Here is some more that seems to fit in here with the postings in this thread:
MacDonald recognised that truth could be separated into scientific truth and poetic truth (cf. C. S. Lewis' treatment of Myth). He held firmly to the literal truth of the resurrection and the miracles of Christ which he regarded as evidences of the higher law of love.
He followed Plato in thinking that evil was. to a large extent, a result of deprivation and not depravation. Human beings sinned because they did not see the truth clearly, and to have a clear vision of God would mean that they would be so overwhelmed by his love, that all wrongdoing would be immediately set aside. Seeing right was the beginning of acting right, and Christ was the clearest picture of God given to humankind.
He rejected totally the doctrine of penal substitution as put forward by Calvin which argues that Christ has taken the place of sinners and is punished in their place recognising that in turn it raised serious questions about the character and nature of God. Instead he argued that Christ had come to save people from their sins, and not from the punishment of their sins. The problem was not the need to appease a wrathful God but the disease of sin itself.
Salvation is a process of evolution toward Christ-likeness. We are marred by the Self. Sin is choosing not to obey and conform to the will of the Father in response to which God must send his consuming fire to burn the evil out of us.
"The wrath will consume what they call themselves; so that the selves God made shall appear." (Unspoken Sermons 1, p44).
MacDonald would accept no compromise with sin but saw evil as a discord that will eventually be brought into harmony with God when the whole of creation is reunited with him.
Hell is not a place of punishment but a place of purification to prepare one to enter God's presence. True repentance, however, is essential.
"All pains, indeed, and all sorrows, all demons, yea, and all sins themselves, under the suffering care of the highest minister, are but the ministers of truth an righteousness." (Mary Marston, Vol.II, p.321). Some things that we call evil are sent to bring the sinner back to God.
He was open to the possibility that some might recognise good for what it is but still choose the bad, but he did not think this very likely.
Thus Hell is not a place of eternal conscious torment in fire but an ultimate, final encounter with God. Hell is knowing the infinite loss of God and is forced on no one. It is self selected. As C. S. Lewis wrote, "There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done", and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done". (The Great Divorce, p72). It is a falling out of the hands of the one who loves us.
He believed that death is not an end but a doorway into a greater reality.
"For I suspect the next world will more plainly be a going on with this than most people think - only it will be much better for some, and much worse for others, as the Lord has taught us in the parable of the rich man and the beggar." (There & Back, Vol.III, pp.138-9).
Salvation is rooted in God's love and his will to save, not in the reckoning of accounts. Legal metaphors of guilt and judgement play their part in the Scriptures, but the reality beyond the metaphor is relational and personal, it relates to God' search for fallen human beings and their response or otherwise to his initiative. This search does not cease at the point of human death. This life is simply a stage on the journey Home.
George MacDonald taught a religion of the heart not the head. People could not be driven into the kingdom of God but rather led by example in the doing of good. He thirsted for a [mystic] union with the divine that would enhance rather than submerge human individuality. MacDonald sought to express the divine in the human, and the human in the divine. As Father, God is calling his children Home. God reveals himself through creation but supremely through Christ, the obedient Son.
