Archives for “Richard Beck”
(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.
- God’s love vs. God’s wrath; or, when a doctrine’s unpalatability suggests its reexamination Michael Patton, a man I respect immensely, has just reminded his readers that, “The palatability of a doctrine does not determine its veracity.” This is a principle based in logic,...