George MacDonald's Spiritual Vision: An Introductory Overview

Spiritual Vision

An Introductory

Overview

Michael Phillips

Copyright © 2018, Michael Phillips

CONTENTS

Introduction

1.  KNOWING GOD TRULY

2.  MEANINGS MATTER

3.  TRUE AND FALSE GOSPELS

4.  THE NATURE AND CHARACTER OF GOD

5.  THE GODHEAD AND MAN’S RESPONSE

6.  SALVATION

7.  CHILDSHIP

8.  JUSTICE AND ATONEMENT

9.  GOD’S ETERNAL PURPOSE TO REDEEM HIS UNIVERSE

Appendix: The Gulf That Divided

Selected Bibliography

"By these extracts from writings I have long loved,

I hope to help some of my friends to a genuine

acquaintance with the writer…

"In making these extracts, I have taken the

following liberties: I have made shorter sentences out of

long ones, purely by omission; and I have, in a few

places, inserted or substituted a word necessary,

because of such omission, to bring out the sense."

—George MacDonald, A Cabinet of Gems

INTRODUCTION

This small book, though weighty and dense in places, is nevertheless intended to provide a summarizing overview of what we might call the high points of George MacDonald’s theological outlook.

When working on the more comprehensive title George MacDonald’s Transformational Theology of the Christian Faith, I realized that not everyone is prepared, nor wants, to dive into the deep end of the pool with a 400-page collection of MacDonald’s complete sermons with accompanying notes. A shorter complementary overview was also needed, a survey that progressively identified the key elements of MacDonald’s theology without requiring readers to plow through fifty-page sermons.

Toward that end I prepared a series of talks for one of our MacDonald retreat weekends. This book is the result. Hopefully those who find MacDonald’s ideas a little daunting to lay hold of will find them easier to digest and assimilate in this format.

Aspects of MacDonald’s vision of an eternally loving Fatherhood and a childship of obedience are sprinkled like radiant literary gems throughout all his writings. As our subtitle here indicates, the elucidation of MacDonald’s uncommon vision can be viewed as transformational.

Everyone will of course define transformational by the light of his or her own experience and background. The only apologetic I can make for my analysis of his work and my use of that word is to say that my own life’s pilgrimage has been informed, and much in my outlook about God and his work transformed, by the truths I have unearthed in MacDonald’s writings.

Over forty-five years ago, my wife Judy and I discovered in George MacDonald’s writings an oasis for our souls. In summoning us into the high regions of Fatherhood, MacDonald challenged us to think more expansively about our faith, and thus instilled a loftier perspective of eternity within us for our spirits to dwell.

As none of MacDonald’s novels or sermons were then available, we set out to reacquaint the reading public with this remarkable 19th century Scotsman through the publication of new editions of his works. As we did, we encountered much debate about which genre of MacDonald’s corpus was most important, was most skillfully executed, and which has contributed most directly to his ongoing literary legacy.

This discussion has dominated scholarly studies since MacDonald’s own lifetime. By their very breadth and scope, MacDonald’s poetic, imaginative, allegorical, and visionary gifts, and the sweeping range of his corpus, have lent themselves to a myriad of interpretations. It struck us, however, that these attempts to rank MacDonald’s work often missed the bull’s eye. Curiously, even many who highly revered MacDonald yet failed to grasp the eternal import of his life and work. His close friend John Ruskin, who lived one of the Victorian era’s notable examples of a troubled life, was fascinated by MacDonald’s writing but confessed himself unable to understand it. Though Ruskin enjoyed an intimacy with MacDonald the rest us can but envy from afar, in a sense he remained on the outside, never experiencing the deepest MacDonald had to offer.

Two of the best book-length studies ever produced on MacDonald’s work were written by an avowed atheist and an unabashed skeptic. After studying his work in enormous depth and with occasional insight, both men entirely missed the essence and spiritual foundation of that work. Indeed, many have taken this analysis of MacDonald to the extreme, reading the most bizarre Freudian interpretations into MacDonald’s writing, while psychoanalyzing MacDonald himself, quite literally from cradle to grave.

In our own time, as his connections to C.S. Lewis have become more widely known and his reputation has expanded, MacDonald has become the subject of an increasing number of scholarly papers, books, blogs, and websites. Hundreds of theses have been written, studies published, societies formed, and countless talks given in symposiums and conferences, which analyze and dissect MacDonald’s work from every angle imaginable…while the eternal raison d’être of MacDonald’s life often remains neglected.

