Undeception

One citation of choice for those insisting that Jesus affirmed the typically Fundamentalist and Evangelical view of Scripture as our “infallible rule of faith and practice” is John 10.34-36, in which Jesus’ part of an argument with the Jewish leaders is recorded thus:

Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are gods’? If he called them ‘gods’ to whom the word of God came (and the Scripture cannot be broken), what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’?’

Many read this as Jesus confirming the full authority of the Old Testament as supporting their contention that the Bible is the “Word of God”. But the unquestioned assumptions behind the use of this verse as a prooftext are a mile deep.

First, as I explained before, logically it is only post-canon that we can even conceivably view the Bible in its entirety as ”the word of God”. And as it happens, we have good evidence that such an interpretation would be particularly invalid here.

For one thing, referring to the Tanakh (the Jewish canon such as it was at the time) using the Greek word graphē (lit. ‘writing, text’) was done in the plural, hence “the Scriptures”.  But here graphē is used in the singular: this means that “the Scripture” that “cannot be broken,” here refers only to the specific passage or “word of God” in question, i.e. “you are gods” from Psalm 82.6. It does not refer to the entire Jewish or Christian canon. Once again, you can’t just read “word of God” and think “the Christian canon”: here as usual the passage being referred to is not just any old passage of the Old Testament, but what purports to be a direct quote from God (“I have said…”). Plus, “the word of God” is qualified by “to whom the word of God came”: in other words, the entire Bible did not come to the audience of Psalm 82, so we know that only that particular text is being referred to as the “word/message of God” on this occasion. The apologist will want to extend this to the whole Bible, but they are responsible for proving why that is legitimate.

The more important point, however, is that in this passage Jesus is shown giving an undoubtedly rhetorical argument, arguing from within his opponents’ viewpoint but not necessarily adopting it himself. Perhaps most obviously, apart from Mormons I doubt many people really think Jesus was calling everyone “gods” in the sense we think of it: elohim meant either “mighty ones” or “God”, and we certainly have no other evidence to suggest Jesus thought of everyone as deities. John is picturing Jesus dishing out a bit of witty repartee dripping with irony, not a solemn theological exegesis of Scripture.

It’s not really in dispute whether the Jews, and hence presumably Jesus himself, upheld their Scriptures as having a divine source and authority, but there’s reason to suppose that Jesus is laying it on a little thick here: in verse 34, John paints Jesus referring to the Jewish Scriptures as “your Law”–not “our Law”, “God’s Law”, or even just ”the Law”. Just like all throughout the rest of the Fourth Gospel, that places Jesus as an outsider to the Jewish religious system. In effect, he’s saying, “In your own Scripture it says ‘you are gods’, and that message of God can’t be broken (right?). So why are so inconsistent?”

From verse 1 of the Gospel, Jesus is pictured as the personification of God’s message to humanity that trumped everything the Jews previously thought was God’s message.

You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to have life.

John 5.39-40

Now, as unique and distinctive as the Gospel of John is, this understanding of Jesus as the superseding Word of God is quite consonant with the other books of the New Testament. And when truly grasped, this understanding is fairly devastating to the typical inerrantist approach to Christianity. Here’s what I mean.

One of the most consistent presentations of Jesus’ teaching, serving as the lifeblood of so much of the New Testament, is the idea that rote obedience to God is insufficient and that cultivating and living up to God’s ideals is paramount. This is behind the standard Reformation doctrine of sola fide, in which we are set free from the Law of Moses with all its rituals and reconciled to God through Jesus alone. In all four Gospels Jesus is shown making a point to unshackle valid religious observance from hollow, blind ritualism. This is commonly understood by inerrantists.

