George MacDonald is today perhaps the best known of the nineteenth century’s universalists, though he himself would never have used the term “universalist” to describe himself. His mature theology, while very much his own, rooted in his own childhood intuitions and early spiritual awakening, clearly resonates with the Romanic sensibilities of the era and bears notable similarities to the theology of Thomas Erskine, F. D. Maurice, and others with whom MacDonald was familiar. And as with those thinkers, his ideas have multiple echoes of themes found in the Origenian tradition. Whether these echoes were intentional or not, indeed, whether MacDonald was even aware of them or not, is hard to say. What we might say, however, is that his theology represents those themes in a very nineteenth-century, poetic mode.
It is time, as this stage of our investigation draws to a close, to consider some of the universalists of the nineteenth century who remained more Evangelical in their Romantic theology. In the next chapter, we shall consider an Independent, a Baptist, and a Holiness preacher.
409. And the list should certainly include some of the great American poets and novelists of the period too: John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Harriet Beecher Stowe (whose brother, the theologian Edward Beecher, challenged traditional hell in his History of Opinions on the Scriptural Doctrine of Retribution [1878]). It is worth noting that, when George MacDonald went on a literary tour of America, he met all of those mentioned here.
410. Wheeler, Heaven, Hell & the Victorians, 194.
411. Wheeler, Heaven, Hell & the Victorians, 2.
412. MacDonald, England’s Antiphon, 329.
413. Bailey, Festus: A Poem, 578. On Bailey, see Wheeler, Heaven, Hell, & the Victorians, 98–101.
414. Bailey, Festus: A Poem, 65.
415. Bailey, Festus: A Poem, 582.
416. Two excellent biographies are Hein, George MacDonald: Victorian Mythmaker, and Raeper, George MacDonald.
417. MacDonald, Weighed and Wanting, 47.
418. Quoted in Raeper, George MacDonald, 56.
419. Those novelists who name him as a significant influence include C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, G. K. Chesterton, J. R. R. Tolkein, E. Nesbit, and Madaleine L’Engle (who was herself a Christian universalist).
420. Josephine Butler (1828–1906), the Christian social reformer, best known for her work with and for prostitutes, also believed in universal salvation.
421. George also knew Edward Plumptre, who worked at King’s College, London.
422. MacDonald, “Thanksgiving for F. D. Maurice.” This verse was omitted from the published version. It is reproduced in Raeper, George MacDonald, 408n52.
423. Frederick William Robertson (1816–53) was a celebrated Anglican preacher with Evangelical roots, best known for his ministry in Brighton. He had criticized the traditional doctrine of hell.
424. MacDonald’s interest in Erskine may have been sparked by A. J. Scott, a close friend of Erskine’s and another important influence on MacDonald.
425. Raeper, George MacDonald, 241.
426. Perhaps the key outlet for MacDonald’s universalist-inclined theology is found in the three volumes of his Unspoken Sermons (series 1 [1867], series 2 [1885], series 3 [1889]). As so many editions of these sermons exist, in the citations that follow we shall indicate the sermon, but not the page number.
427. MacDonald, “Creation in Christ.”
428. MacDonald, “Child in the Midst.”
429. MacDonald loved the Bible, not for its own sake, but because it pointed him to Jesus. “The Bible is to me the most precious thing in the world, because it tells me his story.” However, he was very aware of the dangers of idolizing the Bible and of treating it, rather than Jesus, as the prime locus of divine revelation. His focus was thus always on Christ: Scripture points not to itself, but to him, and must be read not according to the letter, but according to the Spirit—it must be read in the light of Christ. The way he handled difficult texts in the Bible manifests this hermeneutic. If a biblical text appears to present God behaving in what seems to be a wicked way incompatible with the revelation in Jesus then we must say that we are not certain how to understand the text, but that whatever it is saying about God it cannot be what it appears to say. One must keep looking for what it is God is saying through the text, but one must never accept that God acts wickedly, nor that what seems to you to be wicked is really good. You must never “receive any word as light because another calls it light, while it looks to you dark. Say either the thing is not what it seems, or God never said or did it. But of all evils, to misinterpret what God does, and then say the thing as interpreted must be right because God does it, is of the devil” (“Light”). This role for conscience in the hermeneutic reminds one of Erskine and Coleridge.
