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    The White Stone: Selections from George MacDonald
    The White Stone: Selections from George MacDonald
    The White Stone: Selections from George MacDonald
    Ebook160 pages51 minutes

    The White Stone: Selections from George MacDonald

    By Ellyn Sanna

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    About this ebook

    "We receive from God the white stone of our identity," wrote George MacDonald, "on which is written our true name. Each of us is growing toward the revelation of our true selves." MacDonald's theology of love, hope, and affirmation runs through all his writing—and in The White Stone, Anamchara Books has pulled out some of the best selections and arranged them thematically.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAnamchara Books
    Release dateJul 28, 2011
    ISBN9781937211202
    The White Stone: Selections from George MacDonald
    Author

    Ellyn Sanna

    Ellyn Sanna is the author of more than thirty books. She is also the executive editor at Harding House Publishing Service, where she has helped to create hundreds of educational books for young adults. She and her family (along with assorted animals) make their home in upstate New York.

    Read more from Ellyn Sanna

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      Book preview

      The White Stone - Ellyn Sanna

      Introduction

      George MacDonald was a mystic, a prolific author, and a theological rebel. He was also a loving father and husband, as well as a clergyman who was unable to keep a job. But it was his belief in Jesus Christ as a living person that shaped each of the other aspects of his life.

      He was born in Scotland in 1824, the son of a farmer. His family attended the Congregational Church, a Calvinist denomination that believed in the doctrine of predestination (that God has chosen the elect for salvation, while others will be condemned to hell). MacDonald is said to have burst into tears as a young boy when someone explained this doctrine to him, despite the fact that he was assured he was among the elect.

      As a young man, MacDonald earned a degree at the University of Aberdeen and then went Highbury College in London to prepare for ministry in the Congregational Church. In 1850, he was appointed pastor at the church in Arundel, West Sussex, but because his sermons insisted that God’s love is relentless, pursuing human beings for all eternity, his salary was cut in half. He was repeatedly accused of heresy, and after three years, he resigned.

      In 1851, MacDonald married Louisa Powell. They had six sons and five daughters together, and supporting his large family became MacDonald’s greatest challenge: he preached, taught, tutored, and wrote novels that were the bestselling romances of his day—and still, he often needed to rely on the charity of his friends.

      Never a worldly success, MacDonald still influenced many of the world’s greatest writers and thinkers. Lewis Carroll, John Ruskin, Tennyson, Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Trollope, Lewes, Thackeray, Longfellow, Walt Whitman, and Lady Byron were all his friends. After his death, W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and J.R.R. Tolkien all counted MacDonald as an important influence on their thinking.

      During MacDonald’s lifetime, his romantic novels were his bread-and-butter, but it was his fantasies and sermons that have best survived the test of time. His best-known works—The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, At the Back of the North Wind, Phantastes, and Lilith—laid the foundation for a genre of writing upon which authors like C. S. Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle would later build. I write, not for children, MacDonald said, but for the child-like, whether they be five, or fifty, or seventy-five.

      Throughout his life, in all his creative and professional endeavors, MacDonald steadfastly rejected the doctrine of substitutionary atonement—the concept that Christ’s death was necessary in order to appease the wrath of a vengeful God. The idea that God could be anything but love was the true heresy, MacDonald insisted; the Divine as revealed by Christ, a God of total love and giving, was the only God in which MacDonald believed—and he believed in this God of love utterly, with his entire being.

      MacDonald’s belief was not a watery, undemanding sort of theology. Love is the ultimate challenge; it demands that we become our true selves, a process that is often painful, that requires everything from us. The surgeon’s knife may be excruciating—but it only cuts in order to heal.

      This is a theology that has seldom been taught by the established Church, and yet it is a quiet, biblical vein of thought that has never been totally repressed. The early Church Fathers—Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa—believed in universal salvation. That changed with the establishment of Augustinian theology as the church norm, and alternative perspectives (for instance, that of Pelagius, the Celtic theologian) were labeled heresy. Confidence in the supremacy of God’s love and the ultimate wholeness of the human soul continued to run through the revelations of the great medieval mystics, however, including Julian of Norwich, John of the Cross, and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing. And in the twenty-first century, Pastor Rob Bell caused a stir in the evangelical world by insisting that love wins.

      The doctrine of universal salvation remains a controversial one. Those who believe in it tend to do so quietly, for fear of offending

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