Please donât use this as a trigger to spew hate at these two - but try to figure out why they think this and how we could help them understand GMD better, etc.
Given many of us quote him, itâs helpful to know that he has been put in this box, as it means weâll need to give disclaimers & explain what heâs saying more.
Piper quoting MacDonald: âI turn with loathing from the god of Jonathan Edwardsâ. Amen and Amen!
But I think that any Calvinist reading this statement of MacDonaldâs would react in a similar way to Piper. MacDonald saw the Calvinist god as incompatible with his own God. I wholeheartedly agree with MacDonald AND Piper in that they worship entirely different gods. I think it is not a matter of trying to âsquare the circleâ by finding unity where there is none. What is required for any semblance of unity is a complete transformation from one faith to another. The gulf between Piper and MacDonald is at least as wide as the gulf between Islam and Christianity. We need to recognise that. I am pleased that Piper has the integrity to do so.
There is no hate from me towards either of these two. They belong to a completely different faith to my own. Alex, you say " try to figure out why they think this and how we could help them understand GMD better". My point is that they understand GMD perfectly. I respect them for that. I think it shows less respect to them to imagine that they have misunderstood MacDonald.
I admire your gentle Spirit Alex but I believe that GMD was patently clear in his beliefs and no disclaimers are needed.
Thank you Alex.
I was surprised when Piper said that when he was reading MacDonold and came across his statement that âI turn with loathing from the god of Jonathan Edwardsâ he simply âclosed the bookâ. I find this far to often that people only read or study material that agrees with what they already believe. And itâs very sad that Keller does not consider MacDonald a Christian because he understands atonement differently than he does, very sad.
I can understand why GMDâs statement so shocked Piper, because he highly respects Jonathan Edwards and he understands God to be of the same character as Edwards discribed Him to be. Of course, GMDâs understanding of of the character of God is very different.
The comments about GMac are so sad and misguided its comical. I was literally laughing out loud at how pathetic some of their conclusions were. (And while not a Piper fan, I do respect Keller quite a bit). And Keller went further than Piper in saying GMac is not a believer. So I guess according to Tim K, GMac is roasting in hell right now.
showing grace to such as these is a REAL struggle, i find. i hope God enables me to do so. Heâs the only one that could. such arrogance is staggering coming from such an indefensible view of God and the Bible.
I donât know enough about Piper, Keller, Lewis or MD to effectively comment. But I wonder if a Lewis expert (is McGrath one?) would largely agree with them? And I wonder what a MD expert would say? let alone Lewis and MD themselves! 
I think pilgrim is on the right track, though perhaps a little strong in positing two entirely different gods.
One is reminded of John AdamsâŚ
"Had you and I been forty days with Moses on Mount Sinai, and admitted to behold the divine Shechinah, and there told that one was three and three one, we might not have had courage to deny it, but we could not have believed it. The thunders and lightnings and earthquakes, and the transcendent splendors and glories, might have overwhelmed us with terror and amazement, but we could not have believed the doctrine. We should be more likely to say in our hearts â whatever we might say with our lipsâ, This is chance. There is no God, no truth. This is all delusion, fiction, and a lie, or it is all chance. But what is chance? It is motion; it is action; it is event; it is phenomenon without cause. Chance is no cause at all; it is nothing, and nothing has produced all this pomp and splendor, and nothing may produce our eternal damnation in the flames of hell-fire and brimstone, for what we know, as well as this tremendous exhibition of terror and falsehood.
God has infinite wisdom, goodness, and power; he created the universe; his duration is eternal, a parte ante and a parte post. His presence is as extensive as space. What is space? An infinite spherical vacuum. He created this speck of dirt and the human species for his glory; and with the deliberate design of making nine tenths of our species miserable for ever for his glory. This is the doctrine of Christian theologians, in general, ten to one. Now, my friend, can prophecies or miracles convince you or me that infinite benevolence, wisdom, and power, created, and preserves for a time, innumerable millions, to make them miserable for ever, for his own glory? Wretch! What is his glory? Is he ambitious? Does he want promotion? Is he vain, tickled with adulation, exulting and triumphing in his power and the sweetness of his vengeance? Pardon me, my Maker, for these awful questions. My answer to them is always ready. I believe no such things. My adoration of the author of the universe is too profound and too sincere. The love of God and his creation â delight, joy, triumph, exultation in my own existence â though but an atom, a molecule organ- ique in the universe â are my religion.
