Christianity, whatever else it is, is an explosion. Unless it is sensational there is simply no sense in it. Unless the Gospel sounds like a gun going off it has not been uttered at all.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that Christianity should be a powerful and vibrant force in society, making a significant impact.
In this quote, Chesterton emphasizes that Christianity must be full of energy and excitement to fulfill its purpose. He argues that if the message of the Gospel is not captivating or profound, it loses its significance and fails to resonate with its audience. The reference to an 'explosion' connotes a dramatic and transformative power, asserting that religious truths should be experienced with passion and fervor, akin to the blast of a gun.
In practice
In a sermon to emphasize the transformative power of faith, you might say, 'Christianity is like an explosion, it’s meant to shake us to our core.'
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?…There is nobody—here among these grey arches, and moaning pigeons, and cheerful games and tradition and emulation, all so skilfully organised to prevent feeling alone.
I have a wife, I have sons: all of them hostages given to fate.
One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
If one has got power, one must manifest it in action.
That is what deconstruction is made of: not the mixture but the tension between memory, fidelity, the preservation of something that has been given to us, and, at the same time, heterogeneity, something absolutely new, and a break.
It's so kind of you to want to visit me in my loneliness. - The Wicked Witch of the West. Now I know I have a heart, because it's breaking. - The Tin Woodsman Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.
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