George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles Read online

  CONTENTS

  Introduction to the

  Hansen Lectureship Series

  Walter Hansen

  1 George MacDonald in

  the Age of the Incarnation

  Response: James Edward Beitler III

  2 George MacDonald

  and the Crisis of Doubt

  Response: Richard Hughes Gibson

  3 George MacDonald and the

  Reenchantment of the World

  Response: Jill Peláez Baumgaertner

  Contributors

  Author Index

  Subject Index

  Scripture Index

  Notes

  Praise for George MacDonald

  in the Age of Miracles

  About the Author

  More Titles from InterVarsity Press

  INTRODUCTION

  TO THE HANSEN

  LECTURESHIP SERIES

  Walter Hansen

  THE KEN AND JEAN HANSEN LECTURESHIP

  I was motivated to set up a lectureship in honor of my parents, Ken and Jean Hansen, at the Wade Center primarily because they loved Marion E. Wade. My father began working for Mr. Wade in 1946, the year I was born. He launched my father and mentored him in his business career. Often when I look at the picture of Marion Wade in the Wade Center, I give thanks to God for his beneficial influence in my family and in my life.

  After Darlene and I were married in December 1967, the middle of my senior year at Wheaton College, we invited Marion and Lil Wade for dinner in our apartment. I wanted Darlene to get to know the best storyteller I’ve ever heard.

  When Marion Wade passed through death into the Lord’s presence on November 28, 1973, his last words to my father were, “Remember Joshua, Ken.” As Joshua was the one who followed Moses to lead God’s people, my father was the one who followed Marion Wade to lead the ServiceMaster Company.

  After members of Marion Wade’s family and friends at ServiceMaster set up a memorial fund in honor of Marion Wade at Wheaton College, my parents initiated the renaming of Clyde Kilby’s collection of papers and books from the seven British authors—C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield—as the Marion E. Wade Collection.

  I’m also motivated to name this lectureship after my parents because they loved the literature of these seven authors whose papers are now collected at the Wade Center.

  While I was still in college, my father and mother took an evening course on Lewis and Tolkien with Dr. Kilby. The class was limited to nine students so that they could meet in Dr. Kilby’s living room. Dr. Kilby’s wife, Martha, served tea and cookies.

  My parents were avid readers, collectors, and promoters of the books of the seven Wade authors, even hosting a book club in their living room led by Dr. Kilby. When they moved to Santa Barbara in 1977, they named their home Rivendell, after the beautiful house of the elf Lord Elrond, whose home served as a welcome haven to weary travelers as well as a cultural center for Middle-earth history and lore. Family and friends who stayed in their home know that their home fulfilled Tolkien’s description of Rivendell:

  And so at last they all came to the Last Homely House, and found its doors flung wide. . . . [The] house was perfect whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all. . . . Their clothes were mended as well as their bruises, their tempers and their hopes. . . . Their plans were improved with the best advice.1

  Our family treasures many memories of our times at Rivendell, highlighted by storytelling. Our conversations often drew from images of the stories of Lewis, Tolkien, and the other authors. We had our own code language: “That was a terrible Bridge of Khazaddûm experience.” “That meeting felt like the Council of Elrond.”

  One cold February, Clyde and Martha Kilby escaped the deep freeze of Wheaton to thaw out and recover for two weeks at my parents’ Rivendell home in Santa Barbara. As a thank-you note, Clyde Kilby dedicated his book Images of Salvation in the Fiction of C. S. Lewis to my parents. When my parents set up our family foundation in 1985, they named the foundation Rivendell Stewards’ Trust. In many ways, they lived in and they lived out the stories of the seven authors. It seems fitting and proper, therefore, to name this lectureship in honor of Ken and Jean Hansen.

  ESCAPE FOR PRISONERS

  The purpose of the Hansen Lectureship is to provide a way of escape for prisoners. J. R. R. Tolkien writes about the positive role of escape in literature:

  I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers of Escape are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic.2

  Note that Tolkien is not talking about escapism or an avoidance of reality, but rather the idea of escape as a means of providing a new view of reality, the true transcendent reality that is often screened from our view in this fallen world. He adds:

  Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using Escape in this [derogatory] way the [literary] critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.3

  I am not proposing that these lectures give us a way to escape from our responsibilities or ignore the needs of the world around us, but rather that we explore the stories of the seven authors to escape from a distorted view of reality, from a sense of hopelessness, and to awaken us to the true hope of what God desires for us and promises to do for us.

  C. S. Lewis offers a similar vision for the possibility that such literature could open our eyes to a new reality:

  We want to escape the illusions of perspective. . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own. . . . The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. . . . In reading great literature I become a thousand men yet remain myself. . . . Here as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.4

  The purpose of the Hansen Lectureship is to explore the great literature of the seven Wade authors so that we can escape from the prison of our self-centeredness and narrow, parochial perspective in order to see with other eyes, feel with other hearts, and be equipped for practical deeds in real life. As a result, we will learn new ways to experience and extend the fulfillment of our Lord’s mission: “to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free” (Lk 4:18 NIV).

