Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures,

 and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.

-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

I have found yet another guide to the faith.  It was one I had heard about and read excerpts from but had never taken the time to read in earnest: Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s Orthodoxy.  Mr. Chesterton resonates with the same sensible yet imaginative faith that has always drawn me to C.S. Lewis.  The imagination of Chesterton’s mind comes from having faith in himself and in God who draws him along the path, the sensibility comes from the healthy doubt of humility in the face of God’s glory.  I have been reminded lately by the still small voice that life, particularly a life lived in a Godly direction, is the ultimate adventure.  The trials of life are exhilarating and satisfying only in as much as we stand the chance of failure.  When we become parents, as my wife and I have recently done for the second time, we are struck by the awe and responsibility of raising children.  We suspect that we might be good parents but we are never truly sure.  I am not particularly interested in hearing reassurances that I’m doing okay, the proof for me will be that Jack and Cate grow up to be well adjusted people.

            Parenthood is an adventure that is made more stressful and more exhilarating by the possibility, in fact, the likelihood that we will mess up.  In general I am a person who likes to be good at what I do.  I have never enjoyed sports that emphasize speed alone because I am not fast.  I do not find calculus interesting because I cannot understand it.  I do find theology interesting because I “get it.”  I enjoy playing the guitar because I can do it passably, while certainly having room for improvement.  I think that part of success in life is knowing which adventures to undertake.  I have undertaken ministry, parenthood, marriage, writing, all things in which I have some faith in myself, enough faith to get going at least.  In all those things there is some doubt as well, enough doubt to make them interesting and to provoke me to keep trying.

            U2 has an interesting line in one of their latest songs, “Some things you shouldn’t get too good at: smiling, crying and celebrity.  Some people have way too much confidence baby.”  It occurs to me that a good number of people in the world get entirely too wrapped up in pleasure or pain and it seems like our entire nation is infatuated with celebrity.  I have known many people who had way too much confidence in themselves and their ideas.  The primary source of strife between people, in the church and elsewhere, is people having way too much confidence in their own dogma.  T.V.’s Bill O’Reilly refers to this confidence with regard to extreme liberal or conservative viewpoints as “drinking the Kool-Aid” but even moderates have dogmatic assumptions.

            I have found that it is always good to have enough confidence to have an honest conversation with people who have different opinions from yourself without being defensive.  Those conversations will be even more interesting if you allow yourself to realize that they may be right.  Your faith, and your knowledge, will become stronger if you have opposition to push against.  However, caving in is not an adventure, ceding your beliefs will cause the adventure to end in disaster, learning how to treat opposing views as though they may be right is different from admitting that they are right.

            When it comes to articles of faith there are a couple important points of dogma that we must accept: that God is one: Father, Son and Holy Spirit and that the Son is Jesus Christ.  This dogma has roots in our experience and the traditions of the Church; it is founded in Scripture and supported by the rigors of philosophy and reason (remember I am admitting to being dogmatic on these points primarily because this is an article not a book, see Mr. Lewis, Mr. Chesterton, Mr. Barth, Mr. Calvin et al for exhaustive support of this statement).  Beyond that there is very little of which we can be absolutely sure.  In fact there is very little that we should want to be absolutely sure of beyond this statement.  This dogmatic paradigm leaves the universe an astonishingly free and wondrous place, to begin to bind it with further codicils and addenda would begin to hinder the freedom and wonder, in short hinder the adventure of living in God’s creation.