MacDonald (as selected by Lewis)

Faith & Science Conversation
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The above already included more than Lewis did; (Lewis’ selection ended with ‘…how can he pray?’)

But despite my expansion on Lewis above, I cannot resist including the entire next paragraphs also from the same sermon, being so germane as they are to so much that interests this forum). Here it is.

As to the so-called scientific challenge to prove the efficacy of prayer by the result of simultaneous petition, I am almost ashamed to allude to it. There should be light enough in science itself to show the proposal absurd. A God capable of being so moved in one direction or another, is a God not worth believing in–could not be the God believed in by Jesus Christ–and he said he knew. A God that should fail to hear, receive, attend to one single prayer, the feeblest or worst, I cannot believe in; but a God that would grant every request of every man or every company of men, would be an evil God–that is no God, but a demon. That God should hang in the thought-atmosphere like a windmill, waiting till men enough should combine and send out prayer in sufficient force to turn his outspread arms, is an idea too absurd. God waits to be gracious not to be tempted. A man capable of proposing such a test, could have in his mind no worthy representative idea of a God, and might well disbelieve in any: it is better to disbelieve than believe in a God unworthy.

‘But I want to believe in God. I want to know that there is a God that answers prayer, that I may believe in him. There was a time when I believed in him. I prayed to him in great and sore trouble of heart and mind, and he did not hear me. I have not prayed since.’

How do you know that he did not hear you?

‘He did not give me what I asked, though the weal of my soul hung on it.’

In your judgment. Perhaps he knew better.

‘I am the worse for his refusal. I would have believed in him if he had heard me.’

Till the next desire came which he would not grant, and then you would have turned your God away. A desirable believer you would have made! A worthy brother to him who thought nothing fit to give the Father less than his all! You would accept of him no decision against your desire! That ungranted, there was no God, or not a good one! I think I will not argue with you more. This only I will say: God has not to consider his children only at the moment of their prayer. Should he be willing to give a man the thing he knows he would afterwards wish he had not given him? If a man be not fit to be refused, if he be not ready to be treated with love’s severity, what he wishes may perhaps be given him in order that he may wish it had not been given him; but barely to give a man what he wants because he wants it, and without farther purpose of his good, would be to let a poor ignorant child take his fate into his own hands–the cruelty of a devil. Yet is every prayer heard; and the real soul of the prayer may require, for its real answer, that it should not be granted in the form in which it is requested.

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At the risk of sounding flippant, which neither of us intend to be, I quote Elizabeth Bennet, “I hear such different accounts of [Him] as to puzzle me exceedingly.”

I want to embrace what MacDonald is saying, but there are always other stories, accounts, explanations I am not able to discount or conveniently ignore.
An inclusive simplicty would be nice; I think for me (for now?) it’s out of reach.

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That speaks to our support of the unbeliever’s comfort, contentment and self-satisfaction.

That echoes Jesus about the inhabitants of dusty towns.

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Yes, and not a good Father, either!

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Oh, Dale! You sometimes come across as a one-drum person! If you think MacDonald meant this as a cudgel for believers to apply to others, then you mistake MacDonald’s spirit if you think to find comfort in his words.

Let me just put it this way - as particularly feisty and intelligent friend of mine once so aptly put it - something like this (and you need to imagine this being spoken by somebody with a twinkle in her eye):

If you just aren’t able to fathom that something could possibly apply to you, then just take the baby step of observing how spectacularly well it applies to everybody else!

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Oh, Merv. :slightly_smiling_face: You really haven’t apprehended the big picture if you have inferred that I don’t think it applies to me. (Your drum kit is missing some pieces itself. ; - ) I am crazy blessed beyond all deserving as my wife just said about us in her prayer of thanks over our meal a short while ago.

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:grin:

“I played my best for him” and “He smiled at me”.

That strikes a real melody for me

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I strongly agree that everyone’s got a different response to pain–I remember the accounts I have read of Wiesel’s story about putting God on trial for abandoning his people. Didn’t they convict Him, and then someone said, “Now is the time for evening prayer”? I don’t know how people think that way.

Another passage in “The Baron’s Apprenticeship” talks about how we should hope for the best God there can be–and not stop at a halfway God. Yet, that’s the question humanity has struggled with since before Job–how can bad things happen to good people?

As Martin wrote, there’s no signal that shows an intervention.

I’ve just finished listening to an interview by Randal Rauser on his new book, “The Doubter’s Creed”, with a podcast called “Reason to Doubt,” by skeptics. It was very well done and with kind interaction.

One point he made is that it’s better to be after God’s own heart, than to just dot the i’s and cross the t’s of belief. He recounts the story of a Rwandan pastor, believing all the right things, betraying his congregation to the vigilantes; and a Senegalese Muslim man in Rwanda who saved about 100 Rwandans before dying himself in their service. Another example: someone tried to get Rauser evicted from his place at the seminary where he preaches, because he believes in hopeful salvation outside of the faith .When Rauser asked him what he thought would happen to a 12 year old Jewish girl who died in Auschwitz, rejecting Christianity because the only faith she knew belonged to that of those who killed her and her family, the man had no answer whether he thought God would send her to Heaven or not.
Can you be a Christian if you don’t believe? A Discussion on “Reason to Doubt” - Randal Rauser
I agree that this theodicy does not satisfy me, either.

I would really like to interview MacDonald some more–mainly because there is so much wisdom in his other writings.
Thanks

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And now, if only your could just force a stubborn one or two others here to just see the light like you see it, and become as blessed as you are, right? :wink:

What a motley bunch we all make.

