Official Christianity, of late years, has been having what is known as a bad press. 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.
Those bold words come from Dorothy Sayers, contemporary and friend of C. S. Lewis, fiction writer in her early years, turning to specifically Christian apologetics and imaginative plays afterward. She also made a name for herself near the end of her life doing a new translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy.
Although raised in a clergyman’s home, Sayers’s early life didn’t reflect a serious commitment to the faith. Maturity, though, seemed to draw her back and turned her into one of the most stalwart Anglicans of her time.
The above quote comes from an essay called “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged,” which posits that Christianity is exciting, not in the least boring. Take the drama of Christ’s life, for instance:
He [God] had the honesty and the courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself.
What does she mean?
He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man.
The Christian story, and the “dogma” attached to it is “the tale of the time when God was the underdog and got beaten.” He came to men—those he had made—as a man, “and the men he had made broke him and killed him.” This is not dull, Sayers cries; rather, it is a “terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero.”
She continues,
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.
And then there was that Resurrection. How does one top that for drama?
One is free to disbelieve the entire story and the dogma attached to it, Sayers admits, but “if we are going to disbelieve a thing, it seems on the whole to be desirable that we should first find out what, exactly, we are disbelieving.”
As you can tell, Sayers is not one to mince words. Near the end of the essay, she summarizes succinctly:
Now, we may call that doctrine exhilarating, or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation, or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all.
That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed.
Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, would recognize it as news; those who did hear it for the first time actually called it news, and good news at that; though we are likely to forget that the word Gospel ever meant anything so sensational.
If your concept of Christian faith is that it is dull, boring, and static, you need to investigate further. This is the greatest drama of all ages, and it has eternal consequences. That is pure dynamism.