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Unspoken Sermons

G >> George MacDonald >> Unspoken Sermons




If it be asked how, if it be false, the doctrine of substitution can
have been permitted to remain so long an article of faith to so many, I
answer, On the same principle on which God took up and made use of the
sacrifices men had, in their lack of faith, invented as a way of
pleasing him. Some children will tell lies to please the parents that
hate lying. They will even confess to having done a wrong they have not
done, thinking their parents would like them to say they had done it,
because they teach them to confess. God accepted men's sacrifices until
he could get them to see--and with how many has he yet not succeeded,
in the church and out of it!--that he does not care for such things.

'But,' again it may well be asked, 'whence then has sprung the
undeniable potency of that teaching?'

I answer, From its having in it a notion of God and his Christ, poor
indeed and faint, but, by the very poverty and untruth in its
presentation, fitted to the weakness and unbelief of men, seeing it was
by men invented to meet and ease the demand made upon their own
weakness and unbelief. Thus the leaven spreads. The truth is there. It
is Christ the glory of God. But the ideas that poor slavish souls breed
concerning this glory the moment the darkness begins to disperse, is
quite another thing. Truth is indeed too good for men to believe; they
must dilute it before they can take it; they must dilute it before they
dare give it. They must make it less true before they can believe it
enough to get any good of it. Unable to believe in the love of the Lord
Jesus Christ, they invented a mediator in his mother, and so were able
to approach a little where else they had stood away; unable to believe
in the forgivingness of their father in heaven, they invented a way to
be forgiven that should not demand of him so much; which might make it
right for him to forgive; which should save them from having to believe
downright in the tenderness of his father-heart, for that they found
impossible. They thought him bound to punish for the sake of punishing,
as an offset to their sin; they could not believe in clear forgiveness;
that did not seem divine; it needed itself to be justified; so they
invented for its justification a horrible injustice, involving all that
was bad in sacrifice, even human sacrifice. They invented a
satisfaction for sin which was an insult to God. He sought no
satisfaction, but an obedient return to the Father. What satisfaction
was needed he made himself in what he did to cause them to turn from
evil and go back to him. The thing was too simple for complicated
unbelief and the arguing spirit. Gladly would I help their followers to
loathe such thoughts of God; but for that, they themselves must grow
better men and women. While they are capable of being satisfied with
them, there would be no advantage in their becoming intellectually
convinced that such thoughts were wrong. I would not speak a word to
persuade them of it. Success would be worthless. They would but remain
what they were--children capable of thinking meanly of their father.
When the heart recoils, discovering how horrible it would be to have
such an unreality for God, it will begin to search about and see
whether it must indeed accept such statements concerning God; it will
search after a real God by whom to hold fast, a real God to deliver
them from the terrible idol. It is for those thus moved that I write,
not at all for the sake of disputing with those who love the lie they
may not be to blame for holding; who, like the Jews of old, would cast
out of their synagogue the man who doubts the genuineness of their
moral caricature of God, who doubts their travesty of the grandest
truth in the universe, the atonement of Jesus Christ. Of such a man
they will unhesitatingly report that he does not believe in the
atonement. But a lie for God is against God, and carries the sentence
of death in itself.

Instead of giving their energy to do the will of God, men of power have
given it to the construction of a system by which to explain why Christ
must die, what were the necessities and designs of God in permitting
his death; and men of power of our own day, while casting from them not
a little of the good in the teaching of the Roman Church, have clung to
the morally and spiritually vulgar idea of justice and satisfaction
held by pagan Rome, buttressed by the Jewish notion of sacrifice, and
in its very home, alas, with the mother of all the western churches!
Better the reformers had kept their belief in a purgatory, and parted
with what is called vicarious sacrifice!

Their system is briefly this: God is bound to punish sin, and to punish
it to the uttermost. His justice requires that sin be punished. But he
loves man, and does not want to punish him if he can help it. Jesus
Christ says, 'I will take his punishment upon me.' God accepts his
offer, and lets man go unpunished--upon a condition. His justice is
more than satisfied by the punishment of an infinite being instead of a
world of worthless creatures. The suffering of Jesus is of greater
value than that of all the generations, through endless ages, because
he is infinite, pure, perfect in love and truth, being God's own
everlasting son. God's condition with man is, that he believe in
Christ's atonement thus explained. A man must say, 'I have sinned, and
deserve to be tortured to all eternity. But Christ has paid my debts,
by being punished instead of me. Therefore he is my Saviour. I am now
bound by gratitude to him to turn away from evil.' Some would doubtless
insist on his saying a good deal more, but this is enough for my
purpose.

