Throne, Altar, Liberty
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Friday, August 11, 2023
Be a Protestant BUT NOT A NUT!
I have borrowed the title of this essay, mutatis mutandis, from that of the fourth chapter in Dr. John R. Rice’s book I Am a Fundamentalist (1975). Dr. Rice wrote that book in the midst of the “second-degree separation” controversy that was dividing fundamentalist against fundamentalist in the 1970s. It was his answer to those fundamentalists who were on the side of “second-degree separation”. The chapter in question addresses the issue of riding hobby-horses. To give an example, he wrote “Some people are strong against apostasy and modernism, but they think a man a modernist if he gives a Christmas present or sends a Christmas greeting card, or observes Easter Sunday and preaches on the resurrection”. I know just such a nut, although he probably considers himself a charismatic rather than a fundamentalist. Another example was “There are others who think one is a modernist if he doesn’t drink carrot juice, eat whole wheat bread and wheat germ, if he doesn’t abstain from pork and coffee”. Personally, I’d be more inclined to think someone a modernist if he did those things, rather than didn’t do them. At any rate, I describe my position as orthodox rather than fundamentalist. Doctrinally, the ancient Creeds are the litmus test of orthodoxy, rather than a list of five fundamentals drawn up in the last century. Since all the fundamentals of fundamentalism are included in the Creeds, orthodoxy can be said to be more than fundamentalism, not less. With regards to practice, the biggest distinction between orthodoxy and fundamentalism is that orthodoxy rejects the idea of withdrawing from the Church because of error, doctrinal or moral, which idea is historically associated with the heresies of Novatianism and Donatism. In orthodoxy, separation from heresy and apostasy takes the form of excommunicating the heretics and apostates and the right way of dealing with institutional error is that of a reconquista rather than an exodus. That having been said, I think the distinction Dr. Rice made between his brand of fundamentalism – I would say that if all fundamentalist Baptists were like him it would be a much better movement except that the biggest problem with Baptist fundamentalism is that most fundamental Baptist preachers are would-be John R. Rices who are pale imitations at best – almost caricatures – and the kooks, can be applied to Protestants and Hyper-Protestants.
On the one hand there is Protestantism. On the other hand there is Hyper-Protestantism. Protestantism is good. Hyper-Protestantism is bad. The word “Catholic” is a useful shibboleth for distinguishing between a Protestant and a Hyper-Protestant. “Catholic” is a bad word to the Hyper-Protestant who uses it to mean everything he thinks Protestantism opposes. The English and Lutheran Reformers never used “Catholic” in this way. They referred to the errors against which they “protested” as “Romish” or “popish” to indicate that these were recent errors and errors which belonged to a particular Church, the Church governed by the Patriarch of Rome, rather than the Catholic Church, the whole of the Christian Church including all Churches governed by Apostolic bishops. Indeed, the Patriarch of Rome’s claim to have the supreme governorship over the entire Church, a claim rejected by the Churches under the other Patriarchs since Patristic days, is one of the errors of Rome against which the Reformers protested. Calling the Roman Church the Catholic Church is tantamount to accepting that error. Some Protestants today have fallen into the habit of using Catholic for the Roman Church and its members, not out of Hyper-Protestantism but out of the idea that it is respectful to call people what they call themselves. This is the same flawed reasoning that some use to justify using a person’s stated preference in pronouns rather than those which correspond to that person’s biological sex. In both cases truth is what one ends up sacrificing in the name of being polite. Protestants who use Catholic to mean “Roman Catholic” for this reason can usually be distinguished from Hyper-Protestants in that they do not speak the word as if it were a swear word in the way Hyper-Protestants do.
Catholic, an intensified compound version of the Greek word for “whole” has been used since at least the beginning of the second century when St. Ignatius of Antioch used it in his Epistle to the Smyrnaeans, to mean the Church in its entirety, the Church everywhere as opposed to the Church in just one location, the Church in Rome, for example, or the Church in Smyrna. The Catholic faith is the faith confessed by all orthodox Christians, in all orthodox Churches, everywhere, the faith confessed in the Creed. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed has the best right to be called the Catholic Creed in that it was accepted by all the ancient Churches before there was any break in fellowship between them and is still accepted by them today, the dispute over the wording that divided East from West notwithstanding. This Creed was developed by the first two Ecumenical Councils – Councils to which the government of the entire Church, everywhere was invited to participate – in the fourth century, taking an earlier, local form of the Creed, as its template. The shorter but similarly worded Apostles’ Creed, developed out of the form of the Creed used by the Church in Rome in baptisms at least as early as the second century. The similarity between the two suggests that the forms out of which both were developed were themselves versions of an earlier template that most likely goes back to the Apostles. Hints of such a form that pre-dated the writing of the New Testament are dropped from time to time by St. Paul in his epistles and this would explain the antiquity of the origin story from which the Apostles’ Creed derives its name, the origin story being basically true, but referring to the earliest form of the Creed, from which multiple local versions were derived, two of which eventually became the Apostles’ and Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creeds. In the fifth century, after the third Ecumenical Council but before the fourth, in the period when the fellowship of the ancient Churches was first broken, St. Vincent, a monk in Lerins Abbey on one of the islands of the same name off the coast of the French Riviera, wrote his Commonitorium under the pseudonym “Peregrinus” in which he explored the question of how to distinguish true Catholic doctrine from heresy, famously stating that in the Catholic Church care must be taken to “hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, and by all”. He is often said to have proposed three tests of Catholicity, but in actuality he proposed four. The first test is that the doctrine must be derived from the Holy Scriptures. This first Catholic principle of St. Vincent is identical to the first principle of Protestantism. The other three tests pertain to the interpretation of Scripture and they are universality (an interpretation is not Catholic if it is only found in one region of the Church), antiquity (an interpretation is not Catholic if it does not go back to the earliest centuries of the Church but is instead of late origin and contained within a particular timespan rather than being taught in all times of the Church) and consent (formal acknowledgement by the authorities of the Church, preferably at the Ecumenical level).
