race or even religion.
Just in case you mistake this as an attempt to white-wash the progressives, let me assure you my intention is quite the reverse. The progressives’ anti-Israel position arises out of a far more pernicious attitude than mere anti-Semitism. It arises out of the hatred that is at the very heart of leftism.
The Left is the openly revolutionary form of liberalism. Sometimes liberalism tries to hide its revolutionary nature behind a mask of reform, of working within the institutions of civilization to accomplish its goals, but when that mask is removed what you get is the Left. The Left, therefore, is the true face of liberalism, and that face is one of revolution and sedition. Liberalism is not a constructive force but a destructive force. In its earliest recognizable form it began as an attack on Christendom or Christian civilization, the heir to classical Greco-Roman civilization. Its first targets were kings who are the earthly political representatives of the King of Kings Who rules over all of Creation, and the Church, the corporate body of Jesus Christ in which His Incarnational presence is sacramentally continued after His Ascension to the right hand of the Father. In attacking God’s earthly representation in this way liberalism revealed that its ultimate hatred is of God Himself. Liberalism is essentially the earthly continuation of Satan’s revolt against God. After attacking king and Church, liberalism launched its siege on every other tradition and institution of Christian civilization. From what we have just seen about liberalism’s essential nature its hatred of civilization is entirely explicable. Liberalism hates kings because they are the earthly representation of God’s Sovereign rule over Creation. Liberalism hates the Church because the Church is the earthly representation of Christ’s priestly intercession in Heaven. Liberalism hates civilization because civilization is the product of man as builder and it is in his capacity as builder that man most displays the image in which man was created, the image of God the Creator.
That is the hatred that is on display whenever the progressive Left blithers on and on about “colonialism” and “imperialism”. Man, in his fallen estate, is incapable of building a perfect civilization. Imperfect civilization, however, is better than no civilization at all. The Left is no more capable of building a perfect civilization than the builders of the past it is always decrying, sometimes for their real sins but more often for new offences they just made up yesterday, and the Left is not interested in trying to build a perfect civilization. It is only interested in tearing down the civilization others have built. It claims to be speaking out for “victims”. Sometimes the “victims” are people who have suffered actual harm in some way from civilization building. Other times, they are merely those who have not shared equally in the benefits of civilization with others. Either way, the Left’s idea that civilization must be razed, its history erased, and its builders “cancelled” and defamed is hardly the answer and in the support they are now showing for the despicable acts of murderous terrorists they show that their motivation is not genuine concern for those who have not fared as well from civilization as others, but a Satanic hatred of civilization builders, for representing, even in an imperfect way, the image of the Creator God.
That is a far more vile form of hatred than the extremely banal one of which the neoconservatives are accusing them. Posted by Gerry T. Neal a
As you are all most likely aware, the Israel-Palestinian conflict has flared up again. Like clockwork, the apologists for both sides have come crawling out of the woodworks insisting that we all take sides. Interestingly, this time around the apologists on each side are taking rather the same position with regards to the apologists of the other side that they insist the side they are cheering for in the Middle East take towards the other side, i.e., one of eradication and elimination. The pro-Israel side is calling for the pro-Palestinian side to be silenced, their protests shut down, and their views criminalized. Some on the pro-Israel side are capable of distinguishing between being pro-Palestinian, that is to say, someone who seeks to promote the basic human rights of the Palestinian Arab population, and being a supporter of the murderous terrorist organization Hamas, but it seems to me that they are outnumbered by those lacking this capacity. To be fair, this same incapacity characterizes the other side as well. On either side, it is most ugly in its manifestation. The pro-Israelis who fail to make the distinction have come close to calling for all expressions of humanitarian concern for the Palestinians to be outlawed as hate. They clearly have come dangerously unhinged because all rational, sensible, and decent people are categorically opposed to laws criminalizing hate qua hate. The other side, however, has made it difficult not to sympathize with them to some degree in that they have been openly cheering on the most vile and despicable sorts of behaviour on the part of Hamas.
Two and a half years ago, in an essay entitled “The Holy Land Returns to the Old Normal” I gave an overview of the Israel-Palestine conflict, rebutted a few common fallacies concerning it, offered an explanation of where the insistence that we all take sides comes from, and answered that demand. I do not intend to go over all of that material again, but I hope you will excuse my quoting myself here. At the end of the essay I pointed out the obvious real nature of the relationship between the Israeli government and Hamas:
The most ill-kept secret of the Middle East is that Likud Israeli governments and Hamas each rely upon the other to maintain their popular support among their own people. The Palestinians expect Hamas to keep on harassing Israel. The Israelis expect their government to brutally punish the Palestinians. Each, therefore, provides the other with the excuse to do what they need to do to play to their own crowds. So we come to May of this year. On the sixth the Palestinians hold a protest in East Jerusalem, on the seventh the Israelis crack down and storm the al-Aqsa mosque, on the tenth Hamas issues an ultimatum which Israel naturally ignores and the rockets start flying, on the eleventh the Israeli Air Force begin several days of bombing the hell out of Gaza. On the twentieth, having given their fans the show they were looking for, Netanyahu and Hamas agree to a ceasefire. Bada bing, bada boom, it is all over in a fortnight, mission accomplished, everyone is happy, high fives all around. Too bad about all the people who had to die, but didn’t someone somewhere at sometime say something about an omelet and eggs?
There is no good reason to think that any of this has changed in the present situation. Indeed, the current conflagration could be said to exemplify the point. The actions of the Israeli government and Hamas both clearly serve the interests of the other. Consider Hamas’ attack on 7 October. On top of the usual barrage of rockets, Hamas breached Israel’s supposedly impenetrable barrier and almost 3000 of their agents entered Israel, attacked towns, kibbutzim (collective farms), and even a weekend music festival. They murdered some 1500 people, and took about 150 hostages. The murder victims and hostages were mostly Israeli citizens, although there were a few soldiers and a number of people from other countries who were in Israel in various capacities – workers, students, attendees of the music festival – among both the dead and hostages. This was far better organized and co-ordinated than any previous Hamas attack and consequently far more lethal but it is difficult to see how it accomplished anything for Hamas other than the bloodshed itself. It did, however, clearly serve a purpose of Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu, who had been ousted as Prime Minister of Israel in June of 2021, was re-elected in December of last year on a hard-line platform and needed to at least appear to be making good on his promises. Cracking down on Hamas is the easiest way of doing that and by carrying out an attack of this nature Hamas handed him an iron clad justification for doing so. On a side note, whatever else you might say about Benjamin Netanyahu, his political longevity is something to be marvelled at. I fully expect that sometime down the road we will be reading, a week or two after his funeral, that he has just won re-election as Prime Minister of Israel in a landslide.
Now some of you might be thinking “Aha, gotcha, there is a flaw in your argument. Hamas’s actions might serve Netanyahu’s ends, but in retaliating the Israeli government will wipe them out so there is no reciprocal benefit, it is a one-way street this time around”. This, however, very much remains to be seen. So far, apart from the rhetoric, Israel’s retaliatory actions have consisted of the same sort of aerial bombardment with which they have responded to past Hamas attacks, albeit on a larger scale. There has been talk of an imminent and massive ground incursion into Gaza for a week and a half now but if it ever materializes the IDF’s overwhelming military superiority does not guarantee Israel a quick and easy victory. Ask the Americans. Israel would be walking into the same sort of situation in which the United States found herself entangled in Vietnam and later Afghanistan. This is a long term operation and the longer it drags on the more it is to Hamas’ favour, because the longer such a conflict stretches out, the less international public sympathy will be with Israel, and it is in the arena of international public opinion that Hamas fights all its true battles.
