I'm Glad You Asked ...

Spirituality Column #249
August 16, 2011
Current in Carmel - Westfield - Noblesville – Fishers
(Indianapolis north suburban home newspapers)

I’m Glad You Asked …
By Bob Walters

… Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have [in Christ] … – 1 Peter 3:15

When G.K. Chesterton was asked, Orthodoxy was his answer.

In his earlier book Heretics, he had described the spiritual inadequacy of the early 20th century’s burgeoning social and academic inclination away from Christianity and toward Darwinism, socialism and science. When publicly challenged for disparaging “modern thought” without clearly describing his own Christian faith, Chesterton responded in 1908 with Orthodoxy.

Rather than presenting an impenetrable apologetic about scripture or the Trinity, Orthodoxy plainly describes how Chesterton arrived at his faith the same way a secularist arrives at his disbelief … through experience and investigating the facts.

Modernist indictments against Christianity are many. Christianity can’t be right, modernists say, because man is too similar to the beasts. Religion is only the darkness of superstition. The church causes more problems than it solves.

Chesterton looks closely and finds differently, composing a withering yet common-sense return of rhetorical fire. He notices that man is entirely dissimilar to beasts, that Christianity was the only light at both ends of the tunnel known as the Dark Ages, and that the Christian church historically has provided an underappreciated yet perpetual spiritual safety net for Western civilization. His argument is reasonable; his conclusions reassuring.

Chesterton notices that modern philosophy plays fast and loose with spiritual “facts.” Setting God aside, modernism voices contradictory opinions focused on the ultimate sovereignty or non-sovereignty of man.

Chesterton found his faith at the intersection of that contradiction; at the center and the heart of the Cross of Christ.

God may well be eternal and separate from man, but God as Jesus Christ entered time, space and humanity to prove that God – to be truly God – needed to be something even beyond omnipotent; He needed to be courageous, proven in the real courage of the real trial on the Cross. On the honed edges of Christ’s sundering sword we learn that love is an exercise in recognizing differences, not similarities. Astonishingly, we learn that divine power, ultimately, is an exercise of servanthood.

The Cross has a “collision” at its core and “can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape.” As modern society seeks empirical predictability for all phenomena, Chesterton insists that it is Christianity’s wonder, awe and faith that divinely feed all human morality, creativity and hope.

As for Chesterton’s beliefs, I’m glad someone asked.

Walters (www.believerbob.blogspot.com, email rlwcom@aol.com) writes from the perspective that faith is an intellectual strength, not a weakness.