Confessing Evangelical

We're off on holiday, driving off tomorrow (see left) to spend a week in the New Forest (in a static caravan; see right). See y'all soon!

Following on from my previous post, the English conservative evangelical writer Vaughan Roberts describes this "worship as sacrament" phenomenon in his book, True Worship. He provides some examples that help substantiate the point I was making yesterday, for example when he describes a leaflet he received advertising a large Christian conference:

"Join us for dynamic teaching to set you on the right path, and inspiring worship where you can meet with God and receive the energy and love you need to be a mover and shaker in today's world. ... Alongside our teaching programme are worship events which put you in touch with the power and love of God."

As Roberts observes:

Do you see the implication of what is said there? Bible teaching is good; it sets you on the right path. But it is through "worship", by which they mean singing, that we meet with God and are put in touch with his love and power.

To which one might add that the only conception this leaflet has of how God's Word might function is as Law ("dynamic teaching to set you on the right path"). Any concept of "Gospel" that the organisers might have appears to be restricted to the effects of "worship" ("meet with God and [be] put in touch with his love and power").

The leaflet also refers to "spine-tingling moments of worship"; what another friend of Roberts describes as "the liver shiver". I'm sure many of us have experienced this, that moment when:

...we have felt our whole bodies tingling. Our emotions have been switched on, and it has been almost as if we have been transported out of ourselves.

This needn't just be in a "contemporary" setting. For some people, mediaeval buildings, candles or choral music can have a similar effect (here's a CD - or rather, a whole box-set - that certainly "does it" for me). The problem is that many people associate that "buzz", that "liver shiver", with true worship, the moment when they truly meet with God (again, I can relate to this from my own experience).

But as Roberts points out, that feeling can be encountered in all sorts of settings - listening to Beethoven or the Beatles, or at the FA Cup Final for that matter. It's a physiological/psychological reaction, not a sign of the Holy Spirit at work.

My own feeling is that this equation of the "liver shiver" (or having a "warm fuzzy") with experiencing God's presence owes a lot to Christian naivety and super-spirituality about how our bodies work, and about the effect of our physical state on our mental/spiritual state (CS Lewis has a lot to say on this in The Screwtape Letters). In particular, the sexual overtones of some of these descriptions of "spine-tingling worship" are hard to miss ("we have felt our whole bodies tingling. Our emotions have been switched on..."). And it's striking how many praise CDs feature cover photos of attractive young women singing with their heads thrown back, eyes closed and lips parted. (See also this article from Touchstone Magazine, which makes a similar point about "romantic worship").

As Roberts concludes:

The Bible never teaches us that a feeling can take us into the presence of God. If that had been possible, God would have sent us a musician rather than a saviour. Only Christ can take us into the Most Holy Place in heaven, where we have direct access to the Father through faith in him.

And (as Roberts, sadly, doesn't go on to say as clearly as one might hope) it is, above all, in the church's ministry of Word and Sacrament that we encounter Christ and have access to the Father.

Loving and blundering Lutheran couple Rob and Devona have an interesting site which I'll be blogrolling next time I get round to updating my sidebar. An opportunity for us all to eavesdrop on their discussions ranging from theology to possible names for their imminent baby. I look forward to future posts on whose turn it is to do the washing up and why on earth we have to spend Sunday lunch at your mother's, again :-)

In a recent post, Rob comments on his experiences of modern praise and worship services, from his time in church bands. "The idea's been in my head," he writes, "that these modern worship services - though often well intentioned - often become replacement 'sacraments' to their participants."

I'm sure he's right (indeed, as something of an "ex-charismatic" myself, I can confirm it from personal experience), and it's not only Lutherans who have noticed - and regretted - this tendency. Sydney-based (and predominantly Anglican) evangelical magazine The Briefing has carried a number of articles on this topic in recent years. On the whole, I dislike and disagree with the Sydney approach to worship, with its reduction of church services merely to "gatherings" for mutual edification and encouragement, rather than seeing worship as being primarily God's act as He distributes His grace in and through the Word and Sacraments. Actually, "dislike and disagree" is an understatement: witnessing the Sydney approach to "worship" in a local Anglican church was what finally convinced me I no longer had a home within Anglicanism (as I've described previously).

However, The Briefing has made some good points about the "worship as sacrament" approach of many charismatics and evangelicals today. In his article "Confessions of a teenage praise junkie", Tony Payne writes:

For many modern Christians, "praise" is a personal encounter with God, usually strongly emotional in its tone, in which we speak or sing to him and tell him how much we love him, and honour him ... It is usually uttered in the same breath as "worship" - as in the ubiquitous "praise and worship" albums that litter Christian bookstores and car cassette cases. It is an experience of communion with God, where God's presence is especially encountered.

In fact, Payne points out, the word "praise" has a more mundane and ordinary meaning, whether in Hebrew or English. "Praise" is what we do when "we see a friend doing something excellent, or notice a fine quality or attribute in his character". We may express our approval and admiration of that friend, both to him personally and to other people. In other words, we "praise" him. As Payne continues:

Praise is not making beautiful music for God. It is not a personal, mystical encounter with God. Nor do we praise God by saying, "We praise you God, thank you Jesus, Hallelujah".

Praise is advertising. It is remembering and declaring who God is and what he has done. It takes place in his hearing, but it is done by telling others. It is boasting about God, speaking well of him, broadcasting his virtues and excellences. It springs from salvation, from what he has done for us. Praise is the testimony of the redeemed.

The modern charismatic/evangelical approach is summed up in the words to a Keith Green song which Tony Payne quotes in his article: "When I hear the praises start, I see no stain upon you...". As Payne points out, "this salvation-by-praise is a little dodgy theologically", and really what Green should have sung is, "Because there is no stain on you, I want to hear the praises start".

In another article from The Briefing's archives, John Dickson writes on "Worship and the Digeridoo". The use of the digeridoo by Aborigines reflects the pagan approach to worship in which "the worship activities of the faithful create the enviroment in which the divine presence (whether for blessing or curse) is roused". This is the type of "worship" practised by the prophets of Baal at Mount Carmel in 1 Kings 18, and contrasts with Elijah's behaviour, which Dickson describes as being almost a form of "anti-worship", as Elijah "tries to create an atmosphere which is non-conducive to divine intervention (for example, pouring water over the sacrifice)" and then uses only "a short prayer of dependence" which is based on Yahweh's prior faithfulness, rather than being "an attempt to rouse God to act". As Dickson points out:

This contrast between Israel’s worship and that of her neighbours can be simply stated in an antithesis: For Israel, worship was the response to God’s action, not the means of rousing it. (emphasis original)

Unfortunately, there is a tendency now to revert to an approach to "praise and worship" which is more reminiscent of paganism than of biblical religion. At its most extreme form, this is found in the "Strategic Level Spiritual Warfare" movement, with its promotion of "praise and worship" as a means by which God "binds up" demonic powers in the surrounding neighbourhood. But, more broadly, there is:

...the popular belief that praise and worship singing releases the presence of God in a Christian meeting. A Christian singer told me a few weeks ago that they thought that praise music should be played at the end of Christian meetings because it "kept the presence of God in the building" ... In a multitude of different forms, the view that praise singing brings God’s presence to a meeting, is one of the most solidly believed principles of praise...

Such a view has more in common with paganism than with Christianity. There is nothing in the Bible that would suggest that God is any more present with his people after one hour of heartfelt praise singing than when the meeting began. To think otherwise is dangerously close to what I read about the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18.