What’s not always recognized is that Jesus was not afraid to take Scriptures and declare them or their appropriation by the literalists of the day to be inadequate to please God; this happens most obviously in Matthew 5′s recurring “You have heard it said, but I say…” He is commonly shown taking up the mantle of the OT prophet and prying up the planks of literalistic adherence to Torah:

• When challenged about associating with yet-impenitent sinners: “Go and learn what this means: I desire mercy, not sacrifice” (cf. Isaiah 1.13-23, Amos 5.21-25);
• After picking grain on the Sabbath: “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”
• Simply refraining from acting out in anger is not enough: “I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment…”
• Undermining the rationale behind Torah’s purity laws: “Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters, not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?” (see this discussion)

For Jesus, as F.F. Bruce put it, “The law is fulfilled ethically rather than ceremonially.”That ethic can be summed up as acting in love, as is borne out in his exaltation of two commandments as the “greatest”; anything the Law and the Prophets say that has value is a manifestation of loving the Lord with all your being and proving it by loving your neighbor as yourself. This is the law of love.

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

John 13.34-35

Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for whoever loves others has fulfilled the law.

Romans 13.8

Ritual is a legitimate and even valuable way to express devotion to God and love for one’s neighbor: slavish obedience to rituals resulting in breaking those two great commandments, whether because the laws and rituals don’t go far enough in helping us avoid breaking those commandments or because they entice us to act against them, is defective and counterproductive. This is, in fact, the meaning of Jesus’ statements that he came to “fulfill” rather than “abolish” the Law: Jesus wasn’t campaigning against the Law as a set of rituals meant to evince one’s disciplined love of God and neighbor, but was intent on getting his countrymen to do the more important job of fulfilling the purpose behind the Law, which frequently includes going above the letter of the Law rather than ignoring it.

My point: even if Jesus agreed with inerrantists that the Old Testament Scriptures are word-for-word from God above (and it is difficult to find evidence that he did), he certainly did make it a point to warn that using Scripture as an “infallible rule of faith and practice” is a hopelessly backwards way of trying to serve God faithfully.

This dissatisfaction with treating Scripture as an ideal standard continues throughout the New Testament. As Paul memorably put it, “The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” In Galatians the Law is described as a schoolmaster that’s been replaced by Jesus. Peter in Acts is shown that following laws of ritual purity grieves God’s heart because it marginalizes people He has declared clean. For the author of Hebrews, the New Covenant Jesus established is “better” than the old one in that the law of God is written on our hearts instead of stone. Everywhere we look, we see early Christian testimony that says, “The Law was great, but it was insufficient to create righteousness.” I could go on and on. It’s the core of Christianity. The central insight energizing the Christian faith is that now, as then, the Scriptures are only useful inasmuch as they help us live out the first and second greatest commandments faithfully.

So when I read Jesus criticizing the practice of korban in Mark 7, I perceive that he was far more interested in the ethical truth behind the commandment to honor one’s parents, as given full weight by the prescribed penalty of execution for those who insulted their parents, than he was in affirming the Old Testament – still less the Christian canon – as the “standard of faith and practice” . Jesus taught us to observe the letter of the Law only insofar as it helps us fulfill the heart of God that we find represented in the two greatest commandments–the law of love.

Please note that this is a far, far cry from the prooftext-laced condemnations of behavior that we see coming out of many inerrantists. Where we see Jesus condemning behavior, it’s not for issues of personal holiness: it’s because he saw a system, built as it was around avoiding breaking Torah, that ran roughshod over those whom God demanded to be cared for as a primary act of devotion to Himself. For modern-day inerrantists, it’s different: instead of adding impossible regulations to fail-proof our adherence to the Bible’s demands for righteousness, we add the notion of non-negotiable doctrines that go far beyond Jesus’ New Command and end up violating the law of love just the same.