None of the doctrines that the early Reformers, English and Lutheran, protested against in the teachings of the Church of Rome are affirmed as articles of faith in the Creed, Apostles’ or Nicene-Constantinopolitan. With one possible exception, none of the practices of the Roman Church that these Reformers objected to can withstand the Vincentian tests.
We shall return to that possible exception momentarily. First I wish to observe that Hyper-Protestantism gets the word Protestant as wrong as it gets the word Catholic. Most Hyper-Protestants use the word Protestant as if the word were synonymous with “Calvinist”. This is true even of many Hyper-Protestants who would object to being called Calvinists themselves on the grounds that they are Arminians. Arminianism is to Calvinism what heresy is to orthodox Christianity in general, a defective form. Of course, what I am calling Calvinism here is not actually Calvinism in the sense of “the teachings of John Calvin”. John Calvin himself was closer to Lutheranism than to what has been called Calvinism since the seventeenth century. Dr. Luther would not appreciate hearing that not only because he regarded Calvin’s view of the Eucharist as rank heresy but also because he objected to a movement being named after him in the first place. Calvin, however, as is clear from his writings, was Lutheran in his views of the extent of the Atonement and assurance of salvation, rather than Calvinist. John Calvin was to Lutheranism, what Jacob Arminius and his followers were to Calvinism, which ought to be called either Bezism or Dortism, after its true fathers, Theodore Beza and the Reformed Synod of Dort. Protestant, however, is the general term for all the Christians who threw off the usurped supremacy of the Patriarch of Rome in the sixteenth century. In the best sense of the word, it is defined only by the doctrines that set the earliest and most conservative of the Reformers apart from Rome rather than by doctrines distinctive of any of the more specific traditions that emerged from the Reformation. If we have to define Protestantism by the doctrines of a specific tradition, Lutheranism has a better claim to being that tradition than Calvinism, being the original Protestant tradition of which John Calvin’s Calvinism was a deviation, from which deviation Theodore Beza and the Synod of Dort further deviated with their “Calvinism”, of which Arminianism is a yet further deviation.
The doctrines of the general Reformation, that is to say what the Reformers positively affirmed rather than merely what they denied in Rome’s teachings, are today commonly summed up in the five solae – sola Scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide, solus Christus, soli Deo Gloria. This is not the best formulation, in my opinion. It does not date to the Reformation itself, but only to the last century. It is a Calvinist formulation. One of the most important teachings of the Reformers is missing from it. Sola Scriptura can be easily misinterpreted to mean something that Dr. Luther and the English Reformers would have found abhorrent, i.e., the idea that the Bible can and should be privately interpreted in isolation from tradition and the Church. The other solas can be summed up in a single doctrine – the freeness of salvation as the gift of God. If I were to come up with a formula summarizing the doctrines of the general Reformation it would be:
– The supremacy of Scripture as the written Word of God
– The freeness of salvation as the gift of God
– The Gospel is the assurance of salvation to all who believe it
The last of these was absolutely essential to the Reformation. It was the search for such that led Dr. Luther to the Pauline epistles on justification and to oppose the carrot-on-a-stick approach coupled with the outright sale of salvation to which Rome had stooped at that point in time. John Calvin was as one with Dr. Luther on this. Those who would later call themselves “Calvinists” were and are not in accord with either Luther or Calvin but actually offend against this truth worse than Rome. In their theology the Gospel cannot assure anyone of salvation because Jesus came only to save a handful of pre-selected individuals. Nobody can really know that he is among the chosen few. He must constantly look for evidence of his regeneration in his own works, but can draw no lasting comfort, because if he falls away it will demonstrate he was not really regenerate, which remains a possibility until the very end of his life. Consider what such “Calvinists” as John Piper and John F. MacArthur Jr. have to say about assurance of salvation today. Both take the position that the Gospel cannot fully assure those who believe it of their own salvation because they must prove their faith to be real to themselves by finding evidence of it in their works, a position explicitly condemned by both Dr. Luther and John Calvin, and solidly rejected in the Lutheran tradition to this day. MacArthur, who has been unsound on all sorts of other matters, including at one point a key element of Nicene Christology, wrote not one, not two, but three books arguing this point, proving only that he wouldn’t be able to tell the Law from the Gospel if the difference between the two were to take anthropomorphic form and walk up and smack him upside the head. Piper is more subtle, like the serpent in the Garden. He merely slips nuggets of the faith-based-on-works error such as “assurance is partially based on objective evidences for Christian truth” into presentations that contain a lot of sounder statements. The Reformation truth is that while faith is accompanied by the