Introductory comments by Web Master:

The book below, which was written by Charles W. Moore, presents historical background and arguments concerning restoration of Christian unity. It is extremely well written and except for expected differences, due to faith backgrounds, I highly endorse it as being informative to Catholics, Orthodox, and other Christian believers. NOTE: Colorization has been added.

THAT THEY MAY BE ONE

To heal the scandal of the fragmented Church

By CHARLES W. MOORE
1997 Copyright © 1997 -- All rights reserved.
Web published here by permission.

PREFACE

PART I CHRISTIANITY IN CRISIS
Chapter 1: HOW DID CHRISTIANITY GO OFF THE RAILS?
Chapter 2: THE PROBLEM WITH PROTESTANTISM
Chapter 3: RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION
Chapter 4: THE END OF CATHOLIC CULTURE
Chapter 5: THE SPIRIT OF SKEPTICISM
Chapter 6: SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE REFORMATION
Chapter 7: LIBERAL HUMANISM
Chapter 8: THE LONG ROAD BACK TO CHRISTIAN UNITY
Chapter 9: The strange case of how 2,000 protestant Evangelicals ended up joining the Orthodox church
Chapter 10: ONE LORD, ONE FAITH, ONE BAPTISM
Chapter 11: What the Church Is Not: Liberal Mainline Protestantism and "Protestantized" North American Catholicism

PART II DIFFICULTIES
CHAPTER 12: AUTHORITY
Chapter 13: SACRAMENTAL GRACE
Chapter 14: THE EUCHARIST
Chapter 15: THE APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION
Chapter 16: CONFESSION AND ABSOLUTION
Chapter 17: LITURGICAL WORSHIP
Chapter 18: VENERATION OF MARY AND THE SAINTS
Chapter 19: PRAYERS TO MARY AND THE SAINTS
Chapter 20: MANDATORY CELIBACY IN THE PRIESTHOOD
Chapter 21: "CALL NO MAN FATHER"
Chapter 22: PURGATORY
Chapter 23: ICONS, RELICS, AND IMAGES
Chapter 24: THE TRADITION

Part III WHAT IS THE CHURCH?
Chapter 25: THE TASK

"Now I plead with you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and the same judgment." (1 Cor. 1: 10)

"The Christian Church is in one hell of a situation."

Anglican Catholic

PREFACE

"And one might therefore say of me that in this book I have only made up a bunch of other people's flowers, and that of my own I have only provided the string that ties them together."

Monteigne

This book is about a big idea -the oneness of the Christian Faith- nothing less than restoring the doctrinally unified, undivided Christian Church that existed prior to the Great East-West Schism of c.1054 AD. It may be too big an idea for one little book; but I hope what follows here will serve as a catalyst for thought and discussion. This much I am sure of: having His Church divided, let alone fragmented into literally thousands of competing--all too often warring--denominational factions cannot possibly be God's will.

Jesus prayed: "Holy Father, keep through Your name those whom You have given Me, that they may be one as We are." (St. John 17: 11) So, while the idea that this book articulates and advocates may be overly optimistic, I believe that it is worthy. The divided Church is a tragedy and a scandal. It is sinful. It needs to be healed.

A divided Church presents a disastrous witness to the unity in Christ we purport to affirm. No one in his right mind would argue that the voice of a unified Church would not be vastly more effective in witnessing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to a broken and sinful world, than is the cacophonous babel of contradictory Christian positions that exist today.

It was not always so of course. Throughout the first Christian millennium, the Church spoke with one voice. Divers heresies cropped up to challenge unity and sound doctrine during those thousand years, but the Church managed to stay one--as Christ desires. The first great Christian schism, between Rome and Constantinople, accrued honour to neither party, but at least it could be said that both sides in the dispute retained orthodox doctrine--the sacred Deposit of Faith.

The second schismatic wave that occurred 500 years later inadvertently precipitated a descent into heresy and apostasy that destroyed Christian culture and set in motion a process of philosophical and moral decay, from which it is as yet unclear whether the Church will survive as more than a tiny, culturally irrelevant, island of faith in a vast roiling sea of pagan secular barbarism.

In this book I shall attempt to explain how we got into these regrettable circumstances. It is necessary to have some understanding of the Church's history in order to make an informed evaluation of what caused the fragmentation of Christendom, and to decide whether those reasons stand up to scrutiny. What I have to say on the pages that follow will not be a comfortable message for many, and it is certainly inadequate as a prescription for healing the Church. I do hope however that my thesis herein might serve as a catalyst for further thought, and ultimately, action, toward restoration of the Church of Jesus Christ as One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic, unified body. I invite you to join me in this quest.

Part I: CHRISTIANITY IN CRISIS'

Chapter 1: HOW DID CHRISTIANITY GO OFF THE RAILS?

Christianity is in crisis at the end of the second Christian millennium, The Church's cultural purchase is melting away like ice-cream in the hot August sun, its moral authority over what used to be Christendom all but spent. How did the Christian Faith lose its rightful place at the head of the civilization it established and built? A complex concatenation of factors led to this sorry pass, chief among them being the fact that for the past 500 years Christianity has addressed the world with an ever more fragmented and incoherent babel of often contradictory voices. The weakening, destructive effect this has had on the Church's effectiveness as a witness to the risen Christ, cannot be underestimated or overstated. It is a tragedy that has exponentially aided the forces of wickedness in the world. The unfortunate spectacle of literally thousands of Christian sects, frequently hostile to one another, all simultaneously claiming to be the true Church founded on the love of Christ, does not tend to encourage thoughtful people to wish to join or even seriously listen to any of them.

Of course the troublesome question is: which of the multiple banners flown by fragmented Christianity as it marches and staggers and retreats these days can the Faith be restored to unity under? The only logical answer to that is a return to the true, undivided Faith that existed in essential doctrinal unity for the first thousand years of Christendom, and which continues in the Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic traditions today. For over 1,000 years, from Christ's ministry to A.D. 1054, there was ONE Church, and at least from the Council of Chaledon in A.D. 451 to 1054, doctrinal stability prevailed in that Church. There really was a time when the same Universal (Catholic) Faith could be defined as "what was believed by all men everywhere" throughout the undivided Church. Any logical-thinking Christian absolutely must regard the sundering of Church unity that began with the great east/west schism of 1,054 as a tragedy of cosmic proportions.

Christ founded a Church against which He declared the gates of hell would not prevail, and He promised to abide with that Church until he comes again. It simply cannot be a matter of indifference to Him whether the human beings He desires to save from sin and its consequences are a part of that Church or not. Jesus did not say: "The gates of hell will not prevail against my churches." He referred to His Church in the singular. Some Protestants recite the Apostles' and/or the Nicene creeds, which affirm belief in "The Holy Catholic Church;" and "One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church;" respectively. The work around rationalization is that the real universal or "catholic" Church is not any visible communion but rather an "invisible fellowship of true believers in all churches." However, this argument doesn't stand up convincingly under historical scrutiny.

Early Christians regarded the visible Church as not only the form, but quite literally the context of Christianity. The Church was one; with one doctrine, and exercising one authority. Dissent within the communion was not tolerated. A universal union of local churches was bound together organically in the unity of the Apostolic Succession, one liturgy, and the sense of common victory by grace over natural divisions. For them, the Church was the literal Body of Christ--a divine-human organism. Were they wrong? St. Paul affirms that the Church is One (Eph 4: 3-5) with Christ as its Head (Eph. 4: 14-16) The word catholic comes from the Greek Katholikos, meaning "universal." which in turn derives from katholou, "in general". It was first used by Bishop Ignatius of Antioch in a letter to the Smyrnians (c. AD 110) to distinguish the whole Church from individual congregations. Subsequently, the term "catholic" distinguished orthodox Christians from those who embraced heresy. Catholicism and affirmation of infallible Church authority (on matters of doctrine and morality) are identical. A "Catholic" who considers himself free to believe as he chooses is a contradiction in terms. For Catholics, reason and truth are objective--not what each individual chooses to make them.

The word orthodox (from the Greek: "right-believing") affirms the claim of doctrinal consistency with apostolic truth, The term "Catholic" in the sense of the Church being universal can only apply to a Church in which there is agreement as to what constitutes true doctrine. The word Catholic was used in the primitive, undivided Church to define the commonly held doctrine affirmed in the Church "by all men everywhere"--the rule of faith defined in the 5th Century by St. Vincent of Lerins as "Let us hold that which has been believed everywhere, always and by all, for that is truly and properly Catholic." Consequently, unless we subscribe to the exclusive catholicity of one particular branch of the divided and fragmented Church, strictly speaking there has been no truly catholic Church since at least 1054. The term "Catholic" cannot be legitimately considered to mean "universal" alone, unless it is acknowledged to incorporate universality of doctrine, orders, morals, and sacraments. The nearest approximation of true catholicity that exists in post-schism, post-Reformation Christendom, resides in the branches of Christianity that retain the essential doctrines, creeds, orders, tradition, and sacraments of the primitive, undivided Church, but none can legitimately claim exclusivity.

At this point, I must appeal to Protestant readers to bear with me and to not prejudicially dismiss my argument at least until you've absorbed it in its entirety. Let me state clearly at the outset that this is NOT an anti-Protestant polemic, and while a critique of Protestant ideas and the philosophical assumptions behind them necessarily appears herein, it is emphatically not intended as an attack on, or disparagement of, the sincere faith of Protestant Christians, past or present. I acknowledge and celebrate the fact that the life and work of sincere Christians adherent to Protestant beliefs has had profound and beneficial effects on millions of individuals and countless societies and cultures over the past five centuries.

My own family background is Baptist, and I became a Christian believer through the ministry of Protestant evangelism. However, a subsequent quarter-century of scriptural, theological, and historical inquiry has led me to conviction that division of the Christian Church into competing camps--Orthodox/Catholic and Protestant--cannot be God's will. I have further become convinced that the Christian Faith in its fullness can only be lived and experienced within the sacramental compass of the original apostolic Orthodox/Catholic Faith. Additionally, I believe that the Protestant reformers, despite presumed good intentions, were predominantly responsible for unleashing a mood and spirit of subjective anarchy from which derives the depraved and frequently vile liberal humanism that is currently busily at work destroying Western civilization.

I think also, speaking from both personal experience and observation, that few Protestants ever seriously consider Orthodox/Catholicism on the basis of what it claims to be in its written doctrines, dogmas, and policies, but rather only through an accretion of hearsay assumptions and prejudices that are often inaccurate or even maliciously biased. As Catholic apologist Sir Arnold Lunn observed: "Most Catholics avoid controversy not because they dislike intelligent discussion with a non-Catholic, but because the preliminary spade work which is necessary to clear the ground of debate from the litter of ignorant prejudice exhausts all but the stoutest heart." One of my hopes for this book is that it might sweep away some of that litter and to help non-Orthodox/Catholic Christians to view the Apostolic Church from a more informed perspective.

I concede that the breadth and scope of "Orthodox/Catholicism" is itself a matter of much controversy. The Eastern Orthodox Church claims to be the only true apostolic Church, with an unbroken line of historical continuity, episcopal succession, and doctrinal orthodoxy extending back to the communities created by Christ and His disciples in the Levant and Asia Minor. It claims to hold the original Christian faith that was common to the primitive, undivided Church in both East and West during the first millennium of Christian history, and has always regarded itself as the organic continuation of the original Apostolic community and as holding a faith fully consistent with the Apostolic message.

On the other hand, Rome considers the Eastern Church to be schismatic. Orthodoxy reciprocally regards the entire Western Church, subsequent to Rome's break with Constantinople in 1054, to be schismatic and/or heretical. Roman Catholics deem Protestants to be heretics. Many Anglicans labour under considerable ambiguity as to whether they are Protestant or Catholic. The Eastern Orthodox have grave doubts about the validity of Anglican orders, and the Roman Church explicitly declared them to be null and void in a Papal Bull of 1896, in which it was claimed that Matthew Parker's consecration as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1559 was illegitimate due to doubt over whether the orders of his chief consecrator, William Barlow, were valid. While Roman doubts about Barlow have not been proved, and even if they were for argument's sake correct, legitimacy would have been secured through Archbishop William Laud, from whom the present Church of England Episcopate derives. Laud's consecration in 1621 was through the hands of undisputed bishops in the Irish and Italian succession.²

To be Apostolic, Orthodox, and Catholic, a church must affirm certain fixed principles, which are derived from four principal sources: the teachings of Christ; the Apostles, the early Church Fathers, and the inspired revelations in the canonical Scriptures. For the purpose of this book I am applying the general term "Orthodox/Catholicism" (and vice-versa) to churches that affirm the traditional, apostolic, orthodox doctrines and creeds, sacramental grace, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist; the episcopal apostolic clerical orders of the historic, undivided Church, and that hold Church tradition³ as well as Holy Scripture as authoritative. These qualifications obtain in Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Traditional Anglican Catholicism.

As a member of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada, this writer is part of the international Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC), which explicitly affirms the ancient, Apostolic, Orthodox/Catholic faith of the primitive, undivided Church in its principal doctrinal statement, "The Affirmation of St. Louis." Since the TAC is not well-known outside Anglicanism, or indeed even within it, a brief explanation is in order. Contrary to popular misconception, an autonomous Church of England existed long before King Henry VIII and the Reformation. Indeed an autonomous British branch of the one Apostolic, Catholic Church can trace its roots back to Celtic Christianity in the 2nd Century, when it was part of a classical form of Christianity that was neither Eastern Orthodox nor Roman Catholic--not under the authority of the Bishop of Rome or any other foreign bishop, but "autocephalous," as the Eastern Churches have always been; that is: governed by its own head bishop, and simply in continuum with the common Apostolic Christian heritage.

The earliest undisputed documentary evidence of the organized Christian church in England is found in written works of early Church fathers (EG: Tertullian and Origen) early in the 3rd Century, although the first English Christian communities were probably established significantly earlier than that. Three English bishops attended the Council of Arles in 314, and English bishops also attended the Council of Sardica in 347 and the Council of Ariminum in 360. Several references to the Church in Britain during the Roman occupation are found in the writings of 4th Century Church fathers. There are two schools of thought with regard to whether the first Christian missionaries came to Britain from the Eastern Church of Asia Minor through Ireland, or from the Western Church in Rome. The Celtic British Church existed mainly in the north of England. When later missionaries arrived from Rome, they found the Christian Church already established in Great Britain.

The early Celtic Church was spiritually vigourous and strongly evangelistic, preaching the Gospel not only to pagans in the British Isles, but also sending missionaries to Europe, Africa, Iceland, and perhaps even pre-Columbian North America. St. Patrick of Ireland and St. Columba of Scotland are probably the ancient Celtic Church's most well-known figures. Some other early British Christian Saints are Saints Alban, Aidan, Hilda, and Chad.

In the 5th and 6th Centuries, the British Isles were subjected to increasing attacks and invasions by Norse and Baltic pirate raiders, especially on the east coasts of England and Scotland, resulting is a barbarization and re-paganization of society there. The invading Angles, Saxons, and Jutes drove the original English Celtic Christians into western enclaves in Cornwall and Wales. In 595, St. Augustine (of Canterbury), a Benedictine monk and prior of St. Andrew's Church in Rome, was dispatched by Pope Gregory I (The Great) leading a group of some 40 missionaries to re-evangelize Britain.

Augustine landed on the Isle of Thanet in Kent. King 'thelbert of Kent (c. 552-616) was a pagan, but his wife, Bertha, daughter of Charlibert, the King of Paris, was a Christian, and the couple with members of their court, went to Thanet to see Augustine, who, according to the Venerable Bede, came to meet them in procession behind the Cross and a picture of Jesus, and "prayed both for themselves, and also for them to whom and for whose sake they came thither."

'thelbert was impressed by Augustine's preaching, and invited the missionaries to his capital, Canterbury, where they were allowed to hold masses in the old church of St. Martin, which had been built during the Roman occupation. 'thelbert became a Christian, and was baptized on June 2, 597. On Christmas Day 597, tradition has it that more than 10,000 persons were baptized in the River Swale by Augustine, the first Archbishop of the English Church at Canterbury. He appointed two other Roman missionaries, Mellitus and Justus, Bishops of London and Rochester respectively, founded a monastery, and re-consecrated another nameless, disused Roman church at Canterbury as Christ Church. This building was eventually expanded into the present-day Canterbury Cathedral.

Augustine attempted to secure unity with the Celtic bishops, without success, but over the next hundred years he and his successors gradually re-established Christendom--the Mass, Latin writing and letters, and Christian civilization in general, to the ravaged regions bounded by the North Sea. During this time, the Church in western Britain, though impoverished and beleaguered, remained stubbornly autonomous, and refused to help the Italian papal missionaries. Consequently, the Roman Church encouraged and financed campaigns by east-coast-based British chieftains against the fiefdoms of western British warlords and bishops.

Most of Ireland was already under the authority of the Roman Church, and Irish missionaries were enlisted to help with re-Christianizing the barbarized eastern districts. However, the Irish Church still retained a semi-autonomous spirit and disagreed with the Romans over certain customs of the Latin Church, notably Easter observances.

Things came to a head at the Synod of Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast, convened by King Oswy of Northumbria in A.D. 664, where arguments for conformity with Roman customs and usages prevailed. At Whitby most of the British Celtic Church voluntarily submitted itself to the Bishop of Rome, and to full unity with the Latin or Western Church in Europe, although it still remained largely autonomous due to its geographical isolation from the papal see. Some dioceses in Wales and Ireland remained independent of Rome until the 12th Century. Consequently, it is argued that Henry VIII merely restored an autonomy to the native British Church in 1531 that parts of it had forfeited only 300 years earlier, and as long as he remained on the throne, the official religion of England was virtually Catholicism without the Papacy. Henry claimed that he was reaffirming the ancient right of Christian princes and kings to exercise supremacy over the affairs of the church within their domain, citing as precedents, relations between church and state in the Eastern Roman Empire and until the 9th century under Charlemagne.

The reader will search these pages in vain for any attempt at a defense of the particular motive behind Henry VIII's break with the Papacy, or of the English Reformers' introduction of selected Continental heresies to the Church of England.

I also have no intention of mounting here an apologetic for the impaired and heterodox late 20th Century Church of England. Unfortunately, mainstream Anglicanism has been handicapped since Thomas Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley, and Hugh Latimer busily set about adding Continental Protestant theological accretions to the English Church's Catholic doctrines immediately following Henry VIII's death in 1547. During the reign of Elizabeth I, the influence of Puritans within the Anglican communion increased, and they succeeded in bringing the Church of England into closer conformity with Calvinistic Reformed ideas. On the other hand, during the 19th century the Church of England experienced a "counter-reformation" of sorts, when a group of clerics at the University of Oxford initiated a movement to restore the Catholic elements in the Church of England's spiritual heritage that had been suppressed by the Reformation. The "High Church" Oxford movement transformed its version of Anglicanism, placing renewed emphasis on the dignity and beauty of religious observances and affirming the central place of worship. The Anglo-Catholic High Churchmen revived theological concern for the traditional Catholic and Apostolic character of the ministry and the sacraments, and the ancient creeds of the undivided Church.

Today, the Church of England suffers from acute institutional "multiple personality disorder," a disease induced by the Canterbury communion's wishy-washy ethic of "inclusivity." In the Anglican Church, you can find most any doctrinal confession, ranging from paganism through outright atheism, Gnosticism, agnosticism, addle-brained liberal modernism and radical post-modernism, Evangelism, Pentecostalism, to "bells and smells" Anglo-Catholicism. Many Anglicans extol this inclusiveness as a virtue but in fact it is an acquiescence to compromise-- the resort to ambiguous formulae that both believer and heretic can subscribe to, which, axiomatically, accords the heretic equal status in the church as the true believer. This ethic is not coincidental in a state-established church, since the typical orientation of statesmen is to seek compromise where a reconciliation of opposing views seems a remote prospect. Thus an uneasy sort of peace is achieved, but it satisfies none of the participant parties.

Recent innovations embraced by "mainstream" Anglicanism, like the ordination of women, and in some Anglican provinces non-celibate homosexualists as well, have served to harden Orthodox and Roman rejection of Anglican orders. However, the Traditional Anglican Communion and other "continuing" Anglican communions maintain that Anglican Catholicism chose to align itself with the universal doctrines and practices and the Apostolic succession of the universal (catholic) Church. They introduced no peculiar creeds, no unique sacraments, and no distinct ordinal practices or orders. They simply retained the bishops, priests, and deacons of the Orthodox/Catholic Church.

In contrast with the European Reformers like Luther, Zwingli, the Anabaptists and later, Calvin, who put themselves in a position of having to develop a new theological system on the fly, as it were, the tenets affirmed by the 16th and 17th Century Anglican Church were not the work of any original theologian in the way that Lutheranism and Calvinism were. The English Reformation produced no new confessional document equivalent to Philip Melanchthon's Lutheran Augsburg Confession or the Reformed Heidelberg Catechism, but rather simply reaffirmed what the English Reformers deemed to be the teachings of the ancient apostolic faith. Traditional Anglicanism has no creeds other than the ones developed by the early Church, and shares this creedal catholicity with the Roman and Eastern Orthodox Churches.

Henry's usurpation to himself of the place of Supreme Head of the Church of England was an act of arrogant hubris to facilitate ignoble ends--his determination to defy Pope Clement VII and divorce Catherine of Aragon so he could marry his pregnant mistress Anne Boleyn. However that was essentially a political act of state and not an ecclesiastical or theological revolution, such as was happening on the Continent.

The English Catholic Church at the beginning of the 16th Century was relatively uncorrupt, and in any case, Henry VIII was no Reformer. Indeed, the title "Defender of the Faith," still held by British monarchs today, was originally awarded to Henry VIII by the Pope in appreciation of Henry's forceful treatise against the anti-Papal theology of Martin Luther. In this work, Henry wrote that no punishment was too great for one who "will not obey the Chief Priest and Supreme Judge on earth," and that it was impossible to draw distinctions between "Christ's Church" and "the Pope's Church," because the Pope is "Christ's vicar in that Church over which Christ is the Head," and furthermore, "the whole Church is not only subject to Christ but, for Christ's sake, to Christ's only vicar, the Pope of Rome."⁴

Henry VIII remained a Catholic to his death, albeit a spectacularly apostate one, and the Church of England, in his lifetime, also remained Catholic in virtually all respects except obedience to the Pope. The "King's Book" published in 1543, and the Act of Six Articles, enforced belief in transubstantiation, the sufficiency of Communion of one kind, clerical celibacy, the binding effect of vows of celibacy, the rightfulness of private Masses, and the necessity of Sacramental confession.

Henry publicly burned Protestant translations of the Bible, and during his final illness rejected suggestions from Protestant advisors that he receive the Eucharist sitting. He replied: "If I could throw myself not only on the ground but under the ground, I should not hold myself to have given sufficient honour to the most Holy Sacrament." Deathbed contrition no doubt, but Henry had much to be contrite about.

One persistent voice of conscience on Henry's life was his cousin Reginald Pole, son of Margaret Pole, the Countess of Salisbury, and the last of the Plantagenet line. Indeed, historian T.M. Parker asserts that "the Poles, descended from George, Duke of Clarence, Edward lV's brother, were more certain heirs of the Plantagenets than the reigning [Tudor] dynasty."⁵

In 1535, Henry wrote to Pole in Rome, ordering him to submit his opinions on Henry's breach with the Papacy and self-appointment as the Supreme Head of the English Church. Pole replied in a letter entitled "Concerning the Unity of the Church," denouncing Henry's destruction of Church unity, his creation of a national Church, and above all his taking the title Head of the Church:

"Are titles given for nothing, or less than nothing," Pole wrote, "that men should call you, the robber and persecutor of the Church, the Head of the Church? Your father was a penurious man, but even he founded a few monasteries for the care of the poor; but who can cite any good deed of yours? Pleasure-houses, built for your own gratification, ruined monasteries, wrecked churches, their possessions confiscated to the Crown.... You have destroyed your nobles on the most frivolous pretenses; you have filled your court with worthless men, to whom you have yielded up everything. But what shall I say of the butcheries; of the dreadful executions which have made England the slaughter-house of the innocent? The holiest and most spotless men, for the new crimes invented by yourself, put to death in the most horrible and unheard-of manner. The gracious Bishop of Rochester, the unparalleled [Sir Thomas] More, the learned Reynolds, and so many others were victims of your senseless and wicked fury. In their bloody death no torment was spared to them nor any insult to their religion.... And you are the man who holds that the Pope on account of his moral deficiencies cannot be Head of the Church!... Finally I turn to you Henry, as your friend, your physician, your one-time intimate. I say to you repent, return, make good your misdeeds. In contrition lies man's hope. I am your Nathan. Be my David."

Alas, Henry's "senseless and wicked fury" was far from spent, and he was further enraged by the fact that the Pope had made Pole a Cardinal and appointed him Papal Legate to England. Henry hired assassins to attempt (unsuccessfully) to kill Pole, seized and killed two of Pole's brothers on a trumped up charge of treason, and even arrested Pole's 70-year-old mother, Margaret, and beheaded her for refusing to acknowledge Henry as Head of the Church.

When the news reached Pole, he remarked: "Until now I had thought God had given me the grace of being son of one of the best and most honoured ladies in England. Now he has vouchsafed to honour me still more, by making me the son of a martyr."

Anglican apologists might argue that Pole, who returned to England after the death of Henry's short-lived son Edward VI in 1553, as Papal Legate, spiritual advisor to Queen Mary, and eventually Archbishop of Canterbury, was at least party by association to plenty of religious executions himself, including those of the Anglican Reformers Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer. Latimer could hardly complain, having written to Henry VIII's Master of Rolls and Vicar General, Thomas Cromwell, at the time of the killing of Pole's family: "Blessed be the God of England whose minister ye be! I heard you once say you would make him [Pole] eat his own heart, which you have now brought to pass, for he must needs eat his own heart and be as heartless as he is graceless.⁶

It has been argued that of the 273 individuals burned by Bloody Mary, two-thirds would likely have been burned anyway by Cranmer, had he remained in power, as "Anabaptists"("the Devil's martyrs, according to their Lutheran co-Reformers). Clearly there was plenty of shame to go around, and this writer finds respective citations of atrocity by Catholic and Protestant apologists a singularly unprofitable line of debate. As Roman Catholic convert G.K. Chesterton said of Mary's reign: "She was allowed to deprive small men of their lives, she was not allowed to deprive great men of their property--or rather of other people's property. She could punish heresy, she could not punish sacrilege. She was forced into the false position of killing men who had not gone to church and sparing men who had gone there to steal the church ornaments."⁷

In point of fact, Pole and Mary did have a plan to reform the English Church within Roman Catholicism, to enforce clergy to be resident in their parishes; to instruct all congregations in the principles of the faith through frequent and intelligent preaching; for bishops and priests to live frugally, using the greatest portion of revenues for charity and education; to establish seminaries with high educational standards, to publish a new English language translation of the New Testament, a catechism, and a book of homilies, and they did produce a new English prayer book for private use. However, within three years of the 1555 national synod at which these proposals were tabled, both Reginald Pole and Mary Tudor died, coincidentally within hours of each other, on November 17, 1558. With them died the hope of reversing the English Reformation.

Chapter 2: THE PROBLEM WITH PROTESTANTISM

I have no desire to offend my Protestant friends here, but when mutually contradictory positions exist on matters such as sacramental grace, the nature and function of the priesthood, Christ's real presence in the Mass, or baptismal regeneration, one view must necessarily be correct and the other mistaken, no matter how sincerely each is held. It is illogical to assert that both can be ordained of God. The notion that "you can believe one thing and I another about a matter of fact or truth, and neither of us has to be wrong," is a relativist sophistry unsupported by reason or logic.

There is also the troubling matter of the major Reformers' theological "creativity." As historian Philip Hughes observes: "And the Lutheran conquest of Christian thought--the immediate conquest--was, in its essence, that an orator of genius persuaded the ordinary man by the thousand to throw over what every preacher he had ever heard had always said, and to accept instead of it, merely on the word of a man who said he knew better, ideas never heard of until now."⁸ In his bull of 1520 condemning Luther's teachings, Pope Leo X notes that if Luther's ideas were true, it would follow that the Church, whose guide is the Holy Ghost, would have to be in error and always had been in error. The day after Luther's famous defiant stand at the Diet of Worms on April 17, 1521, the young Holy Roman Emperor Charles V declared that "A single monk, led astray by private judgment, has set himself against the faith held by all Christians for a thousand years and more, and impudently concludes that all Christians up till now have been in error."