In summary, those who believe in a supremely authoritative Bible cite Jesus to support their view of inerrancy by assuming that Jesus somehow referred to the Bible as the Word of God, uniformly inspired by the Holy Spirit. Over the last few posts I think I have shown that a claim for Jesus’ acceptance of the modern Protestant’s God’s-Word-ism goes far outside of the scope of evidence. And regardless, I think it’s clear that at very least he would not draw the same sorts of conclusions from God’s-Word-ism that modern inerrantists so commonly do, especially regarding their bedrock, non-negotiable belief that the Bible is our sole “standard of faith and practice”. It is the law of love, internalized and painstakingly woven throughout our interactions, that should be our standard of faith and practice, and at times when our doctrines derived from the Bible lead us to violate that law that should be imprinted upon our hearts, we must respectfully release those doctrines and cling for dear life to the law of love.

So if you choose , against all the evidence, to maintain cognitive assent to the idea that the Bible is inerrant, that still shouldn’t be the foundation of your life in Christ. Even if true, it amounts to trivia. What matters is what you do when that inerrant Bible seems to be encouraging you to strain at doctrinal gnats while swallowing ethically rancid camels, treating the perceived shortcomings of others as grounds to violate Jesus’ highest commandment.

When people quote 1 Corinthians 13.13, “Now these three things remain: faith, hope, and love,” the odd man out is almost invariably hope.

Preachers and other exegetes tend to read too much into serialized lists like the one there at the end of 1 Corinthians 13, imagining that the things listed have been presented by the author in a super-humanly insightful, divinely inspired order of importance; then they tend to turn those suppositions into sermons or doctrines. I, in turn, tend to cast such speculations out as the fanciful effects of a too-mystical, Bible Code-esque view of Scripture.

But in this case, I really can imagine that the order of “faith, hope, and love” was intentional after all. Paul certainly identifies the most important member of the group, which happens to be the last listed and could imply that the list is in order of “great, greater, greatest”. This would mean that hope is next to love, and that faith, without which it is reportedly impossible to please God, is somehow not as “great” as hope. But could that be?

I don’t know if Paul meant to imply that. But as far as I’m concerned, hope is at least as important as faith — in one sense, maybe even “greater”.

Love is the basis of my faith and the object of my worship. Above all, it is in Love that I trust and in whose interests I seek to act – the biblical understanding of “faith”. I find a denial of the objectivity, universality, and absoluteness of love’s existence and importance wholly unsatisfactory to my observation and experience, and I worship the Judeo-Christian God insofar as I believe He is Himself love personified. I believe that it is love in which we live, move, and have our being. So my faith is in love, specifically the sort described by followers of Jesus since the first century.

But this doesn’t mean that hope is some strange third wheel: it’s where I live. My faith – what I seek to live by – is energized by my hope in love; in other words, faith is how I live, and hope is why I live that way. I abide in the hope that way, way down there, below all those turtles, is Love. And it is hope that keeps me believing and acting out my faith. My commitment to living out my devotion to the absolute values of love and goodness is energized by my hopeful expectation that this kind of life will not be for naught. It keeps me carrying on in the darkest days of doubt.

Unfortunately, our particular set of guiding beliefs and expectations is what most Evangelicals refer to as faith. A lack of certainty is seen as an enemy of faith. In removing the intrinsically unfulfilled aspect of hope from the equation, they are left with an understanding of faith as assumed certainty. But, as Paul once wrote, “Who hopes for what he already has?” We can live in anticipation, expectation, and even confidence of something without feigning certitude of it. It is those who force themselves to come to grips with the extremely tentative nature of our beliefs, ideals, and expectations who best understand the Christian hope and, as a result, faith.

Be that as it may, all the talk about the virtue of Christian doubt among the progressive/liberal sort of Christians, myself included, understandably leaves many cold — again, myself included. Even while affirming the necessity of healthy skepticism, I have been discouraged to see a rising preoccupation with doubt among many of my fellow sojourners: doubt has become the stereotypical post-Evangelical replacement for faith. Entire blogs have turned into doubt vs. faith zones, not necessarily because the authors really think that faith and doubt are opposites (although some probably do), but because in overcompensating for the problem of a steadfastly uninformed faith, they have forgotten that doubt is not its own recipe, but merely an ingredient of a greater virtue, that “sunnier side of doubt” to which Tennyson alluded: hope.