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If this is a real event I can read of somewhere, I’d love to know more about it. I guess I could just by Rouser’s new book “Doubter’s Creed”? Was it from that book that you heard this story?

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Yes, he talks about it on the interview, but he’s also written about it on line–I found one of them

Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God? A Question Explored Through Sheep and Goats - Randal Rauser

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@Randy and @Mervin_Bitikofer, I think you might mean this man in an article that @Klax shared with us some time ago:

Yes.
Studying the Holocaust, going to concentration camps, reading the poetry, studying photos of the ghettos. Those kinds of things complicate my theology significantly.

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Yes, that one. I remember his sharing it, too.
Thanks.

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Randy, thanks for this. I”m over here, trying to pull myself together.

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This so depends on how you view the depravity in your self.

I have no issue looking the other way with people, even professing Christians, believing they are not that bad. This does have a large effect, dare I say necessary, on what they believe happens to relatively good people in non-Christian faiths.

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Randy, I”m just finishing up the Rauser vidio with the Reason to Doubt men. Thanks so much for sharing it. Again, my head hurts. But it’s a good hurt. I think.

Around 13:30 Rauser says:

I think the approach of bridge building is important, because even if at the end of that bridge-building conversation, you don’t end up converting them on the spot, well you’ve at least built a bridge right now. You have something you didn’t have before. I think if both sides could focus more on things like shared value, humanity as a whole would be better off.

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No doubt the best God is a surprising God. And one which will not be unfair, yet is absolutely self-centered, it is God’s love for himself that resolves the apparent dilemma between his justice and grace.

Consider a passage from Hebrews that should clue us into the fact that redemption is not as it seems. That maybe God is going to amaze us in ways we never thought possible. That all our tears will be wiped away, and that includes our sad remembrance of the past… when all seems lost, but God.

This is something I wrote a little over a year ago.

Could it be?

It’s kind of neat how a verse which you read numerous times, comes off the page.

Hebrews 9:7

“but into the second only the high priest goes, and he but once a year, and not without taking blood, which he offers for himself and for the unintentional sins of the people.”

Unintentional sins.

Terrors of a younger self came to mind. Of reading Numbers 15:30, and thinking that this time I had indeed gone too far. In a Jewish commentary then, I found something about how there is a public nature to this kind of sin. And since I had none done that, I figured I was still okay.

But now, this phrase in Hebrews 9:7 caught my attention. What do the commentators say about it?

Guthrie notices it, but does not comment:

It is noticeable that the annual offering is said to be for the errors of the people (literally ‘ignorances’, agnoēmata).

Allen sees a disparity:

This construal assumes, however, that “high- handed sins” were not atoned for on the Day of Atonement, an assumption that cannot be made with any certainty based
on the Old Testament text.

Owen is adamant it is sin all the same:

Scripture calls all sins by the name of “errors.”

And Pink goes where I haven’t seen anyone else go:

Under the dispensation of law God graciously made provision for the infirmities of His people, granting them sacrifices for sins committed unwillingly and unwittingly… The distinction pointed out above is the key to Psalm 51:16, “For Thou desirest not sacrifice, else would I give it.” There is no room for doubt that David knew full well the terrible character of the sins which he committed against Uriah and his wife. Later, when he was convicted of this, he realized that the law made no provision for forgiveness. What, then, did he do? Psalm 51:1-3 tells us: he laid hold on God Himself and said, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise” (verse 17). It was faith, penitently, appropriating the mercy of God in Christ.

Could it be the writer of Hebrews is properly interpreting the dispensation of the law, and showing that Jesus is indeed better to “perfect the conscience of the worshipper”?

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(91) Why Should It Be Necessary?

‘But if God is so good as you represent him, and if he knows all that we need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary to ask him for anything?’

I answer, What if he knows prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object in God’s idea of prayer be the supplying of our great, our endless need–the need of himself? What if the good of all our smaller and lower needs lies in this, that they help to drive us to God? Hunger may drive the runaway child home, and he may or may not be fed at once, but he needs his mother more than his dinner. Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other need; prayer is the beginning of that communion, and some need is the motive of that prayer. Our wants are for the sake of our coming into communion with God, our eternal need. If gratitude and love immediately followed the supply of our needs, if God our Saviour was the one thought of our hearts, then it might be unnecessary that we should ask for anything we need. But seeing we take our supplies as a matter of course, feeling as if they came out of nothing, or from the earth, or our own thoughts, instead of out of a heart of love and a will which alone is force, it is needful that we should be made feel some at least of our wants, that we may seek him who alone supplies all of them, and find his every gift a window to his heart of truth. So begins a communion, a talking with God, a coming-to-one with him, which is the sole end of prayer, yea, of existence itself in its infinite phases. We must ask that we may receive; but that we should receive what we ask in respect of our lower needs, is not God’s end in making us pray, for he could give us everything without that: to bring his child to his knee, God withholds that man may ask.

From MacDonald’s sermon: “The Word of Jesus on Prayer ”

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And I can still hear the (as yet) possibly unanswered objections that you have heard, @Kendel , still wanting to ask MacDonald: “Sure - God may withold that a man may ask and feel the acute and highest need for communion with God, but surely this means that this highest need at least should not ever be left unanswered, even if the immediate requests are not granted?” I.e. how is it then that some do not percieve they have been granted this highest of needs upon their approach to the throne? Are they so material-minded that they recognize an answer only if it comes as the grant of their material petition? I do not think we can make such a mean supposition against the many giants of faith who have spoken of the silence.

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Yep, Merv. You heard me.

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