As to the justice of God requiring the punishment of the sinner, I have
said enough. That the mere suffering of the sinner can be no
satisfaction to justice, I have also tried to show. If the suffering of
the sinner be indeed required by the justice of God, let it be
administered. But what shall we say adequate to confront the base
representation that it is not punishment, not the suffering of the
sinner that is required, but suffering! nay, as if this were not depth
enough of baseness to crown all heathenish representation of the ways
of God, that the suffering of the innocent is unspeakably preferable in
his eyes to that of the wicked, as a make-up for wrong done! nay,
again, 'in the lowest deep a lower deep,' that the suffering of the
holy, the suffering of the loving, the suffering of the eternally and
perfectly good, is supremely satisfactory to the pure justice of the
Father of spirits! Not all the suffering that could be heaped upon the
wicked could buy them a moment's respite, so little is their suffering
a counterpoise to their wrong; in the working of this law of
equivalents, this _lex talionis_, the suffering of millions of years
could not equal the sin of a moment, could not pay off one farthing of
the deep debt. But so much more valuable, precious, and dear, is the
suffering of the innocent, so much more of a satisfaction--observe--to
the _justice_ of God, that in return for that suffering another wrong
is done: the sinners who deserve and ought to be punished are set free.

I know the root of all that can be said on the subject; the notion is
imbedded in the gray matter of my Scotch brains; and if I reject it, I
know what I reject. For the love of God my heart rose early against the
low invention. Strange that in a Christian land it should need to be
said, that to punish the innocent and let the guilty go free is unjust!
It wrongs the innocent, the guilty, and God himself. It would be the
worst of all wrongs to the guilty to treat them as innocent. The whole
device is a piece of spiritual charlatanry--fit only for a fraudulent
jail-delivery. If the wicked ought to be punished, it were the worst
possible perversion of justice to take a righteous being however
strong, and punish him instead of the sinner however weak. To the
poorest idea of justice in punishment, it is essential that the sinner,
and no other than the sinner, should receive the punishment. The strong
being that was willing to bear such punishment might well be regarded
as worshipful, but what of the God whose so-called justice he thus
defeats? If you say it is justice, not God that demands the suffering,
I say justice cannot demand that which is unjust, and the whole thing
is unjust. God is absolutely just, and there is no deliverance from his
justice, which is one with his mercy. The device is an absurdity--a
grotesquely deformed absurdity. To represent the living God as a party
to such a style of action, is to veil with a mask of cruelty and
hypocrisy the face whose glory can he seen only in the face of Jesus;
to put a tirade of vulgar Roman legality into the mouth of the Lord God
merciful and gracious, who will by no means clear the guilty. Rather
than believe such ugly folly of him whose very name is enough to make
those that know him heave the breath of the hart panting for the
waterbrooks; rather than think of him what in a man would make me avoid
him at the risk of my life, I would say, 'There is no God; let us
neither eat nor drink, that we may die! For lo, this is not our God!
This is not he for whom we have waited!' But I have seen his face and
heard his voice in the face and the voice of Jesus Christ; and I say
this is our God, the very one whose being the Creator makes it an
infinite gladness to be the created. I will not have the God of the
scribes and the pharisees whether Jewish or Christian, protestant,
Roman, or Greek, but thy father, O Christ! He is my God. If you say,
'That is our God, not yours!' I answer, 'Your portrait of your God is
an evil caricature of the face of Christ.'

To believe in a vicarious sacrifice, is to think to take refuge with
the Son from the righteousness of the Father; to take refuge with his
work instead of with the Son himself; to take refuge with a theory of
that work instead of the work itself; to shelter behind a false quirk
of law instead of nestling in the eternal heart of the unchangeable and
righteous Father, who is merciful in that he renders to every man
according to his work, and compels their obedience, nor admits judicial
quibble or subterfuge. God will never let a man off with any fault. He
must have him clean. He will excuse him to the very uttermost of truth,
but not a hair's-breadth beyond it; he is his true father, and will
have his child true as his son Jesus Christ is true. He will impute to
him nothing that he has not, will lose sight of no smallest good that
he has; will quench no smoking flax, break no bruised reed, but send
forth judgment unto victory. He is God beyond all that heart hungriest
for love and righteousness could to eternity desire.

