Table of Contents

Introduction
It Came from Calvin
The Jewish Concepts of Shituf and Avodah Zarah
Is Reverencing the Saints Truly Pagan?
Calvin’s Intellectual Dishonesty
Fast-Forwarding to Calvin’s Followers
— Judaization
— Making Things Up
— An Expanded Conception of “Worship”
What Good Things Come from the Reformed Tradition?
Conclusions

Introduction

There is no such thing as “Sola Scriptura.” In practice everybody reads the Bible through their peculiar combination of biases, preconceived notions, and presuppositions. There are no exceptions to this: you and I, every last one of us, are all guilty.

Which brings us to a few weeks ago.

I’d found a meme in the wild about “Protestant Mary” versus “Biblical Mary,” which I then shared on Facebook. I’m not a “viral marketer” by nature, I didn’t create this post, and in general my posts get very little in the way of reach or engagement. So I expected nothing more than a few “heart” and “laugh” reacts, not for it to become a teachable moment in its own right.

But the teachable moment came. Prots gonna prot, and man did they start protting! So here we are.

So where, pray tell, did this Protestant hostility toward honoring Mary and the Saints come from? It didn’t come from Luther, and it certainly didn’t come from the Bible.

It Came from Calvin

If this antipathy toward honoring the Saints didn’t come from Luther or the Bible, then were did it come from?

It came from Calvin.

Specifically it originates in Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion. In Book 1, chapter 12, where he wastes no time in attacking the veneration of Saints as “idolatry.”

“In the same way, too, for some ages past, departed saints have been exalted to partnership with God, to be worshiped, invoked, and lauded in his stead. And yet we do not even think that the majesty of God is obscured by this abomination, whereas it is in a great measure suppressed and extinguished—all that we retain being a frigid opinion of his supreme power. At the same time, being deluded by these entanglements, we go astray after divers gods.”

That word “partnership” could also be translated “fellowship” or “association” (original: “in Dei societatem”), and his use of that word tells us he’s working from the Jewish concept of “shituf,” also known as “shutfus.”

The Jewish Concepts of Shituf and Avodah Zarah

In Jewish theology, shituf occurs when somebody assigns something a sort of partnership with God, resulting in a religious belief that’s not outright polytheistic or henotheistic, but also doesn’t satisfy Judaism’s standard for strict monotheism. This is contrasted with “avodah zarah,” which literally translates as “strange or foreign worship,” and is used when referring to outright polytheism or idolatry.

In fact the concept of Avodah Zarah, as explained in the linked article, brings with it the exact same prohibition that Reformed Protestantism has against invocation of the Saints:

“Another way of violating the prohibition of Avodah Zarah through shituf is by directing one’s prayers to something other than Hashem. Even asking an angel to convey my prayers to Hashem qualifies as a very serious prohibition of Avodah Zarah.”

That said: if my reading of Jewish polemics is correct, then the difference between shituf and avodah zarah seems to be one of drgree – shituf is forbidden to Jews but allowed for Gentiles, while avodah zarah is unacceptable for everybody. And Christianity was traditionally called avodah zarah on account of the Trinity, even though the Tosefos school took a friendlier approach in the 17^th century by upgrading Christianity to shituf instead.

That however takes us into the history of Jewish views surrounding Christianity, which is outside our scope for today. It’s enough to have the concept that seems at the root of Calvin’s thinking, so that we can have a context for continuing our inquiry.

Is Reverencing the Saints Truly Pagan?

We’ve quoted from Calvin’s Institutes, and we’ve discussed the Jewish theological foundation of this starting premise. Now let’s talk about his actual charge.

If Calvin and his descendants charge that devotion to the Saints is “pagan,” then we have a right to ask what the Pagans themselves said about it. Their answer: “It didn’t come from us, bro. Those Christians are creepy!”

We have a few instances where Pagans actually talk about the Christian practice of devotion to the Saints, and at each turn they describe the practice as creepy and deeply disgusting.

Peter Brown discusses this in his The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function within Latin Christianity. In discussing the Pagan reaction to the Cult of the Saints, he says that “To a Mediterranean man of traditional background, much of this would have been peripheral, and some of it, downright disgusting. (p. 5)”

He continues by talking about the often-drawn parallels between the Pagan Heroes and the Christian Saints, ultimately concluding that the two are incompatible:

“Thus, in Christian belief, the grave, the memory of the dead, and the religious ceremonial that might surround this memory were placed within a totally different structure of relations between God, the dead, and the living. To explain the Christian cult of the martyrs as a continuation of the pagan cult of heroes helps as little as to reconstruct the form and function of a late-antique Christian basilica from the few columns and capitals taken from classical buildings that are occasionally incorporated in its arcades. … Nothing could be more misleading than to assume that, by the middle of the fourth century, some insensible tide of religious sentiment had washed away the barriers by which Mediterranean pagans had sought for so long to mark off the human dead from the living. Far from it: on this point, the rise of Christianity in the pagan world was met by deep religious anger. We can chart the rise to prominence of the Christian church most faithfully by listening to pagan reactions to the cult of martyrs. (pp. 6-7)”

This brings us to surviving quotations of what the Pagans themselves had to say about the subject. Brown gives two, Eunapius of Sardis and Emperor Julian. I have tracked down the original sources and give both quotations.

