The History of Scottish Theology, Volume III: The Long Twentieth Century 9780198759355, 0198759355

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THE HISTORY OF SCOTTISH THEOLOGY The History of Scottish Theology, Volume I Celtic Origins to Reformed Orthodoxy The History of Scottish Theology, Volume II The Early Enlightenment to the Late Victorian Era The History of Scottish Theology, Volume III The Long Twentieth Century

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EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD PROFESSOR ALEXANDER BROADIE (University of Glasgow)

PROFESSOR STEWART J. BROWN (University of Edinburgh)

PROFESSOR SUSAN HARDMAN MOORE (University of Edinburgh)

PROFESSOR COLIN KIDD (University of St Andrews)

PROFESSOR DONALD MACLEOD (Edinburgh Theological Seminary)

PROFESSOR CHARLOTTE METHUEN (University of Glasgow)

PROFESSOR MARGO TODD (University of Pennsylvania)

PROFESSOR IAIN TORRANCE (University of Aberdeen)

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The History of Scottish Theology Volume III The Long Twentieth Century Edited by

DAVID FERGUSSON and

MARK W. ELLIOTT

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2019 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019945447 ISBN 978–0–19–875935–5 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgements We wish to record our thanks to several people who have assisted with the production of this three-volume work. Dr Sandy Forsyth has provided valuable support with contracts, organization of conferences, and regular communication with authors. As associate editor, he has contributed much to this project and we are greatly indebted to him for his labours. Initial copy editing was undertaken by Dr Cory Brock, Revd Craig Meek, and Dr Laura Mair. The indexes were prepared by Richard Brash, PhD student at New College, who also provided valuable support with proof reading. Three conferences were held which enabled contributors to present initial drafts of their work; these were held in 2016–17 at Princeton Theological Seminary and New College, Edinburgh with financial support from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. We are also grateful to the members of the Editorial Advisory Board for their advice and encouragement, particularly during the early stages of the project. David Fergusson and Mark W. Elliott

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Contents List of Contributors

1. The Theology of Carmina Gadelica Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart

ix

1

2. Scottish Kenotic Theology Bruce L. McCormack

19

3. Theologies of the Cross: Denney and Forsyth Jason A. Goroncy

35

4. The Theology of the Scottish Protestant Missionary Movement Brian Stanley

51

5. Theology and Ecumenism after Edinburgh 1910 Marlene Finlayson

64

6. From Idealism to Personalism: Caird, Oman, and Macmurray Adam Hood

79

7. The Gifford Lectures Gordon Graham

94

8. A Century of Social Theology Johnston McKay

106

9. John Baillie and Donald Baillie George M. Newlands

119

10. Theology and Art in Scotland David Brown

132

11. The Influence of Barth in Scotland Paul T. Nimmo

146

12. Modern Christology: Mackintosh, Baillie, and Macquarrie David Fergusson

161

13. The Dissemination of Scottish Theology: T&T Clark John Riches

175

14. The Scottish Theological Diaspora: Canada Cairns Craig

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15. The Scottish Theological Diaspora: Australasia Peter Matheson

203

16. Ronald Gregor Smith George Pattison

214

17. Thomas F. Torrance Paul D. Molnar

227

18. Theology and Practice of Mission in Mid-Twentieth-Century Scotland Alexander Forsyth 19. The Revival of Celtic Christianity Ian Bradley 20. Catholic and Protestant Sensibilities in Scottish Literature: Stevenson to Spark Linden Bicket

242 259

271

21. Theological Constructions of Scottish National Identity Doug Gay

288

22. Catholic Theology since Vatican II William McFadden

303

23. Late Twentieth-Century Controversies in Sexual Ethics, Gender, and Ordination Lesley Orr

317

24. Episcopalian Theology in the Twentieth Century Alison Peden

333

25. Reformed Theology in the Later Twentieth Century Gary D. Badcock

347

Name Index Subject Index

361 370

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List of Contributors Gary D. Badcock is the Peache Professor of Divinity at Huron University College, Western University in London, Ontario. He studied in Edinburgh (BD 1987; PhD 1991), and taught Systematic Theology at the Universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh the 1990s, latterly as Meldrum Lecturer in Dogmatic Theology at New College. He has, among other works, previously published on the Edinburgh theological tradition in general, and on John McIntyre in particular. Linden Bicket is Senior Teaching Fellow in Theology and Ethics at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of George Mackay Brown and the Scottish Catholic Imagination (2017). Ian Bradley is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St Andrews where he taught church history and practical theology from 1999 to 2017. He was Principal of St Mary’s College, St Andrews, from 2013 to 2017. He is the author of over forty books, including six on the theme of Celtic Christianity, the most recent of which is Following the Celtic Way (2018). A regular broadcaster and contributor to national newspapers, he is currently deeply involved in the promotion of pilgrimage in Scotland. David Brown is Emeritus Professor of Theology, Aesthetics and Culture at the University of St Andrews and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2002. Two recent volumes assess his work: Christopher R. Brewer (ed.), Christian Theology and the Transformation of Natural Religion: From Incarnation to Sacramentality (2018); Garrick W. Allen et al. (eds.), The Moving Text: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on David Brown and the Bible (2018). Cairns Craig is Glucksman Professor of Irish and Scottish Studies at the University of Aberdeen. Among his books dealing with the Scottish intellectual tradition are Intending Scotland: Explorations in Scottish Culture since the Enlightenment (2009) and The Wealth of the Nation: Scotland, Culture, Independence (2018). His books on Scottish literature include Out of History (1997) and The Modern Scottish Novel (1999). He was general editor of the four-volume History of Scottish Literature (1987) and is an editor of The Journal of Scottish Thought and The Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies. David Fergusson is Professor of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. A Fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, he has published Faith and Its Critics (2009), based on his Glasgow Gifford Lectures (2008). His most recent book is The Providence of God: A Polyphonic Approach (2018). Marlene Finlayson is an independent researcher, with a degree of Master of Theology with Distinction in Inter-Faith Studies (University of Glasgow) 2009, and a PhD in Church History (University of Edinburgh) 2015. Her research has been published as A Prophetic Voice: David Smith Cairns (1862–1946) (2018). It is an intellectual biography of this Scottish minister, academic, and writer, who made a significant contribution to the

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science–religion debates of his day, and to Edinburgh 1910, and published the Army and Religion report that followed the First World War. Her main area of interest is the history of the relationship of the Church of Scotland and the different world religions. Alexander (Sandy) Forsyth is T. F. Torrance Lecturer in Theology and Mission at New College, University of Edinburgh. His book Mission by the People: Re-discovering the Dynamic Missiology of Tom Allan and his Scottish Contemporaries (2017) sought to derive principles for mission by an historical retrieval of the post-war period in Scotland, viewed through the lens of present-day missiology. His research interests lie in practical theology, particularly in missiology, pioneer ministry and church planting, and in faith, church, and society in Scotland. Doug Gay is a Lecturer in Practical Theology at the University of Glasgow, where he is also Principal of Trinity College. He is the author of Honey from the Lion: Christianity and the Ethics of Nationalism (2013) and Reforming the Kirk: The Future of the Church of Scotland (2017). Jason A. Goroncy is Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology at Whitley College, University of Divinity, Australia. He is the author of Hallowed be Thy Name: The Sanctification of All in the Soteriology of P. T. Forsyth (2013), and has edited Descending on Humanity and Intervening in History: Notes from the Pulpit Ministry of P. T. Forsyth (2013), and Tikkun Olam—To Mend the World: A Confluence of Theology and the Arts (2014). Gordon Graham was Professor of Philosophy and the Arts at Princeton Theological Seminary from 2006 to 2018, having previously taught at the Universities of St Andrews and Aberdeen. He now lives in Edinburgh and is General Editor of Oxford University Press’s History of Scottish Philosophy, and edited the volume on Scottish Philosophy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (2015) in the series. Adam Hood is a parish minister of the Church of Scotland and an Honorary Research Fellow of the Queen’s Foundation for Ecumenical Theological Education, Birmingham. He has published books and articles focusing on the work of John Baillie, John Oman, and John Macmurray. Bruce L. McCormack is the Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. He is the recipient of the Karl Barth Prize in 1998 and an honorary doctorate from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena in 2004 for his book Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology (1995). He is currently the Frederick Crosson Fellow in the Center for Philosophy of Religion (Notre Dame) working on a Reformed version of kenotic Christology for Cambridge University Press under the title The Humility of the Eternal Son. William McFadden is a priest of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Galloway in South West Scotland. After studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and at Fordham University in New York, he taught Fundamental Theology and Systematic Theology in Scotus College, the National Seminary in Scotland, where he was rector from 2003 to 2008. He has contributed to various publications and periodicals.

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Johnston McKay is a writer, broadcaster, theologian, lecturer, and Church of Scotland minister. For nearly ten years, he presented the popular weekly programme Personal Touch on BBC Radio Scotland. He has written extensively on Scottish theological history and is the author of The Kirk and the Kingdom (2012). Peter Matheson is a Presbyterian minister. He taught in New College, Edinburgh; Knox Theological Hall, Dunedin; and was Principal of the Uniting Church College in Melbourne. His publications focus on the Reformation, the Third Reich, and New Zealand church history. He was a member of the Iona Community and, with his German wife, Heinke, strongly involved in the Peace Movement and in environmental issues. Paul D. Molnar is Professor of Systematic Theology at St. John’s University, Queens, New York. Most recently, he has published Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology, 2nd edition (2017), Faith, Freedom and the Spirit: The Economic Trinity in Barth, Torrance and Contemporary Theology (2015), and Thomas F. Torrance: Theologian of the Trinity (2009). George M. Newlands is Professor Emeritus of Divinity in the University of Glasgow. He has published widely in theology, including John and Donald Baillie: Transatlantic Theology (2002), Christ and Human Rights (2006), and Hospitable God (with Allen Smith, 2010). Paul T. Nimmo holds the King’s (1620) Chair of Systematic Theology at the University of Aberdeen. His monograph, Being in Action: The Theological Shape of Barth’s Ethical Vision, was awarded a John Templeton Award for Theological Promise in 2009, and he has more recently published Barth: A Guide for the Perplexed (2017), co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Reformed Theology (with David Fergusson, 2016), and edited the church resource Learn: Understanding Our Faith (2017). Lesley Orr is a historian and Honorary Fellow of the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. Her academic, policy, and third sector work has encompassed history, theology, feminism, and gender justice. Research has focused on women in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Scottish church, empire and civil society, war resistance and peace movements, and gender-based violence. Her publications include ‘A Unique and Glorious Mission’: Women and Presbyterianism in Scotland 1830 –1930 (2000) and (with Breitenbach et al.) Scottish Women: A Documentary History 1789–1914 (2013). George Pattison is Professor of Theology and Modern European Thought at the University of Glasgow. He was a parish priest in the Church of England for thirteen years prior to holding posts in the Universities of Cambridge, Aarhus, and Oxford. He is a visiting professor at the University of Copenhagen and has been a Fellow of the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Research. He has published extensively on modern theology, particularly with regard to the role of German Idealism and its critics. His books include Kierkegaard and the Quest for Unambiguous Life (2013), Paul Tillich’s Philosophical Theology (2015), and he has co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard (2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought (2013). Alison Peden was a Fellow of St Hilda’s College, Oxford, and now serves as Canon of St Ninian’s Cathedral, Perth and Rector of St Modoc’s Church, Doune. As an historian of

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medieval intellectual history studying the impact of Neoplatonism on Christian thought, she published Abbo of Fleury, Commentary on the Calculus of Victorius of Aquitaine (2003). Her current research interest is the Scottish Episcopalian theologians George Gleig (1753–1840) and Bertrand Brasnett (1893–1988). John Riches held the Chair of Divinity and Biblical Criticism at Glasgow University where he taught from 1973 to 2003. He has written on the historical Jesus, Jesus and the Transformation of Judaism (1980), on the Synoptic Gospels, Conflicting Mythologies (2000), and on the reception history of Galatians, Galatians through the Centuries (2008). He was one of the translators of Bultmann’s Gospel of John, editor of the translation of von Balthasar’s Glory of the Lord, and worked closely with T&T Clark in the 1980s and 1990s, editing the series Studies of the New Testament and its World. He is currently one of the editors of the Expository Times. Since retirement he has had more time to pursue his interests in development and fair trade and in 2009 founded a fair trade importing company, Just Trading Scotland, which supports smallholder farmers in Africa and Asia. Brian Stanley is Professor of World Christianity in the University of Edinburgh and from 2009–19 was Director of the Centre for the Study of World Christianity. He has published widely on the history of Protestant missions and the growth of Christianity as a world religion. His most recent book is Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History (2018). Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart is Senior Lecturer in Material Culture and Gàidhealtachd History at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, University of the Highlands and Islands. As Senior Researcher for the Carmichael Watson Project at the Centre for Research Collections, Edinburgh University Library, he worked on the papers and material culture collections of Alexander Carmichael, and edited The Life and Legacy of Alexander Carmichael (2008). He has published widely on the history, literature, ethnography, and folklore of the Highlands during the early modern and modern periods.

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1 The Theology of Carmina Gadelica Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart

Carmina Gadelica, published as two volumes in 1900, is one of the most remarkable Scottish books of its time: a luxury artwork with a price (three guineas) to match, magnificently illustrated, expressly designed to remind readers of early medieval illuminated manuscripts. Its contents are no less remarkable: 216 prayers, blessings, and charms recorded in the Highlands and printed in their purportedly original Scottish Gaelic with facing English translations. The first ‘hymn’ offers a good illustration of Carmina’s style, dignified, polished, archaic, and incantatory:

RANN ROIMH URNUIGH

RUNE BEFORE PRAYER

OLD people in the Isles sing this or some other short hymn before prayer. Sometimes the hymn and the prayer are intoned in low tremulous unmeasured cadences like the moving and moaning, the soughing and the sighing, of the evermurmuring sea on their own wild shores. They generally retire to a closet, to an out-house, to the lee of a knoll, or to the shelter of a dell, that they may not be seen nor heard of men. I have known men and women of eighty, ninety, and a hundred years of age continue the practice of their lives in going from one to two miles to the seashore to join their voices with the voicing of the waves and their praises with the praises of the ceaseless sea.

Ta mi lubadh mo ghlun An sul an Athar a chruthaich mi, An sul an Mhic a cheannaich mi, An sul an Spioraid a ghlanaich mi, Le caird agus caoimh. Tre t-Aon Unga fein a Dhe, Tabhair duinn tachar n’ar teinn, Gaol De Gradh De,

I am bending my knee In the eye of the Father who created me, In the eye of the Son who purchased me, In the eye of the Spirit who cleansed me, In friendship and affection. Through Thine own Anointed One, O God, Bestow upon us fulness in our need, Love towards God, The affection of God,

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Gair De, Gais De, Gras De, Sgath De, Us toil De, Dheanamh air talamh nan Tre, Mar ta ainghlich us naoimhich A toighe air neamh. Gach duar agus soillse, Gach la agus oidhche, Gach uair ann an caoimhe, Thoir duinn do ghne.

The smile of God, The wisdom of God, The grace of God, The fear of God, And the will of God To do on the world of the Three, As angels and saints Do in heaven; Each shade and light, Each day and night, Each time in kindness, Give Thou us Thy Spirit.1

The first volume of Carmina has four sections: an extended biographical and ethnographical introduction; Achaine/Invocations, prayers and blessings mainly associated with rising and resting; Aimsire/Seasons, mostly items from the liturgical year; while blessings ensuring the achievement of various tasks are recorded in Oibre/Labour. There are three parts to the second volume: a substantial selection of healing and protective charms and associated plant lore—and a handful of maledictions too—in Uibe/Incantations; an indiscriminate assortment of hymns, omens, and stray verses in Measgain/Miscellaneous; and an extensive lexicon of unusual words and meanings blended with historical and ethnographic lore, rounded off with an annotated list of reciters. The world of Carmina is imbued with a simple faith; dignified, pious, ancient verses now recited clandestinely for fear of scorn and derision; long lives lived in harmony with nature. The editor of Carmina Gadelica, Alexander Carmichael, claimed its subject matter, vouchsafed to him by ‘rare and . . . reticent’ pious reciters throughout the Highlands, reached back centuries: ‘the blending of the pagan and the Christian religions in these poems . . . to many minds will constitute their chief charm’ (I, xxix). For one reviewer, the precious contents ‘reveal strata upon strata of religious belief and superstition, stretching back into pre-historic and ante-Christian times’ (Jolly 1900). Such assessments have been echoed ever since in enthusiastic responses from readers across the Anglophone world. For them, the English translations in Carmina represent primary source material revealing a longneglected ‘Celtic’ vision of Christianity, romantic, ecumenical, mystic, contemplative, egalitarian, and nature-oriented.² Nevertheless, Carmichael’s book raises

¹ Carmichael (1900: I, 2–3). ² The centrality of Carmina to the contemporary Celtic Christianity movement is explored in Meek (2000: passim, esp. 60–78).

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many questions. Carmina Gadelica is certainly one of the most magnificent volumes of its time. It is also one of the most controversial. The life of Alexander Carmichael (1832–1912) is as remarkable, and contentious, as his book. For contemporaries, Carmichael’s reputation was bound up with Carmina Gadelica, described by another reviewer as a ‘splendid consummation of the love-labour of a whole diligent life-time . . . a great religious work, piously perfected by a man, every fibre of whose body and being vibrates to the beauty of holiness, and, as one might say, to the holiness of the beauty which he found in the life of even the most humble of his own people’ (Gillies 1900). Carmina represented the culmination of a lifetime’s collecting throughout the Highlands. In Carmichael’s words, the book required three sacrifices: ‘the sacrifice of time, the sacrifice of toil, and the sacrifice of means’ (1900–71: I, xxxii). In less exalted terms, its compilation cost him over a decade of hard work, and its publication cost him what little money he had. Carmichael’s book excited admiration far beyond Scotland. Among Gaelic scholars, however, discreet dissent prevailed until an irascible academic dispute over its authenticity broke out in the late 1970s, ‘a debate’, according to Ronald Black, ‘akin in some ways to the Ossianic controversy 200 years before’ (1999: 711). The uncomfortable fact was that oral fieldwork by Carmichael’s contemporaries and successors afforded nothing comparable in length or elaboration to the items printed in Carmina. In the apparent absence of original field notes, the scope of editorial interference could be inferred, but not assessed. Carmichael’s field recordings were not missing. The quest for field notes (that is, paper sheets), as well as Carmichael’s rebarbative handwriting, led scholars to overlook some twenty-six field notebooks offering in-depth descriptions of his collecting activities over half a century. Their rediscovery allows us to reassess Carmichael’s life and his contribution to Carmina Gadelica, to understand how its texts were polished, regularized, archaicized, extended, re-presented, and even recreated by an editor collaborating with family members and a wider circle of friends and assistants (Stiùbhart 2008: 23–32). Undoubtedly, Carmichael’s vision draws upon his own experiences of the spirituality of the very poorest islanders, those who had been left behind in the dramatic transformations of Hebridean society and economy during his lifetime. But far from offering fading echoes of an early Celtic church, a substantial portion of Carmina Gadelica shares much in common with vernacular Christianity across Europe: that is, it represents secular appropriations, translations, and elaborations of benedictions, exorcisms, supplications, and blessings most likely derived from late medieval Catholicism, from early modern Catholic missionary endeavours, and maybe even from more recently printed tracts and prayer books. The role of the Iona clergy in disseminating the earlier material is hinted at by the prominence in these texts of St Columba—in the estimation of one of Carmichael’s informants, ‘ard dhotair Alba gu leigheas duine agus beothach’ (‘the greatest doctor in

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Scotland for healing man and beast’) (EUL CW MS 7 fo. 38v)—and unexpectedly corroborated by evidence in a witchcraft trial of 1592: it wes Auld Mackellar of Cruachan that lernit hir his charmis and that the said M’Ellar lernit them at the pryoris of Icolmkill [Iona] . . . (MacPhail 1914: 166)³

As this chapter will demonstrate, wider, national and international nineteenthcentury contexts influenced the editing, presentation, and very concept of Carmina Gadelica. Most obviously, there are the influential opinions of Matthew Arnold, based upon Ernest Renan’s theories concerning Celtic Christianity, mediated through the contemporary ‘Celtic Renascence’ and inflected by late Victorian organic evolutionist theories and rural communitarian ideals. But there is another, perhaps less immediately apparent, theological influence to be reckoned with: in its ritualistic nostalgia, its linking of private and communal devotion, its aesthetic design, its opposition to contemporary evangelicalism, and even in its presentation of Carmichael in the guise of poet-priest, Carmina Gadelica can be read as an unexpected late Highland flowering of Tractarian liturgical ideals—an inspiration deriving not so much from Alexander Carmichael himself as from his wife, Mary Frances MacBean. * *

*

*

*

Alexander Carmichael, Alasdair MacGilleMhìcheil in his native Gaelic, was born in the Island of Lismore in 1832 (Stiùbhart 2008: 2–22, 30–3). In the late 1850s Carmichael commenced his long career in the excise; he also began collecting folklore in Islay and in Skye for John Francis Campbell’s Popular Tales of the West Highlands (1860–2). After two years in Cornwall, Carmichael volunteered for a posting to the southern Outer Hebrides, the richest area for folklore in the Highlands. His occupation, hunting illegal whisky stills and gathering local taxes, may appear inauspicious for an aspiring folklorist. But Carmichael was required to travel systematically around the remotest corners of the islands, becoming acquainted with every community under his supervision. He had to know the people, and the landscape, thoroughly. He also had the bureaucratic expertise necessary to produce and manage folklore files—as well as an essential supply of paper. Carmichael conscientiously avoided prosecuting miscreant islanders except as a last resort, in a tacit mutual agreement that surely assisted his collecting. During the nearly two decades he spent in the Hebrides, Alexander Carmichael would mature as collector, antiquarian, and naturalist. In January 1868 Carmichael married Mary Urquhart MacBean (1838–1928), the daughter of an exciseman, born in Kirkiboll, Sutherland, and brought up in Montrose and Dundee. After her mother died of typhus in 1847, her father ³ See Bárth (2013); Pócs (2013); also Hyde (1906); Franz (1960).

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returned to his native Black Isle. Family lore records that Mary was adopted for a while by her uncle the Rev. Arthur Ranken, Episcopalian priest of Old Deer, with whose daughters she attended the newly opened St Margaret’s Episcopal College for Girls at Crieff, sister school of Trinity College, Glenalmond (Carmichael 1900–71: IV, xli–xlii). If she did so, it was for months rather than years: Mary is recorded working as an innkeeper’s servant in Rosemarkie in the 1851 census. A restless and rootless upbringing, punctuated by a series of catastrophes, helps explain Mary’s later drive, resourcefulness, and strength of character. One of the teachers at St Margaret’s was the clergyman scholar the Rev. George Hay Forbes (1821–75); Mary appears in the 1861 census employed as a schoolmistress living in Burntisland parsonage with Forbes and his wife. Today, George Hay Forbes is best known for the Pitsligo Press, based in the parsonage, which under his painstaking supervision issued an eclectic selection of journals, polemical tracts, sermons, and above all high-quality liturgical works distinguished by outstanding scholarship, free from misprints, and set in a bewildering variety of fonts. Although Forbes employed a printer, he was assisted in his work by several women compositors, as well, it seems, as the older boys and girls of the Church school (Skene 1876; Perry 1927, 1939; Carnie 1955–71; Primrose 1955–71; Strong 2004). As a young woman, Mary MacBean was employed by a clergyman driven by an obsessive interest in liturgy, spurred by the acrimonious controversy over the Episcopalian Prayer Book between the ‘Scottish’ and ‘English’ wings of the church, the latter headed by George Hay Forbes’ brother Bishop Alexander Penrose Forbes (1817–75). Fundamental to this dispute were questions concerning the missals used in the medieval Scottish church: was its liturgical tradition principally influenced by the English church, or might some of its features derive from Gallican and Greek models? The story of Scottish Episcopalian engagement with the Oxford Movement is a complex one, but the influence of Tractarian ritualism and veneration of pre-Reformation liturgies is clear (Nockles 1996; Strong 2002: 26–32, 235–63; Brown 2012: 61–71). Mary MacBean lived in the parsonage while the brothers Forbes prepared for the press their edition of the magnificently illustrated Arbuthnott Missal (1864), the only complete service book known to survive from pre-Reformation Scotland, prefaced by a panoramic survey of extant early medieval liturgies from Britain and Ireland (Forbes 1864). It is surely significant that Alexander Carmichael later drew spurious parallels between Arbuthnott’s patron saint, Ternan, and a supposed Benbecula saint Torranan, in an extended essay in Carmina Gadelica (1900–71: II, 80–3). Carmichael draws directly upon this edition, as well as upon Bishop Forbes’ later Kalendar of Scottish Saints (1872), in notes he made on St Ronan probably dating from early 1886 (EUL CW MS 120 fo. 86). In addition to editing work, George Hay Forbes was committed to a Gaelic ministry for Highland Episcopalians, establishing the Gaelic Tract Society ‘for the purpose of educating and

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maintaining Highland churchpeople in fidelity to their Church’ and also printing a Gaelic translation of the Scottish Communion Office (Perry 1927: 29, 31; Nockles 1996: 675). Mary Carmichael spent at least seven years working in the household of George Hay Forbes, but this period remains obscure. Her husband later wrote that ‘[s]he injured her health past recall I fear in the school at Burntisland’, though she was ‘much attached’ to Forbes’ wife Eleanor.⁴ It is notable that although later family tradition made Bishop Alexander Forbes a ‘guardian of her early life’, for whom she worked as ‘housekeeper and secretary’, and of whom, with Dean Ranken, ‘she often spoke with affection and regard’, her erstwhile employer went unmentioned (Carmichael 1900–71: IV, xli–xlii). Nevertheless, it is unthinkable that the years she spent in a household focused upon researching and printing pre-Reformation missals and hagiographies did not influence the conception and creation of Carmina Gadelica as a lost Gaelic liturgy of prayers and blessings. Its inspiration may thus owe as much to east coast Episcopalianism—and, indirectly, to the sacramentalism of the Oxford Movement—as it does to west coast Hebridean Catholicism. Mary entered George Hay Forbes’ household as Mary Urquhart MacBean; she left as Mary Frances MacBean. This intriguing reinvention may be a tribute to Forbes’ cousin, the Tractarian novelist and philanthropist Felicia Mary Frances Skene (1821–99) whose brother the historian William Forbes Skene would play an important role furthering her husband’s career. If so, Felicia Skene not only supplied Mary with a new identity; she also gave her a practical vocation. Mary’s subsequent tireless, self-abnegating charity work among the island poor may draw upon the example of Felicia Skene, and of contemporary Tractarianinspired Anglican sisterhoods (Rickards 1902; Mumm 1999: 93–156; Sanders 2004). Such exemplars may also have influenced the Carmichaels’ later quietist ‘moderate conservatism’, their shunning of radical activism in favour of a preference to effect change by example. It was as an indirect result of his impending marriage that Alexander Carmichael first became interested in charms. On 16 October 1867 he visited Anna MacIsaac, née MacLellan (c.1808–83), in Ceann Langabhat, an t-Ìochdar, South Uist. She and her husband Hector (c.1797–1878), one of the most celebrated seanchaidhean or storytellers in Uist, had effectively adopted the young exciseman following his arrival in Uist. In a later reminiscence, Carmichael recounted how Mrs MacIsaac presented him with a Eàrna Mhoire or Molucca Bean, a tropical nut carried on the Gulf Stream to the Outer Hebrides, cherished for its powers in safeguarding women in childbirth as well as protecting houses and boats. This particular object ‘has been in the family for many generations perhaps for many centuries and has always been prized as a precious heirloom’:

⁴ National Records of Scotland GD1/126/8/1/128 (Carmichael to W. F. Skene, 3 February 1879).

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Chaidh an Arna bheannaichte so a bheannachadh air an altair leis an t-sagairt agus ann an suilean Dhia agus dhaoine tha i naomh. This blessed bean was blessed on the altar by the priest and in the eyes of God and the people it is sacred.

Some months previously, Carmichael had met Mary Frances MacBean; the couple would marry in Edinburgh on 13 January the following year. The Molucca bean was thus Anna MacIsaac’s wedding present to Alexander Carmichael. The numinous object did not come by itself, however; it had an invocation attached, described by Mrs MacIsaac as a laoidh or hymn: Faic a Mhoire a bhean Us i eir fòd a bhais Faic fein i a Mhic O ‘s ann agad a tha A chomas a thoirt dha’n leana Agus a bhean a bhith slan. et al. Ceartas a thoirt dha’n leana al. Comas a thoir dhan leana.

See, o Mary, the woman On the brink of death. See her, o Son, For you are able To give the infant his power And to make the woman well. and others: To give the infant justice others: To give the infant power.

This is to be said three times placing the Tearna to the lips and then in the hand of the parturient woman who presses it hard in the palm of her hand while the child is being born (EUL CW MS 87 fos. 17r–v).5

Given the importance of Mary Carmichael’s later charitable work in allowing her husband access to some of his best informants from the very poorest stratum of island society—such interactions effectively initiating him into a particular ‘gift economy’, obtaining charms for charity—it is revealing to see how even before marriage their relationship enabled him to record such items. Again, bearing in mind Alexander Carmichael’s extensive ‘re-creation’ of such invocations in his Carmina Gadelica volumes, it is telling that the very first charm he recorded came with variants. Over the following decade, as a well-known figure in local communities and a respectable married family man with a wife heavily involved in local charity work, Alexander Carmichael was able to record from islanders personal, private, even confidential material such as blessings, prayers, charms, and incantations, items sometimes inaccessible to outside collectors. His interest was piqued by newspaper columns written on the subject by his friend the Rev. Alexander Stewart (1829–1901), ‘Nether-Lochaber’, as well as a relocation of his growing family to Ìochdar in South Uist, then to Creag Goraidh in Benbecula, by the South Ford: an

⁵ See also EUL CW MSS 7 fo. 36v; 116 fo. 6; and Carmichael (1900–71: I, 70–1).

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ideal place for a folklore collector, perfectly situated to buttonhole potential interviewees as they awaited the tides to change. In these overwhelmingly Catholic districts vernacular blessings, prayers, and charms were recited more openly than in Protestant North Uist. Carmichael’s new circumstances spurred his interest in popular piety in all its forms: during his first year among Catholic tenantry he recorded seventeen items relating to popular spirituality and calendar customs, considerably more than he had previously collected (Stiùbhart 2013). Despite the fact that during his final years in Uist Carmichael recorded few charm texts, his interest in and appreciation of the genre continued unabated. In a draft reply to a letter concerning folklore in The Highlander in 1881, Carmichael begins by mentioning his work collecting charms: I have always thought that a faithful account of these charms and incantations would be interesting, and, properly considered, mayhap instructive. I have not hitherto however, felt myself equal to the task congenial to me of giving them to the public, although many scores, if not hundreds of them, lie scattered up and down my manuscripts among masses of other rubbish . . . . These mystical beliefs and observances with their hoary origin far back the stream of time, probably contain interest possibly wisdom, had we only the industry of the bee to seek and extract their treasures. (EUL CW MS 230 fo. 176)

If not ‘many scores’, far less hundreds, during his posting to the Hebrides Alexander Carmichael nevertheless managed to collect at least sixty specific charm texts, as well as numerous other prayers and blessings: a remarkable store. Barely a year after drafting the piece above, Carmichael left the islands for good, moving to a new excise post in Edinburgh. Henceforth he would do fieldwork either during summer expeditions or through correspondents. * *

*

*

*

In November 1878 the brother of the novelist Felicia Skene, the historian William Forbes Skene (1809–92), recruited Alexander Carmichael to compose a chapter on traditional agricultural practices surviving in the Hebrides for the third ‘Land and People’ volume of his tour-de-force Celtic Scotland. Through his excise work, Carmichael collected agricultural returns; through his fieldwork, he knew community history. The resulting account was of crucial importance for his later career (Skene 1876–80: III, 378–93). A document dating from the early 1890s in the archive of the Gaelic scholar Alexander Macbain claims that Carmichael’s paper for Skene: was the means of turning the late Lord Napier’s attention to the condition of the Crofters as well as of increasing his interest in measures which have greatly alleviated their burdens. (EUL CW MS 510 n.f.)

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When, three years later, Napier was nominated to chair the parliamentary Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Condition of Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and Islands, he wrote to Carmichael asking him to compile a similar paper for the Commission’s Report. Carmichael recapped his previous piece, adding, at Napier’s request, two prayers, two charm blessings, two milking songs, and a love song: very unorthodox adjuncts in a parliamentary paper (Carmichael 1884: 452–82). These items underlined the eirenic message of Carmichael’s ‘Grazing and agrestic customs’: islanders had the strength and refinement of character to govern themselves. Carmichael’s account provided an unexpected spiritual oasis in what proved a very contentious report. Whatever their political beliefs, readers could agree upon the allure of the gracious verses presented by Carmichael: At the last meeting of the Crofter Royal Commission, the members discussed the various papers that had come before them. “Some praised one paper and some another”, said Professor Mackinnon, “but there was only one opinion among us all that your paper, Mr. Carmichael, is the paper of the Commission – a paper which live as long as the English language lasts. I was asked to tell you this, and to thank you for it”. (EUL CW MS 510 n.f.)

The discreetly diplomatic route that Carmichael had chosen for his submission, stressing islanders’ innate piety, cooperation, and self-regulation, in contradistinction to common prejudices depicting Highlanders as barbaric, uncouth, and slavish in their esteem for authority and tradition, was a powerful one. But adopting this approach entailed losses as well as gains. Against his friends’ counsel, Carmichael eschewed an active role in the crofters’ struggle. Rather, he became an advocate and mediator of Gaelic culture to English-speaking audiences. On 24 December 1888 Alexander Carmichael delivered to the recently formed Gaelic Society of Glasgow perhaps the most important paper of his career: ‘Old Uist Hymns’, an extension of his Napier Commission paper (Carmichael 1887–91). The article was composed at a time of hectic debate concerning radical land redistribution, when it seemed as if the Free Church, who had recently held their General Assembly in Inverness, might adopt a leading role advocating the cause of Highland crofters and cottars (Cameron 1996:47–56, 62–76; MacColl 2006: 179–211; Newby 2007: 146–62). Carmichael’s refined Uist verses suited the cause: not only for their literary value but also—at a time when the Highland congregations of the Free Church were widely charged with bigotry, dogmatism, and Sabbatarianism—to illustrate how, for their composers, religion ‘was not intended merely for church on Sundays, but was one continued round of religious aspirations, from the time when they woke till they sought repose at night’ (Carmichael 1887–91: 46).

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Manuscript evidence suggests that Carmichael was galvanized by his paper’s enthusiastic reception (EUL CW MSS 1, fos. 1–11; 124 fos. 27–30, 32v–34v). During the following decade, however, rather than making lengthy expeditions to the Highlands, he lived in Edinburgh, carrying out undemanding excise work, while spending summers in a rented house in Taynuilt. He had embarked upon the mammoth task of researching, collating, editing, and recreating texts gathered over thirty years in several thousand folios. Given the difficulties Carmichael had faced in compiling even relatively concise pieces for Forbes and Napier, the psychological and intellectual challenges now confronting him were forbidding. It is hardly surprising that his original publishing contract, signed with the Clarendon Press, fell through (Campbell 1978–81: 183). Carmichael would publish on his own; but he would not work on his own. In Edinburgh Alexander Carmichael became a Victorian sage: a mature, authoritative personality, possessed of great experience and endowed with a treasure-trove of anecdotes from the decades he spent in the Hebrides; a central figure in the Gaelic diaspora community in Edinburgh, and a link to an increasingly remote past. Around him gathered a series of assistants and advisers ready to assist with composition, and to publicize his work where necessary. For them, Carmichael was not only a sage, but a guru, whose arduous life in the Hebrides, crowned by his being entrusted with archaic, esoteric rituals and lore by ancient islanders, may have suggested intriguing parallels with the demanding rites of initiation into the exclusive secret societies of occult adepts that proliferated in fin de siècle London Bohemia (Verter 1998: 205–74; Owen 2007: 1–185; Walters 2007: 1–112).⁶ Carmichael kept up a correspondence with the two other major Highland cleric-folklorists: the Rev. John Gregorson Campbell (1834–91) of Tiree, and, following Campbell’s death, Father Allan McDonald (1855–1905), then newly transferred to the Isle of Eriskay (Campbell 2005: 668–9, 674–81, 685, 687). Father Allan, himself to become an icon of the Celtic Revival movement before his untimely death, is significant not only because he collected comparable lore in the same districts as Carmichael—as the latter acknowledged, ‘you and I have taken down many things in common, showing that many things interested us in common’—but because of his Gaelic Hymnal of 1893, Comh-chruinneachadh de Laoidhean Spioradail. This unassuming little volume of spiritual verse by McDonald and earlier bards, leavened by a handful of prayers culled from oral tradition, was a precursor to Carmina Gadelica regarding its content, and something of a negative example regarding its austere appearance (McDonald 1893). Although Carmichael’s acolyte George Henderson found ‘much to be praised’ with the hymns, particularly their ‘very pleasing at times, and very beautiful’ phraseology, he censured the austere presentation, the texts lacking introduction ⁶ For Yeats’ contemporaneous Celtic Mystical Order project, see Foster (1998–2003: I, 101–7, 186–7, 196–7); and Kalogera (1977).

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and context, as well as the book’s overall appearance: ‘[t]he cover is too meagre and lacks the dignity worthy of it’.⁷ Like the Rev. John Gregorson Campbell before him, Father Allan was wary of committing himself to Carmichael’s project, not only because of its ambition—he was then recovering from a nervous breakdown brought on by overwork—but also because of Carmichael’s romanticized perspective on island informants, very different from his own rather more sceptical and worldly standpoint (Black 2002: 8–9, 39–46; Hutchinson 2010: 127–9; Roberts 2010: 218–19). George Henderson (1866–1912) was probably the most able Gaelic scholar of his generation. During the years that his mentor created Carmina Gadelica, he undertook a doctoral thesis at the University of Vienna, then postdoctoral research at Jesus College, Oxford. Henderson’s extensive lexicographical assistance added scholarly depth and historical perspective to Carmichael’s vision; he relentlessly encouraged, chivvied, and promoted the older man; the work’s very title arose from one of Henderson’s characteristically quirky suggestions (Campbell 1978–81: 214–16). One other Gaelic scholar was involved in creating Carmina Gadelica: Carmichael’s daughter Ella (1870–1928), newly matriculated as a student of Celtic, one of the first women undergraduates at the University of Edinburgh (Carmichael 1900–71: I, xxxi; III, xxi–xxiii). Ella Carmichael’s hand is visible throughout the surviving fragments of Carmina Gadelica editing papers. In fact, Alexander Carmichael had become a brand, with family and friends revising and rewriting pieces under his own name. Five years into the editing process, Carmichael came into contact with the circle of the charismatic polymath Patrick Geddes (1854–1932). In February 1894 Carmichael wrote to Father Allan McDonald: Professor Geddes is desirous to get up Celtic lectures in connection with his Universities Extension classes. He has asked me to analyse many for his proposal. We are anxious to bring Celtic to the front . . . ⁸

Embarking on an ambitious publishing venture, Geddes had seized upon the notion of Celtic culture as a vehicle for his commitment to spiritual renewal through arts, crafts, and nature, as an antidote to the anomie of urban industrial life (Macdonald 2005; Cumming 2006: 4–12, 30–46; Pittock and Jack 2007; Ferguson 2011; Shaw 2015). The artistic design and Celtic ornamentation of Geddes’ ‘Celtic Library’ publications, such as his seasonal journal The Evergreen (1895–7), the miscellany Lyra Celtica (1896), the centenary Poems of Ossian (1896), and Songs and Tales of Saint Columba and His Age (1897), gave ⁷ George Henderson to Alexander Carmichael, 15 August 1893. ⁸ Alexander Carmichael to Father Allan McDonald, CH2/1/1/13/110, 15 February 1894 (typescript copy, Canna House).

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Carmichael’s project a new impetus. He could thus reimagine his book not only as a storehouse of traditional prayers and charms, but also as an aestheticized work of art illustrating Geddes’ ideal, influenced by the organic evolutionism of Herbert Spencer, of communities living in a harmonious relationship with nature—and as a textbook for Geddes’ admonition that ‘it is not for London to educate Iona, but for Iona to educate London’ (University of Strathclyde Archives T-GED 5/2/7, ‘Keltic Art’: 8; Ferguson 2011: 136; also Macdonald 2008: 143–4; Renwick 2009). Suitably inspired by a visit to Iona, Ella Carmichael’s companion Jane Hay (1864–1914) had written in the ‘Summer’ issue of The Evergreen how ‘it is only when men have grown away from Nature, when they have shut themselves in cities and grown aliens in their proper home-land that they cease to feel themselves her children, and fear to meet her in death’ (Hay 1896: 35). The stimulus Geddes’ ‘Celtic Renascence’ gave Carmichael’s project comes through in the frequent queries he subsequently directed to Father Allan McDonald in Eriskay concerning the names, natures, and uses of island plants: nature was now to the fore.⁹ It is also seen in the aesthetic redirection of Carmina Gadelica under the supervision of Mary Frances Carmichael, responsible not only for the basic liturgical concept of the book, but also, in her designing and tracing its decorated initials, for its final appearance (Carmichael 1900–71: VI, xxxi–xxxii; Macdonald 2008: 136–41).¹⁰ On 27 December 1895, a paper on Celtic art was read at the Celtic Union, the student association founded by Ella Carmichael: ‘The tying and untying of a Celtic knot’ by James Archibald Campbell of Barbreck (1854–1926), mystic, acquaintance of John Ruskin, and close family friend of Patrick Geddes. Its theme was particularly topical given that Celtic art was also the subject of Arthur Evans’ recent Rhind Lectures. Campbell, however, went beyond far beyond art history. He outlined an artistic education programme teaching Highland children a Celtic decorative style established before the Reformation, even before the coming of Christianity; and also: the beautiful names and legends and usages connected with the plants thus brought into service, as much ‘superstition,’ or sen[s]e of unseen presences and powers, as still lingers among the hills. And, out of the concentration and stimulation of feeling which spring from living art, I am sanguine enough to believe, would arise once more some day an exulting and dignified religious ritual, expressive, not of doctrines and dogmas, but of the affections and reverences which underlie all doctrine, and a simple life, fuller than at present, both of sacred memory and of good cheer. (Campbell 1895) ⁹ Correspondence of Alexander Carmichael with Father Allan McDonald, CH2/1/1/13/1101893–9 (typescript copies, Canna House). ¹⁰ Note how contemporary Irish Gaelic literature was still usually printed in Gaelic rather than Roman characters, thus displaying visual continuity with the manuscript tradition without requiring illustrated ‘Celtic’ initials to do so: Ó Conchubhair (2009: 145–68).

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Such a vision, a spiritual, Highland inflection of the communitarian tenets of the Arts and Crafts Movement, left a deep impression upon Carmina Gadelica. The long-awaited completion of Carmina Gadelica was eventually taken in hand by Walter Biggar Blaikie (1847–1928), a close friend of the Carmichaels. Blaikie had assisted in the design of Geddes’ Evergreen, and arranged its printing by his firm T. & A. Constable, then possessed of ‘some of the highest design and production values in the world’ (Macdonald 2008: 135–6, 142). As well as being engaged in Celtic Renascence circles, Blaikie’s interest in Jacobitism involved him in Gaelic scholarship; indeed, Alexander Carmichael forwarded him island traditions for his Itinerary of Prince Charles Edward Stuart (1897) (Blaikie 1897: xii, 53n). Blaikie may also have had family reasons for taking up Carmina Gadelica. His father, the Rev. Prof. William Garden Blaikie (1820–99) is best known today as a paternalist social commentator and campaigner; Free Church Professor of Apologetics and Pastoral Theology at New College from 1868 until his death, in 1892 he served as the last Moderator who had taken part in the Disruption (Cheyne 1983: 119–22). This last distinction may have owed much to the conciliatory stance adopted by Blaikie Senior at a time when the Free Church, perhaps the central institution in Victorian Scottish intellectual life, was being torn asunder in a long-deferred internecine struggle, waged against a background of dramatic social change and the rise of higher criticism and Darwinian evolutionary theory, between conservative evangelical, Gaelic-speaking ministers and elders on the one hand, and, on the other, liberal, urban, middle-class English-speaking clergy. Over and above issues regarding the strict Sabbatarianism and austere worship espoused by Gaelic congregations, and Highlanders’ growing disquiet regarding the perceived manipulation of ecclesiastical administration by supercilious adversaries, the confrontation took shape around doctrinal questions of scriptural infallibility and the traditional authority of the Westminster Confession. Intemperate debates at Free Church General Assemblies, particularly concerning the passing of the 1892 Declaratory Act during William Garden Blaikie’s own moderatorship, brought about the precipitous secession of two overwhelmingly Highland breakaway denominations: the Free Presbyterian Church in the ‘Second Disruption’ of 1893, and the dissenting ‘continuing Free Church’ who parted from the majority in the wake of the latter’s union with the United Reformed Church in 1900 (MacLeod 2000: 14–22, 125–78, 231–50; Ross 1989: 27–41, 154–254, 298–300). In the liturgy of Gaelic folk belief presented in Carmina Gadelica, Carmichael offered a rebuttal to contemporary stereotypes of Highland beliefs as either mired in primitive superstition or else characterized by harsh, bigoted, joyless authoritarianism, dogmatic Sabbatarianism, and an uncompromisingly literal approach to biblical truth. He himself had been brought up in an island where the established church minister had retained his congregation during the Disruption; early experiences in Skye, where his collecting was frustrated by an evangelical revival

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backed by clergy who ‘are much against sean sgeulachdan [old stories] and denounce them as “ungodly” &c.’, were compounded by later incidents, in particular a dismal visit to a staunch Lewis household where he was informed that ‘[t]he people have forsaken their follies and their Sabbath-breaking, and there is no pipe, no fiddle here now’ (National Library of Scotland Adv. MS 50.1.12 fos. 123r–v; Carmichael 1900–71: I, xxvi). Drawing upon the speculations of Ernest Renan, as mediated through the romantic primitivism of Celtic Renascence circles, Carmichael set forth an alternative genealogy for the deep piety associated with Highland worship within the late nineteenth-century Free Church. This genealogy stretched back centuries before the onset of evangelicalism over much of the Highlands during the early nineteenth century, to a spirituality grounded in a supposedly indigenous, heterodox interpretation of Christianity infused with older pagan nature-beliefs. In this perspective, the Disruption, and even the Reformation itself, were milestones on Scottish Gaeldom’s long decline into cultural decadence, self-alienation, philistinism, and ignorance. If Carmichael’s book was purposely conceived to remind its readers of early Gaelic Christian manuscripts, so also its creator deliberately presented himself as following the example of Renan’s Hibernian monks: a dedicated transcriber, keeping the flame alive in a time of darkness: ‘le travail de la plume devint une œuvre sainte’ (Renan 1859: 441; also Balcou 1997: 63–72; Leerssen 2006; Balcou 2017: 136–8). Carmichael’s idea of Celtic Christianity may be traced back to Renan but, as has been suggested, the concept of Carmina Gadelica as a liturgy of Gaelic folk belief may owe rather more to Oxford Tractarianism. Carmina Gadelica partook in a broad, burgeoning interest in liturgical history and the nature of the ‘Primitive Church’, and a reclamation of Scotland’s pre-Reformation traditions of worship, manifested in the Tractarian-inspired ‘Scoto-Catholic’ reform movement in the Church of Scotland. Carmichael’s great work bears comparison not only to the successive editions of the Church Service Society’s eclectic Euchologion, or a Book of Common Order, but also to Professor Thomas J. Crawford’s collection of Prayers for Social and Family Worship (1859), and even to the series of hymn books published by all main Presbyterian denominations, culminating in the joint Church Hymnary of 1898 (Barkley 1977; Rees 1980: 87–439; Murray 1997; Brown 2012: 71–7). Indirectly, Carmina Gadelica draws upon the ecclesiastical liberalism and innovation that at the same time were instigating tensions, and eventual schisms, among Free Church Highland congregations. Indeed, with its veneration of ‘ancient forms’ of ritual, and its regulated, repetitive, dignified, and emotionally soothing verses, Carmina Gadelica bespeaks of a dissatisfaction with existing patterns of worship—particularly the growth of evangelical dissent—that is strongly reminiscent of Victorian devotional poetry (Blair 2012: 85–121). Appreciating contemporary political, religious, and artistic contexts, and recognizing the contributions of a close-knit group of family and younger devotees,

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assist us in understanding how and why Carmichael’s book came to be. In the end, however, its spiritual vision was one mediated through Alexander Carmichael himself. A candid, empathetic, dedicated interviewer, during two decades he had been vouchsafed private, esoteric lore by aged islanders. But the many prayers, blessings, and charms he noted down frequently appeared incomplete, imperfectly remembered, patched up, and crowded with variant readings. For Carmichael, ‘[t]he fragments recalled by their families, like the fragments of Greek or Etruscan vases, indicated the originals’ (Carmichael 1900–71: I, xxviii). Using his unparalleled knowledge of his native language and culture, as well as imagination, romanticism, and historical preconceptions, Alexander Carmichael took it upon himself to synthesize the various different versions he had gathered in the field, creatively reworking and reimagining them, before assembling the resulting longer, more polished, archaic ‘originals’ into an ancient lost liturgy. In Carmina Gadelica readers have a treasure-trove of traditional lore, a magnificent artwork, and a crucial modernist text. But, as contemporary reviews suggest, during its decade-long gestation the book travelled far from its original conception as a premeditated intervention at a specific political juncture, relying upon the agricultural credentials and technical experience of its author. Affected by the spiritual concerns and artistic aspirations of the Celtic Renascence, the fervent religious debates then racking the Free Church, and the viewpoints of wellwishers and disciples in the urban middle-class Gaelic diaspora, Carmina Gadelica, and the authorial persona of Alexander Carmichael himself, were reworked, aestheticized, spiritualized, and abstracted. Sub specie æternitatis, his three-guinea masterwork certainly won an extensive, enduring, global readership—but that readership did not include the island crofters and cottars who had entrusted Carmichael with their store in the first place.

Bibliography Balcou, Jean (1997). Renan: Un Celte rationaliste. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Balcou, Jean (2017). Ernest Renan: Une biographie. Paris: Champion Classiques. Barkley, John M. (1977). ‘The Renaissance of Public Worship in the Church of Scotland, 1865–1905’, Studies in Church History 14: 339–50. Bárth, Dániel (2013). ‘Benediction and Exorcism in Early Modern Hungary’, in James Alexander Kapaló et al. (eds.), The Power of Words: Studies on Charms and Charming in Europe. Budapest: Central European University Press, 199–210. Black, Ronald (ed.) (1999). An Tuil – The Flood: Anthology of 20th-Century Scottish Gaelic Verse. Edinburgh: Polygon. Black, Ronald (ed.) (2002). Eilein na h-Òige: The Poems of Fr Allan McDonald. Glasgow: Mungo Books.

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Blaikie, Walter Biggar (1897). Itinerary of Prince Charles Edward Stuart. Scottish History Society, vol. 23, Series 1. Edinburgh: T. & A. Constable. Blair, Kirstie (2012). Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, Stewart J. (2012). ‘Scotland and the Oxford Movement’, in Stewart J. Brown and Peter B. Nockles (eds.), The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World 1830–1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 56–77. Cameron, Ewen A. (1996). Land for the People? The British Government and the Scottish Highlands, c. 1880–1925. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Campbell, J. A. (1895). Letter. Scotsman, 30 December, p. 10. Campbell, John Gregorson (2005). The Gaelic Otherworld, ed. Ronald Black. Edinburgh: Birlinn. Campbell, John Lorne (1978–81). ‘Carmina Gadelica: George Henderson’s Corrections and Suggestions’, Scottish Gaelic Studies XIII: 183–218. Carmichael, Alexander (1884). ‘Grazing and Agrestic Customs of the Outer Hebrides’, in Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the Condition of the Crofters and Cottars in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Parliamentary Papers of 1884, xxxiii–xxxvi. Carmichael, Alexander (1887–91). ‘Uist Old Hymns’, Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Glasgow, vol. I: 34–47. Carmichael, Alexander et al. (eds.) (1900–71). Carmina Gadelica, 6 vols. Edinburgh: T. & A. Constable et al. Carnie, Robert Hay (1955–71). ‘The Pitsligo Press of George Hay Forbes: Some Additions and Corrections’, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions, vol. IV: 233–43. Cheyne, A. C. (1983). The Transforming of the Kirk: Victorian Scotland’s Religious Revolution. Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press. Cumming, Elizabeth (2006). Hand, Heart and Soul: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Scotland. Edinburgh: Birlinn. Ferguson, Megan (2011). ‘Patrick Geddes and the Celtic Renascence of the 1890s’. PhD thesis, University of Dundee. Forbes, George Hay (ed.) (1864). Liber Ecclesiæ Beati Terrenani de Arbuthnott. Burntisland: Pitsligo Press. Foster, Roy (1998–2003). W. B. Yeats: A Life, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Franz, Adolph (1960 [1909]). Die kirchlichen Benediktionen im Mittelalter, 2 vols. Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlaganstalt. Gillies, Dr Hugh Cameron (1900). Review of Carmina Gadelica, Highland News, 8 December. Hay, Jane (1896). ‘The Dance of Life’, The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal 3: 32–5. Hutchinson, Roger (2010). Father Allan: The Life and Legacy of a Hebridean Priest. Edinburgh: Birlinn.

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Hyde, Douglas (ed.) (1906). Abhráin Diadha Chúige Connacht, or The Religious Songs of Connacht, 2 vols. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Jolly, William (1900). Review of Carmina Gadelica, Inverness Courier, 25 December. Kalogera, Lucy Shephard (1977). ‘Yeats’s Celtic Mysteries’. PhD thesis, Florida State University. Leerssen, Joep (2006). ‘Englishness, Ethnicity and Matthew Arnold’, Journal of English Studies 10: 63–79. MacColl, Allan W. (2006). Land, Faith and the Crofting Community: Christianity and Social Criticism in the Highlands of Scotland, 1843–1893. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McDonald, Father Allan (ed.) (1893). Comh-chruinneachadh de Laoidhean Spioradail. Oban: Hugh MacDonald. Macdonald, Murdo (2005). ‘Celticism and Internationalism in the Circle of Patrick Geddes’, Visual Culture in Britain 6: 69–83. Macdonald, Murdo (2008). ‘The Visual Dimension to Carmina Gadelica’, in Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart (ed.), The Life and Legacy of Alexander Carmichael. Callicvol: Islands Book Trust, 135–45. MacLeod, James Lachlan (2000). The Second Disruption: The Free Church in Victorian Scotland and the Origins of the Free Presbyterian Church. East Linton: Tuckwell. MacPhail, J. R. N. (ed.) (1914). Highland Papers Volume I. Second Series, vol. V. Edinburgh: Scottish History Society. Meek, Donald (2000). The Quest for Celtic Christianity. Edinburgh: Handsel Press. Mumm, Susan (1999). Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers: Anglican Sisterhoods in Victorian Britain. London: Leicester University Press. Murray, Douglas M. (1997). ‘The Study of the Catholic Tradition of the Kirk: ScotoCatholics and the Worship of the Reformers’, Studies in Church History 33: 517–27. Newby, Andrew G. (2007). Ireland, Radicalism and the Scottish Highlands, c. 1870–1912. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Nockles, Peter B. (1996). ‘ “Our Brethren of the North”: The Scottish Episcopal Church and the Oxford Movement’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 47: 655–82. Ó Conchubhair, Brian (2009). Fin de Siècle na Gaeilge: Darwin, an Athbheochan agus Smaointeoireacht na hEorpa. Indreabhán: An Clóchomhar. Owen, Alex (2007). The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Perry, William (1927). George Hay Forbes: A Romance in Scholarship. London: SPCK. Perry, William (1939). Alexander Penrose Forbes, Bishop of Brechin: The Scottish Pusey. London: SPCK. Pittock, Murray and Isla Jack (2007). ‘Patrick Geddes and the Celtic Revival’, in Susan Manning (ed.), The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, Volume 2: Enlightenment, Britain and Empire (1707–1918). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 338–46.

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Pócs, Éva (2013). ‘Church Benedictions and Popular Charms in Hungary’, in James Alexander Kapaló et al. (eds.), The Power of Words: Studies on Charms and Charming in Europe. Budapest: Central European University Press, 165–97. Primrose, J. B. (1955–71). ‘The Pitsligo Press of George Hay Forbes’, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions, vol. IV: 53–89. Rees, Brian A. (1980). ‘James Cooper and the Scoto-Catholic Party: Tractarian Reform in the Church of Scotland, 1882–1918’. PhD thesis, University of St Andrews. Renan (1859). ‘La poésie des races Celtiques’, in Essais de morale et de critique. Paris: Michel Lévy Frères. Renwick, Chris (2009). ‘The Practice of Spencerian Science: Patrick Geddes’ Biosocial Programme, 1876–1889’, Isis 100: 36–57. Rickards, Edith C. (1902). Felicia Skene of Oxford: A Memoir. London: John Murray. Roberts, Alasdair (2010). ‘John Gray, André Raffalovich and Father Allan MacDonald of Eriskay’, Innes Review 61: 207–31. Ross, Kenneth R. (1989). Church and Creed in Scotland: The Free Church Case 1900–1904 and its Origins. Edinburgh: Rutherford House. Sanders, Andrew (2004). ‘Skene, Felicia Mary Frances [pseudonymn Erskine Moir] (1821–1899)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shaw, Michael (2015). ‘The Fin-de-Siècle Scots Renascence: The Roles of Decadence in the Development of Scottish Cultural Nationalism, c. 1880–1914’. PhD thesis, University of Glasgow. Skene, Felicia Mary Frances (1876). A Memoir of Alexander, Bishop of Brechin, with a Brief Notice of his Brother the Rev. George Hay Forbes. London: J. Masters and Co. Skene, William Forbes (1876–80). Celtic Scotland, 3 vols. Edinburgh: Edmonston & Douglas. Stiùbhart, Domhnall Uilleam (2008). ‘Alexander Carmichael and Carmina Gadelica’, in Domhnall Uilleam Stiùbhart (ed.), The Life and Legacy of Alexander Carmichael. Port of Ness, Isle of Lewis: Islands Book Trust, 1–39. Stiùbhart, Domhnall Uilleam (2013). ‘The Making of a Charm Collector: Alexander Carmichael in Uist, from 1864 to 1882’, in James Alexander Kapaló et al. (eds.), The Power of Words: Studies on Charms and Charming in Europe. Budapest: Central European University Press, 27–70. Strong, Rowan (2002). Episcopalianism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: Religious Responses to a Modernizing Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strong, Rowan (2004). ‘Forbes, George Hay (1821–1875)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Verter, Bradford J. M. (1998). ‘Dark Star Rising: The Emergence of Modern Occultism, 1800–1950’. PhD thesis, Princeton University. Walters, Jennifer (2007). ‘Magical Revival: Occultism and the Culture of Regeneration in Britain, c. 1880–1929’. PhD thesis, University of Stirling.

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2 Scottish Kenotic Theology Bruce L. McCormack

Introduction In its origins, what is called ‘kenotic Christology’ was a powerful movement in German Lutheran theology in the mid-nineteenth century—which presented itself as the best possible way to preserve the commitments resident in the classical Lutheran Christology of the Formula of Concord from the corrosive acids of ‘life of Jesus’ research. That being the case, it is necessary that we begin with a brief description the older Christology—and how it came to be—so that we can better understand why ‘life of Jesus’ research would constitute a threat to it. Orthodox Lutheran Christology was born out of a controversy which erupted in the mid-1520s over the nature of Christ’s presence in the Lord’s Supper; a controversy which quickly passed over into a heated debate over basic issues in Christology. The positions taken on both sides were church-defining, which meant that the Protestant Reformation would henceforth be carried forward by two separated evangelical churches: the Lutheran churches in Germany and Scandinavia and the Reformed churches in Switzerland, Holland, parts of Hungary, Romania, Poland, the England of King Edward VI—and, of course, Scotland. The occasion for the initial disagreement over the Lord’s Supper was provided by the publication of Zwingli’s On True and False Religion in 1525. In that work, Zwingli set aside every understanding of the Lord’s Supper as entailing a ‘sacramental eating’ (Zwingli 1981: 205) of the body and blood of Christ and argued instead that the Supper is a ‘joyful commemoration’ (Zwingli 1981: 200) by which the death of Christ is declared in its saving significance and thanksgiving and praise are given to God. His most persuasive argument (at least to later Reformed theologians like Calvin) was that the risen body of Christ is still a real body, in essential continuity with his historical body. And it belongs to bodies that they should have extension in space (‘locality’) in one place only; bodies cannot be in more places than one at the same time. So given that Christ’s risen body ascended into heaven (Acts 1:6–11) and is ‘seated’ at the ‘right hand’ of God the Father, that is the only place where the risen body can be locally present (Calvin 1960: 1393). Martin Luther was passionately committed to a real local presence of Christ’s body and blood in the elements of bread and wine. But he needed a way to explain how Christ’s body can be in more than one place, i.e. on multiple Eucharistic

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tables simultaneously. His response to Zwingli consisted in a doctrine of the ‘ubiquity’ of Christ’s body (that Christ is present wherever the Logos is in both heaven and earth) which found its ontological condition of possibility in a Christological novelty, the so-called genus majestaticum (or ‘genus of majesty’)—in accordance with which the divine nature so penetrates the human nature of Christ as to allow for a ‘communication’ to it of the divine attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and, most importantly for the sacramental controversy, omnipresence (Heron 1983: 118). In its most radical rendering—that of Johannes Brenz (sixteenth-century Reformer of the Duchy of Württemberg in south-west Germany)—participation by the human Jesus in the omni-attributes was the immediate consequence of the union which took place in the womb of the Virgin. Jesus made full use of the omni-attributes during the course of his earthly ministry, on this view, but did so, for the most part, in secret. That meant that Jesus of Nazareth could already in the days of his earthly ministry have been in Rome at the same time he was in Jerusalem. It also meant that omniscience was his from birth—if not already in the womb (Strauss 1840–1: I.142). ‘He [Brenz] does not hesitate to say that the ascension and the session at the right hand of God took place, not after the resurrection, but from the very beginning, from the moment when the hypostatical union of the two natures took place. Incarnation and exaltation are in his view identical’ (Bruce 1900: 92). And so: ‘The earthly Christ combined in himself, so to speak, two humanities, a humbled one, and an exalted one’ (Bruce 1900: 93). An alternative conception to this radical form of the communication had to emerge—and did, in the writings of Martin Chemnitz. Chemnitz affirmed the possession by Jesus of the omni-attributes from birth but argued that they were only used by him where and when the Logos willed. This allowed space not only for real growth and development during the course of Jesus’ childhood and adolescence; it also created space for his voluntary but real experience of the ‘infirmities’ to which the Fall had made human beings susceptible (illness among them) and the temptation and suffering to which such infirmities give rise (Bruce 1900: 96). It was Chemnitz’s view of willed non-use of the omni-attributes which found its way into the Formula of Concord. For their part, the Reformed rejected any inter-penetration of the natures (or perichoresis), thereby completely removing the Christological ground required for the thought of a genus majestaticum to gain plausibility. They saw in it a ‘mixture’ and ‘confusion’ of the natures which had been rejected by Chalcedon. And so: the Reformed allowed for only two genera of ‘communication’—the communication of the attributes of both natures to the ‘whole Christ’ (the divine and human ‘person’) and a ‘communication of works’ (which held that the energies of operation proper to the two natures flow together so as to appear outwardly as a single work). The Lutherans accused them of ‘Nestorianism’ for refusing the interpenetration of natures; the Reformed accused the Lutherans of teaching a docetic

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view of Christ’s incarnation. And so matters stood in confessional circles until the nineteenth century. The occasion which spurred the creation of modern kenoticism was the publication in 1835 of David Friedrich Strauss’ Life of Jesus: Critically Examined. For in this work, the method of critically comparing stories and sayings in the four Gospels in an attempt to show irreconcilable differences and the resultant need for critical judgement in establishing the truth with regard to the ‘life of Jesus’ led quickly to focused attention on questions surrounding Jesus’ emotional and moral development and growth and/or changes in his understanding of his mission. Such developments had to bring the ‘full humanity’ of the orthodox Lutheran Christ into question sooner or later—sooner, as it turned out. Strauss followed his first great work with a second whose motto might well have been ‘the true critique of dogma is its history’ (Strauss 1840–1: I.71). In it, he subjected the Lutheran Christology to scathing criticism, drawing with both hands on classical Reformed sources while adding his own quite modern objections. A response was imperative if Lutheran confessional theology was to remain vital and church-defining. It came from the kenoticists. Not content with the thought of a willed non-use of divine properties ‘possessed’ by the human Jesus, the kenoticists would push the logic of the classical two-states theory a step further so that the ‘self-emptying’ (ekenosen) spoken of Phil. 2:7 was made to be an act performed by the Logos asarkos as an ontological in precondition to becoming incarnate—through a willed ‘depotentiation’ (the surrender or ‘reduction’ by the Logos of precisely those divine attributes which, if retained, would make a thoroughly human way of being in the world impossible to Jesus). The thought was: the Logos can take them up again in the state of exaltation and share them with Jesus and, in this way, the Lutheran genus majestaticum would be protected from further erosion. Gottfried Thomasius of Erlangen was the first to offer a full-blown kenotic theory in his Beiträge zur kirchlichen Christologie in 1845. He was followed in this endeavour by his colleagues in Erlangen, Johann Christian Konrad von Hofmann, Franz Hermann Reinhold Frank, and August Ebrard—but also inter alios by Theodor Albert Liebner (Kiel and Leipzig), Hans Lassen Martensen (Copenhagen), and Wolfgang Friedrich Geß (Basler Missionshaus). Perspicuous criticism also followed quickly. The arch-opponent of kenoticism in all of its variants was Isaak August Dorner whose review of Thomasius’ Beiträge appeared already in 1846. Thus, the lines along which the battle over kenotic thinking would be fought over the next thirty years in Germany were in place quite early. From the distance of a century and half, it is not at all surprising that Lutherans would have felt it necessary to introduce modifications into their received Christology; the surprising thing is that any Reformed theologian would have been drawn into this controversy. As has already been made clear, the sixteenth-century Reformed had removed the ontological ground from beneath the Lutheran genus

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majestaticum through their rejection of a perichoresis of the natures. One might have thought that the nineteenth-century Reformed would have been content to let the fires of historical criticism rage, secure in the knowledge that their way of distinguishing the ‘natures’ would prove immune to any ‘assured results’ of such criticism. But that is not how things turned out. Why the Reformed should have taken an interest will become immediately clear as we turn now to Scottish kenoticism.

The Mediator of Kenotic Christology to Scotland: A. B. Bruce Alexander Balmain Bruce (1831–99) served the Free Church of Scotland as a parish minister from 1859 to 1875. His book The Training of the Twelve in 1871 drew attention to his scholarly abilities and so it came to pass that he was appointed the Cunningham Lecturer in Edinburgh in 1874. The lectures bore the title ‘The Humiliation of Christ’. A year later, he was appointed to a professorship in the Free Church Hall in Glasgow. His Cunningham Lectures were published in 1876 by T&T Clark and went through five editions over the next quarter century. The Humiliation of Christ was Bruce’s magnum opus. It was a work of astonishing erudition, ranging widely over patristic, medieval, Reformation, and modern sources. It is also a work of great historical significance in that it introduced kenotic Christology to Scotland (and, more broadly, to the United Kingdom). Bruce’s knowledge of German-language source materials pertinent to the kenotic Christology remains to this day without parallel. All who came after built upon his interpretation—though differing in many ways in the conclusions drawn. What, then, drew Bruce to engage in sympathetic if critical mediation of German Lutheran kenoticism? He was intimately acquainted with sixteenthcentury Christological debates and he made it clear that he sided with his Reformed forebears. His criticism of the Lutheran genus majestaticum can be summarized in a word: docetism! So why kenotic Christology? One answer is that he regarded the German kenoticists as drawing nearer to classical Reformed Christology insofar as they took the so-called ‘state of humiliation’ with a seriousness not possible for sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lutherans. Whether they would have agreed is doubtful, but that Bruce was convinced it was so is significant. Even more important is Bruce’s emphasis on the ‘practical’ (Bruce 1900: 7)—on what he called ‘applied theology’ over against the speculative—and this, for two reasons. First, Bruce held it to be a very good idea to reverse the traditional loci treating of the ‘person’ of Christ and a ‘two states’ theory, beginning with two states, of which it would be the state of humiliation which merits virtually the whole of the theologian’s attention; ‘ . . . as the main business of Christology is to

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form a true conception of the historical person Jesus Christ, we may confine our attention chiefly to the earlier of the two states which belongs to history and falls within our observation, concerning which alone we possess much information’ (Bruce 1900: 8). The ‘practical’ also meant a primary focus on the ethical or moral value of doctrinal teaching (Bruce 1900: 6). Bruce was well aware of the criticism which had befallen metaphysical treatments of doctrine since the Enlightenment; demonstrating their moral value was essential in his view to the ongoing viability of ‘orthodox’ teachings. Protesting that every exegesis of the so-called ‘Christ hymn’ in Phil. 2 presupposes a doctrine of God (so that none can be regarded as completely objective), he candidly admitted: ‘ . . . I avow my wish to arrive at a particular conclusion with respect to the interpretation of the passage; one, viz. which should assign a reality to the idea of a Being in the form of God by a free act of condescension becoming man. I am desirous to have ground for believing that the apostle speaks here not only of the exemplary humility of the man Jesus, but of the more wonderful, sublime self-humiliation of the pre-existent personal Son of God’ (Bruce 1900: 110–12). There was also the spiritual value of the theme of Christ’s humiliation to be considered. The Jesus of the Epistle to the Hebrews who ‘learned obedience through the things he suffered’ (Heb. 5:8) is a friend to sinners, a man capable of understanding what it is to be tempted to sin, a ‘brother’ to those who experience life as a trial to be endured. For what sorrow-laden men need is not an Apollo, the aesthetically perfect embodiment of manly beauty, but a Christ in whom they confidently recognize a veritable Brother; and for this purpose a body like a broken earthen vessel, and a vision marred more than any man, may be better qualifications than the most classic beauty of face and form that ever Greek sculptor hewed out of marble. (Bruce 1900: 262)

And Bruce made it quite clear that for Jesus to experience life as he did was not because the Logos ‘allowed’ him to do so through an act of will; temptation and suffering are natural to human life in the fallen world into which the Logos entered (Bruce 1900: 23). In any event, Bruce had ample reason to be interested in the German kenoticists even if his motivations were quite different. Ironically, he was not finally a ‘kenoticist’ in the strict sense. None of the models elaborated in Germany was finally convincing to him; indeed, it may most accurately be said that he regarded the ‘person’ of Christ as an ‘insoluble problem’ (Bruce 1900: 192). And so, he refused to choose amongst his ‘types’ (Bruce 1900: 190), even though he had a favourite in the German-speaking Dane, H. L. Martensen. It would have violated Bruce’s emphasis on the ethical to have made a decision with regard to what he regarded as a metaphysical issue—at least, that was how he saw it. The important

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thing, he thought, was to sketch the broad outlines of what may and should be said on the basis of the ‘Christ hymn’ and the Epistle to the Hebrews—without going so far as to develop a Christological ‘theory’. Since Bruce’s influence on later Scottish theology had less to do with his own Christology than it did in making the German kenoticists accessible, it is important that his typology be set forth here in brief outline, together with his criticisms of the figures he made representative of each type. The four types are: the ‘absolute dualistic’, the ‘absolute metamorphic’, the ‘absolute semi-metamorphic’, and the ‘real but relative’. Each ‘type’ is reduced to a single representative, though presumably Bruce believed each to have its adherents. The first is represented by Gottfried Thomasius, the second by Wolfgang Geß, the third by August Ebrard, and the fourth by H. L. Martensen. Thomasius’ theory rests on a speculative foundation consisting in a distinction between the ‘essential’ and the ‘relative’ attributes of God (Bruce 1900: 143n1). The ‘relative’ attributes are those which God has only as a consequence of having made a free decision to create a world. They are not ‘necessary’ to God, since the decision to create is not necessary. The ‘relative’ attributes are omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. The ‘essential’ attributes are absolute power (presumably without relation to anything outwith God but concentrated wholly in itself ), absolute truth, absolute holiness, and absolute love (Bruce 1900: 143). The reason for this distinction is clear though Bruce fails to engage in an analysis of it. It is designed to allow for surrender of the omni-attributes by the Logos in the act of assuming human nature while preserving God’s essential immutability. In other words, Thomasius claimed that his understanding of the divine selflimitation entails no change in the being of God as such. On this showing, the Lutheran genus majestaticum is applicable only to the state of exaltation; it has no applicability in the state of humiliation. Again, Bruce does not inquire into the motivations informing the Thomasian theory. The closest he came was to acknowledge that Thomasius believed his Christology to be consistent with the Lutheran axiom ‘ “The Word not outside the flesh, nor the flesh outside the Word” (nec verbum extra carnem, nec caro extra verbum)’ (Bruce 1900: 141). Examined more closely, the kenosis as taught by Thomasius is an act of depotentiation. Divine power is ‘contracted to its innermost ground, fulness concentrated in itself . . . ’ (Bruce 1900: 144). At this point, an ambiguity in the Thomasian theory arises since Thomasius wanted also to be able to say that this concentrated power is revealed from time to time in the human existence of Christ. The ambiguity consists in the fact that if the concentrated power cannot reveal itself, Thomasius has created a dualism: ‘Revelation’ would, however, require free self-determination on the part of the Logos consistent with the thought that the Logos alone is ‘person-making’. But such a view would undermine what Thomasius says about the nature of the kenosis itself, for it would render impossible a real depotentiation. A more consistent view would make

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power to be present only ‘in itself ’ and not as revealed—while accepting the dualism that would then arise, and making the Holy Spirit the power by which Jesus’ divinity is revealed both to himself and through him to others. Omniscience is, if anything, an even more challenging problem—and it creates a problem for the distinction between ‘essential’ and ‘relative’ attributes. For the essential attributes are the description of a fully self-consciousness Subject, as Dorner had pointed out long before. Herr Dr. Thomasius crashes on these rocks. For he makes the kenosis to reach even to the divine consciousness of the Logos . . . Or is the love which John identifies with God’s essence still possible if the Logos gives up His consciousness . . . ? One can, with justification, say that the writer had caused the Logos to surrender His essence as well. (Dorner 1846: 42)

Bruce shows that he is aware of this problem though he brushes over it fairly quickly without mentioning its consequences for the distinction between ‘essential’ and ‘relative’ attributes (Bruce 1900: 175). The most telling of Bruce’s criticisms is also one he learned from Dorner. If the Logos were truly depotentiated in order to be united with human nature and if such depotentiation extended even to his divine self-consciousness, then what we have in effect is the union of the Logos made human with the human Jesus; a human soul with a human soul. Such a union cannot, in the very nature of the case, achieve a unity of ‘person’ (Dorner 1846: 45). He would later add: such a conception is a clear violation of the Chalcedonian ‘without division, without separation’ clause (Dorner 1853: 1266). Bruce’s concern, not surprisingly, is a more practical one. ‘Why two human souls to do the work of one? for, ex hypothesi, the depotentiated Logos is to all intents and purposes a human soul . . . . [W]hy not just say at once the Logos became a human soul?’ (Bruce 1900: 177). That question would lead later Scottish kenoticists simply to abandon the two-natures logic of Chalcedon altogether in favour of the singularity of a Logos ‘self-reduced’. Wolfgang Geß represents Bruce’s second ‘type’, the ‘absolute metamorphic.’ On Geß’s view, the Logos became a human soul in becoming incarnate. This is Apollinaris turned on his head. The human soul is still replaced (as in Apollinaris) but in Geß’s case, by a Logos who has become a human soul. ‘The only difference between the Logos and a human soul was that he became human by voluntary kenosis, while an ordinary human soul derives its existence from a creative act [of God]’ (Bruce 1900: 148). How does the kenosis take place? The leading thought for Geß is that the eternal life which flows from the Father to the Son is cut off at its source. The perichoresis of Father and Son remains intact, but the life that is originally the Father’s is suspended for a time until it be restored—gradually over the life of the human Jesus but fully only in the resurrection (Bruce 1900: 144).