This pinpoints, in my opinion, an essential point for all who love MacDonald to bear in mind as they read his books. Poetic imagination, great wisdom, and the skill to spin memorable stories...these will never measure greatness in eternal realms. Robert Burns, King Solomon, and Ernest Hemingway attest to the fleeting nature of all three.

For eternal greatness we must look elsewhere.

My focus and passion to make MacDonald’s work accessible to a wide cross section of readers has therefore converged in a single quest—to probe the spiritual pulse of the man.

Certainly MacDonald’s diverse range of literary skills and gifts expressed through faerie, myth, symbolic fantasy, poetry, and allegory lends itself to review on multiple levels. But I have tried to discover, and then articulate through diverse means, the bull’s eye, the foundational perspectives that lay at root in all MacDonald’s work—novels, stories, fantasies, poetry. What ties everything together? What made him tick...spiritually?

What was the core and essence of George MacDonald’s beliefs that informed how he lived? In a sense, this small book, brief as it is, represents the culmination of that forty-year quest to know the deepest of George MacDonald’s heart.

There may be those who wonder why selections are not represented from a wider swath of MacDonald’s novels, stories, fairy tales, and fantasies. Certainly MacDonald’s spiritual vision is beautifully illuminated in the imaginative works. We feel MacDonald’s heart portrayed in the characters of Malcolm, Gibbie, Robert Falconer, and so many others, and through the probing words of the Wise Woman and the Grandmother of the Curdie tales and North Wind. We scarcely need to be reminded that all MacDonald’s writings contain countless threads of insight into his transformational spiritual outlook.

MacDonald’s vision is applied and lived in his stories, yet its specifics are less thoroughly expounded in those sources. It is in his didactic non-fiction where MacDonald addresses his belief system directly and at length. There we discover a straightforward and detailed articulation of those principles which give life to his fantasies and imbue his realistic novels with such eternal power.

C.S. Lewis clearly understood this all-important bull’s eye of MacDonald’s life. Though speaking of MacDonald’s romanticism and mythopoeic art, and acknowledging his personal debt to Phantastes, it was not for his imaginative genius that Lewis most highly revered MacDonald. When he came to producing his own anthology of MacDonald selections, it was also to the sermons Lewis turned.

Lewis acknowledged that to understand MacDonald fully required recognition of his spiritual not merely his imaginative vision. In his anthology, Lewis references only two brief quotes from Phantastes but over 250 from the sermons. He recognized that the touchstone and source of the deepest in MacDonald was to be found in his non-fiction. In the Introduction to his George MacDonald, An Anthology, after discussing various tangential aspects of MacDonald’s genius, Lewis directed his attention to identifying with precision the essence of George MacDonald—the Spirit of Christ that is found in his work. Lewis writes, The Divine Sonship is the key-conception which unites all the different elements of his thought...I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself.

(To talk about the two separately, however, misdirects our attention toward a division that does not exist at all. MacDonald’s vision was a spiritually imaginative one. It is his imagination that gives such scope and power to his spiritual vision.)

Following Lewis’s lead, it is in the sermons where we find MacDonald’s ideas most cogently and completely presented. This straightforward didactic presentation helps us isolate concepts in depth and detail that will of necessity remain more subtle and fragmentary elsewhere. The passage in What’s Mine’s Mine, in the chapter entitled The Gulf that Divided, for example, in which Ian attempts to explain God’s justice to his mother, is one of the most profound exchanges in MacDonald’s fiction. It is a beautiful passage—yet falls short of providing us a complete picture of MacDonald’s thought on the subject. If one wants a full picture of MacDonald’s perspective on justice it is to the non-fictional sermon Justice we must turn.

Similarly, Curdie’s transformative experience with the purifying fire of burning roses gives a foretaste of that principle which MacDonald expounds directly and fully in the sermon The Consuming Fire. MacDonald’s sermons provide us with the primary source material for his theological ideas.

There are of course instances where occasional fictional selections highlight an aspect of MacDonald’s thought not found in his sermons. Some of these are included along with the sermon extracts. For example, in David Elginbrod we encounter MacDonald speaking of the invisibility of the lines of division that exist in God’s economy. Similarly, his exposé of the fallacy of traditional theology as being, he says, founded in hell, is clarified with precision in Robert Falconer.

The selections included here represent but the pinnacles of distant mountains, peaks of far more extensive progressions of thought found in the originals from which they are taken. That is, of course, the whole idea—to give sufficient glimpses of those summits to encourage readers to explore the entire mountain range.

I have