Catholic and Protestant

 

The Anglican Church is both Catholic and Protestant, although the liberalism that has become far too prevalent in the Church in both England and North America is neither Catholic nor Protestant nor, for that matter, Christian, but is rather a revisionist theology that borrows Christian terms and redefines them to fit the ideas of the post-Christian secularism that “Western Civilization” adapted after ceasing to be Christendom.  While orthodox Anglicans of both high and low varieties are usually okay with the expression “Reformed Catholic” some Anglo-Catholics are as allergic to the term Protestant as some evangelical Anglicans, those who share some traits of what I call Hyper-Protestantism, are of the term Catholic.

 

I maintain that we ought to embrace both words, albeit with the caveat that they are properly defined.

 

“Protestant” requires the most definition. It has become a rather vague term, designating any ecclesiastical group not in fellowship with the Roman See except those who parted ways with Rome prior to the sixteenth century like the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox or whose breech with Rome was based on new innovations Rome introduced after the Council of Trent like the Old Catholics.  Used this way, it conveys little to nothing in the way of positive information about what these groups believe.  For the term to be meaningful rather than useless it needs to be defined in a way that identifies beliefs that all Protestant groups hold in common.  This requires that it be less inclusive than is the current norm.

 

The words that we would most naturally use as substitutes for “Protestant” come with their own sets of difficulties, however.  “Reformed,” while it sounds better to the ear than “Protestant” and taken literally is a precise statement of what we mean when we say the Anglican Church is Protestant, that is, that is has undergone a “Reformation”, comes with a problem that is the opposite of that attached to “Protestant.”  It is too precise.  Especially when it is spelled with a capital R, it identifies a specific ecclesiastical tradition, that which emerged from the Reformation in Switzerland and as a theological term it indicates the system associated with the Reformed Church, and in particular the interpretation of predestination adapted at the Synod of Dort.  While a sort of Calvinism was probably the predominant theology among Anglican clergy of the last half of the sixteenth century and there was an attempt to enshrine this in the official theology of the Church by appending the Lambeth Articles to the Articles of Religion this attempt ultimately failed because it went against the overall spirit of the first Elizabethan era which was to avoid committing the Church to either side in the disputes between the mainstream traditions of the continental Reformation.  This meant that the slight slant towards the Swiss Reformed tradition that had been introduced late in the reforms under Edward VI was removed by the reforms under Elizabeth I. Examples of this can be seen in the revision of the Articles of Religion into the current Thirty-Nine from the Edwardian Forty-Two and the dropping of the black rubric from the Elizabethan editions of the Book of Common Prayer.

 

In the sixteenth century “Protestant” was largely a term of abuse used by the Roman See and its adherents for the Reformers and their followers.  Their own preferred self-designation was “evangelical” but as with the term “Reformed” little would be gained by substituting this for “Protestant.”  By the twentieth century, especially in North America, this term had come to have a rather different set of connotations than in the sixteenth century.  It has connotations of pietism, puritanism, revivalism and an approach to religion centred on personal experience of the type that the sixteenth century Magisterial Reformers would most likely have denounced as the enthusiasm and extremism associated with those they dubbed Schwärmerei.  Alternately it can suggest a revised version of fundamentalism that is less separatist (good) but also far more willing to compromise on the infallible authority of Scripture (bad). 

 

There is also the problem that the self-application of this term by the sixteenth century Reformers and their followers was based on the mistaken idea that they had recovered a Gospel that the Church had lost.  The Gospel is clearly identified in the New Testament as the message that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures and the testimony of eyewitnesses.  It is at the heart of the faith confessed in both the Apostles’ and Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creeds as well as the Athanasian Symbol, along with the basic truths that identify the Christ proclaimed in the Gospel (that there is one God, Who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that the Son, while remaining fully God, became truly Man, by taking unto Himself a whole human nature through His miraculous conception by the Holy Ghost and birth of the Virgin Mary).  It was never lost by the Church.  If the Reformers recovered anything it was the Pauline doctrine of justification, but this is not the Gospel.  The Pauline doctrine of justification – that it is by faith and not by works, or as the Reformers put it, by faith alone – is a doctrine about the Gospel, but it is not the Gospel itself.  The Gospel is Christocentric – it is about Jesus Christ. Justification by faith and not works is anthropocentric – it is about us, and how we receive the benefit of what the Gospel proclaims.  To claim that justification by faith alone is itself the Gospel is to place us rather than Jesus Christ at the centre of the Gospel.

 

Rather than abandon it for these alternatives, it makes more sense to retain “Protestant” with a proper definition.  The definition need include no more than two positive affirmations of belief.  The first is that the Bible as God’s written Word is the authoritative standard of truth to which the Church’s doctrine and tradition must conform.  The second is that the salvation which Jesus Christ accomplished for us in the events proclaimed in the Gospel is in all of its aspects given to us freely as a gift which we receive by faith rather than by our works.  

 

“Catholic”, as stated, requires less definition.  This is the ancient term – the first recorded use of it is in the writings of St. Ignatius of Antioch who was martyred early in the second century – that designated the whole Church as distinguished from the Church in a specific location (the Church in Rome, the Church in Galatia, and so forth).  It is the Greek word for whole – which is also the root from which the English word whole is derived – with the prefix kata attached as an intensifier.  In addition to designating the whole Church, the early Christians used it to distinguish the true faith from heresy.  This is how the term is used in the Athanasian Symbol, in, for example, its first statement “Whosoever would be saved needeth before all things to hold fast the Catholic Faith.”  Used this way, it is basically synonymous with orthodox, but note that the usage of Catholic as orthodox is derived from the meaning of Catholic as whole.  The Catholic faith, the orthodox faith, does not include doctrines that are particular to one place or one time, but is the faith confessed by the whole Church of Christ.  As. St. Vincent of Lerins famously put it is the faith confessed “everywhere, in all times, and by all.”

