A while back, linking to one of John Stackhouse’s posts, I wrote the following:
it’s not the belief in absolute truth as such that produces dogmatism, but the combination of a belief in absolute truth with a belief that the self is absolute; and it’s to defend that belief in the absolute self that people declare the truth to be relative. For my own part, I believe that the truth is absolute, and I am relative; my certainty is necessarily limited, not by the absence of absolutes, but by my own limited ability to perceive and apprehend them accurately. . . . We should believe what we believe firmly and with conviction; but also with humility. After all, the fact that we believe something doesn’t guarantee that it’s true; as Dr. Stackhouse says, it’s about confidence in God who is truth, not about certainty in ourselves, who aren’t.
That was something I’d been kicking around for a while, which I was foolish enough to think I’d come up with on my own. Turns out the only reason I thought that was because it had been too long since I read Chesterton. Here’s the root and spring of that idea, from Orthodoxy (only much better put, as you would expect), courtesy of Ray Ortlund—and along with it, the reminder of the importance of humility:
What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert—himself.