Audio only:
Joe examines the evidence for the Sign of the Cross as an ancient Christian practice.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and why do Catholics make the sign of the cross? If you’re not Catholic, should you be making the sign of the cross yourself? And broadly speaking, Protestants fall into three groups on this question. Those who use the sign of the cross, those who think it’s harmless, and those who think it’s actually dangerous. In the first group, you’re gonna get Lutherans and Anglicans who often make the sign of the cross in their own liturgies. Now, I should note that historically, Lutherans like Martin Buster were clear the sign of the cross could only be retained if it was accepted and used with a strict understanding of its meaning, untainted by what he called any admixture of superstition. But many Protestants, probably most, fall into a second group. They think of the sign of the cross as a basically harmless Catholic thing.
Doug Wilson argues that the sign of the cross is lawful, but he also thinks it’s inappropriate for Protestants to make the sign of the cross because it just seems too Catholic. And even James White argues that the sign of the cross really isn’t any big deal.
CLIP:
I’ll put it this way, that, um, if someone said, “Is it lawful or appropriate for Protestants to cross themselves?” I’d say, yeah, it’s lawful, but it’s not appropriate at all.
Joe:
Making the sign of the cross. Um, and again, the, the fundamentalist says this is just, you know, this is just terrible, horrible. I don’t think it’s any big deal. But as we just heard James White acknowledge, there are Protestants, particularly fundamentalists, who believe that the sign of the cross is actually evil. So according to people like Stephen Anderson, the sign of the cross is pagan.
CLIP:
It’s a one way take it to hell in that Roman Catholic church. Yeah. That’s what you get from that cr – eating that cracker. That’s what you get from doing all this kind of stupidity and superstitious pagan nonsense. Why don’t you go get a rabbit’s foot while you’re at it?
Joe:
And Iglesia de Cristo, the largest Protestant denomination in the Philippines, even claims that the sign of the cross is the mark of the beast from the Book of Revelation.
CLIP:
Don’t brand yourself with that sign, the sign of the cross. That is not the sign from God. That is a sign identifying one having been deceived by the deceiver, and he is branding them to be tormented in the lake of fire.
Joe:
Now I wanna suggest today that all three of these Protestant views are wrong. More specifically, I hope today to convince you that number one, the sign of the cross is incredibly powerful spiritually, that it’s not superstitious to believe this, that number two, there are good reasons to suspect that the sign of the cross comes from the apostles themselves. And then number three, if we do find the sign of the cross in the Bible, it’s not in the part about the mark of the beast. Now, before I get there, I wanna give a quick thank you to everyone who supports this channel over at shamelessjoe.com. It’s been a while since I’ve publicly thanked my Patreon supporters, but you all are tremendously helpful and I love the community that we’ve formed. I love answering your questions on Mondays and Fridays, and I love the fact that one of you, Kyle, sent me the shirt that I’m wearing right now so that I’m literally signed with the cross.
So with that, let’s talk about the bloodiest persecution of Christians in Roman history. This was the Diocletian persecution, sometimes known as the great persecution. But you may not know the Emperor Diocletian didn’t actually start out hating Christians. He didn’t start out with persecuting and killing them. Rather, he started out as a popular and successful emperor who seems to have been liked by both Christians and pagans alike. It was only in the year 303, about 20 years into his reign and a mere three years before his retirement, the Diocletian begins this bloody crackdown on Christians. In fact, prior to this time, there were even Christians in his royal entourage. So this raises a kind of mysterious historical question. What was it that happened that made Diocletian turn so dramatically and abruptly against the Christians who had once been seemingly supportive of him? Scholars suggest all kinds of possible causes, but I think we should listen to one of those early Christians who lived at the time of Diocletian, namely Lactatius.
