Marginal Christianity

As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. –  Orthodoxy Interesting that in a work titled Orthodoxy Chesterton valorizes mystery. Much of the modern project has been about eradicating mystery in life, and as an unintended side effect, imagination with it. Orthodoxy became doctrine and moralism replaced faith as life’s animating force. A doctrinaire moralism (of the right of the left) breeds only death because it sacrifices life’s depth for some supposed greater measure of control and manipulation of life and history. Life became constricted and narrowed. Understanding replaced mystery, prose supplanted poetry, we became infatuated with life’s glittering and glamorous surface and willingly traded life’s inexplicable, unmanageable, unconquerable, mysteries for it. Orthodoxy grows out of and is sustained by mystery. Worship is its proper home, life its dramatic stage, imagination its organ of meaning, and vitality its esse...

“Dear Sir: Regarding your article 'What's Wrong with the World?' I am. Yours truly, Chesterton.” Us “To Whom It May Concern: Regarding your article ‘What’s Wrong with the World?’ YOU ARE! Yours ideologically, Me. And we think the Adam and Eve stories in the Bible are ancient tales we long since left behind! No such luck, friends. You made me do it, and you know it! May we some day reach Chesterton’s degree of honesty.  

“There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong.” I don’t know exactly what Chesterton had in mind here, but his sentiment seems appropriate to our ideologized, competing political correctness filled nation today. Are there any “real Americans” left? What might they be like?

“Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian.” ― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy We’ve discovered a bit about why that’s so in our previous posts. I want to transition away from my original question about how it is possible to “count it all joy” in the midst of suffering, persecution, or distress that befalls us for following and serving Jesus Christ to some of its effects and consequences in our lives. Chief among them for me are these four: 1.        Joy is not a sedative that insulates the church from its struggles or a consolation prize that salves the wounds it incurs for not “winning,” fire in belly 2.        Joy mobilizes the church to “keep on keeping on” with its struggle and resist the allure of settling in and settling down. increase of power 3.        Joy is not a soft, “touchy-feely,” inner thing opposed to a militant resistance ...