The Need for Creed

Seriously, is this not terrifying?

After the service on Sunday, I'd like to point you towards the writing of a quite brilliant woman: Dorothy L Sayers. Her writing on the creed is some of the best I've ever seen.  Dorothy Sayers is known primarily for her mystery fiction that she wrote, which is how I first came into contact with her.  My mother had a pretty serious collection of Lord Peter Wimsey murder mysteries in our basement, with cover art that scared the stuffing out of young me.  Dead bodies in coffins and all that. But just like CS Lewis is more known for his imaginative fiction than his apologetics, Dorothy Sayers is known more for her detective fiction than her apologetics.  The two of them were well acquainted, and read each others' works.

Now good apologetics, like that of Chesterton and Sayers and Lewis, is of a timeless stuff, just like the material they talk about.  It's usually a bit of a shame when people make apologetics relevant for their time and their time only, and then when that time has passed, so too have their words.  Good apologetics, naturally, deal with the universal truths of humanity and theology, and where they intersect. Just like the source material of the Bible, which, despite being thousands of years old, still manages to be relevant to everyday life.  Funny that.

Yup, the problem for missionaries
was somewhere else

Anyhow, when Sayers talks about the creed, we would do well to listen, because her words are more applicable now than ever.  We may think of her time as a sort of 'golden time' for Christian faith, a time in which people were comfortably Christian, when the mission field was one guy in your town, and the continent of Africa, when you could confidently say that the real work of the gospel was to be done 'over there.'  But in that golden time, there were seeds of trouble being sown, seeds that would help to bring about the current climate of those who are 'spiritual but not religious.'  You see, Sayers understood the importance of the creeds, especially in an age like hers (and ours), that saw little use for them.

                                                        Christ, in His Divine innocence, said to 

the Woman of Samaria, "Ye worship ye 

know not what" — being apparently under 

the impression that it might be desirable, 

on the whole, to know what one was worshipping. 

He thus showed Himself sadly out of touch with the 

twentieth-century mind, for the cry today is: 

"Away with the tendentious complexities of dogma — let 

us have the simple spirit of worship; just worship, 

no matter of what!" The only drawback to this demand for a 

generalized and undirected worship is the practical 

difficulty of arousing any sort of enthusiasm for the worship of nothing 

in particular. 

                                                       (Creed or Chaos?, 19)

Can you believe that in Sayers' time, this was happening?  We thought that the Christian faith in the 30s and 40s was pretty secure, that people were confident in their beliefs, and that things were pretty well regimented.  Well, wrong-o.  Things were beginning to collapse back then.  It's a question that we get from the youth every once in a while, as to why they have to go through and memorize the tedious old Apostles' Creed, the thing that seems the most removed from real life.  After all, the commandments are a curb, rule, and guide to your life, and the Lord's Prayer is the prayer that Jesus himself told his disciples to pray, but where does the creed fit in?  

Well, as you heard on Sunday, the creed informs everything else.  There's a good scene from the movie "Dogma," in which the character of Bethany opines 'it doesn't matter what you have faith in, all that matters is that you have faith.'  It's sure a popular sentiment, and one that Christians tend to find problematic.  Because there's nothing new under the sun, and because people have always been the same no matter what, Dorothy Sayers was able to articulate what the problem actually was.  The faith of Christianity, unchanged through the centuries, was able to remain unchanged because it dealt with a simple problem, that of sinful, fallen humanity and its relationship with God and each other.  As time wore on though, people became more in the business of conforming Christ to men, than men to Christ.  The idea of being perfect as God himself is perfect, is a difficult, undesired one.  We don't want that kind of pressure, nor that kind of perfection.  But God, in his infinite wisdom, has promised to make us perfect, as he is perfect.  He has promised to make us into a fit dwelling place for himself.  That doesn;t mean that we'll be good enough, but that we'll be good.  

Sayers got that the majority of Christian thinking on the subject of faith and the object of faith hinges on the creed.  Yes, the term 'organized religion' has become a little bit of a dirty word these days, but the Christian faith tells you what it believes in from the get-go.  There are a great many mysteries in what we believe, such as the sacraments, such as how Jesus turns water into wine, such as how God created everything in just a week, but the mystery is not 'which God do you believe in?'  That one is clear.

PJ.