Old World Swine, at it again;
As other Catholic bloggers have ably pointed out, presidential hopeful
Mike Huckabee, in his victory speech
after the Iowa primary, quoted – and cited – G.K. Chesterton. Okay, technically he misquoted Chesterton, but not badly. It was still heartening to hear.
Any time I see GKC gaining influence in the world, I count that as a
good thing. So I was delighted to see him popping up in a book I was
given recently, written by Evangelical author Ravi Zacharias.
The book – Can Man Live Without God (Thomas Nelson)- was a Christmas
gift from my sister and her husband. They would describe themselves – I
think – as Bible Only, non-denominational Christians, or (in their
view) just basic Christians. My brother, a pastor who’s church they
attended for some time, maintained that this faith was not even
Protestant… that it was just plain meat-and-potatoes Christianity and
had nothing at all to do with any historical Christian "movement" of one
stripe or another. He truly believed this.
I was a little leary of the book, therefore. But, one of the things I
have hoped to accomplish this year is to read more, and seeing as they
were thoughtful enough to give me the book, I was only too happy to read it.
Mr. Zacharias got my attention right away by mulling over the lyrics of
King Crimson, one of my favorite bands (although I prefer their later
work – Discipline more than Court of the Crimson King).
He waits until chapter 8 to begin quoting G.K. Chesterton, but he
returns to him more than to any other Christian source – several
times throughout the book – as well as drawing heavily on Malcolm
Muggeridge and C.S. Lewis.
Few, I think, would have their mind changed one way or another by
reading this book. Zacharias says nothing new, which is fine by me (I
saw on television a Christian ministry that advertised their
charismatic leader had "a message unlike any other in the Christian
World!" – exactly what we don’t need). What Zacharias
manages is to pull together a quick survey of the most dominant
philosophical voices of the twentieth century (that is to say, atheists
of differing flavors), outlines the major defects of their thought and
its disastrous consequences for society, and gives voice to the most
able defenders of Truth. He straightforwardly presents Christ as the
answer to all of man’s deepest longings.
I think Francis Schaeffer did a more thorough job of dissecting atheist
philosophy and the ills of modern society (from this perspective) than
does Mr. Zacharias. The book is too brief for him to be very
philosophically rigorous, but he does provide a workable introduction
to these broad ideas and their historical background for those who are
not already familiar with them. He quotes Nietzche, Kant, Descartes,
Huxley, Bertrand Russel and the like from the Life is Meaningless side,
and refutes them using Chesterton, Lewis, Pascal, Muggeridge and others
(including contemporaries like Norman Geisler and Peter Kreeft). He has
good language for Mother Teresa (Mr. Zacharias is of East Indian
heritage) and St. Augustine, and takes no overt jabs at the Catholic
Church. The book is forwarded by Charles Colson, a friend of Catholics
(or as some would have it, a dirty rotten Papist sympathizer).
On the whole, I was very cheered that the book drew from such sources
(especially Chesterton, of course). It ought to make any observant
reader want to read both Chesterton and Muggeridge. It also gives me a
terrific opportunity to pass on some of Chesterton’s writing, from
which the world can only benefit.
Have others noticed Chesterton’s thought beginning to loom large on
the Christian horizon? Is sanity breaking out here and there? Are
post-modern, post-Protestant Christians ready now to hear what he has
to
say?
