This continues the series of posts on the Hutchmoot talk by Andy P. and me. The last post, beginning my part, spoke of the inconsolable longing which Lewis awakened in my heart with Narnia.
By my mid twenties I had read nearly all of the works of Lewis. I read and reread The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, Mere Christianity, Till We Have Faces, God in the Dock, and most of the others. In The Great Divorce I saw people I knew, and myself, in the ghosts from the Grey Town. Complainers, self-justifiers, self-pitiers, hanging on to offenses and illusions from their past; since they lived by illusions, they had become illusions themselves. They refused to be their real selves God made them to be, became caught up in world, flesh, and devil, and eventually lost their ability to be real at all. This idea of the false self and the true self runs as a common thread through the works of Lewis and George MacDonald. In Perelandra, as the demon-possessed scientist Weston does his best to tempt the pure Queen to disobey by filling her mind with inflated and melodramatic views of herself, Lewis writes, “The external, and, as it were, dramatic conception of the self was the enemy’s true aim. He was making her mind a theatre in which that phantom self should hold the stage. He had already written the play.”
In my mid twenties I began to seek out the works of George MacDonald because Lewis said, “He was my master.” Lewis wrote that Phantastes “baptised my imagination. But MacDonald disturbed me at first. I had carried a legalistic concept of God in my early years which culminated in a nine month stint in a very legalistic church at around the age of seventeen. I longed for God to be more like Aslan. Nearly a decade later when I encountered MacDonald, I had traded the legalistic God for a more biblical God I could trust. By then I was trusting God to take care of me financially via Malachi 3 and Matthew 6, and I trusted Him to get me to Heaven through Christ. In short, I was believing in a God of grace and love but not one who required holiness. At the time I didn’t believe it was possible to be holy; I believed Jesus died merely to pay my sin debt so I could go to Heaven when I die.
By the time I was beginning to read MacDonald, I had long since learned that I couldn’t ever be good enough to pass muster. MacDonald’s constant talk of obedience, of doing what Jesus said to do, tore at the depths of me. He stirred up what seemed an ancient sense of inadequacy. I would read him for awhile and set the book down, feeling agitated inside. He writes of Jesus in Unspoken Sermons Series II, “It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in him, if you do not do anything he tells you.” He struck at the heart of some of the things I had been taught – the lie that mental assent to a set of facts about God, about Christ, was the same as relying on God Himself. I began to find through MacDonald that true faith and action were inseparable, that obedience was just another word for Faith, that real faith will always bear fruit in our action. He wrote, “It is the one terrible heresy of the church, that it has always been presenting something else than obedience as faith in Christ.”
Although at the time I struggled with MacDonald’s unrelenting emphasis on obedience, paradoxically it was through MacDonald I began to find that the righteousness of Christ is at the heart of a redeemed man; that Christ in the man is the root and the source of fruit in a true man. In study I began to find the Word of God supports this. I had long believed the opposite, that even as the redeemed, we were at the root depraved and sinful, and that only through physical death would we be holy, so I had given up. But MacDonald says, “Of what use then is the law? To lead us to Christ, the Truth – to waken in our minds a sense of what our deepest nature, the presence…of God in us, requires of us – to let us know, in part by failure, that the purest effort of will of which we are capable cannot lift us up even to the abstaining of wrong to our neighbor.” Unspoken Sermons, Series One
MacDonald writes in Unspoken Sermons Series Three, “The Christ in us is our own true nature made blossom in us by the Lord, whose life is the light of men that it may become the life of men.”
This “Christ in the man,” for MacDonald, is the source and ground of our real identity. MacDonald’s constant prompts to obey God, to do what Jesus Christ said to do, are the starting point to finding that real identity. For MacDonald, “Everyone who desires to follow the Master has the spirit of the Master, and will receive more, that he may follow closer, nearer, in his very footsteps.” This echoes Ephesians 5:8-10, “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of the Spirit is in all goodness, righteousness, and truth), finding out what is acceptable to the Lord.” This new self, or true self, that we really are and are meant to live by is a consistent theme in MacDonald’s work. For MacDonald, salvation means Christ has given himself to us as our inner wellspring of righteousness, and to be true is to live by that trueness – our humanity indwelt by and in willing cooperation with his Deity.