Chesterton on Life and Faith

I have long wanted to read G. K. Chesterton's book Orthodoxy. This summer I finally marked it off my list. One can easily see his influence on another great thinker, C. S. Lewis. Here are few nuggets I found in my reading of the book.

"We have said we must be fond of this world, even in order to change it. We now add that we must be fond of another world (real or imaginary) in order to have something to change it to."

"Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul."

"Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once."

"Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason."

"For orthodox theology has specially insisted that Christ was not a being apart from God and man, like an elf, nor yet a being half human and half not, like a centaur, but both things at once and both things thoroughly, very man and very God."

"Man will sometimes act slowly upon new ideas; but he will only act swiftly upon old ideas."

"But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist."

Quoteable Quotes

A Christian begins with the conclusion that a good God will restore creation to its original design, and sees all history as proceeding toward that end.
Philip Yancey

God's desire is to use our powerlessness to send us fleeing back to him. Evil wants it to send us reeling to rely on ourselves with even greater intensity. We unwittingly follow evil's plan when we attempt to escape our powerlessness through martyrdom, rebellion, or disengagement.
Dan Allender

In contrast to many a preacher today, Jesus knew that "love your enemies" didn't mean "don't make any."

William Sloane Coffin

Quoteable Quotes

"Fellowship with other disciples, living and dead, is another practice essential to the "Christ focus."

"Knowledge 'at a distance,' knowing certain 'facts' about something, doesn't amount to knowing it."

"Jesus is the human face on the kingdom of God. He makes it concretely accessible."

"Jesus, however, did not send his people out to make Christians or to start churches as we understand them today. He sent them to make disciples (students, apprentices) to him and, supported by his presence, to teach them all that he had taught by word and deed. That is a very different type of enterprise!"

Dallas Willard Knowing Christ Today

"If we fail in love, we fail in all things else."

William Sloane Coffin

Quoteable Quotes

"Preaching is something dangerously public that emerges from something intensely private." N.T. Wright

"It will also mean that those who discover the living God in and through Jesus must be prepared to face up to the evil structures and powers that still dominate and control so much of God's world, and to challenge them in the name of Jesus and with the power of his victory on the cross." N. T. Wright

The Need for Christian Thinkers

John Stott in his commentary on Acts writes, 

There is an urgent need for more more Christian thinkers who will dedicate their minds to Christ, not only as lecturers, but also as authors, journalists, dramatists and broadcasters, as television script-writers, producers and personalities, and as artists and actors who use a variety of art forms in which to communicate the gospel. 

The Millennial generation is less influenced by talking heads who lecture about the incarnation of Jesus Christ than any other generation in history. They are more open to traces of the transcendent in pop culture. The church must find ways to communicate the gospel in new forms, even newer ones than Stott mentions, but include those he references if we will see future generations encounter the living Christ! We don't just need new generations of missionaries and preachers we need believers in all vocations to make Yahweh famous.

Quotes on the Church

A church is a group of people collapsing into God and collapsing into one another. Gordon Crosby

A church is a place where you can go when you bottom out! paraphrase of Henri Nouwen

A church is where you go to share your fears.  Walter B. Shurden

Quoteable Quotes

There is nothing mightier or nobler than when man and wife are of one heart and mind in a house. 
Homer

I am incurably convinced that the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.
G.K. Chesterton

Quoteable Quotes Series

Catch on fire with enthusiasm and people will come for miles to watch you burn.
     John Wesley

Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate.
     G.K. Chesterton

Pray in the Spirit at all times.
      The Apostle Paul

Quoteable Quotes

Vocation is not primarily a thing one does to live but the thing one lives to do. It is, or should be, the full expression of your faculties, the thing in which you find spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction.

       Dorothy Sayers

Maturity is to accept oneself and ones origins as non-negotiable.

I do not want to make Baptists shut themselves up in their little clam shells and be indifferent to the ocean outside of them. I am a Baptist, but I am more than a Baptist. All things are mine; whether Francis of Assisi, or Luther, or Knox, or Wesley; all are mine because I am Christ's. The old Adam is a strict denominationalist; the new Adam is just a Christian.

       Walter Rauschenbusch

I came across all of these in the book, For Faith and Friendship, currently in my stack of reading material.