I'll give you one more chapter today from the book. I haven't gotten together proper footnotes for it yet, so only the chapter is given and not the page number. I'll correct that later. This chapter deals with George MacDonald's stance against 'eternal torture' and his disbelief in 'biblical infallibility'. ~~CW Seper

Chapter Four

The Un-Fundamentalist

To talk about George MacDonald's particular religious affiliations would be pointless. He was raised a Congregationalist and later in life became an Anglican, but sects were not important to him as such. His was not a God of sects or even necessarily of religion as most of us know it. His God was one that revealed himself in different ways to different people. This revealed God might come through reflection in holy writings often enough; to MacDonald, the bible was not about man's search for God but about God's revelation to man. The bible, however, was something that only brought you to a certain precipice. From there the deeper reflection of the individual's soul took the helm.

There are thoughts and feelings that cannot be called up in the mind by any power of will or force of imagination; which, being spiritual, must arise in the soul when in it's highest spiritual condition; when the mind, indeed, like a smooth lake, reflects only heavenly images....[1]

He saw God's thoughts at work in everything that surrounded man. MacDonald could almost be called a naturalist, but his was not the naturalism of the pantheist. Yet nature was very inspiring to him, he had an unusual affinity for the sea, for mountains, trees and flowers, even oddly enough—for gems—their multifaceted reflection of light and color was a suggestion of multidimensional heaven itself all around us if we could but see it with spiritual eyes.

All of life, whether waking or asleep, held a lesson to be learned. And if we would remain obstinate to the end and not learn what we must, then hell itself would push us, and humble us into rightness. But George MacDonald's God was not a God of eternal tortures. He thought that if hell existed at all, it could be only a temporary state that brought about repentance—a refining fire. He had studied Greek texts all his life and knew full well that the concept of a fiery place of torment was an invention of the Greeks which the Jews likely picked up while in Roman captivity. There was no hell in the Old Testament, just the typical dark, shadowy underworlds that had been so manifest in the texts of all the people from the Mesopotamian area since the ancient Sumerians first wrote of them. But once the Jews found themselves living among the Romans, they had suddenly picked up more than a few Roman traits in their ideas. Only a few books in the New Testament mention hell, particularly the Gospel of Mathew. The Gospel of John makes no mention of hell nor of eternal tortures of any kind. And MacDonald was quite aware of the many problems in the text of Mathew. The genealogies that seemed quite at odds with those found in Luke's gospel, the many quotes from Old Testament books that were said to be prophetic of Jesus but of which there didn't seem to be any clear connection. A great example would of course be Mathew's use of Isaiah 7:14 to support a virgin birth for Jesus, but a closer inspection Isaiah 7:14 and the next few chapters seems rather to be a narrative about the birth of a son to be born to Isaiah himself and a prophetess as a sign for a king to go to war. This child was called Maher-Shalal-Hash-Baz. Mathew may find some vague support for the virgin birth in Luke but not anywhere else in the bible. None of the epistles of St. Paul (all of them written before any of the gospels) mention anything of a virgin birth. Further, it was written of this child in Isaiah that, "...he shall eat curds and honey”. But if this was the diet of Jesus, the bible makes no mention of it. Rather, we find him as one who breaks bread and broils fish. The Romans however had several tales of people (usually gods) who were born of a virgin, often a virgin mortal woman paired with a god. Hercules for one example, the brothers Romulus and Remus would be another. Now that the Jews were being occupied by the Romans, they also suddenly had a tale of a child born to a mortal virgin woman and a god—the God. Yet only Mathew and Luke seem to know of it. We may freely speculate that some New Testament writers, or perhaps one or more scribes in later years, felt compelled to establish a doctrine of virgin birth to compete with what they saw around them. Or it could be that Jesus really was born of a virgin but that Mathew chose an incorrect Old Testament passage to support this contention. What we must remember though is that, if Jesus was born of a virgin, the most prolific writer of the New Testament, the very father of Christian Apologetics, St. Paul, felt no need to make mention of it. Perhaps he did in a letter that's never been found. But it would seem more likely that he either had never heard of it, or, that he saw no great significance in the event. To believe or disbelieve in the virgin birth is one thing, but, that creeds and doctrines would later contain phrasing based on something as fragile as the virgin birth story would be the type of sloppy thinking in the church that brought out the Holy wrath of MacDonald.[2]