 

“Protestant” and “Catholic”, so defined, should not be thought to be at odds with each other.  A Catholicism that is defined by what is believed and practiced by the whole Church, in all times and places, rather than what may be particular in one place and time, will not include such things as mandatory celibacy for clergy, restricting Communion to one kind for the laity, an intermediate state for the faithful prior to the Final Judgement that resembles hell except in that it is temporary, supererogatory works and a treasury of merit, indulgences and dispensations, that are innovations of the Roman Church from after when she and the Churches of the four ancient Patriarchs of the East broke fellowship with each other at the end of the first Christian millennium.  These things have never been part of the faith and practice of the Eastern Churches.  The Protestantism that rejects these on the grounds of their being unscriptural is not rejecting anything that can truly be said to be Catholic.  That having been said, there are ideas commonly thought to be “Protestant” that are at odds with Catholicism properly defined.  Examples of these include a) the idea that the true “Church” is not an organized community/society but an aggregate term for speaking of all people who considered as individuals are Christian believers, b) the idea that ecclesiastical government (episcopal, Presbyterian, congregational) is adiopha rather than of Apostolic provenance, c) the idea that when Holy Communion is said to be an anamnesis or memorial of the Lord’s death this means a depiction in the present of an event in the past rather than the means given to us by grace whereby we partake in time of the Lord’s sacrifice which has been taken out of time and into eternity by His offering of Himself in the Tabernacle built not with hands in Heaven, d) the idea that baptism, the sacrament of entry under the New Covenant corresponding with circumcision under the Old, unlike the New Covenant itself is less inclusive rather than more and should therefore be withheld from the infants of Christian parents, and e) that when the Son of God “was made flesh and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father)” so that He could say to St. Philip “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” this did not effect a fundamental change from when God said to Israel through Moses under the Old Covenant “ye saw no manner of similitude on the day that the LORD spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire.”  Just as none of the beliefs and practices that Rome introduced after the Schism and which Protestantism rejected is truly Catholic, so none of these ideas that conflict with what is truly Catholic should be considered essential to what is truly Protestant.  That all of them are wrong is demonstrable from the Scriptures.[1]

 

Rather than picking “Protestant” or “Catholic” to describe our Church, orthodox Anglicans should embrace both terms, defining “Protestant” so as to include the supreme authority of Scripture and the freeness of the gift of Christ’s salvation received by faith[2] but to exclude ideas that conflict with what is truly Catholic in that it belongs to the faith and practice of the whole Church since the earliest times and defining “Catholic” so as to include what belongs to the faith and practice of the whole Church from the earliest times but to exclude those distinctly Roman errors rightly excised from our English Church in the Reformation.

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[1] That a) is wrong is evident from both the Greek word for Church, ekklesia, which denotes a group that has met or assembled, and from how the New Testament uses the word – it is always a visible community of Christian believers, never just a convenient way of speaking of X, Y, and Z Christians, regardless of whether they have ever met.   With regards to b), the episcopal polity is clearly of Apostolic provenance in the New Testament – the Apostles themselves, along with those invited to share in their governance such as SS Timothy and Titus, are the bishops in the sense of the governors of the Church, presiding as the top tier of a ministry which like that of the Old Testament Church has three tiers, the middle being that of the presbyters and the lower tier the deacons.  That the Apostles were the governors and the New Testament was written while they were still alive is the reason the word bishop had not yet become the official designation of the governors and is sometimes used of presbyters.  This is a seer/prophet matter and does not negate the New Testament’s clear testimony to the Apostolic provenance of the ecclesiastical government found in all ancient Churches prior to the sixteenth century.  With regards to c), look up every occurrence of anamnesis in the Bible, LXX Old Testament and New Testament.   In none of these does it mean something intended to call something from the past to our mental recollection.  That Christ died in time, but took His sacrifice out of time and into eternity by offering it in the Heavenly Tabernacle is a key theme of the epistle to the Hebrews.  With regards to d), that baptism takes the place of circumcision can be demonstrated from Colossians 2:11-13 and that the New Covenant is more inclusive than the Old is rather the point of Christ’s commission to take His Gospel and baptize all nations, as well as of St. Paul’s frequent comments about the Old Testament Law, which distinguished Israel from other nations, being removed as a “wall of partition” between them.  That infants, circumcised on the eight day under the Old Covenant, would not be excluded from baptism under the New, is the only reasonable inference from this and is basically explicitly stated by the Lord when He rebuked His disciples from not allowing the infants to be brought to Him.  The words quoted from St. John’s Gospel in e) ought to be sufficient to rebut it.  Obviously the Incarnation changed everything.  The arguments that St. John of Damascus and St. Theodore the Studite advanced against the iconoclasts and which won out in the seventh ecumenical council were built firmly upon the foundation of the Incarnation.  While Christians who adopt iconoclasm like to think they are walking in the footsteps of King Josiah and that Christians who reject their iconoclasm are tainted with pagan idolatry, in reality the iconoclasts have adopted a position typical of monotheistic religions that reject the Incarnation.

[2] When Dr. Luther said that justification is by “faith alone”, by “alone” he excluded only what St. Paul had already excluded in Romans and Galatians, our own works, and for the very reason St. Paul gives for excluding these in Romans 4, that if it were by works it would be a wage paid to us rather than a gift freely given.  Faith is the hand by which we receives the freely given grace of God and in this function it is indeed alone in that nothing else we do can either do this instead of faith or alongside faith.  This does not exclude the sacraments as means of grace, as ought to be evident from what Dr. Luther, Calvin, and our own Anglican formularies have to say about them.  In the giving of a gift, two hands are always involved, the hand of the recipient and the hand of the giver.  The sacraments are the hand of the Giver working through the means of His Church.  Nor does it say anything about any other function of faith, such as its being one of the three elements of basic Christian character alongside hope and Christian love.  Nor is it some sort of ontological statement.  This adequately answers any reasonable objection someone might try to make to it on the grounds of theology that is actually Catholic.  When Rome anathematized it in the Council of Trent, and the Eastern Church rejected it as found in the Confession of Cyril I Lucaris, what they rejected was the idea that someone can gain acceptance before God by getting all of his intellectual ducks lined up properly while living however he pleases. This, however, is not what Dr. Luther meant but is rather a form of salvation by works in which visible outward works have been replaced by invisible inner works.  The Protestant doctrine can only be properly understood as speaking of faith as the hand that receives the gift of salvation.  That salvation is a gift we receive rather than something we earn or achieve for ourselves is a Catholic truth that both the Roman and Eastern Churches traditionally affirm, a fact one needs only look at the early history of the struggles against the rigorist schismatics the Donatists and Novatians and against the heresy of Pelagius to discover, but it had become badly obscured, especially at the popular level, in the Roman Church by the end of the fifteenth century.

The King has Arrived

His Majesty, King Charles III accompanied by Queen Camilla has arrived here in the Dominion of Canada, where he will be giving the throne speech opening the new Parliament in person.  While it is not often in recent years that something happens in my country of which I approve, this is very much to my liking.

 

I have been both a royalist and a monarchist all my life.  I put the word royalist first because monarchism requires royalism for clarity.  Monarchy is the ancient constitutional principle of the rule of one – or better, the leadership of the one, for the suffix –arche indicates the idea of headship, source, leadership more than “rule” which is what the suffix –cracy suggests. The ancients recognized three basic constitutional principles, the one, the few, and the many, but also that there were good and bad forms of each.  The good form of the principle of the one is kingship, the bad form is tyranny.  Royalism is about kings and queens, not tyrants.   Kingship is an office that possesses authority by ancient prescription.  A tyrant never has authority, only power, which he generally obtains by gathering a mob of followers to support him.  Tyranny is closely intertwined with democracy and populism and always has been.

