Bishop Daniel Martins on Advent

Last week I posted something I intended to be playful—OK, slightly snarky, perhaps—about maintaining proper discipline in seasonal observances; that is, not allowing “Christmas” to bleed over too much and too early into Advent. I got a lot of metaphorical “thumbs up” signals, but also raised a few eyebrows, and I have no doubt that there were some criticisms thought, if not voiced, in my direction.  Those who practice Christian faith in the context of a liturgical/sacramental church community “got,” for the most part, where I was coming from. Those who practice Christian faith in some other “key,” or are not Christian at all, are likely among those who were mystified. So, here I endeavor to clear things up a little bit. 

First, if you are not a liturgical/sacramental Christian (I myself came to faith, in childhood, as an evangelical happily unconcerned with anything liturgical or sacramental), then my remark about not singing or listening to Christmas carols before actual Christmas was not directed at you. So ... there’s no judgment. Knock yourself out. Deck the hall, don whatever apparel you want, and troll the ancient yuletide carol, whatever that may be for you. You be you. But, you may be curious why I and others choose not to do so prematurely (by our lights). Here’s why:

Advent is a season that begins on the Sunday nearest St Andrew’s Day (November 30), and concludes as the sun sets on Christmas Eve. Advent has its own vibe, its own shape. It’s not just a “churchy” way of saying “Christmas.” Christmas is a season that begins at sundown on December 24, and continues for twelve days (yes, the “12 Days of Christmas” *begin,* not end, on Christmas). The season of Christmas is a time for festivity and merry-making, culminating on the feast of Epiphany on January 6, the emblem of which, for western Christians, is the arrival of the Wise Men at Bethlehem with their gifts for the infant Jesus. Advent, by contrast, is a season of preparation, of restrained anticipation of the celebration, but not the celebration itself. It is not, strictly speaking, a penitential season, but it does have a “penitential accent.” The scripture readings appointed for early Advent actually focus, not on Christmas, the first coming of Christ to be our redeemer, but on the second coming of Christ to be our judge. There’s an appropriate element of sobriety associated with the prospect of standing before our Maker on the Day of Judgment, is there not? As the season progresses, we hear a lot from John the Baptist, and his call to repentance, and from the prophet Isaiah, with oracles of hope for deliverance from all that ails the world. Finally, on the last Sunday of the season, our attention *is* focused on the birth of the Savior, with stories of angelic appearances to Mary and Joseph.

For century upon century, there was basic congruence between the Church’s liturgical observance of this pattern of preparation followed by celebration and the way the seasons were observed in the culture at large, in people’s homes and schools and businesses. It is still within living memory that people would head into the woods to chop down a Christmas tree only in the final few days before the feast, and not fully decorating it until Christmas Eve. For various reasons, however, the larger culture gradually abandoned the traditional pattern. The festive, celebratory aspects of Christmas bled into Advent, eclipsing any note of preparation or quiet anticipation. In homes, schools, and offices, “Christmas” parties began to be held most any time in December—generally, earlier and earlier. Seasonal music fills the retail and commercial world beginning, it now seems, right after Hallowe’en.

At the same time, and compounding the confusion, our culture has rapidly grown starkly secular. Even speaking of “Christmas” has been eschewed in favor of “the holidays,” in an effort not to exclude those who do not identify as Christian, which is an exponentially growing segment of society. In such a social context, trying to speak of the integrity of Advent as a preparatory season is completely unintelligible. Many are familiar with the notion of an “Advent calendar,” but have no sense at all of the religious context of either the thing itself or the season for which it is named.

So, at no time of year does a liturgical/sacramental Christian experience such cognitive dissonance as during Advent! Strictly speaking, parties are not appropriate—yet, the invitations arrive at a fast and furious rate. Unless one wants to be thought an anti-social curmudgeon, one sucks it up and attends and smiles and enjoys it. Strictly speaking, festive outdoor and indoor decorations are not yet appropriate. Yet, peer pressure in neighborhoods can be irresistible. Even church communities suffer from a split personality, with the church interior itself allowed to remain “Advent pure” until after the final service of the Fourth Sunday of Advent, while, in the parish hall, the Christmas tree is decorated all through December while various church groups hold their holiday parties.

After December 25, the disjunction continues, only in an inverted way. On St Stephen’s Day (December 26, when King Wenceslas looked out on the deep, crisp, and even snow), abandoned Christmas trees can be spotted thrown to the curb and the world moves on (especially around January 2), even while, inside churches, Christmas carols continue to be sung for the next couple of Sundays still.

So, I and my colleagues in the Advent Police are not out to rain on anybody’s parade. We understand *we* are the weirdos here, and nobody else cares about our suffering (with my tongue firmly in my cheek) when city workers wrap garlands around light poles in late November. We have no expectation of changing the larger culture. But neither will we go quietly into that good night. Among the Christian communities that we serve, at any rate, we will continue winsomely to contend for the integrity of the old ways, even if those ways can now clearly be discerned only in the texts and rubrics of our liturgical sources.

Thomas Howard: Recognizing The Church

Linking this excellent piece penned by the late Thomas Howard for Touchstone Magazine.  Though Howard writes as a convert to Roman Catholicism, he nowhere in the article hard sells Roman doctrine, and the reasons he gives for his conversion appeal to Orthodox and Anglo-Catholic alike.  Some salient quotations:

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I was brought up in an Evangelical household. To say this is to say something good.

