The Furious Opposites

Mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other. PSALM 85:10

The chapter of Orthodoxy called The Paradoxes of Christianity is the hinge of the whole book, and it begins with Chesterton’s own puzzlement. As a young man, still outside the faith, he had read a great deal of anti-Christian writing, by the famous sceptics of his day. And the more he read, the more he noticed something odd. The critics of Christianity did not agree about what was wrong with it. Indeed, they contradicted each other flatly.

Attacked from every side

One critic said that Christianity was too gloomy, a religion of monks and funerals that had taken the joy out of life. Another said that it was too cheerful, a comfortable fairy tale that hid from men the real misery of the world. One said that it was too meek, teaching men to submit to tyranny and turn the other cheek; another that it was too warlike, the cause of crusades and persecutions. One said that it despised women by its monks and celibates; another that it pampered them, filling the churches with them. One said that it was the enemy of the family; another that it was the family’s narrowest defender.

At first this simply confirmed his unbelief. Surely a religion attacked from every direction must be very bad indeed. But slowly another thought dawned on him. If a man is called too fat by one critic and too thin by another, it may be that he is very oddly shaped. But it may also be that he is exactly the right shape, and that his critics are the odd ones. Perhaps Christianity was not a monstrosity at all. Perhaps it was the only sane thing in the room, and each critic was measuring it by his own particular madness.

Keeping both furious

As Chesterton looked more closely, he found that this was exactly the case. Christianity had a habit, not of finding a comfortable middle point between two virtues, but of holding both of them at full strength at once. He took courage as his first example. True courage, he said, is a kind of contradiction: it means a strong desire to live, taking the form of a readiness to die. The soldier surrounded by enemies will escape only if he fights his way out with a reckless disregard for his life. He must, in a phrase from this chapter, “desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.” Christianity, Chesterton found, had not watered down either desire. It had kept both.

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. MATTHEW 16:25

So it was with humility and dignity. The pagan world had tried to find a balance: a man should think moderately well of himself, neither too proud nor too humble. Christianity did something far stranger. It told a man that he was a miserable sinner, utterly unworthy, and at the same time that he was a creature of infinite worth for whom the Son of God had died. Chesterton summed up the whole pattern in a single sentence: “Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious.” And of humility and dignity in particular: “One can hardly think too little of one’s self. One can hardly think too much of one’s soul.”

I am a worm, and no man. PSALM 22:6

Ye are bought with a price. 1 CORINTHIANS 7:23

It was the same with mercy and judgement. The Christian is to be far angrier at sin than the pagan ever was, and far kinder to the sinner. It was the same with the church’s love of the world and its call to renounce it, with its pageantry and its poverty, its saints in sackcloth and its cathedrals in gold. Chesterton concluded that the church had not compromised between these things but set them side by side, each in its full colour, like the red and white upon the shield of St George, rather than mixing them into pink. “The more I considered Christianity,” he wrote, “the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”

The God-Man

Chesterton saw that this pattern was no accident. It runs back to the centre of the faith. At the heart of the creed stands a Person who is not half God and half man, a sort of compromise between the two, but fully God and fully man at once. The church did not split the difference between His divinity and His humanity. It held both, without diminishing either. All the other paradoxes, Chesterton thought, are echoes of that one.

And without controversy great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh, justified in the Spirit, seen of angels, preached unto the Gentiles, believed on in the world, received up into glory. 1 TIMOTHY 3:16

Why an inch matters

This, he argued, explains something that sceptics have always found absurd about the history of the church: its fierce quarrels over apparently tiny points of doctrine. Why should the councils have argued for years over a single letter in a Greek word? Because, Chesterton answered, when you are holding a great balance, an inch is everything. If the church had let go of Christ’s divinity, or of His humanity, the whole structure would have toppled, and with it everything that made the faith the faith. The councils were not quibbling. They were keeping their balance on a tightrope.

Weighing it

This is one of the most illuminating chapters in all of Chesterton, and much of it can be received without reserve. The Bible is full of the furious opposites he described: the Lord who is a lion and a lamb, the gospel that humbles and exalts, the God who is just and the justifier of him that believeth.

To declare, I say, at this time his righteousness: that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus. ROMANS 3:26

Two cautions are in order. First, the word paradox can become an excuse. Chesterton used it to describe truths that look contradictory but are not, because Scripture teaches both. It is not a licence to call any confusion a mystery or to believe two genuinely contradictory things. The test is always whether both sides are written.

Second, when Chesterton describes the church as holding all these opposites, he is thinking of the visible church of history, with its monasteries and its pageantry, and in later life he identified that church with Rome. Evangelical readers will believe that the balance he loved is found first in Scripture itself, and that the visible churches, Rome included, have often lost it. The cure for an unbalanced church is not a greater confidence in the church, but a closer reading of the Bible.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Which of the furious opposites do you find hardest to hold together: humility and dignity, wrath at sin and mercy to sinners, love of the world and renunciation of it?

2. Have you watered down one of them to make the other easier? Ask God to restore it.

3. Read Philippians 2:5–11 and notice the paradox at the centre of the faith: the God who humbled Himself and was highly exalted.

4. Think of a doctrine you have dismissed as a quibble. Ask what might fall if it were let go.

5. Read the chapter of Orthodoxy called The Paradoxes of Christianity, in the Ochorus library.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus Christ, You are the Lion and the Lamb, truly God and truly man.

I confess that I am less than nothing in myself, and I thank You that You thought me worth dying for.

Make me angrier at sin and kinder to sinners. Make me love Your world and hold it loosely.

Keep me balanced on the narrow way, not by my own skill, but by holding fast to You. Amen.