Patricia Hofer

Now this is progressive Christianity.

“The grandeur of the poem is that Job pleads his cause with God against all the remonstrance of religious authority, recognizing no one but God, and justified therein. And the grandest of all is this, that he implies, if he does not actually say, that God ‘owes’ something to his creature. This is the beginning of the greatest discovery of all–that God owes ‘himself’ to the creature he has made in his image, for so he has made him incapable of living without him… It is God to whom every hunger, every aspiration, every desire, every longing of our nature is to be referred; he made all our needs–made us the creatures of a thousand necessities–and have we no claim on him? Nay, we have claims innumerable, infinite; and his one great claim on us is that we should claim our claims of him…Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to rouse the honest. … Doubt must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed… To know that our faith is weak is the first step towards its strengthening … I care not whether the book of Job be a history or a poem… It was probably, in the childlike days of the world, a well-known story in the east, which some man, whom God had made wise to understand his will and his ways, took up, and told after the fashion of a poet… God is offering us the one thing we cannot live without–his own self: we must make room for him; we must cleanse our hearts that he may come in…” George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, “The Voice of Job.”

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