When we confess that God is just, what do we mean? Quite likely we mean that God rewards good deeds and punishes evil deeds, either in this life or the next, in the exact proportion they deserve. God is likened to a wise magistrate, knowing all motivations, particulars, contingencies, and consequences. He dispenses impartial justice, universally and comprehensively. The virtuous are rewarded with goods and blessings, and the wicked are punished by the infliction of privation and suffering. Each receives their due. No one can complain that they have been treated unfairly; no one can protest that God has not set things right. Yet if we define the divine justice as the rewarding of good and the punishing of evil, God would seem to be committed to punish every iniquitous and sinful act, without exception. To do otherwise would be an abdication of duty and a violation of justice. What then of the divine mercy? Has it been expunged from God? That cannot be correct. As the psalmist sings: “For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call upon you” (Ps 86:5). We thus appear to be presented with a contradiction in God himself. For the way forward, we turn to the prophet of Scotland, George MacDonald.[1]
The Injustice of Retribution
In his famous sermon “Justice,” MacDonald rejects the popular identification of justice with retribution:
If you ask any ordinary Sunday congregation in England, what is meant by the justice of God, would not nineteen out of twenty answer, that it means his punishing of sin? Think for a moment what degree of justice it would indicate in a man—that he punished every wrong. A Roman emperor, a Turkish cadi, might do that, and be the most unjust both of men and judges. Ahab might be just on the throne of punishment, and in his garden the murderer of Naboth. In God shall we imagine a distinction of office and character? 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! The love of the father makes him desire to be unjust as a magistrate![2]
Instead of imagining God as a courtroom judge, imagine him as a perfect father. How does a good father treat his children? Is he principally concerned to punish according to the letter of the law? Absolutely not. All of his acts toward his children are motivated by love, by the desire to advance their long-term well-being. When they injure someone, he insists they make apology and restitution. He may even administer corporal punishment (my father typically used a yardstick), but always the good of the child is uppermost in his mind. His goal is to set his child on the right path. This is the fair play which constitutes genuine justice and best accords with the merciful character of the God and Father of Jesus Christ. God is just because he always acts in service to the good. Justice and love are one.
Is God bound to punish sin? George MacDonald’s answer is an emphatic no. If the answer were yes, then forgiveness would be impossible. Justice and mercy would find themselves opposed to each other, generating a schism within the Godhead. But we know that God does forgive sin; hence it must be just and right for him to forgive. But wickedness deserves punishment, the retributivist replies. The lex talionis enjoys a long history, and several texts in Scripture appear to support it. Yet how do we reconcile retribution with mercy? If justice demands the punishment of our sinful acts, then they must be punished to the full extent required by justice. It will not do to think of God as first punishing sin and then subsequently forgiving it. “If sin demands punishment, and the righteous punishment is given, then the man is free,” comments MacDonald. “Why should he be forgiven?”[3] Clearly there is something odd about the idea of pardoning an offense after punishment has been dispensed. The jurist within us demands that wrongdoers endure the suffering they deserve. If one of my loved ones have been wounded, harmed, or murdered, I want the criminal to suffer. That’s why we have prisons and executions. Vengeance must be exacted—“eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe” (Ex 21:24-25).
Yet the infliction of pain, declares MacDonald, cannot put the world to rights:
Punishment, deserved suffering, is no equipoise to sin. It is no use laying it in the other scale. It will not move it a hair’s breadth. Suffering weighs nothing at all against sin. It is not of the same kind, not under the same laws, any more than mind and matter. We say a man deserves punishment; but when we forgive and do not punish him, we do not always feel that we have done wrong; neither when we do punish him do we feel that any amends has been made for his wrongdoing. If it were an offset to wrong, then God would be bound to punish for the sake of the punishment; but he cannot be, for he forgives. Then it is not for the sake of the punishment, as a thing that in itself ought to be done, but for the sake of something else, as a means to an end, that God punishes. It is not directly for justice, else how could he show mercy, for that would involve injustice?[4]
God forgives! This liberating gospel truth alone should alone compel us to reevaluate our inherited notion of retributive justice. The infliction of suffering upon the wrongdoer does not provide redress; it does not rectify; it does not heal the disorder created by the crime. Retribution has no place in the divine heart. If God is just, he has but one duty: to destroy the sin that has entered into his good world:
Primarily, God is not bound to punish sin; he is bound to destroy sin. If he were not the Maker, he might not be bound to destroy sin—I do not know; but seeing he has created creatures who have sinned, and therefore sin has, by the creating act of God, come into the world, God is, in his own righteousness, bound to destroy sin.[5]
The true justice of God is restorative, not punitive. The infliction of suffering, in and of itself, makes better neither the world nor the sinner.
