Transcription
Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Katherine. Thank you very much, David, and all of you. It's very good to be here.
Uh, I don't think in Britain there is anything called an ethical culture society, as far as I know. Perhaps our culture is unethical, or our ethics are uncultured, or something.
Uh, so this is an interesting place, which is neither a church, nor a cinema, nor a theater. And, and that this is New York, so excellent. Uh, I always, I always learn something new when I come to New York.
Um, and there are all sorts of things I would love to talk to you about this evening, and our time is limited. And I do want, as David said, to flag up some of the issues in this book. After you believe, I know some of you have heard on MP3 or whatever, a lecture that I gave in Fuller Seminary just over a year ago, which was a kind of flyer for this book before I'd written it. And so I will come through some of that material, and perhaps it bears repeating, and perhaps that's all right.
But, uh, picking up what Katherine was saying, I want to start by showing you how I got into this topic. Because actually, most people who write about the New Testament have not written about character formation or virtue, and vice versa. People who do that sort of ethical theory don't normally go to the Bible to do it. They do it on, on the basis of other philosophical texts and so on.
Um, and I came in really rather by the back door, because of the work that I'd been doing and writing about on the final hope. And both Katherine and David mentioned this, life after, after life after death. So many of us in the Western church, be it Catholic or Protestant, be it conservative or liberal, be it charismatic or Evangelical, all of us since the Middle Ages have thought in terms of dying and going to either heaven or hell.
I've just reread C.S. Lewis's book, *The Great Divorce*, which many of you will know. One of the first writers in recent Western times to question the idea that heaven and hell are equal and opposite. And Lewis argues for this very strong, physical, solid vision of the new world which God has for his people. Call it Heaven, if you like, though the Bible actually calls it the new heavens and the new earth. Because for many of us, the word Heaven implies a kind of non-physical, purely spiritual existence, which is certainly not what the Bible has in mind.
And then for Lewis, hell is this rather thin, ulated, shrunken little existence, which is very next, very near to the denial of existence altogether. Because that's really what hell is. Hell is saying no to everything that God, the Creator, gives and does and wants for his people. Saying, "Okay, I see that, but I'm going to stick with my own stuff." And so you shrink, and so you become smaller, and so you become really unable to sit there, equal and opposite with Heaven.
So anyway, I was working on this idea of the new heavens and the new earth as a re-embodied, indeed, more than re-embodied hope. I've often said to people, when you read 2 Corinthians 5, and Paul talks about our desire is not to be unclothed, but to be more fully clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up with life. And the image I've often used is this: you know how it is if a friend has been really sick and taken a long time off work, and they've been in the hospital, and you go and visit them after a while, and you come away and you say, "Poor old so-and-so, he's just a shadow of his former self." The good news of the resurrection hope is that if you are in Christ, if you are indwelt by the Spirit, you are just a shadow of your future self.
There is a real you, which is more you than you can even begin to imagine. Uniquely you. God made you to reflect in some unique way, a particular facet of his glory and his love out into the world. And when you are in Christ and indwelt by the Spirit, you do that more and more. You become more uniquely yourself. Evil, despite what the media tell you, makes you boring, shuts you in, makes you a clone of all sorts of other people who are doing much the same tedious sort of stuff. When you are seized by Christ and indwelt by the Spirit, he will make you more truly yourself.
That's part of the paradox. We live in a culture which says, "You've got to be yourself, find yourself, discover yourself." And Jesus says, "Yes, that's what you're going to do. But the, the way you do it is by dying and rising again." Jesus said, "If anyone would come after me, they must deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me." And that isn't an antithesis to when he said, "I came that they might have life, and have it in all its fullness." That is, as Jesus showed in each of the gospels, that is the way to life in all its fullness.
And so I was working on this idea of this full life, not the life immediately after death, when we rest with Christ, when we are in paradise, when we are, if you like, in heaven with Christ, conscious, happy with him. We are waiting, because until God remakes the heavens and the earth, then the whole story of creation will not be complete. And that's what we're waiting for. When that happens, then the whole creation will be flooded with the knowledge and love and glory of God, as the waters cover the sea. And we will be raised to new bodily life. Two-stage postmortem hope is what the New Testament offers. Don't settle for cheap or shrunken imitations, as they might say in the advertisements.
