I met Ursula Haverbeck in Germany. She was the epitome and grace and class. She was fearless in her pursuit of the truth. She reminds me of another German, who said: “Here I stand, I can do no other,” in defence of being true to one’s conscience. [In German, ““ Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir. Amen.” ] Her imprisonment in old age shows the bankruptcy of the present German government and the heroic courage of this quiet grandmother. — Paul Fromm
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:
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
It is the Kalends of January once again. On the civil calendar this is, of course, New Year’s Day, and the year 2023 AD is upon us. On the liturgical kalendar, it is the Feast of the Circumcision of Our Lord, falling as it does on the octave day of Christmas, that is to say the eighth day of Christmas when “eight maids a-milking” is one’s true love’s gift by the old carol and, more relevantly, when Jesus was circumcised in accordance with the prescriptions of the Mosaic Law. This is also the day upon which I post my annual essay telling about myself, who I am, and where I stand on various matters. As usual I shall begin by mentioning where I picked this custom up. I learned it from a man who was one of my own favourite opinion writers, the late Charley Reese, who was a career op-ed columnist with the Orlando Sentinel whose thrice-weekly column was syndicated by King Features. Reese wrote a column like this once a year, sometimes at the end, sometimes at the beginning, and recommended that other writers do the same. I believe the Rev. Chuck Baldwin has also followed Reese’s recommendation in this matter.
This is on the one hand the easiest essay I have to write every year and an the other the hardest. It is easy in the sense that I know the subject thoroughly and intimately and no research is required. It is the hardest because it pertains primarily, not to my thoughts on passing events, but to my more basic convictions and principles underlying these thoughts, and since these remain very constant it is something of a challenge to write this every year in a way that is fresh and not one that might as well just say “see last year’s essay”. The title can be the biggest part of this challenge and this year as in 2019 I have recycled the title of the first of these essays, the quotation “Here I Stand” from Dr. Luther, by translating it into a classical tongue. It was Latin in 2019, it is Greek in 2023,
I am a Canadian and a very patriotic Canadian provided that by “Canada” is understood the great Dominion envisioned by Sir John A. Macdonald, Sir George Étienne Cartier and the other Fathers of Confederation, established by the British North America Act of 1867 which came into effect on 1 July of that year. If anyone is offended by this mention of our country’s founders, I assure you the offense is entirely intentional on my part, you will never hear one word of apology from me for it no matter how entitled you feel to such an apology or how imperiously you demand it, and nothing would delight me more than to offend you further. I was born and have lived all my life in Manitoba, which is the eastmost of the prairie provinces situated pretty much smack in the middle of the country. While I have lived in the provincial capital of Winnipeg for almost a quarter of a century, I still consider myself to be a rural Manitoban rather than a Winnipegger. I was raised on a farm near the village of Oak River and the town of Rivers in the southwestern part of the province. In between growing up there and moving to Winnipeg I studied theology for five years at what had once been Winnipeg Bible College, was Providence College and Theological Seminary when I studied there, and has subsequently become Providence University College. This is a rural school located in Otterburne, about a half hour’s drive south of Winnipeg near the small town of Niverville and the village of St. Pierre-Jolys.