 

While my royalism and monarchism was initially instinctual and related to my general conservative and reactionary instinct, that is, an inclination for what is ancient, time-tested, proven, and traditional rather than what is faddish, popular, and theoretical, one of the many ways in which the office of kingship is superior to any sort of elected head of state is that it is not a political office in the sense of partisan politics. 

 

My great-aunt Hazel passed away this January.  Thirteen years ago in “Testimony of a Tory” I made reference to a conversation that she and I had over Christmas the previous year in which she wholeheartedly agreed with me when I said that I wanted Canada to remain a monarchy and never become a republic.  She regularly voted NDP and while that party’s most recent leader, Jimmy Dhaliwal, was a republican, its most popular leader in the last twenty years, the late Jack Layton, was a royalist. 

 

One of the most enthusiastic supporters of Canada’s monarchy in the last century and probably the most noted expert on our constitution that our country has ever had, Eugene Forsey, was literally all over the map politically, as far as party alignment goes.  Raised a Conservative, he was one of the founders of the CCF membership in which he abandoned at the time of the merger that formed the NDP, then sat in the Senate as a Liberal appointed on the recommendation of Pierre Trudeau, while all the time calling himself a “John A. Macdonald Conservative”. 

 

The Green Party’s former leader Elizabeth May, currently the only elected Member from that party, is a strong royalist.  

 

You don’t have to be a conservative to be a royalist, although, and I say this as a rebuke of those Canadians who call themselves “conservative” but think that American republicanism is the standard of conservatism, you do have to be a royalist to be a conservative in the truest sense of the word.  

 

Some have criticized kingship for all the pomp that surrounds it but this criticism is misguided.  The pomp of kingship is attached to the office and not to the man who holds it.  Furthermore, the pomp of kingship is a dignified pomp, which extends to other institutions associated with kingship, especially Parliament.  That there is as much dignified pomp in our House of Commons as there is we can attribute entirely to its association with kingship through the Westminster parliamentary system.  Democracy removed from such a setting is a petty, ugly thing, and it becomes much more petty and ugly when someone skilled at expressing the grievances of large numbers of people, regardless of whether these grievances are legitimate or not, uses that skill to rise to power.  The cult of personality that can form around such a person is attached entirely to the man and not his office and is dangerous as well as ugly.  We have seen this happen twice in the United States in recent decades.  The cult of personality surrounding the current American president is one example.  That which surrounded Barack Obama is the other.

 

In one of Alexandre Dumas père’s D’Artagnan romances, the character of Athos defends the office of kingship, saying something to the effect that if it should happen to be occupied by an unworthy occupant, honour and duty require that the office be respected, if not the man.  In the case of our current Sovereign I have to say that the man won an awful lot of respect from me when at the beginning of his coronation, in words he himself had added to the service, he replied to the welcome in the name of the King of Kings by saying “in His name, and after His example, I come not to be served but to serve.”  That is so much better than the overweening peacocking and hubris coming from the elected head of state south of the border.

 

So, a warm welcome to His Majesty.

God Save the King!

A Surprisingly Good Start

Since last month’s Dominion election, Blofeld, who has succeeded Captain Airhead as both leader of the Liberal Party and prime minister of Canada, has made it very difficult for me to maintain my intense dislike of him.  Difficult, but not impossible.  He is, after all, the worst kind of banker, someone with a track record of supporting the same sort of goofy environmental and social causes as his predecessor, and worst of all, a Grit.  However, his reversal of the Liberal Party’s previous practice of urinating all over Canada’s Loyalist roots and heritage is much to be appreciated.  The decision to arrange for His Majesty, King Charles III to deliver the throne speech opening the forty-fifth Parliament in person was a wonderful move which I wholeheartedly applaud.

 

Of course I am not holding my breath in anticipation of Blofeld’s re-criminalizing or even placing restrictions on abortion, abolishing MAID, re-orienting government policy towards a firm defense of parental rights against deranged educators who think their calling is to teach children to be ashamed of Canada and her history, hate white people, and choose their own gender or a firm defense of law-abiding Canadians and their property against violent criminals, abandoning the failed harms reduction approach to drug abuse in favour of a sane prevention based approach, jettisoning the vile government policy that has been in place under both Liberal and Conservative governments since the first Trudeau premiership of tolerating or at time encouraging hatred towards specific groups – males, heterosexuals, people who identify as their actual sex, whites, Christians, and above all the combination of these – while protecting other groups – basically everyone else - from even having their feelings hurt by words they find offensive, or anything else of this sort.   

 

To be fair, had the Conservatives won, I would not have expected them to do many of these things either.  Evelyn Waugh said once that he was giving up voting because he had been voting Conservative for years and they failed to turn the clock back even a second.  The Canadian version of the party has not been any different, at least in my lifetime.  They have long ago forgotten what they are supposed to be for.  Earlier this week, when former leader Andrew Scheer was named interim leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition until the party’s actual leader can return to the House via by-election, he said “The Conservative Party is the party of free trade.”  That would have come as news to Sir John A. Macdonald, the Right Honourable John G. Diefenbaker, and basically every Conservative prime minister prior to Brian Mulroney.

 

This Tuesday Blofeld met with Krasnov the Orange, who after fulfilling the prophecy of the wounded head of the beast last year became president of the United States for the second time.  Krasnov is the second Communist agent to have infiltrated the White House by means of the Republican party.  The first was Dwight Eisenhower, who in World War II sabotaged the Western forces so that Stalin’s could reach Berlin first, forcibly repatriated thousands of people who had fled Soviet tyranny and, most likely, had George Patton murdered to prevent exposure of his crimes.  Krasnov defended his obvious calls to make Canada the fifty-first state by talking about how it looked to him as a real estate developer which, of course, was what he was doing back before he became a television star.  Blofeld’s response, pointing out that “there are some places that are never for sale” and that Canada “is not for sale.  It won’t be for sale ever” was most appropriate.  Krasnov told him “never say never” and he replied that Canadians would not be changing their minds.

 

Was Krasnov’s “never say never” remark a James Bond reference?  It is one word short of the title of the 1983 Irvin Kershner directed remake of Thunderball. The Blofeld our new prime minister resembles, however, is Christoph Waltz who portrayed the character in Spectre (2015) and No Time To Die (2021), the only actor to portray him twice.  The Blofeld in Never Say Never Again was Max von Syndow, the Swedish actor who crossed over to the American film industry after making a name for himself in the films of Ingmar Bergman, by portraying our Lord in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) in which two other then-future Blofelds appear - Donald Pleasence from You Only Live Twice (1967) portraying the devil and Telly Savalas from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) portraying Pontius Pilate.  Apparently Krasnov can’t keep his Blofelds straight.