430. MacDonald, “Justice.”
431. MacDonald, “Justice.”
432. Talbott, “Just Mercy of God,” 234. He quotes from MacDonald, “Justice.”
433. MacDonald, “Justice.”
434. MacDonald, “Justice.”
435. MacDonald, “Justice.”
436. MacDonald, “Righteousness.”
437. MacDonald, “Righteousness.”
438. MacDonald, Robert Falconer, vol. 3, ch. 5. English translation from Scots by David Jack (2016 edition, 326–27).
439. MacDonald, “Light.”
440. MacDonald, “Truth in Jesus.”
441. MacDonald, “Truth in Jesus.”
442. MacDonald, “Last Farthing.”
443. MacDonald, “Salvation from Sin.”
444. MacDonald, “Justice.”
445. MacDonald, “Justice.”
446. MacDonald, Alec Forbes of Howglen, ch. 28.
447. MacDonald, “Voice of Job.”
448. MacDonald, “Voice of Job.”
449. MacDonald, “Consuming Fire.”
450. MacDonald, “Consuming Fire.”
451. MacDonald, “Consuming Fire.”
452. MacDonald, “Consuming Fire.”
453. MacDonald, “Consuming Fire.”
454. MacDonald, Lilith, ch. 30.
455. MacDonald, “Consuming Fire.”
456. MacDonald, “Justice.”
457. MacDonald, “Consuming Fire.” Italics mine.
458. MacDonald, Lilith, ch. 42. The lying down in question concerns lying down in death in the house in which dreamers sleep until the end of the world. In the novel, this death is a good death in which life is found. However, not all the dead are ready to embrace this peaceful and healing death. The book follows the journey of Mr. Vane as he is prepared to sleep in the house. Lilith too, having escaped the outer darkness, falls asleep into this healing sleep. Adam’s point to Vane here then is not the truism that all people die, but that all creatures must eventually yield to the mode of death that is restorative, life-giving sleep. Even Lilith yielded and lay down, finding life.
459. MacDonald, Miracles of Our Lord, 268.
460. All the quotations are from Lilith, ch. 39. A contemporary afterlife fiction deeply inspired by MacDonald is Michael Phillips’s Hell and Beyond (2013).
461. Kimel, “Salvation of Lilith.”
462. MacDonald, George MacDonald and His Wife, 551–52.
14
Universalism in Great Britain IV
Independents, Baptists, and the Holiness Movement
The nineteenth-century boundary-pushers were not confined to the state church, but included those on the fringes of Anglicanism, non-conformists, and o
thers. Three of the most influential in Britain in the later nineteenth century were Andrew Jukes, Samuel Cox, and Hannah Whitall Smith.
Andrew Jukes (1815–1901)
Life
Andrew Jukes was born in Bombay in 1815, his father having worked for the East India Company. He moved to England in 1820 after the death of his father. After leaving Harrow School in 1832, where he had been close friends with F. W. Faber, later to become a famous hymn writer, he joined the army in India and then in 1837 went to study at Cambridge University, where he was deeply influenced by the Evangelical Anglican minister Charles Simeon. Jukes was a capable theologian and biblical scholar; his Cambridge thesis on the interpretation of prophetic texts even won the Hulsean Prize in 1840.
Andrew Jukes started and ended his life as an Anglican. After training at Cambridge University, he went to St. John’s Church in Hull, for which he was ordained a deacon in 1842. However, as an Evangelical, he had various problems with what he was expected to believe and teach: he could not reconcile himself with the matter of baptismal regeneration, he had problems with certain of the Thirty-Nine Articles
(including Article 2, the declaration that Christ died to reconcile the Father to us, rather than vice versa), and he did not think that the Athanasian Creed was correct to claim that one’s salvation depends on getting one’s trinitarian theology correct. In addition, some controversy had arisen over a sermon he preached and then published on Christian unity, which was seen by some in authority in the Anglican church as too open to communion with dissenters. Thus, Jukes reluctantly seceded from the Church of England in 1842, never becoming ordained as a priest.463
Jukes and his family soon got rebaptized by a local Baptist minister, though he never became a Baptist. Instead he became an independent Evangelical minister in Hull. His church has been compared to the Plymouth Brethren in its informality and its dependence on the inspiration of the Spirit, though while there were many informal links with Brethren assemblies, and Jukes’s theology had many convergences with Brethren (and Baptist) theology, it was not ever formally linked with that or any network.464 Perhaps the best-known member of Jukes’s Hull congregation was Hudson Taylor, who later founded the China Inland Mission. Taylor was deeply inspired in his faith during his time there.
Jukes continued to study Scripture, the church fathers (having a special love for Origen), and more recent mystical writers like Jacob Böhme and William Law. He was also in correspondence with F. D. Maurice. Jukes preached and published a lot, bringing out a whole string of biblical and theological studies from 1847 until 1893. His biblical interpretation gave a lot of space to the typological interpretation of Old Testament texts, which was fairly typical of Evangelicals in his day. The publication for which he is best known is his book-length defense of universal salvation—The Second Death and the Restitution of All Things.465
Jukes’s initial ponderings about universalism went back to his undergraduate days, when he had realized that ōlām and aiōnios do not mean “everlasting.” He mused privately on the issues for many years, then gathered some letters that he had sent over a period of years to a friend on the subject of eternal punishment and collected them into a book manuscript, which he circulated among friends, but refused to publish. In 1867, he relented under the advice of his friends and the book appeared as The Second Death and the Restitution of All Things. It was one of the seminal nineteenth-century defenses of universal salvation.
Unsurprisingly, his book generated controversy and some fierce dissent from many of his friends and associates in the ministry, who distanced themselves from him.466 The stress and hurt of this, combined with various stresses from his twenty-five-year ministry, especially the strain of raising funds for a massive new building for the church (pictured here), led to a physical and mental breakdown. He left Hull and took a tour of Greece, Egypt, and the Holy Land in 1867–68.