  PENTECOSTAL FIRE

  Timothy Larsen’s following three lectures on George MacDonald lead us in a chronological-logical sequence from joyfully celebrating the birth of the Messiah with festivities to faithfully following Jesus with fellow doubters to humbly receiving the purifying Pentecostal fire in the trials of life. I am especially enchanted by seeing the way that MacDonald’s myth of the mystical fire of roses is an image of his own experience of the refining fire of the Spirit. When Dr. Larsen reflects on the meaning of the rosefire at the
end of his last lecture, he quotes the last lines of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, which itself quotes Julian of Norwich:

  And all shall be well and

  All manner of things shall be well

  When the tongues of flame are in-folded

  Into the crowned knot of fire

  And the fire and the rose are one.5

  Larsen’s quote points to an illuminating link between MacDonald and Eliot. We gain more understanding of the rosefire in MacDonald’s mythology and personal experience by looking at the image of Pentecostal fire in Eliot’s Four Quartets. A few lines before Larsen’s quote from Eliot, we read these lines:

  The dove descending breaks the air

  With flame of incandescent terror

  Of which the tongues declare

  The one discharge from sin and error.

  The only hope, or else despair

  Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—

  To be redeemed from fire by fire.

  Who then devised the torment? Love.

  Love is the unfamiliar Name

  Behind the hands that wove

  The intolerable shirt of flame

  Which human power cannot remove.

  We only live, only suspire

  Consumed by either fire or fire.6

  Eliot wrote “Little Gidding” as the fourth poem of the Four Quartets between 1940 and 1942 while he served as a fire warden during the Blitz in London. This war poem describes his traumatic experience. Fulfilling his duty, he walked through ruins and rubble in the early morning to report fires and destruction caused by wave after wave of German bombers during the “interminable night.”7 Eliot’s image of the “dark dove with flickering tongue” uses the name of Germany’s first military plane, the Taube, or Dove.8 Later in this poem, his reference to the dove sounds at first like another description of German terror bombing:

  The dove descending breaks the air

  With flame of incandescent terror

  But the next lines point in a totally different direction:

  Of which the tongues declare

  The one discharge from sin and error.

  The beginning of “Little Gidding” informs us that “pentecostal fire” is a theme of this poem.9 The “exasperated spirit” is “restored by that refining fire.”10 In continuity with that theme, the “dove descending” with tongues of flame refers to the Day of Pentecost when tongues of fire came upon the apostles (Acts 2:1-4). Filled with the Holy Spirit, they began speaking with other tongues to declare forgiveness of sins through Jesus Christ (Acts 2:38).

  This double entendre sounds sacrilegious. Is the dove descending both the German fire bomber and the Holy Spirit? Yes. Both bring fire and death, but completely different kinds of fire and death. That’s the point of this layering of meanings. Both the dove-bombers and the Dove-Holy Spirit brought fire and a sudden end to the normal routines of life. The fire of the bombers is the destructive fire of pride, greed, and hate. The fire of the Holy Spirit is the redemptive fire of divine love.

  Eliot presents us with a choice:

  The only hope, or else despair

  Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—

  To be redeemed from fire by fire.

  To choose to fight the fire of hate with the fire of hate is the way of despair. Our only hope is to choose the fire of God’s love: “to be redeemed from fire by fire.” Martin Luther King Jr. set forth this choice: “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”11

  “Love” devised this redemptive fire: “Love is the unfamiliar Name.” Such an oblique reference to God keeps the language in the realm of modern poetry. To say directly “Love is the name of God; God is Love” moves from poetry to prosaic theology. Eliot does not make that move. Rather, he layers and complicates his poetic language even more in the next lines with an image from an obscure Greek myth.

  Love is the unfamiliar Name

  Behind the hands that wove

  The intolerable shirt of flame

  Which human power cannot remove.

  In Greek mythology, the centaur Nessus was killed by Hercules. As he was dying, he gave Dejanira, Hercules’s wife, a tunic for her husband, saying that it would keep her husband from unfaithful passions. When Hercules put it on he felt the poison of it become like fire in his bones. He attempted to pull it off but could not. Hate wove the shirt that killed him. In Eliot’s poem, love wove the shirt of flame. Love burns away unfaithful passions.

  We have to make a choice: the fire of hate that destroys the soul or the fire of love that purifies the soul. Regardless, we will be “consumed by either fire or fire.” Dr. Larsen’s lectures lead us to see the purifying power of the rosefire in and through George MacDonald’s life. MacDonald wisely guides our choice in prayer: “As for us, now will we come to thee, our Consuming Fire. And thou wilt not burn us more than we can bear. But thou wilt burn us. And although thou seem to slay us, yet will we trust in thee.”12

  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.”