It sounds crazy but it is nevertheless true that every time Hamas attacks Israel it is with the intention of provoking a retaliatory attack. The reason this seems crazy is because Israel is so much stronger than Hamas in terms of military might. It conjures up the picture of a chihuahua getting in the face of a big bruiser of a bull dog and yipping away annoyingly until the larger dog barks or bites its head off. One moral of the Old Testament account of David and Goliath, however, is that size isn’t everything. In this case, Hamas wants Israel to attack back because every time Israel does far more Palestinian civilians are killed than Hamas agents, enabling Hamas to run to the international news media, the General Assembly of the United Nations, the World Council of Churches, humanitarian organizations, university professors and student activists, and basically every group of self-important jackasses with a lot of money and power and not enough brain cells to fill a thimble, and whine and cry about how mean old Israel has been beating on them again, after which these groups wag their fingers in Israel’s face saying shame on you, shame on you, and dump tons of money in humanitarian relief into Hamas controlled Palestinian territory, keeping Hamas solvent, and freeing up other resources with which to buy more rockets.
A great illustration of the Hamas strategy can be found in the 1959 film The Mouse That Roared. In the movie, a small European country, the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, has built its entire economy on a single export product, the wine Pinot Grand Fenwick. When a California wine company produces a cheap knockoff, and the country is threatened with insolvency, Duchess Gloriana (Peter Sellers) and her Prime Minister, Count Mountjoy (Peter Sellers) hatch a scheme to attack the United States, lose, and then reap the rewards of losing to the United States, which pours plenty of money into rebuilding the countries it has defeated in war. So they send the United States a declaration of war and then put their game warden, Tully (guess who), in charge of their small army of soldiers, mail-clad and armed with bows and arrows, and send him over. The scheme goes awry when Tully accidentally wins the war – watch the movie to find out how. The point of course, is that Hamas’ strategy is essentially that of Grand Fenwick. It is a darker version that involves much more bloodshed including the sacrifice of large numbers of their own and the payoff is expected more from third parties than from the victorious attackee, but it is the same basic scam.
Israel is running a big scam too, of course. In her case it is not the gullible “international community” that is the mark so much as the equally gullible United States of America. Israel, which paid for the creation of Hamas – see my previous essay alluded to earlier – has long been the single largest recipient of American foreign aid, in part because the various pro-Israel lobby groups in the United States make the National Rifle Association look like rank amateurs in comparison, but also because Israel knows how to play on the United States’ national mythology by presenting herself as the only liberal democracy in her region, surrounded and besieged by anti-Semitic autocrats, just like those that the United States likes to imagine herself as having single-handedly defeated in the Second World War. Of course there is some truth in that depiction. When did you ever hear of a successful scam that consisted completely of falsehoods?
This is why it is best for the rest of the world to stay out of this conflict and refuse to give in to this demand that we pick sides. Our involvement, whichever side we end up supporting, however well-intentioned, ends up facilitating the worst sort of behaviour of both sides.
We need to stop looking at the conflict in the Middle East through the lens of the “good guys” versus “bad guys” dichotomy, rooted in the heresy of Mani that has permeated Western popular culture through the pernicious influence of Hollywood movies and the comic book industry. There are no “good guys” in this conflict although there are a lot of innocent victims, both Israeli and Palestinian Arab.
If someone were to point a gun to my head and demand that I choose sides I would chose Israel, although I would be sure to hold my nose while doing so. Israel is a legitimate state, or at least the closest thing to a legitimate state that a modern democratic government without a king can be, which isn’t very close. Hamas is a criminal organization of lawless thugs and murderers. Israel has spent the last three quarters of a century trying to build up a civilized society for herself and her people. Hamas are destroyers not builders. I am a life-long Tory by instinct and as the late Sir Roger Scruton wisely put it “Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.” I will never side with those who only ever walk the easy path of destroying what others have labouriously built. Not Year Zero, Cultural Maoist, groups like Black Lives Matter and Every Child Matters in North America. Not Hamas in the Middle East. Finally, while both sides value the lives of civilians on the other side extremely cheap, there is a huge difference in that Hamas places no higher a value on the lives of their own civilians. Indeed, Hamas arguably values the lives of civilian Palestinian Arabs less than Israel. Hamas, when it attacks Israel, targets the civilian population, but prior to 7 October, its attacks have been largely ineffective. It fires tons of rockets at Israel, almost all of which are taken down by the Iron Dome, and the few that make it past are not guaranteed to hit anything or anyone. Its rocket launchers, however, Hamas deliberately places in residential neighbourhoods, mosques, hospitals, schools, and other similar locations where a retaliatory strike to take out the rocket launcher will have maximum civilian casualties. The same is true of anything else Hamas has that would be considered a legitimate military target by the rules that most countries, nominally at least, support for the conduct of warfare. Therefore, Israel must either stand there and allow herself to be attacked, the sort of thing someone whose soul has been killed and brain rotted from training in public relations and/or human resources might recommend, (1) or take out Hamas’ attack bases and in the process destroy the civilian and humanitarian infrastructure within which those bases are hid and kill the countless numbers of Palestinians that Hamas uses as human shields, handing Hamas plenty of ammunition in the form of bad press to use against her..
That having been said, the reasons for refusing the choice, for not taking sides are solid. It is in the mutual interests of Israel and Hamas to keep this conflict going forever, but this is not in the interests of the civilians on both sides, nor is it in the interests of the rest of the world which both sides expect to pay for their lethal and destructive activities. It is in the best interests of everybody, that the rest of the world refuse to be dragged into this any longer, and tell the two sides they both need to grow up.
I shall, Lord willing, follow up this essay with two others. The first will demonstrate that the Christian Zionist position that we are required by the Scriptures to take Israel’s side in Middle-East conflicts is rank heresy. The second will look at the neoconservative claim that the pro-Palestinian Left’s unhinged support of Hamas comes from anti-Semitism and demonstrate that it comes from a different source.
(1) Contrary to what the Anabaptist heresy teaches, Jesus said nothing of this sort in Matthew 5:39. This verse is best understood as forbidding revenge rather than self-defence but even if taken as forbidding self-defence it says nothing about how governments, responsible for the security of those they govern, are to act, as evident from the fact that before this section of the Sermon, Jesus gave a disclaimer that it is not to be taken as abrogating the Law. — Gerry T. Neal
Manitoba is now up the Creek, Without a Paddle, in a Leaky Kinew
I have said before that I think we Canadians owe our Sovereign, now His Majesty Charles III, although when I made the remark originally it was our late Sovereign Lady of blessed memory, Elizabeth II, an apology for the incompetent, utterly corrupt, and insanely evil clown who, through our abuse of our voting privilege, has been Prime Minister of this Commonwealth Realm for the last eight years. Now I would add that the Canadians of my province, Manitoba, owe a double apology for putting the only politician in the Dominion worse than Captain Airhead himself into the premier’s office, with a majority in the Legislature behind him.
When the evil New Democratic Party led by the execrable Wab Kinew won the provincial election on 3 October, I was disgusted but not surprised. When Lee Harding of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a local think-tank here in Winnipeg, published a piece on 29 September calling for the re-election of the Progressive Conservatives, I could not agree with his title as much as I desired that outcome. The title was “Manitoba PCs Deserve Another Mandate”. No, they did not. The reason for voting PC this election was not that they deserved it but that the alternative was much, much, worse.
The Progressive Conservatives, led by Brian Pallister, won the provincial election of 2016 and governed well enough in their first term that Harding’s title would have been true had he written his article in 2019. That year they won re-election and at the annual New Year’s Levée hosted by the Lieutenant Governor I shook Pallister’s hand and congratulated him on his victory. Within a few months of this, however, Pallister’s governance went south badly and I came to loathe the man. In July of 2021, a short time before he resigned as PC leader and premier, I expressed this in these words:
Brian Pallister is an ignorant fool!
He’s a stupid, ugly, loser and he smells bad too!
His one and only virtue,
I hate to say it but it’s true,
His one and only virtue is –
He’s not Wab Kinew!