My father was a layman, not a preacher; but he was a devoted and assiduous daily student of the Bible. He and my mother exist to this day in my imagination as the very icons of the godly man and woman. It was a wonderful thing—that sage, earnest, transparent, Bible-centered faith. I owe the fact that I am a believer today, and that my whole pilgrimage, steep and tortuous as it has been sometimes, has been towards the center, not away from it, to the faith and prayers and example of my father and mother. I believe that I and my five brothers and sisters, all of whom, now, in our sixties, are Christians who want to follow the Lord wholly, would all testify to this godly influence of our parents. The household was a household suffused with the Bible. We sang hymns—daily—hundreds of them over the years, so that probably all six of us know scores of hymns by heart. We had family prayers twice a day, after breakfast and after supper. Our parents prayed with us at our bedside, the last thing at night. We all went to Sunday school and church regularly. There is only one agenda in a fundamentalist Sunday school: the Bible. The Bible day in and day out, year in and year out. Flannelgraph lessons, sword drills, Scripture memory: Everything was focused directly on the Bible itself. I am grateful for every minute of this, now, 50 years later. Because of this, the whole of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, is ringing in my ears all the time. Hundreds of verses, in the language of the King James Version, are there, intact, in my memory. I hope that, if my memory fails and I lose my wits in my old age, perhaps these verses, from so long ago, will remain there and bring me solace. . . .

But I speak as one whose pilgrimage has led him from the world of Protestant Evangelicalism to the Roman Catholic Church. One way or another, all of us whose nurture has been in one of the sectors of Protestantism where the Bible is honored, where the gospel is preached without dissimulation, and where Jesus Christ is worshipped as God and Savior—all of us desire to be faithful to the ancient faith that we profess, and to be found obedient to the will of God. Certainly such fidelity and obedience have motivated us so far, and we want to be able to give an accounting of ourselves when it comes to our turn at the Divine Tribunal, for we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ.

Why then, would anyone want to leave such a world? Was not that a rendering of the ancient faith almost without equal? Surely to leave it would be to go from great plenty out to famine and penury?. . . .

During my 23 years as an Anglican, I discovered, and gradually became at home in, the world of liturgy, and of sacrament, and of the church year. But also as I read in theology and church history and in the tradition of Christian spirituality, I found myself increasingly acutely conscious of a question: But what is the Church?

Every Sunday at the Anglican liturgy I found myself repeating, “I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.” These are words from an era that all of us—Roman, Orthodox, Anglican, Protestant, and unaffiliated—must take seriously, since all of us, whether we are pleased to admit it or not, are the direct beneficiaries of the work of the men who hammered out those words. You and I may think, in some of our less reflective moments, that all we need is the Bible and our own wits. Sola Scriptura. Just me and my Bible. But that is an impertinent notion. Every Christian in every assembly of believers in this world is incalculably in the debt of the men who succeeded the apostles. For they are the ones who, during those early centuries when the Church was moving from the morning of Pentecost out into the long haul of history, fought and thought and worked and wrote and died, so that “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” might indeed be handed on. Heresiarchs popped up out of the weeds left, right, and center, and all of them believed in the “verbal inspiration” of Scripture. It was the Church, in her bishops and councils, that preserved the faith from the errors of the heresiarchs and other zealots, and that shepherded the faithful along in the Way, as it was called.

You and I, insofar as we are familiar with modern Protestantism and, a fortiori, with Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, are familiar with a state of affairs that would have been unimaginable to our Fathers in the faith in those early days. I am referring to the oddity that, even though we all say we believe in the final and fixed truth of divine revelation, we are nevertheless all at odds when it comes to deciding just what that truth is. Oh, to be sure, we all agree on the so-called fundamentals of the gospel—but of course those fundamentals have been articulated and distilled for us by the Church that wrote the creeds. The Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the modernists all toil away at the pages of the Bible, but you and I would say they are not getting the right things out of that Bible. Why do we say that? Because, whether we acknowledge it or not, our “orthodox” understanding of the Bible has been articulated for us by the Church. All sorts of notions, for example, have cropped up about the Trinity, about the mystery of Our Lord’s divine and human natures, and so forth. The reason you and I are not Nestorians or Eutychians or Apollinarians or Docetists or Arians or Montanists is that the Church guarded and interpreted and taught the Bible, and we, the faithful, have had a reliable and apostolic voice in the Church that says, “This is what Holy Scripture is to be understood as teaching, and that which you hear Eutychius or Sabellius teaching from the Bible is not to be believed.”

But I was speaking of the question that began to force its way into my mind during those years: What is the Church? What may have appeared as a digression just now, when I referred to the men who worked so hard to preserve the faith, and the bishops and councils who settled upon the right understanding of revelation, was not a digression at all. When I heard myself repeating the words from the Nicene Creed at the liturgy, “I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church,” I was, of course, saying words that are not directly from any one text in the Bible and yet that have been spoken in all of Christendom for a millennium and a half now and in some sense constitute a plumbline for us. The Creed is not Scripture; that is true. But then all of us, whether we come from groups that repeat the creed or not, would agree, “Oh yes, indeed; that is the faith which we all profess.” Some would add, “But of course, we get it straight out of the Bible. We don’t need any creed.” The great difficulty here is that Eutychius and Sabellius and Arius got their notions straight out of the Bible as well. Who will arbitrate these things for us? Who will speak with authority to us faithful, all of us rushing about flapping the pages of our well-thumbed New Testaments, locked in shrill contests over the two natures of Christ, or baptism, or the Lord’s Supper, or the mystery of predestination? This question formed itself in the following way for me, a twentieth-century Christian: Who will arbitrate for us between Luther and Calvin? Or between Luther and Zwingli, both appealing loudly to Scripture, and each with a view of the Lord’s Table that categorically excludes the other’s view? And who will arbitrate for us between John Wesley and George Whitefield—that is, between Arminius and Calvin? Or between J. N. Darby (he thought he had found the biblical pattern for Christian gathering, and the Plymouth Brethren to this day adhere to his teaching) and all the denominations? Or between the dispensationalists and the Calvinists on the question of eschatology?

