Good Fences Make Good Christians

O LORD, we beseech thee to keep thy Church and household continually in thy true religion; that they who do lean only upon the hope of thy heavenly grace may evermore be defended by thy mighty power; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

— Collect for the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

The fact that we pray for God to “keep us” in His true religion clearly implies that it is possible for us to drift out of it, into false religion or no religion at all. Most of us have observed this tragic reality in the lives of the people around us, and if we look frankly at our own hearts, we will likely recognize tendencies that could lead to apostasy if left unchecked. If we are to maintain our faithfulness, some sort of safeguard is evidently necessary. At the same time, our zeal for “true religion” must not degrade into fearful compulsion or anxious insularity. It is a tricky balancing act. How can we keep from drifting away while preserving the healthy freedom needed for true flourishing? Two different Christian authors have used the image of a fence to picture structures that can help us strike this balance in two different spheres of the Christian life: doctrine and practice.

Certain strains of Christianity tend to conceive of “true religion” primarily as a matter of holding correct doctrinal beliefs. When this is the case, knowing the “right answers” comes to be a matter of paramount, existential importance, and theological unknowns—legitimate questions without clear answers—are experienced as overwhelming and unanswerable threats. We cannot get away from this fear by resorting to a kind of laissez-faire relativism in which “your truth” is just as valid as “my truth.” Much is indeed at stake if we hold false beliefs about God. False doctrines might take us beyond the bounds of Christianity into heresy—a term which can be simply defined as “those beliefs a Christian cannot hold.”

The church has always dealt with the danger of heresy by defining orthodoxy—a term which can be simply defined as “those beliefs all Christians must hold.” In Orthodoxy, the great Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton likens orthodoxy to a fence, and imagines what happens if that fence is lost:

We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff's edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the center of the island; and their song had ceased.

Paradoxically, the “fence” of orthodoxy frees us rather than constricting us. It is not there to oppressively constrain, but to protect us from falling into fatal error—and if we are not afraid of falling all the time, we suddenly become buoyantly, joyously free. Once the orthodox doctrines are set solidly around us, we find that there is a great deal of freedom to play within their bounds, and we do not need to be afraid that, by asking the wrong question, we will unwittingly stumble over the edge of a cliff to our soul’s hurt. Rather than contracting the world, orthodoxy opens it, enabling us to ask honest questions, express honest curiosity, and hold the sometimes uncomfortable tension of honest uncertainty without the constant terror of falling into heresy.

But knowing and believing the right things is only one sphere of the Christian life. It is possible for a person to give intellectual assent to the correct doctrinal positions while remaining spiritually malformed, because human beings are more than mere intellects. A commitment to Christian doctrine is no automatic guarantee that one will live a Christian life; the tragic reality is that people can be intensely invested in the truths of the Christian religion at an intellectual level while being blind to flagrant, destructive immorality in their own lives. Orthodoxy is a fence for our minds, but we also need fences for our hearts.

In Pastoral Theology, the Anglican priest and writer Martin Thornton likens one of our tradition’s distinctive practices, the threefold rule of prayer, to a fence:

This conception of Rule as a threefold system, an interconnected framework, might be illustrated by the idea of a fence. We are constructing a fence—to keep the devil out of the garden of the soul—for the disciples of St. Thérèse who like such pictures. This carefully constructed fence of the spiritual life is built around a series of big strong posts, firmly embedded in the ground, and placed at regular intervals; these represent the Mass, which acts as the central support of all else. A more numerous series of smaller stakes, embedded in the ground and placed at more frequent intervals between the main posts are the Offices. Finally there are a number of horizontal, parallel cross-pieces which may vary in number, size, strength, or material, which link up the verticals and which are dependent upon them; this is private prayer.

The threefold rule of prayer keeps our experiential encounters with God safe and stable in a way that forms our hearts, not just our intellects. Because of the objectivity and communal nature of the Offices and the Mass, along with their solid grounding in Scripture and tradition, our personal prayer is protected from veering off into merely subjective, individual “mysticism” disconnected from the doctrinal tenets and behavioral imperatives of the Christian religion. And yet, if we maintain a vivid life of personal prayer, the Offices and the Mass are protected from becoming lifeless rituals that do not touch our hearts in any real way. A robust and well-rounded life of prayer is indeed like a fence that shepherds us towards faithfulness and away from apostasy.

To say that good fences make good Christians is not to perpetuate the stereotype of traditional Christians as hidebound, incurious, and suspicious, nor is it to suggest that the purpose of Christianity is to insulate us from the suffering of the world. It is simply to acknowledge the truth that certain kinds of structure, safety, and stability are vital, even indispensable aids to the growth Christ invites us to. In the 15th chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.” To playfully mix our metaphors, we might say that the “fences” Christ’s followers have constructed over the centuries—orthodoxy to safeguard our doctrine and the rule of prayer to safeguard our practice—are also like trellises, stable structures to support us as, like branches of the vine, we abide and flourish in Our Lord.