It was Pallister’s handling of the bat flu scare that had so soured me on his governance. He had imposed a particularly harsh lockdown, had done so earlier than many other provinces, and had done so in an arrogant, in-your-face, manner. Wab Kinew and the NDP criticized Pallister’s handling of the pandemic, but their criticism went entirely in the wrong direction. They criticized Pallister for not imposing lockdowns sooner, not making them harsher, lifting them too early and this sort of thing. They should have been criticizing Pallister for trampling all over the most basic rights and freedoms of Manitobans, that is to say our ancient Common Law rights and freedoms not the useless and empty guarantees of Pierre Trudeau’s Charter, and acting like there are no constitutional limits to the power of government in an emergency. Their mishandling of the bat flu panic under Pallister is the reason the PC’s don’t deserve another mandate. Kinew’s criticism of the same, which amounted to a demand that Pallister do more of what he was doing wrong, is one reason why the NDP do not deserve to replace the PC’s as government and are a much worse alternative.
It was not the botched job he made of the bat flu that ultimately brought about Pallister’s resignation as PC leader and premier at the beginning of September 2021. This was 2021, and the crazy progressive leftists who dominate so much of the Canadian mainstream media, envious as always of their counterparts in the United States, decided that Canada needed her version of the George Floyd controversy that had been manufactured by the BLM Movement – the movement for whom the lives of American blacks matter the least because their target is the American police who protect American blacks from the violent crime that costs so many blacks their lives each year – and so jumped on the discovery of ground disturbances – and that was all that were discovered – on the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, which the band interpreted as the discovery of unmarked graves – not “mass graves” as falsely reported – and began claiming that this “proved” the version of the Indian Residential Schools narrative that defrocked United Church minister and conspiracy theorist Kevin Annett has been spouting since the 1990s, i.e., that children were murdered by the thousands in the schools and buried in secret graves. Imagine if the mainstream media in the UK were to start reporting David Icke’s theory that the world is controlled by reptilian shapeshifters from outer space and you will have an approximation of the degree of departure from journalistic standards and integrity that was involved here. Their claim has since been thoroughly debunked, which is why leftist politicians now want to criminalize debunking it, but it had its intended effect. That summer saw the biggest wave of hate crimes in Canadian history as Church buildings – whether the Churches had any connection to the residential schools or not – were burned or otherwise vandalized all across the country. On Dominion Day, Year Zero, Cultural Maoist terrorists, toppled the statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislature. No society can afford to tolerate this sort of violent, seditious, assault on her history and civilization and Brian Pallister appropriately condemned these acts. In doing so he made positive statements about the previous generations of Canadians who settled and built the country and who are now constantly being defamed by progressive academics and journalists, in violation of the fifth and ninth commandments. The provincial Indian chiefs decided to take offense at this – take offense is the operative phrase, as none was given, Pallister had not said anything about them, negative or otherwise – and demanded that Pallister apologize. Pallister should have told them to go suck an egg and stood his ground. Instead, about a month later, he cravenly gave them the apology they didn’t deserve, and in the event didn’t accept, and shortly thereafter resigned.
Kelvin Goertzen took over as interim party leader and premier until the party held its leadership vote on 30 October. Now, I am not a fan of this method of choosing a party leader. I think that it is far more consistent with our parliamentary form of government for the party caucus – the party’s sitting members in the House of Commons or provincial legislative assembly – to choose their leader, and that selling paid memberships in the party with a vote for the leader attached smacks of the American republican system. I also dislike the way our elections, Dominion and provincial, are now treated by almost everyone as if we were directly voting for the prime minister or premier, rather than voting for our local representatives in a larger parliamentary assembly, for the same reason. This is a consequence of being inundated with too much American culture in the form of television and movies. That having been said, if the party leader is to be chosen this way, it should at least be open and honest. That is precisely what the vote that put Heather Stefanson in as leader of Manitoba’s Progressive Conservatives and premier of the province was not. Stefanson was the candidate supported by the sitting members – had the party chosen its leader according to my preferred method she would have still become leader. She was also, however, the candidate that the backroom bosses of the party wanted as leader, and when they ultimately got their way their new leader had a huge cloud of suspicion of shenanigans over her head. Stefanson won the leadership vote by a narrow margin – 51.1% over the 48.9% received by Shelly Glover, which looks even narrower in total vote count – 8, 405 for Stefanson, 8, 042 for Glover. Glover, who had formerly been a member of the House of Commons representing St. Boniface, based her campaign in part on dissatisfaction with how Pallister, with whose government Stefanson had been associated, had handled the bat flu. The party’s former CFO, Ken Lee, had also sought the leadership, in his case making opposition the Pallister lockdowns his sole issue, but his candidacy was disqualified for reasons that never really were made clear. This looked shady, as did the fact that over 1200 members had not received their ballots in time to vote, and when Glover lost by such a narrow margin – less than 400 votes – she contested the outcome, but her challenge was quickly dismissed. This had all the appearances of a backroom fix.
When this happened I realized that it would take a miracle for the Progressive Conservatives to win the next election. You cannot treat your voting base this way and expect them to turn up in sufficient numbers to support you come election time.
It was apparent during the short election campaign, and the longer pre-campaign leading up to it, that Stefanson’s PCs were not remotely as committed to their winning the election as their enemies were to their being defeated. I say enemies rather than opponents because it is not just their rivals in the legislature that I am talking about.
The unions have been determined to take down the PCs since pretty much the moment Brian Pallister became premier and have really stepped up their game in the last couple of years. They have spent a fortune on billboard ads all over Winnipeg attacking the PC government. Then there are the yard signs that began popping up like mushrooms all over the place long before the party campaign signs came out. These couldn’t explicitly endorse candidate or party, but everyone knew what they were getting at. The most common such signs were from the Manitoba Nurses Union and the Manitoba Teachers Society.
Allied with these unions in their quest to bring down the PCs and put Kinew’s NDP into government, was the media, especially the CBC, which as Crown broadcaster by rights ought to be neutral, and the Winnipeg Free Press.
These media, along with the Manitoba Nurses Union and the NDP, have been using health care as a club to bash the Progressive Conservatives with ever since Pallister, early in his premiership, indicated his disagreement with them that health care spending needs to keep going in one direction only, up, converted the Emergency Rooms at Seven Oaks and Victoria Hospitals in Winnipeg into urgent care centres, and closed the Concordia Hospital ER refocusing the hospital to transitional care for the elderly and those undergoing physical rehabilitation. The PCs dropped the ball on this one. They should have hammered back, just as hard, pointing out that the consultant’s report on whose recommendations they did this had been commissioned by the previous, NDP, government, and that at the same time they expanded the capacity of the three remaining ERs – Health Sciences Centre, St. Boniface, and Grace. They should also have emphasized that health care has usually fared much worse under NDP governments in rural ridings. The ER in Vita, a rural community about an hour and a half south-east of Winnipeg, closed three years after Greg Selinger became premier. Two years later it was still closed, with eighteen others along with it. ERs in many other rural communities remained open, but on a basis somewhat like a multi-point parish, with the same doctor serving several ERs, being in the one the one day, another the next. In the second last year of Gary Doer’s premiership, the ER in Virden, a rural community along the TransCanada Highway near the Saskatchewan border was temporarily closed, mercifully for only about half a year. These examples are representative, not comprehensive, and while the rural doctor shortage is a chronic problem regardless of who is in government, rural areas always fare worse under the NDP. Not coincidentally, these same areas rarely if at all vote NDP. A rural ER closure, even a temporary one, is worse than an ER closure in Winnipeg, for while there are more people in Winnipeg, the transit time to the next ER, especially if the ER to close is one that serviced a very large area, like the one in Vita, is increased that much more in the country.
