Farewell Dorothy L. Sayers

After reading the sound bite, "Farewell Rob Bell," I went back and read what John Piper said that Dorothy Sayers said.  It was his Dorothy Sayers soundbite, on hell, on the Hell, on The One True Hell, of course.   In this post, I'd like to look at that with you.

(But, in a quick parenthetical paragraph, let me also warn that pinning down Dorothy L. Sayers on Hell is a bit like pinning down Jesus on Hell.  What Sayers and Jesus said about men -- especially religious men -- mistreating women is much clearer and just as passionate as any of their teachings on Hell, we might agree.  Thus, the title of this post here really could have been:  "The Hells of Dorothy L. Sayers."  On that, I'll try to say more in a moment.  For now, we're listening again to John Piper.)

John Piper produced his Sayers essay on the web in May 2000 ["By John Piper. © Desiring God. Website: desiringGod.org"].  He entitled it, "Dorothy Sayers on Why Hell Is a Non-Negotiable."  He reproduced it for sale in his subsequent book Pierced by the Word: Thirty-One Meditations for Your Soul, which his publisher started marketing and then selling on September 11, 2003.

Piper opens the Sayers On Hell essay by saying, "Today belongs to the soundbite; tomorrow belongs to marketing; eternity belongs to the Truth."  Then he warns against "truths," and he reiterates, singularly, that his readers be inclined toward divine truth:   "O may God give us a humble, submissive love for the truth of God's word in the depth and fullness of it. "  Then he warns with the first of an accumulation of quotations:  first "God's word" twice "in the depth and fullness" of two verses from Paul.  The first verse is:  "The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires."  After Paul, Piper has another man teach his readers:  "Clark Pinnock, a Canadian theologian who still calls himself an evangelical."  This, then, prepares readers for Sayers.

What Piper says that Sayers says is this:

Dorothy Sayers, who died in 1957, speaks a necessary antidote to this kind of abandonment of truth.

There seems to be a kind of conspiracy, especially among middle-aged writers of vaguely liberal tendency, to forget, or to conceal, where the doctrine of Hell comes from. One finds frequent references to the "cruel and abominable mediaeval doctrine of hell," or "the childish and grotesque mediaeval imagery of physical fire and worms." . . .
But the case is quite otherwise; let us face the facts. The doctrine of hell is not " mediaeval": it is Christ's. It is not a device of "mediaeval priestcraft" for frightening people into giving money to the church: it is Christ's deliberate judgment on sin. The imagery of the undying worm and the unquenchable fire derives, not from "mediaeval superstition," but originally from the Prophet Isaiah, and it was Christ who emphatically used it. . . . It confronts us in the oldest and least "edited" of the gospels: it is explicit in many of the most familiar parables and implicit in many more: it bulks far larger in the teaching than one realizes, until one reads the Evangelists [gospels] through instead of picking out the most comfortable texts: one cannot get rid of it without tearing the New Testament to tatters. We cannot repudiate Hell without altogether repudiating Christ. (Dorothy Sayers, A Matter of Eternity, ed. Rosamond Kent Sprague [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1973], p. 86)

I would only add: There are many other things which, if abandoned, will also mean the eventual repudiation of Christ. It is not out of antiquarian allegiance that we love the truth - even the hard ones. It is out of love to Christ - and love to the people that only the Christ of truth can save.

Longing to love people with the truth,

Pastor John

© Desiring God

And that's it.  Truth wins.
----
Well, that's almost it. As you might have guessed, there's more. Dorothy L. Sayers wrote much on Hell. Famously, she translated Dante's Inferno, which she rendered Hell.  Yes, of course, she was interested in  frequent references to the "cruel and abominable mediaeval doctrine of hell."  She was also interested in fiction of all kinds, writing much herself.

For example, here's from one of Sayers's novels:

"For God's sake, old man, do what you can to put the thing right before next assizes.  If you don't, I'll never forgive you.  Damn it, you don't want to hang the wrong person, do you?--especially a woman and all that."

"Have a fag," said Parker.  "You're looking quite wild about the eyes.  What have you been doing with yourself?  I'm sorry if we've got the wrong pig by the ear, but it's the defense's business to point out where we're wrong, and I can't say they put up a very convincing show."

"No, confound them.  Biggy did his best, but that fool and beast Crofts gave him no materials at all.  Blast his ugly eyes!  I know the brute thinks she did it.  I hope he will fry in hell and be served up with cayenne pepper on a redhot dish!"