On returning to England in 1868, he moved to London, and determined to rejoin the Church of England, moving away from his Brethren connections. He was not ordained a priest, but he was granted permission by the Bishop of London to officiate at the Anglican Eucharist, though he was still unwell and did not take up ministry again immediately, and never again was employed fulltime in ministry. However, Jukes continued to serve the church with his gifts in numerous ways, and became acquainted with other universalists at this time—including George MacDonald and Hannah Whitall Smith, through whom he became involved in the Broadlands Conferences. Jukes would speak at the conferences, and in Broadlands circles he became known as “Saint Andrew.”
Andrew Jukes died in 1901 and was buried beside his wife in Hull.
Thought
The Second Death and the Restitution of All Things begins with the problem to be resolved: how can we make sense of biblical teaching on the final destiny of humanity when its witness seems to be contradictory, with various texts seeming to indicate that some people will be forever lost, while others appearing to teach that all will be saved. Unusually in such discussions, his answer to this question begins with some groundwork on the doctrine of Scripture and its interpretation.
Scripture—its nature and interpretation
To understand the divine revelation in the Bible, we must start with the revelation of God par excellence: the incarnation of the Logos in Christ. This is the key to understanding the structure of all the lesser divine revelations, including Scripture, nature, and providence. Jesus is “the Word of God made flesh . . . not partly man and partly God. . . . So exactly is Holy Scripture the Word of God; not half human and half divine, but thoroughly human, yet no less thoroughly divine” (5).467 Thus, “Scripture is pre-eminent, and differs from other books exactly as the flesh of Christ differs from the flesh of other men. . . . I see it is human; I see that it has grown; I see that it can be judged and wounded. . . . But it is like Christ’s body, the peculiar tabernacle of God’s truth” (9). Like the flesh of Christ, the letter of Scripture “is a veil quite as much as a revelation, hiding while it reveals, and yet revealing while it hides; presenting to the eye something very different from that which is within, even as the veil of the Tabernacle, with its inwoven cherubim, hid the glory within the veil, of which nevertheless it was the witness; and that therefore, as seen by sense, it is and must be apparently inconsistent and self-contradictory” (9). In other words, the reason why Scripture seems on the surface to contradict itself is a result of the very nature of the self-manifestation of God to creatures. God, in love, has to accommodate himself and reveal himself to creation through the created order itself and this involved paradox and a measure of “hiding quite as much as it reveals” (10). How many saw Christ as a mere man, failing to discern the glory of God made known in and through him! So too the humanity of Scripture both veils and reveals God’s word.
Now, Jukes is insistent that the Bible is the supreme authority for guiding Christian belief and practice, trumping every other authority, including tradition, reason, and conscience. However, Scripture must be interpreted aright, in accordance with the mind of the Spirit. Individual texts must therefore be read in the context of the whole canon. He thinks that the traditional teaching on hell affirms one set of biblical texts (those that seem to limit the final number of the saved), but is forced to ignore or deny another set (those that seem to teach universal salvation) and to “represent God in a character absolutely opposed to that in which the gospel exhibits Him” (26). Jukes sees his book as offering a way that allows both sides of the biblical tension to stand, clarifying how the contradictions are only apparent.
The key to the puzzle, claims Jukes, is found in three insights into the ways of God.
1. The truth of the firstborn and firstfruits (28–41)
The basic idea here is that God works out his purposes for the whole of humanity through a select subsection of that whole. Indeed, this is the gospel itself! For Paul, the gospel, first declared to Abraham, is that “in your seed [des
cendants] shall all the families of the earth be blessed” (Gen 12:3; Gal 3:8). The seed of Abraham (Israel) are the means by which God will restore blessing to all families in creation. That is the good news, fulfilled in Christ. The idea of the few blessing the many comes out in numerous Old Testament ideas, in particular teachings on firstfruits and firstborn.
We shall consider Jukes’s teaching on the firstfruits (and set aside his teaching on the firstborn for reasons of space). The notion of firstfruits comes from Old Testament law. There were in fact two firstfruits offerings. The first was the first sheaf or ears of corn to appear from the earth. These were offered to God in sacrifice at the Feast of Unleavened Bread, during Passover (Lev 23:10–11). The second firstfruits were leavened cakes offered fifty days later at Pentecost (Lev 23:17).
For Jukes, a lover of typology, Christ in his resurrection fulfills the firstfruits of the Passover. The firstfruits were, after all, offered on the day after the Passover Sabbath (Lev 23:11), the very day on which Jesus was raised. St. Paul makes this same connection, speaking of the risen Christ as “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor 15:20). Jesus’ resurrection was chronologically first—preceding the general resurrection—but was also the promise that the rest of the dead would follow, though each in his own order (15:22–24). Christ was not resurrected instead of us, but on our behalf, the means by which our resurrection will come and the guarantee that it will.
A Larger Hope 2 Page 30