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The great advantage of this theory over that of Thomasius lay in its overcoming of ‘dualism’; there is only one soul here, that of the Logos made human (Bruce 1900: 148). It also faced a number of challenges, several of which Geß anticipated and addressed head on. What becomes of the ‘integrity of Christ’s assumed humanity’ on this view? Geß’s answer was to suggest that how a human soul comes into being has no relevance for understanding its integrity. What, then, of the doctrine of divine immutability? ‘How is it possible . . . that a Divine Being can thus all but extinguish himself ?’ (Bruce 1900: 149). Here Geß suggests that the Son’s reception of the life flowing from the Father is ‘His own deed’, an act of volition. So the power of God was a ‘power over himself ’ before it was a power over other things and persons (Bruce 1900: 150). And so, if divine Love moves God to redeem the human race and incarnation is necessary to that end, then self-extinguishing must be possible. To say only that much demonstrates the need to revise the traditional account of immutability, but Bruce does not explore that issue further. What happens to the inter-Trinitarian relation of Father and Son when the life that is in the Father ceases to flow to the Son? Geß did not shrink from saying that the Son is not a participant in giving life to the Spirit while in the state of humiliation (i.e. the relation depicted by the term filioque is suspended). The Son ceases to uphold and govern the universe during the state of humiliation, that work being done by the Father through the Spirit (Bruce 1900: 151). And, finally, the Logos does not cease in some sense to be human even in the exaltation (however repotentiated), so that the being of the Son is somehow enlarged—which again raises questions about the precise nature of divine immutability. Bruce adds two more criticisms, one having to do with God’s subjection of self to the dominion of matter (solved by repotentiation in the exaltation); the other having to do with Christ’s sinlessness. The latter is a very real problem for Bruce himself, one that he feels biblical testimony forces upon us and is not the consequence of speculation. If sin was a real possibility for the Logos made human, how are we to account for the fact that this possibility was never actualized? He is not convinced that Geß has an answer to this question. It is one that he will consider at some length in the context of setting forth his own reflections on the lived history of Jesus Christ. August Ebrard, representing the ‘semi-metamorphic’ type, was in agreement with Geß that the Logos takes the place of the human soul. The difference is that Ebrard wanted to say that no divine attributes are simply surrendered in the kenosis; all are retained. And yet, with the assumption of human nature, divine attributes were expressed: not in reference to the collective universe, but only in reference to particular objects presenting themselves to his notice in time and space. Omnipotence remained but in an applied form, as an unlimited power to perform miracles;

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omniscience remained in an applied form, as an unlimited power to see through all objects which he wished to see through; omnipresence remained in an applied form as an unlimited power to transport himself whither he would.

(Bruce 1900: 153) Such a view would seem to lie close to Chemnitz’s idea of a willed non-use (in certain respects) of divine attributes—in spite of the fact that Chemnitz would not have approved the idea that the Logos took the place of Christ’s human soul. It is clear that Bruce found Ebrard obscure in his writing style and inconsistent in his claims. It is not surprising that those who used Bruce’s book as a road map to the kenotic movement in Germany found little to attract them here. Bruce’s fourth type is denominated ‘real but relative’—which tells us little with respect to its representative figure, H. L. Martensen. Martensen is typically identified in histories of nineteenth-century theology as belonging to the ‘mediating school’, influenced by both Schleiermacher and Hegel (Stephan and Schmidt 1973: 236–7; Hirsch 1949: 389). Crucial to Martensen’s conception is the implied claim that it is essential to God to become human—much in the way that God’s act of positing himself over against himself in finite form in an act of selfdifferentiation is essential, in Hegel’s thinking, for attaining absolute selfconsciousness. God remains God even as God ‘goes forth’ from God to become human; or, in Martensen’s language, the Logos continues to fill heaven and earth even as he also exists concretely as human. The ‘Logos-revelation’ through world unity and governance is supplemented by a ‘Christ revelation’ (Bruce 1900: 160). Bruce understands the act of kenosis in Martensen to be ‘voluntary’ (Bruce 1900: 187), but he is mistaken in this. And so, he is also wrong in thinking that Martensen offers an ethical theory (grounded in the divine love) rather than a theory of absolute or partial ‘metaphysical kenosis’ (Bruce 1900: 187–8). Bruce’s conclusion with respect to the four types of kenotic theory? ‘It is not necessary to adopt any one of them; we are not obliged to choose between them; we may stand aloof from them all . . . ’. Any one of them might be used ‘as a prop around which faith may twine’ (Bruce 1900: 190). But none should be taken with the kind of seriousness which would make theology captive to metaphysics. Bruce himself is content to say—along the lines of the ethical theory he prefers—that kenosis involves a change of ‘state’ on the part of the Logos; that the ‘personality’ of the Logos remains the same in and through that change so that the ‘kenosis and tapeinosis were two acts of the same mind dwelling in the same Subject’; and that kenosis, as finding its root in the divine love, must be a free act. He denies that kenosis could mean ‘self-extinction or metamorphosis of a Divine Being into a mere man’ (Bruce 1900: 22, cf. 35 for a list of Bruce’s ‘axioms’ governing thinking about kenosis). The fact that the divine Subject also lives a human life, subject to its limitations, implies a ‘double life’ is something he can live with.

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The Later Scottish Kenoticists As a consequence of the penetrating criticisms of I. A. Dorner in particular and the emergence of the anti-metaphysical program of Albrecht Ritschl in the 1870s, the kenotic movement had suffered eclipse in Germany by the 1880s—just as it was becoming a force in Scottish theology. Despite the penetrating criticisms levelled by theologians from the established church (Caird 1899: 127–34; Paterson 1912: 230–2), it maintained its hold, particularly amongst the theologians of the (United) Free Church. By the time that Donald Baillie pointed out that the Christ of the kenoticists could only be a ‘temporary theophany’, not God incarnate (Baillie 1948: 96–7), the spell cast by kenotic Christology in Scotland had been broken. The heyday of Scottish kenoticism may be judged to have stretched from 1897 to 1912; from the publication of Forrest’s The Christ of History and Experience to Mackintosh’s The Person of Jesus Christ.

David W. Forrest David W. Forrest (1856–1918) was a minister of the United Presbyterian Church. While still a minister, he gave the Kerr Lectures at the Free Church College in Glasgow, named after the merger of the United Presbyterians with the Free Church in 1900: the United Free Church College. The lectures were, as already noted, published in 1897. Largely on the strength of this volume, Forrest was called to the Chair of Systematic Theology in the United Free Church College in 1914. Unlike Bruce, Forrest embraced the idea that the Logos took the place of a human soul (Forrest 1897: 198, 204). That would seem to be a fair conclusion to draw from the fact that it is the Logos which, Forrest says, had to ‘pass through all the stages, unconscious as well as conscious, of a human life’ (Forrest 1897: 197). And that meant that Forrest also accepted the understanding of kenosis as involving metaphysical ‘change’—the surrender of the divine attributes of omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence (Forrest 1897: 194–5). Thus he could embrace the ancient anhypostasia of the human, so long as its ‘personality’ was that of the divine Subject stripped of divine attributes—and, temporarily, of divine self-consciousness. With French exegete Frédéric Godet, Forrest argues that the Logos only regained his divine consciousness (i.e. awareness of his deity) subsequent to his child’s (normal) development of human consciousness—and in a way appropriate to the integrity for the latter. ‘[T]here was but one consciousness in him, as there was but one personality – that of the Word made flesh. But it was a consciousness which had a double quality, or at least a double reference’ (Forrest 1897: 199–200). Forrest does not give any attention whatsoever to the German kenoticists. His guides are Bruce, the English bishop Charles Gore, and (most especially) Godet.

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He shares with Bruce a preference for the concrete ‘facts’ of Jesus’ life over speculation, for the ethical over against the metaphysical. He (quite wrongly) suggests that Chalcedon treated the ‘natures’ as ‘abstractions’—even suggesting that there is an ‘abstract opposition’ between them (Forrest 1897: 198). That much is clearly not the case, insofar as created being participates, according to the Fathers, in uncreated being by virtue of its creation; otherwise, created being would not ‘be’ at all. So there is no ‘opposition’. Nor was the purpose of Chalcedon merely a negative one, that of warding off errors on all sides without advancing a positive solution (Forrest 1897: 194). Still, the crucial point here is that Forrest believed that the kenotic Christology was much to be preferred to Chalcedon. Allegiance to the tradition had its limits.

P. T. Forsyth Peter Taylor Forsyth (1848–1921) was a Scot who served as a minister to Congregationalist churches in England before becoming Principal of Hackney College in London in 1901. Initially trained at the University of Aberdeen, he also studied under Albrecht Ritschl in Göttingen. Early in his ministerial career, he underwent a conversion which led him to abandon ‘liberal’ theological ideas in favour of a more nearly evangelical faith. Forsyth’s version of kenotic Christology is briefly set forth in his The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (1909). Though he was clearly familiar with the leading versions of German kenoticism as well as with criticisms like those found in Dorner’s history of Christology, he did not engage directly with any of this literature, contenting himself instead to simply present his own positive account which bore great similarity to the depotentiation theory of Thomasius. The difference between them is minimal, consisting finally in an attempt to clarify the depotentiation as applying not just to so-called “relative attributes” but most fundamentally to divine self-consciousness . . . if the renunciation were carried so far as to part with a divine self-consciousness and will, it is not clear what is left in the way of identity or continuity at all. What is there, then, in common between the eternal Son and the man Jesus? What remains of the divine nature when we extinguish the immanent ethical and personal qualities in any absolute sense? (Forsyth 1946: 307)

The importance of this question for Forsyth had to do with his belief that the ‘ethical’ attributes were more basic (‘immanent’) in God than were the ‘metaphysical’ (which, while not lacking in God prior to creating as sheer potencies are, in fact, made to be what we know them to be through the relation of God to the world given in the act of creation). ‘The nature of the Godhead is Holy Love. There

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lies the region, the nature, and the norm of its omnipotence . . . . It can do, not everything conceivable to freakish fancy, but everything prescribed by Holy Love’ (Forsyth 1946: 313). And so, ‘omnipotence’ is defined as a power to do all that God wills to do. So defined, the step back from actuality into potency can also be subject to the divine willing. Similarly with omniscience: though the knowledge of God in its actuality is an eternal act of comprehensive and perfect intuition (the knowledge of all things in an instantaneous gaze), retraction into potency requires a willed act of knowing discursively as humans do, building new knowledge on knowledge already acquired. Forsyth was committed to the notion that the retreat of divine knowledge into potency gradually gave way to the return of divine self-consciousness as Jesus grew and matured into adulthood. The presence of the love of God animating his soul was necessary to the atoning work he would accomplish. Unlike A. B. Bruce, Forsyth was content to let go of the idea of a ‘double life’ (divine and human). He seems to think of the incarnate Logos as a Logos made capable of the human through depotentiation—which requires no assumption of a human nature. His break with Chalcedon is thus more complete than was the case with Bruce. ‘Let us cease speaking of a nature as if it were an entity; of two natures as two independent entities; and let us think and speak of two modes of being . . . ’ (Forsyth 1946: 307). ‘Nor were there two streams parallel while unmingled. There could not be two wills, or two consciousnesses, in the same personality, by any psychological possibility now credible. We could not have in the same person both knowledge and ignorance of the same thing’ (Forsyth 1946: 319). One gets the feeling when reading Forsyth that the theological problems which first gave rise to modern kenoticism are no longer living problems for him. Nor are the criticisms marshalled against kenoticism in its more developed, theoretical forms of much interest to him. He proceeds as if the magic spell cast by the then current emphasis on the significance of moral striving rooted in love as basic to the emergence of ‘personality’ were the only thing that matters and that its proclamation would be sufficient to awaken a positive response. Conspicuous by its absence is the orthodox Reformed understanding that it is the Holy Spirit who was the source of Christ’s knowledge of his mission and its empowerment. The ‘moral heroism’ of Bruce’s Christ remains (Bruce 1900: 12) but not Bruce’s sensitivity to the Reformed tradition.

H. R. Mackintosh Not since Bruce’s The Humiliation of Christ had Scotland produced an academic work on Christology of the quality of that found in Hugh Ross Mackintosh’s The Person of Jesus Christ (1912). Mackintosh (1870–1936) was born in Paisley to a Free Church minister father who preached in Gaelic. Having graduated from New

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College, Edinburgh, he went abroad to study in Germany, most importantly in Marburg, where he became close to Wilhelm Herrmann. From Herrmann, he acquired a knowledge of and appreciation for Schleiermacher. Upon his return, he became a Free Church, then United Free Church minister in Tayport (1897–1901) and Beechgrove in Aberdeen (1901–4). He was installed in the chair of systematic theology at New College in 1904. With the reunion of 1929, his ordination was now to the Church of Scotland, whose Moderator he became in 1932. Mackintosh’s book is a learned one, traversing most of the ground covered by Bruce with his own fresh insights and conclusions. The Christology set forth in it consisted in a merging of Schleiermacher and Thomasius. In leading later theology to start with the ‘present experience of the new life as immediately dependent upon Jesus’, Schleiermacher had set forth a starting point for Christological construction ‘whose depth and value can scarcely be overestimated’ (Mackintosh 1927: 254). Schleiermacher’s great shortcoming was that he made less of his starting point than he ought to have done. For Schleiermacher, ‘Redeemed men [sic] are men liberated from the oppression of finite causes, and dependent solely on the Absolute Causality, rather than forgiven sinners, living in fellowship with God the Father’ (Mackintosh 1927: 254). But like the great Berliner, Mackintosh wanted to trace the effects of Christ’s redemptive work in believers back to their source in a conception of Christ’s redemptive work—which in turn would lay the foundation for consideration of Christ’s person. The order here is important. To begin with the experience of redemption is to begin with the theme of ‘union with Christ’ since ‘ . . . union with Christ is a brief name for all the apostles mean by salvation. For St. Paul and St. John oneness with Christ is to be redeemed, and to be redeemed is oneness with Christ’ (Mackintosh 1927: 334). And so: ‘ . . . if by its very nature all Christian theology is an interpretation of believing experience from within, this oneness with Christ, of which we are conscious, is our punctum stans’ (Mackintosh 1927: 332–3). ‘Union with Christ’ is to be conceived as a ‘reciprocal appropriation and interpenetration of spirit by spirit . . . . Our solidarity with Christ is such that in his death we also die; in his grave we are buried; with the Risen Lord, and in him, we too rise to newness of life’ (Mackintosh 1927: 335). Even more important, perhaps, is the claim that union with Christ is union with God (Mackintosh 1927: 338). To establish this claim, however, he understands the work of Christ in a particular way and tailors his understanding of the person of Christ to it. Central to the work of Christ, as viewed by Mackintosh, is the forgiveness of sins. The key claim in this regard is that only one who is God can forgive sins. The Christ who condemns sin in his flesh is one with his Father; his own judgement upon sin was God’s judgement. ‘This judgment then . . . is a Divine judgment; at the same time, it is pronounced through the medium of perfect manhood’ (Mackintosh 1927: 331). But if Christ’s death constitutes divine judgement upon sin and guilt (there is a hint here of John McLeod Campbell’s notion of vicarious

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repentance), then there is no antagonism at work between the Son as sin-bearer and his Father and the older Reformed penal substitution theory is to be rejected (Mackintosh 1927: 333). Christ is never more at one with his Father than in his death. It should be clear on the basis of this all too brief account of atonement that the kenotic idea of God reduced to a human form of existence—God living humanly—is thoroughly compatible with it. The eternal Son remains one with himself and with the other members of the Godhead even in his humiliation. His identity as God is preserved even as expressed in human form. Mackintosh’s Christology does not differ in essentials from that of Forsyth. Holy love is the most basic attribute of God and governs God’s use of power. Mackintosh’s version of the Son’s self-imposed depotentiation does not involve the surrender of any divine attributes but their adaptation to new conditions of life as taken on by the divine subject (Mackintosh 1927: 477). For this reason, he thinks his view superior to all of the more speculative treatments like those of Thomasius and Geß (Mackintosh 1927: 468). It should be observed that none of this is intended as a repair of Chalcedon (as was the case with the Germans). Chalcedon’s two natures logic has been replaced by the singularity of a divine subject self-reduced (Mackintosh 1927: 292–9). And with that, a link with classical Reformed Christology has also been severed. Mackintosh’s achievement was to give to the combination of Thomasian depotentiation as ‘self-reduction’ with Geß’s insistence that the Logos made human is the one self-conscious person (affirmed by both Forrest and Forsyth) an empirical rather than a metaphysical foundation.

Conclusion A lengthier presentation might well have considered the responses of the kenoticists to anticipated and/or already instantiated objections. None were particularly bothered, for example, by the implications of their teaching for divine immutability. A Logos self-reduced is still the Logos; it mattered little to them if he had undergone change. That only made him more attractive to them, precisely because more ‘human’. But there are two problems they did not address which bear mention in closing. First, if it is the case that the human Jesus could not function humanly if possessing the omni-attributes (which was the reason given all along for the alleged depotentiation), then it is not at all clear how the risen Christ who reacquires them could remain human. If the incarnation is in perpetuity (as most agree), that is a real problem. A second drawback is one that comes from the pressures of our own ecumenical age. The Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches remain deeply committed to Chalcedon. To fail to honour the logic of Chalcedon at the very least (if not the

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categories employed) would be most difficult for a Protestant working today in the field of dogmatics. That was not yet a constitutive issue for the Scottish kenoticists. By the time we get to Mackintosh, there no longer remains a sense (which was still alive in Bruce) of the need for a theology that would mediate between the ancient and modern worlds. Kenoticism, in Mackintosh’s hands, is a strictly modern enterprise.

Bibliography Baillie, Donald M. (1948). God Was In Christ. London: Faber & Faber. Breidert, Martin (1977). Die kenotische Christologie des 19. Jahrhunderts. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn. Brown, David (2011). Divine Humanity. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Bruce, Alexander Balmain (1900). The Humiliation of Christ, 5th edition. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Caird, John (1899). The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, vol. 2. Glasgow: Maclehose. Calvin, John (1960). Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John McNeill. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press. Dorner, I. A. (1839). Entwicklungsgeschichte der Lehre von der Person Christi. Stuttgart: Verlag von S. G. Liesching. Dorner, I. A. (1846). ‘Rezension von G. Thomasius, Beiträge zur kirchlichen Christologie’, Allgemeines Repertorium für die Theologische Literatur und kirchliche Statistik 5: 33–50. Dorner, I. A. (1853). Entwicklungsgeschichte der Lehre von der Person Christi, Zweiter Teil. Berlin: Gustav Schlawitz. Ebrard, Johannes Heinrich August (1852). Christliche Dogmatik, Zweiter Band. Königsberg: Verlag von August Wilhelm Unzer. Forrest, David W. (1897). The Christ of History and Experience. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Forsyth, P. T. (1946). The Person and Place of Jesus Christ. London: Independent Press. Geß, Wolfgang Friedrich (1870/1887). Christi Person und Werk. Basel: C. Detloff ’s Buchhandlung. Heron, Alasdair (1983). Table and Tradition. Edinburgh: The Hansel Press. Hirsch, Emanuel (1949). Geschichte der neuern evangelischen Theologie, vol. 5. Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann Verlag. Holte, Ragnar (1965). Die Vermittlungstheologie: Ihre theologischen Grundbegriffe kritisch untersucht. Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksells. Law, David R. (2010). ‘Kenotic Christology’, in David Fergusson (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Theology. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 251–79.

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Mackintosh, H. R. (1927). The Person of Jesus Christ. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Martensen, H. L. (1870). Die christliche Dogmatik. Berlin: Verlag von Gustav Schlawitz. Paterson, William P. (1912). The Rule of Faith. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Schneckenberger, Matthias (1855). Vergleichende Darstellung des lutherischen und reformirten Lehrbegriffs. Stuttgart: Verlag von J. B. Metzler’schen Buchhandlung. Stephan, Horst and Martin Schmidt (1973). Geschichte der evangelischen Theologie in Deutschland seit dem Idealismus. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Strauss, David (1840–1). Die christliche Glaubenslehre, 2 vols. Tübingen/Stuttgart: C. F. Osiander and F. H. Köhler. Thomasius, Gottfried (1845). Beiträge zur kirchlichen Christologie. Erlangen: Verlag von Theodor Bläsing. Thomasius, Gottfried (1857). Christi Person und Werk, Zweiter Teil. Erlangen: Verlag von Theodor Bläsing. Zwingli, Ulrich (1981). Commentary on True and False Religion. Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press.

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3 Theologies of the Cross Denney and Forsyth Jason A. Goroncy

Europe’s long nineteenth century was marked by extraordinary social, intellectual, and political transformation. The Church was not impervious to such, and the best of its theologians critically embraced the new mood. Among these were two Scots, P. T. Forsyth (1848–1921) and James Denney (1856–1917), who in their own ways were determined to unleash the reserve of the ancient evangelical faith with a modern pronunciation. * *

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Forsyth was a high-Victorian Congregational minister and theologian turned Edwardian college principal.¹ He was born and educated in Aberdeen, and at the close of the academic session in 1872, undertook a semester of study with Albrecht Ritschl and Carl Stumpf in Göttingen before returning to Britain to train for the Congregational ministry at New College, London. He exercised pastoral charges—in decreasingly eccentric and increasingly public modes—at Springwood, Shipley (1876–9), at St Thomas’ Square, Hackney, London (1879–85), at Cheetham Hill, Manchester (1885–8), at Clarendon Park, Leicester (1888–94), and at Emmanuel Church, Cambridge (1894–1901). In 1901, Forsyth was called to the principalship of Hackney College, London. The years of his principalship were marked by a growing and prolific public ministry at home and abroad, and by an extraordinary fertility in terms of his maturing theology and literary output. In 1905, he served as Chairman of the Congregational Union of England and Wales. In 1907, he delivered the Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale (subsequently published as Positive Preaching and [the] Modern Mind), and during the following year addressed the Third International Congregational Council in Edinburgh, where he gave the Congregational Lectures on ‘The Person and Place of Jesus Christ’. While visiting London in October 1910, Denney stayed with Forsyth. Writing to his sister around the same time, Denney described his host as ‘an extremely ¹ For a fuller biography, see Bradley (1952) and Goroncy (2013a: 1–66). Substantive bibliographies are available in Benedetto (1993) and McCurdy (1995).

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clever though rather tantalising man’ (Moffatt 1921: 154). By all accounts he was. He was known also for his antithetical and idiosyncratic writing style, about which Denney commented: Forsyth’s book [Positive Preaching and the Modern Mind] interested me very much, but the peculiarity of his style is such that only people who agree with him strongly are likely to read him through. It is immensely clever at some points at which it is not enough to be clever. It is like hitting Goliath between the eyes with a pebble which does not sink into his skull, but only makes him see clearer. (Denney 1920: 97)

And about Forsyth’s Missions in State and Church, Denney wrote: I found [it] very difficult to read. If this is how one feels who is heartily at one with the writer, how must it strike an unsympathetic reader? He has more true and important things to say, in my opinion, than any one at present writing on theology; but if these papers were preached, as most of them seem to have been, I am sure most of the audiences, while willing enough to take hold of them, must have been sadly perplexed to find the handle. (1920: 118–19)

Denney suggested that perhaps Forsyth’s most powerful words are spared for diagnoses of the moral condition of both Church and society at large, diagnoses which Forsyth offered in light of humanity’s indifference to God’s holiness, the inexorability of God’s love, and the transforming judgement in God’s forgiving grace. Forsyth, Denney declared, ‘takes care not to be personal, nor to say what implies censure of individuals, but he feels free to be scornful of much on which a whole generation has nursed its self-complacency’ (Denney 1907a: 57). * *

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Denney was a New Testament scholar, theologian, and influential churchman.² Born in Paisley, he spent his childhood at nearby Greenock and, in 1879, completed his undergraduate studies at Glasgow University. He proceeded to study theology at the Free Church College where he was exposed to some of the most acute minds of his generation, including A. B. Bruce, J. S. Candlish, and T. M. Lindsay. Upon completing his studies in 1883, Denney was appointed Missioner at East Hill Street Mission of St John’s (Free Church, Glasgow) and then, from 1886, served for eleven years as a well-loved parish minister of East Free Church in Broughty Ferry. Within months of his induction, he married Mary Carmichael Brown who introduced him to the writings of C. H. Spurgeon who,

² For a fuller biography and bibliography, see Gordon (2006).

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‘perhaps as much as any one . . . led him to the great decision of his life – the decision to preach the Atoning Death of the Lord Jesus Christ’ (Denney 1920: xvi). In 1897, Denney returned to his old alma mater, serving first as Professor of Systematic and Pastoral Theology, and then, from 1900, as Professor of New Testament Language and Literature, and, from 1915, as Principal, a post he held until his death in 1917. During these final decades, Denney’s theology reached its full maturity and his literary output proved most prodigious. Denney’s work attracted widespread acclaim from both students and academic colleagues. J. K. Mozley, for example, wrote: As a New Testament scholar and commentator [Denney] was in the first rank; as an expounder of the doctrine of the Atonement he was Dale’s superior in exact understanding of the text of the Gospels and Epistles; and if he lacked Forsyth’s distinctive vision of the theologia crucis, as that in which the revelation of God in Christ was summed up and its moral meaning secured, he possessed a clarity both of thought and style which made his writings far easier to understand. (1951: 130–1)

On numerous occasions, Forsyth also offered appreciative appraisals of Denney’s work. While Forsyth admitted, in 1906, to ‘have not read Denney with such care’ (Mackintosh 1943: 211), he later confessed that ‘Denney became a court of reference in my silent thought. No man was so needful for the conscience of the Church and the public . . . There is nobody left now to be the theological prophet and lead in the moral reconstruction of belief ’ (Forsyth 1920: n.p.). On another occasion, Forsyth judged that Denney ‘has more important things to say than anyone at present writing theology’ (Hunter 1962: 9). And again: ‘Denney is the greatest thinker we have upon our side’ (Moffatt 1921: 153). Forsyth’s praise notwithstanding, the assessment of one commentator is quite fair: ‘It is probably safe to say that in so far as Dr. Denney’s actual opinions are concerned, they will have little influence on the future of theology. He was not a great pathfinder. But his work will always command respect for its apologetic value in his own generation’ (Anon. 1919: 428). Our two subjects were concerned to bridge the gulf that modernity had opened up between the universities and the churches. Denney’s commitment to ‘do the work of an evangelist’ (Denney 1920: 176) meant that he had no interest in theological fads, insisting that ‘the propagation and . . . the scientific construction of the Christian religion . . . should never be divorced’ (Denney 1902: 283). His habits, like those of Forsyth, arose from the conviction that responsible theology ‘must pay attention to the world God has placed us in’. For, as Forsyth asserted, ‘it is this age that we are set to serve, change, and raise. It is not another in which we do not live. We must deal with our own conditions’ (1945: 357; cf. Denney 1903: 20). Their interests therefore were unconfined to explicitly ecclesiastical and

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theological concerns. But regardless of the subject, they shared a conviction that the cross is the locus of God’s self-justification and self-discovery, realities which are confirmed in the evangelical experience of forgiveness and which are orientated towards the transformation of the human person and of the wider public.

Forsyth on the Cross All Forsyth’s major theological concerns are examined sub specie crucis. He insists that the development of any meaningful staurology (theology of the cross) calls for more than merely cataloguing biblical texts or seeking to contain the atonement’s meanings by recourse to metaphors. It calls for situating interpretations of the cross within the frame of a universal, coherent, and moral ontology, more basic and more unfailing than is its physicalist counterpart. This ontology, which is the expansion of an ‘eternal moral personality’ (1962: 19), engages human persons through the organ of the conscience and directs creation towards the end for which God creates all things; namely, the realization of divine holiness everywhere, God’s self-realization in the other. While Denney avers that ‘the only source of redemption’ lay in God’s interest in ‘all sinners’ (1902: 95), for Forsyth, the source is God’s own ‘insatiable holiness’ (1962: 30). ‘The first charge on a Redeemer’, therefore, ‘is satisfaction to that holiness’ (1957: 4). It is this demand by God upon God—the sense that God owed it to God’s self to self-propitiate and to find God’s self ‘on a world scale amid the extremest conditions created by human sin’ (1923: 299)—that necessitates God’s reconciling work in the cross. Here, God’s entire human life must confront and bring to naught God’s antithesis—sin—lest all things, and God, be placed at risk: ‘Holy love must heal itself. The personality of God, being holy, must recover and assert itself in the sanctification of the whole universe, and by its own resources make itself good in its infinite harmony everywhere in and between all souls’ (1923: 298–99). The Kantian ‘must’ spoken here reaches its most rhetorically-powerful articulation in Forsyth’s expression ‘Die sin must or God’ (1916: 151). There is an almost aesthetic quality in Forsyth’s staurology: the cross is not only where God finds God’s self in the world, but also where God feels so found. It is also a staurology characterized by a relentless theocentrism: the cross is first and foremost God’s answer to God’s self, God’s definitive response to the first petition of the Lord’s Prayer—‘hallowed be thy name’. What is at stake, Forsyth claims, is the entire fabric of reality. More critically, unless God’s antithesis be brought to naught, the threat of God’s own being being erased remains a terrifying possibility. Whether this implied dualism is a provisional or ontological one is never resolved in Forsyth’s writing. What is resolved is that such a situation is unmarked by permanence.

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In a rare footnote, Forsyth reveals the source of his thinking here to be Hegel’s Religionsphilosophie wherein Hegel speaks of God’s ‘going out . . . into finitude’ and of manifesting God’s self ‘in finitude’ (Hegel 1895: 38). Christ, as Hegel has it, has taken upon himself ‘something foreign to God’—‘finitude in all its forms, and which at its furthest extreme is represented by Evil’—‘in order to slay it by His death’ (1895: 92–3). The ‘Universal puts itself into antithesis with itself ’ in order to return to itself through an act which abolishes the ‘rigidity of the antithesis’ (1895: 87, 111). Hegel informs Forsyth’s unyielding conviction that God alone can satisfy the moral order God never disturbed and pay the cost God never incurred. In the holiness of the cross, the living God, who is ‘the dying God’ (Forsyth 2013: 136), finds God’s self. By taking this route, Forsyth avoids an unacceptable and rarely-resolved schism in much Protestant theology—the rift between Christology and theology proper. There is no redemption by proxy. Following Calvin, Forsyth locates his staurology in the territory of moral action, the reconciling achievement of the cross lying in Christ’s perfect and suffering obedience: ‘[God] could be satisfied and rejoiced only by the hallowing of His name, by perfect and obedient answer to His holy heart from amid conditions of pain, death, and judgement’ (1910b: 205–6). The obedience unveiled in the divine economy is an unbroken prolongation of that which marks the triune life in tempore and in aeternitate, and so constitutes Christ’s whole personality as God’s Son. There is nothing in the Father’s perfect Word that is not answering the Father in their history together with the world as it is drawn out by the Spirit. The cross’s value, moreover, lay in it being not only the act of God performed ab extra upon humanity, but also in it being that act of God done ab intra—from the side of and within the limitations of the human situation. Here, God’s voluntary selfhumiliation finds a most gratifying and creative voice in Forsyth’s modified kenoticism, a doctrine which attracts no support in Denney but which ‘more than any other single notion points to the deepest sense of the mystery of the incarnation’ (MacKinnon 1972: 297). Forsyth argues for a complementary two-act movement of kenosis (emptying) and plerosis (filling) in Christ’s life. Regarding the latter, the cross is where Christ comes to his fullness, where God finds God’s self. Forsyth also anticipates and responds to objections of the doctrine by defining kenosis in terms of the self-limitation, self-contraction, or self-compression of the divine attributes. This idea bears witness to God’s true omnipotence while underscoring Christ’s moral achievement: omnipotence because God would not be truly omnipotent if God did not have ‘the power to limit Himself . . . to bend and die’ (1957: 33), and a moral achievement because the nature of confession that holiness seeks must come from the side of the creature. Such a move is also a fruit of Forsyth’s aversion to Chalcedonianism on grounds that it capitulates to Hellenistic ideas, a move which exposes him, unfairly, to the charge of promoting a low or merely instrumental view of the incarnation, or even of advancing a form of Eutychianism.

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Here Forsyth is particularly indebted to Anselm’s conviction that there is a requirement that atonement also arrives ‘from sin’s side’, as it were. Given humanity’s moral quagmire, however, the undoing of the effects of sustained blasphemy ‘from the sinner’s side’ remains impossible, let alone that done ‘on the scale of the race’, as Forsyth insists is called for (1987: 108–9). Reconciliation therefore is, from first to last, wholly grace: ‘Procured grace is a contradiction in terms. The atonement did not procure grace, it flowed from grace’ (1910a: 78). Neither is God reconciled by any third party: ‘God came, He did not send’ (1918: 263). Forsyth is not uncritical of Anselm, however. While preserving Anselm’s view that for God to simply forgive would be dishonourable, Forsyth believes that by highlighting (feudal) honour rather than holiness, Anselm ‘put theology on a false track’ (1910b: 223), sponsoring a compounding of sin rather than sin’s full abrogation. Moreover, he contends that Anselm failed to appreciate the personal nature of Christ’s sacrifice, its concern with obedience. And Anselm’s Christ, he believes, acts entirely over our heads, without any real reference to the human nature wherein the benefit is to take effect, and so leaves human subjects mere beneficiaries. Middle Age soteriology, Forsyth insists, requires the ethical advances of Protestant orthodoxy which place the making of satisfaction in the moral and personal realm of the conscience. Unsurprisingly, Forsyth, along with Denney, welcomes—with some caution— many of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century assaults on penal theories of the atonement, and shows some sympathy for the achievements of the German mediating theologians, particularly those of Isaak Dorner, and for the ‘new’ Christologies proposed by R. C. Moberly and J. McLeod Campbell. He does not, however, follow the fashion of rejecting wholesale the penal and substitutionary elements within the atonement. He wants to retain these for their ‘positive worth’ while shifting away from the ‘quid pro quos’ and ‘dubious ethics of substitution’ that characterize such and which tend to vacate the action of genuine personality and to promote ‘mere distributive equity’ (1901: 67; 1887: 126; 1957: 4). Whether or not he wholly succeeds in this effort remains an open question. But one way that Forsyth does achieve this retention at key junctures is to rework atonement theologies old and new into a threefold cord of triumph, satisfaction, and regeneration. According to Forsyth, this corresponds to Christ’s threefold confession of God’s holiness: ‘[Triumph] emphasises the finality of our Lord’s victory over the evil power or devil; . . . [Satisfaction], the finality of His satisfaction, expiation, or atonement presented to the holy power of God; and . . . [Regeneration] the finality of His sanctifying or new-creative influence on the soul of [persons]’ (1910b: 199). Positively, Forsyth might say, through its confession of God’s holiness, the cross reveals, establishes, and puts into historic action the changeless grace of God. Negatively, the revelation and establishment of holiness takes place through the revelation of sin’s sinfulness and of sin’s judgement. Creatively, Christ’s cross constitutes out of the wreck of the old a new humanity in communion with God.

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Regarding this latter object, Forsyth contends that one of the grounds for divine satisfaction is the atonement’s anticipation and effect upon creatures called to share in God’s holiness. One reason for Forsyth’s hesitation about penal theories is their fundamentally backward vista. Within their own terms of reference, penal models leave human beings pardoned criminals but not participants in God’s new work. Conversely, cruciform justice transforms not only human subjects but also the structures they occupy. This too is part of Christ’s one work of reconciliation and is not its mere sequel. Put otherwise, Holy Love does not overcome its antithesis by merely destroying it. Rather, Holy Love achieves its telos through the recreation of those persons for whom sin has become a way of being and the transformation of those structures that befit such. It is because judgement has a particularly teleological, liberating, and creative character to it that it is to be anticipated in hope rather than recoiled from in dread.

Denney on the Cross Denney’s presentation of Christ owes an uncompromising debt to the witness of the New Testament, and particularly to St Paul. From the Apostle, Denney learns that Christ—and not merely a word about him—is the content of the Christian community’s kerygma, the sine qua non of his atoning action explicated as both propitiation and divine gift. In the Bible, Denney argues, ‘the Cross dominates everything. It interprets everything. It puts all things in their true relations to each other’ (1902: 315). Alan Sell describes Denney as ‘a man of one theme’ (1987: 195), and few would doubt that Denney’s work on the atonement ‘represents his major contribution as a theologian, a contribution by which his reputation must stand or fall’ (Marshall 1969: 225). Christian speech is not exhausted in Denney’s theology by attention to the Easter activities, however. Both he and Forsyth gave much attention to the Jesus of the Gospels, underscoring how those acquainted with Christ in his ministry are transfigured by his personality and ‘initiated . . . into the mystery of His Passion’ (1902: 294). This is the pattern by which the Spirit continues to make the ‘present and eternal’ Christ known ‘here and now’, for ‘the historical Christ does not belong to the past’ (1917: 9). Although Denney reads Christ’s entire life as the revelation of God and of God’s kingdom, he insists that to truly preach Christ is to represent his death as ‘the main part’ (1908a: 398). Here Denney takes aim at the Christian Platonists, and at B. F. Westcott and J. M. Wilson who, in his estimation, ‘concentrate attention on the Incarnation as something which can be appreciated entirely independent’ of the atonement (1902: 320–1). Denney rejects this move for three reasons: first, it represents an unwelcome shift from the New Testament’s ‘centre of gravity’: ‘Not Bethlehem, but Calvary, is the focus of revelation, and any construction of Christianity which ignores or denies this distorts Christianity by putting it out of

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focus’ (1902: 324, 325). Second, Denney, like Forsyth, expresses concern that the theological conditions that sponsor a focus on incarnation over that of atonement grant undue attention to speculative rather than moral problems, a dislike bred from the Idealism he first encountered in Edward Caird’s class at Glasgow University, and which he sees pressed intemperately in Ritschl’s chasm between religion and metaphysics. Third, Denney believes that the ‘obtrusion of the Incarnation at the cost of the Atonement’ (1902: 327) promotes neo-Hegelian sentimentality. One might argue that Denney’s response to the work of Westcott and Wilson restricts the risky shape that love takes in the divine economy, and that neither the genesis nor the history of Jesus’ life need be played off against its terminus. Denney’s attempt to clarify his position by stating that Christ’s ‘life is part of His death’ (1903: 109) is unlikely to satisfy many readers. But it would be a misjudgement to conclude that Denney is not alert to the force of at least some of the main counter-arguments. He states, for example, that ‘when the death [of Christ] is separated from the life it loses moral character’ (1903: 109). But he stops short of offering any exhaustive alternative, an indication of a Bible scholar’s reluctance to traverse ground the Bible itself does not ply but where a systematician might be more confident—or foolhardy?—to tread. No objection can be mounted, however, that for Denney the reconciliation secured in the cross is ‘the diamond pivot on which the whole system of Christian truth revolves’ and that ‘to displace it or tamper with it is to reduce the New Testament to an intellectual chaos’ (1895: 109). Contra Julius Kaftan and other neo-Ritschlians, Denney insists that ‘reconciliation is not something which is doing; it is something which is done’ (1902: 146)—‘if we cannot say, Here is the reconciliation, receive it, – then for [humanity’s] actual state we have no Gospel at all’ (1907b: 214). So as stoutly Protestant as he was, Denney used to say that he envied the Roman Catholic priest his crucifix: ‘I would like to go into every church in the land’, he said, ‘and, holding up the crucifix, cry to the congregation “God loves like that” ’ (Taylor 1962: 10). Denney shares Forsyth’s concern to safeguard against any suggestion that in Jesus the Son propitiated an angry Father; or that there is an eternal contradiction in the divine life; or that the Father is ever anything but well-pleased with the Son. He makes plain, however, that reconciliation both presupposes and overcomes a ‘state of estrangement’ between God and humanity: ‘There is something in God as well as something in [the human person] which has to be dealt with before there can be peace’ (1907b: 211). Regrettably, Denney, unlike Forsyth, avoids explaining exactly what this ‘something in God’ is, and so threatens to open the door to a God who is in some way conditioned by the work of the cross. Christ’s death is, Denney says, ‘The condition of [humanity’s] entering again into fellowship with [God]’ (1902: 174). Still, Denney’s staurology offers an alternative to the neo-Hegelian Idealism that so dominated late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theology wherein sin is judged to be something that creation, and presumably God, must in

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some sense come to be reconciled with. Denney judges that such schemes reduce God’s propitiating work to empty semantics and insists, with Forsyth, that ‘God is irreconcilable to evil’ (1903: 82). The confession of God’s holiness made in the atonement is, therefore, ‘necessary’, not only for the creature but also for God (1903: 94; 1917: 162). But if, as Denney insists, God in God’s Son enters into the ‘derangement’, ‘disturbance’, ‘violence’, and ‘whole responsibility of the situation created by sin’ (1903: 54, 91), then the concern need not be God’s being reconciled with sin but rather God’s being fully identified with sin, so that the death of God in the death of Christ means sin’s end. To recognize the moral contradiction expressed in a text like 2 Corinthians 5:21 (a favourite for both Denney and Forsyth) is to recognize the secret of Holy Love that recoils not from propitiatory judgement, apart from which the Gospel is robbed of its ‘nerve’ (1907b: 222).³ In St Paul’s thought, Denney surmises, the death of Christ relates to three main realities: the love of God, the love of Christ, and the sinfulness of human beings. The cross demonstrates the unsurpassable character of the divine love, makes public the Son’s loving obedience towards the Father with whom he loves the world, and ‘is a death for sin, whatever else may be said of it’. Here, Denney’s commitment to the idea of substitutionary atonement comes to the fore: ‘there was no possibility of Christ’s dealing with sin effectually except by taking our responsibility in it on himself – that is, except by dying for it’ (1902: 126). According to Denney, it is Christ’s ‘purgation of sins’ that constitutes ‘the evangelical truth which is covered by the word “substitute”, and which is not covered by the word “representative” ’ (1902: 236). Denney’s reservations vis-à-vis the grammar of ‘representative’ appear to rest on ‘a confusion between a representative and a delegate’ (Caird 1979: 198), and betray some amnesia about his best instincts that faithful witness to the atonement calls for a multiplicity of metaphors. It is made more problematic too because he interprets the idea of Christ’s being made a substitute for humanity solely as a human work rather than a gift of God. In Denney’s view, Christ dies as humanity’s substitute alone, and only becomes humanity’s representative after the sinner’s conversion. The propitiatory elements in God’s atoning work must not, for Denney, be divorced from its ethical or moral elements, which build on the foundation of the former, lest God’s work in Christ be reduced to ‘a piece of pure mythology’ (1902: 127). Christ’s death evokes, empowers, and draws people ‘into a moral fellowship’ with God, and there calls for Christ’s action to be ‘reproduced somehow in their own life’ (1903: 100, 102):⁴ ‘The forensic theory of atonement . . . is not unrelated ³ This emphasis on Christ’s death as a moral reality may be difficult to reconcile with Denney’s claim that Christ did not suffer the punishment of a guilty conscience. Jesus’ unfamiliarity with what makes any death ‘dreadful’, the shadow of a bad conscience, raises questions about Jesus’ full identification with sinners in their death, and what it can mean, therefore, for Christ to ‘enter by dying into the experiences which death is for sinners’ (1917: 279–80). ⁴ Cf. Denney (1897b: 426). At times, Denney overstates his case. E.g. Denney (1911: 2, 275).

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to the ethico-mystical; it is not parallel to it; it is not a mistaken ad hominem or rather ad Pharisaeum mode of thought which ought to be displaced by the other; it has the essential eternal truth in it by which and by which alone the experiences are generated in which the strength of the other is supposed to lie’ (1902: 184). Denney is uninterested in ‘what can be said in defence of Christianity remoto Christo or quasi nihil sciatur de Christo’ (1917: 65). Evident here is not only some distance that Denney wants to mark between himself and Anselm, but also his resistance towards those absurd reductions of staurology to a single atonement model or unambiguous dogmatic articulation. Here he shares also Forsyth’s concern to underscore the regenerative effects of the atonement. Neither cares much for any antithesis between objective and subjective aspects in discussing the atonement, nor to champion any ‘incompatibility between a divine necessity and a necessity for us’ (1903: 90; italics in original). The recovery of the ‘for us’ is, Denney believes, the real mithridate to historical scepticism. He suggests, for example, that Tertullian’s legal categories be employed to interpret Christ’s work ‘on the analogy of human experience in the moral world’, and that when reading Athanasius ‘room has to be made . . . for ideas more capable of verification in human experience’ (1917: 40, 51). At this point he criticizes Anselm—the representative of that ‘crude and immoral redemptiones of the Middle Ages’— for formulating a theology of satisfaction from rational necessities that belong to ‘the world of metaphysics’ rather than of ‘spiritual experience’ (1917: 51, 75). A younger Denney had preached that ‘grace . . . gives life only because it supplies a new motive in the knowledge of God’s love as revealed in the death of Jesus Christ’ (1885: 7). But by 1893, his ‘Ritschlian appreciation of Anselm and Abelard’ is converted towards a more rigorous defence of substitution that, in Denney’s judgement, does not ‘ignore the serious element in the situation which the atonement is designed to meet’. As he expresses to W. Robertson Nicoll: [Hastings Rashdall’s] line of interpretation has been taken as far as it will go now, and has yielded all it can yield; . . . it is time to rediscover the fact that the Apostles in their doctrine of atonement were dealing with something which never comes within Rashdall’s (nor Ritschl’s) view – namely, God’s condemnation of sin as a terrifically real and serious thing. It may seem irreverent to say so, but the ‘höchste einzigartige Heldenaufopferung’ theory of the atonement seems to me simply to ignore the serious element in the situation which the atonement is designed to meet. A martyrdom in plain English, no matter how holy and loving the martyr, is an irrelevance . . . There is a fascinating way of presenting Abelardism, but as a fisher-evangelist, a friend of mine, once said to me, to preach it is like fishing with a barbless hook: your bait is taken, but you don’t catch men. (1920: 1–2)

Still, those staurologies that minimize or overlook moral reproductions of Christ’s atoning work in the believer’s life are judged wholly inadequate. With Forsyth, Denney believes this to be one of the main achievements of the Protestant Reformations.

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There is, to be sure, a change in emphasis, methodology, atmosphere, and grammar in Denney’s later thinking on the atonement. So Gordon: Concepts [Denney] considered abstract, contractual or mechanical were displaced by others more relational, ethical and personal, and latterly his preferred metaphors were those which conveyed the truths of sin as essentially broken relationship and the cross as the effectual and final revelation of divine sinbearing love. (2006: 222)

This conviction is most evident in The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation wherein Denney welcomes Anselm’s ‘truly heroic effort to present the truth of the Christian doctrine of reconciliation in a scientific and systematic form’ (1917: 64) and by so doing insists that the ends for God’s creation of humanity, namely communion, are necessarily placed at the forefront of Cur Deus Homo?—‘the truest and greatest book on the Atonement that has ever been written’ (1903: 83, 84). He also welcomes Abelard’s stress on the loving character of God’s cruciform revelation and its appeal ‘for love’ (1917: 82), thereby rescuing atonement theology from the metaphysicians. He welcomes too Thomas’ presentation of the atonement as ‘something not alien to those who are to be saved, but capable of a moral appropriation’ (1917: 87)—an emphasis that, in Denney’s estimation, marks a genuine advance on Anselm’s theology and further develops the Abelardian emphasis on communion. Osiander’s (and, later, Newman’s) efforts to interpret the doctrine of justification by faith ‘“mystically,” not legally’ (1917: 106) is also appraised positively, as is much in Grotius’ governmental treatment of the atonement because it provokes a ‘more searching study of such ideas as law and punishment’, and assists to ‘remove the ban of individualism, and to revive the idea of the Kingdom of God by its emphasis on the idea of a common good’ (1917: 113). Denney welcomes too the Socinian insistence that divine forgiveness is free and unconditioned by an inner need for satisfaction, even while criticizing the Socinian rejection of the notion that ‘in Christ God somehow takes part with sinners against Himself ’ (1917: 100; italics in original); and he welcomes the more recent work undertaken by McLeod Campbell and Horace Bushnell, the latter for his exposition of Christ’s love as vicarious self-giving ‘in the whole circumstances of our stricken life’, and the former for his insistence on the way that Christ takes upon himself the responsibility of human persons to God in ‘the calamity, the burden, and the ruin of their sin’ (1917: 256, 258).⁵ Certainly, the younger Denney’s focus on the atonement’s objective, propitiatory, and substitutionary elements is expanded in his more mature writings to include a greater emphasis on those ⁵ This was a return to an earlier interest for Denney. In his lecture on ‘The Passion of the Son’, part of his series of lectures on the Apostles’ Creed delivered during his charge at Broughty Ferry (Denney 1888), Denney examined the notion of vicarious penitential feeling as articulated in Bushnell’s The Vicarious Sacrifice Grounded in Principles of Universal Obligation and Mason’s The Faith of the Gospel, a subject revisited in his farewell sermon to that same congregation. See Denney (1897a: 4).

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theories more amenable to relational and existential accounts. As Denney would express it in a late lecture: The death of Christ is a fact or reality with many aspects, many constituents, many relations, intentions and powers in it, and its reconciling virtue may be dependent on them all . . . Truths are often dependent on each other for their virtue, even when the interdependence is not perceived; and no doctrine has suffered more than the doctrine of the atonement from exclusive emphasis being laid on this or that element of truth which really ceases to be effective when its connection with others is ignored. (n.d.: 6)

It has been suggested that too absent from both Denney’s and Forsyth’s accounts of the cross is explicit witness to the work of the Holy Spirit. Denney, who wrote the article on ‘Holy Spirit’ for Hastings’ A Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels (1906), admits that the Holy Spirit is ‘a very vague term’ and is ‘practically indistinguishable’ from an experience of Christ, ‘an experience of power, life, and joy’ resulting from faith (1917: 308, 309, 310).⁶ Moreover, there is, in Denney’s words, ‘no justification . . . for representing the Spirit as a third person in the same sense as God and Christ’ (1917: 311; cf. 1908a: 400–1). Somewhat unsurprisingly, therefore, Denney suffered from the accusation that he was implicitly binitarian in his theology.⁷ Forsyth also faced the charge that his theology was pneumatologically undersupplied.⁸ In Denney’s defence, Taylor suggests that in Denney’s theology the Spirit is prevalent without being explicit (1962: 119–32). In Forsyth’s defence, the hazards of identifying Spirit with Hegel’s and Romanticism’s Geist, and that with history itself, were never far away. Indeed, Forsyth explicitly warns of those who are ‘full of Geist . . . but not full of the Holy Ghost’ (1914: 640). In truth, our two subjects insist on the closest possible relation between cross and Spirit, consistently identify the Spirit’s sanctifying work closely with Christology, emphasize that it is by the Spirit that we make our theories of atonement, and that the Spirit guides God’s people in the exegesis, proclamation, and hearing of Scripture. Both were, after all, sons of Calvin.

Conclusion While both of our subjects received a favourable hearing in their day, interest in Forsyth’s thought has endured in ways that that in Denney’s has not. There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the most important is that it was Forsyth’s theology by and large—and particularly what he had to say about the cross—that ⁶ See Denney (1906: 738). ⁷ See Darlow (1925: 360–5). ⁸ See Gunton (1995: 54); Sykes (1995: 13–14); Terry (2007: 102).

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better spoke to a world whose confidence in progress had been buried in the ‘chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful . . . abode of madness’ (Owen 1967: 431)—the no man’s lands of Flanders and France. Forsyth, in ways manifestly more pronounced than Denney, insists that what the death of God in Jesus reveals is that salvation is not necessarily experienced as salvation. He sees that if little else, the Gospels remind us of the ineradicability of the tragic from Christianity, and that while the Church might speak of victory it remains victory achieved at dreadful and unjustifiable cost. An astute reader of Forsyth, Donald MacKinnon reminds us that in the Gospels, ‘Christ’s ministry ends in sheer disaster’ (1979: 83). The tragedy is not resolved; and life’s ambiguity is not overcome. Here Jesus’ identity with God really is put at risk—and with it God’s relationship with creation. This is part of the cross’s great paradox—that no longer can transcendence and tragedy be thought of apart from each other. The temptation is to muffle Christ’s cry of dereliction, to domesticate the scandal called ‘cross’, to proclaim that the resurrection somehow makes it all less tragic—as if the end somehow is the sheer manipulation of a process writ large with conflict, as if the truth of the human and divine dilemma is a cruel mirage, as if grace were not really grace all the way down, as if the cross were something other than the foundations of a consciously-godless world ‘being hammered out’ to their acrimonious end (MacKinnon 1979: 20), as if the very ‘abysses of existence’ were not being ‘sounded and the ultimate contradictions of life plumbed and explored’ (MacKinnon 1968: 104) in this one raw human history called Jesus. At no point is the gulf between the New Testament and Christian Platonism more wide, and the implications for Christian theology and its reading of history more grave. On this note, Forsyth’s The Justification of God, first published in 1916, is among the most compelling of theological responses to the Second World War, and indeed to the litany of creation’s horrors since.⁹

Bibliography Anon. (1919). ‘Current Opinion’, The Biblical World 53/4: 424–32. Andrews, Jessie F. (1938). ‘Memoir’, in P. T. Forsyth, The Work of Christ. London: Independent Press, vii–xxviii. Benedetto, Robert (1993). P. T. Forsyth: Bibliography and Index. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Bradley, William L. (1952). P. T. Forsyth: The Man and His Work. London: Independent Press.

⁹ As one reviewer noted, ‘It has taken a second World War to bring to light the significance of what P. T. Forsyth saw clearly as the issues whilst the first . . . was still raging. This is in itself evidence enough of his prophetic insight, and spiritual sensitivity’ (Gummer 1948: 349).

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Caird, George B. (1979). ‘Biblical Classics: VIII. James Denney: The Death of Christ’, The Expository Times 90/7: 196–9. Darlow, T. H. (1925). William Robertson Nicoll: His Life and Letters. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Denney, James (n.d.). DEN09-11: ‘The Atonement (I)’. Unpublished lecture, New College, Edinburgh. Denney, James (1885). DEN06-07c: ‘Sin Shall Not Have Dominion’. Unpublished sermon, New College, Edinburgh. Denney, James (1888). DEN08-18: ‘Apostles’ Creed 4 – Passion’. Unpublished lecture, New College, Edinburgh. Denney, James (1895). Studies in Theology: Lectures Delivered in Chicago Theological Seminary. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Denney, James (1897a). DEN07-156: ‘The Love of God (farewell sermon)’. Unpublished sermon, New College, Edinburgh. Denney, James (1897b). ‘Dogmatic Theology’, The Expositor 5/6: 422–40. Denney, James (1902). The Death of Christ: Its Place and Interpretation in the New Testament. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Denney, James (1903). The Atonement and the Modern Mind. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Denney, James (1906). ‘Holy Spirit’, in James Hastings (ed.), A Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 731–3. Denney, James (1907a). ‘Principal Forsyth on Preaching’, The British Weekly, 24 October, p. 57. Denney, James (1907b). The Second Epistle to the Corinthians. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Denney, James (1908a). Jesus and the Gospel: Christianity Justified in the Mind of Christ. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Denney, James (1908b). ‘Preaching Christ’, in James Hastings, John C. Lambert, and John A. Selbie (eds.), A Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Denney, James (1911). The Way Everlasting. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Denney, James (1917). The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Denney, James (1920). Letters of Principal James Denney to W. Robertson Nicoll, 1893–1917. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Denney, James (1959). The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation. London: James Clark & Co. Forsyth, P. T. (1887). ‘Sunday Schools and Modern Theology’, The Christian World Pulpit, 23 February, pp. 123–7. Forsyth, P. T. (1901). ‘The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought’, in F. Godet et al. (eds.), The Atonement in Modern Religious Thought: A Theological Symposium,. New York: Thomas Whittaker, 61–88.

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Forsyth, P. T. (1910a). The Person and Place of Jesus Christ: The Congregational Union Lecture for 1909. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Forsyth, P. T. (1910b). The Cruciality of the Cross. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Forsyth, P. T. (1910c). The Work of Christ. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Forsyth, P. T. (1914). ‘Regeneration, Creation, and Miracle’, Methodist Review Quarterly 64: 627–43. Forsyth, P. T. (1916). The Justification of God: Lectures for War-Time on a Christian Theodicy. London: Duckworth & Co. Forsyth, P. T. (1918). ‘The Christianity of Christ and Christ our Christianity’, Review and Expositor 15/3: 249–65. Forsyth, P. T. (1920). Letter to William Robertson Nicoll, 25 November. Unpublished. Forsyth, P. T. (1923). ‘The Preaching of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ. [VII:] The Meaning of a Sinless Christ’, The Expositor, 8th series, 25: 288–312. Forsyth, P. T. (1945). ‘Gain and Godliness’, Congregational Quarterly 23: 356–8. Forsyth, P. T. (1957). God the Holy Father. London: Independent Press. Forsyth, P. T. (1962). The Church, the Gospel and Society. London: Independent Press. Forsyth, P. T. (1987). The Preaching of Jesus and the Gospel of Christ. Blackwood, South Australia: New Creation. Forsyth, P. T. (2013). ‘The Pulpit and the Age, 1885’, in J. A. Goroncy (ed.), Descending on Humanity and Intervening in History: Notes from the Pulpit Ministry of P. T. Forsyth. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 131–44. Gordon, James M. (2006). James Denney (1856–1917): An Intellectual and Contextual Biography. Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press. Goroncy, Jason A. (2012). ‘ “Tha mi a’ toirt fainear dur gearan”: J. McLeod Campbell and P. T. Forsyth on the Extent of Christ’s Vicarious Ministry’, in Myk Habets and Bobby Grow (eds.), Evangelical Calvinism: Essays Resourcing the Continuing Reformation of the Church. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 253–86. Goroncy, Jason A. (ed.) (2013a). Descending on Humanity and Intervening in History: Notes from the Pulpit Ministry of P. T. Forsyth. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. Goroncy, Jason A. (2013b). Hallowed Be Thy Name: The Sanctification of All in the Soteriology of Peter Taylor Forsyth. London: T&T Clark. Gummer, Selwyn (1948). ‘Peter Taylor Forsyth: A Contemporary Theologian’, London Quarterly and Holborn Review 173: 349–53. Gunton, Colin E. (1995). ‘The Real as the Redemptive: Forsyth on Authority and Freedom’, in Trevor A. Hart (ed.), Justice the True and Only Mercy: Essays on the Life and Theology of Peter Taylor Forsyth. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 37–58. Hegel, G. W. F. (1895). Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 3, trans. E. B. Speirs and Burdon Sanderson. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tübner & Co. Hunter, Archibald M. (1949). ‘The Theological Wisdom of James Denney’, The Expository Times 60: 238–40.

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Hunter, Archibald M. (1962). ‘Foreword’, in John Randolph Taylor (ed.), God Loves Like That! The Theology of James Denney. London: SCM Press, 9–10. McCurdy, Leslie (1995). ‘Bibliography’, in Trevor A. Hart (ed.), Justice the True and Only Mercy: Essays on the Life and Theology of Peter Taylor Forsyth. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 256–330. MacKinnon, Donald M. (1968). Borderlands of Theology. Philadelphia, PA: J. B. Lippincott Company. MacKinnon, Donald M. (1972). ‘ “Substance” in Christology – A Cross-Bench View’, in S. W. Sykes and J. Clayton (eds.), Christ, Faith and History: Cambridge Studies in Christology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 279–300. MacKinnon, Donald M. (1979). Explorations in Theology 5. London: SCM Press. Mackintosh, Robert (1943). ‘The Authority of the Cross’, Congregational Quarterly 21: 209–18. Marshall, I. Howard (1969). ‘James Denney’, in Philip Edgcumbe Hughes (ed.), Creative Minds in Contemporary Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 203–38. Moffatt, James (ed.) (1921). Letters of Principal James Denney to His Family and Friends. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Mozley, John K. (1951). Some Tendencies in British Theology: From the Publication of Lux Mundi to the Present Day. London: SPCK. Owen, Wilfred (1967). The Collected Letters of Wilfred Owen. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sell, Alan P. F. (1987). Defending and Declaring the Faith: Some Scottish Examples, 1860–1920. Exeter: Paternoster Press. Sykes, Stephen W. (1995). ‘P. T. Forsyth on the Church’, in Trevor A. Hart (ed.), Justice the True and Only Mercy: Essays on the Life and Theology of Peter Taylor Forsyth. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1–15. Taylor, John Randolph (1962). God Loves Like That! The Theology of James Denney. London: SCM Press. Terry, Justyn (2007). The Justifying Judgement of God: A Reassessment of the Place of Judgement in the Saving Work of Christ. Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press.

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4 The Theology of the Scottish Protestant Missionary Movement Brian Stanley

Was there a distinctively Scottish approach to Protestant foreign missions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? And if there was, how should we account for that distinctiveness? Did it arise from the particular emphases and frameworks of the inheritance of Reformed theology in Scotland? Or from the particular intellectual shape that the Enlightenment assumed in Scotland? Or from the confluence between the two? Before making an attempt to answer this cluster of associated questions, two preliminary observations must be made. The first is that the Scottish contribution to the British Protestant overseas missionary enterprise was a disproportionately large one. In any survey of the most influential British missionary thinkers and strategists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Scottish names would occupy a very prominent place. To a greater extent than is often realized, the theological and cultural perspectives of the British churches on the peoples and religions of the non-European world were shaped by Scottish figures. Thus, any estimate of the most significant theorists of Christian education in British India would devote considerable attention to Alexander Duff of Calcutta, John Wilson of Bombay, and William Miller of Madras. Similarly, any survey of the changing patterns of theological reflection on the relationship of Christianity to Hinduism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries could not fail to mention John Nicol Farquhar, Nicol MacNicol, and Alfred George Hogg. Farquhar, having returned from service with the YMCA in India to become the first professor of comparative religion in the University of Manchester from 1924 to 1929, is remembered as one of the pioneers of the discipline of religious studies. Among the architects of a more sympathetic Christian approach to Islam, William Temple Gairdner of Cairo, a missionary of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), occupies a prominent place; he was a Scot, born in Ardrossan to a Presbyterian (originally Unitarian) physician father and an Evangelical Anglican mother. If our concern is with scholarly reflection on China and the study of the Confucian tradition, then James Legge, missionary of the London Missionary Society (LMS) and the first professor of Chinese Studies at Oxford from 1876 to 1897, is a figure of global importance. In East Asia in particular, Scots also made prominent contributions to Bible

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translation. Another LMS missionary, William Milne, was responsible for translating Deuteronomy to Job in Robert Morrison’s Chinese Bible of 1819. John Ross of the United Presbyterian mission to Manchuria is revered in Korea as the translator of the first Korean New Testament in 1887 and the founding father of Korean Protestantism. If our focus is on the African continent, and the ways in which Christians began to ponder the tangled questions of the slave trade, and the impact for good or ill of Western civilization, commerce, and colonial expansion, then John Philip, Robert Moffat, David Livingstone, John Mackenzie, Alexander Mackay, Mary Slessor, James Stewart, and Robert Laws all demand attention. If we are interested in the changing religious complexion of South America, a continent not usually associated with British missionary influence, Scots such as James (Diego) Thomson, Robert Reid Kalley, John Alexander Mackay, and A. Stuart MacNairn deserve mention as those who made seminal contributions to the growth and indigenization of Protestantism. If our concern is with the questions that overseas missions raised for the theological problem of Christian disunity, the name of Joseph Houldsworth Oldham would quickly come to the fore. We should also take note of those Scots whose influence over the missionary movement was exercised primarily within Britain, by their personal example, preaching, writing, or mentoring of theological students for missionary service. These include: David Bogue of the Gosport Seminary, who trained some 70 per cent of the London Missionary Society’s India missionaries before 1826 (Piggin 1984: 157); Thomas Chalmers, educator and inspirer of future missionaries at the University of St Andrews; John Love, secretary of the London and (later) of the Glasgow Missionary Societies, who gave his name to Lovedale in the eastern Cape, the most famous Scottish mission station in Africa; Annie Hunter Small, founder and principal of the Women’s Missionary Training Institute of the Free Church of Scotland (generally known as St Colm’s); and Professor David S. Cairns of Aberdeen, compiler of the influential Commission IV Report at the World Missionary Conference in 1910 on ‘The Christian Message in Relation to Non-Christian Religions’. A second important preliminary point that must be made is to underscore the truism that the Scottish contribution to the Protestant foreign missionary movement was not confined to those who served with the missions of the Church of Scotland or other Presbyterian churches. Of the twenty-three outstanding Scottish missionaries whose names have been mentioned above, thirteen were sent overseas by a mission agency that was not specifically linked to any of the Scottish Presbyterian churches.¹ When the Protestant missionary movement in Scotland began in the 1790s, its guiding ethos, like that of its English counterpart, was one of interdenominational evangelicalism. That strand of the Scottish missionary ¹ Wilson, Farquhar, Temple Gairdner, Legge, Philip, Moffat, Milne, Livingstone, Mackenzie, Alexander Mackay, Thomson, Kalley, MacNairn.

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movement continued to be extremely important long after the Assembly of the Church of Scotland eventually decided in 1824 to initiate its own overseas missionary efforts. The first secretary of the LMS, founded in 1795 as simply ‘The Missionary Society’, was the aforementioned John Love, minister of the Church of Scotland congregation at Spitalfields in London. The ‘Fundamental Principle’ of the LMS left each congregation of indigenous converts at liberty to decide their own denominational polity—a bold ecumenical principle, but one that ironically half-smuggled Congregationalism in through the back door. Its author was Alexander Waugh, minister of the Scots Secession Church in London, who was a rather Congregational kind of Presbyterian. Eight of those whom I have listed were missionaries of the LMS. One more—John Wilson—was originally a member of the Scottish Missionary Society, an interdenominational voluntary society founded in 1796 under the original name of the Edinburgh Missionary Society. Like its partner, the Glasgow Missionary Society, it was modelled on the example of the LMS, and endeavoured to embrace Presbyterians from both the Church of Scotland and the various seceding churches, an endeavour that ultimately failed in the case of the Glasgow Missionary Society (Walls 2002a: 175). Wilson only became a missionary of the Church of Scotland in 1835, six years after his arrival in Bombay. One of the other names listed—Robert Reid Kalley, a lifelong member of the Church of Scotland—was accepted by the LMS to serve in China, but had his connection severed when he became engaged to a spouse whom the Society deemed insufficiently healthy for the China field. He therefore chose to work independently, becoming a notable pioneer of the evangelical cause in Madeira and Brazil. Of the 1,023 missionaries appointed by the LMS between 1795 and 1895, no less than 183, or 17.8 per cent, were Scots (Calder 1945: 5–10). The Scottish missionary movement was thus a coat of many colours, some of which shone with a brighter Presbyterian hue than others. The Scottish pioneer among the Bakwena of southern Africa, Robert Moffat of Kuruman, though born to Presbyterian parents in East Lothian, professed conversion in 1814 in an Independent Methodist chapel in Cheshire, and subsequently became a Congregationalist through the influence of William Roby, a leading Congregational pastor in Manchester. John Philip, David Livingstone, and James Legge all came from Presbyterian families but went to the mission field as Congregationalists. Remarkably, Philip, Legge, and William Milne all came from the same Congregational church in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, a congregation formed in 1800 by the former minister of the General Associate Synod, George Cowie. Cowie had been ejected from the denomination on account of his identification with the vibrant movement of itinerant evangelism led by the brothers Robert and James Haldane (Escott 1960: 257). The Independent church in Hamilton which first Neil and Agnes Livingstone, and then their son David (after a period worshipping in the Old Relief Church), joined in the mid-1830s on their departure from the Church of Scotland, also owed its origins to James Haldane and his associates (Escott 1960:

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311–12; Ross 2002: 4–6). James ‘Diego’ Thomson, indefatigable pioneer of public education and agent of the British and Foreign Bible Society in many parts of Latin America and Spain, served before departing for Argentina in 1818 as co-pastor with James Haldane of the 3,200-seater Tabernacle at the top of Leith Walk in Edinburgh. The Tabernacle congregation increasingly followed the Haldane brothers in their adoption of Baptist principles in 1808; Thomson’s own convictions were undoubtedly Baptist. Alexander Mackay was a member of the Free Church of Scotland in Rynie, Aberdeenshire, but was employed by the CMS. He could never get his head round the predilection of the CMS for methods that strengthened the idea of English rule in Uganda—‘English men, English church, English formularies, English bishop’ (Mackay 1891: 362). J. N. Farquhar was a member of John Street Evangelical Union church in Aberdeen. The Evangelical Union was founded by James Morison, a minister of the United Secession Church who was expelled in 1841 for teaching the universality of the atonement. This small denomination was increasingly open to broader theological perspectives. It is worthy of note that one of Farquhar’s referees when he applied to the LMS in 1890 was A. M. Fairbairn, minister of another of the Evangelical Union’s congregations in Aberdeen. Fairbairn later became principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, and one of the most influential Nonconformist theologians of the late Victorian age. Fairbairn had studied in Berlin. As one of the first Scottish theologians to develop an interest in the science of religion, it seems probable that his interest rubbed off on Farquhar (Sharpe 1965: 110–19, 127–30). At the other end of the evangelical spectrum, Stuart MacNairn, missionary in Peru with the Regions Beyond Missionary Union from 1904 to 1911, and for forty years from 1912 general secretary of the Evangelical Union of South America (now Latin Link), had as a young man in 1897–8 attended missionary training courses in Edinburgh run by the United Presbyterian Church. However, his initial church links were with the nondenominational Carrubbers Close mission, after which he joined the Brethren assembly led by the Edinburgh solicitor and leading preacher among the Scottish Brethren, L. W. G. Alexander. John Alexander Mackay, sent as a missionary to Peru by the continuing Free Church of Scotland in 1916, was reared in the strict Calvinism of the Free Presbyterian Church in Inverness. He eventually espoused broader theological horizons, serving as president of Princeton Theological Seminary from 1936 to 1959, and as a member of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches from 1948 to 1954. His book The Other Spanish Christ (1932) urged that there was an alternative to the dead victim Christ of much Latin American piety—the living Christ of personal faith. Hence no discussion of the missionary theology and approaches of Scottish Protestants can confine itself to the official mission agencies of the main Scottish Presbyterian churches, nor even to those missionaries who were members of one of those churches but served with interdenominational societies.

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This cross-denominational selection of notable Scottish missionary figures suggests that it would be virtually impossible to identify any common core of theology that was shared by them all. Nevertheless, five broad generalizations can be offered. The first is that the Scottish missionary movement exemplifies with peculiar sharpness a tension that was endemic in both Catholic and Protestant missions from their very inception. Is the mission of the church better conducted through regular ecclesiastical structures, or through specialist voluntary agencies staffed by those most committed to the cause? The missionary movement that took root in Protestant Europe from the 1790s and then spread to North America, mostly favoured the second option. This was because the churches at national level were either indifferent to the cause of overseas mission—as was largely the case with the Church of England—or lacked any effective national structures with which to do it—as was the case with English Nonconformity. The distinctiveness of Scotland is that the national church in 1824 abandoned its original hesitancy about the overseas missionary cause and decided that, after all, it would ‘do’ foreign missions on its own account, and not leave the task to nondenominational voluntary societies. The Free Church of Scotland after 1843 inherited all the Church of Scotland’s missionaries, with the exception of one female missionary in Bengal (Walls 1993: 572), and continued the ecclesial tradition of overseas mission. The Scottish Presbyterian claim that foreign missions were properly an ecclesial activity, to be fully subject to the governing structures and confessional standards of a national church, was nevertheless to remain the exception, and not the rule, in Protestantism until the second half of the twentieth century. Then, under the influence of the missio Dei (the idea that mission is intrinsic to the purposes of God and hence also to the very being of the Church), the pendulum in the ecumenical movement swung back towards integrating mission and church. From the arrival of Alexander Duff in Calcutta in 1830 onwards, the mission thought of Scottish Presbyterians was more explicitly ecclesial in nature than was true of Protestants in England, Germany, or the United States, where the voluntary society model predominated. Nevertheless, the triumph of ‘churchly’ mission in Scotland was far from complete. In the first half of the nineteenth century, many Scottish missionaries, as we have seen, were deeply influenced by the interdenominational, antihierarchical, and outward-looking evangelicalism of the brothers James and Robert Haldane that was so typical of the mood of the early Protestant missionary movement, both within Britain and overseas. James Haldane’s principled view that the term ‘laity’ ideally ought to be abandoned as a relic of popery undoubtedly shaped the attitudes of many of those Scots from artisan backgrounds who volunteered for service in the Edinburgh, Glasgow, or London Missionary Societies (Lovegrove 2002: 128). Although the two former societies displayed their Presbyterian credentials by attempting to insist that all missionary candidates should complete a programme of training for ordination before being

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sent out, this rule was honoured more in the breach than in the making (Walls 2002a: 175). The missionary movement was a context in which the historic distinction of status between clerics and laymen—and, from the late nineteenth century, also, laywomen—was steadily eroded, and Presbyterian missions were no exception. For example, in the remote mission station of the United Presbyterian Church (later United Free Church) at Akpap near Okoyong in Calabar, where did authority lie at the close of the nineteenth century? Presbyterian orthodoxy dictated that it lay with the ordained male elders of the South-Eastern or Calabar Presbytery. In fact it was Mary Slessor, a member from 1886 of what was, in cheerful defiance of geography, termed the ‘Zenana’ Mission of the United Presbyterian Church, who in 1898 was appointed by the British Consul-General as Vice-Consul at Akpap, with power to adjudicate in local disputes on behalf of the colonial state. Though not an elder in the church, Slessor exercised an autonomous local ministry as a Christian magistrate that would have been unthinkable in a Presbyterian context in Scotland. Other issues of status were the consequence of the advent of medical missions. Some senior medical missionaries also became ordained. In October 1929 the senior medical missionary at Chogoria in central Kenya, Dr John W. Arthur, who had been ordained in 1915, demanded that the Church of Scotland Mission’s native employees and elders sign a pledge indicating their loyalty to the Church and support of its existing policy that a Christian girl should not be circumcised (Cunningham 2019: 255). The consequences were disastrous for the mission. Was the nature of Arthur’s authority medical, or ecclesial, or some undefined combination of the two? A second point worthy of consideration is whether the theology of Scottish missionaries as a whole bears the distinctive stamp of Calvin’s desire to see the entire life of Christian communities—including their political and economic affairs—brought under the theocratic rule of Christ. Such at least was the claim of David S. Cairns in an address to Scottish students in 1911 that identified three distinguishing features of the Scottish missionary tradition—though in fact they apply to most missions in the Reformed tradition. The first of these was a concern for the application of the doctrine of the kingdom of God to the societies to which missionaries went; the second was the ecclesiocentric emphasis already discussed; the third was an emphasis on ‘strong’ or rigorous theology (Cairns 1911; Walls 2002b). Certainly the great majority of Scottish missionaries had at least some Presbyterian blood coursing in their veins, though a good number had recoiled from stricter versions of Reformed doctrine towards populist varieties of evangelicalism that emphasized the universal and compelling love of God for all humankind—a route that in the more temperate theological climate of the late nineteenth century, could lead to J. N. Farquhar’s principle that Christ was the fulfilment of the highest aspirations of Hinduism. Scottish Presbyterian missionaries were more likely than were their English counterparts to insist that the goal

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of the mission enterprise should encompass the reform and regeneration of entire ‘heathen’ communities according to the law of Christ. That insistence could lead to an endorsement of imperial objectives, but equally also to a fearless prophetic stance against manifest injustice. Kenneth R. Ross has suggested that the impressive record of Scottish missionary political radicalism in twentieth-century South Africa and Malawi, demonstrated above all in resistance to the British colonial project of Central African Federation between 1953 and 1963, gives support to Cairns’ claim that Scottish missionaries were typically concerned to apply the kingship of Christ to the political realm (Ross 2014: 139–40). For those who had left the fold of the Kirk, it is more difficult to estimate exactly what, if anything, the residual legacy of Calvinist theology was. It might be suggested that a continuing awareness of the guiding hand of Providence over all human affairs was one such residue, as is evident, for example, in the unrelenting consciousness of David Livingstone that even his geographical explorations and scientific researches were superintended by Providence with the salvation of Africa ultimately in view. Although a vivid consciousness of the providential rule of God over both individual human lives and the affairs of nations in order to promote his saving purposes for humanity was an almost universal characteristic of nineteenth-century Protestant missions, shared also in England by Anglicans, Baptists, and even Methodists, the indebtedness of the movement as a whole to Reformed theology (notably to Jonathan Edwards) needs to be emphasized. A third plausible hypothesis, not unrelated to the second point, is that Scottish missionaries were even more likely than their English counterparts to insist that education was integral to the task of seeking the transformation of individuals and entire communities into the image of Christ. Educational efforts have been characteristic of all Christian missions, even of those conservative faith missions that initially proclaimed their primitivist intention to confine themselves to evangelism and avoid supposedly wasteful expenditure on educational institutions. But there is no doubt that Scottish missionaries have tended to place particular emphasis on the role of education in mission. They were generally better educated than their English counterparts. There is no doubting the manifest superiority of the Scottish system of parish education over its English equivalent in the period before 1870. From 1736 onwards training for the ministry of the Church of Scotland took at least eight years: four years of a university arts (or philosophy) course, followed by four years in one of the university halls of divinity. As a result, it was common for Scottish missionaries to have begun their university studies at a very early age, sometimes as young as thirteen. Moreover, the Scottish universities, unlike Oxford and Cambridge, were open to religious dissenters, so this educational pathway became standard for those who belonged to the seceding or independent churches as well as members of the national church (Piggin 1984: 220–2).