As Dickson concludes:

The view that our 'praise and worship' rouses God to act in some way is attractive because it gives us a part to play in the divine activity. It makes us feel as though we are able to create the atmosphere which is conducive to God’s blessing - that my singing, praying and praising somehow invites God’s presence. Attractive as it might be to some, I hope it is obvious that this way of thinking cuts right across the gospel of sheer grace.

At its heart, the "worship as sacrament" approach is an expression of the theology of glory. One key aspect of the theology of glory is this desire to ascend to God, to have a direct unmediated encounter with Him. In the theology of the cross, by contrast, it is God who descends to us, as He brings His grace to us, hidden under apparently worthless and despicable forms - a baby in a feeding trough; a man dying in agony; water in a font; bread and wine on an altar; a man speaking in a pulpit - and discerned only by faith, rather than by sight or "experience".

Went to Southampton on Saturday to a friend's wedding. A lovely day, but it did involve driving along one of the most depressing stretches of road in the country: the M3 through Twyford Down. This was a controversial road scheme that led to a lot of protests when it was built about ten years ago, as it involved cutting a motorway straight through downland that was both an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and a Site of Special Scientific Importance. Calls to build a tunnel instead were ignored.

What gets me is not only that they built a motorway through Twyford Down, but that they built a motorway of such heartstopping brutality and ugliness:


A strong contender for the ugliest stretch of road in England, if not the world. It's almost enough to make you think they did it deliberately, as a spiteful two-fingered salute both to the English countryside and to those who opposed the scheme. (Notice how I've unconsciously slipped into blaming the mysterious "they"...).

But while looking for pictures of this abomination, I found an interesting alternative view from the website of the Centre for Sustainable Development at Cambridge University. This points out that, while "there is no denying that a civilised society would have built a tunnel", the development as a whole became a model of effective planning gain, that should ensure that future road developments are less ruinous that Twyford Down.

The plus side to the Twyford Down development was that, as the bulldozers moved in on the Down to build the M3, on the other side of the hill the old A33 Winchester bypass was being restored to a natural environment no less valuable and beautiful than Twyford Down. The article quotes a piece from New Scientist in which the environmentalist Fred Pearce writes:

It is a classic image of England. Take a walk out of medieval Winchester, past the cathedral and over the water meadows, where John Keats wrote his ode To Autumn, and on up the chalk downland to the top of St Catherine’s Hill, site of an ancient hill fort. Only from the top of the hill do you begin to hear the M3 as it ploughs through a gash in the next crest - Twyford Down. And, whisper it for fear of waking the ghosts of the protesters who camped here in 1993, it is the motorway that made the quiet of the walk possible. Confused? Before the ruin of Twyford Down, another road, the Winchester bypass, carved its way between the water meadows and St Catherine’s Hill. But as part of planning approval, engineers had to remove the bypass. Which they have. To dramatic effect.

Peace has been restored to the water meadows and the walk is silent and unimpeded. The meadow has been reunited with the hill; the cutting filled in. This spring, on the path of the old road, you can hear skylarks, watch butterflies and sniff wild thyme. You would never know there had ever been a bypass here. Three cheers for the environmental engineers.

Here's an example of what, until recently, was a dual-carriageway:


That's still no excuse for the rape of Twyford Down. But it does show that, like the poet says, "Sometimes things don't go, after all, from bad to worse."

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I went to see a production of The Tempest by the wonderful outdoor theatre company, Illyria (see right), whom we've been following for a number of years (the Illyria website reproduces a couple of reviews of the production - I agree wholeheartedly with the first of these).

Like most of Illyria's productions, the show manages to combine anarchic, bawdy comedy - unlike many productions, Illyria never cut the "below stairs" scenes, and make the most of Shakespeare's (often surprisingly rude) jokes - with a sensitive and intelligent treatment of the "serious" aspects to the play, and some excellent performances. The best programmes in the business, too, particularly Oliver Gray's "director's notes" (the website includes his notes for Romeo & Juliet, Midsummer Night's Dream, and As You Like It).

One memorable moment in The Tempest came during Ariel's song in Act 1 Scene 2, where the production captured perfectly the numinous quality of the poetry of the second stanza (surely some of the most beautiful poetry ever written):

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
           Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them -- Ding-dong, bell.

At the end of the play, the release of Ariel was especially moving: Ariel, the air-spirit whose faithfulness to Prospero cannot mask his desperation to be freed from servitude, drinks a potion given to him (with great tenderness) by Prospero, and collapses into Prospero's wheelchair; and at that moment, a dozen dark- and light-blue balloons (matching Ariel's costume) are released into the air and float up into the sky...

Say what you like about Silvio "oldest swinger in town" Berlusconi, no-one can accuse him of failing to add to the gaiety of nations. Following his decision to greet Tony and Cherie Blair dressed in a white bandana (warning: viewers of a sensitive disposition may find some of these images disturbing), the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera - clearly one of the few outposts of the Italian media not firmly under Signor Berlusconi's control - provides this gallery of previous headgear-related fashion blunders by the Italian PM.

I've already posted this in the comments over on Bunnie's blog, having lifted it from the comments on Chris's blog, but on reflection it deserves better than being buried in people's comment sections.

This comes from a friend of Chris who provided the following response to the question, "Why use divisive labels like 'Lutheran'? Why not just call yourself a 'Christian'?" I read this when I was just becoming a Lutheran, and found it immensely helpful:

I have heard that it is wise for us to refer to ourselves as "Christians first and Lutherans second." Why would I want to use the word "LUTHER" instead of the word "CHRIST" to identify myself? There is nothing wrong with calling yourself a Christian first and a Lutheran second. However, in a world where the meaning of the word "Christian" can mean almost ANYTHING (its linguistic sphere is rather broad, isn't it?), I would rather specify that I am a person who believes what the CONFESSIONAL Lutheran Church teaches.

To say that I am a Christian only could mean that I support the Social Gospel groups who deny the atonement, the neo-anabaptists (who deny the work of the Trinity in baptism), the Reformed (who teach that Christ died only for the sins of the mysterious elect), or the Roman Catholics (who teach that a man is saved by works). But by saying that I am a Lutheran, I, by definition, believe very specific things.

In this age of doctrinal division and of many heretical sects trying to attach the name "Christian" to their followers, it is more beneficial to all involved if I be known as a Lutheran - not to the exclusion of being called a Christian, but as an explanation of what THIS Christian man believes.

This is most certainly true.

In the comments to my previous post on O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Bunnie correctly pointed out that, in addition to the great script and acting, not to mention the "beautiful sacramentalism", the music in the film is "divine". The music - including, I assume, the Soggy Bottom Boys' barnstorming hit, "I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow" - was written by T-Bone Burnett, who I first came across in Steve Turner's 1988 book, Hungry for Heaven: Rock'n'Roll & the Search for Redemption.

Hungry for Heaven is an interesting book detailing the influence of religion on pop music, even Turner does seem to have the slightly odd belief that the entire history of pop music up to 1980 was merely preparatory for the arrival upon the scene of U2. Erm, whatever, dude.

But one of the most compelling figures in the book is T-Bone Burnett, whose music I'm not really familiar with (other than the gorgeous "Till the Heart Caves In", co-written with Roy Orbison, and one of the highlights of kd lang's album, "Drag"), but who comes across very well in the brief references to him in Turner's book. Burnett is a Christian, partly because, as he puts it, "Christianity has survived Christians for two thousand years now, which from my point of view is evidence that maybe something is going on there" (p.155).