The Hermeneutics of Love
MacDonald denounces every reading of Scripture, no matter how literal and plain, that attributes to God what, in our heart of hearts, we know to be evil:
But you say he does so and so, and is just; I say, he does not do so and so, and is just. You say he does, for the Bible says so. I say, if the Bible said so, the Bible would lie; but the Bible does not say so. The lord of life complains of men for not judging right. To say on the authority of the Bible that God does a thing no honourable man would do, is to lie against God; to say that it is therefore right, is to lie against the very spirit of God.[6]
MacDonald is not afraid to appeal to conscience in his interpretation of the Scriptures. “I acknowledge no authority calling upon me to believe a thing of God,” he comments, “which I could not believe right in my fellow man.”[7] This may sound like mere humanism, but that would misread the Scotsman’s intent. He is appealing to a conscience that has been fully informed by God’s self-revelation in Jesus. He reads the Scriptures in Christ and through Christ. Hence he will not entertain any construal of the Bible that contradicts the character of the Father made known in the teachings and example of the Incarnate Son. Against the literalism of a naive biblicism, MacDonald proposes a hermeneutic of love. When confronted with difficult Scriptural texts, we must strive to bring our interpretation in line with the dominical revelation that God is love—absolute, infinite, unconditional love. What we must not do is justify evil in the name of Jesus Christ:
If you say, That may be right of God to do which it would not be right of man to do, I answer, Yes, because the relation of the maker to his creatures is very different from the relation of one of those creatures to another, and he has therefore duties toward his creatures requiring of him what no man would have the right to do to his fellow-man; but he can have no duty that is not both just and merciful. More is required of the maker, by his own act of creation, than can be required of men. More and higher justice and righteousness is required of him by himself, the Truth;—greater nobleness, more penetrating sympathy; and nothing but what, if an honest man understood it, he would say was right. If it be a thing man cannot understand, then man can say nothing as to whether it is right or wrong. He cannot even know that God does it, when the it is unintelligible to him. What he calls it may be but the smallest facet of a composite action. His part is silence. If it be said by any that God does a thing, and the thing seems to me unjust, then either I do not know what the thing is, or God does not do it. The saying cannot mean what it seems to mean, or the saying is not true. If, for instance, it be said that God visits the sins of the fathers on the children, a man who takes visits upon to mean punishes, and the children to mean the innocent children, ought to say, ‘Either I do not understand the statement, or the thing is not true, whoever says it.’ God may do what seems to a man not right, but it must so seem to him because God works on higher, on divine, on perfect principles, too right for a selfish, unfair, or unloving man to understand. But least of all must we accept some low notion of justice in a man, and argue that God is just in doing after that notion.[8]
MacDonald is not proposing a novel way to read the Holy Scriptures. Many of the Church Fathers insist that we may not attribute to God words, actions, characteristics that would be unworthy of the Father made known in his Son Jesus Christ. St Isaac the Syrian, for example, is clear: the crucified and risen Christ is our hermeneutic; we read the Scriptures through the spectacles of cruciform love. We must not, therefore, remain at the surface of the text but must delve deeper until we find the divine Lover waiting for us:
That we should imagine that anger, wrath, jealousy or the such like have anything to do with the divine Nature is utterly abhorrent for us: no one in their right mind, no one who has any understanding at all can possibly come to such madness as to think anything of the sort against God. Nor again can we possibly say that He acts thus out of retribution, even though the Scriptures may on the outer surface posit this. Even to think this of God and to suppose that retribution for evil acts is to be found with Him is abominable. By implying that He makes use of such a great and difficult thing out of retribution we are attributing a weakness to the divine Nature. We cannot even believe such a thing can be found in those human beings who live a virtuous and upright life and whose thoughts are entirely in accord with the divine will—let alone believe it of God, that He has done something out of retribution for anticipated evil acts in connection with those whose nature He had brought into being with honour and great love. Knowing them and all their conduct, the flow of His grace did not dry up from them: not even after they started living amid many evil deeds did He withhold His care for them, even for a moment. . . . For it would be most odious and utterly blasphemous to think that hate or resentment exists with God, even against demonic beings; or to imagine any other weakness, or passibility, or whatever else might be involved in the course of retribution of good or bad as applying, in a retributive way, to that glorious divine Nature.[9]
The Obligations of Love
Of particular interest is MacDonald’s claim that by his creation of the world God has assumed moral obligations toward his creatures. MacDonald seems to be departing from the classical teaching that because the Creator is the transcendent source of morality, he has no obligations toward the world. In reply, MacDonald insists that the Father of Jesus always acts for the good of his children. What we call divine obligation is but an expression of his faithfulness and love:
‘Ah, but,’ says the partisan of God, ‘the Almighty stands in a relation very different from that of an earthly father: there is no parallel.’ I grant it: there is no parallel. The man did not create the child, he only yielded to an impulse created in himself: God is infinitely more bound to provide for his child than any man is to provide for his. The relation is infinitely, divinely closer. It is God to whom every hunger, every aspiration, every desire, every longing of our nature is to be referred; he made all our needs—made us the creatures of a thousand necessities—and have we no claim on him? Nay, we have claims innumerable, infinite; and his one great claim on us is that we should claim our claims of him.[10]
We are made by the Good for the Good. Will our heavenly Father be satisfied with anything less than our rectification and glorification in his Kingdom?