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It is thus not surprising that the Church of Scotland’s adoption of the foreign mission project in 1824 was marked by an unusually pronounced emphasis on the civilizing role of education. Such an emphasis was especially characteristic of the Moderate party in the Church. The prime movers of the 1824 scheme were two leading Moderates, James Bryce, Scottish chaplain to the East India Company in Calcutta, and Dr John Inglis, minister of Greyfriars Church in Edinburgh. Their first missionary, Alexander Duff, was a pupil of Thomas Chalmers at the University of St Andrews, and as such came from the Evangelical rather than the Moderate party in the Kirk. Nevertheless, he went further than his teacher in the determinative role he attached to education in the process of Christianization, and hence his mission theory came close to the rational Calvinism of Bryce and Inglis (Maxwell 2001: 134–7). Scottish Presbyterians of both Evangelical and Moderate stamp were also influenced in their overseas strategy by the quite recent domestic mission experience of the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK), which found a recipe of itinerant preaching, bible distribution, and village schools to be effective in transmitting evangelical piety to the benighted inhabitants of the Scottish Highlands. Chalmers himself had assured the Fife and Kinross Bible Society in 1812 if ‘schools and bibles have been found . . . to be the engines of civilization to the people of Britain, it is altogether a fair and direct exercise of induction when these schools and bibles are counted upon . . . as equally powerful engines of civilization to the people of other countries’ (cited in Stanley 2001: 180–1). Yet, as a disciple of Calvin, Chalmers held to what he termed ‘the portable evidence of Christianity’. This was the principle that all human beings, however degraded by sin and lacking in educational refinement, still possessed an innate moral sense to which missionary preachers of the Cross could make rational appeal in confidence that the Spirit would then accomplish his generating work. Alexander Duff, on the other hand, was led by the teaching of another of his St Andrews lecturers, the leading Moderate, Principal George Hill, to the view that preaching the Gospel to Hindus would be quite ineffective unless they were first raised by a Christian literary education to a sufficient level of rationality to perceive the innate superiority of Christianity. Thus what became after 1843 the Free Church’s College in Calcutta, formerly the General Assembly’s Institution, ironically became associated with a Scottish Moderate rather than an Evangelical view of the relative roles of proclamation and education in the dissemination of Christianity to Hindus. In practice in India, the pressure of demand from the higher castes for an advanced English-medium education that would prepare their children for the job market, tipped the balance between preaching, Bible translation and distribution, and schooling even further in the direction of education. This gave the Free Church missions in Bengal, Madras, and Bombay a distinctive reputation for the extent and quality of their investment in advanced educational institutions (Maxwell 2001: 137–40; Stanley 2001: 181–2). Only gradually from

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the 1880s, as evidence accumulated that this downward filtration approach to the evangelization of India was not delivering the expected dividend of conversions— and that the hope for Christianity in India lay rather with people movements among the oppressed castes—did these missions begin to reduce their disproportionate investment in Anglophone Christian education in India (Porter 1988). Nevertheless, Scottish Presbyterian missions continued well into the twentieth century to be distinguished by the confidence they placed in high-level educational institutions. In Kenya, for example, the Church of Scotland mission to the Gikuyu placed enormous emphasis on the potential of mission schools to refashion both the minds and the bodies of Gikuyu young people into a supposedly Christian image (Cunningham 2019). In India, Madras Christian College was the location of the labours of the most influential missionary educationalist of the late nineteenth century, William Miller, and in more recent times (1962–70) of Duncan Forrester, later Professor of Christian Ethics and Practical Theology at New College, Edinburgh. A fourth point, integrally related to the preceding one, is that many Scottish missionaries trained in the first half of the nineteenth century drew deeply from currents of thought flowing from the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, the majority of whose exponents were orthodox Christian believers. The indebtedness of Duff and even Thomas Chalmers (Piggin 1984: 91) to George Hill is only one, albeit important, example. The grounding in moral philosophy that the arts courses in Scottish universities provided introduced students to the principles of common-sense empirical philosophy. Thus, James Legge, as a student at King’s College, Aberdeen, from 1831 to 1835, became intimately familiar with the writings of Thomas Reid, drawing from him a confidence in the existence of intuitive moral principles or self-evident truths that were common to all humanity, even if they were expressed in very different terms in different intellectual systems. These Scottish Enlightenment ideas would later be determinative in inclining Legge to adopt an open mind to the wisdom of the Confucian classics, of which he became the leading scholarly exponent in the West (Pfister, 2004: I, 63–82). David Livingstone, whose education was more self-taught in character, was deeply impressed by the ideas of a later Scottish thinker, the Broughty Ferry schoolmaster, Thomas Dick, in particular his conviction that the worlds of scientific knowledge and scriptural revelation were entirely harmonious (Stanley 2014: 157–8). But the most decisive channels of influence from the Scottish Enlightenment were those that pertained to questions of how to propel preindustrial societies along the road of social and economic improvement. John Philip’s seminal work, Researches in South Africa (1828), cited Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson—as well as the English economists David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus—in support of his case that the Khoikhoi people of the Cape Colony, who were in a state of virtual slavery to Boer farmers, could never be expected to be industrious until they were given their liberty and appropriate financial

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incentives for their labour (Philip 1828: I, 362–78; II, 315–16, 355–70; Ross 1986: 66, 81, 225). His resulting emphasis on the importance of linking the preaching of Christianity to the encouragement in the Cape of a market economy of independent producers influenced Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton in writing the 1836 report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aborigines, and then shaped the antislavery strategy of the disastrous Niger Expedition of 1841. In this way, an originally Scottish current of Christian economic thought flowed into the mainstream of English missions. Despite the signal failure of the Niger Expedition, David Livingstone in his turn gave the humanitarian creed of ‘commerce and Christianity’ its greatest publicity in 1857–8 when launching his campaign to rid East Africa of the slave trade. After his death in 1873, the Livingstonia mission to northern Malawi, a venture originally sponsored by Sir William Mackinnon and a group of Glasgow industrialists, and one that had its own trading company, the African Lakes Company, perpetuated the tradition. A distinctive emphasis on industrial education characterized the Livingstonia and, to a lesser extent, Blantyre missions in Malawi well into the twentieth century. The final hypothesis that can be offered is that by the early twentieth century, the formerly distinctive features in Scottish missionary thought had become less marked, though some elements of distinctiveness in mission policy and practice remained, as the examples of Scottish missions in Kenya and Malawi suggest. The Scottish Enlightenment no longer wielded its unique influence on the theological curricula of the Scottish universities. In its place, currents of idealist and evolutionary philosophy increasingly redrew the contours of theology, though possibly to a lesser extent in Scotland than in England. The more consensual ‘fulfilment’ approaches to Hinduism taken early in the twentieth century by Scottish mission theologians such as Nicol MacNicol and John Nicol Farquhar owed a good deal to idealist principles, depending as they did on the assertion of the universality of human religious experience and the organic development of lower (nonChristian) to higher (Christian) religious forms. Much the same was true of English mission theorists who pursued a similar realignment of Christianity and Hinduism according to principles of religious evolution. From about the 1870s, missionaries trained in Scottish universities were more likely than were their Anglican counterparts educated in Oxford and Cambridge to be familiar with, and in some measure receptive to German theology and higher criticism. Nevertheless, most English Nonconformist colleges were not far behind the Scottish universities in the speed with which they adopted the new biblical criticism. Under the influence of moderate advocates of biblical criticism, such as George Adam Smith, James Denney, and James Orr of the United Free Church College in Glasgow, many Scottish missionaries, like their English Nonconformist counterparts, found little difficulty in combining moderately critical approaches to the Bible and a broader version of Reformed theology with continuing commitment to the evangelistic task. The Edinburgh-trained Alfred George Hogg, whose

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dialectical principle of ‘challenging relevancy’ was perhaps the most original twentieth-century contribution to theological reflection on the relationship of Christianity to Hinduism, drew inspiration from a variety of theological sources, mostly in the tradition of Albrecht Ritschl. He was a member of D. S. Cairns’ Bible class at Morningside United Presbyterian Church; studied philosophy under Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison at the University of Edinburgh; trained at the United Presbyterian Hall from 1897, and then at New College; and spent a term studying at Halle, where he came under the influence of Ritschlian theologians such as Wilhelm Herrmann, Julius Kaftan, and Arthur Titius. Once he arrived in Madras in 1903, however, Hogg’s exposure to a renascent Hinduism compelled him to rework his indebtedness to the Ritschlian tradition by a renewed emphasis on the radical distinctiveness of the Christian belief in the unique selfmanifestation of God in Christ (Cox 1977: 1–11; Sharpe 1965: 283–4; Stanley 2009: 222–7). In the Church of England, by contrast, it was the two opposing wings of the Church that were least sympathetic to higher criticism and German theology—the Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic parties—that were the chief suppliers of missionaries, rather than the Broad Church in the middle. There was no Scottish equivalent to the fundamentalist split in Evangelical Anglicanism that saw the Bible Churchmen’s Missionary Society secede from the CMS in 1922, though those conservative members of the Free Church who refused to unite with the United Presbyterian Church in 1900 present something of an early parallel. Karl Barth’s theology gained earlier and more widespread acceptance in Scotland than in England, in the wake of the publication in 1933 of Edwyn Hoskyns’ English translation of his The Epistle to the Romans. New College proved the most receptive environment of all to Barth’s theology, which reached the peak of its influence in Edinburgh after 1952 under Thomas F. Torrance, whose parents had served with the China Inland Mission (Morgan 2010: 2–3, 43, 163, 220–4, 245). That fact may have helped the missionaries of the Church of Scotland—especially those trained at New College—to hold to the continuing evangelistic imperative alongside an openness to modern biblical scholarship as Christian missions entered the political and ideological turmoil of the post-war years. As the missionary movement in the twentieth century acquired an increasingly ecumenical tone, the distinctiveness of the Scottish missionary tradition weakened. From its origins in 1893 the Student Christian Movement brought the Scottish missionary movement into more direct contact with its English counterparts, and the World Missionary Conference in 1910 extended the process by bringing British missions into closer dialogue with American and European Protestant mission thought. From its inception the Protestant missionary movement had been a transnational phenomenon. Although the Scottish branch of that movement in the nineteenth century had its share of theological and policy distinctives, as the twentieth century proceeded, national variations in the

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theology of missions were eclipsed by divergences of a more fundamental theological character. It has been claimed that nineteenth-century missionary experience in China was the primary source of the divergence in the modern German churches between conservative and liberal expressions of the faith (Wu 2016). This is a considerable overstatement of a truism—namely, that the mission field opened the eyes of Western Christians to a range of religious experience that they had not experienced before. In the Scottish case, and indeed for the British missionary movement as a whole, the repercussions of the missionary movement for the discipline of theology were more limited than was true in Germany. Scottish missionaries contributed more to the emerging disciplines of linguistics, oriental studies, and religious studies than they did to systematic theology. The currents of theological influence flowed more in the other direction—from Scotland (and, behind it, Germany) to the overseas mission field (Walls 1996: 197–8).

Bibliography Cairns, D. S. (1911). The Vocation of Scotland in View of her Religious Heritage. London: Student Christian Movement. Calder, James M. (1945). Scotland’s March Past: The Share of Scottish Churches in the London Missionary Society. London: Livingstone Press. Cox, James Leland (1977). ‘The Development of A. G. Hogg’s Theology in Relation to Non-Christian Faith: Its Significance for the Tambaram Meeting of the International Missionary Council’. PhD thesis, University of Aberdeen. Cunningham, Tom (2019). ‘A Muscular Christianity: The Church of Scotland Mission, Gikuyu, and the Question of the Body in Colonial Kenya c1906–c1938’. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh. Escott, Harry (1960). A History of Scottish Congregationalism. Glasgow: The Congregational Union of Scotland. Lovegrove, Deryck W. (2002). ‘Lay Leadership, Establishment Crisis and the Disdain of the Clergy’, in Deryck W. Lovegrove (ed.), The Rise of the Laity in Evangelical Protestantism. London: Routledge, 117–33. Mackay, J. W. H. (1891). A. M. Mackay, Pioneer Missionary of the Church Missionary Society to Uganda; By his Sister. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Mackay, John A. (1932). The Other Spanish Christ: A Study in the Spiritual History of Spain and Latin America. London: SCM Press. Maxwell, Ian D. (2001). ‘Civilization or Christianity? The Scottish Debate on Mission Methods, 1750–1835’, in Brian Stanley (ed.), Christian Missions and the Enlightenment. Grand Rapids, MI, Cambridge, and Richmond: William B. Eerdmans and Curzon Press, 123–40.

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Morgan, D. Densil (2010). Barth Reception in Britain. London: T&T Clark. Pfister, Lauren F. (2004). Striving for ‘The Whole Duty of Man’: James Legge and the Scottish Protestant Encounter with China, 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Philip, John (1828). Researches in South Africa: Illustrating the Civil, Moral, and Religious Condition of the Native Tribes . . . , 2 vols. London: J. Duncan. Piggin, Stuart (1984). Making Evangelical Missionaries 1789–1858: The Social Background, Motives and Training of British Protestant Missionaries to India. Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay Press. Porter, Andrew N. (1988). ‘Scottish Missions and Education in Nineteenth-Century India: The Changing Face of Trusteeship’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 16/3: 35–57. Ross, Andrew C. (1986). John Philip (1775–1851): Missions, Race and Politics in South Africa. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Ross, Andrew C. (2002). David Livingstone: Mission and Empire. London and New York: Hambledon and London. Ross, Kenneth R. (ed.) (2014). Roots and Fruits: Retrieving Scotland’s Missionary Story. Oxford: Regnum Books. Sharpe, Eric J. (1965). Not to Destroy but to Fulfil: The Contribution of J. N. Farquhar to Protestant Missionary Thought in India before 1914. Uppsala: Gleerup for the Swedish Institute of Missionary Research. Stanley, Brian (2001). ‘Christianity and Civilization in English Evangelical Mission Thought, 1792–1857’, in Brian Stanley (ed.), Christian Missions and the Enlightenment. Grand Rapids, MI, Cambridge, and Richmond: William B. Eerdmans and Curzon Press, 169–97. Stanley, Brian (2009). The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910. Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans. Stanley, Brian (2014). ‘The Missionary and the Rainmaker: David Livingstone, the Bakwena, and the Nature of Medicine’, Social Sciences and Missions 27/2–3: 1–18. Walls, Andrew F. (1993). ‘Missions’, in Nigel M. de S. Cameron et al. (eds.), Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 567–94. Walls, Andrew F. (1996). The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of the Faith. Maryknoll, NY and Edinburgh: Orbis Books and T&T Clark. Walls, Andrew F. (2002a). ‘The Missionary Movement: A Lay Fiefdom?’ in Deryck W. Lovegrove (ed.), The Rise of the Laity in Evangelical Protestantism. London: Routledge, 167–86. Walls, Andrew F. (2002b). The Cross-Cultural Process in Christian History. Maryknoll, NY and Edinburgh: Orbis Books and T&T Clark. Wu, Albert Monshan (2016). From Christ to Confucius: German Missionaries, Chinese Christians, and the Globalization of Christianity, 1860–1950. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.

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5 Theology and Ecumenism after Edinburgh 1910 Marlene Finlayson

Nascent Ecumenism The formal structure of the Ecumenical Movement, as we know it today, was established in the fourth decade of the twentieth century, with the inauguration of the British Council of Churches in 1942, and was followed by the setting up of the World Council of Churches in 1948. However, the spirit that breathed life into the movement was already making its effects felt in Scotland in the second half of the nineteenth century, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the proliferation of denominations that had reached a dramatic peak in the Disruption of 1843. The need for unity was accentuated by the post-millennial theology of the day, which provided the impetus for the completion of the vast missionary enterprise that was perceived necessary before Christ’s return to earth in the second coming: the preaching of the Gospel to every nation. The awareness that the Church was not fit for its perceived God-given task of evangelization grew into the search for unity that is ecumenism. In mid-nineteenth-century Scotland, the drive towards unity came mainly from the newly established Free Church, led by two of its pre-eminent theologians: Thomas Chalmers (1780–1847) and Robert Candlish (1806–73). Neither man had anticipated the division which occurred with the Disruption. Chalmers himself was not opposed to the principle of Establishment, which allowed for the national recognition of religion. In the struggle for freedom in spiritual matters, if there was to be a break, they believed it would be with the State, if the State was not willing to guarantee the spiritual independence of the Church. In the debates during the run up to the General Assembly of 1843, it was not clear until it was too late that the majority of attendees would not vote to separate from the State. The resulting Disruption brought further division within the Church, in some quarters accompanied by a spirit of sectarianism. Just a few weeks later, Chalmers attended the Bicentennial Celebrations of the Westminster Assembly, at which Robert Balmer (1787–1844) of the United Secession Church made a speech on the necessity of Christian Union. Deeply impressed by this, Chalmers, together with five other churchmen, including Balmer and Candlish, published in 1845 Essays on Christian Union. With a

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sense of urgency, the book articulated the failure of the churches to live up to the ideal of loving fellowship set by Jesus, and supported the call for an alliance of evangelical Christians to fulfil the mission of the Church at home and abroad. Its central message was that all the denominations had fallen short of Jesus’ ideal of unity, expressed in his ‘priestly prayer’ recorded in John 17:1–26 with its core message, ‘May they all be one. Father, may they be one in us, as you are in me and I am in you, so that the world may believe it was you who sent me.’ Chalmers could see no perceptible advances towards this goal, and declared that the ‘serious evil’ of division was in conflict with it. Jesus’ prayer implied that the salvation of the world depended on the unity of Christians. Chalmers suggested that much could be learned from the many missionaries who had found denominational differences of no practical importance in the field; the churches needed to ask themselves if such differences belonged to the essence of Christianity. In describing the kind of unity being sought, Chalmers declared that it was not about incorporation into one society, but about ‘harmonious cooperation’ for the fulfilment of tasks which the churches agreed to be desirable. He advocated the ideal of immediate cooperation with a view to incorporation at a later time, but confessed his personal hope for a time when unity would include the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches (Chalmers et al. 1845: 17). For the time being the constitution of the Evangelical Alliance, inaugurated in 1846, embodied the idea of union among individual Christians of the different denominations. What was sought was unity in diversity: a loving prayerful fellowship in which differences were dealt with in mutual forbearance rather than as causes for division and schism. According to King, divisions were more about polity than about doctrinal beliefs, and the doctrine, all but universally held in Scotland, was that of the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms. One of the principles that characterized such Calvinist theology was the belief that humanity is utterly fallen and saved only through the grace of God. For King it seemed impossible that ‘gratitude should so unite us to God, and fail to produce our union to one another’ (Chalmers et al. 1845: 235–8). The book was a clarion call to the churches to rid themselves of sectarianism and to nurture a catholic spirit. Wardlaw described such a spirit as ‘a spirit of love to the whole church of Christ, and fellowship of heart with “all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours” ’ (Wardlaw in Chalmers et al. 1845: 281). This catholic spirit would not allow differences to prevent immediate fellowship or wait for uniformity to enjoy it. For Wardlaw, the absence of the catholic spirit was a grievous defect in the believer’s emulation of the Lord. In the closing chapter of the book, Symington reiterated this condemnation of division and infighting: So far as this obtains, it is to the shame of the church, it is to the unspeakable prejudice of her spiritual interests, it mars her efficiency in the objects to be

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  pursued by a church of Christ, it is to her reproach before the world, and is occasion of triumph to all her enemies. If her members are cold, and distant, and repulsive to one another, how can they either attract others to her fellowship, or be themselves prepared for the heavenly state. (Chalmers et al. 1845: 494)

The book set the keynote for the remainder of the nineteenth century’s ecumenical debate and progress. Leaders in all the Presbyterian churches were active to some degree or other in the pursuit of unity and the recovery of the catholic spirit. The Church Service Society was formed in 1865 by ministers and elders of the Church of Scotland, ‘for the study of liturgies—ancient and modern—of the Christian Church, with a view to the preparation and publication of forms of Prayer for Public Worship’. They wanted to improve worship in the Kirk by recovering its catholic basis, but without being connected to any particular point of view or position. By 1895 the Society had over 500 clerical members. In 1892, differences between the two main wings of the Church of Scotland, the Broad Church and High Church parties, led the latter group (known also as ScotoCatholics) to separate from the Scottish Church Society on a catholic doctrinal basis. Their aim was to recover the catholic tradition of the Kirk as stated in the Scots Confession. They stressed the divine nature of the Church, which shares in the ministry of Christ to God and to the world (Cameron et al. 1993: 750). Influenced by William Milligan (1821–93), a founding member and first president of the Scottish Church Society, the unity of the Church was fundamental to the Scoto-Catholics. Milligan, a Church of Scotland biblical scholar and theologian, stressed the need for the recovery of the doctrine of the priesthood of Christ and of the priestly calling of the Church (Cameron et al. 1993: 565–6). Describing the aims of the Scottish Church Society in his Croall Lectures of 1879–8, Milligan stated that among them was ‘the deepening of a penitential sense of the sin and peril of schism and the furtherance of catholic unity in every way consistent with true loyalty to the Church of Scotland’ (H. R. T. Brandreth in Rouse et al. 1954: 285). James Cooper (1846–1922), a Church of Scotland minister and one of the leading Scoto-Catholics of his day, was also a member of the Church Service Society and a founding member of the Scottish Church Society. Influenced by Milligan and by the Oxford Movement, he was keen to promote the union of the Church of Scotland and the Anglican Church: ‘a United Church for the British Empire’. In 1881 he introduced to his church in Aberdeen the liturgical practice of daily worship, which was challenged by several of his elders. He successfully defended himself by appealing to the Reformed standards of the Kirk. Cooper was also an influential member of the Church Union Committee, which met between 1912 and 1917, for negotiations between representatives of the Church of Scotland and the United Free Church with a view to union. Cooper insisted that a formulation of the doctrines of Trinity and incarnation, consistent with Catholic

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creeds, be included in the Articles Declaratory (Cameron et al. 1993: 210–11). Cooper’s ideas for a union of Presbyterianism and Episcopacy received a negative response from the Church of Scotland’s leaders, but were noted by the Lambeth Conference of 1908 as a possible means of providing lines of guidance for reunion. While throughout the second half of the nineteenth century there was still some opposition to the trend for cooperation, there was from a number of quarters increased momentum towards unity. Much of this was expressed through the voluntary movements, for example the Student Christian Movement (SCM), and the Young Men’s and Women’s Christian Associations (YMCA and YWCA); in the liberalizing of theology with its focus on the idea of the Kingdom of God; and through the missionary movement and its aims and methods of evangelizing the world in a generation. In what follows, each will be examined.

The Ecumenical Spirit in the Voluntary Movements Voluntary movements such as the SCM, YMCA, and YWCA were inextricably connected with the Evangelical Awakening with its passion for evangelism. Influenced by it, Christians came together in societies, voluntary movements, or organizations, to win the world for Christ. Influenced by D. L. Moody and Henry Drummond, they emphasized personal experience over doctrine, and the centrality of a personal relationship with Christ. Global evangelism was their compelling impulse. Rouse described them as the unconscious pioneers of the movement for Christian unity: not ecumenical in objective, having their own specific aims, for example, missionary work or social work, but ecumenical in result by creating a sense of togetherness (Brandreth 1954: 309–18). The Paris Basis, adopted by the first World YMCA Conference in 1855, attempted to foster unity by keeping doctrine at a minimum. Its statement averred the following: The Young Men’s Christian Associations seek to unite those young men who, regarding Jesus Christ as their God and Saviour, according to the Holy Scriptures, desire to be his disciples in their faith and in their life, and to associate their efforts for the extension of his Kingdom amongst young men. Any differences of opinion on other subjects, however important in themselves, shall not interfere with the harmonious relations of the constituent members and associates of the World Alliance. (Hopkins 1981: 70–3)

The SCM, like the YM/WCA, was characterized by an approach to the Bible that was open to the findings of biblical criticism; openness to scientific discovery; and by a commitment to the pursuit of social justice and to missionary service. The centrality of the Bible to the student movement included a focus on the

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‘great commission’ in Matthew 28:19. ‘Go, therefore, make disciples of all the nations . . . ’. The movement adopted the emergent Kingdom of God theology, with its twin emphases on personal experience and social ethics, as expounded by Albrecht Ritschl (1822–89), and later in Scotland by Flint and Bruce.

The Theology of the Kingdom of God Biblical criticism had brought into sharp focus both the person and teaching of Jesus, especially his teaching on the Kingdom of God. In the nineteenth century, largely due to Ritschl, the Kingdom of God had become the focus for theological debate. In Scotland in the 1870s and 1880s there had been a swing away from the individualism of evangelical Christianity, which emphasized personal salvation. Scottish theologians focused on the Kingdom of God in terms of an ideal society, which the Church would bring to birth. The primary feature in Kingdom theology was the universal Fatherhood of God, with its corollary, the brotherhood of man. Such a theology lent itself to a dialogical approach that was respectful of difference, based on the idea that every person, having a common Creator, retained something of the image of God, and as such was worthy of respect. Among academic staff in the universities were some who, embracing a social theology, had promoted and nurtured openness and a willingness to respect different ecclesiological and doctrinal emphases: for example Robert Flint (1838–1910) and Alexander Balmain Bruce (1831–99). Flint was professor of divinity at Edinburgh. He saw natural theology as the ground for all other theology. For him, no religion or philosophy had ever been without the truths of natural religion. The Reformers had not given adequate recognition of the rights of reason or the evidences of God in creation, providence, or the nature of humankind, unlike those of the Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions. Natural theology, as propounded by Flint, may have presented opportunities for dialogue with those of differing traditions and beliefs, having its basis in common human experience. The evidences or proofs of God’s existence are countless. They are to be found in all the forces, laws, and arrangement of nature – in every material object, every organism, every intellect and heart. At the same time they concur and coalesce into a single all-comprehensive argument, which is just the sum of the indications of God given by the physical universe, the minds of men, and human history. Nothing short of that is the full proof. (Flint 1886: 62–3)

Flint was a key figure in reviving ideas of the Kingdom of God in Scotland. In 1865, he published a sermon on ‘The Nature of the Kingdom of God on Earth’, in which he declared the Kingdom of God as a realm in which brotherhood

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was the defining relationship, and where there was no oppression of others (Flint 1865: 53–82). Those outside the ecclesiastical establishment could be bearers of the Kingdom, and the Church itself could be in opposition to the Kingdom, if it adopted worldly aims. Flint saw the controversies about the constitution and government of the churches as an example of worldliness that prevented them going about the true work of establishing the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom was wider than the Church, which he, like Ritschl, saw as a means to an end, and not an end in itself (McKay 2011: 26–42). Flint was a member of the Church of Scotland, but the Free Church also had in Bruce an interpreter of the Kingdom of God as a social ideal as well as a spiritual reality. Bruce was professor of apologetics and New Testament at Free Church Hall, Glasgow. In 1892 his Apologetics declared that the primary task of Apologetics was to help honest doubters regain their faith by confronting the challenges arising from philosophy, science, history, and biblical criticism (Bruce 1892: 37–8). Apologists should steer away from any of the internal controversies of the Church. For Bruce, the purpose of apologetics was practical rather than theoretical: dealing with doubts that made faith difficult. The apologist should avoid the traditional method of trying to justify individual doctrines under two headings: ‘Evidences of Natural Religion’ (all that could be known from the natural world), and ‘Evidences of Revealed Religion’ (particularly those found in Scripture). For Bruce, the traditional selection of topics, such as revelation, inspiration, miracles, and the canon, seemed arbitrary and removed from the burning issues of the day, and the method was unsatisfactory. He saw a need for a ‘simplified creed’ that retained only the essentials of belief (Reardon 1971: 425). Rather than metaphysical and speculative theology, his was a biblical theology in which he perceived a need for the recovery of knowledge of the Son of Man as recorded in the gospels. He felt that Jesus’ teaching needed no elaborate system of evidences to commend it. Drawing a distinction between doctrines of faith and theological dogmas he was unhappy with much in the Church’s traditional doctrine because of what he perceived as the Church’s legalism. The wise apologist instinctively shuns conflict with dogmatic unbelief as futile. He desiderates and assumes in those for whom he writes a certain fairness and openness of mind, a generous spirit under hostile bias which he seeks to remove, a bias due to no ignoble cause, animated even in its hostility by worthy motives. But, on the other hand, with equal decision he avoids partisanship with dogmatic belief. He regards himself as a defender of the catholic faith, not as a hired advocate or special pleader for a particular theological system. He distinguishes between religion and theology, between faith and opinion, between essential doctrines and the debateable dogmas of the schools. (Bruce 1892: 37)

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Going beyond this, Bruce spoke of ‘good pagans who show themselves to be implicit Christians by deeds of kindness to Christ’s brethren the poor and needy’ (Bruce 1892: 39)—an idea that much later would be debated in the ‘deep ecumenism’ of inter-religious dialogue and echoed by Karl Rahner’s concept of ‘anonymous Christians’.

Global Evangelism as a Spur towards Unity When Milligan was invited to give the Croall Lectures in 1879–8 he insisted that visible unity was the only thing that would provide the Church with the strength to fulfil her mission. It was an essential mark of her faithfulness. Where different denominations worked in the same mission field, they must do so in a relationship of unity that was plain for all to see, expressed in mutual helpfulness, intercommunion, and even a degree of confederation (Milligan 1894: 204–7). Thirty years later Christian disunity was still seen as a ‘scandal inhibiting the progress of the gospel’, particularly in Asia (Stanley 2009: 280). It was in missionary circles that the drive towards ecumenism became imperative due to the perceived enormity of the task of evangelizing the world. During the second half of the nineteenth century, a series of four international conferences was held to promote the work of Protestant missions. At the time of the fifth conference in New York in April–May 1900, John R. Mott (1865–1955), National Secretary of the Intercollegiate Young Men’s Christian Association of America and Canada, and founding member and General Secretary of the World Student Christian Federation (WSCF) had already published The Evangelism of the World in this Generation, drawing attention to the fact that virtually the whole earth was now known and ready to receive the Gospel. The title of his book became the ‘Watchword’, first for the student movement, and was then adopted by the fourth missionary conference in Liverpool in 1896. Described by his biographer as the leading Protestant ecumenical and missionary statesman of the first half of the twentieth century, Mott’s ideal for the Church was of a ‘community transcending denomination, race, nation and geography, and focused on living issues’. A lay Methodist, he had been profoundly influenced by D. L. Moody, and by the Holiness movement which stressed unity in diversity within a Universal Christian Church (Hopkins 1981: 70–3). He emphasized the role of students in achieving this goal: ‘The universities and colleges of the world teach the teachers, preach to the preachers, and govern the governors’ (Blackie 1995: 16). The conferences in 1888 and 1900 had been called ‘ecumenical’, signifying the belief that the denominations must come together to form a global plan of campaign. By 1908, when planning began for another missionary conference an invitation came from Scotland to hold it in Edinburgh in 1910. The organizing

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committee decided that it would be inappropriate to use the word ‘ecumenical’ in the title. For them, a truly ecumenical conference would consider a much wider range of subjects and would include some historical Christian churches (Roman Catholic and Orthodox) that would not be represented at the conference. It was nonetheless ecumenical in spirit, in the sense that it brought together many people from diverse Protestant, mainly evangelical denominations. Mott was appointed Chair of the Conference, but two Scots also played pivotal roles in Edinburgh. Joseph Houldsworth Oldham (1874–1969) was appointed Conference Secretary. A lay theologian in the United Free Church, and with experience in the mission field in India, Oldham has been described as ‘the greatest Scottish ecumenical pioneer and leader’ of the twentieth century, and a major architect of the British Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches (Forrester, in Cameron 1993: 273–5). The other, the Scottish theologian and apologist David Smith Cairns (1862–1946), was to have a prominent role chairing Commission IV in Edinburgh, and as leader of a YMCA-sponsored interdenominational inquiry into the effects of the First World War on the religious life of the nation and attitudes to the churches. Both men had strong liberal and ecumenical credentials, being deeply involved with the student movement, which was characterized by its openness to the findings of science and biblical criticism. Both men were also influenced by the Modernist movement in the Anglican Church, particularly by one of its leading exponents, Lily Dougall, attending interdenominational meetings at her home in Cutt’s End, Cumnor. Oldham provided the organizational skills for the Conference and for the continuing formal development of the ecumenical movement, while Cairns had been chosen by Mott and Oldham as someone who could give a solid theological underpinning to the proceedings in 1910. Cairns would go on to become one of the most influential speakers at student conferences during the next two decades and one of the original sponsors of the ecumenical Iona Community, founded by George MacLeod in 1938. Cairns’ theology was influenced by the Ritschlian school, for whom doctrine and ethics were one, with faith providing the incentive and power to cooperate in the task of realizing the Kingdom of God. One of its later proponents, Adolf Harnack (1850–1931), declared that the rise of dogma had smothered and obscured the essence of Christianity, which he declared to be the ethic of Jesus, found in his teaching in the gospel accounts. The elements of this teaching were the Fatherhood of God, the infinite worth of the human soul, and the ethical ideal of the Kingdom of God (Macquarrie 1963: 88–9). Regarding speculative Christian doctrines as secondary, Ritschlianism was sometimes seen as having an ambiguous attitude to doctrine, and this is something that might be said of Cairns. For instance, he admitted that he could not accept the traditional creed of Chalcedon with its belief in Christ’s two natures, perfect manhood and perfect Godhead. For Cairns, the field of psychology was revealing how much was still to be learned

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about human nature; therefore, confidence in the theologians’ ability to make a definitive statement about the nature of the ‘God-Man’ was inappropriate, going beyond the limits of honest thought, and preventing united Christian action in the world. Cairns could agree that in Jesus was one who was human and divine, but beyond that he could not go. For him, ‘It seems that if we go beyond this we are dealing more with words than with concepts’ (Cairns 1979: 88–9). In the first decade of the twentieth century, Cairns was influential in the reflections of the World Student Christian Federation, as its leaders attempted to revise its Basis of Membership. Cairns was anxious that the Basis would not be too prescriptive in terms of its Christology. He pointed out that there were many among the students who did not see Jesus as God, although they were truer disciples than some who found his divinity easy to believe in. He also reminded them that the early Christians had an undeveloped Christology and suggested that, as they could not agree what was normative for faith, they should focus on winning the hearts and consciences of the students, trusting that their theology would develop as they matured in the Christian life. The aims and basis of the movement were eventually agreed and adopted in 1913, and Cairns’ influence is clear to see. The personal Declaration of Membership was concise: ‘In joining this Union, I declare my faith in God through Jesus Christ, whom as Saviour and Lord I desire to serve.’ This left the way open to include members with varying theological perspectives. This emphasis on things in common was to be a central feature of Edinburgh 1910, where in order to achieve the evangelization of the world, the denominations were willing to work together in spite of confessional and ecclesiastical differences. Oldham was determined to have a broader spectrum of theological opinion than had been at previous conferences, and it was vital for him that the conference should be fully endorsed by the Anglican Church. This brought its own challenges, particularly when Anglican needs seemed to some American members to threaten freedom of debate by the Commissions. The Anglo-Catholics, led by Bishop Charles Gore of Birmingham, were persuaded to attend only after guarantees that no resolutions would be passed on church order or discipline. In the end, the American members agreed that no resolutions on any topic should be proposed for adoption by the conference. They felt this would reassure the Anglicans, while preserving freedom for the Commissions in their investigations and freedom of discussion for the conference itself. Understandably much of the concern on the Anglican side may have been due to the weight of numbers on the nonconformist ‘side’. Oldham later described Gore’s consent to attend the conference as ‘the turning point in the history of the ecumenical movement’. He believed that without Gore, Randall Davidson, the archbishop of Canterbury, would never have agreed to address the conference, leaving the Anglican (and later the Orthodox) churches outside what would have remained ‘an unambiguously Protestant movement’

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(Oldham 1960: 333). The purpose was to deal with the practical problems encountered by missionaries in the field. The delegates represented missionary societies rather than churches or denominations and provided more reassurance to the Anglo-Catholics by agreeing not to discuss Protestant missions to Roman Catholic territories; there would be nothing that could be construed as proselytism. Of the eight international commissions, Stanley records that the report of Commission VIII, Co-operation and the Promotion of Unity, had a far greater impact on subsequent ecumenical history than all the other commissions put together, providing the most tangible result of the conference in the formation of the Continuation Committee, which met for the first time in 1911 with Mott as chair and Oldham as secretary (Stanley 2009: 278). The recorded wisdom of the delegates would be preserved and acted on. Stanley records that the formation of the Continuation Committee was ‘not some unanticipated by-product of the conference, but a response to memoranda prepared on both sides of the Atlantic before the conference assembled and to a specific recommendation from Commission VIII’ (Stanley 2009: 6). What broke new ground at Edinburgh was the decision to embody missionary cooperation in a structured form and on a global scale which imposed on wholly autonomous voluntary missionary agencies an obligation to take much more seriously than hitherto a broader ecumenical view of the missionary task. (Stanley 2009: 278)

A watershed had been reached. While Commission VIII had a direct impact on the developing ecumenism of the day, Commission IV, ‘The Missionary Message in Relation to the NonChristian Religions’ chaired by Cairns, provided a subliminal message that must have reinforced the idea of openness between the various Christian traditions. Based on the experiences of the missionaries themselves, Commission IV called for a change in approach to the missionary task; moving away from the iconoclastic approach to one that showed respect for the beliefs and practices of people of different religious traditions. The report concluded that the evidence pointed to two main things. First, the attitude of the missionaries should be one of understanding and, if possible, sympathy. They should also seek out the nobler elements of the different religions and use them as steps to higher things. This inclusive (fulfilment) theology included the recognition of the imago Dei, the presence of the divinity within all individuals. In this it echoed the theology of Flint with its admission of the possibility of revelation outside Christianity. In his closing remarks to the conference, the vice-chair of Commission IV, Robert E. Speer, reported that the Commission had chosen to use as its operating principle ‘do as you would be done by’. It would be difficult to imagine that the

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attendees did not see in the new approach to people of different religions an analogue for their own interdenominational situation, and the need for a fresh approach to dialogue among the denominations, characterized by respect and a willingness to listen. Edinburgh 1910 ended on a note of confidence and optimism that, if the churches cooperated, their goal of world evangelization could be achieved; and in the inauguration of the Continuation Committee they had a concrete sign of such determination. After 1910 the spirit of ecumenism was nourished by a new publication, launched in January 1912. Oldham edited the quarterly journal The International Review of Missions, with co-editor Georgina Gollock. It discussed the problems and issues concerning the entire world mission of the Church. It was supraconfessional and international, covering Roman Catholic developments too. By the time the war broke out in 1914, international cooperation among Christians had already made considerable progress (Karlstrom, in Rouse et al. 1954: 509).

The First World War: Ecumenism Tested The war provided an opportunity for practical cooperation in the service of the fighting men, although this did not come without some rivalries being expressed from time to time, for instance, over the allocation of rank. A variety of Christian bodies set out to create social, spiritual, and physical support systems in the areas of conflict. In response to concerns of the churches as they began to anticipate a period of reconstruction after the war, the YMCA sponsored an interdenominational inquiry into the effects of the war on the religious life of the nations and attitudes to the churches. With Cairns as its chairperson, a committee was set up, representing a wide span of denominations including Quakers and Anglicans. Roman Catholic evidence was sought, and several Roman Catholic chaplains contributed to its findings. Baron Friedrich von Hügel, the Roman Catholic scholar of mysticism, had been invited to join the committee, but declined to be an official member or to sign the report. In spite of this, he attended meetings of the committee, took a leading part in discussions and carried on a detailed correspondence with Cairns. The combined findings of Scottish and English inquiries were published in 1919 as The Army and Religion: An Inquiry and its Bearings Upon the Religious Life of the Nation. Cairns was its chief architect, providing an important critique of the Church and its vision in the early twentieth century, and providing a call for reform and renewal in Church life. Questionnaires had been sent to men of all ranks, and to chaplains, doctors, nurses, hut leaders, and workers. From their replies it was deduced that four-fifths of the young male population were no longer associated with churches in any vital way, and this was blamed on

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ecclesiastical divisions, on the churches’ failure to meet the social and physical needs caused by the Industrial Revolution, and on the decay of faith which resulted from the materialism of Church members (Cairns 1919: 116–26). Taking the idea of the Kingdom of God seriously meant considering how it might become a reality, and the universal nature of the Church made it the obvious international force—a supranational League of the Kingdom—which might exist alongside the League of Nations. The report concluded that the Church had a social mission, as Jesus had given his followers a social ideal in the Kingdom of God, and a social law in the law of love. It saw the great immediate moral problem that faced the world was its attitude to war and peace, and the Church’s role was to take the lead in the pursuit of peace. The evidence of the inquiry showed that the fighting men blamed the churches for not having done more to prevent the war. The churches’ task was so huge that cooperation was vital, and it was suggested that the time had come to move from the ‘un-denominational’ approach to one of cooperation, to the ‘interdenominational’ one. The un-denominational approach had been applied at Edinburgh 1910, when the churches focused on the things that they agreed on, while accepting that they would ignore their differences. It was built on the principle that what united the churches were ‘the only matters of primary importance, the distinctive tenets being secondary’ (Cairns 1919: 183–9). The report pointed out the limitations of such an approach, comparing it to a friendship in which the friends kept silence on the matters on which they feel deeply. Such a position was unsatisfactory. Interdenominationalism was founded on a very different basis. According to Cairns: Each of the denominations has in it something vital and peculiar to itself which it cannot wholly abandon without denying its history and compromising something peculiar to its life, and that, therefore, it should not be asked to abnegate its peculiar standpoint as an initial condition of cooperation. It is rather invited to make its own contribution to the common service of the Kingdom of God. What that contribution may ultimately be is left to the future to determine. Meantime, freedom of expression is accorded to all parties . . . labouring together for Christ’s Kingdom. (Cairns 1919: 183)

This approach removed an obstacle to cooperation in that no one had to sacrifice any principle or feel disloyal to past traditions or antecedents in the faith. The focus of theology had been changing, and one of the central questions was concerned with how knowledge of God might be obtained. In thinking about the nature of such revelation there were those who argued that authentic information might be found in the experience of the believer. John Baillie was one of those for whom this question of religious knowledge was a predominant concern. For him, faith was a primary mode of awareness, of moral consciousness, bearing witness to the real nature of things. With this consciousness of moral value comes a sense of

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absolute obligation, of duty. Baillie, relying on the findings of Cairns’ Army and Religion report, believed that the men in the armies, although alienated from the churches, had displayed this consciousness. Bewildered by the division of the denominations and the intellectual complexities of doctrines, they had none the less shown by their self-sacrificial actions a wealth of noble virtues that according to Baillie read like lists of the fruits of the spirit. The churches could learn from them. In describing what makes a person Christian, Baillie declared: . . . in this latter day it is true that what makes a man a Christian is neither his intellectual acceptance of certain ideas nor his conformity to a certain rule but his possession of a certain Spirit and his participation in a certain Life. To be a Christian, as we cannot too often remind ourselves, is not merely to think this and the other, nor is it merely to do this and to leave the other undone; it is rather to have living and personal experience of the fellowship of Christian love. It is to be rooted and grounded in agape. (Baillie 1926: 203–4)

The war had damaged international relations, but not permanently. The long gestation period of the nineteenth century had allowed the roots of fellowship to go deep enough to survive the catastrophe. The international missionary conferences from the middle of the century allowed for developing friendships as well as exchanges of ideas. From 1895 onwards, meetings of the WSCF allowed further positive relations to develop. At the individual level, in the second half of the century, many young student ministers went out from Scotland and spent some time in German theology faculties; for instance Cairns went to Marburg, Oldham to Halle, and William P. Paterson to Leipzig, Erlangen, and Berlin. By the time war came, these individuals were influential figures in the Church, retaining their concern that the German churches would remain within the worldwide fellowship of Christians. When Paterson made his inaugural speech as Moderator of the United Free Church in 1919, he urged the League of Nations to include Germany among its members, warning of the dangers of humiliating one’s enemy by imposing crushing conditions (Fergusson 2004). It took some years to re-establish relations as they had been, but eventually the sense of unity in fellowship was recovered: the ‘harmonious cooperation’ of Chalmers; and along with it the organizational structures that allowed it to flourish despite the storm. If the tragedy of war was not to be repeated, the task of evangelizing the world and extending the Kingdom must be taken up again. After 1918 the quest for unity continued and intensified, and in the mid-1920s the Faith and Order movement was established to provide a platform for the discussion of controversial issues related to doctrine and discipline. Around the same time the Life and Work movement was set up to discuss the churches’ role with regard to international peace and justice issues. Both movements would merge at the formation of the World Council of Churches in 1948.

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While the general exhaustion of the population and the economic slump sidelined much of the social agenda of the Army and Religion report, its findings revitalized the search for unity. After the war the two largest churches in Scotland, the United Free Church and the Church of Scotland, channelled their energies into the ecumenical task of organic union, which they achieved in 1929. Cairns played an important role in their reunification, serving on the Union Committee for several years, getting to know many Church leaders on both sides.

Bibliography Baillie, John (1926). The Roots of Religion in the Human Soul. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Blackie, Nansie (1995). In Love and Laughter: A Portrait of Robert Mackie. Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press. Brown, Stewart J. (2008). Providence and Empire. Harlow: Pearson Longman. Bruce, Alexander B. (1892). Apologetics: or, Christianity Defensively Stated. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Cairns, David Smith (ed.) (1910). The Missionary Message in Relation to NonChristian Religions. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Cairns, David Smith (ed.) (1919). The Army and Religion: An Inquiry and its Bearings Upon the Religious Life of the Nation. London: Macmillan and Co. Cairns, David Smith (1979). A System of Christian Doctrine. Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press. Cameron, Nigel M. de S., David F. Wright, and David C. Lachman (eds.) (1993). Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Chalmers, Thomas et al. (1845). Essays on Christian Union. London: Hamilton, Adams & Co. Fergusson, David (2004). ‘William Paterson 1860–1939’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi. org/10.1093/ref:odnb/3547 Flint, Robert (1865). Christ’s Kingdom upon Earth: A Series of Discourses. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Flint, Robert (1886). Theism, 5th edition. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Hopkins, C. Howard (1979). John R. Mott: A Biography. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Hopkins, C. Howard (1981). ‘The Legacy of John R. Mott’, The International Bulletin of Missionary Research, April: 70. Latourette, Kenneth Scott (1945). A History of the Expansion of Christianity, vol. VII: Advance Through Storm: AD 1914 and After. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. McKay, Johnston (2011). The Kirk and the Kingdom: A Century of Tension in Scottish Social Theology 1830–1929. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Macquarrie, John (1963). Twentieth-Century Religious Thought: The Frontiers of Philosophy and Theology, 1900–1960. London: SCM Press. Milligan, William (1894). The Resurrection of Our Lord, 4th edition. London: Macmillan. Mott, John R. (1910). The Decisive Hour of Christian Missions. New York: The Young People’s Missionary Movement of the United States and Canada. Oldham, Joseph H. (1960). ‘Reflections on Edinburgh, 1910’, Religion and Life 29/3 (Summer): 329–38. Reardon, Bernard M. G. (1971). From Coleridge to Gore: A Century of Religious Thought in Britain. London: Longmans. Rouse, Ruth, Stephen Neil, and Harold E. Fey (eds.) (1954). A History of the Ecumenical Movement 1517–1968. London: SPCK. Stanley, Brian (2009). The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

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6 From Idealism to Personalism Caird, Oman, and Macmurray Adam Hood

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Scotland was going through a period of wide-ranging social, economic, political, and intellectual change (Cheyne 1983). Among Christian thinkers, this gave rise to radical reappraisal of faith and practice, in debates focused around the twin pillars of Presbyterianism, the Bible, and the Westminster Confession (Fergusson 2013). In light of Biblical Criticism and the influence of German and English thought, some argued that if faith was to have continuing relevance, it needed to be reconfigured to cohere with leading thought and related to the emerging society. This chapter will look at the ways in which three Scottish thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attempted to address this task. Each was committed to reshaping Christianity but took a distinct tack. Caird aimed to reformulate Christian doctrine through the prism of Hegel’s philosophy. Oman and Macmurray wanted to revivify Christianity through discussing what were, for them, the crucial socio-religious problems of the day. Both aimed to show that religious faith and human freedom were complementary.

John Caird (1820–98) John Caird was born in Greenock, the son of a businessman.¹ Destined early on to join the family business, he trained instead for the Church of Scotland ministry. Excelling academically at Glasgow, he enjoyed successful ministries in Ayr and Edinburgh. When he moved to rural Perthshire, he found leisure to engage closely with Carlyle and Coleridge, as well as German idealism.² From this grew a concern to sketch out the rationale of faith, clarifying the obscure and revising problematic elements of conventional Christian belief. Caird was able to develop his ideas during an academic career at Glasgow, 1863–98.

¹ See E. Caird (1899), Cheyne (1999), and McKenna (2012) for further biographical details. ² See Fergusson (2013) for discussion of the growth of idealism in nineteenth-century Scotland.

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Historically, Caird played an important role in popularizing the fresh streams that entered Scottish theology in the latter half of the nineteenth century (Cheyne 1983). He also published significant academic works (1880, 1888, 1899). Caird’s apologetic approach hung on the claim that reality was a coherent whole and could be understood rationally. For him, Christianity was part of reason’s attempt to understand the whole. This led Caird to stress the immanence of God in creation and human experience, thus circumventing the challenge of science to supernaturalism. It also involved the argument that the influence of faith was moral rather than transactional. Caird held an optimistic belief in progress, which he saw as coterminous with divine providence. For him biblical studies had yielded new insights into the nature and structure of the ancient documents, the limits of their authority and the hermeneutical principles appropriate to their interpretation. Again, the natural sciences had enabled new understandings of inspiration and the limited relevance of the Bible beyond the religious and moral spheres. In other words, the times were propitious for the refashioning of Christian doctrine. Caird’s willingness to reshape Christianity in response to new thinking was consistent with his stress on the rationality of religion. In this, Caird disagreed with those who argued that what lay beyond human experience was not available to reason, but could only be known through revelation. Whilst Caird acknowledged that religious insight would always be partial, since the individual was epistemically limited by natural capacity, temperament, and cultural bias, he argued that the authority of the Gospel lay in its consistency with the intellectual and moral aspirations of humankind. The religious thinker must proceed through rational criticism if they wished to establish the reality of that which religion spoke of in symbolic forms (Mander 2011: 148). Caird’s stress on rational inquiry in theology necessarily excluded grounding religious beliefs in a literal reading of the Scriptures or in intuitions. Biblical criticism led him to understand revelation as the disclosure of the divine to human beings as they responded emotionally and rationally to their environment (Mander 2011: 149). God, immanent in creation, constantly revealed and realized Godself in all things and beings, particularly in that which was conscious, living, good, and, most of all, in the life of human beings and in their history (Caird 1899: 143). Through human life there were partial, imperfect disclosures of God—God thought and acted through the human response to the divine (Mander 2011: 154). Even Christ was to be seen in this way. Caird’s vision of faith was Christocentric; he stressed ‘love and loyalty’ to Christ over doctrine, ecclesial authority, and morality (E. Caird 1899: xvi). However, Christ’s role was as an exemplary human being who expressed fully the metaphysical union of humankind and God—in his life was seen a human mind and will wholly identified with the divine mind and will, such that Christ participated uniquely in the life of God. ‘He is an example of the higher metaphysical life that lies latent within us all’ (Mander 2011: 156).

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Whilst Caird’s approach aimed to establish the rationality of Christianity, he recognized that there was a distinction between philosophy, which was exclusively conceptual, and faith, which was both conceptual and practical. Both were concerned with the same metaphysical reality, but each expressed this in different idioms. Religion, addressing a universal audience, used the concrete and pictorial to speak of the most real. Philosophy was wholly abstract. Moreover, for Caird, practical piety, the application of belief to practice, was more essential to faith than conceptual accuracy (E. Caird 1899: xvii–xviii). This claim led to the assertion that the world’s religions were different attempts to express the same aspiration to moral and spiritual perfection through union with the divine, though Christianity was uniquely insightful, particularly in its idea of the incarnation. Caird argued for the existence of God through an analysis of the human encounter with the world. According to Caird, human experience counted against the idea that facts and objects existed independently of mind, for mind shaped both the form and content of experience. Moreover, since finite mind could not give shape to the cosmos, this suggested that an infinite mind was the ultimate source of being and thought. The character of human knowing also pointed to the existence of the divine. Human knowing involved the assumption that there was no final barrier between the subject and the object. Indeed, the subject grew in selfunderstanding only as it came to know the not-self (Mander 2011: 150–1). The ‘self and the world are two sides of the same reality’ (Fergusson 2013: 8). The development of the individual involved self-transcendence through the encounter with the other—to be truly oneself was to constantly strive, through curiosity and learning, to be more than oneself. Since this drive was insatiable it was a permanent feature of human life. Humans were continually pulled by an awareness of boundless possibilities of intellectual, moral, and aesthetic advancement, which were a reflection of the immanent divine (Caird 1880: 87). Caird was part of a significant group of nineteenth-century Scottish idealists, whose work has been somewhat overlooked due to the scholarly emphasis on the Scottish Enlightenment (Fergusson 2013). It represents audacious revisionism much influenced by Hegel and is a genuine attempt to reconcile Christian doctrine with the thought of the time. He aims, not simply to articulate common intuitions, but to ‘challenge, clarify and raise these to a new level of understanding’ (Fergusson 2013: 3). Caird offers a unified metaphysics answering the problems of the Kantian dichotomy between the phenomenal and the noumenal and, in this way, tries to make space for faith, ethics, and art alongside the natural sciences, whilst countering naturalism. There are, however, limitations. Chief amongst these is his tendency to attenuate the distinction between God and the world (Mackintosh 1937: 111). Certainly, he stands at some remove from the typical Reformed emphasis on the ontological distance between God and the creation. Commonly, Reformed thinkers have stressed God’s aseity and transcendence, the necessity of revelation, the mystery

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of sin, the uniqueness of the incarnation, and the modest epistemic grasp that even the redeemed enjoy (Fergusson 2013). Caird is in tension with this tradition. He fails, perhaps, to appreciate the epistemic implications of the ontological distance between God and humankind, as well as the effect of sin on human knowledge of the divine (Sonderegger 2015: 36–41). He also seems to dissolve time in the universal. Certainly, his Christology appears to suggest that there is no unique revelation in the historic Christ, but simply an instantiation of universal ideas (Mackintosh 1937: 109).

John Oman (1860–1939) Whilst Caird sought to meet the challenges of his day by attempting to refashion Christian doctrine as a whole, Oman focused on resolving what he held to be the central religious problem of his times, the relation of faith and personal freedom. Oman held that human personhood was defined by autonomy and asked how, in the light of modern understandings in biblical studies, in philosophy and in natural science, could autonomous people find religious commitment? The Robertson Smith heresy trial, which was conducted in Edinburgh during Oman’s student days there, was one experience that helped to focus this problem for him. Oman found the trial and the reactions of church people a spur to a vocation to the ministry, with the express aim of engaging in a search for truth, which would attract anyone by reason of its integrity. Underlying this were the convictions that, since God was a God of truth, obscurantism was unbelief; that only a courageous facing of the issues could yield a religion that was ‘virile and stable’; and that an attempt to argue for religion based on its practical functionality was unlikely to convince (Oman 1902). John Oman was born in Orkney in 1860 and reared in the tradition of the Scottish Secession.³ He studied in Edinburgh, majoring in philosophy, where he also undertook ministerial training in the United Presbyterian Hall. During his studies, Oman spent two summers in Germany; a facility in German and an appreciation of German thought distinguished his theology. In 1889, Oman took up a pastoral post in Alnwick, Northumberland where he remained until 1907 when he was appointed to Westminster College, Cambridge—Oman served as Principal between 1922 and 1935. He published a number of volumes during his life. By common consent his most significant were Grace and Personality and The Natural and the Supernatural. For Oman, the apologetic challenge facing Christianity arose out of the recognition of moral personality as the fullest expression of human being. There were, for him, two dimensions of moral personality: it involved living autonomously and responsibly. His anthropology led him to assert that only a faith that could commend itself to the believer as true in the light of the highest available means ³ For a fuller account of Oman’s background and influences see Sell (2012) and McKimmon (2012).

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and that went with the grain of moral personality could command the religious believer’s whole-hearted assent or consecration. Autonomy included three moments (Oman 1931a). Firstly, to be autonomous was to exhibit self-consciousness. Human beings formed intentions and acted on the basis of their personal interpretation of their environment, which was formed out of several elements including material and ideal interests, the context of their upbringing and the experiences that had shaped their lives. Moreover, selfconsciousness was both descriptive and prescriptive. All people lived out of an interpretation of their environment. Few, however, pursued an autonomous interpretation of the world; they allowed others to set the terms of their consciousness for them. Secondly, autonomy involved self-direction; the human capacity to form one’s own intentions and to judge between possible actions. The opposite of self-direction, heteronomy, was sin. Oman allowed that a person might learn from life and others, yet they ought to form their own view and intentions. Indeed, even the divine will could not short-circuit this moral necessity. In this regard, Oman stressed that Christ’s function in the life of the believer was not as the source of infallible truth, nor as the agent of a salvific process that occurred beyond the consciousness of the individual, but as an inspiring example of honest and courageous living. Thirdly, autonomy involved self-determination—the capacity to act in terms of the intentions which had been formed. Oman regarded the awareness that is associated with self-determination as ‘our most direct conscious experience’ and indeed the basis of self-consciousness (Oman 1931a: 45). The self became aware of itself through its actions, which differentiated it from its environment and other creatures. Self-identity was the memory of the self ’s doings in the world and the self ’s being was constituted by the capacity for self-determination. Autonomy could be mistaken for narcissism, except that Oman assumed the implicit presence of a predisposition to seek truth; the moral agent strove for honesty or sincerity. For Oman, the poet, who was marked by ‘aesthetic sincerity’, was an exemplar of honesty. The poet faced up to the world as it was, eschewing conventionalities, recognizing their partial grasp of truth, beauty, and goodness (Oman 1931b: 126). Contrariwise, a typical form that insincerity took was the search for finalities: fixed organizations, ethical schemes, or theologies (Oman 1941). Since the autonomy of the will was essential to human flourishing, it followed that ‘there can be no personal relation with us except through it’ (Oman 1931a: 46). On this basis, Oman distinguished between a personal and an individual relation between persons. An individual relation was that characterized by the passivity of one of the parties involved; whereas a personal relation, one which nourished moral personality, involved mutuality and the ability of both parties to perceive, intend, and act freely. When help was offered in a personal relation, it was offered in such a way as to bring ‘forth a response from within’ (Oman 1931a: 43).

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His analysis of moral personality led Oman to be critical of those who saw faith as obedience to traditional dogmas and practices. The historical study of the Bible and the progress of natural science and philosophy had undermined the idea that the divine will and presence could be found in authoritative propositions and stories transcribed in the Bible or in Church tradition. More fundamentally, the traditional view impaired the moral personality of the individual; a proper understanding of personality and of grace required that persons had a genuine opportunity to accept or reject the divine will. This, for Oman, was the nub of the problem of faith and freedom. His solution was to argue that God’s providential activity and revelation in Scripture and Christ are such as to nourish and reward, not undermine moral personality. Oman’s understanding of God’s presence and action in the world emphasized the immanence of God in creation. This was reflected in his assertion that human consciousness in its totality included a universal, intuitive, cognitive, but nonconceptual awareness of the transcendent sphere, characterized by qualities of awe and attraction (Oman 1941: xi). Primordially this awareness had the character of a feeling of dread or awe; it was a response to that which was awe-inspiring.⁴ In its most primitive form this feeling was occasioned by a sense of the oneness of the world. God was active and known in the whole of human experience. All were in touch with and constrained by the divine. Since implicit in the feeling of the divine was the desire to draw close to, to understand and to respond appropriately to the transcendent, it follows, for Oman, that the search to understand God and the divine will was a basic human reflex. The encounter that Oman spoke of was an intensely personal one, for God dealt with each person individually, revealing the divine will progressively as they pursued insight and lived out of their best understanding of what God wanted. Clearly the idea of knowledge here was not only that of propositional learning, but something like Locke’s idea of the ‘inward and full persuasion of the mind’. In Oman’s view, human knowledge of any environment, including the divine, involved the coming together of various kinds of feeling, psychological states, evaluative processes, and intellectual reflection. There were elements of human passivity and activity in knowledge gathering. Humans perceived through feeling; the nature and significance of what was perceived was a matter of interpretation, involving evaluation and thought.⁵ Oman’s picture of faith as a personal encounter with and search for the divine, which involves a progressive clarification of the nature and will of God, goes some way to explaining how he held together moral personality and faith. The divine, being immanent in the human environment, disclosed itself progressively, but only in response to the human search for and commitment to acting in terms of ⁴ Feeling here is not an occasional emotion, but a basic form of perception. ⁵ John Hick (1966) was influenced by Oman’s epistemology.

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the divine and always coordinate with the intellectual and moral resources of the community and Church of the time. In this sense, there was both a divine and human element in faith, ensuring the freedom of the moral personality and the intensity of practical commitment intrinsic to faith. Oman’s view of the nature of faith shaped his understanding of the role of Scripture and of Christ in the life of the believer. His axiom was that faith and theology, the formalized intellectual pursuit of the transcendent, moved forward only as they paid close attention to the witness of the divine in experience: ‘Only if we see grace as it works on earth and understand it as it affects our own experience, can we possibly hope to have clearness or certainty’ (Oman 1931a: 40). In this, Scripture had an important supportive role. Believers should give attention to the insights of others, including the writers of the Scriptures and Jesus, but only to help establish, for themselves, the will of the divine. The people of the past gained knowledge of the divine through an honest search for understanding and not through arbitrary disclosures of information. One looked to Scripture, not for infallible guidance, but for clues to the nature of the divine, which could assist discernment in the present. Oman stressed that one often learns more from the attitudes of the faithful of the past, than from their specific articulations of the faith. For Oman, Christ was saviour as the man who faced up to ‘unjust human agony which is life’s supreme mystery’ and who was able to achieve a personal victory over the injustice of his suffering (1950: 46). Through Christ’s acceptance of the cross as within the divine purpose, the mystery of suffering was transfigured into the mystery of God’s love. Through his ability to accept suffering and to trust that there was divine meaning within it, Jesus invited the faithful to adopt a new attitude that views all experience as permeated by God’s love. The harsh experiences of life were not thereby rendered transparent, but there was trust that God’s love was being worked out through all things. Jesus was saviour, not because he changed the facts of existence, but because through adopting his attitude there was a new relation to events. The cross was also saving in the sense that it bore witness, from the God-ward side, to the Father’s loving purpose to overcome the ‘bondage of sin’ and the ‘chaos and ruin it works in God’s world’ (1950: 120). In Christ’s self-surrender to God and others, it was also shown that God values above all ‘meekness and patience . . . a heart receptive of His truth and responsive to His will’ (1950: 125). In Christ, there was a paradigmatic disclosure of God’s own being and the true being of humankind. The mode of this disclosure was such as to maintain human freedom, for the cross invites a free response to the love of God but does not compel it. In Oman’s view, where faith is understood as involving the acceptance of fixed doctrinal propositions, this can generate intellectual and existential difficulties for the believer. As scientific and other forms of knowledge develop, the believer may experience cognitive dissonance. Oman’s solution is to suggest that the truth

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about God and faith is discovered not received, which makes room for the exercise of human freedom. Underpinning this approach is his view that God is known as immanent in human experience, that God sustains a gracious relationship with humankind and that Scripture, tradition, and Christ function as clues to the divine environment, beckoning the believer to grow in understanding and consecration. However, there may be concerns over some aspects of Oman’s work. He claims that the environment affords an intuitive knowledge of the divine, which is primordially felt as the undifferentiated oneness of the world. It is difficult, though, to see how he can plausibly make the transition from this assertion to the affirmation that, for the Christian, the world is encountered as deeply personal. This inconsistency is important, since Oman holds that his theology is inferential; it models human experience. Again, Oman’s analysis of autonomy suggests that the moral self by necessity aims to form its own judgements and act on the basis of these. However, his subsequent claim that God’s graciousness is instantiated in God’s allowing humans epistemic freedom to discover the divine will, falls somewhat short of the more radical implications of autonomy as he elucidates these. Perhaps, in general, Oman’s problems arise from the limitations of the personal metaphor when it comes to understanding experience. It is difficult to bring all aspects of human experience under this one hermeneutical key and it is equally challenging to explain how human autonomy, as he understands it, can be reconciled with the perception that it is God who finally fixes the good and the true.

John Macmurray (1891–1976) John Macmurray’s understanding of the challenge facing Christianity was that it was the problem of the personal (Macmurray 1957: 21). For Macmurray, philosophy’s perennial task was to ‘exhibit the unity of human experience as a whole’, but the nature of this task changed over time as historical circumstances threw up new practical problems raising theoretical issues (1957: 22). He held that the twentieth century had seen a radical break with the past across a range of human activities, including religion and morals, and this gave rise to the crisis of the personal. By this, Macmurray meant a tendency in modern life to look for organizational and technocratic ways of defining and realizing human wellbeing (1957: 29). This involved the subordination of personal freedom and responsibility, with the consequent atrophy of habits of self-reflection and the pursuance of virtuous ideals, such as holiness. ‘Success will tend to become the criterion of rightness, and there will spread through society a temper which is extraverted, pragmatic and merely objective, for which all problems are soluble by better organization’ (1957: 30–1). Macmurray argued that Christianity, reconceived, had a decisive part to play in responding to this problem.

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John Macmurray was born in south-west Scotland but lived as a youth in Aberdeen.⁶ His parents were both committed Christians and as a youth he moved in independent evangelical circles. An early ambition was to be a missionary in China. He studied at Glasgow and Balliol, although his time in Oxford was disrupted by service in the Great War. His war experience shaped his subsequent career, for it highlighted the need for reconciliation between people. After his studies, Macmurray held academic posts in Manchester, South Africa, Oxford, London, and Edinburgh. Though he moved away from evangelicalism, he identified as a Christian throughout his life, becoming a Quaker in retirement. His Gifford Lectures (1957, 1961a) are widely regarded as the summation of his life’s work. After a traditional religious upbringing, Macmurray became disillusioned with Creedal Christianity, in the first instance, through his study of the Bible as a historical text (1965). However, he never lost a sense of the reality of religion. Its powerful influence on his own life and that of his parents could not be denied. He sought, therefore, a more relevant and persuasive understanding of its significance. Moreover, his critique of traditional faith was fuelled by what he saw as the failures of the churches during the Great War. An understanding of Macmurray’s thought begins with his attempt to reconceive the shape of personal life and the role of reflection in it. A key argument was that human beings were best conceived as agents rather than thinkers. Humans do and then they think about what they have done. This perspective provided a better account of human experience than alternatives, not least because it offered, in his view, a plausible resolution of the mind/body problem. If humans were understood as doers, then it followed that freedom was the emergent problem of human existence. Humans, as doers, intend things. It follows that to be fulfilled is to act freely, without constraint. Macmurray held that there were three conditions of human freedom. The first was the need to decide what was of importance; that is, what, in the doing, would bring greatest satisfaction. However, modern people found this a difficult question. Macmurray sometimes characterized this as a loss of faith, arguing that the decline of the churches in the West was both an expression and a cause of a growing inability to think deeply about the meaning of life (Macmurray 1957). The ability to establish what was important to do, in turn, depended on the ability of people to think, feel, and act for themselves, that is, to frame their own responses to the world beyond themselves (Macmurray 1932: 138). They must be able to come to their own mind as to the nature of the world, they must be able to identify for themselves what is of significance in that world, and they must be able to act based on their ideas and feelings. Macmurray believed that there was an objective view of and felt response to the world. This, of course, was an ideal and ⁶ See Costello (2002) and McIntosh (2011) for more extensive accounts of Macmurray’s life and intellectual development.

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gaining some approximation to it required that a person allowed their thinking and feeling to develop in response to that which lies beyond the self. Freedom is dependent on love for the not-self. A second condition of human freedom was that of accessing the means to do what was intended. If an agent intended to do something, they needed to work out how to do that. Macmurray’s perceptive comment is that, in many contemporary societies, people sometimes confuse the means of life—power or technique—with the goals of life. The third and most encompassing condition of freedom arose from the fact that humans always acted in a world where others were present. This meant that to act freely a person required the cooperation of others, both in allowing the agent to act as they intended and in cooperating with the agent in pursuing shared goals. Personal relationships were, however, problematic because they were reciprocal, which is to say that there was always the possibility that intentions would conflict, leading to estrangement and the need for forgiveness and reconciliation. The problem of the personal was, then, the problem of how to align the intentions of agents, such that all were able to act freely. This was a perennial aspect of human society. However, it was particularly a modern concern, in that the ever growing technological and economic integration of human societies, alongside the atrophy of habits of self-reflection had exacerbated the problem (Macmurray 1957: 26). This problem was also the most important question facing humankind, since its resolution provided the context in which worthwhile goals and appropriate means could be fixed. In analysing how the problem could be solved, Macmurray argued that freedom was only found through developing loving relationships with others. There are several dimensions to this. One was the sociological observation that humans developed the capacity for thought, feeling, and action in the context of human relationships, so that the capacity for freedom was dependent upon their interrelationships with others. Further, Macmurray held that freedom involved responding spontaneously and appropriately, in thought and feeling, to the notself. Fear, the opposite of love, inhibited this freedom, for it was the disposition to protect oneself from danger and where it became dominant, a person or community would be unable to think and feel objectively about the world. It followed that a precondition of human freedom was the nurturing of loving relationships. Macmurray’s emphasis on agency led him to regard the reflective activities of humankind—there were three archetypal forms of reflection: science, art, and religion—as arising out of and for the sake of action. They arose to facilitate human freedom. They were secondary moments in human activity, arising when action was disrupted. Science was concerned with the search for means, art with worthwhile ends, and religion, the original form of reflection, was concerned with the problem posed by human relationships. Since the problem of human relationships was universal, so also was religion (Macmurray 1961b: 46). Its role was

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to construct, sustain, and revivify communities of friendship; the extension of the model of the ideal family—a community of affection, self-giving love, loyalty, and trust—to all. Religious activities aimed, first, to maintain those communities that existed and to heal fractures where they occurred. One way in which religions had sought to maintain the feeling of community over the generations was through belief in life after death. Again, religions sought to generate community feeling where this had been lost or had never existed. Groups of people might share a functional relationship, but this was not a community. The function of religious reflection was to create a feeling of community where none existed, or to restore it where it had been lost. The religious concepts of forgiveness and grace were important in this regard. Finally, the religious attitude aimed at exploring the possibilities of relationship by extending community, in principle, to all people. The Christian belief that God loved and welcomed all invited the attempt to build a universal community of friendship. The religious function also aimed at deepening and intensifying existing bonds of affection, through an ongoing spiral of reflection on and experimentation in community building (1961a, 1961b). Religion, for Macmurray, performed its social function through ritual practices, the development of contemplative modes of life, and the construction of religious beliefs, the latter being the least significant of the triad. Ritual was particularly important, for actions and words symbolized and reinforced the common life that people shared. Ritual was powerful because it involved the interaction of people together. Doctrine, though not central, also played a significant role (Macmurray 1961b: 71–2). Faith was an attitude of trust towards the Other and doctrine aimed to articulate ideas that would sustain fearlessness. The belief that God was a loving, personal agent, at work in history to build a universal community, was one such belief (Macmurray 1938: 116–17). Another particularly important idea was that humans lived in a personal universe, for this was the ground of the suppression of fear (Hood 2003: 49–52). By personal universe, Macmurray meant that humans intuit, in the context of action, the unity or integration of the world. Further, the fact of human agency meant that the world must be a unity of action and that the unity of the world was constituted by the action of a loving God. Again, doctrine sustained community by providing a symbolic language with which to explore the realm of the personal. Salvation by grace alone, for example, symbolized that reconciliation between persons was always received as a gift. A major study by McIntosh (2011) suggests, in contrast to the analysis above, that Macmurray’s emphasis on Christianity is both vague and unnecessary to his system, since it does not arise from his philosophical presuppositions. It would be possible, in McIntosh’s view, to break the link with Christianity and reshape Macmurray’s work as a ‘non-religious social ethic’ (2011: 199). Whilst appreciating the attempt to render Macmurray useful to a religiously plural society, it is implausible to hold that Christian beliefs are not integral to his thought, such that

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their removal would seriously damage the integrity of his philosophy. The foregoing discussion has shown that, for Macmurray, both religious practice and the teaching of Jesus are central to his understanding of how the problem of the personal can be overcome. Moreover, McIntosh fails to appreciate that Macmurray’s analysis of the personal may well be influenced by the Christian conception of a relational God. It may be the fruit of a consciousness informed by Christianity (Aves 1991: 137). Macmurray’s analysis of the problems associated with technocratic approaches to moral or religious questions is acute. He is one of a group of thinkers who focus on the cultural predicament brought about by scientism (Beveridge and Turnbull 1989: 96–7). He highlights the facile secularism that fails to appreciate the personal and social costs of the attenuation of the religious consciousness with its practice of self-criticism, its focus on the interior life, and its encouragement of personal responsibility. Moreover, as an apologetic, Macmurray’s attempt to signal the importance of Christianity through highlighting the role of faith in creating and sustaining communities of friendship is valuable. Likewise, his stress on the necessary relationship between belief and practice in Christianity is an important corrective to the tendency to view belief as mere assent to religious propositions or the notion that religion is mainly concerned with the consolation of an afterlife and not with action here and now (McIntosh 2011: 153). There are, though, problematic features in Macmurray. His account of the logic of reflection suggests that religious belief can be explained in terms of problems integral to human agency. However, a typical religious view is that faith arises from an encounter with the immaterial, which discloses itself to humankind (Newbigin 1937: 68). Though occasionally Macmurray seems to allude to the possibility of a direct encounter with God, the sweep of his work tends to view the idea of God as arising as a necessary postulate for the recovery of human community (Macmurray 1965: 34, 53).⁷ It is this that Trethowan is highly critical of: ‘God’s function [in Macmurray] is simply to hold the world together . . . Has he then no life of his own?’ (1970: 235–6). Macmurray produces an authentic natural theology, which argues for faith through an analysis of human experience (Jaki 1986). However, the attempt to produce a metaphysics leads to over-simplification. For example, he offers a stipulative account of religion, which takes little notice of religion as it actually exists. Again, he claims to have identified empirical and logical grounds for thinking of fellowship as the supreme human good, but fails to register that people hold a multiplicity of ends as intrinsically good and that some of these may conflict with fellowship, as he understands it. Prima facie, this suggests that fellowship is not a logically necessary condition of human fulfilment, but a valued ⁷ McIntosh comments that, for Macmurray, ‘Christianity [needs to be] defined in such a way as to render it a practically effective strategy for human progress’ (2011: 175).

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end that arises out of the conceptual web of Christianity. Belief may be a creative presence, not simply a reflection of that which is intuited in agency.

Conclusion This chapter has examined Caird, Oman, and Macmurray from the perspective of apologetics. It has been shown that each aimed to provide a coherent and relevant representation of Christianity for their age. Each of them also shared intellectual motifs, which arose, perhaps, from a common ancestry in British idealism (Mander 2011). First, each sees the world as an expression of a spiritual reality. God, for them, is immanent in human experience and realizes the divine purpose in ways that uphold human freedom. Even Macmurray, who carried on a polemic against idealism, finally affirms that human freedom is underpinned by thinking of the world as a unity of divine action. Secondly, each holds that the world must be conceived as a unity through God’s action. Each agrees that the world is accessible to reason and that both philosophy and theology, in their own idioms, aim to understand the whole (Mander 2011: 25). Thirdly, each affirms the spiritual evolution of reality and holds that Christianity is the ideal type of a universal religion. Fourthly, each is optimistic about the human potential to respond to the divine promptings. Each thinks of revelation as non-coercive and sees Christ as playing an exemplary role. For each there is a root in human experience that orientates people to God. One is struck, then, by their common allegiance to idealist themes, though significant differences do remain. For instance, the stress on the personal in Oman and Macmurray contrasts with Caird’s focus on the Absolute (Fergusson 2013). Again, Caird and Macmurray give expression to the idealist concern with the reform of social life (Mander 2011: 6). This voice in muted in Oman. Historical theology is illuminating because it provides a snapshot of recurring models of thought, which can orientate the thinker in the present. Herein lies part of the value of the present study. Caird, Oman, and Macmurray aimed to represent Christian faith to a doubting world and, in this, they provide a glimpse of the theological possibilities and limitations of certain intellectual trajectories and of the broad metaphysical agenda that they shared.