Eunapius (c. 347-c. 420) was a historian who lived during the Empire’s shift from Paganism to Christianity, and saw the . In his Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists, he describes in detail the de-paganization of Alexandria, and recoils with horror at the cult of Saints and their Relics:

“They settled these monks at Canobus also, and thus they fettered the human race to the worship of slaves, and those not even honest slaves, instead of the true gods. For they collected the bones and skulls of criminals who had been put to death for numerous crimes, men whom the law courts of the city had condemned to punishment, made them out to be gods, haunted their sepulchres, and thought that they became better by defiling themselves at their graves. ‘Martyrs’ the dead men were called, and ‘ministers’ of a sort, and ‘ambassadors’ from the gods to carry men’s prayers, – these slaves in vilest servitude, who had been consumed by stripes and carried on their phantom forms the scars of their villainy.”

Julian, on the other hand, is concerned with a much wider attack against Christianity, and his main point seems to be the same as Calvin’s: “You Galileans should be more Jewish. Why can’t you Galileans be more Jewish?”

He brings the Cult of the Saints into this in section 335 of his Against the Galilaeans, where he writes:

“However this evil doctrine [of Jesus’ divinity] did originate with John; but who could detest as they deserve all those doctrines that you have invented as a sequel, while you keep adding many corpses newly dead to the corpse of long ago? You have filled the whole world with tombs and sepulchres, and yet in your scriptures it is nowhere said that you must grovel among tombs and pay them honour. But you have gone so far in iniquity that you think you need not listen even to the words of Jesus of Nazareth on this matter. Listen then to what he says about sepulchres: ‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres; outward the tomb appears beautiful, but within it is full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.’ (Mt. 23:27) If, then, Jesus said that sepulchres are full of uncleanness, how can you invoke God at them?”

While Eunapius writes with sheer horror, we see Julian writing as the politician: he leverages public disgust over the Cult of the Saints to help him make his argument, and then he twists the Scriptures to make it sound as if Jesus were talking about literal tombs (he was actually speaking about the scribes and Pharisees metaphorically).

In any case the verdict is clear: this didn’t come from the Pagans. The Cult of the Saints is something the Christians came up with all by their lonesome.

With this and the above section in mind, we can now come back to Calvin and talk about his intellectual dishonesty.

Calvin’s Intellectual Dishonesty

Let’s bring this back to Calvin. In other words, Calvin’s attack on Catholicism draws on the long tradition of Jewish polemics against all of Christianity.

However I can’t help but feel Calvin was a coward, or at best intellectually dishonest, because he refuses to follow his reasoning to its logical conclusion. If he had been honest, then he would also have renounced the Trinity, denied the divinity of Jesus, and either converted to Judaism or just founded his own form of Jewish-ish Messianism.

In my view an honest Calvin would not have remained a Christian, or at least not any sort that we would readily recognize as Christian. My own take is that an intellectually-honest Calvin would have found himself more in agreement with Michael Servetus’ conclusions on the subject, or at least more open-minded about discussing them.

But we’re not finished with Calvin just yet. His tirade in the Institutes continues, attacking the distinction between Latria (worship) and Dulia (reverence):

“The distinction of what is called δυλια and λατρια was invented for the very purpose of permitting divine honors to be paid to angels and dead men with apparent impunity. For it is plain that the worship which Papists pay to saints differs in no respect from the worship of God: for this worship is paid without distinction; only when they are pressed they have recourse to the evasion, that what belongs to God is kept unimpaired, because they leave him λατρια.”

Notice that Calvin arbitrarily claims the distinction between latria and dulia is a false one, but something else is also at work here.

For that “something else,” I want you to pay close attention to something: those “Greek” words are actually Latin words written in Greek letters. Now I’m going to continue the passage, where he compares them to the actual Greek words:

“For λατρεὶα in Greek has the same meaning as worship in Latin; whereas δουλεὶα properly means service, though the words are sometimes used in Scripture indiscriminately. But granting that the distinction is invariably preserved, the thing to be inquired into is the meaning of each. Δουλεὶα unquestionably means service, and λατρεὶα worship. But no man doubts that to serve is something higher than to worship. For it were often a hard thing to serve him whom you would not refuse to reverence. It is, therefore, an unjust division to assign the greater to the saints and leave the less to God.”

If you paid attention, you’ll notice that Calvin is ignoring how loan-words work across languages as well as those meanings can evolve over time even within the same language. For example our English word “person” means something totally different from the Latin word from which it was borrowed (“persona,” which actually means “mask”). However Calvin is insisting on the Greek meanings of the words as though they are present-tense and equally applicable to the Latin borrowings.

