All posts tagged George MacDonald

  • Certitude: A Disaster Waiting To Happen

    Doubt

    Certitude: A Disaster Waiting To Happen
    Brian Zahnd

    Do you love your faith so little that you have never battled a single fear lest your faith should not be true? Where there are no doubts, no questions, no perplexities, there can be no growth.
    –George MacDonald

    In my spiritual memoir, Water To Wine, part of the story I tell involves my own journey away from cheap certitude toward an authentic faith. It is a phenomenon of modernity that certitude (mental assent toward something as an absolute empirical fact) has become confused with faith (an orientation of the soul toward God in the form of deep trust). That this phenomenon is prevalent among certain streams of Christians is strangely ironic since this involves genuflecting at the altar of empiricism and privileging knowledge over faith. Privileging empiricism above faith as the final arbiter of truth is a hallmark of modernity, but it is also antithetical to Christianity.

    Certitude is a poor substitute for authentic faith. But certitude is popular; it’s popular because it’s easy. No wrestling with doubt, no dark night of the soul, no costly agonizing over the matter, no testing yourself with hard questions. Just accept a secondhand assumption or a majority opinion or a popular sentiment as the final word and settle into certainty. Certitude is easy…until it’s impossible. And that’s why certitude is so often a disaster waiting to happen. The empty slogan “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” is cheap certitude, not genuine faith.
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  • The Faceless White Giant

    Faceless

    The Faceless White Giant
    Brian Zahnd

    The seeds of an Angry God theology were sown early in my life and they came in the form of cartoons — the infamous gospel tracts by J.T. Chick. With titles like This Was Your Life, Somebody Goofed, The Awful Truth, and Are Roman Catholics Christians?, Chick tracts usually end with everyone but fundamentalist Christians being hurled into what looks like the fires of Mount Doom by a merciless God depicted as a faceless white giant.

    A well-meaning but unhelpful Sunday School teacher gave me a Chick tract when I was twelve and those garish images with their ludicrous theology burned their way into my adolescent imagination. I had met the Angry God! And I was afraid of this God. Who wouldn’t be? Think about it. In the Gospel According to J.T. Chick, if you don’t believe just right, an omnipotent giant will consign you to eternal torture!

    Fortunately I could believe in Jesus and be saved from his Father — the Angry God. But then I heard a revival preacher ask a disturbing question: “Do you believe in Jesus in your heart or just in your head?” He went on to say that if we believed in Jesus in our head but not our heart we would miss heaven by eighteen inches and wind up in hell forever! More anxiety-inducing theology! Now I had to decide if I had faith in my heart or if I was on my way to hell because I only believed in Jesus with my head. That’s a lot of pressure for a twelve-year-old…or anyone.
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