Publisher's Synopsis
The Everlasting Man is a two-part history of mankind: 1. "On the Creature Called Man" and 2. "On the Man Called Christ." This book consists of Part 2, in which GKC comes to the conclusion that just as man is more than an animal, Christ can be proven to be more than just man. -- PART 2 Chapter 2: The Riddles of the Gospel - In this chapter, Chesterton uses a reductio ad absurdum argument and applies it to Jesus. In the first part of the book ("On the Creature Called Man"), Chesterton shows how if man is just an animal then that leads to both the absurd (why would there be religion of any kind then?) and to contradictions (why is there art?). In this the second part we see if Christ is merely a man, taking the same approach. Now the difficult part about using reductio ad absurdum is that one must only follow the premise. Chesterton does this (just as he did with man) by looking at Christ through a secular point of view until it contradicts itself. Who is Christ? What do we do with Him? These questions have been the hounds from which we run from. It seems that the light is so bright that we must dim it by putting Christ in a specific box - yet it is the plethora of boxes that confirm that He is more than the sum of the parts we try to put him in. When we look at the gospel we see weird things happen (remember this is from a secular point of view): riddles, statements that make no sense - even to the Jews, stories, the praising of the meek during a military occupation, and so forth. Let us begin the journey to see if Christ was just a man. --- Chapter 3: The Strangest Story in the World - The summary of the life of Christ comes to an end. That end though was the whole purpose of his coming. In Man's point of view Jesus was killed by claiming something that he was - the "I Am'. The argument that Jesus' life was a mere fabrication misses the point that if it was fabricated then it really is an original fabrication. Falsities need something to base themselves off of - yet here is something so frightening so original that we try to water it down.The new can only rise after the old has passed away. Just as a butterfly can take flight only after the caterpillar is done crawling in the dirt, so our myths, and philosophies were destroyed, annihilated, and even proved false during the life but most assuredly in the death of Christ. ---Chapter 4: The Witness of the Heretics - Here in this chapter the church is proved true by an unusual rhetorical technique: Using the attacks against the church to defend the church. When we look at true doctrine, the guiding light of the word, we see that with it we can stand against the world. ---Chapter 5: The Escape from Paganism - The path of man and the path of the God in this chapter are contrasted. In the whole first part of this book Man's path was shown to be a falling (sometimes slow, but mostly a plummet) away from God. The start of the second half was God rescuing man - not only that but all the attempts of man from the first half of history were either shown as complete and utter falsehoods (that had to surrender) or were reconciled. Yet the church at that time in history for the most part were in Europe, the East was left to itself. Thus we can see the great schism, the East shows a world that believes in 'nothing' while the West believes in everything, but the church believes in the eternal.---Chapter 6: The Five Deaths of the Faith - When we look at the history of the church to the untrained mind it seems that it continually shaped itself with creeds until it reached something that the people would accept. This is not the case, in fact it is the opposite. The church when ever it went for the popular view died. Then the church came back without the popularity but with the truth. The church cannot be destroyed externally nor internally. Man cannot destroy the eternal.