What probable cause exists to determine which view-- Orthodox/Catholic or Protestant--is true in disputed matters?. On one hand we have a unified body and unbroken line of doctrine and tradition reaching back 2,000 years to the very beginnings of the Christian Church. On the other, a constellation of belief systems, none yet 500 years old, all derived to some degree from the Orthodox/Catholic tradition whose authority they repudiate. The undivided Orthodox/Catholic Church's heritage belongs to Protestant Christians too, unless they propose that Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, et al., started something entirely new from scratch back in the 16th Century. However, while some of the European Reformers may have been convinced that by repudiating the Papacy and medieval Catholic Christendom they were returning to primitive Apostolic Christianity--they were grievously mistaken. Certainly they had no appeal to the Eastern Church. Patriarch Jeremiah II (1572-'95) rejected the Augsburg Confession as obvious heresy. "You can never be in agreement with us, or rather, say with the truth," wrote Jeremiah, "And we beg you not to trouble us further, not to write us or appeal to us while you go on reinterpreting the guiding lights of the Church and its theologians in other ways, paying them respect but repudiating them in deeds... Go your way, and write us no more about dogmas."⁹

Protestant apologists will counter that corruption in the medieval Roman Catholic hierarchy justifiably provoked the Reformers' revolution, and they will cite various more recent moral failures and other shortcomings particular to Orthodox/Catholics. While such criticisms are often overstated and/or not informed by fact so much as by myth and prejudice, no historically literate person will dispute that the immediately pre-Reformation Roman Church had many serious problems, or that Orthodox/Catholic individuals have always been, and continue to be, poor sinners afflicted by failings common to humanity. However, the faults of the medieval Church were matters of individual conduct--not doctrine--and any legitimate reform initiative should have remained within the Church to address the problems there.¹⁰ Reform doesn't necessarily imply secession, and to reject Orthodox/Catholicism because certain individuals past and present have failed to honour and live up to its teachings is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Protestantism abandoned the universal Church on the basis of misdirected good intentions mixed with erroneous philosophical assumptions and political opportunism.

It must also be understood in the interest of historical accuracy that as bad as the corrupt popes of the Renaissance were in terms of personal morality, not one of them made heretical alterations to the theological, moral, or doctrinal teaching of the Roman Church. As former Protestant, now Roman Catholic convert, Tom Howard notes: "Whereas other benches of bishops, which shall be nameless, in our own day are applauding homosexual promiscuity, adultery, everything else, themselves in a frolic through Sodom and Gomorrah, not one of those wicked Renaissance popes ever said, `Yes, I have lovers backstage here and this is a deeply Christian style of life.' They knew they were going to hell. They knew they were sinning."¹¹ Yet they did not adulterate the Deposit of Faith.

It must be remembered that the original Reformers all started out as Roman Catholics, and that the Protestant Reformation was born in a spirit of rebellion. Sometimes this revolt was manifested in utterly sophomoric forms, such as Ulrich Zwingli's stunt of publicly cooking up a pan of sausages in the middle of the 40 day Lenten fast, thus "showing our emancipation from such man-made rules." Luther and his followers ceremonially burned Leo X's bull, along with the Corpus of Canon Law and some minor scholastic works, on the town sewerage dump at Wittenburg on December 10, 1520.

To argue that the Reformers only rejected the Roman Catholic Church's 16th Century present, and didn't break with the Christian past, simply doesn't stand up to critical scrutiny. The European Reformers, albeit to varying degrees, rejected the Church's Sacraments, Tradition, and Authority, not merely the corrupt Catholic hierarchy of the time. Under Protestantism's revolutionary ethos, all forms of innovation came to be greeted with enthusiasm, rather than with caution and suspicion as they had been under Catholicism. Free enquiry and "the right of private judgment" are the paradigms of Protestant culture, which denies any central, united authority of doctrine or knowledge. Reformed Christianity would rest solely on individual faith based on the guidance contained in the Bible. This assumption inevitably destroyed the cultural purchase disciplined philosophy previously exerted on society prior to the Reformation, and the notion that there would be profound differences of opinion on fundamental issues came to be taken for granted.

G.K. Chesterton, a convert to Roman Catholicism relatively late in life, argued that with Luther, "[The Augustinian tradition] came out of its cell again, in the day of storm and ruin, and cried out with a new and mighty voice for an elemental and emotional religion, and for the destruction of all philosophies.... It had one theory that was the destruction of all theories; in fact it had its own theology which was itself the death of theology. Man could say nothing to God, nothing from God, nothing about God, except an almost inarticulate cry for mercy and for the supernatural help of Christ, in a world where all natural things were useless. Reason was useless. Will was useless.... Nothing remained in earth or heaven, but the name of Christ lifted in that lonely imprecation; awful as the cry of a beast in pain."¹²

The gloomy outlook Chesterton refers to was articulated in Martin Luther's own Wittenberg Testament, in which he affirmed that "Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, in saying; Repent ye! intended that the whole life of believers should be penitence. This word cannot be understood of sacramental penance, that is, of the confession and satisfaction which are performed under the ministry of priests. It does not, however, refer solely to inward penitence; nay, such inward penitence is nought unless it outwardly produces various mortifications of the flesh. The penalty thus continues as long as the hatred of self, that is, true inward penitence, continues, namely: until our entrance into the Kingdom of Heaven."

Luther asserted the total depravity and corruption of human nature, the utter powerlessness of man to do good, and the belief that men are predestined by God to heaven or hell without regard for what sort of life they lead. Calvin amplified this into an inflexible and horrible doctrine about predestination to hell that equated all temporal pleasure with sin. The Reformers were nothing if not inconsistent. Calvin rejected the Catholic Church's authority as that of the anti-Christ and proclaimed the sovereignty if individual human conscience. Yet he claimed that "... if authority and liberty of judging the law be left to private men, there will never be any certainty set down, but rather all religion will become doubtful." In that saying, Calvin concisely defined the problem with Protestantism, and prophesied its inevitable consequences for Christendom.

The Reformation did much more than ending the ecclesiastical supremacy of the pope in Western Christendom. It changed the general Christian focus in the West from an objective concentration on praising God and acknowledging what He has done for us, to an increasingly subjective emphasis on personal experience and internalized faith. The Right Rev. Robert Mercer, C.R., Diocesan Bishop of the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada observes: "I note that after, say, 1700 AD hymns tend to be more subjective. Me and my Savior. Me and my love for Him. Me and my sin. We even sing hymns to ourselves, preach ourselves musical exhortations, as it were...."¹³ This obsession with personal feeling was and is at odds with Orthodox/Catholic tradition, in which what one "feels" during Christian worship is essentially irrelevant. Fr. Andrew Neaum says: "The worship of the church flows on whether I am there or not, whether I feel pious, moved, or not. The tradition flows on, and simply by going one slips into its river, and is carried along for an hour, to slip out again refreshed and renewed, whether one recognizes the fact or not."¹⁴

In Protestantism there is a constant emphasis on the subjective self, EG: "In order to be a Christian `I have to," or "one has to.'" In Orthodox/Catholic understanding, becoming a Christian is a more objective process, whereby you are not expected to grasp the whole light of Christian understanding immediately. It is like the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts saying: "I know I'm reading something that is significant, but what does it all mean?" In the present chaos of Western denominational pluralism, the Protestant Christian is left to figure out "what it all means" almost entirely on his own resources, without any authority or guidance other than his own interpretation of what the Bible says to him as an individual.

Arnold Lunn described Protestantism as "a mixture of objective truth and subjective error." That is: it is objective insofar as it retains selected Orthodox/Catholic doctrines, and the Orthodox/Catholic arguments in defense of these doctrines, but the Protestant must also rely on subjective feeling to bolster his incomplete belief in Orthodox/Catholic Truth. Ergo, the Protestant who still accepts the Orthodox/Catholic doctrine of the Trinity, but who rejects the authority of the Church to define that doctrine, must necessarily fall back on his own subjective feeling to support his Trinitarian belief, because it is impossible to prove that doctrine on the basis of New Testament texts alone. Sola Scriptura does not conclusively protect Trinitarian belief. Orthodox/Catholicism, on the other hand, is objective in terms of doctrinal belief. The Affirmation of St. Louis (TAC) declares that "The conscience, as the inherent knowledge of right and wrong, cannot stand alone as a sovereign arbiter of morals. Every Christian is obligated to form his conscience by the Divine Moral Law and the Mind of Christ as revealed in Holy Scriptures, and by the teachings and Tradition of the Church."

Protestantism, implicitly rejects the concept of immutable absolutes and affirms liberal progressivism in the sense that it is theoretically willing to change and adopt new or "better" ideas and discard the traditions of the past on the basis of democratic opinion. For example, several conservative Protestant denominations have voted to issue policy statements strongly condemning homosexual behavior (although not the PERSONS who practice it) as sinful and inimical to Biblical teaching. That is commendable as far as it goes, but the point too easily overlooked is that the very process of voting on this matter implies a priori that the vote could potentially go the other way--that affirmation and acceptance of homosexual behavior could also become church policy on the basis of a democratic vote. This has of course already happened in several liberal Protestant denominations. However, in terms of Orthodox/Catholic understanding, the matter of rejection or acceptance of homosexual behavior is not a negotiable issue--not something that could ever be legitimately voted on. Scripture and 2,000 years of Holy Tradition have declared homosexual behavior to be sinful and morally deficient, and there is simply nothing to discuss.

However, Protestants in the post-modern West, and indeed many Western Catholics, have been so thoroughly conditioned by the reflexive assumptions of Enlightenment liberalism, that Orthodox/Catholic certitude on moral issues (or anything else) becomes extremely difficult to accept. It seems like an abdication of intellect and reason, although it should be carefully noted that it is only after a Catholic has accepted by reason the concept of an infallible Church that he surrenders private judgment to the judgment of the Church, and then only on points where the Church speaks with the voice of God. On all other points, private judgment for Catholics remains unimpaired. However, in the not-unrelated paradigms of Protestantism and liberalism, EVERYTHING is theoretically negotiable and mutable, since there is no fundamental ground of knowledge and authority. Even the appeal to Scripture is open to interpretation. If something seems like a "better idea" at the time, Protestants and liberals want to adopt it. Conversely, Orthodox/Catholics acknowledge and affirm that there is absolute truth that doesn't change with the ephemeral fashions, whims, and obsessions of time.

The only thing that prevented Protestant anti-authoritarian freedom from degenerating into secularist chaos during the first post-Reformation centuries was the fact that laws and public morals--the social consensual ethos--continued to be based on a priori assumptions of Biblical inerrancy. The late Protestant evangelical philosopher Francis Schaeffer wrote: "The Bible's absolutes provide a consensus within which freedom can operate. But once the Christian consensus has been removed... then the very freedoms which have come out of the Reformation became a destructive force leading to chaos in society."¹⁵

Schaeffer's son Frank, whose conversion from evangelicalism to Orthodoxy is discussed in a later chapter, says that: "Any Protestant who is honest will admit concerning the chaos of Protestantism that it's debatable that if that chaos had been in the Church from the beginning there would be any Christian witness left. It has had such a diluting effect on it."¹⁶

Besides their reference to Scripture as the sole authority, sola scriptura, the Reformers, because of their concern about prevailing attitudes that salvation depended on works of merit rather than the grace and mercy of God, developed the companion doctrine of sola fides - -justification¹⁷ by faith alone. Martin Luther wanted to excise the book of James from the Bible because of its affirmation that faith without works is dead. John Calvin recognized only one will operating in the universe--the Divine Will, which he emphasized so strongly that he virtually denied (in his stress on the role of predestination) the power of human free will. Man's good works, which proceeded from no free will in Calvin's construct, were thus of no consequence in terms of salvation.

Both Luther and Calvin had a bleakly pessimistic view of human nature, and affirmed the total depravity of man; that no "good works" done by man avail in the slightest toward his salvation. Man's nature is utterly sinful, and remains so even after baptism and justification by grace. All man's acts are essentially sinful, and continue to be sins even after he is justified, although God no longer holds these sins against him. In the Reformers' theology, there was no room for natural goodness, no such thing as small sins, and no such thing as human merit. "Without the faith that works through charity, even the works which appear good are sins," wrote Luther, who taught that God not only permits sin, but that sin cannot be committed unless God commands it. "It does not follow," he maintained, "that God wants the sin to be committed, although He wills that it should take place." The reason for this alleged divine perversity, according to Luther, is to demonstrate through divine anger punishing the sinner how hateful sin is to God.

The primitive, undivided Church also affirmed that salvation was granted by the mercy of God, and that those baptized into Christ were called to believe in Him and that good works would be the fruit of their faith. The concept of faith versus works was unknown in the early Church. Or as C.S. Lewis observed, it's like trying to decide which blade of a pair of scissors is more important.

Orthodox/Catholics believe that justification by faith in God is part of being brought into covenant relationship with Him, rather than a sort of legal acquittal before Him. It is God's mercy, not our own faith that saves us. God initiates and makes the New Covenant with us. For Orthodox/Catholics, justification by faith is a dynamic--not static-- concept. It is not a point-in-time thing. Faith is not something the Catholic Christian exercises at one critical moment, expecting it to be effective for the rest of his life. True Christian faith is not just a decision, but a carrying through of that decision as a way of life. Orthodox/Catholics happily affirm justification by faith (Rom. 3:28), but not justification by faith alone, which contradicts Scripture (James 2: 17, 25).

Chapter 3: RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION

It would of course be unfair and inaccurate to place sole blame on Protestantism for the ascendance of secular humanism in Western society, although the Reformers unquestionably pulled the bung out of the liberal barrel. The Reformation either originated or facilitated the advancement of a constellation of interconnected modern ideas that had a profound influence on political, economic, and philosophical developments in the centuries that followed up to our present day. As G.K. Chesterton put it: "On a great map like the mind of Aquinas, the mind of Luther would be almost invisible. But it is not altogether untrue to say, as so many journalists have said without caring whether it was true or untrue, that Luther opened an epoch; and began the modern world.

"He was the first man who ever consciously used his consciousness; or what was later called his Personality. That is what we now call personality. A little later is was called Psychology. After that it was called Advertisement or Salesmanship.... [Luther] did in a very real sense make the modern world. He destroyed Reason; and substituted Suggestion."¹⁸

The spirit that presaged the end of dominant Catholic Christendom really began to stir with the Renaissance during the 14th and 15th Centuries, a movement whose most ardent apologists extravagantly regarded as the rebirth of the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome. Indeed Renaissance scholars had re-discovered, and developed profound admiration for, the rich cultures of pagan antiquity, and in the process become semi-pagan in spirit themselves. This revived enthusiasm for Graeco-Roman glory--its art, architecture, literature, and philosophy-- aroused a notion that the nemesis of these great cultures was none other than the spread of Christianity. Indeed this had been implied before by such pagan reactionaries as Julian the Apostate, who wrote in the 4th Century of "The Christians, to whom we owe all our misfortunes...."

This postulate has remained persistent since the decline of the Roman Empire became manifest, coincident with the exponential spread of Christendom during the half-millennium between Christ's Resurrection and about A.D. 500. Blaming Christianity for divers malignancies-- present and ancient--has become especially fashionable in the latter part of the 20th Century. However a contradictory school of thought has been articulated at least since the time of St. Jerome (A.D. 320-420), who argued that if the Graeco-Roman world had accepted the Orthodox/Catholic faith sooner, the decay of ancient material and cultural civilization would never have taken place.

The paradigm-shift that the Renaissance represented had divers catalysts. Beginning with the revival of the Holy Roman Empire (which was, as has been noted, neither holy, nor Roman, nor in fact--an empire) under Otto I in 962, popes and emperors competed for supremacy. A, bitter antagonism developed between Rome and the German Empire, which was exacerbated in the 14th and 15th Centuries by burgeoning German nationalism. Increasing resentment of papal taxation, and submission to a foreign Pope also developed in northern Europe, especially England and Germany, during this era. The late Middle Ages were punctuated by various power-struggles between the Popes and secular Kings, emperors and other lay-potentates, which led to the Avignon papacy of 1309-77, in which Christendom's central authority was captured by one of its provinces. This state of affairs ruptured Church unity and resulted in the papal Great Schism of 1378-1415. A unified papacy was reestablished under Martin V, but it had suffered heavy damage to its prestige, and the popular sense of Christian commonwealth was severely eroded.

Meanwhile in England, the statutes of Mortmain in 1279, Provisors in 1351, and Praemunire in 1393, substantially reduced the Church's power to withdraw land from the control of the civil government, to appoint clerics, and to exercise judicial authority, setting the stage for Henry VIII's breach with the Papacy a century and a half later.

Anti-Catholic critics have made much of the Church's descent into superstition during the late Medieval period, and although essential doctrine remained untouched by bad popes and general corruption, it was indeed overlaid by a great deal of superstitious unfortunateness, particularly the issue of indulgences, which were to soon result in catastrophe.

The doctrine of indulgences affirmed that Church authorities can assign what could be described as "spiritual credits" earned by especially saintly individuals who had led holy lives to the benefit of others: an indulgence granted. In the late Medieval era, indulgences began to be handed out--essentially sold--in exchange for alms or other monies given for a pious purpose, a clear distortion of the basic concept. In addition, the ecclesiastical courts had in many cases become engines of extortion, since it was always convenient for Church lawyers and judges to discover cases of heresy or other spiritual misdemeanors for which fines could be levied. These abuses brought the credibility of the Church as a repository of truth into disrepute, and promoted skepticism about essential doctrines.

"I did see the common people of Christendom to be corrupted, not only in their ways, but in their ideas," wrote Erasmus of Rotterdam. "I considered the most part of those which profess themselves to be pastors and doctors to abuse the titles of Christ to their own advantage... preaching men's inventions and alleging them to be God's commandments... indulgences, financial substitutes for penance, and such like..."

There was also the matter of payment to the Church of mortuaries- -dues payable upon death. When a person died, one or another clerical organization had the right to bury him and collect the mortuary payment. Ordinarily this would be the local parish, which would collect funeral dues from the surviving family after the funeral. However practices varied in different clerical jurisdictions, and in some places the mortuary would take the form of the Church appropriating the deceased's most valuable material possession. This practice of mortuaries amounted to a gratuitous tax which enriched the clergy at the expense of the laity.

The Church had also become rich due to feudal land holdings and other endowments that had come into its possession. The Church's tax-free land holdings, are estimated to have included as much as one-fifth to one-third of the area of Europe. Much of this wealth was used for commendable purposes, building and maintenance of church buildings, monasteries, hospitals, schools, and higher education institutions. However, by the end of the Middle Ages, widespread abuse became common whereby the Church's endowments came to be regarded as a source of private income for clerics and even lay-nobility designated as "guardians" of Church properties. Witnessing monies and land that had been donated for the proper conduct of the Church, to help the poor, or to finance education or medical care, used to finance lavish lifestyles for corrupt clerics or even laymen, promoted a general cynicism and resentment. It should however be acknowledged that despite this scandal, most of the Church's income continued to be applied to rightful purposes.

The fate of the medieval Greenland colonies provides a capsule vignette of the effect abuse of indulgences and mortuaries could have. The Greenlanders had been evangelized around AD 1000 by Lief Ericsson, who was converted to Christianity and made a missionary by King Olaf Trygveson during a visit to Norway in 999. Nineteen year old Lief returned to Greenland with several priests, and his mother, Tjodhild, built the first church there at Brattahlid.

Eventually there were 16 churches in the Greenland colonies--12 in the Eastern Settlement and four in the Western Settlement. The Cathedral at Sandness, whose foundation still remains, measured 80 feet by 60 feet. The bishop's residence was said to be even larger.

However, by the mid-14th Century, the Greenland colonies had fallen on hard times, partly because climate change was making already marginal conditions more difficult. As well, nearly all of the colonies' 250-odd farms had become possessions of the Church through payment of mortuaries and the sale of indulgences. The formerly independent, landowning, Viking farmers were reduced to tenancy and serfdom.

In 1342, the entire population of the Western Settlement disappeared, leaving no evidence of epidemic disease or violence. Their ships were gone, and it was speculated that fed up with living in quasi-slavery in harsh conditions, they, "having given up all good manners and true virtues, turned to the people of America." No conclusive trace of the lost colonists has ever been found.

The last officiating Greenland bishop died in 1383, but a large wedding with guests from Iceland took place in 1408, and two papal letters mention church services there in 1418. A great naval attack by native Eskimos, which killed hundreds and destroyed homes and churches, struck the Greenland colony's deathblow that same year.

Along with a corrupt clergy, another factor that increased the burgeoning of doubt and undermined Church authority was the assault on traditional certitudes resulting from new scientific discovery and speculation, as well as a vastly expanded geographical context that came with New World discovery. Things were shown to be not what they had so long dependably seemed, and this greatly disturbed the equilibrium of Christendom. Rapid expansion of material knowledge upset long-fixed traditions of thought about the nature of the universe. The now-familiar tension and conflict between science and religion began in earnest with the Renaissance spirit.

Without doubt the most revolutionary technological development of the late Middle Ages was Johann Gutenburg's printing press (c. 1452), which facilitated radically more efficient, rapid, and general communication of information--both true and false--than had ever existed before in history. Techno-prophet and conservative Catholic Marshall McLuhan, most of whose self-perceived fans never bothered to find out what he really had to say, argued that the balance of human senses had been disrupted by the "bombshell" of a phonetic alphabet in the 4th Century BC, and even more so by the "H-bomb" of movable type in the 15th Century. McLuhan believed that "Print gave tribal man an eye for an ear," making the visual sense paramount over the other four senses. This, he protested, led to an unhealthy obsession with specialization, and a fragmentation of peoples and cultures that was manifested in such phenomena as the Protestant Reformation, the concept of the nation-state, the rise of bureaucracy, and the ascendancy of the "expert." McLuhan's famous observation that "The medium is the message," which became a misappropriated buzz-phrase of the baby- boomer generation, actually meant that any communications medium creates a particular mental environment of its own that in turn colours how people it touches perceive and experience the world. Printing, for instance, would engender the concept that only documented knowledge is reliable and trustworthy, making tradition, including the traditional authority of the Church, suspect. This idea would become incorporated with the sola scriptura doctrine of the Reformation.

In reaction to their eroding moral authority, the clergy struck back, often brutally, using threats and acts of force to impose order on an increasingly restive laity. Not only heresy and rebellion, but even complaints expressed about clerical excesses were met with harsher and more frequent punishments. The ancient practice of burning people alive was revived with a vengeance, enlarging the quotient of fear and resentment of the Church and its "reign of terror" at the end of the Middle Ages.

The Hundred Years War in France and the War of the Roses in England both contributed to the social and spiritual ferment of the pre-Renaissance period, but the most shattering cataclysm of all was the Black Death--Bubonic Plague--which tore into Europe via Mediterranean ports in 1348 and killed at least a third of Western Christendom--25 million people--within the span of two hideous years, throwing its economies into chaos. The ranks of the clergy were decimated, making it necessary to ordain many poorly educated or otherwise inadequate priests. This state of affairs also opened Church offices to those who sought them as a means to achieve personal gain and power, with subsequent disastrous consequences.

In many respects, Christian civilization, which had arguably reached its zenith in the High Middle Ages during the 11th, 12th, and 13th Centuries, never fully recovered from the Black Death's ravages. The modern era hadn't quite begun, but it was waiting in the wings, poised to burst onto the stage of history and steal the show. Meanwhile the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381, led by Wat Tyler, and the German Peasants' Revolt some 150 years later that was so brutally put down with the blessing of Martin Luther,¹⁹ bore witness to the lingering economic effects of wars, plague and late medieval corrupt mismanagement of affairs both spiritual and temporal.

The Renaissance period is consensually deemed to have marked the end of the Middle Ages, the burgeoning of modernism, the decline of traditional Catholic religion as the dominant Western socio-political force, and the rise of the secular nation-state as a political paradigm. In this new conception of the world, focus shifted from the general destiny and unity of all Christendom, to the earthly progress of particular states, each of which should enjoy sovereign independence to make laws applying to its citizens without interference or sanction from any higher moral power. The time-honoured unity of Empire and Papacy, with all of Christendom operating under one civil authority acting in synergy with a central religious authority over spiritual matters, was discarded. Politics began to be regarded in secular terms--recognizing no higher law than the temporal welfare of the particular state and its citizens, to wit: "separation of Church and state." The future plagues of state bureaucracy and the confiscatory taxation necessary to pay for it also gained a foothold during the Renaissance. Niccolo Machiavelli more or less invented and defined modern, pragmatic, power politics in his famous 1513 work "The Prince."

During the Renaissance, humanism began to displace classical philosophy and disciplined medieval scholasticism. Voltaire considered the Renaissance to be a crucial watershed in the alleged liberation of the human mind from superstition and error, which he identified with Christianity. Sir Thomas More, who ironically was to become a sainted Roman Catholic martyr, foreshadowed socialist folly in his work, "Utopia,", in which he prescribed a classless, communal society, without Christianity, and guided solely by human reason. Nineteenth Century French historian Jules Michelet maintained that the Renaissance marked a true rebirth of the human spirit, which was a precondition for all of the great achievements of modernity, characterized by the rise of the individual, scientific inquiry and geographical exploration, and the growth of secular values. In the eyes of these humanists, medieval society was a period of unrelieved darkness--a point Christian admirers of Catholic society and culture hotly dispute.

In Christian terms, Renaissance "rebirth" was nothing other than a renovation of the human hubris that led to man's expulsion from Eden. To humanists, only human values are significant, and a culture of humanism is essentially hostile to Christian humility and reverence for the supernatural. The Renaissance humanists were profoundly convinced that society and its requirements had "outgrown" older modes of thought. The Renaissance was characterized by a rise in sexual immorality, and widespread interest in the occult, magic, and astrology. In religion, the durable old Gnostic and Manichean heresies--never entirely stamped out--once again reared their ugly heads.

The humanist virus also infected the world of Renaissance art. "In old times," wrote John Ruskin, "men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith; in later times they used the objects of faith to show their powers of painting. The distinction is enormous, the difference as incalculable as irreconcilable." Medieval Christian painters had consecrated their art to the service of Catholic religion. Humanist painters used their mistresses as models for the Madonna, and exploited sacred subjects to demonstrate their mastery of technique.

Ruskin believed that post-medieval architecture expressed the worst characteristics of pagan pride and ignorance, a "blank, hopeless, haughty self-sufficiency." What he would think of today's Bauhaus monstrosities and suburban kitsch boggles the imagination.

"Something very beautiful passed out of the world at the Renaissance," writes Sir Arnold Lunn, "the beauty which was not the monopoly of class or clique, but which found expression in the common things of common men, in the peasant's hut no less than the palace..."²⁰

We only need compare the architectural glory of, say, 14th Century Venice, with Blake's "dark satanic mills" of the Industrial Revolution, the hellish no-man's-land of post-modern U.S. inner-city urban decay, or the cancerous strip-mall sprawl blighting the outskirts of nearly every North American city and town, to grasp what Ruskin and Lunn were getting at.

"The standard to which Ruskin appealed was ethical rather than aesthetic," notes Lunn. "The good produced the beautiful, but he was interested in the beautiful mainly because it was a reflection of the good. [Pre-Renaissance] architecture was nobler because it enshrined a nobler ideal."²¹

Unfortunately, as discussed above, the Roman Catholic Church found itself weakened by internal strife and ill-prepared, just at the time it needed to combat the tide of humanism, neo-paganism, and budding liberalism that swept over Europe during the Renaissance. Not least among these problems was the Great Papal Schism referred to briefly earlier in this chapter, which began after the death of Pope Gregory XI in March, 1378. Rome was determined that the papacy, which had been ensconced at Avignon and dominated by the French Crown for 70 years, must return to Rome with the election of the new pope. A somewhat rowdy papal conclave was strongly lobbied by crowds outside to elect a Roman, or at least an Italian pope. A Neapolitan priest who took the name Urban VI was chosen, a disastrous mistake as it turned out. Urban proved to be bullheaded, arbitrary, and ruthless when opposed or questioned. He launched a campaign to drastically reduce the power of the cardinals, who had been virtual co-rulers with the Avignon popes.

Under French influence, a majority of cardinals gradually withdrew from the papal court. In a meeting at Anagni the cardinals declared Urban's election null and void because, they alleged, they had elected him under extreme duress from the Roman mobs. A second pope, Cardinal Robert of Geneva who became Clement VII, was elected. Urban VI did not step down willingly, and Clement VII was obliged to exercise his reign from Avignon. Thus began nearly four decades of division in the Church along national, political, and religious lines between two lines of papal claimants: the Roman succession of Urban VI, Boniface IX, Innocent VII, and Gregory XII, and the Avignon line of Clement VII and Benedict XIII.