After all, Lactatius was a contemporary of Diocletian, but he wasn’t just a contemporary. The Imper Diocletian had personally appointed him as a teacher of rhetoric at Nikimedia, and so he was well positioned, sometimes even as an eyewitness, to know about imperial affairs. Now, eventually, Lactatius converts from paganism to Christianity and he resigns from his post. So what does his former ally of Diocletian have to say? Well, he writes about how Diocletian went to the horses. Now, these are ancient oracles who would use the end trails and livers of sacrificed animals to try to foretell the future. Now, of itself, while that might jump out as a detail for us today, it was unremarkable at the time. As Richard Damaris has pointed out, there was actually a long tradition of Roman emperors and Caesars and other leaders relying upon these prophetic omens to try to plan for the future.
So what was different this time around? Well, as Lactatius tells us, while Diocletian sacrificed, some attendants of his who were Christians stood by and they put the immortal sign, that is the sign of the cross on their foreheads. At this time, the demons were chased away and the holy rights interrupted. Now, if you watch my recent episode on relics, you might remember something similar happened to Julian the apostate. He had tried to consult pagan oracles about the future, but the presence of Christian relics, the relics of Saint Pablos of Antioch, prevented the demonic rights from working. Well, this time it was the Christians making the sign of the cross. The soothsayers eventually realized that Christians must be present obstructing their rights, and so the Emperor Diocletian orders everyone present that they have to make sacrifices or else they’re going to be scourged. And it’s this, this is the spark that quickly turns into the worst Christian persecution in all of early Christian history.
Now, you might object, well, that’s just one event. Maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe it wasn’t really a miracle that the oracles were obstructed. The horses were wrong. That would be a reasonable objection, but the problem is this. The Christians under Roman rule were used to living among people who openly engaged in occult and demonic magical practices. And the Christians quickly realized that the sign of the cross was useful in thwarting the power of demons. Saint Anthonatius wrote that by the sign of the cross, all magic is stopped and all witchcraft brought to naught and all the idols are being deserted and left. In his biography of Saint Anthony of the desert, Athanasius describes how when Anthony would encounter those vexed with demons, he would call upon Christ, make the sign of the cross two or three times over the demoniacs, and this would drive out the demons.
And this was the seemingly universal Christian practice. An ancient document called the Apostolic Traditions, which might date back as early as 215, gives these instructions. “If you are tempted, reverently sign yourself on the forehead, for this sign of the passion is displayed against the devil, if it is made in faith and not to please people, but through knowledge, putting it forward like a breastplace. For if the adversary sees the power of the spirit from the heart being outwardly demonstrated in the likeness of baptism, he will flee away trembling, not because you spat on him, but because you breathed on him. “And Tertullian, writing around the year 2:10, describes how the sign of the cross was a daily part of Christian life. He writes,” At every forward step and movement, at every going in and out, when we put on our clothes and shoes, when we bathe, when we sit at table, when we light the lamps, on couch, on seat, in all the ordinary actions of daily life, we trace upon the forehead the sign.
“Saint Cyril of Jerusalem described the sign of the cross as the sign of the faithful and the dread of devils. And Saint Anthonatius even offered a test to anybody who might wonder about the spiritual effectiveness of the sign of the cross. He says,” Let him come who would test by experience what we have now said, and in the very presence of the deceit of demons and the imposter of oracles and the marvels of magic, let him use the sign of that cross, which is laughed at among them, and he will see how by its means demons fly, oracles cease, all magic and witchcraft is brought to naught. “So the early Christians, they didn’t just believe superstitiously that the sign of the cross was spiritually effective, they knew it worked because they’d seen the power of the cross against the forces of demons living in a pagan and demonic culture.
When the scribes accused Jesus of casting out demons by the power of the prince of demons, he responds by pointing out the absurdity of the charge asking,” How can Satan cast out Satan? “And that answer suffices to answer false teachers like Stephen Anderson or the folks at Iglesia de Cristo. It makes no sense to claim that the early Christians making the sign of the cross were driving out these demons with something they’d gotten from superstition or paganism or even the mark of the beast itself. Now, you might be wondering how it was that these Christians around the world knew to make the sign of the cross. Well, as my Catholic Answers colleague Jimmy Aiken showed recently, the early Christians claimed to have received this tradition from the apostles. For instance, St. Basil the Great famously described how on both matters of charigma and dogma, both scripture and unwritten epistolic tradition have equal force and true religion.