 

Is Krasnov’s latest proposal, a 100% tariff on non-American films, a by-product of his ignorance of the basics of James Bond filmography?  That would make as much sense as his stated reasons for any of the other things he has done since regaining the White House.  In this case, I welcome his proposal.  If he goes through with it, other countries will be prompted to respond with retaliatory tariffs on American-made films.  Limiting the influence of Hollywood can only be a good thing.

 

Back to Blofeld, so far he has been doing much better as prime minister than I expected, although with as low expectations as I had that isn’t saying much.  Still, with His Majesty coming, for the first time in ages I am looking forward to an opening rather than a dissolution of Parliament.

God Save the King!

Thoughts on the 2025 Dominion Election

The 28 April, 2025 Dominion election has come and gone in Canada and we have elected our forty-fifth Parliament.  This is what a Dominion election is about.  We go to the polls to choose who will represent our local constituency in the House of Commons, the lower house which along with the Senate, comprises Parliament, the traditional institution in which by ancient prescription the legislative powers of the Crown are exercised.  This is good and as it should be. 

 

The members of Parliament are divided into factions which we call parties.  An unfortunate side effect of a Dominion election is that one of these parties wins a larger number of seats than the others.  If that party wins 172 seats, they have an outright majority of the seats in the House.  If they win less than 172 but more than any other party they have a plurality of the seats.  In either case, this party is said to have “won” the election and is customarily invited by the King or, more commonly, his vice-regal representative the Governor General, to form the next government.   The King, Parliament, civil service, and courts are all “the government,” of course, but in a narrower sense of the term the government consists of the ministers who make the day to day decisions of the King’s Privy Council, the institution in which the executive powers of the Crown are vested.  The leader of the winning party becomes the first minister of His Majesty’s government, the prime minister who chooses a cabinet of other executive ministers to head such ministries as finance, transportation, and dog-walking.

 

In this election, the Liberal Party won a plurality that came just short of a majority.  Initially this was reported as 169 seats but a recount in Lower Canada has since reduced it to 168.  I found this outcome disgusting and appalling.  The Grits have been in power for the last ten years during which period they have: 1) sabotaged the country’s economy, 2) waged war on the memory of her founders and historical leaders, 3) showed alarming disregard for their accountability to Parliament, 4) trod roughshod on the basic rights and freedoms of all Canadians supposedly protected by the Charter they are always patting themselves on the back for introducing in 1982, 5) shoved the insane cultural revolutionary ideas regarding sex, gender, race, and the like that are currently called “woke” down everyone’s throats, 6) reignited the national unity crisis that had finally died down after the first Trudeau premiership, 7) brought in an inexcusable number of new immigrants exacerbating the housing and affordability crises they the Liberals had created, 8) adapted and encouraged provincial governments to adapt policies that enable and encourage rather than hinder and discourage a lifestyle of drug abuse, 9) repeatedly attempted to take control over what Canadians say or think on the internet in the name of fighting “hate” while presiding over and tacitly encouraging a huge wave of hate crimes directed against Christian churches, and 10) took what Pope John Paul II had dubbed the “culture of death” to the nth degree as over the course of their decade in power euthanasia was first legalized for those already dying, then expanded to include virtually everyone else, and actively promoted to such an extreme that even the United Nations condemned it.  I could say more, but I’ll limit the list to one each for each of the years they have been in power.  The point is they did not deserve another term in office, much less an increase in their seat count.

 

Four months ago, when Captain Airhead, having made himself the most loathed prime minister in the history of Canada – if not the entire Commonwealth – finally got the hint and resigned, we were more sick and tired of the Liberals than we had ever been.  Their comeback cannot be attributed to the qualities of the man who replaced Captain Airhead.  An economist by education, Mark Carney spent most of his career in banking, investment and central.  He was an advisor to his predecessor and so could not credibly claim to be a clean break from him, especially when it was obvious that he was Captain Airhead’s hand-picked choice as successor.  He completely lacks his predecessor’s charisma and bears an uncanny resemblance to James Bond’s archnemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld as portrayed by Christoph Waltz in the Daniel Craig films.  These aren’t the makings of someone capable of breathing new life into the corpse of a political party.

 

That the Liberals won another term and even increased their seats to four short of a majority is all the more astonishing in that the Conservatives also gained seats.  In fact, the Conservative seat total went up by twenty four since the previous Dominion election.  The Liberals only gained sixteen seats.  The collapse of the New Democratic Party is what made this possible.  The NDP went from twenty-four seats to seven, losing seventeen seats and their official party status.  That the NDP was reduced to single digit seats and that Jimmy Dhaliwal lost his own seat and stepped down as leader of that awful party I would count among the positive outcomes of the election with one caveat, that they are part of a larger shift that is not positive.  The Lower Canadian separatists also lost ten seats and the Green Party lost one bringing its seat count down to one, that of its former leader Elizabeth May.  That the Liberals and Conservatives both saw large seat increases, while the smaller parties saw devastating losses, is indicative of a shift on the part of the electorate to thinking in terms of a two-party rivalry.  That is the way the American system operates.  It is not how ours is supposed to operate.

 

That brings us to the reason for the Liberal comeback.  It is almost entirely due to foreign interference in the election.  No, not interference by Red China, of the type the Liberals have been trying to cover up for years.  Interference by the leader of Canada’s oldest frenemy.  I hate to use this pop culture portmanteau but no other word adequately describes the relationship between the United States and Canada.  Canada and the United States were founded on opposite principles and ideals.  The United States was founded on the idea of cutting ties to the Christian civilization of Great Britain and Europe and establishing from scratch a new secular country based on ideals derived from abstract reason.  In other words she was founded on liberalism.  In defiance of this concept, Canada was founded on loyalty, on retaining ties to British and European Christendom, and adapting the institutions of the old country to the circumstances of the new.  In other words, she was founded on conservatism.  This would make the two countries natural enemies.  Nevertheless, for most of our history we have enjoyed the world’s longest undefended border, have been each other’s largest trade partner, and fought on the same side in two World Wars and several other global conflicts.   This is how friends behave.  So, frenemies. 

 

The current president of the United States is a man allegedly recruited by the KGB in 1987.  If true, his seeming attempts to engineer the collapse of international trade and history’s biggest stock market crash since his re-election last year become explicable as the actions of the ultimate Communist sleeper agent seeking to destroy capitalism from within.  It would not be the first time a Communist was elected president of the United States running on the Republican ticket. Whatever the truth of that may be, about the same time he started dropping tariffs the way his predecessors dropped bombs, Krasnov the Orange began saying that our country should become his country’s fifty-first state.  Initially this seemed like a joke at the expense of Captain Airhead, but he has kept it up ever since, including a particularly loathsome social media post addressed to the Canadian electorate on the day of the election. 

