Timothy Larsen

Review: Diary of an Old Soul

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Cover image of "Diary of an Old Soul by George MacDonald, Introduction and notes by Timothy Larsen.

Diary of an Old Soul, George MacDonald, with introduction and notes by Timothy Larsen. IVP Academic (ISBN: 9781514007686), 2024 (originally published in 1880).

Summary: A new edition of MacDonald’s extended devotional poem, with seven line stanzas for each day of the year.

In 1880, George MacDonald, the prolific fantasy writer, published a work he titled A Book of Strife in the Form of a Diary of an Old Soul. He intended the book as a gift to friends, assuming the cost of publication. As historian Timothy Larsen notes in the Introduction, devotional works were common during this time, supplementing daily Bible readings with spiritual reflections. What MacDonald did was write an extended poem broken into 365 seven line stanzas. Opposite the poems, he provided a blank page for the reader to write his or her own reflections, which would become part of the work.

The New Edition

IVP Academic has just published a new edition of this work. Unlike later versions, this edition preserves the interleaving of blank pages with the poem with one to three stanzas on a page with a blank page opposite. Wheaton historian Timothy Larsen, drawing upon the resources of the Marion E. Wade Center, provides an introduction to the life, context, and content of The Diary. He also lightly annotates the work, mainly defining unusual words and giving context for some allusions. I appreciated the unobtrusive character of the notes. They did not distract from the text. The IVP edition is 4.25 x 7 inches in size, with a cloth binding and bookmark ribbon, ideal for devotional use.

The Poem

The original first part of MacDonald’s title gives us a clue to the character of the poem. MacDonald portrays the strife of the soul against sin, spiritual inertia, and the vicissitudes of life, in order to love God as one would desire. This is not for lack of his intimacy with God but because of it. That intimacy is evident in these lines from January 5:

My soul breathes only in thy infinite soul;
I breathe, I think, I love, I live but thee.
Oh breathe, oh think--O Love, live into me;
Unworthy is my life till all divine,
Till thou see in me only what is thine.

The poem does not follow the liturgical year. MacDonald was from a Low Church background. He makes an exception only for Christmas, which he loved. Rather, his poems sometimes follow the circumstances of his own life: the memory of a lost child, the loss of a home due to straitened finances, or even a rainy, gloomy spring.

Given the extended poem nature of the work, consecutive stanzas are often thematically related. The stanzas for August 21-23, for example, focus on our forgetfulness of God. He observes how often our thoughts are upon other things than God. While he recognizes that this reflects his own finitude, he does not want to fall into sin. Rather, he longs to never stray far from God though not always conscious of God.

The verses remind us of God’s utter sufficiency and our utter dependence upon him in every moment, in our living, aging, and dying. This verse, from August 6 is a good example:

O Father, thou art my eternity.
Not on the clasp Of consciousness--on thee
My life depends; and I can well afford
All to forget, so thou remember, Lord.
In thee I rest; in sleep thou dost me fold,
In thee I labour; still in thee, grow old;
And dying, shall I not find in thee, my Life, be bold?

Using The Diary

Unlike my reading for this review, The Diary is best read one stanza a day. That said, be aware of the stanzas before and after. Timothy Larsen suggests his own practice of reading and re-reading each day’s reading. To this I would add turning your reading into prayers. And use the blank pages to crystallize your own thoughts and impressions. Just as in our reading of scripture, some passages will resonate more deeply at a given time. I suspect one may come back to this in another year and connect with a very different set of verses.

Even in my initial read-through, MacDonald caught my attention at numerous points. On December 23, for example, he speaks of the loneliness of God. That’s one I want to think about further! What makes The Diary so good is that MacDonald gives voice to all the seasons of our spiritual journey, not just the exalted times. In doing so, he often provides words for us in the times our own words fail us. What a gift this must have been to his friends!

[I will be interviewing Timothy Larsen, who introduced and annotated this work on July 9, 1 pm ET. If you are interested in listening to the live interview, sign up for the weblink here.]

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles

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George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles (The Ken and Jean Hansen Lectureship Series), Timothy Larsen. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2018.