The Salvation of the Outer Darkness
If the justice of God is essentially restorative and redemptive, how then can the eternal condemnation of the wicked ever be just and right?
Punishment, I repeat, is not the thing required of God, but the absolute destruction of sin. What better is the world, what better is the sinner, what better is God, what better is the truth, that the sinner should suffer—continue suffering to all eternity? Would there be less sin in the universe? Would there be any making-up for sin? Would it show God justified in doing what he knew would bring sin into the world, justified in making creatures who he knew would sin? What setting-right would come of the sinner’s suffering? If justice demand it, if suffering be the equivalent for sin, then the sinner must suffer, then God is bound to exact his suffering, and not pardon; and so the making of man was a tyrannical deed, a creative cruelty.[11]
The Scottish preacher speaks boldly, some might say blasphemously. If the LORD foreknew that human beings would sin, thus necessitating their just condemnation to everlasting torment, his creation of the world can only be understood as a tyrannical deed and act of cruelty. Whatever the number of the damned turns out to be, God decided to create them anyway, knowing full well their ultimate fate. The damned are the collateral damage of divine creation—the many (or few) must suffer so that the few (or many) may thrive. What is this but a deal conceived in the depths of Tartarus. The God and Father of Jesus Christ has become a monster. MacDonald’s powerful objection is directed against the retributive model of hell (no doubt the only model he knew) but can easily be extended to contemporary free-will models as well. However we understand eternal perdition, if it lacks redemptive purpose, it is an unholy abomination. The preacher continues:
The path across the gulf that divides right from wrong is not the fire, but repentance. If my friend has wronged me, will it console me to see him punished? Will that be a rendering to me of my due? Will his agony be a balm to my deep wound? Should I be fit for any friendship if that were possible even in regard to my enemy? But would not the shadow of repentant grief, the light of reviving love on his countenance, heal it at once however deep? Take any of those wicked people in Dante’s hell, and ask wherein is justice served by their punishment. Mind, I am not saying it is not right to punish them; I am saying that justice is not, never can be, satisfied by suffering—nay, cannot have any satisfaction in or from suffering. Human resentment, human revenge, human hate may. 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. Is he not defeated every time that one of those lost souls defies him? All hell cannot make Vanni Fucci say ‘I was wrong.’ God is triumphantly defeated, I say, throughout the hell of his vengeance. Although against evil, it is but the vain and wasted cruelty of a tyrant. There is no destruction of evil thereby, but an enhancing of its horrible power in the midst of the most agonizing and disgusting tortures a divine imagination can invent. . . .