 

That Carney’s Liberals were able to translate Krasnov’s threats into enough votes for themselves to come back from political death is clearly the explanation of their victory but the explanation itself needs an explanation.  After all, the idea of Canada becoming an American state is abhorrent and loathsome to almost all Canadians including those, like myself, who find the thought of voting Liberal just as repugnant.  The idea that the Liberals are the best choice for dealing with Krasnov’s Anschluss threats makes no sense.  The Liberals have a new leader with no political experience, their own policies are largely to blame for the economic weakness that Krasnov is exploiting, and, most importantly, the Liberals have always, since the nineteenth century, sought to more closely integrate Canada with the United States.

 

While it was Brian Mulroney who signed the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement with Ronald Reagan in 1988, this was in betrayal of his own party’s traditional position.  Free trade with the United States was always the position of the Liberals.  Sir Wilfred Laurier ran on a platform of free trade – he called it “reciprocity” – with the United States in 1891.  The same year, Goldwin Smith, a Liberal intellectual, published a book Canada and the Canadian Question in which he maintained that Confederation was a mistake and that Canada should seek to join the United States.  John Wesley Dafoe, who for the first half of the twentieth century edited the Winnipeg Free Press, which then as now was a Liberal – big and little l – newspaper, and was Sir Wilfred Laurier’s biographer, entitled his history of our country Canada: An American Nation (1935). The absence of “North” was deliberate.  Dafoe saw Canada as the same kind of country as the United States, a country built on the foundation of liberalism by breaking ties with Old World Christian civilization, albeit by means other than a war of independence.  This interpretation of Canadian history is the Liberal interpretation, what Donald Creighton, who like myself vehemently disagreed with it, called the “Authorized Version.”  Even in the 1960s, when the Liberal Party leadership fell into the hands of Communists, it remained the party of Americanization.  Lester Pearson, who had been an informant of Elizabeth Bentley’s Soviet spy ring in the 1940s and who betrayed Canada’s traditional loyalties in his actions in the Suez Canal Crisis to serve the interests of both the United States and the Soviet Union, acted on behalf of JFK when he ousted Diefenbaker in 1963.  His successor, Pierre Trudeau, who had visited the Soviet Union towards the end of Stalin’s regime as a delegate to a Communist conference and as a far left journalist helped engineer the “Quiet Revolution” against established Roman Catholicism in Lower Canada in the 1950s, who admired Mao and basically never met a Communist he didn’t like, as prime minister in the 1970s and 1980s, got all his inspiration for his “communist” innovations from American models – LBJ’s “Great Society”,  the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the American Bill of Rights.  More recently, Captain Airhead was a disgustingly obsequious “Amen Charlie” to the American president, at least when Obama and J. Brandon Magoo held the office.

 

To summarize, the Liberal Party’s track record is such that they are the last party in Canada that ought to be trusted with handling a threat of being swallowed up by the United States. 

 

It turns out that they did not need a reliable track record in standing up to the United States on behalf of Canada to be elected.  All they needed was to make standing up to the United States and more specifically Krasnov the central issue of their campaign.  By doing so, they aligned themselves with the thinking of most Canadians that an existential threat to our country must be treated more seriously than any other matter.  And yes, despite the efforts of some who ought to know better to pretend otherwise, Krasnov’s rhetoric does indeed constitute an existential threat.  Lying through his teeth about his country subsidizing ours to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars[1], Krasnov keeps claiming that the only alternative is for us to become an American state.  If we became an American state, our country would cease to exist, therefore this rhetoric, however much worded politely in a Corleoneish “I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse”[2] manner, constitutes an existential threat.

 

By treating Krasnov’s threats to Canada as the central issue they were the Liberals were able to win an election they did not deserve to win.  For the Liberals to win, the Conservatives had to “lose”, that is, if increasing your seat total by twenty-four deserves to be called “losing.”  The Conservatives did not win the plurality or the majority that they had seemed on track for winning until Krasnov opened his big mouth, but a Dominion election is not the same sort of zero-sum, winner-take-all affair as an American presidential election.  That is not how the Westminster parliamentary system works.  The Conservatives as the second largest party remain His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and in a much stronger position than before apart from the fact that their leader lost his own seat.

 

No, that is not my trying to put a positive gloss on a disappointing outcome.  If there is one thing Canadians need it is a better understanding of and appreciation for our constitution.[3]  As for disappointment, my disappointment in the composition of the forty-fifth Parliament lies in the fact that the Liberals won and not that the Conservatives lost.  Maxime Bernier has been saying, ever since he lost the race for the Conservative leadership to Andrew Scheer and formed the People’s Party of Canada that the Conservative Party is now conservative in name only.  He seemed to devote most of his energies during this campaign to telling this to audiences of American television stations which may explain why the People’s Party’s portion of the vote dropped to below 1%.  As it so happens, I agree with his assessment of the Conservative Party although I reject Bernier’s measuring stick for determining conservatism.  Bernier’s standard of conservatism is what has been called conservatism in the United States since World War II which is a form of what everyone, everywhere else in the world, calls liberalism.  It is a better form of liberalism – lower taxes, freer markets, a lighter state, basically everything ancient Israel asked of Rehoboam after the death of Solomon – than what currently goes by the name liberalism in North America – basically, what Rehoboam, following the bad advice of the young and ignoring that of the elders who had advised his father, gave them - but it is still properly called liberalism rather than conservatism.  If the Conservative Party were actually conservative in other than name it would have won this election hands down because there would not have been the slightest doubt that it was the best choice to stand up to Krasnov’s bullying.  Real conservatism is about protecting the good things that have been handed down to us and passing them down to those who will come after us, about adapting traditional institutions rather than inventing new ones from scratch, about respecting the sacred and refusing to subordinate all of life to the values of the marketplace.  A Conservative party that was actually conservative – or better yet actually Tory[4] – would have seen Krasnov’s suggestion that Canada join the United States as an offense against everything for which it stands.

 

Having said that, I think that actions that cost the Conservative Party the votes they would have needed to win were mostly those of others than the party leader and those actually running in the election.  The Alberta premier’s warning that the country would face a national unity crisis if the Liberals won the election most likely had the opposite effect of what was intended.  In my youth, Lower Canada would frequently use the threat of leaving and breaking up Confederation to obtain what it wanted from the Dominion government.  This was not well received out here in the prairies and I very much doubt the similar rhetoric from Alberta took well outside that province.  Danielle Smith in this case should probably be viewed as the messenger rather than the one making the threat.  On election night, as the results from Atlantic Canada started to come in and the Liberals took an early lead but well before the outcome of the election could be reasonably called, I observed Albertan hotheads commenting in online threads about how they were done with Canada, were going to leave and take their province with them, and basically carry on like crybaby Hollywood liberals do every time they lose an election. [5]  It was rather satisfying, amidst the disappointment of the Liberal victory, to see these types lose.