repentance that the Law works in us by convicting us of our sin and by the works that spring from the Christian love worked in us by the love of God received through faith, these accompanying things are not part of the basis of faith which rests on nothing but the Gospel, the objective message that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, has saved all who believe in Him by dying for their sins on the Cross and rising from the dead, which message is proclaimed both in Word and Sacrament, and that the faith that rests on that objective Truth is itself the subjective experience of assurance of salvation. The subjective experience, faith which is assurance (Heb. 11:1), must rest entirely on the solid rock of what is objective, the Gospel, for if it rests partly on that solid rock, and partly on grounds that are themselves subjective, our experiences and works, it will be most unstable indeed. The Hyper-Protestant Puritanism, that in addition to being regicidal, tyrannical, and opposed to all joy, defected from Calvin’s teachings in precisely this way, and one of its fruit, alongside the evils of the Modern Age – liberalism, Communism, and Americanism – was a psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually crippling dearth of assurance and plague of despair.
Nothing in these basic truths of the Reformation conflicts with anything in the Creed. Nor do they conflict with the teachings, practices, and forms of worship common to all the ancient Churches, i.e., the Catholic tradition. They place Protestantism in opposition to such late Medieval Roman doctrines as human merit, supererogatory works (the idea that someone other than Jesus can do works over and above what is required of him and so contribute to someone else’s salvation), and the whole general impression Rome was giving that salvation was a reward for dotting all your is and crossing all your ts, but not with the Catholic faith held throughout the Church everywhere, in all ages, since the Apostles. Basic Protestantism, therefore, is in conflict with Romanism not Catholicism, and since the Catholic faith of the Creed is the basic Christian faith, to be a good Protestant, one must first be a Catholic. The essential distinction between Hyper-Protestantism and Protestantism is that Hyper-Protestantism opposes what is Catholic and not merely Roman.
I do not mean that Hyper-Protestantism rejects the Creed, necessarily, although Hyper-Protestants generally do not hold to the necessity of organizational and organic continuity with the Apostolic Church in Jerusalem, making it rather difficult for them to confess the ninth Article about the “Holy Catholick Church”, at least with a sense that would have been recognized by any Christian anywhere prior to the Reformation. What I mean is that Hyper-Protestants reject the Catholic tradition wholesale except for elements that they cannot deny are Scriptural. If there is a traditional practice of the Roman Church that the Hyper-Protestant cannot find a Scriptural text that says you must do it this way, the Hyper-Protestant will say that you must not do it that way, even if there is no Scriptural text forbidding it, and every other ancient Church does it that way, not just the Roman. This is called the regulative principle. Although it appears in most of the important Calvinist confessions, it was actually far more typical of Zwingli’s approach than of Calvin’s. Indeed, while Zwingli had already been practicing it in Zurich for about half a decade before the rise of Anabaptism, the movement of Continental Hyper-Protestant schismatics who took their cue from Zwingli rather than Luther and Calvin but whose radicalism brought about a break with all of the Magisterial Reformers including Zwingli himself, it was the Anabaptists who first articulated it as a stated principle. It was Conrad Grebel, the founder of the Swiss Brethren, an Anabaptist sect who raised it in arguing for the Anabaptist position on baptism, the argument going that because there is no specific command to baptize infants in the New Testament it must therefore be prohibited. Grebel pointed to Tertullian, the second to third century apologist, as having taught the regulative principle. Since it only appeared in Tertullian’s writings after he joined the ultra-rigid Montanists towards the end of his life, this was not exactly a good argument for the principle. Especially since it is impossible to reconcile that principle with the doctrine of Christian liberty taught by St. Paul in his epistles.
The opposite of the regulative principle it the normative principle. In its simplest, this is the idea that if the Scripture does not forbid you to do something, you are permitted to do it. There is obviously no conflict between this principle and the Pauline doctrine of Christian liberty. It can, however, depending upon how it is interpreted in its implications, conflict with the Pauline doctrine of orderly worship and conduct in the Church. One version of the normative principle, primarily associated with evangelical and especially charismatic worship in the twentieth century, is the idea of eliminating all or almost all formal structure and allowing everyone from the preacher to those providing the music to the congregants in the pew to each do his own thing as he thinks the Holy Ghost is leading. This sounds like a recipe of chaos and in some instances this is exactly what it produces. More often, however, the result in practice is that the worship service ends up resembling a performance at a theatre, an evening in a night club, or some other secular activity that in no way resembles a Church service.