Bibliography Aves, John (1991). ‘Persons in Relation: John Macmurray’, in Christoph Schwöbel and Colin E. Gunton (eds.), Persons Divine and Human. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 120–37. Beveridge, Craig and Ronald Turnbull (1989). The Eclipse of Scottish Culture. Edinburgh: Polygon.

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Caird, Edward (1899). ‘Memoir of Principal Caird’, in John Caird, The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity with a memoir by Edward Caird, vol. 1. Glasgow: Maclehose, ix–cxli. Caird, John (1880). An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. Glasgow: Maclehose. Caird, John (1888). Spinoza. Edinburgh: Blackwood. Caird, John (1899). The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity with a memoir by Edward Caird, 2 vols. Glasgow: Maclehose. Cheyne, A. C. (1983). The Transforming of the Kirk: Victorian Scotland’s Religious Revival. Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press. Cheyne, A. C. (1999). ‘John Caird (1820–98): Preacher, Professor, Principal’, in Studies in Scottish Church History. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 165–83. Costello, John E. (2002). John Macmurray: A Biography. Edinburgh: Floris. Fergusson, David (2013). ‘Scottish Idealism’, in Karl Ameriks (ed.), Philosophy and Natural Sciences, vol. 1 of The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, gen. eds. Nicholas Boyle and Elizabeth Disley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 270–96. Hick, John (1966). Faith and Knowledge. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hood, Adam (2003). Baillie, Oman and Macmurray: Experience and Religious Belief. Aldershot: Ashgate. Jaki, Stanley L. (1986). Lord Gifford and his Lectures: A Centenary Retrospect. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. McIntosh, Esther (2011). John Macmurray’s Religious Philosophy. Farnham: Ashgate. McKenna, Scott S. (2012). ‘John Caird: An Intellectual Biography’. MPhil thesis, University of Edinburgh. McKimmon, Eric G. (2012). ‘John Oman, Orkney’s Theologian: A Contextual Study of John Oman’s Theology with Reference to Personal Freedom as the Unifying Principle’. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh. Mackintosh, H. R. (1937). Types of Modern Theology: Schleiermacher to Barth. London: Nisbet. Macmurray, John (1932). Freedom in the Modern World. London: Faber. Macmurray, John (1938). The Clue to History. London: SCM. Macmurray, John (1957). The Self as Agent: The Form of the Personal, vol. 1. London: Faber. Macmurray, John (1961a). Persons in Relation: The Form of the Personal, vol. 2. London: Faber. Macmurray, John (1961b). Religion, Art and Science: A Study of the Reflective Activities in Man. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Macmurray, John (1965). Search for Reality in Religion. London: Allen & Unwin. Mander, W. J. (2011). British Idealism: A History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Newbigin, J. E. L. (1937). Christian Freedom in the Modern World. London: SCM. Oman, John (1902). Vision and Authority or the Throne of St. Peter. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Oman, John (1931a). Grace and Personality, 4th edition. London: Cambridge University Press. Oman, John (1931b). The Natural and the Supernatural. London: Cambridge University Press. Oman, John (1941). Honest Religion. Religious Book Club edn. London: Religious Book Club. Oman, John (1950). A Dialogue with God and Other Sermons and Addresses. London: James Clarke. Sell, Alan (2012). ‘Living in the Half Lights: John Oman in Context’, in Adam Hood (ed.), John Oman: New Perspectives. Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press, 3–63. Sonderegger, Katherine (2015). Systematic Theology, Vol. 1: The Doctrine of God. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. Trethowan, I. (1970). Absolute Value. London: Allen & Unwin.

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7 The Gifford Lectures Gordon Graham

‘The Gifford Lectures’ have been delivered at the universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and St Andrews for well over a century, and attained a reputation that makes an invitation to give them a prestigious accolade. The institution of these lectures was the result of a bequest by Adam, Lord Gifford, an Edinburgh lawyer who had made a considerable fortune in the course of his commercial practice and left £80,000 in his Will, to be distributed between the four universities of Scotland in specified amounts. By the standards of the time—indeed of any time—Gifford’s bequest was very large,¹ but if the generosity of the bequest was unusual, even more unusual, perhaps, was its purpose. Unlike most other smaller gifts and bequests, its aim was not to finance some part of the universities’ established activities, or provide additional teaching posts, scholarships, and prizes, but to enable the four universities to give the general public access to the thinking of the very best academic minds. ‘[S]aid sums are to be paid in trust only for the . . . purpose of establishing in each of the four cities . . . a Lectureship or Popular Chair for Promoting, Advancing, Teaching and Diffusing the study of Natural Theology, in the widest sense of that term . . . ’ (Jaki 1995: 98). The lectures should be ‘public and popular’, the Will goes on to say, and accessible to ‘the whole community without matriculation’, that is, Scottish society beyond the universities. The full text of Gifford’s Will is a substantial document that sets out both this condition, and the purpose of the lectures at considerable length. Gifford left ‘all the details and arrangements’ of each lectureship in the hands, and at the discretion, of ‘patrons’ appointed from within the individual universities, subject only to their complying with nine principles that his Will goes on to enunciate. Most of these principles concern the organization of the lectures and financial management of the funds, but the fourth laid it down that the lecturers would not be subject to a religious test of any kind. They could be of ‘any religion or way of thinking’, and even ‘sceptics or agnostics or freethinkers’, provided only that they would be ‘true thinkers, lovers of and earnest inquirers after truth’. The fifth principle, however, did place a constraint upon the approach they could take; they must ‘treat their subject as a strictly natural science’ (Jaki 1995: 100). ¹ There are several different ways in which the contemporary value of Gifford’s bequest might be calculated. Comparative purchasing power is the most conservative, but even this produces a figure well over £8 million/$11 million.

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The first sets of lectures took place in 1888—at Edinburgh, Glasgow, and St Andrews—just three years after Lord Gifford made his Will. For the first few decades, appointment as Gifford Lecturer carried a very substantial stipend, equivalent to a professorial salary. In return for this stipend, those who accepted the appointment were expected to give two sets of lectures in consecutive academic years. From early on, a further expectation grew up—that the lectures would be published in book form, and indeed Gifford had himself suggested that the funds might properly be used to subsidize ‘publication in a cheap form’. This did not always happen, but it occurred sufficiently often that the lectures soon exceeded Gifford’s original hope of providing local and university audiences with intellectual stimulation, and began to make a significant contribution to the wider world of letters and learning. Furthermore, while initially the lecturers were British based, it was not long before academics from continental Europe and the United States were invited to give Gifford Lectures. This raised the profile, and accordingly the influence of ‘the Giffords’ increased considerably, especially after William James delivered his lectures on The Varieties of Religious Experience at Edinburgh in 1901. The book in which these lectures were published one year later has never gone out of print. Since their inception, the Gifford Lectures have undergone many changes. The First World War took a huge toll on the value of the endowments, substantially reducing the stipend that it was possible to pay. The changing pattern of academic life made two consecutive years of lecturing hard to secure. Even one sustained series could prove difficult, so that from time to time ‘series’ comprising single lectures by a variety of speakers were arranged instead. Such a modification, of course, could not result in the publication of a major work. Changing intellectual views and interests raised doubts about the viability of natural theology, and whether the subjects specified by Gifford could ever be treated as a strictly natural science. In turn, this led to lectures on subjects that, it seems likely, neither Lord Gifford nor his contemporaries would have anticipated, and which can be said to comply with his bequest on only the most flexible interpretation. Yet, despite all these changes, it remains the case that over the course of more than a century, a steady stream of Gifford Lectures have continued to be given by highly distinguished philosophers, theologians, scientists, and intellectual historians that plausibly fall under the label ‘natural theology’. The majority have subsequently appeared as books. A great many of these books have been highly regarded, and a few have attained the status of enduringly important contributions to their subject. In the 1990s, with financial assistance from the Templeton Foundation, a comprehensive website was established recording and summarizing this wealth of academic activity and production.² There is, consequently, neither need nor point for such a record to be replicated here. The aim of this chapter, accordingly, is not a brief history of the Giffords, but an assessment of their significance. Such ² https://www.giffordlectures.org/

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an assessment might be conceived along sociological lines—an inquiry into the impact of this long and impressive flow of lectures and books upon the universities of Scotland, and the communities of which they are a part. The difficulty with such an undertaking is that political events, economic developments, and cultural changes over such a long period make the isolation of this one factor impossibly difficult. More plausible is the hope that we might make a more limited assessment, one confined to intellectual history. Can we trace any influence on the development of the disciplines with which the lecturers have engaged? Here too, however, it seems that the existence of very many factors militates against identifying the distinctive impact of the lectures. So, the question to be addressed has to be a more philosophical one: to what extent have the lectures and books that owe their existence to Lord Gifford realized the intention that he had for them? This question raises a further, yet more philosophical question: to what extent could such an intention ever be realized? * * * * * A little surprisingly, perhaps, there have been relatively few attempts to assess the intellectual significance of the Gifford Lectures. In 1921, William Davidson, then Professor of Logic at Aberdeen, devoted his Croall Lectures to a review of the Giffords up to 1919, subsequently published under the title Recent Theistic Discussion. In 1970, Bernard E. Jones edited a Gifford anthology with a title culled from Lord Gifford’s Will—Earnest Enquirers after Truth. The book consists almost entirely in extracts from the lectures, some of them as short as a single sentence. These are organized thematically under headings that, like the title, use phrases from the Will, and in this way Jones does document the degree to which the lectures (up to 1968) covered the ground set out in the Will. Apart from a brief introductory overview, however, there is nothing by way of critical assessment. There is a more evident element of assessment in Lord Gifford and His Lectures: A Centenary Retrospect by Stanley Jaki, the physicist/theologian who was Gifford Lecturer at Edinburgh in the years 1974–6. First published in 1986, Jaki’s short book was reissued in an updated and expanded version in 1995. The opening essay is a review of the lectures similar to, but considerably shorter than Davidson’s. The remainder, and larger part of the volume, is devoted to listing the lectures and lecturers, reproducing the text of Lord Gifford’s Will, publishing (for the first time) a memoir by his brother John Gifford, and adding selections from lectures that Adam Gifford himself had given. None of these three volumes is large, and even taken together they offer very little sustained reflection on the intellectual significance of the lectures.³ Davidson assesses the significance of the lectures in

³ John Haldane, whose Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen in 2005 have never been published, has a short paper about the Gifford Lectures in Theology Today 63 (2007), but its principal focus is on the connection between America and Scottish philosophy more generally.

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terms of the consensus they may be said to arrive at from the point of view of ‘affording a more stable basis for enlightened Theism’ (Davidson 1921: 229). Jaki is more inclined to take the lectures singly and to assess the degree to which they succeed or fail as treatments and arguments in their own right. But he concludes with a remark that is salient to our present purpose when he says that Lord Gifford ‘with the naïveté of a zealous amateur in philosophy as well as in theology hoped that natural theology would deliver far more than it actually can’ (Jaki 1995: 63). On the other hand, he adds, ‘that it can deliver much less than it really can is a widely shared view in the academic community, including its theological sector’ (Jaki 1995: 63) The second claim is one to which we will return. If Jaki is right in attributing to Gifford the naïveté of a zealous amateur, this is not the only source of uncertainty about the realization of his intention. The Will specifies the subject matter of the lectures as ‘natural theology’ and requires that it be treated ‘as a natural science’, but in its further attempt to characterize the scope of ‘natural theology’ it allows a great variety of approaches that do not obviously share very much common ground. By natural theology, the Will tells us, is meant ‘The Knowledge of God, the Infinite, the All, the First and Only Cause, the One and the Sole Substance, the Sole Being, the Sole Reality, and the Sole Existence, the Knowledge of His Nature and Attributes, the Knowledge of the Relations which men and the whole universe bear to Him, the Knowledge of the Nature and Foundations of Ethics or Morals, and of all Obligation and Duties thence arising’ (Jaki 1995: 98). The repeated use of ‘knowledge’ suggests a common pursuit, but at a minimum this characterization encompasses three subject areas, which, if ultimately connected, are for the most part distinct—metaphysics and ontology, theology and religion, ethics and moral philosophy. These had long been taught and studied separately within the universities of Scotland (and most other places) and become the responsibility of distinct Chairs and Departments. Furthermore, from the beginning invitations were issued not only to philosophers, theologians, and moralists, but to philologists, historians, anthropologists, and mathematicians—Max Muller at Glasgow (1888–92), Andrew Lang at St Andrews (1888–90), E. B. Tylor (1889–91) at Aberdeen, George Stokes at Edinburgh (1891–3). Over the years the range of disciplines grew, and from time to time has included professors of classics, literature, and psychiatry. The result, inevitably, is that there is no obvious sense in which the lectures can be said to have collectively contributed to a growing body of knowledge. In his Croall Lectures, Davidson is able to identify a direction of thought that affords ‘a more stable basis for enlightened Theism’ only by largely ignoring many of the lectures and focusing on a few, notably lectures in philosophical theology. It is true that the university patrons of the lectures were never very rigorous (or perhaps even entirely clear) in their interpretation of ‘natural theology’, but even if they had been, the characterization of the subject matter contained in Gifford’s Will left them a great deal of latitude.

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Whether or not Jaki rightly accuses Gifford of amateurish naïveté, and whether or not Gifford’s specification of the subject matter was too broad to serve his purpose, there is this further difficulty. Philosophers of science have long agreed that the growth of scientific knowledge cannot properly be conceptualized in terms of the accumulation of established fact (contrary, perhaps, to the originating vision of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, an innovation of the Scottish Enlightenment that began publishing a little over a century before the first Gifford Lectures were given). In itself, however, this does not undermine the idea that scientific knowledge does grow and has grown. In sharp contrast, however, the idea of the growth of theological knowledge is highly problematic. We know more about infectious diseases now than human beings have ever known. But do we know more about God than people did in ages past? We might accept Lord Gifford’s implicit belief that knowledge of ‘God, the Infinite, the All, the First and Only Cause . . . the Sole reality . . . Foundations of Morals etc.’ is possible, while at the same time doubting whether it can be said to grow in anything like the way our knowledge of the physical and biological worlds has grown. This is not a peculiarity of theology. It applies no less to philosophy and the humanities more generally. Yet, if there is no ‘growth’ of knowledge in these areas, can there be anything properly called ‘advancing’ the subject matter? If not, what then of Lord Gifford’s hopes? The underlying issue here is one that philosophers in Scotland raised and discussed most intently in precisely the same period at which the Gifford Lectures were established. The ambition of the Scottish philosophers of the eighteenth century had been to employ the methods of the natural sciences to good effect by applying them to the human sciences. It is an ambition expressly, and famously, articulated by Hume in the introduction to his Treatise of Human Nature where he laments ‘the weak foundations’ of philosophical systems hitherto, and applauds those more recent philosophers ‘who have begun to put science of man on a new footing’ (Hume 2007 [1739]: 3–5). One hundred and fifty years later, however, not much progress seemed to have been made along these lines. There appeared to be no less ‘noise and clamour’ (to use Hume’s phrase) within philosophical circles than there had ever been. In 1891, A. S. Pringle-Pattison, who was later to be Gifford Lecturer in both Aberdeen (1911–13) and Edinburgh (1921–3), devoted his inaugural lecture as Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at Edinburgh to ‘The Present Position of the Philosophical Sciences’ (Pringle-Pattison 1911). Two years later Sir Henry Jones, who also gave the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh (1919–21), published a paper on ‘The Nature of Philosophy’ that expressly looked again at Hume’s contention (Jones 1893). Both Jones and Pringle-Pattison were exercised by the fact that, whereas the empirical sciences seemed to have progressed by leaps and bounds since the seminal work of Newton, Boyle, and others, what they continued to call ‘the philosophical sciences’ had persisted as contexts in which radical disagreement

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flourished. That is to say, they observed in philosophy, unlike science, very little consensus. Moreover, any occasional consensus is usually very short lived. Philosophical theories may for a time be unfashionable, but they are never consigned to history and their turn comes round again. Despite this, Jones and Pringle-Pattison found reason to conclude that philosophical discussion is of great intellectual value, but in a quite different way to the natural sciences.⁴ This conclusion, however, can hardly be made to serve Lord Gifford’s bequest. It may be that (with some difficulty) we can construe the concept of knowledge of God in such a way that academic inquiry deepens it. Perhaps our knowledge of God is like our knowledge of other people; discovering hitherto unknown facts about them can result in knowing them better. But Lord Gifford’s insistence that the lecturers treat their subject as a strictly natural science seems to rule out this interpretation. ‘Science’ implies not only the discovery of facts, but their systematic organization into a body of knowledge. It is only once the humanities are acknowledged not to be sciences within which knowledge is systematically ‘advanced’, that their distinctive concern with the exploration of meaning can be appreciated. The exploration of meaning, however, inevitably opens up a variety of interpretations. The result is not an anarchy of personal opinion. There can be better and worse, illuminating and obfuscating interpretations of a philosophical thesis, a poem or a theological doctrine. Still, this neither implies nor requires the ideal of one definitive meaning whose discovery will render further interpretation otiose. The contrast with science is plain. The discovery of germs rendered earlier theories of disease redundant. Any subsequent interest in them was historical, not scientific. It is true that a few Gifford Lectures have had something of the character of natural sciences, especially those that have approached their subject from the point of view of a social science such as anthropology or psychology. But the knowledge that results from these more evidently empirical studies is not a knowledge of God, but a knowledge of beliefs about God, the ways in which people have conceived their experience of the divine, and the practices that this experience has generated. Possibly, these investigations throw some light on ‘Knowledge of the Relations which men bear to [God]’, but if so, at best it is knowledge of one side of the relation only. The conclusion seems inescapable. If, on a reasonably straightforward reading, Lord Gifford’s hope was that his bequest would result in advancing our knowledge of God by means of a sustained and cumulative ‘science’ of natural theology, it has not been realized. And this is because it could not be. * *

*

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*

⁴ I discuss the philosophical issues here, and Jones’ essay, in ‘Philosophy, Knowledge and Understanding’ (Graham 2017).

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In considering Lord Gifford’s hopes, there is another dimension that needs to be explored. It relates to his provision that the lectures reach ‘the whole community’. ‘My hope and desire’, he says in his Will, ‘is that these lectureships and lectures may promote and advance among all classes the true knowledge of Him . . . in whom we live and move and have our being’ (Jaki 1995: 101). This is not just because of the value of knowledge for its own sake, but because of a firm conviction that ‘the true knowledge of God . . . and the true and felt knowledge (not mere nominal knowledge) of the relation of man and the universe to Him, and of the true foundations of all ethics and morals . . . is the means of man’s highest well-being, and the security of his upward progress’ (Jaki 1995: 97). The lectures, in other words, had a moral and educational purpose—improving the lives of those who listened to or read them. While this second purpose may strike us in the twenty-first century as redolent of a Victorian high-mindedness that the intervening period has left behind, it is not so easily discounted, because something similar (expressed in less flowery prose) generally underlies the rationale offered for the ‘practical’ philosophy—political philosophy, applied ethics, public theology—that came (or returned) to prominence in the last third of the twentieth century. Protagonists of ‘applied philosophy’, it is plausible to suggest, also purport to offer more than ‘mere nominal knowledge’, and to contribute to the formation of better societies and citizens. So, the question of how far it was reasonable for Lord Gifford to entertain such a hope, and how far it was realized, is a question that has considerable contemporary relevance. We might think, with some justice, that Lord Gifford was displaying a certain naïveté here too, no less than in his hope for scientific advances in natural theology. But just as his conception of ‘science’ and its value for theology echoed an intellectual ambition with deep historical roots in Scotland, so his belief that philosophical thinking could contribute to moral education also reflected a very long-standing Scottish educational ideal. Since the foundation of the ancient universities in the fifteenth century, moral philosophy had played a role in the ‘liberal’ education that the universities aimed to give their students. This key element in the curriculum reflected a belief that where there are ‘men that are rude, ignorant of letters and almost barbarous’, acquiring ‘the most precious pearl of knowledge’ would make them ‘informed’ and even ‘learned’.⁵ In seeking to promote knowledge as a source of moral improvement, then, Lord Gifford was simply endorsing an educational ideal that had animated the Scottish educational system for centuries. Of course, this fact in itself does not show that the idea was a realistic one, though its persistence over such a long period of time provides some evidence of

⁵ The phrases in quotation marks are taken from the founding document of King’s College Aberdeen, established in 1495.

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its plausibility.⁶ Once again, however, Lord Gifford articulated this hope at precisely the moment when the Scottish universities were finding it increasingly hard to realize.⁷ The reason for this was the changing social and academic context in which they found themselves. In The Wealth of Nations, Sect. V Art. II, Adam Smith explores the history, function, and effectiveness of Europe’s universities. From the point of view of educating new generations with a ‘course of education towards objects more useful both to the individual and to the publick’, he finds them to be seriously deficient (Smith 1976 [1776]: 759). But in a letter, written around that time, he makes an exception of the universities in Scotland. ‘In the present state of the Scotch universities, I do most sincerely look upon them as, for all their faults, without exception the best seminaries of learning to be found anywhere in Europe’ (Smith 1976 [1776]: 781). The expression ‘the best seminaries of learning’ is significant. In the course of the eighteenth century, the universities of Scotland replaced ‘regents’ or tutors, with professors. This signalled the fact that their task was to advance their subject, as well as teach it, but the value of their researches was judged by its relevance to education. Smith may have exaggerated the merits of the Scottish universities. Some of his contemporaries certainly thought so. But there is good reason to hold that, in comparison with Oxford, Cambridge, and the French universities, they were indeed ‘seminaries’ capable of producing what Coleridge later called a ‘clerisy’—which is to say, a professional class of ministers, lawyers, physicians, and teachers, that would serve the advancement of society as a whole. The liberal learning acquired by such a ‘clerisy’ could be disseminated to a wider population (in which, if Davie is to be believed, adult literacy was notably higher than elsewhere). Hume, who has nothing positive to say about his time as a student at Edinburgh University, nevertheless endorses the social efficacy of a ‘clerisy’ when he commends morally improving sermons preached by well-educated clergy as a form of religion far preferable to either ‘superstition’ or ‘enthusiasm’, and the one most likely to contribute to the well-being of society. The picture may be a rather rosy one, but it is not without foundation. Its clearest embodiment, perhaps, is Adam Ferguson’s occupancy of the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh from 1764 to 1785. Ferguson’s lectures, which attracted a large attendance, were expressly intended to serve the moral education of those who heard them. They were neither doctrinal nor moralizing, however, but grounded on ‘moral science’, the intellectual project that shaped philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment. Nor was Ferguson alone; he is simply an especially ⁶ Further evidence is to be found in its influence on the American College ideal, an influence that can be traced in places to the present day. See Sloan (1971). ⁷ The subversion/abandonment of this ideal over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century is the theme of George Elder Davie’s celebrated book The Democratic Intellect. It is widely accepted that, while there is a kernel of truth in Davie’s compelling story, there is also a large measure of romanticism.

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clear example of the role of the Scottish university professor. As Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, Thomas Reid both gave his students a year long course on ‘Practical Ethics’ and published Essays on the Active Powers, an influential volume that was the outcome of many years of study and reflection. Set against this background, Lord Gifford’s hope that expert study and reflection on ‘the true foundations of all ethics and morals’ might be diffused across whole communities as a ‘means of man’s highest well-being’ does not seem either foolish or naïve. Rather, his Will simply makes generous provision for an aspiration that animated the Scottish university system over a long time. Nevertheless, by the late nineteenth century, things had changed. For many decades following the Act of Union of 1707, Scotland combined increasing economic growth with relative geographical isolation, religious uniformity, and distinctive institutions. This combination served to intensify the intellectually vigorous culture that emerged. By the middle decades of the nineteenth century, however, important changes had led to altered circumstances. Geographical isolation ended when the advent of railways vastly reduced travel times between Scotland and England. The Disruption of 1843 undermined the social pre-eminence of the national Church of Scotland. The Irish famine brought large numbers of Roman Catholics to what had been an almost exclusively Protestant country. The Scottish universities came under new scrutiny at Westminster and were reorganized by the Act of 1868, the first of a series of university reforms. The effect of all this was the gradual dissolution of the society (if it ever really existed) in which universities could be ‘seminaries of learning’ producing a professional class through whom intellectual ideas and moral principles could be suffused across society as a whole.⁸ In short, these important changes radically altered Scotland. It was no longer the kind of society in which the lectures Gifford established could ‘diffuse’ moral lessons. Just as his hopes for a strictly scientific approach to natural theology rested upon an outdated ideal, so his hopes that they would play a valued role in the moral education of society at large rested upon an outdated social order. * * * * * What then should we conclude about the significance of the lectures? If nothing else, we can safely say that Lord Gifford’s bequest resulted in a large number of valuable books. While undeniably a minority of these are of limited interest, many others made valuable contributions to the debates with which they were concerned. In most cases, changes in literary style and intellectual enthusiasm have meant that their contribution was limited to the debates of their own time. ⁸ With respect to their ‘impact’ I leave aside some crucial empirical questions about how many people attended the lectures and how well they listened. Initially, ‘the Giffords’ were reported in newspapers as important social events, but it is well known that many Gifford Lecturers had difficulty holding their audiences over the series.

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A. S. Pringle-Pattison’s first set of lectures—The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy (1917)—is a notable example. The revised texts of the twenty lectures he gave exhibit genuine novelty, great insight, and immense erudition. Yet the demise of the ‘recent’ philosophy to which the title refers has led to near total neglect. In a significant number of instances, however, the books have proved to be of more enduring interest and importance, and sometimes extremely influential. These two things do not always go together. For example, John Macmurray’s Gifford Lectures, given at Glasgow from 1952 to 1954 and subsequently published in two volumes under the title The Form of the Personal, elaborate an approach to the philosophy of agency that is arguably the most profoundly original since Descartes. Such an assessment, however, cannot disguise the fact that they go almost unmentioned in books devoted to the philosophy of mind and action, have generated very little secondary literature, and are virtually unknown to contemporary philosophers. While they may be of the greatest intellectual interest, they have exercised virtually no intellectual influence.⁹ By contrast, the published version of William James’ Edinburgh Lectures— Varieties of Religious Experience—became a classic, a book that no study of the subject could or can ignore. A similar claim can plausibly be made about Alasdair MacIntyre’s Three Rival Version of Moral Inquiry, Alvin Plantinga’s Warrant and Proper Function, and Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. All these books have provided the subject matter for seminars and conferences, and generated a vast quantity of secondary literature. Whether they enter the realms of ‘classics’ is something only the test of time will tell. But it is certainly a possibility. There is no obvious correlation between Gifford Lectures that resulted in major works of intellectual distinction and Gifford Lectures that commanded, retained, and inspired large audiences. Conversely, some sets of lectures that captivated the people who heard them, led to insignificant publications, sometimes to no publication at all. Given the sentiments expressed in Lord Gifford’s Will, there is reason to regard lectures that inspired an audience drawn from both the host university and the surrounding community as more fully realizing the purposes of his bequest, than much duller lectures on a narrowly academic topic, even if the latter resulted in a memorable and influential book. Whether that makes the former more valuable than the latter is not, it seems to me, a comparison on which we need to adjudicate. Success on either score means that Lord Gifford’s bequest left the world a richer place and played a notable part in enhancing the work of the Scottish universities. ⁹ The explanation for this neglect, however lamentable, may not be very far to seek. Though Macmurray occupied two prestigious Chairs—first in London, then in Edinburgh—he was out of sympathy with the direction ‘professional’ philosophy had taken especially in the English-speaking world. As a result, he was academically somewhat isolated. Moreover, thanks to his radio broadcasts, he was a ‘popular’ thinker, and the popular philosophical writings for which he was best known rarely display the systematic profundity of his Gifford Lectures.

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If this is the most that can be said about the significance of the Gifford Lectures, it is no mean outcome. On the contrary, it probably leaves the Gifford Lectures unparalleled, not just within the universities of Scotland, but the world of the academic much more widely. Still, perhaps there is even more to be claimed for them. Stanley Jaki’s assessment, quoted earlier, concluded that while Gifford’s hopes for natural theology treated strictly as a science might have been naïvely unrealistic, the lectures Jaki reviewed provided evidence against a widely shared, and contrary, assumption—that natural theology can contribute next to nothing to academic inquiry and moral education. That assumption is still at work in the modern university, and even among theologians. In what way, we might ask, have the Gifford Lectures challenged it? Contemporary culture, C. P. Snow famously argued, is marked (and marred) by a division between two cultures—the sciences and the humanities. Snow’s target, and principal lament, was the scientific ignorance of people highly educated in the humanities, an ignorance often accompanied by complacency and even arrogance. We need not accept the precise analysis Snow offers us to acknowledge that he did identify an important division. Moreover, however comfortable those highly educated in the humanities may be in their scientific ignorance, the scientific method has gained authority over more and more aspects of human life and experience. Systematic empirical investigation is regarded as the most promising avenue, not only in physics, chemistry, biology, technology, and the medical sciences, where it has long reigned supreme, but in psychology, economics, politics, social policy, business management, and education, formerly provinces of ‘the arts’ rather than ‘the sciences’. In these spheres, the success of the scientific method is open to doubt, but this has rarely prompted questions about its authority. It is generally assumed that if the scientific method has not yet resulted in, for instance, effective economic management or the successful treatment of psychological disorders, this implies that more research is needed, not that the method is misguided. The rational authority of science, and the increasing dominance that has resulted, has had two consequences, among many. First, it has put humanities on the defensive, and driven them to seek their justification on grounds other than truth and usefulness—as sources of recreational delight, say, or subjective meaning. Secondly, it has led the proponents of science to exceed the bounds of the method itself, and to claim the status of science for what is in fact a materialist metaphysics. This is plainly ‘overreach’; there is no set of observations of experiments that can demonstrate the truth of metaphysical materialism, and by implication, the need evidently remains for metaphysical reflection. Such reflection, however, if it is not to be driven on to the defensive by the culture of science, must proceed in a way that is both sympathetic to and knowledgeable about the natural sciences. This is precisely the position that ‘natural theology’ as conceived by the Gifford Lectures adopts. It has not always been the case, of

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course, but time and again, Gifford Lectures have been given by philosophers, theologians, and scientists who are engaged with the traditional questions of metaphysics—‘God, the Infinite . . . Substance . . . Reality . . . the Nature and Foundations of Ethics’—and are at the same time fully cognizant with the strengths, accomplishments, and limitations of the natural sciences. The Gifford Lectures, in other words, have been a dedicated intellectual space for building a bridge between Snow’s two cultures.

Bibliography Davidson, William L. (1921). Recent Theistic Discussion. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Graham, Gordon (2017). ‘Philosophy, Knowledge, and Understanding’, in Stephen R. Grimm (ed.), Making Sense of the World: New Essays on the Philosophy of Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 98–115. Hume, David (2007 [1739]). A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. D. F. Norton and M. Norton. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jaki, Stanley (1995). Lord Gifford and His Lectures: A Centenary Retrospect, 2nd edition. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Jones, Bernard E. (1970). Earnest Enquirers after Truth: A Gifford Anthology. London: George Allen & Unwin. Jones, H. (1893). ‘The Nature of Philosophy’, Mind 2: 161–73. Pringle-Pattison, A. S. (1911). Man’s Place in the Cosmos and Other Essays. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons. Pringle-Pattison, A. S. (1917). The Idea of God in the Light of Recent Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sloan, Douglas (1971). The Scottish Enlightenment and the American College Ideal. New York: Teachers College Press. Smith, Adam (1976 [1776]). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, vol. II, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Snow, Charles Percy (1959). The Two Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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8 A Century of Social Theology Johnston McKay

If we sin socially we must suffer socially. By its fruits every social system must be judged, and by its fruits our present social system stands condemned. —Rev. Dr David Watson¹

There is always a risk in making exclusive claims of originality for a writer, so it is safer to describe Robert Flint as ‘one of the first authors, writing in English to give most serious consideration to Christ’s Kingdom upon Earth’. That was the title of his first book, published in 1865 during his first year as the Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of St Andrews, following ministries in Aberdeen East (1859–62) and Kilconquhar in Fife (1862–4). He was later to become Professor of Divinity in Edinburgh from 1876 until his death in 1910. Flint claims that identification of the Church with the Kingdom of God is a ‘pernicious notion’. The Kingdom of God is not to be established among us in this country solely by the services of the sanctuary, or directly religious exercises and instruction. A legislator by obtaining good laws, a poet by writing ennobling verses, a country gentleman by an active interest in the well-being of those who are on his estates and in his own neighbourhood, and every class of men by the faithful discharge of their special duties in commerce or trade, science or art, may help and hasten on the coming of the kingdom of God without entering into the ecclesiastical sphere of action. (Flint 1865: 71)

Earlier writers such as Patrick Brewster and Robert Burns in Paisley and later Norman Macleod of the Barony in Glasgow believed that the Church and its evangelical outreach were essential to social progress. Speaking to the first Church Congress on Social Issues in 1899, Flint said that ‘The social problem is a religious one, but it is also an economic, political, moral and educational one; by no means merely a religious one, but inclusive of all secular agencies, institutions and movements’ (Flint 1865: 83). However, in the same address he insists that what ¹ Watson (1919: 41).

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has been revealed to the Church is ‘not one solution among many, but the solution, the one which excludes nothing that is true and includes nothing that is false in other solutions which have been proposed’. For Flint, the Kingdom of God is what motivates Christians to be active in church and society, but crucially he sees a place for agencies other than the Church in advancing the Kingdom of God on earth. Robert Flint’s social and political theology represents a paradigm shift in the Church’s attitude to social issues in the middle years of the nineteenth century, which Donald Smith has described as a time when the Church departed ‘from the historic Reformed social tradition’ which would have demanded a more critical reaction to the developments of industrial society in faithfulness to the Gospel and the theological heritage of the Church (Smith 1987: 175). Through the preaching and the practical concern of the most socially concerned churchmen of the time, such as Robert Burns, Robert Buchanan, and Norman Macleod, the Church was urged to be concerned with social conditions and support for reform. These more progressive social views were limited, however, by the acceptance of the prevailing orthodoxy which held that the most effective way to improve social conditions was through the Church’s missionary, evangelical, and educational work. Norman Macleod wrote, ‘If ever society is to be regenerated, it is by the agency of living brothers and sisters in the Lord; and every plan, however apparently wise, for recovering mankind from their degradation, and which does not make use of the personal ministrations of Christian men and women as an essential part of its very life is doomed, we think, to perish’ (1862: 239). Robert Flint’s immense contribution to social theology in Scotland was to encourage and persuade the Church to depart from that view by including the contribution of elements of civil society in the cause of the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. With his international reputation as a leading philosophical theologian, Flint was regarded as one of the outstanding figures of the Church of Scotland in his time. One of his students, W. P. Paterson, who went on to become Professor of Divinity in the University of Edinburgh, edited with David Watson a book of contributions on social issues, Social Evils and Problems. Paterson wrote that ‘We at last realise that faithful preaching of the Gospel by an evangelical ministry has not and will not, in itself, dispose of social injustice and degradation’ (Paterson and Watson 1918: 27; also quoted in Smith 1987: 359). In his Moderatorial address to the General Assembly of 1919, ‘Recent History and the Call to Brotherhood’, Paterson reiterated this conviction: In the modern period, marked by the upheaval attendant on the industrial revolution and the progress of democracy, the Protestant Church tended to regard the realms of politics and the progress of democracy as lying outside the Kingdom of God, and to be satisfied with exhorting industrial Christians to keep their integrity

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amid the temptations of the world . . . More recently there has been a revival of the older and worthier conception that the laws of God demand to be applied in all spheres, including the political and economic. (Paterson 1919: 32)

Two Glasgow ministers, Donald Macleod of Park Church from 1869 to 1905 and John Marshall Lang in the Barony from 1873 to 1900, contributed considerably to the development of social and political theology in Scotland. Both were contemporary with Robert Flint as students at the University of Glasgow. In 1890, Macleod became convener of the General Assembly’s Home Mission Committee, and Lang convener of an Assembly commission ‘to enquire into the religious condition of the people of Scotland’. Each proceeded to write books of significance for social and political theology in Scotland (Macleod 1893; Lang 1902). Donald Macleod contrasts ‘the Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ’ with other kingdoms he recognizes: ‘the kingdom of Commerce with its penetrating influences, the kingdom of Science with its vast interests, the kingdom of Literature, of Art, of Public Opinion, all of which govern that inner sphere which gives shape to history’ and he asks his readers to ‘imagine the diffusive power of the heavenly leaven to have penetrated the entire “lump” of human existence’. He takes the example of commerce: Is it possible that Commerce shall everywhere, in its dealings with the poorest tribe in Africa, as well as in the open transactions of the Exchange, on which beats ‘the fierce light’ of public sentiment, be characterised by its recognition of law, and of the still higher principles of righteousness, purity, fair play and Christ-like goodness. The change which such implies would not destroy commerce, it would only consecrate it as having become a Kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ. (Macleod 1893: 109–10)

Writing about a regenerated society requiring regenerated individuals, Lang was always more inclined to express his views in such generalities. Macleod was much more specific in criticizing particular practices such as the cheap production of goods, made possible only through low wages. He was much more critical of economic laissez-faire policies, which he compared to ‘the “survival of the fittest” of the Naturalist’, resulting in the ‘sinking, suffering and social destruction of the weakest’ (Lang 1902: 197). Both Macleod and Lang follow Flint in attacking socialism for neglecting God, and, in its extremer forms, for destroying individual liberty; but of the two Macleod is more sympathetic to some of its aims and ideals, and less inclined to see individual liberty as always desirable. Although the two men have been often linked (e.g. Cheyne 1983: 135), Macleod and Lang had somewhat different expectations of what could be achieved through aiming at the conversion of the individual soul. The latter wrote:

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A man may be improved through the improvement of his environment— assuredly he would be deteriorated when he is left in a wretched environment — but the improvement coming from without will be effectual only when there is an improvement coming from within . . . the social happiness desiderated is only possible through such a renewal of the will as shall deliver a true self-love, perfected in social fellowships and disciplines, from a self-love which separates from one’s neighbour. Permanently elevated life implies the moral dynamic that Christianity specially contemplates. (Lang 1902: 315–16)

That statement can be contrasted with what Donald Macleod said in St Giles’ Cathedral in 1888. While recognizing charitable agencies at work within and without the Church, he asserted that ‘we know how much the community is indebted to them, and a thousand other agencies, for daily ameliorations of the worst conditions of society. But we would be untrue to our convictions, if we did not proclaim our belief that, beneficial and numerous as these operations are, they do little more than scratch the surface’ (Macleod 1886: 132). Considerable credit has been accorded to the Presbytery of Glasgow for taking up the issue of poor housing in Glasgow, largely as a result of moves by figures such as Lang and Macleod. However, some caution should be exercised in giving all the credit to the Presbytery of Glasgow. First, the Presbytery’s concern for housing conditions was not disinterested. In April 1888, the Presbytery considered a proposed Overture to the General Assembly. It referred to insanitary conditions and poor housing in the city, intemperance, and lack of educational and social facilities as factors in what was the Presbytery’s prior concern: the widespread lack of church attendance. Frederick Lockhart Robertson of St Andrew’s Parish attempted to separate the examination of social conditions from the issue of poor church attendance and proposed, instead of presenting on Overture to the General Assembly, that the Presbytery should set up a committee to consult laymen of knowledge and experience, magistrates and public health officials and ‘frame a scheme in which the work of the Church may be brought into harmonious action with the work of the magistrates for improving the dwellings and the social and moral habits of the people’ (Glasgow Herald, 18 April 1888). Presbytery resolved to overture the General Assembly, and as a result, the Assembly enjoined Presbyteries ‘after special enquiry and conference regarding the non-attendance upon ordinances within their several bounds, and the causes which contribute to it, to take such action as seems possible and desirable and to report to next General Assembly through the Home Mission Committee the conclusions to which they have come and the practical measures they have adopted’ (Reports 1889: 389). For a number of reasons, this was a significant debate in the history of the Church of Scotland’s response to urban conditions. First, it shows the extent to which there was still an underlying assumption, despite the information available to the Presbytery, that intemperance was the main contributory cause of poor

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housing conditions. There has been a tendency to assume, because the early moves in the Presbytery of Glasgow led to the important appointment of its Housing Commission, that there was a recognition of the economic and structural causes of poverty, and that attributing poverty to personal irresponsibility had been abandoned. Clearly this was not so. Although it may be considered implicit in Robertson’s motion and in the speech he made in support of it, he did not accept this explanation. Second, the Presbytery acknowledged that it required help from beyond its ranks, and that ministers did not require to be heavily represented on the Commission. Of its twenty-five members, only seven were ministers. It is of considerable importance that the Presbytery chose to give the Commission a lay, expert majority, including members from other Presbyterian denominations. Attention to the debate shows clearly that while the Presbytery’s Housing Commission has correctly been associated with the names of Lang and Donald Macleod, the crucial part played by Frederick Lockhart Robertson has been neglected. One of those who subsequently pursued the inclusion of social issues in the Church of Scotland’s agenda was Rev. David Watson, the first minister of the working-class congregation of St Clements in Glasgow’s east end from 1886 until 1938. He largely initiated the Church of Scotland’s Social Work Committee but regarded social work and social policy as separate and distinct. He founded the Scottish Christian Social Union and wrote extensively on social questions (Watson 1908, 1911, 1919). Watson wrote ‘What do we mean by social advance? We mean the advance of the Kingdom of God in its glorious entirety—not merely improving physical conditions, social betterment, righteousness, happiness. The Kingdom of God in its widest acceptation, is human well-being, the highest conceivable well being. The Kingdom of God has often been preached exclusively as a spiritual ideal. In recent days it has been frequently been preached as a social ideal. In reality it is both.’ After referring to the Jewish understanding that the Kingdom of God was a spiritual, ethical, and social ideal he explains that ‘for my present purpose, however I am more concerned to show that the Kingdom of God is, and always has been a social ideal’ (Watson 1911: 24). This social theology, expressed in terms of society’s progressing towards the realization of the Christian vision of the Kingdom of God was an ideal vehicle to reflect the mood of confident optimism that prevailed in Glasgow in the late nineteenth century. T. M. Devine has spoken of how it became one the great cities of the world with its extraordinary output of marine engines, locomotives, and steel. By the eve of the First World War, the Clyde was producing one fifth of the world’s tonnage, more by a considerable margin than all the German yards combined (Devine 1999: 249–50). A social theology, taking progress towards the Kingdom of God as its standpoint, could recognize the positive contribution of increasing municipalization towards social improvement, while offering a stark description and condemnation of urban social conditions. This enabled secular moves in the political sphere to be

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included as evidence of the anticipated progress towards the Kingdom of God. As such, it represents a significant advance in the social theology of the Church of Scotland. In the work of the United Presbyterian Church and the Free Church in this sphere, and after 1900 in the United Free Church, three names stand out: William Clow, Alexander Scott Matheson, and William Dickie.² Clow insists that Jesus envisaged a spiritualized Kingdom. It does him a grave injustice to claim that he ‘posed as a social reformer’ (Clow 1913: 73). He was not interested in the distribution of wealth (Clow 1913: 86), nor did he confuse justice with equality. Attacks on wealth are ‘neither just ethics nor wise economics’ (Clow 1913: 101). Clow refuses to accept that environmental conditions have an effect on spiritual commitment. ‘Every man who knows the poor can recount numberless cases of homes, as holy as the home of Nazareth, maintained on less than £1 a week’ (Clow 1913: 63). The Church’s priority, Clow says, is ‘not to make laws, not to lobby public questions, not to pronounce on the matter of hours and wages, not to play policemen in the streets, but to make men of faith’ (Clow 1913: 259). Its second priority is to teach Christian ethics, to expound the principles taught by Christ and to apply these principles to the lives of men. The Church is not called upon to interfere in the issues which occupy legislators, nor to tell employers what wages to pay nor tell employees how to organize trades unions. The date of Clow’s publication of Christ in the Social Order (1913) is significant. Britain faced several crises: constitutional when the House of Lords rejected Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’ and the ensuing conflict between Lords and Commons, two elections in 1910 and the death of the popular Edward VII and the accession of George V, who was perceived to be a more distant figure. All this contributed to a mood of uncertainty. That mood appeared justified when the industrial workers urged trade unions to take power at local and national level, and there were strikes in all the major industries in 1910. In the year Clow published Christ in the Social Order, there were almost 1,500 strikes, unemployment rose to 11.3 per cent, the Riot Act had to be read in Liverpool and the army deployed there, while in South Wales ‘the country appeared to be on the verge of civil war’ (Searle 2004: 102, 104). In response to this mood, Clow, convinced that religious revival is the necessary prelude to social improvement, virtually makes it a condition of social progress. He seems to have little sense of the vested interests, structural and institutional, which maintained conditions of hardship. Nor does he recognize the complicity of some property owning Church members in the causes of urban poverty. He wanted ministers to be forbidden from discussing social or political issues in ² Willliam Clow was a minister in Lanarkshire, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and Glasgow before being appointed Professor of Practical Training and Christian Ethics at the United Free Church College in Glasgow, of which he became Principal in 1922. Alexander Scott Mathieson was a United Presbyterian and then United Free Church minister in Glasgow, and Dumbarton. William Dickie, after ministries in Paisley, Rosehearty, and Perth was inducted to Partick Dowanhill Church in 1889.

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public, though he allowed that the courts of the Church could have the right to pronounce on the ethical implications of political actions. How the courts could do that without the ministers in Presbytery speaking about politics was not made clear. Clow insists that only committed Christians in the secular world can contribute to the advance of the Kingdom of God. Other institutions such as local government, educational bodies, and the state can contribute to the coming of the Kingdom, but only through committed Christians within them. It is not clear what status Clow would give to those achievements which would be regarded as contributions to the Kingdom by those without Christian commitment. Political and social theology was the focus of the debate particularly in the early years of the twentieth century in the United Free Church. For most of these years, Robert Drummond, minister of Lothian Road United Free Church in Edinburgh, was the convener of the Church’s Home Mission Committee and then of its Committee on Social Problems. In his autobiography he wrote of having had as convener ‘a glorious battle to fight against conservative obscurantism . . . The more our spirits are saturated with our Lord’s conception of his own mission to bring in the Kingdom of God, the more we realise that Christianity is as essentially social as it is intensely individual . . . that we are as truly carrying on Home Mission when we are moving local authorities to remove a slum as when we are preaching the need for the cleansing of the heart and the renewing of the spirit’ (Drummond 1951: 97, 98). Doubtless Clow was one of those whom Drummond would have thought of as representing conservative obscurantism. Drummond’s Kerr Lectures on the early Church show that he differed from Watson, Clow, and Matheson in four significant respects. First, Drummond recognizes that Jesus regularly used the phrase, the Kingdom of God, but he believes less frequently as his ministry progressed, and seldom in his teaching of the disciples. From this he concludes that the phrase cannot ‘be made to appear as a chief category in Christ’s thought’ (Drummond 1900: 183). Second, he argues that for Paul, the Kingdom of God was just part of what it means to be ‘in Christ’ and so ‘as Christ therefore came into prominence the need to enlarge the Kingdom vanished’ and thus, for Drummond, becomes more metaphorical than real. Third, although insisting that Kingdom and Church are separate, he comes very close to regarding them as sharing an identity. And finally, unlike his contemporaries, Drummond sees the realization of the Kingdom of God as the initial move towards a Kingdom which is eschatological and apocalyptic (Drummond 1900: 202). A tension between whether the Church should act in its service of the coming Kingdom along with secular and municipal authorities or whether its role is entirely separate and distinct ran through the debates of the United Free Church. These flared into open conflict when the Life and Work Committee fulfilled an instruction to draw up a clear statement of the Church’s doctrine of the Kingdom. The Liberal government’s welfare programme began the year it was elected when it permitted local authorities to increase rates to subsidize school meals. By

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1911 the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908 was providing a modest non-contributory pension of five shillings a week for more than one million people over the age of seventy. The National Insurance Act enabled all workers between the ages of sixteen and seventy, whose earnings did not reach the income tax threshold to claim sickness benefit. Those in the churches, from the days of Patrick Brewster onwards, who had expressed concern for the old, the sick, and the unemployed were bound to regard these measures as of enormous importance. Those who saw the alleviation of poverty and the improvement of social conditions as steps towards the Kingdom of God on earth will have regarded these as ‘good laws’ which Robert Flint had argued contributed towards the Kingdom’s advance. Those, like Scott Matheson and David Watson, who believed that a redistribution of wealth within the country was an essential step towards the Kingdom will have welcomed the increase of the standard rate of income tax and the imposition of a tax of sixpence on every £1 of income above £3,000 from those whose income exceeded £5,000. And those, like Lang in the Church of Scotland, and William Clow in the United Free Church, who represented a large body of opinion which traced social deprivation to excessive alcohol consumption will have applauded the increased taxes on beer and spirits. Some, however, may have entertained a degree of anxiety that if the state moved irreversibly into the area of social welfare, the role of the Church as the traditional provider of support for the poor would be eroded. If the Kingdom of God was defined in terms of meeting social needs, there may have been many who feared there would be a correspondingly diminished role for the Church in advancing the Kingdom. The prominence given to social questions both by the United Free Church and the Church of Scotland led to an understanding between the two that they should avoid duplication in both study and comment. So the Church of Scotland’s General Assembly concentrated on social commitment to the marginalized through practical action, while the United Free Church attempted to understand the causes of social problems. Neither presbyteries nor the General Assemblies had the institutional mechanisms to undertake the analysis of social issues until, in 1908, eight overtures were presented to the United Free Church Assembly asking that social questions be given their own place on the Church’s agenda. In 1909, the General Assembly of the United Free Church decided that a pastoral letter should be circulated to the whole Church, criticizing low wages, poor housing, and aggressive competition in business, and concluding that because of the huge effect of environment on individuals and society, social welfare and justice were its proper concern. This has been described as ‘the first occasion upon which a Protestant Church had sought to address its members on social questions’ (Smith 1987: 348). In 1910, a committee chaired by Robert Drummond³ ³ Reports to the General Assembly 1910, Report of the Special Committee appointed to experiment along the lines of a Church and Labour Department.

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successfully proposed the creation of what was the first committee within the whole Scottish Church to examine and comment on social and industrial questions. The following year the terms of reference of the new Special Committee on Social Problems⁴ authorized that ‘by conference with Presbyteries, employers, masters’ federations, Chambers of Commerce, Trades Councils and other labour organisations [it] would keep itself and the Church informed on industrial and social problems’ (Reports 1911: XXXII, 19). Two years later, it argued for the total reform of the whole industrial and economic system. Donald Smith comments that this social action by the United Free Church in the years immediately before the First World War was ‘the first significant break from the tradition of 19th century Christian social concern based on an acceptance of the existing order, and which expressed itself in charitable and reclamation work based on a suspicion or rejection of the existing order and also in social criticism and in more dynamic and radical forms of social action’ (Smith 1987: 356). At this point, further attention must be paid to David Watson, who spent his whole ministry in the east end of Glasgow. Watson provides a very significant example in the Church of Scotland of the move from social work to social criticism. Recognizing that the Church’s role in social work must be alongside the part played by national and local government and social agencies generally, he very clearly, deliberately, and trenchantly takes the Church to task for its failures. There is a clear indication of sympathy for those who keep apart from the Church for the shortcomings of its social theology: he holds that many are distanced from the Church through a sense that it has not contributed sufficiently to social amelioration. The Church has acquiesced in and so helped to stereotype the environment and adverse conditions which so many have had to endure. The Church has not preached sufficiently the Gospel of the Kingdom, and has failed to apply Christian ethics to social, economic, and industrial conditions. Charity more than justice has been the emphasis (Watson 1919: 16). In 1919, the Church of Scotland’s Commission on the War concluded its series of reports and recorded that the Church ‘has not been fearless enough in exposing the wrongs which have crept into the social, industrial and commercial system’ (Reports 1919: 660). The result was the setting up of the Church and Nation Committee to watch over those developments in the nation’s life in which moral and spiritual considerations specially arise, and take ‘wise yet daring action . . . when required in the main industrial and social problems that are emerging’ (Reports 1919: 685; Smith 1987: 361). The first convener was John White of the Barony Church in Glasgow, who had been the person most responsible for the setting up of the committee. The following year, in its first report, the Church and Nation Committee remarkably reported that demands made by industrial workers ⁴ The word ‘Special’ was dropped in 1912, an indication that the United Free Church’s attention to social problems was to be an ongoing issue for study and report.

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should be met, and given a higher status with a voice in industrial decisions, improved working conditions and greater security of employment; a larger share of the wealth produced by capital and labour and more leisure (Reports 1920: 526; Smith 1987: 362–3). Also in 1920, the Social Problems Committee of the United Free Church told its General Assembly that the Church ‘which claims to follow Jesus Christ should not turn a deaf ear to the claims of higher status for the worker, for his share in the control of the conditions of industry, for adequate housing of the people, for protection against unemployment, and for suitable recreation’ (Reports to the General Assembly of the UF Church 1920: XXIII, 2; Smith 1987: 364). In 1923 the Social Problems Committee presented to the United Free Church General Assembly ‘what was undoubtedly the most radical social pronouncement which had ever been made by a Scottish Church’ (Smith 1987: 364), insisting that the social policy of the Church should be nothing short of the realization of the Kingdom of God on earth. No sphere of human activity lies beyond the authority of Christ nor should any part of human life be left to the uncontrolled operation of economic laws (Reports of the United Free Church General Assembly 1923: XXIII, 4). However, A. C. Cheyne makes this trenchant judgement on the Church during depressions, when in the General Assembly there was more concern about ministers’ pay than social justice, ‘and in how gingerly a manner they handled all questions of social justice, without feeling that official Christianity had little to offer the oppressed but pious platitudes, assurance of strictly non-political sympathy and bland exhortations to grin and bear it’ (Cheyne 1983: 183). In 1925, the year before a General Strike, in his Moderatorial address to the General Assembly, John White said, ‘Let it be clearly understood that we are not called upon to elaborate any scheme of social economics or politics; but we are required to declare that the teachings of the Kingdom of God, when applied to the problems of today, bring into prominence two governing principles . . . the equal and infinite value of every personality in the sight of God, and the brotherhood of man and should refrain from the technical side of economics, which is a science for experts, in which the Church has no authority’ (The Scotsman, 29 May 1925). If, however, the only thing the Church could do to advance the Kingdom of God was to proclaim the infinite value of every individual in the sight of God and the brotherhood of man, then White was open to the charge that he had reduced the essence of the teaching of Jesus to a useful slogan. In 1940, the General Assembly appointed a Commission for the Interpretation of God’s Will in the Present Crisis, chaired by Professor John Baillie⁵ and which became known simply as ‘the Baillie Commission’. The remit given to the Commission was ‘to study in detail the practical questions which have emerged, ⁵ Baillie was to be Moderator of the General Assembly for one of the years the Committee sat, 1943–4.

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or may emerge of supreme importance for the advancement of the Kingdom of God in the world’ (Church of Scotland 1946: 7). In its first report, spelling out Baillie’s rejection of Flint’s view that the Church is one force among, for example, civic and governmental bodies, the Commission calls for ‘a new recognition for the principle that our Christian faith claims in the last resort to dominate the whole of life instead of being one department of it alongside others, and that all departments must in the last resort acknowledge their subordination to the chief end of man’ (Reports to the General Assembly: 40). And the Commission says to those who believe that social reform requires prior spiritual revival that ‘there are many who suspect the spirituality to which we call them of making too ready a compliance with a social order that for them means only hunger, slum conditions, unemployment or sweated labour’ (Reports to the General Assembly: 49). Specifically, the Commission’s 1942 report pointed to the defects which it identified in current economic structure: the use of unemployment as economic policy, the dominance of profit, the destruction of surpluses to maintain high prices, inequality which led to a dependency culture, urbanization which destroys community, and the undervaluing of political in comparison to economic power. The following year the focus of the Commission was on another Baillie theme: the centrality of the Church for social progress. Quoting the third-century bishop and martyr Cyprian that there is ‘no salvation outside the Church’ the Report concludes that ‘[t]he truth is not that adherence to the Church (still less one branch of it) is a formal condition of salvation; the truth is rather that entry into its divine-human fellowship is what salvation means. By being received into a new and liberating life in community with Christ and other believers, a person is delivered from the self-centredness which is the essence of sin’ (Reports to the General Assembly: 76). In 1944, despite affirming the equality of the sexes in the workplace and the home, Baillie’s Commission was critical of the growing liberation of women. It is at their ‘will’ that voluntary limits are placed of family size and ‘the altered social and economic status of women has in many cases helped to destroy the family and to obscure the fact that a woman’s nature will not be fulfilled nor her instincts satisfied by handling things when she should be absorbed in caring for persons’ (Reports to the General Assembly: 143). On industrial life the Commission stressed what it had originally told the General Assembly two years earlier: ‘Economic power must be made objectively responsible to the community as a whole . . . This means we must be prepared for a much greater measure of direction, on the part of the community, of the uses to which economic power may be put . . . The common interest demands a far greater measure of public control of capital resources and means of production than our tradition has in the past envisaged’ (Reports to the General Assembly: 156–7). Duncan Forrester argued that the Baillie Commission was significant in three ways: it tackled a wide range of social issues with a commendable theological

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seriousness; it committed the Church to working for a new social and economic order; and, like the Beveridge Report, it contributed to public expectation of a radical change in post-war Britain. ‘[E]ach shaped and fed the public’s expectations, and in the case of the Baillie Commission strongly influenced Christian opinion in favour of radical social change’ (Forrester 1993: 232). Robert Flint and John Baillie had this in common: both regarded the institutional Church and the effect of the Christian faith as having a more significant role in promoting social reform and dominating social analysis than any other agency. They did not, however, recognize that the pre-eminent role of the Church in social reform was drawing irretrievably towards its close.

Bibliography Cheyne, A. C. (1983). The Transforming of the Kirk. Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press. Church of Scotland (1946). God’s Will for Church and Nation. London: SCM. Clow, William (1913). Christ in the Social Order. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Devine, T. M. (1999). The Scottish Nation 1700–2000. London: Penguin. Drummond, R. J. (1900). The Relation of the Apostolic Teaching to the Teaching of Jesus. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Drummond, R. J. (1951). Lest we Forget: Reminiscences of a Nonagenarian. Edinburgh: Ettrick Press. Flint, Robert (1865). Christ’s Kingdom upon Earth. Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons. Forrester, Duncan B. (1993). ‘John Baillie as a Social Theologian’, in David Fergusson (ed.), Christ, Church and Society: Essays on John Baillie and Donald Baillie. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 221–34. Lang, John Marshall (1902). The Church and its Social Mission. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons. McKay, Johnston (2007). The Kirk and the Kingdom: A Century of Tension in Scottish Social Theology 1830–1929. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Macleod, Donald (1886). ‘The Parochial System’, in The Church and the People. St Giles’ Lectures, Sixth Series. Edinburgh: Macniven and Wallace. Macleod, Donald (1893). Christ and Society. London: Isbister and Co. Macleod, Norman (1862). Parish Papers. London: A. Strahan. Paterson William P. (1919). Recent History and the Call to Brotherhood. Edinburgh: William Blackwood. Paterson, William P. and David Watson (1918). Social Evils and Problems. Church of Scotland Commission on the War. Edinburgh: William Blackwood. Reports of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland (1889, 1919). Edinburgh: William Blackwood.

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Reports of the General Assembly of the United Free Church (1911, 1920, 1922, 1923). Edinburgh: Constable. Searle, G. R. (2004). A New England: Peace and War, 1886–1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, Donald C. (1987). Passive Obedience and Prophetic Protest. New York: Peter Lang. Watson, David (1908). Social Problems and the Church’s Duty. Oxford: A&C Black; Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Watson, David (1911). Social Advance: Its Meaning, Method and Goal. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Watson, David (1919). The Social Expression of Christianity. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

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9 John Baillie and Donald Baillie George M. Newlands

John Baillie (1886–1960) and his brother Donald Baillie (1887–1954) were among the distinguished Scottish theologians of the modern era. Educated and brought up within a deeply embedded Reformed tradition in Scotland, they were at the same time influenced by a wider tradition of British and European philosophy and culture, and were, in turn, to be studied in North America and throughout the English-speaking world. Scots were often to be found at this time in philosophy and theology departments abroad, especially where Presbyterian churches were well established. John Baillie’s writing reflects this background more clearly than Donald’s. Moving between Scotland, Canada, and the United States, Baillie developed a maturity which was to reflect this cosmopolitan experience. At the same time, he came to feel at ease in the senior common rooms of England. And he had this in common with Anglican clergy and theologians, that both were inclined to favour a broad liberal relationship between theology and culture, even where this was modified by an infusion of Barthian or Tractarian correction. The ecumenical movement still seemed to be an obvious way forward and an imperative for the Christian churches. At the time of John’s death this alliance was still strong, though signs of dissolution were present. Evidence for this striking cultural breadth is conveniently to hand. Though much has been written about the Baillies in the last half century, little attention has been paid to John’s diaries (Donald’s have not survived the drastic cull made of Donald’s papers after John’s death by his widow). The diary entries often consist of a single line. They open up a spectacular range of people encountered and of experiences in many contexts—not simply the names of the theological luminaries of the age—but the less striking entries throw light on a legacy which reveals much about the Baillies and their world. For John Baillie his diary was a kind of mirror on his life. He sometimes seems in the end to have struggled to ensure that the mirror did not break, and his life along with it. It covers the period from 1905 to 1959. The details are often colourful and telling. In his first year in college, in March 1905, John visits a university concert—the Dettingen Te Deum, likes a sermon by ‘Prof Mckintosh’ (sic), walks with a girlfriend, and writes a sonnet. The Mackintosh link was to be highly significant till Mackintosh died in 1936.

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In 1911, John brings Henry Sloane Coffin (HS) to J. Y. Simpson, arrives in Marburg, dines in Edinburgh at Seth’s to meet Bosanquet, and so on. In 1916 he meets Jewel, soon to be his wife, in France. He is there till 1918. Donald is in France in 1917. In 1919 John is off to Auburn, New York State. Reading material is often noted. In 1928, John, now based in Toronto, is reading D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent and A. D. Lindsay’s The Nature of Religious Truth. In 1930, he accepts the call to Union Seminary in New York, examines Paul Lehman’s PhD thesis, takes Karl Barth ‘around the sights of St Andrews’ and meets Niebuhr and his mother. In 1931, he meets Niebuhr’s fiancée and visits France. In 1932, he has preached eighteen sermons in Boston, visits Barth and is in Cambridge. By 1935, he is back in Edinburgh. On 30 March: ‘Dietrich Bonhoeffer called in afternoon. Ping pong after dinner.’ On 5 September: ‘In the afternoon we were taken on a long drive out of Berlin to see the construction of the Reichsautobahn.’ So it continues till the last item on 2 September 1960:‘Dr Price called in morning, Isabel (Forrester) came to see me with Willie.’ It is hard to think of any British theologian with a wider range of personal acquaintance at this peak time of global Christian theological influence. Discounting the myriad church and university meetings, through these pages we meet the famous and the less famous, from T. S. Eliot and John Foster Dulles, to Martin Niemoeller and King Haakon. There are many small group gatherings—in the 1930s the Oldham Group in New York, The Moot in London, the Tuesday club in Edinburgh, the executive of Faith and Order, the Church of Scotland Peace Society, a Foreign Office reception in Berlin, the Scoto-Russia Fellowship, the Aid to Britain group in New York, the AGM of the Deaconess Hospital in Edinburgh, and so on. The 1940s bring YMCA meetings in France and in Britain, WCC, and BBC committees. The 1950s bring lecture series in North and South America, Europe, and Australasia. The bishop of Washington visits in the week before Baillie dies in 1960. He sits on more than seventy university committees in Edinburgh. The recipient of numerous honorary degrees worldwide, he is a President of the World Council of Churches. There are gaps—the Indian and Asian continent, burgeoning liberation movements. The formative perspective of the manse is still there, enlarged by the contemporary culture of Scotland, Canada, and the East Coast of America. Scottish philosophy, and beyond this the reality of the imperial dream, was still important. There was a two-way traffic of ideas and graduate students with the Scottish diaspora. John, and to a lesser extent Donald, benefited from this. Though there was comparatively less connection with Oxbridge philosophy, or indeed theology, the Scots prized their continental connection, especially in France and then in Germany, and were sometimes perhaps more alert to issues in history, sociology, and anthropology than their southern neighbours. Despite this ubiquity of presence, the rise of Barth studies in the Reformed tradition was almost to submerge the Baillie tradition. In a time of crisis Karl Barth

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provided a firm response to the temptation to dilute Christian faith with secular and other cultural influences. Theology is often enriched by attending to the insights of complementary but diverse traditions. Theology was important, but it was grounded in events. There was no jingoism in John’s 1914–18 War sermons. He was shocked at the treatment of the enemy wounded—sometimes murdered. In the 1920s Donald’s letters spoke passionately in favour of the striking miners. John’s return to Scotland in 1934 brought new challenges. Bonhoeffer visits in 1935 and Donald and John visit the wives of Dachau inmates. Donald works with refugees. In his writing in the 1940s John walks the tightrope between a wider Christendom and the sacred community. Still very much a citizen of the Empire, he is not totally naïve about it. Ultimately, what makes us human and keeps us aware of our responsibilities and our limitations is the sense of the presence of God.

John Baillie Although Baillie later recalled ‘a rigorously Calvinistic upbringing’, mainly by his mother, who was soon widowed, there were also liberal strands in Free Church culture and a huge respect for learning. This drove the brothers to brilliant academic careers at Inverness Royal Academy (where John studied between 1898 and 1904) and at the University of Edinburgh: both graduated with firsts in philosophy and distinction in divinity. Baillie spent the summer terms of 1909 and 1911 at the universities of Jena and Marburg, respectively. For a short time assistants in the philosophy department at the University of Edinburgh, the brothers then spent time in the YMCA in France during the First World War. A seminal influence till his death in 1936 was the Edinburgh professor of systematic theology H. R. Mackintosh. In April 1919 Baillie married Florence Jewel Fowler, moved to Auburn Theological Seminary in New York State and was ordained in the Presbyterian church there in 1920. Their only child, Ian Fowler Baillie, was born in 1921.The Roots of Religion in the Human Soul appeared in 1926 and The Interpretation of Religion in 1929. These books reflected the journey from the manse in Gairloch to American society—poetry and politics, the polarization of church politics in the fundamentalist debate, and participation in conferences on the social gospel in the early 1920s. Baillie moved in 1927 to Emmanuel College, Toronto, in the newly formed United Church of Canada. His wife suffered from tuberculosis during much of the 1920s and was in sanatoria between 1923 and 1930. In 1930 he moved back to the United States to Union Theological Seminary in New York, then arguably the world’s greatest theological seminary. It provided a forum for theology where, along with Henry Sloane Coffin, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Pitney Van Dusen, he was to have a major impact on Western theology for the next two decades.

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Though Baillie returned to Edinburgh in 1934, the four exerted huge influence on the new World Council of Churches. They strove for a via media between extreme liberalism on the one hand and a narrow Barthianism on the other. Baillie was Professor of Divinity at Edinburgh University from 1934 to 1956. He also served as principal of New College, Edinburgh, and dean of the faculty of divinity (1950–6). The Queen made him a Companion of Honour. The theme of the presence of God to faith was central to the three books that followed Baillie’s first publications: And the Life Everlasting (1933), Our Knowledge of God (1939), and Invitation to Pilgrimage (1942). An emphasis on spirituality was manifested in A Diary of Private Prayer (1936), which sold tens of thousands of copies; a devotional work combining honest self-examination with a concentration on God’s reconciling grace. Wider social and political concern was demonstrated, during his Moderatorial year in the Church of Scotland in 1943, with the preparation for the General Assembly of the report of the special commission for the interpretation of God’s will in the present crisis. The report, published in 1946 as God’s Will in our Time, combined critique of the Nazis with a programme for social reconstruction after the war, a programme echoed in the Beveridge reports. The report recognized the difficulty in applying Christian principles in society, and took the route of ‘middle axioms’, which should ‘exhibit the relevance of the ruling principles to the particular field of action in which guidance is needed’ (Baillie 1946: 45). It argued that ‘[e]conomic power must be made objectively responsible to the community as a whole’ (Baillie 1946: 156). The report reflected awareness of the German church struggle, numerous Church of England and ecumenical gatherings, and also the work of the Moot, an influential forum that met in Oxford and London. As well as J. H. Oldham, its founder, participants included influential writers and theologians—Eric Fenn, H. A. Hodges, Karl Mannheim, Walter Moberly, Alec Vidler, T. S. Eliot, H. H. Farmer, Donald Mackinnon, and John Middleton Murry. Baillie’s death precluded the delivery of his Gifford Lectures, but they were published posthumously as The Sense of the Presence of God (1962). They provided a masterly synthesis of his life’s work. Here he displayed a characteristic combination of an appeal to experience with an exploration of rational grounds for belief in God. In many ways, this work represents a return to the themes of his most creative project with its concept of ‘mediated immediacy’ to describe the ways in which our knowledge of God is always through creaturely forms while possessing the immediacy of an encounter (Baillie 1939). His later work reflects similar concerns but in a different philosophical climate. Knowledge seems to imply certitude, he argued, but often does not go beyond probabilities. Our knowledge of the realities is primary, and our knowledge of truths concerning them secondary. Moral convictions are central to human life, and ‘[o]ur total experience of reality presents itself to us as a single experience’ (Baillie 1962: 50). Baillie discussed procedures for verification and falsification, and argued that

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‘[a] faith that is consistent with everything possible is not a faith in anything actual’ (Baillie 1962: 71), stressing that the ultimate refutation of doubts was theological and incarnational. Faith was ‘an awareness of the divine presence itself, however hidden behind the veils of sense’ (Baillie 1962: 89). Baillie argued that ‘[i]n the widest sense of the term all language may be said to be symbolic’ (Baillie 1962: 113); but admitted that not all theological statements were analogical. Despite being known in, with, and under other realities, there is a certain directness in the apprehension of God. Love of God is always related to love of neighbour, and, beyond this, to a new humanity. Baillie thought it important not to confuse dogmas with the primary perceptions of faith and raised the wider issue of ‘Faith and the Faiths’. What does it mean to speak of salvation in a name? While there was an awareness of God in ‘the pagan religions’, the way of Christ was decisive. In Baillie’s view, scientific and religious accounts of the world complemented one another. What others may see as coincidence, Christians will read as providential. Furthermore, gratitude was ‘not only the dominant note of Christian piety, but equally the dominant motive of Christian action in the world’ (Baillie 1962: 236). Propositions were necessary but not sufficient, as faith depended on trust. We have to do with ‘a God whose living and active presence among us can be perceived by faith in a large variety of human contexts and situations’ (Baillie 1962: 61). John Baillie’s theology, like that of his brother, remained liberal and evangelical. Sympathetic critics of each other’s work and sensitive to theology in context, they could deploy arguments from various theological traditions when this seemed right. They deplored exclusivism and dogmatic narrowness. Baillie’s ‘strongly independent mind made him resistant to passing fashions, while his irenic spirit preferred to discover underlying unities rather than sharpen distinctions into conflicts’ (Cheyne 1993: 50). He has been characterized as steering a middle course between American fundamentalists and modernists.

Donald Baillie Donald Baillie was born in 1887, two years after his brother John. From Inverness Royal Academy, Donald went on to a First in philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and an assistantship in the philosophy department. He studied theology in Edinburgh, Marburg, and Heidelberg, and was inducted to the parish of Bervie in 1918. The Bervie period saw the publication in 1922 of Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith in Outline—a translation of the basic paragraphs of The Christian Faith. When the full Christian Faith was published in translation in 1927, the first thirty-two paragraphs were translated by Donald. In 1920 he had published an article in The Expositor entitled ‘What is the Theology of Experience?’ based on Schleiermacher and critical of James and Russell. In 1923 he

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moved to Cupar, and thence to Kilmacolm, and eventually to St Andrews University. Throughout his life people testified to Donald’s sense of humour and his great capacity for building friendships. He was said to be a man with no enemies.

Faith in God Donald Baillie’s first book, Faith in God and its Christian Consummation (1927), was concerned, like all his work, with the relation between faith and experience. Experience was not just of experience, but of faith. The book was of first-rate quality, but the thesis about the relation between faith and morality was very controversial, then as now. His basic argument has become more popular again in recent writing. Though Donald’s name was not well known till the appearance of God Was in Christ twenty years later, John always pointed to him as the real theologian and understood the quality of his work. The introduction to Faith in God examines the idea of faith and its historical emergence—Part I ‘What is faith?’, and Part II ‘Christian faith’. Faith is not dependent on custom, authority, or suggestion. It is not dependent, either, on reason or philosophy. On the contrary, it is now seen that philosophy is dependent on faith. Faith is ‘reason’s highest exercise’. In pursuit of his thesis Baillie refers to works from a wide variety of authors, from Luther to Durkheim and Malinowski. The will to believe is impossible. Faith has to be waited for as a gift from God. But James has taught us that faith is somehow conditioned by the will. The next chapter covers faith and moral conviction. The way out of doubt to faith is by the moral consciousness. If morality means anything, it ultimately means God. Good men have an unconscious faith—this is the religious a priori. Tyrell and others are adduced in parallel: ‘True spiritual religion is a development, not of magical religion, but of the moral life.’ Morality without religion is meaningless. The last section of Part I, ‘Faith and the Knowledge of God’, deals with objections that the account given is too irrational—religion in fact arises from fear; but that is not true. Rudolf Otto’s numinous is a dangerous theory. It is more than morality, but not separate from morality. Part II is entitled explicitly ‘Christian Faith’. How is faith related to history? ‘The historical fact of Jesus becomes certain to us in kindling our faith in God.’ This is faith in God through Jesus Christ. ‘The object of Christian faith is neither God apart from Christ, nor God and Christ, but God in Christ.’ There is much recent concern with faith healing. Yet this may be less than profound. In fact, ‘suffering, nobly borne, has a peculiarly refining influence on character’. It can be accepted in faith as part of ‘the mysterious discipline of pain’ (Baillie 1927: 290). ‘Thus the cross of Christ became for all time the supreme example of God’s paradox.’ The book ends with lines which in many ways encapsulate his understanding of the Christian life:

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We must be neither too impatient of antinomy nor too tolerant of it, if we are to advance to a clearer understanding of the deep Christian secret. Yet it is not altogether by thinking the matter out, but by living it out in daily Christian faith and love, that we shall arrive at a deeper insight in which the paradox will be less acute. And a book about hope cannot end better than upon this note of hope and expectation. (Baillie 1927: 308)

St Andrews In 1934 Donald Baillie became Professor of Systematic Theology in the University of St Andrews. Though he had done academic work, he had not worked in an academic context before. This pattern was not untypical of the time—the scholar/ minister brought his parish experience to academic life and to the education of the ministers of the future. Much of Donald’s literary legacy consists of unpublished sermons—often models of theological refinement and literary art. He had political views, notably on the need for social justice, in relation to the miners’ strike. But the sermons are concerned largely with individual faith and morality. Though he knew Reinhold Niebuhr, there is little on the complexity of the modern industrial world, the grey areas of Moral Man and Immoral Society. His world was largely that of the small town and the university in rural settings. Often at Swanwick, at Student Christian Movement conferences, he was involved in much discussion, very open discussion, with student groups—this in some ways was his great strength. 1935 saw him back in Germany, leaving St Andrews on 31 July on a journey via Cologne to Marburg, during which he attempted to liaise with members of the Confessing Church and to find out what was going on. On 26 July there is a letter from Rudolf Bultmann, thanking him for his hospitality in St Andrews and looking forward to seeing him in Marburg in August. There is a postcard from Marburg on 7 August—a time of great tension between the faculty and the government. By 9 August Donald is writing from the Hospiz St Michael, Wilhelmstrasse 34, Berlin. He has come from Marburg and a stay for two nights with the Bultmanns. Of staying with Bultmann he writes ‘he and his wife were kindness itself ’ and contributes a poem to their visitors’ book: Bultmann had arranged for him to meet Von Soden, Hermelink, and Natorp’s successor, Frank, in Marburg. He moves to Berlin. On 14 August he writes from Augsburg: ‘I leave for Heidelberg at 9.47, where I shall go in quest of my youth.’ On 19 September, replying to a letter from John written from Hohenschwangau, he mentions a service in the Old Catholic church in Heidelberg: ‘But at several points the priest had to pause for quite a time owing to the deafening noise made by brownshirts marching outside . . . He was about as pro-Nazi as anybody I met in Germany.’ He adds: ‘I hope you are enjoying Munich, Nuremberg, Wurzburg and Brussels.’

