Evangelizing the Televangelized

Consider this. These Australians are mocking what they think is Christianity.



Can we all agree that what Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn and their like give us is not any form of Christianity? Yet unlike your local pastor and mine, these clowns are on television for everyone to see. Sadly, they are perhaps the only people claiming to speak for Christ who penetrate the secular worlds of people like these Australian television entertainers.

There is nothing that anyone can do to eliminate the supply of this nonsense. The right of free speech extends also to snake oil merchandising. But surely we can work on the demand side. Who are these people who are watching, and attending, and (most importantly) funding this stuff? Where are the missionaries to the televangelist audiences?

But I'll end on a light note. If you watch carefully at the end of the video, you can see one of the Aussie "faith healers" flip an old man in a wheelchair. (Let me add that ordinarily that would not be funny.) The tall guy at the very end turns and whacks someone. I didn't catch it until the third viewing.

Billy Graham's Long Shadow

When a friend recently told me that Woody Allen once interviewed Billy Graham, I thought he was joking. It seemed comparable to Groucho Marx interviewing Cornelius Van Til.

But here it is on YouTube. Billy actually does a great job turning Woody's irreverent jabs into gospel opportunities, and often topping the great comedian with fast and funny come-backs.





I do not know exactly when this interview took place, but my guess is the mid to late 1960s.

For the fun and sheer wonder of it, here is Billy Graham in 1949..



...and 1957...



...and 1971...



After sitting under the sound, Reformed, Evangelical ministry of Dr. Glyn Own at Knox Presbyterian Church in Toronto for 16 months, I came to saving knowledge of God after Billy Graham preached a New years Eve service at the IVCF 1984 Urbana Mission Conference.

We had been blessed for several days with the expository teaching of Rev. Eric Alexander from Glasgow. Through that I came to under stand the connection between the cross and my sin, between Christ's death and my life. That is the heart of the gospel.

Billy Graham closed our several days together--19,000 young people gathered at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champagne--with a New Year's Eve worship service. During that time, he told us to bow our heads and close out eyes. He asked us, If God were to call you to the mission field, would you go?" Anyone who would was to stand up. My friends, one on each side of me, stood up. They were missionary kids themselves. I did not stand because I had no desire to go off to the far reaches of the world, even despite what I had learned that week about the centrality of missionary work in the life of the church.

After the service, we went directly to out buses to take us wherever on the continent we were going. In the darkness of that bus on my way back to Toronto, I thought about what I had done--or rather not done--that night. By the grace of God I confronted myself, asking, "David! The Lord has given his Son to die for the payment of your sins, and if he tells you to go to Nepal or Brazil you're going to refuse him? You're going to withhold from the One who did not withhold his only Son, his beloved Son for you?" It made no sense at all. So I committed my self to serve him in any way he would direct me to serve him. I count my conversion from that point. I had received Christ as both Lord and Savior (his inseparable offices).

There are things with which I have disagreed in Billy Graham's ministry. The altar call is one of them. But that night--December 31, 1984--God used Billy Graham to bring me into his kingdom, perfecting the labors of others before him. I thank the Lord for Billy Graham.

Thoughts on Paedo-Communion

Calvin serving the Lord's Supper in Geneva

In his communion address this morning, my pastor compared the Lord's Supper to a family meal. As no passage came immediately to mind in support of this image, his remark distracted me as I pondered in what sense this might be true. Yes, the redeemed in Christ are adopted into the family of God. We are born again as brothers and sisters in Christ. And the Lord's Supper is certainly just that: a supper, and thus a meal.

But I quickly thought of what any paedo-communionists in the congregation would do with his image. "Yes," the would say. "Our children are not little pagans. They are part of the covenant family, as their baptism testifies. [True.] So why are they barred from the family meal?" This imaginary objection was troubling to me. So as I am entirely certain that serving communion to unconverted, unregenerate covenant children (paedo-communion) is an erroneous application of covenant theology, I was ready to jettison the family meal image as unhelpful, and confront the pastor at the door.

Then it occurred to me that the problem lay in a misunderstanding of the nature of the Christian spiritual family in contradistinction to the merely natural family. In the natural family, you come to life, then you live life, and then you die. In the spiritual family that is ours in Christ, however, you start out dead, then you come to life, and then you live life forevermore. Paedo-communionists miss this difference, and that is the root of their well-intentioned confusion. I would no sooner administer the communion elements to my infant children than I would to my deceased saintly grandfather (if I had one). Both of them are in my family. Both of them are included in the New Covenant. But both of them are dead, so to administer the bread and the wine to either one of them would be inappropriate at this time.