After decades of wrangling and fruitless negotiations, the cardinals finally called the Council of Pisa in 1409, which deposed both Gregory XII and Benedict XIII and then elected yet another pope, Alexander V (who was succeeded shortly afterward by the medieval John XXIII). The Pisan popes received the support of most of Latin Christendom, but the papal schism continued until the Council of Constance (1414-18) removed all three papal claimants and on Nov. 11, 1417 elected one new pope, Martin V, who was finally accepted by almost everyone. However, the papal battles were not quite over yet. Another schism emerged at the Council of Basel (1431-49) which elected "Antipope" Felix V. Happily, Felix abdicated in 1449, and the unified papacy was at long last restored.

However, the prestige and authority of Rome, and the Catholic Church in general, had been disastrously diminished in 39 years of internal strife. By the 15th Century the fractured papacy had surrendered most of its control of the Church to the French and Spanish monarchies. The fact that reforms were needed to address corruption became obvious, and various agendas for reorganizing the ecclesiastical hierarchy had been debated at the Council of Constance from 1414 to 1418, but none gained majority support, so none were implemented at that time, with disastrous consequences.

Some popes of the post-schism, post-conciliar period, notably Nicholas V (1447-1455) and Pius II (1458-1464) were learned, devout, Christian men and worthy leaders of Christ's Church, but others were interested mainly in political life, furtherance of their families' interests, and collection of revenue. Alexander VI (Rodrigo de Borja--father of Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia, by his mistress, Vanozza dei Cattanei) ascended to the papal throne by means of bribery, blackmail, and other chicanery, and his reign was characterized by a descent into decadence that included oral readings of pornographic literature in the papal library. This perversion of the papacy resulted in deteriorating clerical discipline and morale, and flourishing heresies, making conditions ripe for the most successful of all heresies--Protestantism--to make its bow.

Julius II, the "soldier-pope," was enthroned in October 1503, and attempted to institute reforms during his decade of tenure, but was more interested in consolidating the papacy's eroding political influence. Giovanni de Medici (Leo X) of Florence (second son of Florentine commercial magnate Lorenzo "The Magnificent" de Medici) followed Julius II in 1513--a genuinely popular choice for pope despite the fact that he was only a 38 year old deacon who had not been ordained at the time of his election. However, virtually continuous wars, endless political intrigues, and Leo X's personal admiration for the Borgias and his desire to emulate their empire-building ambitions undermined his half-hearted Church reform initiatives.

Despite the advanced degree of apostasy and/or perfunctory concern for spiritual matters at the highest levels of the Church, there remained a remnant of spiritually discerning and morally upright clerics, who watched with growing dismay as the cancerous deterioration continued. Among these was a German Augustinian monk and university professor named Martin Luther.

Humanism began to displace Scholasticism as the dominant philosophy of Western Europe during the 15th Century. Christian humanists like Desiderius Erasmus of Holland, John Colet of England, and others, anticipated the Reformation in their tendency to study the Bible directly, ignoring medieval commentaries, and in their application of "new learning" critical methods to New Testament study. Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla criticized Bible translations other documents that supported Church dogma and tradition. However, despite their flirtations with heresy, the Renaissance Christian humanists continued to regard themselves as good Catholics. Erasmus, for instance, refused to throw in his lot with Martin Luther.

Proto-Reform heretical movements led by John Wycliffe (the Lollards in England) and Jan Hus or "John Huss" (the Hussites in Bohemia) cropped up during the 14th and 15th centuries The execution of Huss as a heretic in 1415 initiated the Hussite Wars, a violent Bohemian nationalist rebellion, stamped out only with difficulty by the combined armies of the Holy Roman emperor and the Pope. The Hussite wars anticipated post-Reformation religious civil war (the Peasant's Revolt) in Germany and their residual influence played a significant role in the Reformation later on.

Wycliffe, (c.1330-1384) who was for a time Master of Balliol College at Oxford University, launched a series of forceful attacks on Catholic Practice and doctrine in the late 14th Century. In 1379, Wycliffe wrote: "All men are tenants-in-chief under God, and hold from him all that they are and possess; the Pope claims to be our mesne-lord, and to interfere between us and our divine suzerain, and therein he grievously errs."²² Wycliffe believed that the sacramental power of the priesthood was an illusion, and anticipated Protestant liberalism in his belief that reason and conscience are wholly adequate guides for the self-directed soul, asserting that the State must act as guardian over the Church, that the Church should be under secular power in each country, and that the papacy should be eliminated. "After Urban VI," declared Wycliffe in 1382, "no one ought to be received as Pope, but men should live, after the manner of the Greek Church, under their own laws." Wycliffe was mistaken about the Orthodox Church, but his writings and statements did make him one of the principal authors of the Protestant Reformation. King Richard of England's Queen, Anne of Bohemia, was a Wycliffe sympathizer, and sent his pamphlets home to Bohemia where they influenced Jan Hus, who in turn inspired Martin Luther.

It must also be noted, however, that devout, orthodox, Christian voices also remained within the Church during the Renaissance, such as Girolomo Savonarola (1452-1498), Thomas Kempis (c. 1380-1471), Francisco Xemenes de Cisneros (1435-1517), the "small-r" reformer Erasmus of Rotterdam (c. 1470-?) and countless others whose names are now forgotten but who kept the Faith alive through the bad papacies.

Chapter 4: THE END OF CATHOLIC CULTURE

The Renaissance, the Reformation, and the French Revolution that followed them, ended medieval Catholic culture in Western Europe and launched the era of modern liberalization. The Reformation's repudiation of central spiritual and moral authority made Christian faith, as it had been understood by the Church for a millennium and a half, virtually impossible. Conviction was substituted for faith, establishing an environment in which everyone was free to interpret truth on the basis of subjective understanding and conscience, thereby paving the way for ideological plagues like liberal moral relativism, logical positivism, and situational ethics.

Not that the founding Reformers had abandoned all of the orthodox doctrines of the Church that had united Christendom for over 1,500 years. The proto-Protestants continued to affirm the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation of Christ; the immortality of the soul and the eternity of blessedness (or its polar opposite) after death. The essential definition of faith as certitude in things not demonstrable by direct experience or deductive proof remained. However it remained in increasingly fragmented groups, rather than as a universal affirmation, held commonly throughout Christendom, taken for granted as the central governing influence in everyone's life. There was now such a diversity of doctrinal emphasis and moral affirmation that no common consensual norm could be applied to all of our civilization. With no common moral bond, moral authority, or unified Sacramental expression in a single liturgy, Christendom was severely weakened. The loss of Christian unity vastly diminished Christian capacity for coordinated resistance to the sustained assaults of spiritual evil--a state of affairs that has become woefully obvious in the last third of the 20th-Century as what is left of Christian civilization slides ever deeper into an abyss of moral depravity.

Francis Schaeffer noted: "The [post-Reformation] freedom that once was founded on a biblical consensus and a Christian ethos has now become autonomous freedom, cut loose from all constraints. Here we have the world spirit of our age--autonomous Man setting himself up as God, in defiance of the knowledge and the moral and spiritual truth which God has given....

"As evangelical, Bible-believing Christians we have not done well in understanding this.... Very few have taken a strong stand against the world spirit of this age as it destroys our culture."²³

Differences in religion are the root of differences in culture, religion being the main determining element in the establishment of a civilization. The Catholic religion built Western Christian civilization, and that culture cannot be sustained without Catholic Christianity as its dominant moral compass. Since the Reformation, Christianity's influence on Western culture has steadily declined, a phenomenon directly attributable to Protestantism's demonstration that Church authority could be successfully challenged. However, behind the assertion that authority should be thrown off lies the assumption that freedom is a moral imperative--that what is not free absolutely and always ought to be free, and that limits on freedom of any sort are intrinsically evil. Unfortunately, the effect of doing away with anything and everything that inhibits or restrains personal autonomy is in fact a direct and deliberate rebellion against God and His law. Freedom without form, order, or limits amounts to chaos, and inevitably leads to the breakdown of society and civilization.

Rejection of authority and tradition led predictably and inexorably to the cultural embrace of modernity and secularization. The ascendancy of reductionist science, the Industrial Revolution, and the philosophical Enlightenment were all enabled and empowered by the Protestant Reformation. Questioning the beneficial goodness of these developments seems peculiar--even bizarre--to most modern minds, but historians of the future will be able to evaluate their consequences more objectively, given adequate time remaining to do so. The fact that we have taken what was a perfectly good planet for people to live on, and within an interval of 100 years or so turned it into a polluted cesspool that may not sustain human life much longer--a direct result of scientific and industrial activity--may provide the ultimate and definitive judgment.

Westerners in general and Protestants in particular tend to reflexively equate Christian virtue with progress, utilitarianism, and even material prosperity, a topic I will discuss more comprehensively in another chapter. This is one reason why monasticism has never made more than a peripheral impact in North America and is now in severe decline in Europe as well. The materialist assumptions of post-Enlightenment liberalism deem monasticism to be "useless." It has no immediately tangible social, political, or material benefit. It produces nothing "real." In Protestantism, especially North American Protestantism, material prosperity and social progress are assumed to be the inevitable fruits of Christian living. Western Christians in general have been conditioned to expect that Christianity will produce positive social results in a utilitarian sense. They want their faith to accomplish something economic or political that people can see. Such results are not necessarily wrong or undesirable, but they should not be the main objective of Christianity whose primary mission is the salvation of souls, not material prosperity and social reform.

The late Canadian philosopher George Grant astutely defined liberalism as an essentially anti-ecological creed: "The idea that man's essence is freedom and that what chiefly concerns man in this life is to shape the world as we want it."²⁴ Grant also argued that by aspiring to transcend "the human condition" and establish Heaven on Earth through application of technological means, post-Enlightenment liberals and leftists destroyed the intellectual and social conditions necessary for wisdom, heroism, and productive work. He noted that all "local cultures" were in danger of being swept away by a pan-global economic technocracy, as liberal humanist intellectuals everywhere pursued their agenda of tearing decent, but formally less educated, people away from their attachment to religion.

Grant believed that western Christendom was doomed, not merely compromised, by the fact that its theologians from at least the 11th century on have downplayed the mystical and over-emphasized rationality and intellect in their approach to God. He blamed these man- centred theologies for the rise of the scientism and industrialization that he believed were destroying civilization, arguing that many church leaders "don't seem to be aware of how deeply the principles of modernity... make the believing of Christianity an impossibility, and that these principles have to be shown to be false."²⁵ George Grant hoped for a religious revival that would re-establish "the idea of limits... the necessity of knowing in advance that there are things one will never do, things that one can know would be wrong at all times and all places.... God is that which we cannot manipulate. He is the limit of our right to change the world. In the recognition of limits the idea of law in some form must once again become real for us." Pre-Reformation Catholic culture in the West understood the crucial need for limits, but Protestantism's demand for individual moral freedom and rejection of authority quickly obscured that understanding in Western popular culture.

So what was Medieval Catholic culture really like? There is a received and seldom-examined assumption in our time that humanity has progressed from the alleged tyranny, oppression, and feudal servitude of the Middle Ages, through the great awakening of humanistic consciousness in the philosophical Enlightenment, to arrive in a brave new world of liberal democratic social justice. This facile and prejudiced view is false. The feudal system itself conferred numerous rights on the peasant classes, and was established in part as a reaction to the tyranny of the Roman Empire in its last days. The Medieval peasantry was exempt from military conscription. The peasant class was highly valued by Christian society, and in exchange for their work peasants were granted freedom (slavery disappeared in France in the 9th Century) and tenured quasi-ownership of their land. Low land taxes and generally fair contracts between feudal landlords and peasant farmers arguably resulted in a more equitable division of property than exists in Europe today.

Landlords seldom sought to be hands-on administrators of their holdings, and local parishes as a rule were governed semi-autonomously by council assemblies presided over by the local priest which elected stewards to one year terms. These stewards, acting on behalf of the landlord, made virtually all the practical, day to day decisions pertaining to administration of forest lands, waterways, roads, bridges, commons, and public buildings. The Reformation-facilitated Industrial Revolution transformed the guildsman and free peasant classes from being essentially self-governing proprietors who owned their own tools and worked out of their own homes for their own profit in organic local economies, into wage-slaves subject to increasingly remote and centralized governments, working for faceless corporations--a state of affairs that still obtains today.

According to French historian Raymond Delatouche, post-modern Europe is doomed because it has rejected the feudal system of small peasant farmers, along with the Christian Faith that built Western civilization. Delatouche observes that the post Industrial Revolution West is the "only civilization which is not based on peasantry," and the only one which in fact assumes that the mark of a truly developed society is the disappearance of small farmers. Delatouche believes that while an agricultural peasantry is the "irreplaceable foundation of any society," the industrial and technological revolutions are "only gigantic fireworks," with an insatiable appetite for fossil fuels used to produce more and more useless and destructive consumer products which serve mainly to create an artificial environment that isolates people from nature and God, and a profit-based economic structure that cares nothing for God or nature.²⁶

Medieval culture was largely illiterate, with perhaps only one of three people at the beginning of the 16th Century being able to read or write. Four hundred years earlier, in the High Medieval period, even great kings and nobles were unable to sign their names. Prior to the invention of the printing press, illiteracy was no great inconvenience or impediment to success in life. Until the late 15th Century, all books had been laboriously produced manuscripts, available to only the very rich, or to scholars and clerics with access to institutional libraries. Consequently, whatever ideas the vast majority of people had about God had been transmitted aurally, and it was through preaching rather than reading that the Gospel was heard. This fact makes Protestant complaints that the Roman Catholic Church "kept the Bible from its people" ring hollow. Except for at the very eve of the Reformation, no mechanisms had existed to put the Bible into the hands of the masses. However, contrary to present-day popular misconception, once printing came on stream in the mid 15th Century, many vernacular editions of the Bible were printed in Catholic Europe, in Italian, Spanish, French and German, but significantly--none in English.²⁷ Other religious books also were published, including prayer books, guides to spiritual life, and manuals for parents in instructing their children in the faith.²⁸

Feudalism was a complicated system of personal, economic, and legal relationships involving the control and use of land and military power. Sovereignty was decentralized and divided among powerful, land-holding nobles who maintained their dominance with private armies. Usually these tenured estates were not actually owned by the local lord or seignior, but were part of a higher noble's holdings assigned at the pleasure of the monarch. Likewise, peasants did not usually own the land they cultivated, but held it from the local seignior. Feudal society was held together by a consensus that every man had a place in the scheme of things with fixed duties inherited at birth which would be passed on to his descendants. Everyone was bound by rules, custom, and tradition in which it was taken for granted that each member of society owed it certain dues, but was in return guaranteed subsistence for himself and his family. Peasants could not be detached from the land they worked, and retained their tenure even if the land passed from one lord to another. This system created a static, steady-state society, organized around rules that provided a strong framework for the preservation of the character of the whole. This social stability was founded and sustained on universally accepted religion whose liturgy and philosophy explained the essential nature of life, death, and most importantly, man's relationship to God and eternity.

Virtually everyone in medieval Europe believed that the universe was created by God; that humans were distinct form other categories of living creatures by virtue of uniquely possessing an immortal soul; that death was just a transitionary stage in human existence; that after death man was intended by his Creator to live in perfect happiness in the Holy City, in the Light of God's immediate presence; that the divine plan had been disrupted by the first man's act of disobedience, which precipitated the Fall from grace; that consequently by his own doing man had destroyed the harmony of God's plan, and wrecked his chances for happiness beyond the grave; that happily, God in His divine mercy had intervened by becoming a man with the same nature as the Creator, who offered Himself as an infinite Sacrifice for the atonement of human sin, thus restoring the prospect of Paradise. These points were all but universally affirmed by everyone from the most powerful monarch to the most common serf.

Medieval European society was centred on a consensus of Christian principles that defined what was right and wrong, what was done and what was not. All human activities were conducted on the understanding that they were acceptable to God, from which derived the Medieval ethic of service. Feudal landlords and their tenants shared a complex relationship bounded my mutual obligations.

The first part of the European Middle Ages was unambiguously rural in temperament--a world of agricultural peasants, country-bred warrior lords, and landed monasteries. Nevertheless, the dominant influence of bishops and monks ensured that it was a cultured rurality, with great architecture, sculpture, painting, music, literature and oratory, and central to it all the Catholic Faith. Medieval agriculture was of a truly sustainable nature, leaving the land more fertile than it had been, in contrast to the prodigal soil degradation and poisoning with chemicals that obtains today. One tenth of the crop, a tithe, was given to the Church, the proceeds of which were intended to support charity and cultural development.

On the other hand, our modern liberal sensibilities are affronted by the fact that dissidents and non-conformists of any sort were treated very harshly. However, it must be acknowledged that this (to our late 20th Century liberally conditioned minds--cruel) intolerance of non-conformity obtained in post-Reformation Protestant culture as well.

Medieval European life, even in the troubled late period, was structured around the Church calendar and its system of fasts and feasts, of which the greatest was the Lenten period followed by Easter. Medieval Catholic religion was not merely the private affair of individuals relating to their Creator, but the central reality in a culture where there was one religion professed by all in society, and in which everyone, at least outwardly confessed devotion to it. The Catholic religion thus dominated every aspect of medieval life: family, work, business, art, social life, and entertainment. It was, in a comprehensive sense, a Christian society in the way that no major society has been since.

It is probable that much late medieval preaching and pastoral teaching, especially after the Black Death had decimated the ranks of the clergy, was not of very high quality, as many priests were poorly educated themselves. Indications are that in many areas of Europe, Catholics only received Holy Communion once yearly during the late medieval period. This was in contrast to the earlier Middle Ages when Mass was conducted every Sunday and on 30 or so other Holy Days each year, and failure to participate was considered a serious sin. Priests were not permitted to marry dating from the 12th Century in Roman Catholic society. However, by the late medieval period many Catholic clerics, especially in rural areas, openly cohabited with women, weakening the Church's reputation and moral authority.

Poor instruction, perfunctory participation in the Sacramental life of the Church, moral corruption in the clergy, and an illiterate, bookless laity, all doubtless contributed to the rise of widespread superstition, belief in witches with resultant cruel atrocities, cults of saints and relics, the infamous abuse of indulgences, and other caricatures of Christianity that helped fan the flames of reformist sentiment. However, it also must be well noted that the superstitious hysteria about witches reached its bloody peak in countries dominated by Calvinistic branches of Protestantism after the Reformation. The very late medieval period also ushered in the Spanish Inquisition (in 1478), which put the ecclesiastical institution of the Church Court, whose true objective was not punishment, but rather conversion or restoration of the sinner to a state of grace, under the control of the state, where, as nearly everyone is aware, it was horribly abused to a legendary degree--a topic deserving of a book of its own.

The Middle Ages were thus a time of sharp contrasts and contradictions. However, it can be convincingly argued that on the balance the medieval system of guilds and freehold peasantry far better expressed the essential Christian belief in the infinite worth of every human soul than does industrialism and technocracy. The sort of democracy that has developed under capitalism and socialism (state capitalism) has actually widened the gulf between economic classes. Despite the hierarchical stratification of medieval society, hard boundaries of social division between rich and poor didn't exist. Catholic feudalism had gradually transformed slaves (who made up two-thirds to three-quarters of humanity at the time of Christ) into serfs, serfs into peasants, and peasants into peasant proprietors over 14 Christian centuries, but that process ground to a halt with the Renaissance.

The very early Christians would not have been able to conceive of any other socio-economic structure than slavery. However, through gradual spiritual awakening, the Christian Church first promoted laws making slavery more humane, and then eliminated it entirely from Christian societies. It was difficult for a baptized Christian to regard another baptized Christian as a chattel.

It was a slow process, but the slave of early Christian Europe, where people could be bought and sold as a commodity, was transformed into the free peasant of medieval times. The intermediate stage of serfdom involved obligations of labour, but also freedom to hold property and hereditary rights. No explicit process brought about this transformation, but rather a common, universal religion confessed by people of all social ranks, which made it more and more impossible to "buy and sell Christian men." The frequent forcible breakup of families in the slave trade was neither consonant with nor defensible under the Christian ethic. Unfortunately, slavery returned with a vengeance after the 16th Century colonization of the New World, and again, somewhat more subtly, as Catholic Culture gave way to post-Reformation industrialism, and the guildsman who owned his own tools and worked out of his own home was transformed into the wage slave toiling in machine age factories--the "dark satanic mills" described by William Blake in his poem, "Jerusalem." The filthy, pestilence-ridden sweatshops of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th Centuries are gone now, at least in the liberal West, but wage-slavery remains the economic paradigm for most people. In the late 20th Century, slavery has taken on the insidious form of servitude to material appetites, which keep most people, even in the prosperous West, chained to a treadmill of acquisition and debt. It is interesting to observe that in the Middle Ages, usury was illegal. It is not at all fanciful to imagine that as the last vestiges of Christian restraint crumble away in the post- Christian West, we will see the return of undisguised slavery.

In contrast to the caricature of feudal oppression, servitude, poverty, drudgery, disease, famine, and superstition and most people today associate with the Middle Ages, the stable civilization and Catholic Culture of pre-Reformation Europe allowed merchants and the artisans considerable freedom of movement, freedom from arbitrary demands for services or taxes, and protection from marauders. These conditions prevailed in medieval towns where merchants and tradesmen organized their guilds as voluntary commonwealths of mutual help and solidarity that helped secure from the landed aristocracy the freedoms they needed. The guilds monopolized their occupations and trained apprentices and journeymen. The rule and spirit of the Guild forbade accumulation of wealth by the few. Apprentices were subject to their masters, but earned the right to become masters themselves in turn. Some guildsmen became as wealthy as the great landed lords, and some lords built town houses, where they spent part of the year. Most townspeople, however, were little better off materially than country people, and many were as dependent economically on their employers as villagers were on their lords. However, townspeople did have greater legal freedom.

In country or town, the feudal system was not based on materialistic greed, as both the modern socialist and capitalist systems are, but rather upon the belief that "the earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof." Nationalism had yet to rear its ugly head. Individuals' loyalties were their families and local communities, to their immediate feudal lords, to higher temporal lords on up through the feudal hierarchy, and ultimately to God. Even the feudal absolute monarchs perceived their possession of kingdoms as a tenancy under God, the true Owner. There was no place in the feudal concept of government for ownership without responsibility, and no place for the modern notion of the nation-state as a mutual-benefit trust. Mutual benefit statism implies possession of "rights," a particular obsession of our post-Christian era, but Christian Feudalism recognized only duties towards God, and under God, towards men--whether one was a serf or a noble, a vassal or a prince. It was a system based on faith in God, rather than in money and power.

The High Middle Ages saw a flowering of culture. "It was that moment in which the Catholic culture came, in the civic sense of the word `culture,' to maturity...," wrote the great mid- 20th Century Anglo-French historian and Roman Catholic apologist Hilaire Belloc, "Never had we had such a well-founded society before, never have we since had any society so well founded or so much concerned with justice. A proof, if proof were needed, of the greatness of that time is the scale of the chief public characters...: St. Louis the King, St. Ferdinand of Castile, St. Dominic and St. Francis, with their new orders of friars; Edward I of England; and in philosophy, which determines all, the towering name of St. Thomas Aquinas."²⁹ The early Medieval period was a time of establishment of great political and social institutions such as Parliaments and Universities, as well as major advances in architecture, art, and literature. It was also a time of social emancipation, marked by developments such as the Magna Carta in England. especially with the Christian family paradigm coming under sustained attack.

In "Now I See," Sir Arnold Lunn draws the reader's attention to three particular paintings representing families during three phases in the history of Europe: Medieval Catholic Christendom; post-Reformation Calvinist Puritanism; and 19th-Century bourgeois modernism. The first painting described by Lunn is the Memling triptych of St. Christopher at Bruges. In the central panel is the commissioner of the painting, Burgomaster Morel, surrounded by his sons and his patron saint. In the right panel, his wife appears with her eleven daughters and her patron saint. "The whole picture is haunted by a strong faith in the supernatural," writes Lunn, "...and there is not one unhappy face in either group. And note as a sure sign of a superstitious age, that this great leader of commerce chose to be painted on his knees."

The second family is in a painting by Michael Schwerz. "If the first group symbolizes the happiness of Catholic supernaturalism," observes Lunn, "this study of a Calvinistic family shows the effect of supernaturalism gone sour. Note the cold cruel compressed lips of the mother, and the smug satisfaction on the face of the eldest daughter. Even the baby looks as if it had a vocation in Puritanism. The most human figure is the father, a pathetic creature with a hint in his eyes of suppressed revolt against the sour Puritanism of his wife."

The third group Lunn describes is in Romney's study of the Beaumont family. "In the interval, he writes, "Calvinism had gone the way of Catholicism. Religion only survived as a ceremonial background.... Look at the two young men on the left, one of them is admiring with satisfaction his own portrait... No reliance on saints here for protection. If good breeding, good looks, good health, and a good income were all that a man needs, the Beaumont family represent the crown of an evolutionary process which begins with Burgomaster Morel on his knees and ends with Mssrs. Beaumont standing firmly on their well-shod feet. Try to introduce a saint into the Beaumont group. The effect would be as incongruous as that produced by those modern stunt paintings of Apostles in lounge suits."³⁰

Chapter 5: THE SPIRIT OF SKEPTICISM

Protestantism's inherent spirit of skepticism, beginning with the statement: "I deny the authority of the Church; everyone must examine the credibility of every doctrine for himself," originally fell back on the prop of Scriptural authority. However, that retrenchment could not withstand the tide of liberal skepticism that the Reformers loosed on the world. Christian appeal to Scripture as the sole authority (sola scriptura) begged the question of New Testament canonicity. The present canon of 27 New Testament books was not finally accepted until the third Council of Carthage around A.D. 397. It should never be forgotten that the Scriptures referred to by St. Paul as being inspired by God (2 Timothy 3:16) are the Hebrew texts--the OLD Testament. The New Testament was not available to the very early Church because it had not been written yet. However the Church survived, grew, and thrived somehow without New Testament Scriptural authority. For first-century Christians, the idea of the Church and the Bible as distinct and separate Revelation would seem a very odd notion indeed.

There were indeed writings that the early Church preserved and distributed for instruction and encouragement in the faith, but it took several hundreds of years before these documents were critically evaluated and a very small proportion of them accorded special value as inspired and authoritative Holy Scripture. For instance there were more than 50 different records or alleged records of the life and teachings of Jesus, of which just four made it into the canon. This collection of documents cannot legitimately be considered the primary authority of the early Christian Church. That authority resided in the Holy Tradition of the Apostles embodied in the visible Church.

The same Church fathers who established Orthodox/Catholic credal doctrines of the Holy Trinity and Christ's Incarnation also determined (c. A.D. 350-397) which books would be included in the New Testament. Were they were right about the Bible and wrong about doctrine? As Frank Schaeffer observes: "The monopoly of truth [Protestants] affirm, the Scriptures for instance, only exists because they were preserved by the Church through history. And they were preserved because the Church kept a strict control of certain nonnegotiable traditions, including its own tradition of what was or was not considered Scripture."³¹

What became the Roman Catholic version of the Old Testament originated as a translation of earlier Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, beginning in the 3rd Century BC among Jewish communities in Egypt and elsewhere outside Palestine where there was demand for Scriptures in the language of the local culture. By the time the Christian Bible began being compiled, around the 1st Century AD, two distinct versions of Jewish Scripture existed: the older Hebrew Bible and the Greek Old Testament--the Septuagint.

The early Christian Church recognized the additional books that appeared in the Septuagint, and many writings of the early Church Fathers attest to this fact. However, Martin Luther removed the books that did not appear in the Hebrew version of the Jewish Scriptures and established them as the Apocrypha, which he suggested was useful for edification but not establishment of doctrine. His stated rationale was a return to earlier and presumably more accurate sources, but a secondary agenda was a repudiation of the Church's canonical authority.

The Reformers, found the story in the Second Book of Maccabees about Judas Maccabeus sending twelve thousand pieces of silver to Jerusalem to pay for sacrifice to be made in atonement for the sins of those fallen in battle particularly objectionable, because it was included in the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead, which affirms: "Let none doubt that it is a pious thought and a salutary one to pray that the dead may have their sins remitted," which provided Old Testament authority for devotion to Requiems. The Introit and Gradual for these Masses: "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat es," ("Grant them O Lord, eternal rest and let light perpetual shine upon them") comes from the Apocrypha as well.

The typical Protestant attitude toward Scripture is as if the Bible had suddenly been discovered in a desert or fallen from the sky like manna from Heaven in the 16th Century. It denies acknowledgment of those who suffered persecution and battled heresy to ensure that the Bible made it into the 16th Century intact, that is: the historical Church. Protestantism essentially ripped the Bible out of the Church's hands and claimed it for itself, while simultaneously denying the Church's Tradition, Sacraments, teachings, and Apostolic legacy.