To Calvin’s credit, he does not spell “latria” and “dulia” in Greek letters in the original text; that’s the translator’s doing. However the linguistic antics are still present, and in the end we are still left with a dishonest argument, specifically as Latin dulia, “reverence,” does not mean the same thing as its Greek root word δουλεὶα, which means something closer to “servitude” or “servile labor.” In fact Calvin specifically translates the Greek δουλεὶα into Latin as “servitus,” which translates to English as “slavery,” “service,” and “servitude” (we may also reasonably translate it as “serfdom”).

We now see where Calvin was both the misguided and the misguider. He started by basing his argument on a Jewish polemic intended against all of Christianity, and then peppered it with flights of his own imagination. We actually see this a LOT in Calvin’s writings, so bear these things in mind if we talk about him again.

Ultimately however, Calvin is only saying one thing: “trust me bro.” Or to put it a better way he’s speaking with his feelings: “It doesn’t matter if there’s a distinction in real life. They’re still both the same thing because I say so!”

Fast-Forwarding to Calvin’s Followers

Calvin was to Protestantism, what Marx was to Socialism and Crowley to Anglosphere Occultism. Not only were three men grifters, they were also excellent systematizers. That systematizing is what brought their make-believe BS to positions of dominance in their respective fields.

A well-defined system is the opium of the intellectuals, baby!

Yet for all of Calvin’s ranting against Catholicism, he himself was not anti-Marian. Calvin upheld Mary’s perpetual virginity, defended her title as Mother of God, and saw her submission to God as an example for Christians to follow. Yet the damage was already done, and it was for his followers to pick up the sledgehammers.

As a result, we see three distinct yet related developments within the Reformed tradition, specifically the English-speaking branch of the Reformed tradition which has been exported worldwide through American missionaries.

Judaization

“From a certain perspective,” writes Dr. Joseph H. Lynch on page 183 of his The Medieval Church, “the intellectual history of Christianity can be viewed as an effort to cope with the Old Testament.”

This brings us to the phenomenon of judaization. The word “judaize” is found in Galatians 2:14, where the original Greek word is “ἰουδαΐζειν,” meaning “to become Jewish” or “to act or live Jewish-ly.” St. Jerome translates this into Latin exactly, giving us the verb “judaizare.” The Douay/Challoner Version translates it as “to live as do the Jews.”

Paul is here referring to a controversy first recorded in Acts 15, which describes the Judaizers as “some coming down from Judea, taught the brethren: That except you be circumcised after the manner of Moses, you cannot be saved.” In essence they were claiming that Gentle converts had to become Jewish and follow Jewish laws in order to become Christians. The controversy was settled at the “Council of Jerusalem” described in that same chapter, which decided that Gentle converts need no more than to follow a few basic moral rules (which appear influenced by the Seven Noahide Laws), with no need to adopt the entirety of Jewish law or ritual.

Since that time, different schools of thought have different answers to how or to what extent the Old Covenant applies to a believing Christian.

Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Anabaptism broadly agree that the Old and New Testaments are separate covenants, though they differ on the exact details. Judaism, Catholicism, and Lutheranism broadly agree that the Old Covenant is binding on Jews but not on Gentiles, though again they differ over exact details.

The Reformed take a different position, first by retaining the distinction between the moral and ceremonial Law, and then teaching that the Old and New Covenants are exactly one and the same. In Book II, Chapter 10 of his Institutes, Calvin tells us the only difference is their administration:

“The covenant made with all the fathers is so far from differing from ours in reality and substance, that it is altogether one and the same: still the administration differs. But because this brief summary is insufficient to give any one a full understanding of the subject, our explanation to be useful must extend to greater length.”

Calvin did not formulate this in isolation, but builds on the bedrock of the then-nascent Reformed tradition. Calvin inherits his basic premise from Zwingli, seems to have inherited this basic premise from Zwingli, who likewise retained the distinction between moral and ceremonial (which he relates to the “inner man” and “outer man,” respectively), and then states that the Old Testament’s moral law is eternal. In the section on Law from his De Vera et Falsa Religione, we read the following:

“And that the Law is the eternal or permanent will of God is proved by what is written in Romans 2:14 of those without the Law: namely, that they show the law has been published in their hearts, in that they do the things the law commands, though the tablets of the law have not been set up before them. But none writes in the heart save God alone. … The Law, therefore, is nothing else than teachings as to the will of God, through which we understand what he wills, what he wills not, what he demands, what he forbids. But, that the will of God is permanent, so that he is never going to change any part of the law which has to do with the inner man, is evident from the words of the Lawgiver himself.”

