George MacDonald and Adoption

When I wrote a post last year on George MacDonald’s sermons, I didn’t say anything about his deep feelings about the theological use of the word “adoption.” Early in his life, George MacDonald was told that he was not a child of God but that God could adopt him as a son. MacDonald grew up thinking that this message meant that God had rejected him to the point that He no longer recognized MacDonald as part of his creation. As an adult, he discovered, he tells us, that the Greek word translated “adoption” in the New Testament does not in fact mean adoption. He indicates the textual context of Galatians 4 in which the heir in Paul’s metaphor is in fact the son of the house but is treated as no better than a slave until “adoption,” which must therefore mean full recognition as a son, not chage of status from non-son to son. Tell a child he is not in his right relationship with his heavenly Father, MacDonald says, but don’t tell him God is not his Father.

This year, I read MacDonald’s novel Donal Grant, and partway through I started thinking: MacDonald sees Donal as himself, and Donal must believe that most Christians are wrong to think that God has adopted them. Then, sure enough, Donal says, in words understandably reminiscent of the sermon I read last year, that the word has been mistranslated and that the mistake has done grave harm to many people. I may be overreacting, but it seemed in this novel as if MacDonald were saying that any Christian who understood “adoption” as a valid theological concept was something like an enemy to the Truth, and that stance made it sound like MacDonald was pitting himself not just against a word or a detail but against the vast majority of English-speaking Christians.

I think that some Christians are wrong about some things. I think, for instance, that MacDonald is wrong to see the acceptance of the word “adoption” as a line in the sand. But I hold my disagreements with other Christians in two very important contexts. First, if most Christians disagree with me on some given doctrine, I simply must attenuate my absolute confidence that I am right. You know. Human. Fallible. Etc. Second, if I truly believe that person A is a Christian and I truly believe that A believes the wrong thing about doctrine B, then, if I see an enemy at all, I hold what I see as the wrong view on B as the enemy, not person A. We wrestle not with flesh and blood.

After reading this book, I feel like I’ve “figured out” MacDonald, and, as I just explained, I’m not sure I like what I figured out. I have three more of his novels on my list for this ten-year reading plan, and right now I’m not sure what I’ll do when they come up.

Leo’s Christmas Sermons

Leo the Great was the Bishop of Rome from 440 to 461. During that time, he famously treated with Attila the Hun and convinced him to leave Rome alone for a while. Over the course of his career, less famously, he preached, as I understand it, at least eight sermons on Christmas day, seven of which have survived. (I reach this tentative conclusion since the ones included in the Eerdman’s Library of the Fathers on ccel.org are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 8.)

These sermons were exactly what I was hoping they would be and, truth be told, was afraid they might not be. The celebration of the birthday of Christ, says Leo, is a day to celebrate God’s gift of redemption. We so often read “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” to mean that God allowed his Son to be sacrificed on the cross. (I heard that interpretation in yesterday’s sermon at my own local, twenty-first-century church.) But God the Father gave us the Son in one sense at the Incarnation and in another sense on the Holy Night in Bethlehem.

Leo tells us that Christmas is also a time to celebrate the Trinity and Christ’s dual nature in one Person: full divinity and full humanity. No anathemas here as in many theological messages in these early centuries. Paul says that the one preaching the false gospel should be cursed, not the one who believes the false message. I don’t want to pronounce my own anathemas against those who pronounced anathemas. I just wholeheartedly support Leo’s desire to use Christmas Day to preach the true gospel without drawing lines through the Church visible.

He does draw a line, however, between those who worship Christ and those who worship the sun – or who think that Christmas is really only about worshiping the sun as its daily time above ground starts to lengthen. And yet, while Leo tells people not to worship creation, he doesn't tell Christians to despise creation either: “And so, dearly beloved, we do not bid or advise you to despise God's works or to think there is anything opposed to your Faith in what the good God has made good, but to use every kind of creature and the whole furniture of this world reasonably and moderately.” And this seems to me a central part of the Christmas message: that if God was willing to take on flesh and humanity in all its mundane materiality, then that physicality must have been created good. God made the land and the sea and the sun and the moon and the stars and the fish and the birds and the beings that creep on the earth, and He saw that they were good. It must be right to enjoy them as long as, as Augustine says, our love for them is subordinate to our love for God – not just less than, but subordinate, in that enjoying earthly gifts leads to enjoying God.

Some Christians have worn black because they thought they must be modest in appearance in order to be good Christians. I don’t judge their decision about what they must do to quell pride; I just don’t want them to tell the Ghost of Christmas Present he can’t wear green. Some Christians have served God in poverty. I don’t judge their deliberation to conquer the lust for wealth; I just don’t want them telling nephew Fred that he can’t share a joyous Christmas meal and games with family and friends. Some Christians have made worship a solemn and silent thing. I don’t doubt that they have found Christ in the quietude; I just don’t want them telling Bob Cratchit he can’t slide down the ice with some neighborhood boys “in honour of its being Christmas Eve.”