"What eloquence!" said Parker, unimpressed.  "Anybody would think you'd gone goopy over the girl."

What is interesting about this particular quotation from Sayers's novel, (Strong Poison, page 56) is how she's having men reference Hell.  It's clear to any reader of Jesus's gospels that she's riffing off of them.  You got the allusions to "that fool" and before that to "ugly eyes" - didn't you?  Jesus said that any man who called his brother fool would go to Hell; Jesus also said that any man who lusted, even with one ugly eye, after a woman would go to Hell too.  And here's a guy, a man, a character in some of Sayers's fiction with a farewell hope of hot hell for someone else who is mishandling the truth.  It's soundbites and soundbites about soundbites and the art of persuasion of men.  So has John Piper gone goopy over Dorothy Sayers?

What Piper doesn't say about the woman Dorothy L. Sayers is what she said about the hell that religious men put women in on earth.  But since we're already risking accumulating teachers and cherry picking quotations as soundbites for truths and fictions, as if love wins, then we might as well listen a little more to Ms. Sayers.  Just a warning:  the following won't tickle your ears much; it doesn't sound too much like a CBMW or a John Piper soundbite.

Here's one of her hells - one of the true truths of Dorothy L. Sayers - who complains about what men, religious men, have said about women:

      Women are not human.  They lie when they say they have human needs:  warm and decent clothing; comfort in the bus; interests directed immediately to God and His universe, not intermediately through any child of man.  They are far above man to inspire him, far beneath him to corrupt him; they have feminine minds and feminine natures, but their mind is not one with their nature like the minds of men; they have no human mind and no human nature.  "Blessed be God," says the Jew [a man of course], "that hath not made me a woman."

       God, of course, may have His own opinion, but the Church [of Christian men of course] is reluctant to endorse it.  I think I have never heard a sermon preached on the story of Martha and Mary that did not attempt, somehow, to explain away its text.  Mary's, of course, was the better part--the Lord said so, and we must not precisely contradict Him.  But we will be careful not to despise Martha.  No doubt, He approved of her too.  We could not get on without her, and indeed (have paid lip-service to God's opinion) we must admit that we greatly prefer her.  For Martha was doing a really feminine job, whereas Mary was just behaving like any other disciple, male or female; and that is a hard pill to swallow.

       Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross.  They had never known a man like this Man -- there never has been such another.   A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them as either "The women, God help us!" or "The ladies, God bless them!": who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unselfconscious.  There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything "funny" about woman's nature.

       But we might easily deduce it from His contemporaries, and from His prophets before Him, and from His Church to this day [of course mainly men].  Women are not human:  nobody shall persuade that they are human; let them say what they like, we will not believe it, though One rose from the dead.

(pages 66-69, Are Women Human)

Model-Breaking Jesus: in Daly, Thatcher, Crossan

Here're just a few patriarchy-exploding, model-breaking quotations:

Those who have come far enough in consciousness to break through the destructive conditioning imposed through "models" offered to the female in our culture are learning to be critical of all ready-made models.  This is not to say that strong and free women do not have an influence, but that this is transmitted rather as an infectious freedom.  Those who are really living on the boundary tend to spark in others the courage to affirm their own unique being.  It may be, as Paul Van Buren contends, that Jesus had such an effect upon his followers.  The important thing, then, was the freedom and power of being in which they participated, which enabled them to be their unique selves.  The point was not blind imitation of Jesus' actions and view.  If reading the Gospels -- or anything else -- sparks this kind of freedom in some persons today, this is hardly to be disparaged.  But then Jesus or any other liberated person who has this effect functions as model precisely in the sense of being a model-breaker, pointing beyond his or her own limitations to the potential for further liberation.

      --Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation

[There is] a hierarchy of mental categories that reflect our cultural values.  These categories are mutually exclusive, because groups [modeled in aristotelian patriarchy, I say] tend to order reality in terms of opposites:  male/female, dark/light, right/wrong, clean/dirty, animal/plant, and so forth.  The members of each opposed set, however [nonetheless, and in model-busting ways, I say], share enough common traits to be reconciled at a higher level of the hierarchy.  Thus, at one [male-dominant] level men and women may be seen as opposites, but at another [model-breaking] level both men and women are "human beings"....

