If Christian dogma is irrelevant to life, to what, in Heaven’s name, is it relevant?—since religious dogma is in fact nothing but a statement of doctrines concerning the nature of life and the universe. If Christian ministers really believe it is only an intellectual game for theologians and has no bearing upon human life, it is no wonder that their congregations are ignorant, bored, and bewildered. And, indeed, in the very next paragraph, Dr. Selbie recognizes the relation of Christian dogma to life:
…peace can come about only through a practical application of Christian principles and values. But this must have behind it something more than a reaction against that pagan humanism that has been found wanting.
The “something more” is dogma, and cannot be anything else, for between humanism and Christianity and between paganism and theism there is no distinction whatever except a distinction of dogma. That you cannot have Christian principles without Christ is becoming increasingly clear because their validity as principles depends on Christ’s authority; and as we have seen, the totalitarian states, having ceased to believe in Christ’s authority, are logically quite justified in repudiating Christian principles. If the average man is required to believe in Christ and accept His authority for Christian principles, it is surely relevant to inquire who or what Christ is, and why His authority should be accepted. But the question, “What think ye of Christ?” lands the average man at once in the very knottiest kind of dogmatic riddle. It is quite useless to say that it doesn’t matter particularly who or what Christ was or by what authority he did those things, and that even if he was only a man, he was a very nice man and we ought to live by his principles; for that is merely humanism, and if the average man in Germany chooses to think that Hitler is a nicer sort of man with still more attractive principles, the Christian humanist has no answer to make. It is not true at all that dogma is hopelessly irrelevant to the life and thought of the average man. What is true is that ministers of the Christian religion often assert that it is, present it for consideration as though it were, and, in fact, by their faulty exposition of it make it so. The central dogma of the Incarnation is that by which relevance stands or falls. If Christ were only man, then he is entirely irrelevant to any thought about God; if he is only God, then he is entirely irrelevant to any experience of human life. It is, in the strictest sense, necessary to the salvation of relevance that a man should believe rightly the Incarnation of Our Lord, Jesus Christ. Unless he believes rightly, there is not the faintest reason why he should believe at all. And in that case, it is wholly irrelevant to chatter about Christian principles. If the average man is going to be interested in Christ at all, it is the dogma that will provide the interest. The trouble is that, in nine cases out of ten, he has never been offered the dogma. What he has been offered is a set of technical theological terms that nobody has taken the trouble to translate into language relevant to ordinary life. “… Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and man.” What does this suggest, except that God the Creator (the irritable, old gentleman with the beard) in some mysterious manner fathered upon the Virgin Mary something amphibious, neither one thing nor t’other, like a merman? And, like human sons, wholly distinct from and (with some excuse) probably antagonistic to the father? And what, in any case, has this remarkable hybrid to do with John Doe or Jane Doe? This attitude of mind is that called by theologians Nestorianism, or perhaps a debased form of Arianism. But we really cannot just give it a technical label and brush it aside as something irrelevant to the thought of the average man. The average man produced it. It is, in fact, an immediate and unsophisticated expression of the thought of the average man. And at the risk of plunging him into the abominable heresy of the Patripassians or the Theopaschites, we must unite with Athanasius to assure John and Jane Doe that the God who lived and died in the world was the same God who made the world, and that, therefore, God himself has the best possible reasons for understanding and sympathizing with John and Jane’s personal troubles. “But,” John Doe and Jane Doe will instantly object, “it can’t have mattered very much to him if he was God. A god can’t really suffer like you and me. Besides, the parson says we are to try and be like Christ; but that’s all nonsense—we can’t be God, and it’s silly to ask us to try.” This able exposition of the Eutychian heresy can scarcely be dismissed as merely “interesting to theologians”; it appears to interest John and Jane to the point of irritation. Willy-nilly, we are forced to involve ourselves further in dogmatic theology and insist that Christ is perfect God and perfect man. At this point, language will trip us up. The average man is not to be restrained from thinking that “perfect God” implies a comparison with gods less perfect, and that “perfect man” means “the best kind of man you can possibly have.” While both these propositions are quite true, they are not precisely what we want to convey. It will perhaps be better to say, “altogether God and altogether man”—God and man at the same time, in every respect and completely; God from eternity to eternity and from the womb to the grave, a man also from the womb to the grave and now. “That,” replies John Doe, “is all very well, but it leaves me cold. Because, if he was God all the time, he must have known that his sufferings and death and so on wouldn’t last, and he could have stopped them by a miracle if he had liked, so his pretending to be an ordinary man was nothing but playacting.” And Jane Doe adds, “You can’t call a person ‘altogether man’ if he was God and didn’t want to do anything wrong. It was easy enough for him to be good, but it’s not at all the same thing for me. How about all that temptation stuff? Playacting again. It doesn’t help me to live what you call a Christian life.” John and Janeare now on the way to becoming convinced Apollinarians, a fact which, however interesting to theologians, has a distinct relevance also to the lives of those average men, since they propose, on the strength of it, to dismiss Christian principles as impracticable. There is no help for it. We must insist upon Christ’s possession of a reasonable soul as well as human flesh; we must admit the human limitations of knowledge and intellect; we must take a hint from Christ himself and suggest that miracles belong to the Son of Man as well as to the Son of God; we must postulate a human will liable to temptation; and we must be quite firm about “equal to the Father as touching his Godhead and inferior to the Father as touching his manhood.” Complicated as the theology is, the average man has walked straight into the heart of the Athanasian Creed, and we are bound to follow. Teachers and preachers never, I think, make it sufficiently clear that dogmas are not a set of arbitrary regulations invented a priori by a committee of theologians enjoying a bout of all-in dialectical wrestling. Most of them were hammered out under pressure of urgent practical necessity to provide an answer to heresy. And heresy is, as I have tried to show, 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. To me, engaged in my diabolical occupation of going to and fro in the world and walking up and down in it, conversations and correspondence bring daily a magnificent crop of all the standard heresies. I am extremely well familiar with them as practical examples of the life and thought of the average man, though I had to hunt through the encyclopedia to fit them with their proper theological titles for the purposes of this address. For the answers I need not go so far; they are compendiously set forth in the creeds. But an interesting fact is this: that nine out of ten of my heretics are exceedingly surprised to discover that the creeds contain any statements that bear a practical and comprehensible meaning. If I tell them it is an article of faith that the same God who made the world endured the suffering of the world, they ask in perfect good faith what connection there is between that statement and the story of Jesus. If I draw their attention to the dogma that the same Jesus who was the divine love was also the light of light, the divine wisdom, they are surprised. Some of them thank me very heartily for this entirely novel and original interpretation of Scripture, which they never heard of before and suppose me to have invented. Others say irritably that they don’t like to think that wisdom and religion have anything to do with each other, and that I should do much better to cut out the wisdom and reason and intelligence and stick to a simple gospel of love. But whether they are pleased or annoyed, they are interested; and the thing that interests them, whether or not they suppose it to be my invention, is the resolute assertion of the dogma.
Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) was an English crime writer, poet, playwright, essayist, translator, and Christian humanist. The above material was extracted from the essay entitled “Creed or Chaos?” from Sayers’ book Letters to a Diminished Church (2004). Reprinted by permission. Thomas Nelson Inc., Nashville, Tennessee. All rights reserved.