Two quotes in particular have stuck in my mind ever since I read the book some years ago. Turner describes how Burnett drew inspiration from CS Lewis' comment that "I believe in God like I believe in the sun. Not just because I can see Him, but because by Him I can see everything else". As Burnett put it in a 1980 interview:

If Jesus is the Light of the World, there are two kinds of songs you can write .You can write songs about the light, or you can write songs about what you can see from the light. That's what I try to do. (p 165)

Turner points out that for Burnett, "a bad piece of song-writing was never redeemed by a spiritually accurate lyric". Burnett explained this to Rolling Stone in 1982:

A bricklayer's job is to build a good wall that will stand against the rain and wind. Writing JESUS on it isn't going to help it withstand the storms. (p.165)

A quote which should be emblazoned in ten-foot high letters above the front door of every CCM record label, as well as being a great expression of the doctrine of vocation.

My wife and I watched O Brother, Where Art Thou? at the weekend. Great fun, but one particularly heartening feature was the depiction of Christianity in the film, which was in many ways sympathetic, even if not particularly reverent (it is a Coen brothers film, after all). Unusually for Hollywood, the film was actually able to distinguish between Christians and Klansmen, and very unusually for Hollywood, the film teaches baptismal regeneration.

Early in the film, the three escapees - Everett (George Clooney), Pete (John Turturro) and Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) - come across a mass baptism in a river in some woods. Delmar and Pete rush forward to be baptised, and come out proclaiming that all their sins have been washed away:

Pete: Well I'll be a sonofabitch. Delmar's been saved.

Delmar: Well that's it, boys. I've been redeemed. The preacher's done warshed away all my sins and transgressions. It's the straight and narrow from here on out, and heaven everlasting's my reward.

Everett: Delmar, what are you talking about? We've got bigger fish to fry.

Delmar: The preacher says all my sins is warshed away, including that Piggly Wiggly I knocked over in Yazoo.

Everett: I thought you said you was innocent of those charges?

Delmar: Well I was lyin'. And the preacher says that that sin's been warshed away too. Neither God nor man's got nothin' on me now. C'mon in boys, the water is fine.

While Delmar and Pete are certainly portrayed as extremely dim (and certainly very much peccator as well as iustus), throughout the film their conversion is depicted as genuine and (without giving away too much of the plot) survives even the harshest of tests, unlike Everett's glib scepticism.

As with most other other Coen Brothers films, O Brother... has a very sparky script. Subsequent to Pete and Delmar's baptism, Everett has to break it to them that the fact that they've been absolved and redeemed doesn't alter the fact that they still face re-imprisonment if caught:

Delmar: But they was witnesses that seen us redeemed.

Everett: That's not the issue, Delmar. Even if that did put you square with the Lord, the State of Mississippi's a little more hard-nosed.

Shortly afterwards, the threesome pick up a young black man, Tommy Johnson, waiting at some crossroads with his guitar:

Tommy: I had to be up at that there crossroads last midnight, to sell my soul to the devil.

Everett: Well, ain't it a small world, spiritually speaking. Pete and Delmar just been baptized and saved. I guess I'm the only one that remains unaffiliated.

Tommy goes on to explain a little more about the transaction:

Everett: What'd the devil give you for your soul, Tommy?

Tommy: Well, he taught me to play this here guitar real good.

Delmar: Oh son, for that you sold your everlasting soul?

Tommy: Well, I wasn't usin' it.

Though perhaps the final word, on a totally different subject, should go to Everett at one particularly meagre mealtime:

No thank you, Delmar. One third of a gopher would only arouse my appetite without beddin' it back down

It's safe to say that Ablaze! - the cringily-named LCMS campaign to reach 100 million people with the Gospel by 2017 - has not received a wholly positive reception. As Bunnie has pointed out, it's particularly ironic that the Southern Baptist Convention - who deny baptismal regeneration - have set as their target one million baptisms by 2005, while the LCMS bases its target on "responses", "people 'saying the prayer'" and so on.

And the Ablaze! Gospel-o-meter doesn't help win over the cynics (e.g. me). Last week, this informed us soberly that "the number of unreached or uncommitted people with whom the Gospel has been shared and reported is 000,000,089. As of this morning, this figure had increased to 000,000,090. Ho hum. Those leading zeros are looking a tad hubristic at the moment...

But one cannot get away from the fact that attempting to reach 100 million people with the Gospel - especially the Gospel as purely confessed by the Evangelical Lutheran Church - is a truly laudable enterprise. If it takes a corny name and some dodgy statistics to help provide support (whether by prayer, money or missionary service) to Lutheran churches around the world, then I can live with that. So I've been suspending judgment until I heard back from our pastor, who attended the Ablaze! launch and LCMS Convention as the representative for the ELCE.

Following his attendance at these events, our pastor and his family then spent a few weeks on holiday in the US, and yesterday was his first Sunday following his return to the UK. As it happened, his sermon was on preaching the Gospel to all nations (with Psalm 49 as the text). While I was only half-listening to the sermon (in the absence of Sunday School, I had to take our three-year old into the back room and prop the door open so I could hear the sermon), I did hear our pastor describe the Ablaze! launch in positive terms, and I also spoke to him about it afterwards.

His view was that the people who are nominally in charge of Ablaze! - the LCMS denominational officials, I assume he meant - are not the people who are really in charge. The real push for Ablaze! has come from South America, particularly Brazil, and (to a lesser, but still significant, extent) from Africa and South-East Asia. The President of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Brazil, the Revd Dr Carlos Winterle, made a particularly powerful impression on the gathering. As our pastor put it, "He was the sort of person who, when he spoke, people listened".

Overall, our pastor was greatly encouraged by the dynamism of the Lutherans from South America and the rest of the Global South. He also found the tone of the whole Ablaze! event encouraging, describing how it was refreshingly free from politics and disputation, with pastors from all over the world setting aside their own agendas for the sake of pursuing Christ's agenda of the Great Commission (I suspect he may have been contrasting this with certain other events he attended during his trip, but we'll let that pass...).

The influence of the Brazilians and other southern-hemisphere Lutherans reminds me of the role played by African and South-East Asian Anglican primates at the 1988 Lambeth Conference, in pushing for the "Decade of Evangelism" that subsequently took place between 1991 and 2000. Again, this was a slightly cringy title - as one conservative evangelical minister put it, a church having a "decade of evangelism" is like a bakery having a "decade of baking bread" - and somewhat undermined/hijacked at times by the heterodox denominational hierarchy and bureaucracy, but it was still a sign of the growing influence of the dynamic, biblically-orthodox Anglicans* of Africa and the rest of the South. (* See comments.)

Perhaps Ablaze! is not so much a sign of rampaging Willow Creek-ism within the Missouri Synod, as it is an indication that the balance of power and influence within confessional Lutheranism is shifting from the US to countries such as Brazil (just as it shifted from Germany to the US during the 19th and early-20th centuries). This would undoubtedly be a positive development, just as the growing influence of Africa and other southern-hemisphere countries is perhaps the last, best chance Anglicanism has of surviving as anything remotely resembling a faithful church.

So for the time being, my own $0.02-worth on Ablaze! is that the church growth stuff is unfortunate, and the bean-counting risible; but the focus on global evangelization is laudable, and the influence and evangelistic drive of southern-hemisphere Lutherans is to be celebrated, encouraged, prayed-for and (crucially) funded by us materially-rich but spiritually-indolent types in the North.

And as our pastor emphasised in his sermon, the message we are taking to the nations is that of Law and Gospel. In other words (though he didn't make this point explicitly) it is as Lutherans, and remaining as Lutherans - not turning ourselves into crypto-Baptists - that we are called to "ignite hearts with the Gospel".