Howl, snarl, bite, ye Calvinistic, ye Athanasian divines, if you will; ye will say I am no Christian; I say ye are no Christians, and there the account is balanced. Yet I believe all the honest men among you are Christians, in my sense of the word."
Thatâs quite a quote!
John Adams of the American revolution? Wow! Who knew? (Not me, obviously.)
Piper/Kellerâs God â catholic Trinity
Lewisâ God â catholic Trinity
MacDâs God â catholic Trinity
Piper/Kellerâs God â omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, ground of all being, creator and sustainer of all that is not God
Lewisâ God â ditto
MacDâs God â ditto
Piper/Kellerâs God â 2nd Person Incarnated fully man and fully God as Jesus of Nazareth the Jewish Messiah, prophet priest and king
Lewisâ God â ditto
MacDâs God â ditto
Piper/Kellerâs Jesus â fully Man and fully God, one person of two natures
Lewisâ God â ditto
MacDâs God â ditto
Piper/Kellerâs Jesus â born in Bethlehem of Judea, of the virgin Mary of Nazareth, betrothed to Joseph of Bethlehem, did and said everything reported in the canonical Gospels, died for sinners on the cross, crucified by Pontius Pilate, bodily resurrected by His own power and by the power of the Father from burial in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea on Sunday morning, ascended bodily to the right hand of the Father after 40 days of subsequent ministry, sent the Holy Spirit at Pentacost to empower the apostles, called Saul of Tarsus as an apostle, inspired the authors of the Judeo-Christian canon
Lewisâ God â ditto
MacDâs God â ditto
Piper/Kellerâs Jesus â will return again to judge the living and the dead, raising all persons in bodily resurrection, the righteous to eonian life shared with God, the unrighteous to eonian judgment in the lake of fire
Lewisâ God â ditto
MacDâs God â ditto
Piper/Kellerâs Jesus â the Way the Truth and the Life, the only Savior and means of salvation from sin, without faith in Whom there can be no salvation from sin
Lewisâ God â ditto
MacDâs God â ditto
Piper/Kellerâs God â the Nicean/Chalcedonian God believed in by Gregory of Nyssa, the leader of the Ecumenical Council of Chaledea and the Father of Orthodoxy, author of that generationâs Great Catechism
Lewisâ God â ditto
MacDâs God â ditto
Piper/Kellerâs God â can and will save every sinner from sin that He originally intends to save, but does not intend to save some sinners (unlike what Gregory Nyssus taught)
Lewisâ God â originally intends and acts to save every sinner from sin, but will not succeed in saving some (unlike what Gregory Nyssus taught)
MacDâs God â originally intends and acts to save every sinner from sin, and can and will succeed in saving all (like what Gregory Nyssus, the Father of Orthodoxy, taught)
MacD â rejected Piperâs Calvinism and Lewisâ Arminianism, but regarded each type as still strong Christians in principle (and often in practice); had enough sense to know that Calvs and Arms still worship the Christian God (despite some emotional hyperbole about Calvinism)
Lewis â rejected Piperâs Calvinism and MacDâs Universalism, but regarded each type as still strong Christians in principle (and often in practice); had enough sense to know that Calvs and Arms still worship the Christian God
Piper/Keller â reject Lewisâ Arminianism but love Lewis (who taught some kind of hopeless punishment different from what they believe and taught a scope of salvation they do not believe while denying the original persistence they believe); reject MacDâs Universalism as being about an entirely completely different god (because MacD only teaches hopeful punishment not hopeless and affirms the original persistence of salvation that they believe), and Keller regards him as not a Christian
Ouch ⌠Thatâs quite a damning indictment! Why is universalism, apparently alone, considered such a hideously heretical doctrine that it places you entirely outside of Christianity?
