The more I think about it, the more outrageous it seems to me. But then again, I suspect I am not alone. There is something amazing about the Gospel’s message, the teaching of Scripture that the last word in human history comes from a dead man hanging on a cross. Peter tells us the cross is the untiring curiosity of angels, who "long to look into these things." In fact it sounds like a fairy tale. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote, "[The Gospel] is like a fairy tale, a fairy tale that came true." You don’t talk in those terms about something unless it is extraordinary, delightful, inspires you with awe and is, yet, rather fanciful.

The theologian, G. K Chesterton’s conversion occurred because of the outrageous criticism of the gospel by the popular critics of his day. Being an unbeliever and skeptic and not thinking much about Christianity at all, he continued to hear critics strike Christianity. It was their bashing that caused him first to notice the gospel and then to become a seeker. The condemnation was so contradictory that he thought Christianity must be from the lower regions of hell itself. He heard Christianity criticized for being too gloomy and then the same people castigated it for being too ethereal. He heard people destroy Christianity making men into monks and doddering sheep. It only got worse -- Christianity was too austere, too much fasting and sackcloth, yet others blamed it for making men gluttons because of their feasting and elaborate cathedral-building. Christianity was repressive towards sexuality, but others said it was excoriated for not restraining sexuality enough. Christianity couldn’t possibly be true because it gave men a false sense of valiance, it perpetrated war. Being the subject of great interest, Chesterton wondered what could Christianity possibly be teaching that would cause such contradictory criticisms?

"The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell," Chesterton wrote. "Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not Christ, He must have been Antichrist." (Orthodoxy) Or there was another possibility, which Chesterton hadn’t counted at the beginning of his investigation and that is that Christianity was indeed true, it was the key that fit the lock that unlocks reality. "A stick might fit a hole or a stone a hollow by accident. But a key and a lock are both complex. And if a key fits a lock, you know it is the right key." (Orthodoxy) The ability of Christianity to hold such extremes together convinced him of its truthfulness.Dorothy L. Sayers, another convert to Christianity, wrote in Creed or Chaos?: "Christianity has compelled the mind of man, not because it is the most cheering view of human existence, but because it is truest to the facts."

Consider some of the outrageous claims of the gospel and they are the most humbling, pride withering, and yet glorious truths imaginable, truths to heal your heart in most any circumstance. God only uses disqualified, unqualified, wounded, broken and helpless people. That means our righteousness be damned. God uses the damaged and flawed to bring glory to himself, giving us a place in God’s Kingdom. God takes his enemies and makes them royalty. Most of us would give our life for someone we love; if we wouldn’t, the last vestiges of what is human has already been leached away. We even understand it when we hear stories of this happening. But the gospel says, God threw his life away to save his enemies. He then takes our rags, cleans us and calls us his children. He makes us royalty. Think about it, sons and daughters of a king, heirs to the wealth of the world.

When you become a Christian you don’t live by rules anymore. That really alarms people. When we have been loved like Jesus loves, we don’t need an external code. Real love implies a kind of surrender. You want to please the beloved. It is not duty that drives you, it is love. Augustine wrote, "Love God and do as you please." That freaked me out till I tried it out on my wife to see if it would work in our marriage. I discovered we don’t live by rules in our relationship, we exist in a kind of relationship that is more liberating and yet more restraining than if we each checked off our list and fulfilled our duty. All other religions require the opposite. If you keep their rules God will love you. We do not have to think like that or worry about Augustine’s theology, when we understand the depth of the gospel’s message of the cross. Chesterton caught the ethos, "[In the gospel] there was room for wrath and love to run wild. And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it has established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild." (Orthodoxy)

The more you ponder it, the more we shouldn’t be surprised. God is good. Love implies lavish and outrageous treatment. There are a lot of things true about Christianity but dull, sterile, suburban -- these adjectives don’t fit the evidence. You may reject the gospel, but only because it is too good.