The Midwest Conservative Journal provides a useful reminder that - contrary to the overwhelming impression given by media reports over the past twelve months - the real scandal at the 2003 ECUSA General Convention was not the ratification of Gene Robinson's election as Bishop of New Hampshire, nor the vote to recognise same-sex blessings as "part of [the] common life" of the church, but something rather more fundamental, which ultimately lies behind these more high-profile decisions.

Astonishingly, at that General Convention the House of Bishops voted down a resolution (B001) that called on the church to affirm the "Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral", which sets out the following as a "bare minimum" statement of Christian faith and practice:

1. The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, as “containing all things necessary to salvation,” and as being the rule and ultimate standard of the faith.
   


2. The Apostle’s Creed, as the Baptismal Symbol; and the Nicene Creed, as the sufficient statement of the Christian faith.
   


3. The two Sacraments ordained by Christ Himself - Baptism and the Supper of the Lord - ministered with unfailing use of Christ’s words of institution, and of the elements ordained by Him.
   


4. The Historic Episcopate, locally adapted in the methods of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into the unity of His Church.
   

Now, it's pretty clear from the behaviour of many liberal/revisionist bishops since last August - best characterised as a combination of episcopal tyranny and canonical fundamentalism - that their objection was not to the fourth "corner" of the quadrilateral. So here we have the spectacle of "Anglican" bishops voting, by 84 votes to 65, with 8 abstentions (abstentions! the fact that some of them apparently either don't know or won't say is even more astonishing than the "no" votes), against the authority of Scripture, the truth of the Creeds, and the ministry of the Sacraments.

While the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral is not, and was never intended to be, a comprehensive statement of Anglican doctrine (that is found in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles), to deny its first three "corners" is to cease to be a Christian church in any meaningful sense of the word.

The art critic and biographer Tim Hilton has written a book called "One More Kilometre and We're in the Showers", reviewed by the Daily Telegraph here.

The book is a history of cycling in the "golden age" of the 1950s and 1960s. Hilton is about the same age as my father, who was a keen club cyclist from the late 1950s onwards, and still goes riding each Sunday for distances that are terrifying to a man half his age (i.e. me). I therefore found the reviewer's description of British cycling enthusiasts in that era rather moving:

His subjects belong to a slice of society that is usually overlooked: no-nonsense, self-reliant men and women, often from skilled working-class backgrounds, teaching their children to cycle within the society of thriving cycling clubs, dedicated to the "culture of the bike"...

My father is indeed a "no-nonsense, self-reliant" man from a very working-class background. I must find a way of asking him what it was like to come from a run-down area of Leeds (long since demolished) and go riding out into the Yorkshire countryside to places like this (I make no apology for repeating this picture of Burnsall which I posted a few weeks ago - I think this is truly one of the most beautiful views in the whole world):


It must have been pretty mindblowing.

What's poignant about this description of "no-nonsense, self-reliant men and women ... from skilled working-class backgrounds" is that so much of that culture seems to have disappeared today. The contemporary equivalent of the young men and women who were riding bikes into the Yorkshire Dales in 1958 - not only getting fresh air, exercise and companionship, but also expanding their horizons - are today more likely to be attaching bucket exhausts and huge spoilers to their (de-badged) Astra GTi's and driving round the Leeds inner ring road with their subwoofers pounding.

ISTM there's something deeply symbolic about this: on the one hand, the young men of the 1950s, like my father, who rode out into the Dales and has then kept on "riding" into a professional career as an accountant, that has recently taken him as far as China to negotiate joint venture deals, at a time when you might expect him to be winding down ready for retirement. And on the other hand, the young men of 2004, going round and round the inner ring road, remaining forever in the same place while making that place somewhat more unpleasant for those around them.

Screwtape expresses his satisfaction at the decline in Christian preaching about the dangers of "the World" in the past century:

In modern Christian writings, though I see much (indeed more than I like) about Mammon, I see few of the old warnings about Worldly Vanities, the Choice of Friends, and the Value of Time. All that, your patient would probably classify as 'Puritanism' - and may I remark in passing that the value we have given to that word is one of the really solid triumphs of the last hundred years? By it we rescue annually thousands of humans from temperance, chastity, and sobriety of life. (from The Screwtape Letters, letter 10)

If Screwtape were writing to a Lutheran's tempter, no doubt he could say exactly the same thing, only replacing the word "Puritanism" with "Pietism"...

Continuing my blog's Holiday From Theology (too hot and humid to quote long chunks of Hermann Sasse Think Deep Thoughts at the moment)... as a public service announcement, here's a link to the most helpful article I've ever read on cycling: Effective Cycling: The Cure for Un-Riding!. It's based on the book Effective Cycling by John Forester, "the crusty old-timer del tutti crusty old-timers", which aims to teach people how to ride properly in traffic.

The basic, core, positive principle - the paradigm, if you will - that can reduce your risk of collision on the roads by a factor of four, is this:

WHEN YOU'RE ON A BIKE,
ACT LIKE A MOTORIST
As the writer goes on to point out, "this does not mean fling trash on the roadside or discharge firearms at people who get in your way". Rather, it means remembering that:

...motorists are familiar with normal traffic patterns and tend to follow them. As a result, they generally avoid smacking into each other. If you play by the same rules, they will generally avoid smacking into you.

In particular, here are four golden rules given in the article for cyclists to follow:

1. Ride straight. (Riding in a parking lane and weaving in and out of traffic to dodge the parked cars is a no-no.)
   


2. Make right turns from the right-hand lane.
   


3. Avoid passing on the left. [i.e. don't "under-take" stationary traffic]
   


4. Stay off the damn sidewalk.
   

(Note: throughout this post, I've transposed the "lefts" and "rights" for the benefit of UK readers. US readers should refer to the linked article).

This contrasts with some of the other behaviour-patterns seen all-too often among cyclists - such as the "youth" I witnessed on Monday evening, riding his mountain bike (why is it always a mountain bike?) along the "damn sidewalk" by a main road near our home, before turning into an adjoining road and proceeding to ride up the wrong side of the road, which - by the grace of God - was free of oncoming traffic. The writer describes this cycling (mis-)behaviour in memorably vivid terms:

As you have seen, or (eek!) have done, there are other ways people have learned to ride bicycles. Call it "un-riding." Un-riders ride on sidewalks, and get smacked. Un-riders initiate right turns from the far left ("safe") lane and get smacked. Un-riders pass in the left gutter in an intersection and get smacked by left-turning traffic. Un-riders walk their bikes through intersections, and don't get smacked, but are un-riders, literally. In short, un-riders play by a different set of rules, and pay the consequences.

The problem is, the writer continues, that people ride their bikes in the way they were taught as children. If you ride a bike in traffic, you need to learn to ride it like an adult, rather than being one of the "thousands of grown-up children un-riding around on bikes". This article is a good start. Please read it. Lecture over!

Update: You can check out your cycling personality profile by taking this quiz. My scores: 76% Effective Cyclist (yeah, right, I'll remember that next time I'm pushing my bike up a hill while small children race past me on their BMXs), 14% Speeding Messenger, 4% Loon (for giving honking motorists the finger, figuratively speaking at least), 4% Sidewalk Scurrier (just because I'd rather take the car if it's raining! Huh!).