The media also found another club to bash the PC government with in the Indians’ demand that the Prairie Green Landfill be searched for the remains of two murdered women that the Winnipeg Police believe to have ended up there. This demand was expressed in protests, blockades, and something that is probably best described as a riot, earlier this year. Here again, Stefanson’s PCs shot themselves in the foot. Not so much by refusing the demand – their grounds for doing so were sound, and certainly not the “racism” of which idiots accuse them – but by bringing the issue into the election campaign. No matter how sound the case for not conducting this just under $200 million search of an area laced with toxins, there was no way Stefanson could argue her point without appearing heartless. It would have been better to stay silent.
So, no, the Stefanson PC’s did not deserve another mandate. The problem is that those who won deserved it even less.
Let me spell it out for you. At the moment, people all across the Dominion of Canada are experiencing an affordability crisis. The price of food has gone through the roof. Many Canadians are skipping meals, many others are buying less healthy processed food than they otherwise would, because the prices at the grocery stores are too high. At the same time rent is sky high and houses are selling at obscene prices. Transportation is also that much more expensive. Much of this is the direct consequence of bad action on the part of the Dominion government. The price of gasoline has gone up considerably due to the carbon tax, which in turn increases the price of everything that needs to be transported using fuel. The housing shortage is a direct consequence of Captain Airhead’s decision to use record immigration, with apologies to Bertolt Brecht, to elect a new people. While Captain Airhead seems to think that food prices are high because of price fixing on the part of the big grocery chains, a notion he borrowed from the man propping his minority government up, federal NDP leader Jimmy Dhaliwal, the fact of the matter is that he has been spending like a drunken sailor since he got into office. When governments spend more than they take in in revenue, this is not a contributing factor to inflation, it is inflation. The extra they spend increases the supply of money, the means of exchange, which decreased the value of money per unit, and causes the price of everything else to rise relative to it. When you spend the way Captain Airhead did over the last few years, paying people to stay home for long periods of time and not go to work – decreasing the production of goods and services and thus causing their cost in currency to go up – you increase inflation exponentially. Manitoba just elected a premier who has the same sort of attitude towards spending as Captain Airhead.
Last month, in the Million Person March, organized by Ottawa Muslim activist Kamel El-Cheik, but supported by many faith groups and people just concerned about the rights of parents, Canadians across the Dominion expressed what polls already had indicated to be the overwhelming majority opinion of Canadians – that schools should not be keeping parents out of the loop about what is going on in the classroom with their kids about gender identity and that sort of thing. While leftists have tried to spin this as an alphabet soup issue, accusing those protesting of various sorts of hatred and bigotry, and spinning the reasonable insistence that teachers entrusted with the education of children report back to the parents who so entrusted them, as “forced outing”, they are being absurd. There is a word for someone who tells kids to keep stuff having to do with sex a secret from their parents. The policy that schools and school boards have been following in recent years seems tailor-made to accommodate such people. Heather Stefanson had promised in her campaign to protect parental rights. The promise would have been more credible had she introduced the legislation to do so earlier when the New Brunswick and Saskatchewan governments were doing so. However, this much is clear, if someone wanted to protect perverts in the schools rather than the rights of parents, he would be cheering the outcome of this election.
The province already has a huge problem with drug abuse and related social evils. The CBC reported in April that provincial Chief Medical Examiner had told them via e-mail that the number of drug-related deaths per year has “risen dramatically here in recent years” and that “the deaths are only the tip of the iceberg”. 407 Manitobans died from overdoses in 2021, 372 the year previously, both record numbers. It was at least 418 in 2022. At least 228 involved fentanyl and/or related drugs. The city of Winnipeg also saw the largest jump in crime severity of any Canadian city in the same period. These two facts are not unrelated, nor is the size of the homelessness problem in Winnipeg. The left, in recent years, has been obsessed with the “harms reduction” approach to this matter, an approach that tries to lower the number of deaths due to overdose and contamination by providing a “safe” supply of drugs and “safe” places to use them. It is usually coupled with decriminalization or outright legalization of some or all narcotics. This approach is concerned more with the effects of drugs on those who (ab)use them and less or not at all with the effects of drug abuse on the surrounding community. It was tried by the NDP in Alberta in the premiership of Rachel Notley, and more dramatically in British Columbia, where the provincial NDP government introduced this approach on a provincial scale earlier at the beginning of this year, despite it having proven a failure when the city of Vancouver tried it, causing overdose deaths to rise. The NDP are incapable of learning from their mistakes on matters such as these. Expect Kinew to try and imitate BC’s mistake, not avoid it and look elsewhere, like, for example, Singapore’s “harm prevention” approach, for a successful model. This problem is about to get much worse in Winnipeg and Manitoba.
It will not be long before we in Manitoba rue the outcome of this election. Now we owe His Majesty a double apology, first for Captain Airhead in the Dominion Prime Minister’s Office, now for Captain Airhead’s doppleganger in the province of Manitoba. — Gerry T. Neal
In my last essay I demonstrated that contrary to the view sometimes put forth by overzealous Low Churchmen of a Reformed-in-the-continental-sense bent that our English branch of Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church affirms her Protestantism in a Calvinist as opposed to Lutheran way in her reformed Confession, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of 1571, these instead are worded in such a way as to side with neither Wittenberg nor Geneva absolutely on the controversies between the two with the result that while on the matter of the Real Presence in the Lord’s Supper they lean towards Calvin without excluding Luther, on the matter of Predestination they lean towards Luther without excluding Calvin. On several other matters – prioritizing the truths confessed in the Catholic Creeds over other doctrines, retaining the Apostolic episcopacy rather than adopting a presbyterian government (some Lutherans, such as the Swedish, are like us in this regards, others, such as the German, who were unable to retain the episcopacy, did not adopt the Genevan model), the normative principle (what is not forbidden by Scripture is permitted) over the regulative principle (what is not commanded by Scripture is forbidden) – Anglicanism, as confessed in the Articles is far closer to the Lutheranism than to Calvinism.
An interesting response to this came in an online Anglican group. The matter of the Lambeth Articles of 1495 was raised and the person who brought it up seemed to think that this document invalidated my entire argument by providing an official Anglican declaration that Article XVII (On Predestination and Election) is to be understood in the most Calvinist way possible. What made this response so interesting was that the answer to it was so obvious – the Lambeth Articles are not official Anglican doctrine. They were denied royal assent twice, first by Queen Elizabeth I, then by King James I at the Hampton Court Conference of 1604. Thank God for the divine right of kings! It was not a matter of the monarchs refusing out of personal theological prejudice to allow the Church to teach what she wanted. At the same time as the events leading to the drafting of the Lambeth Articles the first volumes of a lengthy treatise defending the Elizabethan Religious Settlement against the arguments of Calvinists who wished to overthrow said Settlement and introduce something more radical and less Catholic appeared in print. The way in which this treatise was subsequently embraced by Anglicans of every party demonstrates that Queen Elizabeth and King James knew what they were doing in not allowing a narrower, much more rigid, interpretation of the difficult doctrine of predestination than that which appears in Article XVII to be imposed on the English Church.
The wisdom of the royal judgement in not allowing the Lambeth Articles to become the official doctrine of the Church will become all the more apparent as we look at the history of how this would-be addendum to the Articles of Religion came to be.
The Lambeth Articles indirectly testify to the fact that Article XVII of the Thirty-Nine Articles does not require those who affirm or subscribe to it to accept the interpretation of predestination that is taught in the Lambeth Articles. If it did, there would have been no need for strict Calvinists to draw up the Lambeth Articles and try to make them enforceable upon the clergy.
The Most Reverend Matthew Parker had been chosen to be the next Archbishop of Canterbury upon the accession of Elizabeth I in 1559 and he was consecrated and installed in that office in December of that year. Contrary to lies spread by the Jesuits, this was done properly by four bishops at Lambeth Palace, preserving the Apostolic succession, not in some untoward way in the Nag’s Head Tavern. Nor are the arguments against the legitimacy of his Apostolic succession raised by Roman Patriarch Leo XIII in Apostolicae Curae (1896) valid but that is a subject for another time. One of his first accomplishments was the revision of the Forty-Two Articles, written by his predecessor Thomas Cranmer and briefly made the official doctrine of the Church of England in 1552 at the very end of the reign of Edward VI. These were revised into Thirty-Nine Articles in the Convocation of 1563, with much of the work of revision being done by Parker himself. While a couple of changes had to be made before the Articles received royal assent in 1571 for the most part the Thirty-Nine Articles were what they would ultimately be in 1563. The following year John Calvin died.