By contrast there is the version of the normative principle employed by Dr. Luther and the English Reformers. In this version, the normative principle was applied to the pre-Reformation tradition of the Church and whatever in that tradition was not found to be prohibited by Scripture or to otherwise contradict Scripture was maintained. This is what is most consistent with both the Pauline doctrine of Christian liberty and the Pauline doctrine of orderly worship and conduct. In the Anglican Church’s Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1571) it is spelled out in Article XX “Of the Authority of the Church” which reads:
The Church hath power to decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority in Controversies of Faith: And yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God’s Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another. Wherefore, although the Church be a witness and a keeper of holy Writ, yet, as it ought not to decree any thing against the same, so besides the same ought it not to enforce any thing to be believed for necessity of Salvation.
In the Lutheran Book of Concord it is found in Lutheranism’s Augsburg Confession (1530) in Article XV “Of Ecclesiastical Usages” in the first section of the Article:
Of Usages in the Church they teach that those ought to be observed which may be observed without sin, and which are profitable unto tranquillity and good order in the Church, as particular holy days, festivals, and the like.
Put into practice, the result was that those things which the Anglican Church and the Lutherans rejected were Roman, that is to say, distinctive of the Roman Church after the Great Schism and often quite later than that, whereas those things which were retained were Catholic, that is, common to all the ancient Church – the Church of Rome, the other four ancient Patriarchates in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and even the Assyrian and Oriental Orthodox Churches the fellowship of which with the larger Church was broken beginning in the fifth century AD. In the Lutheran and Anglican traditions, Protestantism is a Reformed Catholicism, not the wholesale rejection of Catholicism except for everything that cannot be jettisoned on account of its being undeniably Scriptural that is Hyper-Protestantism.
In the Anglican Church there are those who bristle at the thought of our Church being Catholic, despite Catholic being used in only a positive sense in all of the Anglican formularies, including the Book of Common Prayer. I do not say that these are Hyper-Protestants, although they have several of the traits of Hyper-Protestantism. They often try to claim that the Articles of Religion can only be read rightly in accordance with as Calvinist interpretation as possible, despite the fact that when the Articles touch on issues where there is a difference of opinion between the continental Protestant traditions, such as Predestination and Election in Article XVII, they are written in such a way that either Lutherans or Calvinists could affirm them (there is no mention of Reprobation, which Calvinists accept and Lutherans reject, in the Article). The Articles of Religion, like the Anglican Formularies in general, were irenicons, drafted so as to minimize conflict among members of the Church of England, whether it be conflict between those who see the Church as Catholic first and Protestant second and those who see it the other way around, or between those whose Protestantism was more Lutheran and those whose Protestantism was more Calvinist. The Anglicans who want the Anglican Church to be only Protestant often make arguments that seemingly presuppose the regulative principle, despite the Articles’ affirmation of the normative. This past weekend I engaged in an online discussion with them on a matter that might seem to be an exception to the rule that the English Reformers rejected only what was Roman and kept all that is Catholic.
That matter occurs in Article XXII of the Articles of Religion. I am not referring to the main subject of that Article which is Purgatory. Purgatory is a Roman doctrine, not a Catholic doctrine. While some of the ideas associated with it go back much further, Purgatory itself dates to the end of the twelfth century, the century after the Great Schism, and is not an official doctrine of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Indeed, the Eastern Orthodox opposed the doctrine following the attempt at reunification in the Second Council of Lyon (1272-1274). There have been and are different schools within Eastern Orthodoxy that have held different views on the matter. The ones who came closest to Rome were the seventeenth century prelates such as Peter of Moghilia and Dositheus of Jerusalem who reacted against the “Calvinist” Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, Cyril Lucaris, and in doing so produced Confessions that affirmed Purgatory in all but name. The rejection of the name is more significant than the affirmation of the doctrine as these men were representative only of their own time in this. Most Eastern Orthodox schools of thought reject the doctrine as well as the name, and interestingly enough there has been a heated on-and-off controversy in the Eastern Church over “Aerial Toll Houses”, a different concept of an intermediate state from that of Purgatory, the most recent flare up in the controversy being in the last century. The Armenian Apostolic and Coptic Orthodox Churches both reject Purgatory and I suspect this is true of the other Non-Chalcedonian Churches. Thus, Purgatory does not pass the Vincentian tests of Catholicity and is a distinctly Roman error. The matter in question is found among those tucked in with Purgatory in this Article. Here is Article XXII in full:
The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints, is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.
Note in passing the use of the word “Romish” rather than “Catholic”.