I AM 16% HIPPIE! What? Are you a Republican? Why did you even bother taken this test?! Go back to your George W. Bush fan club and tell them you just wasted 10 minutes of your life. At least you don’t stink, man. Take the HIPPIE test at Fuali.com

From Mark Steyn's obituary for the Duke of Devonshire, whose home, Chatsworth, became one of Britain's biggest tourist attractions, despite it having looked likely he would have to sell it to pay death duties amounting to 80% of his inheritance, following his father's death in 1955:

The 11th duke considered his options and determined to save what had been his family's home for four centuries. He sold the Holbein, and a Rembrandt, and the family's prized Anglo-Saxon manuscript, the Benedictional of Saint Ethelwold.

And then he set about playing for time and discovered that the notorious indolence of an effete aristocracy was nothing alongside the bureaucratic inertia of socialist tax collectors. He carefully noted how long the Inland Revenue took to reply to his letters, and made a point of taking as long to reply to theirs less one day. By this method, which the Revenue never noticed, he dragged out the final settlement of death duties for seventeen years.

In the comments on my post about cynicism (which started out as a post on cycling, but then went a-wandering, as posts so often do), David commented that "Another reason for avoiding cynicism is that cynicism is what THEY want :-)".

This called to mind the wonderful article written by Matthew Parris in the Spectator about 18 months ago, entitled "Just who are They, and what are They up to?", in which he looks at the English-language habit of referring to un-named groups of people as "they". (The link is to a tidied-up version on my long blog, as the original is so badly formatted as to be almost unreadable). Parris writes:

The third-person plural is a marvellously sloppy get-out. ‘I’ or ‘we’ might involve personal complicity; ‘you’ or ‘he’ points an invidious finger and invites a comeback. But the use of ‘they’ allows the speaker to shift responsibility on to a sketchy entity just about able to bear the weight of our grievance, but not so clearly outlined as to amount to anything we could confront, check our facts with, or take our complaints or inquiries to. ‘They’ have no address or telephone number and do not stand for Parliament. The term is a shorthand for saying, ‘This is my grouse but I don’t plan to do anything about it’: a sort of generalised shrug which suggests there wouldn’t be any point. They never listen anyway.

Parris continues:

I can think of no better unwitting guide to a modern individual’s estimation of his and his peers’ own powerlessness in the universe than his recourse to the third-person plural as a shorthand for other human beings. Do you think that we have set foot on the Moon, or that they have? Do you think that we are searching for a cure for cancer, or that they are? Can we fly faster than the speed of sound these days, or can they? Do we understand the origins of the universe, or do they? Will we – or they? – be cloning humans next?

Note that one can say (for instance) that ‘we’ are searching for a cure for cancer without meaning to imply that one is doing so oneself. I can without hesitation write that ‘we’ may be about to go to war with Iraq when I myself would disapprove of this and might refuse to go myself. I say ‘we’ because I feel involved in national decisions; I feel this is my country, in whose policies I have a say and for whose actions I bear a responsibility.

Do read the rest of the article, if only for the pleasure of reading more of Parris' typically exquisite writing.

A sad fact widely known
The most impassionate song
To a lonely soul
Is so easily outgrown...

Found myself listening to The Smiths last night, for the first time in ages. I'd forgotten just how good they are - far better than is suggested by their image as simply "bedsit miserabilists" for tortured adolescents who just need to get out more, for heaven's sake. Though having been - for rather longer than I care to admit - a tortured adolescent who just needed to get out more, for heaven's sake, it was probably scarcely any surprise that I enjoyed them so much.

But don’t forget the songs
That made you cry
And the songs that saved your life
Yes, you’re older now
And you’re a clever swine
But they were the only ones who ever stood by you...

What struck me last night was what a potent combination Morrissey and Johnny Marr were. Morrissey's lyrics could all too easily have tipped over into merely irritating/depressing maudlin self-pity; Johnny Marr's music could easily have been a little too saccharine-sweet. Both men's solo careers have arguably suffered from these respective traits at times. But put them together, and Marr's music tempers Morrissey's gloom, and Morrissey's lyrics give Marr's music some much-needed "edge" (not least on a song like There Is A Light That Never Goes Out, probably the best Smiths song of all).

I’m here with the cause
I’m holding the torch
In the corner of your room
Can you hear me?
And when you’re dancing and laughing
And finally living
Hear my voice in your head
And think of me kindly...

I do, Mozza, I do.

(Lyrics taken from Rubber Ring, from The World Won't Listen)

I was delighted to discover yesterday that the Lutheran Church uses a version of one of my favourite Collects, used in Lutheran Worship as the Collect for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost:

O God, the Protector of all that trust in You, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: increase and multiply upon us Your mercy that, You being our Ruler and Guide, we may so pass through things temporal that we finally lose not the things eternal; through Jesus Christ, Your Son, our Lord; who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

This called to mind a couple of references to this prayer (or rather, the version of it that appears as the Collect for the fourth Sunday after Trinity in the Book of Common Prayer) in the works of CS Lewis, firstly from The Screwtape Letters:

The Christians describe the Enemy as one “without whom Nothing is strong”. And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.

Discuss, with particular reference to blogging. No, on second thoughts, don't.

Lewis also refers to this Collect to memorable effect in his sermon, "A Slip of the Tongue" (from Screwtape Proposes a Toast):

Not long ago when I was using the collect for the fourth Sunday after Trinity in my private prayers I found that I had made a slip of the tongue. I had meant to pray that I might so pass through things temporal that I finally lost not the things eternal; I found that I had prayed so to pass through things eternal that I finally lost not the things temporal.

I know the feeling. Lewis expands on this point in the context of prayer:

I come into the presence of God with a great fear lest anything should happen to me within that presence which will prove too intolerably inconvenient when I have come out again into my "ordinary" life. I don't want to be carried away into any resolution which I shall afterwards regret ... Even repentance of past acts will have to be paid for. By repenting one acknowledges them as sins - therefore not to be repeated. Better leave that issue undecided.

More generally, we can be highly susceptible to those seductive words, "everything in moderation":

Our temptation is to look for the minimum that will be accepted. We are in fact very like honest but reluctant taxpayers. We approve of an income tax in principle. We make our returns truthfully. But we dread a rise in the tax. We are careful to pay no more than is necessary. And we hope - we very ardently hope - that after we have paid it there will still be enough left to live on.

But despite our constant "craving for limited liability, this fatal reservation", we still have hope:

Failures will be forgiven; it is acquiescence that is fatal, the permitted, regularised presence of an area in ourselves which we still claim for our own. We may never, this side of death, drive the invader out of our territory; but we must be in the Resistance, not in the Vichy government. And this, so far as I can yet see, must be begun again every day. Our morning prayer should be that in the Imitation: Da hodie perfecte incipere - grant me to make an unflawed beginning today, for I have done nothing yet.

Or as someone else put it: "the Old Adam in us should by daily contrition and repentance be drowned and die with all sins and evil desires, and that a new man should daily emerge and arise to live before God in righteousness and purity forever."

Willy Voet, former soigneur (i.e. team dealer physio) for the Festina cycling team, shares some details with us of Richard Virenque's preparations for a time trial in the 1997 Tour de France (from Le Tour by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, p.296):

Given his regular treatments of EPO and especially growth hormones, he was as ready as he would ever be. All he needed was a well-timed injection of caffeine, plus Solucamphre.

Oh dear.

Voet made these revelations during the investigations that followed the notorious 1998 Tour. Two days before the start of that year's race, Voet was stopped on the Belgian/French border in a Festina team car which proved to be "an enormous mobile pharmacy, containing just about every possible illicit performance-enhancing drug, from faintly démodé growth hormone to the tout ce qu'il y à de chic EPO, that formidable blood-strengthening potion erythropoietin" (p.294). Voet's not-especially-plausible first line of defence was that the drugs were intended for his own personal use only. The drugs scandal proceeded to taint the whole of that year's Tour.