The one deepest, highest, truest, fittest, most wholesome suffering must be generated in the wicked by a vision, a true sight, more or less adequate, of the hideousness of their lives, of the horror of the wrongs they have done. . . . Not for its own sake, not as a make-up for sin, not for divine revenge—horrible word, not for any satisfaction to justice, can punishment exist. Punishment is for the sake of amendment and atonement. God is bound by his love to punish sin in order to deliver his creature; he is bound by his justice to destroy sin in his creation. Love is justice—is the fulfilling of the law, for God as well as for his children. This is the reason of punishment; this is why justice requires that the wicked shall not go unpunished—that they, through the eye-opening power of pain, may come to see and do justice, may be brought to desire and make all possible amends, and so become just. Such punishment concerns justice in the deepest degree. For Justice, that is God, is bound in himself to see justice done by his children—not in the mere outward act, but in their very being. He is bound in himself to make up for wrong done by his children, and he can do nothing to make up for wrong done but by bringing about the repentance of the wrong-doer. When the man says, ‘I did wrong; I hate myself and my deed; I cannot endure to think that I did it!’ then, I say, is atonement begun. Without that, all that the Lord did would be lost. He would have made no atonement. Repentance, restitution, confession, prayer for forgiveness, righteous dealing thereafter, is the sole possible, the only true make-up for sin. For nothing less than this did Christ die.[12]
Critics of the greater hope often accuse its proponents of abolishing hell. Nothing could be further from the truth. Note MacDonald’s creative reimagining of hell as purgatory. While lecturing on Dante, he once quipped: “When the Church thought that three places for departed spirits was too many, she took away the wrong one.”[13] In his semi-autobiographical novel Robert Falconer, the protagonist meets with his father and urges him to repent. His father despairingly replies there is no repentance in hell. The narrator comments:
In those few words lay the germ of the preference for hell of poor souls, enfeebled by wickedness. They will not have to do anything there—only to moan and cry and suffer for ever, they think. It is effort, the out-going of the living will that they dread. The sorrow, the remorse of repentance, they do not so much regard: it is the action it involves; it is the having to turn, be different, and do differently, that they shrink from; and they have been taught to believe that this will not be required of them there—in that awful refuge of the will-less. I do not say they think thus: I only say their dim, vague, feeble feelings are such as, if they grew into thought, would take this form. But tell them that the fire of God without and within them will compel them to bethink themselves; that the vision of an open door beyond the smoke and the flames will ever urge them to call up the ice-bound will, that it may obey; that the torturing spirit of God in them will keep their consciences awake, not to remind them of what they ought to have done, but to tell them what they must do now, and hell will no longer fascinate them. Tell them that there is no refuge from the compelling Love of God, save that Love itself—that He is in hell too, and that if they make their bed in hell they shall not escape him, and then, perhaps, they will have some true presentiment of the worm that dieth not and the fire that is not quenched.[14]
In the depths of Gehenna, there we will find the Crucified waiting for us. He will never rest until every sinner has been restored to him through repentance and faith. We may not know how this will be accomplished, but we may nonetheless be confident that in his abundant love God will find a way. “He is their Father,” MacDonald exclaims; “he had power to make them out of himself, separate from 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.”[15] MacDonald may not be able to explain the mechanism of universal salvation; but he knows that Love has destroyed sin and death and risen into glory. The Scotsman cannot envisage the Father of Jesus ever abandoning the children he has brought into being. God has created human beings for union with him—not for death, not for annihilation, not for perdition. He will always and unrelentingly do his best for them, even if it means immersing them in the Gehennic fire of his love.
Yet how? we still ask. How might God convert those who have definitively set their wills against him? Here the author of fairy tales is willing to speculate.
Once upon a time . . .
Imagine a human being, any human being, perhaps you, perhaps me, digging in his or her heels and refusing to love God. “I will not repent,” he declares. “I will not obey God. I will not love him. I would be rid of him once and for all.” In this state of mortal sin, he dies and awakens in the outer darkness. God grants him the autonomy he desires. He is removed from all materiality, from all the goods of the world to which he so idolatrously enslaved himself during his earthly life. He is divorced from all creaturely intercourse. There is no up, no down, no left or right. There is no where, no passage of time, nothing to perceive, no sounds to hear, no presences to feel. Imagine the soul’s bewilderment, disequilibrium, vertigo, terror. There is only the void—a sensory deprivation tank of total isolation:
It is the vast outside; the ghastly dark beyond the gates of the city of which God is the light—where the evil dogs go ranging, silent as the dark, for there is no sound any more than sight. The time of signs is over. Every sense has its signs, and they were all misused: there is no sense, no sign more—nothing now by means of which to believe. The man wakes from the final struggle of death, in absolute loneliness—such a loneliness as in the most miserable moment of deserted childhood he never knew. Not a hint, not a shadow of anything outside his consciousness reaches him. All is dark, dark and dumb; no motion—not the breath of a wind! never a dream of change! not a scent from far-off field! nothing to suggest being or thing besides the man himself, no sign of God anywhere. God has so far withdrawn from the man, that he is conscious only of that from which he has withdrawn. In the midst of the live world he cared for nothing but himself; now in the dead world he is in God’s prison, his own separated self. He would not believe in God because he never saw God; now he doubts if there be such a thing as the face of a man—doubts if he ever really saw one, ever anything more than dreamed of such a thing:—he never came near enough to human being, to know what human being really was—so may well doubt if human beings ever were, if ever he was one of them.[16]
No matter how hard he tries, the lost soul cannot escape from the void nor will himself out of existence. There is nothing to satisfy his disordered desires, no one with whom to converse, no one to dominate or exploit—sheer nothingness and the misery of interminable solitude. The self is alone in the phantasmagoria of nightmare. Madness beckons.
