G.K. Chesterton

Orthodoxy

G. K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy (1908) is one of the most unusual and delightful works of Christian apologetics ever written. Rather than arguing for Christianity from the outside, Chesterton traces the personal, almost accidental journey by which he came to discover that the philosophy he had been slowly constructing for himself — out of fairy tales, a sense of wonder, disgust at modern pessimism, and a love for paradox — turned out to be nothing other than orthodox Christianity. As he puts it with characteristic wit, "I am the man who with the utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before." The book is not a systematic theology; it is a kind of intellectual autobiography, a series of vivid mental pictures that together make a cumulative case that Christian orthodoxy is the one creed large enough, strange enough, and paradoxical enough to fit the actual shape of human life.