Theology In The Classroom

I teach 9th Grade English at a private Christian high school. This has afforded me the opportunity to teach exactly what I like and what I know- a luxury uncommon in government schools. Today I walked my students through the 13th chapter of G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday. Chesterton's main goal in the novel is to reconcile the paradox of an irrational and brutal universe confounded with suffering and the good and loving Creator believed to be its author. Chesterton illustrates the necessity of special revelation through the dialogue of Sunday, the absent minded and powerful President of the Central Anarchist Council of Europe, who functions as Chesterton's allegorical representation of the Creator manifested in the general revelation of nature.

"I? What am I?" roared the President, and he rose slowly to an incredible height, like some enormous wave about to arch above them and break. "You want to know what I am, do you? Bull you are a man of science. Grub in the roots of those trees and find out the truth about them. Syme you are a poet. Stare at those morning clouds. But I tell you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and the topmost cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the sea, and I shall still be a riddle; you shall know what the stars are, and not know what I am. Since the beginning of the world all men have hunted me like a wolf- kings and sages, and poets and law-givers, all the churches, and all the philosophers. But I have never been caught yet, and the skies will fall in the time I turn to bay. I have given them a good run for their money and I will now."

Category: Between The Covers