Week 6: Part II, Chapters III & IV

[Kerstin]

Sorry folks for the delay in posting this. The last few days have been unexpectedly hectic.

Chapter III: The Strangest Story in the World

In this Chapter Chesterton talks of the strangeness of Jesus. Bishop Robert Barron mentioned the same thing in his Catholicism series. Jesus cannot be reduced to just a “good moral man,” or a charismatic speaker with a lot of good insights – this is not who is is. None of the other founders of religions or belief systems claimed to be God.

” There is a sort of notion in the air everywhere that all the religions founders were rivals; that they are all fighting for the starry crown. It is quite false.”

I am reminded here of an earlier point Chesterton made, that no other religion brought forth the equivalent of a Church.

”If Christ was simply a human character, he really was a highly complex and contradictory one human character. For he combined exactly the two things that lie at the two extremes of human variation. He was exactly what the man with a delusion never is; he was wise; he was a good judge. What he said was always unexpected; but it was always unexpectedly magnanimous and often unexpectedly moderate.”

“God is God, as the Moslems say; but a great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it. That is the paradox; everything that is merely approaching to that point is merely receding from it. Socrates, the wisest man, knows that he knows nothing. A lunatic may think he is omniscience, and a fool may talk as if he were omniscient. But Christ is in another sense omniscient if he not only knows, but he knows he knows.”

Then Chesterton talks about the necessity of Good Friday. “The primary thing that he was going to do was to die.” No death, no resurrection.

“You could no more fight the jungle of popular mythology with a private opinion than you could clear away a forest with a pocket knife.”

“Since that day it has never been quite enough to say that God is in the heaven and all is right with the world; since the rumor that God had left his heaven to set it right.”

“There were solitudes beyond where none shall follow. There were secrets in the inmost and invisible part of that drama that have no symbol or speech; or in any severance of a man from men.”

“For in that second cavern the whole of that great and glorious humanity which we call antiquity was gathered up and covered over; and in that place it was buried. It was the end of a very great thing called human history; the history that was merely human. The mythologies and the philosophies were buried there, the gods and the heroes and the sages. In the great Roman phrase, they had lived. But as they could only live, so they could only die; and they were dead.
On the third day the friends of Christ coming at day-break to the place found the grave empty and the stone rolled away. In varying ways they realized the new wonder; but even they hardly realized that the world had died in the night. What they were looking at was the first day of a new creation, with a new heaven and a new earth; and in a semblance of the gardener God walked again in the garden, in the cool not of the evening but the dawn.”

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I am still catching up on Chapter IV...

[Frances]

Theses are beautiful and important quotations, Kerstin. Thank you so much.

[John]

I also liked this from Chapter III:

"The mob went along with the Sadducees and the Pharisees, the philosophers and the moralists. It went along with the imperial magistrates and the sacred priests, the scribes and the soldiers, that the one universal human spirit might suffer a universal condemnation; that there might be one deep, unanimous chorus of approval and harmony when Man was rejected of men."

[John]

In chapter IV, I like his comparison of the creed and the keys. This is a rich image that provides a lot to think about. Changing the creed is like changing the shape of a key; it may unlock a door, but it won't be the same door.

[Manny]

You guys are leaving me in the dust. I'm still in Part 1...lol.

[Kerstin]

Chapter IV: The Witness of the Heretics

Chesterton begins this chapter with the image of the key, which features so prominently as a metaphor in Christianity. Here his “obviousness” comes to the forefront again. He states that a key “is a thing that depends entirely upon keeping its shape.” Now one could write entire dissertations on the significance of this very fact alone and how it implicates the validity and verity of philosophical constructs, and in particular, Christian thought. The very dogma many deride is actually its strength.

He moves on that Christianity, and especially the Church, is not something that started out in simple form and then became more complex as it went along, but it was a complex from the very beginning. “It had a doctrine; it had a discipline; it had sacraments; it had degrees of initiation; it admitted people and expelled people; it affirmed one dogma with authority and repudiated another with anathemas.”
Here he really refutes the concept of evolution from simple to complex pertaining to the Church. Just like Creation is complex right from the beginning, even life at the cellular level is highly complex, so is the Church. She has all the necessary components she needs to do her mission. And part of her mission had to be appealing for everyone. “The Church had to be both Roman and Greek and Jewish and African and Asiatic. In the very words of the Apostle of the Gentiles, it was indeed all things to all men.”

Looking at heresies one finds the common tactic of the Church and the Christian faith being accused of the very thing she opposes. With the examples of Arianism and Manichaeism Chesterton points out that one really is dealing with a separation of faith and philosophy. Faith and philosophy is uniquely intertwined in Christian thought. When you artificially separate them, you fall into heresy. That is quite an insight! When we talk of the concept that God is Love, then the concept of the Trinity, “which is simply the logical side of love,” is already implied, for love always flows outward, it has to have a recipient and is reciprocal in nature. Love, as we define it as Christians, is to will the good of the other as other. If there is only one God, then who is the recipient of his love? Christ has to be from the beginning, Co-Eternal, and the Holy Spirit the love they share.

“…that idea of balance in the deity, as of balance in the family, that makes that creed as sort of sanity, and that sanity the soul of civilization. And that is why the Church is from the first a thing holding its own position and point of view, quite apart from the accidents and anarchies of its age.”