Incidentally I would encourage any of my Protestant readers who subscribe to the myth that Roman Catholics do not esteem Scripture adequately, to carefully ponder the following citation from the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation of the Second Vatican Council: "The Sacred Scriptures contain the Word of God and, since they are inspired, really are the Word of God.... This sacred Synod urges all the Christian faithful to learn by frequent reading of the divine Scriptures the `excellent knowledge of Jesus Christ.' `For ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.' Therefore that they should gladly put themselves in touch with the sacred text itself.... And let them remember that prayer should accompany the reading of Sacred Scripture so that God and man may talk together; for `we speak to Him when we pray; we hear Him when we read the Divine Saying."

Twentieth-Century Christians are blessed with unprecedented access to the Bible, and that is a wonderful thing. However, it is wrong to regard the Holy Scriptures as self-sufficient and self-interpreting. In Orthodox/Catholic understanding, the Bible is meant to be read and interpreted within the context of the life of the Church, under the guidance and illumination of the Holy Spirit. His work in the Church was not suspended after the first century, to sit out the next fourteen centuries, and then resume in the sixteenth.

The Council of Trent's mandate was to restate clearly Catholic doctrine, with particular regard to those points on which the Reformers had offered a new teaching. A decree of April 1546 states that the first objective of the Council was to preserve, not to restore "the purity of the Gospel," and to declare that the truth and the way of life revealed by Jesus Christ "were contained both in written Scriptures and in the unwritten traditions, which received by the Apostles from the lips of Christ had been handed on by them and so come to us." Trent also declared that "to decide the true meaning and interpretation of the Holy Scriptures is the business" of the Church.

The Orthodox Church teaches that while no other treasure of the Church's tradition equals the Bible in value and authority, and that the Bible is the main source of patristic theology, it considers the Bible to be a record of truth, but not truth itself, the truth itself being God alone. Orthodox theologians affirm other records of the experience of God, EG: the writings of the Church Fathers, liturgies and other sacred texts, and the decisions of the Ecumenical Councils. This, they assert, rescues the Church from exclusive focus on the Bible, and "thus guards Orthodox life from the error of idolatrous veneration of the text of Scripture" or "bibliolatry."

The Orthodox Church believes that Sacred Tradition (which is defined as "the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church") plays an important role in the interpretation of Scripture." Scripture and Tradition belong together according to Orthodox teaching, and indeed the Bible needs Sacred Tradition as the living interpreter of God's Word, just as Sacred Tradition needs the Bible as its anchor and foundation. Fr. Kallistos Ware writes: "...we do not read the Bible as isolated individuals, interpreting it solely by the light of our private understanding.... We read it as members of the Church, in communion with all other members throughout the ages. The final criterion for our interpretation of Scripture is the mind of the Church. And this means keeping constantly in view how the meaning of Scripture is explained and applied in Holy Tradition that is to say, how the Bible is understood by the Fathers and the saints, and how it is used in liturgical worship."³²

The Reformers imagined that they could cherry-pick selected creeds and dogmas of the ancient Church while ignoring the ecclesial structures that originally defined and authorized them as Divinely revealed Truth--an approach that is neither logically consistent nor convincing. If what the Church fathers established as doctrine and tradition in the seven great oecumenical councils (AD 325-787) was provisional and mutable, what prevents us from second-guessing them on what is or is not Scriptural? As Lutheran theologian Carl E. Braaten argues: "A purely biblical dogmatics that claims to go straight to Scripture--bypassing the question of the Church's authority in exegeting, interpreting, and transmitting the beliefs of the community for which this book and none other is Holy Writ--is surely self-deluded."³³

That Scripture is authoritative is undisputed among Christians, but the Church is the logical and proper primary interpreter of its revelation. Interpretation is not legitimately the role of just anyone who picks the Bible up, reads a bit, and then decides what it means to him, within whatever frame of reference he brings to the project. There is more than a little residue of the ancient, but remarkably durable, Gnostic heresy in the too-frequent Protestant presumption and acceptance that the "prophetic" insights of a single individual--be he Calvin, Luther, or a modern-day TV evangelist--can blithely ignore or even contradict the centuries of Church teaching and tradition that have gone before.

Indeed, Scripture must be interpreted, but the Apostolic tradition of the Orthodox/Catholic Church is the God-appointed, permanent witness to the Scriptural message, because the Church Herself belongs to that same revelation, being truly the Body of Christ. Protestant belief in sola scriptura is not adequate. As the Council of Trent (1545-1563) declared, tradition--that part of revelation not written down in Scripture, but transmitted through the teaching of the Church--is of equal authority to the Bible.³⁴

Surely Martin Luther never dreamed his teaching that every Christian could and should establish his own relationship with Christ through reading and interpreting Scripture for himself would eventually lead to the horror of Biblical "higher criticism," but once the unified Christian Church's authority had been repudiated, nothing was beyond skepticism. Textual criticism of the Bible that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was utterly predictable in an ethos of skeptical free enquiry and the asserted sovereignty of human reason. In this sense, Protestant Christianity was, as Hilaire Belloc declared, "auto-toxic," carrying within it the germ of its own destruction.

Originally, all Protestant sects asserted that the Bible is the uniquely infallible source of truth and authority, but respectively emphasized one or more self-interpreted text(s) upon which to distinguish themselves from other Protestants. With no objective spiritual discipline, no doctrinal unity, and in repudiating most of the Sacramental life of the primitive undivided Church, there was nothing to inhibit Protestantism from continuing to dissolve, ad infinitum, into ever more idiosyncratic fragments. Reductio ad absurdem. Protestantism bears within its founding notion the process of endless disintegration through perpetual reform; reformation upon Reformation. Reportedly, there are now in the neighborhood of 25,000 Protestant denominations and sects worldwide. How under these bizarre circumstances can Christ's voice be heard through this cacophony of voices, or Christianity speak with anything approximating coherent authority?

A direct progression can be traced from the Reformers' initial attacks on the Church's authority to modern wholesale assaults on every substantive aspect of Christian Faith. Christendom's modern adversaries won't be satisfied until the Church is obliterated as anything more than an irrelevant, toothless shell. Liberal-humanism will not and cannot tolerate the true Christian Gospel, and Christians are mistaken in the notion that they can tolerate a cultural environment dominated by liberal humanism, without profoundly compromising their Christian Faith. In Belloc's words: "We must attempt to destroy [the modern attack on Christianity] as being the fully equipped and ardent enemy of the Faith by which man lives. The duel is to the death."

Belloc's friend G.K. Chesterton wrote that "On a great map like the mind of Aquinas, the mind of Luther would be almost invisible. But it is not altogether untrue to say, as so many journalists have said without caring whether it was true or untrue, that Luther opened an epoch; and began the modern world."³⁵

Chapter 6: SOCIO-ECONOMIC CONSEQUENCES OF THE REFORMATION

The salutary characteristics of Reformation theology and its secular spawn--socio-economic liberalism, include hard work, frugality and individual self-reliance. Modern materialism was developed around these principles, which favoured production over consumption and the interests of the individual over that of the collective community. The Protestant dogma of personal judgment advanced the concept of democratic governmental systems based on representing the preference of a majority or a plurality of individual voters. The destruction of the medieval system of authority removed traditional religious restrictions on trade and banking--especially proscriptions against usury--which had inhibited the development of modern capitalism.

Reformation theology, especially that of John Calvin, emphasized industriousness. The famous "Protestant Work Ethic" terminology actually derives from a famous study by a German Marxist economist, Max Weber, first published as "The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism" in 1904/'05. Weber's thesis was picked up and expanded upon by English economic historian R.H. Tawney who argued in his "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism" (1922) that historical causation is not influenced solely by economic considerations, and that the peculiarly Protestant (especially Calvinist) synergy of asceticism and worldliness facilitated the rise of capitalistic productive efficiency. Weber pointed out that while the necessary material and circumstantial factors that could have accommodated the establishment of capitalist economic structures had existed in Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, Judaic, and indeed Orthodox/Catholic societies; various philosophical, religious, and ethical characteristics inherent to those traditions inhibited such development. By contrast, post-Reformation Christian society provided just the right conceptual soil in which the seed of capitalism could germinate and flourish.

Max Weber was the first to clearly identify and define the organic relationship between the Reformation theological ethic and broader social and economic developments such as capitalism and liberalism. He argued that the following characteristics of Reformed theory led to the rise of capitalism: (a) the emphasis Luther and Calvin placed on the Christian "calling" inclined people to work harder; (b) the Reformers' emphasis on frugality, including a greater commitment to earning than consuming, encouraged accumulation of capital for investment and business growth; (c) belief that success in one's temporal work provided an indication and assurance that the individual Christian was living a well-ordered, disciplined life; and (d) the commercial attitudes that inevitably evolved from these assumptions. In turn, R.H. Tawney argued that Calvinist Puritanism was most "congenial to the world of business," and that it gave the "capitalist spirit" a "tonic."

During the more than 12 centuries in which Roman Catholicism had dominated the spiritual and temporal affairs of Western civilization, economies grew at a glacial rate. In this steady-state environment, people tended to work only as necessary to fulfill immediate or short-term needs. Work was seen as something to be avoided entirely if possible by the higher social classes, and best left to serfs, servants, and peasants. Nor did the latter categories see anything innately virtuous about labour, and consequently they too did as little as they could get away with.

Hilaire Belloc observes: "Under the old social philosophy which had governed the Middle Ages, temporal, and therefore all economic, activities were referred to an eternal standard. The production of wealth, its distribution and exchange, was regulated with a view to securing a Christian life for Christian men. In two points especially was this felt: First in securing the independence of the family, which can only be done by the wide distribution of property, in other words the prevention of the growth of a proletariat; secondly in the close connection between wealth and public function.... The artisan in the towns, organized in his guild, had control over his own life and that of his family. He was not, as he has now become, the economic subordinate of wealthier men. His relations with his apprentices were organic and domestic, unlike the modern relation of mere mechanical contract between laborer with the capitalist who exploits him....

"The society of Christendom, and especially of Western Christendom up to the explosion, which we call the Reformation, had been a society of owners: a Proprietarial Society. It was one in which there remained strong bonds between one class or another, and in which there was a hierarchy of superior and inferior, but not, in the main, a distinction between a restricted body of possessors and a main body of destitute at the mercy of the possessors, such as our society has become. It has become so through the action of the Reformation, which was at the root of the whole change."³⁶

The Calvinist Protestant idea that work for work's sake was innately virtuous supplied a theological rationale for liberal economics and its paradigm of growth. Calvin's emphasis on individualism meant each individual's responsibility to serve God. Every individual Christian had a duty and obligation to be as self-reliant as possible, and to lead a life centred on hard work and frugality. The central doctrine of Reformation theology is salvation by grace through personal faith in Jesus Christ. A question that naturally arose was how can one know that he is really a member of the elect? Catholics receive assurance of their salvation through rites of the Church: the Sacraments and priestly absolution, but these had been rejected by the Reformers. Therefore one answer was found in "By their fruits shall ye know them." A Protestant could receive assurance that God's grace was effective in him through living a daily existence characterized by moral order and devotion to temporal as well as spiritual affairs. While one cannot be saved through one's good works, they still needed to be evidenced in one's life in order to provide assurance of salvation.

Martin Luther's ideal for Christian living was apostolic poverty and simplicity, but he also held that we should apply ourselves to our work in a thoroughgoing manner and strive to do well at any enterprise we put our hand to. This amounted to a significant departure from the "present needs" ethic of work that prevailed under medieval Catholicism.

Labor became an end in itself-- "a station assigned him by the Lord," according to Calvin, who believed that idleness, "sloth," and even relaxation were essentially sinful and indicative of insufficient commitment to God. The individual would no longer cease from his labours once his essential financial and physical needs were satisfied. Continuous work was necessary to fulfill one's obligations to God and to avoid the dangers of idleness. As with so many other aspects of Reformation theory, its economic implications led to unintended consequences. In Calvin's perspective we find the roots of 20th Century manic workaholism. The idea of hard work and ceaseless activity is about all that remains of Calvin's doctrine for most of Western society, but he was successful beyond his wildest expectations in making people feel guilty about "doing nothing."

Four centuries later, materialism is now centred on consumption rather than production. Calvin doubtless never imagined that his half- thought-out ethic of ceaseless production would lead to what we now call Capitalism, but that it would was inevitable. Unlike the economics that existed under Catholic Christendom, in which people tended to work only as much as absolutely necessary, Calvin's ceaseless, tireless production for its own sake was bound to create surplus material wealth which would go to waste if not consumed, an embarrassing problem since, to Calvin's way of thinking, enjoyment of the fruits of one's labour was as carnal and "sinful" as idleness. The solution to this dilemma was reinvestment of the surpluses in even more efficient production and creation of a means of marketing it--leading to the development of consumer capitalism. Calvin tragically underestimated the seductive pull material wealth and comfort would exert on individuals once their production and acquisition was sanctioned by Christianity (and thus the social moral consensus). If he had possessed a realistic view of human nature, he could never have thought that an ethic of work for work's sake combined with material asceticism would be sustainable.

Liberal capitalist economics soon took on a life of its own. Individualism gradually lost the ascetic ideals that Calvin and the other Reformers preached, and along with it the sense of individual responsibility to God. Today it has developed into a secular dogma of freedom to do and/or consume whatever one desires, uninhibited by any sense of moral restraint, let alone duty. Pleasure becomes the primary objective of life, an ethos that pulls the floor out from under moral society. Post-Reformation empiricist English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) argued that man's natural and rightful objective in life was temporal happiness, and a measure of Locke's influence is found in reference to "the pursuit of happiness" in the U.S. Declaration of Independence of July 1776. Locke argued that the proper role of morality was to caution against indulgence in immediate pleasures that result in lasting misery. He believed, far too optimistically, that man's instinctive inclination to be happy should provide sufficient motivation to ensure moral behavior.

However, under a paradigm of sovereign individualism, reason can no longer impose limits on the pursuit of pleasure--including the immediate gratification of every desire, no matter how perverse, criminal, or immoral. As Locke's contemporary Thomas Hobbes argued: when we say "good" we simply mean that which we desire, and by "evil" that which we choose to shun; and that will is "merely the last appetite in deliberating." Likewise, for Hobbes, "True and false are attributes of speech, not of things, and where speech is not, there is neither truth nor falsehood." The objective standards that stand in condemnation of crime and cruelty derive from religion, and have no place in a society based on a consumption ethic. The Reformation made all authority--parental, political, religious, academic, etc.--suspect, or at best subject to individual interpretation. The liberal impulse is to remove all external restraint on the free agency of the individual--to set up a permissive society organized around the pleasures of consumption and sensuality, and is ideologically at odds with the concepts of self-restraint and self-discipline.

Capitalism set up a system dependent for its survival upon the promotion of consumer demand. People are encouraged to spend and consume rather than to save and conserve. The principle of delayed gratification, which initially provided an ascetic rationale for the accumulation of capital, were soon discarded in favour of the spontaneous, emotional, and subjective ideology of endless consumption. Capitalism subordinated the sense of being to a desire for having, and transformed the value of commodities from usefulness to their exchange potential. American philosopher Richard Weaver wrote that one of the "strangest disparities in history," is the "sense of abundance felt by older and simpler societies," contrasted with the "sense of scarcity" felt by our materially rich one.³⁷ That gnawing sense of insecurity pertains not only to the individual's material estate, but also to the soul's status. There may have been a lot less individual liberty under Medieval Christendom, but there was virtually no suicide either.

It was no major leap to go from regarding idleness and relaxation as sinful, to thinking of efficiency and productivity as innately virtuous-- that output was as important as input. Because industrial activity is inextricably linked to the material goods it produces, it is not hard to trace the process by which material prosperity came to be regarded as unquestionably "good;" an outward sign of divine reward for "right living." If work (which increasingly came to mean wage-slavery in industry) was a temporal manifestation of moral propriety and spiritual well-being, then there could hardly be anything wrong with the material fruits of labour or with the environmental sacrifices that resulted from industrial progress. Belloc writes: "In denying the efficacy of good deeds and of the human will, of abnegations, in leaving on one side as useless all the doctrine and tradition of Holy Poverty, Calvin opened the door to the domination of the mind by money.... Calvin himself would have said with learning, sincerity, and zeal that the glory of God was the only object worthy of human activity, but as he divorced such activity from the power of saving the individual soul, what could there remain save the pursuit of riches?"³⁸

The notion of the positive goodness of material wealth and prosperity gradually developed into a heresy that has enjoyed a particularly strong constituency in North America, suggesting that anyone who is not materially prosperous--whether he lives down the street or in the Third World--is somehow deficient in character, lazy perhaps. Nineteenth Century Protestant evangelist Dwight L. Moody implicitly repudiated the traditional Christian ideals of poverty and simplicity, stating that "It is a wonderful fact that men and women saved by the blood of Jesus rarely remain subjects of charity, but rise at once to comfort and respectability.... I never saw a man who put Christ first in his life that wasn't successful."³⁹ The operative words here are "comfort and respectability," the arch-objectives of bourgeois liberalism. "The Gospel of Wealth" preached by Moody fit in perfectly with the burgeoning liberal/humanist apotheosis of material comfort and prosperity. This notion, widely promoted by 19th Century Protestant evangelists, equated Biblical teaching with individualism, free enterprise, and unlimited material accumulation. It is still a dominant motif in many sectors of evangelical culture, manifesting itself in such ideas as the "name it and claim it" pseudo-gospel of acquisition.

It is notable that among Moody's close associated and supporters were such 19th-Century Capitalist barons as John Wanamaker, Cyrus McCormick, Philip Armour, Jay Cooke, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, and J.P. Morgan. Another prominent 19th-Century American Protestant, Russell H. Conwell, also ingratiated himself with captains of industry by preaching that financial success was a reflection of personal righteousness while poverty was a mark of God's punishment.⁴⁰ Evangelist Billy Sunday, a contemporary of Moody and Conwell, was also a friend and confidante of big-name capitalists, including John D. Rockefeller, S.S. Kresge, Elbert H. Cary, Louis F. Swift, Henry S. Frick, and John M. Studebaker. A New York Times columnist of the day asserted that wealthy capitalists supported Sunday as a "police measure--as a means of keeping the lower classes quiet."⁴¹

The term "Gospel of Wealth" was actually coined by Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, in an essay of that name first published in The North American Review in 1889. Carnegie postulated that civilization depended upon a threefold set of "laws": 1. The "sacredness" of private property. 2. Open commercial competition. 3. Unrestrained accumulation of wealth.

Carnegie believed these laws were ordained of God, and that anything which undermined them was "the work of the devil." Consequently, in his schematic, those who lived in accordance with these "divine laws of economics" (ie: unbridled capitalist liberalism), were guaranteed to prosper. Conversely, anyone not materially successful must have serious deficiencies in his Christian life.

The fact that even a cursory reading of Jesus' teaching on poverty in the New Testament reveals the "Gospel of Wealth" to be utter heresy, seems not to have phased Carnegie (or legions of other bourgeois liberal professing Christians) in the least. They, in R.H. Tawney's words, had persuaded themselves that "greed is enterprise and avarice economy."

Carl Jung observed that by the beginning of the 20th-Century it had become "gratuitously offensive" to imply that Christianity should be hostile, or even indifferent to the material world. On the contrary, wrote Jung, the "good Christian" is the "jovial citizen;" the "enterprising businessman;" the best in whatever field of temporal endeavour he involves himself in; "worldly goods," Jung continues, are "interpreted as special rewards for Christian behavior."⁴²

As we have noted, secular humanism evolved from the Reformation doctrine of individual sovereignty, as the Lutheran/Calvinistic concept of covenant with God was gradually (but inevitably) displaced by the liberal religion of self-gratification. The Calvinist idea that productive work was outward evidence of Christian salvation became outmoded as far as most of society was concerned. However, pressure to conform with a Protestant Work Ethic ideal of behavior remained. The "need," as Jung characterized it, is to propitiate a "great power" outside of ourselves. A "Wholly Other," representing the perfect and only reality. The fact that most people now substitute money, power, material prosperity, and "good citizenship," for God, makes little difference in terms of the P.W.E.'s compulsive hold on their psyches.

We might reflect that the Reformers, with self-perceived best of intentions, sowed the seed of the Reformation's auto-destruction by promoting a simplistic, easily distorted, "down-to-earth" idea of visible righteousness. Today, the true cathedrals of consumer society are shopping malls. The marketplace ministers to our personal needs, and is the chief moral instructor of post-modern, post-Christian individualism, taking the place of both the Church and the extended family. Calvin's rigid asceticism, intended to focus the individual's mind on serving God, ultimately and ironically ended up creating and serving the hedonistic demands of a new bourgeois-consumer class. It is no accident that the so- called "Gospel of Wealth," originated in North American Calvinistic Protestantism.

As American scholar Christopher Lasch observed: [The bourgeois] extols cooperation and teamwork while harbouring deeply antisocial impulses. He praises respect for rules and regulations in the secret belief that they do not apply to himself. Acquisitive in the sense that his cravings have no limits, he does not accumulate goods and provisions against the future, in the manner of the acquisitive individualist of nineteenth-century political economy, but demands immediate gratification and lives in a state of restless, perpetually unsatisfied desire."⁴³

Technological development expresses a revolt against the limitations of the human condition, and appeals strongly to the seductive notion that we can remake the world in accord with our desires and harness nature to our purposes, thereby achieving humanistic self-sufficiency.

By the late 20th Century it had become obvious to anyone with eyes to see, that this heroic project was going sour. Not only were the earth's ecological systems breaking down under the stress of human activity, but nihilism, neurosis, and despair were running rampant in the most prosperous, "developed" societies. Many people in the "deprived" Third World living under repressive regimes were arguably happier than the average discontented Westerner. The more we conquer nature; the more we increase our power and wealth; the more we consume; the more scientific knowledge and technological sophistication we possess; the deeper despair bores its way into our collective psyche, feeding on our uneasy sense of failure to live up to our potential as human beings rather than as consumers and despoilers of nature.

"A despairing humanity is not merely an unhappy humanity;" writes Theodore Roszak, "it is an ugly humanity, ugly in its own eyes-- dwarfed, diminished, stunted, and self-loathing. These are the buried sources of world war and despotic collectivism, of scapegoat hatred and exploitation. Ugly hates beautiful, hates gentle, hates loving, hates life. There is a politics of despair.... Out of despair [people] grow burdened with moral embarrassment for themselves, until they must at last despise and crucify the good which they are helpless to achieve. And that is the final measure of damnation. To hate the good precisely because we know it is good and know that its beauty calls our whole being into question."⁴⁴

The average person nurtured in the bosom of liberal democracy tends to be scandalized by any suggestion that hierarchical feudalism had anything to recommend it in terms of justice. We dealt in an earlier chapter with the popular prejudice that caricatures feudalism as a barbaric and oppressive system benefitting only those born into the aristocracy, and that its overthrow was a triumph of human justice.

However, it is arguable that the average person of whatever feudal class was happier and more satisfied with his lot in life than the typical stressed-out denizen of our post-modern liberal democratic cultures. Part of the problem with democratic capitalism is that it created its own dialectical opposition, a large population segment with political and social freedom, but without the economic freedom to take advantage of it --Marx's Proletariat-- a faction convinced that it has "nothing to lose but its chains," and therefore possessing no sense of loyalty to, or stakehold in, capitalist society. Depending upon circumstances and opportunity, varying percentages of this self-perceived dispossessed class will become lawless and even predatory, a phenomenon manifesting manifold examples in contemporary Western democracies.

The full citizen possessing political freedom, but little practical economic freedom, is bound to resent the injustice of being exploited by others of equal political status whose only claim to superiority is the power that comes with greater wealth. The obvious material and social inequalities that abound in purportedly civically "equal" liberal democratic societies are a constant goad to these festering resentments. The ordered and generally acknowledged stratification of social and economic relationships between the duty of superiors and loyalty of inferiors in feudal culture, even when a degree of injustice obtained, was a moral reality familiar to both parties and mutually recognized as their mutual guarantee of a stable, economically secure, and civilized existence. No such bond of mutual commonwealth exists in an economic culture predicated on contract rather than status. Thus, when a wage-earner's services become superfluous to a capital enterprise's economic needs, the capitalist will terminate the worker's employment, perhaps with sincere regret, but with no sense of duty toward the employee beyond the discharge of any contractual obligations. Likewise, the wage-earner feels no particular sense of loyalty toward his employer beyond the stipulations of his job description. However, it is not difficult to discern who has the whip hand in such a relationship, or to recognize how it leads to social instability and alienation.

The impersonality of corporate culture only increases that alienation. Many people who work for large companies may never lay eyes on, let alone meet or talk to, the upper managers and directors who control decision making and policy, and thus the economic destiny of the workers. And even those individuals are not the true employers in companies owned by public shareholders, who, especially these days, often live in foreign lands.

The structural flaw in the liberal economics from which both capitalism and socialism derive, is that the vast majority of citizens come to regard themselves as employees, with little control over their economic security. Labour unions purported to address this problem, but succeeded mainly in reinforcing the contractual dynamic in the workplace. This increases, rather than reduces the level of antagonism in the employer/employee relationship, and in no way enhances any sense of commonwealth. The unionized worker is still a wage-slave, who may have achieved a greater degree of economic justice through collective bargaining, but who ultimately has no secure hold on his socio-economic status beyond the terms of his union's current contract, and is still subject to layoffs. Not only that, he is even less of a free agent than he was as a non-union worker, now having another set of bosses over him-- the union executive.

Karl Marx's remedy has proved to be an even greater failure than capitalism at achieving economic and social justice and a sense of mutual commonwealth. Alienation is the cosmic disease of modern and post-modern society. People feel, with considerable justification, that they are essentially on their own, obliged to swim or sink. The palliative of the impersonal welfare state, resented by its powerless beneficiaries and taxpaying benefactors alike, is a shabby substitute for Christian society in which the more fortunate assume a sense of duty toward the less fortunate, rather than merely a legal obligation that is dispatched when they pay their taxes.

The manifold horrors of our present century, in which the most infernal brutality, cruelty, and evil have co-existed with the ascendancy of liberal humanist ideologies; poverty and famine with material abundance; technological advances with ecological destruction; are largely a consequence of the modern tendency to cast all constructs of problem and solution into an economic context. The futility of this approach is manifest for anyone who has eyes to see. However, because affirmation of the absolute sovereignty of God is incompatible with the sovereignty of man--whether the latter be under democracy or dictatorship--no other solution is seriously considered or even imaginable to growing numbers of people. They see civilization collapsing around them, but can't explain why this is happening. What they don't grasp is that no political or economic system can cure this illness.

In truth, the only force powerful enough to arrest the disintegration and descent into neo-pagan barbarism is the Faith that built Western civilization in the first place--Catholic/Orthodox Christianity. Religion is the only paradigmatic basis for workable, sustainable, just societies. Because of this fact, the High Middle Ages serves as a model of sanity and practicality in terms of economic development and social structure, especially when contrasted with the suicidal madness of our age with its overarching greed and monomania for productive efficiency and delusions of endless material prosperity.

Chapter 7: LIBERAL HUMANISM

"No one can be at the same time a sincere Catholic and a true Socialist."

Pope Pius XI encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (1931)

The Catholic Christian architects and builders of Western civilization held that faith in God is the root of knowledge. The neo-barbarian humanist materialists who now dominate and control Western society and its anti-culture culture hold that faith in God is the root of ignorance, and that no truth is legitimately appreciable except through direct experience and observation. The two polarities cannot peacefully co-exist, because they respectively lead to radically different and incompatible social cultures. The "culture wars" of the 1990s are a symptom of this dynamic.

The so-called philosophical "Enlightenment" of the 17th and 18th Centuries in Europe was an intellectual movement that asserted the sufficiency of human reason, and skepticism with regard to the validity of the traditional authority of the past--including Christian teaching. It also advanced the concepts of nationalism and the secular state in a more systematic way than had ever obtained before. The objective of Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire and Rousseau was to create a better centralized state at the expense of local autonomy. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church defines the Enlightenment (die Aufkl„rung or `clearing') as follows:

"The Aufkl„rung combines opposition to all supernatural religion and belief in the all-sufficiency of human reason with an ardent desire to promote the happiness of men in this life.... Most of its representatives... rejected the Christian dogma and were hostile to Catholicism as well as Protestant orthodoxy, which they regarded as powers of spiritual darkness depriving humanity of the use of its rational faculties. ...Their fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature, which blinded them to the fact of sin, produced an easy optimism and absolute faith of human society once the principles of enlightened reason had been recognized. The spirit of the Aufkl„rung penetrated deeply into German Protestantism, where it disintegrated faith in the authority of the Bible and encouraged Biblical criticism on the one hand and an emotional `pietism' on the other."⁴⁵

The Enlightenment led directly and unambiguously to 19th and 20th Century liberalism, and it must be clearly understood that it stands in complete antithesis to Christianity--Orthodox/Catholic or Protestant-- on all points: denying the supernatural; affirming the all-sufficiency of human reason; rejecting the fall from grace and original sin; denying Christ's divinity and His Resurrection from the dead; believing in the perfectibility of Man; deconstructing the Bible. All of these Enlightenment/liberal beliefs are aggressively anti-Christian. Make no mistake: you cannot make a coherent synthesis of post-Enlightenment liberalism and real Christianity in full understanding of what they respectively signify. You cannot legitimately say: "I am a Christian, but I believe the Church's teaching is false and the Bible is full of errors."