Now, what does that do, then, to how we live here and now? Some of you will have studied the great Greek philosopher Aristotle, 2,400 years ago. One of the great thinkers in the Western world. Aristotle had this vision of what it meant to be genuinely human. He had in mind statesmen. We needed to train up statesmen. They were always men, to lead the, the city, the polis, for the next generation. And we needed to train up warriors, leaders who would run the army, who would be the great generals, who would have strategy built into them, so that they could lead the people in a successful campaign.
And Aristotle had this vision of what this fine, upstanding man, usually an individual, would look like. And he saw, just as you might say with an athlete or a musician, that if you're going to be that sort of person, there are certain muscles you need to train, certain habits that need to become second nature. These are the strengths, not of body, but of mind, of character. And Aristotle had that goal, in Greek, *telos*. That's where we want to get. Here are the steps you need to take to get to it.
So Aristotle listed the virtues: courage, justice, temperance, prudence, and several others that cluster around. But those are the four big ones. He called them the cardinal virtues. Cardinal means they're the hinge on which human life turns. So he urged people to inculcate these virtues, to recognize the strengths of character that they needed to develop, and work on doing so. Because human life doesn't just coast along. You become what you habitually do, or conversely, what you habitually do, you become.
But the difference between virtues and vices is this: anybody can learn a vice. All you have to do is to go into neutral and slide along with the way stuff is going. And before too long, certain habits of life will have you in their grip. It's a vice, in that sense. You don't have to think about it, you don't have to try, it'll happen. But virtue, you have to think about it. You have to say, "I need to take a decision to be this sort of person now."
And the whole Western Protestant tradition has said, "Oh, that's so inauthentic. That's just putting it on. That's just hypocrisy." Luther said that virtue in the Catholic teaching he knew was just hypocrisy, pretending to be something you weren't. What would Aristotle have said? Aristotle might have taken a virtue like courage. I heard a sermon on this a while ago, which was one of the things that set me off on this particular train of thought. Courage is not what happens when somebody about to go into battle takes a very strong drink of something, um, uh, which will fire them up, and then goes charging off into the field of battle, waving their sword around, them shouting some awful war cry. That's not courage. That's second cousin to folly. I suspect you may survive, you may kill a few people, but it isn't courage.
Courage is what happens when you take a thousand small decisions, consciously thought out, to put somebody else's safety ahead of your own. So that then, on the thousand and first occasion, when somebody has just thrown a hand grenade into the middle of a group of your friends, you will unhesitatingly and instinctively, by second nature, go and grab it and throw it away, or throw yourself on it, or whatever it is, putting the other people's safety before. And nobody does that by nature. Some people, thank God, do it by second nature. Second nature is what happens when you front-loaded the moral thinking. "I choose to be this today, and I will choose to be this tomorrow." And it's very hard. But then the character is formed, and then it can really happen.
I had a, I was working on this a year and a bit ago, and I had a striking example, which you will all remember, because it happened just down the road from here, or rather, just down the river from here. You remember in January last year, 15 months ago, whatever it is, a flight took off from LaGuardia, where I landed yesterday evening, and, uh, it hit a flock of Canada geese. And the pilot smelt cooked goose coming through his engines. Nice smell if it's Christmas Day, not a nice smell if you're a few hundred feet above LaGuardia. And he had two minutes. If he had gone to a book, a manual, a rule book, what to do in an emergency, he'd have still been summing through page 350 to find out what to do, and the plane would have been in the, in the Bronx. A lot of people would have died.
If he had just been a trainee pilot who just happened to find his way into the cockpit and just did what comes naturally, who knows what might have happened? Plane might have looped the loop, gone anywhere. Because Chesley Sullenberger III was a 30-year experienced pilot, and an instructor, and a gliding instructor and pilot as well. In that two minutes, he did all kinds of things that you can hardly imagine. There may be some pilots here tonight, and you can imagine them. Most of us can't. In order to do the navigation, to get round in a tight turn, to get the plane banked so that it would fly right, and then just flattened out at the right moment. And I just heard a couple of days ago that actually, when he said to the flight controller, "We're going into the Hudson," the, the air traffic controller assumed that meant, "We're going down with the loss of all lives on board." But it didn't. It landed flat, because he'd done what was necessary up front, over a period of years, so that when it really counted, he could do it by second nature. That's virtue. Courage, justice, patience, temperance. He had them all in spades.
