I would describe my doctrinal position as ‘Mere Orthodoxy.’
There are some theological circles in which I move
where such a confession is reckoned ‘seriously
uncool.’
Inexcusably retrograde.
Yet if in such circumstances I incline to feeling
beleaguered,
To my aid comes G. K. Chesterton,
Like a gale, a refreshing wind, he comes:
“People have fallen into the 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 the equilibrium
of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and 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 un-historic 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. --- 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 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.”*
Peter Frow
October 2022
*G.K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy
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