If you say the best of men have held the opinions I stigmatize, I
answer, 'Some of the best of men have indeed held these theories, and
of men who have held them I have loved and honoured some heartily and
humbly--but because of what they _were_, not because of what they
_thought_; and they were what they were in virtue of their obedient
faith, not of their opinion. They were not better men because of
holding these theories. In virtue of knowing God by obeying his son,
they rose above the theories they had never looked in the face, and so
had never recognized as evil. Many have arrived, in the natural
progress of their sacred growth, at the point where they must abandon
them. The man of whom I knew the most good gave them up gladly. Good to
worshipfulness may be the man that holds them, and I hate them the more
therefore; they are lies that, working under cover of the truth mingled
with them, burrow as near the heart of the good man as they can go.
Whoever, from whatever reason of blindness, may be the holder of a lie,
the thing is a lie, and no falsehood must mingle with the justice we
mete out to it. There is nothing for any lie but the pit of hell. Yet
until the man sees the thing to be a lie, how shall he but hold it! Are
there not mingled with it shadows of the best truth in the universe? So
long as a man is able to love a lie, he is incapable of seeing it is a
lie. He who is true, out and out, will know at once an untruth; and to
that vision we must all come. I do not write for the sake of those who
either make or heartily accept any lie. When they see the glory of God,
they will see the eternal difference between the false and the true,
and not till then. I write for those whom such teaching as theirs has
folded in a cloud through which they cannot see the stars of heaven, so
that some of them even doubt if there be any stars of heaven. For the
holy ones who believed and taught these things in days gone by, all is
well. Many of the holiest of them cast the lies from them long ere the
present teachers of them were born. Many who would never have invented
them for themselves, yet receiving them with the seals affixed of so
many good men, took them in their humility as recognized truths,
instead of inventions of men; and, oppressed by authority, the
authority of men far inferior to themselves, did not dare dispute them,
but proceeded to order their lives by what truths they found in their
company, and so had their reward, the reward of obedience, in being by
that obedience brought to know God, which knowledge broke for them the
net of a presumptuous self-styled orthodoxy. Every man who tries to
obey the Master is my brother, whether he counts me such or not, and I
revere him; but dare I give quarter to what I see to be a lie, because
my brother believes it? The lie is not of God, whoever may hold it.

'Well, then,' will many say, 'if you thus unceremoniously cast to the
winds the doctrine of vicarious sacrifice, what theory do you propose
to substitute in its stead?'

'In the name of the truth,' I answer, _None_. I will send out no theory
of mine to rouse afresh little whirlwinds of dialogistic dust mixed
with dirt and straws and holy words, hiding the Master in talk about
him. If I have any such, I will not cast it on the road as I walk, but
present it on a fair patine to him to whom I may think it well to show
it. Only eyes opened by the sun of righteousness, and made single by
obedience, can judge even the poor moony pearl of formulated thought.
Say if you will that I fear to show my opinion. Is the man a coward who
will not fling his child to the wolves? What faith in this kind I have,
I will have to myself before God, till I see better reason for uttering
it than I do now.

'Will you then take from me my faith, and help me to no other?'

Your faith! God forbid. Your theory is not your faith, nor anything
like it. Your faith is your obedience; your theory I know not what.
Yes, I will gladly leave you without any of what you call faith. Trust
in God. Obey the word--every word of the Master. That is faith; and so
believing, your opinion will grow out of your true life, and be worthy
of it. Peter says the Lord gives the spirit to them that obey him: the
spirit of the Master, and that alone, can guide you to any theory that
it will be of use to you to hold. A theory arrived at any other way is
not worth the time spent on it. Jesus is the creating and saving lord
of our intellects as well as of our more precious hearts; nothing that
he does not think, is worth thinking; no man can think as he thinks,
except he be pure like him; no man can be pure like him, except he go
with him, and learn from him. To put off obeying him till we find a
credible theory concerning him, is to set aside the potion we know it
our duty to drink, for the study of the various schools of therapy. You
know what Christ requires of you is right--much of it at least you
believe to be right, and your duty to do, whether he said it or not:
_do it_. If you do not do what you know of the truth, I do not wonder
that you seek it intellectually, for that kind of search may well be,
as Milton represents it, a solace even to the fallen angels. But do not
call anything that may be so gained, _The Truth_. How can you, not
caring to _be_ true, judge concerning him whose life was to do for very
love the things you confess your duty, yet do them not? Obey the truth,
I say, and let theory wait. Theory may spring from life, but never life
from theory.