Those are the classical virtues, the pagan virtues, if you like. You don't have to be a Christian to have those virtues. One of the things I want to hint at, at least tonight, is that there is a large overlap between Christian goodness and other goodness. Oh yes, there are types of goodness which are unique to Christianity. I'll come back to that. But part of the point of being a Christian is that Jesus Christ is the truly human being. And if you're in, in Christ, you are supposed to be truly human. And all the insights that the rest of human tradition has had that point towards genuine humanity, but often can't quite make it, that just about get there and then fall away, they are validated, reinforced in Jesus Christ.
And so, as I've been looking at the question of Aristotle and character formation, and the question of the future, the new heavens and the new earth, the resurrection, and all that, I've asked myself, supposing instead of Aristotle's goal, Aristotle's *telos*, supposing you have Jesus' goal. Jesus, what is the goal? What are we meant to be? And in various passages in the Bible, not least the Book of Revelation, it's clear that we are supposed to be, an interesting phrase, a royal priesthood. A royal priesthood. Rulers and priests. That's strange language. Most Christians don't habitually, I think, think in those terms. But this is very clear at various parts of the Bible.
And the way you can cash it out is this: God made humans to reflect his wise order into the world, and to reflect the praises of the rest of creation back to him. Rulers and priests. And that's all of us, not just those called to public office, or those called to office in the church. This is every single Christian is to share in God's wise rule, rule over the world, bringing God's love and creative stewardship into the world. It's not a stultifying order. It's, it's a creative, lovely thing. It's Genesis one. And then summing up the praises of creation before the Creator. Rulers and priests.
Now, that's very different from Aristotle's vision. Because Aristotle's vision was all about training up these great individuals who are going to be fine, upstanding one-offs, able to lead in battle, able to lead in the state. Now, we still need people to lead in the state. The question of what it means to lead in battle looks different with every passing day as technology develops, but that's another story. But the Christian vision trains people for a corporate role. And the qualifications you have to have are not the qualifications which leave you feeling, "I'm so good at this, I'm a self-made man." It, I say, it always was men in Aristotle's day doing it. And Aristotle wanted, thought that when the, the perfectly virtuous person had become perfectly virtuous, one of the things they would be was properly proud.
Jesus taught that when your character is fully formed, you won't be thinking about your character at all. You'll be thinking about how much God loves you, and you'll be thinking about whether it's your turn tonight to go and visit Old Mrs. Jones in the hospice. Loving God and loving your neighbor. And so the formation of character varies from Aristotle to Jesus and Paul in quite a remarkable way. Aristotle glimpsed a goal of human flourishing. So did Jesus and Paul and the early Christians. But Jesus' vision of that goal was larger and richer, taking in the whole world, putting humans not as lonely individuals developing their own moral status, but as glad citizens in God's coming kingdom.
And Aristotle saw that the ultimate aim was to become the kind of character who would be able to act in the right way automatically by the long training of habits. Jesus and Paul agreed, but they proposed a very different way by which the relevant habits were to be learned and practiced. That's what this book, *After You Believe*, is much about.
And one of the things I discovered, we were talking about this with friends over supper just now, and I'm not a scientist at all, let alone a brain scientist. I just leave that to the folk who can do it. I've had other life paths. But I read a little bit of brain science in researching this book, because I was struck by something I'd come across about London taxi drivers. Now, I like getting in New York cabs. They're usually quite kind to my wife and myself, take pity on these poor Brits trying to find their way around this wonderful city. But when you go to London, you'll discover London is a far more complicated city again than New York, because it's not on a grid pattern. It's all over the place. And sometimes the streets do this, and sometimes they do that, and sometimes there's a demonstration, and the cabs have to know how to get round and so on. The, the, and, and they're not allowed out until they've mastered the whole thing. They're examined on it.
And they did some studies of the brains of taxi drivers, and they discovered that in serious London taxi drivers, the hippocampus, that's the bit that does spatial reasoning, has actually become physically larger. The, the mental pathways, the neurons, whatever they're called, the electronic codes that go to and fro, have got so developed that they've developed themselves. And these people have actually become different human beings, physically, measurably different human beings.
