A friend took the trouble to write me privately with some encouraging quotes from Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. One of the most exasperating things about McLaren’s book was his attempt to appropriate Chesterton for himself, and so I thought I would just pass those citations on to you. I believe they are all from from chapter 3, The Suicide of Thought. Read a couple emergent books and then read this chapter, or better yet, the entire book. It will be like clapping a oxygen mask on your face after bicycling up Mt. Everest.
“…what we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. 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.”
“…the new skeptic is so humble that he doubts if he can even learn.”
“The old humility was a spur that prevented a man from stopping; not a nail in his boot that prevented him from going on. For the old humility made a man doubtful about his efforts, which might make him work harder. But the new humility makes a man doubtful about his aims, which will make him stop working altogether.
“At any street corner we may meet a man who utters the frantic and blasphemous statement that he may be wrong. Every day one comes across somebody who says that of course his view may not be the right one. Of course his view must be the right one, or it is not his view. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern skeptics are too meek to claim their inheritance.”
“The sages, it is often said, can see no answer to the riddle of religion. But the trouble with our sages is not that they cannot see the answer; it is that they cannot even see the riddle.”
And amen.