Post-Enlightenment liberalism combined with 19th and 20th Century existentialism begat modern liberal secular humanism, which British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper concisely summed-up as "the unwarranted assumption that man only needs freedom from ancient restraints in order to realize his inherent perfection." In their book "Dialectic of Enlightenment" Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno note that "the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant."⁴⁶

Existentialism holds that it is an illusion to imagine that anything can be truly known, or that there are objective truths and moral absolutes. All we have is subjective experience. Everything is "relative," and the only legitimate values are "tolerance" and whatever makes the individual "happy," or at least feel good at the moment. The secular "creeds" laid out in The Humanist Manifestos I and II are clearly inimical to Christian belief, EG: "The Central task of Mankind is the quest for the good life," and "Conceptions of right and wrong are to depend on the feelings of the person in any given situation." Humanist relativists assert that moral principles of right and wrong, virtue and vice, are simply value judgments--matters of personal taste. As American liberal apologist Stanley Fish puts it: "All principles are preferences; All preferences are principled." This half-baked sophistry quickly falls apart when confronted with real-life moral questions like whether murder, rape, or keeping slaves are simply matters of personal taste, but there is no shortage of self-styled humanists who enthusiastically affirm positivist dogmas in the abstract. The true Christian, on the other hand, perceives God as the source of all being and order, who creates human beings in His spiritual image and likeness. Therefore, the actions of human beings are objectively right to the degree that they are consistent with God's divine nature, and wrong to the extent that they deviate from it.

Recently, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia addressed 650 people at the Mississippi College School of Law about the difficulty of being a Christian in public life today. Scalia pointed out that the word "cretin," which means "fool" or "idiot," derives from a Swiss-French word for "Christian." "To be honest about it," said Scalia, "that is the view of Christians taken by modern society. Surely those who adhere to all or most of these traditional Christian beliefs are to be regarded as simple-minded.... We must pray to endure the scorn of the sophisticated world." Predictably, a liberal humanist backlash declared that such opinions make Scalia unfit to sit on America's highest court.

Liberal humanism has long since gone beyond mere doubt and skepticism about the claims and teachings of Christianity, and now considers orthodox Christian doctrine positively erroneous and even destructive. For example, Katha Pollitt, an Associate Editor with the Nation and the Freedom From Religion Foundation's "Free-Thought Heroine of 1995," declares religion to be "a farrago of authoritarian nonsense, misogyny, and humble pie, the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom."⁴⁷ The spirit of skeptical inquiry and the emotional, indefinite approach to knowledge and philosophy ushered in by the Reformation destroyed traditional faith. Doubt came to be popularly perceived as more intellectually sophisticated than faith. As Soren Kierkegaard observed: "Now it is spirited and the sign of a deep nature not to be able to [believe].... Splendid result attained by Christendom!"

Protestantism's bastard child, modern liberal humanism, teaches that no point of view can justifiably impose its principles on society. The Reformation laid the groundwork for liberal Enlightenment doctrines like the alleged goodness and perfectibility of man, and the inevitability of social and moral progress in history. While some Enlightenment philosophers continued to utilize Christian language, their ideas contradicted the essential Christian affirmation that all men are poor sinners in need of salvation by Grace, and that this state of affairs will prevail until the end of time. The Gospel proclaims our dependence upon God, while liberal humanism purports to make men captains of their destiny and masters of their own fate. Essentially, liberal humanism is a denial of acknowledgment that we are created beings living in a created universe and subject to a created order. There is no question of obligations towards God. Law does not derive from God's revealed will, but rather is an expression of the will of the people. Governments don't derive their authority from the Almighty, but from the consent of the governed. Liberal "reality" is what we decide to make it--not an objective ground.

By rejecting the magisterial Church's authority, sacrament, and ritual, the Reformation kicked open the door for humanity to unilaterally declare its "coming of age." The liberal humanist project grossly exaggerates man's place in the cosmic scheme of things while denying God's divine sovereignty. St. Thomas Aquinas argued that our reality inheres in having a certain level or dimension of existence--which is governed by an essential principle which is both a potentiality and a capacity for existence or esse. At one end of this scale is God, who is pure Existence with no potential in Him. All other beings receive their level of existence from God so that there are beings with greater or lesser degrees of being or existence depending on their potential (essence) for it. God is absolute, while human beings and His other creations are inexorably finite.

The Enlightenment cleared the way for quantum leaps in human understanding of the physical world through the advancement of empirical science and geographical exploration. The scientific Enlightenment worldview applied a more skeptical spirit to history and documents, both sacred and secular, and promoted the deconstruction of the Catholic culture of Christendom. It came to be widely assumed that science would eventually be able to explain everything in terms of natural causes. The stable equilibrium that had hitherto prevailed in Christian Europe, the ordered rule and custom that had governed economics, with human relationships connected by inherited status rather than by contract, disappeared with stunning rapidity. The new paradigm introduced unrestrained competition, rather than the steady-state stability of Medieval society.

As material civilization advanced, spiritual civilization declined reciprocally, a process that has continued into our present era. Our partial mastery over nature and acquisition of knowledge about the material world has been accompanied by a commensurate decline in philosophical depth and maturity. It is probable that many would regard the trade-off as advantageous if they recognized its existence at all, but such is our philosophical and spiritual poverty in this post-modern era that few do.

The quasi-sophisticated ignorance and philosophical/intellectual confusion liberal humanism has bred in late 20th Century Western culture is demonstrated in a survey that found 70 percent of Americans affirming belief that the Bible is "the written word of God, totally accurate in all it teaches," while at the same time 72 percent say they believe "there are no absolute values." This self-contradiction bespeaks the cultural dominance of half-baked and incoherent philosophical notions like radical Empiricism, Existentialism, and Naturalistic Determinism that have so impoverished the intellectual life of our era. Liberal modernism of course, as Hilaire Belloc noted, "is indifferent to self-contradiction. It merely affirms. It advances like an animal, counting on strength alone."

Real Christianity is incompatible with liberal humanism. Until our own philosophically and spiritually bankrupt era, the Christian Gospel was never taken to mean that we are here to stroke everyone's self-esteem, to make them feel happy and welcome. Too many modern would-be Christians, nominally Orthodox/Catholic and Protestant alike, prefer sentimentality to virtue. That way they can feel good about themselves without having to change their behavior or do anything else that's inconvenient. However, Christianity, properly understood and lived, makes rigorous and sometimes even harsh demands on the individual. It is not about "self-realization," but rather the realization that Jesus is Lord and that we are here to obey and serve Him.

What matters is not what we would like Christ to have been, but rather what He was and is. Any Jesus worth worshiping must be more than just a subjective construct that we can mould and manipulate to suit our prejudices and preferences. The liberal project of emphasizing the human Jesus, while largely ignoring or even denying His divinity, would only be intellectually defensible if Jesus really were not divine. And if Jesus is not divine, what is the point of Christianity? As St. Paul pointed out, if Christ is not raised from the dead, then we Christians are of all men most pitiable.

Unless Jesus really was God, many of his statements can only leave us to conclude that He was a madman. For example: "Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven.... He that receiveth me, receiveth him that sent me." (St. Matthew 10: 32, 40)

Only God, or a deluded lunatic, would have said: "All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.... Lo I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. (St. Matthew 28: 18, 20) Jesus claimed that all nations would be gathered before Him on Judgment Day, while He sits on His throne and pronounces judgment on them. Hardly a claim one would expect from a sane individual, unless of course, He really was God.

The exclusively "human" Jesus of the liberals, strangely enough, is very much a modern humanitarian, a peacenik and socialist who opposes war and violence, and is preoccupied with equitable distribution of the world's material goods. In short, the liberals' Jesus remarkably resembles their idealized projection of themselves, "the people of God." Such a Jesus appeals to liberal narcissism, but fortunately he is not recognizable in the Jesus of the Gospels, who is anything but an amiable pacifist and philanthropist. In the New Testament we find a Jesus who pronounces unambiguously: "He that believeth not is condemned." The unprofitable servant is to be cast into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. This line of rhetoric is likely to be altogether too redneck and judgmental for your typical liberal-humanist to stomach.

Liberals who read the Gospel accounts of Jesus' teachings (and of course outside of the Gospels and the Apostolic tradition--which liberals reject--what do we know of Christ?) will find plenty more that conflicts with their ideologies and prejudices. For example, the Christ of the Gospels believes in hell. Liberals don't want to believe in hell, and insist that Christ must have been mistaken on that point. Jesus also believed in evil spirits, which liberals scoff at as "superstition" peculiar to His time. They, enlightened by science, of course know so much better. And so on. Once it has been decided that Christ didn't quite know what He was talking about on so many weighty matters, it indeed becomes difficult to sustain the concept of Christ as God, or to rely on much of anything He had to say. On the other hand, if we affirm that Jesus was God, then it is absurd to suggest that He was mistaken about hell and evil spirits and the Judgment.

American historian and former Stalinist, Eugene Genovese, who has returned to the Catholic Faith into which he was baptized, argues that Catholicism is the only faith that satisfies his logical need for an omnipotent God. "I have to say," he writes,⁴⁸ "a God who is progressing, learning from his creatures, is not somebody who interests me. If I have something to teach God, I don't need him anymore. A God of love who is not simultaneously a God of wrath doesn't interest me either."

Unlike liberals, bona fide Orthodox/Catholics affirm as true everything that Christ taught, for the novel reason that He taught it, and they predicate their general belief system on these teachings as the standard of moral and spiritual knowledge, as opposed to setting up their own subjective suspicions or the latest philosophical fashions and trends as a substitute for that standard, and presuming to dictate the terms by which they will accept God and His revelation, rather than coming to terms with Him through that revelation.

Arnold Lunn likened liberal theology enthusiasts to a little girl drawing a picture. "What are you drawing?" her mother asked. "I'm drawing God," the little girl replied. "But you can't do that," objected the mother, "nobody knows what God looks like." "They'll know now," said the little girl determinedly, and kept on drawing.

The liberal humanist movement that insists on substituting mawkish sentimentalism and naive faith in science for real religion, will succeed only in writing civilization's epitaph if it is left unchecked. As an antidote, the Church must assert the Gospel with authority and unshakable confidence in its message, not in the hesitating and irenistic dissembling with which it as been inclined to address issues in the public square over the past 50 years.

Chapter 8: THE LONG ROAD BACK TO CHRISTIAN UNITY

In its present fragmented state, Christianity is poorly equipped to battle the humanist onslaught. My dream is of a Christian Faith restored to unified strength as literally one truly Holy Apostolic Catholic Church. I believe that this will be possible only if, (a): Protestants can be brought back within the fold of Orthodox/Catholicism, and (b): the churches that still affirm the Apostolic Faith can somehow be reconciled with one another. An optimistic and naive hope perhaps, but the alternative is grim. Hilaire Belloc noted that the True Church cannot disappear entirely, since it is the only institution among men not subject to the universal law of mortality, but he warned that the Church could indeed be "reduced to a small band almost forgotten amid the vast numbers of its opponents and their contempt for the defeated thing."

Happily, some convergence toward unity is evident. A significant proportion of Anglicans worldwide, distressed by the increasingly impaired and apostate established Anglican/Episcopalian communion, are leaving to become Roman Catholic, Orthodox, or to join the Traditional Anglican Communion.

Then there are former Protestant evangelicals like myself who have returned to the Orthodox/Catholic fold. John Frank (`Franky') Schaeffer--son of the man many regard as the foremost evangelical Christian philosopher of this century--joined the Greek Orthodox Church in 1990. As Schaeffer puts it: "At long last I had been given weapons of sacrament, faith and tradition with which to do spiritual battle. I was no longer trying to go it alone." It is ironic that former Protestants, coming from denominations that consider themselves the "free church," often experience a tremendous sense of liberation when they convert to Orthodox/Catholicism.

"Our experiential Protestant `desert,'" says Frank Schaeffer, "is such an all-pervasive monolithic culture that, within it, we Protestants never dreamed that there was still a faith both sure and `primitive'--close to the early Church--vibrant and true, of which it could be accurately proclaimed, `This is the faith of our Fathers; this is the doctrine of the Apostles!'" In Catholicism/Orthodoxy, you no longer have to struggle to get "right with God" through your own subjective understanding. Your relationship with God is found within the sacramental life of the Church and the faith of Christ who lifts you up--no longer dependent upon your "faith alone."

Schaeffer's friend Tom Howard, a professor of English and author of several books (EG: Christ the Tiger, and Evangelical Is Not Enough) also made what he calls "my own pilgrimage from good, sturdy, Bible-centred Protestant evangelicalism into a form of Christianity which was...liturgical and sacramental and historical..." Howard became first Anglican, then Episcopalian, and ultimately was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1985, a conversion that cost him his position teaching English at evangelical Gordon College. "I pray every morning for the reunion of the Church, on God's terms, not ours," says Howard, "and I will be the happiest man in Christendom if that can ever get itself sorted out."

Chapter 9: THE STRANGE CASE OF HOW 2,000 PROTESTANT EVANGELICALS ENDED UP JOINING THE ORTHODOX CHURCH

In early 1987, some 2,000 members of the now-dissolved Evangelical Orthodox Church were received into full communion with the Eastern Orthodox Church--the largest ever mass conversion to Orthodoxy in North American history. Even more remarkable was the fact that the leaders and clergy of the erstwhile E.O.C. group were former evangelical Protestants, with backgrounds in Campus Crusade for Christ, Youth for Christ, and Young Life, and degrees from institutions like Wheaton College, Dallas Seminary, Fuller Seminary, Southwestern Baptist Seminary, Seattle Pacific University, Oral Roberts University, Lincoln Christian College, and Biola University.

As one of the former E.O.C. priests, Peter Gillquist, a former regional director of Campus Crusade and now an archpriest of the Antiochan Orthodox Christian Diocese of North America, asks rhetorically in his book "Becoming Orthodox," "whatever would possess two thousand Bible-believing, blood-bought, Gospel-preaching, Christ-centred, life-long evangelical Protestants to embrace this Orthodox faith so enthusiastically... [to] end up embracing historic ecclesiology, liturgical worship, and sacrament?" What indeed?

Fr. Gillquist relates how he became increasingly disillusioned with what he was accomplishing as a Protestant "parachurch" evangelist. He recalls seeing a button on someone's shirt that read: "God isn't dead-- Church is." "Amen," Gillquist said to himself, "Not only are converts falling by the wayside, but the churches are so pathetic that they can't handle the ones who do come. The Church is in captivity to an invisible, present- day Babylon!"

In 1973, Peter Gillquist joined a core group of six other burned-out campus evangelists in a quest to discover what had happened to the New Testament Church. "Not too far into our investigation," writes Jon Braun, one of the seven, "we were shocked to discover that there were whole chapters, as it were, of Church history with which we were totally unfamiliar. And in our quest to get to the bottom of what was missing, we made a monumental discovery... the historic Orthodox Church. [Up until then] we didn't even know it still existed."⁴⁹

"As Protestants," observed Jack Sparks, another member of the group, "we know our way back to A.D. 1517 and the Reformation. As evangelicals--Bible people--we know our way up to A.D. 95 or so, when the Apostle John finished writing the Revelation. It's time we fill the gap in between!"

The problem, Sparks allowed, is that "everybody claims to be the New Testament Church. The Catholics say they are; the Baptists say they are; the Church of Christ says it is--and nobody else is. We need to find out `who's right?'"

The group of seven decided to research and study every aspect of Christian history they could uncover until they discovered "who's right." They agreed going into this project that wherever their "phantom search for the perfect Church" led, they would resolve to do and be whatever the New Testament Church did and was. "If we found we were wrong, we would change," says Gillquist.

What the seven seekers discovered indeed revolutionized their vision of what the true Church should be. They discovered that Christian worship was liturgical from the earliest recorded times. The original Greek text of Acts 13:2 refers to "leitourgounton"--"liturgy."

They discovered that the Fathers of the ancient Apostolic Church perceived the consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist as the actual body and blood of Christ, as He Himself affirmed at the last Supper, and that from the earliest times the Sacrament of Holy Communion was the centrepiece of Christian worship.

They discovered that the episcopal orders of clergy date from the First Century, and that Ignatius of Antioch was bishop of the Church there from A.D. 67 to 107. Acts 1:20 (K.J.V.) uses the term "bishopric" ("episcopen" in the original Greek), although some modern Protestant translations paraphrase it. St. Paul speaks of bishops and deacons in Philippians 1:1-2 and 1 Timothy 3: 1-12, and bishops in Titus 1:7. Acts 15 refers to James the brother of Jesus, who was Bishop of Jerusalem, rendering final judgment in a dispute.

They discovered that the New Testament Church was Sacramental, believing that Baptism really is for the remission of sins and the giving of the Holy Spirit (Acts 2:38).

They discovered that "tradition" was the tradition of the very early Church. St, Paul wrote: "Therefore brethren stand fast and hold to the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle" (2 Thess. 2:15). He affirms tradition again in 2 Thess 3:6. The tradition St. Paul speaks of is the teachings of the Apostolic Church, which were considered authoritative long before the New Testament canon was ratified.

These discoveries led to the establishment of a new Church denomination: the Evangelical Orthodox Church, which incorporated the ancient doctrines and forms of worship that the seven scholars had identified in their historical research. At that point, they still had virtually no knowledge of the Eastern Orthodox Church, but once contact was finally established, the journey began in earnest that eventually led most of the former evangelicals into the ancient Apostolic Orthodox Faith. It's a fascinating tale, well told in Peter Gillquist's book.

Chapter 10: ONE LORD, ONE FAITH, ONE BAPTISM

Protestant readers may still argue, "Why is it us who have to make a move?" At risk of repeating myself, the principal answer is that Protestantism moved away from Catholic/Orthodoxy in the first place. Martin Luther's resolve to clean up corruption within the 16th Century Roman Catholic Church was commendable (although the regime Luther established as a substitute was arguably as cruel, or even worse, then the one he wanted to reform). However, Luther and the other Reformers grievously erred in their subsequent moves to change the essential doctrines and beliefs of the traditional Christian Faith, which were not and are not faulty.

The only logical justification for the Reformers' doctrinal revolution would have been if God suddenly decided He had been mistaken for the first 1,500 years of the Church's history, that Orthodox/Catholic doctrine and tradition had not been guided and established by the Holy Spirit after all, and that it was time to wipe the slate clean, so to speak, and start afresh. It is grossly presumptuous to assert or imply that the Church had misapprehended the Truth and the Will of God for 15 centuries, until Luther, Calvin, and company showed up to point out the error of Her ways. The literal definition of "heretic" is "one who picks and chooses," as opposed to one who accepts the entirety of the Church's teaching. Therefore, the European Protestant Reformers were heretics by definition, and the movement they founded is essentially heretical as well. In order for them not to have been heretics, we would be obliged to accept that the Apostolic, Orthodox/Catholic Church herself had been heretical for 1,500 years. The notion that it could be God's will that there be two (or as it turned out, thousands of) Churches, is ludicrous.

"Now just a doggone minute," Protestants might reply, "where do you get off calling my church heretical? That's your opinion and you're entitled to it, but I've been Protestant all my life, my parents and grandparents before me, and nobody is going to turn me into a Catholic!" At least that was more or less my reaction when confronted with these arguments by Catholic friends twenty-odd years ago. Like nearly everyone brought up in 20th century North American culture, I was so steeped in reflexive assumptions of personal autonomy and democratic freedom of conscience, that I simply could not think the concept of a legitimate central moral authority. My grasp of Church history was hazy at best, and what little I knew was heavily biased toward the Protestant point of view. The Catholic perspective, as I perceived it, seemed insufferably arrogant in not granting "equal time" moral equivalence to Protestantism. After all, our opinion was just as valid as theirs!

Alas, that reaction was purely and reflexively liberal, despite the fact that I fancied myself a true-blue, small `c' conservative-- theologically and politically. What I just couldn't "get" at that stage in my philosophical development was that within the context of Catholic/Orthodoxy, personal opinion--mine or anyone else's, doesn't matter. The Apostolic authority of Catholic/Orthodox doctrine is not based on the personal opinions of individuals, including Popes and Patriarchs. As Catholic scholar Dr. Cheslyn Jones once remarked when asked to give "the Catholic point of view" on an issue: "My dear, either it's Catholic or it's a point of view." The fatal flaw of Protestantism is that it is a point (indeed many points) of view, an expression of opinion about God rather than the revelation of God's divine will and nature.

The Church councils of 325-787 did not invent new doctrine based on opinion, but rather determined and reaffirmed what had always been believed about God by the True Church based on teachings of Christ and the Apostles. For over 1,000 years, the undivided Christian Church had one doctrine, and for another five centuries after that, although Constantinople and Rome disagreed on certain issues (EG: the filioque⁵⁰ clause in the Nicene Creed ), fundamental doctrinal beliefs of East and West remained essentially the same.

The True Church of Jesus Christ can be neither a democracy nor a debating society, and that it is widely perceived to be both nowadays is a liberal, not a Christian notion. "One Lord, one faith, one baptism," declares St. Paul. If your right to your sovereign opinion, and loyalty to your denominational heritage, family tradition, etc., mean more to you than the unity of one true universal Church, then you are indeed Protestant in spirit. This debate, properly apprehended, is not a tribal turf-struggle, but rather about the nature of Truth. Truth resides in God, being the ultimate, objective ground of reality that exists whether you or I or anyone affirms it or not.

Another objection to any call to universal Orthodox/Catholic unity might be that one sect of Protestantism--Pentecostalism--is currently the fastest-growing religious category in the world. At present rates of growth, an estimated 50% of all Christians will be Pentecostal by early in the 21st Century. Although I don't celebrate the fact that many Pentecostal converts come from moribund Catholic communities in the Americas, it can't be disputed that the Pentecostals do a superb job of evangelizing.

However, some aspects of the global Pentecostal revival are highly questionable outside the context of sheep-stealing. For example, a Time magazine story⁵¹ noted that the Brazil-based Universal Church of God, one of the fastest-growing Pentecostal denominations globally with 3.5 million adherents in 34 countries, employs some pretty unethical practices. TIME reported that Universal Church evangelists promise seven days of prayers and blessings to those who give $50 or more to the Church. A $20 donation buys a cut-rate three days of blessings. Hmm; sounds a bit like selling indulgences, doesn't it?

The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God reportedly has an annual cash flow of $750 million to $2 billion, and its leader, self-appointed and self-ordained "Bishop" Edir Macedo Bezerra, lives in a mansion in Purchase, New York, although there are only 15,000 members of his flock in the U.S. In October, 1995, another Brazilian Universal Church "Bishop," Sergio von Helde, shocked TV audiences by kicking, slapping, and insulting a statue of Our Lady Aparecida, Brazil's patron saint, while on camera. While most North American Pentecostals would doubtless deplore such shameful and disrespectful shenanigans, as well as the Universal Church's exploitative and avaricious fund-raising tactics, the latter prove that one must be careful about applauding the explosive growth of world Pentecostalism without qualification.

And, while Pentecostalism is highly effective in attracting converts, it does a rather poor job of taking Christians very far along the road to spiritual growth after the conversion experience. Bereft of creedal discipline, liturgy, orthodox doctrine, the priesthood, and the rich sacramental life of Orthodox/Catholicism, Pentecostal Churches are simply not equipped to nurture real growth in the Faith. Their emphasis is on perpetual evangelistic revival, not on achieving spiritual maturity.

Revivalism is commendable in that it produces Christian conversions, but emotional fervor cannot be sustained for very long, and Christian faith must be sustained by something more substantial than a dramatic conversion. The evangelical notion that Christian profession is suspect unless it is the product of a vivid religious conversion experience is mistaken and destructive.

This writer's own conversion to faith in Jesus Christ was of the profound, point-in-time, dramatic variety--a personal encounter with the risen Christ. The euphoria lasted for several months, which were followed by a quarter-century quest to recover that initial spiritual "high." Happily, I instead discovered in the historical Apostolic Faith the substance and religious depth that I had really been seeking.

"Just knowing Jesus" is not enough. A `born-again" experience, however profound and dramatic, is not enough. I know--I've been there. Salvation isn't just a one-time affair occurring at a single point in one's life. Certainly it can begin that way, but it must be an ongoing journey. We must not only become Christian, we must learn to be Christian, and we can't do this on our own strength, on the basis of "feelings" or experience--even the experience of being "slain in the Spirit." Doctrine and structure do matter. But what a powerful force for the propagation of the Faith Pentecostal Christians could bring to the True Church with their evangelical zeal and energy!

The Catholic/Orthodox Churches affirm a belief based on reason and sound theological grounding, which is independent of emotion and subjective experience. They do not disparage experience, but recognize that an enduring faith cannot be wholly sustained by it. Even the great revivalist and Methodist founder John Wesley warned that: "You are in danger of enthusiasm every hour... if you despise or lightly esteem reason, knowledge or human learning; every one of which is an excellent gift of God and may serve the noblest purposes. I advise you never to use the words wisdom, reason or knowledge by way of reproach. On the contrary pray that you may abound in them more and more."

As former evangelical--now Roman Catholic--Tom Howard puts it: "An evangelical eventually wakes up and says, `Look, I've got Jesus. I've got the Bible. I've got the faith. I love the Gospel. We've got zeal, we've got creativity, we've got energy. We've got everything. But What is the Church? WHAT IS THE CHURCH?'"⁵²

Chapter 11: WHAT THE CHURCH IS NOT: LIBERAL MAINLINE PROTESTANTISM AND "PROTESTANTIZED" NORTH AMERICAN CATHOLICISM

"The more left wing your are, the more permissive you are and the less religious you are. The more right wing you are, the more conservative you are; probably you are more religious."

Thomas Cardinal Winning, Roman Catholic Primate of Scotland

BBC interview, October 1996

If lopsided emphasis on revival and neglect of creed, sacrament, and doctrine are the Achilles' heel of Protestant evangelicalism, the quest for "relevance" has been plague and pestilence to the so-called "mainline" Protestant denominations over the past half-century. Widespread devolution into the mire of humanist neo-gnosticism has taken place, and these churches now function in almost total capitulation to the anti-culture culture of Western post-modern secularism. Instead of creating, driving, changing, and dominating culture as the Church historically did throughout its first 19 centuries, mainstream 20th Century Protestantism has raised the white flag; thrown in the proverbial towel, and resigned itself to passive accommodation of secular humanist "values." The concept of a uniquely Christian state of mind is foreign to mainstream Protestantism, whose adherents, except in the relatively narrow and specific areas of "spirituality" and personal ethics, overwhelmingly accept as normative a frame of reference contrived by secular minds on the basis of secular evaluations.

Whatever residues and resonances of Orthodox/Catholic doctrine and sensibility as once existed in these denominations continue to steadily diminish, to be replaced by a banal mush of politically-correct liberal sentimentalism and even explicitly pagan elements masquerading under the banner of a celebration of "feminist spirituality" or "multiculturalism." Precipitously declining membership in these churches bespeaks a failure to transmit a faith that attracts the allegiance of successor generations, which is hardly surprising considering that there remains little in the way of a coherent expression of what the faith to be transmitted might be. The reason the Christian religion no longer attracts and animates people the way it once did is that it has lost confidence in its essential message. The fact is, as noted in the foregoing chapter on liberal-humanism, that true Christianity is an offense and a scandal to the post-modern liberals who dominate the polity and administration of many church denominations--especially "old-line" Protestant ones. These self-perceivedly "broad-minded" individuals like to think of the various world religions, including Christianity, as all containing some part of the truth but not all of it. To them, the historical, uncompromising Christian claim that Christianity is uniquely the truth, and the firm assertion that all other religions and philosophies are only true to the extent that they approximate Christian beliefs and principles, and false when they deviate from them, is an embarrassment.

The central point of the Christian faith boils down to this: If Jesus Christ is, as He affirmed, "The Way, The Truth and The Life," and the "True Vine," and if His claim that "No man cometh to the Father but by Me," is true, and if He really did rise from the dead on Easter morning, as the Church has believed from the very beginning, then it is absurd to suggest that other religions can be "equally true" in any sense that they contradict the Christian Gospel. The liberal notion that Christians must always regard the religious convictions and sensibilities of others with deference is supported by neither the Gospels nor Christian tradition. Pluralistic affirmation of the moral equivalence of various religious views is the product not of faith, but of doubt.

