MacDonald (as selected by Lewis)

Swapping quotes:

“… but it’s harder to be resigned than happy people think.”

(Squire Hamley, after the deaths of his wife and then his oldest son, in film adaptation of Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell)

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Woah… if you are saying what I think you are saying… something which I have sincerely thought about as truthfully as I know how, then I would like to more carefully consider what accounts you are referring to.

I’m gathering you’re referring to accounts of people experiencing a painful and apparent, sustained absence of God. Such as the Lewis description Randy posted.

MacDonald seemed (at least to this one of his readership) to keep a tenacious hold on God’s goodness through an astonishing range of his own experiences. He has insisted (without any exceptions I’ve ever spotted) that any evil that befalls us - either is not God’s doing - or; if it is, then it is something that we just can’t understand yet, but will someday when our perspective is one with God’s. Those are the only two options he ever entertained. The one thing he steadfastly refused to countenance is that God would ever wish eternal, retributive evil or suffering on anybody.

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I reread it a few a times and keep coming back to this:

Yeah, Lewis is really not on my mind. I’m thinking of quite a few accounts I’ve read here in the forum as well as listened to in RL.
When a person really has tried to cling to faith and finds God silent — loses hope, because there seems to be nothing to hope in — those are the accounts I read and find really gut-wrenching.
They don’t fit any theological construct I know without rewriting the accounts to fit the theology.

I hate to be a contrarian; I prefer neatly engineered packages. But there are things that keep me up at night, though. Yesterday MacDonald brought it up.

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That’s helpful… these are deep waters

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On a related tangent… I was thinking about Christopher Hitchens complaint about why in the world would God reveal himself to a dirt kicking herdsman in Mesopotamia when the Chinese were sailing ships around the world.

My wife was watching The Chosen series the night before last, and she remarked how she didn’t like the way they portrayed Judas in an attractive way.

I said the difference between Judas and Peter is difficult to tell, and I think people are uncomfortable realizing how much they were alike.

Good for the show to go there!

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Yeah - so far they’re showing Judas in a winsome light - albeit one who is preoccupied with money and finances. [Notice how ready I am to see that as a negative light about him, knowing where he goes with it all and knowing the gospel commentary about his eventual fate.] But there isn’t any reason to believe he wasn’t just as sincere and devoted (and yes - often clueless) as any of his other twelve brethren. What disturbs us so is that we want to maintain our clean divisions between the “good guys” and the “bad guys”. Anything that humanizes or shows the bad guys in any better lights is automatically provocative for us. Because we would like to think there is somehow a substantial barrier between “us” and “them” - and that surely we (the good guys, of course!) could never do what he did.

All that to say - that I’m totally with you on that! I really like how that show has portrayed people and told the story so far.

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Many authors (like Philip Yancey) have spilled much ink about “the dark night of the soul” - people - especially some now remembered as saints or heros of one sort or another, who went through such spiritually devastating times.

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As someone who went through a dark period and experienced the divine, I still pause because I imagine that it can get so much worse… I’d like to think that God or Jesus will be there for me, but what if he isn’t in the way that I expect him.

Sometimes this life feels like purgatory.

Feel like I’m on a ledge here, but Peter and Judas could easily be rendered in a Romans 9:13 passage. That other passage comes to mind where Jesus said Judas was lost so that what was said would be fulfilled… John 17:12.

Most Christians would also say I’m out on a ledge for even asking this … but … might there be an important distinction to be made between “lost” and “permanently lost”? I find myself admiring MacDonald’s tenacity in pressing such distinctions - and in insisting on the abiding hope that he has (and that he insists we all have) in Christ.

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It does seem “tremendously unfair,” and for me it was unthinkable before I realized how much I deserved to go to hell.

Peter rejected Jesus three times, and Jesus restored him with a threefold question of whether he loved him.

John Piper had a sermon which forms much of the groundwork for my thinking about Judas and Peter. In it he took the perfectly acceptable theological position that Jesus’ death was sufficient for Judas. But I forget how he wrapped it up in the end.

I love this but of course I’d elaborate that onensss differently. But as a handle for what it is it will do fine, and handles are all we have available as we are.

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Even his own.

(His Where the Light Fell demonstrates how a conversion experience can be objective and rational, something solid to hold on to, even when intrinsically personal. So was Francis Collins’, in a different way.)

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I’ve been a little distracted of late but I surely do appreciate you sharing this. For me it isn’t about the gods on offer all being evil. It is mostly my hunch that the desire to cast God in cozy, relatable terms expresses a preference for idols. I prefer to think I am open to the God that is, as She is which infuses everything without being any kind of thing at all - not a parent or a being apart.

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And what happens when we is seen to be just one more of those handles?

Now that we is starting to look like training wheels

It’s bad enough, when its a night or week/s or months. I learned a great deal of empathy for RC theology of a mediatrix. Jesus himself was terrifying for a while. And that was only months.

But years? Decades? of nothing?
Has the lover just left? Was the lover a mirage the whole time?
I find myself only holding more questions all the time.

I’d like to talk to MacDonald about these things.

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