The scholar in MacDonald would question any biblical passage that he felt would cast God in an unsavory light, or, that didn't stand to reason—how could he not and keep his integrity? It was more than mere scholarship and philosophy that caused him to question the concept of eternal torture however, his God-given conscience travailed at the very thought of such a state for any soul to be in:

Primarily, God is not bound to punish sin; he is bound to destroy sin....

Punishment, I repeat, is not the thing required of God, but the absolute destruction of sin. What better is the world, what better is the sinner, what better is God, what better is the truth, that the sinner should suffer—continue suffering to all eternity? Would there be less sin in the universe? Would there be any making-up for sin? Would it show God justified in doing what he knew would bring sin into the world, justified in making creatures who he knew would sin? What setting-right would come of the sinner's suffering? If justice demand it, if suffering be the equivalent for sin, then the sinner must suffer, then God is bound to exact his suffering, and not pardon; and so the making of man was a tyrannical deed, a creative cruelty. But grant that the sinner has deserved to suffer, no amount of suffering is any atonement for his sin. To suffer to all eternity could not make up for one unjust word. Does that mean, then, that for an unjust word I deserve to suffer to all eternity? The unjust word is an eternally evil thing; nothing but God in my heart can cleanse me from the evil that uttered it; but does it follow that I saw the evil of what I did so perfectly, that eternal punishment for it would be just? Sorrow and confession and self-abasing love will make up for the evil word; suffering will not. For evil in the abstract, nothing can be done. It is eternally evil. But I may be saved from it by learning to loathe it, to hate it, to shrink from it with an eternal avoidance. The only vengeance worth having on sin is to make the sinner himself its executioner. Sin and punishment are in no antagonism to each other in man, any more than pardon and punishment are in God; they can perfectly co-exist. The one naturally follows the other, punishment being born of sin, because evil exists only by the life of good, and has no life of its own, being in itself death. Sin and suffering are not natural opposites; the opposite of evil is good, not suffering; the opposite of sin is not suffering, but righteousness. The path across the gulf that divides right from wrong is not the fire, but repentance. If my friend has wronged me, will it console me to see him punished? Will that be a rendering to me of my due? Will his agony be a balm to my deep wound? Should I be fit for any friendship if that were possible even in regard to my enemy? But would not the shadow of repentant grief, the light of reviving love on his countenance, heal it at once however deep? Take any of those wicked people in Dante's hell, and ask wherein is justice served by their punishment. Mind, I am not saying it is not right to punish them; I am saying that justice is not, never can be, satisfied by suffering-nay, cannot have any satisfaction in or from suffering. Human resentment, human revenge, human hate may. Such justice as Dante's keeps wickedness alive in its most terrible forms. The life of God goes forth to inform, or at least give a home to victorious evil. Is he not defeated every time that one of those lost souls defies him? All hell cannot make Vanni Fucci say 'I was wrong.' God is triumphantly defeated, I say, throughout the hell of his vengeance. Although against evil, it is but the vain and wasted cruelty of a tyrant. There is no destruction of evil thereby, but an enhancing of its horrible power in the midst of the most agonizing and disgusting tortures a divine imagination can invent. If sin must be kept alive, then hell must be kept alive; but while I regard the smallest sin as infinitely loathsome, I do not believe that any being, never good enough to see the essential ugliness of sin, could sin so as to deserve such punishment. I am not now, however, dealing with the question of the duration of punishment, but with the idea of punishment itself; and would only say in passing, that the notion that a creature born imperfect, nay, born with impulses to evil not of his own generating, and which he could not help having, a creature to whom the true face of God was never presented, and by whom it never could have been seen, should be thus condemned, is as loathsome a lie against God as could find place in heart too undeveloped to understand what justice is, and too low to look up into the face of Jesus. It never in truth found place in any heart, though in many a pettifogging brain. There is but one thing lower than deliberately to believe such a lie, and that is to worship the God of whom it is believed. The one deepest, highest, truest, fittest, most wholesome suffering must be generated in the wicked by a vision, a true sight, more or less adequate, of the hideousness of their lives, of the horror of the wrongs they have done. Physical suffering may be a factor in rousing this mental pain; but 'I would I had never been born!' must be the cry of Judas, not because of the hell-fire around him, but because he loathes the man that betrayed his friend, the world's friend. When a man loathes himself, he has begun to be saved. Punishment tends to this result. Not for its own sake, not as a make-up for sin, not for divine revenge-horrible word, not for any satisfaction to justice, can punishment exist. Punishment is for the sake of amendment and atonement. God is bound by his love to punish sin in order to deliver his creature; he is bound by his justice to destroy sin in his creation. Love is justice-is the fulfilling of the law, for God as well as for his children. This is the reason of punishment; this is why justice requires that the wicked shall not go unpunished-that they, through the eye-opening power of pain, may come to see and do justice, may be brought to desire and make all possible amends, and so become just. Such punishment concerns justice in the deepest degree. For Justice, that is God, is bound in himself to see justice done by his children-not in the mere outward act, but in their very being. He is bound in himself to make up for wrong done by his children, and he can do nothing to make up for wrong done but by bringing about the repentance of the wrong-doer. When the man says, 'I did wrong; I hate myself and my deed; I cannot endure to think that I did it!' then, I say, is atonement begun. Without that, all that the Lord did would be lost. He would have made no atonement. Repentance, restitution, confession, prayer for forgiveness, righteous dealing thereafter, is the sole possible, the only true make-up for sin. For nothing less than this did Christ die. When a man acknowledges the right he denied before; when he says to the wrong, 'I abjure, I loathe you; I see now what you are; I could not see it before because I would not; God forgive me; make me clean, or let me die!' then justice, that is God, has conquered-and not till then.

