Jeff Cook, "C.S. Lewis, Rob Bell & 'Love Wins'"

Nick:

This is something I've been mulling over for a few weeks. I think I agree with most of what Cook says about Bell. I don't see much difference between Bell and Lewis, though there are nuances. Bell seems for more hopeful about God potentially saving all, whereas Lewis had a more pessimistic streak about such things.

McKnight:

This post is by a friend of the Jesus Creed blog; Jeff’s got a strong point to make about Rob Bell’s new book and the seeming culture war at work in the responses. He isn’t suggesting that such a battle is all that is in play, and I’m asking us to give his post a very careful hearing and reading. I’m not enough of a CS Lewis expert to give a definitive answer, though I always have thought the end of The Last Battle went in a universalistic direction. Perhaps we can have some CS Lewis experts speak up today.

 Cook:

Rob Bell, CS Lewis, and the Real Argument at Hand

After a couple of weeks of dialogue it is clear to me that the primary issue in the debate over Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived is not about what Bell is saying, but how he says it.

I suspect many felt poked in the eye by the way Harper and Rob decided to market Love Wins. I suspect Bell intimidates some because he is part of a culture they do not understand and cannot control (that culture is urban, postmodern, and discovers the truth more naturally through questions, sarcasm, and intuition than through the systematic presentations of the top Christian publishing house).

And let’s not kid ourselves, I suspect the fire behind the debate is often about envy and resentment of a very talented man, about our own inability to get a hearing in the public square, and about the fear that new ways of talking about Jesus might trump what some have preached for decades.

These issues are big, but they are not only about doctrine. The issues at hand are about culture and control, about how the theology of emerging Christians will be defined, and about the continuing fight between postmodern and modern expressions of Christianity. This seems clear to me now, for I would like to defend the following claim:

There’s not one controversial idea in Love Wins that is not clearly voiced as a real possibility by the most popular evangelical writer of the last century, CS Lewis. 



Lewis and Bell hint at a number of theological possibilities in their writings that cut against what we might call the majority opinion, including: the possibility that those in hell might journey toward the grace of God after death, the possibility that those who have not heard the name of Jesus might find salvation in and through the image of Christ in their own pagan stories and myths, the possibility that some will eventually receive God’s grace freely after death, the possibility that hell is about bigger things than God’s wrath, the insistence that the metaphors describing what Jesus’ cross accomplishes and how his work is applied to us are culturally subjective, and that some ancient pictures of the atonement may be too confusing to help us right here, right now. All of these lines of thought were in Lewis’s writings before they were in Love Wins.

Let’s look at one example. Though I [Jeff Cook] do not hold the following position (I’m an annihilationist regarding hell), consider how Lewis, like Bell, advances the possibility that those in hell might one day journey toward the grace of God after death. Lewis writes, “I would pay any price to be able to say ‘All will be saved’ but my reason retorts, ‘Without their will, or with it?’” Notice in this and other quotes like it, the salvation of a soul is not dependent on God’s will, but the will of the damned. In the same vein, he wrote, “I believe that if a million chances were likely to do good, they would be given” (The Problem of Pain, 110). This is a confession that God wants to save all and would provide such roads if God thought they’d work.

For the rest, click HERE.

--Nick

George MacDonald, "The God Revealed in Jesus Christ"

This article was offered for free by author Thomas Talbott on his website. It is from the anthology "All Shall be Well; Explorations in Universal Salvation and Theology, From Origen to Moltmann," edited by Robin Parry (or Gregory MacDonald, as he was known).

This post will cover pages nine through thirteen, and continue in the essay written by Thomas Talbott on my favorite deceased theologian, George MacDonald.

Universal Salvation in the Theology of George MacDonald (1824-1905) by Thomas Talbott

Now if, according to MacDonald, Jesus Christ is the very revelation of God to us, just what is the nature of the God he reveals? In a sermon entitled “The Creation in Christ,” MacDonald asked: “Now what is the deepest in God?”27 That is, what is the most basic attribute of divinity, the one that explains God‘s most basic reasons for acting? It could not be his power because having the power to do something could never, by itself, provide a reason to do it. Neither does having the power to do something exclude the possibility of doing it for a selfish or even for a demonic reason. So, because Jesus himself described God as our “Father in heaven,” because his entire message, as MacDonald understood it, was one of love and forgiveness, and because I John 4:8 & 16 declares twice that God not only loves but is love, MacDonald likewise wrote: “In one word, God is Love. Love is the deepest depth, the essence of his nature, at the root of all his being. . . . His perfection is his love. All his divine rights rest upon his love.”28 But if it is indeed God‘s nature to love, how then should we understand his holiness and justice? Are not these also attributes of God? People sometimes say, as if it were an illuminating remark, that God is not only loving and merciful, but also just; they then exhort us to take into account God‘s justice, as well as his love, and to avoid an overly sentimental understanding of his love. According to MacDonald, however, God‘s justice is itself an expression of his love and, beyond that, his justice and mercy are exactly the same attribute. Nor was MacDonald‘s understanding of God‘s perfecting love, which a sinner might sometimes experience as wrath, harsh judgment, or even a temporary hardening of a heart, even remotely sentimental.