âWho are you to judge another manâs servant?â
I donât think we need to engage in âdisclaimersâ about universalism 
Iâm not sure that GMD was engaging in emotional hyperbole about Jonathan Edwards. Heâd read Edwardâs Spider sermon and Sinners in the Hands of an angry God that ask us â in a heightened and emotionally charged language to believe not only that God will not save some/most but that God will delight in torturing the reprobate for eternity. Itâs âthis idea of God that universalist and others react to in their guts as in no way having any resemblance to the God that they know and love. This is why they often say that God as pictured by TULIP Calvinism has to be a different god or even that this god sounds more like Satan. This is not an accusation that Calvinists are Satanists wearing pointy hats and sacrificing children â it is just an expression of a huge difference and inversion. Of course at a level of abstraction â one step removed from the menaces of the hellfire sermons we can talk common ground through in more abstract theology. Btu this is for those who are strong in the faith and eager to build bridges. And I still donât think that GMD was indulging in hyperbole â he was raised a Calvinist and knew what the terrors of the narrowest forms of Calvinism had done to sensitive souls in his native Scotland.
We know what torture means at a human level. Iâve met victims of torture and have had to study accounts of the psychology of torturers. I cannot impute such evil to God even as transcendent mystery. People can believe this stuff as a notion - and often there is enough of the message of Godsâ love in their limited and cruel version of the Gospel to make them far better people than their beliefs. That much I will grant.
It never was, in early Christianity. But in our day it is damnable heresy because it conflicts with penal substitution, an aberration of the middle ages concerning the atonement.
If Christ paid the penalty for all who accept him and no others, then the others have to go to hell forever, or at least be annihilated.
Iâm quite sure he wasnât. MacDonald really did loathe the damnable doctrine that God hates sinners, and canât wait to thrust them into hell.
God is LOVE, and is kind to evil and unthankful people (Luke 6:35). Jesus said that if we do the same, we are truly the children of God.
What follows are excerpts from George MacDonald, The Hope of the Gospel, Salvation from Sin, chapter one.
The wrong, the evil that is in a man; he must be set free from it. I do not mean set free from the sins he has done: that will follow; I mean the sins he is doing, or is capable of doing; the sins in his being which spoil his nature, the wrongness in him, the evil he consents to; the sin he is, which makes him do the sin he does.
He will want only to be rid of his suffering; but that he cannot have, unless he is delivered from its essential root, a thing infinitely worse than any suffering it can produce. If he will not have that deliverance, he must keep his suffering. Through chastisement he will take at last the only way that leads to liberty. There can be no deliverance but to come out of his evil dream into the glory of God.
The Lord never came to deliver men from the consequences of their sins while those sins remained. That would be to throw the medicine out the window while the man still lies sick! That would be to come directly against the very laws of existence! Yet men, loving their sins, and feeling nothing of their dread hatefulness, have (consistently with their low condition) constantly taken this word concerning the Lord to mean that he came to save them from the punishment of their sins. This idea (this miserable fancy rather) has terribly corrupted the preaching of the gospel. The message of the good news has not been truly delivered.
He came to work along with out punishment. He came to side with it, and set us free from our sins. No man is safe from hell until he is free from his sins.
Not for any or all of his sins that are past shall a man be condemned; not for the worst of them does he need to fear remaining unforgiven. The sin in which he dwells, the sin of which he will not come out. That sin is the sole ruin of a man. His present live sins, those sins pervading his thoughts and ruling his conduct; the sins he keeps doing, and will not give up; the sins he is called to abandon, but to which he clings instead, the same sins which are the cause of his misery, though he may not know it â these are the sins for which he is even now condemned.
It is the indwelling badness, ready to produce bad actions, from which we need to be delivered. If a man will not strive against this badness, he is left to commit evil and reap the consequences. To be saved from these consequences, would be no deliverance; it would be an immediate, ever deepening damnation. It is the evil in our being (no essential part of it, thank God!) âthis is that from which He came to deliver us â not the things we have done, but the possibility of doing such things anymore. As this possibility departs, and we confess to those we have wronged, the power over us of our evil deeds will depart also, and so shall we be saved from them. The bad that lives in us, our evil judgments, our unjust desires, our hate and pride and envy and greed and self-satisfaction ---- these are the souls of our sins, our live sins, more terrible than the bodies of our sins, that is, the deeds we do, because they not only produce these loathsome characteristics, but they make us just as loathsome. Our wrong deeds are our dead works; our evil thoughts are our live sins. These sins, the essential opposites of faith and love, these sins that dwell in us and work in us, are the sins from which Jesus came to deliver us. When we turn against them and refuse to obey them, they rise in fierce insistence, but at the same time begin to die. We are then on the Lordâs side, and He begins to deliver us from them.
