Chestertonian Calvinism: A Brief Explanation and Defense

by Douglas Wilson

By Chestertonian I am talking about an ongoing spirit of exuberant gratitude, a spirit that enables the person in possession of it to look at the world in ways that strike others as new, fresh, paradoxical, or just plain sideways.

Chesterton once said, speaking of those who accommodate themselves to the trend of the times, that “at its worst it consists of many millions of frightened creatures all accommodating themselves to a trend that is not there.”

But whenever God delivers His people in any remarkable way, as the years go by, whatever new wineskin was involved in it will turn gradually into an old wineskin. Part of this process is that the number of unregenerate people will start to grow, but they are stuck with the vocabulary of the previous great reformation and revival. Grumpy people are stuck with the vocabulary of gladness. This gives them new material to work on, new and challenging material to distort. Given enough time, however, distort it they will.

Everything is connected. Everything matters. Nonsense tolerated anywhere will metastasize, and the results are always ugly. When the people have got used to unreason they can no longer be startled at injustice.

Once as a boy I was improving my mind by reading Mad magazine, and I came across an epigram from Alfred E. Newman, which has helped to shape my entire outlook on these matters. He said, “Today’s non-conformists are getting harder and harder to tell apart.”

But in classical Protestant theology, the grace of God is not like a reservoir at all, maintained by ecclesiastical functionaries, but is more like a tsunami, coming in from the infinite oceans of grace. We have no control over it whatsoever.

So a man is not justified through being correct in his doctrine of justification. To maintain that would be a denial of the doctrine of justification.

When crowds are calling for sacrifice, you can depend upon it, they are looking for the sacrifice of somebody else.

Before the Puritans were swept off the scene for ever, they had done two extraordinary things. They had broken to pieces in plain battle on an English meadow the chivalry of a great nation, bred from its youth to arms. And they had brought forth from the agony a small book, called The Pilgrim’s Progress, which was greater literature than the whole contemporary culture of the great Renaissance, founded on three generations of the worship of learning and art.

When the day of resurrection finally comes, it is not the case that God has mighty angels pick up big erasers in order to wipe out everything that had gone before. The cosmos is not erased, and the history of the cosmos is not erased. The cosmos is reborn, and what went before is contained within, and glorified by, that new and resurrected state.

Christendom has had a series of revolutions and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave. (The Everlasting Man, p. 250)