I started on the path that led me to study theology at Providence when I was fifteen years old. That summer, the summer between my finishing Junior High in Oak River Elementary School and beginning High School at Rivers Collegiate Institute I came to believe in Jesus Christ as my Saviour. This was the type of experience that in evangelical circles is called being “born again”. Interestingly, the evangelicals who borrow this phrase from Jesus’ nocturnal interview with Nicodemus in the third chapter of the Gospel according to St. John and apply it to personal conversion tend to avoid the term “believe”, so emphasized in the Johannine and Pauline literature of the New Testament and indeed in the very discussion in which Jesus’ introduces the idea of the new birth and replace it with language such as “invite Jesus into your heat” and “make a commitment to Christ”. Infer from that what you will. My conversion was certainly a matter of faith, of believing and trusting which are, of course, the same thing approached from different angles. I had had some religious instruction as a child. My family was mostly mainstream Protestant, United Church and Anglican, and in addition to what I learned from them, in elementary school we said the Lord’s Prayer every morning and in the younger grades had Bible stories read to us. No, this is not because I am extremely old – I am a few months away from my forty-seventh birthday and a few years younger than the Prime Minister. The Bible and the Lord’s Prayer persisted in rural public schools long after urban ones had abandoned them, and it was not until my sixth year that the Supreme Court of Canada gained the same power to remove these things from the schools that its American counterpart had had and had exercised around the time my dad was born, and it was much later that it began exercising those powers the way the American court had done decades earlier. At any rate, in my early teens I had gained a deeper understanding of the message of the Christian faith from the Gideons’ New Testament that I had been given – in school – when I was twelve, and books by Christian writers such as Nicky Cruz, Billy Graham and Hal Lindsey that I had borrowed from the library. I had come to understand that Christianity taught that God is good, that He made the world and us in it good, that we had made ourselves bad by abusing the free will He had given us and sinning, but that God in His love had given us the gift of a Saviour in His Son, Jesus Christ, Who, like His Father and the Holy Ghost, was fully God, but Who by being born of the Virgin Mary became fully Man while remaining fully God, and Who, being without sin Himself, took all the sins of the whole world upon Himself when, rejected by the leaders of His own people, He was handed over to the Romans to be crucified, and Who offered up His Own Suffering and Death as payment for the sins of the world, a payment, the acceptance of which was testified to by His Resurrection, triumphant over sin and death and all else associated with these things. We are unable to achieve or even contribute to our own salvation, it is given to us freely in Jesus Christ, we merely receive it by believing in the Saviour. When I was fifteen, I was finally ready to do so and believed in Jesus Christ as my Saviour for the first time.
While I was in still in high school I was baptized by a Baptist pastor. Much later as an adult I was confirmed in the Anglican Church. Many would probably see this as two steps in opposing directions. I left the mainstream denominations after my conversion because of how heavily permeated by religious liberalism – a compromised form of Christianity that seeks to accommodate all the Modern ideas that are hostile to orthodox Christianity and as a result resembles outright unbelief more than faith – they were and was baptized in a fellowship where the Bible was still taken seriously. Strange as it may seem, however, the same basic principle led me to take the second step and seek confirmation in the Anglican Church. That principle is that Christianity should be believed and practiced the way it has been believed and practiced in every age and region of the Church since Jesus first instructed the Apostles. I would later learn that St. Vincent of Lérins had beautifully encapsulated this principle in his fifth century canon: “In ipsa item catholica ecclesia magnopere curandum est, ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est”, which means “So in the Catholic Church itself, great care must be taken that we hold that which has been believed always, everywhere and by all.” Liberalism remains a problem in the mainstream churches, indeed, it is much worse now than thirty-some years ago, and so when I joined the Anglican Church it was a parish that had been associated from the beginning with the Anglican Essentials movement that had started up to combat liberalism about the time I was graduating from High School. In my continued study of the Bible and theology, however, I had come to see that the principle of St. Vincent’s canon should not apply merely to the absolute fundamentals but to the faith as a whole. While I remain firmly Protestant in my Pauline and Johannine conviction that salvation is a free gift that we are incapable of earning or in any way contributing to but must receive simply by faith and in my conviction that the authority of the Church – and God has established authority in the Church – and her traditions – beliefs, practices, etc., handed down through from one generation to the next, an essential safeguard against reckless experimentation and so overall something that is very good rather than bad – are and must be both subject to the final authority of the written Word of God, the Holy Scriptures, I have come to strongly oppose what I call hyper-Protestantism. Hyper-Protestantism rejects not merely the sort of things the early Reformers like Dr. Luther had fought against, which were generally things introduced by the patriarch of Rome after the Church under him had separated from other equally old Churches – the Byzantine Churches in the eleventh century, the Near Eastern ones in the fifth – and so were properly distinctively Roman, but much of what is genuinely Catholic – a good rule of thumb is that if it is shared by these other equally ancient Churches it is probably Catholic not Roman. It holds the same view of Church history – that the Roman Empire, after legalizing Christianity, immediately created a false Church, the Catholic Church, that those who held to the true original faith opposed as a persecuted minority throughout history – that is common to all