Aach! GM challenges just about every standard doctrine I’m familiar with. And he makes sense doing it. The whole sermon makes sense while making me feel upside down and backward.
Still listening and thinking. Probably one more time through today to get it in my head.
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I feel some of that same challenge - and I imagine at some of the same points you might be referring to in this sermon specificaly. How often have we heard preachers speak of our righteousness not being our own, but is Christ’s instead? But the language used gets tricky - especially when we start making words like “imputed” (a word that MacDonald disputes - at least in how we’ve come to use it for this) - when we make that start to do the heavy lifting for our theology, MacDonald sees it leading to trouble. And as you suggest (or seem to agree with me anyway) - I think he builds a pretty good case.
We can still speak of Christ being punished for my sins; as in here is how this world, (of which I’m a supportive part) … here is how it treats a truly righteous man. So yeah - in that sense, Jesus willingly came here and dwelt among us anyway and bore with his body the consequences of my/our collective and individual sins. So the language works. And when we think of the consequences of our sins as representative of God’s wrath (e.g. If I play irresponsibly with fire and suffer burns as a result, that can be seen as God’s wrath that helps teach me a lesson about it all). Our problem is that this then morphs into God planning and devising wrath and evil for us all and especially for his son as if our punishment could justly be shifted away from the guilty parties and onto the innocent - and indeed most righteous person ever. At that point, though, MacDonald slams on the breaks and calls us on it - our “sleight of hand” of language has gone too far, and now we are accusing God of being the willful architect of much evil indeed! One can see the scattering of verses in scriptures that can be used to support this, but MacDonald (in my view) uses the vast weight of the entire gospel and apostolic corpus to prevail against such traditions that end up assigning God such low attributes of character.
In short, I think there is some wiggle room for language, but … it’s still a challenge to be reckoned with.
-Merv
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Feel free to expand on that if you care to. Do you think that’s saying something different, or does it take one to a different place/person?
and hi @Kendel . I’ve been following these sermons only sporadically, as time permits. GM provokes many interesting thoughts, but I often find myself getting lost in the formality and verbosity of his old-style English. It sometimes takes multiple passes at the text to (maybe?) understand what he’s getting at. Sometimes I’m unclear of how he defines his terms. Like “faith” and “righteousness” here. For example, it seems that GM here calls faith the first righteous act of the Christian because it is in obedience to a “duty” to respond to God. And so GM says Abraham was “credited righteousness” because of this step of faith was obedient, and hence “good”. So Abraham was good but not yet perfect in God’s eyes.
My understanding of Paul’s point in Romans (where he talks of faith being “credited as righteousness”) was just that we were no longer under the law. That Christ’s death had fulfilled the demands of that old covenant law perfectly, and so through faith in him, we are credited as if we are completely forgiven and sinless (we take on Christ’s righteousness if we trust him). So I’m finding it hard to resonate with GM’s slant here which describes faith as an “obedient duty” —something gives us a measure of “goodness”.?Yes, faith is a good and necessary thing for relationship with God. Yet I don’t think it gives us righteousness per se, rather it is Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross that accomplished that. Faith is just the means of accessing what God has done…??
just the thoughts rattling around in my head on this one.
thanks.
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It takes one to a Person differently.
Yeah, Merv. I’ve been steeped in Imputed Righteousness, just what MacDonald is calling a legal fiction and a terrible lie. So, I’ll have to wrangle with this for a while. Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA) is the foundation of the theological structure I know. However, in various threads here I have encountered individual participants (certainly not BL the organization) openly questioning as well as vehemently arguing against the doctrine. That has been new to me. And now MacDonald speaks against it. Thinking through this part of the sermon will take me some time.
There are other parts of the sermon that I really like and which will require a lot less work on my part. I need to come back to them in the next few days, when there will hopefully be more time to read things over and think them over.
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And this relates, I think, to the relationship of “work” to faith that Kierkegaard talks about in Fear and Trembling although I don’t think they are identical.