“I believe that justice and mercy are simply one and the same thing; without justice to the full there can be no mercy, and without mercy to the full there can be no justice; that such is the mercy of God that he will hold his children in the consuming fire of his distance until they pay the uttermost farthing, until they drop the purse of selfishness with all the dross that is in it, and rush home to the Father and the Son, and the many brethren—rush inside the centre of the life-giving fire whose outer circles burn. I believe that no hell will be lacking which would help the just mercy of God to redeem his children.”29

So God is not, in other words, a split personality whose justice pushes him in one direction and whose mercy pushes him in another. In order to illustrate the point, MacDonald chose, as a text for his sermon entitled “Justice,” the King James translation of Psalm 62:12: “Also unto thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy; for thou renderest to every man according to his work.” He then pointed out that, given the prevailing Calvinist theology of his day, one would have expected this text to read very differently, something like: “Also unto thee, O Lord, belongs justice; for thou renders to everyone according to his or her work.” But if MacDonald was right about justice and mercy (and the Calvinists of his day were mistaken), then it matters not which term one might choose. For the two resulting statements are, if not synonymous, at least logically equivalent, and so both are true if either one is true.30 MacDonald might also have pointed to a text such as Isaiah 30:18, according to which God‘s mercy expresses his justice: “Therefore the Lord wants to be gracious to you; . . . he will rise up and show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of justice.” Or he might have pointed to the eleventh chapter of Romans, which explicitly teaches that God‘s severity towards the disobedient, his judgment of sin, and even his temporary hardening of a heart all express his boundless mercy. The point is that, according to explicit teachings in the Bible, God‘s justice and mercy both require exactly the same thing, namely, an absolute destruction of sin and the separation of every sinner from it.

This single move, that of affirming an identity between divine justice and divine mercy, strikes at the very heart of Calvinism as a system of theology. Many Christians who might reject MacDonald‘s universalism—Arminians, Roman Catholics, and other freewill theists—can nonetheless accept such an identity, but a Calvinist cannot. You cannot consistently affirm a doctrine of limited election (much less that of limited atonement) unless you suppose that God deals “justly” with some people—namely, the non-elect—without being merciful to them. In defense of limited atonement, therefore, the Calvinist philosopher Paul Helm has argued that mercy differs from justice in just this respect: By its very nature mercy must be supererogatory, an expression of undeserved love, and hence cannot rest upon a moral necessity of any kind. “What is essential to such [undeserved] love is it could, consistently with all else that God is, be withheld by him. If God cannot but exercise mercy as he cannot but exercise justice then its character as mercy vanishes. If God has to exercise mercy as he has to exercise justice then such ‘mercy‘ would not be mercy [i.e. would not be undeserved love]. . . . A justice that could be unilaterally waved would not be justice, and a mercy which could not be unilaterally waved would not be mercy.”31

Now the first thing to observe about such an argument is that it is not a biblical argument at all; that is, it does not rest upon the interpretation of some biblical text or combination of texts. It is instead a quasi-philosophical argument of a kind that MacDonald encountered repeatedly and always rejected on the ground that it rests upon an utterly pagan understanding of justice and mercy.32 The easiest response would be to make Helm a present of the word “mercy” and then simply to replace it with any one of the following: “beneficence,” “kindness,” “compassion,” or even “pity.” One could then note the absurdity of the following claim: “If, given his essential attributes, God cannot but exercise beneficence [kindness, compassion, or pity] as he cannot but exercise justice, then its character as beneficence vanishes.” And, finally, one could point out that Romans 11 culminates in the statement: “For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful [or beneficent] to all.”33 As I have suggested elsewhere, the basic Pauline concept here, typically “translated in our English Bibles with the word ‘mercy,‘ is not that of undeserved love at all. It is instead that of beneficence, kindness, compassion, or pity. It has in view not the setting aside of a just punishment, as Helm supposes, but the relief of misery or distress.”34 In fact, MacDonald himself rejected as absurd the whole idea of God withholding a deserved punishment from someone. For if divine justice and mercy are the very same attribute, then God withholds a deserved punishment only if he withholds his mercy as well.

