I love ML, and I loved that book, but I read it in my early 20s or even younger (at any rate, a long time ago!), and it is definitely one of her less sophisticated efforts. I've read her religious non-fiction extensively, and it's actually what kept me in Christianity and led me to seek out mainline Protestant traditions when I was running screaming from Catholicism. That book and A House Like a Lotus definitely have some major flaws, even with these shining moments of goodness in them. She handles the difficult stuff far better in An Acceptable Time, which follows Meg and Calvin's daughter on a time-travel adventure.
L'Engle's take on the Bible, from what I've gleaned from her other writings, were actually pretty close to your own. She wasn't averse to drawing from other traditions, and her philosophy is that God is the ultimate good, that Christ is for all of us, and that the Bible is the living word of God, meaning that we have the opportunity to re-create what it means every time we read it. She writes several places that she thinks the Bible is "real" the way Scout Finch and Emily of New Moon and Mary Lennox are "real."
I think her underlying philosophy is one of a big-picture God. When we encounter difficulty, her pat answer is that we're only seeing one small part of the issue and that if you zoom out something very different could be going on. That's a feature I see in just about all her work, including all the Time books and especially A Wind in the Door. She claimed not to be a universalist, but then went on to clarify that she thinks that ultimately God will reconcile everyone and everything in time, but that it won't be on a timeline we can understand.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2014-05-10 03:19 am (UTC)L'Engle's take on the Bible, from what I've gleaned from her other writings, were actually pretty close to your own. She wasn't averse to drawing from other traditions, and her philosophy is that God is the ultimate good, that Christ is for all of us, and that the Bible is the living word of God, meaning that we have the opportunity to re-create what it means every time we read it. She writes several places that she thinks the Bible is "real" the way Scout Finch and Emily of New Moon and Mary Lennox are "real."
I think her underlying philosophy is one of a big-picture God. When we encounter difficulty, her pat answer is that we're only seeing one small part of the issue and that if you zoom out something very different could be going on. That's a feature I see in just about all her work, including all the Time books and especially A Wind in the Door. She claimed not to be a universalist, but then went on to clarify that she thinks that ultimately God will reconcile everyone and everything in time, but that it won't be on a timeline we can understand.