Book Review: Orthodoxy by G.K. Chesterton

In a break from the usual Bible study, Pastor Santosh reviews one of his favorite books of all time, G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy. The episode explores Chesterton's compelling defense of the Christian faith, demonstrating how it answers life's deepest questions in ways that an atheistic worldview simply cannot. Highlighting the chapter "The Ethics of Elfland," Santosh reflects on how the book reawakens a profound sense of joy, wonder, and enchantment at the supernatural beauty of God's everyday creation. 

Transcript

Speaker 0:01

Hello, friends. Welcome to the Long Obedience Podcast. I'm your host, Santosh Ninan. So good to be with you today, wherever you are, whatever you are doing. Today we're going to do something a little bit different on the podcast. I am going to do a book review. For those of you who've been uh with us for the last couple of weeks, we've been studying a book of the Bible. We've been studying First Peter together. And today I'm going to do something a little bit different. I am going to review one of my favorite books of all time. And I'm going to be doing this about once a month. I'm going to do a book review of a book that's been very meaningful to me, a book that has been instrumental in my spiritual formation. And I hope you enjoy it. Please let me know what you think. The book I have chosen to review today is called Orthodoxy, and it's written by G.K. Chesterton. My history with this book is that I first read it in 1993. I was working in a Christian bookstore in Saskatoon and I saw it on the shelf. And I had vaguely heard of G.K. Chesterton. I didn't know much about him, but I heard he was good, he was important. So I bought the book and I read it that summer. I would go on to reread the book seven more times. I have a few different editions of it, a few different copies of it, including that original 1993 one. And I actually have a first edition. The book was published in 1908, and I happen to have a first edition that is in great condition. I bought it in a used bookstore in New York, and it's actually one of my most prized possessions. I love this book because it's just excellent writing. Chesterton was an incredible writer, and it's an incredible apologetic for the Christian faith. The other book that's been really important in my life is the book Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, which I'll review on another day. G.K. Chesterton had a lot of good lines. Here's one of them: the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried. And then there's another famous story of him that the Times once sent out an inquiry to a bunch of famous writers asking the question, What's wrong with the world today? This was Chesterton's response to that question. Dear sirs, upon your request for what's wrong with the world today, the answer is, I am, yours truly, G.K. Chesterton. To the answer to the question, what's wrong with the world today, I am, yours truly, G.K. Chesterton. No other writer has better explained what we need to make sense in life, what we need to believe in order for life to make sense. And he also shows that the atheistic worldview fails over and over again. All right, let's start off with talking about who this guy was. Who was G.K. Chesterton? His full name was Gilbert Keith Chesterton. He was born in 1874, and he died in 1936. He was British, he was born in London, lived in London his whole life. He never went to college. He went to art school. And he was asked to contribute a few magazine articles on art criticism. And that launched his career as a writer. And he became incredibly prolific. He wrote 100 books, contributed to 200 others, wrote hundreds of poems, five plays, five novels, and 200 short stories, including a series featuring a detective or a priest who acts as a detective. His name is Father Brown. And I was surprised to find out that Father Brown is still on the BBC today. There's a series of TV shows called Father Brown that is still being produced today. Chesterton wrote over 4,000 newspaper articles, and he wrote a weekly column for the Illustrated London News and worked for the Daily News as well. He wrote on topics as diverse as literary and social criticism, history, politics, economics, philosophy, and theology. Chesterton was extremely eccentric looking. He stood six feet four inches, weighed about 300 pounds, usually had a cigar in his mouth, and he wore a cape and a crumpled hat and tiny glasses. I think they're called pincnez glasses that were just on the end of his nose. He was famously absent-minded. He did most of his writing in train stations because he was always missing trains. There's one famous story that he once telegrammed his wife saying, I am at Market Harborough. Where am I supposed to be? His wife's name was Frances. They never had any children. Sadly, they couldn't have children. I'm sure he would have been a great father and grandfather. He wrote a book called The Everlasting Man about Jesus, and that book led C.S. Lewis to becoming a Christian. He wrote a novel called The Napoleon of Notting Hill, which inspired Michael Collins to lead a movement for Irish independence. One essay that he wrote in the illustrated London News inspired Gandhi to lead a movement to end British colonial rule in India. C.S. Lewis said of Chesterton's writing: A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. The very best popular defense of the full Christian position I know is G.K. Chesterton's The Everlasting Man. And to read him is to grow in mental health. Another person who was influenced by Chesterton was the late pastor Tim Keller, who was an apologist in his own right. Keller said, nobody was better than Chesterton at showing that Christianity is not just rationally defensible, but emotionally satisfying and beautiful. G.K. Chesterton died at the start of the 20th century. He died in 1936. Yet all these years later, he is still having an impact and an influence. There's a whole organization called the Chesterton Society, which has local groups all over the world. They host an annual conference. They still uh public, they have publications. You can even buy Chesterton sweatshirts and mugs. Cornell University has a Christian study center called Chesterton House. So this guy had a lot of influence, continues to have a lot of influence. He's just an amazing, amazing man. All right, now I want to jump into the book. So you're going to hear me uh turning pages as I as I look through the book while we go through it together. The purpose of the book is found in the first chapter. He writes, I have attempted in a vague and personal way, in a set of mental pictures rather than in