In C. S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader 
, Lucy reads a spell to make hidden things visible.
To her surprise, Aslan appears in the doorway:
“Oh, Aslan,” said she, “it was kind of you to come.”
“I have been here all the time,” said he, “but you have just made me visible.”
“Aslan!” said Lucy almost a little reproachfully. “Don’t make fun of me. As if anything I could do would make you visible!”
“It did,” said Aslan. “Do you think I wouldn’t obey my own rules?” (pp. 158–59)
I thought of that exchange when I read this:
Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott, The Theology of Jonathan Edwards (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 253–54 (formatting added):
[Edwards] felt compelled to argue for the logic and rationality of the atonement against deist critics. Deists made at least three charges against the orthodox doctrine of the atonement—
- that justice could be satisfied by earnest human efforts,
- that God was not obligated to fulfill his threats, and
- that the merits of one person could not be imputed to another. . . .
Against [#2] the presumption that God does not have to fulfill his threat to Adam and his descendants that they “would surely die” (Gen. 2:17), Edwards suggested an aesthetic approach. They “fitness of things” requires that a lawgiver give regard to his own threats and their fulfillment. And if it is fitting that the divine Lawgiver pay such regard, it is apparent that the fulfillment of threats is an issue of truth. If the Lawgiver sets aside the rule he had made one time, why not twice? Or four times? And in that case, “how can the subject know but that he will always depart from it [the rule]?” Then God would not be trustworthy.