A piquant version of this situation presented itself to us loosely affiliated Evangelicals, with all of our independent seminaries and Grace chapels and Moody churches, and so forth. When a crucial issue arises—say, what we should teach about sexuality—who will speak to us with a finally authoritative voice? The best we can do is to get Christianity Today to run a symposium, with one article by J. I. Packer plumping for traditional morality, and one article by one of our lesbian feminist Evangelicals (there are some) showing that we have all been wrong for the entire 3,500 years since Sinai, and that what the Bible really teaches is that indeed homosexuals may enjoy a fully expressed sexual life. The trouble here is that J. I. Packer has no more authority than our lesbian friend, so the message to the faithful is, “Take your pick.”

This is not, whatever else we wish to say about it, a picture of things that would be recognizable to the apostles, or to the generations that followed them. The faithful, in those early centuries, were certainly aware of a great babel of voices among the Christians, teaching this and teaching that, on every conceivable point of revelation. But the faithful were also aware that there was a body that could speak into the chaos, and declare, with serene and final authority, what the faith that had been taught by the apostles was. Clearly, we Evangelicals have been living in a scheme of things altogether unrecognizable to the apostles and the Fathers of the Church.

“I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church,” I found myself saying in the creed. What Church? What is the Church? What was the Church in the minds of the men who framed that creed? Clearly it was not the donnybrook that the world sees nowadays, with literally thousands of groups, big and small, all clamoring, and all claiming to be, in some sense, the Church.

As an Anglican I became aware that I, as an individual believer, stood in a very long and august lineage of the faithful, stretching back to the apostles and fathers. The picture had changed for me: It was no longer primarily me, my Bible, and Jesus (although heaven knows that is not altogether a bad picture: the only question is, is it the whole picture?). Looming for me, as an Anglican, was “the faith,” ancient, serene, undimmed, true. And that faith somehow could not be split apart from “the Church.” But then, what was the Church?

I realized that, one way or another, I had to come to terms with the Church in all of its antiquity, its authority, its unity, its liturgy, and its sacraments. Those five marks, or aspects, of the Church are matters that all of us, I think, would find to be eluding us in the free churches. I speak as a Roman Catholic, for that is where my own pilgrimage has brought me in my quest for this Church in all of its antiquity, authority, unity, liturgy, and sacraments.

First, the antiquity of the Church confronts me. As an Evangelical, I discovered while I was in college that it was possible to dismiss the entire Church as having gone off the rails by about a.d. 95. That is, we, with our open Bibles, knew better than old Ignatius or Polycarp or Clement, who had been taught by the apostles themselves—we knew better than they just what the Church is and what it should look like. Never mind that our worship services would have been unrecognizable to them, or that our church government would have been equally unrecognizable, or that the vocabulary in which we spoke of the Christian life would have been equally unrecognizable. We were right, and the Fathers were wrong. That settled the matter.

The trouble here was that what these wrong-headed men wrote—about God, about our Lord Jesus Christ, about his Church, about the Christian’s walk and warfare—was so titanic, and so rich, and so luminous, that their error seemed infinitely truer and more glorious than my truth. I gradually felt that it was I, not they, who was under surveillance. The “glorious company of the apostles, the noble army of martyrs, and the holy Church throughout all the world” (to quote the ancient hymn, the Te Deum) judge me, not I them. Ignatius, Polycarp, Clement, Justin, Irenaeus, Cyprian, Cyril, Basil, the Gregorys, Augustine, Ambrose, Hilary, Benedict—it is under the gaze of this senate that I find myself standing. Alas. How tawdry, how otiose, how flimsy, how embarrassing, seem the arguments that I had been prepared, so gaily, to put forward against the crushing radiance of their confession. The Church is here, in all of its antiquity, judging me.

Second, the Church in its authority confronts me. That strange authority to bind and to loose that our Lord bestowed on his disciples has not evaporated from the Church—or so the Church has believed from the beginning. If you will read the story of those decades that followed Pentecost, and especially that followed upon the death of the apostles, you will discover that the unction to teach and to preside in the Church that passed from the apostles to the bishops was understood to be an apostolic unction. I, for example, could not start up out of the bulrushes and say, “Hi, everybody! The Lord has led me to be a bishop! I’m starting me a church over here.” The whole Christian community—bishops, presbyters, deacons, and laity—would have looked solemnly at me and gone about their business. The Holy Spirit, in those days, did not carry on private transactions with isolated souls, and then announce to the Church that so-and-so had been anointed for this or that ministry. The unction of the Holy Spirit, and the authority of the Church to ordain for ministry, were not two random enterprises. The Holy Spirit worked in, and through, the Church’s ministry and voice. To be sure, he could do what he wanted to do, as he had always done, being God. Under the Old Covenant, we could say that he worked in and through Israel; but of course you find these extra characters like Job and Jethro and the Magi, coming across the stage from outside the Covenant, yet nonetheless undeniably having been in touch with God. God can do what he wants, of course. . . .

Third, the Church in its unity confronts me. This is the most difficult and daunting matter. But one thing eventually became clear: My happy Evangelical view of the church’s unity as being nothing more than the worldwide clutter that we had under our general umbrella was, for good or ill, not what the ancient Church had understood by the word unity. As an Evangelical, I could pick which source of things appealed most to me: Dallas Seminary; Fuller Seminary; John Wimber; Azusa Street; the Peninsula Bible Church; Hudson Taylor; the deeper life as taught at Keswick; Virginia Mollenkott; John Stott; or Sam Shoemaker. And in one sense, variety is doubtless a sign of vigorous life in the Church. But in another sense, of course, it is a disaster. It is disastrous if I invest any of the above with the authority that belongs alone to the Church. But then who shall guide my choices?

