George MacDonald Saved My Life

by Eric McCarty

C.S. Lewis said “my own debt to [MacDonald’s Unspoken Sermons] is almost as great as one man can owe to another.” I could say the same. This is a brief summary of how George MacDonald saved my life.  What greater debt is there?  GeorgeMacDonaldQuotes.com is a small attempt to repay that debt and to continue the work of Lewis in spreading the religious teaching of George MacDonald.

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I will attempt to describe a psychological/spiritual/physical nightmare from which I barely escaped in the winter of 2014.  But I’ll start with what put me in the deep, dark hole.

For years, I have struggled with the concept of never-ending torment for most of the people ever created, an idea championed by Augustine around 400 AD.  This is the view widely held by most of modern, western Christianity and the only view I had ever heard.

I will attempt to describe some of the logical trouble I found with the concept below, but before I do, I would like to point out that reasoning does not defeat a nightmare that is true.  Let me explain.  

The whole concept of eternal torment for so many people is nothing else to me, and many others, than a nightmare — a nightmare from which you cannot escape, even if you don’t endure it yourself, because you are bound to those who do endure it by love.  You are commanded to feel the pain.  And the pain never stops.

You cannot make it go away with arguments for its rightness.  You can try to justify it with scriptures, logic, etc., but nightmares are not weakened by any exercise of deduction or scriptural reasoning.  If this is true, it’s a never-ending, all-encompassing nightmare no matter how you spin it.  There is no escaping it.

There are a couple of big hangups for me on Eternal Conscious Torment (ECT).

1. What kind of God would call billions of people into being, knowing that was the unimaginably horrible outcome?  The words callous, selfish, and unloving came to mind for me.  Speaking of love . . .
2. Jesus says that the Father loves His enemies, yet we say that He tortures His enemies forever. Something doesn’t match up, here. Torture, for no other reason than to cause pain, is not love.  It is hate.  If a person kept someone alive in a basement for twenty years just to torture them, we would call that person a monster, an animal.  We would speak of that person with the strongest possible negative terms.  We have a God who does it infinitely better than that.  He tortures forever.  A billion years from now, He’ll still be torturing, and He’s just gotten started.

Let’s explore #2 a little deeper.  He says one thing and does another.  Think about that.  He makes the rules.  He says He loves, but His actions are those of a hating God.  (These actions also violate the concept of Justice, contrary to what many Christians would argue, but that’s another topic.  I’m glad to discuss in the comments below.)  So this is either all a bunch of hooey, or we have a God here who is not really good (He does not tell the truth) and who cannot be loved, worshiped, or trusted.  Either option led me in a very dark direction.

The “hooey” option leaves you with a meaningless existence and I’m simply not built for meaninglessness.

The “bad God” option puts you between a rock and a hard place. You have God holding a gun to your head and telling you that the only way he takes the gun away is to love a God who would put a gun to your head to get you to love Him. “Love Me or I will hate you.” I found that impossible to do when I really looked at it.

The trouble didn’t end with that impossibility. Let’s say I could find a way to love and worship this God. The nightmare of never-ending torture was just too dark, even if I’m not the one experiencing it. (Want misery? Try loving your own child or your neighbor or even someone you don’t like, as Christ tells us we should, watch them die and believe that God is going to torture them forever. I honestly don’t know how Christians who believe this are happy.  This can only breed wretchedness or callousness.  We see a lot of the latter in Christianity today.)

That’s how it was for me, anyway.  I was stuck in a very bad position and it was taking me to some very bad places.  It would be hard to overstate just how deep was the misery which followed these conclusions.  I will share some, but not all, of what was going on in me.

I spiraled into a cave of clinical depression, insomnia, and severe anxiety attacks.  The guidance of Christian mentors (friends I still love dearly) only led me deeper.  I listened to the counsel of both Calvinists and Arminians.  They both ended up in the same sickening place.

The whole concept of eternal torment for so many people is nothing else than a nightmare — a nightmare from which you cannot escape, even if you don’t endure it yourself, because you are bound to those who do endure it by love.  You are commanded to feel the pain.  And the pain never stops.

There is no escaping the nightmare, no matter how you might justify it with scriptures, logic, etc.  Nightmares are not weakened by any exercise of deduction or scriptural reasoning.  If this is true, it’s a never-ending, all-encompassing nightmare no matter how you spin it.  There is no escaping it.

Intangible maladies turned physical.  My blood pressure soared and a CT scan revealed that hypertension was enlarging my aorta, a potentially fatal condition.  The psychological/spiritual nightmare was literally killing me.

There was no where to turn.  No way out of the abyss.  The darkness was cascading down to my family and friends.  Frantic phone calls in the wee hours.  I couldn’t think straight.    I was putting my wife, daughters, and friends through a great deal of trauma.  Headaches.  Recurring, full-body panic-sweats every half hour.  Each thought was a hammer blow.  The idea of never-ending hell is a hell of its own.

(Many people don’t know that the First Great Awakening came to a screeching halt when Jonathan Edwards’ uncle, under Edwards’ teaching as a member of his congregation, slit his own throat in the throes of spiritual turmoil.  Is it any wonder that MacDonald said “I turn with loathing from the god of Jonathan Edwards.”?  My own experience and that of Edwards’ uncle are not isolated events.  See Gary Amirault’s The Fruit of the Teaching of Hell for more examples of depression, despair, and the crushing effects of what many consider to be a major part of the “Good News”.)

For the 10th time in a week, I found myself at home from work, prostrate, and shaking on my bathroom floor.  With my wife in tears beside me, again, I made a decision.

I grabbed hold of the only thing that would keep me alive.  I grabbed hold of George MacDonald’s God.

I had read a couple of MacDonald’s novels after hearing about him through C.S. Lewis.  I learned about his views on hell from Michael Phillips.  So I read more.  And more.  And more.

MacDonald believed that redemption after death is implied in much of Christ’s teaching and was hopeful that all created beings would one day be brought home to the Father.  He believed that hell is restorative in nature, not just punitive.

For hell is God’s and not the devil’s. Hell is on the side of God and man, to free the child of God from the corruption of death. Not one soul will ever be redeemed from hell but by being saved from his sins, from the evil in him. If hell be needful to save him, hell will blaze, and the worm will writhe and bite, until he takes refuge in the will of the Father. ‘Salvation from hell, is salvation as conceived by such to whom hell and not evil is the terror.’ But if even for dread of hell a poor soul seek the Father, he will be heard of him in his terror, and, taught of him to seek the immeasurably greater gift, will in the greater receive the less. – from “Salvation From Sin” in The Hope Of The Gospel.

This was, of course, contraband material for a conservative evangelical.  But I was not simply a conservative evangelical.  I was a man fighting to stay alive.

I soon found that it wasn’t just George MacDonald’s God I was learning about.  It was the God of the early church fathers who spread incomparably good news through the Roman empire and beyond.

It is the God of Thomas Allin, Gerry Beauchemin, Robin Parry, Peter Hiatt, George Sarris, Thomas Talbott, Michael Phillips, Madeleine L’Engle, and William Barclay to name a few more recent notables.  (If you are encountering this for the first time, you may saying “but the Bible says it’s eternal”.  Well, our current translations say eternal.  But our current translations carry with them the theological bias resulting from the heavy hand of Augustine and his followers.  Pay special attention to the term “aionios” in the original language.)

As I write this a year later, I am whole again.  No, “again” is not the right word.  Let me restate.  I am more whole than I’ve ever been, but not as whole as I one day will be, thanks in no small part to MacDonald and the men and women who have followed in his footsteps.