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In 1936 Donald Baillie represented the Church of Scotland at the Geneva celebrations of the Reformation and at the Faith and Order Committee in Lausanne. By 20 April he was in Montpellier—‘I have been here about 16 days.’ On 8 May he has a conversation in Lausanne with Paul Tillich. Tillich thinks the Germans very pro-Nazi. Donald is not so sure from conversations in Berlin, Marburg, and Munich. Writing on 26 May from Lausanne, he says that the Nazis are acceptable to some in Germany because they saved Germany from Communism. ‘I was thinking last night that it is extraordinarily difficult for anyone living on the Continent just now to be other than pessimistic.’ On 15 June he is in Geneva Cathedral for the celebrations of the 400th anniversary of the Reformation. On 7 September he spent the day in Paris. John has been in Berlin. By 12 September he is writing from St Andrews: ‘I think I am very much the better of my five and a half months away from Scotland . . . I’m much interested to hear that you visited Niemoeller in Dahlem. I’ve read more than a third of Barth’s Word of God in English. It really is a terrible book.’ In 1938 Donald was again on the continent. He visits Berlin. A postcard from Berlin on 27 August comments: ‘Last night at Frau N’s house. Lunch today at home of As[mussen]. I’ve learned a very great deal about things.’ In a note from Karlsruhe on the 29th he says that he had spent a fortnight in 1910 bei Fraulein Zeiss in Jena. ‘I am now more convinced that criticism and discontent are far more widespread and acute than ever.’ He then he travels to Geneva, spends a few days in Heidelberg and is back home on 6 September. On the 10th he writes: ‘I have on my mantelpiece a beautiful photo of Niemoeller that his wife gave me.’ On 18 March he had written to John about ‘Non Aryans who are hoping to come to Edinburgh.’ The Baillies remained very close, not least on social issues. On 18 November 1941 Donald reminds John of the need to stress more of the social challenge of the gospel than he has done to date. On 12 May 1943 he made a broadcast in German on ‘Die Hoffnung des Evangeliums’, in a very eirenic tone. This continues— Donald to John, 12 November 1944: ‘It seems to me that public utterances are getting foolisher than ever about “what to do with Germany” and with hardly a voice raised against them, except that of the Bishop of Chichester (who has perhaps spoilt his chances of succeeding at Canterbury by his brave utterances).’ In February 1946 Donald was chairman of the Communion and Intercommunion section of the preparatory committee for Amsterdam. He was prepared to speak when necessary in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. On 26 May 1946 he seconded an amendment to a motion by his friend Nevile Davidson to limit the spread of the atom bomb: ‘To have any bombs already made dismantled . . . would have an immense effect on international affairs.’ The motion was defeated. On 10 June Donald receives a letter from Rudolf Bultmann full of family news. On 15 August there is another letter from Bultmann,

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discussing the state of contemporary student life. On 23 August Donald writes to John; he has sent food parcels to Bultmann and Schlink.

God Was in Christ 1948 brought the masterly God Was in Christ. Typically, Donald was very unsure about the quality of the work and had doubts about its publication. The American response was very positive. There is a good review in Time on 23 August 1948. James McCord wrote to Scribners that ‘In every respect I believe that it is the most significant book in the field of Christology, at least for a decade.’ Pit Van Dusen called it ‘incomparably the most satisfactory interpretation of the person of Christ published in this century’ (Van Dusen1950). God Was in Christ was completed in July 1947 and reflects a theme on which Donald had been working for years. Clearly written, for many people it struck just the right note in Christology. It defended historical criticism. It sought to preserve the mystery of the incarnation in the tradition, under the banner of paradox. The first section of chapter 1, on the end of Docetism, firmly settles for the centrality of Jesus’ full humanity. The case is substantiated in the next chapter. But more is necessary. Why a Christology? (chapter 3). ‘We shall never do justice to the love of God if we leave out the supreme paradox of the Incarnation . . . A true Christology will tell us not simply that God is like Christ, but that God was in Christ’ (Baillie 1948: 65–6). Christology is a check on modern misinterpretations of history. Baillie offers a critique of Christologies—anhypostasia, kenosis, leadership, and lordship. We might wonder if he would have found in Rahner a view of kenosis very similar to his own outlook—God is the one for whom to be is to give oneself away to others—but that was not then available. His own favoured concept was of course paradox (chapter 5). The fundamental paradox in Christian life is ‘Not I, but the grace of God’ (Baillie 1948: 122): this is a reflection of the incarnate Christ. A toned-down Christology is absurd. ‘It must be all or nothing—all or nothing on both the human and the divine side’ (Baillie 1948: 132). This was the vision which Donald pursued, sometimes painfully but always unswervingly, in his own life. He develops the Godward side of incarnation in a chapter on incarnation and Trinity. A succinct discussion of Barth and Hodgson leads to reappraisal. Experience of grace is experience of God, Father, Son and Spirit. Trinity is central to faith and devotion. But Christian experience is not neutral. It is rooted in the framework of sin, forgiveness, and reconciliation; hence atonement. People may lack a sense of sin yet suffer from all sorts of mental complexes. They are looking for acceptance, by themselves and others. In addition, our actions often hurt others. Reconciliation in depth is costly—hence, the cross and (the next chapter) the Lamb of God. The death of Jesus shows the essential nature of God’s love.

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Atonement is both objective and subjective. Atonement renders the incarnation comprehensible to us through the forgiveness of our sins. A short epilogue on the body of Christ stresses the importance of Christian community: a society of sinners forgiven becomes the nucleus of a new humanity. Karl Barth was to raise a question about a central area of the book. As he saw it, a text like Gal. 2.20: ‘Nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me,’ is not merely a statement about the being of the apostle or the Christian, but it offers a schema for the knowledge of Jesus Christ himself . . . And somewhere along this way the question will always arise whether the relationship between the unio hypostatica and the unio mystica may not be reversed; whether it is better reversed, whether the unio mystica is not to be understood as the true and basic phenomenon, the analogans, . . . and the unio hypostatica as the secondary the analogatum, . . . the representation or mythological copy of the religious happening as it takes place in us. (Barth1967: 55–6)

From Barth’s perspective, this was the Achilles’ heel of religious Neoprotestantism yet again. Baillie too had reservations about aspects of mysticism and might perhaps have responded that the faith-creating presence of God is as objective as anything in the created order, while the Chalcedonian formula is as much a cultural construction as it is a revealed blueprint of the divine nature. All our concepts remain limited eschatological suggestions, as Barth famously put it. The year 1950 brought David Cairns: An Autobiography. The ‘Memoir’ contributed by Donald in some ways echoes his own life. The great man had serious doubts and imperfect health: ‘Again I have a vivid snapshot of myself standing beneath a flaring gas-jet in my bedroom in Lonsdale Terrace, absolutely dismayed . . . I remember how cold the starlight seemed on those winter nights’ (Baillie 1950: 10–11).

Theology of the Sacraments This book (1957) is the posthumously published course of Moore Lectures delivered in the Presbyterian Theological Seminary at San Anselmo, California in 1952. It begins with John’s fascinating essay ‘Donald: A Brother’s Impression’. The introductory chapter explores ‘Sacrament, Nature and Grace’. Today there is a rediscovery of biblical theology, and it would be good to have a rediscovery of the sacraments. The word is important. But ours is a sacramental universe and sacraments operate through human faith. We then come to ‘The Sacraments and Sacred History’. What can we say of the dominical institution of the sacraments? They go back ‘right into the life and ministry of Jesus’. There is a continuity

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between the incarnation and the sacraments. They also have an eschatological reference, pointing forward to the Kingdom. We come to ‘The Sacrament of Baptism’. There is a connection between the ministry of Jesus and a baptismal rite of repentance and cleansing and initiation (Baillie 1957: 77). In baptism children are brought into a new environment. God’s initiative precedes our faith (Baillie 1957: 89). A chapter on ‘The Real Presence’ goes back again to the Highland communion season. ‘The most objective and penetrating kind of presence that God can give us is through faith.’ The feast is a memorial feast but it is also more. The fifth chapter deals with ‘The Eucharistic Offering’. All our worship is an offering to God, in which we offer ourselves, but ‘we can only make an offering in union with Christ’s eternal sacrifice’ (Baillie 1957: 116). This involves the whole church. ‘May it not be that both the doctrine of the Real Presence and the doctrine of the eucharistic offering, begin to come right and to take their true shape when they are controlled by the idea of the sacrament as a corporate act of the one body of Christ?’ (Baillie 1957: 124). In dealing with the sacraments he starts out, as often, from human nature and human experience. On the Trinity too he affirms that ‘the main truth is that the doctrine is based on history and experience’. Something should be said of John’s biographical essay on Donald in this volume. A main theme is that ‘Donald especially was from an early age haunted with religious doubts. The strain on his spirit was acute. His only confidante was his mother’ (Baillie 1957: 15). Stress and depression often reappeared. He suffered from chronic asthma. ‘He would put to himself and to me the question as to whether the extreme bodily lassitude was the cause or the result, or merely the accompaniment, of the darkness of soul’ (Baillie 1957: 21). The other side of all this was his charm and generosity, the ‘gentleness, wit and piety’ of which his pupils were so often to speak, the ‘I yet not I’ of the paradox of grace which he so profoundly instantiated in his own person. Donald would appear to have been one of those highly talented individuals for whom great achievement is linked inexorably with suffering. The deep shadow of the Calvinist culture in which he was brought up was perhaps a burden which alternately stimulated and crushed his creativity. Donald’s commitment to ecumenical causes was deep but it was not uncritical. At the General Assembly of 1953 Donald presented the report of the Inter-Church Relations Committee. He stressed that the ecumenical movement was increasingly important, though still in its infancy. The task of the Church regarding refugees (an old concern) was still very important. There was a need for more study of Christology and Ecclesiology, ‘because it was by going deeper that the Christian churches came nearer to each other in Christ’. Donald Baillie died in October of 1954. C. B. Ketcham, an American graduate student, wrote: ‘We came expecting to be impressed, but we were overawed. We came expecting to be friends, but we were loved. Great men and great scholars

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may come to St Mary’s College, but no man can ever take his place in our hearts’ (Newlands 2002: 186).¹ The German translation of God Was in Christ appeared in 1954. Bultmann wrote to John on 27 December 1954 on God Was in Christ: . . . Zu dieser Interpretation, das ich in meiner Terminologie also “existentiale” bezeichnen moechte, fuehle ich mich tief mit ihm verbunden und reich gefoerdert. (Baillie 1957: 54)²

Bultmann wrote again to John on 14 January 1955 about his coming visit to Edinburgh. Donald Baillie gained a reputation for being an outstanding preacher. Yet he never published his own sermons. His sermons, rather like Newman’s, tended to be concerned for the individual in concern for other individuals. To Whom Shall We Go? was a collection published in Edinburgh in 1955. It opens with a useful ‘Memoir’ by John Dow. Out of Nazareth was published in Edinburgh in 1958. Another area to which Donald gave much attention was prayer. This dimension lent a stability and a catholicity to his work which was a source of theological freedom, which could allow experiment and which could still be valuable in the future. If twentieth-century Presbyterians could be saints, Donald Baillie came about as close as anyone to that category. He seems to have been universally liked and respected, loved by many. His friendship was hugely valued by those who knew him best. He was modest, genuinely humble, intellectually brilliant. He was imaginative—perhaps sometimes too much so for his own good. He was certainly a man of flesh and blood, sometimes frustrated, angry about what he regarded as unfair practices, with distinctive theological and political views. He struggled against debilitating illness for most of his life. He devoted himself to others—to his mother, to his congregations, to his students—in ways which might not always have been in his own best interest. His published work was neither voluminous nor encyclopaedic, nor even always strikingly original. It was always perceptive, judicious, and creative. It represented an open Christian faith which sought inclusivity and hospitality, which recognized weakness and suffering for what they are, and pointed to faith and love as ways of coping with any circumstances. ¹ Charles Ketcham recalled in conversation Donald’s great humility. He was immensely friendly to his students, but essentially a very private man. He threatened no one, and typically turned down the principalship of St Mary’s College. Ketcham thought that Donald’s last illness was misdiagnosed—he was sent to Austria for recuperation when he should have gone to hospital. John by contrast was less open to dialogue in class in this period—perhaps he was already getting somewhat tired (Newlands 2002: 186). ² ‘It is the most significant book of our time in the field of Christology . . . In this interpretation, which I like to call “existential”, I feel myself deeply at one with him, and I have found it richly rewarding.’

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By the mid-century new issues were emerging for which the writings of the Baillies provided no specific solutions. But the tone of the liberal orthodox option long remained an important guide for those who were open to listen, both for systematic theologians and for many scholars in cognate theological disciplines.³

Bibliography Baillie Papers. University of Edinburgh, Baillie MSS. Baillie, Donald (1927). Faith in God and its Christian Consummation. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Baillie, Donald (1948). God Was in Christ: An Essay on the Incarnation and Atonement. London: Faber &Faber. Baillie, Donald (1950). ‘Memoir’, in David Cairns: An Autobiography. London: SCM, 9–37. Baillie, Donald (1955). To Whom Shall We Go? Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press. Baillie, Donald (1957). Theology of the Sacraments. London: Faber &Faber. Baillie, Donald (1958). Out of Nazareth. Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press. Baillie, John (1939). Our Knowledge of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baillie, John (1946). God’s Will in Our Time. London: SCM. Baillie, John (1962). The Sense of the Presence of God. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barth, Karl (1967). Church Dogmatics, vol. IV/2.Edinburgh:T&T Clark. Cheyne, A. C. (1993). ‘John Baillie’, in Nigel M. de S. Cameron (ed.), The Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 50. Fergusson, David (ed.) (1993). Christ, Church, and Society: Essays on John Baillie and Donald Baillie. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Newlands, George (2002). John and Donald Baillie: Transatlantic Theology. New York: Peter Lang. Newlands, George (2004). ‘Baillie, John (1886–1960)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition.Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/ ref:odnb/40282 Van Dusen, Pitney (1950). ‘Review of God Was in Christ’, Christianity and Crisis, 25 December.

³ I am much indebted to Dr Anthony Allison for assistance with the production of this chapter.

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10 Theology and Art in Scotland David Brown

One way of telling the story of the relation between religion and the arts in Scotland over the past few centuries would be to stress a deep but ultimately idolatrous interaction in the medieval church that was succeeded by Reformation negativity, destined to last until the nineteenth century; then, mainly under pressure from external influences, an expansion that began with a concern with church architecture proceeded through stained glass finally to music: the challenge of the Neo-Gothic first coming from the ‘English’ Episcopal church, that of stained glass from German work in Glasgow Cathedral, and the use of the organ from American evangelists later that same century.¹ However, in what follows I want to propose a more complex account that also takes seriously the contribution of theological reflection in its own right. But initially something must be said about the simpler story. First, in respect of the medieval church the truth is that we remain largely ignorant of what was going on. Did the artists who created the splendid early Celtic manuscripts have worthy successors of comparable standing?² We simply do not know. The finest painting to survive from the period is the work of a Dutch and not a Scottish master, while what more ordinary parish churches produced suggests some talent but again we have no idea of how extensive this was.³ Equally in music the modern revival of the work of Robert Carver may point to something exceptional rather than a general pattern.⁴ But equally on the other side we need to guard against the temptation to exclude all imaginative creativity from the founders and heirs of the Scottish Reformation. Admittedly, despite Calvin’s own position on art standing midway between Luther on the one side and Zwingli and Karlstadt on the other, Knox seems to have wanted to go further, as the 1559 First Book of Discipline well illustrates.⁵ Even so, the houses

¹ St John’s Princes Street (1818) was an iconic early example of Neo-Gothic. The Royal Bavarian Glassworks received the commission for stained glass from Glasgow City Council in 1856. Sankey’s and Moody’s mission to Scotland in 1873–4 helped to popularize use of the organ. ² Even the Book of Kells is often claimed to have originated in Iona. ³ The Dutch painting is the Trinity Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes (National Gallery, Edinburgh). The sculptural decoration of Roslyn Chapel is obviously exceptional, but could the paintings that have survived from Fowlis Easter have been something like the norm? ⁴ He was a canon of Scone Abbey till its suppression in 1559. ⁵ Calvin opposed all imagery in church (Institutes I, xi) but did, unlike Knox, allow paintings of biblical narratives at home (Michalski 1993: 70).

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of the wealthier continued to be decorated in interesting ways,⁶ while the ban on religious topics gave a new impetus to portraiture. There were also occasional rebellions (of which the scheme in Provost Skene’s house in Aberdeen is perhaps the most famous) that suggest potential openings towards the more moderate position in Calvinist Holland (Todd 2002: 330–1). However, what really made the difference was the fresh intellectual input provided from within the Scottish intellectual tradition. I shall therefore begin this survey with Enlightenment aesthetics, then explore some key theological precedents set by two early nineteenth-century artists, before concluding with the most significant Scottish theologian to reflect on visual art, P. T. Forsyth (d. 1921). I will end with some reflections on more recent developments. Francis Hutcheson’s Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue of 1725 was to set a pattern in Scotland for the rest of the century, of sustained investigation into aesthetic issues, including the kind of God that might be implied. Not that the latter element was unexpected, given the fact that most of the philosophers concerned were also ordained ministers.⁷ For Hutcheson beauty is rather like Locke’s secondary qualities, an internal pleasure-giving sense unrelated to self-interest that arises from the presence of ‘uniformity amidst variety’, later expanded to ‘a vast uniformity amidst an almost infinite variety’ (Hutcheson 2008: I, x, 23; I, xv, 25; II, iii, 28; II, v, 30). There being no prior probability for expecting such uniformity, its existence is then argued by Hutcheson to indicate the providence of a benevolent deity concerned with increasing human knowledge (Hutcheson 2008: I, viii, 80–1). Whereas Hutcheson’s discussion is rather dry and formal with few examples, later treatments demonstrate real concern to relate the details of the creative arts to God as in some sense their originator. This is evident in the most important work from the end of the century, in the discussion of beauty by minister and philosopher Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of 1785. His ‘common sense philosophy’ leads him to reject Hutcheson’s reliance on both Locke’s and Hume’s assertion of an entirely subjectivist origin for aesthetic ideas. In its place comes the inherence of beauty in the objects in themselves: ‘we have no ground to think so disrespectfully of the author of our being; the faculties he has given us are not fallacious; nor is that beauty, which he has liberally diffused over all the works of his hands, a mere fancy in us but a real excellence in his works, which express the perfection of their divine author’ (Reid 1785: VIII, iv, 741). Twenty years earlier Lord Kames had also attempted an answer to Hume (a distant relative) by putting more emphasis on education (1762). Reid, however,

⁶ Not just in palaces like Crathes Castle but even in the bourgeois homes of South Street, St Andrews. ⁷ Although born in Ireland, both parentage and residency made him more Scot than Irish. Hutcheson was a probationer minister.

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is more subtle in distinguishing between instinctive and rational beauty, with the former illustrated by the blackbird’s selection of ‘her sooty spouse’ and the nightingale of ‘her musical composer’, whereas the rational is further subdivided into a ‘grandeur’ that ‘naturally produces admiration’ and a ‘beauty’ that ‘naturally produces love’ (Reid 1785: VIII, iv, 743–8). Both, though, are presented as firmly subordinate to practical utility in benefit to human beings, however large a role uniformity and variety might still play for Reid in overall aesthetic assessment (Reid 1785: VIII, iv, 756–7). While that emphasis on utility does make some of Reid’s observations sound quite odd, such as his claim that ‘a sheep derives its beauty from the fineness and quantity of its fleece’ (Reid 1785: VIII, iv, 758), it would be quite wrong to suppose concern to uphold the argument from design lies at the real heart of his discussion. The various criteria and examples presented rather suggest interest in a number of types of interrelation between art and divinity. Creation is presented as primarily an expression of the divine mind in its majesty, harmony, and variety, qualities that could of course be beneficial to humans but need not necessarily be seen as such. Indeed, such openness makes it but a short step to envisaging aesthetic experiences of nature as directed instead to allowing the possibility of the perception of certain divine attributes (such as transcendence and a love of order or intricacy), with one of the roles of art then being to aid such perceptions through nature. Such was the position adopted by Reid’s former tutor at Aberdeen, George Turnbull, although he appears not have made this stance fully explicit until after he became a priest of the Church of England. In his Treatise on Ancient Painting (1740), intended for those making the Grand Tour of Europe, he argues that, just as history painting should be seen as a means of encouraging reflection on our own moral dispositions, so landscape painting (whether narrowly representational or improved—as ‘a supplement’) should be viewed as intended to draw out reflection on the divine character lying behind nature. In similar vein Archibald Alison (another Scot who became an Anglican but unlike Turnbull returned to Scotland to work in Edinburgh) identifies the cultivation of ‘religious sentiment’ as the culmination of what he wants to say about aesthetics in his lengthy work, Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (1790). His desire to respect both nature and art leads to a subtle expansion of what Turnbull had said more briefly about art as nature’s ‘supplement’. Because works of art are principally the expression of the mind of artists, ‘the forms, and the scenery of material nature are around them, not to govern, but to awaken their genius . . . and from this investigation to exalt their conceptions to the imagination of forms and of compositions of form, more pure and more perfect, than any that nature herself ever presents to them’ (Alison 1821: 453). Yet, so far from this allowing spectator or artist to look down on nature, on Alison’s view what such openness demonstrates is the summons of our own nature to ‘a nobler conclusion’, one in which we experience nature as expressive of divine power, wisdom,

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and goodness in making such a trajectory possible (Alison 1821: 457–8). It was a similar openness which his friend, the Presbyterian Dugald Stewart, postulated when, after noting the great variety of contexts in which beauty might be used, he observed that ‘Unfathomable Design’ by deviating from uniformity ‘enhances to an astonishing degree the delight arising from the regularity which, in her minuter details, she everywhere scatters in such inexhaustible profusion’ (Stewart 1816: 283–4). In other words, the incomplete and undetermined allows us to see better the possibilities. Nor in the light of such comments will it do to speak of a narrow Classicism in such writers: some merit in Gothic is acknowledged, even if mention is most commonly made of one of its less significant aspects (symmetry).⁸ Initially it might be thought that such abstract reflections were too far removed from the practice of artists to have had much influence, but it should not be forgotten that artists were sometimes personal friends of the philosophers concerned, notably Henry Raeburn of both Reid and Stewart. Indeed, not only did Raeburn paint Reid several times (including a very striking portrait of the philosopher shortly before his death),⁹ it has been argued that Reid’s theory of direct perception influenced not only Raeburn but also eventually the Impressionists (Macmillan 1990: 157–8). Such philosophical underpinning was one way of giving legitimacy to how painting was done. More relevant here is the religious dimension that philosophers like Alison made possible even for something so apparently secular as landscape. What mattered was the sentiment with which it was recorded and indeed transformed. One can see the results in someone like John Thomson of Duddingston (1778–1840) with his passion for landscape art. According to his biographer he would have preferred to have become a full-time artist but instead followed his father into the ministry, yet with such a deep commitment to art that parishioners sometimes objected (Baird 1895: 11, 22–6, 75). Although some landscapes did move him to tears, his reaction was far from being a purely emotional response.¹⁰ His intention was to encourage viewers to see Scottish scenery in a new light: his paintings should ‘instruct the reason . . . or elevate the imagination’, with ‘the prose of Nature’ omitted in favour of its ‘spirit’ and ‘grandeur’ (Baird 1895: 119, x).¹¹ As his biographer concludes, ‘as he looked out upon the earth and sea and sky, all seemed to stir with the gleam of God’s eye. Beauty was for him God’s handwriting—a wayside sacrament to be welcome in every fair face, every fair sky, every fair flower; to be drunk in with all one’s eyes’ (Baird 1895: 161–2). Although this comment perhaps exaggerates (Thomson was sometimes more interested in historical associations than religious), it does undoubtedly indicate

⁸ ⁹ ¹⁰ ¹¹

E.g. Hutcheson (2008: 64–5). Currently in Fyvie Castle. E.g. Baird (1895: 104). The latter is a quotation from Ralph Emerson.

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a direction that can be detected in some of the more talented Scottish painters that were to follow him in this tradition of association, among them Horatio McCulloch (1805–67) and William McTaggart (1835–1910). While McCulloch can be credited with creating a Wordsworthian sensibility before the now deserted Scottish Highland landscape, McTaggart remains unsurpassed in his seascapes that, again, are ‘touched by religious awe’ (Macmillan 1990: 226, 247). One intriguing example of this inheritance in the twentieth century is the work of Sir David Young Cameron (1865–1945). An elder of the Church of Scotland who transformed his own parish church at Kippen (near Stirling) with works of art, he nonetheless firmly resisted the idealizing or romanticizing of the Scottish landscape. Although his pervasive use of brown tones could be interpreted as a form of reductionism, more likely it is an invitation to see a religious response as a form of realism rather than just escapism. But, if Thomson and landscape art may be used to illustrate one kind of theological influence on Scottish art, his more famous and slightly younger contemporary, Sir David Wilkie (1785–1841), may be allowed to represent another. Almost exclusively an historical, genre, and portrait painter, Wilkie can lay claim to have been Scotland’s first artist with an international reputation, for not only did he have various royal appointments but also his paintings sold in America, France, and Germany (Cunningham 1843: I, 380; II, 33, 84, 102; III, 228, 274). Like Thomson, he was the son of a manse but unlike Thomson he had the opportunity of professional training at the Trustees Academy in Edinburgh (I, 32–46). Although thereafter his career was largely pursued in London, he never reneged upon his roots. On his father’s death his sister and mother were encouraged to come and live with him in London, while both before and after that death regular visits to Scotland were maintained (I, 360–8). In addition, his commitment to Presbyterianism continued, even as he began to worship in the Church of England (II, 94, 125; III, 123). Indeed, a number of his paintings celebrated Knox and simple Presbyterian forms (II, 72; III, 222, 233, 247). Even so and rather remarkably for that age, although his sympathies for Judaism and Islam were somewhat limited (III, 315–17, 357, 381, 421–2), he expressed considerable admiration for Roman Catholic practice as experienced in places such as Rouen, Florence, and Rome (I, 392–3 (cf. 396, 403); II, 181, 194, 209–12). We are particularly fortunate in having a three-volume work that gathers together his journals, letters, and lectures on art. From their perusal we discover an artist concerned to move Britain beyond what he sees as its very limited conception of the purpose and role of art. In particular, throughout his threeyear tour of Europe he made detailed observations on the art of its churches and galleries that not only powerfully endorse the legitimacy of explicitly religious art but also insist on its restoration, where possible, to its original context, as with Rubens’ three famous paintings to Antwerp (I, 443–4, 452). But he also goes further, in arguing for the need for British art (including Scottish) to engage

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actively with a similar art for its own churches (III, 138–40). This was the conclusion he reached as a result of a trip to the Holy Land which clearly had a profound impact on him (III, 411–13, 432–3). Indeed, he had already resolved upon such art from himself, with a concern, like his friend David Roberts (1796–1864),¹² for contextual accuracy but going beyond Roberts towards specifics of the biblical narrative when, unfortunately, he died prematurely on the journey home near Malta (Cunningham 1843: III, 393, 415–16, 472, 507–8). What is of special interest is Wilkie’s view of the purpose of art: its techniques are there to rouse perceptions that might otherwise not come to the surface: ‘a sacred awe in observers of every class’, ‘the knowledge of Revelation’ (III, 190, 199). So, although (as already noted) he was concerned to offer accurate renditions of the biblical countryside, this was not to be at the expense of evoking recognition of the significance of some particular biblical event, nor to be a matter of mere copying: ‘the duty of art is of a higher kind . . . Art is only art when it adds mind to form’ (III, 131). So, it would be quite wrong to devalue his existing repertoire as mere genre painting. On the contrary, his painting of Burns’ Cottar’s Saturday Night truly constitutes a profound expression of the importance of family worship, while his representation of suffering in Ireland (as in The Sleeping Whiteboy) was meant to challenge prevailing British attitudes.¹³ In such a process, spectators within the frame could be used to help encourage the right kind of approach (III, 165). The technical ‘resources of art’ should be ‘kept out of view’ so that ‘the picture appears as a dream – a new existence’. Thus, it is not the skill of Rubens in his Descent from the Cross that we should note but Christ’s ‘look of subdued and godlike suffering’ (III, 150–3). In a similar way, had he lived, Wilkie’s ideal for his own religious art would have conjured more than just the land that he had visited. It would have helped to let it live in others’ imagination. As he describes his impressions of Jerusalem, ‘this struck me as unlike all other cities; it recalled the imaginations of Nicholas Poussin—a city not for every day, not for the present, but for all time,—as if built for an eternal Sabbath’ (III, 387). So, although neither Thomson nor Wilkie in general created art that would immediately make us think of a religious dimension, along with the writings of the eighteenth-century philosophers, they can be seen as firmly preparing the ground for the transformations of the later nineteenth century when Scotland at last rejected the Calvinist suspicions that had so dominated earlier centuries, and produced a wide range of explicitly religious painting. Accordingly, it simply will not do to suggest that it was reflections from churchmen such as those

¹² Roberts’ images are magnificent but bear little relation to reality. His descriptions also display no obvious sign of religious sentiment. See Roberts (1989: I, 43, 45; III, 27). ¹³ Cottar’s Saturday Night (1837) is in Kelvingrove Art Gallery, Glasgow; The Sleeping Whiteboy (1836) is in Tate Britain.

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involved in the Scoto-Catholic movement that produced the later changes.¹⁴ While the work of artists such as John Philip and George Harvey can be seen to continue Wilkie’s focus on scenes from the historical and contemporary church, someone like Robert Scott Lauder (1803–69) nicely exhibits what the changing philosophical and artistic context now made possible. Lauder was in fact the sonin-law of Thomson, while the influence of Wilkie in his general approach is also obvious (cf. Macmillan 1990: 203). But Lauder went further in distinctive treatments of Christ himself. Thus, whereas Christ Teacheth Humility (1845) very much emphasizes Christ’s humanity, On the Way to Emmaus (1850) clearly seeks to express the Saviour’s divinity through the piercing gaze that has been assigned to the Risen Christ.¹⁵ However, it would be quite wrong to deduce from the work of Wilkie and Lauder that the ground rules for Christian art in Scotland had now been settled: far from it. One now largely forgotten theological contribution to the continuing debate came from a scion of one of the oldest of Scottish families, Alexander, Lord Lindsay, subsequently 25th Earl of Crawford. In his three-volume Sketches of the History of Christian Art (1847) he uses a principle derived from Trinitarian theology (in rough, sense, intellect, and spirit) to argue for the culmination of the Christian tradition in the early Renaissance, thus anticipating the later Pre-Raphaelites.¹⁶ Meantime the Aberdeen Scottish Episcopalian William Dyce (1806–64), was coming to very similar views which were eventually confirmed on a visit to Rome, during which Michelangelo was subjected to relentless critique.¹⁷ The moral and spiritual must be central and not any attempt made ‘to charm or flatter the senses’ (Errington 1992). Yet, although the influence of fifteenth-century Italy is clear in his earlier work, it is fascinating to observe a major change of direction in the paintings for which he is now best known (Pointon 1976). To the consternation of viewers then and now he abandoned any attempt to reflect the topography of the Holy Land. Instead, Christ as The Man of Sorrows (1860), despite being traditionally clad, is made to sit amidst a rugged Arran landscape, while in The Good Shepherd (1859) not only the countryside but even the farm buildings hint at the Britain of his own day. It was a daring attempt to bring out the continuing relevance of Jesus as Saviour, just as the landscape in Pegwell Bay (1860) is used to give his own distinctive answer to the challenges of modern science: divine eternity remains.¹⁸ Equally, the United Presbyterian and Glaswegian Alexander Greek Thomson (1817–75) sought to fight against the forces from England that were to ensure the ¹⁴ For its more practical, liturgical orientation, see Brown (2009); Yates (2009: 114–22). ¹⁵ The former is now in the National Gallery in Edinburgh, the latter in the McMannus Galleries, Dundee. ¹⁶ For a brief outline, see Steegman (1947); for the corresponding art collection, see Barker et al. (2000). ¹⁷ Unpublished lecture of 1844 on Christian Art: Dyce Papers, Aberdeen Art Gallery. ¹⁸ Man of Sorrows is in the National Gallery in Edinburgh, Pegwell Bay in Tate Britain, and The Good Shepherd is in St Peter’s Church, Little Budworth, Cheshire.

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triumph of Gothic in Scotland no less than in England. One reason for that triumph was the strong support given to the style by England’s greatest art critic of the nineteenth century, John Ruskin, whose earlier writings are strongly imbued with the Calvinism of his parents’ Scottish origins in Edinburgh. Sadly, not many of Thomson’s churches have survived (the best known is St Vincent Glasgow) but an impressive array of occasional theoretical writings remain (Stamp 1999). In these he argues for the revelatory quality of Egyptian and Greek architecture in its stability and monumentality, arguing that it is the horizontal and not the vertical that has most potential for conveying a sense of the infinite: what one might call majesty immanence. The contrast with the other-worldly aims of Gothic could scarcely be more obvious. Either way, such debates ensured that the once acceptable notion of a minister keeping his hat on in church to indicate the absence of any aesthetic or symbolic significance in the church building became firmly a thing of the past.¹⁹ Yet, despite such promising initiatives Scottish theologians singularly failed to make any significant contribution to such debates. Indeed, even major philosophers fought shy of the visual and instead, as with Edward Caird and Henry Jones (who held in succession the moral philosophy chair at Glasgow between 1866 and 1922), focused on the expression of religion in the major literary figures of their day such as Browning, Tennyson, and Wordsworth. The one major exception is the theologian P. T. Forsyth (1848–1921). Although born and educated in Aberdeen, his ministry and teaching career (in the Congregational church) were spent entirely in England. Even so, his most influential theological writing, such as The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (1909), is most naturally interpreted as stemming from the Scottish and Germanic tradition rather than from that in his adopted land.²⁰ Two key books are devoted to the question of art and theology. Although contemporary theologians sometimes dismiss these reflections as too much the product of a Hegelianism that he fights shy of elsewhere, no less an art critic than the atheist Peter Fuller (1947–90) spoke of his observations as ‘a tour de force of twentieth century art criticism’ (Fuller 1988:145). This seems to me exactly right, as, no matter how often one might disagree with particular aspects of Forsyth’s judgements, they represent a profound engagement with the significance of art for theology, and so are a natural impetus to further reflection. Christ on Parnassus (1911) is the more general book. Here in surveying the Western tradition he argues in typical Hegelian manner that Greek sculpture though idealizing the body was still essentially too immanent in its approach, while Hebrew thought failed to escape from an exclusive stress on transcendence. It was thus only with Christian painting that the two elements were combined in the revelation of the ¹⁹ E.g. the practice of the minister at St Cuthbert’s in Edinburgh (Cosh 2003: 474). ²⁰ For two modern assessments of his approach to art, see Wood (1988) and Begbie (1995).

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transcendent divine in the particularities of the human condition, especially in love and forgiveness. Even so, Forsyth still resists giving the final palm to painting since for him such an art form remains too tied to this world. Rather, it is preeminently in music and poetry that individuals are most effectively carried to the spiritual sides of their natures, to word and sound that allow escape from the temptations of physical beauty and make one think instead of moral and spiritual values (Forsyth 1911: 272, 280). In a similar way although earlier in the book acknowledging the many merits of Gothic architecture, he nonetheless concludes by declaring not only its acoustic inadequacy for proclamation of the word but also, more fundamentally, what he sees as its misconception of Christianity as mystery, whereas architecture’s true role, he believes, should be to address a quickened conscience and intelligent will.²¹ Inevitably, with such comprehensive claims there is much to cavil at. Despite Forsyth’s claim to the contrary, it would surely be hard to deny that Phidias’ statue of Zeus (435 ) at Olympia really did successfully convey awe at the majestic transcendence and otherness of the divine: thirteen metres tall, it was made of ivory, gold, and wood, with a reflecting pool of olive oil at the base, all of which contributed to its role as a worthy pilgrimage goal.²² Again, the Hebrew mind was scarcely as resistant to the aesthetic as Forsyth claims. Although conceding the presence of sculpture in the Temple, Forsyth fails to note how this might have worked in combination with appreciation of natural beauty eventually to produce the now excavated, elaborately decorated synagogue floors from the early centuries of our common era (Forsyth 1911: 44).²³ Equally he is too quick to hold up Rembrandt as an ideal and condemn other artists such as Michelangelo or Rubens as ‘pagan’ (Forsyth 1911: 105), whereas none can be fairly assessed except against the competing traditions of representation out of which they emerged. In seeking to enable viewers to find the divine in the Christian story, Rubens’ cosmic drama on a grand scale is surely no less eloquent than Rembrandt’s no less artificial play of light. Ironically, there is no shortage of passages in Forsyth that would have allowed him to escape from the limitations of his own position. Thus, while his praise for music and poetry may suggest a misguided desire to get beyond the purely material (these arts too have an inescapable physical element), elsewhere he identifies the power of all art as lying in its inherent ‘sacramentality’, the mediation of the spiritual through the material (Forsyth 1911: 257). Indeed, he does not hesitate to use the language of transubstantiation as a means of describing the process: ‘There is a certain transubstantiation. [The artist] does not simply associate his feeling with the material, nor symbolise it, but he embodies his feeling in the material . . . it makes me [i.e. the viewer] the citizen of a world unseen’ (Forsyth 1911: 258). ²¹ Cf. 176 with 190–1. ²² Pausanias, Description of Greece 5.11.1–10. ²³ I am thinking of synagogues such as Beit Alpha, Capernaum and Hammat Tiberias.

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And it is precisely such notions that are especially prominent in his discussion of contemporary artists in his earlier Religion in Recent Art (1889). Commenting on Holman Hunt’s The Scapegoat he observes: ‘What we have here, then is a most wonderful and successful symbol, not artificial but natural, not conventional but original . . . a symbol with sacramental power to convey the staggering horror of spiritual curse, and the awful strain of the sin-bearing which takes sin away’ (Forsyth 1901: 187). Forsyth was a real enthusiast for contemporary art. For instance, he does not hesitate to describe Watts as the Michelangelo of his own day or to suggest that Hunt’s Shadow of Death is ‘the greatest Christ that Protestant art has attained to’ (Forsyth 1901: 97, 194). But, whether right or not in such judgements, what is undoubtedly impressive is the deep and real engagement he shows with such paintings, not least because he finds in them a parallel endeavour to the proper study of Scripture. Thus, commenting on the work of Burne Jones, he observes: ‘Reduce your Bible to a mere theological history and your piety to humdrum, and depend on it the insulted spirit of the imagination will find means to make you regret your mistake. Banish imagination from your religion, and art will be forced to invent a religion of its own’ (Forsyth 1901: 46). Intriguingly, even Holman Hunt is criticized for at times succumbing to too much literalism: ‘He has been straitened by the excess of his realism; and what the Church did to Maurice has perhaps been done by Palestine to Hunt. What the archaeology of the creeds did to the theologian, the archaeology of the Holy Land seems to have done to the artist . . . Both escaped from the bondage of the Bible into a largeness of thought which is the very soul of the Bible. But both came, to some degree, under a new form of bondage which they took for support—the one to the creeds of the church, the other to its cradle’ (Forsyth 1901: 166). The criticism is not entirely fair to Hunt (or to F. D. Maurice for that matter), especially when one compares Hunt’s art work with the excessive romanticism of David Roberts on the one hand or the crude literalism of someone like Thomas Seddon on the other. But the basic implication surely does hold, that Scripture is a work of the literary imagination, full of metaphors, symbols, images, analogies, stories, and myths, and as such intended to take readers well beyond the purely literal. But can we go further, and say that imaginative art lies at the very heart of Christian faith? Certainly, this is the contention Forsyth himself makes in these two books. One needs a bridge between the material world that we inhabit and the immaterial reality that is God’s existence. Like Scripture the aim of the artist should be to help us ‘to gain one vision of two worlds; to read one system in two spheres; to behold through the glass the picture, and the water of life within the river of time’ (Forsyth 1901: 178).²⁴ Yet, despite having developed this argument over a century ago, Forsyth’s theological engagement with the visual arts has

²⁴ For an attempt to develop that argument, see Brown (2017: 23–36).

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lacked successors until relatively recently, which is all the more regrettable, given that in the intervening period art and theology have been moving ever further apart. Perhaps the observations of one of the Scottish colourists, J. D. Fergusson, can be used to make the point. In his book on Modern Scottish Painting, first published in 1943, he sees Calvinism, or at least ‘what is called Calvinism’, as the great enemy of imagination and innovation in art (Fergusson 2015: 82, 95, 108–9, 113, 123, 126–7, 139, 142, 145); in particular in its suspicion of nudity, whereas his own famous Les Eus (1913) of dancing nudes can be seen to offer, as well as rhythm, ‘the beauty of light on healthy skin’ (Fergusson 2015: 140). It has been suggested that this particular painting displays the influence of Hindu temple sculpture (Macdonald 2000: 160). If so, it would accord well with the way in which such religious impulses as Fergusson had turned elsewhere, towards earlier pagan beliefs, as in his sculpture Hymn to Eastre, the Sun (1924) or the painting Danu, Mother of the Gods (1952). Or, to mention briefly another such example, Alan Davie (1920–2014) seemed prepared to engage with almost every form of religious symbolism in his painting except what pertained to Christianity. In more recent times one promising sign of more positive moves from the theological side has been the decision of almost every Scottish divinity department to engage with the arts in one form or another, of which the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts at St Andrews (ITIA) is the best known. Although born in England, Trevor Hart, the person who played the leading role in its foundation in 2000, has since the beginning of his research studies in the mid-1980s spent his entire academic career in Scotland, and that is perhaps reflected in the theology he chose to apply to the arts, with an early book dedicated to Forsyth and later work much influenced by Karl Barth.²⁵ Hart’s primary area of expertise is literary but others have been appointed with strong interests in the visual, among them the Scot, David Brown.²⁶ But amid increasing divergence does contemporary Scottish art still offer material for theological reflection, and, if so, how might the dialogue proceed? Over the course of several books Scotland’s best-known philosopher of recent years, the Catholic convert Alasdair MacIntyre (born in Glasgow in 1929) has argued that the universal rationality espoused by liberalism is unfit for purpose and so must give place to a context/tradition-dependent form of reasoning before any adequate assessment of rival merits can be offered. In one such book one of the three traditions he explores at length is the eighteenth-century Scottish philosophy with which this essay began (MacIntyre 1988: 209–332). More

²⁵ He is currently engaged in writing a three-volume work, the first of which appeared in 2014. ²⁶ Best known for his five-volume OUP work on the relation between theology and the arts (1999–2008). For some reflections from Brown on the relation between religion, culture, and Scottish identity, see Brown (2014).

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pertinent here is the way in which he pours scorn on how appreciation of art is currently taught without regard to its relation to sources and continuing traditions: ‘allowing us to exhibit what were in fact very different and heterogeneous kinds of objects under one and the same aesthetic rubric in artificial neutral contexts in our museums’ (MacIntyre 1988: 385). One more general implication would be to insist that theologians treat art as more than merely illustrative. Even hostile engagement with the Christian tradition might have useful things to say to that tradition. So, for example, the gruesome crucifixion-like images of John Bellany (1942–2013) from the fishing village of Port Seton must surely lead to sad acknowledgement of how utterly oppressive Christianity has at times been, just as the inversion by Douglas Gordon (b.1966), the video artist, of the National Gallery’s Hans Holbein the Younger’s Allegory of the Two Testaments can challenge any simplistic notion of supersessionism (Gordon 2006: 48–55). Again, works by Sir Eduardo Paolozzi (1924–2005) and Peter Howson (b. 1958) may have been admitted to Scottish churches but it is surely not without significance that these are among their least striking or controversial: in Paolozzi’s case a stained window in St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral in Edinburgh; in Howson’s a painting of St John Ogilvie in St Andrew’s Catholic Cathedral in Glasgow.²⁷ Yet, might not Howson’s readiness to find Christ elsewhere in Glasgow’s underbelly represent a more profound insight into the nature of Christianity than many a sermon to be heard in that city’s churches? Peter Howson is a practising Christian but not dissimilar thoughts might also sometimes be stirred by those on the margins of faith: as with the folds of fabric that simultaneously conceal and reveal in the work of Alison Watt (b. 1965) and so conjure a God at once present yet utterly mysterious.²⁸ As a final example, consider the contribution of Nathan Coley (b. 1967). Many have interpreted his miniature cardboard reproduction of the churches of Edinburgh under the title Lamp of Sacrifice as an implicit critique of the wasted resources of a past age. But, significantly, another work has Tate Modern on Fire. Could not, therefore, the message of both works be read in more than one way?²⁹ It is just such openness that allows traditions within art to flourish and provide continuing relevance. As this survey indicates, theology has been slow to reciprocate and recognize the implicit parallel with an imaginative Christian tradition but things may be changing.

²⁷ There are of course occasional exceptions such as Stuart Duffin’s Last Supper II in Langside Parish Church, Glasgow. ²⁸ An especially powerful example is to be found in the Memorial Chapel of Old St Paul’s Edinburgh. ²⁹ As the novelist Ewan Morrison suggests in Nathan Coley (2017).

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Bibliography Alison, Archibald (1821). Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste, 2nd American edition. Harford: George Goodwin. Baird, William (1895). John Thomson of Duddingston, Pastor and Painter. Edinburgh: T. & A. Constable. Barker, Nicholas et al. (eds.) (2000). ‘A Poet in Paradise’: Lord Lindsay and Christian Art. Edinburgh: National Gallery of Scotland. Begbie, Jeremy (1995). ‘The Ambivalent Rainbow: Forsyth, Art and Creation’, in Trevor Hart (ed.), Justice the True and Only Mercy: Essays on the Life and Theology of Peter Taylor Forsyth. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 197–219. Brown, David (2014). ‘Scotland: Religion, Culture and National Identity’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 14: 88–99. Brown, David (2017). Divine Generosity and Human Creativity, ed. Christopher R. Brewer and Robert MacSwain. London: Routledge. Brown, Stewart J. (2009). ‘The Scoto-Catholic Movement in Presbyterian Worship c.1850–c.1920’, in Duncan B. Forrester and Doug Gay (eds.), Worship and Liturgy in Context: Studies and Case Studies in Theology and Practice. London: SCM, 152–63. Coley, Nathan (2015). Nathan Coley. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland. Cosh, Mary (2003). Edinburgh: The Golden Age. Edinburgh: Birlinn. Cunningham, Allan (1843). The Life of Sir David Wilkie. London: John Murray. Errington, Lindsay (1992). ‘Ascetics and Sensualists: William Dyce’s Views on Christian Art’, The Burlington Magazine 134: 491–7. Fergusson, J. D. (2015). Modern Scottish Painting. Edinburgh: Luath Press. Forsyth, P. T. (1901). Religion in Recent Art, 2nd edition. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Forsyth, P. T. (1911). Christ on Parnassus. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Fuller, Peter (1988). Theoria: Art and the Absence of Grace. London: Chatto & Windus. Gordon, Douglas (2006). Superhumannatural. Edinburgh: National Gallery. Hutcheson, Francis (2008). An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, revised edition. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. Macdonald, Murdo (2000). Scottish Art. London: Thames & Hudson. MacIntyre, Alasdair (1988). Whose Justice? Which Rationality? London: Duckworth. Macmillan, Duncan (1990). Scottish Art, 1460–1990. Edinburgh: Mainstream. Michalski, S. (1993). The Reformation and the Visual Arts. London: Routledge. Morrison, Ewan (2017). Nathan Coley. Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland. Pointon, Marcia (1976). ‘William Dyce as a Painter of Biblical Subjects’, The Art Bulletin 58: 260–8. Reid, Thomas (1785). Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. Edinburgh: John Bell.

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Roberts, David (1989). The Holy Land. London: Studio Editions. Stamp, Gavin (ed.) (1999). The Light of Truth and Beauty. Glasgow: Alexander Thomson Society. Steegman, John (1947). ‘Lord Lindsay’s History of Christian Art’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 10: 121–31. Stewart, Dugald (1816). Philosophical Essays. Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Company. Todd, Margo (2002). The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wood, Ralph C. (1988). ‘Christ on Parnassus: P. T. Forsyth among the Liberals’, Journal of Literature and Theology 2: 83–95. Yates, Nigel (2009). Preaching, Word and Sacrament. London: T&T Clark.

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11 The Influence of Barth in Scotland Paul T. Nimmo

Introduction Within the world of twentieth-century theology, the figure of Karl Barth (1886–1968) looms large as one of the scholars who most profoundly impacted the theological landscape. Throughout his career—from his early years as a parish minister in Safenwil through his time as a dogmatics professor in Germany to his later days as an academic statesman in Basel—Barth was a creative and controversial thinker (Nimmo 2017), provoking responses ranging from warm welcome to strong denunciation. The influence of the theology of Barth was felt with particular keenness in Scotland, where a variety of historical and contextual factors—lucidly summarized by Morgan as ‘its Reformed nature, its intellectual openness to the European continent and the importance placed upon dogmatics in the universities and the Kirk’—rendered the terrain fertile for serious attention to and engagement with his thinking (Morgan 2010: 49; cf. McGrath 2006: 123–5). The resultant—and diverse—reception of the work of Barth in Scotland has been recounted in impressive scope in other ventures (see McPake 1994: 178–234, Finke 1995; Morgan 2010; also Roberts 1991: 105–17). This chapter essays the more modest task of investigating the influence which Barth exerted upon three significant Scottish theologians: John McConnachie (1875–1948), H. R. Mackintosh (1870–1936), and T. F. Torrance (1913–2007). Each of these thinkers bears signal responsibility for Barth becoming a central conversation partner for theology in Scotland from 1930 onwards, though each had a rather different relationship to his work. This chapter exposits the influence of Barth upon each of the selected theologians in detail, attending to their significant publications on Barth as well as to wider contextual factors. It concludes by offering one reason for the different influences of Barth upon each of their work, and by reflecting upon the ongoing influence of Barth in Scotland.

John McConnachie McConnachie was one of the earliest expositors of the theology of Barth in the English-speaking world, and also one of its most enthusiastic advocates. Following

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studies in Aberdeen and Edinburgh, the latter including work in Marburg with Wilhelm Herrmann, he served as minister of Dundee St John’s for more than thirty years, but retained a strong interest in academic theology. He was not the first to publish in English on Barth’s radical agenda of reorienting theology from talk of humanity to the revelation of God: Anglophone reception of Barth’s work began at least as early as 1923 in the United States (Sykes 1979: 3) and 1925 in the United Kingdom (Morgan 2010: 13). But barriers of language, distance, and culture meant that in 1927, when McConnachie first responded to Barth’s work in print, Barth remained relatively unheralded in the British theological world. McConnachie’s first article on Barth appeared in the Hibbert Journal, and begins with a brief biographical sketch, memorably describing Barth as ‘a dynamic personality, with the prophetic fire, and a sturdy fighter for what he considers the truth’ (McConnachie 1927: 386). The text then explores in turn Barth’s method, his critical view of human religion and the church, and his constructive agenda. McConnachie observes that the latter is based upon ‘Revelation with a capital R, that is, as it has reached us in the Bible’ (McConnachie 1927: 391), and proceeds to outline—on the basis of Barth’s available publications at the time—Barth’s view of the Word of God, the diastasis of God and humanity, Jesus Christ, faith, and ethics. He appreciates the way Barth’s theology seeks to ‘bring back the Christian mind of our day to the message of the Gospel, . . . and to recover the spirit of the Reformation with its emphasis on sin and grace’ (McConnachie 1927: 400). However, he is also critical: Barth is ‘one-sided’, and his scheme is pervaded by ‘religious and ethical pessimism’; there is insufficient space for human experience or Christian nurture, and insufficient connection between ‘the historical Jesus and the Risen Christ’ (McConnachie 1927: 399–400). This first article of McConnachie was not alone in raising the profile of Barth in the English-speaking world. Adolf Keller, a former mentor of Barth, had written articles and a co-authored monograph that profiled Barth’s work around the same time (Morgan 2010: 8–14 and 21–4), and in 1928, Barth’s collection of essays Das Wort Gottes und die Theologie was translated into English by Douglas Horton, spurring a series of reviews and articles. Sykes thus suggests that from 1929 ‘it cannot reasonably be said that Barth was neglected in English-language theological writing’ (Sykes 1979: 3–4; cf. Morgan 2010: 23). As McConnachie deepened his engagement with Barth’s theology, the notes of criticism diminished and then disappeared, on the basis—as Finke recounts—of his growing conviction that ‘his own church was in a situation of crisis and in need of a far-reaching and comprehensive reorientation’ (Finke 1995: 103). McConnachie published two monographs on Barth in swift succession, in 1931 and 1933. In the process of writing the first book, provisionally titled ‘Karl Barth and the Preacher’, he asked Barth to write a short introduction to the effect that Barth knew him, had seen him in Bonn, in his lecture-room—McConnachie had attended Barth’s lectures on a holiday visit to Bonn in 1930—had read many of

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his texts about him, considered that they were helpful to mediate his views to an English-speaking public, and had used them to that end himself. McConnachie assured Barth that ‘I shall not go into any questions of criticism’, though noted that ‘I have not swallowed your message in a wholesale uncritical fashion’. Barth declined the invitation, suggesting that the provisional title was not in the spirit of his own work, which began with the theological before moving to the homiletical. McConnachie then asked if he could reproduce part of Barth’s response in the book, a request that Barth granted (Barth 2001 [1931]: 147–9; cf. McConnachie 1931: 11–12). McConnachie’s first book drew on a wide range of Barth’s published works, from his commentaries on Romans (in its second edition) and Philippians through occasional lectures and texts to the first volume of his planned multivolume work of Christian dogmatics, Christliche Dogmatik I. The volume began by setting the scene for the emergence of the theology of Karl Barth. Prior to Barth, in McConnachie’s account, ‘liberal theology slid ever deeper into the swamp of relativism . . . the objective content of the Christian Faith slowly disintegrated, and lost its absolute value’. Small wonder, then, that McConnachie heralded ‘the Theology of Crisis’ advanced by Barth with its ‘intellectual and spiritual power . . . and [its] deep knowledge of the modern soul and its sickness’ (McConnachie 1931: 16, 17). McConnachie prized the ‘great assertion’ at the centre of Barth’s teaching, that ‘Religion is one thing, Revelation is quite another thing . . . Religion is the movement of man towards God. Revelation is the movement of God towards man’, as well as the Christocentric culmination of this understanding of the divine movement in Jesus Christ, in whom God has entered human history ‘ “once for all,” in the “never-to-be repeated event” ’ (McConnachie 1931: 67, 68). In the Word made flesh, McConnachie reports, ‘Barth believes that he secures a basis [for faith] above the contingencies of history, as well as beyond the subjectivity of religious experience’: it is the Holy Spirit who ‘opens the life of man to the Word of God, and makes him capable of receiving it’ (McConnachie 1931: 121, 123). Through this divinely enabled human possibility, Barth wishes to bring back ‘the lost wonder of God’, ‘the lost sense of sin’, ‘the lost doctrine of Divine Reconciliation’, and ‘the lost doctrine of the Kingdom of God’ (McConnachie 1931: 138, 148, 153, 161). Along the way, McConnachie also diligently presents Barth’s theory and practice of preaching, and his presentation of Christian ethics (McConnachie 1931: 168–241). Throughout the volume, McConnachie is highly appreciative and explicitly retracts his earlier criticisms, even offering a lengthy rebuttal of common charges against Barth (McConnachie 1931: 272–88). This first book, in Morgan’s account, ‘made an immediate impact’ (Morgan 2010: 39). The second book, published in 1933, was able to draw additionally on the first part-volume of Barth’s new multi-volume venture, Church Dogmatics—the earlier venture now abandoned on account of criticism received in respect of its ongoing existential notes and anthropological optimism. McConnachie quotes in his

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introduction Barth’s approval of the previous 1931 volume: ‘I have read [this book] attentively and I am glad to tell you that I am entirely satisfied with its contents. I acknowledge it gladly as a good and accurate introduction to the work which I am trying to do’ (McConnachie 1933: 9). In the same introduction, McConnachie suggests that it is time for each country ‘to translate the message of Karl Barth into its own modes of thought, and to acclimatise it in its own speech’ (McConnachie 1933: 8). In his contribution to the task, McConnachie intends ‘to show that this theology is not a foreign product that we are seeking to import . . . but that it has its roots deep in that Reformed Faith which we share’ (McConnachie 1933: 9). McConnachie begins once again by presenting the situation of the church as dire and under judgement—it is ‘so uncertain in its witness to the Word of God, so powerless to take men captive, so despairing in a world of despair, yet so eager to be a Church of power and earthly magnitude’ (McConnachie 1933: 18–19). He then tracks the development of Barth’s theology, sensitive to the change of format and content between Barth’s early commentaries on Romans and his later dogmatic works (McConnachie 1933: 38–58). But for all this development, he observes again the way in which the ‘Barthian Movement’ has departed from liberal theology, particularly the ‘Ritschlian School of theology’, even as it was represented by Wilhelm Herrmann (McConnachie 1933: 34–6). There follows a series of chapters expositing various themes in Barth’s work, centring on the revealed Word of God, in whole-hearted agreement with Barth’s recognition that the ‘problem of Revelation has become critical for our time, and that the very future of historical Christianity depends upon it’ (McConnachie 1933: 212). Again, preaching is a major theme within McConnachie’s reception of Barth, while the ethics of Barth again receives its own chapter (McConnachie 1933: 152–73 and 254–85). And again, the volume concludes with a stern refutation of the critics of Barth (McConnachie 1933: 286–323), though in truth refutation of criticism appears passim (cf. McConnachie 1933: 80, 223, 232). The book concludes with a rousing encomium of praise, declaring that ‘theology, through this Movement, has recovered its soul’ (McConnachie 1933: 325–6). With the publication of this second book, Morgan suggests, ‘the initial period of Barth reception in Scotland reached its climax’ (Morgan 2010: 43), although it should be noted in passing that not all the early works on Barth in Scotland shared McConnachie’s enthusiasm (McPake 1994: 185–217). Though McConnachie published no further books on Barth, he did write a series of further articles on Barth and related themes (McPake 1996). Among these were a defence of Barth’s rejection of natural theology (McConnachie 1934), a contribution to the Festschrift for Barth’s 50th birthday (McPake 1996: 102), and a final essay shortly before his death in which he wrote that ‘No one has done more to reinterpret, transform, and illumine the issues of the Reformation for our day than Karl Barth’ (McConnachie 1947: 103).

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McConnachie has rightly been described as ‘a faithful populariser of Barth’s work’ (Roberts 1991: 107), but this should not be understood to be to the detriment of the insight and profundity of his expositions, in contrast to the then-prevalent ‘tradition of amateurish comment on Barth, based largely on the negative impact made by some of his early works’ (Sykes 1979: 12). At the same time, it is evident that McConnachie’s attention to and advocacy of Barth’s theology arose out of his own ecclesial and pastoral situation and the vision that Barth could offer practical guidance also in a Scottish context. His own constructive work strongly evidences the influence of Karl Barth (e.g. McConnachie 1948). If his work remains broadly uncritical of Barth, failing to address some of the potential infelicities in Barth’s thinking in the earlier period (McPake 1996: 108) and reprising some of Barth’s rather biased views on the historiography of modern theology (McPake 1994: 192), it nonetheless offered a lucid, informed, and attractive account of Barth’s theology in its early years as a movement deeply rooted in the Reformed tradition yet highly relevant for the present day.

H. R. Mackintosh H. R. Mackintosh was Professor of Divinity at New College in Edinburgh from 1904 to his untimely death in 1936. His own studies had been pursued at Edinburgh and included—four years prior to McConnachie—a semester at Marburg working with Wilhelm Herrmann (Sell 1993: 524). In the course of his career, Mackintosh had also engaged heavily with Ritschl and Schleiermacher, being responsible—with A. B. Macaulay and J. S. Stewart—for having their major works translated into English (Torrance 1987: 161). His initial engagement with Barth came relatively late in his career, and though it was broadly contemporary with McConnachie, its substance was rather more complex. Mackintosh first referred to Barth in print in the context of a short article on ‘The Swiss Group’ of theologians published in 1924. The article only mentioned Barth, but prophetically observed the possibility that ‘we are witnessing the first beginning of a new movement, the counterpart . . . of the Ritschlian school’ (Morgan 2010: 27). Mackintosh’s first published work directly on Barth came in 1928, in an article surveying the work of Karl Barth as one of the ‘Leaders of Theological Thought’, a theologian whose movement was currently evoking ‘the deepest interest, alike in friend and foe’, and ‘acute’ controversy in Germany (Mackintosh 1928: 536). Mackintosh offers brief biographical information before sketching Barth as something of a prophet on the margins of theology, opposing to Schleiermacher the line of ‘Kierkegaard, Luther and Calvin, Paul, Jeremiah’ (Mackintosh 1928: 536). Mackintosh observes for Barth that ‘The theme of theology is not the deification of man but the incarnation of God’, and that ‘We have to submit our minds, as theologians, to the essential voice of the Bible, where

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in His Word God reveals Himself in a final authority’ (Mackintosh 1928: 536). The snapshot of Barth’s theology that follows seems to draw primarily on the second edition of Barth’s commentary on Romans, though there are quotations from at least two of Barth’s 1922 essays (‘The Problem of Ethics Today’ and ‘The Word of God as the Task of Theology’); correspondingly, it explores themes such as the transcendence of God, the condemnation of religion, the dialectical nature of theology, the centrality of Jesus Christ, the radicality of salvation, and the judgement upon the church. In contrast to McConnachie, however, Mackintosh is far from uncritical: Barth is less helpful ‘in distinguishing what is the voice of God from what is not’, holds an ‘absolutist view of the Old Testament’, and has an account of faith as ‘a vacuum’ which provokes ‘obvious and reasonable objections’, and a critique of the church which contains ‘wild and chaotic words’ (Mackintosh 1928: 536, 537, 539). And Mackintosh seems unaware at this point of Barth’s turn to more systematic work later in the 1920s, writing that ‘[Barth] will not attempt to rival the systematic efforts of thinkers like Ritschl or Troeltsch’ (Mackintosh 1928: 536): though the article is doubtless characteristic of Mackintosh’s ‘judicious learning and caution’ (Roberts 1991: 108), it is thus rather incomplete. He hopes nevertheless to have rendered fair account, and finds ‘Barth . . . important and memorable, if not for his solutions, at least for the cardinal questions he compels us to encounter’ (Mackintosh 1928: 540). Yet his final words are almost prophetic: Barth’s accent upon the problematic, the anxious, and the fearful ‘may yet change, and if it changes, Barth will prove an even greater and more revolutionary Christian force than at this hour’ (Mackintosh 1928: 540). Mackintosh’s next public treatment of Barth appeared in his lecture on ‘The Theology of the Word of God’, which focused on the work of Karl Barth and was delivered as part of the 1933 Croall Lectures at Edinburgh. As noted above, Barth had emerged as an important figure on the Scottish theological scene by this point, with Torrance recalling that ‘a theological revolution was in process’ around New College in the early 1930s (Torrance 1987: 161). There was much momentum: between the lecture itself and its publication in Types of Modern Theology in 1937, Hoskyns had published a translation of Barth’s famous second commentary on Romans (in 1933), Barth had been invited to give the Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen (in 1935), and George S. Hendry had drawn extensively on Barth’s work in his Hastie Lectures of 1935 at Glasgow (Sykes 1979: 6). In 1936, moreover, a translation by G. T. Thomson of the first part-volume of Church Dogmatics had been published in Edinburgh, where doctoral students were working on themes in Barth’s theology under G. T. Thomson and John Baillie (Morgan 2010: 161–3, 203). Not all scholarly reception was positive: John Baillie was to reject Barth’s account of divine revelation because he did not believe it ‘correctly reproduces the human situation as we actually find it existing’ (Baillie 1963 [1941]: 17–27), although McGrath observes that ‘there are clearly points at which Baillie welcomed Barthian insights’ (McGrath 1999: 132), while Hendry’s enthusiasm for Barth waned in subsequent years (Morgan 2010: 273; McPake 1994: 231–3).

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In his lecture, Mackintosh introduced Barth as ‘incontestably the greatest figure in Christian theology that has appeared for decades’ (Mackintosh 1937: 263). Mackintosh registers awareness—and approval—of the previous and ongoing development in Barth’s theology, and posits that from the beginning ‘it has forced men to take Revelation seriously, with revival of faith as a consequence’ (Mackintosh 1937: 264). The tone of the lecture is irenic, Mackintosh defending Barth against charges that Barth’s dialectical way of speaking is ‘no better than a jumble of organized nonsense’ (Mackintosh 1937: 267), and agreeing with Barth that the ‘purpose of much contemporary theology has been to satisfy the human intelligence . . . rather than to understand, obey, and set forth the Word of God’ (Mackintosh 1937: 269–70). Mackintosh consequently acknowledges that ‘It is no accident that [Barth’s] theology has the closest ties with preaching’ (Mackintosh 1937: 271). The majority of the lecture surveys Barth’s account of the core themes in theology—the discipline of theology, revelation, the Word of God, God and Christ, and the church. Mackintosh draws on a wide range of texts, up to and including the first part-volume of Church Dogmatics, and is sensitive to the development in Barth’s position over time (Mackintosh 1937: 272, 283, 286, 296). The exposition contains regular asides voicing approval of the material surveyed: on Barth’s diminishment of natural theology, Mackintosh adds ‘and surely his argument has weight’; on Barth’s interlinking of revelation and reconciliation, he suggests ‘[t]his is an attractive position’; on Barth’s account of faith and experience, he notes that ‘[Barth] still insists, and rightly, that whether experience has the character of true faith is to be decided by its relation to the believed Word of God’; on Barth’s connection of faith with participation in the resurrection, he commends ‘Barth’s entirely right emphasis on the Pauline doctrine’; and finally on Barth’s view of the church he posits that it ‘has all the gravity and all the grandeur of Reformation thought’ (Mackintosh 1937: 278, 281, 284, 306, 311). In the conclusion Mackintosh raises modest lines of critique. He is dubious about Barth’s ‘excessive actualism’—‘his persistent tendency to stress . . . the dynamic aspects of Christian faith and life at the expense of the static’; he contends that a scriptural view includes also a more perduring and concrete sense of the Christian faith and life as sustained by God; and he seeks ‘further light’ on ‘the conception of the Church’ and ‘the imago Dei in man’ in Barth’s theology (Mackintosh 1937: 313–16). Mackintosh also records throughout reservations about Barth’s writing style (Mackintosh 1937: 288, 307, 312, 313), while acknowledging that it ‘is that of a speaker, a rousing orator or herald’ (Mackintosh 1937: 313, 314). But he moves on swiftly from all these ‘undeveloped hints of criticism’ to consider ‘the greatness of the theological work done by Barth, and its promise of what is even greater’ (Mackintosh 1937: 316). Mackintosh concludes that Barth

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has ‘unrivalled power to wake up the sleeping intelligence of the Christian society and to insist that theology shall be Biblical in its essence from end to end’ (Mackintosh 1937: 318, 319). It is clear that the account of Barth offered by Mackintosh in this lecture represents a ‘sympathetic exposition’ (McPake 1994: 153). However, the extent to which Mackintosh was under the theological influence of Barth is a contested and complex matter. Mackintosh, as McConnachie and Barth, had studied under Herrmann in Marburg. Indeed, McConnachie had in his first book criticized Mackintosh for seeking—with Ritschl and Herrmann but against Barth—‘to find some basis for faith in scientifically ascertained facts of our Lord’s life’ (McConnachie 1931: 120). Redman suggests, however, that even the early Mackintosh departed from Herrmann’s Christology ‘at a number of key points’, and indeed that Mackintosh anticipated—or paralleled—Barth’s work in certain respects (Redman 1988: 524, 531; cf. Torrance 1987: 167, 171). Torrance similarly writes of ‘the strong biblical and incarnational emphasis of H. R. Mackintosh in which he had anticipated Barth’s reaction to the liberal teaching of Ritschl and Schleiermacher’ (Torrance 1987: 161). The lectures in Types of Modern Theology do indeed distance Mackintosh explicitly from Ritschl (Mackintosh 1937: 172–179), with McGrath suggesting that ‘clear shifts were taking place in Mackintosh’s thinking’ around this time, involving ‘a significant distancing from ideas . . . regarded as “Ritschlian” in nature’ (McGrath 1999: 33; cf. Torrance 1987: 170), and Morgan suggesting that Barth’s categories were ‘elemental’ to Mackintosh’s ‘revelation-based theology of the Word of God’ (Morgan 2010: 160). At the same time, some additional precision may be required at this point. In Types of Modern Theology, Mackintosh clearly distinguishes between ‘ “the theology of Ritschl” and “the Ritschlian theology” ’ and observes that few of his preceding criticisms of Ritschl ‘could fairly be urged . . . against the views set forth by Herrmann, Haering, or Kaftan’ (Mackintosh 1937: 179, 180). No such sophistication had been present in the work of McConnachie, who had simply treated all liberal theologians together. And Mackintosh does not develop this latter point in detail, or proceed to expound, attack, or defend the ‘Ritschlian theology’. Yet, as McPake observes, ‘enthusiasm for Barth does not betoken rejection of Herrmann, et al., even if it does mean censure of Ritschl’ (McPake 1994: 159). The possibility remains that even as he distanced himself from the theology of Ritschl, Mackintosh refrained from embracing fully the theology of Barth, that Mackintosh retained sufficient openness—and independence—to be able to accommodate theological impulses not only from Barth but also from the ‘Ritschlian theology’. If so, then it seems likely, as McGrath concludes, that ‘one can never really say that Mackintosh was “Ritschlian” or Barthian, in that he maintained something of a critical distance from both viewpoints’ (McGrath 1999: 124).

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T. F. Torrance T. F. Torrance was Professor of Christian Dogmatics at Edinburgh for almost three decades until his retirement in 1979, though he continued to lecture and publish for many years subsequent. It was during his studies at Edinburgh in the 1930s that he was first introduced to the work of Barth by reading John McConnachie and listening to H. R. Mackintosh (Torrance 1990: 83; cf. Torrance 1987: 161). Torrance retrospectively identifies those features of Barth’s theology which he found helpful even at this early stage, features which were to mark consistently his own later work in theology. Among these were Barth’s evangelical appropriation of both patristic and Reformation theology, his ‘conception of dogmatics as a critical science in its own right’, and his rejection of liberal and fundamentalist theologies as betraying the Gospel (Torrance 1990: 122–3). After his initial studies, Torrance went to Basel for two semesters in 1937–8, participating in both Barth’s university seminar and his home seminar (McGrath 1999: 43–4); Torrance continued to have a warm professional relationship with Barth until the latter’s death. Also in the academic year 1937–8, Barth came to deliver in Scotland to give the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen. By this time Barth’s reputation had grown in Scotland and elsewhere not only through his theological writing, but also through his role in the German church struggle, such that ‘[b]y the late 1930s there was little reason for the theology of Karl Barth to be unknown or misunderstood in Britain’ (Morgan 2010: 171). McGrath writes of this early period that Torrance ‘regarded Barth as a theological master’, although McGrath cautions that this regard was not uncritical, for Torrance even then registered critical difference, notably in respect of Barth’s ‘apparent lack of emphasis upon mission or evangelism’ (McGrath 1999: 45). His earliest lectures on dogmatics, at Auburn Seminary in 1938–9, demonstrate ‘verbal and conceptual dependence on Barth’ at various points (McGrath 1999: 134–7, also 149–50), but had ‘surprisingly little in the way of explicit reference to Barth’ and also referred frequently to the Scottish tradition of Mackintosh, P. T. Forsyth, and others (McGrath 1999: 51). They offered a clear critique of the Protestant liberal tradition; indeed, where Mackintosh himself risked representing the same tradition, Torrance critiqued him here also (McGrath 1999: 52, 53). Torrance spent the next decade in parish ministry, but continued to be actively involved in the academic scene. He was instrumental in the formation of the Scottish Church Theology Society in the early 1940s, and in the establishment— together with J. K. S. Reid—of the Scottish Journal of Theology (Morgan 2010: 220, 222). Neither forum had any direct agenda to pursue or promote the theology of Barth; however, both provided venues for the exposition and evaluation of Barth’s ideas (cf. McGrath 1999: 129; Morgan 2010: 218). Torrance also continued to write theology: he contributed various essays to Evangelical Quarterly, including on election indebted to the spirit of Barth in 1941 (Morgan 2010: 255); wrote an

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early pamphlet on ‘Modern Theological Debate’ in 1941, focusing on the doctrine of revelation and again reflecting ‘indebtedness’ to Barth (McPake 1994: 288); published essays on Kierkegaard in 1943 and on soteriology in 1945 in The Presbyter, a journal ‘suffused with Barthian themes and informed by his writings’ (Morgan 2010: 185); and contributed a chapter on Reformed anthropology to Reformation Old and New, a Festschrift for Barth’s 60th birthday in 1946 described as ‘a milestone of British Barth reception’ (Morgan 2010: 193). In 1947, Torrance also came to the defence of Barth in a series of exchanges with Cornelius van Til concerning the interpretation and evaluation of Barth’s theology (Morgan 2010: 246). Torrance’s theological vigour was given further time and resource following his transition to academic work at Edinburgh from 1950. In 1952, he was instrumental in the co-founding of the Society for the Study of Theology (McGrath 1999: 80), and he planned and coordinated—first with J. K. S. Reid and then with Geoffrey W. Bromiley—the daunting task of editing and translating Barth’s Church Dogmatics into English (Morgan 2010: 260). Torrance continued to defend the position of Barth: in particular in 1952 in the course a series of exchanges with the philosopher Brand Blanshard published in The Scotsman (Torrance and Torrance 2009), but also more widely in the 1950s in various disputes in British theology around scriptural inerrancy and limited atonement (Morgan 2010: 252–3). Thus, when Morgan writes that ‘Scotland . . . would provide the prime momentum for Barth reception in the United Kingdom from the 1950s onwards’ (Morgan 2010: 220), this is due in no small measure to the work of Torrance, even as in other quarters the work of Barth would not find the same positive response. The latter was notably the case in Glasgow, where the rather different influences of Ronald Gregor Smith and Ian Henderson rejected a number of Barth’s ideas, and led to Glasgow becoming a centre of ‘an existentialised, liberal, and more secular theology’ (Morgan 2010: 210, 237). In a 1955 article surveying the life and work of Barth in Expository Times— Torrance’s first direct appraisal of the significance of Barth—Torrance described him as ‘incontestably the greatest figure in modern theology since Schleiermacher’, listing him among ‘the great élite of the church—Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin’. Barth is thus located amidst the great orthodox thinkers of the Christian tradition, as one whose ‘comprehensive grasp and wrestling with the whole history of Christian thought makes him essentially a catholic theologian’ (Torrance 1955: 205). The article traces the biography and development of Barth, and singles out four dimensions of his work for further explanation: its understanding of theology as science; its unrelenting focus on Jesus Christ; its ecumenical potential; and its emphasis on the new humanity in Jesus Christ (Torrance 1955: 208–9). With each of these emphases, Torrance was in full accord; indeed, McPake suggests that around this time Torrance had come to own the characteristic emphases in Barth’s theology: ‘by 1956 Torrance has

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formulated a relatively self-consistent understanding of the nature of God’s revelation . . . with conscious indebtedness to Barth’ (McPake 1994: 301, also 294). The conclusion to Torrance’s article, however, is rather more critical, lamenting the lack of attention in Barth’s work to the doctrines of the Holy Spirit and of union with Jesus Christ (Torrance 1955: 209). There followed in 1962 Torrance’s first monograph on Barth—Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology 1910–1931, which Sykes contends initiated ‘a new and more sophisticated era for English-language reception of Barth’ (Sykes 1979: 10–11). The book charts the way Barth’s thinking ‘carried him out of and far beyond the tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ to the discovery that ‘God is God’, and that ‘God is the God who . . . must and does come to man on this earth’ (Torrance 1962: 17, 39–40). Though the exposition is sympathetic, endorsing Barth’s decision to begin theology with the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ (McPake 1994: 309), there are occasional retrospective critiques of Barth’s earlier views as inadequate (Torrance 1962: 85–7, 92–3, 138–9). The final chapter—‘The Barthian Revolution’—praises the way in which Barth has re-established the ‘reciprocal relation between theology and Church’, recovered Jesus Christ as ‘the proper object of our faith’, and rethought the relationship between theology and culture (Torrance 1962: 203, 208, 216). A prominent feature of the work is Torrance’s approval of Barth’s conception of the discipline of theology as ‘a free, independent science’ (Torrance 1962: 204, cf. 180–93). This latter theme, which consistently proved important to Torrance from his student days, led to his monograph Theological Science in 1969. Here, the discipline of theology is conceived as a scientific inquiry alongside that of other sciences, in that it ‘is obliged to submit only to the demands of its own subject-matter and to accept only the forms, possibilities and conditions of knowledge dictated by the nature of what it seeks to know’ (Torrance 1969: 338). Torrance’s work here brings together thinkers as diverse as Athanasius, Einstein, Polanyi, and Mackintosh—as well, of course, as Barth (McGrath 1999: 174), and does so with Barth’s explicit approval (Torrance 1990: 130). At the same time, Torrance clearly goes beyond Barth here: certainly in the scope of his inquiry (McPake 1994: 352), but arguably also in his conception of the relationship between theology and other sciences (cf. McPake 1994: 355–6, 365). Bromiley aptly concludes in this connection that in these matters, ‘Torrance does independent investigation on an obvious Barthian basis’ (Bromiley 1988: 12). Torrance similarly goes through and beyond Barth in his creative rehabilitation of natural theology (see Torrance 1970; cf. Finke 1995: 235–8). As McGrath suggests, Barth rejected natural theology because of its assertion of a knowledge of God independent of revelation; but Torrance explored how natural theology might regain legitimacy and validity within the context of a theology of revelation (McGrath 1999: 185). Torrance thus ‘restored natural theology to its traditional place within Reformed theology, while . . . tak[ing] seriously the objections which Barth

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raised against it’ (McGrath 1999: 147), albeit not without gentle critique of Barth’s work in the process (Torrance 1970: 123). In the ensuing years, Torrance wrote a series of further articles on Barth, later gathered together as Karl Barth: Biblical and Evangelical Theologian (Torrance 1990), in which exposition, analysis, and construction were combined in a thoroughly instructive way. While much ground remains common to Barth and Torrance across this material, there are a series of points at which Torrance simply rejects Barth’s position and follows his own trajectory—sometimes with the conviction that in doing so he is being truer to Barth’s guiding principles (cf. Torrance 1990: 135), though such claims would require further scrutiny. McGrath observes other areas of difference between Barth and Torrance arising in the doctrine of baptism, in pneumatology, in the interpretation of Calvin, and in the understanding of union with Christ (McGrath 1999: 197); the first-named of these is perhaps particularly significant in view of Torrance’s convenership of the Church of Scotland Commission on Baptism (1954–62). To this list of differences one might add disagreements between the two thinkers regarding the filioque clause in the Western creed, the doctrine of creation, and the doctrine of the ascension (cf. Torrance 1990: 131–2, 134), as well as on the doctrine of God and on theological anthropology. Finke reports that Torrance understood his own work to be a ‘consistent continuation of the theology of Barth that both preserves Barth’s most essential intentions and always thinks further along the path pursued by Barth himself ’ (Finke 1995: 222). However, if Torrance can indeed be said to have been so significantly influenced by Barth, then this was evidently not at the expense of his own theological initiative and creativity. It is readily discernible within the impressive legacy of monographs, articles, and lectures bequeathed by the career of Torrance that—though there are plentiful insights and impulses from Barth— there is no principled dependence. Thus perhaps Roberts overstates the case in venturing that ‘The only major Barthian systematic theology to emerge in Britain is that of T. F. Torrance’ (Roberts 1991: 139), with McGrath more accurate in suggesting that ‘it is quite improper to regard Torrance as some slavish imitator of Barth’ (McGrath 1999: 147). It is interesting here to observe Torrance’s career-long admiration of Athanasius, whom he saw as another great catholic theologian, and his sense of Barth as sharing in the same ‘struggle for pure doctrine in the church’ (Torrance 1990: 182). Indeed, late in life, Torrance memorably suggested that he was not primarily a ‘Barthian’ but rather an ‘Athanasian’ (Torrance n.d.). And McGrath notes that in his late work on the doctrine of God, Torrance, far from reading Athanasius through a Barthian lens, critiques Barth from an Athanasian perspective (McGrath 1999: 166–7). Yet perhaps even this identification fails to capture fully the originality of Torrance’s contribution to theology and its roots not only in Athanasius and Barth but across the catholic tradition.