Once again, we come back to the picture that we have in the ancient Church. Whatever varieties of expression there may have been—in Alexandria as over against Lyons or in Antioch as over against Rome—nevertheless, when it came to the faith itself, and also to order and discipline and piety in the Church, no one was left groping or mulling over the choices in the flea market. Where we Protestants were pleased to live with a muddle—even with stark contradiction (as in the case of Luther versus Zwingli, for example)—the Church of antiquity was united. No one needed to remain in doubt for long as to what the Christian Church might be, or where it might be found. The Montanists were certainly zealous and earnest, and had much to commend them; the difficulty, finally, was that they were not the Church. Likewise with the Donatists. God bless them for their fidelity and ardor and purity, but they were not the Church. As protracted and difficult as the Arian controversy was, no one needed to remain forever in doubt as to what the Church had settled upon: Athanasius was fighting for the apostolic faith, against heresy. It did not remain an open question forever. There was one Church and the Church was one. And this was a discernible, visible, embodied unity, not a loose aggregate of vaguely like-minded believers with their various task forces all across the globe. The bishop of Antioch was not analogous to the general secretary of the World Evangelical Fellowship or the head of the National Association of Evangelicals. He could speak with the full authority of the Church behind him; these latter gentlemen can only speak for their own organization. He was not even analogous to the stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church or the presiding bishop of the Episcopalians, neither of whom is understood by his clientele to be speaking in matters of doctrine and morality with an undoubted apostolic authority.

This line of thought could bring us quickly to the point at which various voices today might start bidding for our attention, each one of them with “Hey—ours is the apostolic voice—over here!” That is not my task here. I only would want to urge you to test your own understanding of the Church against the Church’s ancient understanding of itself as united, as one. What is that unity? It is a matter that has perhaps been answered too superficially and frivolously for the last two hundred years in American Protestantism. The Church in its unity is here, judging us. . . .

Fifth and finally, the sacraments of the Church confront me. The word sacrament is the Latin word for the Greek mysterion, mystery. Indeed, we are in the presence of mystery here, for the sacraments, like the Incarnation itself, constitute physical points at which the eternal touches time, or the unseen touches the seen, or grace touches nature. It is the Gnostics and Manichaeans who want a purely disembodied religion.

Judaism, and its fulfillment, Christianity, are heavy with matter. First, at creation itself, where solid matter was spoken into existence by the Word of God. Then redemption, beginning not with the wave of a spiritual wand, nor with mere edicts pronounced from the sky, but rather with skins and blood—the pelts of animals slaughtered by the Lord God to cover our guilty nakedness. Stone altars, blood, fat, scapegoats, incense, gold, acacia wood—the Old Covenant is heavily physical.

Then the New Covenant: We now escape into the purely spiritual and leave the physical behind, right? Wrong. First a pregnancy, then a birth. Obstetrics and gynecology, right at the center of redemption. Fasting in the wilderness, water to wine, a crown of thorns, splinters and nails and blood—our eternal salvation carried out in grotesquely physical terms. Then pure spirituality, right? Wrong. A corpse resuscitated. And not only that—a human body taken up into the midmost mysteries of the eternal Trinity. And Bread and Wine, Body and Blood, pledged and given to the Church, for as long as history lasts. Who has relegated this great gift to the margins of Christian worship and consciousness? By what warrant did men, 1,500 years after the Lord’s gift of his Body and Blood, decide that this was a mere detail, somewhat embarrassing, and certainly nothing central or crucial—a show-and-tell device at best? O tragedy! O sacrilege! What impoverishment for the faithful!

A Question Directed to Fr. Robert Hart As Well

What are *you* prepared to do about us, Bob, since you also believe we're Nazis?  Cowboy up and tell us.  And know that your response will be made public.

If we're Nazis, then you must be a Bonhoeffer.  Either that or just shut up and play Beatle tunes.

Explained: Why Christians voted for Donald Trump. A Rejoinder to Rev. Matthew Byers and Linda Grace Byers

Piggybacking on this post immediately below:

This article by a Christian living in the UK will serve as part of my reply to the Byers' bizarre podcasts about Donald J. Trump and Elon Musk:

Explained: Why Christians voted for Donald Trump

Inasmuch as the author is British, and inasmuch as folks in the Commonwealth countries tend to think politically like the British, I figured this article might be a little easier for the Byers to get their heads around than one written by an American MAGA voter.

The crux of the issue is this:  when we Christians cast our votes for political leaders, we aren't electing saints.  We aren't even electing people who are good in all respects.  We are electing people whom we deem best for the country and for the Church.  And in this last election, that was the Trump/Vance ticket.  The genius of Elon Musk is part of that package, his weird transhumanist and other ideas notwithstanding.

Lesser of two evils, plain and simple.  Those purists who operate according to Charles Hadden Spurgeon's bromide, “Of Two Evils, Choose Neither,” are living as much in a fool's paradise as he was.  If evil can be lessened, then it should be lessened.  Now, this article finesses the issue somewhat and argues for a somewhat revised principle instead: 

One reason people think they are trapped between the lesser of two evils is because they confuse this idea with what are really priorities in the Bible. For example, although I am to love all people (1 Pet. 4:8), I am united to my wife in a unique way that images Christ’s love for his church (Eph. 5:25). My love toward her is thus to be prioritized differently than it is toward others. When voting for an elder in my church, Scripture obliges me to vote for a man who meets clear qualifications (1 Tim. 3) such as being “apt to teach”—a priority not mandatory for all church members. A big problem is that many people expect the President of the United States to be as godly as an elder. Sorry, but elder is a higher office.

