George MacDonald's Books

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Alexandrian

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George MacDonald was definitely NOT Reformed. He grew up in the Scottish national church, which is Reformed, but he himself despised Reformed theology and spent his whole life basically attacking it like he had a bee in his bonnet. He was kicked out of his Calvinist parish and spent the rest of his career as an itinerant preacher/writer. George MacDonald's most candid statements about Reformed theology can be found in the sermon "Justice," in which he presents these little gems:
From all copies of Jonathan Edwards’s portrait of God, however faded by time, however softened by the use of less glaring pigments, I turn with loathing. They yield the idea of the Ancient of Days, ‘the glad creator,’ and put in its stead a miserable, puritanical martinet of a God, caring not for righteousness, but for his rights; not for the eternal purities, but the goody proprieties. There is but one thing lower than deliberately to believe such a lie, and that is to worship the God of whom it is believed.

The prophets of such a God take all the glow, all the hope, all the colour, all the worth, out of life on earth, and offer you instead what they call eternal bliss—a pale, tearless hell. Of all things, turn from a mean, poverty stricken faith. From such and their false teaching I would gladly help to deliver the true-hearted. Let the dead bury their dead, but I would do what I may to keep them from burying the living.
 
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