Finding Grace in the Sinner's Place

Stanley Voke was a pastor in England in the years following World War II. I once heard him quoted in a sermon as having said: “There is in all of us a struggle to get and keep our own righteousness, which is why it is so hard to come to the sinner’s place.” It stuck with me because it goes powerfully to the very heart of the gospel.

Today, I found a longer statement from Mr. Voke on the subject. It is said to be taken from the second chapter of his book, Reality: The Way of Personal Revival. I found this wonderful exhortation on the Peacemaker website.

The Sinner's Place

BY STANLEY VOKE

"Nothing in my hand I bring, Simply to Thy Cross I cling."

The hardest thing for anyone is to take the sinner's place. So hard in fact that many never take it at all, while others, having once been brought there, do not care to come there again. None are by nature fond of the sinner's place. Yet if we do not come there, we cannot really know Christ or taste the sweetness of God's forgiving grace. If we avoid it, we might as well say "we have no sin" and so deceive ourselves.

TAKING THE SINNER'S PLACE

The sinner's place is where we accept without excuse that we are sinners. We may admit only one sin such as jealousy or pride; we may be convicted of something that seems small, but in so doing we have come again to the sinner's place-though we may have been Christians for many years. Behind each sin God may show us things more serious until not one but many things are admitted and we are brought to admit the whole radical evil of our nature. A man once confessed he had stolen a rope. He brought it back. The next day he returned, this time bringing a cow he had been unwilling to admit was on the end of the rope! When we take the sinner's place, we admit the truth about ourselves-the whole truth.

The sinner's place is where we take blame. We stop excusing ourselves and saying, "I was not really myself when I did that." Instead we bow our head saying, "Yes, Lord, that was me; that is what I am really like." We no longer blame our nerves, our circumstances, or other people. Should someone point out some fault or criticize us, even unkindly, we do not argue and justify ourselves or try to explain things away. We even admit to the critic that if he knew us as we really are he would find much else to criticize. We save endless time and breath when we come quickly to the sinner's place. Indeed things would be different in many a church if the members met regularly there at the sinner's place.

This is the place David took as, when Nathan challenged him, he bowed his head saying, "I have sinned." Here Job stood and cried, "Behold, I am vile," and Isaiah said, "Woe is me! For I am undone." Here the publican prayed, "God be merciful to me a sinner"; here Peter fell at the feet of Jesus saying, "Depart from me; for I am a sinful man." In this place, the prodigal son confessed "Father, I have sinned and am no more worthy." Paul often knelt in the sinner's place and many a saint has watered it with his tears. If we have not come here, we have not yet begun with God (2Sa 12:13, Ps 51:4, Job 40:4, Isa 6:5, Lk 18:13, Lk 5:8, Lk 15:18).

We do not like the sinner's place for we are afraid it will hurt our pride. So we fight, argue, put others in the wrong, excuse ourselves, and in fact do anything rather than take the sinner's place where God awaits to forgive and set us free.

AVOIDING THE SINNER'S PLACE

Often, we avoid this place because we will not call sin, sin. We talk of shortcomings, failures, weaknesses, frailties, faults, disabilities, propensities; anything but sin. A rose by any other name is just as sweet, and sin by any other name is just as evil-to God. The trouble is we make our own definitions instead of accepting God's. In the Scripture, sin is anything short of the glory of God, anything that misses the mark of moral perfection or crosses the line of God's will, anything that is twisted from the plumbline of Divine righteousness whether it be in motive, desire, intention, instinct, thought, habit, look, word, deed, reaction or relationship. If done heedlessly or in ignorance, it is still sin and to call it something else needing neither repentance nor forgiveness is to avoid the sinner's place.

We can refuse to see sin as sin. Maybe we are active people who have no time to bother with such trivialities. We have our positions and programs to maintain. Like Naaman, we are busy winning our laurels while we cover our leprosy. We address meetings, chair committees, take on jobs, give money to this and that-in fact do anything-except confess ourselves spiritual lepers who need to wash and be clean. We are as those in Jeremiah's day who rushed like horses into battle but never stopped to repent or say, "What have I done?" We are so very busy-too busy ever to stand in the sinner's place (Jer 8:6).