:::

The notion that the salvation of Jesus is a salvation from the consequences of our sins, is a false, mean, low notion. The salvation of Christ is salvation from the smallest tendency or leaning to sin. It is a deliverance into the pure air of God's ways of thinking and feeling. It is a salvation that makes the heart pure, with the will and choice of the heart to be pure. To such a heart, sin is disgusting. It sees a thing as it is,-that is, as God sees it, for God sees everything as it is. The soul thus saved would rather sink into the flames of hell than steal into heaven and skulk there under the shadow of an imputed righteousness. No soul is saved that would not prefer hell to sin. Jesus did not die to save us from punishment; he was called Jesus because he should save his people from their sins.[3]

Of course many people accused George MacDonald of Universalism because of his stance on hell, however, it wasn't that MacDonald thought there couldn't be a hell, nor that a person could not have the possibility of being there eternally. But rather, that if there was such a state as hell, that either no one would go there, or that they would not stay there long if they did.

George MacDonald was no fundamentalist; he felt the weight of no obligation toward the worship of a book, not even the bible, as did (and do) so many others claiming to belong to Christ. He saw as a young boy in Scotland, under the strict code of Calvinism, the dangers that arose in doing so. Greville speaking of his father's studies at Highbury (theology school) says:

But likely enough, his studies were of other importance than the professors presumed: they were strengthening his suspicions already germinating, that mere scholarship in the interpretation of Christ's words was of small worth, if not often dangerous; though almost up to his last days he was searching his Greek Testament for it's innermost meanings.[4]

Eternal torture was hardly the only teaching that MacDonald rebelled against during his Calvinist upbringing. Something that troubled him just as deeply was their stance on predestination. John Calvin's philosophy of double predestination went something like this:

“We call predestination God's eternal decree, by which he determined within himself what he willed to become of each man. For all are not created in equal condition; rather, eternal life is foreordained for some, eternal damnation for others”[5]

Single predestination is the less severe form of the teaching. Some Christians have asserted that their relationship to God depends only on God and on God's eternal decree established before the foundation of the world. This point of view is implied only twice in the New Testament, in Romans 8 and Ephesians 1. “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son. ... And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified” (Romans 8:29-30). These verses imply single predestination, because they concern only predestination to life with God. George MacDonald would write of the subject many years later: "I well remember feeling as a child that I did not care for God to love me if he did not love everybody."[6]

MacDonald was undoubtedly part of the great rebellion towards the stricter tenants of Calvinism during the middle part of the 19th Century in Scotland. Greville tells us his father would have indeed been considered by some (including his brother Charles) as being one of many "black sheep" at the Blackfriar's Congregational Church in Aberdeen, a group of mostly young men who simply could see no sense in much of what they saw in Calvinist teaching.