Doubt is not a substitute for faith: it’s a corrective measure for a faith characterized by artificial certitude. Doubt has no positive existence worth celebrating; it is a side effect of humility, which begins in discomfort, settles into euphoria, but usually leaves those dwelling in it too long feeling hungry for more certainty. A healthy skepticism says, “I’ll step lightly until I know this is true,” whereas the unhealthy form of it I see too much of these days says, “I’ll go around looking for things to debunk.” Although the widespread misunderstanding of “faith” as blind belief among Evangelicals is legitimately critiqued by a humble recognition of our fallibility and potential for self-delusion, this deficiency is not necessarily remedied by either a similarly conceited disbelief or a similarly blind default stance of skepticism. When certainty eludes us, we must avoid manufacturing it in any direction; I am suggesting we would do well to remember the under-appreciated virtue of hope.

My hope, more than my credulity, is in the Christian God. Do I believe in God, Jesus, the ethic of love articulated by my forbears in the Christian faith, etc.? In a sense, but primarily because I hope in them. Hope steers my faith, not the assumption of certainty that masquerades as “faith”. My theological speculations are an explanation of how I expect my hope to be realized by love’s final victory, and my faith is merely how I go about fulfilling my theology. My hope is that which I commit to build through my life of faith. It seems to me, then, that hope is closer to love than either one is to faith.

With the tendency to conflate a reasoned and conscious hope with the make-believe of those in stout denial of reality, many who have come down this road with me have decided that they are content to rest in disbelief, a ready shelter from the turmoil of doubt. To be sure, getting one’s head out of the clouds and finding the beauty where we are on the ground is a laudable task, and I will listen to what they teach me and respectfully wish them well; but hope calls me deeper.

Have you been half asleep
And have you heard voices?
I’ve heard them calling my name
Is this the sweet sound
That calls the young sailors?
The voice might be one and the same

The moment we begin our exploration of the expanse beyond the turtle our world sits upon, we become like aliens. Faith is my commitment to step out of my capsule of unquestioned certainty and into that unknown world, knowing full well that what I inhale has every chance of being incompatible with my constitution. For after all, the air where I’m headed can hardly be any more unhealthy than the air I’m leaving behind. It’s either stay and suffocate while I try to convince myself to be satisfied in this world or dare to suppose that my difficulty in breathing here is due to the fact that, in Lewis’s words, “I was made for another world.” I will embrace even the faint opportunity to fill my lungs with a purer air so that I am more fit to offer something to this hurting world.

I’ve heard it too many times to ignore it
It’s something that I’m s’posed to be…

So in hope, my act of faith in a love still largely unrealized, I take a deep breath, and descend the ladder to place my foot on the back of the next turtle down…

Amidst the current controversy, some are pointing out that, despite being maligned as though they were novel signs of our wayward times, current trends of Christians questioning the negative attributes of God sometimes presented in Scripture, attitudes like jealousy and vengeance that we find intolerable in other humans, are hardly novel in church history. To underscore this, here’s a voice that most influential believers throughout church history have apparently tried to ignore:

That we should imagine that anger, wrath, jealousy or such like have anything to do with the divine Nature is something utterly abhorrent for us: no one in their right mind, no one who has any understanding (at all) can possibly come to such madness as to think anything of the sort about God. Nor again can we possibly say that He acts thus out of retribution, even though the Scriptures may on the outer surface posit this. Even to think this of God and to suppose that retribution for evil acts is to be found with Him is abominable. [p. 162-163]

It is not (the way of) the compassionate Maker to create rational beings in order to deliver them over mercilessly to unending affliction (in punishment) for things of which He knew even before they were fashioned, (aware) how they would turn out when He created them – and whom (nonetheless) He created. [p. 165]

