388. Maurice was very open about the enormous theological debt that he owed to his friend Thomas Erskine.
389. Plumptre, Spirits in Prison, viii.
390. On the debate about Essays and Reviews, see Rowell, Hell and the Victorians, 116–23; Laufer, Hell’s Destruction, 124–26.
391. H. B. Wilson was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford (1839–44) and vicar of Great Staughton in Cambridgeshire from 1850 to 1888.
392 . Wilson, “National Church,” 205–6.
393 Quoted in Rowell, Hell and the Victorians, 119.
394. Rowell, Hell and the Victorians, 122–23.
395. Edward Plumptre’s assessment in Spirits in Prison, viii. Farrar says in the preface that he had not intended to publish the sermons, but so many misleading accounts of what he said were circulating, he was forced into it. He denies that his intention was to cause any controversy. On the Farrar/Pusey debate, see Rowell, Hell and the Victorians, 139–52; Laufer, Hell’s Destruction, 137–39.
396. We shall not rehearse his arguments (contained in the preface, the third sermon, “Hell—What It Is Not,” and Excursus II and III) as many of them will be familiar by now. He considers the traditional doctrine of hell to be based on what he stresses are demonstrably false translations of gehenna as “hell,” krisis as “damnation,” aiōnios as “everlasting,” and asbeston pur as “fire that shall never be quenched.” He argues that, upon inspection, these translations have no sound foundations and, on a closer inspection of key texts, the doctrine of everlasting torment has no solid basis in Scripture. Furthermore, the doctrine is ethically monstrous and theologically catastrophic. It may be worth taking one example, because it is a little unusual, of his response to proof texts for eternal torment. Let’s consider his comments on Jesus’ words about Judas that “it had been good for that man if he had not been born.” Farrar observes how Jesus says nothing about torments and their endlessness. He maintains that the restoration of Judas does not mean his admittance into perfect bliss. “A man’s sin may be ultimately forgiven him; he may even attain to a certain degree of peace; and yet, while the memory of his sin remains, he may be the first to acquiesce in the sorrowful decision that it had been well for him if he had not been born. A cessation of agonizing remorse is not the same thing as perfect peace, nor are the alleviations of deserved punishment identical with the beatific vision” (xxxix).
397. While critical of the Catholic version of purgatory, he does grant that it is a more merciful doctrine than the traditional Protestant one, offering at least some mitigation to the doctrine of hell, as we can see in Dante’s Divine Comedy (58–59).
398. Rowell, Hell and the Victorians, 216. In this regard, it is perhaps of interest to note that it was Farrar who arranged for Darwin to be buried at Westminster Abbey, and at the funeral served as a pallbearer and preached the sermon.
399. Farrar claims that the views set forth in the sermons were ones that “I have never since my early youth had the slightest doubt” (xii). He also claims Andrew Jukes’s universalist text The Restitution of All Things among the influences in his preparation of the work—“a singularly calm, devout, and thoughtful treatise” (xii)—and Samuel Cox’s universalist text, Salvator Mundi (xxxii). On Jukes and Cox see chapter 13 of this book.
400. “I do not attempt to formulate a reconciliation of the two contrasted views. . . . We seem landed, as in other questions, God’s fore-knowledge and man’s free-will, God’s predestination and man’s responsibility, in the paradox of seemingly contradictory conclusions. I do not say that such reconciliation is for our faculties and under our conditions of thought, possible. We must, it may be, be content to rest in the belief that each presents a partial aspect of the truth which may one day be revealed in its completeness. We may at least tolerate, as the Church of the third and fourth centuries tolerated, those who hold either to the exclusion of the other. We may endeavor to appropriate to ourselves whatever is profitable in the way of encouragement or warning, of hope or fear, in each” (73).
401. “And so the dark shadow of Augustine fell on the theology of the Western church, and condemned its thoughts of the love of God to so many centuries of disastrous twilight” (152).
402. He considers the work of Protestants: Carl Nitzsch, H. Martensen (Danish), Dorner, Julius Müller, and Franz Delitzsche, who all saw the possibility of ongoing grace and forgiveness beyond death, even if they were not universalists.
403. “Our purgatory, if we may venture to rehabilitate that abused and dishonoured word, will not be confined to the baptized or to those who have known historically and through human teachers the revelation of God, but will include all who have lived according to the light they had, and have, in however feeble a manner, repented of their sins and followed after righteousness” (309–10). This healing, purging fire will not exclude those who got sucked into heresy, nor consist in material fire.
404. In fact, the 1885 edition was entitled The Question of Questions: Is Christ Indeed the Saviour of the World? But the second edition, published in 1887, took on the title that the book retained thereafter, Universalism Asserted. The definitive edition is now the new Annotated Edition (2015), edited, annotated, and with an introduction by Robin A. Parry and entitled Christ Triumphant.
405. Race and Religion: Hellenistic Theology: Its Place in Christian Thought (1899) and the posthumously published The Augustinian Revolution in Theology (1911).