And although he hated the rigors of learning the Shorter Catechism as a boy, it was it's teaching he came to loath as a man. The opening line goes: "The chief end of man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever." MacDonald would later respond to this: "For my part, I wish the spiritual engineers who constructed it had, after laying the grandest foundation-stone that truth could afford them, glorified God by going no further."[7]

Fortunately for young George, his father had similar reservations concerning Calvinism. George MacDonald Senior would write to his son in 1850:

Like you, I cannot by any means give in to the extreme points either of Calvinism or Arminianism, nor can I bear to see that which is evidently gospel mystery torn to pieces by those who believe there is no mystery in the scriptures and therefore attempt to explain away what is evidently for the honor of God to conceal. I see so much of mystery in nature, and so much of it in myself, that it would be a proof to my mind that the scriptures were not from God were there nothing in them beyond the grasp of my own mind.[8]

Critical Biblical scholarship was already in full bloom by the time MacDonald was a boy during the first half of the 19th Century. The Pentateuch had by this time been dissected into the now commonplace J, P, E, and D writers rather than the previously absurd notion that Moses had written it all himself. MacDonald was friends with Oxford Biblical Scholar Dean Stanley and together they had no doubt kept a watchful eye on the work of fellow scholars in the field such as Graf, Vatke and the incomparable Julius Wellhausen. Still, then, as now, the "powers that be" which were at the center of church dominance in greater Christendom were generally unwilling to allow that they and the church fathers had at times been wrong in their thinking and teaching even under the microscope of honest scholarship. MacDonald might have suggested to them that, "A lie for God is a lie against God".

George MacDonald's deepest convictions concerning the bible, biblical inspiration, and what it takes to truly be a Christian were probably best summed up in a letter he wrote to an unidentified woman that had written him (apparently expressing disapproval), asking why he had left so much of the old faith behind.

"Have you really been reading my books, and at this time ask me what have I lost of the old faith? Much have I rejected of the new, but I have never rejected anything I could keep, and have never turned to gather again what I had once cast away. With the faith itself to be found in the old Scottish manse I trust I have a true sympathy. With many of the forms gathered around that faith and supposed by the faithful to set forth and explain their faith, I have none. At a very early age I had begun to cast them from me; but all the time my faith in Jesus as the Son of the Father of men and the Savior of us all, has been growing. If it were not for the fear of its sounding unkind, I would say that if you had been a disciple of his instead of mine, you would not have mistaken me so much. Do not suppose that I believe in Jesus because it is said so-and-so in a book. I believe in him because he is himself. The vision of him in that book, and, I trust, his own living power in me, have enabled me to understand him, to look him in the face, as it were, and accept him as my Master and Savior, in following whom I shall come to the rest of the Father's peace. The Bible is to me the most precious thing in the world, because it tells me his story; and what good men thought about him who know him and accepted him. But, the common theory of the inspiration of the words, instead of the breathing of God's truth into the hearts and souls of those who wrote it, and who then did their best with it, is degrading and evil; and they who hold it are in danger of worshipping the letter instead of living in the Spirit, of being idolaters of the Bible instead of disciples of Jesus.... It is Jesus who is the Revelation of God, not the Bible; that is but a means to a mighty eternal end. The book is indeed sent us by God, but it nowhere claims to be His very word. If it were—and it would be no irreverence to say it—it would have been a good deal better written. Yet even it's errors and blunders do not touch the truth, and are the merest trifles—dear as the little spot of earth on the whiteness of the snowdrop. Jesus alone is The Word of God.

