From a small but heavy book...

Someone on their blog quoted Harvey Cox and his thought that “"Faith is resurgent, while dogma is dying." The blogger thought that was good but I instead thought of Dorothy Sayers’ insistence that “The Dogma is the Drama.”

That is the title of one chapter in her very small book Strong Meat. She wrote the book as a small comment on her better known book and play, The Greatest Drama Ever Staged.”

As the Guardian at that time, 1939, put it, “In a masterly pamphlet, Miss Sayers proceeds with wit and flashing insight, to make good the claim that the greatest drama ever staged is the official creed of Christendom, and to show that it is not dogma but, the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness.”

She writes about some fellows who believe her play is great because of her own creativity and fail to understand the absolute greatness of the Trinity, Incarnation, redemption and Christ’s second coming. That is great drama.

She was writing at a time in England when many simply didn’t understand the dogma of the Church. And she blamed the Christians of her day for their weak attention to that dogma both in their words and their lives. As she put it:

“We are apt, for example, to be a little sparing of the palms and hosannas. We are chary of wielding the scourge of small cords, lest we offend somebody or interfere with trade. We do not furbish up our wits to disentangle knotty questions about Sunday observance and tribute money, nor hasten to sit at the feet of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions. We pass hastily over disquieting jests about making friends with the mammon of unrighteousness and alarming observations about bringing not peace but a sword; nor do we distinguish ourselves by the graciousness with which we sit at meat with publicans and sinners. Somehow or other, and with the best intentions, we have shown the world the typical Christian in the likeness of a crashing and rather ill-natured bore—and this in the Name of the One Who assuredly never bored a soul in those thirty-three years during which He passed through the world like a flame."

Sayers was a good friend of Charles Williams and C.S. Lewis and her wit and Christian faith was just as strong. We now have much knottier problems that many fail to attempt to disentangle-and we are certainly afraid of that scourge of small cords or of using the sword of the Spirit, the word of God, lest we trouble someone’s peace. And we need to sit with all sinners, including ourselves, and speak the words of the gospel.

I truly believe her admonitions are correct for this day. “Let us, in heaven’s name, drag out the Divine Drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slip-shod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction.”

She adds, “If all men are offended because of Christ let them be offend; but where is the sense of them being offended at something that is not Christ and is nothing like Him? We do Him singularly little honour by watering down His personality till it could not offend a fly. Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ.”

And I simply must quote the last paragraph in the book:

“It is the dogma that is the drama—not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death—but the terrifying assertion that the same God Who made the world lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that a man might be glad to believe.”