LETTERS TO A DIMINISHED CHURCH

Author- Dorothy Sayers

Publisher-W Publishing Group 

ISBN- 0-8499-4526-7

 

Dorothy Sayers was a British author, playwright and scholar who lived 1893-1957.  She was a member of the famous “Inklings”, an informal group of writers that included C.S.Lewis, J.R.R.Tolkien, and Charles Williams. This book is a series of essays on the church and Christianity, most of them were written during the period of the Second World War.  He writing is dynamic and incisive.  She turns on its head the popular perception of Christianity on its head.  She argues that the essence of Christianity is in the Person and character of Jesus Christ- energetic, dramatic and utterly alive.  These essays are challenging to the rather effete view of Christianity held by many.  She shows a robust view of Christianity, startling and relevant today and she was when these were written.  There are passionate arguments here for Christian doctrine. The first essay is entitled ‘The Greatest Drama ever Told”.  She is referring to the basic question ‘What think ye of Christ’.  The title suggests her own perception of the wonder of Christ and the gospel concerning Him.  Her writing stretches the minds of those who will take the trouble to read her with concentration.  It contextualises the truth, dissolving the simplistic notions which are in vogue in many churches.  We are taken back to the roots of things, away from the fads, crazes and religious fashions which plague the church of our day.  Essays include a Christian view of work and economics, there is one which deals with the origin and place of evil in the world.  She exposes the hypocrisy implicit in the magnifying of one of the ‘deadly sins’ in her essay ‘The Other Six Deadly Sins’.  There is a sense of the prophetic about her writings although clothed in great intellectual prose.  Some will struggle in keeping up with her, there are many startling paragraphs which demand thoughtful pondering.  Here is a quote to conclude this book brief and possibly to whet your appetite to read these essays. “Somehow or other, and with the best intentions, we have shown the world the typical Christian in the likeness of a crashing and rather ill-natured bore- and this in the Name of the One who is assuredly never bored a soul in those thirty three years during which He passed through this world like a flame.  Let us, in Heaven’s name, draw our the Divine Drama from under the dreadful accumulations of slipshod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction”.

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