I will not then tell you what I think, but I will tell any man who
cares to hear it what I believe. I will do it now. Of course what I say
must partake thus much of the character of theory that I cannot prove
it; I can only endeavour to order my life by it.

I believe in Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, my elder brother, my
lord and master; I believe that he has a right to my absolute obedience
whereinsoever I know or shall come to know his will; that to obey him
is to ascend the pinnacle of my being; that not to obey him would be to
deny him. I believe that he died that I might die like him--die to any
ruling power in me but the will of God--live ready to be nailed to the
cross as he was, if God will it. I believe that he is my Saviour from
myself, and from all that has come of loving myself, from all that God
does not love, and would not have me love--all that is not worth
loving; that he died that the justice, the mercy of God, might have its
way with me, making me just as God is just, merciful as he is merciful,
perfect as my father in heaven is perfect. I believe and pray that he
will give me what punishment I need to set me right, or keep me from
going wrong. I believe that he died to deliver me from all meanness,
all pretence, all falseness, all unfairness, all poverty of spirit, all
cowardice, all fear, all anxiety, all forms of self-love, all trust or
hope in possession; to make me merry as a child, the child of our
father in heaven, loving nothing but what is lovely, desiring nothing I
should be ashamed to let the universe of God see me desire. I believe
that God is just like Jesus, only greater yet, for Jesus said so. I
believe that God is absolutely, grandly beautiful, even as the highest
soul of man counts beauty, but infinitely beyond that soul's highest
idea--with the beauty that creates beauty, not merely shows it, or
itself exists beautiful. I believe that God has always done, is always
doing his best for every man; that no man is miserable because God is
forgetting him; that he is not a God to crouch before, but our father,
to whom the child-heart cries exultant, 'Do with me as thou wilt.'

I believe that there is nothing good for me or for any man but God, and
more and more of God, and that alone through knowing Christ can we come
nigh to him.

I believe that no man is ever condemned for any sin except one--that he
will not leave his sins and come out of them, and be the child of him
who is his father.

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.

I believe that to him who obeys, and thus opens the doors of his heart
to receive the eternal gift, God gives the spirit of his son, the
spirit of himself, to be in him, and lead him to the understanding of
all truth; that the true disciple shall thus always know what he ought
to do, though not necessarily what another ought to do; that the spirit
of the father and the son enlightens by teaching righteousness. I
believe that no teacher should strive to make men think as he thinks,
but to lead them to the living Truth, to the Master himself, of whom
alone they can learn anything, who will make them in themselves know
what is true by the very seeing of it. I believe that the inspiration
of the Almighty alone gives understanding. I believe that to be the
disciple of Christ is the end of being; that to persuade men to be his
disciples is the end of teaching.

'The sum of all this is that you do not believe in the atonement?'

