It’s fearful how that same thing, “walking on the waves”, can be both a blessing and a curse (Deut. 11:26?)
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Can you say more about what you see in this last quote that strikes you as knock against his characteristic humility or visions of heaven? … because I agree with your assessment of his optimism about heaven. But this particular excerpt caught me off guard in maybe a different way than what I’m hearing you express. I’ll be happy to expand on what I got from it - but want to hear from you first.
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Thanks. Well, I think I jumped the gun–on first glance, I was surprised to see an emphasis of what I thought was man’s domination over nature. However, on second review, I don’t think that’s the point. It seems more about man’s subjugation to the true law.
What struck me about this particular thought of MacDonald’s (that nothing will hurt the true believer) is how the majority of us seem to be embarrassed by this particular passage found at the end of Mark (and only there I believe) where we’re told believers can drink poison and handle serpents without being harmed.
Nobody will admit they are “embarrassed” by anything found in scriptures, of course, but the proof is in how this is silently passed over (unless you actually attend a snake-handling church - and even in those rare congregations, I’d wager they don’t go in for the poison drinking so much). So even if most Bible-thumping Christians won’t own up to it, one can probably see what parts of the Bible they are willing to discount just by noting the absence of passages like this from any of their favorite preaching "go-to"s.
And yet here we are. MacDonald seems to be referencing just exactly this. And MacDonald doesn’t strike me as being of the snake-handling bravado type. So just what is he doing with these verses? My take on it - given what MacDonald has written elsewhere - is that he is expressing a conviction that the only real hurt or evil that can befall a man is if something would come between that man and Christ. Given that death itself won’t be able to do that, then just what is it left for that man to fear? “Plenty!” I can hear most of us respond. We can probably all imagine things even worse than death. But I think what MacDonald drives at is that perfect love casts out fear - even fear of death. So if or when we ever enjoy that kind of communion with Christ, the world has nothing left to hold over you or to make you cower in fear. They could even nail you to a cross, and your unconquerable love would simply bless and pray for them in return. They have power to kill your body, but they can’t touch your soul. That’s how I understand those verses.
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That makes sense. I really appreciate that insight.
I remember a passage from “Malcolm” (“The Fisherman’s Lady,”) in which Sandy Graham asks him if he was not afraid to go out on the sea. “Afraid!” said he, “I would not want my master to say, ‘O you of litlte faith!’”
“But what if He should be for you to be drowned?”
“If you were to say I were to be drowned, and He not mean it, then I would be afraid,” he responded.
(that’s a general idea of the passage). It’s something that has come back to me often.
It could bear a lot of meditation. On the one hand, becoming truly mature would indicate a willingness to put God at the helm of everything. On the other, the seeming randomness of most “good” and “bad” indicates that such conjecture seems foolhardy, and possibly naively fatalistic.
Regarding the snake handling–I thought that was a later addition that may not be authentic? I get the drift, though, and agree; it applies to all of this. I’m embarrassed by many things in Scripture–sometimes with good reason, and other times less so!
Thanks for the discussion.
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It’s been done before.
What harm can happen to him who knows that God does everything, and who loves beforehand everything that God does?
Pithy quotes from our current reading which give us pause to reflect - #1294 by Dale
(123) Life in the Word
All things were made through the Word, but that which was made in the Word was life, and that life is the light of men: they who live by this light, that is, live as Jesus lived–by obedience, namely, to the Father, have a share in their own making; the light becomes life in them; they are, in their lower way, alive with the life that was first born in Jesus, and through him has been born in them–by obedience they become one with the godhead: ‘As many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God.’ He does not make them the sons of God, but he gives them power to become the sons of God…
As found from MacDonald’s unspoken sermon “Abba, Father ”
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I don’t imagine it is in the Bible but the saying “trust in God but tie up your camel” seems to conflict with embracing serpents, poison drinking or, for that matter, pandemic foolhardiness. The passage in Mark you cite seems to encourage leaning into what is seen as an immediate but illogical advantage of faith.
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Doing a Google image search of “snake handling preachers” makes for a freakish ride down memory lane
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I like that saying. Nobody would be long for this world if they thought their faith was so strong that they don’t even bother looking both ways before crossing the street. Faith is our evidence of things unseen, to be sure, but it is not a substitute for what our God-given vision can see.
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Going back to Revelation, it’s when the conflict arises between the values of the city of God and the city of man, that this gets complicated and interesting. What does true overcoming look like? In laying down your life, or coming through the fire untouched?
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It is interesting how often what I read in The Matter With Things relates to what I read the next morning in this thread of yours. I’ve included the most relevant portion here and what comes after it I’ll post on Pithy Quotes*. It only relates to it and is not trying to make the same point.
*Looks like that post will need to wait a bit.