If Christ was not who He said He was, and if he did not literally rise from the dead, then Christianity is a preposterous fraud, and we should give up the charade. The only possible legitimate and intellectually honest positions are to either accept the Christian Gospel or reject it, but you can't have it both ways.

Unfortunately, the churches in our post-modern era have been infiltrated and subverted by a spirit that is not just indifferent to the Gospel, but is overtly contemptuous and barely tolerant of it. This didn't happen overnight. The process was rather similar to that of the famous experiment in which a frog that is dropped into a pot of boiling water immediately hops out, but the same frog placed in a pot of cool water that is slowly heated to a boil will sit complacently and cook. The churches have gradually accommodated to the liberal modern spirit that prefers to believe in human freedom rather than in God. Liberal humanism trusts in human cleverness and temporal power, not divine wisdom; it trusts not in Providence, but in human ability to create an earthly paradise through social, economic, and technological progress. This garden of earthly delights can be indulged in without guilt once humanity has liberated itself from all "superstition" and inhibition. Traditional Christian belief in God's Almighty power, grace, and Providence is totally incompatible with the liberal humanist project of self-engineered human redemption, and nothing is more repugnant to the fully convinced modern or post-modern individual than the central Christian teaching that all humans are in fact poor sinners who must first and foremost deny ourselves in order to be made truly free.

Consequently, the liberal-humanism that dominates most Western churches at the end of the 20th-Century represents the temporal triumph of a spirit that sees itself as superior to religion, that wants to purge the church of all that is "superstitious," and to substitute sentimental symbolism for the spiritual substance of faith and Sacraments. This "Brave New Church" will dedicate itself to celebrating the human spirit; its god will be the image of absolute human freedom; its creed the "Gospel of Humanity;" its liturgy an invitation for celebrants to celebrate themselves as "the people of God;" and its standard of virtue will be an ethic of "choice," subjective feeling, sentimental feelgood-ism, and indiscriminate tolerance of everything save for traditional Christianity's claim to absolute authority as the only true way of life. That, liberal humanists cannot abide.

This too is the unintended legacy of the Reformation's rejection of the Church's magisterial authority, and its affirmation that every Christian must be free to interpret the Gospel on the basis of his own conscience. As Theodore Roszak writes: "For there was one terrible possibility that the Protestant founders failed to anticipate in their fierce hunger for iconoclastic purity. They did not see that the eclipse of God might grow so dark and last so long that men and women would lose their eyes for the light."⁵³

A church without magisterial authority is a church that will be obliged to change its teachings to suit the philosophical and social fashions of the moment, and a religion based on popular opinion amounts to a democratic social club--not the living out of a revelation from an omnipotent and omniscient God who exists and operates whether we agree with Him or not. As Roszak notes: "Mainstream Christian orthodoxy, with its minimal investment in visionary experience, was more than willing to see its God become a functional postulate in a desacralized universe.... They may never have heard the word `Deism,' but they continue to pay respects to that aloof `Somebody (or is it Something?) Up There,' the managerial deity who stands well off behind the scientist's universe, careful never to intrude... a shy and shriveled divinity... an afterthought... a clich‚. If God has at last died in our culture, he has not been buried. For the casually religious, he lingers like a fond old relative who has been so expertly embalmed that we may prop him up in the far corner of the living room and pretend the old fellow is still with us. We have even taken pains to bend his fallen mouth into a benign and permissive smile... and that is a comfort. It makes him so much easier to live with. No more of the old hellfire and brimstone; no more of the terrible mystery and paradox that require the crucifixion of the intellect; no more dark nights of the soul. Is it any wonder that for many people, a dead and stuffed God seems preferable not only to no God at all, but to any God at all?"⁵⁴

But to have faith in the liberal humanist "God" is to have faith in nothing more than human sentiment and intellectual fad. That sort of "God" fools fewer and fewer people these days, which explains why attendance in liberal churches declines on a fairly constant curve. The post-modern, post-baby-boom generations are more cynical and far less sentimental than the liberal moderns who precede them, and are hardly likely to be persuaded to place any confidence in such an obviously contrived "deity," let alone worship it. On the other hand, they just might be reachable by a Church that uncompromisingly proclaims the truth, and points the way out of the barren swamps of post-modern nihilism.

The scourges of subjective sentimentalism and relativistic modernism are not exclusively concentrated in the avowedly liberal Protestant denominations. Studies cited by evangelical scholar Gene Edward Veith Jr. in a recent book found that 56 percent of single "fundamentalist"⁵⁵ Christians indulge in sex outside marriage--nearly the same percentage as single non-Christians, and 49 percent of American Protestants say they are "pro-choice" regarding abortion.⁵⁶ A survey released in March 1996 by Barna Research of Oxnard, California, found that 84 percent of self-described "committed, born-again Christians" held non-biblical views on several crucial points. Forty-nine percent agreed with the statement: "The devil or Satan is not a living being but is a symbol of evil." Thirty-nine percent agreed that "If a person is generally good, they will earn a place in heaven." Thirty percent agreed that "Jesus Christ was a great teacher, but he did not come back to physical life after he was crucified." Twenty-nine percent thought that "Jesus Christ was human and committed sins like other people."⁵⁷ All of these statements are of course completely heretical. The Barna survey discovered that only 16 percent of people calling themselves Christian could correctly identify the most basic Christian beliefs. "Almost 40% of our church-going population is inoculated against the Gospel, because they think they already have it," commented Barna's Research Director Dave Kinnaman. "They think they've got a faith tailor- made for themselves. They like everything providential and agreeable, and reject anything smacking of absolute truth or judgment. The secular virtue of tolerance is their only absolute."⁵⁸

Many nominal Roman Catholics today too, especially in the West, have adopted the Protestant spirit to a degree that they can no longer be legitimately considered to be truly Catholic either, in any strict application of the term. For example, a dissident movement calling itself "Catholics of Vision," beginning in Austria and Germany in the mid-1990s and then spreading into the U.S. and Canada, gathered over two million signatures on a petition demanding democratization of the Roman Catholic Church; "an all pervading atmosphere of freedom among the people of God;" "liberation" of theologians from doctrinal restraints; "normalization" of homosexuality; repeal of mandatory priestly celibacy; ordination of women; "freedom of conscience" with regard to contraception and abortion; and election of bishops. In other words, a prescription for radical liberal humanism and Protestant "freedom of private judgment."

A 1995 TIME/CNN Yankelovich poll of U.S. Catholics found that 60% favored female priesthood; 75% said that non-marital sexual relations are not necessarily wrong; 80% believed they can contradict the Church's official positions on morality and still be "good Catholics"; and 78% said that individual Catholics can safely ignore Church teachings and make up their own minds on moral issues like abortion. Gene Edward Veith Jr's. statistics say that 66 percent of single Roman Catholics are sexually active, that 83 percent of Roman Catholics accept premarital sex, and that 47 percent are "pro-choice." The principles of personal moral autonomy and freedom of conscience these persons affirm are emphatically not Catholic, and these statistics illustrate that most North American Roman Catholics have clearly capitulated to a Protestant mood of radical individualism. Therefore, as Christianity Today editor Timothy Morgan notes, when rock star and pornographer Madonna Louise Ciccone declares that her baby is "gonna be a good Catholic, just like me," most North Americans, Catholic and Protestant alike, figure that she has just as much right to define "her" Christianity as anyone else.

Not so. There are minimum standards of orthodox belief individuals must meet in order to legitimately call themselves Christian, even in the most rudimentary sense, and most liberals and post-modernists, based on their own testimony, do not honor these basic Christian beliefs whether they are nominally Protestant or Catholic. Did Jesus Christ rise from the dead or not? This is more than a theological or rhetorical question. A Christian must affirm without equivocation that Jesus Christ was and is God the Creator Incarnate, and that He rose from the dead. Anyone who does not believe that these two points are objectively true cannot legitimately call him/herself Christian.

In our ideologically pluralistic era, with its multicultural obsessions, the concept of exclusive truth is dissonant with the popular zeitgeist-- literally repugnant to some, including increasing numbers of professing Christians. However, the essence of Christianity has always obliged its adherents to draw boundaries and circles. Jesus established the Christian claim to unique revelation when He said: "I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes to the Father but by me." This is the inescapable essence of the Christian message, no matter how much it may make post-modern "liberal Christian" multiculturalists squirm with embarrassment. The more troublesome question is where do we draw the boundaries and how big to we make the circles that delineate what is and is not Christian.

It is in this line and circle-drawing that the inconsistency, illogic, and inherent relativism of Protestant liberalism are accented. Protestants generally affirm that some sort of boundaries are necessary, but tend to keep moving them to accommodate the influences of the secular, humanistic world--making the circle ever-bigger. Orthodox/Catholics, on the other hand, insist that the boundaries must stay where they have always been.

Do all of the multi-thousands of Christian denominations have legitimate equal claim to call themselves the Church? Or has Protestantism simply given up on the concept of the Church as an objective body at all?

PART II: DIFFICULTIES

Chapter 12: AUTHORITY

Authority, both religious and secular, is ordained of God. St, Paul clearly stated in Romans 13:1: "Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed of God." No one can reasonably dispute that the orders of episcopal government--Bishops, Priests, and Deacons--existed in the very early Church.

In Acts 1: 20 the term "office," referring to the Apostolic vacancy left by Judas, is literally translated "Bishopric." In a letter to the church at Philadelphia, Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch (67-107) writes of "Christians at one with the bishop and the presbyters [priests] and the deacons." St. Peter was the first Bishop of Antioch before AD 53, and was later Bishop of Rome, where he was martyred c. AD 65.

Much Protestant resistance to restoration of Orthodox/Catholic Church unity inheres in misapprehension of what "Church authority" really means. A popular Protestant perception seems to be that the Roman Catholic Pope functions as an autocrat, imposing his every will and whim on a subservient laity. In fact, the Pope, Cardinals, Bishops, and Deacons are themselves under the authority of the Church's doctrine, tradition, and canon law. Their function is to administer that authority within, not over, the Church--not to assume it personally.

However, Roman Catholic church policy is unquestionably characterized by centralized authority under the Pope, who the Roman Church regards as the successor to the apostle Peter. In Roman Catholic belief, the Petrine See is the sacrament of the Church's unity. Peter is the vicar of Christ, and Christ is the head of the Church. The First Vatican Council (1869-70) further enhanced the role of the papacy by declaring that the church's infallibility (or inability to err on central issues of the Christian faith) can be exercised personally by the Pope. Papal infallibility has been invoked only in extraordinary circumstances, and the notion, held by some Protestants, that Catholics believe that it applies to every word that proceeds from the pontiff's mouth, is utterly without foundation.

To be deemed infallible, a statement of the Pope must satisfy all of the following criteria: (1) he must be speaking ex cathedra as Pope; (2) the utterance must define a doctrine concerning faith and morals; (3) he must be defining a doctrine to be affirmed by the whole Church. Unless all three conditions obtain the Pope is not speaking infallibly. For example, the Pope may err when expressing his personal theological views, and not ex cathedra, as, for example, when he condemned Galileo.

It is inaccurate to assume, as many Protestants do, that the Pope could produce an infallible ex cathedra pronouncement at any time, and on any subject connected with faith and morals. Any explicit ex cathedra utterance is based on intensive research and study by both the Pope himself and his Episcopal advisors.

Eastern Orthodoxy's rejection of papal authority was part of the reason for the great East/West Church schism in 1054, but it cannot be argued that the primacy of the Bishop of Rome was not acknowledged by great Eastern early Church Fathers and Saints including Ignatius, Iren'us, Denys, Athanasius, and St. John Chrysostom. St. Ignatius, who was consecrated a Bishop by St. Peter himself, according to Chrysostom, wrote to the Roman Church: "Ye were the instructors of others, and my desire is that those lessons should hold good which as teachers ye enjoined." Orthodox scholar Fr. Alexander Schmemann writes: "[In the primitive Church] there is no mention of `rights' or `subordination,' but the more ancient churches were naturally more concerned for the universal unity of Christians and the welfare of the Church. Among them the Church of Rome, the Church of the Apostles Peter and Paul--the Church of the capital of the empire--undoubtedly enjoyed special recognition from the very first."⁵⁹ The Bishop of Rome was considered the Apostle Peter's successor, and head of the universal church by divine appointment. By the beginning of the fourth century, says Schmemann, "Rome's first place was not denied by anyone in the Church." Eastern Bishops acknowledged the Pope as their father and teacher. However, in the 5th Century Popes increasingly asserted that the see of St. Peter was the ultimate judge in matters of faith and discipline, whereas the East affirmed the authority of councils, where the local churches spoke as equals. They were happily prepared to respect the tradition of the Petrine see, according the Roman bishop a measure of moral and doctrinal authority, but they believed that the canonical and primatial rights of individual churches were to be determined above all by historical considerations.

St. Iren'us, a disciple of St. Polycarp, who, Iren'us wrote, "had not only been trained by the Apostles but had conversed with many of those who had seen Christ," paid tribute to "the Church, founded and established at Rome by two most glorious apostles Peter and Paul. For this Church, on account of its higher origin, the whole Church (I mean the faithful on all sides) must needs agree; wherein the tradition which is of the Apostles hath ever been preserved by them in all countries."

St. Ignatius's writings also affirm the three hierarchical episcopal offices, the monarchical bishopric, the doctrine of the Eucharist, Catholic teaching on the value of virginity, and of major relevance to the theme of this book: the teaching that the Church is one. "Have a care for unity, than which nothing is better," Ignatius wrote to St. Polycarp. "Be not deceived, my brethren; if any man follow one who makes a schism he doth not inherit the Kingdom of God; if anyone walk in another doctrine he consenteth not to the Passion."

When schism finally came, it was not only over theological and ecclesiological disagreements, but also reasons of state. The Turks were at Byzantium's gates, while the Normans were ravaging the Roman Empire's northern holdings. However, Alexander Schmemann notes that when the actual separation came in 1054, it was not over substantive issues like the filioque, a celibate priesthood, and papal infallibility, but rather more trivial matters like disputes over the ecclesiastical calendar, the use of unleavened bread and the singing of Alleluia at Easter, etc.

Mutual anathemas (excommunication) were exchanged by Pope Leo IX and Patriarch Michael Cerularius of Constantinople, and once the break was perceived as final, Schmemann notes, "hatred crowded into this prolonged encounter between the divided halves of the Christian world. The separation of the churches ceased to be a dispute between hierarchs or a theological controversy; for centuries it was part of the flesh and blood of the people of the Church, a constant source of anguish in their state of mind. `Latinism' in the East and `the Greeks' in the West were synonymous with evil, heresy, and became terms of profanity." A similar dynamic would apply in Europe and America 500 years later, after the Reformation schism.

"The worst part of the separation of the churches," continues Schmemann," lies in the fact that through the centuries we find hardly any sign of suffering from it, any longing for reunification, any awareness of the abnormality, sin, and horror of this schism in Christendom. There was almost a satisfaction with the separation, and a desire to discover darker and darker aspects of the opposite camp. It was a separation not only in the sense that these two churches were in fact divided, but also in the sense of a continually deepening and widening gulf in the state of mind of the total Christian community."⁶⁰ (once again, this dynamic was to be repeated following the Reformers' break with Rome).

If there had been an practical hope of mending the torn fabric of the Church in the Middle Ages, it was dashed by the so-called Fourth Crusade of 1202-1204, a misbegotten adventure mounted on a nominal pretext of the Western Church coming to the aid of Constantinople, which had been captured by the Turks, to restore the deposed Byzantine emperor, Isaac II Angelos, to his throne. However, Constantinople owed a large financial debt to the Venetian city-state, which supplied equipment and transport to the mostly French Crusaders. The Doge of Venice, Enrico Dandolo, was intent on exploiting the campaign as a means of recovering Venetian money as well as eliminating the Hungarian Christian port of Zara, which was Venice's chief commercial competitor on the Adriatic.

When Pope Innocent III heard of the Venetians' true agenda, he forbade the expedition, and after it went ahead in defiance of his prohibition, he excommunicated all participants. The Crusaders stormed up the Bosporus and took Constantinople on April 13, 1204, and proceeded to ransack, rape, and pillage over the next three days. Most of the city's art objects and other treasures were either destroyed or carted off to Venice. In the meantime, both Isaac II, Angelos and his son had died, so the Crusaders proceeded to set up a colonial administration they pompously named the "Latin Empire" in the ruined city, with Count Baldwin of Flanders (1171-1205) as its potentate. They forcefully imposed the Latin liturgy on the Greek Church, supplanting the domestic Greek rite. This humiliation was bitterly resented throughout the Eastern Church, leading to the proverbial dictum: "Better the boot of the Turk, than the slipper of the Bishop of Rome." Greek forces re-took Constantinople in 1261, at which time the Eastern Church immediately reverted to the Greek liturgy. The Osmanli Turks, under Sultan Mehmed II, finally re-conquered Constantinople for good in 1453, bringing the Byzantine Empire to an end. The injustice of the West's cynical "help" and its attempt at restoration of Church unity by military force, hardened the East's animosity and suspicion.

There was half-hearted talk of reconciliation between East and West at the councils of Lyon (1274) and Florence (1438-39), but nothing came of them. Unilateral doctrinal statements declared by the Church of Rome at the Council of Trent (1545-1563), and the dogma of papal infallibility defined at the First Vatican Council in 1870, widened the gulf between Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Only since the Second Vatican Council (1962-65) has serious interest in reconciliation revived.

"For you are still carnal. For where there are envy, strife, and divisions among you, are you not carnal and behaving like mere men?" (1 Cor 3:3)

Chapter 13: SACRAMENTAL GRACE

One of the most profound dissonances between Orthodox/Catholic and Protestant belief lies in respective perceptions of the meaning of the Sacraments. The Roman Catholic Church and the Traditional Anglican Communion recognize seven Sacraments: Baptism; Confirmation; the Holy Eucharist; Confession or Repentance; Holy Orders; Holy Matrimony; and Holy Unction or Anointing of the Sick. The TAC's "Affirmation of St. Louis" refers to these seven Sacraments as "objective signs of the continued presence and saving activity of Christ our Lord among His people and as His covenanted means for conveying His grace." Orthodoxy does not arbitrarily limit the Sacraments to these seven, but also regards as Sacramental: offices and things like the Great Blessing of the Water at Epiphany; the funeral service; Consecration of a Church, The Anointing or Coronation of an Emperor or King; preaching through which we convince with Christ as the Word of God; Icons; Relics of Saints; minor Sanctification of foods, houses, fields, etc; prayer and charity. For instance, St John Chrysostom stated: "Charity is a sacrament... for our sacraments are above all God's charity and love of mankind."⁶¹ Martin Luther, on the other hand, rejected all the Sacraments save for Baptism and Holy Communion, and redefined the significance of those.

In Orthodox/Catholic belief, a Sacrament is a divine rite instituted by Christ or His Apostles in which things visible convey to us the hidden grace of God. Through Sacraments, God's grace is mediated to us through matter. The Sacraments use natural things as vehicles of the Holy Spirit to remind us that matter created by God is good. They are deemed to be inspired by and extensions of the Incarnation in which God Himself did not eschew becoming flesh for our salvation. This is in direct contradiction of the Gnostic-Manichaean heresies and their residual modern manifestations that explicitly or implicitly hold matter as ignoble or evil, and only spirit as good. Through the use of material vehicles, nature also participates in salvation from the consequences of the Fall and the Curse to which it was subjected through no fault of its own.⁶² The Sacraments minister to the whole person--body, mind, and spirit.

The Sacraments of initiation: Baptism; Chrismation/Confirmation, and Holy Communion, are unquestionably the most important because through them we enter the full life of the Church. Orthodox/Catholics baptize infants as did the early Church, not because they believe, but in order that they might believe--Sacramentally planting the seeds of faith as it were. Through the life of the Church, these seeds will be nourished to grow and produce Christian maturity. Baptism consecrates us to Christ. As St. John Chrysostom wrote: "For this reason we baptize children, although they have no sin... in order to confer upon them sanctification, adoption, inheritance... that they may be members of Christ and become the abode of the Holy Spirit." Through Baptism, we are born into the life of Christ, "not of blood nor the will of man, but of God" (St. John 1:13). Baptism symbolizes our participation in the death and resurrection of Christ--our death to sin, and rising to the new life in Christ.

Fr. Kallistos Ware writes: "However careless and indifferent the baptized may be in subsequent life, this indwelling presence of the Spirit is never totally withdrawn. But unless we co-operate with God's grace-- unless through the exercise of free will, we struggle to perform the commandments--it is likely that the Spirit's presence within us will remain hidden and unconscious."⁶³

Chrismation or Confirmation is the Christian's participation in the anointing of Christ by the Holy Spirit after His baptism. In Baptism we Sacramentally share in the death and resurrection of Jesus; in Chrismation/Confirmation we receive the Holy Spirit, Who enables us to live the life of God into which we are born through baptism.

Chapter 14: THE EUCHARIST

Many Protestants consider Holy Communion or The Lord's Supper as merely a commemoration or remembrance of Christ's sacrifice for us, in which the elements remain nothing but bread and wine, only representing Christ's Body and Blood and having no spiritual reality. John Calvin rejected the possibility of any sort of objective presence of Christ at the Eucharist. Martin Luther, however, affirmed that Christ is really present in the Eucharistic elements, and not just in the soul of the communicant.

Orthodox/Catholics believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist--that the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Christ, although there are differences on what that means in a material sense.

Jesus said: "Most assuredly, I say unto you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.

"Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up in the last day.

"For My flesh is food indeed and My blood is drink indeed.

"He who eats my flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him." (St. John 6: 53-56)

There is no implication of symbolism or commemoration here. "This is My Body; this is My blood."⁶⁴ The Eucharist makes present again the sacrifice of Christ in a mysterious manner. The Traditional Anglican Affirmation of St. Louis defines the Eucharist as "the sacrifice which unites us to the all-sufficient Sacrifice of Christ on the Cross and the Sacrament in which He feeds us with His Body and Blood." Those who receive the Eucharist unworthily are declared to be bringing condemnation and sickness--even death--upon themselves (1 Cor. 13:30). Surely no mere symbol could have such power!

St. Justin wrote less than two centuries after the Crucifixion, and in a manner as on a matter long established and accepted, and for the instruction of readers who were newly or not yet Christian, that the sacramental bread was no longer "common bread," but "the flesh of Christ."

For Roman Catholics, the Sacrifice of the Mass is the Sacrifice of Christ which was "full, perfect and sufficient," but which can be repeated by men in time and space because God is outside of time and every Mass is connected to Christ's bloody sacrifice. Each mass is the unbloody sacrifice, which, united to Christ's eternal sacrifice is offered to God again and again as the most perfect of prayers, since it is divine and eternal.

The Protestant Reformers argued that the "Sacrifice of the Mass" meant that the Catholic/Orthodox priest offered up Christ, really present in the forms of the bread and wine, as a propitiatory sacrifice to God for the sins of the living and the dead, and against this concept they vigourously rebelled. The Reformers insisted that (a) Christ's sacrifice took place once and for all on the cross (indeed the adverb hapax or ephapax--meaning `once and for all'--is applied in this context five times in the Letter to the Hebrews) and cannot be re-enacted or supplemented in any way; (b) Christ's Sacrifice was made by Himself alone, and sinful humanity cannot make it or share in making it; (c) was a perfect and all- sufficient propitiation for sin, so that any additional propitiatory sacrifices are unnessessary, and derogatory to it. This explicitly contradicts Catholic teaching, re-affirmed at the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent (1545-54), that:

"Inasmuch as in this divine sacrifice which is celebrated in the mass is contained and immolated in an unbloody manner the same Christ who once offered himself in a bloody manner on the altar of the cross, the holy council teaches that this is truly propitiatory and has the effect, that if we, contrite and penitent, with sincere heart and upright faith, with fear and reverence, draw nigh to God, we obtain mercy and find grace in seasonable aid. For, appeased by this sacrifice, the Lord grants the grace and gift of penitence, and pardons even the gravest crimes and sins. For the victim is one and the same, the same now offering by the ministry of priests who then offered himself on the cross, the manner alone of the offering being different...." (Session 22, Chapter II)

"If anyone says that the sacrifice of the mass is one only of praise and thanksgiving; or that it is a mere commemoration of the sacrifice consummated on the cross but not a propitiatory one; or that it profits him only who receives, and ought not to be offered for the living and the dead, for sins, punishments, satisfactions, and other necessities, let him be anathema." (Canon 3)⁶⁵

We may speculate that the conciliar bishops of Trent were perhaps reacting more strongly than was warranted to the Reformation revolt in making these statements. While the bishops of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-'65 did not explicitly repudiate the findings of Trent on this matter, they did take pains to clarify that the Eucharist is not a repetition, but a perpetuation of Christ's sacrifice on the cross, and that the eucharistic offering is made not by priests but by Christ and His whole people together. They affirmed that Christ "instituted the Eucharistic Sacrifice... in order to perpetuate the sacrifice of the Cross throughout the centuries until he should come again." Priests, "acting in the person of Christ, join in the offering of the faithful to the sacrifice of their Head. Until the coming of the Lord... they re-present and apply in the sacrifice of the mass the one sacrifice of the New Testament, namely the sacrifice of Christ offering himself once and for all to his Father as a spotless victim."

There is doubtless still a great deal of dissonance between Roman Catholic teaching on the Eucharist and its significance, and most of the variegated Protestant modalities of thinking on this subject, however, it behooves Christians of good will on both sides of the dialectic to ensure that they are really disagreeing about substance, and not merely about semantics and emphasis.

The Orthodox position on these matters is refreshingly clear. The Orthodox Church affirms that the Eucharist makes present again the sacrifice of Christ in a mysterious manner. While the Sacrifice of Christ is presented in the New Testament as something that happened once and for all, the Orthodox Church maintains that the Sacrifice of Jesus is made present again to us in the Eucharist so that baptized Christians can partake of it, but it is still something that happened once and for all. It is therefore not a new sacrifice, but an unbloody re-presentation of Christ's original sacrifice. The Eucharist in Catholic/Orthodox worship not only remembers the death of our Lord, but also His burial, Resurrection, Ascension, and anticipates His Second Coming.

For the Church's first thousand years while it was still one and undivided, the elements of the Eucharist were received unquestioningly as the Body and Blood of Christ. How the bread and wine became Christ's Body and Blood was considered a mystery that the Church did not attempt to explain. The Roman Catholic Church later developed a detailed theory called "transubstantiation" that does attempt to explain how the bread and wine become divine elements; ergo: the elements are no longer bread and wine but are physically changed into the actual Body and Blood of Christ. Only the appearances of the bread and wine such as colour and taste remain unchanged.

Orthodox⁶⁶ and Anglican Catholics still simply accept the mystery of the change without insisting on a reasoned explanation. St. John of Damascus wrote: "And now you ask, `How does the bread become Christ's Body, and the wine and the water become Blood?' I tell you, the Holy Ghost comes and makes these Divine Mysteries... to be Christ's Body and Blood."

All Orthodox/Catholics, however, affirm that God's grace is transmitted in a real sense through the elements of the Eucharist, and that it is a completion of all the Sacraments and not merely one of them. The Eucharist is celebrated daily in Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches.

Chapter 15: THE APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION

Orthodox/Catholics believe that there has been a direct and unbroken line of Apostolic succession in the Holy Episcopal Orders and continuity of origin from Christ and the original 12 Apostles to the present-day bishops, priests, and deacons of the Church. As Jesus told the Twelve: "Peace unto you! As the Father has sent Me, I also send you... Receive the Holy Spirit.

"If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained." (St. John 20:21-23)

The first seven deacons were ordained by the Apostles (Acts 6:6). Priests were ordained by the laying on of hands (Acts 13:3.) The ministry of Christ was transferred from one person to another through the laying on of hands (2 Timothy 1:6-7).

The authority of faith was in the tradition of Christ's Apostles. At the head of one church was a presiding officer, the Episkopos or Bishop, who was nominated either by the local clergy or the church community at large, but who held his office by virtue of the Apostolic Succession. Bishops were consecrated by their peers to occupy the "place of Christ" at the Eucharistic meal, and to guard and witness a tradition reaching back, uninterrupted, to Christ, the Apostles, and Mary, and that unites the local churches in the community of faith.

This was the original form of the Church or "Ekklesia," affirmed by such as St. Ignatius of Antioch who knew the Church from the time of Pentecost, and whose writings of around 100 A.D. take a personal, monarchical episcopacy for granted.