Behind the widespread idea that God‘s mercy is supererogatory lies the more general absurdity that, even as our Creator, God owes us nothing in our so-called fallen state; in particular, he has no obligation (no responsibility grounded in necessity) to save sinners. But MacDonald rejected that view as patently absurd. For just as the decision to have children entails an obligation to care and to provide for them, however disobedient they may become, so God‘s decision to create us entailed a freely accepted obligation to meet our true spiritual needs. MacDonald thus exclaimed:

Away with the thought that God could have been a perfect, an adorable creator, doing anything less than he has done for his children! . . . The idea that God would be God all the same, as glorious as he needed to be, had he not taken upon himself the divine toil of bringing home his wandered children, had he done nothing to seek and save the lost, is false as hell. Lying for God could go no farther. As if the idea of God admitted of his being less than he is, less than perfect, less than all-inall, less than Jesus Christ! less than Love absolute, less than entire unselfishness! . . . It will be answered that we have fallen, and God is thereby freed from any obligation, if any ever were. It is but another lie. No amount of wrongdoing in a child can ever free a parent from the divine necessity of doing all he can to deliver his child.35

So here, once again, we see how MacDonald‘s vision of God‘s all-pervasive love so inflamed his imagination that he found much of the Western theological tradition, insofar as it departs from a consistent expression of it, deeply offensive.

--Nick

Footnotes:

27 “The Creation in Christ.”  In Unspoken Sermons, 420.

28 Ibid., 421.

29 “Justice.” In Unspoken Sermons , 535.

30 Two statements need not be synonymous in order to be logically equivalent. For example, “The triangle on the board is equilateral” and “The triangle on the board is equiangular” are not synonymous statements. But they are logically equivalent. It is necessarily true that both are true if either one is true.

31 Helm, “The Logic of Limited Atonement,” 50.

32 There are in fact powerful exegetical arguments in support of MacDonald‘ s contention here. For an exceptionally careful study of how the translation of the Hebrew Bible into the Septuagint and the subsequent translation of the Septuagint into the Latin Vulgate distorted the Hebrew understanding of justice and drove an unwarranted wedge between justice and mercy, see McGrath, “Justice and Justification”; for a discussion that non-specialists might find somewhat more accessible, see Brinsmead, “The Scandal of God‘s Justice: Part 1”; and for an exhaustive review of the biblical evidence, see Marshall, Beyond Retribution, chapter 2: “The Justice of God in Paul and Jesus.”

33 Rom 11:32.

34 See Talbott, “Grace, Character Formation,and Predestination unto Glory,” 22.

35 “The Voice of Job.” In Unspoken Sermons , 340, 342– 43.

C.S. Lewis and "Mere Purgatory"

Anytime Jerry Walls, Scot McKnight and C.S. Lewis factor into a discussion is a good time waiting to happen.

That’s right, C.S. Lewis seemed to have embraced a view Jerry Walls can accurately call “mere purgatory.” (SeePurgatory: The Logic of Total Transformation) For many the logic looks like this: If C.S. Lewis believed it, and if C.S. Lewis is “mere” evangelicalism, then it is justifiable to believe in purgatory. Make no mistake about this logic: many evangelicals have courage to believe things unacceptable to their peers and congregations because they know Lewis believed something similar.

One more time: Do you believe in purgatory? Do you think transformation will be instantaneous or gradual? Is moral (total) transformation required to participate in God’s heaven?

Lewis, of course, was no saint. And neither was he a proper evangelical as we have come to know that term. Not long ago I was with a man who went to University with Lewis, and that man said to me, “We are all surprised that it is C.S. Lewis who has become the darling of evangelicals.” [By the way, those who have read Bonhoeffer's Ethics or his Letters and Papers from Prison often say the same of Bonhoeffer.]

C.S. Lewis, for instance, prayed for the dead (found in hisLetters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer). The standard view is that the dead are sealed — either glorified or damned. Praying for the dead at least implies something can happen to the dead that could change their status, and so his imagined questioner asks if he is bringing in the idea of Purgatory. Here are the words of C.S. Lewis (Walls has this quote; I am copying this from Letters to Malcolm, p. 108):

Well, I suppose I am. Though even in Heaven some perpetual increase of beatitude, reached by a continually more self-surrender, without the possibility of failure but not perhaps without its own ardours and exertions — for delight also has its severities and steep ascents, as loves know — might be supposed. But I won’t press, or guess, that side for the moment. I believe in Purgatory.

