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    Orthodoxy
    Orthodoxy
    Orthodoxy
    Ebook236 pages4 hours

    Orthodoxy

    By G.K Chesterton and Matthew Lee Anderson

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    Now with a foreword by Matthew Lee Anderson

    Antiquated. Unimaginative. Repressive. We've all heard these common reactions to orthodox Christian beliefs. Even Christians themselves are guilty of the tendency to discard historic Christianity.

    Yet as we read through the literature in Christianity’s past, we learn that we are in better company with our beliefs than we might think. Through his enchanting book, Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton reminds us of the paradoxes of our faith and the joy that comes when we explore them.

    From the foreword by Matthew Lee Anderson, author of The End of Our Exploring:

    “How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it?”

    And with that question, G.K. Chesterton recounts the heart of an intellectual journey that took him from the edges of a nihilistic pessimism into the center of the paradoxical joy of Christian orthodoxy. His book is not a defense of the Christian faith, at least not primarily, so much as an attempt to explain how the startling paradoxes and sharp edges of the creed explain everything else.

    It is a dated work, dealing in the categories and concerns of Chesterton’s contemporaries, and yet it comes nearer timelessness than anything we have today. Though Orthodoxy was written near the start of the 20th century, I have dubbed it the most important book for the 21st. There are few claims I have made in my life that I am more sure of than that one. 

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMoody Publishers
    Release dateJun 1, 2009
    ISBN9781575673455
    Author

    G.K Chesterton

    G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was a prolific English journalist and author best known for his mystery series featuring the priest-detective Father Brown and for the metaphysical thriller The Man Who Was Thursday. Baptized into the Church of England, Chesterton underwent a crisis of faith as a young man and became fascinated with the occult. He eventually converted to Roman Catholicism and published some of Christianity’s most influential apologetics, including Heretics and Orthodoxy. 

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    Reviews for Orthodoxy

    4/5

    11 ratings10 reviews

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    • 5/5
      A great work by a great writer. I wish I could have his faith!
    • 5/5
      brilliant!
    • 5/5
      Brilliant. One to read again and again.
    • 5/5
      This book is simply amazing. I've already written a lengthy review of it, and i'll post that here soon.
    • 5/5
      What a wonderful exploration of one man's faith. Well thought-out, and yet passionate and personal, Orthodoxy shows how Chesterton explored the issues of faith, came to a mighty conclusion, only then to realize that his conclusion was what Christianity had been preaching for centuries.The book is a heavy one, despite its short length, but should be studied carefully by anyone who might be looking seriously at the issue of religion.
    • 5/5
      Chesterton at his philosophical best. He presents his personal arguments for the existence of God and skewers all the puffed up, empty-headed modern philosophers and worthless aristocrats and oligarchs. His wit is as fresh and sharp as Mark Twain's.
    • 4/5
      Chesterton's "Orthodoxy" and Lewis' "Mere Christianity" are classics of contemporary Christian apologetics. Both write to a similar audience, namely, secular academics. Lewis' appeal was broader, however, for he was reaching out to those people influenced or educated by these academics. Consequently, these books are full of reason and logic but are devoid of Bible quotes. This might dismay some fundamentalists, but this type of apologetic is absolutely necessary. Just as a Muslim will not convince a Christian regarding Islam by quoting the Qu'ran, so, in most cases, a Christian will not convert a secular academic by quoting the Bible. The appeal must be made on common ground, in this case, reason and logic. In this regard, Chesterton succeeds.That being said, I give him only 3 1/2 stars because of his rambling, time-sensitive style. It is easy for an American reading in the 21st century to become completely lost in Chesterton's quips and references to late-modernity intellectuals.Lewis' broader appeal makes him more accessible to Chesterton, so I recommend "Mere Christianity" over "Orthodoxy" to the average 21st century American, whereas I recommend "Orthodoxy" to those who are educated in late 19th and early 20th-century intellectualism.Both books are useful for Christians in developing apologetic skills and for non-Christians, especially seculars, in understanding a traditional, intellectual, and non-fundamentalist brand of Christianity.
    • 4/5
      A thoughtful and fascinating account of the author's move from agnosticism, in his teens, through to a profound faith in God, and subsequent adoption of the Christian faith.