 

Then there was the commentary from the Conservative Party’s supporters in the media.  Yes, these are vastly outnumbered by Liberal Party supporters in the media, but they do exist.  Their approach to Krasnov and his threats did not do the Conservative Party any favours.  Initially, when the threat was only of tariffs they justified Krasnov by saying that his demands were not unreasonable and were that we do things we should be doing for our own sakes, like crack down on fentanyl.   They were not entirely wrong, except in that Krasnov seemed to be demanding that we prevent people from leaving our country the way Communist countries used to (further evidence that he is KGB?)  Unfortunately, this persisted long after Krasnov’s threats had gone from tariffs to Anschluss.  

 

Worse, these commentators often came across as mocking and ridiculing Canadians for being angry at Krasnov’s attacks and for standing up for our country.   The more responsible Conservative commentators, like Brian Lilley, were careful to direct such criticism only towards the Liberals and NDP and not for expressing Canadian patriotism in itself but for their hypocrisy in having spent the last ten years bashing the country, her history, and her heroes.  Less careful commentators, however, often came across as suggesting that the only ones expressing Canadian patriotism were the Liberals and the Left in general or even as mocking Canadian patriotism in itself. I recall one commentator describing the booing at the American national anthem at sporting events as “jingoism at its worst.”  Seriously?  The president of the neighbour country says that our country shouldn’t exist and should be swallowed up by his and booing his country’s national anthem in response is a worse form of jingoism?  As with the “I’m going to take my province and leave” types, there is satisfaction in seeing the sort of person with so little judgement or taste as to express such nonsense lose.

 

Unfortunately the price of such satisfaction is having to put up with the premiership of Blofeld, whom Krasnov seems to adore.

 

God Save the King!

 

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[1] Krasnov was referring to the United States’ trade deficit with our country and to our insufficient spending on defense.  Even if the trade deficit was as large as that, and it is not, it is much smaller and disappears when energy exports are taken out of consideration, it would not amount to a subsidy, because a trade deficit is not a subsidy.  A subsidy flows in one-direction, from subsidizer to subsidized.  A trade deficit is what happens when two parties are exchanging cash for other goods in both direction, and party A buys more of party B’s goods for cash than party B buys of party A’s goods.  Party A is not subsidizing party B, because party A is getting party B’s goods in return for his cash.  In the case of Canadian and American trade the only thing that resembles a subsidy is the fact that the United States buys energy resources from us at well below the market value.  That is us subsidizing the United States, not the other way around.  As for our insufficient spending on defense, while I find this objectionable it does not amount to the United States subsidizing us and is in fact our business and not Krasnov’s.  There is only one country that has ever tried to conquer Canada, and that was the United States in the pre-Confederation period of the nineteenth century.  Krasnov’s claim that the United States has been “protecting” us is identical to when a different kind of “Don” sends his thugs to a shop owner to collect a payout with threats to the effect of “This is a pretty nice place you got here.  Would be a pity if something were to happen to it.”

[2] Okay, maybe the “Don” in the previous note is not such a different kind from Krasnov after all.

[3] Among the things they need a better understanding of is the fact that a constitution is a set of governing institutions, the system by which they operate, and the traditions that inform and shape them and not a piece of paper that magically prevents the government from abusing its powers.  If Canadians understood this better, they would not commit such errors as to think that Canada had no constitution prior to 1982, that the Liberals gave us our constitution in 1982, or that the Charter is our constitution (it is part of our constitutional law, but not the whole of our constitutional law, much less the constitution itself) and would be more enraged at the offences the Liberals keep committing against our constitution.

[4] A Tory is a specific kind of conservative by the meaning of the word I have provided in the text of this essay.  Conservatives tend to prefer monarchy, Tories are monarchists and royalists, respect for the sacred is part of conservatism, orthodox Churchmanship of Toryism.

[5] Many Albertans and neoconservatives elsewhere in Canada see Alberta as the most conservative province in Canada.  This, however, is based on making American “conservatism”, i.e., the older form of liberalism, the standard of conservatism.  By the standard of actual conservatism, Alberta is arguably the least conservative province in Canada.  It has been, at least since the oil boom, the province of the young and the rootless, by which I mean that a large part of its population are people who moved there from elsewhere in Canada, from the United States, and from further abroad in their youth in the hopes of becoming rich. 

Holy Week

 We are in Holy Week, the week of the Christian liturgical Kalendar that leads up to the annual celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ that is Pascha or Easter depending upon where you live and what language you speak.  The celebration of Pascha/Easter goes back to the very beginning of Christian history.  In the early centuries of persecution before the legalization of Christianity there were disputes as to when and how the Christian Passover – Pascha is the Latinization of Πάσχα which is the Greek transliteration of פֶסַח (Pesach), the Hebrew Passover – was to be celebrated.  The majority regarded the Christian Passover as a celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ and held it on the Sunday after the Jewish Passover.  Some, primarily among the churches of Asia Minor to which the book of Revelation was addressed, thought that it should be a commemoration of His death to be held on the date according to the Hebrew calendar on which He died.  Since that date was the fourteenth of Nisan these were called Quartodecimans from the Latin for fourteen. A variation of this, held by a much smaller number of Christians located mostly in Gaul, celebrated on the date He died according to the Roman calendar, which was the twenty-fifth of March.[1]  Settling this controversy was the main non-doctrinal accomplishment of the First Council of Nicaea in 325.[2]  The earliest extent mention of the observance of the entire Holy Week dates to the last half of the century prior to that.[3]  Towards the end of the fourth century, just prior to the second ecumenical Council (the First Council of Constantinople, 383), the Spanish nun Egeria made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and in what is actually a long letter but which also reads as an early example of a travel journal[4] provided a detailed account of the Holy Week services held by the Christians in Jerusalem whose bishop at the time was the important Church Father St. Cyril.  This was the most elaborate celebration of the Holy Week at the time and through accounts such Egeria’s Jerusalem’s practice came to influence other Churches throughout the Christian world.

 

The observation of Holy Week seems like an inevitable development.  The four Evangelists present a much clearer picture of what Jesus said and did in the week of the Crucifixion than of any other period in His earthly ministry.  The week begins with Palm Sunday, remembering Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem in fulfilment of Zechariah 9:9-12.  We might begin it with the eve of Palm Sunday, when the anointing of Jesus by Mary at the supper in Bethany took place.  SS Matthew and Mark tell of this event in the middle of their account of Judas’ pact with Jesus’ enemies to betray Him for thirty-pieces of silver.  By doing so they indicate not when the supper occurred but that Judas’ decision to betray Jesus began with this event.  It is from St. John that we learn that the anointing had taken place a few days earlier than Judas’ deal with the high priests, which took place on the Wednesday of the week of the Passion.  St. John connects the two events in a different way by identifying Judas as the one who had voiced the objection to Mary’s act.