Straight from Lewis’ own mouth: he believed in Purgatory. I have no compulsion to say that because Lewis believed it, it is either OK or evangelical. But it is a bit of an instinct for many of us who think Lewis tapped into the core of the Christian faith in his Mere Christianity to give the man a cupped ear, if not at least a nod.

Walls then sketches how Lewis talked about his deceased wife, Joy, in A Grief Observed, and how he connected her to purgatorial sufferings and cleansings. The view was held by Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Dorothy Sayers. Walls makes a case for seeing Lewis’ purgatory flowing naturally from Lewis’ theology. That is, purgatory is not incidental or casual for Lewis.

Lewis, truth be told, was not evangelical in his atonement theory either. We are in a big hole because we are rebels, and to get out we have to lay down our arms — this is what he means by repentance. But we can’t perfectly repent so, in an Anselmian kind of logic, sees Christ as the perfect penitent (I argued this a bit in Jesus Creed in the chapter on John’s baptism). He substitutes for us in that he surrenders perfectly to God. (Walls observes that Lewis wasn’t into a justification worldview.)

Walls quotes from Lewis, the famous one about there being many people in the world who are slowly becoming non-Christians, and some of them are clergymen; there are also many who are slowly becoming Christians, though they don’t know it. In this Lewis is being a virtue ethicist where character is what makes us fit for heaven: that is, we will find ourselves at home in heaven or find ourselves unable to stomach the place. And a higher level of faith, for Lewis, was when the person, well down the road in his or her journey, comes to the disposition that we are unable and that the person trusts Christ to do it all for them. That is, the person becomes Christlike.

And Christ will finish the job. What complicates it is our freedom. We can push Christ away. But the job will not be — cannot be — completed in this life. Which means it is completed postmortem. Lewis does not teach imputation of Christ’s righteousness; but gracious transformation into Christlikeness. Salvation, for Lewis, was participation in the dance of the Trinity.

Purgatory then is natural to Lewis because salvation is about total transformation, and it requires human reception. It will be finished, that’s a given; but when is the issue. For Lewis, since it isn’t finished here, it will be finished there. Ergo, purgatory is an entailment of salvation as transformation.

For Lewis, purgatory is about sanctification/purification (not retribution); it entails the pain of growth into the deeper reality of joy; and Lewis never minimizes human freedom. But it is the work of God: hence, Walls insists this view of purgatory is very much a matter of grace.

OK, time for me to state where I am:

1. Method is of colossal significance here: there is no biblical warrant for purgatory.

2. Walls, in my view, has made a case for a view of purgatory that is compatible with genuine Protestant thinking, though I cannot imagine the monergist or Calvinist would believe in his view of purgatory. But Walls argues the satisfaction models of purgatory are contradictory to Protestant thinking but the sanctification models are not.

3. I believe those who are committed to virtue ethics ought to believe in purgatory.

4. Walls is right in pushing this discussion into human freedom: if perfection is required, and if perfection for the saint is a matter of growth into perfection because it requires freedom, then purgatory is a reasonable (even Protestant) entailment.  Which takes me back to #1 above. How do we frame these sorts of doctrines? What warrants do Scriptures provide?

McKnight/ Jesus Creed, Lewis & Walls

--Nick

C.S. Lewis & George MacDonald, "The Nature of Christian Faith" part II

This article was offered for free by author Thomas Talbott on his website. It is from the anthology "All Shall be Well; Explorations in Universal Salvation and Theology, From Origen to Moltmann," edited by Robin Parry (or Gregory MacDonald, as he was known).

This post will cover pages four through nine, and continue in the essay written by Thomas Talbott on my favorite deceased theologian, George MacDonald.