      GK Chesterton uses analogies to good effect, and describes his gradual search for meaning in life, looking at objections to God posed by atheists, and - one at a time - realising that they were all based on fallacy.

      It took me several weeks to read this book; some of it was a bit long-winded, and there was much to ponder. I found his thought processes a bit convoluted in places, yet reassuring and often refreshing.

      He wrote the book, apparently, to answer his critics... and in doing so produced an excellent apologetic for his beliefs. Recommended to anyone who is happy with a somewhat lengthy - and, inevitably, dated - discussion of faith from a fully rational and logical standpoint .
    • 5/5
      I'm in the peculiar (and rather frustrating) situation of being a book lover living in a foreign country with no access to an English library and (temporarily, I hope) in a financial situation that prevents me from buying books. Therefore, I've had to fall back on the collection of books that I already own. I've just recently finished reading G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy for the 3rd time. If you're familiar with Chesterton then you well know his penchant for paradox and mirth. This writer had a knack for showing familiar things in a startling new light.Orthodoxy doesn't disappoint. It constantly amazes and stimulates from the first page to the last. It's as good as a book on religion and philosophy can get.I won't write about this book what's already been written in other reviews below. I'll only add that in my 3rd reading of this book I came across a passage that somehow I had forgotten after my first 2 readings. This passage is a prime example of how Chesterton can astonish:"All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself is it probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary . . . The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity; but to my inactivity . . . it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising . . . The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they especially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. 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. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore."That's from a chapter titled 'The Ethics of Elfland' and I think that's a good example of the flavor of the entire book.
    • 4/5
      Although Chesterton included many references to his contemporaries and to the issues of his day, most of them now obscure, the clarity of his writing and the force of his argument made this an interesting and surprising read for me.

    Book preview

    Orthodoxy - G.K Chesterton

    13.

    Preface

    THIS BOOK IS MEANT to be a companion to Heretics, and to put the positive side in addition to the negative. Many critics complained of the book called Heretics because it merely criticized current philosophies without offering any alternative philosophy. This book is an attempt to answer the challenge. It is unavoidably affirmative and therefore unavoidably autobiographical. The writer has been driven back upon somewhat the same difficulty as that which beset Newman in writing his Apologia; he has been forced to be egotistical only in order to be sincere. While everything else may be different the motive in both cases is the same. It is the purpose of the writer to attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian Faith can be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it. The book is therefore arranged upon the positive principle of a riddle and its answer. It deals first with all the writer’s own solitary and sincere speculations and then with all the startling style in which they were all suddenly satisfied by the Christian Theology. The writer regards it as amounting to a convincing creed. But if is not that it is at least a repeated and surprising coincidence.

    GILBERT K. CHESTERTON

    Introduction: In Defence

    of Everything Else

    THE ONLY POSSIBLE EXCUSE for this book is that it is an answer to a challenge. Even a bad shot is dignified when he accepts a duel. When some time ago I published a series of hasty but sincere papers, under the name of Heretics, several critics for whose intellect I have a warm respect (I may mention specially Mr. G. S. Street) said that it was all very well for me to tell everybody to affirm his cosmic theory, but that I had carefully avoided supporting my precepts with example. I will begin to worry about my philosophy, said Mr. Street, when Mr. Chesterton has given us his. It was perhaps an incautious suggestion to make to a person only too ready to write books upon the feeblest provocation. But after all, though Mr. Street has inspired and created this book, he need not read it. If he does read it, he will find that in its pages 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 have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas. I always find, however, that I am either too busy or too lazy to write this fine work, so I may as well give it away for the purposes of philosophical illustration. There will probably be a general impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool. I am not here concerned to deny that he looked a fool. But if you imagine that he felt a fool, or at any rate that the sense of folly was his sole or his dominant emotion, then you have not studied with sufficient delicacy the rich romantic nature of the hero of this tale. His mistake was really a most enviable mistake; and he knew it, if he was the man I take him for. What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again? What could be better than to have all the fun of discovering South Africa without the disgusting necessity of landing there? What could be more glorious than to brace one’s self up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was really old South Wales. This at least seems to me the main problem for philosophers, and is in a manner the main problem of this book. How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this queer cosmic town, with its many-legged citizens, with its monstrous and ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honour of being our own

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