I will never forget the day (or even where I was standing) when I first heard those words from George MacDonald's sermon, "Self-Denial.”

Immediately, I thought of the many slanderous doctrines I was once taught and eventually preached myself. I recalled my deep commitment to penal substitutionary atonement, my assumptions about retributive judgment, and my own traumas related to eternal conscious torment. But along came MacDonald and showed me that abandoning the idolatrous god behind those monstrous notions was not heresy or sentimentalism or false teaching. It was faithfulness to the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

It seems to me that MacDonald's exhortation to dismantle and abandon these constructs is an act of supreme faithfulness, because they are obstructions to the knowledge of God, entrenched prejudices of the old self made sacred, and the very traditions of men that set themselves against the loving Father seen in the life, teachings, death and resurrection of Jesus. In that sense, MacDonald stands among the greatest of history's deconstructionists, melting down the golden calf of a paganized gospel and pointing us instead to the true God of infinite love.

I believe that George MacDonald is a wonderful ally and conversation partner--a trustworthy guide--who embodies and informs the best of what I try to articulate in Out of the Embers: Faith After the Great Deconstruction. In fact, the rest of the paragraph in "Self-Denial" would make a valuable precis of my whole project:

“Good souls many will one day be horrified at the things they now believe of God. If they have not thought about them, but given themselves to obedience, they may not have done them much harm as yet; but they can make little progress in the knowledge of God, while, if but passively, holding evil things true of him. If, on the other hand, they do think about them, and find in them no obstruction, they must indeed be far from anything to be called a true knowledge of God. But there are those who find them a terrible obstruction, and yet imagine, or at least fear them true: such must take courage to forsake the false in any shape, to deny their old selves in the most seemingly sacred of prejudices, and follow Jesus, not as he is presented in the tradition of the elders, but as he is presented by himself, his apostles, and the spirit of truth. There are ‘traditions of men’ after Christ as well as before him, and far worse, as ‘making of none effect’ higher and better things; and we have to look to it, how we have learned Christ.”
– George MacDonald from “Self Denial” from Unspoken Sermons

Bradley Jersak, Dean of Theology & Culture, St. Stephen's University
Editor, CWRmagazine / Clarion-Journal.com
Brad Jersak.com