Summary: Three lectures on the works of George MacDonald with responses that focus on the miraculous in these works, particularly with regard to the incarnation, faith amid doubt, and the re-enchantment of life.

Wheaton College is the home of the Marion E. Wade Center, which houses materials by and about seven British authors: Owen Barfield, G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy l. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. Each year the center hosts an annual lecture series named in honor of Ken and Jean Hansen, who were instrumental in establishing the center, which honors the founder of ServiceMaster, with whom Ken Hansen worked.

That is background to this book, containing the 2018 lectures by Timothy Larsen, a professor of history and Christian Thought at Wheaton, and three responses by Wheaton colleagues. The lectures focus broadly on the theme of the miraculous.

The first of these centers on the incarnation. Larsen notes a theological shift in the nineteenth century from a focus on the atonement, the death of Christ and its implications, to the incarnation, the coming of Christ in the flesh. Once consequence was a shift in focus from Easter to Christmas being the great Christian holiday and Larsen notes how this is evident in many of MacDonald’s work focusing around Christmas. Accompanying this is a focus on the love of God in MacDonald’s works. James Edward Beitler III in his response elaborates the theme of incarnation in Phantastes, the two natures of Christ, and the idea of embodied thought.

The second lecture considers doubt and the idea of “the crisis of doubt” in Victorian writing. MacDonald believed in honest or holy doubt that was an expression of faith and maintained strong friendships with notorious doubts like Tennyson (e.g. “In Memoriam”). He proposes that this is integral to a process of reaching a deeper, more settled Christian faith, as occurs in his character Thomas Wingfold. Most significant for MacDonald are the times his characters trust and obey in the face of doubt. In MacDonald’s own life, this process accounts for his profound belief in miracles, including the resurrection, which sustained him in the loss of two children. Richard Hughes Gibson responds in considering how this works out in MacDonald’s ideas about poetry.

The third and final lecture focuses on the theme of re-enchantment and centers on the image of the “rosefire” in The Princess and the Goblin. MacDonald connected this image to God’s sanctifying work, the love that purifies and explores how this idea runs through MacDonald’s fantasies. Along the way, we also learn about his unhappy clerical career and his ideas about purgation, if not purgatory. Jill Pelaez Baumgaertner keys off two mentions of poetry and draws in the work of Luther, Donne, Blake, Richard John Neuhaus, and Frederick Buechner to show how fairy tales were a way into reality, particularly the reality of eschatological hope, for MacDonald.

This is a delightful addition to the library of any MacDonald fan. It struck me that it offers yet another example of the truth we often find in fiction. Personally, the second lecture on doubt spoke the most to me. I work with those whose research leads, as it would any thinking person, to questions and doubts. Too often, I believe, we confuse faith with certainty, which is faith’s opposite. We miss how honest or even holy doubt itself, especially when accompanied by the obedience that trusts that what one has believed is so, even in the face of questions, is perhaps a singular form of faith.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Every Leaf, Line, and Letter

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Every Leaf, Line, and Letter, Edited by Timothy Larsen, Introduction by Thomas S. Kidd. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2021.

Summary: A collection of articles in honor of historian of evangelicalism, David Bebbington, exploring expressions of the “biblicism,” in Bebbington’s definition of evangelicalism, known as the “Bebbington Quadrilateral.”

Historian David Bebbington is most widely known for his description of the defining characteristics of evangelicalism: conversionism, activism, biblicism, and crucicentrism, which has become known as the “Bebbington Quadrilateral.” This collection of articles focuses on biblicism, an effort to honor Bebbington on his 70th birthday and retirement from his Chair. The articles cover a span of time from the 1730’s to the present and are organized by century. One of the main themes of the books is the variety of uses of the Bible and forms of expression of evangelicalism’s commitment to the Bible. In my review I will summarize the articles by century, noting salient points.

Eighteenth Century

Kristina Benham opens this collection considering American preaching during the Revolutionary War and the widespread invocation of Exodus and Independence as ascent to an American Zion. She notes how the exodus theme will later be used by slaves from within the American system. Bruce Hindmarsh takes some exception with Bebbington’s observation of Enlightenment influence in 18th century evangelicalism by noting the extensive examples of figural reading of the biblical text. Then Jonathan Yeager rounds out this section by contrasting the views of Jonathan Edwards and John Erskine on faith and free will. Yeager exposes Edward’s distinctiveness from the reformers on his views of the place of the will in the exercise of faith, contrasting him with the more traditionally reformed Erskine.