Good decision-makers are eclectic and not wedded to ‘consistency’. But when things turn out, for whatever reasons, the way we thought they might, we tend to overestimate our role in their doing so. We overestimate our ability to predict and to control. That way disaster often ensues.
An algorithm as a replacement for an embodied skill is one case of an insufficiently flexible path, a concatenation of steps that aims to achieve a reliable goal. At its best, and if the poor performers at whom they are targeted were likely to follow them, they would avoid some poor outcomes. But they would ensure others. They are generalisations, and every case needs to be evaluated on its merits. Even if they were sufficiently reliable to cover most cases, they would eventuate in mediocrity. Dreyfus and Dreyfus outlined the difference between embodied skill and an algorithm, the skill being something that is so much part of an expert through experience that the skilled practitioner is barely aware of his or her own knowledge.103 They distinguish five levels of skilfulness, beginning with the novice and working up to the person with judgment informed by a lifetime’s experience. The detail of these levels is not important, but their conclusion is. In the first three levels of skill acquisition, algorithms are overall more helpful than not: in the highest two they actually impede excellence. You shouldn’t break the rules until the rules have become second nature – but then you must sometimes break the rules if you are to be successful and excel at what you do. Skilled pilots, surgeons, or commanders can often offer little insight, after having skilfully handled a crisis, into how they thought, or why they did what they did. Most often they say, ‘I just did what I had to’. Once questioned, they offer post hoc rationalisations, if anything at all.
As Kay puts it,
solving equations of motion is a means of understanding how well-judged shots find the goal, but it is not a means of making it happen … People spend inordinate amounts of time asking experts like Beckham what is the secret of their success.
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I think I might be seeing something of the parallels you refer to. Or let me see if this sounds right at any rate as a parallel to the above thought.
Hard and ostensibly universal truths (moral maxims) make a poor substitute for relationship (obedience) with the Spirit of Truth. I.e. Until we have our desires in order with the Law of Love, the lesser statements of law will have to do. Better than nothing, yes - but at their best they help corral one toward seeking the higher law of love that is behind it all in the first place.
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That really zeros in on what made it seem related to me, more clearly than I first realized.
I think how we hold the truth makes a big difference in far it can lift us up. If we insist on specific facts to consent to and steps to follow it can be better than nothing but still far, far less than what is possible. If God is in it for relationship we should probably try harder to allow it to impact us more.
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This goes well with your even pithier version over in Pithy Quoties:
(124) The Office of Christ
Never could we have known the heart of the Father, never felt it possible to love him as sons, but for him who cast himself into the gulf that yawned between us. In and through him we were foreordained to the sonship: sonship, even had we never sinned, never could we reach without him. We should have been little children loving the Father indeed, but children far from the sonhood that understands and adores.
As found from MacDonald’s unspoken sermon “Abba, Father ”
In case prior snippets didn’t include enough to make this clear: in this sermon, MacDonald makes clear his dislike of the English translators choice to use the word “adoption”. He finds that word to be an odious replacement for true sonship - as if we could have ever had any other ‘true’ Father but our Creator - that our Creator should suffer being thought of as having some sort of surrogate or secondary status. No doubt there are physically adopted children who may feel quite differently about what ‘adoption’ does or doesn’t mean; but such is MacDonald’s prejudice.
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Thanks for clarifying this, Merv. MacDonald is simply wrong here and lacks a correct understanding of adoption. Although he may have witnessed forms of adoption that were nothing more than one step from homelessness — common throughout history.
As an adoptive parent, I understand the “endless” list of decisions and choices that went into the process of having my daughter, my child. As well as the costs. And as a birth-parent as well, I can compare the two processes. They are entirely different, but the end result is the same. We have two daughters of equal status, value, inheritance. We value them as individuals and also as sisters, and we have worked hard to instill that view in them as well.
Viewed through our experience, the biblical concept of adoption as children of God is wonderful. In the process of adoption, God has chosen to do unimaginable things for us that our birth parents could never do. The deliberate nature of the process makes it all the more wonderful.
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And thanks for your counter-observations in that regard too, Kendel. I suspect that’s what a lot of people recognize about it - that adoption is a real God-send for many a child and parents.
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(125) The Slowness of the New Creation
But as the world must be redeemed in a few men to begin with, so the soul is redeemed in a few of its thoughts and wants and ways, to begin with: it takes a long time to finish the new creation of this redemption.
As found from MacDonald’s unspoken sermon “Abba, Father ”
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I almost want to say I think we only are redeemed whenever and so long as we can redeem the world, letting it stay fully present and embodied for us rather than letting it become abstracted, categorized and peripheral in our attention. McGilchrist says attention is a moral act; how we dispose ours determines how the world is and what it means for us.
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