The discussion began with someone sharing the quotation “If you think you need a mediator with Jesus; you don’t know Jesus”. Now, there is nothing wrong with these words taken in their plain, ordinary, sense. There is One God, St. Paul declares, and One Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus (1 Tim. 2:5). You do not need a mediator between yourself and the Mediator. The man being quoted, however, was James R. White, a Reformed Baptist minister and the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries. This is a man who never misses an opportunity to throw the Catholic baby out with the Roman bathwater. A few years ago I thoroughly rebutted his attempt to have it both ways on Nestorianism and “the Mother of God”, something not uncommon among Calvinists, as well as his embrace of “scientific” textual criticism as applied to the New Testament, the gateway drug to “higher criticism” an error he could easily have avoided had he applied the Vincentian Catholic principle to textual criticism and adopted the position that the true text of the New Testament is the text received by the Church everywhere, always, and by all, with the recognition that in areas of the Church where another language predominates that text may find representation in a “Vulgate” of the dominant language, such as the Latin Vulgate in the Roman Church, and the Authorized Bible in the English Church. I observed the possibility that by “mediator” White might actually have meant “intermediary”. Hyper-Protestants reject the Apostolic priesthood of the Church, despite its being there in the New Testament, because they reject the idea of intermediaries between Jesus and the individual believer, condemning themselves in the process because they accept the necessity of preaching, and preachers are intermediaries between Jesus and the individual believer in precisely the same way that Apostolic priests are, not gatekeepers who decide who gets to see Jesus, but stewards appointed to bring Jesus to each individual through their dual ministry of Word and Sacrament.
As it turned out, however, the discussion went down a different road than that. What the person who posted the quote from James White and those who agreed with him were interested in condemning was the practice of asking the saints to pray for them.
Now this is not something that I do myself. I have never had any interest in doing this, much less a compelling urge to do so. It is, however, something that is done in all the ancient Churches – Roman, Eastern Orthodox, Non-Chalcedonian, and Assyrian – and so cannot be said to be a distinctly Roman practice. The only case that can be made against it being Catholic is that it can only be traced back for certain to the third century. In St. Clement of Rome’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, written before the end of the first century, around the time St. John was writing the Book of Revelation, this early Roman bishop and companion of St. Paul talks in what is usually numbered as the fifty sixth chapter about remembering those who, having fallen into sin, had submitted in meekness and humility to the will of God, to God and the saints. The wording is ambiguous and the saints mentioned here could be the living members of the Church, but especially since everywhere else in the epistle St. Clement refers to these as brethren, this could also be the earliest reference to the practice in question, in which case it most decidedly is Catholic, this earliest of the writings of the Apostolic Fathers having been regularly read in the Churches along with the Sacred texts in the early centuries and considered, although ultimately rejected, for canonical status. Even if St. Clement is not a first century witness to the practice, the third century predates both the first Ecumenical Council and the rise of Emperor Constantine who is usually regarded as the founder of “Catholicism” by the restorationist type of Hyper-Protestant, the historical illiterate who thinks that the Church apostatized the moment Christianity was legalized (a view these type of Hyper-Protestants share with all the heretical sects they call cults) . It is recommended by both St. John Chrysostom and St. Augustine in the fourth century, neither of whom was known as an innovator and both of whom would have staunchly rejected it had it been inconsistent with orthodox Christianity as it had come down to them. Indeed, the idea of the Intercession of the Saints – that the faithful who have gone on to the next life are praying for us in Heaven – that is associated with the practice, and often but not always denied by those who reject it, can be traced back with certainty much earlier than the practice, being frequently mentioned in the Apostolic Fathers. For that matter, it appears in the Bible itself in Revelation 5:8 where the twenty-four elders are depicted as holding golden vials, filled with odours that are the “prayers of the saints” (if the “saints” here are taken to be the saints on Earth, the image is even stronger, for it suggests that it is the saints in Heaven who bring before the Throne the prayers of the saints on Earth), which raises a few questions about the Scriptural literacy of those who loudly trumpet their belief in “Sola Scriptura” while denying that the faithful departed pray for us. An even more important doctrine is at stake in this dispute, however, the doctrine of “The Communion of the Saints” that is indisputably Catholic, confessed in the Apostles’ version of the Creed, and held even by those ancient Churches that use only the Nicene and not the Apostles’ Creed. It was for the sake of this Truth, not the practice itself per se, that when I realized what was being argued, I joined in the argument on the side of the defenders of the practice.
