George MacDonald on God’s condescension

March 25th, 2010 | 14 Comments

(Many thanks to Richard Beck of Experimental Theology for reminding me of an old friend.)

George MacDonald was a theologian, pastor, and author who lived in Scotland in the nineteenth century. He was raised in a strongly Calvinist environment but instinctively rejected what he considered a harsh view of God in his own tradition, the Church of Scotland. The following is an excerpt of an “unspoken sermon” that is based off of a couple fundamental motifs running through MacDonald’s writings, that of the cherished child and also of the special close relationship between father and child, both of which were markedly countercultural at the time but which he saw modeled in his own relationship with his father.

How terribly, then, have the theologians misrepresented God in the measures of the low and showy, not the lofty and simple humanities! Nearly all of them represent him as a great King on a grand throne, thinking how grand he is, and making it the business of his being and the end of his universe to keep up his glory, wielding the bolts of a Jupiter against them that take his name in vain. They would not allow this, but follow out what they say, and it comes much to this. Brothers, have you found our king ? There he is, kissing little children and saying they are like God. There he is at table with the head of a fisherman lying on his bosom, and somewhat heavy at heart that even he, the beloved disciple, cannot yet understand him well. The simplest peasant who loves his children and his sheep were—no, not a truer, for the other is false, but—a true type of our God beside that monstrosity of a monarch.

The God who is ever uttering himself in the changeful profusions of nature; who takes millions of years to form a soul that shall understand him and be blessed*; who never needs to be, and never is, in haste; who welcomes the simplest thought of truth or beauty as the return for seed he has sown upon the old fallows of eternity; who rejoices in the response of a faltering moment to the age-long cry of his wisdom in the streets; the God of music, of painting, of building, the Lord of Hosts, the God of mountains and oceans; whose laws go forth from one unseen point of wisdom, and thither return without an atom of loss; the God of history working in time unto Christianity; this God is the God of little children, and he alone can be perfectly, abandonedly simple and devoted. The deepest, purest love of a woman has its well-spring in him. Our longing desires can no more exhaust the fulness of the treasures of the Godhead, than our imagination can touch their measure. Of him not a thought, not a joy, not a hope of one of his creatures can pass unseen; and while one of them remains unsatisfied, he is not Lord over all.

Therefore, with angels and with archangels, with the spirits of the just made perfect, with the little children of the kingdom, yea, with the Lord himself, and for all them that know him not, we praise and magnify and laud his name in itself, saying Our Father. We do not draw back for that we are unworthy, nor even for that we are hard-hearted and care not for the good. For it is his childlikeness that makes him our God and Father. The perfection of his relation to us swallows up all our imperfections, all our defects, all our evils; for our childhood is born of his fatherhood. That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and his desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to him, “Thou art my refuge, because thou art my home.”

from “The Child in the Midst“

* Please note that this was published in 1867. Strikingly, it appears that MacDonald had recognized and embraced the theological beauty of evolutionary theory within ten years of Origin of the Species.

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March 25th, 2010

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  • http://thechurchofjesuschrist.us/ Polycarp

    Amen, and amen

  • http://thecreationofanevolutionist.blogspot.com/ Mike Beidler

    Interesting. I just read this from George MacDonald this morning:

    I wonder how often the spiritual cure of faith in the Son of Man, the Great Healer, has been tried on those possessed with our modern demons. Is it proved that insanity has its origin in the physical disorder which, it is now said, can be shown to accompany it invariably? Let it be so; it yet appears to me that if the physician would, like the Son of Man himself, descend as it were into the disorganized world in which the consciousness of his patient exists, and receiving as fact all that he reveals to him of its condition—for fact it is, of a very real sort—introduce, by all means that sympathy can suggest, the one central cure for evil, spiritual and material, namely, the truth of the Son of Man, the vision of the perfect friend and helper, with the revelation of the promised liberty of obedience—if he did this, it seems to me that cures might still be wrought as marvelous as those of the ancient time.

    From David Elginbrod, vol. 2 [1863], Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1871, pp. 239-240

  • http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/ed_babinski/babinski-bio.html EdwardTBabinski

    There was another universalist Christian who lived around the same time as Macdonald, perhaps a little after his day, who wrote something about how the same God who created red sandstone layers which took eons to form would likewise work patiently on the recreation of souls in the afterlife and their translation from darkness into the light.

