So Chesterton’s “journalist,” whatever his protestations, strikes me as a dogmatist of this sort. He is, if I may risk trespassing on Chesterton’s domain, dogmatically anti-dogmatic.
However, were he (or, increasingly, she) to respond to G.K.’s invitation “to ask what the dogmas are,” what might one offer? Here I find Henri de Lubac presents an intriguing suggestion. De Lubac writes:
One could no more separate the revealed truths from the very Person of the Redeemer, than one could conceive a true and complete idea of the transcendent newness of Christianity if one did not recognize that, in this Person of Christ, such as the Apostles already show him to us, … the reality of charity and the truth of dogma are indissolubly united. Charity constitutes the reality of this dogma, as this dogma itself constitutes the truth of this charity.
Am I being overly simplistic in finding here the affirmation that the “dogma” is “the very Person of the redeemer” in whom truth and charity form, indeed, a seamless garment? And that both the root and the fruit of the Christian life manifest a distinctive Christo-logic that the “revealed truths” necessarily articulate, but never exhaust?
The root, then, is the Paschal Mystery of the Lord, and the fruit and flower are the transformed lives of Christians.