The second reason many Christians wish to avoid choosing between the lesser of two evils is because they confuse an evil with a wrong.  An “evil” is something that brings suffering. Evil is therefore broader than a wrong.  For example, my back pain is an evil.  To alleviate it, I may choose back surgery, an even greater evil. But my hope is that, although super painful in the short-term, surgery will facilitate complete relief long-term. Starvation, poverty, and disease, are also forms of evil. James says that “God cannot be tempted by evil, and He Himself does not tempt anyone” (1:13). He means we shouldn’t use evil as an excuse to sin. Also, the devil is called “the evil one” (1 John 5:19). So we see the breadth of evil.

A “wrong”, on the other hand, is a sin against God. Steal a candy bar from the 7-11 and you’ve committed a wrong. I am rather confident that “No Trump” evangelicals incorrectly assume that a vote for Trump is a wrong—a sin against God.

Now let’s make sense of all of this. Imagine our two families are miles from land in a sinking boat. Suddenly, out of the mist, come two boats to save us. One is captained by an adulterer; the other is captained by a thief. Which boat will you get into?  You say, “Neither one. I’m waiting for the evangelical boat which is captained by a devout Christian who will end abortion.” I say, “You’re kidding, right?” You reply, “Both these guys are reprobates and I’m not going to choose between two evils.”

You see what you’ve done? For one, you failed to prioritize scripturally. The immediate priority is to save our families so we can fight another day. Scripture passages against thievery and adultery simply don’t apply here.

Second, you confused an evil with a wrong. As bloody painful as it is for you to sit in the adulterer’s boat on the way to dry ground, God doesn’t view you as an adulterer. Neither does he view your choice to get your family into the boat as a “wrong.”

Right now our nation is sinking. And two boats are on the way. God is not asking you to pick between “the lesser of two evils.” He asking you to: (1) Prioritize what Scripture prioritizes. (2) Distinguish an evil from a wrong.

Is it possible that God, in his infinite wisdom, has brought Trump along, if for no other reason than to prevent this nation from sinking permanently into the abyss of PC progressivism? And that he has done this so that when this nation is back on the ground we can then plan for the kind of constitutional conservative we need for the future?

This makes so much eminent sense, and in so doing makes the Byers and all who think like them laughingstocks. 

Yes, Trump has been inconsistent on abortion, his COVID policies and other matters.  But he also delivered a huge victory to the pro-life cause through his appointment of conservative justices to the US Supreme Court, and the formation of his current team suggests he has learned some important lessons from the mistakes he made during the pandemic.  The Byers' demand for some sort of Christian perfection in a leader is utterly irrational.  God sometimes anoints pagans to do his will.  Consider King Cyrus.  Isa. 45:1.

But more troubling, they suggest a policy that would essentially hand political power to the Antichrist in perpetuity.  Just whose side are they on, anyway?

Meet Canadian "Never Trumper" Low Churchers Rev. Matthew Byers and His Mom

UPDATE:  Rev. Byers has apparently either made his Facebook page private or has deactivated it, so his "Only The Truth" podcasts are no longer visible, except to his friends if he has gone private. 

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If you have the stomach for 43 minutes of illogic, oversimplication and fact twisting regarding POTUS 47, you can view it here.  It is teeth-grindingly bad, with formal logical fallacies committed about every 30 seconds, and he and his mom going off like cosmic bunnies in all directions.  Painful stuff, but I enjoin you to spend the time, as it provides the context of what I will say below.  Pay special attention to Byers' interaction with Mark Sanders.

I've engaged Byers before on matters theological.  He is a Low Churcher, but unfortunately the kind of Low Churcher who calls Anglo-Catholics like me, "Romanists", "papists", "idolaters" and the like.  In other words, the kind of half-educated Low Churcher who can't sustain an argument against Anglo-Catholics, and who therefore, liberal-like, resorts to name-calling when he sees he is losing.

Anyway, I exchanged a few comments with Rev. Byers at this dog of a podcast.  He deleted them and then summarily blocked me.

But not before I got screenshots.  (*Always* get screeshots.)

That was the last comment I was able to make.  As mentioned above, Byers deleted this exchange and then blocked me.  Which created a bit of a problem for him, by the way, since I an an Admin at a Facebook discussion group where he is a member.  Blocking the Admin is always a no-no.  I gave him 24 hours to either unblock me or get booted from the group.

Anyway, look at the progression of Byers argument in our exchange:  I said, essentially, that he and his mother are grossly oversimplifying the matter.  His response:  "Trump is your master and you're just a Romanist meany who likes to attack Protestants."  I then explain to him that I'm not a "Romanist", but rather quite Orthodox in my Anglo-Catholic theology, and that I have directed the same sort of criticism at TDSer Robert Hart, who is a fellow Anglo-Catholic priest.

And that was that. Off I was sent.  Byers didn't want to be embarrassed at his own page, I guess.  However, if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

Or in the alternative, cancel your critics.

The Robert Hart archive.

Fr. Calvin Robinson on the 2024 Election

"After five years of 'pandemics', lockdowns, medical mandates, closed churches, inflation, tax rises, extortionate energy bills, men invading women’s spaces and  sports, Pakistani Moslem rape gangs, child indoctrination and mutilation, terrorist sympathisers in the open, proxy wars, erasure of basic freedoms, two-tiered policing, cancel culture, Marxism and Mohammedanism everywhere, it is good to end the year with some positivity.

Embrace the win. Celebrate the moment. Things are about to get interesting in this next chapter.

It is garbage day for the Establishment."

The Measure of Fr. Robert Hart's Mentality

Summed up in these recent posts of his on his Facebook page:

I'm not sure what to make, exactly, of his comment about Elon Musk, but it certainly can be read to imply that he's fantasizing Elon's death.  Maybe his bishop will ask him to clarify.  Or maybe he won't.

Fr. Robert Hart Again Accuses Me of "Slander"

Well, once again he shows that he is ignorant of the difference between libel and slander, on which I instructed him here.  But no matter.  If he's incapable of being educated, so be it.