Universal Salvation in the Theology of George MacDonald (1824-1905) by Thomas Talbott

Although MacDonald was never shy about challenging the prevailing theological doctrines of his day, sometimes with a surprising degree of harshness, he also denied that the proper purpose of teaching was to persuade others to conform their thinking to the teacher‘s own thinking. Instead, the sole purpose should be to acquaint people with the living Christ of the New Testament. As MacDonald himself put it: "I believe that no teacher should strive to make men think as he thinks, but [should instead strive] to lead them to the living Truth, to the Master himself, of whom alone they can learn anything, who will make them in themselves know what is true by the very seeing of it. I believe that the inspiration of the Almighty alone gives understanding. I believe that to be the disciple of Christ is the end of being; that to persuade men to be his disciples is the end of teaching."(13)

These words also illustrate the extent to which MacDonald adopted a Christocentric approach to revelation. Like Karl Barth whom he anticipated in this regard, he seems to have distinguished sharply between the incarnate Word of God, which is the light (or the true revelation) that comes into the world and enlightens every person, and the words of any human witness, such as John the Baptist, who might testify to the light.(14) As the incarnate Word of God, Jesus Christ is the ultimate and final revelation from God, and everything else, including everything else in the Bible, must be interpreted in light of this ultimate and final revelation that, sooner or later, will enlighten every person. Faith is simply the obedient response to this revelation, and, as such, it can also be a reliable source of knowledge under the right conditions. In that one respect, at least, MacDonald‘s understanding of faith was similar to that of John Calvin, whose overall theology he passionately rejected. For even as Calvin held that "the only true faith is that which the Spirit of God seals in our hearts,"(15) so MacDonald held that "the inspiration of the Almighty alone gives understanding"; and even as Calvin held that certain convictions sealed in our hearts by the Spirit of God are "self-authenticating," so MacDonald held that "the Master" enables us to "know what is true by the very seeing of it."

By faith, for example, "we understand that the world was created by the word of God"(16) and we can know this, furthermore, without having to infer it from other propositions or from some body of evidence. Or, to express the point in a way familiar to contemporary philosophers, at least some of the truths known by faith are properly basic in Alvin Plantinga‘s sense.(17) In no way, however, did MacDonald identify saving faith with the possession of correct doctrine. Faith may be a source of knowledge, but it just is an obedient heart or a disposition to obey; and it "is the one terrible heresy of the church," MacDonald lamented, "that it has always been presenting something else than obedience as faith in Christ."(18) In particular, Christians too often confuse faith in Christ with an acceptance of certain theories or abstract doctrines about his nature and work, and they just as often confuse an absence of "correct" doctrine with an absence of faith. But like Kierkegaard, MacDonald held that an acceptance of correct doctrine is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition of saving faith.

It is not a sufficient condition, because accepting a particular theory carries no guarantee of obedience; and besides, "to hold a thing with the intellect," he insisted, "is not [even] to believe it [in the relevant sense]. A man‘s real belief is that which he lives by."(19) And neither is an acceptance of correct doctrine a necessary condition of saving faith, because one can have an obedient heart, a willingness to submit to the "true light, which enlightens everyone,"(20) without giving assent to any particular theory about the nature of Jesus Christ and his redemptive work. MacDonald even went so far as to suggest that an atheist might be closer to the Kingdom of God than a professing Christian: "It is better to be an atheist who does the will of God, than a so-called Christian who does not. . . . The doing of things from duty is but a stage on the road to the kingdom of truth and love."(21)Indeed, our theological opinions and theories, however correct they may be, might be the very thing that prevents us "from being Christians. For when you say that, to be saved, a man must hold this or that [theory], then are you leaving the living God and his will, and putting trust in some notion [such as a theory of atonement] about him or his will."(22) But our task, MacDonald contended, is simply to follow in obedience the one who died on our behalf and rose again in triumph; it is not to haggle over humanly devised theories about the way in which the death and resurrection of Christ successfully reconciles us to God.

Accordingly, a set of incorrect theological opinions, honestly and humbly held, could no more condemn someone than a set of correct opinions, held apart from a transformed heart, could successfully save someone. But if that is true, then in what sense, exactly, is faith also a source of knowledge? MacDonald‘s rather nuanced answer includes an appeal to Philippians 3:15–16, wherein Paul wrote: "Let those of us then who are mature be of the same mind; and if you think differently about anything [my emphasis] this too God will reveal to you. Only let us hold fast to what we have attained." Commenting on this text, MacDonald wrote: "Observe what widest conceivable scope is given by the apostle to honest opinion, even in things of grandest import!—the one only essential point with him is, that whereto we have attained, what we have seen to be true, we walk by that."(23) So faith (or an obedient heart) is indeed, MacDonald contended, the principle instrument through which God imparts spiritual understanding and a knowledge of himself. But whatever light now dawns in our understanding, whatever ultimate truths we now discern (however faintly), and whatever obligations we now acknowledge, we must allow that to penetrate our hearts and to transform us. We must, in other words, own up to whatever light we have. When we follow that light in obedience and thereby submit to it, the Spirit will inevitably enable us to see farther and wider.

