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G. K. Chesterton did not think of himself as a theologian. In his era, Catholic theology was still the domain of a highly trained clerical elite. Granting the title "theologian" to a journalist in those days would have been as outrageous as dubbing a journalist a "physicist" or "lawyer" today.

But within a generation of Chesterton's death, "lay theologian" was no longer sounding to Roman Catholic ears like a contradiction in terms. Chesterton's striking contributions to theology, partly the fruit of his unusual perspective, more than made up for his lack of formal qualifications.

In nineteenth-century England, which saw the restoration of the Roman episcopal hierarchy after centuries of suppression, Catholic culture developed in several different directions at once.

On an administrative level, a flood of Irish immigrants built a strong and loyal foundation for the revival of the parishes. Intellectually, the church was blessed with several generations of highly educated literary men such as John Lingard, John Henry Newman, and Coventry Patmore.

This double infusion of energy led to a vast program of building (churches, schools, seminaries) on the one hand, and what became known as the "Catholic literary revival" on the other. Newman had prophesied as much, foreseeing in 1852 an imminent "second spring" for Catholic Christianity in Britain. This literary revival continued until the 1950s.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton was at its heart. Priests and bishops, philosophers and theologians, Church of England and Church of Rome took an interest in his writing.

Like several of the revival's leaders, Chesterton was not in Holy Orders, but his great intellect and education enabled him to penetrate any subject he addressed—including theology. As he commented in The New Jerusalem, "Theology is only thought applied to religion." On another occasion, he described theology as a "sublime detective story" in which the purpose is not to discover how someone died, but why he is alive.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, the great Swiss theologian who died in 1988, recognized Chesterton as a masterful practitioner of the "lay style" of theology. He found in Chesterton's humor the antidote to much of the "bestial seriousness and desperate optimism of modern world views," as well as a brilliant demonstration that only in Christianity "can one preserve the wonder of being, liberty, childlikeness, the adventure, the resilient, energizing paradox of existence."

"Paradox" is a word consistently used to describe Chesterton's style. It refers to statements that seem contradictory but are actually true.

Hugh Kenner's classic study Paradox in Chesterton shows how his use of this device is not, as it may appear, a weakness. Chesterton's paradoxes flow from the "direct intuition of being," a metaphysical vision of reality shaped by his transforming encounter with God.

Chesterton did not so much make paradoxes as see them. Most of the time, we fail to notice them because we are content to think in clichés and truisms—what Kenner calls "mental inertia." And this is precisely why Chesterton's statements so often appear absurd when we first encounter them. For example, in the introduction to The Defendant, he writes:

Religion has had to provide that longest and strangest telescope—the telescope through which we could see the star upon which we dwelt. For the mind and eyes of the average man this world is as lost as Eden and as sunken as Atlantis. There runs a strange law through the length of human history—that men are continually tending to undervalue their environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves.

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