Just because (the terms) wrath, anger, hatred, and the rest are used of the Creator, we should not imagine that He (actually) does anything in anger or hatred or zeal. Many figurative terms are employed in the Scriptures of God, terms which are far removed from His (true) nature. And just as (our) rational nature has (already) become gradually more illuminated and wise in a holy understanding of the mysteries which are hidden in (Scripture’s) discourse about God – that we should not understand everything (literally) as it is written, but rather that we should see, (concealed) inside the bodily exterior of the narratives, the hidden providence and eternal knowledge which guides all – so too we shall in the future come to know and be aware of many things for which our present understanding will be seen as contrary to what it will be then; and the whole ordering of things yonder will undo any precise opinion we possess now in (our) supposition about Truth. For there are many, indeed endless, things which do not even enter our minds here, not even as promises of any kind. [p. 171]

[from Isaac of Nineveh (Isaac the Syrian). ‘The Second Part’, Chapters IV-XLI . Translated by S. Brock]

St. Isaac the Syrian (image via Wikipedia)

For more discussion of these and other related thoughts by Isaac the Syrian, the seventh century ascetic and Orthodox saint, see this good discussion, whence the above quotes.

It is surely significant that although very little of the first-hand writings of heretics and dissidents from early church history (such as Marcion or Arius) were permitted to be transmitted to us, Isaac’s and the still earlier voices of Origen and (Saint!) Gregory of Nyssa were never silenced. In other words, the Church never said “Farewell” to these men. By all means, let’s “reform” — back to a time when belief in an eternal hell wasn’t a litmus test for the right hand of Christian fellowship!

And now, like it or not, these ancient voices are being joined in one way or another by more voices every year.

I thought I was done posting about this subject for a while, but apparently I’m not the only one thinking about this! The following comes from Roger Olson, someone whose views I often find quite compelling. What does he think about the atonement?

…I do think denial of any objective-transactional aspect of the atonement is dangerous to the gospel.  Purely subjective theories fall short; they cannot account for how the atonement takes care of the guilt problem.  They are inextricably tied to an optimistic, perhaps even Pelagian, view of humanity when taken alone.

To me, anyway, the gospel IS that Christ died for our sins in the sense that his death made it possible for God to forgive sinners righteously.  Take that away and the preaching of the cross gradually (or suddenly) fades away.  So does the gospel.

via About the atonement | Roger E Olson

Olson seems to be working from popular but deficient definitions of two words.

The first problematic understanding is of the nature of sin: he still views sin primarily in terms of “guilt”. Then again, maybe it’s his definition of guilt that’s the problem. I believe that sin is real, and that it is the common enemy of God and man. But that’s just it: sin is the enemy, not the sinner. The idea that “the guilt problem” means that mankind with its sinful behavior is a fire that God needs to put out, that is, until Christ died, is the fuzzy logic behind the “objective-transactional” views of governmental and penal substitution theories of the atonement. But it’s not a logic that holds up very well if we take at all seriously the way that Jesus taught us to talk about God, namely as a Father. Any interest I might have in “tak[ing] care of the guilt problem” whenever my young son commits a sin (such as lying) would be nothing less than a perversity on my part. I do care about his guilt, but only insofar as it stems from my real parental concern for his well-being and moral development. He may be an offender, but a good parent first wants to address the fact that his child is a victim of his/her own acts. If my daughter stepped in to offer herself to receive my son’s punishment, and I took her up on her offer, either to demonstrate my sense of “justice” (which sounds disturbingly like the lex talionis superseded by Jesus himself) as in the governmental theory or, admittedly much worse, because I had an otherwise insatiable need to punish someone, anyone, for my son’s misdeeds, I would not be a good parent, much less the wise father of consummate love taught in the New Testament. No, sin is a sickness that must be removed from our souls, not “cancelled” or “paid for” through some clever “transaction”. The sinner must be cured, not left to decay as punishment for being sick. Olson and Piper, as rarely on the same page as they are, unite to disagree with this assessment just as emphatically as I reject theirs. [Note: the preceding paragraph has been edited slightly since publication for clarity.]

