Dave Zimmerman is the author of Deliver Us From Me-Ville and Comic Book Character: Unleashing the Hero in Us All. He’s also my rocking editor at InterVarsity Press. He writes a regular column for Burnside Writers Collective, called “Becoming the Great Us.” You can also catch him on the IVP blog Strangely Dim or at his own blog, Loud Time.
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Every time I read a book by G. K. Chesterton for the first time, I have the nagging suspicion that it’s his magnum opus, his best of all works. I’m not blind to the unbridled subjectivity of this fandom; I freely confess that I am hopelessly geeked out over this great journalist/apologist/essayist/novelist/rhetorician of early-twentieth-century Britain. I’m only perplexed by the question, What’s his best book? And the only response that gives me any satisfaction is, I’m afraid, You never forget your first.
Orthodoxy—published in 1908 as a companion to Chesterton’s Heretics, an explicit critique of his non-Christian contemporaries George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and others—was my first. It’s an appropriate first entry for someone removed from the author by an ocean and a century, for whom the controversies and debates of the day are now little more than intellectual exercises, for whom the cultural quirks of the author are nicely anachronistic. Chesterton is an icon of his era; to read him is to understand the times in which he lived.
But it’s more than that. And Orthodoxy is a particularly good example of what it is to read Chesterton. Many people defend Christian orthodoxy; many others revile it. Chesterton plays with it, and in the course of playing with it he shows the strength of its claims and the folly of its cultured despisers. It’s from Orthodoxy that we get the image of God the child:
Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. . . . It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again,” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again,” to the moon. . . . We have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.
Chesterton is a master of paradox because he is an admirer, a student of it. In that respect he is an acquired taste; the person who is put off by well-worn phrases turned on their heads and the celebration of unresolved tensions, may well look back on Orthodoxy not so much as their first exposure to Chesterton but their last, their only. That’s okay, because his influence is widespread among thoughtful Christians, from C. S. Lewis to Phil Yancey, so that even if you’re not reading Chesterton, you’re more than likely soaking in him.
In an era that also spawned petty internecine debates between fundamentalist and liberal theologians, that systematized Christianity into faith by bullet-point, Chesterton opened wide the door to an expansive Christianity, a Great Story where God is the hero and the ending is laughably happy.
I love the idea of Chesterton, but I’ve tried to read Orthodoxy twice and bogged down both times in chapter 5. (I loved Chapter 4, however, “The Ethics of Elfland”). Perhaps my inability to understand most of what Chesterton was saying was because my kids were super small and my brain was still mushy from all the child-bearing hormones. In fact, I’m sure that’s it. Yeah. It has nothing to do with the fact that G.K. Chesterton is about 110 times smarter than I am and 160 times as well read.
Now that my kids are a little older and my brain cells have recovered somewhat and Dave has abashed me with his Chesterton fandom and made me think I’m missing out on something, maybe I’ll try Orthodoxy again and be able to make more sense of it. And perhaps the passage of a few years has rendered me more intelligent than I used to be. One can hope.
Hm. I just pulled my copy of Orthodoxy off my shelf. I think I’m going to have to buy a new one. The copy I have is a hideously ugly mass market version published in 1960 (so you can imagine the extent of its ugliness). Come to think of it, the sheer unattractiveness of the book was probably why I couldn’t get through it. (Naturally.) Others may not judge a book by its cover but I freely confess, I do. Pretty books are more fun to read.
I second that!!