We thus approach what I (and many others) have found to be the single most refreshing aspect of MacDonald‘s approach to religion. He recognized that we must all proceed from where we now are in our respective spiritual journeys, and he saw no virtue in trying to suppress honest doubt or in ignoring moral qualms concerning, say, a widely accepted interpretation of the Bible. Such bad faith, as he saw it, is the very antithesis of a genuine faith in Christ. "Do not try to believe anything," he thus exhorted, "that affects you as darkness. Even if you mistake and refuse something true thereby, you will do less wrong to Christ by such a refusal than you would by accepting as his what you can see only as darkness."(24) Granted, what a given person sees as darkness at a particular time may depend on a host of cultural and individual factors, perhaps even on a confusion of one kind or another. Even MacDonald‘s own teachings, he would have acknowledged, may affect some as darkness. But with respect to any genuine revelation from God, it "is impossible," he believed, that "you are seeing a true, a real thing—seeing it as it is, I mean—if it looks to you darkness."(25)

Imagine yourself, by way of illustration, a simple peasant with no knowledge of Greek or Hebrew, little knowledge of the Bible‘s historical background, and no access to scholarly works on the Bible. Imagine further that, even though you believe in your heart that racism and slavery are terrible evils, you should find yourself utterly unable to refute, exegetically, your pastor‘s racist interpretation of the curse of Ham or his appeal to Paul in support of institutional slavery. And imagine, finally, that your pastor should then play his trump card: an appeal to original sin in an effort to knock you off your moral convictions, as if sin would more likely corrupt your deeply rooted moral convictions than it would his interpretation of Scripture. How should you then respond in the face of your pastor‘s seemingly superior knowledge of the Scriptures and his injunction to bow humbly before them (as he interprets them, of course)? MacDonald‘s counsel on such matters was clear: Hold on to your moral convictions, treat them as part of the light that the Word of God has brought into the world, and do not "let your cowardly conscience receive any word as light because another calls it light, while it looks to you dark. Say either the thing is not what it seems, or God never said or did it. But, of all evils, to misinterpret what God does, and then say the thing as interpreted must be right because God does it, is of the devil."(26)

To be continued.

--Nick

Footnotes:
12 "The Child in the Midst." In Unspoken Sermons, 15. Unspoken Sermons was originally published in three series in 1867, 1885, and 1889 in London by Longmans, Green & Co.
13 MacDonald, "Justice." In Unspoken Sermons , 536.
14 See John 1:1– 9. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from the Bible will be from the New Revised Standard Version copyrighted in 1989 by the National Council of Churches in the United States of America.
15 Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion , Bk. 1, Ch. viii, Sec. 5.
16 Heb 11:3.
17 See Plantinga, "Warranted Christian Belief", ch. 8. According to Plantinga, ―gospel truths resemble self "evident propositions" in the same respect that "perceptual and memory beliefs" resemble them. That is, "They are evident, but don‘t get their evidence from other propositions; they have their evidence in themselves (and not by way of inference from other propositions" (Ibid., 262). 

18 "The Truth in Jesus." In Unspoken Sermons , 393.
19 Ibid., 390.
20 John 1:9.
21 MacDonald, Paul Faber, Surgeon , 25.
22 "The Truth in Jesus." In Unspoken Sermons , 390– 91.
23 Ibid., 410.
24 From Rolland Hein‘s edited version of "Light" in George MacDonald: Creation in Christ, 42. I choose this edited version because MacDonald‘s use of "thee," "thou," "thy," and some older linguistic forms in the paragraph from which the quotation is lifted could be distracting to some readers.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.

C.S. Lewis & his "Master", George MacDonald the Universalist part I

This article was offered for free by author Thomas Talbott on his website. It is from the anthology "All Shall be Well; Explorations in Universal Salvation and Theology, From Origen to Moltmann," edited by Robin Parry (or Gregory MacDonald, as he was known).

If anyone is looking for a historical look at famous Christian universalists, look no further. Everyone from Origen to Barth to Moltmann is covered in amazing detail and eloquent revelation.

And we start with my personal favorite deceased theologian, the Scottish minister and fantasy writer, George MacDonald. This will cover pages one through four.

