It is not seeing things as they are to think first of a Briareus with a hundred hands, and then call every man a cripple for only having two. It is not seeing things as they are to start with a vision of Argus with his hundred eyes, and then jeer at every man with two eyes as if he had only one. And it is not seeing things as they are to imagine a demigod of infinite mental clarity, who may or may not appear in the latter days of the earth, and then to see all men as idiots.
This struck me as an odd position for a Christian apologist. I know that if I didn’t see us all as idiots, I might think we all deserved to die—oh, wait.
I’m not sure Chesterson deserves the epithet of apologist. Christian yes… evangelist, of a sort. I see him as a cut above the apologist class of Christian commentators.
I don’t know that “apologist” counts as a natural class, but he definitely produced Christian apologetics. He may have preferred to call them ‘refutations’ of non-Christian or atheist doctrines.
Of course, if you can compute the way an Argus would see an obscured object, or a Briareus would approach a dexterity-testing-task, that might be useful in evaluating our approaches to similar problems.
-G.K. Chesterton
Related: this slide
This struck me as an odd position for a Christian apologist. I know that if I didn’t see us all as idiots, I might think we all deserved to die—oh, wait.
I’m not sure Chesterson deserves the epithet of apologist. Christian yes… evangelist, of a sort. I see him as a cut above the apologist class of Christian commentators.
I don’t know that “apologist” counts as a natural class, but he definitely produced Christian apologetics. He may have preferred to call them ‘refutations’ of non-Christian or atheist doctrines.
Of course, if you can compute the way an Argus would see an obscured object, or a Briareus would approach a dexterity-testing-task, that might be useful in evaluating our approaches to similar problems.