Now, I had intended not to blog about this recent kerfuffle between us.  I was content to let it die privately. However, he's now forced the issue by posting this at The Continuum blog.  Here's the pertinent excerpt:

"On Friday (Nov. 1) I received several emails from a priest (?) who has written several slanderous "hit pieces" about me over the years on his blog, all of them deliberately misrepresenting me and demonstrating something of an obsession that makes me wonder of I need to hire security - not that I could afford it. They were about a comment that I never posted on Facebook that used an impolite (to say the least) word, apparently on a Facebook page of yet a third clergyman whom I have never met and frankly, because he violates the unwritten but generally understood ethical norm of not trying to be both a priest and a publicly known political pundit, hope never to meet (I do not approve of clergy appearing at political rallies to endorse candidates, especially a rally that included some of the most vile and slanderous hate speech ever to shock the nation for a second time since 1939 at Madison Square Garden. It is a shame that it has played host to such a scandalous spectacle now twice in our history). In the emails sent to me on Friday, was included a screenshot of the comment with the obscene word, and it looked exactly as if it had been posted from my Facebook account. He also mentioned "other [comments presumably]" which bothered me. Well, it is an old trick to create a fake Facebook account using someone's name and picture. This method has been used, as we all know, by people inviting us to "friend" people who are already on our "friends" lists, I suppose for some purpose to do with hacking. However, the priest (?) who was sending me the emailed screenshot has been blocked from seeing anything I post on Facebook since February of 2023. In other words, the fact that he was able to see it is only because I did not post it; it did not come from my account: Everything I post there is hidden from him because I had already blocked him."

This has to do with a comment Fr. Hart made, and subsequently deleted, at a post on Fr. Calvin Robinson's public Facebook page, but not before Fr. Robinson got a screenshot of it.  Fr. Robinson is the "priest and a publicly known political pundit" Hart disparagingly mentions in the quotation above.  The first photo below is of the Hart's comment.  The second photo show him "liking" the negative comment of Alice Linsley, showing his interest in the comments:

Hart claims that "it is an old trick to create a fake Facebook account using someone's name and picture."  That's true, but unfortunately for Hart, that "like" he clicked on Mrs. Linsley's comment links straight to his actual Facebook account, not a fake account, and I can prove it.  One of the things I asked him in our email exchange is why a hacker would post something and then delete it, as if he had second thoughts.  Hart is simply lying through his teeth.

In a pathetic attempt to further bolster his defense, he writes:

"However, the priest (?) who was sending me the emailed screenshot has been blocked from seeing anything I post on Facebook since February of 2023. In other words, the fact that he was able to see it is only because I did not post it; it did not come from my account: Everything I post there is hidden from him because I had already blocked him."

As I explained to him and have stated here, the image comes from a screenshot Fr. Robinson made, and then shared in a private group of which I am a member.  What's more, even though he has blocked me on his page and I can't see his posts, there are other ways of seeing them, as everyone knows.  Fr. Robinson's screenshot combined with my ability to do an end run around Hart's blocking me revealed that he posted that comment at Robinson's page and then deleted it.  (The subthread at which Hart made this comment has been deleted by its author, but I have both photographic and videographic proof that it was there.)

Hart complains that this is just another "slanderous" attack from me (he means "libelous"), similar to the ones I have made previously here at the Old Jamestown Church.  Well, those "attacks" came in response to his vile and vitriologic language which he had been directing against the objects of his political ire, mainly Donald Trump and his supporters.  You can read all about that past exchange in the Robert Hart archives.  Hart simply cannot find the resolve to repent for such unseemly behavior.  Or for lying.

Here's what I predict will happen if and when Hart sees this blog post.  He will rail against me, with implicit threats of ecclesial and legal prosecution.  He'll try to seize the high spiritual ground, as he does in the quotation above.  He'll rant and rave for awhile, but just like he did last time, he'll return to his basement with his tail between his legs and return to spewing his TDS comments at his own Facebook page and others.  It's pitiful.

And, as always, his bishop will do nothing about it.

A Prayer for Our Country from the Book of Common Prayer

"Almighty God, who hast given us this good land for our heritage: We humbly beseech thee that we may always prove ourselves a people mindful of thy favor and glad to do thy will. Bless our land with honorable industry, sound learning, and pure conduct. Save us from violence, discord, and confusion; from pride and arrogance, and from every evil way. Defend our liberties, and fashion into one united people the  multitudes brought hither out of many kindreds and tongues. Endue with the spirit of wisdom those to whom, in thy Name, we entrust the authority of government, that there may be justice and peace at home, and that, through obedience to thy law, we may show forth thy praise among the nations of the earth. In the time of prosperity, fill our hearts with thankfulness, and in the day of trouble, suffer not our trust in thee to fail; all of which we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

Fr. Calvin Robinson at the Perseus Men's Conference

I was blessed to attend this conference last week at St. Francis Anglican Church in Spartanburg, SC.  Fr. Robinson was our first speaker.  I will post other talks here shortly.

Happy Reformation Month! Alister McGrath's "Iustitia Dei" Continues to Vex Protestants

First, in earlier editions of this work McGrath called Luther's solafidianism a "theological novum", meaning it had no basis in anything taught by the Church in its 1,500-year history. I've maintained that "theological novum" is a polite and scholarly way of saying "heresy", because that's what a heresy is by definition.

Now this in his 4th edition:

“One of the more significant aspects of this newly revised version is the treatment of justification in the Greek fathers. Previously, McGrath suggested that a regenerative reading of justification was the result of the emergence of Latin in the Western Christianity. The narrative held that when the Greek term for ‘to justify’ (=dikaioō) was translated into Latin (=iustificare), Christian interpreters came to misinterpret Paul’s teaching. This was because the Latin suggested that justification involved ‘making’ the believer righteous. The notion that ‘justification’ involves a transformative element was viewed as contradicted by the Greek.