Yet perhaps there may be a way to reality, to sanity, to love:
The most frightful idea of what could, to his own consciousness, befall a man, is that he should have to lead an existence with which God had nothing to do. The thing could not be; for being that is caused, the causation ceasing, must of necessity cease. It is always in, and never out of God, that we can live and do. But I suppose the man so left that he seems to himself utterly alone, yet, alas! with himself—smallest interchange of thought, feeblest contact of existence, dullest reflection from other being, impossible: in such evil case I believe the man would be glad to come in contact with the worst-loathed insect: it would be a shape of life, something beyond and besides his own huge, void, formless being! I imagine some such feeling in the prayer of the devils for leave to go into the swine. His worst enemy, could he but be aware of him, he would be ready to worship. For the misery would be not merely the absence of all being other than his own self, but the fearful, endless, unavoidable presence of that self. Without the correction, the reflection, the support of other presences, being is not merely unsafe, it is a horror—for anyone but God, who is his own being. For him whose idea is God’s, and the image of God, his own being is far too fragmentary and imperfect to be anything like good company. It is the lovely creatures God has made all around us, in them giving us himself, that, until we know him, save us from the frenzy of aloneness—for that aloneness is Self, Self, Self. The man who minds only himself must at last go mad if God did not interfere.
Can there be any way out of the misery? Will the soul that could not believe in God, with all his lovely world around testifying of him, believe when shut in the prison of its own lonely, weary all-and-nothing? It would for a time try to believe that it was indeed nothing, a mere glow of the setting sun on a cloud of dust, a paltry dream that dreamed itself—then, ah, if only the dream might dream that it was no more! that would be the one thing to hope for. Self-loathing, and that for no sin, from no repentance, from no vision of better, would begin and grow and grow; and to what it might not come no soul can tell—of essential, original misery, uncompromising self disgust! Only, then, if a being be capable of self-disgust, is there not some room for hope—as much as a pinch of earth in the cleft of a rock might yield for the growth of a pine? Nay, there must be hope while there is existence; for where there is existence there must be God; and God is for ever good, nor can be other than good. But alas, the distance from the light! Such a soul is at the farthest verge of life’s negation!—no, not the farthest! a man is nearer heaven when in deepest hell than just ere he begins to reap the reward of his doings—for he is in a condition to receive the smallest show of the life that is, as a boon unspeakable. All his years in the world he received the endless gifts of sun and air, earth and sea and human face divine, as things that came to him because that was their way, and there was no one to prevent them; now the poorest thinning of the darkness he would hail as men of old the glow of a descending angel; it would be as a messenger from God. Not that he would think of God! it takes long to think of God; but hope, not yet seeming hope, would begin to dawn in his bosom, and the thinner darkness would be as a cave of light, a refuge from the horrid self of which he used to be so proud.[17]
“Help me,” the tortured soul whispers. “Help me.” And then comes the word he is so desperate to hear:
“I am the resurrection and the life.”
ENDNOTES
[1] George MacDonald’s son Greville named his father “St George the Divine.”
[2] George MacDonald, “Justice,” Unspoken Sermons, Series Three (1889).
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Isaac of Nineveh, The Second Part (1995), II.39.2-3.
[10] George MacDonald, “The Voice of Job,” Unspoken Sermons, Series Two (1885).
[11] “Justice.”
[12] Ibid.
[13] Quoted by Barbara Amell, “George MacDonald on Purgatory,” Wingfold 89 (Winter 2015): 39.
[14] George MacDonald, Robert Falconer (1868), chap. III.XV.
[15] “Justice.”
[16] George MacDonald, “The Last Farthing,” Unspoken Sermons, Series Two (1885).
[17] Ibid.