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Conclusion The significant influence of the work of Barth upon the theologies of McConnachie, Mackintosh, and Torrance—and consequently upon the theological scene in Scotland—cannot be doubted, even as the precise nature of that influence differed in each case. After initial hesitation, McConnachie became an avowed follower of Barth; Torrance, meanwhile, was an admiring reader from the start, but one whose critical and creative instincts were always in play. Mackintosh demonstrated increasing respect for the work of Barth, and a complex dialectic of approval and distance in his final work, but his untimely death renders it difficult to determine Barth’s precise impact upon him. All three were faithful expositors of the theology of Barth, seeing him in the trajectory of the great Reformers and recognizing both his impact upon the discipline of theology as well as his importance for the life of the church and its people, even as none followed him significantly in his political engagement. At the heart of the discernible difference between the influence of Barth upon McConnachie and Torrance and that upon Mackintosh may lie their different accounts of modern Protestantism. Mackintosh not only discerned a significant variety of thinking within that tradition but also correspondingly conceived of greater possible continuity between Barth and that tradition, whereas McConnachie and Torrance accepted and endorsed Barth’s claim to have left that entire tradition behind (with Torrance seeking in particular to emphasize Barth’s continuity with patristic ideas). The relationship between Barth and modern theology remains contested, but some of Barth’s core theological concerns—the idea of revelation as reflexive, the focus of theology as Christocentric, and the rejection of natural theology, metaphysics, and apologetics—are certainly common to both. In Scotland as elsewhere the work of Barth engendered—and continues to engender—a very wide spectrum of response. The three theologians studied in this chapter would be considered to fall at various points on the positive side of the spectrum, and are thus hardly representative of the whole. Nonetheless the three studies shed important light on one major trajectory of thinking in Scottish theology in the twentieth century, a trajectory with ongoing significance today as Barth continues to inform, inspire, and provoke readers in academy and church. The study of Barth remains a particular strength of certain Scottish divinity departments, and the presence of Barth’s name in doctrinal reports (at least in the Church of Scotland) has remained prominent down the years. If in 1939 John Baillie wrote, ‘Nobody seems to be able to talk theology these days without mentioning him’ (quoted in Sykes 1979: 2), it might be said that in some Scottish quarters today little has changed.

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Bibliography Baillie, John (1963 [1941]). Our Knowledge of God. London: Oxford University Press. Barth, Karl (2001 [1931]). ‘An Pfarrer John McConnachie, Dundee, Großbritannien’, in Offene Briefe 1909–1935, Karl Barth Gesamtausgabe V.35, ed. Diether Koch. Zürich: TVZ, 147–51. Bromiley, Geoffrey W. (1988). ‘The Influence of Barth after World War II’, in Nigel Biggar (ed.), Reckoning with Barth: Essays in Commemoration of the Centenary of Karl Barth’s Birth. London and Oxford: Mowbray, 9–23. Finke, Anne-Kathrin (1995). Karl Barth in Grossbritannien: Rezeption und Wirkungsgeschichte. Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag. McConnachie, John (1927). ‘The Teaching of Karl Barth: A New Positive Movement in German Theology’, Hibbert Journal 25: 385–400. McConnachie, John (1931). The Significance of Karl Barth. London: Hodder & Stoughton. McConnachie, John (1933). The Barthian Theology and the Man of To-day. London: Hodder & Stoughton. McConnachie, John (1934). ‘Natural Religion or Revelation’, Expository Times 45: 441–7. McConnachie, John (1947). ‘Reformation Issues To-Day’ in F. W. Campfield (ed.), Reformation Old and New. London and Redhill: Lutterworth Press, 103–20. McConnachie, John (1948). ‘The Uniqueness of the Word of God’, Scottish Journal of Theology 1: 113–35. McGrath, Alister E. (2006 [1999]). Thomas F. Torrance: An Intellectual Biography. London: T&T Clark. Mackintosh, H. R. (1924). ‘Recent Foreign Theology: The Swiss Group’, Expository Times 36: 73–5. Mackintosh, H. R. (1928). ‘Leaders of Theological Thought: Karl Barth’, Expository Times 39: 536–40. Mackintosh, H. R. (1937). Types of Modem Theology. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. McPake, J. L. (1994). ‘H. R. Mackintosh, T.F. Torrance and the Reception of the Theology of Karl Barth in Scotland’. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh. McPake, John (1996). ‘John McConnachie as the Original Advocate of the Theology of Karl Barth in Scotland: The Primacy of Revelation’, Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 14: 101–14. Morgan, D. Densil (2010). Barth Reception in Britain. London: T&T Clark. Nimmo, Paul T. (2017). Karl Barth: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Bloomsbury/ T&T Clark.

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Redman, Robert R. (1988). ‘H. R. Mackintosh’s Contribution to Christology and Soteriology in the Twentieth Century’, Scottish Journal of Theology 41: 517–34. Roberts, R. H. (1991). ‘The Reception of the Theology of Karl Barth in the Anglo-Saxon World: History, Typology and Prospect’, in R. H. Roberts (ed.), A Theology on its Way? Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 95–154. Sell, A. P. F. (1993). ‘Mackintosh, Hugh Ross’, in Nigel M. de S. Cameron (ed.), The Dictionary of Scottish Church History & Theology. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 524–5. Sykes, S. W. (1979). ‘The Study of Barth’, in S. W. Sykes (ed.), Karl Barth: Studies of his Theological Methods. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1–16. Torrance, Iain and Morag Torrance (eds.) (2009). ‘A Skirmish in the Early Reception of Karl Barth in Scotland: The Exchange between Thomas F. Torrance and Brand Blanshard’, Theology in Scotland 16: 5–22. Torrance, T. F. (n.d.). ‘Reply to Donald Macleod’. Audio file at http:// tapesfromscotland.org/Rutherfordhouseaudio.htm, accessed 1 August 2018. Torrance, T. F. (1955). ‘Karl Barth’, Expository Times 66: 205–9. Torrance, T. F. (1962). Karl Barth: An Introduction to His Early Theology 1910–1931. London: SCM. Torrance, T. F. (1969). Theological Science. London: Oxford University Press. Torrance, T. F. (1970). ‘The Problem of Natural Theology in the Thought of Karl Barth’, Religious Studies 6: 121–35. Torrance, T. F. (1987). ‘Hugh Ross Mackintosh: Theologian of the Cross’, Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 5: 160–73. Torrance, T. F. (1990). Karl Barth: Biblical and Evangelical Theologian. Edinburgh: T&T Clark.

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12 Modern Christology Mackintosh, Baillie, and Macquarrie David Fergusson

In this comparative study of three theologians of the twentieth century—Hugh Ross Mackintosh (1870–1936), Donald M. Baillie (1887–1954), and John Macquarrie (1919–2007)—I shall explore a commitment to a strong Christology in a postChalcedonian register. Their three key texts arguably represent the most significant Scottish contributions to the subject in the twentieth century (McIntyre 1993: 88). While remaining in contact with the catholic traditions of the church, each sought to reinterpret these under the conditions of modernity. In doing so, their work manifests an intense devotional commitment to Jesus while simultaneously wrestling with problems that continue to beset contemporary articulations of Christ’s person and work. Their accomplishment is evident not least in an accessible and lucid style that ensured a wide reach for their work. The links between these three scholars were personal, intellectual, and ecclesial. Each was trained initially in philosophy before studying theology as preparation for ministry. The influence of German thought is readily apparent in their published work—each of them indeed translated important material at one time or another. Having studied under Wilhelm Herrmann in Marburg, Mackintosh developed his own Christocentric theology during his years as professor at New College. In his influential volume The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ (1912), he sought an integrated account of the incarnation and the atonement, reminiscent in some ways of the ground-breaking work of McLeod Campbell. Through his later years, he became increasingly fascinated with the work of Karl Barth. Though registering criticisms and reservations, he recognized Barth’s importance. Their meeting at Waverley station was vividly recalled by Barth years later (Busch 1976: 205). A pupil of Mackintosh, Donald Baillie also studied under Herrmann in Marburg before entering upon parish ministry. After taking up his chair in St Andrews in 1934, he produced God Was in Christ (1948), one of the Christological classics of the twentieth century. John (Ian) Macquarrie was a product of the west of Scotland. Raised in Renfrew, he studied philosophy and theology in Glasgow before serving as a military chaplain from 1945 to 1947. His work with prisoners of war in the Middle East enabled him to develop a facility in German; this served him well when later he became the co-translator of Heidegger’s Being

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and Time (Macquarrie 1999: 14). After parish ministry in Brechin, Macquarrie was appointed to a lectureship in Glasgow where he taught alongside Ian Henderson and Ronald Gregor Smith. There he established his reputation with the publication of An Existentialist Theology (1955), a comparison of Heidegger and Bultmann largely based on his doctoral thesis which had been examined by Donald Baillie. Even in this early work, Macquarrie’s theological instincts in combining elements of liberalism and orthodoxy can be discerned. These were displayed in an illustrious and prolific career at Union Theological Seminary in New York (1962–70), where he was (re)ordained an Episcopalian, and then at Christ Church, Oxford after his appointment as the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in 1970. From about the middle of the nineteenth century, most Scottish theologians studied in Germany or Switzerland with the leading thinkers of the day. Each year a group of students—the so-called Scottish caravan—would make their way to the continent to sit under the leading biblical and theological scholars whether in Göttingen, Berlin, Marburg, Tübingen, Basel, or Zurich. This influence was evident both in the translational work that was produced and also in the transposition of trends such as kenotic theology, Ritschlianism, and dialectical theology to a Scottish ecclesial context. An agenda of problems and possibilities was thus generated. The metaphysics of the two-natures formula agreed at Chalcedon had become increasingly problematic for a post-Kantian audience. In the fifth century, the language of ousia, physis, prosopon, and hypostasis may have served an important purpose in excluding positions that either divided the person of Christ or so stressed his divinity to the point of jeopardizing his humanity. But for a nineteenth-century theologian schooled in metaphysical scepticism and revisionism, it seemed impossible to conceive imaginatively of a divine subject assuming a human nature without detriment either to his divine identity or his full humanity. Given the preoccupation with historical criticism, the categories of Chalcedon seemed to obscure a Jesus who was really like us in terms of bodily weakness, limited knowledge, and socio-cultural determination. If the hypostasis that assumed a human nature by combination rather than absorption was and must remain divine, then the persona of Jesus as a human being seemed apparent rather than real. This problem, like several others in theology, seemed to trouble premodern scholars rather less. But it was acutely felt through much of the nineteenth century in Germany, England, and Scotland.

Hugh Ross Mackintosh In summarizing his difficulties with Chalcedon, Mackintosh appears to represent a consensus, or something approaching one. Its loss of ethical and personal categories results in a ‘mechanical and even material flavour’ (Mackintosh 1912:

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214, 294). This puts it at odds with the post-Kantian milieu in which Mackintosh was schooled both in Scotland and Germany. And in yoking together a divine and a human nature, the formula provokes two lines of criticism. According to one, a dual parallelism of natures is posited in a manner that compromises ‘the unity of impression made by the historic Jesus’ (Mackintosh 1912: 214). According to the other, the unity of Christ’s person is simply asserted rather than exhibited. As a result, the humanity of Christ becomes a ‘mere selfless organ of the Divine Word’ (Mackintosh 1912: 214, 296) and is thus fatally weakened. So either we have a double self or an abridgement of the humanity of Christ which makes any historical reading of the gospels impossible. In the constructive work to which he turns in Part III, Mackintosh admits that if it comes to a choice then he must surrender the divinity of Christ to protect his humanity (Mackintosh 1912: 395). Yet he believes that the choice is a false one, for both can be upheld but within a non-Chalcedonian scheme. Donald Baillie also viewed this rejection of traditional approaches to Christology as axiomatic. Nowadays, he claims, we have become so accustomed to presupposing and confessing Jesus as human—the lasting effect of the quest for the historical Jesus—that several traditional positions have been decisively abandoned. The limits of Christ’s knowledge are recognized. His miraculous works are seen as human accomplishments rather than as proofs of a divine nature. And his moral and religious life must be viewed as human and historical by virtue of his temptation, prayer, and confession of God (Baillie 1948: 11–16). Mackintosh’s own proposal might be viewed as an augmented Schleiermacherian Christology. An initial distinction is introduced between the ‘immediate utterances of faith’ and their ‘transcendent implicates’—this appears to mirror Herrmann’s division between the ground of faith (Glaubensgrund) and the convictions that this generates (Glaubensgedanken) (Mackintosh 1912: 315). In the former, Jesus is experienced as a personal manifestation of a redeeming God. This is expressed, according to the latter, through a conceptual framework dominated by incarnation, atonement, resurrection, and divine sovereignty. Here Mackintosh’s Christology combines approaches from below and above. We must read the story of Jesus as it is presented in the gospels. While sympathetic to historical criticism, he remains confident of its power to deliver positive judgements. In an appendix to the volume, he is ready to defend the probability and fittingness, if not the necessity, of the virgin birth. And from the very outset, he stakes a claim on the reliability of the apostolic witness while admitting that this may also reflect the Sitz im Leben of the early community. ‘The impulse to select, to fling upon words or incidents a light answering to the later situation of the Church is natural and intelligible; what is not so is an impulse to deform or to fabricate’ (Mackintosh 1912: 8). Following E. F. Scott, he claims that the primary interest of the gospel writers is in presenting us with the facts, even if they use their own theological colouring. And, in reading the gospels, we find that a self-evident, single, and harmonious power is pressed upon us. From this perspective of an encounter with

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the living Christ, the story is also to be read. A Christology from above is thus combined with a corresponding movement from below; each requires the other. ‘The Christ shining out upon us from the sources is a fact so real and sure that it tests and attests its own constituent elements’ (Mackintosh 1912: 314). This appears to rule out any exclusive move from below that will generate an adoptionism in which Christ is merely a hero or a genius, an instance of a general type. His determination as redeemer of the totality of our lives makes this impossible. Mackintosh insists upon integrating the incarnation and the atonement. Through his work, the person of Christ is known to us. Echoing John McLeod Campbell both in approach and phraseology, he stresses that the atoning work of Christ must be interpreted according to the relations established in the incarnation (Mackintosh 1912: 342; Purves 2015: 167–98). This work of Christ is expounded under four headings, which taken together display a commitment to the totus Christus. These are (i) his moral authority by which we are both checked and ‘borne away’ (Mackintosh 1912: 328); (ii) an atonement in which we are forgiven and reconciled to God by virtue of Christ’s self-identification with us in his incarnation; (iii) our personal union with Christ, a pivotal theme for the New Testament writers (and for Mackintosh’s subsequent work) which encapsulates all the dimensions of salvation; and (iv) a revelation of God as Father in a way that ‘none more perfect can be conceived’ (Mackintosh 1912: 340)—this is only possible because Christ is ‘one with that which He conveyed’ (Mackintosh 1912: 341). The high Christocentrism espoused by Mackintosh is reinforced by his strong reading of the resurrection, exaltation, and heavenly priesthood of Jesus, who continues to act on God’s behalf through the spirit. Somewhat neglected by McLeod Campbell, these themes are foregrounded in Mackintosh’s account of ‘the immediate utterances of faith’ (Mackintosh 1912: 345). The work of Christ continues through the giving of the Spirit and his intercession with the Father (here we see an incipient Trinitarianism). He notes the dual significance of the first Christian creed—Jesus is Lord—with its attention both to the history of Jesus and his divine status as kyrios, together with the early practice of praying to him. This ensures a strong sense of Jesus both as source of faith and as subject of God’s action (Mackintosh 1912: 372–8). In turning finally to the person of Christ, Mackintosh argues, ‘taking a line laid down by Schleiermacher’ that the divine work of redemption demands the predication of ‘personal Godhead’ (Mackintosh 1912: 408). We find in Jesus a presence and a power that are not less than that of God. This is not a simple identification of Jesus and God, since Jesus spoke of God in the third person and prayed to God in the second; instead, we should conceive of a unity of ‘will and character’ (Mackintosh 1912: 424). The notion of pre-existence is defended in terms of a personal and eternal presence within the life of God. Admittedly, some of Mackintosh’s claims regarding Jesus’ inner spiritual consciousness are implausibly speculative (Mackintosh 1912: 447) but he insists upon this as apostolic

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teaching that captures the eternal dimension of a Father–Son relationship within the life of God. In a curious passage, which as we shall see adumbrates both Baillie’s and Macquarrie’s proposals, he suggests that the divine stamp on humanity indicates both a coming forth from God and the finding of a free human response. What is presumably intended by this more adoptionist remark is that Jesus is both a human creature but one who bears pre-eminently the eternal image of God. Yet the general drift of Mackintosh’s argument is towards a stronger account of personal pre-existence which should not be translated into a divine principle or idea corresponding to the earthly Jesus. In the end, faith must think of Jesus as the beloved Son, rather than the perfect saint (Mackintosh 1912: 461). The direction of this high Christology seems to lead us back towards Chalcedon. In a hostile review, B. B. Warfield expressed some frustration on this point. The concept of the incarnation requires a divine subject who becomes human— hence a two-natures Christology is the inevitable correlate of this approach. ‘[W]hen we say incarnation we say Two Natures – or can there really be an incarnation without a somewhat which becomes incarnate and a somewhat in which it becomes incarnate?’ (Warfield 1913: 151; Redman 1997: 137–40). Mackintosh’s proposed alternative is to invoke kenosis as the concept which preserves a high Christology without reviving the impossible metaphysics of Chalcedon.¹ In this context, he distinguishes earlier kenotic theories which offer elaborate accounts of how a divine subject could become human from a later and more limited application of the notion of kenosis, in part dependent upon P. T. Forsyth, in which it is invoked as an ‘interpretative postulate’ (Mackintosh 1912: 468). The description of Christ, we might say, demands a kenotic narrative but not an ontological explanation of how this happens. If Christ is confessed as eternally divine but unequivocally human, and we must dispense with a theory of two wills and consciousnesses, then we cannot avoid recourse to the language of kenosis. ‘No human life of God is possible without a prior self-adjustment of deity’ (Mackintosh 1912: 470). Mackintosh is alert to the standard criticisms of kenotic Christology. Ritschl claimed that on this account Christ must divest himself of his divinity and so cannot reveal God. But Mackintosh insists not upon a renunciation of Godhead so much as a contraction to the limits of humanity without ceasing to be divine; only in this way can the redeeming love of God come to us Mackintosh 1912: 486). Again, he stresses that this is not a psychological analysis of the person of Jesus so much as a religious confession. Yet it is not always clear how he can avoid the entanglements that beset other attempts at a coherent description of kenosis. Some of his own formulations suggest an older krypsis model in which Jesus is conscious of his divine capacities but does not invoke or realize them. ‘Christ, who ¹ For further discussion of Mackintosh’s kenoticism as a ‘modern project’, see the essay by Bruce L. McCormack, Chapter 2 in this volume.

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in virtue of His relation to the Father had Divine knowledge within reach, took only what was essential to His vocation’ (Mackintosh 1912: 477). Yet this is not a quotidian process in his earthly life but ‘self-limitation, transcendently achieved as a single, final deed’ (Mackintosh 1912: 482). Later critics remained unpersuaded of Mackintosh’s kenotic move. Baillie claimed that no version of kenoticism could overcome three besetting questions. What was the Word of God doing in the cosmos during Christ’s earthly life? Does kenosis simply give us a temporary divine theophany in which God appears in some human disguise—a metamorphosis rather than a true union? And what becomes of the eternal humanity of Christ, a traditional catholic theme? (Baillie 1948: 94–8). Yet Mackintosh’s Christological text is one of the finest in the history of Scottish theology (McIntyre 1998: 259). Its exegetical thoroughness, historical erudition, and constructive proposals are striking in a theologian still at a relatively young age. His tendency to lapse into rather dense expressions and sermonic flights may have resulted in some loss of conceptual precision and lucidity of argument. But he combines a spiritual passion with an intellectual rigour and honesty that characterize his life’s work. The reception and adjustment of themes from Schleiermacher and Herrmann reveal his deep immersion in nineteenthcentury theology coupled with a willingness to reconsider and revise some of their positions. Nevertheless, the reception of his work has been marked by a decisive rejection of kenoticism. And if Chalcedonianism is already excluded, then in what other directions could Scottish Christology turn? Must Mackintosh’s high Christology be scaled down?

Donald M. Baillie Donald Baillie’s God Was in Christ (1948) has become a minor classic. Though it has occasioned significant debate and even controversy, its author was generally considered to be one of the mildest and most saintly of theologians, a man said to be without enemies. A pupil of Mackintosh and Herrmann, Baillie shares their anxieties around Chalcedonianism and continues to be perplexed by the challenges raised by historical criticism of the gospels. His core conviction is that this cannot be circumvented by quasi-docetic strategies. If God has condescended to appear in human form, then we remain reliant upon the contemporary witnesses for authentic first-hand testimony. Writing in the wake of radical form criticism, Baillie is troubled both by the prospect of scepticism surrounding attempts to reach behind the history of the early church to Jesus himself and also by (Kierkegaardian) attempts to embrace this radicalism in affirming that we have a different form of access to the Christ of faith (Baillie 1948: 48–54). Both are rejected. While conceding that earlier generations were too preoccupied by the

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inner life of Jesus and our communion with it, he argues that it is a core intention of the New Testament writers to provide us with vital information about the Jesus of history. If not as conservative as Mackintosh in his historical conclusions, he sides with the approach of C. H. Dodd in discerning authentic material about Jesus in the days of his flesh. ‘[S]urely we should expect those men, believing what they did about Jesus, to be immensely interested in recalling anything that He had said or done, simply because He had said or done it, however remote they might be from the modern “biographical” interest’ (Baillie 1948: 57). An incarnational Christology remains necessary for Baillie owing to considerations already evident in Mackintosh’s earlier work. A (Ritschlian) eulogizing of Jesus as teacher and religious exemplar is insufficient to sustain central convictions around his significance in shaping our understanding of both God and history. These are determined for us by the person and work of Jesus, though Baillie concedes that many souls troubled by the abstractions of traditional Christology have often found relief in returning to a human Jesus and his message of God’s kingdom (Baillie 1948: 61). But a theology of the incarnation is inescapable if the significance of Jesus for Christian faith is to be articulated. And since this cannot be viewed as Jesus becoming divine or as undergoing a temporary metamorphosis into human form, other ways of understanding the incarnation are required. A return to classical Christology is excluded for the kinds of consideration already noted. Chalcedonianism is rejected on account of its reducing the humanity of Jesus to an adjunct of his divine personality through an act of assumption. He notes that the patristic concepts of anhypostasia and enhypostasia were intended as a bulwark against adoptionism, without loss of Christ’s full humanity in the hypostatic union. But he remains unconvinced of contemporary attempts at rehabilitation. If we think of a divine person assuming a human nature but remaining a divine person, then we will inevitably compromise any account of Jesus as a fully human, historical figure. Here the act of historical imagination cannot make any progress except with recourse either to bifurcating the life of Jesus or to denying his full humanity. Though this is not pursued, Baillie seems to suggest that the traditional two-natures model is an impediment to Christian discipleship. It requires our assent to a model that remains a puzzle rather than a source of inspiration or devotion. And once this fundamental decision is taken, then an alternative Christological model has to be developed. Yet since Baillie cannot follow Mackintosh’s kenoticism, what remains? At this juncture, we are faced with the most creative element of Baillie’s work, namely the application of ‘the paradox of grace’ to the person of Jesus. Here an important dimension of Christian experience is applied as the hermeneutical key to understanding the presence of God in Jesus. Following 1 Corinthians 15:10, Baillie notes that we are inclined to attest our best deeds as not our own but the work of God’s grace within us. And yet in such moments we are never more truly free and human. This paradox can illuminate the person of Christ. When we

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advance it to the highest degree, we can imagine a life in which everything is of God and yet is also truly human. This is what we find in the gospel record—a life that is so receptive to divine grace as to represent the highest possible indwelling of God in human form. ‘If the paradox is a reality in our poor imperfect lives at all, so far as there is any good in them, does not the same or a similar paradox, taken as the perfect and absolute pitch, appear as the Mystery of the Incarnation?’ (Baillie 1948: 117–18). At first blush, the obvious problem with this approach is its incipient adoptionism. Jesus is understood with reference to the language of Christian experience. By virtue of his greater receptivity to divine grace, he differs from us in degree not in kind. On one side, this was viewed as the central weakness of the book. Karl Barth, for example, regarded it a fundamental mistake to use the Christian life as the index to the person of Jesus. This could only result in Jesus being construed as another Christian rather than the Son of God incarnate (Barth 1958: 57). This reading is confirmed not only by some adoptionist phrases in Baillie’s work but also by an important lacuna. The resurrection is given only a limited place in his account (Baillie 1948: 185 and 199; MacKinnon 1948: 209) with the consequence that the sense of Jesus as a present and active subject in the Christian life is largely muted. How Baillie might have responded to this is not clear, though the caveats noted below suggest that he would have developed a notion central to the apostolic witness. On the other side, Baillie’s work has been regarded as an important breakthrough (Newlands 2002: 175–9)—an exercise in Christological revisionism— which opened the way towards a continuum in which Jesus could be placed alongside the great teachers and exemplars of other faith traditions (Hick 1958). In many ways, this confirms the suspicion of adoptionism amongst his more orthodox critics. Some of Baillie’s expressions lean in this direction. ‘Therefore when at last God broke through into human life with full revelation and became incarnate, must we not say that in a sense it was because here at last a Man was perfectly receptive’ (Baillie 1948: 149; McIntyre 1993: 111–12). Yet Baillie elsewhere resists adoptionist construction, as indeed the use of the upper case in ‘Man’ might suggest. The paradox of grace is governed by at least three qualifications in its Christological application. First, he stresses the ‘absolute pitch’ of the phenomenon in Jesus, so that we might regard the difference in degree as really a difference in kind (McIntyre 1993: 107; Baillie 1958). Second, he claims that the paradox of grace in the Christian life has its source or prototype in Christ. This priority and dependence set him apart from his followers (Baillie 1948: 128) and seem to require an understanding of a divine prevenience determining the person of Jesus in a unique way. Third, this notion of prevenience requires us to think in terms of a pre-existence in which the Son is sent forth. Hence God’s initiative in the incarnation can only be captured by the language of descent which in turn requires some version of the doctrine of the Trinity. ‘[W]e are bound to use such expressions in order to do justice to the divine priority and initiative and

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condescension, and even sacrifice, in the Incarnation’ (Baillie 1948: 151). In key respects, this might be represented as an ‘Antiochene’ strategy to make sense of the uniqueness of the incarnation in terms of divine indwelling (McEnhill 1997). Where does this leave us? As with Mackintosh, Baillie’s Christology appears to halt between alternatives. His criticism of both Chalcedonianism and kenoticism prevents either of these models from undergirding his paradox of grace. At the same time, his commitment to a high Christology excludes a reduced adoptionism or a casting of Jesus merely in the role of religious teacher, exemplar and model. Yet, if the paradox of grace seems insufficient as an account of the cause of the incarnation, then its attraction for a modern audience might persist as a description of its effect. Appealing to the Christian imagination, Baillie offers us a way of thinking of Jesus as he might have appeared to his first followers. In doing so, he offers a model for Christian devotion and action which seems less abstract than the two-natures formula. And, at a stretch, he may even have identified a way in which an approach ‘from below’ can generate one ‘from above’. This may be the abiding contribution of Donald Baillie’s work. In the end, he himself seems to eschew any attempt to explain the incarnation in the way in which earlier Christologies had sought to do (Baillie 1948: 124). His attestation of Jesus as a fully human, historically contextualized person sets him apart from classical Christology. But his insistence upon Jesus’ uniqueness in relation to the purposes of God and to our human condition demands the use of traditional notions that continue to assign a maximal religious significance to him.

John Macquarrie The influence of Baillie on Macquarrie is evident at both ends of his career. As the external examiner to his doctoral thesis, Baillie appears to have impressed upon the young Macquarrie the significance of critical historical study of the gospels for Christology (Macquarrie 1999: 16). This is already evident in his early reservations around Bultmann’s demythologizing project (Macquarrie 1955: 177–80; Fergusson 2006: 28). In Jesus Christ in Modern Thought (1990), Macquarrie discusses Baillie extensively (Macquarrie 1990: 327–9), while appearing to follow a similar approach ‘from below’ in the constructive material advanced in Part Three. Macquarrie’s study has been regarded as amongst the most distinguished outputs in his extensive oeuvre. Representing the final work in a trilogy, this volume seeks to formulate a post-Chalcedonian Christology which remains faithful to its ‘governing intention’ (Macquarrie 1990: 383). Yet, from the five challenges that he poses, it is clear that Macquarrie regards modern theology as functioning in a different milieu from the classical tradition (Macquarrie 1990: 341–7). (i) Historical questions surrounding the development of the gospel traditions no longer make it possible to view everything as representing the actual

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words and deeds of Jesus. For example, the miracle stories cannot be regarded as a simple confirmation of his divine status. (ii) Christology must commence with the human Jesus and proceed thereby, i.e. from below, since this is where his first disciples began. Murmurings of adoptionism should not deflect us from this vital task. The theologian requires to repose upon the work of the historian, even while acknowledging its provisionality. In his own work, Macquarrie follows Sanders, in much the same way as Baillie had once borrowed from C. H. Dodd, and Mackintosh from E. F. Scott. (iii) We must recognize that there are different metaphysical conceptualities available for describing Jesus— Chalcedon is neither the only nor the best, it seems. And, in any case, the New Testament managed well enough without such conceptual patterns. If anti-intellectualism is a problem, then so is academic imperialism. (iv) Much classical Christology has been yoked to an impersonal account of the atonement as a transaction between God and Jesus that takes place ‘behind our backs’ (Baillie 1948: 200). This prevents a fully amplified account of Jesus as the representative human. Although Macquarrie fails to develop this point in any detail, he appears to repeat the familiar charge that classical Christology had too little to say about the moral and religious significance of the human life of Jesus. (v) Finally, a contemporary Christology must describe, however tentatively, the relationship of Jesus to the exemplars of other faiths. Assumptions of exclusivism cannot now be sustained. A more nuanced approach is demanded that admits not only the possibility but the reality of divine disclosure across the religions of the world, and, for all we know, in distant reaches of the cosmos. In this last respect, Macquarrie’s work advances beyond Mackintosh and Baillie, neither of whom had much to say on the subject of other religions. Critics of Macquarrie who perceive here a capitulation to the modern age will need to tell us which of these five challenges is irrelevant or can be met in other ways, as opposed merely to by-passing them. His criticism of Chalcedon turns on its use of physis as if it represented a fixed stock of characteristics which make an individual what it is and not another thing. Following Schleiermacher, he regards this as resulting in sheer contradiction when Jesus is confessed as having two natures in one person (Macquarrie 1990: 384–5). Both humans and God are to be understood less in terms of a ‘fixed essence’ and more through emergent and dynamic notions. This enables Macquarrie to speak of a dual process of deification and inhumanization taking place in Jesus. As a human being, Jesus expresses more fully and vividly the imaging of God in all human life. This, he readily concedes in commending Schleiermacher again, must make for a difference in degree but not in kind. And yet this human movement is complemented by a turning on God’s part in which the divine communicates itself to a human person more fully than ever before—hence a Christology from above is the necessary correlate to one that begins from below. God is constantly surpassing

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God, Macquarrie suggests, in ever new ways of reaching out to the creation (Macquarrie 1990: 384). In this way, the intention of Chalcedon is fulfilled with a double movement replacing a duality of natures (Morley 2002: 143–70). In distancing himself from adoptionism, Macquarrie advances a revisionist reading of pre-existence. In doing so, he probably over-commits to James Dunn’s deflationary interpretation of key New Testament passages (Wright 1996: 8), but his theological reading stands irrespective of this exegesis. The only coherent construction of pre-existence available to us is one in which Jesus is in some way intended by God as vital to the economy of salvation. Is this sufficient? Macquarrie seems sanguine on such matters. ‘If someone objects that on such a view Jesus Christ pre-existed “only” in the mind of God, I think one would have to reply that to be conceived and affirmed in the intention of God is to be enjoy a very high degree of reality, even if it is different from the reality of existing in space and time’ (Macquarrie 1990: 391). In expounding ‘the mysteries of Jesus Christ’, Macquarrie gives us a flavour of the range of commitments he continued to hold in late career. Not all of this is argued as persuasively as one might wish. He appears doubtful about the historicity of the virgin birth; its presence only in Matthew and Luke raises some questions, and it is doubtful in any case whether it can make an indispensable theological contribution (Macquarrie 1990: 392–4). What of the empty tomb? Resurrection is not reducible to a resuscitated corpse and in any case Paul shows no awareness of the empty tomb tradition. Here Macquarrie is skating on thinner ice. Many exegetes would claim that Paul assumes the empty tomb tradition in the formula of 1 Corinthians 15: 3–7. In any case, how we do account for the unparalleled conviction everywhere present in the apostolic witness that Christ is alive and present? Macquarrie’s account seems to end rather tamely with references to mystical visions and spiritual perceptions (Macquarrie 1990: 409), though perhaps he judges that this is all that is given or required. From there, he moves to his Ending B (The Austere Ending) in which the cross is the high point and culmination of Jesus’ career. The resurrection is not another event for Jesus, but the mythological expression of the church’s deepest conviction that God was in the crucified Christ. This austere ending he attributes to Bultmann. His own preference remains undeclared and perhaps unresolved. His readers are left to choose between this and Ending A (the happy one). Both have scriptural warrants but Macquarrie ‘doubts that they can be combined into an intelligible unity’ (Macquarrie 1990: 414). It would be a mistake to dismiss this as a counsel of despair, or as a mere reflection of Macquarrie’s innate accommodationist tendencies or mystical temperament. The presence of irreconcilable ‘happy’ and ‘austere’ endings in his Christology may be born of an honest recognition that these are necessary elements of the Christian life, their incorporation in Scripture signalling that in the final analysis an existential adequacy is more important than a simple consistency (Morgan 2006: 251–2).

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Macquarrie closes with a reflection on Jesus amongst the world religions. Two common characteristics of these religions are described. First, each recognizes a holy or sacred reality, albeit represented differently. And, second, in virtually all the world religions there is a human figure who stands in some special relation to that reality (Macquarrie 1990: 418). These representatives have sought to realize the highest possibilities within human nature and to mediate divine grace to others. In a reworking of Hebrews 11, Macquarrie includes them in his roll call of the faithful (Macquarrie 1990: 421–2). Yet he notes that this is a viewpoint that reflects his Christian particularity, for it is by virtue of Jesus as the Word of God that we recognize the same Word in other traditions. For those who confess Jesus, there is a sufficiency and finality in their own tradition, but not such as to prevent us from discerning the presence of saviour figures in other faiths. Somewhat ironically, given his stern criticism of The Myth of God Incarnate in 1977, Macquarrie himself seems to have held an adjacent position with his methodology from below, a Christology of degree, and affirmation of commensurate saviour figures in other faiths (Morgan 2006: 251; Macquarrie 1995). The reception of Jesus Christ in Modern Thought has been dogged by accusations of a break with orthodoxy (Coll 2006; Purdy 2009). This was hardly surprising given the criticism of Chalcedon and general endorsement of Schleiermacher (Morgan 2006). In Christology Revisited (1998), Macquarrie clarifies his position, particularly with respect to the recurrent charge of adoptionism which appears to have rankled with him (Macquarrie 1998: 22). ‘[L]ike most authors, as soon as the book was finished and fixed in print, I began to realize that some things that might have been said had not been said, that many things could have been said better, while still other things should perhaps not have been said at all’ (Macquarrie 1998: 7). Notwithstanding the perception of this as a later work of retraction (Purdy 2009: xviii), Macquarrie seems only to state his position with greater clarity here and elsewhere (Macquarrie 2003: 134–9). The terms of classical Christology are to be reworked and restated, rather than abandoned. Often a loose term of castigation, ‘adoptionism’ is associated with an exclusive Christological movement from below. Jesus is designated Son of God by virtue of the outcome of his human life. But Macquarrie insists that this cannot be the whole story. The New Testament is clear that the movement comes also from God towards us and so demands the notion of pre-existence. ‘God, in his creativity conceived a being, who on the finite level, might express his own “image and likeness” . . . This did not mean that the human being became God or a part of God, but that he or she became an image or icon of those qualities of deity that can be manifested on the finite level . . . [Jesus] was the human hypostasis transformed by a constant immersion in the divine Spirit’ (Macquarrie 1998: 78–80). Admittedly, this seems quite a long way from Chalcedon, perhaps owing to Macquarrie’s doctrine of God which moves in a process direction (McIntyre 1998: 280–2), but it signals a further attempt to respect its governing intention. This is confirmed by

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Macquarrie’s commitment to a cosmic Christology, albeit one that connects with other faiths and traditions. In the end, we may be left with the problem of whether a stronger Christology, allied to a more traditional doctrine of God, can be articulated along these post-Chalcedonian lines. The works of Mackintosh, Baillie, and Macquarrie represent a trajectory of modern Christological thought, with Macquarrie’s more revisionist proposals arguably the inevitable outcome. Several questions pervade their discussion. How does one avoid the problems of Chalcedonianism without abandoning its guiding intention? In what ways can Christology cope with the challenges generated by historical criticism of the gospels? What strategies can be developed for communicating the significance of Jesus to contemporary audiences? How is Jesus’ finality for Christian faith to be articulated in an age of religious pluralism? These are our problems too and, in turning to them, we remain indebted to the sustained efforts of our theological forebears.²

Bibliography Baillie, Donald M. (1948). God Was in Christ: An Essay on the Incarnation and Atonement. London: Faber & Faber. Baillie, John (1958). ‘Some Comments on Professor Hick’s Article on “The Christology of D. M. Baillie” ’, Scottish Journal of Theology 11/3: 265–70. Barth, Karl (1958). Church Dogmatics IV/2. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Busch, Eberhard (1976). Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts. London: SCM. Coll, Niall (2006). ‘ “Within the Constraining Framework of Modern Thought”: John Macquarrie’s Post-Enlightenment Christology’, in Robert Morgan (ed.), In Search of Humanity and Deity: A Celebration of John Macquarrie’s Theology. London: SCM, 217–27. Fergusson, David (2006). ‘John Macquarrie as Interpreter of Bultmann’, in Robert Morgan (ed.), In Search of Humanity and Deity: A Celebration of John Macquarrie’s Theology. London: SCM, 25–33. Hick, John (1958). ‘The Christology of D. M. Baillie’, Scottish Journal of Theology 11/1: 1–12. McEnhill, Peter (1997). ‘ “Good Pleasure, Grace and the Person of God Incarnate”: Interpreting the Christology of D. M. Baillie for Today’, Scottish Journal of Theology 50/1: 61–82. McIntyre, John (1993). ‘The Christology of Donald Baillie in Perspective’, in David Fergusson (ed.), Christ, Church and Society: Essays on John Baillie and Donald Baillie. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 87–113. ² I am grateful to Craig Meek for comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

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McIntyre, John (1998). The Shape of Christology, 2nd edition. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. MacKinnon, Donald M. (1948). ‘Review of Donald M. Baillie, God Was in Christ’, Scottish Journal of Theology 1/2: 207–9. Mackintosh, Hugh Ross (1912). The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Mackintosh, Hugh Ross (1937). Types of Modern Theology. London: Nisbet. Macquarrie, John (1955). An Existentialist Theology: A Comparison of Heidegger and Bultmann, London: SCM. Macquarrie, John (1977). ‘Christianity Without Incarnation? Some Critical Comments’, in Michael Green (ed.), The Truth of God Incarnate. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 140–4. Macquarrie, John (1990). Jesus Christ in Modern Thought. London: Collins. Macquarrie, John (1995). The Mediators: Nine Stars in the Sky. London: SCM. Macquarrie, John (1998). Christology Revisited. London: SCM. Macquarrie, John (1999). On Being a Theologian: Reflections at Eighty. London: SCM. Macquarrie, John (2003). Stubborn Theological Questions. London: SCM. Morgan, Robert (2006). ‘Jesus in History and Faith: A Schleiermacherian Christology’, in Robert Morgan (ed.), In Search of Humanity and Deity: A Celebration of John Macquarrie’s Theology. London: SCM, 228–53. Morley, Georgina (2002). John Macquarrie’s Natural Theology: The Grace of Being. Aldershot: Ashgate. Newlands, George M. (2002). John and Donald Baillie: Transatlantic Theology. New York: Peter Lang. Purdy, Vernon L. (2009). The Christology of John Macquarrie. New York: Peter Lang. Purves, Andrew (2015). Exploring Christology and Atonement: Conversations with John McLeod Campbell, H. R. Mackintosh and T. F. Torrance. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic. Redman, Robert (1997). Reformulating Reformed Theology: Jesus Christ in the Theology of H. R. Mackintosh. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Warfield, B. B. (1913). ‘Review of H. R. Mackintosh, The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ’, Princeton Theological Review 11: 141–56. Wright, N. T. (1996). Jesus and the Victory of God. London: SPCK.

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13 The Dissemination of Scottish Theology T&T Clark John Riches

The title of this chapter might easily give rise to some false impressions: that the task of a publishing house like T&T Clark was to offer to the people of Scotland— or indeed more widely—a discrete form of theology which was distinctively Scottish; and again, that the task of a publisher is simply to pass on what already exists. The long history of T&T Clark makes it abundantly clear that while their plans certainly included publishing the views and writings of Scottish theologians, they also sought to inform and shape the dominant forms of theology in Scotland; just as it shows how, albeit with caution and financial realism, they were able to shape a new readership, not just in Scotland but around the world. There is, as we shall see, a steady interplay between the choices of works to publish, whether that is in terms of accepting or rejecting works which were offered to them, or, as was more generally the case, of works which they commissioned or chose to publish in translation, and the moulding of a new generation of theologians and of a readership which would be willing to buy their books. Publishing is as much about creating a readership as it is about packaging and presenting—marketing—what is available independently of publishers’ efforts. Publishing is constrained by the market and the economic conditions of its times, but it is also about vision and conviction. As a commercial operation which was certainly at times very successful in financial terms, T&T Clark was regularly prepared to make choices not on the basis of short-term financial gain but of an overriding commitment to particular theological and ethical convictions. The firm was established by the 22-year-old Thomas Clark in 1821 and had its first premises in Parliament Square, Edinburgh.¹ Initially, it concentrated on selling and publishing works about the law. Thomas Clark had worked for legal booksellers in London, and only gradually widened the range of topics covered by the new business to include theology as well as further topics of apparently unlimited range. Not only did he publish works of biblical theology in a series ¹ For a detailed account of the firm which sets out its history and theological commitments before looking closely at its commercial history, see Dempster (1992). Further brief discussions are to be found in Harvey (1939–40), Bell (2007: 293–4), and Finkelstein and McCleery (2007: 303–5).

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called The Biblical Cabinet; he also initiated two further series, The Cabinet Library of Scarce and Celebrated Tracts and The Students’ Cabinet Library of Useful Tracts. It seems clear that Thomas’ ambitions were considerable: to publish texts for students of all faculties, to provide a comprehensive series of ‘useful’ texts for all students. One may detect here both the Scottish Reformed and the Scottish Enlightenment’s emphasis on the importance of universal education. What is also interesting, from the start of the house’s work, is its willingness to include works of continental origin. Thomas travelled in France, Holland, and Germany and the first of the works in his Biblical Cabinet was J. A. Ernesti’s Principles of Biblical Interpretation of the New Testament (1832), in its context a remarkable and courageous step. It would appear that Thomas, like Pusey, Coleridge, and many others, was drawn to the vigour of theological argument in Germany as it attempted to grapple with the questions, not least historical questions, which the eighteenth century had raised. In 1846 Thomas was joined by his nephew, also Thomas Clark, and the firm acquired its full name, T&T Clark. In the meantime, the business had moved to its long-term home at 38 George Street. A further period of vigorous expansion was about to begin. The new Thomas took the firm into a new phase. If there had been ideas about covering a broad range of topics, for the next forty years there was a steady expansion of the theological list. Initially, much effort was given over to the development of the Foreign Theological Library, a collection of translations of works of French, Danish, and mostly German theological scholarship. Many of these were sold by subscription, subscribers receiving four books a year. This was followed by the Ante-Nicene Library, a large collection of the writings of the Church Fathers from after the time of the Apostolic Fathers to the Council of Nicaea. This meant a large financial outlay. It was followed by a complete edition of the works of John Owen, a Calvin library, a sixteen-volume edition of the works of Augustine, and in 1873 the start of work on the translation of H. A. W. Meyer’s Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament. Such an output is certainly evidence of a remarkable demand for serious and taxing works of theology; but the sustained effort to introduce English-speaking readers to works of German scholarship of an, albeit moderately, critical kind was also about educating their readership and thus creating an increasingly favourable climate for the reception of historical and critical studies. Thomas, the nephew, was a good deal more than a publisher, successful as he was at his job. He took an extremely active part in the public life of the Scottish capital, was a member of the Merchant Company, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Curator of the University, and a town councillor who in 1885 became Lord Provost. The following year, at the Edinburgh International Exhibition, he was given his baronetcy by the queen. As an active member of the Free Church of Scotland, he sought to embody in his public life those beliefs and values, whose rigorous examination and strengthening he desired to promote through his

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commercial publishing. This is yet another mode of dissemination of the theology which his Scottish business did so much to further. Sir Thomas was joined in the business by his son John Maurice, who was admitted as a partner in 1880 at the age of 21. When Sir Thomas retired in 1886, John Maurice became, for eight years, sole partner, until, in 1894, he received his brother Thomas George into partnership. John Maurice and Thomas George worked closely together on the many important programmes which they initiated in the period up to the First World War. The list of new projects and series is highly impressive. There were new ventures with American publishers, notably Scribners, with whom Sir John had already established good relations. They brought out two new series, an International Theological Library, which sought to cover a wide range of theological topics with books by leading figures in their fields, and the International Critical Commentary (ICC), which offered detailed commentaries on all the books of the Bible, both Old and New Testament. Dealing with the United States was problematic, due to the widespread pirating by US companies of books published outside their country. Despite this John Maurice and subsequent partners in the firm persevered and the ICC has become acknowledged as one of the leading English language commentaries. It has undoubtedly played a major part in cementing T&T Clark’s reputation as a major academic publisher of theology. John Maurice and Thomas George also worked closely throughout this period with the Scottish minister, prolific writer, and editor James Hastings. He was responsible for a great range of series, from the popular to the academic. His lasting achievements are his Dictionary of the Bible, the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, and the founding in 1889 and the subsequent regular editing of the Expository Times. These were all, in their different ways, large-scale international projects, which were promoting scholarly theology regardless of its geographical provenance. Hastings’ energy in drawing on the skills of so many international experts would serve the firm well, as it brought them into contact with leading scholars who could contribute to their other projects. Moreover, as Dempster has shown, the works that Hastings edited were the ones which in the very lean years after the First World War, would prevent the demise of the business (Dempster 1992: 243–6). Yet, while John Maurice and Thomas George undoubtedly contributed hugely to the development and international reputation of the publishing house, the later years of John Maurice’s life were to be marked by falling sales, dwindling investment, and the general depression of publishing following on the First World War; and, deeply regretted by John Maurice, the resignation of his brother, Thomas George Ramsay Davidson, who felt unable to return to the firm after the war and went into farming. Whatever the complex economic, social, and cultural reasons for this decline in the firm’s fortunes, the fact was that for the first three decades of the twentieth century, with one major exception, no new major projects were

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undertaken and the business was living more and more on the past, on reprints of works which had been on their list for a long time. The next generation, John Maurice’s son, Sir Thomas and Thomas George’s son, Thomas George, with that major exception, did little to reverse this trend. They lacked the energy and drive (even, in some cases the competence) to build productive relationships with leading academics, even where the opportunity presented itself: John Baillie expressed himself as far from happy with the manner in which his work had been handled by Sir Thomas (T&T Clark Archive, NLS Dep. 247/1). The two Thomases presided over the business until 1956, when they were joined by Thomas George’s son, T. G. Ramsay D. Clark, though by this point Sir Thomas had largely withdrawn from the business. The firm continued to list most of their titles, to reprint when editions ran out, and even to commission revised editions. The new leadership certainly initiated, under the editorship of J. A. Emerton and C. A. Cranfield, a complete revision of the ICC, which slowly appeared over the next decades. The exception to this extremely cautious approach was, however, no mean exception: it was the translation and publication of the fourteen volumes of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. This was done by a team of translators led by G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance and appeared between 1936 and 1969. This, the publication of probably the century’s most influential theological work, undoubtedly brought a degree of financial security into the business and gave it international profile. Together with the sales of old titles and the lack of substantial, and potentially risky, investment in new titles, it meant indeed that the firm’s financial performance steadily improved. But, with the exception of the Church Dogmatics and the gradual appearance of the revised ICC, there was little in the catalogue to suggest creative energy or vision. This was managed decline rather than the development of the firm’s theological vision. Indeed the practice of listing all available titles in alphabetical order without any kind of distinction in presentation to indicate which were new titles, suggested a kind of bondage to the past which could not bode well for the future. As Dempster remarks, ‘It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that, by the late 1960s, the firm was placing over-much reliance on a backlist which could not indefinitely sustain its existence. New titles were appearing but not in sufficient numbers to sustain the firm’s reputation as a prestigious and vibrant concern, and to lay down the backlist of the future’ (Dempster 1992: 258). Realizing this, Thomas George and Ramsay took the decision to merge with John Bartholomew and Son, a decision which took effect from 1 April 1973. Under the agreement, and as long as the Bartholomew Group remained independent, ‘the Clarks were given complete freedom in the way they ran the business’ (Dempster 1992: 259). However, in 1980, the Group was taken over by Reader’s Digest, who were considerably more directive and asked T&T Clark to ‘produce two popular titles . . . You and Your Rights in Scotland and The Family Guide to the Bible’ (Dempster 1992: 260). In 1983 Thomas George retired. In 1985,

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Reader’s Digest sold off the group to Times Books, which published the Times Atlas. Times Books was owned by News International, who were in turn owned by NewsCorp. For a while, that is to say, T&T Clark were owned by Rupert Murdoch, though it is doubtful this strange fact was often drawn to his attention, even though Murdoch’s grandfather was, by a further strange coincidence, a Free Church minister who trained at New College. For a while T&T Clark were allowed to get on without interference. In 1989, Ramsay retired and Geoffrey Green, not a member of the family, became Managing Director. However, in 1989 NewsCorp, who already owned Harper & Row, bought the Scottish publishers, Collins, and the two companies were merged as HarperCollins. Bartholomew was integrated into the new concern, while T&T Clark was again allowed comparative freedom. Then finally, in 1991, NewsCorp decided to sell off some of its subsidiaries and this made possible a successful management buy-out of T&T Clark by the Managing Director, Geoffrey Green. For a short while, the firm had again become an independent Scottish publisher. While all this had been going on, things had not been standing still. Geoffrey Green had joined the firm in 1975, having recently completed a doctorate on the history of American theatre. He had married in the States while doing his research and returned to Edinburgh in 1974 to complete his doctorate before pursuing teaching options back in the States. Seeking temporary employment, he was put in touch with Ramsay, was offered a job and joined the firm in March. In 1977, he was appointed Publishing Director, having responsibility for developing new titles as well as managing the existing list. Here I must declare an interest. Over the next twenty years I enjoyed working with Geoffrey and was able to observe and discuss his determined efforts to build up and strengthen T&T Clark. His first major venture, once he had been allowed to reshape the catalogue to give prominence to new titles, was to find a replacement for Barth’s Church Dogmatics, which had provided a major source of revenue and recognition for the business since the 1930s. Hans Urs von Balthasar, who had written a highly thoughtful account of Barth’s theology (based on lectures which Barth and his seminar had attended in Basel where they both lived), was producing his major work and theological trilogy in fifteen volumes and this seemed an obvious successor. It would certainly represent a departure of a kind, for the firm had never previously made such a heavy investment in the work of a Roman Catholic theologian. While it was in no way a work of Scottish theology, it had been strongly supported by the Scottish theologian Donald MacKinnon and I had already translated one of von Balthasar’s shorter works, Elucidations. There were difficulties. It transpired that von Balthasar had given all the translation rights to Joseph Fessio, S.J. (a pupil of Joseph Ratzinger), who had already commissioned translations of two of the volumes. A closer look at samples of these translations persuaded von Balthasar and his literary team to entrust T&T Clark with the translation, though Fessio continued to be listed as co-editor.

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A team of UK scholars was enlisted to undertake the translation which was copublished by T&T Clark and Ignatius Press, and began to appear in 1982. The first seven volumes were completed by 1991. A further venture into Catholic theology of a rather different hue was the publishing of the Roman Catholic journal Concilium which actively promoted the new Catholic vision of the Second Vatican Council (Balthasar responded with his own journal Communio). This was introducing T&T Clark to a largely new reading public and certainly developing its international reputation. On the other side, not to lose sight of the considerable interest in Barth’s work which the firm had engendered over the years, Geoffrey Green embarked on a reissue of the writings of T. F. Torrance, the Scottish theologian who had done most to promote Barth’s writings and theology, as well as taking over the publication of The Scottish Journal of Theology from 1991–2001, which Torrance had founded with J. K. S. Reid in 1948. All of this represented a remarkable growth in the firm’s list and boded well for the future of the business. Geoffrey Green also looked to the development of works of biblical studies. The revised ICC was still appearing and was widely recognized as one of the leading examples of what its title proclaimed it to be: an international, critical commentary. But the commentary form has both strengths and limitations. It cannot examine a topic in the same sustained way as can a monograph. Within the world of British publishing, monographs published had been largely restricted to the publication of revised PhD theses. While there were undoubtedly works of this kind which were of major importance, it would be good to create a vehicle for monographs by established figures which could help to encourage development within the discipline of biblical studies. The plan was to start a new series by publishing translations of some of the more outstanding monographs from the German monograph series and then to encourage other established scholars to contribute. This was not by any means meant to exclude revised PhD theses and a number would be included. The series was to be called Studies of the New Testament and its World, a title which reflected important, mostly recent developments in the discipline. The first work to be published was Martin Hengel’s The Charismatic Leader and his Followers, a sustained examination of Matt. 8:21–2. Translations of works by other leading figures—Gerd Theissen on miracles stories in the gospels and on Corinthians in its social setting, Hans Huebner on Paul and the law, Heikki Räisänen on the messianic secret in Mark—followed and steadily a stream of further titles, some of which were commissioned for the series, some offered, from younger, now well-established figures: Judith Lieu on I & II John, John Barclay’s Obeying the Truth on Galatians (both revisions of their PhD theses). In time, there were further contributions from the Nordic countries, from Troels Engberg-Pedersen and Risto Uro, from Australia from David Sim, and from North America from J. Louis Martyn and his pupil Joel Marcus, who at the time was teaching in Glasgow. My colleagues in Glasgow, Joel Marcus and

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John Barclay, joined the editorial team in the 1990s and the series ran to some thirty titles by the time that T&T Clark ceased to be an independent publisher. Throughout this period the Expository Times continued to play a key part in the firm’s output. Cyril Rodd had succeeded C. L. Mitton as editor in 1976 and his ‘Talking Points on Books’ which appeared every month highlighted new publications of interest and importance alongside reviews of other recent theological publications of (largely) British, American, and continental origin, articles examining detailed points of exegesis, and others offering surveys of recent work in a particular field and sermons to cover the Sundays of the month. It played an important role both in the promotion of new works of scholarship and in the formation and professional development of many clergy, who were probably its principal subscribers. Work continued, too, in producing important works of reference, not least the Dictionary of Scottish Church History & Theology edited by David F. Wright, David C. Lachman, and Donald E. Meek. Thus it could be said that by the turn of the millennium, T&T Clark was in reasonably good health and certainly active and innovative. But the whole world of book-selling and publishing, indeed more widely of communications and international markets, was to change so dramatically, that those committed to international publishing, as opposed to very local publishing, would find it increasingly hard to survive. Geoffrey Green speaks of the impact of Amazon in sweeping away the old territorial rights agreements between publishers. Customers in Europe, South Africa, or Australia could now buy editions licensed only to the US, for example from Amazon, without T&T Clark receiving any revenue. It was not long before T&T Clark would amalgamate with Continuum, a London and New York-based international theological publisher which adopted the name of T&T Clark as its academic imprint. In 2002 the business moved to London and in 2003 Geoffrey Green left Continuum. This, however, was not the end of T&T Clark and its publications. The Expository Times, now based at New College in Edinburgh, was first managed by Continuum but then sold to the American academic publishers Sage, and is enjoying a new lease of life. It has been fully digitized and is sold all over the world. While under Continuum’s oversight, it was decided to discontinue the weekly sermons. This caused a major outbreak of complaints from preachers from across the globe who had found them a source of ideas and inspiration. The sermons were restored. The format has changed little. The subjects treated have expanded and include articles on systematic and practical theology, ethics, and other faiths. Since its return to Edinburgh, the Expository Times has become if anything more rather than less international. Not only has its readership spread all over the world, with many universities subscribing to electronic versions, but it publishes articles from contributors from every continent. In 2011, in another major development, Continuum was acquired by Bloomsbury, a London publisher which had seen extraordinary growth as a result of its

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decision to publish the Edinburgh author J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Bloomsbury’s theological list is organized into two halves, an academic and a trade list and the T&T Clark and Continuum backlists were distributed across the two divisions. The academic theology and biblical studies material assembled in this way is truly impressive and continues to grow. It is all now published under the imprint of T&T Clark. What started as a small family-owned Edinburgh publisher has now become a global brand. This brief history of T&T Clark shows the deep roots of the firm in the nineteenth century. There is an almost Buddenbrooksian character to the development of the firm. It is a business in the heart of Scotland’s capital city run by a family which came to have an increasingly prominent civic position. They were exemplary members of Edinburgh’s commercial class, prosperous, respected, Sir Thomas Clark riding in his carriage from his house in Charlotte Square to his business at 38 George Street. But they were more than just Edinburgh merchants. As publishers of academic theology, the Clarks’ relationships with their authors were frequently mediated by prominent figures in the universities and after the Disruption, the Free Church colleges of the day. They were, too, well aware of the challenges facing theological faculties with, in Scotland, their close ties to the church. It is clear from the correspondence cited by Dempster that they were aware of the threat which a certain kind of radicalism posed to Evangelical orthodoxy; but equally clear that they realized that the churches needed to confront the challenges posed to the biblical literalism prevailing at the beginning of the century by developing the historical, philological, and critical skills requisite for answering critical objections. Ernesti’s New Testament hermeneutic, the first volume published in the Biblical Cabinet, presents this task in a clear but in many ways reassuring way to the educated if conservative clergy to whom this must have been principally directed. The choice of Ernesti’s work to open this series in 1832 is revealing. This is a work which was first published in Latin in 1760. That fact alone has to say something about Thomas Clark, the founder’s nephew. Ernesti was a classical and biblical scholar whose philosophical roots were in German Rationalism. His central claim was that the New Testament should be interpreted like any other book. This above all meant that the possible meanings of the texts were in the first place to be determined by the linguistic rules and conventions of the time of writing. Historical and philological interpretation were primary and prior to the attempt to determine the actual meaning of any given text in the light of its substantive claims and our judgement about its plausibility. Yet Ernesti himself was at heart deeply conservative and clearly believed that there would be no fundamental contradictions between the sense of Scripture which such historical and philological investigation would propose and his own conservative evangelical beliefs. Karl Aner, the historian of the theology of the second half of the eighteenth century, writes of Ernesti and his contemporaries, that while such biblical

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philologists subjected both the words and the sense of Scripture to critical scrutiny, ‘they never doubted the inspiration of Scripture. Naturally, they were no longer able to extend the doctrine of inspiration to cover the individual words of Scripture; but for someone like Ernesti, his belief in the real inspiration of Scripture was so rocklike, that should he come across a contradiction he would resort immediately to the kind of harmonising which was so distasteful to Lessing.’ He quotes a contemporary, the Orientalist Faber, ‘Did Ernesti ever venture an exalted thought except of a grammatical nature? Did he ever embark on a flight which could have taken him beyond the sphere of ordinary insights and ordinary theologians’ (Aner 1964: 219–21, quotation from 211)? Thomas Clark’s nephew, Thomas, followed pretty faithfully in these footsteps. If one considers the authors published in the Foreign Theological Library, they can principally be described as mediating theologians, figures like Luecke, C. J. Nitsch, Tholuck, Julius Mueller, I. A. Dorner, R. Rothe, and H. L. Martensen, though more rigorously conservative figures such as Hengstenberg were also included. For the most part seeing themselves as followers of Schleiermacher, they sought to mediate between faith and scientific knowledge. In an ideal world they might have been able to show that there were no contradictions or tensions between evangelical beliefs and the interpretations of the Bible which a careful philological reading led to. In practical terms, compromises and accommodations were inevitable. Nor were they a completely homogeneous group. As Friedrich Traub notes: There are speculative, biblical, pietistic and ecclesial elements to be found in different combinations in all of them; the transitions from one to the other are frequently fluid. Yet they are all convinced that what is of value in confessional as well as in liberal theology is to be found with them: the full content of positive Christianity, which the confessional theologians believe only they have, and the freedom of scientific enquiry which the liberal claims as their particular advantage. (Traub 1931)

Traub, however, believes that this intermediate position became increasingly difficult to maintain and ultimately led to false compromises which undermined their position. Lessing would doubtless have approved. While such theologians may for some decades have provided a large part of the works which were translated into English and published by T&T Clark, as the century wore on new theological positions began to appear in their lists. As early as 1872, they had published Albrecht Ritschl’s A Critical History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation, the historical first volume of Ritschl’s major work on the subject. In 1900, the Clarks published the third, systematic volume of Ritschl’s work, in a translation edited by H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macaulay. As the editors remark in their Preface, attention to this theologian’s doctrinal system had been ‘steadily deepening for some years’ and they

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reference James Denney’s Studies in Theology (1895), James Orr’s The Ritschlian Theology and the Evangelical Faith (1897), both published by Hodder & Stoughton, and Alfred E. Garvie’s The Ritschlian Theology, which T&T Clark had issued in the same year as the translation. That this was a particularly Scottish undertaking is made clear by the list of translators, all five of whom were ministers in Scotland. There is clear evidence here, in the works listed in the Preface, of a new generation of Scottish theologians who were drawing deep inspiration from German theology and encouraging the Clarks to publish works which were moving beyond the mediating theologies which had been their mainstay into more constructive forms of biblical theology. Mackintosh would indeed, after the war, persuade the Clarks to allow him to undertake a, not wholly successful, translation of Schleiermacher’s Der christliche Glaube, published in English as The Christian Faith. Viewed from the vantage of ninety years later, this event may be considered as rivalling in importance the publication of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. It continues in print in new editions and influences Protestant and Catholic theologians alike. Together with Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith, the publication of Ritschl’s Justification and Reconciliation marks a highpoint in openness to critical theology on the part of the Clarks. Ritschl, who had started as a follower of Schleiermacher but had then switched his allegiance to F. C. Baur and the Tübingen School, gave historical critical study of the biblical texts a central role in his theology. He certainly moved away from Baur’s account of the development of early Christianity but the fact clearly remains that his account of justification and reconciliation is more than just an accommodation of Reformation theology with philological study of the biblical texts; or indeed, simply the result of his moving away from Baur’s Hegelianism to a position more influenced by Kant, much as Ritschl may have learnt from Kant. It is a profoundly original construction of Christian theology which derives both from his critical, historical reading of the Reformers as well as from his account of the development of Christianity out of Jesus’ preaching of the Kingdom of God, with its deep roots in the Old Testament (Schäfer 1968). Alongside these substantial contributions to doctrinal and systematic theology, the firm continued to contribute powerfully to the development of critical, philological studies of the Bible. The ancient language dictionaries, the editions of the Church Fathers, the ICC, the Expository Times, the Dictionary of the Bible, and the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics all represent major steps along the road to creating an educated church readership which could navigate the critical waters of nineteenth-century intellectual controversy. Hastings’ comment on Sir Thomas at his death makes the point strongly: ‘Scotland probably owes him more than can ever be acknowledged. For Scotland has passed through a great theological crisis with extraordinary ease and benefit, and the steady, evangelical, yet never intolerant hand that more than any other guided the theological reading of Scotland those trying years had not a little to do with it’ (Hastings 1900–1).

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Moreover, work in this field was genuinely international and interdenominational. By this time T&T Clark were working closely with publishers and scholars in North America as well as in Europe and, as Dempster points out, were keen to enlist the support of scholars as widely as possible and to avoid overrepresentation by any particular denomination (Dempster 1992: 21–2). And without doubt, the firm was able to draw on scholars of distinction in their own particular fields. In a letter of 20 March 1919 to Sir John Clark, Fr. von Hügel expresses his appreciation of the quality of work that appeared under Clark’s imprint: ‘I continue much impressed by, and very grateful for, the vigour and courage, with which yourself and Dr. Hastings have kept this great enterprise [the ERE] going, right through that terrible war, and its countless, dislocating influences . . . . I would have liked to thank Dr Hastings for his particular choice of writers on such of the subjects as I know at all well’ (T&T Clark Archive, NLS Dep. 247/10). For the most part, the Clarks were able to avoid controversy in a field where controversy was never far away and were able to bring their theologically conservative readers with them. It is clear that they were conscious of the dangers of offending some of these readers but that they were also prepared to risk such displeasure and possible loss of readers where they were convinced of the value of a particular work. A letter from Marcus Dods over proposals to publish Bernhard Weiss’ Life of Christ makes this plain: I sympathise with y. perplexity about Weiss. It is similar to my own perplexity about the publication of the truth about Genesis. To publish Weiss will be a new departure for you as a publisher & will be at once recognised as such. And I have little doubt there wd be a clamour agt. you and you wd. lose subscriptions – At the same time I think you need have no fear of ‘harming young minds’ because young minds already have access to [illegible]. You will do no harm save to yourselves, but only good by publishing it – and that is my decided opinion. But unless you yourself see that & and are prepared for the condemnation of the fanatical, I think you shd. leave it alone. Other publishers can take it up without producing the slightest shock to anyone. (T&T Clark Archive, NLS Dep. 247/4 [12 April 1882], quoted in Dempster 1992: 19)

Clarks published Weiss and there is no record of any serious controversy as a result. There certainly were occasions when their authors’ orthodoxy was questioned. H. H. Wendt’s The Teaching of Jesus met with sharp criticism in the British Weekly (20 October 1892), where the reviewer accused him of not being ‘a believer in the deity of Christ’. Wendt was quick to defend himself: ‘I have exhibited in my work not my own belief but only, in a merely [=purely?] historical way, the teaching of Jesus himself esp. also his ideas of his Messianity and of his being

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“The Son of God” in a pre-eminent sense. . . . Jesus’ words when justly interpreted state his divine character not in a smaller but in a higher sense, not on a feebler but on a firmer foundation, than the traditional dogmatics.’ Wendt’s extended reply, which, carefully read, clearly marks his distancing himself from traditional dogmatic positions was duly sent by John Maurice to the British Review (T&T Clark Archive, NLS Dep. 247/36). However, if the publication of Ritschl’s Justification and Reconciliation marked a high point of openness to theological criticism, things were about to change. Ritschl was subjected to radical criticism, not least by Karl Barth. Barth saw his theology as a return to the Enlightenment and as placing ‘Christian faith at the service of the bourgeoisie of the age of Bismarck’ (Schäfer 1968: 11). One can see why such a theology would have had a strong appeal to those enjoying an assured position within the Scottish society of their day. As, however, Schäfer argues, Barth’s judgement fails adequately to notice the two poles of Ritschl’s thought: the religious and the ethical, justification and the Kingdom of God, and fails to take sufficiently seriously Ritschl’s personal rooting in the theology of the Reformers (Luther and Calvin) and the Bible. It is interesting to reflect upon how much of what T&T Clark published was in a way reminiscent of the work of John McLeod Campbell, a Lutheran and biblical theological corrective to the dominant Calvinist influence in Scotland. However that may be, in the aftermath of the First World War and the deep uncertainties which it brought politically, socially, culturally, and religiously, the radical criticisms of nineteenth-century theology by figures like Barth became increasingly attractive. Mackintosh, the translator of Ritschl and Schleiermacher, was strongly, if not uncritically, attracted to the post-war German-speaking theology of figures such as Barth and Brunner, as evidenced by his Types of Modern Theology (1937). His successor at New College, G. T. Thomson, became one the first translators of The Church Dogmatics. His successor, T. F. Torrance, was one of Barth’s most powerful advocates. The Clarks’ decision to publish Barth’s dogmatics marked the end of a long period nurturing a measured sense of criticism and openness to doctrinal reformulation. It was not music to everyone’s ears. There is an interesting exchange between John Baillie and Sir Thomas Clark in August 1937. Baillie writes to say that Ronald Gregor Smith of Glasgow wants to translate Friedrich Gogarten’s Gericht odere Skepsis (Judgement or Scepticism). Gregor Smith, an important theologian in his own right, had recently completed the translation of Martin Buber’s I and Thou, a work which was to remain in print to the present and to render significant financial support to the firm. Moreover, as Baillie points out, not only is Gogarten an important scholar, but there is the added interest that the work has as its subtitle ‘A Polemic against Karl Barth’. A note of John Baillie’s subsequent visit to the office in George Street records that ‘Prof. B. thought such issue well worthwhile, Gogarten appealing to a wider circle in Scotland than Barth.’ Sir Thomas

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explained their difficulty and that they had left the decision to G. T. Thomson. It is unsurprising that the translation never appeared. In his obituary for John Baillie in the Scotsman on 30 September 1960, John McIntyre wrote: the Scottish mind ‘is too realistic to be lured into the quite false assumption that reality, and above all, the Reality could be petrified in any system, whether Gothic or neo-Gothic’. John Baillie had been ‘plotting a third way. British theology has never known the Liberalism against which Barth protested so forcefully and so necessarily and has found it difficult to sympathise with the full Barthian position. Principal Baillie interpreted the European scene to many a bewildered Scottish divinity student, and created live options where the latter might well have said, “A plague on both your houses.” ’ In such words one can see reflected the rich legacy which T&T Clark through their thoughtful choice and steady cultivation of works of careful, scholarly, and reflective theology throughout the nineteenth century had left to further generations of Scottish theologians. The Gifford Lectures website refers to John Baillie as ‘the greatest of the mediating theologians’, a fitting tribute to him and to the influence of the steady stream of ‘Vermittlungstheologen’ who had appeared in translation under the T&T Clark imprint.² Whether the firm would be able to leave a similarly rich legacy for the next century was by the turn of the millennium more open to question. The members of the family who led the firm in the twentieth century did not share quite the same strong Evangelical convictions as their forebears. And yet, they were the English language publishers of one of the strongest theological responses to the rise of fascism in Europe, Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. That stands alongside the earlier publication of Ritschl and Schleiermacher, and indeed the later publication of von Balthasar, as an enduring resource for Englishspeaking theology. The publication of Barth marked a major change of direction. Sir John chose not to heed the voices who cautioned against embracing Barth and maybe the history of Scottish theology would have been different had he chosen to follow that advice. The turbulent intellectual history of the latter part of the twentieth century makes it certain that no single response or programme of theological publishing could have done justice to it. And that is perhaps the central point. A fuller response, a more creative programme of publishing would have had to be more multi-faceted than was perhaps within the powers of the later members of the family; and it may have seemed that the later flowering of the firm under Geoffrey Green with its openness to a wide spectrum of Catholic theology came too late. But then, in a remarkable turn of events, a major international publishing operation with the T&T Clark imprint has emerged, which, while it is clearly no

² See https://www.giffordlectures.org/lecturers/john-baillie

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longer an Edinburgh publishing house, draws much of its strength and identity from the extraordinary record of a Scottish publishing family in bringing to their readers many of the major works of theology and biblical studies from over nearly two hundred years. Moreover, the digital revolution in publishing means that it is now possible to make this rich backlist available—and profitable—across the world. For the T&T Clark bicentenary in 2021, they will launch a new digital resource focusing both on the major theologians in their collection, notably Barth and von Balthasar, and also, under the T&T Clark Jesus Library, on their collection in the latter field which will draw heavily on the revised edition of The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ by Emil Schürer (famously revised by Vermes, Millar, Black, and Goodman). They will also publish the first volumes of a new T&T Clark Encyclopaedia of Theology, alongside a major new study of the reception of Jesus in the first three centuries. A new force in theological publishing has emerged, building on this rich past, which promises to keep not only the T&T Clark name but also much of its rich publishing history in the front of theological publishing for years to come. It is an undertaking which is committed to making available the tools for thoughtful and critical exploration of the Christian theological tradition in a spirit of openness and internationalism. Perhaps that, in the end, is the truly Scottish contribution which T&T Clark have made.