the heretical sects from the Mormons to the Jehovah’s Witnesses that hyper-Protestants call “cults”, although ironically what distinguishes the “cults” from the other hyper-Protestants is that they, that is the cults, are more consistent and take the logic of this deeply flawed view of Church history to its logical conclusion in rejecting the Trinitarian faith of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, an irony that is all the more poignant when one takes into consideration how reluctant hyper-Protestant evangelical leaders have been to expel from their midst leaders who have prominently defected from Nicene Trinitarianism themselves by rejecting the Eternal Generation of the Son. I think that re-inventing the wheel and fixing that which is not broke are among the stupidest things human beings try to do and that this holds double when it comes to religion and faith. Nobody has been able to produce a statement of Christian faith that better expresses the core essentials than the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, nor one which does a better job of shutting out all opportunities of heresy than the Athanasian. Nobody has been able to devise a form of Church government than that established in the New Testament. Christ placed His Apostles as the governing order over His Church, establishing them as a new albeit different sort of high priesthood – this no more conflicts with the universal priesthood of all Christian believers than the establishment of the Levitical priesthood under the Aaronic high priests conflicted with the proclamation in the Torah of the universal priesthood of national Israel and St. Paul uses Greek words in Romans to describe his ministry as an Apostle that can only be used of an established priesthood, and they used that authority to establish two other orders to assist them, the deacons (ministers) first, who were charged with looking after food distribution and the like, then as the Church spread beyond Jerusalem, the presbyters (elders) who were also initially called episcopoi (overseers) because they were the administrators of the local Churches who answered to the Apostles, and to admit others such as Timothy and Titus to their own order, which appropriated the title episcopoi from the presbyters to itself soon after the Apostles died in order to reserve “Apostle” for those directly commissioned by Christ. This form of governance has served the Church well for two millennia, apart from the problem of a certain member of the post-Apostolic episcopal order intruding into the jurisdiction of other bishops and asserting supremacy over the entire Church, and nothing that has been thought up to replace it in the last five centuries has been an improvement. Contemporary forms of worship are hardly improvements on traditional liturgies derived from ancient sources. While obviously many disagree with me on this last point, and many others who don’t would say that it is subjective, a matter of aesthetic preference, traditional liturgies are generally far more theocentric, focusing God and requiring an attitude of reverence from the worshipper, whereas contemporary worship is much more anthropocentric – or perhaps autocentric – focusing on how the worshipper feels about God, and encouraging familiarity over reverence.
I describe myself as a Tory. I have to explain this every time I do so because in common Canadian parlance Tory is used for members and supporters of the Conservative Party of Canada. There are also those who call themselves small-c conservatives to indicate that conservative refers to their political ideas rather than their partisan allegiance. When I say that I am a Tory, however, it is with a meaning that I would contrast with both big-C and small-c conservatism. As with small-c conservatism it is not about party allegiance. It is the institution of Parliament that I believe in, support, and am concerned about, not any of the parties that vie for control of it every Dominion election. Each of these parties is constantly prattling on about “our democracy” but it is Parliament the institution not democracy the abstract ideal that I care about and this is a significant part of what I mean when I say that I a Tory. While democracy is an old word, going back to ancient Greece where it was used for the constitutions of various cities, most notably Athens when she was at the height of her cultural influence, since its revival in the Modern Age it has been used for an abstract ideal. Abstract ideals are as old as the word democracy, of course. The “Forms” that feature so prominently in Plato’s dialogues could be described as abstract ideals. An abstract ideal is something you see in only in your mind and not with your eyes. While this is traditionally regarded as where Plato and Aristotle diverged from one another – Plato thought the Forms were more real than the physical world, that everything in the physical world was an imperfect copy of some Form or another, and that the Forms could be perceived only through reason, whereas Aristotle thought that the Ideas, his modified version of the Forms, were not in some other real but embodied in the physical world, and had to be observed in the things in which they were embodied – for both, the abstract ideals they were concerned with were universal ideas that in some way or another were connected to specific concrete examples in the physical world. Modern abstract ideals are not like that. The Modern conceit is that man has the rational power to think up entirely in his head something superior to anything that exists in the concrete world and that he can improve or even perfect the concrete world by forcing it to conform to these ideals. I reject this way of thinking entirely and reject the “democracy” that is this kind of ideal. In my country, the politicians who speak the loudest about “our democracy” have the least respect for Parliament, its traditions and protocols, and its constraints upon their doing whatever they want. Indeed, the current politician who uses the phrase “our democracy” more than any other, is the Prime Minister who seems to think that it means his right, having barely squeaked out an election win, to govern autocratically and dictatorially until the next election. Nor is there any reason for him not to think so because “democracy” as a Modern ideal with no essential connection to the concrete is whatever the idealist wants it to be. No, it is Parliament not democracy that I believe in, because Parliament is real and concrete, a real institution that is ancient, that has weathered the test of time and through that test proven itself.
