Dorothy Sayers quotes (following Seymour paper's question about recent books read)
"The central dogma of the Incarnation is that by which its relevance stands or falls. If Christ were only man, then he is irrelevant to any thought about God; if he is only God, then he is entirely irrelevant to any experience of human life."
"…the outline of the official story—the tale of the time when God was the underdog and got beaten, when he submitted to the conditions he had laid down and became a man like the men he had made, and the men he had made broke him and killed him. This is the dogma we find so dull—this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and the hero. If this is dull, then what, in Heaven's name, is worthy to be called exciting? The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore—on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him 'meek and mild,' and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies."
"Only two accusations of personal depravity seem to have been brought against Jesus of Nazareth. First, that he was a Sabbath-breaker. Secondly, that he was 'a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners'—that he ate too heartily, drank too freely, and kept very disreputable company…For nineteen and a half centuries, the Christian churches have labored, not without success, to remove this unfortunate impression made by their Lord and Master…Christian morals, as distinct from purely secular morals, consist in three things and three things only: Sunday observance, not getting intoxicated, and not practicing immorality…I do not suggest that the Church does wrong to pay attention to [these]…What I do suggest is that by overemphasizing this side of morality, to the comparative neglect of others, she has not only betrayed her mission but, incidentally, also defeated her own aims even about morality."
"It is the business of the Church to recognize that the secular vocation, as such, is sacred. Christian people, and particularly Christian clergy, must get it firmly into their heads that when a man or woman is called to a particular job of secular work, that is as true vocation as though he or she were called to specifically religious work…In nothing has the Church lost Her hold on reality as in Her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation. She has allowed work and religion to become separate departments, and is astounded to find that, as a result, the secular work of the world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends… – Dorothy Sayers
"Work should be looked upon—not as a drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God…Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God."
"The Church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables. Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly—but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever came out of the carpenter's shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth."
"Somehow or other, and with the best of 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 one who assuredly never bored a soul in those thirty-three years during which he passed through the world like a flame."
"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 anecdotes and clotted mythological nonsense. There are the ignorant Christians, who combine a mild, gentle-Jesus sentimentality with vaguely humanistic ethics…Finally, there are the more-or-less instructed churchgoers, who know all the arguments about divorce and 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 peashooter facing a fan-fire of machine guns."
"Heresy is…largely the expression of opinion of the untutored average man, trying to grapple with the problems of the universe at the point where they begin to interfere with daily life and thought."
"We are constantly assured that the churches are empty because preachers insist too much upon doctrine—'dull dogma' as people call it. The fact is the precise opposite. It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man—and the dogma is the drama. That drama is summarized quite clearly in the creeds of the Church, and if we think it dull, it is because we either have never really read those amazing documents or have recited them so often and so mechanically as to have lost all sense of their meaning."
"Some schools of thought assert that…everything we do is rigidly determined for us, and that, however much we may dislike the pattern, we can do nothing about it…However much we may believe [this], we seemed forced to behave as though we did not."
"Why doesn't God smite this dictator dead?' is a question a little remote from us. Why, madam, did He not strike you dumb and imbecile before you uttered that baseless and unkind slander the day before yesterday? Or me, before I behaved with such cruel lack of consideration to that well-meaning friend? And why, sir, did He not cause your hand to rot off at the wrist before you signed your name to that dirty little bit of financial trickery?
"What do we find God 'doing about' this business of sin and evil?...God did not abolish the fact of evil; He transformed it. He did not stop the Crucifixion; He rose from the dead."
"For whatever reason, God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—and he [God] had the honesty and the courage to take his own medicine."
"And here Christianity has its enormous advantage over every other religion in the world. It is the only religion that gives value to evil and suffering."
"…the outline of the official story—the tale of the time when God was the underdog and got beaten, when he submitted to the conditions he had laid down and became a man like the men he had made, and the men he had made broke him and killed him. This is the dogma we find so dull—this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and the hero. If this is dull, then what, in Heaven's name, is worthy to be called exciting? The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore—on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him 'meek and mild,' and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies."
"Only two accusations of personal depravity seem to have been brought against Jesus of Nazareth. First, that he was a Sabbath-breaker. Secondly, that he was 'a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners'—that he ate too heartily, drank too freely, and kept very disreputable company…For nineteen and a half centuries, the Christian churches have labored, not without success, to remove this unfortunate impression made by their Lord and Master…Christian morals, as distinct from purely secular morals, consist in three things and three things only: Sunday observance, not getting intoxicated, and not practicing immorality…I do not suggest that the Church does wrong to pay attention to [these]…What I do suggest is that by overemphasizing this side of morality, to the comparative neglect of others, she has not only betrayed her mission but, incidentally, also defeated her own aims even about morality."
"It is the business of the Church to recognize that the secular vocation, as such, is sacred. Christian people, and particularly Christian clergy, must get it firmly into their heads that when a man or woman is called to a particular job of secular work, that is as true vocation as though he or she were called to specifically religious work…In nothing has the Church lost Her hold on reality as in Her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation. She has allowed work and religion to become separate departments, and is astounded to find that, as a result, the secular work of the world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends… – Dorothy Sayers
"Work should be looked upon—not as a drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God…Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God."
"The Church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables. Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly—but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever came out of the carpenter's shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth."
"Somehow or other, and with the best of 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 one who assuredly never bored a soul in those thirty-three years during which he passed through the world like a flame."
"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 anecdotes and clotted mythological nonsense. There are the ignorant Christians, who combine a mild, gentle-Jesus sentimentality with vaguely humanistic ethics…Finally, there are the more-or-less instructed churchgoers, who know all the arguments about divorce and 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 peashooter facing a fan-fire of machine guns."
"Heresy is…largely the expression of opinion of the untutored average man, trying to grapple with the problems of the universe at the point where they begin to interfere with daily life and thought."
"We are constantly assured that the churches are empty because preachers insist too much upon doctrine—'dull dogma' as people call it. The fact is the precise opposite. It is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man—and the dogma is the drama. That drama is summarized quite clearly in the creeds of the Church, and if we think it dull, it is because we either have never really read those amazing documents or have recited them so often and so mechanically as to have lost all sense of their meaning."
"Some schools of thought assert that…everything we do is rigidly determined for us, and that, however much we may dislike the pattern, we can do nothing about it…However much we may believe [this], we seemed forced to behave as though we did not."
"Why doesn't God smite this dictator dead?' is a question a little remote from us. Why, madam, did He not strike you dumb and imbecile before you uttered that baseless and unkind slander the day before yesterday? Or me, before I behaved with such cruel lack of consideration to that well-meaning friend? And why, sir, did He not cause your hand to rot off at the wrist before you signed your name to that dirty little bit of financial trickery?
"What do we find God 'doing about' this business of sin and evil?...God did not abolish the fact of evil; He transformed it. He did not stop the Crucifixion; He rose from the dead."
"For whatever reason, God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—and he [God] had the honesty and the courage to take his own medicine."
"And here Christianity has its enormous advantage over every other religion in the world. It is the only religion that gives value to evil and suffering."
posted by Eric Schansberg at 1:30 PM
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