A word here about, well, words, is in order. Those on the other side of the debate consistently spoke of the practice of asking the faithful departed for their prayers as “praying to the saints”. I consistently referred to it as asking for their prayers. I would not have been comfortable making the arguments I made, even in defence of the Truth confessed in the Creed, using the same language as the other side. The English word “pray”, comes to us through French, from a Latin word meaning “ask, beg, request, entreat” and in earlier centuries was used in a more general sense. “I pray thee”, contracted to “prithee” used to be a common synonym for “please” and was used with requests made of other people. For most people, however, “pray” has long ceased to be a synonym for “ask” in general, and is now limited to requests made as acts of worship. This being the case, I would say that the word should be reserved for requests made directly to God, and not used of the act of requesting that others pray for you. There are two entirely different arguments here depending upon whether we follow that rule or not. One is an argument about whether we should make the same kind of requests of the faithful departed that we make of God, in which case the right is on the side of those who say no, we should not. The other is an argument about whether we should make the same kind of requests of the faithful departed that we make of other living Christians. It is in regards to this second argument that I would say that since the practice is Catholic and not just Roman and based on “the Communion of the Saints” confessed in the Creed a strong burden of proof must be placed on those who say it isn’t allowed to prove their case from the Scriptures, which I do not think they can do. I will note that the language of “praying to the saints” is sometimes used by defenders of the practice among those Churches who practice it, undermining their own position in my opinion. It has been my observation, however, that this language is far more likely to be used by less-informed lay people in these Churches than in official ecclesiastical statements. On a related note, the frequent heard accusation by Hyper-Protestants against the Roman Church, and sometimes the other ancient Churches, that they pray more to Mary and the saints than to God, has no validity with regards to prayers used in public worship, although it may sometimes be warranted in the case of private practice, just as private Protestants may distort things in private in a way unsanctioned by their Church or sect. In Eastern Orthodoxy, one of the most popular prayers, if not the most popular, is a prayer addressed to Jesus – it is actually called “The Jesus Prayer” – and virtually indistinguishable from the one that in evangelical circles is often substituted for “believe” in presentations of the Gospel and treated as if it were a magical incantation the reciting of which mechanically transforms one into a Christian. The act of asking the Saints or Mary to grant something in their own power is not sanctioned by any Church and is, of course, idolatry. This is not to say that it is not superstitiously done by the ignorant, but the only requests directed towards anyone other than God in the liturgies of any of the ancient Churches are requests for prayer.
When I raised the point of the difference between praying to someone and asking them to pray for you in the debate someone pointed out that Article XXII speaks of “invocation of Saints” and argued that “invocation” is a broader term and includes all forms of address not just prayer. My response was to point out that in that case technically the Article forbids asking living Christians to pray for us as well. For, as the type of Hyper-Protestant who does not understand how language works and that a word can have a narrower as well as a wider meaning and so condemns the use of “Saint” as a title likes to point out, all Christians are Saints in the most basic sense of the word.
So what about Article XXII? Do the Articles of Religion depart from the normative principle affirmed in Article XXII by condemning a practice “invocation of Saints” that is truly Catholic rather than merely Roman?
As the saying goes “it’s complicated”. The Articles affirm the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds as well as the Athanasian (more an annotated version of the Apostles’ than a distinct Creed in its own right) in Article VIII saying these are “proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture”. Thus, they cannot mean in Article XXII that the doctrine of the “Communion of the Saints” confessed in the Apostles’ Creed is “grounded upon no warranty of Scripture” when they seemingly impugn the practice based on this doctrine. This raises the question of whether the practice and the doctrine can be so separated that one can affirm one without the other. If they cannot, then either the Articles contradict themselves, a possibility as they, not being Holy Scripture, are not infallible, something those Anglicans which insist so strongly on their Protestantism might try to remember, or, as the wording of the Article allows, the “fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God” is not “invocation of Saints” per se but the “Romish doctrine” concerning it. John Henry Newman tried to make this last argument with regards to the main subject of the Article, Purgatory, in the last of the Tracts for the Times before he crossed the Tiber. His argument was not particularly convincing, although it could possibly be made more strongly for “invocation of Saints” than for Purgatory based on invocation being Catholic and Purgatory distinctly Roman, potentially allowing for “the Romish doctrine” about “invocation of Saints” being asking them to intercede for those in Purgatory. I’m not going to press that interpretation as it seems highly unlikely that this is what was meant in the days of the Elizabethan Settlement by those who came up with the final draft of the Articles. Historically it was not until the Tractarians that High Churchmen thought to understand the Article in any way other than as completely forbidding the practice as demonstrated by it being a point of contention between the Non-Jurors and the Eastern Orthodox in the unsuccessful attempt to bring the two into communion in the early eighteenth century, about a century before the Oxford Movement. Neither, however, am I going to say that the Articles do contradict themselves. Rather, I am going to take the position that Article XXII as an exercise of that “power to decree Rites or Ceremonies” affirmed of the Church in the same Article that affirms the Normative Principle and as thus binding upon the province of the Holy Catholic Church that is the Anglican Church in terms of practice and not an authoritative statement dictating what we are to think about the practice, a position quite in keeping with the spirit of the court of Elizabeth I, who understood well that her God-given authority to regulate the Church for the sake of the peace of her realm was limited to the public exercise of religion and did not extend to the private consciences of men, something monarchs reigning by divine right understand a lot better than politicians elected by the mob. In keeping with this position on Article XXII which is in accordance with my own non-participation in this practice as a member of the Anglican Church, I shall now discuss the matter of whether or not the practice violates Scriptural prohibitions and/or principles. My position is that it does not.