  • http://thechurchofjesuschrist.us/ Polycarp

    Edward, I would like the name of that preacher.

    I know that I am a heretic, but it seems to me that universalism is completely compatible with Christianity, and many of the greatest Christian minds were, yet today it is looked upon as post-modernist thought.

  • http://undeception.com/ Steve

    Interesting quote; it underscores that the theme of condescension was a common one for MacDonald. It is a beautiful and brilliant point of his that we should seek to mirror Christ's behavior by condescending not only to the level of the child, but even of the mentally disturbed. Thanks!

  • http://undeception.com/ Steve

    Thanks, Edward. I'm with Joel: can you give us any clues as to who this might have been?

  • http://undeception.com/ Steve

    That is an interesting quote! It underlines MacDonald's theme of
    condescension, particularly in the incarnation. Thanks!

  • http://thecreationofanevolutionist.blogspot.com/ Mike Beidler

    Funny. I didn't notice the first time what you noticed the first time. You didn't notice the first time what I noticed the first time. ;-)

  • http://undeception.com/ Steve

    Please elucidate what you noticed the first time. :)

  • http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/ed_babinski/babinski-bio.html EdwardTBabinski

    Thomas Erskine is the universalist I alluded to. Perhaps the most frequently quoted passage in all his writings is this one:

    “He who waited so long for the formation of a piece of old red sandstone will surely wait with much long-suffering for the perfection of a human spirit.”

    Another favorite quotation is this one:

    “The most zealous defenders of the verbal inspiration of theBible admit that there are parts of it of less importance than others.This is a great admission, because another is involved in it, namely that we ourselves must be judges of the comparative importance of these different parts.”

    See David F. Winslow’s biography, Thomas Erskine: Advocate for the Character of God

    http://ext.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/105/12/384

  • http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/ed_babinski/babinski-bio.html EdwardTBabinski

    Thomas Erskine is the universalist I alluded to. Perhaps the most frequently quoted passage in all his writings is this one:

    “He who waited so long for the formation of a piece of old red sandstone will surely wait with much long-suffering for the perfection of a human spirit.”

    Another favorite quotation is this one:

    “The most zealous defenders of the verbal inspiration of theBible admit that there are parts of it of less importance than others.This is a great admission, because another is involved in it, namely that we ourselves must be judges of the comparative importance of these different parts.”

    See David F. Winslow's biography, Thomas Erskine: Advocate for the Character of God

    http://ext.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/105/12/384

  • http://undeception.com/ Steve

    Please elucidate what you noticed the first time. :)

  • http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/ed_babinski/babinski-bio.html EdwardTBabinski

    Thomas Erskine is the universalist I alluded to. Perhaps the most frequently quoted passage in all his writings is this one:

    “He who waited so long for the formation of a piece of old red sandstone will surely wait with much long-suffering for the perfection of a human spirit.”

    Another favorite quotation is this one:

    “The most zealous defenders of the verbal inspiration of theBible admit that there are parts of it of less importance than others.This is a great admission, because another is involved in it, namely that we ourselves must be judges of the comparative importance of these different parts.”

    See David F. Winslow's biography, Thomas Erskine: Advocate for the Character of God

    http://ext.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/105/12/384

  • http://wearethestories.wordpress.com Eric Gregory

    Just a quick note:

    You said: “Strikingly, it appears that MacDonald had recognized and embraced the theological beauty of evolutionary theory within ten years of Origin of the Species.”

    I’d say that it’s only striking from a modern perspective. The English had little issue with Darwin’s theory when it came out, and even those who did, made their case purely on scientific grounds.

    Here is Bishop Samuel Wilberforce on evolution:

    “Our readers will not have failed to notice that we have objected to the views with which we are dealing solely on scientific grounds. We have done so from our fixed conviction that it is thus that the truth or falsehood of such arguments should be tried. We have no sympathy with those who object to any facts or alleged facts in nature, or to any inference logically deduced from them, because they believe them to contradict what it appears to them is taught by Revelation. We think that all such objections savour of a timidity which is really inconsistent with a firm and well-intrusted faith..”