406. He considered his way of being Anglican to be liberal, rationalist, evangelical, and catholic (no caps).
407. On the debate about the Athanasian Creed, see Wheeler, Heaven, Hell, and the Victorians, 192–94; Laufer, Hell’s Destruction, 128–30.
408. Gladstone, Studies Subsidiary to the Works, 206.
13
Universalism in Great Britain III
George MacDonald among the Poets
The Literary World and Hell
Numerous poets and novelists in the nineteenth century felt distinctly uncomfortable with the traditional doctrine of hell. Many of the major literary figures of the century were at least agnostic about the outcome of the final judgment, and several expressed open hostility to the idea of eternal torment, and even showed universalist tendencies. One thinks, for instance, of the novelists Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, James Anthony Froude, Charles Kingsley, Edna Lyall, Margaret Oliphant, and William Thackeray, or the poets Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Philip Bailey, and Alfred Tennyson.409
Consider Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, who expressed his disdain for eternal torment by refusing to recite the Athanasian Creed in church, a creed Charlotte Brontë called “profane.”410 Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam (1849), which has been described as “the most important poem of the Victorian period on the subject of death and the future life,”411 expresses a yearning and a tentative hope that after the many griefs of this life, “all will be well.” Here is the key section:
Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood
That nothing walks with aimless feet,
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubble to the void,
When God has made the pile complete.
Behold, we know not anything,
I can but trust that good shall fall.
At last—far off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.
The wish, that of the living whole,
No life may fail beyond the grave,
Derives it not from what we have,
The likest God within the soul?
I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope
And gather dust and chaff, and call,
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.
The “larger hope” of which he speaks and for which he can only “grope” and “faintly trust” became the term of choice for many when referring to views leaning in universalist directions. It is worth noting that F. D. Maurice dedicated his Theological Essays to Tennyson (in turn, Tennyson wrote a poem for Maurice when the latter lost his job at King’s College), and F. W. Farrar dedicated his Mercy and Judgment to him, referring to him as “the poet of the larger hope.” George MacDonald described In Memoriam as “the poem of hoping doubters, the poem of our age . . . the cry of the bereaved Psyche into the dark infinite after the vanished love.”412 His poem certainly caught something of the spirit of the age.
Consider too the following from a lesser-known poem, Festus (1839), by Philip James Bailey (1816–1902).
All men have sinned: and all have died,
All men are saved. Oh! Not a single soul
Less than the countless all can satisfy
The infinite triumph which belongs to me.413
After all, “To whom shall mercy hope deny?”414 Even Lucifer, after the first edition of the poem, has hope: “This day art thou / Redeemed to archangelic state.”415
The nineteenth-century novelist who is perhaps best remembered today as embracing “the larger hope” is the Scottish author George MacDonald, and he deserves closer attention.
George MacDonald (1824–1905)
Life
George MacDonald was born and grew up in a farming household in Huntley, rural Aberdeenshire.416 He had been brought up Congregationalist, hence Calvinist, but from childhood had struggled with the idea that God elects some people and not others for salvation. “I well remember feeling as a child that I did not care for God to love me if he did not love everybody.”417 This distaste for the Calvinist vision of the deity followed him like a shadow throughout his life.
MacDonald attended King’s College, at the University of Aberdeen, before moving to London to work as a private tutor in 1845. While studying as an undergraduate he found his faith in some turmoil as it went through a chrysalis phase; he was unlearning much that he had been taught in his youth and looking to God and Scripture for new directions. What he desired was a wholehearted, passionate love for God, and this he gradually found: “I love my bible more. I am always finding out something new in it. I seem to have had everything to learn over again from the beginning—All my teaching in youth seems useless to me—I must get it all from the bible again.”418
In 1848, he attended Highbury Theological College in London to train for the ministry before moving in 1850 to Trinity Congregational Church in Arundel to serve as minister. However, things did not go well there, and in 1852 the congregation cut his salary because of “heresy” (in particular, the idea that “with the Heathen the time of trial does not . . . cease at their death”) with the intention of forcing him out. George and his wife Louisa were unable to support their family (they had just had their first baby, Lilia), so George was forced to resign the pulpit in mid-1853, leaving behind any ambitions of a future in ordained ministry. The family moved to Manchester and then in 1859 back to London.
George’s true gift turned out to be as a poet and novelist, rather than as a minister. This was not a new love. His first published poem had appeared in 1846, and his first book of poetry, Within and Without, in 1855. Other notable publications included Phantastes (1859), the fantasy novel that famously baptized the imagination of C. S. Lewis; David Elginbrod (1863); Robert Falconer (1868); At the Back of the North Wind (1871); The Princess and the Goblin (1872); The Princess and Curdie (1882); and Lilith (1895). The first and last of these publications were pioneering works in the genre of fantasy literature and continue to be influential today.419 His sensibilities were Romantic, and he had immersed himself in the works of German and English Romantics like Goethe and Schiller, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. His theology too reflected the same Romantic dispositions, as we shall see.
Slowly but surely, MacDonald’s work began to gain an audience. He was never an A-list author, but he became well-known and respected by many. Indeed, in 1868 the University of Aberdeen conferred an honorary LLD degree on him for “high literary eminence as a poet and author.”
