We continue our series in Chesterton's classic Orthodoxy by looking at his famous chapter on the paradox of Christianity. Chesterton writes about how the strangeness of Christianity bolsters its credibility as truth. We should not expect divine revelation to make complete sense to our minds. He also points out that the hostility of the modern world towards Christianity reveals its compelling power. People are fine with a universal religion so long as it is not Christianity. Christianity challenges, disrupts, and even romances us into seeing the world as it actually is. 

"Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously."

"It looked not so much as if Christianity was bad enough to include any vices, but rather as if any stick was good enough to beat Christianity with."

"This is the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy. 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 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."

Bryan and Paul discuss chapter five of G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy entitled "The Flag of the World". In this chapter, Chesterton explains why we must love a place before we critique it and the freedom that God gives to mankind. He takes shots at naturalism and so-called "progress" by helping us understand how Christianity revolutionized the world. He also digs into the paradox that true love for the world requires a particular hatred for it and a desire to see its redemption.

"The point is not that this world is too sad to love or too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more."

"Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her."

"...what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it. We do not want joy and anger to neutralize each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent. We have to feel the universe at once as an ogre's castle, to be stormed, and yet as our own cottage, to which we can return at evening."

"Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but to look outwards, to behold with astonishment and enthusiasm a divine company and a divine captain."

Dr. Jonathan Pennington of Southern Seminary (SBTS) joins us to talk about his new book Come and See: The Journey of Knowing God Through Scripture. We talk about three ways of reading Scripture well: informationally, theologically, and transformationally. Each of these stages challenges us to grow in our understanding of the word of God in practical and tangible ways. We read informationally by using our cognitive faculties to grasp content or information in Scripture. We read theologically when we pay attention to the whole scope of the Bible and the church's tradition of interpretation via creeds and confessions as we engage with texts. Finally, We read transformationally when we slow down and prayerfully apply Scripture to our lives and receive it as a means through which God meets us and changes us by the Holy Spirit.

Show Notes

Visit Dr. Pennington's Website: https://www.jonathanpennington.com/

Get his book Come and See

About Dr. Pennington

Jonathan T. Pennington is currently Professor of New Testament Interpretation at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky (USA). He has also regularly served as a visiting professor at Reformed Theological Seminary (Orlando), Southeastern Seminary, The Village Church Institute (Dallas), and The Institute of Biblical Studies in Orlando, FL as well as Morling College (Melbourne, Australia).

He is also the Spiritual Formation Pastor at Sojourn East and regularly speaks and teaches in churches all over the country.

He earned a B.A. in History as well as a Teaching Certificate from Northern Illinois University. He received the Master of Divinity degree from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (Chicago), where he also taught Greek for two years as a NT Fellow. During his time at TEDS he also served for five years as the Associate Pastor at the Evangelical Free Church of Mt. Morris in northern Illinois.

He holds the PhD in New Testament Studies from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland (in St. Mary’s College), where he wrote a thesis entitled “Heaven and Earth in the Gospel of Matthew” under the supervision of Professors Richard Bauckham and Philip Esler. He attended St. Andrews as a Rotary International Ambassadorial Scholar and while there he also served as a lecturer in Greek. Dr. Pennington is a member of the Society of Biblical Literature, the Evangelical Theological Society, the Tyndale Fellowship (Cambridge), the Institute for Biblical Research, and the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies. He has published a wide variety of books, articles, and Greek and Hebrew language tools. (For fuller information see the Publications pages.) He is the also the host and co-producer of the YouTube show Cars, Coffee, Theology.

We’re back in Chesterton’s Orthodoxy looking at his take on how fairy tales inform our virtues and teach us about joy. Our modern craving for novelty reveals a weakness rather than a strength for God continues to do the same things over and over again, but finds joy in them. Children find joy in repetition because they do not lose their wonder for the world through cynicism. We also look at how democracy relies on tradition to give former generations a “vote” in how we live our lives. A failure to appreciate tradition disconnects us from the stabilizing forces of society. 

Quotes from Orthodoxy

"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."

"There is the great lesson of Beauty and the Beast; that a thing must be loved before it is loveable."

"Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.” 