In [John Dominic] Crossan's view, Jesus intended to build his [wise, accessible] sapiential, here-and-now Kingdom on the ruins of normal society.  For this reason, Jesus' teaching was characterized by statements calculated to undermine the social structure of Roman Palestine.  Ancient Mediterranean culture was organized into two interlocking groups, "the familial and the political, kinship and politics"; Jesus opposed both with "biting aphorisms and dialogues."  Indeed, Jesus "very, very often" entered into "an almost savage attack on family values," specifically the oppressive values associated with patriarchal rule....  But this subversion of traditional family values was, ultimately, a commentary on the larger social order, since "the family is society in miniature"....  Each of these activities invited people to experience God's sovereign rule in defiance of cultural norms.  Specifically, whereas Caesar's Kingdom was sharply stratified on the basis of patriarchy, patronage, honor, and, in Palestine at least, religious purity, God's kingdom would be open, accessible, and egalitarian, completely devoid of rank.

      -- Tom Thatcher [quoting Crossan's Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography and The Historical Jesus], Jesus the Riddler: the Power of Ambiguity in the Gospels

female trafficking in the bible?

[Our] Western, American, middle-class point of view can actually interfere with our understanding of God's Word. The story of Naomi and Ruth takes place against the backdrop of an ancient patriarchal culture. If we want to grasp the message, we must enter Naomi's world. We can do this better with the help of our sisters in the Third World whose cultures more closely resemble the ancient biblical culture.
--Carolyn Custis James, The Gospel of Ruth (p 30)

What if one of our sisters is from Malawi and is helping us? What if she's "a child of the third wife in a polygamous marriage"? What of "her experience as a widow and mother of three" might inform ours, if we're willing for ours to be so informed? What if she's encouraging us "to think of the trafficked women in Geneva and not to forget that contextual Bible study is about transformation"? What if we start to have some "thought about how few choices trafficked women and men have?" And then what if we began reading the Bible, the Book of Ruth, and chapter 3?

Well then, we may just do what the wonderful Jane Stranz is doing and now encourages us to do: to "read it with the idea that Ruth could be seen as a trafficked woman - that Naomi could be seen as a formerly trafficked woman who encourages another woman to follow the same path, because of course there is no other path." Jane has been listening to Fulata Mbano Moyo, her "brilliant colleague," sharing with us her insights again.

Would we really be doing injustice to the Bible? As importantly, if we don't consider the possibility, then are we doing injustice to Ruth and to Naomi?  Or don't we remember those lines of John Keats's "Ode to A Nightingale" which go like this:

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
    No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
    In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
    Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
        She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
                The same that oft-times hath
    Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
        Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

If Keats is not thinking of the tears of the trafficked human, he nonetheless conveys how "forlorn."  If we're reluctant to listen to Mbano Moyo, then how about Keats?  If not a feminist like Jane (who has reminded us of the problem of trafficking in our world), then how about a Bible translator like David Ker (who also continues to remind us)?  Ancient Israel of the bible, or Geneva, Glasgow, Tokyo, Congo, Africa, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, the East, and the West.  We do well to listen to the silences to the cries to the voices, our own and others', when we read.

Now, to be sure, Carolyn Custis James (whose book I quote from to start this post) doesn't necessarily advocate reading the bible to see Ruth or Naomi as trafficked humans.  But in her chapter, “When Women Initiate and Men Respond” (on pages 173-174 The Gospel of Ruth), Custis James does get us thinking about how to read "Arthur Golden’s best-selling novel, Memoirs of a Geisha"; she's getting us to consider how we, women and men in the Western world, initiate and respond.  How do we respond to the experiences and the stories of trafficked girls and boys?

Custis James reads how Memoirs of a Geisha:

chronicles the life of a young Japanese girl sold into slavery by her desperately poor parents—an appalling transaction in human flesh repeated in real life thousands upon thousands of times throughout the world’s sordid history and still happening today in shocking numbers. Sayuri is trafficked into the world of the geisha—the upper-class counterpart of the common prostitute. She is destined to become a “butterfly in the night.” Her youthful beauty, artistic accomplishments, and virginity will go to the highest bidder from among a coterie of Japanese businessmen. The Chairman—the elegant man approaching her now—is one of them.