John Calvin’s death removed what had up to then been the chief restraint preventing the Genevan school from running to seed on the doctrine of predestination. It seems strange to think of it that way today, when Calvin’s name is virtually synonymous with predestination, but compared to those who came after him he was quite moderate on the topic. Like Dr. Luther, he was strongly influenced by St. Augustine of Hippo, who in the early fifth century led the orthodox Church in condemning the heresy of Pelagianism (the denial of Original Sin and assertion that the human will unassisted by God’s grace can move towards God). In defending Augustinian orthodoxy, at least as he understood it, in On the Bondage of the Will (1525) his answer to Erasmus, Dr. Luther had taken a strong view of predestination that was very similar to that of Calvin’s. It did not have as important a place in his theology as it did in Calvin’s, however, just as in Calvin’s theology predestination was not near as important is it would become among Calvin’s followers. While later in his life Dr. Luther continued to regard On the Bondage of the Will as his favourite of his own writings, he clearly saw the danger of fixating on the doctrine, especially if it is considered apart from Jesus Christ and the Gospel, and warned against this danger, reminding people of the difference between what God has revealed to us and what He has kept hidden, and that it is inadvisable to focus on and speculate about the hidden things (he argued this at length and in several places in his Lectures on Genesis). In the larger Lutheran tradition predestination and election are affirmed only of those who will ultimately be saved, there is no teaching of reprobation to damnation. Jesus is proclaimed as having died for all, with the Grace He obtained for all on the Cross brought to man in the two forms of the Gospel, Word and Sacrament. Faith, the sole means of receiving the Grace so brought to man, is itself formed in the human heart by the Grace contained in the Gospel, again Word and Sacrament, without any contribution from our own will. The Grace in the Gospel is sufficient to produce saving faith in all, but resistible, so that salvation is entirely of God, damnation entirely of man. Dr. Luther and his tradition took care that the doctrine of predestination not be taught in such a way as to either undermine the assurance of the Gospel or encourage licentious behaviour.
In John Calvin’s writings, while predestination has a larger role than in Dr. Luther’s, it is by no means the doctrine to which all other truths must be subordinated that it often seems to be in the teachings of many of his followers. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, he devotes four chapters to it, towards the end of the third (out of four) volume. The third volume is about salvation, following after the first, which is about God the Creator, and the second, which is about God the Redeemer. He turns to election in this volume, only after extensively covering Grace, Faith, Regeneration, Justification, Assurance, the Christian Life, and Christian Liberty. It is very much a subordinate doctrine, that he derives from the sovereignty, omnipotence, and omniscience of God, but without the puerile manner in which some who bear his name today taunt those who do not believe exactly the way they do with the accusation that they preach too small a God, then wonder why nobody else is impressed with their “my God is bigger than your God” type arguments that sound like nothing so much as a boy in the schoolyard telling his playmates “my dad can beat up your dad”. He expresses the same concerns about the abuse of the doctrine as Luther and from his Institutes it appears that his pastoral counsel to someone troubled by an undue fixation on predestination was almost identical to Luther’s, that is, look to Christ as revealed in the Gospel, not to the hidden councils of God. Later Calvinists had trouble doing this because of their doctrine that Jesus died only for the elect. The closest Calvin came to teaching this doctrine was in his remarks on 1 John 2.2 in his Commentary on the Catholic Epistles. That was published in 1531. In his Commentary on the Gospel of John, published two years later, his remarks on the most beloved and comforting words in all of Scripture, the familiar sixteenth verse of the third chapter, exclude all possibility of a Limited Atonement interpretation: “And he has employed the universal term whosoever, both to invite all indiscriminately to partake of life, and to cut off every excuse from unbelievers. Such is also the import of the term World, which he formerly used; for though nothing will be found in the world that is worthy of the favour of God, yet he shows himself to be reconciled to the whole world, when he invites all men without exception to the faith of Christ, which is nothing else than an entrance into life”.
Article XVII, both as Cranmer had originally written it in the Forty-Two Articles, and in the slightly edited form in which it stands in the Thirty-Nine Articles, speaks of predestination only in reference to the saved not the lost. In this, it affirms what the larger Lutheran tradition affirms, without affirming what appeared to have been Dr. Luther’s position in 1525 but what the Lutheran tradition and possibly Dr. Luther himself in his later years moved away from, and what the Lutheran tradition would explicitly reject in the Formula of Concord six years after the Thirty-Nine Articles were adopted by the Church of England, that is double predestination. Double predestination is rejected in paragraphs three and four of Article XI of the Formula of Concord, the only Article in all of the Lutheran Confessions on the subject of Election. There is no Article on election or predestination in the Geneva Confession of 1536, or the Gallican (French) Confession of 1559, the only Confessions written in whole or in part by John Calvin himself. It appears in the Second Helvetic Confession, however which was written by Heinrich Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor, shortly before Calvin’s death, and published shortly after. In the Three Forms of Unity of the Reformed Church, the Heidelberg Catechism written by Ursinus in the same year that Parker was revising the Articles of Religion makes no mention of predestination, unsurprisingly perhaps in that it is a Catechism, that is to say, intended to be introductory and basic. In the other two, however, Article XVI of the Belgic Confession (1561) is on Election, with the weak form of the doctrine of reprobation affirmed and the Canons of Dort (1619) are entirely in defense of the doctrine of Double Predestination. This shows how the doctrine became much more important in the Calvinist tradition as it developed.
The Anglican Article XVII neither affirms reprobation like the Calvinist tradition, nor positively rejects it like the Lutheran tradition in the Formula of Concord. What it does affirm about predestination is much more Lutheran than Calvinist though. The second paragraph begins by saying that it is a comfort for the godly. This, however, is only true if we heed the advice of the final paragraph. Here, Parker’s revision of Cranmer’s original, was perhaps unfortunate. Cranmer wrote “Furthermore, although the Decrees of predestination are unknown unto us, we must receive God’s promises in such wise as they are generally set forth to us in Holy Scripture, and in our doings, that will of God is to be followed which we have expressly declared unto us in the word of God.” The italicized portion was removed in the Thirty-Nine Articles. It is stronger in the original wording, but the meaning still stands in the revised version, and it is identical to the advice given by Dr. Luther in his Lectures on Genesis, that we should not concern ourselves with what God has not revealed to us, His secret counsels from all eternity, but with what God has revealed to us in the Gospel.
Cranmer in 1553 and Parker ten years later could not have known the direction that the Reformed tradition would take after Calvin’s death, but they seem, like Dr. Luther, to have recognized that predestination is a doctrine that can easily take someone who runs with it into any number of ditches, and to have written Article XVII to guard against this possibility. The Most Reverend and Right Honourable John Whitgift would have been well-advised to follow the lead of these his predecessors. He seems to have attempted to do so at first but in 1595 committed the blunder of signing off on a document that, had it received final approval, would have imposed an interpretation of predestination on Article XVII that was more extreme than could be found in any then-extent Calvinist Confession. Ironically, his intent in so doing was to restore peace to the campus of Cambridge University, where he himself had been a professor earlier in his career at the beginning of the Elizabethan Age.