We continue our discussion of G.K. Chesterton's book Orthodoxy with his third chapter on how modernity's abandonment of Christianity not only lets vices go wild, but also virtues. We also discuss how Chesterton identifies modern false humility that remains skeptical about everything except its own skepticism. Here are some solid quotes from chapter three:

"The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone."

"A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt—the Divine Reason. Huxley preached a humility content to learn from Nature. But the new sceptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn."

"A man does not go mad because he makes a statue a mile high, but he may go mad by thinking it out in square inches."

"Every act of will is an act of self-limitation. To desire action is to desire limitation. In that sense every act is an act of self-sacrifice. When you choose anything, you reject everything else."

"But it is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits." 

Ryan Hurd from the Davenant Institute joins us to talk about the "spiritual" and "literal" readings of Scripture. Evangelicals often misunderstand the "literal" sense as referring only to the historicity of the Bible. But the church throughout the ages understood the literal sense in terms of the "letters" of the text in addition to its historicity. The "literal" and "spiritual" readings do not oppose one another, but work together as a cohesive unit in order to deepen our understanding of God through his word. Ryan draws upon Origen, Augustine, and Aquinas in order to retrieve the classic senses of Scripture that Christians utilized for ages. We also talk about ways ordinary lay readers can grow in their reading of Scripture in a way that furthers their joy and worship of God.

Show Notes

Ryan Hurd is a systematic theologian whose area of expertise is doctrine of God, specifically the Trinity. His primary training is in the high medieval and early modern scholastics as well as the 20th century ressourcement movement. He has written a number of articles and regularly does translations of early modern theology sources; but his primary project is writing a systematics of the Trinity.

Master of the Sacred Page Video Series by Ryan Hurd

This is the second part of our interview with Dr. Matt Colvin. Many speculate that the Apostle Paul, as a faithful Pharisee, likely married at a young age, but lived a life of celibacy after his conversion. Some believe Paul to be a widow, but others see him as a man abandoned by an unbelieving wife after his conversion. Matt Colvin takes us through 1 Corinthians 7 with a mind toward Paul's Jewish worldview in order to establish a compelling vision of marriage, divorce, and the meaning of conversion. We also discuss the "permanence" view of marriage that does not permit divorce or remarriage under any circumstances and the effects of divorce upon our society as a whole.

This is the first part of a two-part interview with Dr. Matt Colvin who joins us again to provide a provocative perspective on 1 Corinthians 7 and its application to Paul's life. Drawing upon the work of scholar David Daube, Colvin argues that Paul likely experienced abandonment from his wife which dissolved their marriage and led to his teaching in 1 Corinthians 7. Along the way we discuss how Daube's perspective reframes the debate over the permissibility of divorce and remarriage. Don't miss this episode.

Show Notes

Sexual Identity: Can We Rebuild? by Matt Colvin

We continue our series through G.K. Chesterton's classic work Orthodoxy by looking at the similarities between atheists, liberal Christians, and lunatics. Here are some zingers from Chesterton himself:

"The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.”

"Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom."

"The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."

"The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."

We begin a new series on G.K. Chesterton's classic book "Orthodoxy" which features a series of essays by the controversial author about faith, tradition, and the modern world. Chesterton's prose and wit allowed him to entertain while also provoke skeptics of the faith in an unparalleled way. His influence on writes such as C.S. Lewis demonstrates the effectiveness of his logic and style with commentary on society that seems prophetic in the modern day. He did not pull any punches, yet remains one of the most winsome figures in Christianity. He was not afraid to polarize and state his opinions openly without fear of ridicule, but also understood how narrative, imagination, and humor disarms opponents and points them to consider the truth claims of Christianity. In the first chapter, Chesterton likens returning to Christianity to a man who thinks he discovers a new land, but in fact re-discovers his home. If you've never read Chesterton or find him difficult to understand this series is for you. 

I never in my life said anything merely because I thought it funny; though of course, I have had ordinary human vainglory, and may have thought it funny because I had said it. It is one thing to describe an interview with a gorgon or a griffin, a creature who does not exist. It is another thing to discover that the rhinoceros does exist and then take pleasure in the fact that he looks as if he didn’t. -- except from Orthodoxy