Bibliography Aner, Karl (1964). Die Theologie der Lessingzeit. Hildesheim: Georg Olms. Bell, Bill (ed.) (2007). The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, vol. 3: Ambition and Industry, 1800–1880. Ediburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Buber, Martin (2013). I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith. Bloomsbury Revelations series. London: Bloomsbury. Dempster, John A. H. (1992). The T. & T. Clark Story: A Victorian Publisher and the New Theology, with an epilogue covering the twentieth-century history of the firm. Edinburgh: Pentland Press. Denney, James (1895). Studies in Theology. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Finkelstein, David and Alistair McCleery (eds.) (2007). The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, vol. 4: Professionalism and Diversity, 1880–2000. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Garvie, Alfred E. (1900). The Ritschlian Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Harvey, James (1939–40). ‘The Publishing House of Messrs. T. & T. Clark, Edinburgh’, Expository Times 51: 10–13. Hastings, James (1900–1). ‘Entre Nous’, Expository Times 12: 240.

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McLeod Campbell, John (1855). The Nature of the Atonement and its Relation to Remission of Sins and Eternal Life. London: Macmillan & Co. Orr, James (1897). The Ritschlian Theology and the Evangelical Faith. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Schäfer, Rolf (1968). Ritschl: Grundlinien eines fast verschollenen dogmatischen Systems. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Schleiermacher, Friedrich D. E. (1928). The Christian Faith, ed. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. T&T Clark Archive. National Library of Scotland, Dep. 247. Traub, Friedrich (1931). ‘Vermittlungstheologie’, in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2nd edition, vol. 5, col. 1549. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Wendt, Hans Hinrich (1892). The Teaching of Jesus. Edinburgh: T&T Clark.

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14 The Scottish Theological Diaspora Canada Cairns Craig

In The Christian’s Knowledge of God, Walter Williamson Bryden, the son of Scottish Presbyterian migrants to Canada, insisted that, ‘The constant tendency of theology is to become a philosophy; at times theology assumes the form of a pure science of God and of those relations presumed to exist between God, man and the universe. Invidious as the distinction may appear to some, with such types of thinking theology has no essential relationship’ (Bryden 1940: 22). Bryden’s insistence on theology’s separation from philosophy was in inverse proportion to the history of theology in the reformed tradition in Canada, which had been profoundly bound up with the heritage of Scottish philosophy. Many of the institutions of higher education in Canada were Scottish in origin—Dalhousie, McGill, Queen’s (Kingston), Manitoba College, University of Saskatchewan—and the Common Sense philosophy of Thomas Reid provided the context for the study of religion. Common Sense philosophy came in some cases directly from Scotland, with the migration of Scots philosopher-theologians—such as John Clark Murray, who was appointed at Queen’s in Kingston in 1862 after training for the Free Church ministry in Edinburgh—but also indirectly as a result of many Canadians undertaking part of their education in Scotland—Bryden himself attended the Free Church College in Glasgow for a year. There was also a considerable influence from the United States where Common Sense had been part of the fabric of higher education and a key element in the religious education offered by institutions with a Presbyterian commitment, such as the Princeton Theological Seminary, founded in 1812, whose first professor, Archibald Alexander, had studied under Scottish theologian John Witherspoon at the College of New Jersey. Equally, James McCosh who had taken one of his degrees at Edinburgh University and was taught by Sir William Hamilton, migrated to take up the Presidency of the College of New Jersey in 1868, and was to prove a powerful influence on Canadian thinkers. As A. B. McKillop notes in his study of nineteenth-century Canadian thought, ‘The decades of the 1850s and 1860s marked the peak of the influence of the Scottish Common Sense philosophy upon the Anglo-Canadian mind. Virtually all professors of philosophy at English-speaking universities had been educated within the Common Sense tradition’ (McKillop 1979: 52–3).

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Two early textbooks for theological students, James Beavan’s Elements of Natural Theology (1850) and James Bovell’s Outlines of Natural Theology, for the Use of the Canadian Student (1859), leaned heavily on Common Sense philosophy because it allowed them to support both the traditions of revealed religion and the truths of empirical science. This combination was given additional validation by Sir William Hamilton’s edition of Reid’s works, which began to appear in 1846. Hamilton’s considerable influence in North America was noted in a letter to Hamilton’s biographer, John Veitch, by Noah Porter, Professor of Moral Philosophy and Metaphysics at Yale: Hamilton was so learned that he could not but command respect. He was critical enough to inspire confidence. He was daring enough to satisfy the aspirations of the most adventurous. He was wise and solid enough to quietly displace pretentious assertion by well-reasoned truth, and to effectually set aside ambitious rhapsody by discriminating logic. While he has not by any means been the only teacher of this generation – while his own writings have directed and encouraged us to study the philosophers of the Continent – yet his influence has been most potent to repress what might otherwise have been magniloquent pretension, and to stimulate these who but for him would have been discouraged by uncertainty and bewildered by scepticism. (Veitch 1859: 427)

Through Hamilton and McCosh, eighteenth-century Scottish philosophy was seen still to address the needs—and set aside the doubts—of a society to which Presbyterian Christianity had made itself central. Scots were a minority fraction of the Canadian population but they exerted control over many of the key areas of the Canadian economy. Pierre Berton, for instance, suggests that their prominence came from an ethic in which it was work, save and study; study, save and work. The Irish outnumbered them as they did the English, but the Scots ran the country. Though they formed only one-fifteenth of the population they controlled the fur trade, the great banking and financial houses, the major educational institutions and, to a considerable extent, the government. (Quoted in Klempa 1994: 2)

Berton was commenting on the career of Sir George Stephen, President of the Bank of Montreal and a founder of the Canadian Pacific Railway, but what he gestures to is an important feature of Scottish migration to North America. Most Scots were not a ‘diaspora’ in the sense that that word has been applied to Jews or Armenians: they were not victims fleeing violence (even if this might be true of some Scots cleared from their traditional lands). The majority of Scots migrants chose to leave their homeland and set about recreating the institutions by which Scotland’s identity had been maintained since the Union of 1707—a church and a

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school system devoted to encouraging the literacy that made Bible study possible; colleges for the training of ministers; universities that were geographically dispersed, often including a medical school and a botanic garden. Scottish migrants were not a diaspora dreaming of a return to the homeland: they were, to adopt another Greek term for migrants, xeniteians, whose business was to re-found the institutions of the homeland in their host land and make those the central pillars of a new society. The building of institutions based on Scottish models rapidly brought Scots into conflict not only with the Anglican community, which regarded itself as the only ‘established’ church in the Canadas, but with the increasing numbers of Roman Catholics, both in the traditional French-speaking areas of Quebec and in the new settlements in Upper Canada. There was also conflict, however, between the different strands of Scottish Presbyterianism: some demanded an official role and state support for the Church of Scotland equivalent to that provided to the Church of England, but many who belonged to seceder communities were committed to ‘voluntaryism’, resisting any dependence of the church on the state. The tensions between these strands can be seen in the career of Thomas McCulloch (1776–1843), who migrated to Nova Scotia in 1803. King’s College at Windsor was at the time the province’s single institution of higher education but was effectively open only to Anglicans. McCulloch set out to create an alternative educational system that would serve the dissenting community, and Pictou Academy was finally opened in 1818 with McCulloch as Principal: that success was to initiate a long-running dispute about whether it should be officially under the control of the Church of Scotland or whether it should be independent of the established church. It brought McCulloch, who wanted to train ministers from among the Canadian population, into conflict with the Glasgow Colonial Society, which saw its purpose as providing Scottish ministers for Scottish communities. Throughout his career, however, McCulloch used his pen to defend the Reformed tradition and in books such as Popery Condemned (1808) and Popery Again Condemned (1810), he illustrated from the Scriptures and the history of the early church the theological justification for the Reformed tradition. At the same time, he insisted on teaching science as part of the curriculum at the Academy, giving demonstrations of chemical experiments with equipment imported from Glasgow. McCulloch’s efforts failed to produce an institution of higher education at Pictou but his intellectual prominence in the province meant that when Dalhousie University, originally planned in 1818 on the model of Edinburgh, finally opened its doors to students in 1838, he was appointed its first president, fulfilling indirectly what had been the driving ambition of his academy at Pictou. It was because of their commitment to institution-building that Scots came to play such a disproportionate role in the development of Canada, and it was the need to create effective Presbyterian institutions that underpinned the efforts to unify the various strands of Presbyterianism in Canada: as early as 1831 the

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‘Synod of the Presbyterian Church of Canada in Connection with the Church of Scotland’ was formed by bringing together nineteen presbyteries scattered across both Ontario and Quebec (Handy 1976: 242). It was a further consolidation of these mergers that led to the establishment of Queen’s University in Kingston as a Church of Scotland institution in 1842. While the Canadian Church seemed to be moving towards unity, the Church in Scotland was moving towards division, culminating in the Disruption of 1843, and though there was no political reason for a disruption of the Church in Canada, a separate Free Church was established in sympathy with the Free Church’s evangelical and missionary zeal. The Disruption made available many livings in Scotland and there was an exodus of ministers keen to take up the places of those who had abandoned the established church: in Pictou, for instance, as many as six ministers departed together (Handy 1976: 242). Those who returned to the Church of Scotland were described at the 1844 Assembly as having returned to work in the vineyard of the homeland (Murison 1993: 138) but the members of the new Free Church regarded such return migrants as symptomatic of the established church’s substitution of material gain for spiritual commitment. Dr Robert Burns described how ‘men left their Canadian congregations, and started across the sea eager to have a share of the spoil’ and one of their abandoned parishioners envisaged their departure in biblical terms: ‘You see, sir, they were on our side, but Satan took them up to an exceeding high mountain and showed them, across the Atlantic, empty manses, good stipends, and comfortable glebes in Scotland and – they fled from us’ (Brown 1876: 560). Burns himself, however, travelled in the other direction, taking charge of the development of the Free Church in Canada and promoting a renewed evangelicalism, one which was given institutional backing by the launch of The Montreal Witness in 1845, a newspaper created in imitation of Hugh Miller’s The Witness, which had been so influential in evangelical causes in the period before the Disruption. The founder of the Montreal Witness, John Dougall, was a Scottish migrant who had been involved in organizations such as the French Canadian Missionary Society, which aimed at converting French Canadians to Protestantism. The Montreal Witness was sufficiently successful for Dougall to be invited to New York to create a US version of the newspaper. The evangelical missionary impulse of Dougall’s newspapers can be gathered from the following, from 11 May 1846: We have seen a map of the world in which the Heathen portions are black, the Mohammedan green, those under the Roman Catholic and Greek churches red, and those which are enlightened by the Bible – i.e. Protestants, white. Now, what proportion of the earth does the reader think has been thus enlightened during eighteen hundred years? A moment’s reflection will convince him that it is a very small one – a little of Europe and America, and scarcely a speck of Asia and Africa. The rest is chiefly enveloped in the blackness of total darkness, or, what is little better, illumined by rays of light coming through the distorted medium of

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the great impostor, or the Man of Sin. But this is not the worst: of the white portion, the condition is anything but satisfactory. In some parts, as in Germany and Switzerland, infidelity, under the name of rationalism, prevails; in others, such as the Southern States, slavery has obtained the mastery; in all, intemperance, profanity, licentiousness, and practical infidelity, abound. Nay, even among the members of evangelical churches, who do not constitute the tithe of a tithe of the world’s population, how much apathy, selfishness, and conformity to the world, is discoverable! Truly, the time for lamentations has not yet passed.

Dougall’s sense of an embattled religion in a world dominated by false beliefs was matched by his commitment to converting the world to his views: If any Christian will see where the blame on account of the present state of the world really lies, let him study Romans x. 13–16, where it is clearly laid down, that there cannot be faith in Christ where the gospel cannot be preached unless preachers – i.e. missionaries – be sent; and, therefore, the churches which withhold any thing that they might do towards the sending of the Gospel to every part of the world, are clearly to blame for the state of things which they deplore.

The xeniteian aim of The Montreal Witness was to see the institutions of a Scottish evangelical Christianity established throughout the world. The Montreal Witness might be populist in its evangelism, but the evangelical tradition was no less pronounced in Canada’s academic institutions: John William Dawson (1820–99) was a product of McCulloch’s Academy in Pictou whose xeniteian institution-building led him to McGill College in Montreal, of which he was President from 1855 until 1893, during which time it became one of the leading North American universities. Despite having trained for the ministry, Dawson was to establish himself as the foremost geologist of Canada, but one who believed he could accommodate the geological record to the biblical account of creation: in The Origin of the World According to Revelation and Science (1877), Dawson argued for a parallelism between the discoveries of geology and the biblical account of creation, with each of the major geological periods as described by Charles Lyell in his Principles of Geology (1830) corresponding to the days of creation as outlined in Genesis (Dawson 1877: 341), such that the ‘geological order of animal life . . . agrees perfectly with that sketched by Moses, in which the lower types are completed at once, and the progress is wholly in the higher’ (Dawson 1877: 347). And though the geological record is one of the death and extinction of species, Man is the capital of the column [of nature]; and if marred and defaced by moral evil, the symmetry of the whole is to be restored, not by rejecting him altogether, like the extinct species of the ancient world, and replacing him by another, but by re-casting him in the image of his Divine Redeemer. Man, though recently

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introduced, is to exist eternally. He is, in one or another state of being, to be witness of all future changes on the earth. (Dawson 1877: 358)

Dawson’s confidence in a mutually supportive relation between religion and science was challenged by Darwin’s account of evolution and in 1862 Dawson appointed a philosopher who had trained to be a minister of the Free Church, John Clark Murray, to teach at McGill and to give support to his religious views. Murray, who had studied under Sir William Hamilton at Edinburgh, based his curriculum on Hamilton’s and prepared a textbook for his students which he published as An Outline of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy. Murray described himself in the dedication as ‘a grateful student’ of Hamilton’s, but he had already published a series of articles in The Canadian Journal which provided a critique of the whole Scottish Common Sense tradition. Hamilton regarded his own philosophy as ‘being identical, in its fundamental positions, with that which is known in our histories of philosophy as the Scottish School’ (Murray 1867: 207), so that to understand Hamilton is, in effect, to understand the whole development of Scottish philosophy. Murray concurred with the French philosopher Victor Cousin that ‘the speculations of the Scottish school, especially in moral philosophy, have uniformly shewn the high moral influence of the old Presbyterianism, or, as Hamilton has expressed it, have been uniformly opposed to all destructive systems’ (Murray 1867: 210). But when the work of Reid is set alongside that of Berkeley, Murray suggests, it is clear that ‘Reid’s thinking never represents the speculative toil of a philosophic intellect, but merely the refined opinions of ordinary intelligence’ (Murray 1876: 121). Despite his claims, Reid had not managed to do away with the ‘representative theory’ of perception, nor had he managed to identify those elements which are necessary in consciousness because he depended upon what is ‘self-evident’ but was never able to produce the criterion by which ‘self-evidence’ was to be distinguished from the prejudice of particular individuals. ‘With this doctrine of first principles’, Murray concludes, ‘it is not to be wondered at that Reid has been so unsuccessful in what ought to have been the most prominent excellence of his system’; and if Reid has failed then so has Scottish philosophy, since ‘in Reid is included all that is distinctive of Scottish metaphysical philosophy previous to Hamilton’ (Murray 1867: 224). The philosophy which had been so entwined with the national version of the Reformed tradition had, according to Murray, proven inadequate to the task of supporting religion in the modern world. Murray himself continued to assert the truth of Christianity in works such as his A Handbook of Christian Ethics (1908) but he was able to do so because the failings of Common Sense had been redeemed by a more sophisticated Scottish philosophy, that of Edward Caird, whose idealism maintained the centrality of theology to philosophy but did so with a philosophical rigour entirely lacking in Reid: ‘Professor Caird’s recent work on Kant is an evidence that the teaching which issues from the chair of Reid goes to a

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length which he could never have surmised’ (Murray 1876: 125). Murray’s recognition of the overturning of Common Sense by idealism was to be given practical embodiment in the person of John Watson, a student of Caird’s who, like many others of Caird’s students, left Scotland to take up a professorship elsewhere—in Watson’s case arriving in Queen’s at Kingston in 1872. Watson’s philosophy built directly on Caird’s idealism, and read the history of philosophy and theology not as a debate about absolute truths but as the historical evolution towards an ever higher understanding of the rationality of the universe. For Watson, religion and the theory of evolution were not opposed to one another, for the history of religion could only be understood through the medium of evolution: ‘It can hardly be necessary at the present day to enter into an elaborate argument to prove that this history of man is inexplicable apart from the idea of evolution’, for ‘historical investigation has amply proved that, by slow and tentative steps, the primitive religions of Greece and Israel developed into monotheism, and that Christianity effected a synthesis of Greek and Jewish ideas by the idea of a principle implicit in both but wider and deeper than either; and especially that the development of theology has consisted in the reinterpretation of Christian ideas in the light of enlarged religious experience’ (Watson 1912: 22). Religion is not a singular revelation, nor can it be justified by a return to the original gospels and their presentation of a Christ shorn of all the accretions of later theological debate: religion, like everything else in a world shaped by evolution, is an accumulative process which runs counter to the eschatological expectations of the early Church: While we are thus enabled to get a clearer and truer vision of the person of Jesus, we only become all the more conscious that for us the whole atmosphere of ideas in which he lived and moved has so completely changed, that it is only by an effort of the historical imagination, and as a result of a minute and careful study of the ideas and modes of thought of his time, that we can enter with sympathy into his mind and teaching. The whole idea of a sudden and miraculous advent of a new order of things, to take place in the lifetime of those then living, has been made incredible to us, not only by its failure of accomplishment, but by its incompatibility with the gradual process of evolution that is one of the main presuppositions of our world of ideas. (Watson 1912: 7)

The basis of faith—for science, philosophy, and theology—lies, for Watson, in two principles: ‘firstly, that the universe is rational; and, secondly, that it is capable of being comprehended in its essential nature by us’, because unless we accept these presuppositions ‘we cannot advance a single step’ (Watson 1912: 25). To advance those steps, however, is to reshape our traditional conceptions both of the relationship between God and man and between good and evil. So, for Watson, God is ‘at once immanent and transcendent’; there is a ‘divine element which is involved in the nature of man, and a human element inseparable from the nature

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of God’ (Watson 1912: 289). The radical relativism of Watson’s philosophical theology is encapsulated in his notion of the ‘invisible church’, the church which exists entirely outwith any established form of religion; the ‘invisible church’, as Watson conceives it, cannot have a rigid and unbending creed, just because of that abounding life and movement which are its characteristics; but, on the other hand, the principle upon which it is based can only suffer development, never complete abrogation. That principle is the essential identity of man and God – a principle which is ever receiving a deeper and wider application, but which always preserves the same fundamental character. (Watson 1912: 303)

The ‘invisible church’ is a church always in evolution towards a higher order of understanding of its own nature and purpose. Watson was the first Canadian to give Gifford Lectures in Scotland and among the first Canadians to establish an international reputation in philosophy and theology: he has been credited with establishing the ‘unity in diversity’ model by which Canadian society presented its distinctive moral and political ethos in the twentieth century (Humphrey 1993: 1). But he was not the only Canadian to take up the philosophy of Edward Caird. Lily Dougall was the daughter of John Dougall of The Montreal Witness: brought up in a strict evangelical household, she rebelled and left Canada in the early 1880s to live with a relative in Edinburgh, where she attended the extramural lectures in English Literature and in Moral Philosophy given by David Masson and Henry Calderwood. She took courses in English, Greek, moral philosophy, logic, and metaphysics and was awarded the degree of LLA—Lady Literate in Arts—from St Andrews. She was in Edinburgh for the major theological event of the 1880s, the ‘trial’ of W. Robertson Smith as a result of the ‘heresy’ of his suggestion, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, that the books of the Bible should be regarded as historical documents rather than as transcendental truth. Without the certainty of Scripture there was, for the dominant figures in the Free Church, no foundation for faith. Lily Dougall sided with Robertson Smith rather than the Free Churchmen: ‘Dr. Rainy’s argument was this’, she wrote of the Principal of the Free Church College, ‘Prof Smith has bothered the church for five years; he has been impertinent to me and to others; away with this turbulent fellow and we will carefully consider afterwards whether his views are correct or not’. Of another Free Churchman she commented: ‘Mr. Wilson briefly expressed the argument thus: “If my neighbour digs in his own cellar, he may say he is not shaking my foundations, but when my walls are beginning to crack I have a right to stop him” . . . I do not wonder that Mr. Wilson is panic stricken if he rests on no firmer foundation than that’ (Dean 2007: 33). Christianity required alternative ways of discovering and experiencing its truth; equally, if the authorship of Scripture could not be attributed directly to God then

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other kinds of authorship might be less sinful than the evangelical tradition suggested. ‘The rage for novels in our day is something astonishing’, The Montreal Witness had declared in 1871, ‘it is in literature what ardent spirits are among drinks; and seems to affect the mind much as alcohol does the body’ (Dean 2007: 37). By the 1890s, Lily Dougall had sufficiently distanced herself from her family’s evangelical beliefs to become the author of a novel, Beggars All, which appeared in 1891, and was followed during the rest of the decade by seven more works of fiction, even though her publishers complained regularly about the amount of religion in them. Throughout the 1890s Lily Dougall commuted regularly between Montreal and Britain, establishing herself in Oxford where she became friends with both Edward Caird and with William Wallace, translator of Hegel. On her way back to Canada in 1894 she read Caird’s The Evolution of Religion (1893) and wrote to her friend Sophie Earp (with whom she was to live until her death): ‘I can’t ever say what that book of Caird’s has been to me. It has united things that seem hopelessly separate (although one felt that there must be a union some place) and it has given everything a place and a satisfactory place, in the big whole of things’ (Dean 2007: 91). Caird’s emphasis on the evolution of religion as itself the sign of a cosmos in which God ‘is conceived as manifesting Himself alike in the whole process of nature and in the process of spirit as it rises above nature’ (Caird 1893: 117), provided Dougall with an alternative to the condemnatory Christianity of her father, and in her novels she dramatizes her characters’ discovery of an immanent God whose concern is not for the saved but for the outcast sinner: ‘The life that was in them all was all of God, every impulse, every act. The energy that thrilled them through, by which they acted, if only as brutes act, by which they spoke, if only to lie, by which they thought and felt, even when thought and feeling were false and bad, the energy which upheld them was all of God’ (Dougall 1895: 50). Dougall believed that the real teachings of Christ demanded that she should engage, both as a Christian and a novelist, with the ‘fallen’ as well as the ‘pure’: The reproach from which Jesus suffered – that he was friendly with those who were not good – stands for much as an indication of how little he valued a “holy” life shut off from the companionship and temptation of sinners. When added to this we find that in not one of his precepts is there an echo of the Old Testament doctrine as to the necessity of shunning the ungodly, we have very strong evidence that he differed as entirely with psalmist and prophet when they teach separation as he did with Pharisee. (Dougall 1900: 84)

The words come from an anonymous theological study, Pro Christo et Ecclesia, published in 1900, which reviewers took to be the work of a male theologian but which was actually the first of a series of theological works that Dougall published during the following two decades, works which made her—though still anonymous—one of the most prominent theologians of the period, and a regular

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contributor to major theological periodicals. Pro Christo et Ecclesia challenged the established churches as being modern equivalents of the institutions Jesus had rejected: the modern churches are like the Pharisees who ‘yielded almost all the world’ to Satan in order to retain the purity of an elect, but if ‘we would be perfect, and walk as he walked, we must round out our powers of sympathy and understanding by intimacy with companions as diverse as the zealot and the publican, as St John and Judas’ (Dougall 1900: 93). The means of extending our powers of sympathy and fellowship are the arts which puritans decry: ‘Granted that the greater part of all works of artistic worth are ungodly, whose the fault? Art cannot be didactic; it can be wholesome and recreative; it can be true, holy, glorious . . . The power is there for your using; if you, the good have not used it, how can you expect the product to be good?’ (Dougall 1900: 132). Indeed, ‘the art decried by puritans comes closest in man to God by allowing us to imitate God’s act of creation, and the most intensely decried art, drama, is the one that is closest to God’ (Dougall 1900: 135). Dougall’s influence on contemporary theological debate was such that the home she shared with Sophie Earp in Cumnor became a centre for the ‘modernist’ wing of the Anglican Church, which came to be known as the ‘Cumnor Group’. Through the First World War this group would meet for several days of debate on a particular religious topic; they would then each write a chapter which would be submitted to another round of discussion before publication: this method of cooperative authorship produced Concerning Prayer (1916), Immortality (1917), and The Spirit (1919), each officially edited by the Oxford theologian B. H. Streeter, but each actually initiated and developed by ‘the author of Pro Christo et Ecclesia’. Dougall’s final collaborative publication had the ambitious subtitle of God and his Relation to Man Considered from the Standpoint of Philosophy, Psychology and Art (1919) and the philosophical point of view was put by A. S. Pringle-Pattison, whose ‘personal idealism’ was a development of Caird’s evolutionary conception of religion: ‘This idea of perfection disclosing its features gradually, as men become able to apprehend the vision, is the immanent God, the inspiring Spirit to whom all progress is due . . . It is the immanence of the transcendent, the presence of the infinite in our finite lives, that alone explains the essential nature of man’ (Streeter 1919: 22). By allowing a Scottish philosopher to set the context for her own contributions on ‘God in Action’ and ‘The Language of the Soul’, Dougall was acknowledging the Scottish context of her theology, with its insistence on a God who is personal and concerned with human beings as persons: as she put it in Christus Futurus (1907), ‘We believe, indeed, that the only philosophic basis for Christianity is the conception of personality as the ultimate factor in human thought; the belief that a personal intellect can alone interpret nature, as a personal intelligence could alone create nature’ (Dougall 1907: 36). John Watson and Lily Dougall were committed to a Christianity which, as Caird had argued, was the progressive revelation of God in history. The optimism

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of such a theology was, however, to be profoundly challenged by the First World War and by the apparent regression to barbarity of self-declared Christian nations. Throughout the later nineteenth century in Canada, other strands of Calvinist theology had continued to have their adherents and John Vissers suggests that four strands were represented in Knox College in Toronto, which continued to be the most important institution for the training of ministers in the reformed tradition: First, there was a confessional Calvinism represented by William MacLaren, who continued to rely on the Princeton theologians and the seventeenth-century Protestant scholastic, and who continued to employ Scottish Common Sense and Baconian inductive reasoning in theology. Secondly, there was a conservative Calvinism represented by William Caven, who, while continuing to affirm the great essential truths of the Reformed faith, nevertheless was willing to accept the accommodation of others to the new challenges. Thirdly, there was a progressive Calvinism which emerged among the younger and newer faculty . . . most of whom had been educated in Britain under Scottish liberal evangelical scholars, and who combined evangelical piety with historical critical study of the Bible and an idealist and Darwinian worldview . . . Fourthly, there was the liberal Calvinism of T. B. Kilpatrick who moved slightly further in the adoption of liberal Protestant theology and the social gospel. (Vissers 2011: 62–3)

The complexities of these various strands of Presbyterianism reflected the continuing divergences of the various groups who had combined to form the Presbyterian Church in Canada in 1875, and which would result, in 1925, in the formation of the United Church of Canada. Not everyone felt able to subscribe to that union, resulting in the formation of the Continuing Presbyterian Church. The Continuing Church had to define the ‘continuity’ which gave it justification and its major spokesperson was Walter Williamson Bryden, whose ‘neo-orthodox’ theology insistently sought to set aside all the accommodations between Christianity and philosophy since the seventeenth century and to recover what he believed to be the core of reformation theology: ‘There is . . . not a shred of evidence in the “sayings” of Jesus, in his moral teachings, his aphorisms, or in his parables,’ Bryden declared, ‘which would lead to the belief that He conceived the coming of the Kingdom, or an acquisition of knowledge of Himself as the Christ, under conditions which could be adapted to the modern idea of evolutionary process’ (Bryden 2011: 6). For Bryden, ‘Revelation . . . belongs strictly to the apocalyptic, eschatological category of thinking, a type of thinking which represents a view of life in utter incompatibility with the category of thinking and the view of life to which evolution and progress belong’ (Bryden 2011: 30). As such, there can be no accommodation with the kind of ‘Invisible Church’ beyond any instituted version of religion that had been proposed by John Watson; Christianity has nothing to do with notions of ‘development’ for,

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Both the faith and the Church originally, and with more or less consistency throughout their respective histories, have conceived of themselves as born out of and sustained in conditions strictly miraculous. That is to say, both claim to be the effects of a strictly eschatological, supernatural cause, and therefore any true interpretation we may apply to the nature of the same must of necessity begin with this as its presupposition. (Bryden 2011: 44)

Equally, Christianity must be understood not as one religion among many but as entirely unique: God’s revelation of himself through Christ means ‘that what utterly distinguishes revelation from religions as such, and, therefore, constitutes the greatness of the Christian faith, is precisely its uniqueness, therefore its utter exclusiveness, its definiteness and determinateness, its inevitable discrimination and differentiation and the absolute nature, the personal concreteness, of its challenge’ (Bryden 2011: 50). Bryden’s attempted return to the foundational principles of the Reformation is also an attempt to restore Canadian Christianity to its Scottish Calvinist roots and is indicative of just how deeply Scottish thought had been built into the foundations of Canadian culture.

Bibliography Brown, Thomas (1876). Annals of the Disruption. Edinburgh: Macniven and Wallace. Bryden, Walter Williamson (1940 [2011]). The Christian’s Knowledge of God. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co. Caird, Edward (1893). The Evolution of Religion, vol. II. Glasgow: James Maclehose & Sons. Dawson, J. W. (1877). Origin of the World According to Revelation and Science. New York: Harper & Brothers. Dean, Joanna (2007). Religious Experience and the New Woman: The Life of Lily Dougall. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dougall, Lily (1895). The Zeit-Geist. London: Hutchinson. Dougall, Lily (1900). Pro Christo et Ecclesia. London and New York: Macmillan. Dougall, Lily (1907). Christus Futurus. London: Macmillan. Falconer, Robert (1927). ‘Scottish Influence in the Higher Education of Canada’, Proceedings and Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, third series, vol. XXI, sect II: 7–20. Handy, Robert T. (1976). A History of the Churches in the United States and Canada. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Humphrey, Christopher (1993). ‘John Watson: The Philosopher of Canadian Identity?’ Historical Papers: Canadian Society of Church History. https://churchhistcan. files.wordpress.com, accessed 23 January 2018.

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Klempa, William (ed.) (1994). The Burning Bush and a Few Acres of Snow: The Presbyterian Contribution to Canadian Life and Culture. Ottawa: Carleton University Press. McKillop, A. B. (1979). A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Victorian Era. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Murison, Barbara C. (1993). ‘The Disruption and the Colonies of Scottish Settlement’, in Stewart J. Brown and Michael Fry (eds.), Scotland in the Age of the Disruption. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 135–50. Murray, Rev. J. Clark (1867). ‘Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy: An Exposition and Criticism’, The Canadian Journal, New Series, no. LXIV (January): 207–24. Murray, John Clark (1870). Outline of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy. Boston: Gould and Lincoln. Murray, John Clark (1876). ‘The Scottish Philosophy’, Macmillan’s Magazine, vol. XXXIX (December). Streeter, B. H. (ed.) (1919). The Spirit: God and His Relation to Man Considered from the Standpoint of Philosophy, Psychology and Art. London: Macmillan. Veitch, John (1859). Memoir of Sir William Hamilton, Bart. Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons. Vissers, John A. (2011). The Neo-Orthodox Theology of W. W. Bryden. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co. Watson, J. R. (1912). Interpretation of Religious Experience, vol. II. Glasgow: Maclehose & Sons. Wilson, Daniel (1861). ‘The President’s Address’, The Canadian Journal, Ser. 2, VI (March).

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15 The Scottish Theological Diaspora Australasia Peter Matheson

Diaspora communities, with one foot in two worlds, tended to be both more innovative and more conservative than their home base. As exiles they wanted to ‘keep the faith’, and yet found in practice that they had to keep adapting it. The emigrants to Australasia did not at all sail away from their Covenanting heritage, now closely wedded to their recent experience of the Disruption. On the contrary, many hoped to earth it more authentically in a new land. ‘When they reached the new land, they rebuilt the old one.’¹ They saw themselves as a ‘pilgrim people’, singing the Lord’s song in quite new waters. The concept of pilgrimage remains significant to this day for Australasian Protestants. Yet nostalgia had to be mingled with pragmatism when Christmas was celebrated in the blazing sun and when Easter signalled the onset of autumn. Heart and mind could pull in very different directions, and the convictions of the first generation did not necessarily hold for their grandchildren. Beliefs, values, and cultural and religious practices from the old country were passionately embraced one moment, only to be quietly revised the next. Tracing Scottish theological influences in Australia and New Zealand can, therefore, be somewhat counter-intuitive, especially from the mid-twentieth century on, when the focus of much theological endeavour has been the development of a contextual, Australian or New Zealand theology, one which takes account, inter alia, of Aboriginal and Maori perspectives. Churches in both countries, too, have had to operate within an increasingly, sometimes militantly secular society, though their most eminent poets, Les Murray and James K. Baxter respectively, have continued to speak the language of faith. Nineteenth-century Scottish emigrants to Australia or New Zealand, after up to six months at sea, found themselves quite literally at the other end of the world. Emigration, after all, was a push/pull business, the dysfunctional nature of the old world being a significant factor in the often heart-breaking decision to make what was then a final break with family and hearth and all that was familiar.

¹ Ian Crichton Smith.

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Economically, socially, and culturally the settlers had to adapt to new landscapes, conditions, and roles, and to a much less homogeneous and structured society. This was not easy, emotionally or spiritually. The women, even more than the men, soon realized that there could be no going back. Jane Bannerman, daughter of Thomas Burns, the first minister in Otago, in south-east New Zealand, cherished her vivid childhood memories: ‘In after days, when we gathered round the grand log fire in the dear old Manse in Dunedin, we talked, oh, so often, of the Disruption days’ (Matheson 1994: 16). But she knew that the umbilical cord had been severed forever. Immediate neighbours in a scattered population were often Anglicans, Roman Catholics, Methodists, or even working-class folk alienated from any church, as was particularly true of the significant convict and ex-convict population in Australia. Presbyterianism was one denomination among others. In the wake of the settlers, or sharing the ship with them, came their ministers, who were overwhelmingly of an evangelical persuasion. The nineteenth century, as the great imperialist and missionary era, had already brought far-flung countries to the attention of Scotland’s churches, and, not least for evangelicals, it had signalled a commitment to indigenous peoples as well. The Maori, in particular, were a focus for evangelical concern, though more so in England than in Scotland. The Disruption and the subsequent formation of the Free Church had also encouraged a restlessness of spirit and a readiness for institutional innovation. The founding days of Presbyterianism in Australasia, after all, coincided with the heyday of Free Church expansion in Scotland. The churches, whether Presbyterian, Anglican, or Catholic, which began to emerge in Australia and New Zealand may have taken their ‘standards’, their patterns of theology and piety, their models for worship and ethics from ‘home’, yet they were also conscious of being in a different situation. Demographically, for one thing, their membership was young and active, mentally and physically. The old and those set in their ways did not emigrate. The thinly populated countryside and the small rural towns made nonsense of the traditional ecclesiastical demarcations in Scotland. Free Church and Established Church members worshipped together, joined forces to call a minister, to build a church, to organize a Presbytery. By day the men felled the bush, broke in new ground in the paddocks, hacked out roads, set out for the goldfields. For the women life was particularly tough, an elemental struggle for survival. None of this encouraged the luxury of theological speculation. Yet there was an unmistakable hunger to put down roots, to frame this life in a new land in a meaningful way. Access to the ordinances of the church, to the means of grace, was as critical for survival as the provision of bodily sustenance. Church buildings sprouted up everywhere as markers of transcendence. ‘Church extension’ was not an optional extra where previously there was no provision at all for church life. Education, too, was a high priority, for which financial sacrifices were gladly made; schools for girls as well as boys appeared with remarkable

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speed, as did colleges and universities. Without pushing this argument too far, one could argue that the pragmatic idealism of the Free Church, its tough focus on social and pastoral priorities, fitted rather well into the challenging context of the young colonial communities. Presbyterian churches, then, were conscious of being exodus communities, and a discourse of liberation was natural within the Free (!) Church. The Disruption, the domestic exile which had preceded the great overseas exile, had shifted historical and theological perspectives, though, of course, not always for the better. A degree of cultural triumphalism is hard to miss. The personality cult embodied in the Scots Worthies, a book possessed by countless laypeople as well as by their ministers, had its dubious side. Nicholas Dickson’s The Kirk and its Worthies, reissued in 1914, was a runaway success, with its tear-jerking illustrations of eviction from kirk and manse, and its idealized depictions of elders, ministers, and precentors. Transplants in an alien soil, the emigrants were very sure of themselves. Faith and culture were inseparable. They were here by God’s will. The commitment to ‘Christ, Crown and Covenant’ ran deep. The Moderate tradition, on the other hand, was in the minority. Most saw themselves as ‘liberals’, by which was meant a robust individualism, a strong moral code, and a whiff of crusading evangelicalism. They saw themselves as part of a tidal wave of evangelical Protestantism that would sweep aside paganism, ignorance, and superstition. Catholics were altogether outside the pale, and Anglicans, dubbed the ‘little enemy’ in Dunedin, New Zealand, were felt to be sadly lacking in any sense of the sole Headship of Christ. The evangelicals brought their libraries with them: commentaries by Calvin, the works of Knox and Calderwood, the writings of the Puritans and of the seventeenth-century controversialists, nineteen-volume editions of Thomas Chalmers, not to mention astonishingly comprehensive collections of Disruption pamphlets, some 700 of which can be found in one Australasian library alone. These pamphlets promoted Secession or Established Church points of view as well as those of the Free Church. Many were written by Thomas Chalmers, or by the church historian William Cunningham. The titles of the books in manses highlighted the ten years’ conflict, the struggle for independence, and Free Church principles. Coffee-table books about the Covenanting martyrs, and about Disruption leaders were common, and testify to more popular reading. John Johnston’s Treasury of the Scottish Covenant was sent from Dunoon in 1897 to James McLaren in Dunedin, ‘with the best Christian regards of his Scotch cousin’. The works of Hugh Miller, a noted geologist in Scotland and a gifted apologist for the Free Church, were widely read. He was confident that the young faith would sweep everything before it with science, commerce, the printing press, and the protection of the British Empire as its allies. We can speak, perhaps, of a sort of ‘folk Calvinism’ in the colonies, a robust sense of belonging to an apostolic

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succession going back to John Knox, Samuel Rutherford, and Thomas Chalmers. These Presbyterians saw themselves as ‘the seeds of future times, the origins of future nations’ as the Colonial Committee of the Free Church put it in 1851. This was Calvinism kitted out in kilt and sporran. Psalm books and the poetry of Rabbie Burns went hand in hand. A. C. Cheyne’s now classical evocation of The Transforming of the Kirk, based on lectures first delivered in Knox Theological Hall, Dunedin, reminds us, however, of the great theological issues of the Victorian era in Scotland: the competing claims of science and theology, the challenge of evolutionary perspectives, the nature of the biblical authority, the relevance of the Westminster Standards, the understanding of the atonement (Cheyne 1983). Laypeople and ministers in Australia and New Zealand were by no means insulated from these debates in Scotland and in America, and this could lead to torrid conflicts, fought out in countless kirk sessions and Presbyteries (and homes!), as deeply held convictions were challenged by the new disciplines of historical criticism, comparative religion, and science. Theology in Australasia was nurtured from two main streams. The distance from the old country and the need for intelligent ministers led remarkably early to the foundation of theological halls, modelled on the Free Church colleges. A more surprising feature, however, of colonial towns such as Melbourne or Dunedin was the appetite among laypeople for public lectures and for debates on issues such as the nature of the atonement, the implications of the historico-critical method, the relationship between science and religion. These lectures were extensively reported in the columns of the local press, and pamphlets wars, to a large extent replicating the currents of thought and controversy back in Scotland, began to vie for the soul of Presbyterians in the colonies. In these small exile communities, personality clashes were fiercer and the tensions led in a minority of cases to bitter splits in congregations and to accusations of heresy, on the one hand, or hidebound dogmatism on the other. Battle-lines were gradually drawn up between orthodox Calvinists such as the Rev. James MacGregor (1829–94), at one time a professor in New College Edinburgh, who had been distinguished in Scotland by his scything polemic against opponents such as Norman Macleod on the question of the observation of the Sabbath. MacGregor was a popular parish minister in the coastal town of Oamaru in Otago. He had many strings to his bow, including a passion for Gaelic history and literature and a flair for high-flown language: he hailed the Resurrection, for example, as ‘the outstretched wings of a humanity fully formed’. He was formidably well read in the Classics as well as in Scripture and Reformed theology, and he also cited contemporary German critical scholars, though not always correctly! He kept in close touch with Charles Hodge and the Princeton School of Theology, notable for its sturdy defence of biblical infallibility. In the colonial context he was a large fish in a rather diminutive pool (Keddie 2016).

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His was a subtle and differentiated mind. His two-volume Apology of the Christian Religion (1891), today unread and unreadable, illustrates both his strengths and his weaknesses. Relying, as he believed, on Reid’s Common Sense philosophy, he regarded the miracles of Jesus as clear proofs of his divinity in the ‘open court of the world’s judgement’. He abhorred the scepticism of Hume and Gibbon, whose rejection of supernaturalism reduced humanity to a ‘calculating machine’. He found the most elegant and sophisticated arguments to oppose anything smacking of accommodation to the spirit of the age, the introduction of hymns to worship, for example, or union with the more Broad Church variety of Presbyterianism to the north of Otago and Southland. His revelational positivism pitted him against the ‘atheistic dogmatism’ of biblical criticism, and he was a doughty defender of the Westminster Confession, though not as an absolute, unchangeable norm of faith. He quarried the Bible for proof texts, and while the Westminster Standards furnished the parameters for theological reflection within them, he found considerable freedom for thought and action. In his pamphlet, the Day of Salvation (1888) he launched a ferocious attack on Professor William Salmond, the first professor of the Dunedin Theological Hall and a gifted communicator and public lecturer whose pamphlet The Reign of Grace, frequently reprinted, had argued against the ‘intellectual terrorism’ of the classical Calvinist view of limited atonement. Salmond’s more liberal views, however, despite falling far short of the profundity of John McLeod Campbell’s theology in Scotland, gradually won the upper hand; the main thrust of McLeod Campbell’s understanding of the atonement became widely accepted (Matheson 2000). A columnist in the Otago Daily Times on the other hand described MacGregor as ‘a rhinoceros doing the Highland Fling’. The secular press in the colonies, while remarkably generous in its coverage of sermons and addresses, tended to keep up a withering critique of the ‘mind-shattering creeds of the Scot’, of anything that it regarded as bigotry. It may be fair comment that if MacGregor and his allies had prevailed, Presbyterianism would have been reduced to an embittered sub-culture in New Zealand. The influence in Australasia of the Glasgow theology of John Caird (1820–98) offers, on the other hand, an intriguing contrast to that of MacGregor. Caird had remained in the Established Church after the Disruption and came under the spell of Hegelian idealism. His famous sermon, ‘Religion in Common Life’, initially preached before Queen Victoria, exemplified his disdain for theological dogmatism. In 1863 he became Professor of Divinity in Glasgow and he exercised a considerable influence on many ministers in New Zealand and Australia. Charles Strong, for example, was in 1875 appointed on his recommendation to the prestigious Scots Church in central Melbourne. Strong’s social and educational concerns and his theological liberalism attracted a wide cross-section of influential and intelligent laypeople and his influence extended well beyond his own congregation.

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In 1880 his measured article on the historical development of the doctrine of the atonement in the Victorian Review stirred up controversy and accusations of heresy, and eventually sparked off a much wider debate on the issues of freedom of conscience, the Westminster Confession, and the relation of science and religion. Traditionalist ministers of Free Church origin attacked his views in the Melbourne Presbytery and then in the Assembly of the Victorian Church, deploying tactics of dubious constitutional legitimacy in the process. The Moderate tradition had always been weak in Australasia, and Strong was forced to resign, despite the firm support of his own congregation and much sympathy within the wider Melbourne community. John Caird wrote to Strong in November 1883 from Glasgow expressing sympathy for him in view of these ‘renewed vexations from the Philistines’.² Strong may have lost this battle, but from the 1880s a steady drift away from what one might call hard-line Calvinism is noticeable within Australian and New Zealand Presbyterianism. The authority of the Westminster Standards was never openly challenged but it was gradually weakened. Declaratory Acts, such as that of Victoria in 1882, leaving room for liberty of opinion on matters not deemed essential to the faith, were modelled on those of the United Presbyterian Church in 1879 and the Free Church in Scotland in 1892. The methods and some of the conclusions of higher criticism were embraced by a growing number of ministers and laypeople. Belief in a literal Hell weakened. Religious seriousness now went hand in hand with an openness to the findings of the new biblical and scientific scholarship. The triumphal tour by Principal Rainy of Australasia in 1888–9 illustrated this steady shift to what is frequently described as a ‘liberal evangelicalism’, with its cautious openness to historical methods and to scientific discovery, and a nascent awareness of structural injustice in society. Rainy’s buoyant optimism about the future was typical of the time. In his address at the Central Jubilee Festival in Melbourne he declared: ‘Why should we not think that better and greater times for Christ’s Church are coming yet than any times she has yet seen?’ (Simpson 1909: II, 102).³ He remained impatient, however, of Broad Church views, and his denunciation of Dean Stanley’s ‘colourless creed’ in his Three Lectures on the Church of Scotland (1872) had evangelical heads nodding throughout the colonies. The growing disinclination of Australian and New Zealand Presbyterians to insist on the verbal inspiration of the Bible was due, at least in part, to the influence of Scottish theologians and biblical scholars such as John Caird, A. B. Davidson, and Robertson Smith. The name of the Scottish Old Testament

² See Badger (1971: 192). ³ Rainy was seen primarily as an ecclesiastical statesman, though also: ‘a scholar who grapples every now and then with questions of theology, history and ethics’. See The New Zealand Herald, 3 August 1889, p. 5.

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professor, George Adam Smith, often cropped up in sermons. Andrew Harper (1844–1936) who lectured in biblical studies in the Theological Hall in Melbourne, and from 1902 in St Andrews College Sydney, had studied in New College. He was greatly influenced by Davidson, by his own fellow-student, Robertson Smith, and by McLeod Campbell’s understanding of the atonement. Like many he combined this openness to biblical criticism with a warm evangelicalism. The Scottish influence, however, was by no means the only one. In many instances one can trace the direct influence on Australasian theologians of German scholars such as D. F. Strauss, and later of Albrecht Ritschl, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and Adolf Harnack. Revivalist movements and Romantic poets and novelists played their part, as well, in encouraging people to attend to the inner voice of conscience or conviction, to listen to their own religious experience. Carlyle, Coleridge, and Browning were widely read. The sermon preached by James Chisholm in 1905 to the Maori Hill congregation in Dunedin is characteristic. It cited George Adam Smith on the pre-scriptural origins of the biblical text, quoted Matthew Arnold, Emerson, J. M. Barrie, and Tennyson, while also evoking the memory of the heroic Covenanting martyrs and the fiery baptism of the Disruption. One notable exemplar of this more liberal spirit was the Rev. James Gibb (1857–1935), who for decades was probably the best-known clergyman in New Zealand. He was born in Aberdeen, of working-class parents, and brought up in the United Presbyterian Church. He emigrated to Melbourne in 1881 and had notable success in his ministry in the working-class suburb of Footscray. At the early age of 29 he was called in 1886 to the First Church of Otago, in Dunedin, and his fame as an outstanding preacher soon spread. Although he had been known as a strong advocate of Calvinist orthodoxy, he was attracted to the reformist group around William Salmond and the fiery Irishman Rutherford Waddell, a crusader for social justice. Increasingly critical of a rigid adherence to the Westminster Standards and open to the insights of biblical criticism, he found himself accused of heresy. He shook these accusations off, however, and as a leading advocate of union with the Northern Presbyterian Church, he was to become the first Moderator of the united Presbyterian Church in New Zealand in 1901. He moved in 1903 to St John’s Church in central Wellington and throughout his career was a passionate crusader for education, home mission, bible teaching in schools, and, after the First World War, for the League of Nations. While he was certainly influenced by the movements in Scottish theology, his own pastoral experience and his embrace of Christian Socialism appear to have been the main factors in his gradual adherence to a more liberal theology. He had to cope in First Church, Otago with dogged opposition from leading elders to the introduction of the organ, for example, and the personal tragedy of three of his children dying in infancy may well have prompted him to a more inclusive understanding of the atonement.

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In New South Wales in Australia the Presbyterian Church had begun by identifying itself as a Scottish church, indeed it had drawn its ministers overwhelmingly from Scotland, while Presbyterians in Victoria had relied much more on ministers trained in its own Theological Hall. By the time of the First World War, however, Presbyterianism in New South Wales was increasingly aware of its own Australian identity, and had attracted a more varied, if overwhelmingly middle-class, membership. Specifically Scottish influences were evident, however, in the appointment to St Andrews College, Sydney in 1915 of Dr Samuel Angus, a gifted and controversial New Testament lecturer. Professors H. R. Mackintosh of Edinburgh and James Denney of Glasgow had warmly commended him to the New South Wales Commission of Assembly. Although only 32 years old, the Ulsterman had studied in Princeton, New College Edinburgh, and Berlin, and had already made a name for himself as the author of The Environment of Early Christianity. By all accounts Angus was energetic and highly personable and his liberalizing influence spread rapidly through the courts of the church. His own warm piety, focused on the historical Jesus, and his ‘Irish fervour’ commended itself to congregations and, among others, to the members of the Student Christian Movement. He worked hard to raise the educational level of the ministry. His eventually successful campaign to allow the discipline of theology to be taught at the secular Sydney University was one of which he was rightly proud. Yet he remained rather aloof from Australian society and culture, often spending up to six months abroad each year. His 1929 D.D. from Glasgow University was one of his many honorary degrees. Concerns, however, began to be aired in conservative circles about his orthodoxy and what many regarded as his Platonizing individualism. His sweeping condemnation in 1934 of the Trinity, the virgin birth, and the physical Resurrection appears to have been due primarily to the theology of Dean Inge, and of the Berlin theologians Deissmann and Harnack. Scottish influences were less evident. Rather remarkably he survived successive campaigns to dismiss him. The Angus controversy revealed, however, that a rift had opened up between fundamentalist and modernist movements in the New South Wales church. The passionate antiCommunism of Angus actually led him for a while into a pro-Hitler stance. Direct German influences were also competing with Scottish theological initiatives in New Zealand. One very influential figure in New Zealand theology, for example, Professor John Dickie, drew heavily on German scholarship, especially that of Ritschl. Dickie was cautiously innovative, breaking away from strict Calvinism with his so-called ‘New Theology’. His widely read Organism of Christian Truth (1931) cannot be categorized as liberal. Dogmatic pronouncements, he suggested, were best taken as suggestive indicators of the truth, and should not be absolutized. Faith was nourished from a blessed sense of the presence of God (Roxborogh 1996).

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The furious controversies around Samuel Angus in New South Wales were eventually calmed by the moderate neo-orthodoxy of Professor John McIntyre from Edinburgh, who was appointed to St Andrews College in 1945. McIntyre, a keen advocate of George MacLeod’s Iona Community and an admirer of Reinhold Niebuhr, introduced comprehensive courses on the Trinity and on Christology and gradually won over hearts and minds. His influential book on St. Anselm and his Critics: A Re-interpretation of the Cur Deus homo was written during his time in Sydney. McIntyre’s undisputed success in debates with the prominent rationalist Professor John Anderson also made him ‘the foremost apologist of the postwar era in New South Wales’ (Emilsen 1991: 276). Long after John McIntyre had returned to Scotland his Shape of Christology remained influential. Still more influential for a whole generation of ministers were the writings of Donald Baillie, especially his treatment of Christology in God Was in Christ and his irenic Theology of the Sacraments. Frank Nichol, Professor of Systematic Theology in Knox College, Dunedin (1963–86) had studied under Baillie in St Andrews and introduced his thought to his students. Donald Baillie’s brother, John Baillie, was equally significant. His role in the memorable 1942 Commission for the Interpretation of God’s Will in the Present Crisis, and his leadership role in the infant World Council of Churches marked him out as a world churchman. Baillie travelled to New Zealand for Presbyterianism’s 1948 centenary celebrations. His Invitation to Pilgrimage, and his devotional classic, A Diary of Private Prayer, were widely read, as was his Idea of Revelation in Recent Thought. The Baillies represented for many Australasian Presbyterians a sane and winsome alternative to the extremes of liberalism and neo-orthodoxy. Their commitment to social justice, to ecumenism and a reasoned advocacy of the faith found particular resonance in SCM circles. Another household name was the popular Glasgow biblical theologian William Barclay. A whole TV series in New Zealand was devoted to him. His carefully tooled studies on the mind of Paul or of Jesus, or on the Beatitudes, bound in their familiar red covers, opened up to laypeople as well as to ministers a contextual approach to the New Testament, though he shunned form criticism and the German hermeneutical school. Among ministers the writings of the Scottish New Testament scholars William Manson and T. W. Manson were also well known. The prominent New Zealand theologian J. M. Bates noted, however, that in the post-war years the main theological influences on the churches had been those of Barth, Brunner, Bultmann, and Tillich. One might add Bonhoeffer, who was also widely read. Possibly no Scottish theological influence in Australia and New Zealand was so great in the post-war period as that of the Iona Community. George Macleod himself, its founder, toured Australia and New Zealand in 1948, packing churches and town halls with his riveting sermons and his genial skills as a story-teller. Friends and associates of the Iona Community had prepared the way for him. He

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came across as a modern-day Elijah, a truly prophetic figure. Undergirding his advocacy of socialism, pacifism, and ecumenism lay a strongly incarnationalist theology. Countless Australians and New Zealanders still pilgrim to Iona, bringing back with them rafts of song-books, worship-books, and a vision of a church which went back beyond the Reformation to a (somewhat romanticized) Celtic tradition. The Church of Scotland’s Book of Common Order, in its successive editions—the 1994 one being edited by John Bell, a prominent member of the Iona Community, who also edited the music of the fourth edition of the Church Hymnary—helped to ease Presbyterianism in both countries into a more catholic understanding of worship. Attention began to be paid to the liturgical year, to a disciplined use of the lectionary, to the dramatic and participatory nature of worship, and to a more frequent celebration of Communion. The robust advocacy and exercise of public theology by Duncan Forrester and then Will Storrar in New College in Scotland led to another significant development: the establishment of the discipline in the Parramatta college of the Uniting Church of Australia in New South Wales and in the University of Otago in New Zealand. This has enriched the ecclesiastical landscape in both countries, and its interdisciplinary nature has filled an important niche in the Australasian universities and in the wider society. In recent decades, therefore, the influence of Scottish theology has continued to be significant. Professor Ruth Page, appointed Principal of New College in 1996, is an interesting example of the mutual influence of Australasia and Scotland on one another. Her God and the Web of Creation was dedicated to her fellow teacher in Tauranga, New Zealand, who first kindled her interest in ecological issues. The prominent Melbourne advocate of what one might term clinical theology, Dr Francis Macnab, studied in Aberdeen, and named the Cairnmillar Institute he founded in honour of his Scottish mentors, Cairns and Millar. Links with the divinity faculties in Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and St Andrews universities remain, but they are now balanced by connections with Durham University, King’s College London, with Cambridge and Oxford. The ecumenical movement, particularly strong in Australia and New Zealand, opened up new horizons. American influences have been particularly evident in pastoral theology, and a very decisive factor has been the turn to Pacific and Asian theology. Attention to indigenous Australian and Maori theology has also steadily grown. The colonial cringe has disappeared, then, but it seems unlikely that the auld alliance of Scottish and Australasian theology will ever disappear, though in future it will be characterized by mutuality and exchange. When Elizabeth Templeton, for example, visited Australia for the World Council of Churches meeting in Canberra in 1991, she returned home with a vivid sense that theology in European garb could no longer be exported without remainder to Australasia. ‘There was no hiding the pain and anger of voices we, in Scotland, don’t often hear much. There was the voice of Australian aboriginal people, forcing us to acknowledge the

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shame of our white northern “civilisation” ’ (Matheson and Hulbert 2019: 147). And there was the voice of Asian Christians saying in no uncertain terms that they would discover Christ in their own way. The 500th anniversary of Calvin’s birth excited considerable interest in both Australia and New Zealand, leading to a number of conferences and publications in both countries in all of which there was recognition of the Scottish heritage. The World Reformed Alliance also continues to provide an umbrella under which Scottish, Australian, and New Zealand theologians meet, interact, and face up to common theological, ecclesiastical, and political challenges. ‘Folk Calvinism’, Presbyterianism in kilt and sporran, has been replaced, one can conclude, by a less ethnocentric creed, more self-critical, more contextual, but still proud of its Scottish heritage. The transformation is a welcome one.

Bibliography Badger, C. R. (1971). The Reverend Charles Strong and the Australian Church. Melbourne: Arcada Press. Breward, Ian (2001). A History of the Churches in Australasia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cheyne, A. C. (1983). The Transforming of the Kirk: Victorian Scotland’s Religious Revolution. Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press. Emilsen, Susan E. (1991). A Whiff of Heresy: Samuel Angus and the Presbyterian Church in New South Wales. Sydney: UNSW Press. Emilsen, Susan E. and William W. Emilsen (eds.) (2000). Mapping the Landscape: Essays in Australian and New Zealand Christianity. Festschrift in Honour of Professor Ian Breward. New York and Oxford: Peter Lang. Keddie, John. (2016). James MacGregor: Preacher, Theologian and Defender of the Faith. JWK Books, n.p. McEldowney, Dennis (ed.) (1990). Presbyterians in Aotearoa, 1840–1990. Wellington: Presbyterian Church of New Zealand. Matheson, Peter (1994). ‘150 Years After: The Influence of the Scottish Disruption of 1843 on New Zealand’, British Review of New Zealand Studies 7: 7–24. Matheson, Peter (2000). ‘Transforming the Creed’, in Stewart. J. Brown and George Newlands (eds.), Scottish Christianity in the Modern World. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 119–32. Matheson, Peter and Alastair Hulbert (eds.) (2019). In Your Knowing is your Loving. Elizabeth Templeton – Prophet of Our Times. Edinburgh: Birlinn Press. Roxborogh, John W. (1996). ‘John Dickie 1875–1942’, in Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 3. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 134–5. Simpson, Patrick Carnegie (1909). The Life of Principal Rainy, 3 vols. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

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16 Ronald Gregor Smith George Pattison

Life and Work: An Overview In thinking about the nature and practice of theology we have learned to be attentive to the institutions in which and for which theological work is carried out. Prominent amongst these institutions are the Church and the Academy. In the days when most of those lecturing or pursuing research in theology faculties were ordained ministers it was not always easy to tell the difference. Today, however, even where ‘theology’ remains part of the faculty or departmental nomenclature, this difference is increasingly striking and it has become hard to understand what is going on in theology if we are not aware of the tensions and pressures that each of the Church and the Academy is dealing with. But Church and Academy do not exhaust the institutions of theology and a third, arguably no less important for the development and shape of modern theology, is publishing. Without publishers to provide primary sources and high quality secondary literature we can scarcely imagine what the practice of theology would be like. At the same time the market for popular or semi-popular theology has until recently ensured that the views and needs of a wider public are also part of theological debate. These remarks are especially important in assessing Ronald Gregor Smith’s distinctive contribution to the development of modern theology, especially in the post-war period. If we judge a theologian’s importance solely by the accumulated weight of research monographs, Smith’s account is relatively slight. If, however, we factor in his work as editor and as translator his contribution to the overall development of British (and more specifically Scottish) theology can be seen to have been major. The translation of Martin Buber’s I and Thou, appearing in 1937 (when Smith was still a student at New College), was already an important event in English-speaking theology and the course of subsequent theology would have been very different without it. But this was only a beginning, and other key authors translated by Smith would include Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann, Karl Barth, Gerhard Ebeling, Karl Heim, Karl Jaspers, Walter Eichrodt, W. A. Visser ‘t Hooft, Søren Kierkegaard, and J. G. Hamann. In addition to his work as a translator, Smith also became Associate Editor (1947) and then Managing Director and Editor (1950) at the Student Christian Movement Press, where he effectively drove forward the introduction into British theology of the radical

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theologies associated with, especially, Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, and Paul Tillich. At the same time Smith set in motion the ‘Library of Theology and Philosophy’ that became a key resource for students and scholars for several generations from the late 1950s onwards. Born in 1913 and dying unexpectedly in 1968, Smith led a relatively short life. Nevertheless, he condensed an extraordinary amount of work across a range of fields into his 55 years. Following graduation with a first-class honours degree in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh (his home city), Smith used a travelling scholarship to spend several months in Munich, where he also met his future wife Käthe Wittlake—although the outbreak of war meant that their wedding had to wait until 1947 (conducted in Bonn by Karl Barth). While studying for the B.D. at New College, Edinburgh, Smith was persuaded by John Baillie to set about translating I and Thou, corresponding with Buber about a multitude of details and visiting him in Germany in 1936. Later he would tell Buber in correspondence that he was ‘fiendishly difficult’ to translate, whilst Buber regarded Smith as the best of his translators. Also while at New College, Smith took part a student theology expedition to Palestine, where he records a walk in Jerusalem spent arguing about theatre with T. F. Torrance (Torrance, Smith notes, wanted to shut the theatres down). On graduation, Smith spent much of 1938–9 in Copenhagen, laying the foundations for a proposed doctorate on ‘The New Humanity, in Special Relationship to Søren Kierkegaard’, also visiting Marburg and hearing Bultmann lecture. In later correspondence the Marburg theologian wrote of an ‘enduring unity of theological intention’ between Smith and himself.¹ Despite the doctorate remaining unwritten, Kierkegaard continued to be a large part of Smith’s intellectual world. Although he not only translated but endorsed Buber’s objection that Kierkegaard saw only one side of life (the religious), to which he was prepared to sacrifice all his relations to human others, Smith seems to have found in this one-sided thinker an extraordinary stimulus to Christian living. As he wrote in an article entitled ‘A Warning about Kierkegaard’, read Kierkegaard ‘by all means’, But take care: you may meet the man himself, the little Danish hunchback, the soul of irony, the essence of wit, the breath of courage, the death of settled faith. And he will not leave you, or our little experience alone: he will concentrate it and intensify, and universalise it: the blaze of eternity will rush across your dark temporal scene. And if you let this happen, if you come to grips with him, you may come to the condition of Jacob who wrestled with the angel: your alleged faith will be unsettled, your security thrown headlong for ever. (Smith 1948b: 83)

¹ Letter of 4 April 1956. Glasgow University Archive GB 247/MS Gen 547/12.

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Presumably it was in some such unsettled state that in 1939 Smith nevertheless moved into parish ministry, serving as minister at the Lawson Memorial Church in Selkirk until 1944, when he became an army chaplain. During his time at Selkirk he wrote the highly personal work Still Point (under the pseudonym of Ronald Maxwell) in which he explored a crisis of vocation. In 1946 he was appointed Education Officer for the University of Bonn, playing an active role in the de-Nazification of the university. His work there included arranging the reinstatement of Thomas Mann as an honorary doctor of Bonn University. He then moved into publishing full-time, inclusive of the brief venture of the Scottish Periodical (two issues in 1947 and 1948) and his work at SCM. In 1956 Smith became Primarius Professor of Divinity at the University of Glasgow, where he remained till his death in 1968. During this time he published two of his three main theological books: The New Man (1956) and Secular Christianity (1966), the third being The Doctrine of God (1970), drafted for the Warfield Lectures at Princeton Theological Seminary and published posthumously.² In the last year of his life he was once more thinking about Kierkegaard, planning a new and much expanded translation of materials from the Danish thinker’s journals.³ At the same time, Smith continued to take an active part in the public dissemination of the new theology, including a number of BBC radio broadcasts—as well as still more translating work. Smith’s interests in literature, reflected in his first degree, not only found expression in his vision for Scottish Periodical and a sequence of literary friendships (including T. S. Eliot, Edwin Muir, and David Daiches), but he continued to write poetry through much of his life, about which Eliot wrote to him that ‘It is certainly worth your while to write [sic] verse. I do not speak from a mercantile view because publication is another matter but your poems tend to have a function and to justify the pains expended on them’.⁴ Still Point witnesses the importance to him of writers such as Donne, Blake, Wordsworth, Traherne, and Jefferies, alongside more scholarly theological sources. It would be tempting to approach Smith through the prism of the key figures whose work he translated and who became the major points of reference in his own work—above all Buber, Bultmann, Bonhoeffer, and Kierkegaard. But Smith was no mere mediator of others’ work. If Buber is correct in seeing dialogue as integral to the articulation and development of humanistic thought, philosophy and theology will necessarily have the character, more or less explicit, of an ongoing and open-ended dialogue. Of course, this will not be a mere conversation about whatever happens to come up but, specifically, a dialogue about the matter ² A fourth work, The Free Man (1969) recycles The New Man and adds some further essays. ³ In the event, however, pending the complete translation currently in progress, an expanded selection would be translated in the six-volume translation by Howard and Edna Hong, starting in 1967. ⁴ Letter of 19 February 1942 in Glasgow University Archive, GB 247 MS Gen 541/23.

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of theology itself (however that is understood). In this sense, the originality of a particular theology is not that it is developed without reference to other sources or offers some novel hypothesis but that the theologian is profoundly and thoughtfully engaged with what is at issue—and in these terms Smith was undoubtedly an original theological thinker. At the heart of Smith’s theological thought was a recognition of the problematic status of the Church in its relation to the world, and also, more fundamentally, the very identity of the human being (‘Man’, in mid-twentieth-century parlance) and of God in the wake of the scientific, cultural, and political upheavals of modernity. In The Doctrine of God we can see Smith pushing these issues towards new formulations that anticipate insights of the so-called postmodern development and had he lived longer he might well have demonstrated that the distance from a radical hermeneutical theology to postmodernity is far less than we might think. Although contemporary ‘post-secular’ theologies are rejecting the idea of ‘the secular’ that Smith promoted, the centrality of this category in much current theology makes it especially timely to reconsider one who was arguably Britain’s most articulate and theologically robust secular theologian. In the remainder of this chapter I shall address the defining themes of Smith’s thought under two main headings: (1) history, humanity, and the secular and (2) the encounter with God and eschatological existence. Finally, I shall (3) briefly look at the short-lived enterprise of the Scottish Periodical that gives perhaps the best insight into how Smith understood the interrelationship of theology, culture, and society in the very specific context of debates about Scottish and European identity. This is not only as relevant today as in the immediate post-war period itself, but it also illustrates how Smith’s theological practice exemplifies his persistent claim that Christianity is only truly itself when it engages with the world in the actuality of its concrete situation.

History, Humanity, and the Secular History is a fundamental element of Smith’s thought. In introducing the biblical foundations of faith in The New Man he begins by stating that ‘The very first clear assumption in the whole body of the biblical writings is that we are dealing here with history’ (Smith 1956: 15). This has the further implication that God ‘is not an extra to the [biblical] history, but is the other side of the one situation’ (Smith 1956: 17). Moreover, this situation engages us as a whole such that, for biblical thought, there is no division between sacred and profane. Israel’s entire life and not just one or other subsidiary aspect of that life is at stake in the encounter with God. The same is true of the New Testament; indeed, ‘in their whole view of man and God the Old Testament and the New Testament are not essentially different’ (Smith 1956: 21).

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But this has not been how we are accustomed to view history or our own place within it. This is because although the biblical witness and faith itself are essentially historical in the sense just set out, the Church did not appear in the world with a fully worked-out theory of history corresponding to its own original essence. And when, in the thought of Augustine, it did develop a clear and distinctive conception of history, this in fact occluded the actuality of historical life. On the one hand Augustine provided a unified account of the meaning and development within history. On the other, he depicted history as never more than provisional, awaiting the completion of the number of the saints and finding its meaning in the eternal life of the heavenly city outside of history.⁵ This view became foundational for medieval society and thought and as such received metaphysical underpinning in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. This, however, falsified the very nature of historical life. Smith therefore affirms Gogarten’s statement that ‘this interpretation of history as a kingdom of metaphysical essences or substances . . . allows no historical significance to precisely that which we regard as the historical process’ (Smith 1956: 34). In Smith’s own words ‘Supernature, not nature, eternity, not time, heaven, not earth, superhistory, not history, was the abiding reality in the metaphysic of Aquinas’ (Smith 1956: 35). In these terms, Aquinas exemplifies what Smith elsewhere describes as ‘the prime temptation of theology throughout the life of Christendom’, namely, ‘to think docetically’, that is, not to take sufficiently seriously the life of history as the exclusive site of any real relationship between God and man (Smith 1966: 137). This situation changes with the Renaissance, seen by Smith as a revolution that has provided the pattern for all subsequent revolutions from the Enlightenment through to the Russian Revolution, inclusive of the Reformation. A significant precursor is in the lives and poetry of the troubadours, since, Smith says, ‘in their view of life people and things became interesting, and asserted their existence, “in their own right” ’ (Smith 1956: 39). Most importantly, what changes in the Renaissance is the view of man or, more specifically, ‘man’s self-understanding’ (Smith 1956: 40), as reflected in developments in science, literature, history, philosophy, and political science. With regard to the central issue, Luther spoke for the Renaissance as a whole: ‘The sphere of faith’s works is worldly society and its order’ (Smith 1956: 41). Thus far, the development of Renaissance thinking is not intrinsically antithetical to Christianity. Nevertheless, the new insistence on human autonomy elicited a negative reaction from the Church, which sought to reassert the authority of the ecclesiastical hierarchy (as in Catholicism) or the Bible (as in Protestantism). Smith largely follows Tillich in his diagnosis of the stultifying confrontation ⁵ In Secular Christianity Smith gives more weight to the positive side of the Augustinian view than in The New Man, although here too the final emphasis is on the limitations of what Smith calls Augustine’s ‘teleological’ view of history (Smith 1966: 73–7).

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between autonomy and heteronomy as well as in stipulating the need for a genuine theonomy as the only possible resolution of this ‘deadlock’, as he describes it. But if a large part of the fault lies on the side of the churches’ attempt to maintain control over the lives of individuals and societies, there is also fault on the other side. On the one hand, Smith (like Tillich) believes that autonomy must be affirmed in its protest against heteronomy and he endorses the nineteenth-century secularist G. J. Holyoake’s call to ‘free the Secular sphere’ and to see that the Bible ‘comes to rule this life, not to regulate the next. All the duties of Christianity are now on earth—deeds done in the body, or, if you will so call them, secular duties’ (Smith 1966: 147). In these terms, secularism is actually a modern transcription of the New Testament experience of justification by faith (Smith 1966: 155). Yet the churches remain resistant to accepting this principle, insisting on seeing ‘secular civilization’ and Christianity as fundamentally opposed. On the other hand (and again in implicit agreement with Tillich), Smith judges that secularism too errs by absolutizing the principle of autonomy and refusing to accept any directives coming from outwith what it is able to know and grasp. By limiting the human future to what we ourselves are able to plan and project we turn the openness of historical life into a ‘closed whole’ (Smith 1966: 154). This engenders the now familiar ills of modernity. Across the globe the spirit of modernity is manifest in ‘the technological dynamism of the West’, in ‘roads and air-lines, cement and diesel engines, Coca-Cola and fertilizers’—things from which we all benefit but that are also ‘tending to reduce everything to the same boring mediocrity and conformism, to one style and taste’ and (in a comment reflecting the influence of Buber) ‘to a life which basically does not emerge from the impersonal world of It, from the collective in which everything is alike, and thinks, moreover, in clichés and slogans: a world which is well stocked with ready victims of demagogy and bigotry, of fanaticism and philistinism’ (Smith 1966: 139). At the individual level the human being is reduced to ‘a mere faceless number in the machinery of productivity, or . . . a bundle of Angst, without hope’ (Smith 1966: 171). However, recognition of the ‘malaise of secularism’ should not lead us to throw over its genuine advances. For Smith, there can be no going back to a situation of pre-modern heteronomy. ‘The knight of faith, as Kierkegaard called him in a beautiful image, can no longer come prancing into the tournament in the panoply of absolute assurance’ (Smith 1956: 59). Secularism is not an enemy to be defeated and, if anything, the problem with secularism is that it is ‘not secular enough’ and the solution is therefore a still more radical secularism that he calls ‘secularity’ (Smith 1966: 172). But what does this mean? The answer is that the negative kind of secularism lacks a radical understanding of history. It supposes that a single meaning, practice, or set of values can be extended across the whole of experience. In the one case this might be

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technological rationality, in another the aestheticization of life. But in each case, no matter how diverse the particular forms this deformation of autonomy might take, it is characterized by a failure to recognize our real boundaries and makes no allowance for an event of transcendence in the midst of history. This event is what Smith will call divine grace, above all as manifested in the incarnation, but in the first instance it may be experienced without specific reference to any particular doctrine. Indeed, no doctrine can be insisted on as a condition of experiencing the opening of history to transcendence since such openness is an event of life and not of theory. As such it arises out of and is meaningful only in the context of the actual historical or temporal moment in which it becomes manifest. It is in this spirit that Smith states that ‘The basic question for theology is neither, What are we to do? nor, How are we to think of things?, but Whence do we receive?’ (Smith 1960: 14).⁶ To which he also affirms the statement of Gerhard Ebeling that ‘Man’s true freedom consists in his receiving himself from elsewhere, in his not having himself to thank for himself, in his not being his own master and thus not being able to free himself from himself ’ (Smith 1960: 16). The recognition of limits and openness to a ‘whence’ does not mean denying autonomy, however. Rather, they imply deepening autonomy. Why? Because the self that knows itself to be thus limited and thus gifted to itself from outwith itself is placed in a situation of radical responsibility. On the one hand, it realizes that it cannot detach itself from the specificity of its situation, on the other, it also realizes that how it is and how it acts in this situation is entirely its own responsibility. Only when we know ourselves as obligated to confront the actual situation facing us in the here and now do we become capable of acting on Christianity’s first and decisive commandment: to love the neighbour as oneself (cf. Smith 1956: 82).

The Encounter with God and Eschatological Existence When post-Renaissance human beings come up against the limits of their existence, why should that experience of a limit be seen as the privileged site of an encounter with God? Or, in other words, why is ‘God’ to be named as the ‘whence’ of what we receive as gift, challenge, or hope? Why speak at just this point of ‘transcendence’, albeit a ‘transcendence’ that is firmly categorized (following Bonhoeffer) as ‘this-worldly’? A first step towards answering these questions relates to what Smith found in Buber. If anything is to call us out of a world in which everything is sinking down into the flattened out wasteland of I-It relationships exemplified in massification and conformism, then it must, as Buber argues, have the character of a Thou.

⁶ This passage is missing from the version of the article published in The Free Man.