MacDonald’s patron, Lady Byron, introduced him to numerous key people to help establish the young unknown writer, and MacDonald became increasingly well-connected with the great and the good in his day. His friends and acquaintances included Charles Dodson (who wrote under the name Lewis Carroll); John Ruskin; Arthur Hughes (the Pre-Raphaelite artist); Mark Twain; Charles Kingsley; Alfred Tennyson; Charles Dickens; Wilkie Collins; Walt Whitman; Harriet Beecher Stowe; Oliver Wendell Holmes; Octavia Hill; Josephine Butler;420 and numerous others.
In 1879, the MacDonald family moved to Bordighera in Italy, where they spent many happy years. But tragedy was never far away. Throughout his life, George had known the loss of many people close to him—his mother when he was eight (1832), his brother and father (1858), and his patron, Lady Byron (1860)—but the loss of several of his children—Mary Josephine (1878), Maurice (1879), Grace (1884), and especially his beloved Lilia (1891)—was a very profound blow. The death of Lilia, his firstborn, cut especially deep and shaped the novel Lilith, which he was writing at the time. Death was always an important theme that MacDonald wrestled with in his works, but in none more so than Lilith, his final work.
In terms of universalist-related connections, we should note that George was a good friend with F. D. Maurice, whom he regarded as a mentor. MacDonald attended St. Peter’s Church in Vere Street, London, where Maurice was vicar (1860–69), so that he could sit under his preaching. Indeed, Maurice managed to lure MacDonald to become an Anglican, in part because it allowed him more freedom for theological exploration. He found a likeminded soul in Maurice, and George even named one of his sons Maurice in his honor (with F. D. serving as godfather to the boy).421 MacDonald wrote the following verse about Maurice and hell:
He taught that hell itself is yet within
The confines of thy kingdom; and its fires
The endless conflict of thy love with sin,
That even by horror works its pure desires.422
Both Maurice and MacDonald looked for inspiration to, among others, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (the Romantic poet and philosopher-theologian); Schleiermacher; the Cambridge Platonists; Origen; Jakob Böhme; F. W. Robertson;423 William Law; and Thomas Erskine. In reading MacDonald’s work, one cannot but be aware of the strong parallels between his thought and that of Erskine. MacDonald was not friends with Erskine, but he did visit him in Linlathen in 1865 and corresponded with him.424 William Raeper sums up the emphasis of Erskine, Maurice, and MacDonald very simply as follows: “the rediscovery of the Father.”425
The larger hope in George MacDonald
As a matter of fact, universal salvation was not one of the key issues addressed by MacDonald and he rarely spoke directly about it. Nevertheless, it is not hard to see that universalism was a natural outcome of his core theological convictions. We shall briefly outline some of those core convictions and indicate how they relate to the breadth of salvation.426
As with Erskine before him, the starting point was MacDonald’s rejection of the Calvinist understanding of God. MacDonald had been instinctively repulsed by this vision of the deity from his childhood days, which made growing up in a church context dominated by Calvinism existentially troubling for him. Gradually he discarded Calvinist theology and embraced a new vision of God—one that renewed his dead faith, turning it into a burning, passionate love for God.
MacDonald came to believe that the person of Christ himself has to be the heart of the Christian understanding of the revelation of God—and the God revealed in Christ is the loving Father of all humanity. All of MacDonald’s theology
is oriented around this center.
And what is the very core of the truth about God, as made known in Jesus? “In one word, God is Love. Love is the deepest depth, the essence of his nature, at the root of all his being. . . . His perfection is his love. All his divine rights rest upon his love.”427 Nothing true that we ever say about God will contradict this central truth—God is love. And any assertions about God incompatible with divine love are necessarily falsehoods.
Furthermore, God is seen to be kenotic, not despotic. “How terribly, then, have the theologians misrepresented God. . . . Nearly all of them represent him as a great King on a grand throne, thinking how grand he is, and making it the business of his being and the end of the universe to keep up his glory, wielding bolts of a Jupiter against them that take his name in vain.” However, God’s glory was not the manifestation of his power, said MacDonald, but his humility. “Brothers, have you found our king? There he is, kissing little children and saying they are like God. There he is at table with the head of a fisherman lying on his bosom.”428
In light of the divine self-revelation in Christ, MacDonald’s understanding of creation, sin, and salvation were all recrafted. God’s purpose in creation was to have children in a loving relationship with him. Sin was to be understood primarily in relational, not legal, terms. Salvation too was relational—God’s purpose is that of restoring his children to himself.429
MacDonald’s new vision required a distancing from the existing theology. Thus, he denounced the Calvinist understanding of salvation as rescue from God’s wrath, he denied the theory of justice that it presupposed (i.e., retributive), he loathed the understanding of the cross by which this salvation was thought to be achieved (i.e., penal substitution), he repudiated the common doctrine-focused understanding of justification by faith and the idea of imputed righteousness, and he rejected the traditional doctrine of hell.
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