The man who had upset the peace at Cambridge was William Barrett, who was the chaplain of Caius College at Cambridge University. On 29 April, 1595, Barrett gave a sermon from the pulpit of St. Mary’s Church, in the course of which he blasted the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and asserted that predestination and reprobation were based on human holiness and sin respectively. The main target of his attack, however, was the more basic doctrine of assurance of salvation. He denounced as arrogance, the confident assurance of one’s salvation. This raised a ruckus and he was immediately brought before the Vice-Chancellor of the University, who chewed him out. Unrepentant, the heads of the various colleges were brought in, and they joined in denouncing him, so he was forced to make a retraction on 10 May. He came across as somewhat less than sincere in his retraction which did not satisfy the academic authorities. As a matter of fact the heads of the colleges went to the Vice-Chancellor demanding his expulsion. At this point the affair was brought by both sides to the attention of Archbishop Whitgift who asked Hadrian Saravia, a prebendary at Gloucester Cathedral and a member of Cambridge’s rival Oxford University, and Lancelot Andrewes who was his personal chaplain at the time, for their opinions on the matter. Their opinion was that while Barrett wasn’t entirely in the right, the Cambridge authorities had gone too far in forcing that retraction on him. The Archbishop, satisfied with this opinion, sent a message to the Cambridge authorities dressing them down and reminding them that they could discipline a chaplain for speaking against the Articles of Religion but not for speaking against whatever was currently in vogue in Geneva. He then made the grave mistake of assigning further investigation to William Whitaker, Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge.
This was a mistake because Whitaker was the man against whom Barrett’s sermon had been directed in the first place. Whitaker had himself given a sermon on 27 February against “those who assert universal grace” by which he meant Peter Baro, who was Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity. Baro was originally from France, like Calvin he had studied law and then he went to Geneva to study theology under Calvin. He was ordained into the ministry by the Reformer himself. When the Huguenots (French Calvinists) faced persecution in France in the 1570s, he fled to England where he was appointed to one of what were then the only two endowed professorships of divinity at Cambridge, which he had held for twenty one years at the time this controversy broke out. In the meantime, like Beza’s student Arminius, he had moved away from the strict view of predestination that Beza had been working to make stricter. Whitaker had held the other endowed professorship in divinity for almost as long, having been appointed to the post in 1580. He had also been appointed Master of St. John’s College in 1586, and about the time Archbishop Whitgift asked him to look into the Barrett case, was made a canon of Canterbury. He very much seemed to be a man on the rise at the time of this controversy. In part this was due to his scholarly achievements. His scholarship was acknowledged, even by Cardinal Bellarmine against whom his magnus opus, Disputations on Holy Scripture, was written, to be second to none. The other part was due to his being protégé of both Whitgift and Lord Burghley (William Cecil – Elizabeth I’s Lord High Treasurer, spymaster, most trusted adviser, and basically, although the office was not yet created, Prime Minister). He was also, however, the most extreme Calvinist among the Church of England’s clergy at the time, outside of the Puritan faction. Needless to say, the theological differences between the Regius and the Lady Margaret Professors of Divinity, had led to the formation of bitterly rival factions in the school of divinity. Whitaker accepted the task of investigating Barrett from Whitgift but, although he himself had been the target of Barrett’s sermon, it was not Barrett he was interested in so much as Baro.
Whitaker gave Barrett a questionnaire full of questions designed to elicit answers from the man which would enable Whitaker to accuse him to Whitgift, not just of Arminianism, a word that had barely made it to the English shore at this point in time, but of the far more serious charge of popery. Usually Calvinist accusations of popery against those who did not agree with their view of predestination were nonsensical slurs but in this case it seems to have been justified. After these events he left England and joined the Roman Church. Whitaker sent Barrett’s answers, with his own commentary, to the Archbishop and then, in September, the Vice-Chancellor and college heads wrote to Whitgift asking for a final ruling, and permission to discipline Barrett. Whitgift, wanting neither to let Barrett off on the points where he seemed to be supporting Romanism nor to force him to agree with the entire recantation that the Cambridge authorities had drawn up, asked Barrett to give an account before him at Lambeth Palace in November. The other members of the tribunal were Richard Fletcher, Bishop of London, and Richard Vaughan, who had been chosen as the next Bishop of Bangor but would not be consecrated and installed until the following year. Whitaker and Humphrey Tyndall, the President of Queen’s College and Dean of Ely, were sent along as the representatives of the Cambridge authorities. The matter of Barrett was fairly easily disposed of – he agreed to another recantation. Then Whitaker handed the Archbishop a set of nine Articles, clarifying in the sense of significantly narrowing, the Church’s position on predestination, and asked him to make it binding on the clergy. This would have opened the door to his having Baro ejected from his seat at Cambridge.
Whitgift, after consulting with the Archbishop of York, made with the other bishops on the tribunal a few revisions to the Articles and then signed them on 20 November. One consequence of this has been that Archbishop Whitgift, the staunch anti-Puritan, has ever since had a reputation for being a far stricter Calvinist than he actually was. Here are the Articles in the form in which they were signed:
God from eternity hath predestinated certain men unto life; certain men he hath reprobated.
The moving or efficient cause of predestination unto life is not the foresight of faith, or of perseverance, or of good works, or of any thing that is in the person predestinated, but only the good will and pleasure of God.
There is predetermined a certain number of the predestinate, which can neither be augmented nor diminished.
Those who are not predestinated to salvation shall be necessarily damned for their sins.
A true, living, and justifying faith, and the Spirit of God justifying [sanctifying], is not extinguished, falleth not away; it vanisheth not away in the elect, either finally or totally.
A man truly faithful, that is, such a one who is endued with a justifying faith, is certain, with the full assurance of faith, of the remission of his sins and of his everlasting salvation by Christ.
Saving grace is not given, is not granted, is not communicated to all men, by which they may be saved if they will.
No man can come unto Christ unless it shall be given unto him, and unless the Father shall draw him; and all men are not drawn by the Father, that they may come to the Son.
It is not in the will or power of every one to be saved.
Whitaker returned to Cambridge to prepare for the prosecution of Baro. He caught a cold on the way home, however, which developed into a fever, and two weeks after the publication of he Lambeth Articles he died. Before he died he met with his other patron, Lord Burghley, who among his many other duties was Chancellor of the University, and discussed the matter, most likely expecting Cecil’s support. The Lord High Treasurer, however, recognized immediately the threat to the peace of realm and Church that the “Lambeth Articles” posed and went directly to Queen Elizabeth with the news that Whitgift had essentially held an unofficial Convocation behind her back in which he had added to the Articles of Religion in such a way as to force a narrow interpretation of a contentious point on them. Queen Elizabeth summoned Whitgift to appear before her and her Privy Council to answer for this illegal behaviour, for which he could do nothing but apologize and beg her pardon. Whitgift received her pardon – but the Lambeth Articles were vetoed. Baro was allowed to finish his term and retire peacefully, and the queen appointed John Overall to the Regius Professorship vacated by the death of Whitaker. Overall was a young clergyman, born the year of the queen’s accession, and ordained only four years prior to his appointment to Cambridge. Later he would work with Lancelot Andrewes on the translation of the Authorized Bible, a few years after which he was consecrated Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield before being translated the very end of his career and life to the See of Norwich. He was already known to be a moderate on the matter of predestination in 1595, however, and it was for this that he was chosen as the replacement of Whitaker.
