Week 5: Part II, Chapters I & II

[Kerstin]

Chapter I: The God in the Cave

In this first chapter of the second part Chesterton returns to the image of the cave. This time, it isn’t the cave of pre-historic man or the caricature thereof. This time we are in the cave – used as a stable – in which Jesus was born. He turns to the Christian paradox of God, the Creator of the universe, being born as a babe, “the hands that had made the sun and the stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle.”

This uniquely Christian aspect changes our psychology, our identity, for one who has never encountered Christ has very different reference points.

” You cannot suspend the idea of a new-born child in the void or think of him without thinking of his mother. You cannot visit the child without visiting his mother; you cannot in common human life approach the child except through his mother.”

Again Chesterton touches upon something very elemental and primal, the relationship of mother and child. The divine is present in our everyday experiences and makes it holy. Chesterton later continues,

”The faith becomes, in more ways than one, a religion of the little things. But its traditions in art and literature and popular fable have quite sufficiently attested, as has been said, this particular paradox of the divine being in the cradle.”

God becoming a child has further ramifications: “Individuals become important, in a sense in which no instruments can be important. A man could not be a means to an end, at any rate to any other man’s end.” This means slavery and the abuse of the servile state are no longer acceptable.

The world had found its Shepherd, and the worldview that emerged was larger than any previously conceived. “We must grasp from the first this character in the new cosmos; that it was larger than the old old cosmos. In that sense Christendom is larger than creation: as creation had been before Christ.

“The Church contains what the world does not contain.” And a later comparison: “And in this light; that the Catholic creed is catholic and that nothing else is catholic. The philosophy of the Church is universal. The philosophy of the philosophers was not universal.”

Chesterton returns to the significance of the clandestine Christmas cave.

”It is also that there is in that image a true idea of an outpost, a piercing through the rock and an entrance into an enemy territory. There is in this buried divinity an idea of undermining the world;…”

“Indeed the Church from its beginnings, and perhaps especially in its beginnings, was not so much a principality as a revolution against the prince of the world.”

“It was resented, because, in its own still and almost secret way, it had declared war. It had risen out of the ground to wreck the heaven and earth of heathenism.”

Chapter II: The Riddles of the Gospel

Here Chesterton dives into the strangeness of the person of Christ and the Gospel, the nature of them quite different from our normal experiences. Christ, he says, “who of all humanity needed least preparation seeming to have had most.”

“For instance, he would not find the ordinary platitudes in favor of peace. He would find several paradoxes in favor of peace.”

“It is extraordinary how very little there is in the recorded words of Christ that ties him at all to his own time.”

“He never used a phrase that made his philosophy depend even upon the very existence of the social order in which he lived.”

“It is enough to say that the materialists have to prove the impossibility of miracles against the testimony of all mankind, not against the prejudices of provincials in North Palestine under the first Roman Emperors.”

“The merely human Christ is a made-up figure, a piece of artificial selection, like the merely evolutionary man.”

[Kerstin]

Chesterton's touching upon the paradox of Christ reminded me of a hymn I've sang in choir before. Our sheet music called it "Christus Paradox" , though here we have another title, "You, Lord, Are Both Lamb and Shepherd"

https://hymnary.org/hymn/LUYH2013/pag...

[John]

Speaking of the three wise men at the Nativity, but also noting the similarities to all wise men, Plato, Confucius, etc, Chesterton says: "They were those who sought not tales but the truth of things; and since their thirst for the truth was itself a thirst for God, they also have had their reward."

Is Chesterton suggesting that the three wise men have been saved, along with Plato, Confucius and other sages through time? Jesus is the Way, the Truth and the Light. Seek and you shall find, knock and the door shall be opened. In ways that I don't completely understand, it seems to me that all those who seek truth, honestly and fully, can be saved by the Truth, by whom there is no other way to salvation.

[John]

Also - "that every other single system is narrow and insufficient compared to this one; that is not a rhetorical boast; it is a real fact and a real dilemma."

[John]

I also loved this quote:

"Those who charged the Christians with burning down Rome with firebrands were slanderers; but they were at least far nearer to the nature of Christianity than those among the moderns who tell us that the Christians were a sort of ethical society, being martyred in languid fashion for telling men they had a duty to their neighbors, and only mildly disliked because they were meek and mild."

[John]

In Chapter II, I very much liked Chesterton's approach rebutting the idea that Jesus was a man of his time who no longer had a place in our time, that in fact Jesus was every bit as revolutionary in his time as he is in our time.

And his biting wit:

"The truth is that when critics have spoken of the local limitations of the Galilean, it has always been a case of the local limitations of the critics."

[Kerstin]

Both of these quotations really point to critics' desire to cut down Jesus "to size", to domesticate him, as Bishop Robert Barron puts it. Jesus deliberately pulls us out of our comfort zones, and that is inconvenient for many.