Yet Calvin was never one to shy away from tortured logic for the sake of “baffling ‘em with bull.” If we come back to the same chapter of the Institutes, he offers up some of that tortured logic to advance the “point” that the Old and New Covenants are one and the same:

“Nay, the Apostle [Paul] makes the Israelites our equals, not only in the grace of the covenant, but also in the signification of the Sacraments. For employing the example of those punishments, which the Scripture states to have been of old inflicted on the Jews, in order to deter the Corinthians from falling into similar wickedness, he begins with premising that they have no ground to claim for themselves any privilege which can exempt them from the divine vengeance which overtook the Jews, since the Lord not only visited them with the same mercies, but also distinguished his grace among them by the same symbols: as if he had said, If you think you are out of danger, because the Baptism which you received, and the Supper of which you daily partake, have excellent promises, and if, in the meantime, despising the goodness of God, you indulge in licentiousness, know that the Jews, on whom the Lord inflicted his severest judgments, possessed similar symbols. They were baptised in passing through the sea, and in the cloud which protected them from the burning heat of the sun. It is said, that this passage was a carnal baptism, corresponding in some degree to our spiritual baptism. But if so, there would be a want of conclusiveness in the argument of the Apostle, whose object is to prevent Christians from imagining that they excelled the Jews in the matter of baptism. Besides, the cavil cannot apply to what immediately follows—viz. that they did ‘all eat the same spiritual meat; and did all drink the same spiritual drink: for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them: and that Rock was Christ,’ (1 Cor. 10:3, 4).”

Now in fairness we have to understand this in context of Calvin’s situation. He was routinely disputing with Catholics, Lutherans, Anabaptists, and anti-Trinitarians, and needed to come up with a position that he could argue successfully. Against Catholics in particular, his tactic was to accuse them of “idolatry” or, in essence, “paganism.” And if he was going to treat “paganism” as a dirty word, then the only viable option left to him is constructing his own form of “judaism” with a lowercase “j.”

Calvin’s followers were not slow to pick up on this, and neither did his opponents. In fact Lutheran theologian Aegidius Hunnius wrote an entire tract, Calvinus Judaizans, accusing Calvin’s Bible exegesis of “judaization” by way of abandoning the Patristic interpretations of texts cited to support the Trinity or the Messiahship of Jesus. Hunnius also accused Calvin of making things up as he went along, something else we’ve already discussed in this article.

Among Calvin’s followers in particular and the Reformed tradition in general, their thought and praxis came to be marked by a spectrum ranging from mild philo-semitism to the outright adoption of Jewish rituals, a phenomenon which continues to the present day. This was pointed out by Huguenot writer Armand Laferrere in 2006, in the article “The Huguenots, the Jews, and Me.”

“In the centuries that followed, Calvin’s insight informed the attitudes of several churches that issued from his tradition. As his teachings spread from the French to the English-speaking world, they gave rise to the well-documented philo-Semitism of Cromwell Republicans, Scottish Presbyterians, and various non-conformist churches; later, they pervaded a large part of American Protestantism, which to this day is replete with references to the Jewish Bible. It was in France, however—the wellspring of Calvinism, and soon the site of its most brutal persecution—that Calvin’s theological philo-Semitism started a centuries-old tradition among local Protestants of emotional identification with the Jewish people.”

This article is excellent for the insight it offers on the Reformed mindset, and I recommend reading it in its entirety. If anything, it helps explain some of the “weirdness” perceived by those of us raised outside that tradition. For example while the rest of us make a distinction between Judaism and Christianity as separate religions, the Reformed have instead internalized an “emotional identity” with the Jewish people, and are more likely than the rest of us to be comfortable with lighting menorahs and having their own version of seder, even though this comfort-level is far from universal and some pastors are quick to point out potential issues. On a personal level I’ve noticed that the Reformed (and those from hybrid Reformed/Anabaptist traditions) are also quicker to defend the modern State of Israel from criticism, even in cases when a particular criticism is objectively true.

I think I’ve belabored this subject long enough, and have done so in order to elaborate on things I’ve said in previous blog posts about modern Christianity trying to market itself as “Judaism 2.0.” Whatever relationship Christianity may have have to Hellenic Judaism, it certainly is not an inheritor to modern-day Rabbinic Judaism. The latter’s theology and praxis developed along their own path separately from the theology and praxis of Christianity – much of that time in an environment of antagonism from Christian authorities – and thus to call Christianity its inheritor or even a “younger brother” is both historically illiterate and just plain wrong.

Making Things Up

Another thing we notice is the tendency among Reformed writers to make stuff up as they go along, following Calvin’s example. This is especially noticeable in anti-Catholic writings, where half-truths and even outright lies are on the table. Fortunately this tactic has mostly gone the way of the dodo after the nineteenth century, however two particularly egregious examples have reverberated among modern Fundamentalists and in the popular imagination.

Conyers Middleton (1683-1750)

The first example would be Conyers Middleton’s A Letter from Rome, showing an Exact Conformity between Popery and Paganism dating 1729, whose popularity over the next hundred years cannot be overstated: whenever it felt like Catholics in England might gain rights, this book would be reprinted like clockwork to scare the populace of “those evil papists.” Middleton’s book constitutes the first serious attempt at the Protestant game of “match this pagan deity to this Catholic Saint,” a game which Fundies still play in our own time (not to mention the many Fundy-born who converted to Neopaganism and took their mentalities with them!).