I think Lewisâ, Kellerâs, Piperâs, & MacDonaldâs positions are all within orthodox Christianity. I like Jasonâs post which showed that despite our differences, thereâs still a fair bit of overlap between us.
Alex I liked Jasonâs post too, very much (yes Jason I liked your post). This eirenical approach is very much that same as taken by Robin Parry (but I do think that Robin is being all things to all men in this, he really wants to change hearts and minds about faulty images of God, heâs just such an old hand at this stuff that his gut reactions longer bother him, or at least they are very tightly controlled).
Now Iâm not in any authority on this site; also I would not actually identify myself specifically as an âevangelical Christianâ â so really the divisions between Calvs, Armis and Kaths are only a concern to me at a step removed.
Iâm just trying to play the advocate for some of the people that might be reading this thread who cannot raise themselves to this level of abstraction on this issue (just as a safety valve and so their perfectly legitimate feelings do not get ignored). And it is indeed significant for any abstract presentation of this kind â in my view -that neither GDM or Jack Lewis believed that God would actually torture people for eternity and take delight in it. That Tulip Calvinists do believe these things is the embodied truth of the matter that hits Universalists and other non Calvinists in the guts who are not battle hardened enough for eirenicism.
Also what about common grace? Keller and Piper seem to believe in this â
As I understand it common grace means that God has given certain bounties to the reprobate in this life â the ability to love, nurture, be creative, engage in cultural activity and scientific research. HE has done this for â the comfort of the electâ. At the last judgement one of the torments of the reprobate will be to have this common grace stripped away from them.
Peace and love
Dick
Iâm talking about important particular details we all agree on â or all three trinitarian groups agree on anyway, but even non-trinitarians Christians agree with a lot of those details (and even some non-Christian theists!) even though categorically theyâre talking about a different kind of supernaturalistic theism and so a somewhat different kind of God. But still not an entirely and completely different kind of God.
How does pointing out important details of similarity somehow become a âlevel of abstractionâ??
Is that how the various non-trinitarians on the site would like me to treat them? â the way Piper and Keller are treating Christian universalists? Because the details of difference between me and any non-trinitarian theist are significantly more numerous than the details of difference between me and Piper (or Lewis for that matter).
I myself have on occasion essentially quoted MacDonald on comparing points of particularly Calv doctrine (where Arms and Kaths agree in disagreeing about those) as âMoloch worshipâ, even here on this site within the past few months. Iâm trying to make a very limited point, though, when I say such things. It would be grossly unfair and inaccurate for me to charge Piper and Keller with actually worshiping Moloch, something that really is a completely different kind of god than orthodox trinitarian supernaturalistic theism.
(On the contrary, I rely on Calvs really being dedicated to being ortho-trin theists and not some other kind of theist, when disputing with them. )
I think, in short, that itâs important (including but not restricted to my own moral health) to treat Calvinists the way I would want them to treat me. I resent them unfairly and inaccurately tarring me with various brushes (and then setting that tar on fire 
), so I had better make sure Iâm not doing to them what I recognize being wrong when they do it to me. Do they discount my orthodox trinitarian theism so that they can pretend I worship a completely different god? I had better not do the same to them. Would I want them to be merciful to me if I speak in well-intentioned error? Then I should be merciful to them.
And, on the same principle, Iâm not going to go around saying that various non-trinitarian Christians on this site (or anywhere else) are worshiping a completely different deity, much less saying so in order to hold that against them morally or whatever.
Iâm supposed to be doing better than Piper&Keller&Co. And thatâs what Iâm trying to do, against my own reactive feelings when they act unfairly (by accident I hope) to MacD and similar Christian universalists.
That being said, I can understand people wanting to let off steam against them, so Iâm not complaining about that (in this thread anyway). Iâm only explaining why Iâm restricting my steam.