I can think of nothing more to add except to say how impressed I am with MacDonald to look at such topics and express so well the insights he does. Seems pretty rare now.
Of course it is. We are part of nature’s bounty even if we do often fancy ourselves above all that. We don’t so much create science as produce it as a byproduct of the way we are which has also given rise to written language which gives stability and long life to the efforts of many generations.
Or maybe the case could be made that it was language, and then even written language that helped give rise to modern science?
Or maybe it takes a village of contributing factors, all of them gifts of nature whose invisible hand is named God?
For the purpose of the book, I think glossary works quite well.
These words are “hard,” not because they are long, difficult to pronounce, or applicable to obscure fields of science, but because they have both material and spiritual layers of meaning. The Holy Spirit teaches us these spiritual layers of meaning through scriptural analogies, which compare material things to spiritual things. Spiritual things, such as love, mercy, justice, and goodness do not present themselves directly to the bodily senses. In order to speak and think clearly about such things, the Holy Spirit raises up our natural language into spiritual service; much like Christ raises up the natural man into spiritual service.
I haven’t read much Edwards – that looks good, and the title rings true in the life of this man (this man writing from his hospital bed 
), a life filled with many surprising works of God, some just for fun as I minutes ago related in a PM:
It doesn’t hurt that it’s available for free multiple ways.
One quick one:
https://www.jonathan-edwards.org/Narrative.html
ETA: Oh, that may be a sermon, but this the book:
A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God
(152) Doubt
To deny the existence of God may, paradoxical as the statement will at first seem to some, involve less unbelief than the smallest yielding to doubt of his goodness. I say yielding ; for a man may be haunted with doubts, and only grow thereby in faith. Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to rouse the honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood; and theirs in general is the inhospitable reception of angels that do not come in their own likeness. Doubt must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed.
As found in MacDonald’s unspoken sermon: The Voice of Job (excepting the added emphasis)
I bolded the parts above that Lewis chose to include in today’s excerpt.
Today’s thought is a notable anticipation of many authors we’ve read lately (Boyd right now in my case) who are reclaiming the valued place of doubt at the table of truth seekers and the faithful.
This mirrors a sentiment which is core to McGilchrist’s books: that the part of consciousness ostensibly in charge is apt to regard with alarm whatever is unrecognizable from the maps of our existing understanding, that is, if the ‘new arrivals’ are recognized as such at all. Our settled opinions can be very self justifying and so ignore what doesn’t fit as long as possible. We tend toward triumphalism regarding what we already believe; certainty can accompany any worldview but with reasonable humility needn’t plague any of them.
The real advantage of faith is the confidence to stand open to new experience. Anyone whose faith requires constant protection from challenge needs more or better faith, or both.
This surprised me like it did Merv; MacDonald hardly seems an advocate for the superficial. In the next section, like Merv, I saw better what GM was getting at:
“The whole is greater than the sum of the parts,” to put it entirely unpoetically. GM reinforces this even farther with:
That we might know Christ from within: “Abide in me, and I in you.” (John 15:4), independent of limited, frail theology, which we simultaneously rely on, and are frustrated by. That we will no longer have clouded knowledge, even if it might be limited. That we may, limited as we are, be able to continue to enter more and more into the secrets of Christ as we learn to know our God all the more
I appreciate MacDonald’s emphasis on what I understand to be subjectivity, that he seems to validate it as a source of experiential knowledge. Spending time with nature and particularly IN nature helps me understand my creatureliness better in contrast with the grandure of the tiny part of all that belongs to God. It doesn’t give me clear theological categories, but it helps me understand different things that are important, too.
Reading this gave me greater appreciation for what Merv had written which in turn provides more appreciation for GM’s idea. For this Martian it also sheds light on the living practice of Christian belief and that also adds depth to understanding what we are in our humanity. Thanks.
(153) Job
Seeing God, Job forgets all he wanted to say, all he thought he would say if he could but see him.
As found in MacDonald’s unspoken sermon: The Voice of Job
Thanks for that. Perhaps, along with Job, so many of our ‘needs’, such as a need to be able to categorize everything tends to vanish when we find ourselves facing the Transcendent.
(154) The Close of the Book of Job
Job had his desire: he saw the face of God–and abhorred himself in dust and ashes. He sought justification; he found self-abhorrence. …
Two things are clearly contained in, and manifest from this poem:–that not every man deserves for his sins to be punished everlastingly from the presence of the Lord; and that the best of men, when he sees the face of God, will know himself vile. God is just, and will never deal with the sinner as if he were capable of sinning the pure sin; yet if the best man be not delivered from himself, that self will sink him into Tophet.
As found in MacDonald’s unspoken sermon: The Voice of Job
In the meantime we rely on this promise. And wait.
John 20:29
Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
We have this one too (not hardly that I am flawlessly keeping them and childlike!):
He who is having my commands,1 and is keeping them, that one it is who is loving me, and he who is loving me shall be loved by my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him.
John 14:21 YLT
1 (Again I would advocate for the Lord’s Day of Rest as being actionable… and rewarding.)
What’s impressive is how easy it is to read John 20:29 as if there is a reward for believing without seeing, when the blessing is the ability to believe without having seen Jesus.
I learned recently there is a rich theological tradition following Augustine who connected John 20:29 with 1 John 2:27.
Another connection can also be made between John 20:30 and 1 John 20:26.
(155) The Way
Christ is the way out, and the way in; the way from slavery, conscious or unconscious, into liberty; the way from the unhomeliness of things to the home we desire but do not know; the way from the stormy skirts of the Father’s garments to the peace of his bosom.
As found in MacDonald’s unspoken sermon: “Self-Denial”. (155-164)
Fear and Trembling again. Sorry. I will finish this book before summer (as defined in Michigan); I promise. (84F/29C Saturday; it’s snowing lightly right now; nowhere near summer).
The subtitle of Fear and Trembling is A Guide to an Unknown Country and is “written” by a character, Johannes de silentio, who says he is not a christian and does not have faith. The entire book is his exploration of Abraham’s faith exhibited in God’s demand for the sacrifice of Isaac. It is a view from the outside by an outsider, who can only describe what faith is not and what faith’s acquisition looks like from the outside. One commentary I’m reading describes the strategy as “negative cartography.”
Part of the value of the book, which I don’t recommend unless one thrives on perplexity, is the honest demonstration of how little any of us can know of faith or who our faith is in. Much like MacDonald’s decsription of “the home we desire but do not know.” We are seeking an unknown country, of which we only have the vaguest conception but for which we have enormous, passionate desire.
Accidentally this morning, I found my way back to a footnote of SK’s that I had read and failed to understand weeks ago. Parts of it go well with your reading of MacDonald, @Mervin_Bitikofer .
The footnote talks about the process of moving from resignation to faith:
This requires passion. Every movement of infinity takes place by means of passion and no movement can be brought about through reflection. This is the continual leap in existence that explains the movement…Even to make the famous Socratic distinction between what one understands and what one does not understand requires passion, and naturally, to make the genuinely Socratic movement, that of ignorance, requires even more passion. But what the times lack is not reflection, but passion.
(Fear and Trembling, Søren Kierkegaard, pg. 51, Kirmmse translation.)
I think MacDonald understood the passion of faith.
hear, hear!
I am challenged by SK’s characterization that movement takes place as a result of passion, not reflection. And yet I sometimes find that passion is the angel that gets me into trouble as often as not, and that a little self-reflection might have been my better angel on my other shoulder before I spoke or did something. But that said, I hear him - and agree. Without passion, one does not venture or accomplish much.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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