The Lambeth Articles, although originally drafted to narrow Anglican orthodoxy to a strictly Calvinist position on predestination, in the modified form in which Whitgift signed them, still left room for non-Calvinist interpretations. The second Article, while affirming “the good will and pleasure of God” as the sole cause of predestination to life, makes no such statement about reprobation and, indeed, the fourth Article by asserting that those not predestinated to life will be damned “for their sins” places the cause of their damnation, and hence their “reprobation”, in themselves rather than God. The ninth Article, of course, can be affirmed by any Augustinian, for not only is it true that “it is not in the will or power of every one to be saved” it is actually “not in the will or power of any one to be saved” because salvation does not come from the will or power of the one saved but from God Who does the saving. “With man it is impossible, but not with God, because all things are possible with God” as our Lord put it. None of the Lambeth Articles asserts the most problematic of the doctrines that would be adopted by the Synod of Dort in response to the Arminian Articles of Remonstrance in 1619, the anti-Scriptural and blasphemous doctrine of Limited Atonement, that Jesus died only for the elect. This is why the fifth Article can assert “A man truly faithful, that is, such a one who is endued with a justifying faith, is certain, with the full assurance of faith, of the remission of his sins and of his everlasting salvation by Christ.” This assertion is inconsistent with the idea that Jesus died only for he elect. Justifying faith is faith in Jesus Christ as He is revealed in the Gospel. The Gospel is not a revelation of what God has done in secret, into which category fall election and predestination. It is a revelation of what God has done for mankind out in the open for everyone to see, by the giving of His Son Jesus Christ, Who made Atonement for dying for the sins of the world, then rose again from the dead. The difference between “historical faith”, which does not justify or save and “saving faith” or “justifying faith” is that the person with “historical faith” sees in the Gospel only events that are some place, some time, distant and unconnected to himself, while the person with justifying faith sees in the Gospel the message that “Jesus died for me” which information is absent from the Gospel if Jesus died only for the elect, and indeed, if Jesus dies only for the elect, the information about whether Jesus died for any particular individual will not be available this side of the Last Judgement, so what is asserted in the fifth Lambeth Article is utterly impossible if Jesus died only for the elect. Indeed, assurance is difficult to square with the concept of double predestination. The early Dr. Luther managed to do so, as did John Calvin, but this was because both men recognized that it was unwise to dwell on what God has not revealed, His secret counsels, but must direct our faith towards what God has revealed in Jesus Christ.
One who did not follow them in this was William Perkins. Perkins was born in the last year of the reign of Mary, studied at Cambridge University, and remained a fellow of Christ’s College at Cambridge until the year before the controversy that produced the Lambeth Articles. He was a Puritan, considered a moderate in that he was neither a separatist nor a rebel, but was very severe in his Calvinism. He died almost twenty years before Limited Atonement was formulated but he accepted Theodore Beza’s supralapsarianism, the form of extreme Calvinism that started the chain of events that led to Dort. He developed the doctrine of “experimental predestination” for when his obsessive preaching on predestination caused people to ask the question “am I one of the elect”. In this he advised people to make use of a practical syllogism – everyone who believes is a child of God, I believe, therefore I am a child of God – that separated assurance from the direct look of faith. Worse, he told them to look for evidence for the second premise, if they doubted their faith was the saving kind, by looking inward for the fruit of sanctification. This didn’t work out too well in his case. His biographer Thomas Fuller records that he died “in the conflict of a troubled conscience”. Perkins’ writings were more influential than any other Puritan of the Elizabethan Age on subsequent generations of Puritans and this problem of dying in the conflict of a troubled conscience recurred over and over again. There were also cases of people living in the conflict of a troubled conscience because of this doctrine and being driven mad by it. William Cowper, the Olney poet and hymn writer, is a classic example of this, although to be fair, the evidence suggests that given his extremely melancholic temperament he might have ended up the same way no matter what doctrine he had been taught.
The example of Perkins, and the subsequent generations of Puritans who followed him in this, if not in his moderation with regards to making further reforms to the Church, demonstrates how an overemphasis on predestination undermines in practice the assurance of salvation that it is supposed to bolster. For a good example of how the doctrine can be taught without having this negative effect see the second to last chapter in Getting Into The Theology of Concord (1977) by Robert D. Preus. The book is a commentary on the Lutheran Confessions and under the heading “Predestination and the Election of Grace” Preus, who was president of Concordia Theological Seminary at the time, explained that it was a doctrine that was only to be introduced after one had already been assured of salvation through faith in the revealed Gospel, in order “to give him even greater certainty and assurance of God’s grace”. Preus recounted his own professor’s explanation of predestination as meaning merely “everything God has done in time to save us and make us His children and preserve us in the faith, He determined in Christ to do for us in eternity.” Understood this way, the doctrine is not the threatening source of uncertainty that it has been when overemphasized as it has been in much of the Calvinist tradition. In the Canons of Dort (1619) Perkins’ view of assurance replaced that of Calvin (found in Article XI of the Geneva Confession of 1536, Articles XVIII, XIX, XX and XXII of the Gallican Confession of 1559, and the Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book III, chapter xxiv, paragraph 5) as the official Calvinist doctrine in the twelfth article under the first head (Divine Election and Reprobation – in Dort, the points are ordered ULTIP rather than TULIP):
Assurance of their eternal and unchangeable election to salvation is given to the chosen in due time, though by various stages and in differing measure. Such assurance comes not by inquisitive searching into the hidden and deep things of God, but by noticing within themselves, with spiritual joy and holy delight, the unmistakable fruits of election pointed out in God’s Word—such as a true faith in Christ, a childlike fear of God, a godly sorrow for their sins, a hunger and thirst for righteousness, and so on.
The Lambeth Articles were brought to the Synod of Dort and read out in the deliberation there. Although they affirm a strong view of assurance of salvation, and the occasion of their drafting was Barrett’s sermon attacking assurance – Saravia and Andrewes advised Whitgift that Barrett had only denied the impossibility of those justified by faith falling from grace, asserted by Calvinism but not in the Articles of Religion, rather than their present assurance of forgiveness and justification, while his accusers maintained he had denied both – they can therefore be regarded as a step in the direction in which Calvinism was moving, away from the solely outward look to the objective truth of the Gospel of Lutheranism and early Calvinism to the inward look of Puritanism/Dort. It is therefore, most merciful indeed, that by the grace of God, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth I prevented them from becoming an official addendum to the Articles of Religion.
Those who wish it were otherwise often claim that the Lambeth Articles represented a consensus of the leading clergy of the Church of England at the time. This is hardly the case. Archbishop Whitgift was by no means as harsh a predestinarian as his signature on these Articles might suggest to some. It is now time to consider another protégé of Whitgift’s who the year before this controversy had published the first four volumes in a defense of the Elizabethan Settlement against those who wished to reshape the Church entirely in the image of Geneva, a defense that gained such wide acceptance that Anglicans of all parties would in the future claim its author as one of their own.
Richard Hooker was born five years before the accession of Elizabeth I and through the patronage of John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury and author of an Apology which defended the reformed Church of England against Romanist attacks on the grounds of arguments drawn from the Church Fathers, studied at Corpus Christi College in Oxford. He became a fellow of the College in 1577 and was ordained a priest two years later. In 1585, Elizabeth I, on the advice of Archbishop Whitgift appointed him Master of the Temple, an unusual title for the senior priest of an unusual Church, the Temple Church, which ministers to the Inner and Middle Temple Inns of Court, in what was originally the headquarters of the Knights Templar. The Reader of the Temple, that is to say, the assistant clergy, was at the time, Walter Travers. Hooker and Travers were kin by marriage – Travers’ brother was married to Hooker’s sister, the relationship between the two clergy is usually, if not entirely accurately, described as that of cousins-in-law – but in very different places theologically. Travers was a Calvinist of the type who thought that every Church everywhere needed to resemble in theology, practice, and order the Church in Geneva, in other words, a Puritan. He had been ordained in Antwerp by Thomas Cartwright, who unlike his contemporary William Perkins was not a moderate, as evidenced by a) his ordaining someone without the episcopal authority to do so, and b) his doing so abroad where he was living in semi-exile (he returned the same year Hooker was appointed Master). Indeed, his Puritanism was so extreme that even Edmund Grindal, the most Puritan-friendly of the Elizabethan Archbishops of Canterbury, denounced him as a nut. Archbishop Whitgift, correctly insisted that Travers needed to be re-ordained, but Travers refused. He then wondered why the queen passed him over for the senior position at the Church and gave it instead to his in-law who already had something of a reputation as an opponent of Puritanism. Why, indeed.
