Articulating George MacDonald’s theology is a complicated project, given his well-known resistance to theological systems and the allusive character of his writing. Explicit theological statements are replete in his sermons and letters, although they usually emerge suggestively, in contrast to particular foils in Victorian Christianity. In his imaginative works, a variety of fictive voices emerges alongside the voice of a pastoral narrator; these voices are sometimes difficult to distinguish. The variety of sources that shaped his theological imagination and the extent to which he adhered to Christian orthodoxy (variously conceived) remain matters for debate. This chapter distils key themes of MacDonald’s theology across his body of work, including: the generative love of God as the deepest reality, the epistemological priority of ‘childlike imagination’ in response, and the soul-shaping journey of suffering leading to glory. It also notes tensions in MacDonald’s theology regarding divine providence, theodicy, and the possibility of universal reconciliation.

Although MacDonald is chiefly known as a literary figure, he saw himself first and foremost as a preacher, preaching thousands of sermons across his career and publishing five volumes explicitly on spirituality. This chapter explores these sermons, both spoken and unspoken, seeing them as metaphysical landscapes providing a space and a medium for theological reflection and spiritual formation. MacDonald’s theological aesthetic is to be found not only in the synthetic biblical hermeneutic he employed but also in the sense of the transcendent which pervades his sermons; his modus operandi in the sermons is the divine sonship, with an emphasis on ‘our real life with Christ concealed’, a distinctive feature of Scottish spirituality. MacDonald was a spiritual explorer, always in search of the inexhaustible ‘treasures of darkness’.