Perversely - but perhaps characteristically - the French have continued to treat local boy Virenque as a sporting hero, despite his serving a twelve-month ban following l'affaire Festina; while at the same time spending the last six years yelling "dopé, dopé!" at Lance Armstrong, a man who has taken more dope tests, all negative, than any other cyclist.

Cynicism about Armstrong's achievements is perhaps to be expected given cycling's track record, even before the open scandals of the past few years. But I prefer to take his denials at face value. First and foremost, there's the eighth commandment to consider. But even apart from that, there are times when it is better to be an innocent dove than a (worldly-)wise serpent.

While it may be true some of the time that "cynic" is merely what an optimist calls a realist, the reflex cynicism so prevalent today - and I certainly don't exempt myself from this - is really a form of insecurity, founded on a desire not to appear stupid and naive. Cynicism - whether it's tapping the side of your nose archly while discussing Armstrong's "training regime", or hinting that dark forces within the White House deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, or insinuating that a public figure is homosexual - is a way of sending out signals that one is privy to secret, inside information on a particular topic or about a particular individual. It's a hedge against future revelations, to preserve one's "credibility".

Better (for your soul, if nothing else) to be saying "Say it ain't so, Joe!" through the tears, than "Oh yes, it's come out at last, knew it would some day", when in fact you knew nothing of the sort.

In his essay, "The Catholic Luther" (see my previous post), David Yeago argues that the turning point for Luther's theology - which has been variously dated at a number of times between 1513 and 1518 - should be dated in 1518, after Luther had already become embroiled in the controversy that followed his posting the 95 Theses. At this time, a shift occurred in which the "new center of Luther's theology of grace became the heart's confident assurance of the promised mercy of God in Christ, what he will later describe simply as 'the faith which grasps Christ,' fides apprehensive Christi", in contrast to the pre-1518 emphasis on the "trusting despair" in which "the sinner afflicted by grace discerns in his afflictions the saving hand of God". What brought about this change?

The most important thing that happened to Luther in 1518 was that he rethought his theology of grace in the context of the theology of the sacraments. This is indeed new; Luther seems to have paid no serious attention to sacramental theology until he got embroiled in the indulgence controversy ... The problem in sacramental theology that proved crucial for Luther was that of the relation among the outward sacramental action, the grace of God, and the faith required of the participant in the sacrament.

Luther struggled with this issue for several months, even coming out with proposals that had a distinct air of Zwinglianism about them. But:

What finally emerged in the summer of 1518 ... seems to have been shaped primarily by reflection on texts such as Matthew 16:19: "Whatever you loose on earth is loosed in heaven." To the question of the sacraments Luther finally responds that the concrete, external, public sacramental act in the Church is the act of Jesus Christ. When we come to the sacrament, we come to Jesus Christ: his word, his act, his authority...

This sacramental focus is crucial to understanding what Luther means by "faith" (which in turn is, of course, crucial for understanding what he means by "justification by faith alone"):

Faith is now sharply defined by this sacramental situation: faith is openness to and acknowledgment of Christ's authority in its concrete sacramental exercise. There is no other prerequisite than faith for the fruitful reception of the sacrament, because the sacrament is itself the public act in which Christ bestows his grace on the ungodly. The public sacramental life of the Church is now seen as the locus of assurance, of certitude, the place where an entirely undialectical salvific communication takes place ... [It] is in and through the public performance of the sacramental signs in the visible Church that grace is bestowed on those who believe.

The point is this: God's grace comes to us supremely through the Church's ministry of Word and Sacrament. At the very start of our Christian lives, Christ's minister baptizes us "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit". Week by week he absolves us, declaring that "I, as a called and ordained servant of the Word, announce the grace of God to all of you, and in the stead and by the command of my Lord Jesus Christ I forgive you all your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit". He proclaims the Gospel of the forgiveness of sins to us in the sermon.

He declares our Lord's Words of Institution ("This is my body given for you ... this cup is the new covenant in my blood, shed for you for the forgiveness of your sins) and then distributes the Lord's body and blood to us with the words, "Take, eat; this is the true body of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, given into death for your sins ... Take, drink; this is the true blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, shed for the forgiveness of your sins.", and dismisses us from the Lord's Table with the words, "The body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ strengthen and preserve you in body and soul to life everlasting."

Finally, he pronounces the blessing upon us at the end of the service: "The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you, the Lord look upon you with favour and +give you peace."

(Or rather, Christ Himself does all these things through His minister).

Thus the question of faith comes down simply to this: do you believe these promises that are declared to you by the pastor in the Divine Service, "in His stead and by the command of our Lord Jesus Christ"? It is not some abstract conception of the Gospel that we are to believe for the forgiveness of our sins, but the Gospel as proclaimed to us (and bestowed upon us) publicly and concretely through the ministry of the church, week by week. What Luther said of Baptism can be extended to all these "sacramental signs" in the church:

"Faith must have something which it believes, that is, of which it takes hold, and upon which it stands and rests. Thus faith clings to the water, and believes that it is Baptism, in which there is pure salvation and life" (Large Catechism, Holy Baptism, 29)

Hence the objection to non-liturgical or non-sacramental (or sacrament-lite) Christianity is not what people do not say, but what they do not hear. In a very important sense, those churches are actually lacking the Gospel. Not that they deny the Gospel or are completely without the Gospel, but that they lack the Gospel in the sense and in the context in which Christ intends it to be proclaimed: not merely the stating of facts about the forgiveness of sins, but a public declaration of the forgiveness of sins in a "performative" sense by which that forgiveness is actually bestowed upon us (see the Pontificator's post on "Justification by faith as a hermeneutical rule"). Thus faith, while not absent, is weakened by having little or nothing of which to take hold, or upon which to stand and rest. That's the tragedy of non-liturgical, non-sacramental forms of Christianity.

And conversely, far from being an individualistic doctrine in tension with (or even standing in opposition to) the church and its ministry, justification by faith is supremely a doctrine of the church, a doctrine which focusses our attention on the Gospel of Jesus Christ as proclaimed in Word and Sacrament in His church.

Josh recently linked to David Yeago's excellent 1996 article, "The Catholic Luther". While I'm sure many people will have read this article following Josh's link, there were a couple of key areas covered by Yeago that I wanted to look at in more detail.

In his article, Yeago argues that the key development in Luther's theology at the threshold of the Reformation is best understood as a "'catholic turn' that anchored Luther's work much more solidly within the framework of catholic Christianity", in contrast to the usual "Protestant reading of Luther's story", in which Luther's breakthrough is seen as coming about in "a historical, unmediated encounter with the naked Pauline kerygma", and Luther's teachings are seen "as saying something radically incompatible with anything said in the Church since the death of Paul (except perhaps for a few glimmers in Augustine)".

Of particular interest to me is Yeago's emphasis on Luther's developing sacramental theology as being the crucial point to consider, and my next post on this subject will look at this. But before we get to that, first of all let's look briefly at what Yeago says about Luther's early, pre-1518 theology.

Yeago argues that, before 1518, the driving force in Luther's theology (as distinct from his own struggles on a personal level) was not the question, "How can I get a gracious God?", but rather, "Where can I find the real God?". Luther's theological concern was the threat of idolatry rather than a craving for the assurance of forgiveness. In particular, how could we come to love God for His own sake, rather than just "using" Him for our own ends (the natural tendency of the sinful man, homo incurvatus in se, man turned in on himself).