We may avoid this place by assuming the role of correctors. With our doctrines neatly tied up, we are evangelical experts with a keen sense of theological smell. We love to correct but not to be corrected. Like the Pharisees of old we keep ourselves out of the sinner's place by putting others in. We are so full of knowledge that we have no room for a broken and contrite heart. Yet even Henry Martyn, great saint as he was, recorded in his diary, "I have resolved never to reprove another except I experience at the same time a peculiar contrition of heart!" He found he needed to live in the sinner's place.

We may avoid this place by making our security in Christ a pretext for non-repentance. We are assured of our salvation, yet somehow we are no longer convicted of sin. We are like the small boy who, when sent from the table to wash his hands, returned with a big smile and the astonishing remark, "Well, they've had such a wash this time they'll never need to be washed again."

We are by faith sons of God and citizens of heaven. But we are still sinners as well. We still need to wash at "the fountain opened for sin and for uncleanness " (Zec 13:1). Grace will never lead us into sin, but it will ever convict us of it, and sin thus revealed will always lead us back to grace. It is possible to avoid the sinner's place by misapplying the blood of Christ, speaking of it as "covering" or "protecting" as did the blood of the Passover lamb. The sacrifice of Christ on Calvary, however, was for sin.

It is an atoning, not simply a protecting agent. If therefore we need it, we do so as sinners coming for cleansing, not as sinless ones needing only to be secured from evil outside ourselves. When we speak only of the blood protecting us, we are avoiding the sinner's place. A student of Spurgeon (a well known English preacher) once preached before him on "The Whole Armor of God." A conceited young man, he dramatized his message, putting on the armor piece by piece, until, having fortified the whole, he waved the sword of the Spirit and cried triumphantly, "And where is the devil now?" Mr. Spurgeon leaned forward and said, "Young man, he's inside that armor!"

We must watch that we do not let Satan in by forsaking the sinner's place. Our hearts are deceitful above all things and, like the mythological Proteus, will adopt any guise to hide their true nature. Beneath our spiritual phraseology and church reputation we are but poor sinners, who need to be cleansed every day in the blood of Jesus.

FINDING GRACE IN THE SINNER'S PLACE

Is it not strange that the place we sinners avoid is the very one the sinless Savior took? Surely if He were the Son of God He would have come down from the Cross! Miracles, mighty sermons, even resurrection itself we could expect of such a One, but not a baptism in Jordan with publicans and harlots, or a criminal execution with murderers and thieves! Yet this is where He came, for His face was set towards this place from all eternity.

There on the same level a sinner met Him that day. Unlike his comrade who died blaming others and cursing God, this dying thief admitted guilt and found forgiveness. Peace and paradise came to him as he took the sinner's place and found Jesus there. This is the paradox of grace. He who insists he is right will be pronounced wrong, while he who admits he is wrong will be declared right. The righteousness of God is only given to those who stand in the sinner's place.Here and here alone is the place of true peace, for here we cease our strivings and find our God. Here is rest of heart and heaven's door. Here we cast away our pretense, and admit what we really are. Here we come to Jesus to be cleansed by His precious blood. Here the Holy Spirit fills and holiness is found. Here are the springs of revival. This is where the whole church needs to come again and again. It is the place of truth and grace and freedom-the sinner's place. When were you last there? In fact, are you there now?

Kids Don't Need You To Be Cool

This is hilarious. How much does your church's youth ministry resemble this?



In your church's youth ministry, what is the role of, or attitude toward:

1. the Scriptures?

2. prayer?

3. pop culture?

4. prudence?

First of all, your church's youth pastors should be...the parents! Your church's youth ministry should be one that equips parents to disciple their own children, i.e. to be godly parents.

But if you must have a youth pastor, remember that kids don't need someone just like themselves except older, nor do they want that. They need godly maturity in someone who loves them, but who loves God even more.

The church I first attended and where I first heard the gospel was Knox Presbyterian Church in Toronto. They had a youth pastor, but he was not young. He was once young. He was a soccer star in Ireland in the 1950s who came out to Canada at the invitation of Rev. William Fitch. I can't comment on the state of his ministry in the 1950s, but when he retired in the early 1980s, he was loved and admired by all the young people in the church and neighborhood. At that point, he certainly wasn't cool, but he was everything those kids needed and he led great numbers of them to Christ, and to ever greater maturity in Christ.

