I am in a class this week that is touching on the epistemological issues involved in doing theology and pretty much believing anything. This morning’s discussion reminded me of a quote from my favorite dead Brittish author GK Chesterton:

We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table. We are in danger of seeing philosophers who doubt the law of gravity as being a mere fancy of their own. Scoffers of old time were too proud to be convinced; but these are too humble to be convinced. The meek do inherit the earth; but the modern sceptics are too meek even to claim their inheritance.

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1908.

I do think that things have gotten a bit worse since Chesterton’s day some 100 years ago. I think the big fella, if alive today, would rend his garments to see a generation so passive and timid about the mere possibility of truth. I wonder if he knew that this gangrenous passivity would come to so infect those who claim to follow the one who once prayed “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.” John 17:17-19 ESV

Truth as a categorical reality is indispensable to all of life, without it we perish in a thousand unqualified ways.