Since this – believing in and supporting concrete institutions that have been proven through the test of time rather than abstract ideals that Modern minds think up and seek to impose on reality – is such an essential part of what I mean by calling myself a Tory, it should be obvious that my belief in and support for hereditary monarchy is even stronger than my belief in and support of Parliament, for it is an older and more time-tested institution. I have been a royalist and monarchist all my life, and, as a citizen of Canada, a Commonwealth Realm, have been a loyal subject of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II all my life until her passing late last year, when I became a loyal subject of His Majesty King Charles III.
Parliament needs monarchy. The seats of the House of Commons are filled by popular election, and each elected Member has a duty to represent the constituency he represents as a whole, to the best of his ability, looking out for their interests whether they voted for or against him. He also, however, faces pressure from the party to which he belongs to support their interests. There is a potential conflict of interest here and in that conflict it is his duty to his constituents that ought to win out over his duty to party. Some nincompoops think the system could be improved by “proportional representation” – another abstract ideal – which, of course, would settle the conflict in favour of the party over the constituents every time. Mercifully, the King, who is above Parliament as Head of State, has no such conflict of interests because he inherited his office and is not beholden to any party for it. He, therefore, can do what no elected Head of State can do, and represent the country as a whole as a unifying figure, in whose name the government elected in Parliament exercises executive power and in whose name the runner-up party, His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, holds the government accountable to Parliament. While this does not eliminate the divisiveness of partisan politics altogether, it does usually prevent it from getting as bad as it is in the republic south of our border. In addition to being such a time-proven source of unity, order, and stability monarchy represents the older view of society as an extension of the family, which is superior to the Modern view of society as an extension of the commercial marketplace represented by the republican model.
When I call myself a Tory I mean, therefore, someone who believes in our traditional institutions, first and foremost the monarchy, but also Parliament, because they are real, concrete, and of proven worth, over and against Modern schemes to improve or perfect the world by imposing abstract ideals upon it, a political way of looking at things that I believe is complementary to my small-o orthodox, small-c catholic, traditional Christian faith discussed above, and so, like such Tories as Dr. Johnson and T. S. Eliot before me, I put the two together under the term. This, as I said before, intentionally draws a contrast with both big and small c conservatives. This is not because they would necessarily disagree with my support for said institutions or my faith, but because these things are not essential to what they mean by “conservative” the way they are essential to what I mean by “Tory”. What small-c conservatives see as essential to conservatism is a set of views that is no different from those held by those who call themselves conservatives in the United States who are small-r republicans and, these days, usually big-R as well.
The United States is a Modern country in the sense that it was founded by men who chose to break away from the British Empire to which they had belonged and its older tradition that still included elements from before the Modern Age and to establish their country from scratch on the foundation of Modern abstract ideals. While something is not necessarily bad or wrong because it is Modern, the more Modern the mindset the more one tends to be blind to what was good or right before the Modern Age. Indeed, one recurring aspect of Modern thought is the tendency to view history as a linear march from the bad in the past to the good in the future, variations of which include the nineteenth century “Whig Interpretation of History” associated with the British Whigs (liberals), and the twentieth century idea of the End Of History, associated with American neoconservatives such as Francis Fukuyama who wrote the paper and book by that title. Indeed, the very concept of “progress” when used in a political sense is a version of this Modern theme. This theme is closely associated with the Modern take on abstract ideals that I have already discussed. Both Modern thoughts are fundamentally a rejection of the truth recognized both by the ancients and by the Christian Church that human beings live within boundaries or limits, some of which they cannot cross, others of which they cross only at their own peril. Both the ancients and the Church recognize some such limits as belonging to the nature of the world – in theology we would say that these are limits built into Creation. Christianity recognizes other limits as being the result of man’s fall into Original Sin. Mankind, created good, damaged his goodness by sinning in the Fall, and was expelled from Paradise. While fallen man can accomplish many great things and can strive for virtue and justice and Goodness, Truth and Beauty, he cannot perfect himself and regain Paradise through his own efforts, but must rely upon the grace of God. In the New Life which Christians live out in the world in this age, the Kingdom of God is present in one sense, but in the fullest sense the coming of the Kingdom and the restoration of redeemed man and Creation to Paradise awaits the Second Coming of Christ at history’s end. Modern thought is based upon a rejection of this, upon a rejection of the idea of respecting limits in general, on the idea that man through Modern reason and science can perfect himself and regain Paradise through his efforts, which the Modern mind conceives