The Centrality of Peripherals

“In all this, we must remember the centrality of peripherals. The point is not to favor the peripherals instead of the center. That would be the sin of majoring on minors, swallowing camels, and all the rest of it. Rather, the point is that on this question the Christian world has fallen into the fallacy of bifurcation. Either we emphasize the center and wave off the peripherals as unimportant, or we emphasize the peripherals and forget the center. But remember, the fruit — which Christ required for identifying the nature of a tree — is way out on the edges of the tree and at the farthest point away from the root. We must recover the notion that peripherals are central because the center is important. Of course we cannot cleanse the inside of the cup by washing the outside. But when someone is transformed on the inside, this will neccessarily have ramifications on the outside” (The Paideia of God, p. 49).