Rejecting Calvinist theology: no to retributive justice
Underpinning the Calvinist understanding of salvation from sin is a theory of justice that MacDonald thought flawed. According to this theory, justice requires God to punish sin “for the sake of punishing.”430 However, “[s]uffering weighs nothing at all against sin”431 and does nothing to compensate or make right what is wrong. As Thomas Talbott explains: “In and of itself, MacDonald contended, punishment does nothing to make up for the slightest of our sins; it ‘is nowise an offset to sin.’ It neither atones for our sin, nor ‘balances the scales of justice,’ nor justifies God’s decision to permit sin in the first place, nor somehow restores God’s stolen glory. . . . So why is God prepared to punish sin? . . . [T]o deliver us from evil.”432
Divine justice, says MacDonald, is not retribution, but a work of divine love, and God punishes not as an end in itself, but as a means to an end—our purification. “Primarily, God is not bound to punish sin; He is bound to destroy sin.”433
I believe that justice and mercy are simply one and the same thing: without justice to the full there can be no mercy, and without mercy to the full there can be no justice; that such is the mercy of God that he will hold his children in the consuming fire of his distance until they pay the uttermost farthing, until they drop the purse of selfishness with all the dross that is in it, and rush home to the Father and the Son, and the many brethren—rush inside the centre of the life-giving fire whose outer circles burn. I believe that no hell will be lacking which would help the just mercy of God to redeem his children.434
MacDonald was concerned too that retributive justice acts independently of love. As presented in traditional theology, God is torn between wanting to forgive sinners in his love but having to punish them in his justice. In positing an inner divine conflict between justice and love, traditional theology threatens the divine unity. “God is one; and the depth of foolishness is reached by that theology which talks of God as if he held different offices, and differed in each. It sets a contradiction in the very nature of God himself. It represents him, for instance, as having to do that as a magistrate which as a father he would not do.”435
Rejecting Calvinist theology: no to penal substitution
The Calvinist saw the cross as the means by which God was able to resolve his inner conflict between his justice and love and thereby save the elect. MacDonald, however, thought penal substitution flawed at several levels. First, it construes God’s relationship to us in mechanical rather than relational ways. Second, it requires God to employ some legal trickery in order to forgive us, thus failing to appreciate the very nature of God’s forgiveness. Forgiveness is freely given and requires no fancy footwork on God’s part to enable him to grant it. Third, it actually extinguishes the possibility of forgiveness of sin, for if God insists on exacting the full penalty for our sins by punishing them in Christ then he has not forgiven the sin at all. Fourth, even if it made sense, all that penal substitution could accomplish would be to provide an escape hatch from punishment in hell, leaving us unchanged, still enslaved to sin. Fifth, it is incoherent even on its own terms, for on a retributive theory of justice, the punishment of an innocent man (Jesus) and the failure to punish the guilty (us) could not be the fulfillment of divine justice. “Justice could not treat a righteous man as an unrighteous. Neither, if justice required the punishment of sin, could justice let the sinner go unpunished.”436 MacDonald considered the teaching that Jesus was a sacrifice to pacify God’s wrath to be pure paganism: “Believe in Moloch if you will, but call him Moloch, not Justice.”437
According to MacDonald, this notion of justice and atonement, understood as a mechanism to divert God’s wrath from us, gets atonement back-to-front. Christ’s atoning work was not to reconcile God to us, but to reconcile us to God. God unwaveringly loves us. It is not God’s attitude that needs changing through atonement, but ours.
He came to satisfy God’s justice by giving him back his children; by making them see that God is just. . . . And there isn’t a word of reconciling God to us in all the Testament, for there was no need of that; it was us that needed to be reconciled to him. And so he bore our sins and carried our sorrows, for those sins . . . caused him no end of grief of mind and pain of body, as everyone knows. It wasn’t his own sins, for he had none, but ours, that caused him suffering; and he took them away. . . . He took our sins upon him, for he came into the middle of them and took them up—by no sleight of hand, by no quibbling of the lawyers about imputing his righteousness to us, and such like, which is not to be found in the Bible at all, though I don’t say that there’s no possible meaning in the phrase, but he took them and took them away, and here am I, . . . growing out of my sins in consequence.438
Thus he cries, “Away with your salvation from the ‘justice’ of a God whom it is a horror to imagine! Away with your iron cages of false metaphysics! I am saved—for God is light!”439
Rejecting Calvinist theology: no to salvation through right doctrine
MacDonald was very critical of the idea of salvation by faith in Christ when it was understood to mean salvation through believing in the right doctrines.