Now, in the debate last weekend, those on the other side were arguing for something and not just against something. What they were arguing for was that Jesus Christ is the only Mediator, that His One Sacrifice is sufficient and that nothing anyone else does can add anything to it, that He is accessible through prayer to all believers and that we don’t need to go through anyone else to get to Him, and that we should not direct towards creatures that which belongs to God alone. With none of this, did I, or anyone else on my side of the debate, disagree, and indeed, I, and I would assume everyone on both sides, would affirm all of this. Those on my side were also arguing for something, and not just the practice of asking the faithful in Heaven to pray for you, but a truth we confess every time we confess the Apostles’ Creed.
Before I even entered this conversation, others on the side that I took had already asked the other side whether or not they ever asked members of their parishes to pray for them. The point of the question, of course, was that if asking the faithful departed to pray for you somehow takes away from Christ’s sole Mediatorship, implies a deficiency in His Sacrifice, or suggest the idea that we need to go through someone else to get to Jesus, then this is also true of asking living believers to pray for us. This point is entirely valid, and I further observed that it cuts both ways. If in asking another Christian for prayer we do so in a way that transgresses by inappropriately offering to our fellow Christian the prayer that we should be addressing to God alone we have transgressed regardless of whether that fellow Christian is alive or dead. If, on the other hand, we ask other Christians for their prayers in accordance with the Scriptures, then it is Scriptural regardless of whether the other Christians are part of the Church Militant – the Church on earth – or the Church Triumphant – the Church in Heaven.
The other side always answered the question with yes. They justified the inconsistency in their position by saying that the New Testament tells us as Christians to ask our living brethren for their prayers. This, while not wrong exactly, is a bit misleading. In the New Testament you find St. Paul requesting the prayers of the Roman Christians (Rom. 15:30), the Colossians (Col. 4:3), and the Thessalonians (1 Thess. 5:25, 2 Thess. 3:1). You find him telling several different groups of Christians that they are always in his prayers (Rom. 1:8-9, Col. 1:9-10, Phil. 1:3-4). There is St. James’ instructions to pray for one another (Jas. 5:16). There are also general instructions to pray for all Christians (Eph. 6:18) or even more generally, all people of all sorts (1 Tim. 2:1) as well as instructions to bear one another’s burdens (Gal. 6:2) and to encourage and build one another up (1 Thess. 5:11). Those opposed to asking the faithful departed for their prayers say that nowhere in all of these passages is there an example of someone asking the departed for their prayers or an instruction to ask the departed specifically for their prayers. With regards to the second point, however, nowhere are we told not to ask the departed faithful for their prayers. With regards to the first, while obviously those to whom St. Paul wrote requesting prayer were living at the time, he did not tell them to stop praying for him when their earthly sojourn was over and they departed to be with Christ. No, I am being neither facetious nor flippant. Those who are opposed to asking the faithful departed for their prayers are generally also opposed to praying for the faithful departed. Praying for the faithful departed is another practice that is Catholic – shared by all the ancient Churches, not just Rome. St. James’ instructions to pray for one another can be reasonably taken to exclude the departed as those for whom the prayer is to be offered because he is not talking about prayers in general but specifically about prayer for healing. However, prayers for the faithful departed are clearly not prohibited in the New Testament because St. Paul offers up just such a prayer for Onesiphorus in 2 Tim. 1:18. For that matter, every prayer in the New Testament that resulted in a resurrection was obviously a prayer for the departed. If this aspect of Catholic practice, prayers for the faithful departed, can be proven by the New Testament, and in case you failed to notice I just proved it from the New Testament, then the other side of the same coin, asking the faithful departed for their prayers can hardly be excluded simply because there is neither example nor instructions for it specifically can be found. I emphasize the word specifically because the burden on those opposed to asking the departed for their prayers is actually heavier than that which the normative principle implies. Their burden is to prove that the faithful departed, the Church Militant, are excluded from the general instructions to bear one another’s burdens, encourage, and build one another up, in all of which praying for one another in a more general sense than in James is included.