Now, if that is so, when you're finding your way around London, how much more might it be so when you're finding your way as a follower of Jesus Christ around the postmodern world? Is that not a wonderful challenge? By the Spirit. This is not me doing it. This is, well, it is me doing it, but it's by the Spirit. We are called to become different people, people who know what the map of the world is, where the twists and turns and awkward passages are, and know how to get where we need to get through it. And I find this very exciting and encouraging as a challenge.
Here we are, near the beginning of a new century, with all sorts of new stuff, not only technology, but, but the post-9/11 world, with all its questions, the postmodern world, with all its cultural, dramatic, literary questions, with all its philosophical and ethical dilemmas and doubts. Who is leading the way forward culturally? Who is showing a way through the postmodern angst and anomie into different, fresh, creative ways of being human? I'm actually not sure what the answer to that is right now. But I do know this: that if all of you here in this room, and similar people elsewhere, were actually to take this agenda seriously, what does it mean that one day we are going to be stewards of creation and worshippers who sum up God's whole creation's praise? Rulers and priests. And if we were to think, "What are the strengths of character we should be developing now if we're going to be that?" The difference we could make is incalculable. Incalculable. Nobody else is leading the way forward into the post-postmodern world. Maybe this is the challenge for the Church of our times.
Because, you see, when you apply this to ethics, which is more or less what it's about, we get into the old debates. Wasn't there a book in America a while ago? Yes, Jennifer, there is a right and wrong. Was it Jennifer? Somebody else. Forget. Um, but, you know, within the '50s and '60s and '70s, so many people saying, "Oh, the old rules don't matter. There isn't really right and wrong. It's all a sort of shades of gray." And people are coming back with a heavy moralism and saying, "Actually, there is a right and a wrong, and you need to know the difference. Here are the rules, and you must live by them." And so many in your generation, my generation, really ever since the Second World War, have said, "Those rules are crushing us. They're a ton weight, forcing us into immaturity, so that all we have to do is keep these these wretched rules." And half of them were made up by people we don't trust anyway. And that's part of the problem, actually, with some bits of the church at the moment, that still trying to say, "The rules, the rules, the..." And people who've lived under that just say, "Give me a break. That's not where I am."
And then there's other ways you can do it. Some people say, "Well, it's not so much rules. You have to calculate whether your actions will produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number." That's consequentialism or utilitarianism. And the problem is, to be honest, when you're in a moral dilemma, "Should I do this or do that? Should I sign this form? Should I meet that person?" Whatever. If you have the chance and the time, under that pressure, to think out all the possible unintended consequences of your action, you're a lucky person. Take a complicated computer to do that, and even that, who knows what the consequences of your action are going to be. Consequences matter, but they will not work as a moral calculus.
And so many people in your culture and mine have gone back to the old romantic vision of spontaneity. "Whatever I do spontaneously, that's the really good thing. And if anyone else comes with their rules and agendas and cramps my style, I resist that. I want to be spontaneous. I want to be free." Trouble is, if you're spontaneous, you'll be like a random atomic particle, zipping around all over the place. You won't be consistent. You won't have any integrity. You won't have any that other great word, authenticity. You just do whatever comes next.
I was, after I gave that lecture in Fuller Seminary in California, just over a year ago, um, my wife and I took a couple of days off down at Laguna Beach. And we were browsing in a silly little junk shop, just for something fun to do. And I discovered a jokey little sign which read, "There are times I think I'm doing things on principle, but mostly I just do what feels good." But that's a principle too. And now, nobody in New York would think like that, of course. That is a purely Californian thing, I know. Um, but you see, that idea of just doing what feels good is the low-grade version of the romantic vision of spontaneity. And it ties up with the existentialist vision of authenticity. "I've got to be true to myself." That's all very well, though being true to yourself. You'll notice in postmodernity, people aren't saying that so much, because who is myself? I look in the mirror and I'm 19 different people. Which one shall I be true to? If we're honest.
