Novelist, Playwright, and Theologian Dorothy Sayers

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I was just introduced – for the very first time – to novelist, playwright, and theologian Dorothy Sayers. Dorothy writes, in a collection of essays cumulatively titled Creed or Chaos? Why Christians Must Choose Either Dogma or Disaster (Or, Why It Really Does Matter What You Believe), the following assessment of the current situation in the Church (the really amazing thing is, that Sayers actually penned this in the 1940s):

Apart from a possible one per cent of intelligent and instructed Christians, there are three kinds of people we have to deal with. There are the frank and open heathen, whose notions of Christianity are a dreadful jumble of rags and tags of Bible anecdote and clotted mythological nonsense. There are the ignorant Christians, who combine a mild gentle-Jesus sentimentality with vaguely humanistic ethics – most of these are Arian heretics. Finally, there are the more or less instructed church-goers, who know all the arguments about divorce and auricular confession and communion in two kinds, but are about as well equipped to do battle on fundamentals against a Marxian atheist or a Wellsian agnostic as a boy with a pea-shooter facing a fan-fire of machine-guns.

I like her style. Have we made much progress? Seems not …

Related posts:

• Creed or Chaos by Dorothy L. Sayers

• Schleiermacher and Humanism

• Dorothy Day Leaps the Social Gospellers’ Gap

• Codex Theodosianus and the Relative Subjugation of Heretics

• Why Do We Do Church History?