Gospel, Church, and Culture

I think this is from Mark Driscoll, the Mars Hill Church pastor in Seattle.



Diagrams and models like this can be very helpful. For example, I think it was a church-growth PCA guy (Scotty Smith?) who described the work of the church as "upreach, inreach, and outreach." It's a poetic way of saying, "You have to be all of these because they're related, and your church life is incomplete without any one of these activities."

I think that this broad distribution of emphasis (I'm avoiding the word "balance") is related to what I was getting at in my Multi-polar Christian Piety post a while ago.

Explaining Francis Bacon

Lytton Strachey's question, "Who has ever explained Francis Bacon?," still hangs over Bacon scholarship (Elizabeth and Essex, A Tragic History. Butler Press, 2007; p.9). Perez Zagorin identified the puzzle at the very outset of his book, a study of Bacon's life and thought entitled simply Francis Bacon (Princeton, 1998) :

Francis Bacon lived two separate but interconnected lives. One was the meditative, reserved life of a philosopher, scientific inquirer, and writer of genius, a thinker of soaring ambition and vast range whose project for the reconstruction of philosophy contained a new vision of science and its place in society. The other was the troubled insecure life of a courtier, professional lawyer, politician, royal servant, adviser, and minister to two sovereigns, Elizabeth I and James I, who from early youth to old age never ceased his quest for high position and the favor of the great (p.3).

He could have practiced law, a profession for which he trained at Gray's Inn. Indeed, many suggested that he solve his financial difficulties by pursuing that option, but he simply refused. He could have sought an academic position, but that would not have satisfied him. He desired political office. Though he combined both scientist and politician in his soul, he was fundamentally a man of politics.

On the political side of Bacon's life and character, the puzzle has two aspects. On the one hand, Zagorin tells us that Bacon's political ambitions,

...absorbed a large part of his time and energy, pitting himself against rivals in a continual competition for office and power, diverting him from pursuing some of his most cherished intellectual goals, and forcing him to leave his main philosophical enterprise fragmentary and unfinished (ibid.).

This unceasing quest for ever higher political office raises the question, why would someone so committed to the benefit of the human race through a radical reorientation of the intellect, as Bacon was, concern himself so obsessively with political climbing for the whole of his adult life? While public service is honorable and requires people of ability and integrity for it to be done well, there were many others who were highly qualified to take up that task, whereas Bacon alone had the insight and learning to carry on what he called "the great instauration of man over the universe."

In Of The Interpretation of Nature Proemium, Bacon justifies his tireless pursuit of political power by the ability it would give him to support co-ordinated, publicly useful scientific inquiry with the requisite human and financial resources. He had in mind something like the National Science Foundation, or, better yet, Salomon's House as he describes it in New Atlantis. Thus, Bacon reconciles his two seemly incompatible and personally consuming goals, the scientific and the political, by interpreting the political enterprise in terms of the scientific one. Zagorin, by accepting this explanation, comes across like a woman who believes the sweetly spoken but not entirely plausible stories of her cheating husband (or vice versa; pp. 57f.). He produces no evidence that Bacon actually used what power he had at any given point to give significant support to the work of science as he was planning it out.

Bacon's explanation is unconvincing especially coming from a man who calculated his actions as carefully as he did. It was surely true that he could use the power of his political office to support his scientific project, but the effort that such a plan required was disproportionate to anything he could reasonably hope to obtain. The likelihood of his success not only in achieving a sufficiently powerful position in government, but also in holding that position long enough to accomplish his goals, and then also in actually using it to advance his grand project by arranging the cooperation of whoever else was necessary was uncertain at best, and unpromising at worst. As it turned out, he did not become Lord Chancellor until 1618 at the age of sixty, just eight years before his death, a position he held for only three years before his scandalous downfall. As a plan, it's comparable to betting your nest egg at the dog track. It is an unbaconian reliance on fortune.