So the cult of spontaneity and the cult of authenticity actually don't get us very far. And instead, I suggest that the path of the Christian virtues, the Christian character strengths, is a path which will result, God willing, in appropriate spontaneity and authenticity. But which will be a spontaneity and an authenticity which you get, if you like, as the reward at the end of the process.
Think back to the image of courage, or any other pictures you like of people who do things with a character well-formed. A close friend of mine gave me this example. At least, he didn't know he was giving it, but I saw it. I was in a big church, big service, seven years ago in England, uh, about three times as many people as there are here. It was a large, very large church, very important occasion, television cameras there and so on. And about 10 minutes, a quarter of an hour into the service, some people broke in at the door, pushed their way past the ushers, injuring one of them, and rushed up the central aisle of the church shouting slogans. Nobody actually knew what they were protesting about. They were shouting and chanting and doing all, it was really quite scary.
And when they got to the front, it was clear they were from their banners that they were part of a particular protest movement called Fathers for Justice, that was campaigning for rights of fathers from broken families and to see their children and so on. And they, they specialized in making a real nuisance of themselves, but they were very loud and very aggravated and so on. And the whole church just froze. Two or three thousand people, people just, just did not know what to do. And then one of the leaders who was taking the service, very quietly, walked across to this chap who was ranting and raging and really was quite scary. And this man just had a quiet word in his ear, and they had a little conversation out of earshot. And then the man went over and had a word with the Dean of the Cathedral, where it was. And the Dean came to the microphone and said that, to our surprise, our guests had agreed that they would have four minutes to, to make a statement, and then they would leave quietly. So the man did, and then they all trooped out.
I thought, "How did you do that?" And the person who'd done it, no particular fuss or worry, he just gone and done it. Then I remembered, 20 years before, I had seen that same man walking through the streets of Oxford in a cassock, on his way to a service, unaffectedly stooping down, stopping by some people, some very rough types who were drinking methylated spirits and all sorts of other stuff, and were being a nuisance on the street, sat down with them and just talked with them casually, smiled. I don't know if he even said a prayer. Went on his way. Didn't seem to phase him. He had spent much of his life quietly being available to people, not afraid of people who other people were afraid of, recognizing them as human beings, seeing them as people in pain, being there with them. So when it really counted, he could do it. And he did it. Transformed the situation.
Some of you will have guessed, I'm talking about Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Character is formed by the thousand little choices, and the thousand little choices turn into people who are able to bring God's wise ordering to a chaotic world, and people who are also able to sum up the praises of creation. That's what art and music and all the rest of it are all about. The whole of creation is praising God, and we are called to join in and to do that consciously. You know, in Revelation, creation is praising God in Revelation 4 and 5. But when the humans praise God, they add the little word, "because you are worthy to receive praise, because you created all things." We are called to be the people who think it out, who know why we praise God, and who think out what we are doing in the ethical sphere and in our moral sphere.
The way Paul puts it is this, in Romans 12: "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may work out in practice what God's will is, what is good and acceptable and perfect." There's the challenge. Transformed. It doesn't happen automatically. And here's the big lie. You see, so many Christians have bought into the idea that, "Well, I became a Christian, I said a prayer, Jesus has come into my life, so now he gives me the Holy Spirit, so now whatever he wants me to do, it'll just happen automatically." Well, if you think that, you'll be a very shallow and muddled Christian. Because from one point of view, it does happen automatically. The Spirit does work in people's lives, thank God for that. But precisely the way that the Spirit does that is by making you more human, which means making you more thoughtful, making you more able to see what the issues are, to think them through, to take the hard moral choices, and to put them into effect. And just because it seems like a hard moral choice doesn't mean that's not what the Spirit is calling you to do.
I have had people say to me pastorally, "Well, I thought maybe God was calling me to do this, or to give up that, or whatever it is. But actually, after a short while, I realized God wasn't calling me to that at all." I think, "Wait a minute. That just means you tried to be good for a day or two, and it felt rather difficult, so you couldn't be right." Because you'd bought into the cult of spontaneity and authenticity, and you were trying to fit the wind of the Spirit into the little bottle of 19th and 20th-century philosophy. Can't be done. "Transformed by the renewing of your mind." Grow up, says Paul, in your thinking.