This is a burden of proof they cannot meet. Indeed, their assumption that the faithful departed are automatically excluded from the New Testament’s instructions to Christians to pray for one another and bear their burdens, is an assumption that contradicts the entire New Testament on the subject of the union between believers with Christ and through Christ each other in the Church, a union that cannot be broken by death. The faithful departed, including the Old Testament saints, are depicted by St. Paul in Hebrews 12 as “so great a cloud of witnesses” on account of which we should “lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us” so that we may “run with patience the race that is set before us”. Later in the same chapter when the Apostle uses Mt. Sinai and Mt. Zion as symbols of the Law and Gospel covenants respectively, he tells his Hebrew Christian readers “ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to an innumerable company of angels, To the general assembly and church of the firstborn, which are written in heaven, and to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect” (vv. 22-23) which would be an incredibly strange way of wording it if he thought death to be an impassible barrier between the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant. Not only are the faithful departed depicted as a “cloud of witnesses” encompassing us, but believers in their earthly sojourn are depicted as having already joined them in Heaven, “And hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 2:6)
The New Testament teaches that on the first Whitsunday (the Christian Pentecost), the Holy Ghost came down from Heaven and united the disciples with Jesus Christ, Who had died, descended as Conqueror into Hell (the Kingdom of death), rose again from the dead, and ascended to Heaven where He sat down at the right hand of God the Father. This union formed the Church, a united body in which Jesus Christ is Head, and all who are baptized into the Christian faith are members. In the establishment of the Church the Old Testament saints, that is, those in the Old Testament who were not just members of the Covenant nation of Israel physically, but were also members of the spiritual Congregation of the Lord, who had been awaiting their redemption in the Kingdom of death, were released by Jesus Christ, and taken up to Heaven with Him when He returned there, were also joined that all of God’s saints in all ages would be part of the one Body of Christ. In the Church, each individual Christian is united with Jesus Christ, and through Jesus Christ with each other. Jesus Christ having already conquered death, believers being described as having “passed from death unto life” (past tense) and having “everlasting life” (present tense) in this life (Jn. 5:24), death cannot break this union and divide those who have departed this world from those who remain. In Jesus Christ and to Jesus Christ, all believers are alive eternally:
I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. (Jn. 11:25-26)
After all, as He said to the Sadducees in rebuking their denial of the resurrection, “He is not the God of the dead, but of the living” (Mk. 12:27).
This is what the Communion of the Saints that we confess in the Apostles’ Creed is all about.
Those who condemn the practice of asking the Church Triumphant to pray with you and for you just as you might ask the person sitting in the pew next to you to do so seem to have a much harder time in affirming this New Testament truth as those of us who do not wish to throw the Catholic baby out with the Roman bathwater have in affirming the truth of Jesus’ sole Mediatorship – even Rome affirms this – which they think, mistakenly, they are safeguarding. That is a pretty strong indicator that they are the ones in error here.
Another such indicator is how quickly they descend into vulgar abuse when they cannot answer questions. Unable to answer how their position is consistent with the New Testament teaching that all believers are one in Him to Whom there is no living and dead, they resort to accusations of occult superstition. Asking the departed faithful to pray for you, they say, violates the Old Testament prohibitions against such things as necromancy, witchcraft, séances and the like. Anybody who knows anything about these practices knows that they are worlds removed from asking the faithful departed for their prayers. The practices condemned in the Old Testament involve summoning the spirits of the dead as if they were your personal slaves, either to obtain information from them, use them to manipulate the natural world in a supernatural way, or both. There is no acknowledgement of God in these practices, the spirits of the dead qua spirits of the dead are invoked, the power to summon them is thought to be inherent in either the ritual used or the summonor, and the power to do what the summonor wants or tell him what he wants is thought to belong to the spirit. Suggesting that the Catholic practice falls into this category is just a cheap insult. The type one would expect from the sort of person who speaks of ecclesiastical bodies which confess Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour, in the words of the ancient Creeds, as possessing the “spirit of Antichrist”.
The New Testament tells us who “Antichrist” is. “Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ?” St. John writes in 1 John 2:22, “He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son.” The Patriarch of Rome has been guilty of overstepping the boundaries of his jurisdiction, usurping a supremacy over the entire Church, and teaching various errors, among them his own infallibility, but as someone who confesses the faith of Jesus Christ in the orthodox form of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and governs a Church that confesses this, the Apostles’ and the Athanasian Creeds, he cannot be the Antichrist. What does it say about Hyper-Protestants that whenever they use the word “Antichrist” it is in association with the Roman Patriarch and his Church?
Indeed, there is another type of Hyper-Protestant than the Calvinist type I have been addressing. In addition to identifying the Patriarch of Rome as the “Antichrist” and the Church he governs as “Mystery Babylon”, this type insists that that adherents of another world religion that literally fits the description of the Antichrist in 1 John 2:22 in that it, like Christianity, claims to have inherited the mantle of the Old Testament religion but departs from Christianity on precisely the point that it denies “that Jesus is the Christ”, cannot be criticized without incurring the curse of Genesis 12:3, as if St. Paul had not identified for Christians once and for all Who the Seed of Abraham is in Galatians 3:16. I know Hyper-Protestants of this type who cannot stand to hear anything negative, no matter how true, said about this other world religion and its adherents, but who believe and regurgitate every last piece of conspiratorial drivel they hear, not only about the Patriarch of Rome and his Church, but about all the ancient Churches so that basically, while believing nothing but good about people who deny that Jesus is the Christ, they write off the vast majority of people in the world today and who have ever lived who confess that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God, their Lord and Saviour, since the majority of people in the world today and who have ever lived who confess Jesus as Christ, Son of God, Lord and Saviour, have belonged to the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and other ancient Churches. These same Hyper-Protestants claim to be Spirit-filled and Spirit-led Christians. One would think that if the Spirit that filled and led them were the Holy Ghost, He would convict them of the sin of participating in the last socially acceptable bigotry (except the genocidal anti-white racial hatred currently being displayed by “anti-racist” academics and activists), anti-Catholic bigotry.
Be a Protestant, but don’t be a Hyper-Protestant nut! — Gerry T. Neal