Creed in the Language of Drama

In the twentieth century there lived a woman who refused to let the Christian creed sit quietly in a dusty chair, dressed in its Sunday best, saying nothing that might startle anyone. Her name was Dorothy L. Sayers, and most of England first met her through a monocle and a murder. She was the inventor of Lord Peter Wimsey, the gentleman detective whose cases sold by the thousand. Born in 1893, sharp as a blade, one of the first women to take a degree at Oxford, she made her living by writing mysteries in which appearances deceived and the truth was dragged at last into the light. But Sayers had another conviction, and it burned hotter than any of her plots. She believed the Christian faith was the most exciting story ever told, and she was furious that the church had managed to make it boring.

Then came the broadcast that scandalised a nation.

In the early years of the Second World War, the BBC asked her to write a cycle of radio plays on the life of Christ. She agreed, and she did the unthinkable. She made Jesus and his disciples talk like real people. Ordinary men, with regional voices, doubt in their bellies, dust on their feet. When word spread that an actor would speak the very words of Jesus over the wireless, the protests came in waves. It was irreverent. It was blasphemous. To put the Lord on the stage, to give him a human voice and human breath, struck many as an outrage. Sayers did not flinch. Her whole point was that this had already happened. The Word had already become flesh. God had already taken a human voice and human breath and entered a real country, in real time, among real people who betrayed him and wept for him. If the story shocked listeners, good. It was meant to. The plays went out under the title The Man Born to Be King, and across blacked-out, bombed, frightened Britain, families gathered round their wirelesses and heard the old story as if for the first time. It was strange again. It was vivid again. It was true.

That was the work of her life, told in a single battle. Sayers was never a preacher in a pulpit. She served the church with words, with craft, with stubborn intelligence. She argued in her essays that if the creed had grown dull, the fault was not in the creed. God creates. God judges. God becomes flesh. God dies. God rises. God renews the whole world. There is nothing tame in any of it. The dullness, she insisted, was ours. We had buried wonder under good manners and called it religion. In her later years she poured the same disciplined love of language into translating Dante, climbing the great poem from hell to paradise, because she would not be content with slogans when God and truth and people all deserved better.

Dorothy Sayers gave the church back its verbs. Not a cabinet of religious labels, polite and lifeless, but the living grammar of God in action: he calls, he comes, he dies, he raises, he sends. She showed the novelists and the lawyers, the teachers and the makers, that ordinary craft done truthfully is a calling under heaven. And she left behind a dare that has never stopped echoing. If the gospel has become wallpaper to you, do not blame the gospel. The drama is still there, waiting. It is only that we have stopped listening for the thunder in it.