Foes of friends

One of the most memorable things I was taught during my degree was that everyone writes with a bias. It was one of those, 'Of course, how did I ever think anything different?' moments. If you think the newspaper (or blog) you read is a bias-free you are wrong: it's just that it has the same bias as you.

It's easier to see in others – look wherever you don’t like.

Today I read on the website of a national newspaper that the family of churches I belong to is ‘the fruit standard of fruit loopiness among English evangelical Christians’. That’s such an English insult, isn’t it?

In defence of Christian orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton wrote:

It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own.

It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom—that would indeed have been simple.

But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.

I confess I'm still working my way towards that having that faith. It's a process I'm likely to have to get used to.