The Christian Imagination

There were many Christian scholars I was introduced to in college. It wasn’t until after college though, that I was introduced to the words of G.K. Chesterton, in James Bryan Smith’s biography of Rich Mullins.

I first read about Chesterton in The Christian Imagination. There I learned of the man who was a journalist and an apologist, while also a poet and an artist.

Orthodoxy is the most recognized work of Chesterton, wherein he gives his personal apologetic of the Christian faith. I finally picked up the book, and having read it, find it hard to describe. First published in 1948, he takes aim at many of the philosophies of the day, including modernism and determinism. He explored many philosophies, agreeing with them to varying degrees before finding them empty. In the end, he found that only Christian orthodoxy answered the riddle.

It’s hard to quote this book. It’s like a song that builds momentum to end in a crescendo. A single piece doesn’t tell the story. Nevertheless, I give you the following words from Chesterton:

The real problem is - Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity? That is the problem the church attempted; that is the miracle she achieved. This is what I have called guessing the hidden eccentricities of life…Christian doctrine detected the oddities of life. It not only discovered the law, but it foresaw the exceptions. Those underrate Christianity who say that it discovered mercy; any one might discover mercy. In fact everyone did. But to discover a plan for being merciful and also severe - that was to anticipate a strange need of human nature….

This was the big fact about Christian ethics; the discovery of the new balance…Christianity was like a huge and ragged and romantic rock, which, though it sways on its pedestal at a touch, yet, because its exaggerated excresences exactly balance each other, is enthroned there for a thousand years…So in Christianity apparent accidents balanced….

It is exactly this which explains what is so inexplicable to all the modern critics of the history of Christianity. I mean the monstrous wars about small points of theology, the earthquakes of emotion about a gesture of a word. It was only a matter of an inch; but an inch is everything when you are balancing. The church could not afford to swerve a hair’s breadth on some things if she was to continue her great and daring experiment of the irregular equilibrium.

Here it is enough to notice that if some small mistake were made in doctrine, huge blunders might be made in human happiness. A sentence phrased wrong about the nature of symbolism would have broken all the best statues in Europe. A slip in definitions might stop all the dances…Doctrines had to be defined within strict limits, even in order that man might enjoy general human liberties. The church had to be careful, if only that the world might be careless.

This is the thrilling romance of orthodoxy. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic. The church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism. She swerved to left and right, so exactly as to avoid enormous obstacles. She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly. The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly. The orthodox church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox church was never respectable. It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians. It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination. It is easy to be a madman: it is easy to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own…It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect. (Chesterton, 145-150)

You can read Orthodoxy online, for free, at the Christian Classics Ethereal Libary.

Chesterton, G.K. Orthodoxy. Colorado Springs, CO: WaterBrook Press. 1994.

The following quote is from page 9 of Their Blood Cries Out: The Worldwide Tragedy of Modern Christians Who are Dying for Their Faith. It’s an excellent book on the Persecuted Church worldwide.

One thing we can say is that the assault on Christians is a fundamental part of the assault on human freedom itself. Many Christians are leading democracy and human-rights activists. They are also in the forefront of economic development. But perhaps more important than what they do is who they are. While usually loyal citizens, they embody an attachment to “another King,” a loyalty to a standard of spiritual allegiance apart from the political order. This fact itself denies that the state is the all encompassing or ultimate arbiter of human life. Regardless of how the relation between God and Caesar has been expressed, it now at least means that, contra to Romans and modern totalitarians, Caesar is not God. This confession, however mute, sticks in the craw of every authoritarian regime and draws their angry and bloody response.

They quote above really drove home to me how significant it is to believe in another King. That belief in another King also implies there are laws apart from what a ruler or governing body say they are. There is an absolute truth other than what the state says is true.

Let me know if you have any thoughts or feedback.

When people of Jewish faith greet one another with “Shalom,” they aren’t simply saying, “Peace.” This Hebrew word means much more than that. Shalom means “May you live in anticipation of that day when God makes all things whole again.” What the prophets are describing in the imagery of the great homecoming is really the shalom future of God.

Walter Brueggemann states, “Shalom is an enduring vision….Among the eloquent spokesmen for the vision…is this letter wrote to the exiles, urging the validity of the vision even among displaced persons: ‘I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for shalom and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope….You will seek me and find me; when you seek me with all your heart, I will be found by you, says the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes’ [Jer. 29:10-11,13-14].

Sine, Tom. Mustard Seed vs McWorld. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books. 1999.

You probably know that I am a Tolkien fan. I’m using a Hobbit banner, and one of my popular posts is about Tolkien’s view of evil. When I was in New Zealand during the “Return of the King” world premiere, the church I was attending, who was along the parade route, decided to put up a big sign that said, “The Return of the King of Kings. Every Sunday at 10am” or whatever their service time was. At the time, I found it anticlimactic, as I was more excited about Tolkien’s Return of the King story.

How is it that the grand narrative in the Bible so often seems unexciting? Is heaven just too far off? Do we reduce it to the point where it is just a book of methods? Maybe we don’t talk about it enough.

It is easy to get discouraged in today’s world. We hear of suffering and evil daily. We see people with power abuse it.

Not long ago, I found a post called Return of the King. Tony Reinke talks about Jesus, the King of Kings, using a lot of Biblical language. It stirred by heart, and excited me about the Return of the King, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Justice will be served. Mankind’s delusions of power will be brought down. The lion will not be tame.

Thanks Tony, for the reminder.