For some, this has held a key to unlocking Reformation debates. R. C. Sproul routinely made this point. (Go to 1:29 in the following video): . . . .

In short, in speaking about this ‘linguistic trick,’ Sproul draws on McGrath’s older work. The reason ‘justification’ was thought to involve the believer actually becoming righteous was due in part to misreading Paul in Latin. The Reformed tradition eventually recovered the original meaning of Paul by returning to the Greek, which shows that justification is not only merely juridical, but counterfactual–the believer is declared righteous but remains unrighteous; the righteousness of God is ‘alien’ to the one who is justified.

McGrath’s new volume shows that this version of history is flawed. Here is the problem: McGrath has discovered that the Greek fathers read justification as involving transformation.

For example, writing on Chrysostom, McGrath states,

‘Chrysostom’s account affirms the declaration or manifestation (endeixeis) of God’s own righteousness with its actualisation in the transformation of the nature of humanity.’ . . . .

McGrath writes,

‘It has become a commonplace in some quarters to suggest that the dik group of terms–particularly the verb dikaioo, “to justify”–are naturally translated as being “treated as righteous” or “reckoned as righteous”, and that Paul’s Greek-speaking readers would have understood him in this way. This may be true at the purely linguistic level; however, the Greek Christian preoccupation with the strongly transformative soteriological metaphor of deification appears to have led to justification being treated in a factitive sense. This is not, however, to be seen as a conceptual imposition on Pauline thought, but rather a discernment of this aspect of his soteriological narrative.’”

Read the rest here.

So, it is now not just that sola fide, ”the article by which the church stands and falls” according to Luther, is essentially called a "heresy" by a pre-eminent Evangelical theologian in his magisterial work on the theological history of the Church's teaching on justification.  In his latest edition, he takes the legs out from under the Evangelical argument that dikaioō means "declare righteous" which is absolutely essential to their argument that they have justification right and that accordingly they bear the true Gospel to the world.  They don't get  justification right, and are therefore bearers of an un-apostolic Gospel. 

Happy Reformation Month!

The Rev'd Fr. Robert Hart, Staying Classy and Getting Fact Checked

Snopes: Fake Photo Shows Gun-Toting, Pro-Trump 'Food Warriors' Ordering at Chick-fil-A


"However, the truth was someone generated the photo with the help of an artificial-intelligence (AI) tool. In other words, the picture was fake."

Well done, Robert.

The Rev'd Fr. Robert Hart, Second Amendment Scholar

Well, it is clear that neither Fr. Hart nor Mr. Michals has ever read the US Supreme Court cases US v. Miller (1939), District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen (2022), which speak clearly and authoritatively on the meaning of the Second Amendment, and particularly to the meaning of the "militia", and to the relationship between its prefatory clause (“A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State”) and its operative clause - what Hart calls the "subordinate" clause - (“the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed”). 

Unfortunately for Hart, as the Court in Heller noted in its primary holding, the operative clause is not logically subordinate to the prefatory clause, and neither was it viewed as such in American legal history:  "Private citizens have the right under the Second Amendment to possess an ordinary type of weapon and use it for lawful, historically established situations such as self-defense in a home, even when there is no relationship to a local militia." 

Concerning the logical relationship between the two clauses Fr. Hart thinks he understands, as David Kopel and I observe in a footnote in our 1997 Maryland Law Review Article, Communitarians Neorepublicans and Guns Assessing the Case for Firearms Prohibition:

“Stephen Halbrook observes that the Second Amendment may be stated in the form of a hypothetical syllogism: ‘If a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state . . . then the right to the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’ (HALBROOK, supra note 148, at 85).  If, for argument's sake, a civilian ‘well-regulated militia’ is no longer ‘necessary to the preservation of a free State,’ it does not logically follow that ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms’ may be now infringed. To so conclude would be to commit the fallacy of denying the antecedent. In illustrating the fallacious logic entailed in denying the antecedent, an analogous but simpler syllogism may be used: ‘If it is raining, there are clouds. It is not raining. Therefore, there are no clouds.’ The conclusion is obviously fallacious, for there may in fact be clouds even though it is not raining.

The Cato Institute's Sheldon Richman parses as follows:

‘Approaching the sentence as grammarians, we immediately note two things: the simple subject is "right" and the full predicate is "shall not be infringed." This, in other words, is a sentence about a right that is already assumed to exist. It does not say, "The people shall have a right to keep and bear arms ...."That has important implications for the opening militia phrase .... Gun opponents often argue that if the opening phrase does not apply-if, say, the standing army takes the place of the militia-then the right to keep and bear arms is nullified. That view would require a willingness by the framers of the Constitution to agree to this statement: If a well-regulated militia is not necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall(or may) be infringed. But it is absurd to think that the Framers would embrace that statement. Their political philosophy would not permit them to speak of a permissible infringement of rights .... The term infringement implies a lack of consent ....If [the Framers'] concern had been to keep the national government from limiting the states' power to form militias, they might have written: "A well-regu-lated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the power of the States to form and control militias shall not be limited.’"

Hart is merely parroting the tired, old argument of liberal hoplophobes, discredited by the corpus of "standard interpretation" law review articles and now officially by the US Supreme Court, that Americans have the right to keep and bear arms ONLY in connection with service in the militia. 

More Fun at Low Church Anglican

"Call no man father!" (Matt. 23:9)

1. Explain the verse in context, and how that application of the verse proves too much; that it is about humility, not honorifics;

2. Explain that this is one of Jesus' many rhetorical devices in the Gospels that do not admit of a strict literal reading;

3. Explain how St. Paul referred to himself as a "father" to his flock;

4. Explain how there are instances in other parts of the Bible where the faithful call men "fathers";

5. Explain how the Ordinal prompts addressing the bishop as "reverend father in God;"

6. Await their reply:

"Call no man father!" (Matt. 23:9)

Seriously, it's like trying to reason with children.