a series of deductions, to state the philosophy in which I have come to believe. I will not call it my philosophy, for I did not make it. God and humanity made it, and it made me. I wish to set forth my faith as particularly answering spiritual need, the need for that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar, which Christendom has rightly named romance. So he's just writing this book to present what he believes in response to a few people who actually just asked him, what is it you believe? The first four chapters of the book are a series of questions that he poses that he does not feel are answered by atheism. Questions like, if the physical world is all there is, why do I still get drawn into wonder and the beauty of nature? Or how can a person live if there is no such thing as objective truth and objective reality? And why have we lost the wonder and beauty of life? Or why do so many of us live with anxiety, depression, and worry? So he opens up the book posing these questions and then saying atheism didn't give him any answers. The next six chapters he presents how Christianity answers all of these questions that were bothering him. On page 70, in the edition I have, he talks about what he came to believe. This is what he writes. I felt in my bones first that this world does not explain itself. It may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation, it may be a conjuring trick with a natural explanation, but the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural explanations I've heard. The thing is magic, true or false. Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have someone to mean it. There was something personal in the world as in a work of art. Whatever it meant, it meant violently. Third, I thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects. Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint. We should thank God for beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them. We owed also an obedience to whatever made us. And last and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods. He had saved them from a wreck. All this I felt, and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. And all this time I had not even thought of Christian theology. So even before his conversion, he's coming up with these ideas. He says that the world probably did not just come into being by itself, that there was a creator behind the world. And if there was a creator, then that creator had a personal being that we could actually get to know. And that we should be grateful to that being, to God, for creating us. So this is uh what he came to believe. And then he goes on and talks about the need for an objective goal or an objective vision for humanity. He writes these words The following propositions have been urged. First, that some faith in our life is required even to improve it. Second, that some dissatisfaction with things as they are is necessary even in order to be satisfied. Third, to have this necessary content and necessary discontent, it is not sufficient to have the obvious equilibrium of the stoic. So what he's saying here is that we need faith to improve things. Secondly, we have to have a dissatisfaction that things are not as they should be, and that it doesn't work for us to just be stoic about things. We actually need passion in our lives. He goes on and says the only intelligible sense that progress or advance can have among people is that we have a definite vision that we wish to make the whole world like that vision. If you like to put it so, the essence of the doctrine is that what we have around us is the mere and mere method and preparation for something we have to create. This is not a world, but rather the material for a world. God has given us not so much the colors of a picture as the colors of a palette, but he has also given us a subject, a model, a fixed vision. Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to suit the vision. But he says that he says progress right now, the way people see progress is we just keep changing the vision. So what he's saying here is that we have to have a common vision. And he said, he will go on to say that it's only in Christianity that we are given that common vision that we should be working for towards in terms of progress. I'm going to go on to another quote near the end of the book. Chesterson writes, I wanted to ask, and to ask with an earnestness amounting to urgency, what is this incomparable energy which appears first in one walking the earth like a living judgment? And this energy which can die with a dying civilization and yet force it to a resurrection from the dead. This energy which, last of all, can inflame a bankrupt peasantry with so fixed a faith in justice that they get what they ask while others go empty away, so that the most helpless island of the empire can actually help itself. There is an answer. It is an answer to say that the energy is truly from outside the world. It is psychic, or at least one of the results of a real psychic disturbance. The highest gratitude and respect are due to the greatest human civilizations. Christianity has given us the power of self-renewal. So here he's talking about what is it that infuses wherever Christianity goes, it brings civilizations alive. And we see this when we see Christianity invading a culture and we see good happening, we see hospitals being built, schools being built, the poor being raised up. And he's wondering what is this? And he says, he uses the word psychic, but he's just really meaning something outside of human nature that has come in. Next quote here, he talks about what he has found. He said, Believing there is a world of spirits, I shall walk in it as I do in the world of men, looking for the thing that I like and think good. Just as I should seek in a desert for clean water, or toil at the north pole to make a comfortable fire, so I shall search the land of void and vision until I find something fresh like water and comforting like fire, until I find some place in eternity where I am literally at home. And there is only one such place to be found. This is where he kind of makes his confession that he has found that one place. He's found it in Christianity, he's found it in Jesus Christ. The final quote I want to share with you is the first line of the final paragraph. Chesterton writes, Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian. And that quote actually means quite a lot to me because the first sermon I ever preached was in 1993 at First Alliance Church in Calgary, Canada. And I used that quote in my sermon because I was making the point that for the Christian, joy is fundamental and sorrow is peripheral. But for the