Spring House: The gift of Orthodoxy for Postmodern Pilgrims

July 30, 2017
Langdon Palmer

We have been brought up to be very suspicious of words like Dogma, Doctrine, and Orthodoxy. Many of us have an emotional reaction to those words - they sound rigid, unthinking, prejudice, old fashioned, the kinds of words that people with closed minds hold on to. And when these words are abused they can function that way. But it turns out that real orthodoxy can serve as a map that leads me out of the cramped universe I constructed for myself into the wide open spaces with Jesus where living water is found. Today we take an intense dive into the philosophical waters of our day in order to discover that what we need now more than ever is the Spring House of Orthodoxy.

Episode Notes

Key quotes to consider while listening to this podcast:

“The dogma is the drama!”
“Official Christianity, of late years, has been having what is known as a bad press. We are constantly assured that the churches are empty because preachers insist too much upon doctrine—dull dogma as people call it. The fact is the precise opposite. It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man—and the dogma is the drama.”

–   Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) in Letters to a Diminished Church

 

"There was never anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy.
It was sanity: and to be sane is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway that, yet in every attitude having the grace of a statuary and the accuracy of arithmetic.

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, and the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect."
–    G.K . Chesterton (1874-1936) in Orthodoxy

 

“In reading Chesterton…, I did not know what I was letting myself in for. A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere– “Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,” as Herbert says, “fine nets and stratagems.” God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”

–    C.S. Lewis (1898 –1963) in Surprised by Joy

 

1st Corinthians 15:1-14

Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures… this is what we preach, and this is what you believed… And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.


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