A Lovely George MacDonald Quote

"Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and man will not take it."
--George MacDonald

George MacDonald on Atonement

'The sum of all this is that you do not believe in the atonement?'

I believe in Jesus Christ. 

Nowhere am I requested to believe in any thing, or in any statement, but everywhere to believe in God and in Jesus Christ. In what you call the atonement, in what you mean by the word, what I have already written must make it plain enough I do not believe. God forbid I should, for it would be to believe a lie, and a lie which is to blame for much non-acceptance of the gospel in this and other lands. But, as the word was used by the best English writers at the time when the translation of the Bible was made--with all my heart, and soul, and strength, and mind, I believe in the atonement, call it the a-tone-ment, or the at-one-ment, as you please. 

I believe that Jesus Christ is our atonement; that through him we are reconciled to, made one with God. There is not one word in the New Testament about reconciling God to us; it is we that have to be reconciled to God. I am not writing, neither desire to write, a treatise on the atonement, my business being to persuade men to be atoned to God; but I will go so far to meet my questioner as to say--without the slightest expectation of satisfying him, or the least care whether I do so or not, for his opinion is of no value to me, though his truth is of endless value to me and to the universe--that, even in the sense of the atonement being a making-up for the evil done by men toward God, I believe in the atonement. Did not the Lord cast himself into the eternal gulf of evil yawning between the children and the Father? Did he not bring the Father to us, let us look on our eternal Sire in the face of his true son, that we might have that in our hearts which alone could make us love him--a true sight of him? Did he not insist on the one truth of the universe, the one saving truth, that God was just what he was? Did he not hold to that assertion to the last, in the face of contradiction and death? Did he not thus lay down his life persuading us to lay down ours at the feet of the Father? Has not his very life by which he died passed into those who have received him, and re-created theirs, so that now they live with the life which alone is life? Did he not foil and slay evil by letting all the waves and billows of its horrid sea break upon him, go over him, and die without rebound--spend their rage, fall defeated, and cease? Verily, he made atonement! We sacrifice to God!--it is God who has sacrificed his own son to us; there was no way else of getting the gift of himself into our hearts. Jesus sacrificed himself to his father and the children to bring them together--all the love on the side of the Father and the Son, all the selfishness on the side of the children. If the joy that alone makes life worth living, the joy that God is such as Christ, be a true thing in my heart, how can I but believe in the atonement of Jesus Christ? I believe it heartily, as God means it.

Then again, as the power that brings about a making-up for any wrong done by man to man, I believe in the atonement. Who that believes in Jesus does not long to atone to his brother for the injury he has done him? What repentant child, feeling he has wronged his father, does not desire to make atonement? Who is the mover, the causer, the persuader, the creator of the repentance, of the passion that restores fourfold?--Jesus, our propitiation, our atonement. He is the head and leader, the prince of the atonement. He could not do it without us, but he leads us up to the Father's knee: he makes us make atonement. Learning Christ, we are not only sorry for what we have done wrong, we not only turn from it and hate it, but we become able to serve both God and man with an infinitely high and true service, a soul-service. We are able to offer our whole being to God to whom by deepest right it belongs. Have I injured anyone? With him to aid my justice, new risen with him from the dead, shall I not make good amends? Have I failed in love to my neighbour? Shall I not now love him with an infinitely better love than was possible to me before? That I will and can make atonement, thanks be to him who is my atonement, making me at one with God and my fellows! 

He is my life, my joy, my lord, my owner, the perfecter of my being by the perfection of his own. I dare not say with Paul that I am the slave of Christ; but my highest aspiration and desire is to be the slave of Christ.

'But you do not believe that the sufferings of Christ, as sufferings, justified the supreme ruler in doing anything which he would not have been at liberty to do but for those sufferings?'

I do not. I believe the notion as unworthy of man's belief, as it is dishonouring to God. It has its origin doubtless in a salutary sense of sin; but sense of sin is not inspiration, though it may lie not far from the temple-door. It is indeed an opener of the eyes, but upon home-defilement, not upon heavenly truth; it is not the revealer of secrets. Also there is another factor in the theory, and that is unbelief--incapacity to accept the freedom of God's forgiveness; incapacity to believe that it is God's chosen nature to forgive, that he is bound in his own divinely willed nature to forgive. No atonement is necessary to him but that men should leave their sins and come back to his heart. But men cannot believe in the forgiveness of God. Therefore they need, therefore he has given them a mediator. And yet they will not know him. They think of the father of souls as if he had abdicated his fatherhood for their sins, and assumed the judge. 

If he put off his fatherhood, which he cannot do, for it is an eternal fact, he puts off with it all relation to us. He cannot repudiate the essential and keep the resultant. Men cannot, or will not, or dare not see that nothing but his being our father gives him any right over us--that nothing but that could give him a perfect right. They regard the father of their spirits as their governor! They yield the idea of the Ancient of Days, 'the glad creator,' and put in its stead a miserable, puritanical martinet of a God, caring not for righteousness, but for his rights; not for the eternal purities, but the goody proprieties. The prophets of such a God take all the glow, all the hope, all the colour, all the worth, out of life on earth, and offer you instead what they call eternal bliss--a pale, tearless hell. Of all things, turn from a mean, poverty stricken faith. But, if you ate straitened in your own mammon-worshipping soul, how shall you believe in a God any greater than can stand up in that prison-chamber?

I desire to wake no dispute, will myself dispute with no man, but for the sake of those whom certain believers trouble, I have spoken my mind. I love the one God seen in the face of Jesus Christ. From all copies of Jonathan Edwards's portrait of God, however faded by time, however softened by the use of less glaring pigments, I turn with loathing. 

Not such a God is he concerning whom was the message John heard from Jesus, that he is light, and in him is no darkness at all.

For the entire sermon entitled "Justice" 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.

Is Rob Bell a Universalist?

No.

It's been over a year, so I figured addressing this would be a nice circular return to form.

He's an Arminian inclusivist who believes in the possibility of post-mortem salvation, and hopes that all people will be saved. Universalism seems to demand a specific level of certainty. Meaning all will eventually be saved. Keith DeRose contacted me and offered a unique and challenging perspective, in that "hopeful" universalism seems to be a personal preference or feeling, rather than an objective view of the data.

Instead of certain, I offer "highly probably" universalism as the best way to define "certain" universalism. "Hopeful" universalism will be termed "possible" universalism from this point forth.

I think Thomas Talbott, Eric Reitan, Robin Parry, Jurgen Moltmann, George MacDonald and Keith DeRose are "highly probable" universalists.

I think Rob Bell is not a universalist, but he believes it is possible. Possibility does not seem to grant universalism. It merely presents it as an option. That is all Rob Bell did. Presented an option and stepped back.

Rob Bell is not certain of whether or not all will be saved. He has said that the afterlife in regards to heaven/hell is speculative. But he hopes all will be saved, and he is open to think it is possible. But he is not certain, and since he cannot be certain, to tag him with the label is simply incorrect. Most "highly probable" universalists will correct you on the label as well.

No need to read anymore into his book. If you want universalism, read the above mentioned gentlemen. Besides Rob Bell, of course. The literature offered by the above gentlemen (particularly Moltmann and MacDonald) is quite compelling.

Arminian.

Inclusivist.

Postmortem salvation.

And I think only one of those labels (arminian/inclusivist/postmortem salvation) is incorrect. I'll be like Bell and maintain some level of certain cheekiness by not saying which one.

And

That's

How

This

Blog

Post

Ends.

--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.