As to Middleton as a person, he was an Anglican priest during the time when the C of E was still firmly within the Reformed tradition; that is to say they were still structured, as Pope Pius V once put it, “after the rule of Calvin,” and took the “Genevan” parts of the Thirty-Nine Articles more seriously than they do now. He was a also ferocious controversialist with a reputation for being unfair to his opponents. During his lifetime he was also considered one of the best writers in the English language, though today we would consider his style long-winded. We see this long-windedness clearly in his introduction, where he explains his so-called “epiphany” that Catholicism as practiced in Rome is a one-to-one match for the Cultus Deorum:

“As  therefore  my  general  studies  had  furnished me with a competent knowledge of Roman history, as well as an inclination to search more particularly into some branches of its antiquities, so I had resolved to employ myself chiefly in inquiries of this sort; and to lose as little time as possible in taking notice of the fopperies and ridiculous ceremonies of the present religion of the place. But I soon found myself mistaken; for the whole form and outward dress of their worship seemed so grossly idolatrous and extravagant, beyond what I had imagined, and made so strong an impression on me, that I could not help considering it with a particular regard; especially when the very reason which I thought would have hindered me from taking any notice of it at all, was the chief cause that engaged me to pay so much attention to it: for nothing, I found, concurred so much with my original intention of conversing with the ancients, or so much helped my imagination to fancy myself wandering about in old heathen Rome, as to observe and attend to their religious worship, all whose ceremonies appeared plainly to have been copied from the rituals of primitive Paganism, as if handed down by an uninterrupted succession from the priests of old, to the priests of new Rome; whilst each of them readily explained and called to my mind some passage of a classic author, where the same ceremony was described as transacted in the same form and manner, and in the same place, where I now saw it executed  before my eyes; so  hat as oft as I was present at any religious  exercise in their churches, it was more natural to fancy myself looking on at some solemn act of idolatry in old Rome, than assisting at a worship, instituted on the principles, and formed upon the plan of Christianity.”

We come soon enough to the point where he makes things up as he goes along, when he starts discussing the Catholic use of incense:

“In the old bass-reliefs, or pieces of sculpture, where any heathen sacrifice is represented, we never fail to observe a boy in sacred habit, which was always white, attending on the priest, with a little chest or box in his hands, in which this incense was kept for the use of the altar. And in the same manner still in the church of Rome, there is always a boy in surplice, waiting on the priest at the altar with the sacred utensils, and among the rest, the Thuribulum or vessel of incense, which the priest, with many ridiculous motions and crossings, waves several times, as it is smoking around and over the altar in different parts of the service.”

And then he continues by talking about the “pagan origins” of holy water:

“The next thing that will, of course, strike one’s imagination, is their use of holy water; for nobody ever goes in or out of a church, but is either sprinkled by the priest, who attends for that purpose on solemn days, or else serves himself with it from a vessel, usually of marble, placed just at the door, not unlike to one of our baptismal fonts. Now this ceremony is so notoriously and directly transmitted to them from Paganism, that their own writers make not the least scruple to own it. The Jesuit la Cerda, in his notes on a passage of Virgil where this practice is mentioned, says, ‘Hence was derived the custom of holy church, to provide purifying or holy  water  at  the  entrance  of  their  churches.’ Aquaminarium or Amula, says the learned Montfaucon, was a vase of holy water, placed by the heathen at the entrance of their temples, to sprinkle themselves with. The same vessel was by the Greeks called Periranterion; two of which, the one of gold, the other of silver, were given by Croesus to the temple of Apollo at Delphi; and the custom of sprinkling themselves was so necessary a part of all their religious offices, that the method of excommunication seems to have been by prohibiting to offenders the approach and use of the holy water-pot. The very composition of this holy water was the same also among the heathen as it is now among the papists, being nothing more than a mixture of salt with common water; and the form of the sprinkling brush, called by the ancients aspersorium or aspergillum, (which is much the same with what the priests now make use of,) may be seen in bass-reliefs or ancient coins, wherever the insignia, or emblems of the pagan priesthood are described, of which it is generally one.”

I needn’t give much comment, as I’ve already discussed Jewish, Pagan, and Christian uses of Holy Water elsewhere. It is enough that the attentive reader will make out Middleton’s assumptions: 1. Christian worship must be bound by the Regulative Principle rather than the Normative, and 2. that “pagan” is a dirty word and therefore anything that even looks remotely “pagan” must automatically be judged as “evil.”

