This is another one of those books where you get a URL where you can read the work for free instead of an ISBN:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14453

George MacDonald is featured here on the booklight in several works. This one stands out because it is not a work of fiction. Rather, The Hope of the Gospel stands out from his other books because it is distilled from sermons that MacDonald gave. While none of these contents in and of themselves proclaim to have been sermons, it is without question that any one of these topics here could stand alone as sermons.

If a person were not of the sermon persuasion, though, one might call it George MacDonald Gives Some Hardcore, Counter intuitive, Christian Advice. This is missing a distinctive linguistic ring, though, and so The Hope of the Gospel sounds better because it is a catchier title. Functionally, though, the offered title is certainly more descriptive. It has the advantage that, if a person is not a Christian, they might read the book just to see how a Christian might think---in this case a 19th century Christian at the peak of the theological summit.

The chief reason MacDonald's advice is counter intuitive is because the guidance of the Messiah is intrinsically against the common sense nostrums and dictates of the world. The Messiah was the biggest rebellion the world had ever seen when it came to the logic of the world. This was so because the logic and actions He was exemplifying came from another world or Kingdom, which is called Heaven. In the rules of Heaven, if you can get ahead in your business by taking advantage of others, you really should not since Heaven is going to see that you have become rich by transgressing a moral law. One way or another, there is going to be consequence for this action. The best bet is to repent, and then figure out what to do with one's self to try to make amends in such a scenario. This is not the logic of say, Microsoft. It is also not the logic of IBM. Neither is it the game plan of a place like Exxon. While these companies might display some of these characteristics, no one can argue that they are successful companies because they do one thing well---they make tons of cash for themselves and their investors. This kind of money making is not always accomplished by doing unto others as one would have done unto themselves and if any AI agent or meatsuit representative of those companies wants to disagree with thebooklight, feel free to state your case and it will be included in this review. Just remember, though, Heaven will be watching.

MacDonald convinces us first and foremost that sin exists. He accomplishes this case by means of defining sin as not doing the Will of God. When knowledge is apprehended that one has acted outside the Will of God, one should seek forgiveness by not despising essential knowledge. How different this characterization is from many modern Church renditions of the need for salvation should be a prima facie fact. The pitch for most forms of salvation in the contemporary religious soulscape is not an appeal to knowledge and its increase, but rather an invocation of pathos. You want to feel loved, right? You want to stop being a bad person, right? You need the Messiah. While these are true by definition, they most often put the object of knowledge in the same envelope with original sin. Of course, once the knowledge cat is out of the knowledge bag, no one will get him or her back in it without buying a crinkle sack or putting some treats in there. The trick becomes how to use knowledge that arrives at an understanding of God and Heaven, and this is where MacDonald makes his stand. He follows this up with a form of the Sinner's Prayer, and the work continues.

Another vignette of an argument concerns the concept of sorrow. While an average person views sorrow to be a negative state, MacDonald lifts it up as a sublime experience of a person who is being crushed. It is through this crushing, he argues, that one is drawn nearer to the Lord. Sorrow, then, is an effective tool to reduce the proud dwelling of a soul into rubble so that the edifice can be reconstructed such that the resulting house stands in eternity AND inhabits the world while not being of it.

More is said concerning what the Messiah did in action toward his townspeople, and how He chose NOT to use the power He had that would have definitively convinced the Jewish peerage that He was the Messiah because the result would have been to generate a kind of malignant growth. The hypothetical converts would have been hardened in heart, he argues, but convinced on the basis of sheer power alone. Therefore, had they gone out into the world upon that basis, love would not have been the principal reason for their sojourn but instead to convert by hurling lightning bolts of faith into people's heads which might reach their heart only by means of fear.

Other topics include inheriting Heaven and being a part of God's family which have their respective gems. As this review is waxing long into the poetic all ready, it behooves us to focus the lens on the narrow concluding part which sets MacDonald into a theological category far advanced for his era.

MacDonald argues toward the end of the work that animals should have souls because there is no reason to think they should not. It is an interesting argument in that he says that nobody gains anything by torturing animals where the quality of their life is concerned. He goes on to say that if someone does this and argues that animals have no soul and so torture of them is irrelevant, they are not going to increase their social standing by saying they tortured something like ten dogs for twelve hours. On the other hand, if they do not undertake this activity, then they are reducing pain and suffering on the whole, which does prove additive to their over all well-being. This, he argues, is why he should not suppose that animals have no soul.

While this is an unusual stance for the 19th century on its own, MacDonald goes a step further and argues that there is no specific reason why an advanced soul might not reincarnate in a more primitive form in a physical sense. In this regard he is speaking of the physiological constructs and appearances of the body that might appear to be what we might think of as "caveman-ish" in a modern parlance. Here, MacDonald appears to be rolling a kind of theological "doobie" that the early Christians held to be true in certain sects but only appears now, generally, among Hindu peoples. It is not that this suggestion is without considerable theological merit, but it is surprising to see anyone in the 19th century who is a professing Christian holding something that was viciously persecuted way back in around the third century and again around the twelfth. In both instances, the aggressor was usually either Rome herself, or one of her proxies.

It seems given this unusual distinction that MacDonald can safely be labeled a Christian Mystic and not simply a Christian Believer. It is little wonder, then, that he inspired the fantasy genre noosphere that persists now. It is also interesting to note that that fantasy sphere really has had no further innovation after MacDonald and the spate of authors inspired by him cut their inroads into its cliffs. Weirder still is to know that those roads were first cleared by professing Christians, who, today, would just as likely denounce many of these kinds of "fantasy" works as to uphold them. The best the modern era has to offer is Harry Potter, and nobody can make the case that it is not about witchcraft and sorcery at its core. Sure, there are bigger and smaller evils within that world that are fought against, but there is no Aslan. There are just a bunch of wizards bickering and tossing magic at one another almost as often as they do the greater evil they are supposed to be combating. The reward in that series is, clearly, the friends they made along the way. Tolkien worked that theme in a far more superior way. He, of course, was inspired by MacDonald. Rowling, one supposes, was inspired by the 90's and 2000's. That sums the influences and differences up rather succinctly. The only way modern Christianity could have any kind of "magic" was to make an environment where it was about mostly sorcery, which, in turn, pissed off all the Christians. Ironic given the world MacDonald inhabits.

One should not read The Hope of the Gospel if one wants a gentle, hand-holding version of Christianity. This book is not that, but it is a treasure house full of spiritual wisdom articulated in ways that lift language into the sublime and away from the mundane. It will not yield its fruit unless the reader wishes to invest a certain amount of sweat-equity.

Original version over at thebooklight.