Integral to the apostolic succession of bishops is the belief that the church has the right and duty to teach Christian doctrine and morals authoritatively and that the substantial correctness of this teaching is guaranteed by the continued presence of the Holy Spirit in the Church.

The ancient local churches all claimed to have been founded by one or another of the original Apostles to whom an unbroken line was maintained through ordination by the laying on of hands. Bishops could also ordain subordinates called "elders," "presbuteros" in Greek, a title which was eventually shortened to "priest." Priests could consecrate the elements of the Eucharist as part of their office

Which brings us to the contemporarily difficult issue of female ordination. Orthodox/Catholics cannot in good conscience and respect for 2,000 years of Church Tradition, accept the ordination of women to Holy Orders in the Church. There is no precedent in the ministry of Jesus or the Apostles for doing this. The Traditional Anglican Communion affirms: "The Holy Orders of bishops, priests and deacons as the perpetuation of Christ's gift of apostolic ministry to His Church, asserting the necessity of a bishop of apostolic succession (or a priest ordained by such) as the celebrant of the Eucharist--these Orders consisting exclusively of men in accordance with Christ's will and institution (as evidenced by the Scriptures), and the universal practice of the Catholic Church."

Many Protestants, and large numbers of nominal Roman Catholics in the liberal West as well, argue that there are no legitimate theological reasons to prohibit Ordination of women to the priesthood, and that such exclusion amounts to gratuitous bigotry. They argue that there are several Scriptural precedents for ministry by women, and that women were excluded from the original Apostleship only because of cultural and social conventions that prevailed at the time of Christ's earthly ministry. However, what Protestants in particular fail to acknowledge, is that a minister and a priest are not the same thing. There have always been female "ministers" in the Catholic/Orthodox Churches--women who minister to the material and spiritual needs of Christians and others. But the Sacramental priesthood is something else entirely, although most priests also have a ministry. A priest is ordained by God through the Apostolic Succession to perform certain specific functions in the Church: pronouncing absolution for sin, and consecrating the elements of the Eucharist. Many Protestants insist that the priesthood is merely a human contrivance never intended by Jesus, but if that were so, the Apostles went off the track very early on in establishing it.

The Orthodox/Catholic churches base their doctrine of Holy Orders on a precedent established by Christ after His Resurrection. "He breathed on them and said, receive the Holy Spirit," (St. John 20: 21) and proclaimed "Whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven." When the Apostles chose a successor to the dead traitor, Judas Iscariot, they looked "among these men that have been in our company all the time the Lord Jesus moved among us." (Acts 1: 21) The word used in the Greek is unambiguously "males" (andron) and not "human" (anthropon).

"One might argue that the apostles got it wrong," observes Bishop Robert Crawley of the Anglican Catholic Church, "but if that's the case, the whole foundation of the Church is in doubt."⁶⁷

Four days after the Church of England's General Synod voted by a razor-thin margin to begin ordaining women, The Rev'd. Dr. Brian Horne, a Theology lecturer at Kings College of London, England, tabled a 22-point thesis outlining theological objections to the decision. Dr. Horne has since left the Church of England.

Dr. Horne affirms that we, as created beings, both fallen and redeemed, live under God's order of creation and redemption, and that the latter does not abrogate nature and the created order, but rather transforms it. Sin distorts and perverts the order of creation, but does not destroy it. Christ's redemption restores the order that has become disordered by sin, but it does not restore the pre-fallen Edenic order, but rather integrates and transforms the sinful state of human nature through the sacrifice of Christ.

In the created order, men and women are essentially different and complimentary. The dialectic of male and female is the fundamental differentiated state in which human substance resides and is articulated. There is no gender-neutral undifferentiated state of human nature, and the order of redemption does not abolish this essential dichotomy.

Sin corrupts and distorts the divinely ordered male/female complimentarity into the dominance of male over female in which women are oppressed by men. It is that distortion of the dialectic, not the dialectic itself, that is redeemed through Christ's sacrifice and properly reflected in the life of the Church.

The essential male/female difference is articulated in the complimentarity of sperm and ovum. The involuntary shedding of female blood during menstruation is the symbol of life, making woman both victim and life-giver. On the other hand, men shed blood only voluntarily, accidentally, or as victims of violence.

Women's priesthood resides in the order of nature, within themselves whereby they shed blood involuntarily for the continuance of the human race. However, because the order of creation has been distorted and perverted, in the order of redemption sin can be redeemed only by the voluntary shedding of blood, which is a sign of humility and sacrifice. This requires the oppressor, man, to signify the restored order.

Therefore, Jesus, the Incarnate Savior, had to be male, argues Dr. Horne, because redemption is the order of humility which had to be signified by man. Male blood had to be shed and male life surrendered in repentance for oppression of women in the sin-adulterated order of creation. "It is a special kind of sacrifice, the self-offering of blood not demanded by nature."

The Holy Eucharist of the Church represents this sacrificial mystery, and the priesthood can only be properly understood in the context of eucharistic liturgy. The male figure of the priest symbolizes and "Iconizes" Christ's willing acceptance of the humility that transforms and heals the distorted order of male dominance. The Church is an essential part of the order of redemption, representing in the Eucharist the pouring out of Christ's blood which transfigures the world.

Christ's Atonement does not abolish the male/female dialectic in the created order, but rather restores it to its rightful relationship. Priesthood is therefore not identical to ministry, but a symbolic and representational office that is not principally functional. As Dr. Horne points out, the priesthood "is concerned, first, with being and not doing." That being is the being of humility, which is its only ground of authority. "The maleness of the Incarnate Lord is the deliberate choice of God and the male priest is the icon of this unique savior."⁶⁸

However, insistence on maintaining the Church tradition of an all-male priesthood in no sense implies a denigration of the work or competence of women or their consignment to "second-class-citizenship" in the Church. As Fr. Anthony Coniaris notes: "Women are not eligible for Holy Orders in the Orthodox Church in keeping with Sacred Tradition and the example established by Jesus and His apostles. This practice conforms with the traditional Orthodox belief that men and women were designed by God to serve Him in different capacities."⁶⁹ The Traditional Anglican Communion approves "The ancient office and ministry of Deaconesses as a lay vocation for women, affirming the need for proper encouragement of that office." The Canon Law Society of America has also recently declared that for the Roman Catholic Church to ordain women as permanent deacons, only a few changes in current church law, all "within the authority of the Apostolic See to make," would be needed. The Society invoked the authority of precedent, referring to the fourth century "Apostolic Constitutions" which clearly document an order of deaconesses, open to virgins and monogamous widows, that flourished in the Eastern Church for about 1,000 years and was also present in the Latin Church during part of its early history.

The Reformation was essentially an anti-clerical movement, attacking the powers and claims of the priesthood and the Papacy. Some Protestants seem to take perverse delight in cataloguing moral failures of particular Orthodox/Catholic clerics and presenting these as an argument against the Church herself. This is surely an unworthy project, and a futile line of reasoning, since it is not difficult to document many instances of equally heinous and unworthy behaviors on the part of certain Protestant clergy. In either case, the guilty parties are renegades from the precepts governing the communions they represent, and their faults or crimes must be ascribed to them alone as weak and poor sinners and not to the churches in which they hold office.

It must be further understood that the efficacy of Sacramental ministration comes from God alone, and is irrelevant to the character of the ministrant. Just as the virtue of a particular priest cannot be transferred to another person, neither can his personal vices rob another of virtue. A useful analogy is that of a court judge. So long as the judge's decisions on the bench are fairly and soundly based in the law, his personal character and moral behavior outside the court are irrelevant. Even if a judge were found to have committed a particular crime, his sentences meted out to other criminals for the same crime would not be invalidated, because their validity rests on his performance of an elected or appointed office and not on his personal moral behavior. Similarly, the Sacraments derive their efficacy from Christ--not from the human channels that convey them.

Chapter 16: CONFESSION AND ABSOLUTION

"If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained." (St. John 20:23)

"And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." (St. Matthew 16:19)

Many Protestants viscerally object to the concept of Sacramental confession of sins to a Priest, and insist that they need only make their confession directly to God. However, the Sacrament of Confession was very much affirmed by the primitive, undivided Church, especially after the 4th Century. Originally, Confession was a public act, required of those who had been officially excommunicated or who had performed acts subject to excommunication. This practice gradually evolved into the form of private confession, followed by a prayer of absolution pronounced by a priest.⁷⁰

St. Athanasius, who was instrumental in establishing the creeds of the Christian Faith, one of which bears his name, wrote: "He who confesses in penitence, receives through the priest by the grace of Christ the remission of sins.... If our chains are loosed, we shall go on to better things; if yours are not loosed, go and give yourself into the hands of the disciples of Jesus; for they are here to loose us, having received the power from the Savior."

St. Augustine affirmed: "To pretend that it is enough to confess to God alone, is to make void the power of the keys given to the Church, and to contradict the words of Christ in the Gospel."

Every Anglican priest at the moment of his ordination hears the words: "Receive the Holy Ghost for the office and work of a Priest in the Church of God, now committed unto thee by the imposition of our hands. Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained." Either this is true or it is blasphemy.

The Book of Common Prayer also affirms in the orders for The Ministry to the Sick: "If the sick person feel his conscience troubled with any weighty matter, he shall be moved to make a special confession of his sins... After which the Priest shall absolve him... with these words: "Our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath left power to his Church to absolve all sinners who truly repent and believe in him: Of his great mercy forgive thee thine offenses. And by his authority committed to me, I absolve thee from all of thy sins, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen."

The Orthodox Church considers the Sacrament of Penance (Confession) to be "a new Baptism," since it involves the forgiveness of all sins committed after Baptism. However, Orthodoxy does not require particular Sacramental forgiveness of every sin, since we are never completely without sin. Rather, grave sins such as murder, apostasy, adultery, and other sins of willful disobedience that separate us from God and the love of our fellow humans must be confessed. Orthodox Christians are expected to avail themselves of Sacramental penance periodically, as a form of spiritual check-up, as a means of humbling themselves before God, and to receive spiritual guidance from their pastor. Sacramental confession before a priest even for lesser sins is recommended at least once a year. It is not regarded legalistically, as a means of sentencing and punishing guilt, but rather as an instrument of liberating and healing the wounds of sin.

Fr. Anthony Coniaris writes: "There are two kinds of confession in the Orthodox Church: private confession by prayer and sacramental confession. Whereas our Roman Catholic brethren tend to hold to sacramental confession only, and our Protestant brethren to confession by private prayer only, the Orthodox Church, following the apostolic way, avoids both extremes."⁷¹

The Roman Catholic Church believes that a certain amount of temporal punishment is due in this life, even for sins that God has pardoned, and that for these some reparations--"satisfaction"--must be made. When Protestants confess their sins to God alone, even with genuine repentance, the only thing to incite them to make reparation is their own will and judgment. Self-imposed penances, like New Year's resolutions, are very difficult for most people to adhere to. However, penances imposed by a confessor are more objective and much less likely to be rationalized and dishonoured.

Confession and Absolution can also be a great relief and comfort to persons weathering dark nights of the soul. The Protestant way--"just me and God" can be a very lonely road to tread.

Another often-heard Protestant criticism of the Orthodox/Catholic Sacraments of Confession and Absolution is that the sinner can emerge from the confessional, his slate wiped clean as it were, and go right back to sinning in the alleged happy knowledge that he will be pardoned again at a subsequent confession. This is of course not true. Confession and Absolution are only valid if entered into sincerely by the penitent; a mortal sin intentionally concealed nullifies the entire confession.

The priest must of course assume good faith on the part of the penitent, but an absolution obtained under false pretenses would be invalid. God will not be mocked, and exploiting the Sacrament of Confession as license to sin willfully surely makes a mockery of the process. Sins are forgiven only where there is at the time of the confession no wish or intention to recommit them. In any case, even if Confession conceivably could be misapprehended as a license to go on sinning, what is there to prevent Protestants from doing exactly the same sort of thing in confessing their sins directly to God? It would seem that there is even less inhibition of abuse when the individual sinner is the sole judge of whether he really is repentant and contrite.

For the Protestant, self-delusion is quite possible and even probable when evaluating his own moral failures, and his efforts at reparation. This is much less likely when sins are confessed to another individual as well as to God. Being obliged to verbally articulate an inventory of one's sins makes them much more difficult to fudge and rationalize. As for the calumny that confession is just a clerical power trip, it must be acknowledged that Orthodox/Catholic priests themselves, even the Pope of Rome, must confess their own sins.

In the Russian Orthodox rite of Penance, the priest addresses the penitent thus, as a witness rather than a judge: "Behold my child, Christ stands here invisibly and receives your confession; therefore, do not be ashamed or afraid, and hide nothing from me; but tell me without hesitation all the things that you have done, and so you will have pardon from our Lord Jesus Christ. See, his holy image is before us; and I am only a witness, bearing testimony before him of all the things you have to say to me. But if you hide anything from me, you will have greater sin. Take care, then, lest having come to a physician you depart unhealed."

Chapter 17: LITURGICAL WORSHIP

Some Protestant churches--notably Lutherans and Anglicans-- practice liturgical worship. Anglican liturgy, for instance, consists of translated and somewhat revised versions of the pre-Reformation Catholic liturgies. Most Protestants reject liturgy however. There is no question that the Jews did and still do use a liturgical form of worship. Therefore, it can be reasonably assumed that the Church also used liturgy from the very first. Christ is "a priest forever" (Heb. 7:17-21) and a minister (Gr. leitourgos--"liturgist"). Acts 13:2 is accurately translated: "they were in the liturgy of the Lord." Acts 20:7 indicates that the Disciples came together regularly on Sundays to celebrate the Eucharist. Hebrews 13:10 notes that "We have an altar..."

"The Protestant evangelical idea of worship as `make-it-up-as-you- go-along' is nonsense," says Frank Schaeffer, "When you come to worship, you're certainly not there to hear a lecture or be educated, or be fed... you are there to worship God. Liturgy and worship is not preaching and teaching and it's not singing songs that titillate you."⁷² Schaeffer contends that worship is something objective you do for God; not something you do for yourself."

In the primitive, undivided Church, a Christian could go to mass anywhere in Christendom and find the same liturgical order of worship. "If you had a time machine," Schaeffer observes, "you could grab a Christian pilgrim out of her third century pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and fast forward her to 15th century Europe, and you march her into a church, and in 10 seconds or less she could not only tell you she was in the Christian Church, but she could also tell you, `I'm in vespers.' She would know exactly where she was in the liturgy."⁷³

Chapter 18: VENERATION OF MARY AND THE SAINTS

In any discussion of Orthodoxy and Catholicism with Protestants, especially evangelicals or fundamentalists, the matter of reverence paid to Saints, and particularly Mary the Mother of Jesus, is bound to be raised. Frequently heard is the accusation that Catholics "worship Mary." This latter is simply not true. Both the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches explicitly forbid worship or adoration of the Virgin Mary. Roman Catholic doctrine states that to adore Mary in the sense that God should be adored would be idolatry, for adoration is reserved for God alone. Catholic doctrine absolutely does not place Mary on an equal plane with Jesus.

On the other hand, to love and reverence Mary is a duty and privilege for Orthodox/Catholic Christians. If it can be legitimately argued that some Catholics give Mary more reverence than is her due, it is even more true that virtually all Protestants give her less, as Billy Graham has pointed out. One Catholic apologist observed, with considerable justification, that even Muslims pay much greater honour to the Mother of Jesus than do the majority of Protestant Christians.

Some Protestants object to the titles Orthodox Catholics give to Mary, such as "Mother of God," "Blessed Virgin," and "Theotokos" ("God-Bearer"). Their objections can be best answered with the following questions: Is Jesus God?, who is His Mother?, did she carry Him in her womb?, was she a virgin when she conceived? In St. Luke's Gospel (1:48), Mary herself affirms: "From henceforth all generations shall call me blessed." At the Annunciation, the Archangel Gabriel greets Mary with the words: "Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women." St. Elizabeth uses the same expression: "Blessed art thou among women... Whence is this to me, that the Mother of my Lord should come to me?"(St. Luke 1:43)

The title "Mother of God" was formally affirmed at the council of Ephesus as early as 434 AD, and was used by Church Fathers Athanasius and Eusebius. Of course neither Roman Catholic nor Eastern Orthodox doctrine teaches that Mary is the Mother of the Holy Trinity. The Holy Trinity has no mother. But Mary is the Mother of the Son of God in his human nature, so she assuredly is the Mother of God in the sense alluded to.

The Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches affirm that Mary was not only a virgin, but ever-virgin, ie: that she never had sexual relations with her husband, Joseph, even after Jesus was born. Most Protestants reject and even scorn this belief, arguing that it is unscriptural (EG: St. Matt. 1.25).⁷⁴ However, it must be acknowledged that the ever-virginity of Mary is a very early teaching of the Church. Saint Athanasius used the term "ever virgin" in reference to Mary, and this view was apparently accepted by the Fathers of the Church from the 5th Century on. It was formally established as a doctrine at the Lateran Council of 649. Orthodox/Catholics build a case of circumstantial evidence to support the ever-virginity dogma based on Old Testament prophesy (Ezekiel 44:1-2),⁷⁵ and alternate meanings and connotations of the word translated as "until" from the Greek text in St. Matthew's Gospel. They also maintain that the brothers and sisters of Christ mentioned in Scripture were actually either cousins or Joseph's issue from an earlier marriage. Abram called his nephew Lot "brother" (Gen. 14:14). Boas referred to his relative Elimelech as his "brother" (Ruth 4:3). Joab called Amasa, his first cousin (2 Sam. 17:25), "brother" just before he killed him (2 Sam. 20:9. On the Cross, Jesus committed His mother to the care of St. John the Disciple, which would have been highly unusual and scandalous if she had had another child of her own to care for her.

In my estimation, neither the pro nor the anti "ever-virginity" factions can mount a case strong enough to convince an impartial jury beyond reasonable doubt. However, I do not think difficulty in accepting this dogma is sufficient basis to reject the Orthodox/Catholic Faith outright. Part of becoming Orthodox/Catholic is to stop resting on one's own understanding and to accept the Church's teaching authority as a whole, whether or not we are convinced intellectually on every detail of dogma.

Which brings us to two other beliefs about the Virgin Mary: that she was bodily assumed into Heaven, and the Roman Catholic dogma of her Immaculate Conception.

The Assumption of the Virgin was ratified as a dogma of the Roman Catholic Church in 1950. It has never been declared a dogma by the Eastern Orthodox Church, but it remains a pious belief based on tradition among Orthodox Christians, who affirm the Dormition of the Theotokos. Orthodox Scholar and historian VIadimir Lossky observes: "The Mother of God was never a theme of the public preaching of the Apostles. While Christ was preached on the housetops... the mystery of His Mother was proclaimed only to those who were within the Church... It is not so much an object of faith as a foundation of our hope, a fruit of faith, ripened in tradition. Let us therefore keep silence, and let us not try to dogmatize about the supreme glory of the Mother of God."⁷⁶

The Immaculate Conception of Mary, on the other hand, is a relatively recent interpolation (1854) unique to the Roman Church, and rejected by Orthodoxy as well as the Protestant churches. The rationale behind this Roman Catholic dogma is a commendable effort to distance Mary (and therefore to protect Christ) from the taint of human sinfulness by declaring that Mary herself was conceived and born without original sin; that as the mortal vehicle of Christ's Incarnation, the Blessed Virgin was, from the moment of her conception, entirely uncontaminated by the stain of original sin, and that as the person chosen uniquely to become the Mother of Incarnate God, Mary was granted freedom from that blemish and thus made a spotless vessel for the savior of mankind.

The Orthodox Church believes that Mary was cleansed of all sin at the Annunciation, after she had willingly agreed to accept God's offer. At this moment, and not before, she became blessed and full of grace ("henceforth"--St. Luke 1:48).

In any case, the Mother is venerated because of the Son and never apart from Him. Orthodox writer and scholar Father Anthony M. Coniaris notes that "The incarnation was not only the work of the Father, of His Power and His Spirit... but it was also the work of the will and faith of the Virgin... Just as God became incarnate voluntarily, so He wished that His mother should bear him freely and with full consent."⁷⁷

Chapter 19: PRAYERS TO MARY AND THE SAINTS

The Orthodox/Catholic Churches teach that the Mother of Christ is the most potent advocate among the Saints in Heaven, and that the Saints, reigning with Christ, offer their prayers for men to God, and that it is good and useful to call upon them, and to have recourse to their prayers, help, and assistance, in order to obtain help from God through Jesus Christ, who alone is Redeemer and Savior. Mary's intercession is invoked because she was closer to Jesus than anyone else and is, therefore, the representative of fallen humanity and the most prominent and holiest member of the Church.

Orthodox/Catholics do not worship Mary and the Saints; rather they venerate them as heroes of the Faith whose example makes it easier for others to believe in God. Anyone who claims that Orthodox/Catholics worship Saints is guilty of calumny, because it is not true. Prayers to Saints are not worshipful, nor in expectation that the Saints themselves possess power to grant prayerful petitions, but rather that the Saints will intercede on the petitioner's behalf with Almighty God, who alone is the source of every grace, blessing, and providence. Like faithful Protestants, Orthodox/Catholic Christians believe that there is just one Mediator between God and man: Jesus Christ. When Orthodox/Catholics invoke the prayers of the Saints, they do not ask the Saints themselves to save or redeem, but to pray for them.

Orthodox/Catholics find it odd that Protestants so doggedly resist the idea that the Angels and Saints in Heaven might intercede with the Lord for fellow Christians on earth. Corporate prayer is affirmed in this life, so why not in Heaven? Jesus said that "joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth," so the heavenly company must take an active interest in us. How could they rejoice over our repentance unless they know about it? St. Paul writes of a "great cloud of witnesses," who surround us continually. "The air is thick with them," says Fr. Anthony Coniaris, "they're like a cloud in their multitude... not one of them silent or indifferent, all of them eager to share what the Lord did for them, how they found Him, what grace they received."⁷⁸ Revelation 8:3-4 refers to an angel whose duty is to offer "the prayers of all Saints upon the golden altar which was before the throne. And the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the Saints, ascended before God from the angel's hand." Revelation 5:8 mentions "golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the Saints."

The prayers of Saints and Angels can hardly be for themselves, since they are already perfected and living in the Holy City, so one must deduce that their prayers are for those in need of prayer--poor sinners in this world.

Prayers for intercession of the Saints in Heaven date from the very early Church, as evidenced by funeral inscriptions on Christian crypts in the Catacombs beneath Rome (c. 2nd to 4th Century), one of such which reads: "Ask for us in thy prayers, for we know thou art with Christ." St. John Chrystostom (c. 346-407) observed: "Not on this fatal day only, but on other days also let us invoke these Saints; let us implore them to become our patrons; for they have great power; not merely during life; but also after death; yea, much greater after death."⁷⁹

Everyone who recites the Nicene Creed, as many Protestants do, affirms the Communion of Saints. This affirmation means that the Church Triumphant in Heaven is not ignorant or insensitive to the needs and sufferings of the Church Militant here on earth. As Fr. Coniaris notes: "The two churches remain connected through the bond of love which is expressed through prayer. The Communion of Saints is a communion through never-ending prayer."⁸⁰

Another Orthodox priest, scholar, and writer, Fr. Kallistos Ware, notes: "In God and His Church there is no division between the living and the departed, but all are one in the love of the Father. Whether we are alive or whether we are dead, as members of the Church we still belong to the same family, and still have a duty to bear one another's burdens. Therefore just as Orthodox Christians here on earth pray for one another and ask for one another's prayers, so they pray for the faithful departed and ask the faithful departed to pray for them. Death cannot sever the bond of mutual love which links the members of the Church together."⁸¹

Chapter 20: MANDATORY CELIBACY IN THE PRIESTHOOD

Mandatory celibacy for priests is really only an issue in the Roman Catholic Church, although Eastern Orthodox bishops have been chosen exclusively from the ranks of voluntarily celibate or widowed priests at least since the reigns of Emperors Theodotus II and Justinian, and the requirement is mentioned in the Synod of Trulla (AD 692). Celibacy is also expected of any Orthodox priest not married at the time of his ordination.

The universal celibacy rule for Roman Catholic priests dates only from 1139, long after the East/West schism of 1054. Post-Reformation Anglicanism restored approval of a married priesthood and bishopric in that communion, continued by the Traditional Anglican Communion.

The Roman celibacy rule is Church law--not divine law, and therefore could be changed by the pope or the general council. Indeed, the Second Vatican Council acknowledged that celibacy is "not demanded of the priesthood by its nature."

The Roman Church also imposes the rule of celibacy on single men ordained as deacons, although mature, married men are also accepted to the diaconate. However, many Eastern Rite Catholic Churches in communion with Rome have a married priesthood, and married Anglican priests who convert to Roman Catholicism are also accepted. Given that the Roman Church is experiencing a critical shortage of priests in some parts of the world, and that mandatory celibacy is widely regarded as a significant impediment to recruitment to Holy Orders, and also the reason some have left the priesthood, it is reasonable to imagine that the Church might consider modifying the requirement if not for apprehension that to do so would increase pressure to ordain women and even non-celibate homosexualists. These days, changing anything might be regarded as a dangerous precedent.

Chapter 21: "CALL NO MAN FATHER"

For many Protestants the Orthodox/Catholic tradition of addressing priests as "Father" presents a major stumbling-block. A New Testament text frequently cited in objection to this practice is St. Matthew 23:9, "And call no man your father upon the earth; for one is your father, which is in heaven."

However, if you look at the context in which this statement is delivered, Jesus is rebuking the scribes and Pharisees for self-righteousness and hypocrisy, and their inward corruptness while they loaded heavy burdens on the people. Arguing the case against calling priests "Father" solely on the basis of this one verse leaves one on uncomfortably soft ground indeed.

A radically literal interpretation of Jesus' words would leave us at a loss as to what we should call our male parent. It should also not be overlooked that Jesus warns against calling people "rabbi" (teacher), or "master" as well as "father." As Fr. Peter Gillquist, who wrestled with the "call no man father" issue during his conversion from Presbyterianism to Orthodoxy, puts it: "In this `call no man father' passage, our Lord is contending with certain rabbis of His day who were using these specific titles to accomplish their own ends. And had these same rabbis been using other titles like reverend and pastor, Jesus, it seems to me, would have said of these as well, `Call no one reverend or pastor.'"⁸²

St. Paul refers to himself as spiritual father to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 4:5). Jesus refers to the rich man in torment crying out to "Father Abraham" in St. Luke 16:24, 30. According to Fr. Anthony Coniaris, "Clergymen are addressed as `Father' in the Orthodox Church since they are the ones through whom we receive our spiritual birth in Christ through baptism.... The title `Father' expresses the attitude of the faithful toward the role of the priest."⁸³ This concept of course relates to the doctrines of Apostolic Succession and Sacramental Grace.

Chapter 22: PURGATORY

The Roman Catholic Church contends that purgatory (from the Latin purgare, "to cleanse") is the place or state after death where the souls of Christians who have died in a state of grace but not free from imperfection expiate their remaining sins before entering the visible presence of God and the saints; the damned, on the other hand, go directly to hell.

Living Roman Catholic Christians are encouraged to pray for those in purgatory, and perform other acts of piety and devotion on their behalf. The suffering of purgatory is less a concept of physical pain than one of postponement of the "beatific vision." Purgatory will end with the Last Judgment at the close of the world.

Roman Catholic dogmas of purgatory were defined at the councils of Lyon (1274) and Ferrara-Florence (1438-45) and reaffirmed at the Council of Trent (1545-63). These dogmas were rejected by Luther, Calvin, and other leaders of the Reformation, who asserted that Christians freed from sin through faith in Jesus Christ go directly to heaven.

The Orthodox church does not affirm the developed Roman Catholic theology of purgatory, but it does encourage prayers for the dead in some undefined intermediate state between temporal life and life in the Holy City.

Chapter 23: ICONS, RELICS, AND IMAGES

After an early controversy on the subject, the Eastern Church affirmed the use of images, or icons, of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints as visible witnesses to the fact that God has taken human flesh in the person of Jesus.

One old English Roman Catholic catechism explicitly affirms: "We should give to relics, crucifixes and holy pictures an inferior and relative honour, so far as they relate to Christ and His Saints, and are memorials of them. We may not pray to relics or images, for they neither see nor hear nor help us." The Catholic Church does not compel anyone to kneel or pray before any statue.

Veneration of relics dates to the early Church. St. Cyril of Jerusalem (4th Century) writes: "Though the soul is not present, a power resides in the bodies of the saints because of the righteous soul which has for so many years dwelt in it, or used it as its minister."