Their first meeting seems innocuous enough. He wipes her tears with his handkerchief and sends her skipping on her way with a coin to buy a shaved ice treat, never to forget his kindness. Like a radiant full moon against the blackened sky, it is a snapshot of contrasts—two human beings dwelling in the same universe, simultaneously inhabiting separate worlds. She is female. Powerless, dependent, vulnerable, voiceless, and (except for the coin he just pressed into her small hand) penniless too. He lives in the privileged world of men and is possessed of power, self-determination, education, and wealth. The disparity between them will never go away and stirs up subliminal questions. What will he do with his advantages? Will he exploit her too? Or is he her ticket to freedom?

So as we think about these questions, we might bravely apply them to ourselves.  We might consider the story of Boaz and Ruth ("What will he do with his advantages? Will he exploit her too? Or is he her ticket to freedom?").  Won't we do well to hear the voices of African women and not forget the forlorn hidden away from among us by men who would traffic and own them?

Recovering like Philip Yancey

"We in the church have as much to learn from people in the recovery movement..."
--Philip Yancey

When Yancey wrote those words, he was writing a "back page" essay for Christianity Today magazine, and it was about the alcoholics anonymous recovery movement.

But he might as well have been writing about recovery from the church.  He's written lots about his upbringing and early adult life in Christian fundamentalism, and his movement out of it.  He's also written about recovery of the histories of Jesus.  He says the gospel writers tend to write like Barbara Tuchman, who's histories read as if they're happening suspensefully for the first time (like watching the movie "Titanic" for the third or forth time, thinking perhaps all will survive and the ending will be happy ever after).  He writes a history of Jesus that way, humbly, as if he never knew certain things about him.  It's a history looking at the facts of the underbelly of the story, so he says.  He's often disappointed with God, he says.  He's disappointed with people who wear God like a bumpersticker, I say.  There's a physical realism to his thinking that reminds me some of some good feminisms.  Feminist recovery work.  This is how and why he some in significant ways influences how I read the Bible.

Once upon a time in a blog post, I quoted Yancey - a quotation about how women were witnesses to the resurrection in the gospels.  Today in a blog post, April DeConick quotes Origen quoting Celsus - a quotation about how women were witnesses to the resurrection in the gospels.  The trouble is, when reading the bible, that many men have used women for many things.  What if they are witnesses?

What are we going to do about the blogger gender gap?

April DeConick says, "Alright, the gender gap among bibliobloggers is appalling. The gender gap has nothing to do with the internet or women being afraid to blog or publicly speak our minds since women do this in many other internet forums."

At her blog, The Forbidden Gospels, she goes on to make a proposal for what we are going to do about the blogger gender gap! Her hypothesis and proposal:

So this is my hypothesis. I think there are as many women bibliobloggers out there as men, but they are not visible. Why? Because many of us women post on subjects that are considered marginal (even heretical, especially if there is any feminist bent) to bible studies by the men who are blogging about the bible. Our blogs are easily justified as unimportant. They remain unknown or unread because they haven't been linked to by the male bibliobloggers who dominate this blog niche and the field in general, a point that Julia wisely raised in the comments to my last post on this subject. Julia wrote: "But I also wonder about the role of networking and way that many of the blogs in the top tier regularly reference one another. How do we encourage each other's success, make sure that others find the good work that's out there?"

So I say, enough of this nonsense and rationalizations. This is what I'm going to do. This weekend when I have more time, I am going to get the women bibliobloggers (all of them) into my sidebar blog roll. I am going to start with this list that Biblioblog Top 50 has so kindly put together on women's blogs (their so-called marginal blogs). And if any of my women readers have biblioblogs not in that list, or if any of my readers know of other women bibliobloggers not in that list, send that information to me and I will add it to the blog roll. Those links will be there for anyone who wishes to copy them and get them into their own blog rolls.

So feel free to join in! April links to her email address at her own blog. Read that full post, and feel free to do something about the blogger gender gap.

(To be clear, I myself am not blogging. Just relisting my old blogroll of the blogs of many of you whose blogs many men in the biblioblogosphere may have considered "marginal." It's here now both in an RSS feed form and in the sidebar (individual links) format. For those of you sifting thru, you'll find blogs by some who've stopped blogging, many who are feminists, many who are bibliobloggers, and some who are feministbibliobloggers. The point is there are many who "post on subjects that are considered marginal (even heretical, especially if there is any feminist bent) to bible studies by the men who are blogging about the bible" and there are many more to recognize.)