non-Christian, sorrow is fundamental and joy is peripheral. So that this book has really walked with me through a lot of different periods of my life. And it has just helped me so much. I want to share, I reread the book this week as I was preparing for the podcast. And there's a chapter in there called The Ethics of Elf Land. And if you don't want to read the whole book, just read that chapter. I'm sure you can find the PDF for free on uh online. It's called The Ethics of Elf Land. And this chapter, when I read it this time, God really used it to help me to see the wonder and the beauty of life. Let me explain what I'm trying to say here. There's a Canadian philosopher named Charles Taylor, who has been very influential on a lot of people's thinking. I don't know if Taylor's a Christian. He's very sympathetic to the Christian worldview. He may be a Christian, I'm not entirely sure. He wrote a book called The Secular Age. It's this massive tome that, unless you're super philosophical, uh philosophically bent, I'm not sure you would really enjoy it. I read it a few years ago and it was quite the slog. But in that book, he makes this point that a major shift in human history happened in the 16th century. In the 16th century, the scientific revolution took place, where humanity for the first time started to see that nature was actually governed by laws, the law of gravity, and so on. The second thing that happened in tandem with that was the Enlightenment. And that is the belief in rationality, in reason as being the most important thing. And so Taylor says what happened at that period is this is what he calls disenchantment. He says that humanity, history before that, before the 16th century, was an enchanted world, meaning that we believe that there was more than just the physical material world. But ever since the 16th century, we've become disenchanted. So instead of spirits, sacred forces, divine meanings embedded in nature, we have a universe that is neutral, explainable, and self-contained. It's more like a machine. So the world becomes more like a machine to be analyzed than a place of adventure and wonder. Science classifies and understands reality. Theology and faith celebrates and worships reality and worships creation and worships the creator. Disenchantment, what has happened, is been a process of dehumanization because we become divorced from the magic of creation, from the beauty of creation. We are also forced to discover our own purpose, our own meaning, and our own identity within ourselves, because truth cannot be found outside of ourselves. Now, in the book, Taylor proposes the arts as our entree back into the world of enchantment. So art, music, literature, poetry, beauty, all these things will lead us back into enchantment. So the enchanted world, the world has meaning. In the disenchanted world, we have to create our own meaning. In the ethics of Elfland, Chesterton makes this point that the world and life is incredible. Everything is grace, everything is a gift to us. We don't deserve the things we have. We don't deserve life. And yet we get it. And he said there should be just this incredible sense of joy at everything, at nature, at relationships, at family. And yet we just seem to take these things for granted. Or worse, we don't even think about them at all. A couple of things happened to me recently. I try to go for a walk every morning by the South Saskatchewan River here in Saskatoon. Saskatchewan is flat prairie land, but in Saskatoon, there's this beautiful river that flows through the center of the city, and there's a beautiful riverbed with lots of amazing trails. And I try to go for a walk there every morning at sunrise. And one day I was walking by the river. I was having my morning walk, and I was looking at the river and I was looking at the vegetation. And then I just had this overwhelming sense of beauty. And I can only describe it as being supernatural. It was this incredible sense of, wow, this is really amazing. This is really beautiful. And the world became alive in a way it never had before. Another thing that happened this past year is I drive my teenage son to school every day and I pick him up from school. And one thing, another thing about Saskatchewan is the sunsets and sunrises in this province are unbelievable. It's the sunrise will take up the whole sky, it will be painted pink. It's just incredible. So I Anyway, I'm driving James to school one day, and it's one of those incredible sunrises that's just taking over the whole sky. And I'm kind of looking at the sunrise, I'm kind of taking it in, and then I had this thought. I thought, do you think what if God paints a new sunrise every day? What if he paints a new sunset every day? What if he actually paints it? And then I immediately thought, well, that's stupid. Of course, he doesn't paint it. He's got other things to do. But then after reading The Ethics of Elfland, where Chesterton talks about the beauty of the world and of God as an artist and God have being the center and source of joy and creativity, I thought, I think it's true. I think he really does paint the sunrises. And he really does paint the sunsets because it gives him joy, because he's spreading his joy to all of us. It's a wild and beautiful world, and every day is a day to experience God's beauty and God's wonder in his creation and in the relationships that we have with one another. I want to close with a verse from the Bible. In Matthew 11, 25, it says, At that time, Jesus said, I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and revealed them to infants. I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and revealed them to infants. And I am grateful that God has revealed his truths to me as an infant, as someone who is not necessarily wise or intelligent. Yet God in his grace reveals his truth to me. And that's what I really got out of Chesterton is this sense of wonder and joy at the beauty of the world and at the life that God has given us. Christianity is beautiful. Christianity is true. Orthodoxy, the book by Chesterton, opened up my heart and mind to that truth in a new way in this reading of it. And because Christianity is beautiful and true, and because Jesus is beautiful and true, we can praise and worship God our Father, who is chosen in his grace and mercy to reveal his truth to infants like you and I. All right, I hope you enjoyed that. Let me know in the comments. Message me on social media, your thoughts on Orthodoxy, your thoughts on G.K. Chesterton. And if you start reading them, let me know. It'd be great. All right. God bless you wherever you are, whatever you're doing. May you sense his deep love for you this day. God bless. Take care.