Believing that certain teachings and theories are true is not saving faith. Saving faith, he said, is believing in a person—Christ. “Even if your plan, your theories, were absolutely true, the holding of them with sincerity, the trusting in this or that about Christ, or in anything he did or could do—the trusting in anything but himself, his own living self—is still a delusion. . . . [W]e must believe in the atoning Christ, and cannot possibly believe in any theory concerning the atonement.”440
And belief in Christ means childlike obedience to Christ. If you don’t obey then you don’t believe. Consequently, in MacDonald’s view, there are plenty of Christians out there who are no more “saved” than many unbelievers, for although they believe the “right” doctrine, they lack childlike trust in and obedience to Christ. “It is better to be an atheist who does the will of God, than a so-called Christian who does not.”441
The doctrine of “imputed righteousness,” by which God looks at sinners but considers them—by means of a legal fiction—to be righteous, even though they have not become righteous was “the poorest of legal cobwebs spun by spiritual spiders.”442
Salvation, rather, is a long journey of sanctification, of self-denial and obedience to our loving Father, not a single moment in our lives. It is deliverance from sin, not deliverance from God’s wrath.
He came to deliver us from the evil in our being. . . . He came to deliver us, not from the things we have done, but the possibility of doing such things anymore. . . . Jesus was born to deliver us from all such and other sin—not primarily from the punishment of any of them. When all are gone, the holy punishment will have departed also. He came to make us good, and therein blessed children.443
Christ made the way back to the Father open for us, he showed us the path, and he enables us to walk in it. He walked the route of the cross, but not so that we don’t have to; he did it to show us how, so that we can take up our cross and follow him. “I believe that he died that I might die like him—die to any ruling power in me but the will of God.”444
Rejecting Calvinist theology: no to traditional hell
The traditional doctrine of hell was anathema to MacDonald. Not only was it unjust and unloving, thus incompatible with the truth revealed in Jesus, but it also represented the perpetuation of evil forever in God’s good creation, and thus a permanent failure on God’s part to achieve his purposes. Speaking of Dante’s inferno, MacDonald writes, “Such justice as Dante’s keeps wickedness alive in its most terrible forms. The life of God goes forth to inform, or at least give a home to victorious evil.”445 This is not the defeat of evil, but its triumph! Traditional hell makes no sense in light of MacDonald’s understanding of justice: “The justice of God is the love of what is right, and the doing of what is right. E
ternal misery in the name of justice could satisfy none but a demon whose bad laws had been broken.”446
MacDonald resisted the traditional idea that death was a point of no return, fixing our fates in eternal heaven or eternal hell. God cannot be less merciful than a human parent. “No amount of wrongdoing in a child can ever free a parent from the divine necessity of doing all he can to deliver his child.”447 Therefore, the claim that God would one day give up seeking the salvation of his children “is false as hell.”448
Nevertheless, MacDonald did teach a postmortem punishment from God, a version of hell. God’s love refuses to leave us in sin and will burn with painful but purifying fire. This fire is actually the presence of God himself, for our God is, in his purity, a consuming fire.
It is the nature of God, so terribly pure that it destroys all that is not pure as fire, which demands like purity in our worshipping. It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus; but that the fire will burn us until we worship thus; yea, will go on burning within us after all that is foreign to it has yielded to its force, no longer with pain and consuming, but as the highest consciousness of life, the presence of God. Yea, the fear of God will cause a man to flee, not from God, but from himself; not from God, but to him. . . . The wrath will consume what they call “themselves”; so that the selves God made shall appear. . . . That which they thought themselves shall have vanished.449
MacDonald was under no illusions about the resistance of sinners to God’s work in them, even when experiencing the painful flames of love. But “[i]f still he cling to that which can be burned, the burning goes deeper and deeper into his bosom, till it reaches the roots of the falsehood that enslaves him.”450 However, if the self-deceived rebel still resists the truth then there is God’s last resort—“He shall be cast into the outer darkness who hates the fire of God.”451 This is to grant the sinner what they mistakenly think they want—to be apart from God.
But when God withdraws from a man as far as that can be without the man’s ceasing to be; when the man feels himself abandoned, hanging in a ceaseless vertigo of existence upon the verge of the gulf of his being, without support, without refuge, without aim, without end, . . . then will he listen in agony for the faintest sound of life from the closed door; and if the moan of suffering humanity ever reaches the ear of the outcast of darkness, he will be ready to rush into the very heart of the Consuming Fire to know life once more.452
This outer darkness “is but the most dreadful form of the consuming fire—the fire without light—the darkness visible, the black flame. God has withdrawn himself, but not lost his hold. His face is turned away, but his hand is laid upon him still.”453 In this state, all one’s illusions of oneself and God shatter and that which prompted one’s flight from God is gone, opening the door to restoration.
MacDonald did contemplate the possibility that God would annihilate sinners who resist him to the end—if the only alternative was eternal torment (which it is not). He was clear that such an annihilation of sinners would not in any way make up for the wrongs they have done and it would constitute a failure for God. “Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil.”454 In the end, however, MacDonald did not believe that annihilation of sinners would be necessary. “Escape is hopeless, for Love is inexorable. Our God is a consuming fire.”455 Sinners cannot resist God forever. It is part of the very essence of humanity that we are created with an orientation to God, so as long as a human being, an image of God, exists there is always a way for the Creator to reach him or her.