"With all sorts of doubt I am familiar, and the result of them is, has been, and will be, a widening of my heart and soul and mind to greater glories of the truth—the truth that is in Jesus—and not in Calvin or Luther or St. Paul or St. John, save as they got it from Him, from whom every simple heart may have it, and can alone get it. You cannot have such proof of the existence of God or the truth of the Gospel story as you can have of a proposition in Euclid or a chemical experiment. But the man who will order his way by the word of the Master shall partake of his peace, and shall have in himself a growing conviction that in him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge....

"One thing more I must say: though the Bible contains many an utterance of the will of God, we do not need to go there to find how to begin to do his will. In every heart there is a consciousness of some duty or other required of it: that is the will of God. He who would be saved must get up and do that will—if it be but to sweep a room or make an apology, or pay a debt. It was he who had kept the commandments whom Jesus invited to be his follower in poverty and labour ...

"From your letter it seems that to be assured of my faith would be a help to you. I cannot say I never doubt, nor until I hold the very heart of good as my very own in Him, can I wish not to doubt. For doubt is the hammer that breaks the windows clouded with human fancies, and lets in the pure light. But I do say that all my hope, all my joy, all my strength are in the Lord Christ and his Father; that all my theories of life and growth are rooted in him; that his truth is gradually clearing up the mysteries of this world.... To Him I belong heart and soul and body, and he may do with me as he will-nay, nay—I pray him to do with me as he wills: for that is my only well-being and freedom."[9]

Two last notes about the man's faith are needed. While he rebelled from an early age toward Calvinism and certain other doctrines he found hard to follow, he had an absolute abhorrence of schism and sects. This is very clear from much of his writing. Even during the great schism that split the Congregationalist Church during the 1840's and created the Free Church, and even considering MacDonald's sympathies in doctrinal disputes toward those who felt it necessary to leave the church, he himself never left it until much later in life, and then, for unknown reasons—he left it quietly and turned to the Church of England.

And lastly, while MacDonald could never hold to a doctrine of biblical infallibility given his intellectual capacities (not to mention his integrity) he would always fear the possible consequences that would come when others finally accepted this same view, as surely there would be many who would be only too happy to pick and choose from the bible those things which would suit their selfish desires. But, haven't people always done this anyway unselfconsciously? He knew how easily people were led by their own egocentric cravings and ambitions. Even during his Calvinistic rebellion this was something that would burden him, as his son Ronald tells us:

...He was at one time known most widely for his fight against the Calvinistic doctrines of election and eternity of punishment. Today, I think he might be pained to see how base a sense of freedom from obligation has arisen as a byproduct of a religious movement in which he took so influential a part.[10]

[1] From GMD's article, Browning's Christmas Eve, published in the Christian Spectator, May—1853

[2] I don't know what GMD actually thought of the virgin birth and I only mention it as a demonstrative event, the likes of which, would parallel his thinking on similar biblical issues. When New Testament writers quote from Old Testament sayings as being prophetic about both an Old Testament figure (David for example) and Jesus simultaneously, oftentimes the Old Testament writings make it seem credible, but other times there just doesn't seem to be any clear connection. There are of course many people, including CS Lewis in his Reflections on the Psalms, who have tried to make an argument in favor of Old Testament writings foreshadowing New Testament events about Christ in some way which we don't yet understand. Either New Testament writers were often wrong, or there's a large and looming mystery in the texts that no one in our era has come close to unfolding.

[3] From GMD's Unspoken Sermons, Volume 3—Justice

[4] From Greville MacDonald's biography of GMD, George MacDonald and his Wife, Book 2, Chapter 5

[5] From John Calvin's, Institutes, 3. 21. 5

[6] From GMD's, Weighed and Wanting, Volume 1, Page 47

[7] From GMD's, Alec Forbes, Volume 1, Page 85

[8] From Greville MacDonald's
biography of GMD, George MacDonald and his Wife, Book 2,
Chapter 6

[9] From Greville MacDonald's biography of GMD, George MacDonald and his Wife, Book 7, Chapter 7

[10] From Ronald MacDonald's essay, George MacDonald: A Personal Note