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.

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.

One of my good friends had a writing assignment on the above topic, and sent some of us his thoughts, which were quite good. He also asked us for our thoughts on the topic. What follows is an edited version of what I sent him in response.

I have a Bible open to the book of Proverbs. This particular Bible presents them as being separated into verses, written as prose. This saddens me. They should be presented as verse, like the poetry that they are. What’s the value of a poem? Is there a point in writing poetry? Collection of poems like Proverbs answer that question with an emphatic “Yes!” It’s not just that they are written in verse with generous use of Hebrew parallelism. They also teach by using metaphor and imagery. They are memorable. They are beautiful. They convey truth. Yet, what is a true poem? How literal do we take metaphor? What does that question even mean?

The Proverbs convey a lot of maxims that are just as true now as they were then. Many of them are general and applicable, regardless of culture. In contrast to much of the Bible, quoting them ‘out of context’ is often fine, since many of these proverbs stand on their own, though in some sections, there is much to be gained from the context. Ultimately, this is poetry, and while it’s instructive poetry, our modern Western minds too often want to reduce poetry to mere principal, and quote it like a soundbite for Twitter. The author(s) could have written without metaphor, which perhaps would suit that purpose better. Instead, they mix truth and beauty. They invoke emotion and empathy. They challenge.

I just came across Proverbs 24:17, “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he is overthrown.” Ah, how we like to pick and choose the maxims that serve our agendas. Perhaps we only like to hear things that justify what we already agree with. Communication studies support this assertion. There is also the matter of how much we trust the person speaking to us. I tend to steer clear of Bible know-it-alls. Part of that is a lack of relationship, and therefore trust. However, I’m not likely to want to know a know-it-all either, partially because I feel they are more interested in telling me what they know than knowing me, that it’s really about them. There is a Proverb that gets to the heart of it, “Better are the wounds of a friend than the kisses of an enemy,” Proverbs 27:6. We need to be open to being wounded by those that love us.

I’m in awe of a God who not only give us words of correction, but who speaks beautiful poetry when he does so.

I just stumbled across Hayhow’s Review, which has the tagline: Welcome to Steve Hayhow’s Blog, where we talk about what we’ve been reading and thinking about lately.

He has a long post with notes on Christian Imagination which is a good read.

Steve also has some quotes about Christian Imagination, including ones by Douglas Wilson and G.K. Chesterton.

I like this quote from Wilson: “We need to take a special care to tell stories that are “not suitable” for modernists. The Bible contians dragons, giants, principalities, satyrs and unicords.”