Orthodox theologians base their arguments affirming the use of icons on the doctrine of the Incarnation: God is invisible and indescribable in his essence, but when the Son of God became man, he voluntarily assumed all the characteristics of created nature, including describability. Consequently, images of Christ, as man, affirm the truth of God's real incarnation. Because divine life shines through Christ's risen and glorified humanity, the function of the iconic artist is to convey the mystery of the Christian faith through art. Furthermore, because icons of Christ and the saints provide direct representation of the holy persons represented on them, these images should be objects of "veneration" (proskynesis ), even though "worship" ( latreia ) is reserved exclusively for God.

Orthodox theologian Fr. Kallistos Ware affirms that veneration of relics proceeds from belief in the resurrection of the body: "Belief in the deification of the body and its eventual resurrection helps to explain the Orthodox veneration of relics. Since the body is redeemed and sanctified along with the soul, and since the body will rise again, it is only fitting that Christians should show respect for the bodily remains of the saints. Reverence for relics is not the fruit of ignorance and superstition, but springs from a highly developed theology of the body."⁸⁴

Chapter 24: THE TRADITION

"Therefore brethren stand fast and hold to the traditions which you were taught, whether by word or our epistle" (2 Thess. 2:15).

I have made many references to tradition in this text, in several different contexts. Consequently, a short summary chapter is in order to clarify the distinction between The Tradition or Holy Tradition, and other traditions. The term "tradition" derived from a Latin word meaning "to hand over." The Tradition is "the faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints" (Jude: verse 3), the sacred Deposit of Faith handed over to the Apostles by Jesus Christ Himself.

The Reformation posited a false dichotomy between Holy Scripture and other elements of The Tradition, which in fact includes the Bible, as well as the Three Creeds, the decisions of the great Ecumenical Church Councils, the writings of the Early Church Fathers, and writings of the Saints. The notion that the balance of The Tradition somehow contradicts the Bible is insupportable. As former Archbishop of Canterbury once wrote: "Tradition does not mean that the Church has teachings which supplement those of the Bible."

There are other Christian traditions and certain traditions unique to particular branches of the fragmented Church that cannot legitimately be considered part of The Tradition, although that does not mean they are necessarily false or wrong.

Part III WHAT IS THE CHURCH?

Chapter 25: THE TASK

Many readers, responding to arguments I have presented in this book, might be inclined to ask: "What is it you are proposing in practical terms; a return to Medieval feudalism and theocratic government?"

The answer is that even if it were somehow possible to erase the events of the past 500-600 years from history and restore High Medieval Christian society, that would hardly be a worthy objective. Of course we cannot go back. We cannot erase the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, and all the scientific and technological developments of the past 600 years. We have to live in our own time and deal with their consequences.

The operative question is not therefore: "Do we want to return to Medievalism?" but rather "Do we want to work toward a restoration of Christendom in our present era?" I suspect that many late 20th-Century Christians, conditioned by the liberal-humanist ethics of relativism and multiculturalism, would recoil in horror from the idea of a new "Pax Christiana."

As I have attempted to illustrate in previous chapters, Western Christianity in general has lost its nerve and its vitality; its conviction in the universal application of the Christian Gospel. This begs the question as to whether Christians have come to regard Christianity as just one particular "flavour" from a smorgasbord buffet of morally equivalent religious expressions.

I contend that the latter notion is utterly absurd. If one purports to affirm the Scriptural claims of Christ and His Apostles, and the historical claims of the Church, while insisting on repudiation of the essential basis of the Christian Faith, what indeed is the point of carrying on the Church as a gutted carcass? As St. Paul observed:

"But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching in vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if it be so that the dead rise not.

"For if the dead rise not; then is Christ not raised: And if Christ be not raised, your faith is in vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.

"If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable."⁸⁵

However, if Christ is indeed risen, as the Church has professed for nearly 2,000 years, then this must logically be the primary focus of Christian confession, and have profound impact on the way we conduct our lives. Unless we are prepared to confess and witness the unique truth and authority of the Gospel of a risen Christ, then it would be far more intellectually honest to affiliate ourselves with some other religious expression, say Buddhism or Taoism, that does not claim to be the one, universal truth.

My central proposal in this book is precisely that one of the highest priority objectives of a re-unified Church should be the re-establishment of Christendom in the socio-economic and political arenas as well as the spiritual and pastoral. The principles of the Orthodox/Catholic faith need to be applied comprehensively--not out of romantic nostalgia for the Middle Ages--but because they are the TRUTH, the ideal blueprint for society to pattern itself after, in accordance with Christ's Great Commission.⁸⁶ Through such application, a renewed Christendom will emerge, not a recidivist quasi-medieval culture, but an organically coherent Christian society appropriate to our own time.

This is obviously no short-term objective, but rather a grand project for the new millennium. It took several centuries to destroy Christendom, and it will take several more to rebuild it. But the goal is worthy. And if Christianity cannot recover the courage of its convictions, and once again forcefully (as the Church Militant) assert its rightful claim to being the unique way to salvation of human souls, its temporal survival as more than a besieged and persecuted remnant is doomed. That is one big "if," and success in such an enterprise is far from guaranteed, but as Mother Theresa of Calcutta has observed, we are not required to succeed, only to be faithful. "Nevertheless, when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?"⁸⁷ Christ asked. The answer is up to us.

The pernicious distempers that afflict the corpus of Western, once-Christian, civilization were unleashed by the fragmentation of Christendom. With no common moral authority or common moral tradition strong enough to restrain the onslaught of evils, they grow unchecked, and the only antidote is a re-unified, revitalized Christendom. Ecumenization of the incoherent potsherds of the historical undivided Church is not nearly adequate to the task at hand, and ecumenical efforts such as the World Council of Churches have, on the evidence, been positively counterproductive, since they breed compromise rather than steadfastness in sound doctrine. Scripture affirms that Christ taught "as one having authority."⁸⁸ If His Church isn't prepared to do likewise, it might as well fold its tents.

A return to Christendom will require a revolution. It will require the repudiation and overthrow of the present dominant quasi-religion of the West (and increasingly the world)--liberal secular humanism and its catechism of rights-centric "values." The Christian Gospel is more than capable of accomplishing this, but only if it is preached and lived with confidence and authority.

The fundamental question boils down to what is a correct concept of the Church. Is it merely a fluid and invisible fellowship of true believers in all the fragmented churches, or is it something more objective and substantial?

In Orthodox/Catholic belief, Christians who willfully cut themselves off from the Apostolic Church are also cutting themselves off from God's grace that is communicated through the Church's Sacraments, which were instituted by Christ Himself and given to the true Church that alone can trace an unbroken line of succession back to Christ and the Apostles. Orthodox/Catholics believe that many souls outside the Apostolic Church's fold will be saved, although the Church does not recommend that they remain there. They hold that there are non Orthodox/Catholics who believe the essentials of the Christian faith, and yet are inhibited from accepting the Divine Commission of the Orthodox/Catholic Church itself, not because of sinfulness or selfishness, because of what is termed "invincible ignorance," since they have never had an adequate and unprejudiced opportunity to consider the Church's claims and doctrines. Such Christian believers are not joined to the visible body of the Church, but they are part of her soul by virtue of a true spiritual communion of faith and belief in Jesus Christ.

The Catholic Church affirms that God Himself is not bound by the rules of His Church, and thus can redeem whomever He chooses. According to Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft, author of "A Handbook of Christian Apologetics," "The Bible says that those who meet Christ and reject him can't be saved. It doesn't say what happens to pagans who never hear about him. They can't be virtuous without Christ and they can't save themselves--nobody can. But they can receive Christ's grace without knowing explicitly that it comes from the Second Person of the Trinity."⁸⁹

Pope Pius IX wrote: "Far be it from us to dare set bounds to the boundless mercy of God;" however, he adds: "we must hold, as of faith, that out of the Apostolic Roman church there is no salvation, and that she is the only ark of safety....

"It is known to us that those who are in invincible ignorance of our most holy religion, but who observe carefully the natural law and precepts given by God upon the hearts of all men, and who, being disposed to obey God, lead an honest and upright life, may by the light of Divine Grace attain to eternal life, for God who sees clearly, and searches and knows the heart, the disposition thoughts and intention of each, and in His supreme mercy and goodness by no means permits that anyone suffer eternal punishment, who has not of his own free will fallen into sin."

So long as everyone remains content to nurture their vested interests in a particular sectarian expression of Christianity, Church unity will never be restored. The logical first step toward healing will be for the various Orthodox/Catholic churches to settle their own mutual differences. There are of course many convenient theological and dogmatic excuses for maintaining the fractured status quo, but it essentially boils down to the collective will to unity or not. I encourage Catholic and Orthodox readers, including, if I may be so presumptuous, the leaders of their denominations, to consider carefully what constitutes the essential deposit of faith, and to work seriously and diligently toward healing the schism among the several Orthodox/Catholic, Apostolic churches. Happily, small but significant steps have already been taken in this direction. In 1965 the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches lifted their mutual anathemas of 1054. and a joint commission for dialogue between them has been established. Representatives met on at least 11 occasions between 1966 and 1981 to discuss differences in doctrine and practice.

In 1995, Pope John Paul II issued an encyclical, Ut Unum Sint (That They May Be One), which included an invitation for re-establishment of Church unity, predicated on Vatican II's declaration that all who are baptized and believe in Jesus Christ are truly, but in some cases imperfectly, in communion. Ut Unum Sint articulates a clear agenda toward Roman Catholic reconciliation with Orthodoxy as well as the fragmented sects of Protestantism.

Commenting on this topic, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus observes: "Ecumenism is not a matter of creating unity but of bringing to fulfillment the unity that already exists. It is not a simple matter of `coming home to Rome,' although full communion does require communion with the Petrine ministry that is exercised by the bishop of Rome. One of the most striking features of Ut Unum Sint is the way that John Paul put on the table for ecumenical discussion how that ministry of Peter might be exercised differently in order to better serve Christian unity. Unfortunately that offer has received slight response from other Christians to date."⁹⁰

Fr. Neuhaus, himself a convert to Roman Catholicism from Lutheranism, says that the Catholic Church's commitment to Christian unity is "unmistakably clear," and "unshakable," and that Ut Unum Sint affirms that ecumenism is neither "optional" nor a mere "appendix," but rather "essential to the Church's life and mission."

In his book "Letters to Father Aristotle: A Journey Through Contemporary American Orthodoxy," Frank Schaeffer writes: "The task or expectation of the Orthodox Church in society is not, in my opinion, to try and reconcile Christianity to the materialistic view of things or to reconcile Orthodoxy to Western Christianity, even if this is done under the slogan of Orthodox witness. It seems to me that the only authentic Orthodox witness is a call to Roman Catholics, Protestants, and other Western Christians to return to the Orthodox way. This call is evangelistic, not ecumenist. The Orthodox Church must accept converts but not bend to meet them, or the world, halfway. Rather than looking endlessly for the middle ground, we must offer the non-Orthodox what we Orthodox alone can provide: the restoration of the sense of the sacred to a severely desecrated and desacralized culture."⁹¹

I have a lot of time for Frank Schaeffer, but I cannot agree with him on several of the above assertions. There is an authentic Western tradition of Christianity that cannot be casually brushed aside as irrelevant. Catholic assertions that the See of Rome alone possesses the exclusive keys to the kingdom of God are likewise counter-productive. Mutually dismissing one another as "schismatic," and insisting on "our way or the doorway," in matters not essential to sound doctrine, are destructive of Christian unity and unnecessary. It would be absurd for Roman Catholics to assert that Eastern Orthodox and Anglican Catholics are not part of the "true church." It is equally absurd for Eastern Orthodoxy to declare that the Western Churches, including the Church of Rome, are outside the bounds of the true faith. If this were really so, how could the Roman Church have produced saints like Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Assisi, or Teresa of Avila? It is unworthy of Orthodox apologists to assert, as some do, that the faith and witness of these saints, and millions of other faithful Roman Catholics since 1054 is somehow invalid. Likewise it is unworthy and ridiculous for Roman Catholics to assert, as some do, that no one can be saved outside the Church of Rome. Before Orthodox/Catholicism can make a convincing appeal for Protestants to return to the fold en masse, it must get its own fractious house in order.

I am absolutely not advocating a sort of soft-minded, accommodational ecumenism and doctrinal relativism here. As I've noted several times in the foregoing text, there are indeed minimum standards of doctrinal belief that must be affirmed and honoured in order for a church's claim to Apostolic orthodoxy and catholicity to be legitimate, but I submit that these standards are satisfied in Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Traditional Catholic Anglicanism, Western Rite Orthodoxy, Eastern Rite Catholicism, and Old Catholicism at least.

The worthy objective is nothing short of restoring full unity of the faith. Unquestionably, some of the disagreements separating these churches from full communion with one another are substantive (EG: the filioque dispute between East and West), but most of the squabbles are based in relatively minor issues of dogma and custom, or, far worse, in accretions of prejudice, animosity, and turf jealousy. This is tiresome, counterproductive, and gratuitously antagonistic to the restoration of the undivided Church. I don't advocate a scintilla of compromise on essential doctrine, but I don't believe that such is necessary to restore bona fide Christian unity.

As noted at the beginning of this discourse, Christianity is in crisis as we approach the end of the second Christian millennium. "Either we of the Faith shall become a small, persecuted neglected island amid mankind," wrote Hilaire Belloc," or we shall be able to lift at the end of the struggle the old battle-cry, `Christus Imperat!'" If the Church remains in its tragically divided state, more likely the former than the latter.

A divided, fragmented Church presents a miserable and unconvincing witness to the world. "We cannot expect the world to believe that the Father sent the Son, that Jesus' claims are true, and that Christianity is true," writes Francis Schaeffer, "unless the world sees some reality in the oneness of true Christians."⁹²

The "oneness" Jesus spoke of in St. John 13 and 17 is not circumscribed within the mystical fellowship of the Church invisible, as many Protestants contend. The point of the Church is that the world will be able to evaluate the Truth of Jesus Christ on the basis of something visible. Jesus was referring to a visible oneness among Christians.

So, the Protestant reader may be asking, what is it that I suggest he or she should do about this? Well, certainly nothing NEW! The last thing we need in the Church is more innovation. Rather, I would encourage the reader to do as much personal research as possible into the history and witness of the primitive, undivided Church, and to measure his/her convictions about what the Church is or should be against that ancient deposit of Apostolic Faith. That done, they should consider objectively how well the communion they currently adhere to conforms to the ancient Apostolic model and the unbroken Christian tradition spanning two millennia.

Please ask yourself these questions. Are you comfortable and satisfied with the doctrinal ambiguity and emphasis on individual, personal, experiential faith characteristic of the Protestant approach? Are you weary of having to "do" faith on your own recognizance, as it were? Do you ever have the uncomfortable feeling, "Is this all there is?" As a faithful Christian can you honestly affirm that God desires His Church to be sundered into tens of thousands of fragments? Can you in good conscience advocate that the Church against which Jesus Christ said the gates of hell would not prevail is merely a fluid and ethereal congery of individual believers? If God really does want His Church to be One, is there any logic in the notion that this oneness should coalesce around a tradition that began with the thinking of a few self-appointed theologians 450 years ago or less, or with a tradition established by Christ, the Apostles, and the ancient Church Fathers at the very beginning of Christianity?

If you apply these questions to your present denominational affiliation, and are not comfortable with the answers that obtain, I encourage you to ask yourself what's really important--loyalty to a particular sectarian position that you may have been born into or adopted, or becoming part of the fullness of sacrament, faith, and worship in the 2,000 year old tradition established by Christ, the Apostles, and the early Church Fathers? There is no "perfect" church bureaucracy or organization, and there never will be. As a temporal, visible institution, the Church is composed of sinful human beings, always prone to error and failure. But the True Church, thanks be to God, is not dependent on human virtue.

Putting broken, fractious Christianity back together again won't be easy--perhaps it will be impossible--but unless the task can be accomplished I grimly predict that the Christian Church will continue its backward slide into cultural marginalization. "When the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?" The answer is up to us-- custodians of the Deposit of Faith on the earth. If we persist in divisiveness, than the likelihood is that Christ won't find much faith on the earth when He returns.

The End

Introduction to Basics for Restoring Christian Unity

Structure of Catholic Church Order of Authority in Catholic Church

ENDNOTES
1. The Diocesan Link, Vol 1 No. 10, Sept. 1996

CHAPTER 1
2. Lewis How, "The Traditional Anglican Communion in Canada" (pamphlet), p. 4
3. It should be noted that in terms of authoritative Tradition, I am speaking here about the Holy Tradition of the undivided Christian Church dating back to the Apostles and spoken of by St. Paul in the New Testament. There are also lesser Christian traditions affirmed by Orthodox/Catholics which are not held to be wrong, but are not held to be part of Holy Tradition either. Then there is dogma, which is also not part of Holy Tradition. See Chapter 24.
4. Miscellaneous Writings of Henry VIII (ed. Macnamara) p. 128
5. T.M. Parker, "The English Reformation to 1558," New York, Oxford, 1950, p.89.
6. Letters and Papers, vol. xiii, pt. 2, no. 1036
7. G.K. Chesterton, "A Short History of England," New York, Dodd, 1917, p.154.

CHAPTER 2
8. Philip Hughes, "A Popular History of the Reformation," Garden City, New York, Image Books, 1960, p. 98.
9. Alexander Schmeman, "Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy," Crestwood, New York, St. VIadimir's Seminary Press, 1977, p. 285
10. Papal legate Reginald Pole, in his opening address to the Council of Trent on Jan 7, 1546, invited the gathered bishops to begin by reflecting that it was they themselves who were most responsible for the evils "now burdening the flock of Christ....We cannot ever name any other cause than ourselves....If God had punished us as we deserved, we should have been long since as Sodom and Gomorrah." (from a translation of Pole's address by Fr. Vincent McNabb, O.P., The Dublin Review, January 1936.)
11. Tom Howard: The Christian Activist, Vol. 9, Fall/Winter 1996, p. 42
12. G.K. Chesterton, "Saint Thomas Aquinas: `The Dumb Ox' " New York, 1956, Doubleday, p. 193
13. Robert Mercer, C.R., Anglican Catholic Church of Canada Diocesan Circular, "Garments Gory and Miscellaneous Matters", July 1996.
14. Andrew Neaum, CR Quarterly Review, January, 1996
15. Francis A. Schaeffer, "The Great Evangelical Disaster," Westchester, Illinois, Crossway Books, 1984, p.48.
16. Frank Schaeffer, The Christian Activist, Vol. 9, March 1996, p.45
17. Justification: the divinely ordained process by which man, from being God's enemy, becomes God's friend.

CHAPTER 3
18. G.K. Chesterton, "Saint Thomas Aquinas: `The Dumb Ox'" New York, Doubleday, 1956, pp. 194-195.
19. Luther wrote: "Kill them, strangle them; what else is to be done to the mad dog that leaps at you? Strike, throttle, stab, secretly or openly...there is nothing more poisonous, more hurtful, more devilish, than a rebel." Years later he was still unrepentant: "It was I who slew all the peasants in the insurrection, for it was I who commanded them to be slaughtered; their blood is on my head...But I throw the responsibility on our Lord God Who instructed me to give this order." It is estimated that some 100,000 peasants were killed in a few months of 1524-'25.
20. Sir Arnold Lunn, p, 56
21. Ibid.
22. "De Officio Regis"

CHAPTER 4
23. Francis A. Schaeffer, "The Great Evangelical Disaster," Westchester, Illinois, Crossway Books, 1984, p. 22.
24. David Cayley Ed., George Grant: In Conversation, House of Anansi Press, Concord Ont.
25. George Grant, letter to Derek Bedson, 1961
26. Raymond Delatouche, "La Chr‚tient‚ M‚di‚vale, Un ModŠle de d‚veloppement," ("Mediaeval Christianity, a Model of Development"), Paris, Tequi, 1989.
27. However, there were a number of Pre-Reformation partial English translations and glosses (vernacular commentaries inserted between the lines of Latin Biblical text), including Caedman of Whitby c. 670; Aldhelm of Sherbourne c. 709; the Venerable Bede 673-735; King Alfred 849-899; The West Saxon Gospels c. 990; and Alefric also c. 990. There were also several English translations of various parts of the New Testament in the 13th and 14th Centuries.
28. Philip Hughes, "A Popular History of the Reformation," Garden City, N.Y., Image Books, 1960, p.68
29. Hilaire Belloc, "The Crisis of Civilization," New York, Fordham University Press, 1937, (Reprinted in 1992 by Tan Books and Publishers Inc.) p.74
30. Sir Arnold Lunn, "Now I See," London and New York, Sheed and Ward, 1933, pp. 62-64.

CHAPTER 5
31. Frank Schaeffer, The Christian Activist, Vol. 8, March 1996, p. 34.
32. Kallistos Ware, "The Orthodox Way," Crestwood, N.Y., St. VIadimir's Seminary Press, 1979, pp. 147-148
33. Carl E. Braaten, "A Harvest of Evangelical Theology," First Things, May 1996, p. 47.
34. The Council of Trent is regarded as an obstacle to restoration of Church unity by the non-Roman churches that affirm Orthodox/Catholic doctrine, since Trent (and the First (1869-70) and Second (1962-65) Vatican Councils for that matter), unlike the seven great councils of the primitive Church, was non-ecumenical. Orthodoxy recognizes only the authority of the ecumenical councils at which East and West were represented together. These were the councils of Nicaea I (325), Constantinople I (381), Ephesus (431), Chalcedon (451), Constantinople II (553), Constantinople III (680), and Nicaea II (787)
35. G.K. Chesterton, "St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox"

CHAPTER 6
36. Hilaire Belloc, "The Crisis of Civilization," Rockford IL, Tan Books and Publishers Inc. (reprint), 1937, pp. 107-108
37. Richard M. Weaver, "Ideas Have Consequences," University of Chicago Press p. 14.
38. Ibid. pp. 97-98
39. Dwight L. Moody, quoted by Richard V. Pierard, "The Unequal Yoke," p.31.
40. Richard V. Pierard, "The Unequal Yoke," pp. 34-35, ref: "Acres of Diamonds," New York, Harper & Brothers, 1915.
41. Ibid, p. 32, ref: The New York Times, May 20, 1916, p. 10
42. C.G. Jung, "The Portable Jung," p. 495.
43. Christopher Lasch "The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations," New York, London, W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1979, Preface XVI
44. Theodore Roszak, "Where The Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society, Berkeley CA, Celestial Arts (reprint), 1972, 1989, Preface XXVIII

CHAPTER 7
45. F.L. Cross, ed., "The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church," London, Oxford University Press, 1958, pp. 104, 105.
46. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, "Dialektik fr Aufklarung (Dialectic of Enlightenment)," trans: John Cumming, New York, Herder and Herder, 1972, p. 3.
47. First Things, May 1996, p. 84
48. National Review, February 24, 1997.

CHAPTER 9
49. Jon E. Braun, Divine Energy, Ben Lomond CA, Conciliar Press, 1991, p. 15

CHAPTER 10
50. The "filioque" clause, asserting that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, rather than from the Father alone, was added to the Nicene Creed at a synod in Toledo, Spain by King Reccared in 589 A.D. The interpolation was initially opposed by the Roman Popes, but was promoted in Europe by Charlemagne (crowned emperor in 800) and his successors. Eventually, it was also adopted (c. 1014) by Rome, and, along with Rome's assertion of universal Papal supremacy, led to the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western branches of the Church in 1054. The schismatic process actually got underway in the 9th century when the Pope refused to recognize the election of Photius as patriarch of Constantinople. Photius responded by challenging the pope's right to rule on the matter and denounced the filioque clause as a Western innovation.
51. March 11, 1996
52 Tom Howard, The Christian Activist, Vol. 9, Fall/Winter 1996, p.28

CHAPTER 11
53. Theodore Roszak "Where The Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Postindustrial Society, Berkeley Ca, Celestial Arts (reprint) 1972, 1989, pp. 129-130.
54. Ibid, pp. 186-187
55. I daresay that not one in 10,000 people who bandy the term "fundamentalist" about, including those who apply it to themselves, has the slightest clue as to what it really signifies. Alarmed by the wave of theological liberalism sweeping over North America during this century's first two decades, several conservative American and British scholars published a twelve-volume defense of doctrinal orthodoxy entitled The Fundamentals.

Dr. J. Gresham Machen, professor of New Testament Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, followed up with his book Christianity and Liberalism in 1923, in which he correctly argued that "liberal Christianity", so-called, is not Christianity at all but a new religion.

The fundamentals of the Christian faith, as defined by Machen, et al., can be distilled into 5 essential truths: 1. the inspiration and inerrancy of Biblical Scripture; 2. the deity of Christ and His virgin birth; 3. the substitutionary atonement of Christ's death; 4. the literal resurrection of Christ from the dead; 5. the literal return of Christ. If affirmation of these five points makes one a fundamentalist, then true, faithful Orthodox/Catholics are fundamentalists!
56. Ted and Virginia Byfield, "Orthodoxy," British Columbia Report, June 17, 1996, p. 31.
57. Joe Woodard, British Columbia Report, "Every man his own church," June 17, 1996, pp. 30-31.
58. Ibid.

CHAPTER 12
59. Alexander Schmeman, "Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy," Crestwood, New York, St. VIadimir's Seminary Press, 1977, p. 239
60. Ibid. p. 252

CHAPTER 13
61. A.M. Coniaris, "Introducing The Orthodox Church," Minneapolis, Light and Life, 1982, p. 125
62. See Genesis 3: 17; Romans 8: 19-22
63. Kallistos Ware, "The Orthodox Way," Crestwood, New York, St. VIadimir's Seminary Press, 1980, p.133

CHAPTER 14
64. See St. Luke 22: 19-20
65. Session XXII (1562) Chapter 2.
66. A.M. Coniaris, "Introducing The Orthodox Church," Minneapolis, Light and Life, 1982, p. 135

CHAPTER 15
67. Bishop Robert Crawley, told to Joe Woodard, "A Traditionalist Breaks Tradition," British Columbia Report, March 31, 1997, p. 36.
68. The Revd. Dr. Brian L. Horne, "Swan Song," The Rock, Vol. 14 No. 3, Sept. 15 1996. p. 18.
69. A.M. Coniaris, "Introducing The Orthodox Church," Minneapolis, Light and Life, 1982, p. 144.

CHAPTER 16
70. John Meyendorf, "Byzantine Theology," Fordham University Press.
71. A.M. Coniaris, "Introducing The Orthodox Church," Minneapolis, Light and Life, 1982, p. 133

CHAPTER 17
72. Frank Schaeffer, reported by Kevin Quast, "Frank Schaeffer eager to share Orthodox message," ChristianWeek, Oct. 22, 1996.
73. Ibid.

CHAPTER 18
74. "and did not know her till she had brought forth her firstborn son."
75. "Then He brought me back to the outer gate of the sanctuary which faces toward the east, but it was shut.

And the Lord said to me, `This gate shall be shut; it shall not be opened, and no man shall enter by it, because the Lord God of Israel has entered by it; therefore it shall be shut."
76. VIadimir Lossky, "Panagia," in "The Orthodox Church in the Ecumenical Movement." W.C.C. Publications.
77. A.M. Coniaris, "Introducing The Orthodox Church," Minneapolis, Light and Life, 1982, p. 100

CHAPTER 19
78. Ibid p. 97
79. John L. Stoddard, "Rebuilding a Lost Faith, New York, P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1922, p. 181
80. A.M. Coniaris, "Introducing The Orthodox Church," Minneapolis, Light and Life, 1982, p. 99.
81. K. Ware, "The Orthodox Church," New York, Viking Press, p. 258

CHAPTER 21
82. Peter E. Gillquist, Becoming Orthodox: A Journey to the Ancient Christian Faith, Brentwood, Tennessee, Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1989, p. 100.
83. A.M. Coniaris, "Introducing The Orthodox Church," Minneapolis, Light and Life, 1982, p. 146.

CHAPTER 23
84. K. Ware, "The Transfiguration of the Body," and article in "Sacrament and Image," ed. A.M. Allchin, Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Servius, 1967.

CHAPTER 25
85. 1 Corinthians, 15: 13-19.
86. St. Matthew 28: 19-20.
87. St. Luke 18: 8.
88. St. Matthew 7: 29.
89. Quoted by Joe Woodard, "How Many Roads Lead To Heaven?", British Columbia Report, Feb. 17, 1997, p. 48.
90. Richard John Neuhaus, First Things, October 1996, p. 83
91. Frank Schaeffer, "Letters to Father Aristotle: A Journey Through Contemporary American Orthodoxy," Salisbury, Mass., Regina Orthodox Press, 1995, p.38
92. Francis A. Schaeffer, "The Great Evangelical Disaster," Westchester, Illinois, Crossway Books, 1984, p.163

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