Luther's initial approach to this problem of idolatrous self-seeking used what Yeago describes as a "strategy of contrariety":

It is a very specific, very simple, and quite perversely brilliant theological move. How can we tell that we are really clinging to God and not to an idol of our own? Luther answers that the gracious presence of the true God is so excruciatingly painful and distastefully unpalatable to our nature that we can have no imaginable self-interested motivation for enduring it.

"Therefore the excellent God, after He has justified and given His spiritual gifts, lest that ungodly nature rush upon them to enjoy them (for they are very lovely and powerfully incite to enjoyment), immediately brings tribulation, exercises, and examines, lest the person perish eternally by such ignorance. For thus a person learns to love and worship God purely, when one worships God not for the sake of His grace and gifts, but for Himself alone."

The problem is that we do not want to come into God's presence for God's sake, but for the sake of all the good things He can do for us: we want to use God. And Luther answers: If it is really God, then He will crucify and torture you as He did Christ, your pattern, and thus leave you no reason to cling to Him except for His own sweet sake.

Far from being a depressing and tormenting teaching, this early version of the theology of the cross "allows the sinner yearning for God under the cross a sort of paradoxical assurance, a sense of being at least in the appropriate place before God, which sustains the heart and enables it to endure to the end."

However, this was still a long way short of the "undialectical confidence in God's mercy that Luther later came to teach". In my next post, we will look at how Yeago describes the development of Luther's theology to encompass this straightforward sense of assurance. In particular, we will see that - while it is often supposed that Luther's teachings on the sacraments were incompatible with his teachings on justification by faith, a regrettable hold-over from his papist past - Luther's sacramental teachings are in fact inseparable from justification by faith, and justification by faith can only be properly understood in the light of the church's ministry of Word and Sacrament.

Revd Humann resurfaces with some beautiful (if slightly lairy) woodcuts from Luther's Bible, as republished in facsimile form by Taschen. The Taschen website includes a number of related goodies, including an essay on "The first bestseller in world history".

Yours for a mere £55 on Amazon.co.uk. The ELCE clearly pays its pastors way too much ;-).

In the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:15-20), our Lord Jesus Christ warned us to "Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves". How are we to recognise them? "You will recognize them by their fruits." Healthy trees - true prophets - bear good fruit; diseased trees - false prophets - bear bad fruit. Simple.

But what are the "fruits" by which we are to recognise true and false prophets? The answers which I've previously come across to this question normally fall into one of three broad categories:

1. Morality: Sooner or later, false prophets reveal their true character by moral failure in their lives.
   


2. Success: True prophets - good teachers - will generally find that their ministry is blessed by God, especially through conversions under their ministry.
   


3. Power: True prophets will demonstrate great spiritual power, not least through miracles attending their ministry.
   

Now, the third of these is given pretty short shrift by the Lord Himself, in the verses immediately following:

On that day many will say to me, "Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?" And then will I declare to them, "I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness."

But the other two, especially the first, probably represent between them the majority view of what the Lord meant by "fruit". And the two are indeed often linked: a "church" like ECUSA is, in large part, both morally bankrupt and spiritually impotent.

However, this view does have its difficulties. For example, there are many churches which have a faithful Gospel ministry but which see relatively little growth, or even a shrinkage of numbers. That scarcely means that their ministers are "false prophets". Equally, there are liberal or revisionist churches that attract large numbers of people. People may even be genuinely converted at a liberal church, since there is often plenty of Gospel inadvertently remaining in these churches (through the use of the liturgy and lectionary).

Furthermore, many "false teachers" are men of impeccable personal morals: Rowan Williams is an excellent example of this, a man who denies many biblical teachings, who has implied that St John was insane when he wrote parts of Revelation, and yet a man who is frequently commended for his personal holiness. And equally, we can all think of examples of apparently "sound" teachers who have undergone tragic collapses in their personal morality.

I was therefore interested to read what was, to me, a new perspective on this passage. The Luther Quest "chaplain", Pr Rolf Preus, has recently posted a devotional entitled Beware of False Prophets, in which he writes as follows (emphasis added):

You can recognize the false prophet by his fruit. A good tree bears good fruit and a bad tree bears bad fruit. The good tree is the tree of the cross upon which the Lord Jesus died for the flock. The sheep are fed and nourished by the fruit from this good tree, that is, the gospel and the sacraments that come from the crucified and risen Lord Jesus.

On Good Friday, water and blood flowed from the pierced side of Jesus right after He had borne in His sacred body the sin of the world. This was to signify that Christ would bring forgiveness and salvation to His people by means of Holy Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. These sacraments are the good fruit from that good tree. The gospel of the forgiveness of sins is the good fruit of that good tree ... No bad fruit can come from the tree of Christ’s crucifixion.

This then helps explain what the true "bad fruit" is by which we can recognise false prophets:

Just as the good tree cannot bear bad fruit, so also the bad tree cannot bear good fruit. False prophets practice nothing but lawlessness. They often make a big show of their devotion to an outward appearance of sanctity. In fact, they appear to be quite holy. That’s the sheep’s clothing. You know them by their fruits. They may claim allegiance to the Bible, but they don’t proclaim the message of Christ crucified for sinners.

They direct sinners elsewhere than to the vicarious suffering of Jesus. They do not preach the pure gospel of the full and free forgiveness of sins for Christ’s sake. They denigrate Holy Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, depriving God’s children of the great comfort the sacraments give. They substitute in the place of God’s saving gospel a message of human potential and human righteousness. This results in lawlessness. This false gospel cannot bear good fruit because it teaches sinners to put their confidence in their own flesh instead of in the blood and righteousness of Jesus.

So the outward moral behaviour (or, for that matter, the spiritual "success") of false teachers is not the fruit: it is the sheep's clothing that hides the ravening wolf within. The fruit is the message that is preached: a false teacher produces bad fruit, teaching that directs people away from Jesus Christ and Him crucified, away from the pure Gospel, away from Baptism, Absolution and the Lord's Supper.

Conversely, the good fruit of true prophets is also not their outward moral behaviour or the "success" of their ministries (though one would certainly hope for both these to be present). Rather, it is that they bring Christ to us and, with Him, forgiveness, life and salvation, through the preaching of the Gospel and the administration of the Sacraments. That is how we recognise the true prophet, in just the same way (this really shouldn't surprise us!) as we recognise the true church: by the presence of the Gospel and Sacraments.

While we're on the subjects of France and cycling (see previous post), I'm currently reading Geoffrey Wheatcroft's history of the Tour de France, Le Tour (at some point I'll have to get round to posting a positive review on Amazon, to counteract the undeserved negative comments currently on there, because I'm loving it; though I agree that Wheatcroft appears to have swallowed several dictionaries).

One particularly interesting figure from the 1930s and 40s is the Italian rider Gino Bartali, a devout Roman Catholic and twice-winner of the Tour. Wheatcroft writes:

[Bartali] was a wonderful rider, as well as one of the more attractive Tour winners, a simple Tuscan, a generous man who, in Italian races, had been known to let another rider win ahead of him when the man's promessa sposa was waiting at the line.

His sense of duty and piety was what everyone wrote and writes about Bartali: he made the pilgrimage to Lourdes, he ate with a statuette of the Madonna on the table, he thanked her for his successes. Maybe what's significant here is that his behaviour was thought noteworthy. The very fact that open devotion seemed quaint or amusing in a man from the homeland of Catholic Europe may have adumbrated the implosion of the Catholic Church a generation or two later, not least in Italy... (pp.128f.)

