Mondays with MacDonald (on Francis Chan vs. Rob Bell)

by Steve Douglas

May 30th, 2011 | 4 Comments

The lord of life complains of men for not judging right. To say on the authority of the Bible that God does a thing no honourable man would do, is to lie against God; to say that it is therefore right, is to lie against the very spirit of God. To uphold a lie for God’s sake is to be against God, not for him. God cannot be lied for. He is the truth. The truth alone is on his side. While his child could not see the rectitude of a thing, he would infinitely rather, even if the thing were right, have him say, God could not do that thing, than have him believe that he did it. If the man were sure God did it, the thing he ought to say would be, ‘Then there must be something about it I do not know, which if I did know, I should see the thing quite differently.’ But where an evil thing is invented to explain and account for a good thing, and a lover of God is called upon to believe the invention or be cast out, he needs not mind being cast out, for it is into the company of Jesus.

Where there is no ground to believe that God does a thing except that men who would explain God have believed and taught it, he is not a true man who accepts men against his own conscience of God. I acknowledge no authority calling upon me to believe a thing of God, which I could not be a man and believe right in my fellow-man. I will accept no explanation of any way of God which explanation involves what I should scorn as false and unfair in a man. If you say, That may be right of God to do which it would not be right of man to do, I answer, Yes, because the relation of the maker to his creatures is very different from the relation of one of those creatures to another, and he has therefore duties toward his creatures requiring of him what no man would have the right to do to his fellow-man; but he can have no duty that is not both just and merciful. More is required of the maker, by his own act of creation, than can be required of men. More and higher justice and righteousness is required of him by himself, the Truth;–greater nobleness, more penetrating sympathy; and nothing but what, if an honest man understood it, he would say was right.

by George MacDonald
from Unspoken Sermons, vol. 3, “Justice”

cf. This video.

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May 30th, 2011

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  • Josh H

    I don’t know about this one. He seems to back himself into a corner. He  agrees (as do I) that “the relation of the maker to his creatures is very different from the relation of one of those creatures to another, and he has therefore duties toward his creatures requiring of him what no man would have the right to do to his fellow-man.” But then MacDonald, being himself one of those creatures, goes on to impose his own conditions on what the creator must do. See what I mean? He is willing to concede that God has higher ways and purposes and that that is ok…as long as A, B, and C. 

    From the reading I’ve done on MacDonald he strikes me as having had a very merciful spirit and a very tender heart (which is admirable & I could learn a lot from him in that). But I think sometimes it may have caused him to want to smooth over some of the harsher points of reality. He seems to have had the stereotypical view of God as a kindly ol’ grandfather who wouldn’t hurt a fly. In this passage from Unspoken Sermons, was he particularly talking about Hell?

  • http://undeception.com/ Steve Douglas

    MacDonald is not “imposing” anything on God: he’s merely describing what he thinks should be expected of Him given such factors as Scripture, experience, and reason. It’s this variety of factors that makes his approach more satisfactory than pretending we’re not imposing anything on Him when we string bunches of conflicting scriptural testimony together, shrug our shoulders, and say, “Well, I guess that settles it; He’s both just and a monster; both loving and hateful; both merciful and vindictive.” MacDonald believed, as I do, that our understanding of God’s nature really culminates in the character of Jesus, and that we can’t just point to this or that Scripture that has God doing manifestly evil things (like ordering the violent deaths of men, women, and children, or torturing people for eternity) and let it overturn those expectations. He believed, as I do, that fewer Scriptures than we usually think actually describe those things, and the the culprit was usually some systematic theology that pieced things together and made God out to be essentially unworshippable.

    If what God meant by “love” and “justice” was not only different but in deep contradiction to the concepts of “love” and “justice” He commanded be developed in us, then He certainly should have used altogether different words. We have every reason to expect that “love” doesn’t mean “not love” or that “justice” not mean “not justice”, or for that matter, that “love” doesn’t mean “not just” or “just” mean “not loving”. As Lewis said, nonsense doesn’t stop being nonsense just because we’re talking about God. MacDonald’s point after the bit you quoted was that if anything, we should expect purer, nobler, more generously applied forms of love and justice, not constraints on or perversions of those concepts.

    You would do well to read a few of his sermons to get a fuller understanding of his rather developed theology (not at all reducible to the grandfather metaphor you mention). MacDonald was extremely “harsh” about sin, and believed God was, too: he often made the point about God not letting us go until we have paid every last farthing (following the parable). He believed in punishment for sin, but argued forcefully that we have absolutely no good reason to believe that He gets off on punishing sin just for the sake of the sin’s wrongness.

    And to answer your last question, he wasn’t talking about hell specifically (although he used similar language elsewhere when speaking of hell); this is a recurring principle in MacDonald. In this case he was referring more specifically to penal substitutionary atonement. You’ve really got to carve out some time to read “Justice”!

    • Paige

      And…Mercy…The very starting point of God’s justice.

  • Cliff Martin

    Thank you again, Steve, for searching out and posting these often very timely quotes from my favorite thinker and writer!! His thoughts are always so winsome, fresh, and life-giving that I’d sooner live out my days hoping he is right than fall back on some proof-text that, alas, God is really not so wonderful after all.