Michael Phillips

Michael Phillips is a prolific bestselling author, with sales of his fiction, nonfiction, and devotional writings exceeding seven million copies worldwide. A leading authority on the works and message of George MacDonald and their connections to C.S. Lewis, he and his wife Judy are former bookstore owners and split their time between George MacDonald’s Scotland and their home in California.

Featured Books By Author

The Truth in Jesus

In spite of a gradually expanding awareness of George MacDonald and his influence on the faith and writings of C.S. Lewis, most Lewis devotees, as well as many readers of MacDonald’s fantasies and fiction, remain largely unacquainted with the theological foundations of MacDonald’s corpus and its influence on Lewis’s spiritual development. When intrepid readers attempt to probe MacDonald’s sermons, however, most find the going extremely difficult. Expecting Lewis’s gift of straightforward clarity, many readers find MacDonald’s Victorian method and syntax from the previous century daunting and impossible to decipher. Dense theological progressions, sentences of 100-200 words, and an archaic linguistic style, prevent MacDonald’s wisdom from shining through with clarity. In his two volumes Your Life in Christ and The Truth in Jesus, Michael Phillips addresses this difficulty with the same editorial expertise that distinguish his editions of MacDonald’s novels. Assisted by insightful introductions based on his extensive knowledge of MacDonald’s writings and thought, these two volumes provide an understandable entrée into the expansive world of George MacDonald’s theological writings.
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Universal Reconciliation

As an unofficial spokesman and representative of George MacDonald in the minds of thousands who have discovered Phillips’s editions of MacDonald’s writings since the 1980s, Michael Phillips has been sought out by men and women from around the world to shed light on the complex conundrum presented by the doctrine of eternal punishment. Seeking to address these inquiries in the least controversial way possible, in 1998 Phillips prepared a private compendium of quotes from writers through history, laying out scriptural evidence on both sides of the controversy. His motive was not to argue for or against any perspective, neither to persuade to a particular point of view, but to give information that would help each individual objectively investigate the matter quietly and personally. Though not made public at the time, Phillips’s booklet proved helpful to many. It is now made more widely available in this new edition. His subtitle aptly summarizes the book’s contents: "A selection of quotations by some Christian individuals of repute who have held to the doctrine of universal reconciliation and a list of scriptures upon which their beliefs are based."
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A Sacrifice of Obedience

A Sacrifice of Obedience was written through the years 2002 and 2003 as an intended sequel to Make Me Like Jesus. It was never published.

Fifteen years have now passed. As I look at the world around me, it seems less likely than ever that Christians in very large numbers will be drawn to a message about sacrifice or obedience. And I am no different. I resist both imperatives just like everyone else. I had hoped by this time in my life to be a little further along.

But obedience remains the bull’s eye of the Christian faith, and the very personal bull’s eye of my own life. Thus, the time at last seems right to revisit this manuscript and share it with whatever fellow pilgrims there may be on that isolated and occasionally lonely path.

You who read these words may be few. Even in Christendom, where the image of the cross looms large in the imaginations and theologies of its many churches and their members, the actual cross-life of sacrifice and obedience is not so well known.

Yet to such a life we are called. It is the only life to which we are called.

Let us, then, courageously explore together a few high points along the Lord’s earthly Calvary road to see what they have to reveal about that life.

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Michael Phillips