Universal Salvation in the Theology of George MacDonald (1824–1905) by Thomas Talbott

Born and raised in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, the Victorian visionary and prolific writer, George MacDonald, achieved enormous popularity in his own day both as an imaginative storyteller and as an authentic prophetic voice. "Between 1851 and 1897," notes Frederick Buechner in the forward to Rolland Hein‘s biography, ―he wrote over fifty books—novels, plays, essays, sermons, poems, fairy tales, not to mention two fantasies for adults (Phantastes, 1858, and Lilith, 1895) that elude the usual categories.(1) His friendship with Lewis Carroll (the penname for Charles Dodgson) was very close, and he also made friends with such luminaries as Henry Longfellow, Walt Whitman, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Mark Twain, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. At the height of his popularity in 1872, Macdonald traveled to the United States for a remarkably successful lecture tour in which he addressed huge audiences and "people flocked to him as prophet, seer, saint, all in one.(2) But in no way did MacDonald seek popular acclaim or tailor a message in an effort to achieve popularity; to the contrary, he always remained true to a stunning religious vision that, one way or another, expressed itself in virtually all of his writings, lectures, and delivered sermons. It was a stunning and utterly consistent vision of God‘s all-inclusive, all-pervasive, and inexorable love.

As it happened, MacDonald‘s popularity faded rapidly after his death in 1905. But even so, his influence upon important nineteenth and twentieth century writers ensured an enduring legacy. As Nick Page notes in his introduction to an annotated edition of MacDonald‘s influential Phantastes (3), "The roll call of writers who have been influenced by his unique perspective includes Robert Louis Stevenson, G. K. Chesterton, E. Nesbit, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R Tolkien, Maurice Sendak, T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden.(4) According to W. H. Auden, for one, MacDonald was "one of the most remarkable writers of the nineteenth century."(5) But probably no one did more than C. S. Lewis to rekindle popular interest in MacDonald, which has grown steadily over the past few decades. In his preface to George MacDonald: an Anthology, Lewis thus wrote: "I have never concealed the fact that I regard him as my master; indeed I fancy that I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him. But it has not seemed to me that those who have received my books kindly take even now sufficient notice of the affiliation."(6) Over the passing years, however, at least some of those who take "kindly" to Lewis‘ own books have indeed come to appreciate why he regarded MacDonald as his own tutor and "master."

Without question MacDonald‘s relationship with his father—an unbreakable bond of loyalty, trust, and unconditional love that developed between them—profoundly influenced his own understanding of God‘s relationship to created persons. On the one hand, George, Sr., was a simple farmer and a constant source of spiritual comfort to a young boy with a sickly constitution, who in his childhood lost his mother to the ravages of tuberculosis.(7) As MacDonald explicitly stated in one sermon, "In my own childhood and boyhood, my father was the refuge from all the ills of life, even sharp pain itself."(8) But, on the other hand, George, Sr., was also devoutly religious, a deacon in a local Presbyterian church, and committed to an especially stern form of Calvinism.

So, because MacDonald was never able to reconcile in his own mind his father‘s Calvinist theology with his father‘s own sensitive, caring, and loving nature, he began to reject his father's theology at a remarkably early age. As Rolland Hein observes in his biography, "The young George took churchgoing very seriously";(9) but his reaction to what he heard in church was often to question or even to reject it. When he first heard ―the doctrine of [limited] election," for example, "he said he did not want God to love him if he did not love everybody."(10) The boy was even known to experience physical pain while sitting in church. From the beginning, however, he loved the Christian Scriptures and spent years as a young man studying them in their original languages. But the more he studied, the more persuaded he became that he needed to unlearn almost everything he had learned in church. He thus wrote the following to his father, with whom he remained in loving contact throughout all of his early struggles: "I love my Bible more—I am always finding out something new in it—I seem to have had everything to learn over again from the beginning—All my teaching in youth seems useless to me—I must get it all from the Bible again."(11)

MacDonald received his formal education at Aberdeen College and subsequently at Highbury Theological College in London, where he studied for the Christian ministry. But he resigned under a cloud of heresy from his first (and only) pastorate after only three years, and I doubt that anyone who reads his voluminous Unspoken Sermons or the lengthy religious reflections embedded in his Victorian novels would likely find this development surprising. For MacDonald was a persistent critic of Western theology, particularly as we encounter it in the likes of Augustine and Calvin, and his own religious convictions tended to accord far better with the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Even as many Christians believe that, despite a detailed knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures, Jesus‘ opponents among the scribes and the Pharisees had simply misunderstood the revelation that Moses and the Hebrew prophets had delivered to them, so MacDonald came to believe that, despite a detailed knowledge of the Christian Scriptures, far too many Western theologians have simply misunderstood the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. So perhaps it is not from religious leaders and scholars, he concluded, that we should even expect the greatest insight and clarity of vision. Here is but one example of his attitude towards the Western theological tradition:

