Introduction

Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God. 1 JOHN 3:1

George MacDonald is one of those writers whom many people have met without knowing it. C. S. Lewis called him his master and said that he had hardly written a book in which he did not quote him. G. K. Chesterton said that one of his stories for children had changed his whole way of seeing the world. W. H. Auden, Madeleine L’Engle and a long line of writers of fantasy owe him a debt they have freely confessed. Yet MacDonald himself is now little read. His novels of Scottish life, once enormously popular, are long and old-fashioned; his fairy tales survive mainly in libraries; and his sermons, which he regarded as the heart of his work, are known chiefly through the passages Lewis gathered from them.

That is a loss, because the sermons are extraordinary. MacDonald was a Scottish Congregational minister who lost his only pulpit before he was thirty, and who went on preaching for the rest of his life — in novels, in poems, in stories for children, and in three volumes of sermons that no congregation ever heard. He called them Unspoken Sermons. They are not easy reading. Their sentences are long and their thought is dense, and they were written by a man who would rather say a hard thing truly than an easy thing smoothly. But page after page they ring with a single conviction, held with a passion that is rare in any century: that God is a Father, wholly and only good, and that He will not rest until His children are as good as He is.

Why he still matters

MacDonald matters, first, because he refused to let anyone make God less good than the best of men. He had grown up among Christians who spoke of God as a stern ruler whose justice had to be satisfied and whose love was reserved for a chosen few, and he found that he could not love such a God or believe that Jesus had revealed Him. He spent his life insisting that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is exactly like Jesus. Whatever one makes of the conclusions he drew from that conviction, the conviction itself is the heart of the New Testament, and he held it with a fire that warms his readers still.

He that hath seen me hath seen the Father. JOHN 14:9

He matters, second, because he made obedience the centre of the Christian life. Long before it became a commonplace, he saw that a great deal of religion is talk about God that never becomes doing what God says. He had little patience with arguments about doctrine that left the arguers unchanged, and he returned again and again to the plain question of whether we are doing what Christ told us to do. For MacDonald the way to know Christ is to obey Him, and the way to understand His words is to do them.

If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself. JOHN 7:17

He matters, third, because he believed that the imagination is a gift of God and a servant of truth. He wrote fairy tales not as a holiday from preaching but as another way of preaching, and he saw in the beauty of the world — a primrose, a sunset, the face of a child — a speech of God that could reach places argument could not. Through Lewis and the writers who followed him, that conviction has shaped the way a great many Christians think about story and wonder.

How this book is arranged

After a chapter on his life, fourteen short chapters set out his teaching. The first group concerns the God he knew: the Father whose child every person is, and the love that is a consuming fire. The second group concerns the life of the disciple: obedience as the opener of eyes, the childlikeness that Jesus set in the midst of His disciples, prayer, the denial of self, the love of neighbour and enemy, and the new name that God gives to each soul. The third group turns to Christ Himself: the truth in Jesus and MacDonald’s account of righteousness, the cry of desolation from the cross, and the creation of all things in Him. The last group looks outward and onward: the imagination as a servant of truth, the God of the living and the hope beyond death, and the last farthing — MacDonald’s teaching on judgement and on the final end of all things. A conclusion follows, and a last chapter on his books and where to start with them.

Each chapter ends with points for reflection and a prayer. MacDonald would have been impatient with any book about God that did not lead its reader to do something, and he would have been more impatient still with one that did not lead its reader to pray. Take the chapters slowly, one at a time, with a Bible open.

A word about his words

MacDonald’s writings are in the public domain, and the Unspoken Sermons are in the Ochorus library. Where he is quoted in these pages the quotations are short, they are taken from those sermons, and the sermon is named, so that the reader may find the passage and read it in its setting. Much of his thought is set out in our own words, because his sentences are long and his style is not the style of our day. Nothing here can replace the man himself. The best use of this book is as a door into his.

Where he must be read with care

This is not a book of hero-worship. MacDonald was a man of deep and searching faith, and many evangelical readers have found that he sends them back to the Gospels with fresh eyes. But on several points of real weight he taught what the historic evangelical faith does not, and he taught it openly and with conviction. It is kinder to name these points at the start, and to name them plainly.

First, and most important, MacDonald hoped and in the end taught that God’s love would finally redeem every soul. He believed in hell, and he described it in terrible terms; but he believed that all punishment is for the sake of healing, and that the prison of which Jesus spoke would not open until the last farthing was paid — and would then open. In his sermon Justice he wrote that “no hell will be lacking which would help the just mercy of God to redeem his children.” This is the view usually called Christian universalism. The church has not held it, and evangelical readers will hold, with the plain words of the Lord, that the judgement is final and the punishment of the wicked everlasting. Chapter sixteen weighs this.

Second, he rejected the teaching that Christ, on the cross, bore the punishment due to our sins in our place. In his sermon Righteousness he called the idea of laying the pain upon the righteous in the name of justice simply monstrous. He believed that Christ died to deliver us from sin, not from its penalty, and that God is bound to destroy sin rather than to punish it. Evangelical readers will hold that the substitution of Christ for sinners stands at the very centre of the gospel. Chapters four and eleven weigh this.

Third, and closely joined to the second, he rejected the doctrine that the righteousness of Christ is credited to the believer who trusts in Him. He thought it a legal fiction that would let a man be called good without being made good, and he said so with scorn. Evangelical readers will hold that God justifies the ungodly freely, for Christ’s sake, and that the making good of the believer follows from that justification rather than replacing it. Chapters five and eleven weigh this.

Fourth, he taught that every human being is a child of God by creation, and he spoke harshly of the doctrine of adoption, by which, as the New Testament puts it, believers receive the right to become the sons of God. Chapter three weighs this.

None of these points is raised to diminish him. They are raised because he would have demanded it. He loathed the habit of taking anything on authority, his own included, and he insisted that every teacher, however good, must be tested against the words of Christ. It should be said, too, that C. S. Lewis, who loved him more than any other writer, did not follow him on the first of these points, and this book will say so where it matters.

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 THESSALONIANS 5:21

Where MacDonald is faithful — on the goodness of God, on the holiness God demands, on obedience, on prayer, on the denial of self, on the beauty of Christ — receive it gladly; there are few writers who say these things so well. Where he goes beyond what is written, or against it, mark it and test it by Scripture. He would not have wanted you to follow him. He would have wanted you to follow Christ, and to do what He says.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. When you think of God, what face do you see? Is it the face of Jesus? Write down honestly what you believe God is like.

2. MacDonald asked whether we are doing what Christ told us. Think of one plain command of Christ that you have not been obeying.

3. Decide how you will read: one chapter a day or a week, with a Bible open and a few minutes of quiet after each prayer.

4. Read MacDonald’s sermon The Child in the Midst, the first of the Unspoken Sermons in the Ochorus library, alongside the first chapters of this book.

5. Ask God for a heart that will receive what is true in any teacher and test everything by His Word.

A PRAYER

Father in heaven, You have shown us Your face in the face of Jesus Christ, and there is no darkness in You at all.

Thank You for the servants You have given Your church, who have helped Your children to see how good You are.

As I read about one of them, keep me from admiring him and forgetting You. Where he was faithful, teach me through him; where he erred, keep me in Your truth.

Make me a doer of Your word and not a hearer only, for the sake of Jesus Christ my Lord. Amen.