Geo MacDonald: What the Apostle Paul Meant by 'Adoption'

In a sermon on Romans 8:15, George MacDonald says the following about what he believes the apostle Paul intended to say when he speaks of adoption:

"The hardest, gladdest thing in all the world is to cry Father! from a full heart. I would help whom I may to call thus upon the Father.

"There are many things in all forms of the systematic teachings of Christianity to block such an outgoing of the heart as this most elemental human cry...(one) such cold wind is the so-called doctrine of adoption."

MacDonald proceeds to explain that the word "adoption" is a poor translation of what Paul is saying about God and His relationship to His children. It is a good word for human transactions, but the problem in using it with God is that it suggests that God is not our original parent or that He was our father, then repudiated us as children and then took us again. MacDonald contends that this kind of view of God's fatherhood gets in the way of our being able to cry "Father!" from a full heart.

So he goes on to say he doesn't believe that the word "adoption" was what Paul had in mind when using the Greek word huiothesia:  "...the word used by St. Paul does not imply that God adopts children that are not his own, but rather that a second time he fathers his own...He will make himself tenfold, yea, infinitely their father...He will have them one with himself..."

"(Paul) means the raising of a father's own child from the condition of tutelage and subjection to others to the position and rights of a son...The idea is that of a spiritual coming of age. Only when a child is a man is he really and fully a son...To be a child is not necessarily to be a son or daughter. The childship is the lower condition of the upward process toward the sonship. It is the soil out of which the true sonship shall grow.

"No more than an earthly parent, God cannot be content to have only children. He must have sons and daughters...His children are not his real, true sons and daughters until they think like him, feel with him, judge as he judges, until they are at home with him and without fear before him because he and they mean the same thing, love the same things, seek the same ends.

"For this we are created. It is the one end of our being and includes all other ends whatever."

Geo MacDonald: The Teacher's Job

In his book, Discovering the Character of God, MacDonald says:
"No teacher should strive to make others think as he thinks, but to lead them to the living Truth, to the Master himself, of whom alone they can learn anything, and who will make them in themselves know what is true by the very seeing of it. The inspiration of the Almighty alone gives understanding. To be the disciple of Christ is the end of being, and to persuade others to be his disciples is the aim of all teaching."

In MacDonald's novel, The Fisherman's Lady, Mr. Graham is a school teacher. In describing him, MacDonald says: 
"He would never contradict anything but would oppose error only by teaching truth. He presented truth and set it face to face with error in the minds of his students, leaving the two sides and the growing intellect, heart, and conscience to fight the matter out. To him the business of the teacher was to rouse and urge this battle by leading fresh forces of truth onto the field."

Geo MacDonald: Light Is More Important than Knowledge and Opinions

The following is taken from some of MacDonald's sermons and essays:

"The man who holds his opinions the most honestly ought to see the most plainly that his opinion must change...If we held opinions aright, we should know that nothing in them that is good can ever be lost...It is only as they help us toward God that our opinions are worth a straw. And every necessary change in them must be to more truth, to greater uplifting power...My opinions, just as my life, as my love, I leave in the hands of him from whom all came.

"Why then is there such dislike to the very idea of change of our ideas...? It may be objected that no man will hold his opinions with the needed earnestness who can entertain the idea of having to change them. But the very objection speaks powerfully against such an overvaluing of opinion...

"Let us...beware lest our opinions come between us and our God, between us and our neighbor, between us and our better selves...The one security is to walk according to the truth which they contain. And if men seem to be unreasonable, opposers of that which to us is plainly true, let us remember that we are not here to convince men, but to let our light shine.

"Knowledge is not necessarily light. And it is light, not knowledge, that we have to spread. The best thing we can do that men may receive truth, is to be ourselves true...

"Above all, let us be humble before the God of truth, faithfully desiring of him that truth in the inward parts which alone can enable us to walk according to that which we have attained..."

Geo MacDonald: The Bible Isn't about the Bible but about the Living God

Speaking in one of his characters in his novel, A Daughter's Devotion, George MacDonald says the following about the Bible:

"...she (did not have) the opportunity of making acquaintance with any who believed and lived like her father in any of the churches in her town. But she had her Bible, and when that troubled her, as it did sometimes, she had God himself to cry to for such wisdom as she could receive. And one of the things she learned was that nowhere in the Bible was she called on to believe in the Bible but in the living God in whom is no darkness, and who alone can give light to understand his own intent. All her troubles she carried to him..."