Alexander Hislop (1807-1865)

For a second example I introduce you to Alexander Hislop, a minister in the Church of Scotland during the mid-nineteenth century. In his 1858 book The Two Babylons, Hislop accuses Catholicism of being a direct descendant of Babylonian mystery traditions with Mary’s and Jesus’ names slapped over the hood to give it a “Christian” flavor. He states his thesis in his very first sentences, in language that hurts the eyes to read:

“In leading proof of the Babylonian character of the Papal Church the first point to which I solicit the reader’s attention, is the character of MYSTERY which attaches alike to the modern Roman and the ancient Babylonian systems. The gigantic system of moral corruption and idolatry described in this passage under the emblem of a woman with a ‘GOLDEN CUP IN HER HAND’ (Rev 17:4), ‘making all nations DRUNK with the wine of her fornication’ (Rev 17:2; 18:3), is divinely called ‘MYSTERY, Babylon the Great’ (Rev 17:5). That Paul’s ‘MYSTERY of iniquity,’ as described in 2 Thessalonians 2:7, has its counterpart in the Church of Rome, no man of candid mind, who has carefully examined the subject, can easily doubt. Such was the impression made by that account on the mind of the great Sir Matthew Hale, no mean judge of evidence, that he used to say, that if the apostolic description were inserted in the public ‘Hue and Cry’ any constable in the realm would be warranted in seizing, wherever he found him, the bishop of Rome as the head of that ‘MYSTERY of iniquity.’ Now, as the system here described is equally characterised by the name of ‘MYSTERY,’ it may be presumed that both passages refer to the same system. But the language applied to the New Testament Babylon, as the reader cannot fail to see, naturally leads us back to the Babylon of the ancient world.”

Examples of Hislop’s fantasies are easy to spot in modern times, and remain popular in Fundamentalist circles. One need not look much further than Chick Tracts for example, notably The Death Cookie, Man in Black, and Why Is Mary Crying?

Another example can be found in a Facebook post I made on June 22, 2021, where I examined and give a blow-by-blow commentary on a Fundamentalist video from (I presume) the early 1990s, where the presenter claims Catholicism is identical with the “Occult World.” My commentary was handicapped by the fact I was unfamiliar with Hislop’s work at the time (I did not become aware of him until a year later), but the video’s debt to The Two Babylons could not be any more obvious.

Honorable Mention: Robert Taylor (1784-1844)

In the time between the earth swallowed Middleton and the rise of Hislop, there was a man undreamed of. Or is it “a man nobody would want to dream of?” I never could tell.

Not long after Middleton published his Letter from Rome, he received a response from Dr. Richard Challoner in The Catholic Christian Instructed (1737). In his preface, Challoner answers Middleton point-for-point, specifically accusing the latter of dishonesty and making things up as he went along. Toward the end of this preface he then points out that Middleton’s arguments could be used against his own form of “English Protestancy” as well as against Catholicism:

“But, before we part, I must put the Doctor and his friends in mind that some people will naturally infer, from what he imagines he has so fully proved, viz. that Popery and Paganism stand upon the same bottom, and that one is no better than the other; they will infer, I say, that the orders which his Church pretends to have by succession from the Church of Rome are no more valid than if they proceeded from an Indian Brachman or a Mahometan Dervise (Chandler’s Sermon, p. 36). And by the self-same way of arguing, by which he pretends to demonstrate an exact conformity between the religion of the present Romans and that of their heathen ancestors, these same gentlemen will, with a much fairer show of probability, prove an exact conformity between the religion by law established, and Popery. The consequence of which will be, if the Doctor be not mistaken in his parallel, that English Protestancy is no better than heathenish idolatry.”

Challoner’s words were prescient, and within less than a century one would rise up to take the dishonesty of Reformed polemical tactics, and weaponize it against that very same tradition! In fact this came to pass in the person of Robert Taylor, nicknamed “The Devil’s Chaplain,” an ex-Anglican cleric who weaponized this tactic not only against “English Protestancy,” but against all of Christianity in general.

Taylor published his claims in his Diegesis in 1829, exactly one hundred years after Middleton’s Letter from Rome, and he speaks of Middleton favorably. In fact on page 230, he speaks of Middleton as having “pointed the way” for his own project, presumably Middleton’s later work A Free Inquiry into the Miraculous Powers:

“Dr. Conyers Middleton, the most distinguished ornament of the church of England, could not, compatibly with his personal convenience, venture to go the whole length of the way which he points out to the travel of freer spirits, though, by demonstrating the utter falsehood and physical impossibility of all and every other pretended miracle that ever was in the world, not excepting one (except such as he might have been put in the pillory if he had not excepted), he leaves the conclusion to be drawn – as it may be by every mind capable of drawing a conclusion, and as he could securely calculate that it would be – with a stronger effect of conviction than if he had himself prescribed it.”

The core of Taylor’s argument is that Jesus never existed and Christianity is all make-believe, and his arguments to “prove” it are nothing short of fantastical. For our purposes it suffices to reproduce his “Pagan Creed” that he gives on page 8, while conceding that “This creed, though not to be found in this form in the Pagan Scriptures, is evidently deducible from them as their sense and purport.”