 

St. John also tells us that Jesus had arrived at Bethany six days prior to the Passover.  This was the Saturday before Palm Sunday, six days before the Passover on the Friday on which Jesus was crucified.  Some see a conflict between St. John and the other Evangelists on the day of the Passover but the conflict disappears upon closer examination.  When St. Mark tells us that “the first day of unleavened bread, when they killed the Passover, his disciples said unto him, Where wilt thou that we go and prepare that thou mayest eat the Passover” (Mk. 14:12) this does not mean that the Passover lambs were killed on the Thursday before the Crucifixion.  St. Mark, like St. Matthew and even the Gentile doctor St. Luke, used the Jewish method of counting days as starting with the previous evening.  This is rooted in the creation account of the book of Genesis, where of the days of creation it is repeatedly stated “And the evening and morning were the X day.”  We also use this method of reckoning days when it comes to holy days in our sacred Kalendar.  That is why the twenty-fourth of December is called “Christmas Eve” and the thirty-first of October is called “Halloween” (short for All Hallows Eve).  Clement Clark Moore was wrong.  “Christmas Eve” is not “the night before Christmas” but rather the part of Christmas that falls on the evening of the twenty-fourth.  When the Synoptic Evangelists tell us that the disciples prepared the Last Supper on the day when the Passover lambs were killed they are counting the evening of the first Maundy Thursday as part of Good Friday.  In the Hebrew calendar it was already the fourteenth of Nisan.  Jesus died at the ninth hour of daylight - three pm - on the fourteenth of Nisan.  This was the hour the sacrificial Passover lamb was slain.  By the method of reckoning days used by the Synoptic Gospels this was still the same day on which the Last Supper had taken place. 

 

This raises the question of what was going on with the Last Supper. It took place, as the Synoptic Gospels say, on the day the Passover lamb was slain, at the beginning of that day, the evening prior to the slaying.  This would seem to rule out it being a Passover meal proper, since this was eaten on the evening following the slaying of the lamb, the evening that begins the fifteenth of Nisan.  St. Luke, however, seems to clearly identify the Last Supper as a Passover meal.  He calls it such himself (Lk. 22:13).  He records Jesus’ calling it such “With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you before I suffer” (Lk. 22:15).  He includes details indicative of a Passover meal such as the first cup (the Kiddush) at the beginning of the meal (Lk. 22:17), before the institution of the Eucharist with the breaking of the bread (Lk. 22:19) and the cup after supper which if this was a Passover meal would have been the third of the cups signifying redemption and blessing.  .

 

The answer to the question is present in the Scriptural texts.  Yes, the Last Supper was a Passover meal, and yes, it was eaten before the Passover lamb was slain, a day before the Jews in general ate the Passover that year.  For the only lamb mentioned as being present at that meal was the “Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world.”  He offered Himself to be eaten at meal in the bread and the cup.  “This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me” He said after breaking the bread while giving it to His disciples (Lk. 22:19) “This cup is the new testament in my blood, which is shed for you” He said over the cup after supper (Lk. 22:20).  Chronologically, it would not be until the following afternoon that His blood would be shed and His body given, but He offered His disciples His body and blood in the first Eucharist the evening before, just as they were eating a Passover meal the evening before the Passover was slain. 

 

There is an important lesson in this.  Although the events in which the salvation of mankind was accomplished, the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, are historical events, events which occurred at a specific place and specific time in the history of the world, at the centre of these events is a Person Who is not bound or limited by space or time.  This Eternal Person Who entered the world of space and time in order to redeem and save, is declared by the Scriptures to be “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8).

 

The Law of Moses specified that the Paschal lamb was to be selected and separated from the rest of the flock on the tenth of Aviv (“Spring”, the original name for the month re-named Nisan in the Babylonian Captivity).  Note how St. Mark concludes his account of the Triumphal Entry: “And Jesus entered into Jerusalem, and into the temple: and when he had looked round about upon all things, and now the eventide was come, he went out unto Bethany with the twelve.” (Mk. 11:11)  The impression that this verse gives, that after the Triumphal Entry, Jesus had a quick look around and then went back to Bethany is reinforced by His promise to the donkey colt’s owners that “straightway he will send him hither”, (Mk. 11:3) i.e., that He would return the animal immediately, which only St. Mark records. This is the only indicator in any of the Gospels of the time of day of the Triumphal Entry.  It was late on Palm Sunday, as the afternoon was turning into evening, at which time the ninth of Aviv/Nisan was ending and the tenth was beginning. 

 

In sermons the events of Palm Sunday and Good Friday are often contrasted.  The crowds that welcomed Jesus with “Hosanna to the Son of David: Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest” on Palm Sunday became the mob that screamed “Crucify Him!  Give us Barabbas” on Good Friday.  The contrasts are important but the underlying harmony between the two events should not be overlooked.

 

When Jesus rode into Jerusalem that Sunday He publicly presented Himself to Jerusalem, King David’s city, the capital of national Israel, as the Messiah they had been awaiting, the Christ.  He had not hidden His identify before this.  That He is the Christ was the import of His remark in the synagogue of Nazareth at the beginning of His public ministry about the prophecy of Isaiah being fulfilled.  What He said about Himself in His sermons and parables and in His controversies with the Pharisees and scribes would be very strange, to say the least, if He did not claim to be the Christ.  He had identified Himself as Christ to individuals such as the Samaritan woman at the well from before His public ministry even started (the encounter with the woman took place prior to the arrest of John the Baptist and hence prior to His public ministry) and when St. Peter, speaking for the Apostles, confessed Him to be the “Christ, the Son of the Living God” (Matt. 16:15) He praised this as having been divinely revealed (Matt. 16:17).  The Triumphal Entry, however, was His official presentation of Himself to the nation as their Messiah or Christ.  The crowds who met Him with palm branches and shouted Hosanna recognized this, of course.  What they didn’t recognize was that by presenting Himself as the Christ, He was presenting Himself as the true Paschal Lamb.  Neither did His disciples recognize this even though He had begun explaining it to them following St. Peter’s confession at Caesarea Philippi (Matt. 16:21) and at His anointing at Bethany, intrinsically connected with His official presentation of Himself as the Christ the following day in that it was a literal anointing of the “Anointed One”, He had again made the connection by saying that “against the day of my burying hath she kept this” (Jn. 12:7). 

