
originally published 9/16/2020
Historian Timothy Larsen situates George MacDonald within a Victorian understanding of faith and doubt. Faith, defined as “what you believe in your heart,” rose to an unprecedented value in the Victorian era, corresponding with a tendency toward unhealthy introspection and preoccupation with the problem of doubt. MacDonald held that these problems hinged upon understanding faith only in cerebral terms. He rejected a narrow Enlightenment view of faith, focusing instead upon trust in the person of Christ — specifically, the self-authenticating revelation of Christ in the Gospels. Larsen discusses how, like many Romantics, MacDonald worked toward the reenchantment of the world through the imagination, writing fairy tales as a medium to explore the meaning of reality. Larsen is the author of George MacDonald in the Age of Miracles: Incarnation, Doubt, and Reenchantment (IVP Academic, 2018).
This interview was originally published on Volume 148 of the Journal.
17 minutes
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