The Heavenly Chariot

 

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.”*

 Well, I’m clinging on to that chariot with all my strength. 

Peter Frow

October 2022 

*G.K. Chesterton - Orthodoxy