And this is partly, you see, this worked out in that wonderful, wonderful passage in 1 Corinthians 15 about, uh, 13, about love. It's a great poem. It's fascinating in terms of its aesthetic place within that section of First Corinthians. Paul has this fantastic picture of the body of Christ in chapter 12. He has this amazing picture of the church at worship in chapter 14. And in between these two, he has this matchless little poem on love, which is itself tripartite and works in a particular way. You can study it. And if you're into literature and poetry, you really just should relish it for what it is, an amazing creation.
But people often miss the fact that Paul says there something about the future in relation to the present. And this is back to Aristotle, only now in the Christian key. Paul says, "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I behaved like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became adult, I put away childish ways. Now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know even as also I am known." And then he says, "So now these three things abide: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love."
What has eschatology to do with ethics? What has the new heavens and the new earth, for which we long, to do with my moral struggles here now? Exactly this, I'll tell you. Love is not our duty, it is our destiny. Love is the language they speak in the new creation, and we get to learn it here. Oh, it's difficult. There are lots of irregular verbs. There's vocabulary that'll be very difficult to get into your head and, and get your tongue around. But learn it, and one day you'll be singing in it.
And faith and hope are pretty much the same. You have to practice them. Say, "What will we hope for in the future?" Hope is not just optimism about something that might happen one day which would be nice. Hope is total trust that the Creator God is God of the future. We won't stop having that total trust in the new creation. It'll just be a wonderful celebration. God is going to do what God is going to do, and we will be part of it.
Faith. Faith will be, will be very different in the future. Faith is the utter trust in God, the Creator, the Redeemer. At the moment, that's hard. We have to practice it like a difficult sport. You, I'm a very bad golfer. I often say to people, one of the great things for me about golf is that a bishop has to have at least one thing that he can do really badly, and it doesn't matter. But most of what I do, you know, got to get it sort of right. But when I have had golf lessons, it's really, you know, I'm told, "You've got to hold it like this, not like that." It feels so unnatural. And some of you here will be golfers, and you'll have gone through that process. And then, actually, only when you practice it again and again, and I don't have time to do that, but when I do it, gradually I can see what it would feel like for that grip gradually to become natural, so that I would just walk up to the ball, and it would happen automatically. I'm not there yet. Maybe when I retire, I'll have more time. Who knows? That'll be the day.
But that's what it's like with faith. Faith is hard now. We should expect it to be hard. We, our grip isn't something that we just have by, by nature. You have to work at it and learn how to do it. Let somebody teach you. But one day, one day we will know as we are known, and trust as God then will entrust us with the stewardship of his world.
And so, what about those wonderful things that Paul talks about in Galatians 5, the Fruit of the Spirit? Uh, it's, it's a fantastic passage, and there's lots I could say about it, but I just want to say a few little things. Um, because I think people again often misunderstand this. Paul says, "Okay, here are the works of the flesh." All those nasty things that make society a bad place to be, that ruin families and so on: immorality and, and, and, uh, uh, anger and violence and jealousy and malice and all of that stuff. And then he says, "Those who are led by the Spirit are not under law." Or not under the law. And we instinctively misunderstand this. You know, when you're listening to the New Testament, it's sometimes like playing a musical instrument in entirely the wrong acoustic. You need a good acoustic to make the instrument speak properly. Or it may be, change the image, only just a very little bit, to, to stretch some violin strings, only instead of stretching them over a violin which has the right sounding body, stretching them instead over a block of concrete, and then wondering why the music doesn't sound right.
Is when people hear, "If you're led by the Spirit, you're not under law," they instinctively go back to the 19th-century rejection of deontology, that is, of rules, in favor of the cult of spontaneity. "Oh, I'm just led by the Spirit, so there aren't any rules. I'm just going to do my own thing. The Spirit will guide me. That'll be all right." No, that's precisely what Paul doesn't mean.
