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In one of his most important books, Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton claims that he is doing spiritual autobiography, not apologetics. He goes so far as to declare: "I never read a line of Christian apologetics." Yet in this and many other works, he made his era's most robust case for faith.

Several elements come together to produce Chesterton's unique—and unusually effective—apologetic style.

First, though the word apologetics means literally "defense," Chesterton was never defensive. As one commentator put it, he "wrestled the initiative from the skeptics and presented the historic faith upon a note of triumphant challenge."

By exposing the false and irrational presuppositions of unbelief, Chesterton shows that the self-styled rationalist is as naked as the monarch in "The Emperor's Clothes." A few examples typify Chesterton's withering logic.

He observes that "the man who denies original sin believes in the Immaculate Conception of everybody."

Against the argument that we must remain agnostic and never claim that God has in fact revealed himself in this world, he says, "We don't know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable."

He says to those who believe that evolution eliminates God's creative activity, "It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything."

Chesterton never tires in pointing out the unjustified and unrecognized dogmatism of the unbeliever, contrasting this close-mindedness with the open and attractive worldview of the orthodox Christian. "The Christian," he writes, "is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle."

In today's apologetic climate, there are two major schools of thought. The presuppositionalists hold that, because of sin, the unbeliever always starts from his or her presuppositions of unbelief, and that only by starting from the presupposition of Christian truth can one achieve anything. The evidentialists argue that we can and must convince the unbeliever of Christian truth by presenting factual evidence.

Chesterton would certainly have joined the evidentialist camp. Note how he defends the miracles of the New Testament, which constitute the central evidence for Christ's deity:

"Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them."

Chesterton's point, here and in general, is that the facts support Christian orthodoxy. If one is willing to investigate those facts, the truth of the faith will become plain. Unbelieving dogmatism keeps a fallen race from the gospel, not an absence of evidence.

Ronald Knox, the great translator of the New Testament, noted this essential characteristic of Chesterton's apologetic as it is reflected in the methods of Father Brown:

"The real secret of Father Brown is that there is nothing of the mystic about him. When he falls into a reverie—I had almost said, a brown study—the other people in the story think that he must be having an ecstasy, because he is a Catholic priest, and will proceed to solve the mystery by some kind of heaven-sent intuition. And the reader, if he is not careful, will get carried away by the same miscalculation. … And all the time Father Brown is doing just what [Agatha Christie's sleuth Hercule] Poirot does; he is using his little grey cells. He is noticing something which the reader hasn't noticed, and will kick himself later for not having noticed."

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