I believe in Jesus Christ. Nowhere am I requested to believe _in_ any
thing, or _in_ any statement, but everywhere to believe in God and in
Jesus Christ. In what you call _the atonement_, in what you mean by the
word, what I have already written must make it plain enough I do not
believe. God forbid I should, for it would be to believe a lie, and a
lie which is to blame for much non-acceptance of the gospel in this and
other lands. But, as the word was used by the best English writers at
the time when the translation of the Bible was made--with all my heart,
and soul, and strength, and mind, I believe in the atonement, call it
the _a-tone-ment_, or the _at-one-ment_, as you please. I believe that
Jesus Christ _is_ our atonement; that through him we are reconciled to,
made one with God. There is not one word in the New Testament about
reconciling God to us; it is we that have to be reconciled to God. I am
not writing, neither desire to write, a treatise on the atonement, my
business being to persuade men to be atoned to God; but I will go so
far to meet my questioner as to say--without the slightest expectation
of satisfying him, or the least care whether I do so or not, for his
_opinion_ is of no value to me, though his truth is of endless value to
me and to the universe--that, even in the sense of the atonement being
a making-up for the evil done by men toward God, I believe in the
atonement. Did not the Lord cast himself into the eternal gulf of evil
yawning between the children and the Father? Did he not bring the
Father to us, let us look on our eternal Sire in the face of his true
son, that we might have that in our hearts which alone could make us
love him--a true sight of him? Did he not insist on the one truth of
the universe, the one saving truth, that God was just what he was? Did
he not hold to that assertion to the last, in the face of contradiction
and death? Did he not thus lay down his life persuading us to lay down
ours at the feet of the Father? Has not his very life by which he died
passed into those who have received him, and re-created theirs, so that
now they live with the life which alone is life? Did he not foil and
slay evil by letting all the waves and billows of its horrid sea break
upon him, go over him, and die without rebound--spend their rage, fall
defeated, and cease? Verily, he made atonement! _We_ sacrifice to
God!--it is God who has sacrificed his own son to us; there was no way
else of getting the gift of himself into our hearts. Jesus sacrificed
himself to his father and the children to bring them together--all the
love on the side of the Father and the Son, all the selfishness on the
side of the children. If the joy that alone makes life worth living,
the joy that God is such as Christ, be a true thing in my heart, how
can I but believe in the atonement of Jesus Christ? I believe it
heartily, as God means it.

Then again, as the power that brings about a making-up for any wrong
done by man to man, I believe in the atonement. Who that believes in
Jesus does not long to atone to his brother for the injury he has done
him? What repentant child, feeling he has wronged his father, does not
desire to make atonement? Who is the mover, the causer, the persuader,
the creator of the repentance, of the passion that restores
fourfold?--Jesus, our propitiation, our atonement. He is the head and
leader, the prince of the atonement. He could not do it without us, but
he leads us up to the Father's knee: he makes us make atonement.
Learning Christ, we are not only sorry for what we have done wrong, we
not only turn from it and hate it, but we become able to serve both God
and man with an infinitely high and true service, a soul-service. We
are able to offer our whole being to God to whom by deepest right it
belongs. Have I injured anyone? With him to aid my justice, new risen
with him from the dead, shall I not make good amends? Have I failed in
love to my neighbour? Shall I not now love him with an infinitely
better love than was possible to me before? That I will and can make
atonement, thanks be to him who is my atonement, making me at one with
God and my fellows! He is my life, my joy, my lord, my owner, the
perfecter of my being by the perfection of his own. I dare not say with
Paul that I am the slave of Christ; but my highest aspiration and
desire is to be the slave of Christ.

'But you do not believe that the sufferings of Christ, as sufferings,
justified the supreme ruler in doing anything which he would not have
been at liberty to do but for those sufferings?'

I do not. I believe the notion as unworthy of man's belief, as it is
dishonouring to God. It has its origin doubtless in a salutary sense of
sin; but sense of sin is not inspiration, though it may lie not far
from the temple-door. It is indeed an opener of the eyes, but upon
home-defilement, not upon heavenly truth; it is not the revealer of
secrets. Also there is another factor in the theory, and that is
unbelief--incapacity to accept the freedom of God's forgiveness;
incapacity to believe that it is God's chosen nature to forgive, that
he is bound in his own divinely willed nature to forgive. No atonement
is necessary to him but that men should leave their sins and come back
to his heart. But men cannot believe in the forgiveness of God.
Therefore they need, therefore he has given them a mediator. And yet
they will not know him. They think of the father of souls as if he had
abdicated his fatherhood for their sins, and assumed the judge. If he
put off his fatherhood, which he cannot do, for it is an eternal fact,
he puts off with it all relation to us. He cannot repudiate the
essential and keep the resultant. Men cannot, or will not, or dare not
see that nothing but his being our father gives him any right over
us--that nothing but that could give him a perfect right. They regard
the father of their spirits as their governor! They yield the idea of
the Ancient of Days, 'the glad creator,' and put in its stead a
miserable, puritanical martinet of a God, caring not for righteousness,
but for his rights; not for the eternal purities, but the goody
proprieties. The prophets of such a God take all the glow, all the
hope, all the colour, all the worth, out of life on earth, and offer
you instead what they call eternal bliss--a pale, tearless hell. Of all
things, turn from a mean, poverty stricken faith. But, if you ate
straitened in your own mammon-worshipping soul, how shall you believe
in a God any greater than can stand up in that prison-chamber?

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