The key point really is that this is fruit. And again, I don't know much about golf. I know even less about gardening. But I do know this: if you just plant a fruit tree, you'll be lucky if you get much fruit from it. If you just leave it there. If you want the tree to bear fruit, you're going to have to work at it. You're going to have to help the tree to bear the fruit. Oh, I know we all, we preachers have preached sermons about works versus fruit. And it's about Christmas trees versus apple trees, you know. I've heard this sermon dozens of times. I've preached it once or twice myself. Where you, if you try to be good in your own strength, it's just like sticking things onto the Christmas tree. And we know that they don't really grow there. They make, it may look pretty for a while, but pretty soon the tree will die, and the stuff will drop off. And that's self-help moralism. And by the way, everything I've said comes under the rubric, just in case there should be any people with particular reformed anxieties here tonight, surely not. Um, the, everything I say comes under the rubric of "by grace through faith." This is by grace alone, through faith alone, and everything happens within that framework.
But, but then, you see, people say, "Well, the apple tree that really grows the fruit, so that's the difference. As a Christian, you're a fruit tree, and so it'll happen automatically." Well, that's all very well. The fruit of the Spirit does not grow automatically. Let me just read you a paragraph from this book. "The nine varieties of fruit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control." They do not suddenly appear just because someone believes in Jesus and has prayed for God's Spirit and then sat back and waited for the fruit to come.
Now, okay, to begin with, there may be dramatic change. I was with a man the other day who spent most of his early life in prison, or youth prisons, or adult prisons. And when he was out, he was being a football hooligan, and he was robbing, and he was taking cars, and he was doing all kinds of immoral and extraordinary stuff, and drink and drugs. And he very nearly died when he was in early middle life from his extraordinary dissolute life. And some Christians found him on a park bench, dying, and prayed for him, and got him to the hospital, and prayed for him, and they talked to the doctors and nurses, and they prayed for him, and he got better.
And when he got better, he wondered what this thing was that these Christians had been doing. And that man now is a wonderful Christian man, thank God, and is working in the prison world to say to young people in the northeast of England, where I live, "Please don't do it like this." Now, his testimony is that in the very early days of his own faith, when he really had no Christian background to speak of at all, um, things were happening in his life where he found that he did want to be different. He did want to do certain things which he'd never want, like read the Bible. Why would you do that? And, and, and he didn't want to do some of the stuff that he had instinctively done before. There are dramatic changes. These do happen when people get converted, thank God. The new life of the Spirit does flow through. But that is the blossom.
To get the fruit, you have to be a gardener. You have to discover how to tend and prune. You have to discover how to irrigate the field. You have to discover how to keep birds and squirrels and rodents away. You have to watch for the blight and the mold. You have to cut away ivy and other parasites that suck the life out of the tree. You have to make sure that the young trunk of the tree can stand firm when there are strong winds coming. And only then will the fruit appear.
And in case you think that that actually sounds rather depressing, that I'm imposing an alien note of false externality on Paul's wonderfully spontaneous, spiritful, joyful picture of the easygoing, romantic Christian note. The final characteristic in the list: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. When I was an undergraduate, I heard a sermon which I rather resented, but which I now think was true, in which the preacher said, "All the fruit of the Spirit is easily counterfeit in happy, healthy young people, except self-control." Isn't that interesting? You know, everything's going well. It's a sunny day. You've got good friends around you. Plenty to do. You're studying, you're playing sport, you're listening to music, having a good time, hanging out. Love, joy, peace. Yeah, that's what I'm into. This is great. And, and yes, I. And self-control? Well, perhaps not quite. You know.
But like Plato's vision of the virtues, back behind Aristotle, so with the fruit. Note that the word fruit is singular, which is isn't the fruits of the Spirit. Uh, once, after a very difficult college meeting in the Oxford college where I worked, one of my colleagues said to me, "I know our Lord told us to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, but being busy men, some of us find it advisable to specialize." Can't be done. You get the lot, or you don't get any. If this tree isn't bearing all nine varieties of fruit, you have to question whether it's the genuine article. And we could go through them, but I mean, it's, it's very interesting. You know, that, that said, take, take joy. Joy is not happiness. Joy and happiness often go together, but joy is much deeper and richer than happiness. Joy is the fruit of the settled conviction that Jesus Christ is raised from the dead.
