01/03/2024 – “Creed or Chaos?” by Dorothy Sayers (1893 – 1957) , published in 1949. (ISBN ref. #: 0-918477-27-1)
I found this book on our bookshelf, that I didn’t recall that we had. Dorothy Sayer’s post WW2 essay: “The Lost Tools of Learning” was a catalyst to the revival in Christian worldview education. Here in the U.S., the first school that took off was “Logos School” in little Moscow, Idaho. Douglas Wilson was one of the founders. I have two previous posts that summarizes this revival: 1). 03/27/2021 – Visioneering for the Next Decade…”, and 2) 04/18/2022 – “Christian Worldview and Education”, with a six minute introductory video. I would recommend logging in and searching on the respective dates.
For now, I will share select excerpts from this great book, only 113 pages in length:
pg. #4: “The church’s answer is categorical and uncompromising and is this: That Jesus Bar-Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, was in factt and in truth, and in the most exact and literal sense of the words, the God ‘by whom all things were made.” His body and brain were those of a common man; His personality was the personality of God, so far as that personality could be expressed in human terms. He was not a kind of demon or fairy pretending to be human; He was in every respect a genuine living man. He was not merely a man so good as to ‘like God’ – He was God.
Now this is not just a pious commonplace; it is not commonplace at all. For what it means is this, among other things: that for whatever reason God chose to make man as he is – limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death — He had the honesty and 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. 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. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.”
pg #14: “But we may all, perhaps allow that it is easier to believe the universe to have come into existence for some reason than for no reason at all. The Church asserts that there is a Mind which made the universe, that He made it because he is the sort of Mind that takes pleasure in creation, and that if we want to know what the Mind of the Creator is, we must look at Christ. In Him, we shall discover a Mind that loved His own creation so completely that He became part of it, suffered with and for it, and made it a sharer in His own glory and a fellow worker with Himself in the working out of His own design for it.”
pg. #31: “It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first hopeless to offer Christianity as a vaguely idealistic aspiration of a simple and consoling kind; it is, on the contrary, a hard, touch, exacting and complex doctrine, steeped in a drastic and uncompromising realism. And it is fatal to imagine that everybody knows quite well what Christianity is and needs only a little encouragement to practice it.”
pg. #46: “The delusion of the mechanical perfectibility of man through a combination of scientific knowledge and unconscious evolution has been responsible for much heartbreak… Human is self-contained — it provides for man no resources outside himself.” Contrast that with:
pg. #48: “Today, if we could really be persuaded that a we are miserable sinners — that the trouble is not outside us but inside us, and that therefore, by the grace of God, we can do something to put it right – we should receive that message as the most hopeful and heartening thing that one could imagine.”
pg. #8: “The right Faith is, that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ.. is God and Man… Perfect God and perfect Man, of a reasonable should and human flesh subsisting…. Who although He be God and Man, yet is He not two, but one Christ. There is the essential doctrine, of which the whole elaborate structure of Christian faith and morals is only the logical consequence.
Now we may call that doctrine exhilarating or we may call in 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.”
https://www.sayers.org.uk/biography/
The Apostle’s Creed:
I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.
He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit
and born of the virgin Mary.
He suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again.
He ascended into heaven,
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of the saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.
The Nicene Creed:
We believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible;
And in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only begotten Son of God,
begotten from the Father before all ages,
light from light,
true God from true God,
begotten not made,
of one substance with the Father,
through Whom all things came into existence,
Who because of us men and because of our salvation came down from the heavens,
and was incarnate from the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary
and became man,
and was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate,
and suffered and was buried,
and rose again on the third day according to the Scriptures
and ascended to heaven, and sits on the right hand of the Father,
and will come again with glory to judge living and dead,
of Whose kingdom there will be no end;
And in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and life-giver,
Who proceeds from the Father,
Who with the Father and the Son is together worshipped and together glorified,
Who spoke through the prophets;
in one holy Catholic and apostolic Church.
We confess one baptism to the remission of sins;
we look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Amen
Athanasian Creed:
https://orthodoxwiki.org/Athanasian_Creed
SolI Deo Gloria!
Always connected through prayer and by His grace!