Musing on MacDonald
Thoughts from Onesimus and guest bloggers
Diamonds’ experience at the Back of the North Wind mirrored my own last summer. I was so tired from hitting a place in my fight against cancer, that I was in bed most of the time. I started re-reading George MacDonald’s novels that my husband and I had loved so much and had read when we were first married...
If we want to forgive truly, and find it difficult, the answer is not found by examining the person who has wronged us, wondering how he could have done such a thing, comparing his sins with the rest of ‘normal’ humanity and trying to find him not so bad by comparison. The key to full, free, and permanent forgiveness actually lies within the self, and is found when we become willing to uncover self-deception.
I believe we far too frequently mistake milk for meat, and get overly satisfied with the belief that we understand various principles as well as they can be understood, or at least as well as we need to. As George MacDonald put it: "Nothing is so ruinous to progress in which effort is needful, as satisfaction with apparent achievement; that ever sounds a halt..."
Bonhoeffer once said that no one can understand “In the beginning” because no one was there in the beginning to see or understand it. In somewhat like manner, I cannot understand truly the words of MacDonald, taken from the reading for January 11th, which say that “God has been working for ages of ages” for His vision of Truth...
It is my supposition that it is within the Christian Community that truths leading to God in the form of both teachings and practice should be both taught and sought. For when Jesus said: But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth, (John 16:13) Jesus was speaking to His apostles as a community, and did not mean this to suggest that individuals could forsake community for private revelation...
"There are two revelations in Christianity: "the revelation of God and the revelation of ourselves." So wrote New Testament scholar William Barclay (1907-1978), a man after George MacDonald's own heart, speaking about Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. A small portion of Barclay's commentary on John 4 follows the story itself...
Both MacDonald and Lewis had much to say about God as the ultimate source of joy in our lives. The true child of God, said MacDonald, trusts in the Father, "and looks to him as the source of life, the gladness of being." And of course this was a major theme for Lewis in Surprised by Joy and many other of his writings. So, in the Heavenly Tea and Coffee Shoppe, sometime in the distant future, I'm imagining Lewis and his "master" waving to Piper to pull up a chair and join their conversation. Here's some of what Piper has to say, from the first chapter of Desiring God.
Being a life-long Catholic with some background in Catholic theology as well, along with being a very long time fan of George MacDonald, I was at first dismayed some years ago to discover what I thought to be some anti-Catholic remarks. I do not claim to be an expert in Catholic theology or an expert on George MacDonald. I do claim to ardently follow both and to have been influenced for the best, I hope, by both...
In the New Testament, and especially in the Fourth Gospel, there are four closely interrelated ideas. There is the idea of rebirth; there is the idea of the kingdom of heaven, into which people cannot enter unless they are reborn; there is the idea of being children of God; and there is the idea of eternal life...All these ideas have a common thought behind them...
According to William Raeper, MacDonald believed that “men and women were born out of the heart of God, not Ex Nihilo as traditionally held by the church, and thus MacDonald aligned himself with the Neo-Platonic theories of Plotinus and Origen” (Raeper 1987:243). MacDonald operated under the shadow of Plato; thus not only will MacDonald’s view be explored, but also be compared and contrasted with the neo-platonic doctrines of Plotinus and Origen.