Given his extraordinary learning and eloquence, it would have been a more efficient use of Bacon's time with a more promising outcome if he had pursued his projects from a position of academic and literary prominence, and used his powerful persuasive abilities to enlist the great in his cause. But Bacon had no interest in a life so far removed from the direct exercise of political power and its attendant honors. Zagorin himself notes that, "Bacon was irresistibly attracted to politics and would never willingly retire into a private existence" (p.4). Indeed, he never did. Even after he was deposed from power as a result of the bribery scandal, instead of turning his full attention to writing and publishing for a more lasting legacy, he continued to beg and claw for power, even if only the right to take his seat in the House of Lords.

(Bacon himself gives us reason not to take him at his word on this public spirited justification for his political ambition. Bacon scholars are remarkably credulous when it comes to Bacon's public affirmations of traditional morality and notions of virtue. But that is another investigation.)

The second aspect of the puzzle of Bacon's politics is the great difficulty he had in accomplishing his goals. He was frequently passed over, and accomplished what ranks he did only by constantly "asserviling" himself, as he lamented near the end of his life. His difficulties were not for lack of talent and intelligence, however. Zagorin's judgment is that people generally saw through his deceits and were repelled by them, earning him distrust rather than influence. Bacon was a great admirer of Machiavelli, but seemed to lack the virtu to be a successful Machiavellian. He was a notorious dissembler and manager of his own image for political purposes. "I had rather know than be known" (Promus of Formularies and Elegancies in Works XIV:13). Zagorin is also very clear on this point.

The subjects of secrecy, esoteric communication, and the techniques of managing people also came into his works. In his personal relationships with the great and powerful whose favor he desired, his preferred methods were dissimulation, subservience, and flattery... (p.14).

Like an orphan who is radically alone and vulnerable in a hostile world, Bacon saw only rivals (like Coke) and instruments (like Essex, the queen herself, and later the king). Zagorin sees this. Bacon, he says, "...regarded other persons purely as means he could exploit to attain his own ends. His object was to aggrandize himself by craft, flattery, and displaying himself in the best possible light" (p.20). One suspects that those who were neither obstacles nor of any use him politically, he used in some other way.

Zagorin identifies Bacon's two contradictory lives, but in fact he had three lives. Whereas his political life compromised his philosophic life, his sexual life compromised his political one. Zagorin spends more than two pages of his short biographical chapter exploring this issue. If Bacon wanted the safest path to high office, then--like Elizabeth, his queen--it would have been prudent of him to commit himself to chastity. He did not.

These contradictions are puzzling only if one accepts Bacon as a genuine philosophical philanthropist with an inscrutable political fixation. On the contrary, it is more reasonable to interpret his scientific project in light of his political ambitions. By this I mean not his politics narrowly conceived (Solomon, Martin, Leary?), but his highest political ambition. He did after all express his philosophic project in strikingly and consistently political language.

Zagorin sets aside his knowledge of Bacon's political obsessions, however, when he turns to consider him as a philosopher. "It is evident that in Bacon's mind the project of developing a philosophy capable of multiplying knowledge and discovery by a true interpretation of nature was his highest, most cherished aim and that to this enterprise other intellectual pursuits were secondary" (p.27). This does not account for his distracting political ambitions, however. If the philosopher is, as Plato says, the one who leaves the cave to pursue the truth, and who would rather remain above, disengaged from the city's concerns, especially the daily concerns, to pursue an understanding of the truth without distraction, then Bacon was no philosopher. He was obsessed with the cave, in particular with it's honors and privileges. He could not even enjoy a graceful retirement in quiet writing and study.

Bacon is tragic figure. He was a man of soaring personal ambition of the sort that would naturally benefit the human race, and indeed has. But he allowed himself to be distracted from his highest goals and most lasting glories by lesser and incompatible accomplishments and pleasures.

Who But God...?

For several years, there has been an email circulating with pictures of a rare flower from Thailand called the Parrot Flower. It is a form of Internet apologetics that asks, "Who but God could do this?"





Just as there are people who fabricate things like this--I assume to make Christians look gullible--so too there are people who call anything of this sort a hoax because it makes the Christian's point a little too nicely.

But Hoax-Slayers tells us that this is indeed the rare Impatiens psittacina that grows in Thailand, Myanmar and portions of east India. Psittacina means "parrot-like."

"[I]nformation about the plant was first published in 1901 in the Curtis Botanical Journal Magazine by the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker. And the now famous photographs included above were taken by a Thai grower of the plant in 2001."