of as the Kingdom of Man rather than the Kingdom of God. It would be foolish to deny that Western Civilization has accomplished anything worthwhile in the centuries it has been dominated by this kind of thinking. I would say, however, that as impressive as Modern accomplishments may be in terms of volume and quantity, in terms of quality the most valuable parts of our civilization’s heritage are those that come to us from ancient times and Christianity. Another aspect of Modern thought is that when its earlier experiments fail to produce perfection and Paradise on earth, it tries again, and its new abstract ideals and new experiments, not only fail again, but tend to make things worth. The longer man travels on the road of trying to achieve Paradise by his own efforts, the closer to Hell he will get. The liberalism that the United States was built upon in the eighteenth century was a set of early Modern ideas. In the early twentieth century a new “liberalism” emerged in the United States consisting of later, worse, Modern ideas. The conservative movement that arose in the United States after World War II was largely a response of the older kind of liberals to the emergence of the new. It was good that someone was fighting the new liberalism, which has since been replaced itself by something far, far worse, but I maintain that a firmer foundation to stand on is one that recognizes the greatest wealth of our Western heritage to be that bequeathed to us from ancient Greco-Roman civilization and Christendom and respects the limits recognized by these older forms of our civilization, rather than the shifting sands of early Modernity.
There is, of course, much in the small-c conservatism with which I agree. I will list two sets of views that I share with most small-c conservatives in Canada and the United States, or at least the small-c conservatives of the generation prior to my own. The first is the following:
– Abortion is murder and should be against the law, and the same is true of euthanasia, now euphemistically called “medical assistance in dying”.- Human beings come in sexes of which there are two, male and female.- There are three genders – masculine, feminine, neuter – but these are properties of words not people.- Marriage is a union between a man (male adult human being) and a woman (female adult human being – not so difficult to define now, was that?)- Divorce should be hard to obtain not easy.- Families should be headed by husbands/fathers.- Children should be raised by their parents loving but with firm discipline, corporal if necessary, and not just allowed to express and define themselves anyway their immature minds see fit.- Teachers in schools are in loco parentis and 100% accountable to parents.- The job of a teacher is to teach children such basics as reading, writing, and arithmetic. If a child fails to learn he should be held back. If he learns he should be rewarded. If he misbehaves he should be disciplined. If all the children in a class fail to learn the teacher should be sacked. If instead of teaching said basics the teacher tries to convince boys that they are girls or vice versa and exposes them to sexually explicit material she should be arrested and severely penalized. The same should happen if she tries to stuff their heads with anti-white racist propaganda.- The criminal justice system is not there to rehabilitate anyone. If someone commits a real crime, that is to say murder, rape, theft, and the like, not some stupid thought crime that some dumbass politician or bureaucrat drew up, they should be punished, after due process has been done, of course, with a real penalty. He should be given neither a slap on the wrist not made the guinea pig of some social experiment in rehabilitation. Once the penalty has been paid, his debt to society has been discharged, and the matter should be declared over and done with. It is perpetually subjecting him to efforts to rehabilitate him that is the true “cruel and unusual punishment”.- The guilt for crimes – again, real crimes of the type just listed – is the perpetrators and not society’s.- Drugs of the type that alter one’s mind bringing out violent and aggressive traits that would otherwise be suppressed and which are known to have this or similar effects even in small amounts so that they cannot be safely partaken of through practicing moderation are a huge social problem. While prohibition may not be an effective solution, a government policy that encourages drug use by making drugs available at government controlled facilities in the name of looking out for the safety of the users is no solution at all but an exacerbation of the problem.- Government policy should be natalistic – encouraging citizens to have children and replenish the population – and friendly to the traditional family – encouraging men and women to marry each other, remain married to each other, have their kids in wedlock, and raise their kids together. It should not do the opposite – promote abortion and encourage every kind of alternative family setup to the traditional. It definitely should not do the latter and then attempt to compensate for the social problems that arise from a large number of kids being raised outside of traditional families with expensive social programs that make matters worse, nor should it practice an anti-natalistic policy and try to compensate for the children not being born through large-scale immigration.- Governments should neither discriminate between their citizens on such bases as sex and race, nor should they criminalize private prejudices or worse try to re-program such prejudices out of people. If members of a minority population are overrepresented among those convicted of crimes this does not necessarily indicate discrimination on the part of the criminal justice system. If the same minority population is also overrepresented among those whom victims of crime and eyewitnesses identify as perpetrators and if the same minority population is also overrepresented among victims of the same kind of crime the problem is not racism on the part of the institution.
