I’ve listened to a lot of Bishop Barron too over the years and have a lot of respect for him too.
Transactional! Indeed I think that comes near the heart of much objection that people like MacDonald and so many other more recent voices too have found with so much recent (and not-so-recent) Christian tradition. I heard/read one other (I can’t remember if it was a MacDonald piece - or maybe it was Richard Rohr) describe it this way: So many want to think of Christianity in contractual terms (which certainly does seem to be the tone of so much Mosaic law of the Torah) when we should instead be thinking of it in convenantal terms, or so the compelling case is made from the gospels and epistles.
MacDonald is a severe critic of anything that gets reduced from the trust of a loving relationship down to mere transaction between parties. And he takes that criticism to the heart of some of our atonement theology of recent centuries. And a lot of strict doctrine-oriented people will probably dismiss his freedom in all that as being “over the pale” for themselves. And indeed MacDonald doesn’t ever really “enter into such fray” on those terms as he seems to have little interest in convincing or compelling people to this or that conviction of his own. He insists that if you and I and anybody else just come sit at Christ’s feet and begin to seek - not just knowledge - but obedient response to him, that all this other stuff we may be so right or so wrong about will all be addressed when Christ sees fit to address it. That’s how I would characterize MacDonald’s attitude, anyway. And yet … yet … (this is just me claiming something on MacDonald’s behalf that he would probably never claim for himself) … in a height of irony, I argue that MacDonald is more steeped in both testaments of scripture than many a strident voice today that claims to be at such pains to defend “the bible”. That is, after reading MacDonald’s unspoken sermons, he seems more scripturally grounded to me today than just about any other popular, evangelical voices that clamor for their tribal followings today. I.e. - the more I read the Bible, the more MacDonald’s discipleship and insight flows from it and makes Christ-centered, joyful sense of it all, and the less biblical today’s ‘biblicists’ are revealed to be in comparison. At least that’s my own provocative take on it. And don’t get me wrong - I probably don’t agree with MacDonald on everything either. (I’m an Anabaptist - we’re going to be outliers on so many fronts!) But after reading GM, I don’t sweat those differences any more.
It may be self-serving of me to bring this up again - but some time ago I started up a bit of a “pet thread” that in a devotional sense followed a C.S. Lewis book titled “MacDonald” where Lewis highlighted favorite excerpts of his from GM’s works. It’s been a few months since I last added to that, but I was doing it daily for quite a while and kept it up as long as interest persisted. You might find a few nuggets of value among that already lengthy thread.