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 I’m around church people, I always check whether they are misled by the modern secular vision. Have they substituted the vision of service for the only thing that will make people whole—community? Are they service peddlers or community builders? Peddling services is unchristian—even if you’re hellbent on helping people. Peddling services instead of building communities is the one way you can be sure not to help…. Service systems teach people that their value lies in their deficiencies. They are built on “inadequacies” called illiteracy, visual deficit, and teenage pregnancy. But communities are built on the capacities of drop-out, illiterate, bad-scene, teenage-pregnant, battered women…. If the church is about community—not service—it’s about capacity not deficiency (1989:38,40)

That’s a quote from John McKnight. It resonates with me. Any comments?

McKnight, John. “Why ‘Servanthood’ is Bad.” The Other Side:38-40, January-February 1989.

The latest in this video series by XPLANE, The Economist, Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod and Laura Bestler. Comments welcome.