"How terribly, then, have the theologians misrepresented God . . .! Nearly all of them represent him as a great King on a grand throne, thinking how grand he is, and making it the business of his being and the end of his universe to keep up his glory, wielding the bolts of a Jupiter against them that take his name in vain. They would not allow this, but follow out what they say, and it comes much to this. Brothers, have you found our king? There he is, kissing little children and saying they are like God. There he is at table with the head of a fisherman lying on his bosom, and somewhat heavy at heart that even he, the beloved disciple, cannot yet understand him well. The simplest peasant who loves his children and his sheep were—no, not a truer, for the other is false, but—a true type of our God beside that monstrosity of a monarch."(12)

As this passage already illustrates, MacDonald passionately believed that God‘s glory consists not in his power or his kingship, but in his humility, in his loving nature, and in his eagerness to give of himself to all of those whom he loves into existence in the first place.

To be continued.

--Nick

Footnotes:

1 See Hein, George MacDonald: Victorian Mythmaker , xvii. 

2 Ibid. His most popular lectures were on Robert Burns and Hamlet , but his repertory also included lectures on the British poet and humorist ―Tom Hood , the Lyrics of Tennyson , King Lear , Macbeth , and Milton.‖ (See Raeper, George MacDonald , 292).
3 Phantastes had a dramatic effect on C.S. Lewis and also influenced such fantasy writers as J.R.R Tolkien and Madeline L‘Engle.
4 See Page‘s introduction to the special annotated edition of Phantastes , 30.
5 Ibid., quoted on the second inside page.
6 Lewis (ed.), George MacDonald: An Anthology , xxxii.
7 "MacDonald was often ill as a boy. On one occasion he was kept in bed for four months and bled from the arm . . .[His] entire life . . . can be characterized as what he had time to do between bouts of illness‖ (Jeff McInnis, Shadows and Chivalry, 11). And yet, though he too was afflicted with tuberculosis, MacDonald nonetheless lived a relatively long life.
8 "Abba, Father!" In Unspoken Sermons , 284. MacDonald recognized, of course, that some people have a less than that you have missed in life. Every time a man might have been to you a refuge . . . that is a time when a father ideal relationship with their own father. So to them he went on to say: ―You must interpret the word [―father‖] by all might have been a father indeed‖ (Ibid ).
9 Hein, George MacDonald: Victorian Mythmaker , 6.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 31.
12 "The Child in the Midst." In Unspoken Sermons, 15. Unspoken Sermons was originally published in three series in 1867, 1885, and 1889 in London by Longmans, Green & Co.

C.S. Lewis, Free Will & Hell

This is a really interesting article written by Kevin Miller over at Hellbound -- 

"One Lewis book that almost failed to pass the evangelical smell test, however, is The Great Divorce. It’s about a group of people in hell who board a bus to heaven, where they get to decide whether or not they want to stay. One-by-one, most of the people find a reason to get back on the bus, finding they prefer to wallow in their petty jealousy, self-pity and bitterness rather than submit to the healing on offer in heaven. 

This is a difficult book for many evangelicals, because it seems to suggest that Lewis believe there might be an opportunity for postmortem salvation–a second chance to get things right after death. It also smacks of an Orthodox understanding of the afterlife, which sees heaven and hell not as separate places but as distinct psychological conditions.

Most evangelicals turn this grit of sand into a pearl by saying, “It’s just a story.” Lewis didn’t actually mean to suggest there might be a second chance after death; he was merely seeking to demonstrate that wherever we wind up after we die, our destination will ultimately be a result of the choices we make here on earth. In fact, the road to heaven or hell doesn’t begin at death; it begins right now. 

While many people find this to be an airtight defense of hell, others aren’t so sure. Philosopher Thomas Talbott is one such dissenter. In his view, the C. S. Lewis defense falls under the category of “hard-hearted theism” a.k.a. “tough love. Many people content themselves with the idea that if people freely choose to reject God, too bad for them. They had their chance just like the rest of us. They just made the wrong choice. And far be it from God to intervene in the face of such poor decision-making. After all, we’re not a bunch of automatons. However, Talbott raises two objections to this line of thinking:"

I'm a fan of Talbott, and he always manages to make me think. To continue, click below!

Article

Hope you enjoy!

--Nick

P.S. for those of you interested in reading more of Thomas Talbott,

Thomas Talbott's personal site and his academic one.

It includes various chapters of his books, as well as his articles. He has interacted in the past with John Piper and William Lane Craig on the philosophical nature of Universalism and free will.