For the full story on these remarkable creatures, go to The Exotic Rainforest and for more pictures, consult the same folks here.

It is marvelous that God would limit such a glorious work to so small a region, the way he places beautiful, colorful fish in the deep depths of the ocean where no one can see them.

The Devil Is In The Antitheses

Donald A. Carson, Prof. of New Testament
Trinity Evangelical Divinity School

On the Emerging Church movement:

So which shall we choose?

Experience or truth? The left wing of an airplane, or the right? Love or integrity? Study or service? Evangelism or discipleship? The front wheels of a car, or the rear? Subjective knowledge or objective knowledge? Faith or obedience?

Damn all false antithesis to hell, for they generate false gods, they perpetuate idols, they twist and distort our souls, they launch the church into violent pendulum swings whose oscillations succeed only in dividing brothers and sisters in Christ.

Donald Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church, p. 234.

You can hear D. A. Carson's sermons at SermonAudio.com.

His Sheep Follow Him

If the elders in Christ's church were like these sheep dogs, and if we were to obey them the way these sheep obey these sheep dogs, the church would be more beautiful and glorious in its life on earth as what you will see in this amazing display of synchronized shepherding.



We continue to unfold glories from God's creation, and parables of his kingdom.

The great chapter in which Jesus describes himself as the Good Shepherd is chapter 10 of The Gospel According to John.

"He who enters by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice" (vv. 2-4 ESV).

"My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand" (vv. 27-28).

The Sportsman and the Well Lived Life

These displays of upper body strength are a wonder to behold.




Amazing as they as, however, I wonder how important it is that they do not actually accomplish anything. The Guinness Book of World Records contains accounts of many things that in themselves are impressive but that more broadly considered are utterly pointless. Sitting on a pole for a very long time comes to mind. After initially admiring the record holder's stamina, or whatever, one cannot help but ask if this is the best use of the fellow's time.

Much of what passes for sports strikes me the same way. Much of modern athletic competition combines the awesome and the trivial--rare human ability combined with fruitless endeavor. But it has not always been so. Many athletic competitions have their origins in agriculture and warfare. Consider the Scottish highland games. Large men throwing things and pulling ropes are practicing competitively what they ordinarily they do on their farms. Consider also the Olympic Games. Traditionally, what do you see? Running. Throwing the javelin. Wrestling. Riding. Shooting. Each of these games, in its original conception, was a display of strength and skills in public competition that were useful in vitally important enterprises. The athletic achievement was not ultimately for its own sake but had reference to these larger, life-sustaining activities.

Those activities--subduing the earth by one's labor and subduing one's enemies in battle--face daunting challenges and so require awesome human accomplishments when done well. We celebrate those accomplishments, and thus also encourage them, by these competitions.

Athletics are healthy both physically and psychologically. I knew a man for whom golf was an antidote to depression. It keeps my parents young and limber. Athletics are also good for the character of the young, when done properly. Wrestling in high school impressed good habits of discipline in me. It is said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Athletics can be serious business.

But athletics becomes trivial when it becomes merely entertainment, amusement, diversion. Though baseball played at its best involves amazing feats of skill and strength, it is of no consequence whether the Yankees or the Red Sox wins the World Series. (Put aside your partisan passions and admit it.) The same is true of the the feats of upper body strength in this video. Yes, they are astounding, but to what end? It is true that they are beautiful, and that is good in itself. It brings out more fully the glory of God's creation. That's wonderful, but God calls us to put his marvelous creation to godly use.

Why do we celebrate these isolated acts of strength and skills without context? Perhaps we no longer believe in ends, but we still can't help be impressed by the means by which we once pursued those ends.

Athletics of this sort remind me of what has become of art. We have removed it from the churches and great houses because so many of us no longer believe in church and great families. So too, now that agriculture and war are mechanized, we can appreciate the yeoman and the warrior in isolation of what called forth the heights of their achievements. We can appreciate their virtuosity without their virtue.

Art has become abstract not only in its form, but also in its placement (if that's right way to put it). We deprive it of any meaningful setting. It goes straight from studio to gallery, unless one turns a living room into a gallery. Art used to serve a function. It used to communicate a story or remember a relative or a person of great accomplishment. It helped us see the special beauty of a landscape or even of a beggar child. What I'm questioning is the value of athletics when it becomes so self-referential, so self-sufficient that it becomes comparable to art-divorced-from-life.

