Piper & Keller love Lewis but say George MacDonald non-Xtian

[Cole]

Keller said MacDonald wasn’t a Christian. Piper hesitated and never claimed MacDonald wasn’t a Christian.

George Macdonald is best known today for his popular novels that have been reprinted in Americanized form from their Scottish coloring. His credibility has been catapulted into the heights of evangelical affection by the amazing quotes of C.S. Lewis in the anthology he put together of MacDonald’s quotations…Indeed it is hard not to admire MacDonald’s radical commitment to follow Jesus Christ…It would be much easier to criticize his views of atonement if he were a bad man. But he was not a bad man.

For some years he preached from rented quarters to anyone who would listen. In the early 1860’s he began a literary career that would last the rest of his life and that would result in fifty two published volumes of poems and novels and sermons, many of which are available today. There is much that is good in these writings. - John Piper, The Pleasures Of God, pp. 167-169

It seems that Piper’s beef with MacDonald is over his views of hell and atonement. Piper never claims MacDonald wasn’t a Christian though.

[anon47460357]

In one of his written sermons, George MacDonald mentioned Christian thinkers who in heaven have repudiated their former mistaken beliefs. I wish I had the passage with me. If I recall correctly, MacDonald was basically saying, “To those who will quote past Christian authorities against me, you needn’t believe them yourself, because these authorities have long since themselves abandoned their errors.”

[lotharson]

Pilgrim made good points at the beginning of the post.

I think that no unity is possible with CONSISTENT Calvinists:
lotharlorraine.wordpress.com/201 … alvinists/

Should we hate them? Of course not, this is a temptation we ought to resist.

[anon47460357]

In one of his written sermons, George MacDonald mentioned Christian thinkers who in heaven have repudiated their former mistaken beliefs. I wish I had the passage with me. If I recall correctly, MacDonald was basically saying, “To those who will quote past Christian authorities against me, you needn’t believe them yourself, because these authorities have long since themselves abandoned their errors.”

I found the passage of which I was thinking. It is in George MacDonald’s sermon “Justice”, found in his third volume of Unspoken Sermons. This is arguably MacDonald’s finest sermon. Here is the passage with some of my own bolding:

If you say the best of men have held the opinions I stigmatize, I answer, 'Some of the best of men have indeed held these theories, and of men who have held them I have loved and honoured some heartily and humbly–but because of what they were, not because of what they thought; and they were what they were in virtue of their obedient faith, not of their opinion. They were not better men because of holding these theories. In virtue of knowing God by obeying his son, they rose above the theories they had never looked in the face, and so had never recognized as evil. Many have arrived, in the natural progress of their sacred growth, at the point where they must abandon them. The man of whom I knew the most good gave them up gladly. Good to worshipfulness may be the man that holds them, and I hate them the more therefore; they are lies that, working under cover of the truth mingled with them, burrow as near the heart of the good man as they can go. Whoever, from whatever reason of blindness, may be the holder of a lie, the thing is a lie, and no falsehood must mingle with the justice we mete out to it. There is nothing for any lie but the pit of hell. Yet until the man sees the thing to be a lie, how shall he but hold it! Are there not mingled with it shadows of the best truth in the universe? So long as a man is able to love a lie, he is incapable of seeing it is a lie. He who is true, out and out, will know at once an untruth; and to that vision we must all come. I do not write for the sake of those who either make or heartily accept any lie. When they see the glory of God, they will see the eternal difference between the false and the true, and not till then. I write for those whom such teaching as theirs has folded in a cloud through which they cannot see the stars of heaven, so that some of them even doubt if there be any stars of heaven. For the holy ones who believed and taught these things in days gone by, all is well. Many of the holiest of them cast the lies from them long ere the present teachers of them were born. Many who would never have invented them for themselves, yet receiving them with the seals affixed of so many good men, took them in their humility as recognized truths, instead of inventions of men; and, oppressed by authority, the authority of men far inferior to themselves, did not dare dispute them, but proceeded to order their lives by what truths they found in their company, and so had their reward, the reward of obedience, in being by that obedience brought to know God, which knowledge broke for them the net of a presumptuous self-styled orthodoxy. Every man who tries to obey the Master is my brother, whether he counts me such or not, and I revere him; but dare I give quarter to what I see to be a lie, because my brother believes it? The lie is not of God, whoever may hold it.

[alatecomer]

As someone who immersed himself in Lewis’s writings earlier in life, and has done the same with MacDonald’s more recently, I have come to believe something that some of you may be able to assent to: I believe Lewis theologically neutered his so called “Master.” I believe, further, that this is why he is so palatable to the average Evangelical (whether Calvinist or Arminian), and why MacDonald never will be. As you all know, Lewis said he probably never wrote a book in which he didn’t at least unconsciously quote or paraphrase MacDonald. That may be, but consciously or not, the deepest spirit of MacDonald never found a comfortable place to rest in those books, in my opinion.

[alecforbes]

Hello and welcome, alatecomer!

I agree 100% with what you say about Lewis “neutering” MacDonald theologically. I posted this on another thread [George MacDonald: Views on Politics and Pacifism?) recently which you might be interested in, mainly for the quotes from Catherine Durie.

One more thing…

Dick said:
Some misunderstanding of Gmac here has been generated by evangelicals reading him with the lens of C.S. Lewis

Yes that’s very true. Lewis and GMac’s theology was not nearly as close as it may appear. There’s an excellent paper by Catherine Durie, “George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis” in The Gold Thread: Essays on George MacDoanld, ed. William Raeper that is very enlightening. Here are a couple quotes:

But at this point we may begin to suspect that Lewis over-emphasizes one side of the equation, that he underlines inexorability rather than love, divine hardness rather than compassion; when he does so, he is realigning MacDonald to match his own temperament and taste. The difference between the two men can be summed up in the images they choose for divine compulsion. MacDonald speaks of sufferings as ‘the strong, sharp-toothed sheep-dogs of the Great Shepherd’. Pursuit, pain and demand are there, but only to bring the wandering sheep back to the fold; throughout, God remains the Shepherd, an image with all its biblical associations of devoted caring, and he controls the dogs to ensure they inflict no real damage. Yet when Lewis reflects on his own history, he sees God as a divine Angler, playing a fish, and himself as hooked through the tongue; or as God as a cat pursuing himself, a mouse. MacDonald could never have used these images of God, with their undertow of sheer power and even cruelly; there may be less affinity than appears between the two men."

and regarding Lewis’s The Great Divorce…

For such a one, refusing repentance, hell would be the only appropriate response from a morally good God, claims Lewis; MacDonald sees things differently, for ‘God is not bound to punish sin; he is bound to destroy sin.’ For him, the Christian who loves his neighbor would rather venture into hell, forfeiting his own heaven, than allow one soul to remain lost. Consequently the function of hell is to induce repentance; it is the expedient which brings about self-repudiation. To propose anything else would be to make God less moral and less loving than man; but God’s nature decrees that he must bring all his children home; ‘God himself must be held in divine disquiet until every one of his family be brought home to his heart’. But this is not how Lewis’s MacDonald speaks; in the novel, the narrator is the troubled, questioning one, and MacDonald the guide gives the hard answers:

‘What some people say on earth is that the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved.’
‘Ye see it does not.’
‘I feel in a way that it ought to.’
‘That sounds very merciful: but see what lurks behind it…The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.’

Lewis and MacDonald are here made to change places; but the MacDonald who makes such forceful points is a ventriloquist’s dummy. It is Lewis’s voice which subverts the real McDonald’s belief in hell as a temporary, purifying force, and heaven as the home of every one of God’s children.

There’s much more, of course, in her essay and I think she (and I) would also agree with you when you said:

As you all know, Lewis said he probably never wrote a book in which he didn’t at least unconsciously quote or paraphrase MacDonald. That may be, but consciously or not, the deepest spirit of MacDonald never found a comfortable place to rest in those books, in my opinion.

Glad to have you here and would love to hear more about you and your journey on an “Introductions” thread!

All the best,

Steve

[David_Jack]

The ironic thing about these guys claiming that Lewis somehow accommodated MacDonald due to the former’s ‘great generosity’ (rather than regarding him as his ‘master’ which even Piper and Keller must know is the truth) is that MacDonald is really the one they should be praising for his generosity: he was far kinder to the Pipers and Kellers of his own day than they are to him. But then his theology allows him to be. Lewis himself makes reference to this in the preface to his ‘George MacDonald: an anthology’, saying that GM, unlike most who reject Calvinism, did not also reject the whole way of life associated with it, and that, with reservations, he saw elements of real worth in what he was rejecting (not in the system of Calvinism necessarily, which he abhorred, but in certain elements present in Scottish Calvinist tradition which were true to genuine Christianity.)

A greater insight into MacDonald’s theology, and how it was shaped by his emancipation from the Scottish Calvinism in which he was raised can be found in his semi-autobiographical novel, Robert Falconer’, which I translated from broad Scots into English last year. As Lewis again says in the intro to his GM anthology, the Calvinist grannie in the story is based on George’s own grandmother ‘a truly terrible old woman’, and the burning of the fiddle (as a snare of the devil), depicted on the front cover of my translation, was a true incident taken from her history.

Jonathan Edwards is also mentioned by name in ‘Robert Falconer’, not quite as scathingly as in the quote to which Piper is referring (which is taken from GM’s sermon ‘Justice’) but still hardly in complimentary terms: “When she (Robert’s grannie) said that God was light, instead of concluding therefrom that he could not do the deeds of darkness, she was driven, from a faith in the teaching of Jonathan Edwards as implicit as any ‘lay papist of Loretto’, to doubt whether the deeds of darkness were not after all deeds of light, or at least to conclude that their character depended not on their own nature, but on who did them.”

Here’s a link to the ‘Robert Falconer’ translation, for anyone interested in the formation of MacDonald’s outlook

worksofmacdonald.com/product … t-falconer