I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.
And in Jasius Christ his only, son our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit.
Born of the Virgin Electra.
Suffered under (whom it might be.)
Was struck by a thunderbolt.
Dead and buried.
He descended into hell.
The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended into heaven.
And sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty.
From whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost.
The Holy Catholic Divinity.
The Communion of Saints.
The forgiveness of sins.
The immortality of the soul.
And the life everlasting.

He places this formulation side-by-side with the Apostles’ Creed, and then gives his judgment that the latter is a mere forgery:

“As then, the so called Apostle’s Creed, is admitted to have been written by no such persons as the Apostles, and with respect to the high authority which has for so many ages been claimed for it, is a convicted imposture and forgery; the equity of rational evidence will allow weight enough, even to a probable conjecture, to overthrow all th it remains of its pretensions. The probability is, that it is really a Pagan document, and of Pagan origination; since, even after the trifling alteration and substitution of one name perhaps for another, to make it subserve its new application, it yet exhibits a closer resemblance to its Pagan stock, than to the Christian stem on which it has been engrafted.”

I leave my readers to their own conclusions, and will only point out that Taylor’s sleight-of-hand is as obvious as it is retarded. The Apostles’ Creed is a development of the Old Roman Symbol, originally a 2^nd-century baptismal formula that has its own documentary tradition (the lack of an actual “Pagan Creed” text indicates one cannot be a rip-off of the other). If the Creed contains any beliefs in common with those of Classical Paganism, that would be because – as Taylor himself would’ve learned at Cambridge – the Christian religion is a via media between Judaism and Paganism, and does not discount a true belief just because it happens to be held by this or that group of people. His argument might be convincing to the low-information crowd, but fails against minds with even a smidgin of religious or historical literacy.

This, right here, is why I brought Taylor into the proverbial chat. He marks the point at which the intellectual dishonesty of Reformed controversialists spilled out from their control and took on a life of its own. We see it time and again whether in the Diegesis, or in Gerard Massey’s claim that Jesus was actually based on Horus, or in atheist memes that “Easter is actually Ishtar” circulating in our own time.

Or this gem of a misinformation that I found this morning:

An Expanded Conception of “Worship”

This section should be shorter than the others, as I won’t be giving too many citations. All we need here is a little deductive logic and some observation of how various Protestantisms operate in the wild.

Within most religions, including historic Christianity, the concept of “worship” is bound together with the offering of sacrifice. We see this clearly within Catholicism and Orthodoxy, where “worship” specifically refers to the Holy Mass or the Divine Liturgy, respectively. In fact among Catholics there’s a tendency to regard anything other than the Mass as “not worship.” It might be “fellowship,” it might be “devotion,” but you’ll have a hard time convincing them it’s straight-up “worship” without some serious qualifications.

Protestants, out of necessity, were forced to adopt a different concept of worship. Beginning with Luther, Protestantism rejects the sacrificial nature of the Mass, which logically dissolves the connection between “worship” and “sacrifice.” Lutheranism however maintained belief in the Real Presence (Augustana, Article 10), which might be why the Lutheran Confessions contain a concession that the Saints “pray for us all the time” and that as a consequence “invocation is harmess but unnecessary,” in spite of taking a negative view of the subject (Apology, Article 21). This latter part is generally not carried out in day-to-day practice, but we see some sort of distinction exists that at the confessional level.

Among the Reformed, the dynamic is different although they also reject the notion of sacrifical worship. Reformed teaching on the Eucharist is divided between Calvin and Zwingli, with different denominations choosing beteent he two camps. Calvin taught that there can be no real presence localized within the elements because Jesus’ body is “locally circumscribed” in heaven, thus there can only be a sort of pneumatic presence, which is to say a vague “spiritual presence” in the room. Zwingli on the other hand taught there was no presence at all, because in his mind the sacraments are merely tokens by which we profess our faith.

In either of these cases, the connection between “worship” and “sacrifice” necessarily collapses, as there is no longer a sacrifice to be offered. There are, however, two other considerations to be addressed.

The first is the place of the Sermon. In the Traditional Latin Mass, the sermon was considered “not part of the Mass” and is completely optional. Luther, in his Deutsche Messe, reversed this and enshrined the Sermon as the most important part of the Liturgy: “Now since in all Divine Service the chief and foremost part is to preach and teach the Word of God, let us begin with the preaching and teaching.” (emphasis mine)

The second brings us back to the accusation that “any invocation of Saints is automatic idolatry.” We’ve already discussed Calvin’s (frankly arbitrary) rejection of the distinction between Latria and Dulia, and needn’t look far to find how well-rooted this is within the Protestant mind.

Ultimately worship is no longer the act of sacrifice. Worship is now the act of talking.

Specifically, worship is now bound up with the act of talking whether expressed in a church service, in a sermon, or even in private prayer. Everything you say to an unseen being, or about an unseen being, becomes conflated with “worship” even if someone’s just saying “Hello” to their Patron Saint on their feastday.