Another taxi driver story. I was in London a few weeks ago, and I got stuck in a traffic jam. Was sitting there bored. And I was dressed more like a bishop than I am now, with a purple shirt and a dog collar. And the taxi driver looked back at me and said, "So, you're a Vicar, are you?" And I said, "No, Bishop, actually." And he, "Yeah, okay." He said, "Church of England?" I said, "Yeah, Church." He said, "Oh, I'm a Catholic myself." He said, "You're having difficulty about women bishops at the moment, aren't you?" And I said, "Yes, we are having difficulty about women bishops." And, and he said, "The way I look at it is this: if God raised Jesus Christ from the dead, all the rest is basically rock and roll." And I got out my Blackberry and I texted my colleague back home and said, "You'd never guess what I've just heard." And he texted straight back and said, "There's your Easter sermon on a plate." And, and it was. It's online, you can look it up. I. But, you see, joy is what happens when you make, and it is an effort. You have to think it through. It's not just, "God raised Jesus. That's right. Resurrection. That's what we believe in." Now, and then go away and think of something else.
The early Christians were being persecuted, beaten up, driven out of towns, misunderstood, vilified. But when you study their writings and their common life, they were joyful because they knew that something had happened in real space, time, matter, reality, as a result of which the world was a different place, and they were invited to be part of it. That's joy.
And in the midst of all the others, I'm nearly done. Time is up. But I just want to say a word about this, because some of those fruits, fruit varieties of fruit of the Spirit, particularly patience and love, are among the things that nobody in the ancient world, and comparatively few in the modern world, think of as virtues. Mentioned blackberries. There's a mobile phone advertisement in England at the moment saying, "Impatient? Patience is a virtue." And, and there's a particular kind of phone which does everything so much more quickly. And so that's great, isn't it? Impatience is a virtue. Let's, impatience isn't a virtue. Any fool can be impatient. Doesn't take effort to be impatient, believe me. I know. That's why, you know, the T-shirt, "Please God, give me patience, and I want it right now."
In the ancient world, there are four Christian virtues which nobody else had regarded as a virtue. Patience is one of them. Humility is another. Aristotle: "self-made man." That's what it's supposed to be. No, you look away from yourself into the God who made you, and out to your neighbor in love. You won't be thinking about yourself. You lose yourself in that. Wonderful patience. Humility. Chastity. Nobody else ever thought sexual self-control was a good idea. You know, "just get as much as you can." And the only real problem in the ancient world with sexual behavior was whether there was a jealous spouse going to come and, and get you for what you've been, what you've been up to. Chastity. And charity. Nobody else in the ancient world thought it was a good idea to look after other people than your own kith and kin. The Christians did. It's one of the main reasons why the gospel spread. Nobody else had dreamt of behaving like that before, let alone making a habit of it, let alone making it the center of their life. That's what we do. We are people who love one another, and whose love goes out into the world.
And that's where I want to end, really. The idea here, you see, some people who write about virtue write about it as though it's a private thing, as though Christians do this so that they can be a pure community, and then maybe, if the world notices there are some people behaving very oddly over there, and maybe we ought to do that. Well, but, but that, it, it cannot be like that. If this is genuine humanness we're talking about, and if we are acquiring those habits of heart and mind and soul and strength, then this must flow out. This must make us better, wiser citizens. Not to collude with nonsense out there, to critique where appropriate, but to celebrate. Paul says, "Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep." And he means that right out there on the street. And he says in Philippians, "Whatever is noble, whatever is pure, whatever is true, whatever is lovely, if there's any virtue, anything worthy of praise, think about these things." There's lots of stuff to celebrate in the wider world. And then he says, "What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, do. And the God of Peace will be with you."
Do you see the point? We are part of that great thing called the human race, and God loves it to bits. And we are to reflect that love and to honor the fact that God has done so much and is doing so much in the world through people who don't know him, because God is good and produces beauty and wisdom of all sorts. But the Christian is called to the lifestyle which says, "This is different. This is the different way to be human." And those two go together. We are to collaborate without compromise, and to critique without dualism. We are to be God's people, shining his light into the world. Not to look down on the rest of the world and say, "Oh, you poor people, you're so dark out there." There is darkness out there, sometimes darkness in here, tragically as well. We are to be the people who shine that light, who reflect God's light into the world. To be rulers and priests. And we are to do that through the character training, the faith, the hope, the love, the following of Jesus, which is our calling as Christians. That's really what I wanted to say. My time is up. Thank you very much. We're going to take some questions now.