The prophet Chesterton – again

Looking for a Christmas lesson for my youth group, about the reality of the Incarnation vs. the make believe holiday of commercialism, I came across an article by Vigen Guroian called The Christian Humanism Of G. K. Chesterton: Truth and the Paradoxical Imagination.

Guroian bases his whole thesis on what Chesterton gave us:

“Chesterton responded with Christian humanism to what he judged to be a serious breakdown of the fundamental moral suppositions deposited by biblical faith and the classical tradition. He believed that this declension was due to the loss of conviction in the culture about the reality of the Incarnation, that is of God truly having become a human being in Jesus Christ with all the import that that has for human existence. For Chesterton, the doctrine of the Incarnation is the hinge that holds together what is, for the Christian, a vision of the world that is essentially paradoxical. And he is astonishingly adept at employing this vision in his cultural criticism and Christian apologetics. The Incarnation sheds light where sin deceives and despair darkens the human horizon. Sin causes us to experience spirit in opposition to matter, faith in conflict with reason, life defeated by death. But the Incarnation reveals these apparent contradictions as paradoxes. Contradiction may signal futility, but paradox is pregnant with the possibility of resolution and harmony.”