The other misunderstanding (puzzling to me in the extreme) that Olson and Piper agree upon is what the gospel is: “…the gospel IS that Christ died for our sins…” Please tell me, then, how Jesus could have been preaching the gospel from the very outset of his ministry! When did he once proclaim his death as the good news? This is massively, bewilderingly wrong, attributable only to the common tendency to allow Pauline theology (esp. from Romans) to trump that of the Gospel writers and their Jesus traditions (in point of fact, I don’t think Paul was so mistaken on that either, but that’s another discussion). The good news of the gospel is of the coming of the Kingdom of God, which was always that God’s heart would soon rule the day: the mighty would be brought low and the lowly exalted. Jesus’ gospel was extremely social; from what we can tell, it was conceived of as a political gospel as well (the return of Israel’s national status), so perhaps it’s best just to say that it was conceived of as a holistic new world order. It didn’t happen quite like they (even Jesus, apparently) thought it would. But in any event, in the Gospels we are never given any indication that Jesus proclaimed that his death was to bring about the Kingdom of God by taking the punishment for our sins. How else could Jesus tell people who called him “Lord” that he never knew them? It was those who “do the will of [the] father,” those who learn to obey their father who take part in the order of the Kingdom. What was Jesus’ solution to the sin problem? In the earliest Gospel’s first statement of Jesus’ ministry in Mark 1.14-15, it was “Repent and believe in the good news!” And notice that “good news” there couldn’t mean “trust in my work upon the cross.”

Olson’s quoted remarks are based on a presupposition: Jesus’ atonement must have been objective, or else Jesus’ death didn’t take care of our guilt. This implies that he is uncomfortable with admitting that perhaps Jesus’ death did not take care of our guilt in a substitutionary fashion, making it possible “for God to forgive sinners righteously.” A righteous father will always forgive his wayward children, will he not? He will punish or love (depending on the circumstance) his children’s misbehavior right out of them; what he will not do is make excuses for it.

Ok, I pledge it: I’m laying off of this subject for the foreseeable future.

When once to a man the human face is the human face divine, and the hand of his neighbour is the hand of a brother, then will he understand what St Paul meant when he said, “I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren.” But he will no longer understand those who, so far from feeling the love of their neighbour an essential of their being, expect to be set free from its law in the world to come. There, at least, for the glory of God, they may limit its expansive tendencies to the narrow circle of their heaven. On its battlements of safety, they will regard hell from afar, and say to each other, “Hark! Listen to their moans. But do not weep, for they are our neighbours no more.” St Paul would be wretched before the throne of God, if he thought there was one man beyond the pale of his mercy, and that as much for God’s glory as for the man’s sake. And what shall we say of the man Christ Jesus? Who, that loves his brother, would not, upheld by the love of Christ, and with a dim hope that in the far-off time there might be some help for him, arise from the company of the blessed, and walk down into the dismal regions of despair, to sit with the last, the only unredeemed, the Judas of his race, and be himself more blessed in the pains of hell, than in the glories of heaven? Who, in the midst of the golden harps and the white wings, knowing that one of his kind, one miserable brother in the old-world-time when men were taught to love their neighbour as themselves, was howling unheeded far below in the vaults of the creation, who, I say, would not feel that he must arise, that he had no choice, that, awful as it was, he must gird his loins, and go down into the smoke and the darkness and the fire, travelling the weary and fearful road into the far country to find his brother?—who, I mean, that had the mind of Christ, that had the love of the Father?

But it is a wild question. God is, and shall be, All in all. Father of our brothers and sisters! thou wilt not be less glorious than we, taught of Christ, are able to think thee. When thou goest into the wilderness to seek, thou wilt not come home until thou hast found. It is because we hope not for them in thee, not knowing thee, not knowing thy love, that we are so hard and so heartless to the brothers and sisters whom thou hast given us.