Nineteenth Century

I found K. Elise Leal’s “Young People Are Actually Becoming Accurate Bible Theologians” one of the most interesting essays in the volume. She looks at children’s Bible education, including a heavy emphasis on memory work and the efforts of the Sunday school movement to form children into “Bible Theologians.” I saw echoes of these efforts in my own childhood Sunday school experience. Mark Noll explores the challenge that the debate to slavery posed to the belief in sola scriptura–the reality that pro-slavery and abolitionist preaching both invoked the same Bible. I’m convinced that evangelicalism in the U.S. bears the mark of this crisis down to the present day. I had not previously been acquainted with Josephine Butler, a crusader for women’s rights whose life was animated by her reading of scripture, particularly in its focus on the gospels and an almost mystical love for Jesus. Mary Riso offers a fascinating portrait of her as an example of the expression of biblicism in evangelical piety.

Twentieth Century

This section opens with David Bebbington’s own contribution to this volume: a study of the Bible crisis in British evangelicalism in the 1920’s, the fundamentalist reaction to critical studies that brought significant divides in the U.S. was more muted, in part because of the strong Anglican evangelical presence who refused to denounce or separate. I was fascinated to learn of the significant role the Bible league played in the student movement that became Inter-Varsity Fellowship in the UK, later spreading to Canada and the U.S. Timothy Larson follows up with a study of Liberal Evangelicals in the UK through a study of the ministry of Vernon Faithful Storr, a leader in the Anglican Evangelical Group Movement, the locus of liberal evangelicalism. It was telling that they were defined as much for their stance against Anglo-Catholicism and for the “central” churchman rather than doctrinal views, although Storrs moved to a position of believing neither in the plenary inspiration or final authority of the Bible. Sadly his efforts to be “on the right side of history” led to the eclipse of his movement by the evangelicals led by John Stott, much to his chagrin.

The next essay shifts the focus to the United States and the anti-lynching efforts of Francis Grimke and the biblical arguments he used, the lack of attention he received, and his developing arguments for the legitimacy of defensive resistance in the face of white tyranny and oppression. The section concludes with the rise of the charismatic movement, particularly in New Zealand and Britain, the rift between Michael Harper and John Stott over whether Spirit baptism was a second and distinct work to justification and how the charismatic renewal led to more democratic uses of scripture in personal and public devotion and ministry.

Twenty-first Century

This last part begins with what I thought a chilling study of the Patriot’s Bible, the interweaving of biblical text and American history laying groundwork for a kind of Christian nationalistic fervor and militarism in defense of country. It is interesting to trace how many problems in American Christianity trace to what is in the margins of our Bibles along with the Biblical text from C. I. Scofield to the present. I’ve often warned against treating the notes as inspired and that we may do better to read Bibles without such notes. Finally Brian Stanley, a global church historian considers the variety of forms biblicism takes in global evangelicalism, particularly in context where oral tradition or hymn-singing are important.

While this is a selective treatment of biblicism in evangelical history as any such treatment must be, this festschrift offers rich food for thought. The two articles on early twentieth century evangelicalism remind me of the challenge of avoiding either polemical dogmatism or liberal latitudinarianism. It was fascinating to think about the formation of children, which seems less important in many circles, than even in my youth. More striking is how often evangelicals have appropriated scripture for political ends, from revolution to slavery to making America great. It makes sense to me of the advocacy of some Christians that we need a new revolution. It seems to me instead that we need a better reading of scripture, perhaps one shaped by the other aspects of Bebbington’s Quadrilateral–the centrality of Christ and his cross, the necessity of conversion (rarely talked about these days) and activism like that of Josephine Butler, fueled by the biblical text and the love of Christ.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Balm in Gilead

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balm in gilead

Balm in Gilead: A Theological Dialogue with Marilynne Robinson, edited by Timothy Larsen and Keith L. Johnson. Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2019.