Am I being overly pragmatic in all of this? Disgracefully utilitarian? What about beauty for its own sake? It is possible, however, to appreciate the aesthetic aspect of a beautiful act or artifact and still set it to work in something that has a larger meaning. It's not so much utility that I have in mind, as it is some larger meaning or narrative, or the affirmation of an important truth, as art does when it is done well.

Slow Down and Behold the Glory of God

"Densmore Shute Bends the Shaft, 1938"
Dr. Harold Edgerton,
the M.I.T. professor who pioneered the art of high-speed photography

Advances in technology have allowed us to observe a level of glorious detail in God's creation that has been previously hidden from us. Dr. Harold Edgerton at M.I.T. pioneered the art of high speed photography, allowing us to see the remarkable movements of the hummingbird, the golfer's swing, and a bullet's path of destruction through an apple.



Here is a marvelous video various slow motions we have the privilege of seeing, now even from the convenience of a home computer.



To top it off, you now have the privilege of doing the high speed photography easily with your own camera, as David Pogue of the New York Times demonstrates.



Now he tells us that Casio has reproduced the capability of that $1000 SLR camera in a pocket sized $350 camera ("Cameras With Time-Machine Powers").

It's not technology that's amazing, nor even we technologists, but God who made this wonderful world, the fullness of whose wonders we are far from exhausting.

O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder,
Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

When through the woods, and forest glades I wander,
And hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees.
When I look down, from lofty mountain grandeur
And see the brook, and feel the gentle breeze.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

And when I think, that God, His Son not sparing;
Sent Him to die, I scarce can take it in;
That on the Cross, my burden gladly bearing,
He bled and died to take away my sin.

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation,
And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart.
Then I shall bow, in humble adoration,
And then proclaim: "My God, how great Thou art!"

Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

"O Store Gud," written by Swedish pastor, Carl Gustaf Boberg (1859-1940) in 1891. Translated into English in 1949 by Stuart Hine, a missionary to Russia where he encountered the hymn.

God's Glory in Craig Smith's Praise

Back in the old days when I listened to the radio and "taped" songs on "cassettes," one night I chanced upon a startlingly beautiful and, it seemed to me, suitably worshipful song of praise from a fellow named Craig Smith. Years later I looked for the singer and the song, but without finding a trace of them. Then came iTunes...still nothing.

Then today, looking for suitable YouTube videos for a Sabbath afternoon, I thought to look up this Craig Smith tune for which I had no title.

Here it is! "We come to thee, O Lord, and bow before the God of Israel." It is very reverent, as songs of God's praise ought to be. I have always found that it communicates "lost in wonder, love, and praise" very effectively, especially in the crescendo at the end. (Don't the download buttons for iTunes etc. get your hopes up.)

Jehovah - Craig Smith

Here is another rediscovered from long ago: "Your heart is what the Father desires...Fashion in me a heart that's thirsting for you." That's what it's all about, folks.

Pure Heart - Craig Smith

One last song. This one is very John Michael Talbotesque.

Lord of all the Earth - Craig Smith

If you know anything about this album or this artist, or even the woman who sings on the "Jehovah" track, please let me know. He has a website for his music, and he appears to be a pastor in Arkansas. I would buy the album if I only could. And, as I am a Scotsman, that's saying a lot.

Multi-polar Christian Piety

In Streams of Living Water, Richard Foster presents a thought provoking thesis: Among the various Christian traditions, there are several “streams” of piety, features of a healthy well-rounded Christian life, both personal and corporate, that do not converge in any one tradition, but each of which is characteristic of one or another tradition. The streams he identifies are prayer, personal holiness, charismatic gifts, compassion, Word-centeredness, sacraments, and he offers historical, biblical and contemporary examples from various traditions—evangelical, contemplative, social justice, etc. Well, there are problems with his list of streams. Most fundamentally, if you are not word-centered, what exactly is the character of your sacraments (are they man made?), the expression of your compassion (is it just secular ideology?), the form of your personal morality (is it legalism?), and your ecstatic experiences (are they even real?)?