I think too slow. So much to work through.
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I’ll expand on that a little.
It is saying something different, it takes one to a Person differently, and it says nothing about duty.
What about being childlike says anything about duty?
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Thanks. I think that this jives with the thought that “pistis,” salvation by allegiance, kind of fits–not that we’re perfect, but we’re forgiven by repenting–that is, reorienting ourselves to follow God. Does that make sense?
That also puts into perspective the multiple allusions to “the righteous,” in both Proverbs and Psalms, among other places in the OT; and the hyperbolic, apparently contradictory “no one is righteous, no, not one.”
In Romans, I’ve read, by the “new view on Paul” (which is apparently the old one), the main thrust is, “Stop trying to make Gentiles follow the Jewish law of circumcision and food taboos. You know yourselves that we were never saved by those things.” Dr. Scot McKnight on the New Perspective on Paul - YouTube
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It’s Greek–it is the root of the word for faith… God uses both pictures. Children have implicit faith and love, and trust., for our father.
We are not disagreeing. Thanks. I’m putting the kids to bed–likely will talk to you in the morning.
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Just to be clear for any other readers that may venture through here… Biologos takes no such stand against any of what’s considered orthodox Christian belief. So please consider “this neighborhood” to be this thread and this thread alone.
And as for “vehemently arguing against it”, I suppose one can’t take GM’s strong words here any other way than exactly that, as you’ve put it. Just remember that GM also (in other places) expressed much hesitation about talking anybody else into or out of any innocently received and prized doctrine, that was then given a home in a true heart. It is the heart itself that GM sees the Lord as valuing regardless of the clarity or even veracity of all the convictions held there. He was more of the spirit of leaving it to Christ’s spirit to teach us all what we need when we need it.
Besides, I rather like what I’ve heard others in our broader “neighborhood” observe about the variety of atonement theories: that each almost certainly has something to tell us about Christ’s life and death, and that perhaps none of them by themselves gives us anything like a complete story. MacDonald only insists (with some passion as we all know) that any ‘complete story’ will necessarily be at the hand of an honorable and completely loving God “in whom can be found no darkness at all.”
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Thanks for pointing that out, Merv. I went back and edited to clarify what I mean about “the neighborhood”. I mean the Forum, where in many threads that I’ve read, there have been individual participants who have confronted and argued against the doctrine of Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA).
I did not want readers to gain the impression that the organization, Biologos, uses the Forum to push or criticise any particular doctrine. Biologos does not require Forum participants to hold to any particular doctrine, or to hold to doctrine at all.
Yes. It has been interesting and instructive to find out more about what others think, and to learn to recognize more how incomplete our knowedge is about God and how he works.
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Yes!
It does help to listen to it, or read it out loud, I find. Since it is a sermon. But still there’s a lot of puzzling to do to follow his thinking, which seems entirely original to me.
Thanks for your discussion of this. It’s helpful.
(227) Righteousness of Faith
To the man who has no faith in God, faith in God cannot look like righteousness; neither can he know that it is creative of all other righteousness toward equal and inferior lives: he cannot know that it is not merely the beginning of righteousness, but the germ of life, the active potency whence life-righteousness grows.
As found in the unspoken sermon: “Righteousness”
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This is a curiosity for me too - that I would love to delve into more. People like Lewis and Chesterton, and even such luminaries as Twain and Lewis Carrol hearken back to GM as a major influence in their lives, careers, and even (in some cases) their conversion to Christianity. (And think how many people now mention Lewis as an influential writer for them … MacDonald’s legacy is deep indeed! and still deeply felt today even though his name is largely unknown to the masses of these.)
So what influenced MacDonald? What did he read? Wikipedia gives some answer to some of that. According to one writer for a Christianity Magazine, somebody by the name of A.J. Scott was a story teller that influenced MacDonald at Aberdeen College - it might be fun to dig up references to that person. GM grew up deeply Calvinist, and after his mother died was raised by his father and uncle, both of whom were quite versed in the literary classics I guess.