Those who believe God will thus be defeated by many souls, must surely be of those who do not believe He cares enough to do His very best for them. He is their Father; he had power to make them out of Himself, and capable of being one with Him: surely He will somehow save and keep them! Not the power of sin itself can close all the channels between creating and created.456
But at length, O God, will you not cast Death and Hell into the lake of fire—even into your own consuming self? . . . Then indeed will you be all in all. For then our poor brothers and sisters, every one—O God, we trust in you, the Consuming Fire—shall have been burnt clean and brought home.457
“Every creature must one night yield himself and lie down,” answered Adam: “he was made for liberty, and must not be left a slave!”458
The only victory of God that makes any sense in MacDonald’s view is the victory of divine love, which is the destruction of sin from all sinners. If, per impossible, God were not to achieve this goal, then love would lose and so would justice. This universal victory is declared in the resurrection itself—Christ is risen and this means that all humanity will rise too: “If Christ be risen, then is the grave of humanity itself empty. We have risen with him, and death has henceforth no dominion over us. Of every dead man and woman it may be said: He—she—is not here, but is risen and gone before us.”459
The salvation of Lilith
MacDonald’s most powerful literary presentation of God’s reconciling to himself even the most hardened of sinners is found in the redemption to Lilith.460 Lilith, a figure from Jewish mythology, was Adam’s first wife. MacDonald presents her as an erotic, angelic creature obsessed with power, and unable to bear the thought of being married to Adam and populating the world with humans. After bearing a child, a daughter, she fled, sold her soul to “the great Shadow,” and became the queen of the city of Bulika, where she rules as a tyrant over her subjects. Fearing that her child would be the cause of her downfall, Lilith made her great mission that of finding and killing her own daughter. Lilith has become a wicked creature that can only steal, kill, and destroy, and she absolutely resists with every fiber of her being all offers of forgiveness and attempts at reconciliation.
In the story, Mr. Vane, the central character, takes Lilith prisoner and brings her to Mara, the daughter of Adam and Eve. Mara then seeks to help Lilith to see the truth about herself and to repent. The account of Lilith’s fierce and sustained resistance to Mara’s work is insightful and revealing. Lilith refuses to turn away from her wickedness and insists that she, Lilith, is her own ruler and that she acts according to the desires of her self. “I will be myself and not another!” Mara counter-claims that in fact Lilith does not know her true self; that her true nature is good, but that the Shadow inclines her to act against who she is in her core. “You are not the Self you imagine.” Lilith seems not to care, so long as she feels like she is doing what she wants then she considers herself to be self-made. As Alvin Kimel explains, “Lilith must learn one necessary truth—she did not create herself and cannot will her nonexistence. As long as she believes that she is an autonomous, independent, self-sufficient being, she remains a slave to the Shadow.”461
Lilith, living under a delusion, sees God as a threat to her liberty. To obey him is slavery and she refuses to abandon her “freedom,” even if she is tortured. Mara has no intention of torturing Lilith into submission to God—“Such compulsion would be of no value. But there is a light that goes deeper than the will, a light that lights up the darkness behind it: that light can change your will, can make it truly yours and not another’s—not the Shadow’s. Into the created can pour itself the creating will, and so redeem it!” The slave is not the one who obeys God, says Mara, but the one who resists God and becomes enslaved to sin.
Kimel explains that Lilith’s redemption takes place in four stages. First, the fire of God—taking the form of a white-hot worm from the hearth—enters her heart, revealing her true created self. This revelation is profound torment for her, for now she “sees at last the good she is not, the evil she is. She knows that she is herself the fire in which she is burning.” But, says Mara to Vane, “she is not forsaken. No gentler way to help her was left.” Lilith, however, still refuses to turn from her false self.
In the second stage,
Lilith cries tears of self-loathing. This is not sorrow, but it is a step in the right direction. However, Lilith still resists.
In the third stage, God grants her what she thinks she seeks—oblivion, nothingness, the outer darkness. Vane tries to explain it:
The source of life had withdrawn itself; all that was left of her conscious being was the dregs of her dead and corrupt life. . . . I gazed on the face of one who knew existence but not love—knew nor life, nor joy, nor good. . . . It was not merely that life had ceased in her, but that she was consciously a dead thing. . . . She now saw what she had made, and behold, it was not good! She was a conscious corpse. . . . Her bodily eyes stood wide open, as if gazing into the heart of horror essential—her own indestructible evil. . . . But with God all things are possible! He can save even the rich.
At this moment, Lilith cries out, “I cannot hold out! I am defeated.” She cannot deceive herself any more. Mara comforts her and assures her that while she is a slave she is on a journey to being again God’s free child, filled with the life of God.
The fourth and final stage is that Lilith must open her hand and surrender that which it contains—something unnamed that will bring life to the wasteland. She struggles to do this and begs Adam to sever her hand so that she can surrender the object. This he does, and Lilith falls asleep into healing peace.
MacDonald’s son Grenville wrote: “[Lilith] was written, I do think, in view of the increasingly easy tendencies in universalists, who, because they had now discarded everlasting retribution as a popular superstition, were dismissing hell-fire altogether, and with it the need for repentance as the way back into the Kingdom.”462 This seems entirely plausible. The story very beautifully illustrates how MacDonald imagined the consuming fire of God burning within a recalcitrant sinner in order to redeem them and bring them back to themselves, to God, to eternal life.
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