“Don’t ever take a fence down,” wrote John F. Kennedy, paraphrasing the great Christian apologist (explainer), G.K. Chesterton, “until you know why it was put up.”
The actual quote from Chesterton is this: “In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them…The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to [the fence] and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’
“To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’”
Consider art. The genuinely creative artist knows the rules…and when to break them. The artless pretender merely breaks rules and produces chaos.
Mozart knew the rules of the sonata form. But it was within its confines that his startling, free form innovations took flight.
Serving a church for the first time, I came to realize that I had violated Chesterton’s common sense observation. In true 60’s fashion, I had worried that the institutional church would not meet my utopian ideals. What I discovered, to my great surprise, is that within the church’s bounded walls all genuine Christianity is both birthed and practiced.
I recently read an ordination paper that contains language I myself might have written years ago. Here the candidate referred to “the old paradigm” of church life: “believe, behave, belong.” Finding this wanting, she advocated instead a ministry focused mostly on fixing the world beyond.
While the church, by definition, has always sought to be a positive force in our world, to deny, diminish, and/or take for granted what goes on in the local church is, in this case, a well-meaning mistake, though a common one.
My brother-in-law, Bill, also a retired UCC pastor, and someone with a great sense of humor, once told his teenage kids, when on a date, to ask their suitors this question: “What is your epistemological frame of reference?”
“If they answer ‘God,’” he advised, “they’re a keeper.”
Epistemology, in short, is the study of how we come to know something.
What my 60’s idealism had failed to notice is that while we were eager to take fences down, we had no epistemology, that is, no awareness that ideas, values, morals, truth, wisdom, and, yes, even institutions and fences, come from some place. They have a history.
Our contemporary culture, steeped as it is in these post-60’s liberationist attitudes, assumes that truth is grasped simply from the air we breathe. We assume we’re born with wisdom and virtue. In this we fail to see something the ancients understood clearly.
Rather than being born with virtue, the ancients understood that virtue must be learned, practiced, and inculcated. While we are born with the capacity to master, say, quantum physics, it’s not something we can know at birth.
Virtue is no different. But where do we learn it?
We learn it, in large measure, from the past (and its fences). What my fellow 60’s-ites and I failed to realize is that the past betrays an indispensable wisdom born of human experience and its practical application through time.
In my rush to reach the Promised Land, I forgot that the past gets a vote, too, with its truths as well as its limitations and failures.
Benighted by an implicit 19th century German historicism, which finds no foundational truths to life, but a succession of wholly new, fluid, and progressive stages leading inevitably to perfection here on earth, we forget or ignore at our peril the lessons of the past.
Chesterton taught that the purpose of a fence is to protect us from real dangers, such as a cliff, which then allows us to play and explore freely within its sheltered confines.
As he writes in Orthodoxy: “[The] more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”