But I found the general concept quite thought provoking. It gave form to something I had been stewing over for some years. I would put it this way. There are indeed, as I said, various features of a healthy, well-rounded Christian life, both personal and corporate. I would identify, perhaps not exhaustively, word-centeredness, theological orthodoxy, reverence, joy, community-love, mercy-love, and mission-love. Devotion to God under the authority of his word has to be fundamental. That is not always accompanied by theological orthodoxy, and vice versa, but the former should develop into the latter, and orthodoxy should found itself on the Word. Love is the mark of a Christian, but this takes various forms. There is the love that a body of believers has for one another as a community, a love they have for the helpless and suffering (who may or may not be among them), and a love they have for the lost, both near and far.

A faithful Christian who eagerly seeks the kingdom of God, who seeks to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, will try to understand all of these features and realize them in practice. But when he does he finds them frustratingly elusive...especially if he tries to realize them all together at once...and even more so if he tries to get there in community with other similarly zealous Christians. It is one of the “tensions” of the Christian life.

A tension is a situation in which you are drawn equally between two incompatible options. They are both good, perhaps even necessary. As such, they both beckon you. But as soon as you attempt to embrace one, you lose the other. What makes it a tension is that you cannot simply opt for one of the poles. By the very nature of things, to do so would bring great unhappiness of some sort. This is a particularly complex tension because it is multi-polar. As a result of the fall, we can never grasp all of these characteristics at once. When you try to grab onto one that you are missing, you lose at least one of those you had. The key to living with this problem is understanding that there are these multiple poles and that they are elusive this side of the Lord’s Second Coming.

This multi-polar model for understanding the complexity and difficulty of the fullness of Christian piety strikes me as useful for understanding the degree of dissatisfaction that many thoughtful and spiritually growing Christians feel toward their churches or church traditions, as well as the frustration we experience when we try to bring ourselves and our churches into greater conformity with biblical holiness.

The awareness of the multi-polar nature of a complete, biblical picture of the church and of the Christian life engenders greater humility in us when we assess other traditions, and honesty in our appreciation their strengths. It also encourages cautious and chastened expectations in one’s own pursuit of this multi-polar centering, and the understanding that the pursuit of that centering is indeed just that: a centering, as opposed to a linear rush forward from one spiritual objective to the next.

For example, Eastern Orthodoxy excels in reverence, but that comes with iconographic idolatry, Marianic mediation, and the subordination of Scripture to a tradition. Contemporary American Evangelicals have a joy that is alien to other traditions, but they are impoverished by theological indifference, individual self-absorption, and historical solipsism. Historically Reformed churches preserve theological orthodoxy with great precision, but they tend to be emotionally reserved, formalistic, and socially inward looking. The parish church offers community, but typically nothing else.

Clearly the poles are not simply equal in importance. Given the nature of the Christian religion as a faith because it is a gracious gift from God rather than a spiritual labor by men, a minimal theological orthodoxy is a sine qua non. There must also be love. “Without love you are nothing.” But love is the fruit and indication of salvation, not the means of appropriating it as a properly informed faith is. The same is true of joy and reverence.

The image of multi-polar centeredness appears to suggest the need for “balance” in the Christian life, but that is misleading. It is not as though one needs to compromise a truth over here or a virtue over there or a relationship in another direction in order to become a well-centered, biblical Christian, i.e., godly. Otherwise, loving people with God’s perfect love or embracing God’s revealed truth accurately in every point of blessed detail would be “going to an extreme” and would preclude living a godly Christian life. But how can perfectly godly love make one ungodly? How can believing the entire Bible make someone unbiblical in any way? There is a sense in which one cannot truly embrace any of the poles except in the center. Joyless orthodoxy is, in a way, a betrayal of orthodoxy.

The trickiness of living life centered between the poles is not a problem inherent in the poles. In themselves, they are perfectly in harmony with one another. In fact, they harmonized perfectly in the sinless life of Christ, who is the very image of God and the Word of truth. He understood, affirmed, and lived out the poles to their fullest. The problem is in us, living as we do in this "Already and Not Yet" condition this side of the parousia. So even a church that intellectually affirms all the poles and understands them biblically will nonetheless find them maddeningly and even divisively elusive in practice.

So with all this unsatisfying and dogged imperfection, what’s a poor pilgrim to do? Knowing the multi-polar ideal, a Christian must settle himself in a church that he conscientiously judges to be the best centered among these elusive poles. The centering Christian must then—grace permitting—hold to what is good, and then humbly, cautiously cultivate what is missing.