And as examples of universal Christian customs that can’t be proven from scripture alone, Basil points to the sign of the cross, he points to ad orient and worship, and he points to certain parts of the institution narrative in the Eucharistic prayers. Much earlier, Tertolian had likewise argued that the sign of the cross has no positive scriptural injunction, but he says instead it is supported by tradition, custom, and faith. On the other hand, even if there is no explicit command to make the sign of the cross anywhere in the Bible, early Christians were very clear that the sign of the cross is referenced in scripture. There’s two passages in particular that regularly get pointed to. First, there’s Ezekiel nine, verse four, in which God sends his angel to protect the faithful, saying, Go through the city through Jerusalem and put a mark upon the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in it.
Now in Hebrew, it literally says to put a tav on the foreheads of the faithful. Now Tav is the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. It looks like this today, but back at the time of Ezekiel, the Tav was in the shape of a cross and eventually it’s kind of a tilted cross, almost like an X. And this seemingly is how Tav becomes the symbol in Jewish culture for signing or marking something, the way that you might X on the dotted line in English. It’s an easy sign even an illiterate person can both make and recognize. And so Ezekiel nine is literally talking about marking the foreheads of the faithful with the sign of the cross. Benjamin Overcast showed in his PhD dissertation that we see later texts that use the same or similar imagery to show the marking of the faithful from the Dead Sea Scrolls to various apocalyptic writings to the New Testament itself.
In Revelation chapter seven, the angels are given this instruction, “Do not harm the earth or the sea or the trees till we have sealed the servants of our God upon their foreheads.” And we see in Revelation nine that the plagues of locusts can harm only those of mankind who have not the seal of God upon their foreheads. Speaking personally as a kid, I remember the startling realization that I’d heard so much from my Protestant brothers and sisters about the mark of the beast on the forehead in Revelation that I had never even realized that there’s also a divine seal placed on the forehead of the faithful. And so Protestants recognizing the mark on the forehead are right to do so, but they’re wrong in imagining that it’s the mark of the beast. It’s rather the sealing of the servants of God with the sign of the cross.
This is the image that was foreshadowed by Ezekiel nine. So Ezekiel nine, Revelation seven, Revelation nine should be read together. And while modern Protestants, in my experience at least, are strangely quiet about the meaning of the sign on the forehead in Revelation seven, the early Christians recognized it for what it was. Churchulian said of Ezekiel nine that the Greek letter Tao in our own letter T is a very form of the cross, which he predicted would be the sign on our foreheads in the true Catholic Jerusalem. Origin describes how a Jewish convert to Christianity had taught him about Ezekiel, but how in the old style letters, Tao resembles the form of the cross and that there’s a prophecy here concerning the sign placed on the forehead of Christians, which all believers make when beginning any activity at all, especially prayer or holy readings. And St.
Augustine offered the Ezekiel prophecy as proof that the mark of Christ is born upon our foreheads as he is held in our hearts. Saint Cyprien of Carthage points to the Ezekiel prophecy to show that those only can escape who have been newborn and signed with the sign of Christ, and he particularly connects the sign of the Tav and Ezekiel with both the seal on the forehead in Revelation and also with the blood on the doorpost in Exodus, this kind of seal on the forehead of the house as it were. So it is perfectly fine to say, as Basil does, that the authority behind the sign of the cross is unwritten apostolic tradition, but I think the stronger argument for this might be that the sign of the cross is in fact referenced in scripture, but in a somewhat subtle way, both in the Old Testament and in the New Testament.
This is the sign and seal of God on the forehead and explains why Revelation 14 describes the sign as writing the name of God and the lamb upon the forehead because we sign ourselves in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Now look, all of this is related to what I’ve referred to in the past as the demonic case for Catholicism. By that I mean this. When you see, for example, Catholic priests driving out demons with exorcisms, when you see Catholic relics neutering the power of demons, when you see the sign of the cross rendering demonic oracles mute, you must know that these things are of God and not of the devil for Satan cannot cast out Satan. For more on that subject, you can check out my full length episode here on the demonic case for Catholicism.
For shameless potpourri, I’m Joe Heshmeyer. God bless you.