A Reader Writes. . .

concerning this post:

"I watched the video but was not overly impressed. The one constant I see when the Eastern apologists discuss icons is that they almost never use Scripture to justify their position. They almost always resort to philosophy and Greek metaphysics. An occasional nod to a Scripture verse may be made but only to stretch it way beyond what it is saying, such as trying to justify the bowing and reverencing of images with the fact that God ordered certain images made in the Temple and on the Ark.

It always goes back to authority and "What says the LORD"? There is absolutely nothing in Scripture that would justify what the Eastern "orthodox" have developed in terms of iconographic theology. But they simply don't care. Mind you I have no problem with icons per se nor even showing them respect. But the "orthodox" have gone to such extremes as to pretend that they are necessary for salvation and for safeguarding the doctrine of the Incarnation. There is even an akathist service TO the Kursk Root icon. Are these extremes Apostolic in nature? Are they Biblical? I doubt it."

My answer:

The argument for the making and veneration of icons is a theological argument, yes, but so is the argument on which the Nicene Creed is based. Neither the word "trinity" nor "homousios" is to be found in the New Testament, yet we use these theological terms to summarize what we believe to be the biblical teaching about the relation between the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Fr. Stephen DeYoung drives this point home compellingly near the end of his debate with Gavin Ortlund, who essentially argues as you do.

Public Service Announcment

Fr. Robert Hart is just as unhinged as ever.

Stay tuned to this channel for future regularly-scheduled announcements benefitting the tradtional Anglican communiuty.

Fun at Low Church Anglican

Notice that the Admins at Low Church Anglican have restricted my comments.  (See bottom of second and third images.)  Joe Mahler is one of them.  There's a historical reason why they do so.  They don't want sustained interactions with educated critics, especially Anglo-Catholics, but an echo chamber.  It speaks volumes.

Are Icons Idols? Responding to J.I. Packer's Iconoclasm

 This video eloquently presents an absolutely devastating reply to J.I. Packer's argument against icons in his popular book "Knowing God", to Puritan iconoclasm, and to the Homily Against the Peril of Idolatry, which unfortunately wormed its way into one of the Church of England's official Formularies. Packer once referred to himself as a "neo-Puritan". Thankfully, and for good reason, the Church of England and her offspring (except for a tiny minority of jurisdictional holdouts) stopped requiring clerical subscription to the Articles of Religion, which incorporates the Homilies.  This video not only demonstrates the pathology of Calvinist iconoclasm in particular, but of Calvinism as a theological worldview.

I can't begin to tell you my thoughts on how excellent this video is. In a mere 30 minutes, this fellow summarizes the depth and fullness of the Eastern Orthodox theology on icons. It is one of the best things I've ever seen, and I plead with you to spend 30 minutes to watch it.

Hark, He Wears The Purple!

Here is pseudo-Anglican forensic bloviator Donald Philip Veitch, donning his new purple clerical shirt.  Don is the principal mover and shaker behind the creation of a new Presbyterian microscopic sect claiming to represent true Anglicanism.  To Don, a presbyter is a bishop, and bishops wear purple. Forget about the fact that this belief stands squarely against the Catholic religion of the prayer book and all of standard Anglican divinity.  To be an Anglican bishop, to be authorized to wear the purple, one must typically be consecrated by three other bishops, who were likewise consecrated.  Don was never consecrated a bishop.  Never.  His claim is both preposterous and heretical.

If you want to watch this certifiable nutburger and his fellows in action, hang out at Low Church Anglicans, Prayer Book Anglican, his public Facebook page, and his YouTube channel.

And as I've warned, if you've come to this blog as an inquirer about Anglicanism and possibly thinking about becoming an Anglican, stay far away from these guys.  They are poison.

Preposterous Presbyterians with Prayerbooks Pontificating about Other Presbyterians

This is the latest from Jameson Overton, one of the pseudo-Anglican nutburgers who frequent Low Church Anglicans and other online fora of theological ill repute.  Overton was recently ordained a priest - uh, sorry, a "presbyter" - in the Reformed Episcopal Church.  I've had the distinct displeasure of bantering with him on a number of occasions, mainly at Prayer Book Anglican, but this afternoon he blocked me at Low Church Anglicans simply because I laughed at his post, linked below, with an emoji.  (Touchy, touchy, son, and I can still see you.) 

Anyway, he was bloviating about noted Presbyterian theologian, author and blogger Doug Wilson.  If you're a trad conservative and don't read Wilson, you should.  He's one of the best out there.  Here's Overton:

"Doug Wilson is being platformed by conservative reactionaries who are more interested in having a society full of white-washed tombs than in seeing sinners come to life in Christ.

Here is a post from another group. I am sharing it here to show why, despite him being a "conservative", he is a heretic who does not know the gospel. We should pray for his repentance, not only for his own soul, but also for the many souls he leads down to their eternal deaths."

The shrill tone and mindless verbiage say it all with respect to Mr. Overton's mentality, if we can even call it that since there's clearly little if anything "mental" going on in his cranium, but read the rest of his post if you have the stomach for it.  Essentially, he hates Wilson because he is one of those "heretical" Federal Vision (FV) Presbyterians, you know, the ones who actually do have some appreciation for the Catholic Faith.  He posts a pic of Wilson in hell:


Well isn't that special?

As I've written here before, if you're just starting out investigating Anglicanism, trust me as a *pastor* when I tell you to stay away from these guys.  They are toxic and demonic, their ostensible love of Christ notwithstanding, and they have perverted the Biblical and Apostolic faith.  That is precisely why they hate FV.

Mr. Jameson Overton: