George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles

Incarnation, Doubt, and Reenchantment

Timothy Larsen

• Publisher: IVP Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780830874040
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Literature & the Arts in Christianity

The Bible is full of miracles. Yet how do we make sense of them today? And where might we see miracles in our own lives?In this installment of the Hansen Lectureship series, historian and theologian Timothy Larsen considers the legacy of George MacDonald, the Victorian Scottish author and minister who is best known for his pioneering fantasy literature, which influenced authors such as C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, G. K. Chesterton, and Madeleine L'Engle.Larsen explores how, throughout his life and writings, MacDonald sought to counteract skepticism, unbelief, naturalism, and materialism and to herald instead the reality of the miraculous, the supernatural, the wondrous, and the realm of the spirit.Based on the annual lecture series hosted at Wheaton College's Marion E. Wade Center, volumes in the Hansen Lectureship Series reflect on the imaginative work and lasting influence of seven British authors: Owen Barfield, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams.

George MacDonald’s second realist novel, Adela Cathcart (1864) begins with a chapter titled “Christmas Eve,” and the rest of the action unfolds during the twelve days of Christmas. A group of neighbors and their holiday guests have formed themselves into a little club to tell one another stories during the festive season. Thus, not unlike the Arabian Nights (to which we shall return), Adela Cathcart is a collection of short stories held together by a framing narrative.

One of these stories is “My Uncle Peter.” The eponymous hero, Peter Belper, was born on December 25. He delights in playing Secret Santa, spying out people who are in distress and leaving them anonymous packages of much-needed aid. The nephew narrator recalls, “‘Ah, my dear,’ he would say to my mother when she expostulated with him on making some present far beyond the small means he at that time possessed, ‘ah, my dear, you see I was born on Christmas day.’”1

Moreover, Uncle Peter’s jolly, generous soul is continually overflowing in sacrificial acts of kindness all the year round. Much of the action revolves around his giving a home to a poor orphan who is being exploited and abused and his endeavoring to find and rescue her when she is abducted by a wicked woman from her past. The story ends with the observation that “Christmas Day makes all the days of the year as sacred as itself.”2 The author of this tale, George MacDonald (1824–1905), was himself born during Advent, and like Uncle Peter—or the reformed Ebenezer Scrooge—he also honored Christmas in his heart and tried to keep it all the year.3

THE CROSS AND THE CRADLE

In a tour de force piece of scholarship, the historian Boyd Hilton has identified the first half of the nineteenth century in Britain as the Age of Atonement and the second half as the Age of the Incarnation.4 The Age of Atonement was a time when the focus was on Christ’s work on the cross as a penal substitution and when related themes loomed large, such as the wrath of God, the justice of God, and eternal punishment. Around 1850, the theological climate changed to one in which the central doctrine was the incarnation and along with it came an emphasis on themes such as the love of God and the fatherhood of God. This change was largely prompted by growing unease with the old doctrinal scheme. For example, theologians began to question whether it could really be considered right and just to allow an innocent person to be punished for the guilty. Once people began to shy away from defending the traditional theory of Christ’s work on the cross, they found it difficult to formulate an alternative one and therefore instead welcomed the idea of simply shifting the locus of the proclamation of the gospel to another doctrine, from the cross to the cradle.

Although Hilton brilliantly relates this theological shift to nineteenth-century political, social, and economic attitudes and policies, he was not the first to discern it. In fact, the Victorians themselves were aware of it and commented on it. George MacDonald had been ordained a Congregational minister, and one of the greatest Congregational pastors and theologians in nineteenth-century Britain was R. W. Dale (1829–1895). In 1889, Dale gave an address that was then published, The Old Evangelicalism and the New. In it, he expounded to his audience on the contrast between the faith of their fathers and their own:

The difference is due to many causes; and among these, very considerable importance must be attributed to the great place which is now given to the fact of the Incarnation. . . . I do not mean that the Death of Christ for the sins of men is denied by Modern Evangelicals—if it were denied they would cease to be Evangelicals—but it is practically relegated by many to a secondary position. The Incarnation, with all that it reveals concerning God, man, and the universe, concerning this life and the life to come, stands first; with the early Evangelicals the Death of Christ for human sin stood first.5

Dale was a bridge-building theologian who was trying to bind the generations together in mutual respect and appreciation. Others, however, were less careful. Another congregationalist, D. W. Simon, let the manger of Bethlehem thoroughly subsume and eclipse the cross of Calvary in a volume tellingly titled Reconciliation by Incarnation (1898).6

This new doctrinal emphasis was, if anything, even stronger in the communion that MacDonald made his spiritual home for most of his adult life, the Church of England. One of its most famous theological books of the late Victorian period was Lux Mundi (1889), which was edited by Charles Gore (1853–1932) who would emerge as one of the most prominent of Anglican theologians and bishops. “Lux Mundi,” of course, means “the light of the world,” a theme that is proclaimed in the meditation on the incarnation in the opening chapter of John’s Gospel: “That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (Jn 1:9). Moreover, Lux Mundi had as its subtitle A Series of Studies on the Religion of the Incarnation.7 In other words, the change was so complete that not only were these theologians and clergymen no longer emphasizing that they were determined to know nothing “save Jesus Christ, and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2), but now they could even speak of the entirety of Christian faith and doctrine under the heading “the religion of the incarnation.”

It was easy and commonplace, however, to think and speak that way in the late Victorian period. Far more interesting are the trendsetters earlier in the century who pioneered this theological shift, often in the face of the spirited opposition from members of the older generation who were deeply committed to their own, particular view of the nature of the atonement as the heart of the Christian message. One such leader was the Anglican theologian Frederick Denison Maurice (1805–1872). It would be difficult even to catalog all of the numerous ways that George MacDonald bound himself in love and devotion to F. D. Maurice. MacDonald was himself an early adopter of the gospel of the incarnation and a pioneering spirit who experienced some opposition from the old guard. MacDonald therefore first became attracted to Maurice through his writings and the attacks he endured because of them, sensing right away that they shared a theological affinity. They soon became friends. One of my favorite moments in their relationship is in 1856 when MacDonald became quite ill, his symptoms including coughing up blood. Maurice visited him at his sickbed and read to him John Ruskin’s moving account of the risen Christ revealing himself to his disciples while they were fishing in the lake of Galilee.8 The MacDonalds eventually joined St. Peter’s Church, Vere Street, London, and thus Maurice became George MacDonald’s pastor as well as his friend. MacDonald even wrote a poem in his honor, “A Thanksgiving for F. D. Maurice,” and dedicated a book to him, The Miracles of Our Lord.9 MacDonald also paid homage to Maurice by turning him into a fictional character in one of his novels and organized a testimonial gift and tribute for him on the grounds that Maurice was “a teacher come from God.”10 Perhaps most touchingly of all, Maurice became the godfather to the MacDonalds’ eighth child, a son whom they christened Maurice in honor of this pastor-theologian-friend who had come from God. As Great-Great-Grandmother Irene so wisely observes in The Princess and the Goblin, “A name is one of those things one can give away and keep all the same. I have a good many such things.”11

As an undergraduate student, Maurice was a member of the Cambridge Apostles, an exclusive intellectual society. In an illuminating study, the historian David Newsome has argued that their commitment to Platonic thought led the Apostles of Maurice’s day, like early church fathers such as Justin Martyr before them, to focus on the Johannine teaching on the Logos and therefore to lay “particular stress on the incarnation and its centrality within the Christian revelation.”12 Maurice’s controversial Theological Essays, published in 1853, highlighted this emphasis. While traditionalists focused their attacks on his willingness to call into question the necessity of believing in the traditional doctrine of eternal punishment, Maurice forcibly stated his objections to the old view of the atonement, arguing that “these notions are becoming more and more intolerable to thoughtful and earnest men.”13 Writing during Advent 1876, the most distinguished Unitarian theologian of the Victorian era, James Martineau (1805–1900)—observing developments among Trinitarians from the outside—gave Maurice the bulk of the credit for this fundamental theological shift: “He has been the chief cause of a radical and permanent change in the ‘orthodox’ theology,—viz. a shifting of its centre of gravity from the Atonement to the Incarnation.”14

A lot could be at stake in these doctrinal disputes. The MacDonalds’ son Greville passed along a family anecdote regarding an aunt of his: “One of the Misses Powell deferred for many months accepting her lover until he could formulate satisfactorily his views on the Atonement; which at last, and most fortunately for the world, he contrived to do.”15 The difference between the Age of Atonement and the Age of the Incarnation was, however, often a generational divide. Part of the reason why MacDonald’s calling as the minister of the Congregational church in Arundel was not successful was because his flock found their twenty-something pastor’s theological views too progressive. Tellingly, one of his theology professors from Highbury College, the place where he had trained for the ministry, recommended that MacDonald look instead for a congregation to serve that had a high percentage of “young men” in it.16 Several years later, when things were still not working out, MacDonald would encourage himself in his calling with these words: “I have to do something for the young people of this country.”17

This generational divide is often dramatized in MacDonald’s novels. In his first realist novel, David Elginbrod, the foil is Mrs. Elton. She pronounces authoritatively o...