 

The disciples, like the rest of Israel, were familiar with the prophecies of the Messiah, the Anointed Son of David, Who would deliver Israel, restore David’s throne, and establish it and rule it forever.  Their Scriptures also predicted that He would suffer and die and be raised from the dead.  Isaiah’s account of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah,[5] Daniel’s prophecy of the Messiah being “cut off, but not for himself”[6], the 21^st/22^nd Psalm[7], prophecies of this nature are found throughout the Old Testament, including in the words spoken to the serpent “and thou shalt bruise his heel” in God’s very first promise that He would send a Saviour.[8]  Prior to their fulfilment, of course, it was difficult to see the connection between these prophecies and those of the triumphant Son of David.  The Genesis prophecy was the key connection.  There were no nations when that promise was made.  The promised Saviour was for all mankind.  Israel, in the Messianic prophecies, is the kingdom of priests Exodus 19:6 declares her to be, performing the priestly function of representing the entire world of mankind.  The promised deliverance, is not mere deliverance of the nation from political subjection to empires such as Assyria, Babylon or Rome, but deliverance of mankind from bondage to the enemies that took mankind captive in the Garden of Eden – Satan, sin, and death.

 

The way the Messiah would defeat these enemies was by meekly submitting to their killing Him.  For the only claims Satan, sin, and death have over mankind arise out of mankind’s voluntary entrance into bondage by sinning in the Garden.  The Messiah is the eternal Son of God, Who when He took human nature to His Own eternal Person in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, became Man but without sin.[9]  He bore the sins of mankind on the Cross, because His death was the true Day of Atonement as well as the true Passover, but He had no sin of His own.  Satan and death, therefore, had no claim on Him, and when He allowed them to take Him anyway they found that they had captured Him over Whom they had no claim and could not hold.  The final day of Holy Week, Holy Saturday, remembers the day when Jesus’ body lay in the grave, the one kingdom of death, while He entered Hell[10], death’s other kingdom, not as captive but as Conqueror.  Note His promise to the repentant thief on the Cross “Today, thou shalt be with me in Paradise.”[11]  While Paradise and Hell are ordinarily thought of as opposite places far removed from each other – think of the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus[12] - at the ninth hour on that fourteenth of Nisan that was the first Good Friday, Paradise invaded Hell.  When on Easter Sunday He rose again from the dead, He left behind Him a Hell the gates of which He had smashed to pieces, and whose captives He had set free.  As Conqueror, He claimed as His spoils, all those that Satan and death had taken captive in the Garden, i.e., mankind.

 

Therefore, while the difference between the Hosannas of Palm Sunday and the demands for crucifixion on Good Friday may illustrate the fickle nature of the whims of the mob, ultimately there is a unity between the two.  By joyously receiving their Messiah on Palm Sunday, the crowds of Jerusalem had selected and separated the true Paschal Lamb, and by demanding His death on Good Friday, they sent Him to the death for which He hand come into the world, by which He accomplished the salvation to which the liberation of the Hebrews from Egypt on the original Passover pointed.

 

Have a blessed Holy Week!

 

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[1] The Crucifixion was one of several events – the first day of Creation and the testing of Abraham with regards to the sacrifice of Isaac are among the others – which ancient Christians, going back to at least the second century, believed to have taken place on the twenty-fifth of March by the Julian calendar.  That the early Christians also regarded this as the date of the Annunciation – and therefore the conception of Jesus Christ, nine months before Christmas, His birth – is believed to be derived from its having been the date of the Crucifixion.  While you won’t find the “integral age” theory spelled out in any Patristic source, that the early Christians were thinking in such terms seems to be a reasonable deduction from the coinciding of the date set for the Annunciation and the date of the Crucifixion.  That the figure through whom God established the Old Covenant, Moses, died on his 120^th birthday, seems to be the implication of Deuteronomy 31:2, and was certainly held to be the meaning of this verse by the ancient rabbis (see Sotah 12b in the Talmud) who held this to be also true of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and King David (see Rosh Hashana 11a in the Talmud) on the basis of a general principle extrapolated from Exodus 23:26 and the example of Moses.  While a direct application of the rabbinic concept to Jesus would have placed Christmas rather than the Annunciation on the twenty-fifth of March, the reason the early Christians would have been thinking in terms of the conception rather than the birth in Jesus’ case is fairly obvious.  The Annunciation and not Christmas was the date the Incarnation took place.  In the early centuries, the Church was challenged by heretics who taught that the union of the divine and human in Jesus took place at some later time.  The most common form of this heresy was to say that it took place at the baptism of Jesus.  The orthodox doctrine, however, is that Jesus’ human nature was united to His Person from the moment of conception, that it was never the human nature of anyone but the Eternal Son of God, that the Incarnation was not the fusion of a human person with a divine person or the possession of a human person by a divine person, but a Divine Person taking a complete human nature that was formed to be His own to His own Person.  Therefore it made more sense to the ancient Christians that the Son of God would die on the day He became Man rather than on His birthday like Moses.  This also lined up better with the Biblical evidence as to the time of His birth.  From the fact that when Gabriel visited Zechariah in the Temple all of Israel was assembled there (that is the significance of “and all the multitude of the people” in Luke 1:10) this had to have been Yom Kippur for no other day in the course of Abihan’s two weeks of duty involved a national assembly (its first week of duty earlier in the year fell on the week after Shavuot, the Hebrew Pentecost) therefore the Annunciation had to have taken place around Passover in March.

[2] The council ruled that Pascha or Easter was to be celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the twenty-first of March.  This was a translation into the solar calendar of the day when the Resurrection occurred which was the Sunday following the Jewish Passover.  The Hebrew calendar is a lunar calendar – a calendar in which the month’s following the lunar cycle takes precedence over the year’s following the solar cycle and so each month begins on the new moon – and Passover occurs in the middle (on what would be called the Ides of the month on the old Roman lunar calendar) of the first month, which is the spring month, ergo the full moon of the month when spring starts.  By the council’s ruling, spring is considered to start on the twenty-first of March, although astronomically the vernal equinox can occur anywhere between the nineteenth and the twenty-first (this year it fell on the twentieth).  

[3] Apostolic Constitutions, 5.13-19.

[4] Peregrinatio Egeriae. There are numerous variations of the title both in Latin and in translation. In some of these there is a “th” instead of a “g” in the nun’s name.  The 1919 SPCK translation by M. L. McClure and C. L. Feltoe, is an example of this.  It can be read here: The Pilgrimage of Egeria

[5] Is. 53.

[6] Dan. 9:26.

[7] 22^nd by the Hebrew numbering, which our Authorized Bible uses, 21^st by the numbering of the LXX and Latin Vulgate.

[8] Gen. 3:15.

[9] Heb. 4:15.

[10] Hell, when used in this way, should be thought of as “the depository of the souls of the dead” rather than “the place to which the incurably unrepentant will ultimately be consigned” although there is a great deal of overlap between the two concepts.  This is the original meaning attached to the word, although today it is more commonly used of eternal punishment. The Bible brings the two together in Rev. 20:14 when it speaks of Hell, in the original sense of the word, being cast into the Lake of Fire which is Hell in today’s sense of the word, at the Last Judgement.

[11] Lk. 23:43.

[12] Lk. 16:19-31.