As this expanded concept of “worship as talking” has fermented amg the Reformed and spread to other Christian traditions, the result can only be called a net negative, up to and including “worship services” that a friend once described to me as “a rock concert with a laser light show.”

However this expanded definition of worship – unmoored from its traditional understanding and placed into the realm of talking – is ultimately what prevents Protestants from being able to honor the Saints, and why they always seem to see any sort of honor to Mary as “Asherah 2.0” or whatwever other Goddess they with to liken her to (Isis, Semiramis, Durga, take your pick).

This is also why converts from Protestantism typically have such a hard time with Marian devotion, or go the opposite way and assume “Mother Mary” is a goddess or at least a female manifestation of God. And am I the only one who’s noticed that “Mother Mary” is a distinctly Protestant appellation? (It seems they really don’t like using the words “Blessed” or “Virgin!”)

What Good Things Come from the Reformed Tradition?

This blog post has been mostly negative, which has not been my intention. If anything I have failed at my desire for a value-neutral presentation. As such I would like to share some of the good things I believe came from the Reformed tradition, in order to counterbalance that negtivity insofar as as I am able.

While I’m generally antagonistic to Reformed theology, I have to be grateful that it gave us the British Enlightenment whcich I see as a culturally-Protestant reaction against institutionalized Protestantism. I strongly appreciate the emphasis on empiricism, which in turn led to a concern with protecting the rights of the individual against the predations of the collective. While the Founding Fathers drew their practical inspration from sources ranging from the Noahide Laws to the Iroquois Confederacy to the Greeks and Romans, it was the British Enlightenment project that furnished the intellectual framework for making the American experiment possible.

As I understand it, this school of thought was a necessary consequence of the Reformed doctrine of cessationism combined with an emphasis on external piety and a “web of responsibilities” rather than internal spirituality. This – again as I perceive it – can only lead one to focus their vision outward in examination of the natural world, with a result superior to the inward-focus and utopianism produced by the Continental Enlightenment. In fact I believe the Continental Enlightenment originally started as a culturally-Catholic reaction against institutionalized Catholicism, which is why I’m convinced something like the American experiment could only have happened within a Protestant intellectual and cultural milieu.

I also can’t help but notice that Reformed congregations tend to be less stand-offish to visitors than I’ve seen with Catholic, Episcopalian, and Lutheran churches who will often ignore the new person or just blow them off. As one may infer from the section where I discussed judaization, the Reformed tradition was founded with a much weaker sense of in-group/out-group boundaries than the rest of our traditions, and it seems to have resulted in non-Fundamentalist congregations being warmer in temperament and more welcoming to outsiders. This openness is certainly a good thing.

Lastly – though this is actually pan-Protestant – I respect the Reformed’s willingness to resort to polities other than the monarchical episcopate. I have mixed feeling about this, since having lived 10-months in a Calvinist town in western Michigan showed me how much the neighbors love minding each other’s business. However the very existence of a system of checks and balances, or even the search for one, is more than institutional Catholicism can claim for itself on any level.

So even though I remain antagonistic to the theology, my answer has to be “Yes.” Because yes, there are things I respect within the Reformed tradition, things I see as objectively good, and some things which are even superior to what Catholicism has on offer.

Conclusions

Every religious tradition has its good points and bad points, just as every religious tradition has its differing worldviews, cultural norms, value systems, and expectations of its members. This is why it’s foolish to insist “we are all the same” because from any empirical observation, we are most emphatically different. Not necessarily better, not necessarily worse, just different.

However when I survey Reformed theology’s good points and bad points, I can’t help but see a net negative. Not only because it was founded on a shifting sand of bad theology and intellectual dishonesty, but because it intentionally disconnects the believer from actively participating in the spiritual realms by way of cessationism, memorialism, outward-focused piety, and even its expanded definitions of “worship” and “idolatry.”

(The irony is that it wasn’t always this way. The Puritans, for example, were outliers who rejected cessationism and possessed an exceptionally rich spiritual literature. That literature, however, seems to have fallen by the wayside in the 1700s.)

Yet when speaking of the Protestant refusal to honor the Saints as anything other than examples, my conclusion is contained in what I said at the beginning:

There is no such thing as “Sola Scriptura.” In practice everybody reads the Bible through their peculiar combination of biases, preconceived notions, and presuppositions. There are no exceptions to this: you and I, every last one of us, are all guilty.

Every church, every denomination, every congregation, and every individual has their own personal Big-T Traditions which form the actual rule of their faith, over and above anything said in any Scripture, any Creed, or any Confession. The Reformed are simply in the unenviable position of inheriting a Tradition that was gaslighted by its founders, and gaslighted heavily.

Their reluctance, therefore, is well-meaning but every bit as misguided as Calvin’s invocation of shituf. And one that only they can get themselves over.

In the meantime I will love them as fellow believers, just as fellow-believers who insist on being wrong.