George MacDonald
from Unspoken Sermons, vol. 1, “Love Thy Neighbour”

It is terrible to represent God as unrelated to us in the way of appeal to his righteousness. How should he be righteous without owing us anything? How would there be any right for the judge of all the earth to do if he owed nothing? Verily he owes us nothing that he does not pay like a God; but it is of the devil to imagine imperfection and disgrace in obligation. So far is God from thinking so that in every act of his being he lays himself under obligation to his creatures. Oh, the grandeur of his goodness, and righteousness, and fearless unselfishness! When doubt and dread invade, and the voice of love in the soul is dumb, what can please the father of men better than to hear his child cry to him from whom he came, ‘Here I am, O God! Thou hast made me: give me that which thou hast made me needing.’ The child’s necessity, his weakness, his helplessness, are the strongest of all his claims. If I am a whale, I can claim a sea; if I am a sea, I claim room to roll, and break in waves after my kind; if I am a lion, I seek my meat from God; am I a child, this, beyond all other claims, I claim– that, if any of my needs are denied me, it shall be by the love of a father, who will let me see his face, and allow me to plead my cause before him. And this must be just what God desires! What would he have, but that his children should claim their father? To what end are all his dealings with them, all his sufferings with and for and in them, but that they should claim their birthright? Is not their birthright what he made them for, made in them when he made them? Is it not what he has been putting forth his energy to give them ever since first he began them to be–the divine nature, God himself? The child has, and must have, a claim on the father, a claim which it is the joy of the father’s heart to acknowledge. A created need is a created claim. God is the origin of both need and supply, the father of our necessities, the abundant giver of the good things. Right gloriously he meets the claims of his child! The story of Jesus is the heart of his answer, not primarily to the prayers, but to the divine necessities of the children he has sent out into his universe.

Away with the thought that God could have been a perfect, an adorable creator, doing anything less than he has done for his children! that any other kind of being than Jesus Christ could have been worthy of all-glorifying worship! that his nature demanded less of him than he has done! that his nature is not absolute love, absolute self-devotion–could have been without these highest splendours!

George MacDonald

from Unspoken Sermons, Vol. 2, “The Voice of Job“

When once to a man the human face is the human face divine, and the hand of his neighbour is the hand of a brother, then will he understand what St Paul meant when he said, “I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren.” But he will no longer understand those who, so far from feeling the love of their neighbour an essential of their being, expect to be set free from its law in the world to come. There, at least, for the glory of God, they may limit its expansive tendencies to the narrow circle of their heaven. On its battlements of safety, they will regard hell from afar, and say to each other, ” Hark! Listen to their moans. But do not weep, for they are our neighbours no more.” St Paul would be wretched before the throne of God, if he thought there was one man beyond the pale of his mercy, and that as much for God’s glory as for the man’s sake. And what shall we say of the man Christ Jesus? Who, that loves his brother, would not, upheld by the love of Christ, and with a dim hope that in the far-off time there might be some help for him, arise from the company of the blessed, and walk down into the dismal regions of despair, to sit with the last, the only unredeemed, the Judas of his race, and be himself more blessed in the pains of hell, than in the glories of heaven? Who, in the midst of the golden harps and the white wings, knowing that one of his kind, one miserable brother in the old-world-time when men were taught to love their neighbour as themselves, was howling unheeded far below in the vaults of the creation, who, I say, would not feel that he must arise, that he had no choice, that, awful as it was, he must gird his loins, and go down into the smoke and the darkness and the fire, travelling the weary and fearful road into the far country to find his brother?—who, I mean, that had the mind of Christ, that had the love of the Father?
.
But it is a wild question. God is, and shall be, All in all. Father of our brothers and sisters! thou wilt not be less glorious than we, taught of Christ, are able to think thee. When thou goest into the wilderness to seek, thou wilt not come home until thou hast found. It is because we hope not for them in thee, not knowing thee, not knowing thy love, that we are so hard and so heartless to the brothers and sisters whom thou hast given us.

George MacDonald
from Unspoken Sermons, Vol. 1, “Love Thy Neighbour”