Summary: A collection of presentations from the 2018 Wheaton Theology Conference, discussing the work, and particularly the fiction, of Marilynne Robinson with contributions from Robinson.

It is not unusual at an academic conference to discuss the work of a particular author. What is perhaps more remarkable is to discuss the work of a living author with the author present and contributing. The subtitle of this work calls this “a theological dialogue with Marilynne Robinson, and this is true in two senses. The various essays do engage the theology, particularly the Calvinism of Robinson’s work. But the conference also engaged Robinson, with a presentation by her (“The Protestant Conscience”) and a conversation between her and Rowan Williams, and an interview with Wheaton College President Philip Ryken.

Most of the essays focus on some aspect of the theology found in Robinson’s work. Timothy Larsen considers the main character of her fiction, Reverend John Ames, his heritage as the grandson of a staunch abolitionist in the mold of Wheaton’s Jonathan Blanchard, his reaction against that as a pacifist, and the mindset of the 1950’s Christian Century which he and fellow minister Boughton regularly discussed. Han-luen Kantzer Komline explores Ames “heart condition,” both physical and spiritual, and his struggle to forgive and extend grace to Jack Boughton, the wayward child of his friend. Timothy George explores the unusual, for an academic and a writer, embrace of Calvinism by Robinson, with its doctrine of predestination, emphasizing grace and undercutting human presumption. George notes the central focus of Robinson on Christ and so does Keith L. Johnson in a discussion of Robinson’s metaphysics. Here he teases out Robinson’s understanding of the significance of the cross as the demonstration of the love of God for us rather than on its sacrificial character, a focus Robinson engages and differs with.

Lauren Winner focuses on the preaching of John Ames–the 67,500 pages and 2,250 sermons in the course of his pastorate in Gilead and his conclusion that “they mattered or they didn’t and that’s the end of it.” One of the most intriguing essays for me was that of Patricia Andujo on the African American experience in Robinson’s works. She explores how these works reflect the attitudes of mainline white churches in the 1950’s, a kind of passivity in the face of racism, even while raising the uncomfortable issue of Jack Boughton’s inter-racial marriage, and the lack of response when the town’s black church burns down and the congregation leaves.

Tiffany Eberle Kriner’s essay on “Space/Time/Doctrine” raises the intriguing idea of the influence of Robinson’s understanding of predestination, and the shifts backwards and forwards in time in her novels. Joel Sheesley, a midwestern artist, focuses on the landscape of Robinson’s novels. In the penultimate essay Rowan Williams explores the theme of the grace that is beyond human goodness. He writes:

“Grace, not goodness, is the key to our healing. To say that is to say that we’re healed in relation not only to God but to one another. Without that dimension, we’re back with toxic goodness again, the goodness that forgets and excludes. Lila’s problem in the novel is that the instinctive warmth, the human friendliness, the humanly constructed fellowship that characterizes Gilead cannot allow itself to be wounded and broken open in such a way that the stranger is welcome, whether that stranger is the racial other, or simply the socially marginal and damaged person like Lila herself. But to be wounded in our goodness, to learn to have that dimension of our self-image and self-presentation cracked open, is the beginning of where grace can act in us” (pp. 163-164).

The final essay is Robinson’s on “The Protestant Conscience,” in which she defends not only the freedom of conscience of religious believers but argues that the Protestant idea of conscience defended the freedom of all rather than enforcing a Christian conscience upon all through means of the state. This presentation is followed by conversations with Rowan Williams, and an interview with Philip Ryken. In this collection, I found these diverting, but not nearly as substantive and satisfying as the various essays. Perhaps a highlight was the difference between Robinson and Williams on the literary merits of Flannery O’Connor, of whom Robinson is no fan.

This is a great volume for any who, like me, love the work of Marilynne Robinson. It helped make greater sense of some of the themes I’ve seen in her work, particularly her Calvinism. It served to invite me to a re-reading of her work in its exploration of themes of place, race, and grace. Robinson’s presence by no means muted the critique of her work, and yet I saw no defensiveness in her comments, which bespeaks the evidence of grace in her life. All in all, this is well worth acquiring if you have followed Robinson’s work. For those who have not, read the novels first, and then you will appreciate this volume!

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.