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 . . . The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable . . . 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 . . . 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 avoid 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. -- G K Chesterton {Orthodoxy, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Image, 1908, pp. 100-101}
Not only does "orthodox" no longer mean being right, it practically means being wrong. --G. K. Chesterton, 1905
We cannot be passive and silent towards those who reject God's Word and our holy faith.-- Abraham Kuyper, Confidentie, p72.
Do not bury our glorious orthodoxy in the treacherous pit of a spurious conservatism.
Abraham Kuyper, Sermon, Conservatism and Orthodoxy, Utrecht, 31 July 1870, in Abraham Kuyper a Biography, Fank Vanden Berg, Paideia Press, 1978.p 49.
After listening to modern tirades against the great creeds of the Church, one receives a shock when one turns to the Westminster Confession... and discovers that in doing so one has turned from shallow modern phrases to a "dead orthodoxy" that is pulsating with life in every word. In such orthodoxy there is life enough to set the whole world aglow with Christian love. --J. Gresham Machen, 1923.
[Leaders of the anarchist movement in Amsterdam] call their public demonstrations "Happenings". These paintings, these poems, and these demonstrations... are the expression of men who are struggling with their appalling lostness. Dare we laugh at such things? Dare we feel superior when we view their tortured expressions in their art? Christians should stop laughing and take such men seriously. Then we shall have the right to speak again to our generation. These men are dying while they live, yet where is our compassion for them? There is nothing more ugly than an orthodoxy without understanding or without compassion. ... Francis A. Schaeffer, The God who is There [1968]
Othodoxy is my doxy; heterodoxy is another man's doxy. William Warburton (1698 - 1779)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
You could have done a lot worse and very little better than to have fallen for a moment or two into a deep and penetrating encounter with the primitive Christianity first introduced upon earth by Christ Jesus; and now reinstated, including its lost element of healing, in Christian Science!
Don't knock it until you've tried it!
That was Chesterton giving it the slightest of knocks. I find your Christian Science unworthy of its name, Those who deny the Trinity and the deity of Christ are not Christian and those who deny the reality of objective physical illness are unscientific. Yours is a cult of denial.
Post a Comment