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This thread continues on the same subject as the "Tragedy" thread.
So, so true. I'm in a Christian book club and lately, the selections have tended toward post-modernism. Sadly, our book club leader (and elder in our church) is tending toward this way of thinking. Colson gets it exactly right here. And, it's time to return to some Chesterton reading!
Colson quoting Chesterton - nice! Though he quotes a text that Chesterton wrote while still an Anglican.
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 easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom -- that would indeed have been simple. 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.
sorry, but I have to chuckle when I hear a Protestant talk about "orthodoxy."
There's a reason the first commandement states:
3 Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Exodus 20:3
The history of the Bible shows, time and time again, that pursuing the "gods" of man leads to destruction. The children of Israel were frequently led astray by the beliefs of the non-believers around them. They demanded to be led by a king, despite God's will, for the reason: "20 That we also may be like all the nations..."(1 Samuel 8:20) They wanted to be accepted by those who didn't believe as they did. It's not easy to stand out as the children of God.
The religious left is following the same pattern. They are more concerned with the precepts and perceptions of man. Tolerance, at least their concept of it, has become a "god" for them and they have quite clearly placed it before the God of Heaven. Just as Israel followed after Baalim, the religious left has set up their own, man-made God(s) in an effort to become more palatible to those who rely on "the arm of man." This is the principle reason why they have such a problem with "Orthodoxy."