Bartali won the Tour in 1938, and he was one of the few pre-war riders to return to the Tour when it resumed in 1947. At the time, Italy was sliding into chaos, with its general elections reduced to proxy contests between the US and the USSR through their respective client parties - the Communists took a third of the vote in 1948 - and with talk of a possible civil war. During the 1948 Tour, Bartali took the maillot jaune early on, but then fell behind, and was twenty minutes off the lead by the time the Tour reached Cannes:

In Cannes Bartali took a telephone call. It was Alcide de Gaspari, the Christian Democrat leader ... [It] would be of huge benefit to Italy, to Christian civilization, and in particular to the Democristiani, [Gaspari] told Bartali, if he could just win one more stage. Bartali replied, "I'll do better than that, I'll win the Tour."

The next day he rode one of the heroic stages in Tour history, ten hours through the Alps over the passes of Allos, Vars and Izoard, to reach Briancon more than six minutes ahead of Schotte. Bartali was still a minute down on Bobet, but he won the next two stages, taking seven in all out of twenty-one, and rode into [Paris] on 25 July to win his second Tour de France, and much the more remarkable of the two. (pp.146f.)

By winning two Tours a decade apart, "Bartali achieved a feat no one had ever accomplished before and no one is ever likely to repeat" (p.147). But Bartali's greatest achievement came not in his cycling career, but while that career was interrupted by the Second World War - though he never mentioned this in his lifetime:

It only transpired months before the centennial Tour that Gino Bartali, hero of the 1938 and 1948 Tours, had shown still greater heroism in 1943-4. Working as a courier for a secret network, he smuggled documents to create false identity papers, and thus enable several hundred Italian Jews to escape deportation and death. Bartali did many good and brave things in his life, but nothing better or braver than this. (p.139)

For more information on "Gino the pious" - in particular, his rivalry with Fausto Coppi, in almost every respect Bartali's polar opposite (it seems most unlikely that anyone ever called Coppi "Fausto the pious") - see here and here.

Contrary the impression that this post may have given, I do in fact have a great love for France and for its language, food, culture, landscape, food etc, and would happily spend every holiday there if given the chance (though we're not going this year, due in part to the logistics of taking a baby abroad).

I was reminded of this last night, watching the documentary A Sunday in Hell, described, accurately, on the BBC Four website as "one of the best cycling films ever made ... [a] vivid and gruelling look at the 1976 Paris-Roubaix single-day bike race". The Paris-Roubaix is otherwise known as "the Hell of the North": 166 miles, much of it along the dreaded pavés, the crude cobbled country tracks that are still to be found in parts of northern France. It was a fascinating film, and also the first time I'd ever seen footage of Eddie Merckx in action. Merckx is still generally regarded as the greatest cyclist of all time (Lance Armstrong notwithstanding), though in fact he failed to win on this particular occasion.

So, unlike some members of the Lutheran Blogosphere I could mention :-), I have a lot of time for France. I even have a grudging admiration for (if not agreement with) its foreign policy, as does even a notorious neo-con warmonger like Mark Steyn. To mark Bastille Day last month, Steyn re-posted his article Surrender Monkeys (you'll need to scroll to the bottom of the page), in which he criticises the "cheese-eating surrender monkey" jibe as being an overly simplistic description of French foreign policy:

There are many idiotic incoherent leaders in the world, but Jacques Chirac is not among them. Say what you like about M. le President - call him irresponsible, call him unreliable, throw in shifty, devious, corrupt, and almost absurdly conceited. But he’s not stupid. The issue for the French is very straightforward: What’s in it for us?

...What’s not in it for France is that America should emerge with its present pre-eminence even more enhanced. France is in the business of la gloire de la republique, and since 1992 the main obstacle to that has been the post-Soviet unipolar geopolitical settlement. They are not temperamentally suited to being anyone’s sidekick: If Tony Blair wants to play Athens to America’s Rome, or Tonto to Bush’s Lone Ranger, or Sandy the dog to Dubya’s Little Orphan Annie, fine. The French aren’t interested in any awards for Best Supporting Actor. This isn’t quite the same as being a bunch of spineless appeasers...

What distinguishes French foreign policy is not la capitulation des singes qui mangent le fromage, but a steely-eyed self-interest, unhampered by concerns over what lesser nations might consider "hypocrisy":

Just before the Iraq war, there was a spot of bother in Ivory Coast. We can skip the details - President Wossname represents the southern Wotchamacallit tribe and they’re unpopular with natives in the northern province of Hoogivsadam. Something like that. But next thing you know, French troops have locked down the entire joint and forced both parties into a deeply unpopular peace deal that suits the Quai d’Orsay but nobody else. All of this while the UN is hunkered down in a month-long debate on whether to approve Article IV Sub-section 7.3 (d) of Hans Blix’s Baghdad hotel bill. Ivory Coast is nominally a sovereign state. The French have no more right to treat it as a colony than the British have to treat Iraq as a colony. But they do. And they don’t care what you think about it.

That's even before we consider the Rainbow Warrior, or French testing of nuclear weapons despite furious worldwide opposition. And it's easy to see what would happen if Osama went for the Big One:

Let’s say the Islamists had long-range WMDs. If they nuked Montpelier (Vermont), M. Chirac would insist that Bush needed to get a strong Security Council resolution before responding. If they nuked Montpellier (France), Iraq [shurely Iran, Mark?] would be a crater by lunchtime.

In short, France's strategic aim since the Second World War - and especially since 1989 - has been to neutralise American power by making it as difficult as possible for the US to exercise that power effectively:

You can’t beat the Americans on the battlefield, but you can tie them down limb by limb in the UN and other supranational bodies ... And, on this terrain, Paris figures, Americans always lose. Either they win but get no credit, as in Afghanistan. Or they win a temporary constrained victory to be subverted by subsequent French machinations, as in the first Gulf War. Through it all France is admirably upfront in its unilateralism: It reserves the right to treat French Africa as its colonies, Middle Eastern dictators as its clients, the European Union as a Greater France and the UN as a kind of global condom to prevent the spread of Americanization. All this it does shamelessly and relatively effectively. It’s time the rest of us were so clear-sighted.

Rick Ritchie (a frequent contributor to Modern Reformation) has set up a new online magazine called Old Solar, "a review of culture from a Lutheran perspective". Some good stuff, including fellow MR-er Rod Rosenbladt on "Learning to Think Theologically" (can't link to this, due to very weird URL), Charlie Mallie on Traditions: Cling to Them or Drop Them?, and Mark Pierson on The Da Vinci Code ("The Da Vinci Code is one of the most preposterous books I’ve ever read. No, wait – let me correct that statement: It is THE most preposterous book I’ve ever read.").

Oh, and some Brit or other.

While "Old Solar does not have a mission statement, because we think mission statements are dumb", as the home page puts it, the "Welcome to Old Solar" item gives a little more detail on the purpose of the site:

Old Solar magazine is named after the language of the unfallen races in C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy. We adopted the name not because we imagine our conversation to be unfallen, but because the name does convey some ideas that represent our purpose well: communication and a longing for a lost world.

This lost world is not an identifiable Golden Age from the past that we could return to by going back fifty or five-hundred years. It is a Golden Vision of what the peculiar strengths of past ages would look like combined together. Our cultural criticism may not directly reference this vision at all times, but it will always be in the background. As we are not a political movement, it may be that a Golden Vision is all we have to offer. Yet that should be a good enough reason to have a magazine.

If you like it, let me know what you think. If you don't, let Rick know instead. :-)