The arrangement at the Temple was that the Master, Hooker, would preach in the morning, and the Reader, Travers would preach in the afternoon. Travers’ sermon would take the form of a rebuttal of the sermon given in the morning. While this would have been inappropriate anywhere else, it does seem sort of fitting in a parish where the congregation was made up mostly of lawyers. Indeed, they managed to carry on in this way without it disturbing their personal friendship. Then, a year later, Archbishop Whitgift finally had enough and ordered Travers to cease and desist. Travers appealed this decision to the Privy Council and as part of his appeal accused Whitgift’s protégé, his own cousin, Hooker of heresy.
The basis of the accusation was a series of three sermons on the book of Habakkuk that Hooker had delivered in March of either 1585 or 1586 – there is conflicting evidence as to which year – that he later published as a pamphlet under the title “A Learned Discourse of Justification, Works, and How the Foundation of Faith is Overthrown”. In these sermons, Hooker articulated the doctrine of justification by faith on the basis of Christ’s merits alone and identified several errors of the Church of Rome in relation to this subject. He distinguished between justification and sanctification, and defended the Protestant position that the former, the righteousness of Christ imputed to the believer, is not based upon the latter, the righteousness that manifests itself in the believer as faith works through love. The faith that justifies, however, is faith in Jesus Christ, not faith in the doctrine of sola fide, and since the Roman Church confesses faith in Jesus Christ as expressed in the orthodox Creed, neither that faith nor the justification that comes through it is necessarily overthrown by the errors of Rome. It was this last point that twisted Travers’ knickers in a knot. It translates into the idea that somebody is not necessarily going to Hell just because they are a member of the Roman Church. To the twisted and paranoid mind of the Puritan that was tantamount to saying the Reformation was a mistake and we should all bow before the Roman Patriarch.
Archbishop Whitgift, although unwilling to openly endorse the idea that not everyone in the Roman Church is lost, tacitly did so by sticking to his guns on Travers, and not disciplining Hooker. In this he was supported by the Privy Council which removed Travers from the position of Reader altogether. Hooker continued as Master of Temple until 1591 when, seeking a less public position so as devote time to writing his treatise, he became rector of the small country parish of St. Andrew’s in the village of Boscombe, again through the patronage of the Archbishop. The first four volumes of his Of The Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie were published about a year before the controversy in Cambridge. Eventually the work would include four other volumes, bringing the total to eight.
Hooker’s Lawes are best thought of as being to Puritanism, what his first patron, Jewel’s Apology was to the Church of Rome, that is to say, an answer to their attacks on the Church of England and the status quo of the same that had been established in the Elizabethan Settlement that employed the language of the attackers. Jewel had defended the orthodoxy and Catholicity of the Church of England, including her Protestant positions, with citations from the Church Fathers. Hooker defended the Anglican Church from the very Scriptures the Puritans claimed as their sole authority. While Hooker also appeals to tradition and reason, these are very much subordinate lower rungs on his hierarchy of authority with Scripture clearly at the top. Hooker uses tradition and reason very effectively in support of his main argument which over and over again is that the Scriptures do not support the radical changes the Puritans were demanding because the Scriptures do not say what the Puritans think and claim they say.
The Lawes are not an eight volume takedown of the doctrine of predestination. It is not the Puritans’ soteriology that is Hooker’s focus but their ideas concerning Church Government. This ought to be evident from the title of the work. Ecclesiastical Politie (Polity) means Church Government. It is not William Perkins whom Hooker is concerned with so much as Thomas Cartwright, the arch-presbyterian mentor of his relative Travers. Specifically, it is the Puritan claim that the Scriptures contain not merely everything necessary for salvation, as Article VI declares, everything necessary to answer any question that might arise, including the one true model of Church government and organization (the Genevan, even though this could be found nowhere on earth before the sixteenth century) and a complete set of instructions as to what can be done in Christian worship to which nothing can be added that is not sinful, idolatrous, and blasphemous, that he systematically dismantles. He patiently makes his case, first laying the foundation with a discussion of the nature of laws in general in the first volume, which leads into a refutation of specific Puritan claims that occupies the rest of the first four books, the ones published before 1595. In the fifth book, published in 1597, which is as long as the first four combined, as he examines Scripture readings, sermons, music, Sacraments, liturgy and basically everything that is today summed up in the word “worship” and demonstrates through an extended defence of the normative principle that the established Anglican way of doing these things is not contrary to Scripture, he begins to segue from answering the claims of the Puritans into setting forth the positive case for the status quo of the Elizabethan Settlement of Religion that will occupy the remainder of the work. In making that case, while he rests ultimately upon the authority of Scripture, he does not do so in the same manner as his opponents, he does not mirror their attitude of thinking there is only one way of doing everything. Instead, having shown that episcopal polity, liturgical worship, royal patronage, etc., not to be in violation of Scripture but to be positively beneficial, he argues that all these should be retained unless their opponents can meet the burden of proof in arguing for their elimination, which they have failed to do.
Although it was the Puritans’ demand for changes in the structure, organization, and practices of the Church that Hooker answered in his Lawes rather than their narrow doctrine of predestination, the basic conservatism of his arguments provided the Church with an alternative path to that which Whitaker wished her to take with the Lambeth Articles. Just as the Puritans insisted that there was only acceptable form of Christian worship, the Genevan, the stricter school of Calvinists, Puritan or not, insisted that there was only one way of understanding the doctrine of predestination, that which they attempted to impose on the Church in the Lambeth Articles, and which would eventually narrow further in the continental Reformed tradition into that espoused at Dort. The Articles of Religion, to which clergy of the Church were required to subscribe, affirm predestination, but only in a more general way. They do not exclude an Anglican clergyman from holding to the narrower view of Whitaker’s Articles, but neither do they require it. There was no need to impose a narrower view. Predestination is mentioned in the Scriptures, but only on a few occasions, and not in such a way as to justify the claim that only the strict Calvinist interpretation is acceptable. In the book of Romans, for example, St. Paul brings it up in precisely the way Dr. Preus talked about. First he shows that all people, Jew and Gentile alike, have sinned and therefore cannot be justified before God by their own works, then he talks about how God has justified by His Grace those who believe in Jesus on account of the redemption He accomplished by His propitiatory death. Having established that believers have peace with God through their Saviour Jesus Christ, he urges them to live righteously because through their union with Christ in baptism, they died to sin with Him in His death, and now live to God and righteousness in the newness of His resurrection life. This leads into an acknowledgement of the ongoing struggle with sin, which the Law is powerless to assist the believer in, which is followed immediately by the encouragement that the Holy Ghost provides what the Law cannot, and it is only then, in this context that predestination is raised to strengthen this assurance and encouragement, by telling the Roman believers that what God is doing in them He will see through to completion because He planned it from before the world and that no power exists that break our union with Jesus Christ. The idea of predestination, in this context, should not give rise to speculation about God arbitrarily deciding so-and-so will be saved and so-and-so will be damned, and the language that some might take in this sense in the following chapters is clearly talking about the present state of nations, Jews and Gentiles, rather than the final destiny of individuals. Indeed, as if to avoid dogmatic speculation about the nature of predestination, the Apostle places foreknowledge before predestination. This does not have to be taken in the Arminian way – I do not understand it that way myself – but it is a good reason to be careful in flinging the word “heresy” around about views other than strict Calvinist double predestination. Heresy is a departure from the basic truths of the faith, primarily those confessed in the ancient and universal Creed, and these are truths that are clear and open revelation in Scripture, central to the message of Scripture, and not things that get a mention in Scripture but with the details left to the unrevealed secret things of God, into which it is unwise to pry. Therefore, from Hooker’s basic conservative principles, we can deduce that it was very wise indeed of Elizabeth I, to not allow a narrow formulation of the doctrine of predestination to become official doctrine in the Church. In taking the path represented by Richard Hooker, rather than that represented by the Lambeth Articles, Anglicanism made the right choice at the crossroads of 1595. –– Gerry T. Neal