And in a letter to an unidentified woman who accused MacDonald of not have any of the "old faith left", he wrote the following about scripture:
"...Do not suppose that I believe in Jesus because it is said so-and-so in a book. I believe in him because he is himself. The vision of him in that book and his own living power in me have enabled me to understand him, to look him in the face, as it were, and accept him as my Master and Saviour... The Bible is to me the most precious thing in the world, because it tells me his story and what good men thought about him who knew him and accepted him. But the common theory of the inspiration of the words, instead of the breathing of God's truth into the hearts and souls of those who wrote it, and who then did their best with it, is degrading and evil; and they who hold it are in danger of worshipping the letter instead of living in the Spirit, of being idolaters of the Bible instead of disciples of Jesus...It is Jesus who is the Revelation of God, not the Bible; that is but a means to a mighty eternal end. The book is indeed sent us by God, but it nowhere claims to be his very word...Jesus alone is the Word of God.

"...all my hope, all my joy, all my strength are in the Lord Christ and his Father; all my theories of life and growth are rooted in him; his truth is gradually clearing up the mysteries of this world...To him I belong heart and soul and body, and he may do with me as he will - nay, nay - I pray him to do with me as he wills: for that is my only well-being and freedom."

MacDonald understood God's intended purpose in scripture to be a means to Jesus, not to be an end in itself and so was able to appreciate it more fully.

Geo MacDonald: Jesus and Women

From his novel, The Curate's Awakening, MacDonald speaks through the mouth of the young curate Wingfold as he was talking with another person about the women that Jesus had spoken to and how it was easy to see how much Jesus loved women by the way he talked to them. Wingfold ended the conversation by saying:

"How any woman can help casting herself heart and soul at the feet of such a man, I cannot imagine. You do not once read of a woman being against him - except his own mother when she thought he was going astray and forgetting his high mission. The divine love in him toward his Father in heaven and his brethren was ever melting down his conscious individuality in sweetest showers upon individual hearts. He came down like rain upon the mown grass, like showers that water he earth. No woman, no man surely ever saw him as he was and did not worship him."

Geo MacDonald: God Is Not Angry with You

In one of his novels, George MacDonald has young Robert saying the following to his grandmother (who had been raised with a view of God as an angry God requiring punishment to turn away His wrath toward humans):

"It's more for our sakes than His own that God cares about his glory. I don't believe that he thinks about his glory except for the sake of truth and men's hearts dying for lack of it...

"God's not like a proud man to take offense, Grannie. There's nothing that please him like the truth, and there's nothing that displeases him like lying, particularly when it's pretended praise...you say some things about him sometimes that sound fearsome to me...
Like when you speak of him as if he was a poor proud man, full of his own importance and ready to be down on anybody that didn't call him by the name of his office - always thinking about his own glory, instead of the quiet mighty grand self-forgetting, all-creating being that he is. Think of the face of that man of sorrows that never said a hard word to a sinful woman or a despised publican. Was he thinking about his own glory, do you think? And whatever isn't like Christ isn't like God."
 
"But laddie, Christ came to satisfy God's justice by suffering the punishment due to our sins, to turn aside his wrath and curse. So Jesus couldn't be altogether God."

"Oh but he is, Grannie. He came to satisfy God's justice by giving him back his children, by making them see that God was just, by sending them back home to fall at his feet...And there isn't a word of reconciling God to us in the New Testament, for there was no need of that; it was us that needed to be reconciled to him...It wasn't his own sins or God's wrath that caused him suffering, but our own sins. 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 preachers about imputing his righteousness to us and such like. But he took them and took them away and here am I, Grannie, growing out of my sins in consequence..."

Geo MacDonald: God and Nature

I plan to put out a series of posts of random quotes from George MacDonald, an all-time favorite author of mine (see Geroge MacDonald). Here are some of his thoughts about nature and God:

 
"I believe that every fact in nature is a revelation of God...from the moment when we first come into contact with the world, it is to us a revelation of God, his things seen by which we come to know the things unseen."

"The truth of a thing, then, is the blossom of it, the thing it is made for, the topmost stone set on with rejoicing...in anything that God has made, in the glory of it, be it sky or flower or human face, we see the glory of God, there a true imagination is beholding a truth of God."

"The heavens and the earth are around us that it may be possible for us to speak of the unseen by the seen, for the outermost husk of creation has correspondence with the deeper things of the Creator. He is not a God that hides himself, but a God who made all that he might reveal himself."