That was the first set.
The second is the following:
– Taxes should be low and not designed to redistribute wealth.- Governments need to balance their budgets rather than run deficits and amass huge debts.- Governments should not follow the inflationary policy of using government spending to stimulate economic growth.- Governments should only intervene in their domestic markets when there is a genuine national interest at stake. If, for example, a country needs resource X, which it can produce at home but can import cheaper, if the foreign supply chain is unreliable or there is a possibility of it being cut off by war, and interruption of supply would be a disaster rather than a temporary inconvenience, the government has a legitimate reason to protect domestic production. Otherwise, people are better managers of their own businesses and affairs than government are.
The first set of these views which I share with small-c conservatives I consider to be by far the most important and essential of the two. Small-c conservatives tend to think it is the other way around. This is yet another reason why I prefer “Tory” as I have explained it, to “conservative”.
Happy New Year!God Save the King! — Gerry T. Neal
What’s the Use?
How often have I heard this note of discouragement when we speak of activism, whether it is attending a protest or writing a letter to an MP? I don’t feel it myself, but I know some others do. What pretends to be the voice of “realism” is really the chattering devil of planned discouragement. The Dark Forces seeking to vacuum away our freedoms have been fascinated by the study of psychology — what makes people’s minds tick and, then, how can this information be used to manipulate or control them.
Modern tyranny has come to the conclusion that they don’t have to physically eliminate all dissenters or doubters. Just scare the majority into compliance (as they have with masks in the COVID Craziness). Then, convey the idea that their position is inevitable. Not everyone will agree, but as long as they are discouraged and passive, the evil agenda prevails.
This brings me o a protest on October 18, the day Lady Michele Renouf was to go on trial in Dresden for remarks made in 2018 at a February 13 memorial held every year for the 300,000+ German civilians incinerated in that city on February 13-14, 1945. The war was essentially over. Dresden was not a manufacturing or military target. It was, indeed, acity to which perhaps 250,000 refugees fleeing the Soviet armies just 70 miles away had fled. Churchill himself in sending the waves of incendiary bombers had gloated that he would roast the German people. Anyway, Lady Michele’s brief impromptu speech caught the attention of the German thought police.
She was detained, interrogated, released and an |”investigation” begun to see whether she had violated Sec. 130 of the German Criminal Code — “racial incitement of the masses”. Her speech had made no reference to race.This law, however, is used to persecute anyone who questions the Hollywood version of World War II or the Jewish tribal history more often called he holocaust. In due course, she was charged. The trial was to commence October 16.
On that day, supporters of the Canadian Association for Free Expression (CAFE) held a protest outside the German Consulate in Toronto. We had a good many discussions with curious passersby. A short video was made of the protest. Reports of the protest spread over the Internet.
We had only a vague report later that day. Something happened in the German court but both Lady Michele and her assistant Peter Rushton were under some sort of gag order. We would not learn until November 2 that the German prosecutor had, at the last minute, withdrawn the charges. The gag order was in place until the formal papers had been signed and filed.Lady Michele was free.
What’s the Use?Here’s what Peter Rushton wrote: ” It was great to see you campaigning for Michèle’s acquittal: for once the international pressure and fear of official embarrassment has succeeded!“
The fake news media may not have covered our protest but people in Germany were watching. There were several reasons likely motivating the German authorities to retreat from the battlefield having menaced Lady Michele with this case for 32 months. However, international notice and condemnation were one of them
We did our part! We did some good!
Years agoU.S. patriots had a motivational saying: “The letter not written influences no one.”
We don’t alway see the results of our actions. Sometimes, indeed, they are ignored but our input goes into the mix influencing the decision makers.
As Luther said as he nailed his 95 theses or arguments to the cathedral door in Wittenburg setting off the Protestant reformation: Here I stand, I can do no other.” ( Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders).
CAFE, Box 332, Rexdale, Ontario, M9W 5L3
The Wuhan Flu has cramped CAFE’s operations, especially holding meetings, as we do across Canada. This has had a major impact on our income. Nevertheless, we have maintained our publishing schedule, bringing out the Free Speech Monitor each month and, of course, maintaining our very active website — http://cafe.nfshost.com. Can you help make up the financial shortfall?
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