But to go deeper and farther back … there are church fathers such as Gregory of Nyssa (and also Origen of Alexandria) some of whom are even more venerated by the Eastern branch, but also heavily acknowledged for much influence in the west as well. I don’t imagine any of MacDonald’s ideas are truly original - but it would be cool to see how he came by them more immediately - though obviously his main source seems to be scriptures themselves.
It would seem that some of his early influence was just a reaction against [parts of] the Calvinism that he was exposed to in his formative years.
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(228) The Same
…he cannot know that it is not merely the beginning of righteousness, but the germ of life, the active potency whence life-righteousness grows. It is not like some single separate act of righteousness; it is the action of the whole man, turning to good from evil–turning his back on all that is opposed to righteousness, and starting on a road on which he cannot stop, in which he must go on growing more and more righteous, discovering more and more what righteousness is, and more and more what is unrighteous in himself. In the one act of believing in God–that is, of giving himself to do what he tells him–he abjures evil, both what he knows and what he does not yet know in himself. A man may indeed have turned to obey God, and yet be capable of many an injustice to his neighbour which he has not yet discovered to be an injustice; but as he goes on obeying, he will go on discovering. Not only will he grow more and more determined to be just, but he will grow more and more sensitive to the idea of injustice–I do not mean in others, but in himself. A man who continues capable of a known injustice to his neighbour, cannot be believed to have turned to God. At all events, a man cannot be near God, so as to be learning what is just toward God, and not be near his neighbour, so as to be learning what is unfair to him; for his will, which is the man, lays hold of righteousness, chooses to be righteous. If a man is to be blamed for not choosing righteousness, for not turning to the light, for not coming out of the darkness, then the man who does choose and turn and come out, is to be justified in his deed, and declared to be righteous. He is not yet thoroughly righteous, but is growing in and toward righteousness.
As found in the unspoken sermon: “Righteousness”
“…starting on a road in which he cannot stop…!!!” Does GM actually think all backsliding is rendered impossible once this process initiates? He’s beginning to sound a bit like parts in one of the later epistles of John if he insists so! And yet he must go on to nuance this somehow, because obviously (as GM concedes many times in this very sermon), Abraham went on to do unrighteous things after he took his initial steps of faith and trust that were credited to him as righteousness.
As Lewis notes of GM, sometimes his expressions are terrifying.
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I think we see MacDonald at his best here. If this is MacDonald’s view of “slaves to righteousness”, what a different kind of “slavery” than is usually meant!
And what of “backsliding?” Whose category is it? Jesus’s?
MacDonald seems to be pointing to a kind of security for the believer who is gripped by the desire for righteousness. Once gripped, she is caught up in a process of growing in righteousness, which was first begun by faith. Let it be so.
Throughout the entire sermon, MacDonald talks about “righteousness” in some of the ways I am used to understanding “sanctification.” He seems to combine the two so that righteousness is both a position and a process. What do you think?
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Absolutely!
I’m trying to think of the source, but I think it’s in “The Princess and Curdie” where he talks about a continuous sanctification. Lewis paraphrases it in “The Great Divorce,”
“Son,‘he said,’ ye cannot in your present state understand eternity…That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why…the Blessed will say "We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven, : and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
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Wow. That’s very interesting. “Spread back and back into their past,” and “will work backwords and turn even that…into….”
It’s interesting to see things like this, isn’t it? Where you can clearly identify an idea that one author makes use of from another author you’ve both read.
(If you can ever get to Wheaton, IL, Randy, you need to plan a visit to the Wade Center, and immurse yourself with Lewis and MacDonald (Plus Tolkien and Sayers and that other guy I can’t remember) for the day/s! I can imagine you staggering around, half drunk on the delight of just being there with all their books and papers, etc.!)
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