Archive: What Dorothy Sayers might say to the United Methodist Church

By Ruth Zimmer

Ask Dorothy Sayers a question, and you might not like her answer. She was not given to supplying comfortable or expected answers. A scientist found this out when he asked Dorothy Sayers to set down in a letter to his scientific organization “her reasons for believing in the Christian faith.”[1] Her response was unsettling, even startling, as she forthrightly began her letter by raising a series of straightforward, challenging questions to the scientist and his colleagues:

“Why do you want a letter from me? Why don’t you take the trouble to find out for yourselves what Christianity is? You take the time to learn technical terms about electricity. Why don’t you do as much for theology? Why do you never read the great writings on the subject, but take your information from the secular ‘experts’ who have picked it up as accurately as you? Why don’t you learn the facts in this field as honestly as in your own field? Why do you accept mildewed old heresies as the language of the church, when any handbook of church history will tell you where they came from?

Why do you want a letter from me telling you about God? You will never bother to check on it or find out whether I’m giving you personal opinions or Christian doctrines. Don’t bother with me. Go away and do some work and let me get on with mine.”

This is a tough answer and not the one expected by the scientist or his colleagues, we can be sure. Dorothy Sayers challenged them to do for themselves what they were well able to do.

Sayers is here calling for intellectual toughness and integrity—a theme found in many of her essays. In re-reading this letter recently I discovered to my chagrin that many times this same challenge could apply to me, to you, to many in our Methodist churches. Why is this so? We avidly read books on child rearing and training when we learn we are going to be parents; we take seriously the responsibility to read and learn the terms, the history, the great writings and the facts in our own fields of daily work (and even related fields), yet we do not approach our spiritual training, growth and development with this same intellectual honesty and directness. We too often accept secular and secondhand opinions on Christianity, not bothering to check them out with Christian doctrine or with the fount of Christian truth—the Scriptures. Others have risked their careers, and some have risked their lives so we could have the Scriptures to read for ourselves. Yet how many of us who call ourselves Christians read the Scriptures daily, seeking answers for our spiritual questions and guidance in our daily Christian walks? We are not doing for ourselves, spiritually, what we are well able to do. As a result many in our churches today have become biblically illiterate. Dorothy Sayers would not accept this kind of intellectual laziness. She would maintain that God clearly expects, even requires of us, intellectual honesty and integrity in our search for spiritual truth and guidance in our daily lives as well as in our daily work.

To our preachers, teachers, seminaries and other leaders in the UM Church, Dorothy Sayers might say, “Stop watering down the Gospel of Christ. Stress the essentials of the faith, and continually reinforce them. Believers need the strong meat of the Gospel; instead, you offer pablum,” and “The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man—and the dogma is the drama”[2] (“The Greatest Drama Ever Staged”). “You do Christ no honor ‘by watering down His personality’ so He will not offend. If the mystery of the ‘divine drama’ of God enfleshed in Christ shocks and offends believers, ‘let them be offended’” (“The Dogma is The Drama”). Many of Sayers’ most representative essays express this conviction that Christian truths must be stated dramatically and lived courageously.

Dorothy Sayers was just as direct and uncompromising in her statements on women’s rights. She was not an aggressive feminist, but she consistently pointed out that “male and female are adjectives qualifying the noun ‘human beings’”[3] (Are Women Human?); and, as human beings, women are just as varied in tastes, abilities and preferences as other human beings (men). Sayers believed one of the primary tasks “for any human being [was] … to [discover] and do [sacramentally and joyfully] the work for which he or she was created” (Are Women Human?). However, Sayers just as emphatically stressed that “it is ridiculous to take on a man’s job just in order to be able to say that ‘a woman has done it—Yah!’ The only decent reason for tackling a job is that it is your job and you want to do it.” [4]

Dorothy Sayers took the Church in general to task for failing to follow the example of Christ in His consistent treatment of women as genuinely unique human beings. He “never nagged … flattered … coaxed or patronized them,” she points out, “never mapped out their sphere for them [Mary and Martha], never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female …” (“The Human-Not-Quite-Human “). There is nothing more repugnant to a human being, Sayers reminds us, as “to be reckoned always as a member of a class and not as an individual person” (A Matter Of Eternity).

Dorothy Sayers would feel the UM Church has done well in being at the forefront in the Church’s acceptance of women in roles of leadership.

Finally, I must acknowledge now what you have probably already guessed. Dorothy Sayers would not like the title of this article. She hated generalizations of all kinds (not just those made about women). She would immediately question, “To which UMC am I speaking? Which is the real UMC? The traditional, faithful followers of the Christ of Scripture or the heretical few who are destroying the Church?”

Dr. Ruth Zimmer is an English professor at Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Christianity Today (December 11, 1981), p. 13.

[2] Many of these essays can be found in The Whimsical Christian (New York: Macmillan, 1978) such as “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged” and “The Dogma Is the Drama.”

[3] Sayers’ commentary on the usual slanted pulpit interpretation of the biblical account of Mary and Martha is a classic. (See “The Human-Not-Quite-Human” in Are Women Human? Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1971, pp. 46-47.)

[4] Sprague, Rosamond Kent, ed. A Matter of Eternity: Selections from … Dorothy L. Sayers. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1973.