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A second step is to recognize that when we are relating to a Thou rather than to an It the relationship will have the character of language, that is, a word or word-event. ‘Language,’ Smith says, ‘is the concrete sign of our historicity’ (Smith 1970: 31) and theology is therefore fundamentally hermeneutical—as he also says ‘the question of hermeneutics is the question of temporality’ (Smith 1970: 32). That we understand ourselves and one another in and through language means that there is no understanding where there is no relation to the historical development embedded in language itself. Our words come to us freighted with meanings that we did not invent although we can make them our own. At the same time, language is never a purely private event. Language occurs in what Buber called the ‘between’ and although it might serve to express private and interior experiences it does so in a medium that is fundamentally public. In language, I am ineluctably with others. A third step is signalled in the saying that what is at issue in the question of faith is whether we are defined by our relation to the past or our relation to the future. If we allow ourselves to be defined by the past, then not only are we accepting that we are no more than links in an evolutionary, historical, or some other kind of causal chain but we are also condemning ourselves to be governed by the kind of fate that ruled over characters in Greek tragedy, unable to break free from the patterns of violence and recrimination that frustrate our aspirations towards wholeness and reconciliation. To be liberated for a relationship with the other as a genuine Thou, with equal and mutually recognized responsibility for a shared future, past and present must be opened up by what is essentially future—in theological language, by eschatology. This does not entail the annihilation of either past or present but what it does do is to make it possible for us fully to realize and grasp our responsibility for both past and present. In short, the event that is to make us capable of responsibility in freedom and love is an event that can only be made possible by the encounter with a Thou who meets us as one who speaks a word in a language we can genuinely understand but, at the same time, speaks from a future that comes into our present from beyond. Such an event reveals what Smith calls ‘a structure of grace’ (Smith 1970: 12). In other words, only the person who is God could speak to us in such a way as to bring about the capacity for freedom and love to which we aspire. This, however, is to bring us back to the apparently fundamental challenge that theology found itself facing in the wake of modernity, namely, that the name ‘God’ had become unintelligible and/or incredible to those experiencing the reality of secularism. In this regard, Smith is duly mindful of the death of God and in Secular Christianity gives extensive coverage of the three nineteenth-century loci classici concerning the death of God—Hegel, Jean Paul, and Nietzsche, noting Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s nihilism as the culmination of two thousand years of Western metaphysics (Smith 1966: 159–65). He is attentive to the

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American ‘death of God’ theology of the 1960s, but he also thinks that the death of God theologians tend to confuse the death of an idea of God with the death of God (Smith 1966: 167). This ‘idea’ of God means conceiving of God as in some way external to the world and to history. For Smith, however, there is no route to the encounter with God except by full immersion in the actuality of our historical situation. Adapting Melanchthon’s saying that to know Christ is to know his benefits Smith argues that transcendence only comes alive in faith ‘within the manifold forms of God’s creation and creativity . . . in our present being. God is met in his works and gifts, not in himself, not in an idea of him. He is met at the luminous point of human existence, where the individual faces him in utter openness, receives forgiveness, and is made free’ (Smith 1956: 111). This might still be read as implying some kind of exteriority of God, in the sense of God existing ‘in himself ’ outside of time and history, although this suggestion is immediately played down when Smith adds that ‘the eternal is in time, heaven is through earth, the supernatural not other than the natural, the spiritual not more than the wholly human: all these categories dissolve in the power of the one real relation, the two-fold relation to people and things’ (Smith 1956: 111–12). We see an extraordinary tension in play here and Smith himself several times applies Kierkegaard’s category of paradox to it. On the one hand, if there really is no God ‘in himself ’ then it seems that divinity dissolves into history, relativity, and subjectivism. Ultimately, Smith seems to think that even Buber succumbs to this temptation since, as he observes (following Michael Theunissen and Bernhard Casper), Buber’s I-Thou begins with the ‘I’ and thus assumes the intentionality of the human subject. Consequently, ‘even when he is attempting to describe the ontology of “between” he is not really doing more than describing the act of meeting in terms of the I’ (Smith 1970: 133). Anticipating more recent developments in continental philosophy of religion, Smith suggests that the understanding of the other must be articulated in a way that is more basic than subjective intentionality. But can this be done without reverting to a metaphysical idea of God? Smith addresses this question under the rubric of ‘God as Being’, which leads him again to Aquinas. Noting Heidegger’s treatment of Being (which Smith thinks supposes ‘a reality in Being’) and of the thematization of Being in Thomist metaphysics, Smith opposes the position that ‘the biblical view does not permit an unqualified affirmation of God as one who is for himself and of himself ’ (Smith 1970: 82). Yet this does not mean the complete ‘disjunction’ of the biblical and the metaphysical God. One way forward might be Karl Rahner’s re-interpretation of God’s selfsubsistent being qua actus purus as actual only in and through God’s acts in time, although Rahner himself, Smith conjectures, still holds the ipsum esse to be basic. Traditionally, the biblical character of seeing God as Being Itself had been grounded in a particular interpretation of God’s self-revelation to Moses as

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‘I am that I am’. Adducing a number of then recent biblical scholars as well as Buber’s and Rosenzweig’s re-translation of the name as ‘I shall be there as I Who will always be there’ Smith concludes that the traditional translation was a false trail and that ‘ “God as Being” is not a satisfactory category for Christian theology’ (Smith 1970: 108), not even when John Macquarrie glosses ‘Being’ as ‘Holy Being’ so as to open a space for all that faith wants to say about God as gracious and lifegiving. The problem is simply that ‘Even the “Being” of which Heidegger speaks is, after all, accessible to us only through “beings” ’ (Smith 1970: 108). God’s being is not, then, to be understood metaphysically but historically, which returns us to Smith’s fundamental theme of history. But what, more precisely, does this mean? To speak of God as involved in history and, specifically, involved in history as personal, is an extraordinary challenge if we are not to sink into anthropomorphism. Smith, naturally, does not want to do this, although he insists that ‘God is seen through human eyes: only our human experience is available’ (Smith 1970: 166). Likewise, he vigorously rejects the notion of Heilsgeschichte and its implication that God has a history within history, manifest in the history of the election, testing, and restoration of Israel or of the triumph of the Church over pagan Rome. So what can it mean to say we encounter God in history, in this-worldly transcendence? It cannot be said that Smith gives a definitive answer. But who has? Perhaps such an answer is not to be had. And perhaps that is Smith’s own conclusion. We must affirm that God is ‘qualitatively different’ but also that God is found ‘in a dimension that is real in our own lives’ (Smith 1970: 169).⁷ Corresponding to the first part of this dilemma, Smith can even say that ‘God is nihil . . . God is beyond the limit’ and God’s historical being in Christ can only ever come to us ‘out of the Ungrund—the unfathomable depth—of this beyond-the-limit’ (Smith 1970: 180). Corresponding to the second part is the statement that the ‘historicity of God’ means that ‘through the self-understanding which is disclosed to us by the kerygma concerning Christ, we are able to recognize that we are not yet what we can be’ (Smith 1970: 181). Appropriately, the penultimate paragraph of The Doctrine of God cites 1 John 3:2 ‘Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is’ (Smith 1970: 183). But all of this, Smith concludes, can only be glimpsed ‘in a mirror, darkly’ (Smith 1970: 183). Meanwhile, we are returned to our place and time in history, attempting to interpret the speech-event of divine revelation in our own lives, which means in our own actions. None of metaphysics, historical criticism, and personal salvation constitutes the real problem of faith. That problem, as Bonhoeffer glossed it, is being for others. As Smith puts it, ‘The basic problem is how to help others endure

⁷ Cf. Caputo’s notion of ‘the insistence of God’; see Caputo (2013: esp. 31–5).

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life’ (Smith 1970: 174). It is as we address that ‘problem’ that our Christian faith becomes reality and as it becomes reality we realize in our own, quiet way the realization of God.

Scottish Periodical Smith planned the first edition of the Scottish Periodical during his time in Bonn. In his editorial to this edition, Smith anticipates the difficulties it will face. Having established ‘another opportunity for new and good writing on a variety of themes’ as the periodical’s first aim, he adds that its second is ‘to encourage those writers, in Scotland and elsewhere, who show a desire to go beyond the intolerance and confusion of the time of the two great wars’ while simultaneously admitting that the ‘Scottish Periodical may become only a landmark of that helplessness and hopelessness of the learned and artistic world which have been so typical of the last thirty years’. ‘The marks of a disintegrated culture are inscribed on our society,’ he adds, ‘and most clearly of all on its writers and scholars and poets’ (Smith 1947: 1). Although he eschews nationalism in the narrow political sense, Smith professes the belief ‘that Scotland is still a real entity, and that once again from Scotland there may come that peculiar blend of philosophy and theology and letters which has been Scotland’s distinctive contribution to English literature and European thought’ (Smith 1947: 1–2). The last is crucial, since as Smith goes on to say ‘we are for Europe’—again, not in any narrow political sense, but ‘for that enigmatic energy which has driven Europe to such heights and such depths’. This being found, the hope is that ‘something new, and dazzling, will come, and Europe may live again’ (Smith 1947: 2). This Scottish and European agenda of renewing the interrelationship of faith, philosophy, and letters is borne out by the content of the two issues, the contributors to which were in many cases personal acquaintances of the editor. Issue 1 comprised an article by Edwin Muir on Franz Kafka, poems by Andrew Young, Norman McCaig, and Guido Cavalcanti, two essays by Smith’s school friend David Daiches (one on the state of the Scottish universities, another on R. L. Stevenson), articles on Scottish literature by James B. Caird, on Valery and Yeats, and on the history of The Edinburgh Review, a short story reflecting the experience of the Rhineland Occupation, and a translation by the editor of an article by Bultmann, ‘To Love your Neighbour’. Issue 2 offered more of the same. This time, Smith had translated an article by Jaspers, ‘The European Spirit’, and contributed an article of his own on Kierkegaard. Articles by Caird and Daiches were continued and other topics included ‘T. S. Eliot and Dante’, C. Day Lewis, Edwin Muir, and Neil M. Gunn, whilst poetry included new work by Hamish Henderson, Edwin Morgan, and Edwin Muir.

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The editorial of the second (and final) issue responds to the objections of some readers that Smith has avoided engaging the political aspect of the current crisis. This, he says, is because ‘we do not regard modern politicians as having the right answers because we believe that they do not even ask the right questions: apparently they have no conception of the magnitude of the issues which are opening round us today’ (Smith 1948a: 1–2). Versus the politicians, ‘in the creative artists and philosophers of our own land and of Europe, we find a deeper insight into what goes in the hearts and minds of people’; versus party loyalty, he recommends the ‘personal quiet decision to live and think for what is truly human and humane’ (Smith 1948a: 2). This last comment is close to how Smith later interprets Bonhoeffer’s notion of an ‘arcane discipline’ at the heart of Christian faith and which he describes as ‘a kind of humorous, humble, and self-effacing secrecy of devotion and hope’ found in ‘the simplicities of the gospel, the call to be humble, and unostentatious in prayer, never using naked power, but always service, and sacrifice, and these, he says, “are both its sustenance and its preservative” ’ (Smith 1956: 104–5). Scottish Periodical was probably Smith’s most idiosyncratic undertaking and therefore gives a special insight into the complex of issues at the heart of both his life and his theology. The theological motive is central and vitalizing, but in the concrete circumstances of society and culture (in this case of Scotland and Europe) it is as much in art, literature, and philosophy as in theology narrowly defined that the question of God and the ‘self-effacing secrecy of devotion and hope’ finds an expression that most communicates itself to those living the crisis of the modern world.

Bibliography Caputo, John D. (2013). The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Clements, Keith W. (1986). The Theology of Ronald Gregor Smith. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Glasgow University Archive. GB 247/MS Gen 547. Long, Eugene T. (ed.) (1974). God, Secularization, and History: Essays in Memory of Ronald Gregor Smith. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Smith, Ronald G. (writing as ‘Ronald Maxwell’) (1943). Still Point. London: Nisbet. Smith, Ronald G. (ed.) (1947). Scottish Periodical 1/1. Smith, Ronald G. (ed.) (1948a). Scottish Periodical 1/2. Smith, Ronald G. (1948b). ‘A Warning about Kierkegaard’, Scottish Periodical 1/2: 80–3. Smith, Ronald G. (1956). The New Man: Christianity and Man’s Coming of Age. London: SCM.

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Smith, Ronald G. (1960). ‘A Theological Perspective on the Secular’, The Christian Scholar XLIII (March). Smith, Ronald G. (1966). Secular Christianity. London: Collins. Smith, Ronald G. (1969). The Free Man: Studies in Christian Anthropology. London: Collins. Smith, Ronald G. (1970). The Doctrine of God. London: Collins.

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17 Thomas F. Torrance Paul D. Molnar

Biography Scottish theologian Thomas Forsyth Torrance (1913–2007) was born of missionary parents in Chengdu, West China in 1913. Because of growing hostility towards missionaries in China, Torrance returned to Scotland in 1927 and eventually attended the University of Edinburgh to study classics and philosophy. He began formal study of theology in New College in 1934 and was captivated by Schleiermacher’s method and the arrangement of his dogmatics into a ‘scientific system of Christian doctrine’ (Torrance 1990: 121). Yet, he was troubled by the fact that Schleiermacher imposed a ‘propositional structure’ on ‘the Christian consciousness’ that ‘lacked any realist scientific objectivity’ (Torrance 1990: 121).¹ His mother was influential in the way Torrance approached Scripture with a Christ-centred view and in opposition to what he later labelled fundamentalism and liberalism (Torrance 1982: 15–19).² She had given him a copy of Karl Barth’s Credo which encouraged him to oppose rationalistic liberalism, fundamentalism, and deterministic kinds of Calvinism as particularly embedded in views of double predestination. Torrance opposed viewing predestination as a fixed determination of those who would be elect and those who would be reprobate without any reference to the fact that a proper view of predestination should have focused on the love of God disclosed in Jesus Christ himself, the lamb slain before the foundation of the world.³ Torrance was deeply influenced by Hugh Ross Mackintosh (1870–1936), who stressed the centrality of Christ and the connection between theology and mission; and Daniel Lamont (1869–1950) who explored Christianity and scientific culture.

¹ For Torrance, ‘Concepts and statements’ used to describe reality ‘do not have their truth in themselves but in the realities to which they refer’ (Torrance 1983a: 1, 7). ² Fundamentalism tended to identify ‘biblical statements about the truth with the truth itself to which they refer’ (Torrance 1982: 17) while liberalism tended to base truth in ‘autonomous religious reason’ (Torrance 1982: 15). ³ Torrance consistently insisted that ‘our act of faith is grounded on God’s decision of Grace to give Himself to us and to choose us for Himself . . . our personal decision is rooted in election, the prevenient movement of God’s love that is so incarnated in Jesus Christ that in Him we have both the pure act of divine Grace toward man and the perfect act of man in obedient response toward God’s Grace’ (Torrance 1969a: 215); Torrance (2008: 257–8).

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From Mackintosh, Torrance learned to stress Matt. 11:27 (Luke 10:22), ‘No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.’ Thus Torrance’s thinking was in harmony with Irenaeus who opposed the Gnostics, and the Nicene Fathers who opposed Arius, because they held that this mutual knowing involved ‘a mutual relation of being between them as well’ (Torrance 1983a: 8ff.; Torrance 2016 [1988]: 58–9). This relation of being was crucial since it meant there was ‘no God behind the back of Jesus Christ’, as Torrance repeatedly stressed.⁴ Consequently, what God is towards us in Jesus Christ, he is eternally in himself so that there is no hidden God with a set of different designs for the human race other than the God who ‘so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life’ (Jn. 3:16). Based on this truth, Torrance built a scientific theology that allowed the unique nature of the object of reflection, namely, the triune God, to determine his theology. Hence: we are given access to the closed circle of divine knowing between the Father and the Son only through cognitive union with Christ, that is only through an interrelation of knowing and being between us and the incarnate Son, although in our case this union is one of participation through grace and not one of nature. (Torrance 2016 [1988]: 59; Torrance 2008: 4–6)

Torrance’s interest in the relationship between theology and science led him to become a recognized expert with a deep knowledge of both subjects so that he was praised for his ‘landmark’ contributions to discussions of theology and science (McGrath 1999: xii; Molnar 2009: 2). In 1978 he was awarded the Templeton Foundation Prize for Progress in Religion. From 1938 to 1939 Torrance taught at Auburn Theological Seminary in New York and was Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland from 1976 to 1977—a position later held by his son Iain (2003–4). Torrance was instrumental in developing the historic agreement between the Reformed and Orthodox Churches that culminated in a joint statement of agreement on the doctrine of the Trinity in 1991. This was a monumental achievement in which, among other things, the groundwork was set to overcome the difficulties caused by the introduction of the filioque clause into the Creed by the Western Church. Both sides agreed that that there are no degrees of deity within the Trinity, as implied in suggestions that the Son and Spirit derive their deity from the Father. The Orthodox honoured Torrance, consecrating him a Protopresbyter in the Patriarchate of Alexandria in 1973 (McGrath 1999: 102).

⁴ E.g. Torrance (1992: 136); Torrance (1990: 201); Torrance (1998 [1976]: 134).

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Dogmatic Theologian Torrance was one of the most significant English-speaking theologians of the twentieth century. He has been recognized as an extraordinarily productive and creative theologian who conveyed a powerful evangelical theology. His ability to combine Calvin and Barth has been commended as leading to ‘the most creative Reformed breakthrough on the sacraments in twentieth-century theology, and arguably the most important Reformed statement since Calvin’ (Hunsinger 2001: 160). That high praise is justified by Torrance’s depth of insight and his unwavering presentation of a theology that is consistently shaped by the unconditional love of God, grounded in the eternal relation of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and revealed and operative in Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word, and the outpouring of his Holy Spirit. His theology consistently embodies his belief that ‘the doctrine of the Trinity’ is ‘the ultimate ground of theological knowledge of God, the basic grammar of theology’ (Torrance 1980: 158–9) and that ‘properly understood it is the nerve and centre’ of all other doctrines ‘and is so deeply integrated with them that when they are held apart from the doctrine of the Trinity they are seriously defective in truth and become malformed’ (Torrance 1996b: 31). Torrance’s theology, which is characterized by an impressive knowledge of the early Church Fathers such as Irenaeus (Torrance 1983a) and especially Athanasius, is also influenced by his understanding of the doctrine of God in a way that is strongly indebted to his own Scottish theological heritage. He followed John Knox, and others in the Scottish tradition who, he claimed, had a deep sense of ‘objectivity in looking away from themselves and their own spiritual experience even of redemption and regeneration and sanctification to Christ’ (Torrance 1996a: 24; 2008: 257–8). Torrance insisted that: The Veritie of God is in us only as by faith we seek it, not in ourselves, but in Christ alone, for it is through the Spirit that we partake of the blessed conjunction between Christ and ourselves and are presented before the Father in the Body of the Son as those who share in his life and righteousness, and are one with him. (Torrance 1965: 152)

For Knox, Veritie referred to our justification by faith or ‘through the blood of Christ’ (Torrance 1965: 150), by grace, as this was connected with the incarnation. Veritie thus accentuated the union of God and our human being in Christ as reconciled to the Father with a view towards the final Advent with Christ as our Mediator between the time of his ascension and second coming. Like Knox, Torrance placed great emphasis on the importance of Christ’s ascension. In that event, he maintained that an interval was deliberately established between his first Parousia and his second one. Thus, it is the ascended and coming Lord who, through his Spirit directs us back to Jesus’ historical life,

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ministry, message, and death and resurrection. From Jesus we know God in truth and the message of reconciliation that applies to all people in and through his present active priestly and prophetic mediation (Torrance 1998 [1976]: 133–4). In his own presentation of Scottish theology from the Reformation to the nineteenth century, Torrance skilfully demonstrates exactly why he opposed what he called a contractual understanding of the Covenant of Grace as this came to be formulated in the Westminster Confession. Such a view was indebted to a faulty doctrine of God, with a faulty view of predestination and ultimately a legalistic or ‘hyperCalvinist’ view of our human relations with God. Such reasoning imagined that Christ died only for the elect and that in some sense salvation and assurance were dependent on us. Torrance was convinced that ‘Calvin’s own theological position was very different from the hardened system that has long passed under the name of Calvinism’ (Torrance 2001 [1949]: 7).⁵ Torrance’s Trinitarian understanding of God, predestination, and the Covenant of Grace powerfully conveys a sense of justification by faith and by grace that takes on a depth of meaning that is lost in purely forensic or more legalistic views. Such views tend to portray Christ’s atoning death in juridical terms of punishment for sin. One might even say that his view of the history of Scottish theology offers a picture of just how ‘hyperCalvinists’ distorted the true meaning of the Gospel. Others, especially John McLeod Campbell (1800–72), at great personal sacrifice, fought hard to put things right by appealing to a proper Christological view of atonement without Nestorian overtones and without any implication that Christ’s death was needed as a way of placating God to achieve salvation for us. These ideas, which pervade Torrance’s major writings, are trustworthy interpretations of what could be called Nicene theology and faithfully express what he believed to be the best of Scottish theology.

Ecumenical Theologian Torrance was a truly ecumenical theologian in that he worked effectively to overcome divisions between: the Church of Scotland and the Church of England; the Church and Israel; Protestants and Catholics; and Eastern Orthodox and Reformed Christians. He thought division in the Church stemmed mainly from failure to live in the communion established by God himself in the incarnation of his Son who reconciled the world to himself. In Christ, God took all the agony, pain, and guilt of human sin (enmity against God) ‘upon himself in order to forgive, redeem, and heal mankind at the very point where we human beings are at ⁵ Torrance stressed that for Calvin human disorder and sin can only be rightly seen in light of God’s grace revealed and effective in Christ himself (Torrance 2001 [1949]: 83ff.). Torrance’s opposition to legalist views of the covenant and justification put forward by the ‘hyper-Calvinists’ centred on Calvin’s passage in the Institutes, cited in full below, that ‘God does not love us because of what Christ has done’; rather, it is because he loves us first ‘that he came in Christ’ (Torrance 1996a: 19 and passim).

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our worst, thus making our sins the bond by which in atoning sacrifice we are forever tied to God’ (Torrance 1983b: 45). Torrance believed that Jews and Christians had much to learn from each other and that it was crucial for Christians ‘to learn from Jews and with Jews to interpret the presentation of Jesus in the Gospels in a more faithful way without distorting it through the spectacles of gentile ideas’ (Torrance 1983b: 42–3). That could only happen when the idea that the Son of God assumed our fallen humanity is taken seriously as it is not when, in much Western theology and particularly in the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, it is repudiated (Torrance 1996 [1959]: I.149). He considered the doctrine of the assumption a ‘breach with the biblical eschatology’ which not only places Mary alongside Christ as co-redeemer but denies the need to await Christ’s second coming; it also opens the door to problematic notions of priesthood, implying that priests have power over the Eucharist (Torrance 1996 [1959]: I.160–1). Torrance’s dialogue with Roman Catholicism stressed the doctrines of justification and the Trinity. He believed that Vatican II’s Christocentric emphasis and its distinction between the substance of faith and its dogmatic expression opened the door to better relations between the Church of Scotland and the Roman Catholic Church centred in the Trinitarian faith advanced by the NiceneConstantinopolitan Creed (Torrance 1983a: 28). From 1954 to 1962 Torrance was Convener of the Church of Scotland Commission on Baptism; from 1955 to 1959 he worked to publish five interim reports and the final report in 1960 (McGrath 1999: 99–100). Torrance served on the Reformed/Roman Catholic Study Commission in 1974 and had a close relationship with Yves Congar.⁶ In 1975 Torrance led a colloquy which discussed Rahner’s volume on the Trinity hoping that there might be some convergence between Reformed and Roman Catholic theology based on the theoretical agreement between Rahner and Barth that a proper understanding of God must begin with God’s saving revelation in the economy. Torrance, however, was not unaware that there were difficulties in Rahner’s thought—at times he allowed logical necessities rather than revelation to dictate his conclusions (Torrance 1994: 79–82). In his Trinitarian doctrine Torrance maintained: ‘The Deity of Christ is the supreme truth of the Gospel, the key to the bewildering enigma of Jesus, for it provides it with a central point of reference consistent with the whole sequence of events leading up to and beyond the crucifixion’ (Torrance 1996b: 46).⁷

⁶ Torrance told me that he gave a lecture in Paris at Congar’s invitation in which he discussed the Eucharist and Congar remarked to him that there was nothing he said, including his view of ‘real presence’, that Congar as a Catholic could not agree with. ⁷ Torrance noted that Calvin’s view of the Trinity ‘asserts the downright Deity of Christ, as having one and the same Being with God the Father, while nevertheless distinct from him as the Son of the Father’ (Torrance 1994: 59–60), and the ‘downright Deity of the Holy Spirit who is a hypostasis of the total Being of God as well as from God’ (Torrance 1994: 60).

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This insight enabled Torrance to give due weight to the resurrection and the ascension: It is in and through Jesus Christ . . . that we creatures of space and time may know God the Father, in such a way as to think and speak truly and validly of him, even in such a way that the forms of our thought and speech really terminate objectively on God himself in his own ultimate Being and Reality. Apart from the resurrection we could not say this. (Torrance 1998 [1976]: 71)

Because Jesus rose from the dead and as the ascended Lord continues to mediate between us and the Father through his Holy Spirit, we may truly know God without having to engage in mythological speculation by projecting our views and concepts into God. Herein lay the importance of the Nicene homoousion which Torrance consistently stressed because it meant that neither the incarnate Son’s oneness in being and act with God the Father and the Spirit nor his oneness in being with us could be undermined or ignored without losing the truth of the Gospel.

Torrance and Barth Appreciating Barth’s scientific approach to revelation, Torrance became one of the key people who introduced Barth to the English-speaking world. His book introducing Barth’s early theology dominated the received view of Barth until 1995 when his thesis that Barth turned from dialectic to analogy after reading Anselm was questioned (McCormack 1995: 421–2).⁸ It would be a serious mistake, however, to think that Torrance did not offer a penetrating, accurate, and helpful but not uncritical interpretation of Barth’s important theology. Torrance read the Eastern Church Fathers in their original Greek. He wrote his doctoral thesis, supervised by Barth, which was published in 1946 as The Doctrine of Grace in the Apostolic Fathers establishing his reputation in historical theology (McGrath 1999: 46, 78). He also married Margaret Edith Spear that year. In addition, he helped edit the English translation of Barth’s massive thirteen-volume Church Dogmatics. Torrance continued to emphasize that denying Christ’s deity as the basis of faith led to uncertainty and relativism insisting: ‘When that goes the bottom . . . drops out of Christianity’; then people seek that foundation elsewhere such as in ‘ethical and human values’ or ‘social relations’ (Torrance 2002: 143). Torrance was not arguing here that Christ’s deity overwhelmed or displaced his humanity and ours. Rather, because his humanity existed enhypostatically within

⁸ For further discussion see Stanley (2008) and Westerholm (2015: 182ff.).

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the Person of Jesus as the Son of God incarnate, what he said and did as man was also, in a mysterious way, the act of God himself for us. This thinking, which advanced a view of predestination and hypostatic union conceived dynamically rather than statically, allowed Torrance to forcefully maintain that it is in the humanity of Jesus Christ in the unity of his Person that God acts as our reconciler and redeemer. Consequently, he rejected any sort of Apollinarian displacement of Jesus’ true humanity, monophysite confusion of divinity and humanity, as well as any Nestorian separation of his humanity and divinity (Torrance 2009: 439ff.; Torrance 2008: 187–97; Torrance 1975: 143–50; Molnar 2009: chapter 5; Molnar 2015). An Apollinarian view would undercut the doctrine of atonement in its intrinsic connection with the incarnation because unless the Word assumed our full humanity marked by sin, but without Jesus sinning himself, then our free will which is in reality our self-will, could never have been overcome vicariously in the Person of the mediator for our benefit (Torrance 2009: 438ff.).⁹ A monophysite view would commingle the two natures, detach grace from Christ, and ultimately confuse the Church with Christ as well (Torrance 1996 [1959]: I.148–56). A Nestorian approach would open the door to ideas of limited atonement and universalism which Torrance rightly insisted were forms of rationalizing the truth of the Gospel. These approaches undermine the true basis of human assurance about our reconciliation with God and our eternal life which we have now as we are united in faith to Christ in his new humanity in and through which he overcame our sin from the divine and human side. Whenever that happens, then humanity would search for other mediators in an attempt to reach God. Such a search would demonstrate that, apart from Jesus Christ himself, there is no way to attain true knowledge of God or to have genuine communion with God or to have the assurance which only God can and does freely promise and give (Torrance 1996a: 79, 96, 110, 131–53, 231).

Theological Science Torrance was a realist in theology; accordingly, any theology that did not allow the reality of Jesus Christ in his uniqueness as God and man to disclose the truth of who God is and who we are, could never claim to be scientific. Just as ‘There could be no science at all if we were not up against an implacably objective rationality in things independent of any and all of us’ (Torrance 1965: 276), so in theology ‘it would be a perversion and a distortion of the Christian Gospel to resolve Christology and soteriology without remainder, so to speak, into the processes and

⁹ On Christ’s vicarious humanity see Molnar (2009: 119ff. and 299).

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advances of technological science’ (Torrance 1965: 277). Torrance criticized John Wren Lewis for disallowing knowledge of reality independent of us and imposing his own ‘artistry upon nature’ (Torrance 1965: 275); similarly, theologians John A. T. Robinson and Paul Tillich identified God symbolically with the ground of their own being. This prevented them from understanding God as actively intervening creatively and redemptively by condescending to us in our need. Such ‘inverted Deism’ led to the secularization of the world, nature, and religion and mimicked Schleiermacher’s God—‘a God without pity and mercy’ who, ‘like the God of Bultmann . . . is present and active in the death of Jesus Christ in no other way than he is present and active in a fatal accident in the street’ (Torrance 1965: 277). This is ‘a movement of thought which detaches nature from the Creator–creature relation, and so introduces the ancient radical dichotomy between God and the world’ (Torrance 1965: 277). It is ‘remarkably parallel to the “atheism” which the Nicene theologians found in the Arian movement in the fourth century’ (Torrance 1965: 277). Torrance maintained that because Tillich and Bultmann employed the problematic perspective embedded in the container or receptacle view of space and time, they could only mythologize the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ assuming it meant that ‘the Son of God is received and contained within the dimensions of a human body’ (Torrance 1969b: 49).¹⁰ Had they been able to accept the sense of the ‘extra Calvinisticum’, they would have realized that God did indeed become incarnate in and as the man Jesus within space and time, but that the Son of God is not contained within the human life of Jesus such that he ceases to be fully God himself, homoousios with the Father, while actively relating with us in time and space. Nicene theologians understood Christ’s relations with us in relational terms and not by detaching God’s actions from time and space as Torrance believed both Bultmann and Tillich had done. By making space timeless and detaching time from space, both theologians changed the objective referent of theology from the history of Jesus as the incarnate Word to their own existential reactions to Jesus. What resulted was a view that disallowed any genuine interaction of the transcendent God with us in specific historical events such as the incarnation. Instead they projected their own deistic views onto Jesus just because they had already engaged in a type of dualistic thinking that presumed the impossibility of God entering time and space for our benefit without ceasing to be God. A timeless view of the incarnation allowed them to substitute their experiences of faith and hope for the resurrection and hope of our

¹⁰ Torrance thought Bultmann’s demythologizing was based on his ‘philosophical preconceptions’ (Torrance 2008: 284) which were indebted to Heidegger and similar to those of Greek philosophy such that the Greeks were ‘baffled . . . that God almighty should be bound and judged by humanity and murdered in order to bring about the forgiveness of sins . . . ’ (Torrance 2008: 292).

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own future existence, respectively. Retaining the old receptacle notion of space and time represented an attempt to flee from time and space to explain the Christian faith. The result is a mythologizing of the incarnation by mistakenly thinking that the Son’s oneness with us was an ‘indication of imperfection in Him’ instead of realizing, as did the Nicene theologians, that it was an indication of his love expressed in condescension for us (Torrance 1995: 344; Molnar 2009: 130–1). The solution to this approach is a return to scientific objectivity in theology which allows the unique nature of God himself present in his incarnate Word and the outpouring of his Holy Spirit to shape our thinking about the creator/creature relation as well as of revelation, sin, and redemption. Because these thinkers just mentioned would only accept as true whatever they could ‘form and fashion through their own imaging and conceiving’ they committed the ‘sin against the principle of scientific objectivity’ (Torrance 1965: 277; Torrance 1997 [1971]: 43–55). They were guilty of projecting their ideas about themselves onto God, thus exhibiting the fact that the root of the problem here is ‘the sin of the human mind, in which man is still trying to be as God, and to impose his will upon the universe, and still insisting on a Christ who will subserve his own wishes and aspirations’ (Torrance 1965: 278).

Thinking about God Such thinking Torrance believed was especially problematic with regard to contemporary attempts to re-name God in an effort to advance gender equality. For Torrance, this does not mean our understanding of words like father, son, or spirit, ‘when used theologically to speak of the Being of God, is to be governed by the gender which by linguistic convention they have in Greek, for gender belongs only to creatures and may not be read back into the Nature of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ (Torrance 1994: 129–30).¹¹ This, because the ‘terms, “father”, “son”, “spirit” and “trinity” are transformed under the impact of God’s selfrevelation and are to be understood strictly in accordance with his transcendent Nature’ (Torrance 1994: 130). What then is the remedy here? It is, Torrance repeatedly advises, to think ‘from a centre in the object “out there” independent of them’ and not ‘from a centre in themselves’ which can only mean that their thinking ‘is first by way of selfexpression and then by way of projection’ (Torrance 1965: 278). Torrance’s aim

¹¹ While Greek terms like ousia and hypostasis were ‘linguistically feminine and conceptually impersonal’, they were ‘radically changed through the mighty acts of God in Jesus Christ’ to refer to the ‘intrinsically personal and active Being of God in his coinherent relations as Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ (Torrance 1994: 130).

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was to close the door to the idea that religion could be substituted for God. Encouraging scientific thinking was one reason why he began the Scottish Journal of Theology (1948); this is evident in his major books on the Trinity and in his ground-breaking work Theological Science which was an expanded form of his 1959 Hewett Lectures on ‘The Nature of Theology and Scientific Method’ (Torrance 1969a). This work explicated a philosophy of theology in which ‘we are directly engaged with knowledge of the Reality of God and not just with religious phenomenality’ (Torrance 1969a: iv), instead of a philosophy of religion which is not theologically shaped. Accordingly, ‘Whenever religion is substituted in the place of God, the fact that in religion we are concerned with the behaviour of religious people, sooner or later means the substitution of humanity in the place of religion—the point at which our “secularizing” philosophers of religion appear to have arrived’ (Torrance 1969a: iv–v). While Torrance believed there was a place for such studies, he wanted to explore our cognitive relation to God himself by presenting a ‘scientific theology’ which was faithful to ‘the demands of His reality and self-giving’ (Torrance 1969a: v). Torrance masterfully conveyed several key ideas among which were that ‘in theology we have to do with a divine Object that demands and creates reciprocity so that our knowledge of God involves right from the start a union and not a disjunction between subject and object, yet a union in which God is not entangled in our subjectivity’ (Torrance 1969a: 307). His thinking here was indebted to the doctrine of the Trinity as understood from patristic sources and by Richard of St Victor, Duns Scotus, and John Calvin (Torrance 1969a: 306; Torrance 1994: 41–76) as theologians who allowed their knowledge to develop on the basis of the Incarnation. Thus, ‘the epistemological significance of the Incarnation’ means that ‘we are summoned to know God strictly in accordance with the way in which He has actually objectified Himself for us in our human existence, in Jesus Christ’ (Torrance 1969a: 310; Torrance 1996b: 131–42). But Torrance was more careful than many contemporary Trinitarian theologians who espouse ideas of a dependent deity. For Torrance the ‘logic of grace’ shaped genuine theological knowledge. This meant that such thinking ‘does not give us leave to read our own humanity back into God or to confine knowledge of Him within our human subjectivities . . . Face to face with Christ our humanity is revealed to be diseased and in-turned, and our subjectivities to be rooted in self-will’ (Torrance 1969a: 310). Thus, we must adapt our thinking to this particular object by renouncing ourselves, taking up our cross and following him so that we may know the Father through union with Christ. Genuine, cognitive union with God in love, Torrance says, can take place only because ‘the estranged human self . . . is healed and recreated in communion with God’ (Torrance 1969a: 310). But that communion is ours only because it has been established in Christ and maintained throughout his life and finally through his death and resurrection. It is actualized in us through the present

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action of the Holy Spirit (Torrance 1969a: 307–12, 349f.; Torrance 1997 [1971]: 171; Torrance 2009: 178–81; 324–6).¹² Torrance was well aware of the fact that ‘the knower cannot be kept out of genuine knowledge of God, so that far from eliminating the personal factor altogether, theological science seeks to allow the subject to be adapted to the object and controlled by it’ (Torrance 1969a: 310–11). Still, in our encounter with Christ, ‘every attempt to impose [ourselves] upon the object’ is called into question by Christ himself who is and remains the truth. Hence, theology must be careful not to project images and analogies ‘out of man’s own self-analysis and self-understanding into God’ (Torrance 1969a: 310; Torrance 2009: 445–6). Torrance was able to link this thinking to a profoundly informed understanding of Hebraic thought conveyed by Scripture and patristic theology in his three important books on the Trinity which were written after his retirement from the University of Edinburgh in 1979.

Justification by Faith Torrance famously applied the doctrine of justification to our knowledge of God following the ‘logic of grace’. This is crucial since the mind is what the Greeks called the ‘governing principle’ of a human person (Torrance 2009: 438). The ‘Greek fathers realised . . . as perhaps few people do today that although we may have freewill, we are not at all free to escape from our self-will’ (Torrance 2009: 439). They also realized that it was in ‘the depths of the human mind . . . which governs and controls all our thinking and culture that we have become estranged from the truth and hostile to God . . . it is right there, in the ontological depths of the human mind, that we desperately need to be redeemed and healed’ (Torrance 2009: 439). This understanding of soteriology pervades Torrance’s analysis of Scottish theology and his Trinitarian theology where he consistently argued against the ‘hyper-Calvinist’ separation of Jesus’ suffering from the suffering of God for us and against any sort of external or purely juridical view of atonement (Torrance 1996a: 57, 303, 310; Torrance 2016 [1988]: 185). Here we have come full circle away from any contractual or legal understanding of the covenant which, as we have seen, led to legalistic depictions of our relations with God which were harmful to Scottish theology. By contrast, Torrance insisted that the only proper way to understand our relations with God is through a personal and dynamic understanding of divine and human action as an expression of the love of God, as ¹² Thus, ‘The Holy Spirit is the living and life-giving Spirit of God who actualises the self-giving of God to us in his Son, and resonates and makes fruitful within us the priestly, atoning and intercessory activity of Christ on our behalf ’ (Torrance 1983b: 117).

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Calvin stressed: ‘God does not love us because of what Christ has done, but it is because he first loved us that he came in Christ in order through atoning sacrifice in which God himself does not hold himself aloof but suffers in and with Christ to reconcile us to himself ’ (Torrance 1996a: 19; Torrance 1983a: 110).¹³ Any other view would lead to ideas of limited atonement, conditional salvation, and uncertainty regarding our regeneration as a reality in Christ for us.

Critical Issues Torrance’s thinking has not gone unchallenged. Some have criticized him for making Athanasius sound more Barthian than Athanasian. Yet, both Barth and Torrance relied on Athanasius’ theology which was shaped by the Nicene faith, to explicate the doctrine of the Trinity which they hoped would be Church unifying. Torrance’s use of Calvin against the Calvinists has also been questioned. Yet, the ‘hyper-Calvinists’ he rightly criticized for espousing versions of limited atonement and determinist views of predestination, were also criticized by Barth who disavowed Federal Theology and Calvin’s view of predestination with its ‘decretum absolutum’. Torrance also has been criticized for: (1) embracing Barth’s view that God’s being and act are one and for insisting that grace could not be detached from the Giver (Christ); (2) identifying, criticizing, and rejecting what he called the ‘Latin Heresy’; and (3) supposedly being a Christomonist in his theology. For Torrance, ‘faith is the mode of the reason adapted by grace to the objective selfrevealing and self-giving of the living God’ (Torrance 1990: x); yet he has been inaccurately accused of ‘Barthian fideism’ (Klinefelter 1973: 128). Because he held that to achieve ‘new’ knowledge one could not allow any prior knowledge to set the questions asked of us by the object of faith, Torrance has been mistakenly accused of epistemological and ontological dualism (Klinefelter 1973: 121ff.). Torrance was labelled a foundationalist by Ronald Thiemann and personally reacted quite strongly against that charge (Molnar 2009: 327–8). His Trinitarian theology was criticized by Colin Gunton (Molnar 2009: 344–9). And his ‘new’ natural theology, while applauded by some, has met with criticisms by others for a number of reasons. First, his claim that natural theology (any attempt to know God without relying on biblically attested revelation) can function properly only within the ambit of revelation is confusing. Either one is doing theology within faith and based on revelation from start to finish or one is not. Second, a close analysis of Torrance’s ‘new’ natural theology would disclose that what he actually tried to offer, despite a few remnants of the old natural theology which he rejected, was a theology of nature as reconciled in Christ. ¹³ In Scottish Theology Torrance refers to Calvin’s Institutes 2.16.4–5. But the actual reference is to 1.16.4–5.

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Alister McGrath claims to build his version of natural theology on Torrance’s ‘new’ natural theology. But his thinking goes way beyond anything Torrance or Barth would countenance as he thinks that with natural theology ‘the Christian evangelist will have a number of “points of contact” for the gospel within the created order’ (McGrath 2001: 299). McGrath also claims that ‘the human mind possesses the capacity to recognize this work of creation as such [which all would of course agree with], and to draw at least some reliable conclusions concerning the nature and character of God from the created order [which Barth firmly and consistently rejects and Torrance firmly rejects, except on occasion, when relating theological and natural science to each other]’ (McGrath 2001: 299; Molnar 2009: 93–9; Molnar 2018).¹⁴ Finally, with regard to the charge that both he and Barth were entirely wrong in their opposition to what Torrance called the ‘Latin Heresy’ (Farrow 2013), one has only to consider how many contemporary theologians end up separating the Spirit from the Word, atonement from incarnation, and grace from the Giver of grace by embracing the analogia entis as a basis for faith, to realize how truly right they were.

Bibliography Farrow, Douglas (2013). ‘T. F. Torrance and the Latin Heresy’, First Things (December): 25–31. Hunsinger, George (2001). ‘The Dimension of Depth: Thomas F. Torrance on the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper’, Scottish Journal of Theology 54/2: 155–76. Klinefelter, David S. (1973). ‘God and Rationality: A Critique of the Theology of Thomas F. Torrance’, The Journal of Religion 53/1: 117–35. McCormack, Bruce L. (1995). Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McGrath, Alister E. (1999). Thomas F. Torrance: An Intellectual Biography. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. McGrath, Alister E. (2001). Scientific Theology, Volume I: Nature. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. McGrath, Alister E. (2009). A Fine-Tuned Universe: The Quest for God in Science and Theology. The 2009 Gifford Lectures. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Molnar, Paul D. (2009). Thomas F. Torrance: Theologian of the Trinity. Farnham: Ashgate.

¹⁴ With Moltmann, McGrath thinks ‘we must learn to think of the “world of nature as bearing the prints of the Triune God” ’ (McGrath 2009: 70). However, if this is in any sense true, then we can look to nature as well as to revelation to understand the mystery of the Trinity. And that is exactly what both Barth and Torrance vigorously rejected!

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Molnar, Paul D. (2015). ‘Thomas F. Torrance and the Problem of Universalism’, Scottish Journal of Theology 68/2: 164–86. Molnar, Paul D. (2018). ‘Natural Theology: An Impossible Possibility?’ Participatio: The Journal of the Thomas F. Torrance Theological Fellowship (forthcoming) Stanley, Timothy (2008). ‘Returning Barth to Anselm’, Modern Theology 24/3: 413–37. Torrance, Thomas F. (1965). Theology in Reconstruction. London: SCM. Torrance, Thomas F. (1969a). Theological Science. New York: Oxford University Press. Torrance, Thomas F. (1969b). Space, Time and Incarnation. Oxford and Edinburgh: Oxford University Press/T&T Clark. Torrance, Thomas F. (1975). Theology in Reconciliation: Essays towards Evangelical and Catholic Unity in East and West. London: Geoffrey Chapman. Torrance, Thomas F. (1980). The Ground and Grammar of Theology. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Torrance, Thomas F. (1982). Reality and Evangelical Theology. Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press. Torrance, Thomas F. (1983a). ‘The Deposit of Faith’, Scottish Journal of Theology 36/1: 1–28. Torrance, Thomas F. (1983b). The Mediation of Christ. New edition published 1992. Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard. Torrance, Thomas F. (1990). Karl Barth: Biblical and Evangelical Theologian. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Torrance, Thomas F. (1992). ‘The Christian Apprehension of God the Father’, in Alvin F. Kimel, Jr (ed.), Speaking the Christian God: The Holy Trinity and the Challenge of Feminism. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 120–43. Torrance, Thomas F. (1994). Trinitarian Perspectives: Toward Doctrinal Agreement. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Torrance, Thomas F. (1995). Divine Meaning: Studies in Patristic Hermeneutics. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Torrance, Thomas F. (1996 [1959]). Conflict & Agreement in the Church, 2 vols. London and Eugene, OR: Lutterworth Press/Wipf & Stock. Torrance, Thomas F. (1996a). Scottish Theology from John Knox to John McLeod Campbell. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Torrance, Thomas F. (1996b). The Christian Doctrine of God, One Being, Three Persons. London: Bloomsbury/T&T Clark. Torrance, Thomas F. (1997 [1971]). God and Rationality. London and Edinburgh: Oxford University Press/T&T Clark. Torrance, Thomas F. (1998 [1976]). Space, Time and Resurrection. Edinburgh: Handsel Press and T&T Clark. Torrance, Thomas F. (2001 [1949]). Calvin’s Doctrine of Man. London and Eugene, OR: Lutterworth Press/Wipf & Stock.

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Torrance, Thomas F. (2002). The Doctrine of Jesus Christ. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. Torrance, Thomas F. (2008). Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, ed. Robert T. Walker. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press. Torrance, Thomas F. (2009). Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, ed. Robert T. Walker. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Academic. Torrance, Thomas F. (2016 [1988]). The Trinitarian Faith: The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Westerholm, Martin (2015). The Ordering of the Christian Mind: Karl Barth and Theological Rationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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18 Theology and Practice of Mission in Mid-Twentieth-Century Scotland Alexander Forsyth

Introduction There was a blossoming period in dynamic modes of mission in Scotland in the two decades following the Second World War, where many of the key issues that now perplex the post-Christendom Church were confronted and addressed in theological reflection and in practice. A buoyant Christianity in Scotland acted as a test-bed for experiments in missiological innovation, inspired by key Scottish figures and their contextual application of ground-breaking theological influences from further afield. Mission was precipitated by the confrontational theology of Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, and Ellul; the incarnational sacrifice of the French ‘worker-priest movement’; the social and political activism of the storefront churches of the East Harlem Protestant Parish; the ecumenical cooperation and integration espoused by the World Council of Churches; and the mass revivalism of Billy Graham. Furthermore, within Scotland in the 1950s the work of Karl Barth and theologies of ‘neo-orthodoxy’ began to permeate into missional expression, influenced by the teaching of Church of Scotland ministry candidates at New College, Edinburgh of T. F. Torrance; whereas in the 1960s, the ‘de-mythologizing ethic’ of a ‘religionless or secular Christianity’ was reflected in Scottish mission, as an outcome of the lecturing to their Glasgow counterparts of Ronald Gregor Smith and Ian Henderson at Trinity College. Though the initiatives which resulted had emerged from within the Church of Scotland, they all remained resolutely ecumenical in their outlook and implementation as regards other Reformed denominations. They further reflected in their later stages the key missiological decrees of the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church (1962–5), such as within Ad Gentes and Lumen Gentium. Through a reconsideration we might not only recognize the theological and historical sources of mission in the present day, but also identify strands for a contextual Scottish missiology for the future. The key driver was the perception that Scotland was a ‘mission field’ where, despite seeming numerical health and prosperity, for the most part the Church and Christian faith were increasingly irrelevant to the lives of ordinary people. In

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that light, the Church required an urgent and radical upheaval so that it might more fully reflect the Gospel in the rediscovery of a true embodiment of New Testament koinonia. As Tom Allan commented, perhaps prophetically, ‘The Church has long since ceased to be anything but a pale reflection of the true Christian community . . . And I believe that on the Church’s attitude to this problem depends, not only its future effectiveness, but its future existence as an institution’ (1954b: 42–3). The central tenets of post-war mission in Scotland were reflective of the wider international context. In the two decades after the Second World War, the laypeople of the churches in the Western nations were energized into cooperative dialogue and decisive action as never before; to rebuild church and society from the physical, moral, and spiritual rubble of the war. As David Bosch has remarked, ‘it dawned upon the churches, both Catholic and Protestant, that the traditional monolithic models of church office no longer matched realities. The theological aggiornomento in both main Western confessions discovered again that apostolicity was an attribute of the entire church and that the ordained ministry could be understood only as existing within the community of faith’ (1991: 471). On the level of mission theology, principal marking points in the period of an international consideration of the ‘apostolate of the laity’ were the works of the Roman Catholic theologian Yves Congar (1957); and from a Protestant perspective, of the first Director of the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey, Hendrik Kraemer (1958). The role of the laity in church and mission also energized the nascent World Council of Churches to a considerable degree, and was reflected in the founding of lay training centres and evangelical academies throughout the world.¹ In that light, in Scotland it was also asserted that the effective cross-cultural translation of the Gospel in the local context could only be carried out by the empowerment of the church laity and not the clergy. Missional endeavours sought the growth by the laity of ground-level, contextual, organic church communities, fully attuned to the rhythms and tempos of work and family life in their worship, and a dedicated presence and availability in social commitment. This shift in direction was seen as the only answer to the complacency of the churches derived from the privileges and false security of late Christendom. Furthermore, although all of its leaders remained male, a focus on the calling of the laity in mission led to wide participation from women in the Church. The confidence placed in such a refocus was absolute: that it would lead to purposeful and exciting new directions in mission as the Gospel interacted with the world; that it would recast church structures to better reflect lived reality; that a reshaping of liturgy would occur towards the everyday concerns of the street;

¹ See World Council of Churches (1957, 1964).

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that denominational barriers would be broken down ecumenically in common mission if not confessionally too; and that a flow of faith and action for justice and peace would result, creating a new society. In post-war Scotland, there remained a willing ear from what the sociologist John Highet described as a ‘church-minded nation’ (1950: 79). Apathy towards Christianity remained tinged with sympathy; the Church’s place within societal structures was assumed as a given; and overt atheism was rare. The churches were vast in their scale, were prominent at the moral, social, and political crux of Scottish life, had the human and financial resources to carry out large-scale mission, and, crucially, pervaded the public confidence to do so. Post-war dynamism was also a reaction to the pre-war years in Scotland, and a national Church then ‘dangerously out of tune not only with many social realities within Scottish society but also with some of the grace notes in its own Reformed tradition’ (Storrar 1994: 60). The pre-war concentration in Scotland mostly assumed that ‘mission’ was ‘evangelism’ through oral proclamation alone, and a call upon a sense of duty to respect the cultural norm of church adherence. In a nation assumed to be inherently Christian, the ‘mission’ of the home Church was essentially one of revivalism, i.e. the enticing of those lapsed, baptized Christians lurking at the outer edges of Christian society back into the fold of the redeemed community. In the post-war period, upon the realization of the increasingly tenuous hold of the Christendom legacy beyond social norm, there began a journey towards a broader understanding of ‘mission’ under what became known as missio Dei theology; the mission of God in the world expressed in multiple forms of word and deed. The first steps towards the realignment of the Church had been taken during the war. Ground-breaking reports were presented to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland by the Baillie Commission. The Commission castigated a prewar Church marked by strident anti-Catholicism and indifference to the plight of the unemployed in the ‘hunger of the thirties’, emphasizing the essential rediscovery of the social implications of the Gospel. In that light, the publication of the report Into All the World on Easter in 1946, by a Joint Committee of the Home Board Committee on Evangelism and the Baillie Commission, recognized that an urgent regeneration of modes of mission was required: The changes in the social environment, outlook and manner of life of the people in this country are so vast that some of the older methods of religious work have been inevitably outmoded, while others call for careful adaptation to new conditions. The eternal gospel remains itself unchanged, but it requires to be proclaimed in a new idiom and presented in new ways and in fresh channels. (Church of Scotland 1946: 9)

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Changes in direction were championed from diverse areas of the Scottish churches. The Iona Community was often pre-eminent. As early as 1944, influenced his missionary experiences in Manchuria, the later deputy leader of the Community, Ralph Morton, had expressed that ‘we have to be prepared to scrap much that is dear and familiar in our life and worship for the sake of building up into a new and living fellowship with those who do not speak our language’ (1944: 11). Set against a needy and receptive social backdrop, caught in the heady optimism of the times, and driven by inspirational figures such as Tom Allan and George MacLeod, the churches responded to the challenges of post-war Scotland on a dramatic scale. Highet could justifiably reflect in 1960: The period since the end of the Second World War has seen evangelistic activities on a scale which in extent and variety must surely be unprecedented in the history of the Scottish Churches. That very fact, indeed, may well be thought to be the outstanding feature of Scottish Church life in the mid-twentieth century. (1960: 70)

Tom Allan and ‘Tell Scotland’ Tom Allan (1916–65) was a minister of the Church of Scotland, evangelist, and theologian. He was minister in the Glasgow parishes of North Kelvinside (1946–53) and St George’s Tron (1955–64), and Field Director of the ‘Tell Scotland’ movement (1953–5). His ideas on the basis of Christian mission were drawn from diverse, rich sources in Scottish and European theology and tradition, in particular the French priests Henri Godin and Yvan Daniel (see Godin and Daniel 1949). His gift was to bring together and then apply those influences in local context, and to set out both his inspirations and the practical outcomes within his seminal book on mission, The Face of My Parish (1954b). He further contributed significantly to the development of a theology of evangelism at international level through the World Council of Churches.² The missional directions that Allan first developed in the parish of North Kelvinside, and that were to provide the focus for the rest of his ministry, were summarized by him in this way: Gradually three principles became articulate for me and I began to hold them with increasing conviction. The first is that the solution to the vast problem of

² On Allan’s ministry and mission, see Forsyth (2017: 19–74).

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communicating the gospel to the masses who live outside the sphere of Christian fellowship is inextricably bound up with the local Church . . . Secondly, that the Church can only fulfil its function, and penetrate the secular world when it is exhibiting the life of a genuine and dynamic Christian community . . . And thirdly, that in all this the place of the layman is decisive. (1954b: 66)

Allan’s goal was the revolution of the Church into ‘missionary parishes’ of constant witness and service. Whilst affirming the parish model, and the reliance on the Church as the agent and object of mission, the ordinary man and woman in the pew were to be the vanguard of public Christian proclamation, social service, and church growth. Allan wrote in 1950: It is becoming clear that there is one way before all others to which God is calling His Church to-day: and that is to reaffirm the Apostolate of the Laity. So that ordinary folk who know in their own lives something of the transforming power of Christ go out as His ambassadors into the workshop, the factory, the marketplace, the community. If the secular world will not come to us, then we must reach out to it, bearing in our lives the image of Christ, and translating our faith into terms of active and decisive witness. (1950: 14)

All possible means would be called into action: ‘[There is a] false dilemma between the so-called “individual salvation” and the so-called “social gospelism”. It is not either/or. It is both/and . . . ’ (1954c: 2). He sought to ‘walk the tightrope’ between theological cliques and to embrace ecumenical cooperation; in a distinctive attempt to employ or support all means at hand, whether preaching, rallies, ‘congregational groups’, incarnational living, or direct social and political action, in order to communicate the Christian Gospel in word and deed. Every act of the Church was, therefore, to be filtered through the lens of mission, and was centred on encounter, with ordinary people, by ordinary people, in their place and context. Allan wrote of his surroundings in Glasgow: ‘Jesus orders us out into the highways and byways, into the streets and lanes of the city, to meet with people wherever they are, and whether they recognise their need for God or not’ (Archive of Tom Allan AA6, 5.2: ‘My Friend the Criminal’). He summarized the goal of his missiology in this way: The mission of the Church is concerned not only with the man,³ but with the world in which the man lives, and is committed to bringing the light of God to bear upon the whole of life. This can only be accomplished in a continuing engagement with the world at every level. (1954a: 3) ³ In keeping with his times, Allan used the words ‘man’ and ‘men’ as synonymous with ‘person’ and ‘people’.

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That task of engagement in the name of the Gospel was of the essence of the nature of church: ‘A church which is not a missionary church is, in no sense of the word, a Church at all’ (1954c: 2). Recognizing the strong influences of the parish mission of Thomas Chalmers, John White and D. P. Thomson, to fulfil these goals Allan called for a ‘congregational group’ of the missionally motivated. The essence was that ‘such a community must be an organic growth . . . The community cannot be established by decree. It must discover its own existence’ (1954b: 68). It was through this ‘overwhelming minority’ that ‘we go out not only to speak to men about Christ and to witness to the fellowship of Christ, but to serve men wherever they are and whatever their needs may be, for Jesus’ sake’ (Archive of Tom Allan AA6, 11.15: ‘The Seedbed of Life’, p. 4). Whilst Allan recognized the danger of such a group becoming Pharisaical and self-serving, he proposed that from its continuous mode of action it might more adequately reflect a New Testament community which would serve the world and radically change the Church: The work will be ultimately effective if the group of volunteers becomes, through the reality of its experience in the mission, a true koinonia; if what began as a parish mission becomes, in effect, a missionary parish; and if the mission of friendship is a prelude to a constant mission of service. These things will not take place overnight. And they will cause upheaval in the Church. (1954b: 98)

Allan experienced such upheaval in North Kelvinside in response to the rapid Church growth that ensued from the parish mission of the ‘congregational group’, which had involved initial ‘visitation’ of all homes in the parish, followed by multiple forms of engagement in witness and service. The cause of upheaval had been the shaking of the Church’s priorities, and the engagement of ordinary folk, particularly the young, in turn causing a rapid influx to the Church of new and unfamiliar faces who had little concept of expected, formalized Church behaviour. They were confronted by an existing Church which struggled to cope. Allan diagnosed the reasons why: firstly, institutional conservatism and opposition to change; and secondly, a ‘secularism’ within the Church whereby it had separated itself from the working classes by its ‘subservience to a bourgeois culture . . . it has transformed the revolutionary ethic of Jesus into an inoffensive prudential morality’ (1954b: 42). That clash of cultures was also to hamper his ideas on a national scale. As knowledge of his work in North Kelvinside spread, Allan was invited in 1953 to become the full-time Field Director of the ‘Tell Scotland’ movement, a very bold, fully coordinated national ecumenical effort of Reformed denominations to evangelize the whole nation of Scotland, initiated and supported by the BBC and broader national media. It sought to engage every congregation in the country,

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and in turn reach every person in their community with the Gospel, whether at work, at home, or at leisure. The model of mission expressed by Allan in North Kelvinside and in The Face of My Parish was carried over to the national movement. A three-stage programme was set out by Allan: publicizing, then gathering the lay forces in ‘congregational groups’, and finally a period of outward mission to the nation. After a successful Phase I, Allan was nevertheless a worried man, fearing a lukewarm response thereafter. Having met Billy Graham following a rally in London, Allan became convinced that Graham’s mass evangelism would inspire Phases II and III. As Allan explained in late 1954: ‘Dr Graham has reminded us of the place of evangelistic preaching in the recruitment of the laity’ (1954c: 22–3). It is important to note that this was Allan’s principal purpose in inviting Graham, in the context of lay mission within ‘Tell Scotland’; a purpose which was, however, to become somewhat lost along the way. The invitation to Graham appeared to sit in direct contradiction to the ‘Tell Scotland’ principles of local, organic, parish growth drafted a few months before from Allan’s prior missiology. It faced vocal, if unsuccessful, opposition from George MacLeod and Ralph Morton of the Iona Community. Billy Graham’s ‘AllScotland Crusade’ of March to April 1955 was the greatest short-term exposure of the nation of Scotland to Christianity, through mass rallies at Kelvin Hall, Glasgow and outdoor stadia, through radio relays across the country of Graham’s rallies, and saturated coverage within television and the newspapers. The Crusade inspired some to find a lasting faith or to enter ministry training, ensuring that there remains a positive legacy that is identifiable. However, despite the Crusade’s prominence and undoubted short-term effect, Allan’s goal at a national level was not achieved. There was no longer-term impact on church attendance, membership, or missionary ethos.⁴ Phase III mission under the ‘Tell Scotland’ model did not significantly materialize, and the movement began a slow demise. Instead, after a short upward spike,⁵ a rapid decline began in the membership of the major denominations in 1956–8 that still continues. Thus, Bisset reflected, ‘1956 was the end of a dream’ (1989: 58). The intervention of the ‘All Scotland Crusade’ changed the nation’s understanding of Christianity at a crucial time before the catastrophic effect of the onrush of secularization in the ‘long sixties’ of 1958 to 1974, and has affected the churches’ perception of ‘mission’ to the present day. The fervent desire at a national level for a radically reorientated church of the laity, united in dedication to the people in mission and service, did not, for the

⁴ See Highet (1958, 1960). ⁵ The membership of the Church of Scotland reached an all-century high in 1956 of 1,319,574 people.

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most part, permeate to the parish level in the face of reticence or discouragement. As Highet wrote in 1960: In the thirteen years since [North Kelvinside], this opposition has been overcome to greater or lesser degree in different areas and in different congregations, but it is difficult not to feel that laity in general has not responded to the call to evangelism to the extent hoped for in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s. (1960: 77)

The years that followed also saw a dissipation of the importance of the ‘apostolate of the laity’ internationally. Thus, Albert van den Heuvel could write in the mid-1960s: No church in the whole world really practically applied the new partnership of the laity and the clergy . . . When we look back at the period since 1945, we see the renewal movement imprisoned in carefully defined and tentative experiments which were never allowed to become a strategy . . . When the world changed around us, the churches remained the same. (1967: 52)

Whilst, therefore, on one level, the intervention of the 1955 Crusade might be viewed detrimentally in relation to the prior potential of a widespread reform of the Church in Scotland and a renewed focus upon the laity in mission that might have buffered the Church from the social turbulence of the 1960s, on another level the dissipation of the movement in Scotland reflected similar trends across Western Europe and North America. So, did Allan’s model of the purging and reinvention of the Church through the apostolate of the laity ever work in a parish setting? It was in Allan’s ministry at St George’s Tron from 1955 to 1963 that the ‘Tell Scotland’ model was most clearly implemented. Allan exhibited in his eight-and-a-half years of city centre ministry an unflagging dedication towards enacting a missionary basis of Gospel and Church, to be expressed theologically in the preaching of the Word, most notably through monthly youth rallies, and the care of those on the streets, with the members of the Church at the heart of it all. The potency and power of Allan’s city-centre ministry was sadly curtailed by ill-health, leading to his premature death from heart failure at the age of 49 in 1965. Allan viewed the major difficulties in mission in Scotland in the immediate post-war period to be ‘contact, communication and consolidation’ (Archive of Tom Allan AA6, 5.7: ‘Rescue the Fallen’, Article 5). Whilst his missiology contextualized both the means and nature of ‘contact’ and ‘communication’, a major stumbling block was in ‘consolidation’ through the reinvention of the nature of the Church. Allan relied on the institutional church as the hub of all mission, and as the venue to which all those who had been engaged were to be directed.

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The model induced a ‘culture shock’ on those new individuals who sought to integrate within the pre-existing institution, and their enthusiasm was largely stifled by apathy and open rebuttal. We thus arrive at what John Harvey would consider to be the ‘fundamental weakness’ of Allan’s model, and that of one of Allan’s chief inspirations, Georges Michonneau: ‘they remained convinced that these souls would eventually come into the church . . . as a result of the faithful and corporate activity of the congregation’ (1987: 72). Allan inspired a quantum leap in the consideration of the interaction of Christianity, culture, and world in the decade following the war. However, considering the Church as the impediment upon which Allan’s inspirational efforts to relocate mission to the local and the personal foundered, Harvey asks the question, ‘is the existing ecclesiastical set-up, however renewed and enthused, the best place to begin?’, given that ‘in the very manner, style and internal context of its being there, it seems to keep erecting, or confirming, more barriers than it can break down’ (1987: 72). Instead, Harvey asks, ‘is there not a “dying to be done” to the view that the old ways can be made to work if they are renewed, and to the approach to a bridging the gap which starts from within the church, rather from out there in the world’ (1987: 73). Harvey is describing the endpoint of the eventual transformation of missiological thinking by the development of ‘contextualization’ towards an ‘inculturation’ not only of the location of the transmission of the Gospel, the identity of the donor, the ear of the recipient, the location of church, or the unified theologies of the laity, but also by the melding of mission, Church, and world. This is the model which would find eventual expression in the exploratory ministry in which Harvey served, in the Gorbals of the 1960s.

Iona Community as Parish Mission The vision of George MacLeod (1895–1991) for the Iona Community at its founding in 1938 was, similarly, to reconnect Church and world in urban Scotland. What was needed was an experiment in the communal expression of Christianity in the tradition, as MacLeod interpreted it, of Celtic Church and society: of tradesmen and a brotherhood of ministers gathering together in equal community to reshape and remould both Christianity and culture. MacLeod’s goal was to make Christ live again in the very breath of the communities of Scotland, rich and poor alike. The vision remained church-based: to rebuild society through the structures of the church from its ruins, figuratively. The vision soon became attached to a literal rebuilding of the monastic buildings of Iona Abbey, as a metaphor for the broader scheme. In its original incarnation from 1938 until the mid-1960s, the purpose of the Community was singular: ‘The Iona Community exists to further the Mission of

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the Church’ (Morton 1956: 5). On Iona, student ministers spent three months in the summer living and working at the Abbey, as unskilled labourers to the craftsmen. MacLeod described this work as ‘a microcosmic foretaste of what a “Congregation” should be’. Thus, he asserted, ‘Our supreme purpose in undertaking the building of the Abbey . . . is not to get the roof on, but to sit at meat with craftsman brothers’ (1946: 97–8). MacLeod wrote in his post-war manifesto, We Shall Rebuild, that ‘if the Church is to leaven the Lump of the world’ (1946: 99) it would do so by a ‘Message of Friendship’ which ‘will be quite unlike the sudden coming of a complete stranger . . . to pour forth in a concentrated week a series of rather astonishing sentences in which the word Salvation appears a remarkable number of times’ (1946: 107). In seeking to realign the expression of the Gospel with the life of the urban worker, the parish church focus of the Iona Community would thus call Iona ministers to widely implement ‘Missions of Friendship’ in their urban parishes, particularly in the new housing areas created by slum clearance. It would also call them to express a desire to witness through innovative forms of reconnection with the home and the factory, in the House Church Movement, and in industrial mission. The Gorbals Group Ministry moved one step further. It was a bold attempt to ‘bridge the gap’ that had long existed between Christianity and the poor, by living out a faith in unconditional service to the people, alongside them in the midst of a Victorian Glasgow slum. In essence, working with God alongside the people, and not extracting the people from their culture to the church.

The Gorbals Group Ministry Two young ministers in training in the Church of Scotland—the later de facto leader of the Gorbals Group, Geoff Shaw, from a wealthy Edinburgh medical family, and his friend and colleague Walter Fyfe of Govanhill, Glasgow— undertook postgraduate study on the STM course at Union Theological Seminary, New York in the academic year of 1953–4. Influenced already by Iona and by the worker-priest movement, the period that Fyfe and Shaw spent in New York, and in particular their exposure on voluntary student attachment by working in the East Harlem Protestant Parish (EHPP) through Bill Webber, also a part-time Union professor, was to crystallize the nature of the incarnational ministry that Fyfe and Shaw were drawn towards. The EHPP aimed to engage wholeheartedly in the life of its people through social and political action, and to overtly form ‘storefront’ churches using accessible liturgy. In 1957, Shaw, Fyfe and his wife Elizabeth, along with their friend John Jardine and his wife Beryl, moved into the Gorbals area of Glasgow to do the same. The Group was later augmented principally by John and Molly Harvey; by the ‘Angel

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of the Gorbals’, Lillias Graham; and the later Bishop of Edinburgh and prominent theologian, Richard Holloway. Dissipating in strength in the late 1960s, the Group continued in nominal operation until Shaw’s untimely death in 1978. The Gorbals was undergoing rapid regeneration, with the old tenements being torn down for new high-rise housing. However, whilst the old housing remained, it held vast overcrowding, abject poverty, and appalling sanitation and ill-health. In that context, the principles of the Gorbals Group Ministry in practice were: (a) Visible presence: to be there, living in the Gorbals. (b) To seek ‘critical solidarity’: being alongside, identifying with and supporting the people. (c) Social and political action. Shaw pithily remarked: ‘It is not enough to feed the goldfish, you also have to change the water in the bowl from time to time’ (Ferguson 1979: 72). That was lived out in the Gorbals at two levels: (i) At a community level—what in practice became the defining and almost overwhelming driving force of the Gorbals Group, rather than the formation of indigenous churches, was to address in political action and social agitation, alongside the people, the appalling living conditions and social problems which they faced. (ii) At a personal level—total availability for the people of the Gorbals at considerable personal cost: the open door for all who needed help, participation in God’s suffering in the world, and an unconditional acceptance of all. (d) What Shaw referred to as ‘gossiping the gospel’ on the street—to fulfil the original goal of bringing the Gospel and the Church to the people. Harvey later sadly noted: ‘In the event, no recognisable indigenous church came into being as a result of the presence of the Gorbals Group’ (1987: 106–7). Causes included the jarring of the principal purposes, to be social redeemers and church builders; internal theological and ecclesiological disagreements; sectarian legacies; ‘cultural intrusion’, the sheer pressure and volume of the work; and the ‘vocabulary of church’ became unlearned, distant, and increasingly irrelevant. In ‘bridging the gap’ between the Church and the poor, Harvey concedes that ‘the Gorbals Group cannot be said to have succeeded’ (1987: 107). Their influence, however, is still strong. It resonates not only through their immediate practical impact, but also in their challenge to the thinking of urban missiology and ministry, in Scotland and perhaps beyond. As Harvey wrote touchingly of his close friend Geoff Shaw: ‘For Scotland, and for Scotland’s church, though, Geoff surely has much to say. About integrity. About vision. About commitment. About trusting people. About seeing where God is, and going to stand alongside him, no matter what the cost’ (2005: 162–3).

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Ecumenism in Post-War Scotland Ecumenism in its ‘golden age’ in Scotland had several angles, as it did worldwide:

(a) Ecumenism as . . . Structural Unity The publication of the ‘Bishops Report’ in 1957 was the death knell in that generation to any hope of structural unity between Scottish Reformed denominations. Moves to establish episcopacy in a form of unity of the Church of Scotland with the Scottish Episcopal Church were rancorously opposed in the succeeding years, fuelled by the Scottish Daily Express. Described by Ian Henderson in his trenchant criticism as ‘a classic of diplomatic ineptitude’ (Henderson 1967: 117), in his view, ‘during the years 1957 to 1959, the Ecumenicals plunged Scotland into a controversy so acrimonious as to give satisfaction only to those opposed to Christianity’ (167: 119). At the least, the reception of the Report revealed a yawning gap between the aspirations of senior churchmen and theologians in comparison to parish ministers and elders in relation to the goals of ecumenical unity, the latter for the most part embracing cooperation and goodwill, but baulking at reintegration.

(b) Ecumenism as . . . Forming the Common Ground for Mission Tom Allan’s view was that: ‘it is in the work of mission that essential unity is discovered. Unity of purpose is vastly more important than organic unity’ (Archive of Tom Allan AA6, 2.18: Speech to London Missionary Society). That commitment was most clearly expressed in Scotland in the ‘Tell Scotland’ movement, embracing the support of the majority of non-Roman Catholic denominations, thus the Church of Scotland, the Episcopal Church, the United Free Church, the Congregational and Baptist Unions of Scotland, the Churches of Christ, and the United Original Secession Church.

(c) Ecumenism as . . . Lay Interaction to Re-form Theology and Church as the Work of the People Much of the success in Scotland of transposing international ecumenism into concrete action was down to one of its worldwide fathers, Robert Mackie and his good friend, Archie Craig. Craig spent much of the 1950s spanning ‘the subliminal gulf which threatened to widen between those concerned with mission and those concerned with unity’,

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in other words between ‘Tell Scotland’ and the Scottish Churches Ecumenical Association, via his ‘supportive and constructive presence in both’ (Templeton 1991: 84). Mackie was integral in the formation of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1948 and was Associate General Secretary of the WCC until 1955. On his return to Scotland, Mackie began to play a pivotal part in Scottish church life. As well as a key role in the ‘Kirk Weeks’ for the laity under the auspices of ‘Tell Scotland’, and in the formation of the Livingston Ecumenical Parish, Mackie was at the forefront of the opening of Scottish Churches House, Dunblane. Writing on the eve of his departure as its first Warden in 1969, Ian Fraser set out its purpose and achievements since its inception in 1960: Nine denominations have set up a place belonging to them all, a meeting-point which is common ground . . . “Dunblane” stands for them something more than an earnest endeavour towards co-operation between Christians. It represents an act of faith that God has something urgent to give us to do when we are willing to learn it together – a new shape for His Church. (1969b: 1)

Its goal therefore was not simply a place for friendly discussion, but a forum for an earnest attempt between ordinary lay members of denominations as well as their leaders to provide a new direction for the structures of the churches themselves. The ecumenical engagement of the Roman Catholic Church following the Second Vatican Council manifested itself in Scotland in its participation in Action of Churches Together in Scotland from 1990. The dedicated involvement of Scottish denominations in the work of the World Council of Churches, World Communion of Reformed Churches, and the Lausanne Movement has further ensured closer cooperation, and mutual respect in coexistence, diminishing any triumphalist notions of the elimination of the other. However, the past goals of structural reintegration, common mission, or a broader reimagining of the churches themselves now seem distant, reflecting persistent theological differences in sacramental theology and ecclesiology. It may be that such themes will re-emerge more strongly only through practical necessity in times of decline.

Conclusions As the late 1950s and early 1960s unfolded, churches in Scotland which had ‘remained the same’ without the radical revisions sought by Allan and his contemporaries became fatally associated with a social outlook that was now increasingly outmoded. They had lost contact with the prevailing culture, rather than becoming embedded within it. This had a crucial, deleterious effect upon the presence of the laity and their recruitment to missionary activity, particularly upon the young people who had been the mainstays of Allan’s model. In complete

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anathema to Allan’s driving ethos, in the words of Callum Brown the churches ‘became estranged from the fulcrum of community identity’ (1990: 81). Had the opportunity been uptaken that was offered by Allan and his contemporaries to refocus Christianity and the Church towards the lives and needs of ordinary people, then the blows of secularization may have been better cushioned. As it was, the internal obduracy which stunted that opportunity then intermingled with the broader shifts in society in a particularly toxic manner for the churches’ future. Whilst we should be wary of a wholesale adoption of Allan’s pre-1954 missiology as a miracle cure for all present ills, given the practical effect which the institution and secularization had upon it, there are however, key motivations, impulses, and directions within it which remain crucial. As a starting point, Allan’s missiology has a contemporary resonance, as ‘though he did not use the language of the missio dei, Allan clearly understood mission theologically in these terms’ (Storrar 2001: 63). For example, from a Canadian speech in 1963: ‘we’re being called to participate . . . in Christ’s mission to the world because He is already at work in the world’ (Tom Allan Archive AA6: ‘The National Conference of United Churchmen: The Company of the Committed’, recorded June 1963). David Bosch adopted the schemata of Hans Küng in identifying six distinctive periods of Christian history and mission as ‘paradigms’. To this, Bosch applied ‘as a working hypothesis’ (1991: 184) the notion of ‘paradigm shifts’ from Thomas Kuhn. The traditional notion of Protestant mission under the ‘modern paradigm’ concentrated on Christianity as the supreme meta-narrative, and the linking of all human history and experience directly to an authoritative and unassailable infinite, to be located in the authority of Scripture, and the atonement and the resurrection of Christ. This strand is identifiable in part of Allan’s concept of parish and national mission: in the primacy of biblical education and training, and latterly in the central role of preaching and mass evangelism. However, his ‘modern’ expressions are ‘certainly not the whole picture with Tom Allan’ (Storrar 2001: 63). As in Allan’s time and ours, Bosch identified that ‘the new paradigm is . . . still emerging and it is, as yet, not clear which shape it will eventually adopt. For the most part we are, at the moment, thinking and working in terms of two paradigms’ (1991: 349). The writer concurs with Storrar that in terms of the United Kingdom, ‘no one typifies this creative tension between overlapping mission paradigms better than Tom Allan’ (Storrar 2001: 61). The concentration on the laity and the organic growth of community is ‘central to the postmodern understanding and practice of mission, discerned by Allan and his post-war French mentors forty years before the publication of Bosch’s seminal study of the trend’ (Storrar 2001: 63–4). Therefore, ‘we may describe Allan’s ministry in both North Kelvinside and the All Scotland Crusade as a “tale of two paradigms” ’ (Storrar 2001: 64). Allan’s ideas and experience, living as he did at the inception of the same sociological challenges that we now face, invite parallels to be drawn to the present.

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There has been comparative stasis in mission and managed decline since that time. Bisset offers the following explanation: The Kirk is not basically a missionary church. It is part of the structure of society rather than the herald of God’s new society. Indeed, mission only becomes an urgent element on the church’s agenda when the Church’s survival is at stake and membership loss needs to be stemmed. In truth, mission requires for most congregations a significant re-orientation of life. (1986: 31)

Whilst his assessment still rings true, the life and work in the two decades after the Second World War still offers hope today to a Church divided and in decline, for its lessons in the priority of holistic mission to all Christian expression; of God’s mission being rooted in the life of the world and not the church building; of acting in mission through ecumenical unity; and, centrally, of the residual potential of ordinary people in expressing the Gospel, whether within the institutional parish church or outwith in new worshipping communities arising from pioneer ministry and church plants. It offers an affirmation of the mission of the whole people of God: in the narrowing of the lay/clergy divide, the recognition of diverse gifts and ministries, and an overhaul of the Church and the forms of mission which it produces. In all of their work, the post-war pioneers understood for the first time in Scotland the need for ‘contextualization’ and ‘cross-cultural translation’ of the Gospel in mission, for as Ian Fraser wrote: Mission . . . has to do with leaving safe territory, grappling to understand alien thought-forms, learning a language which communicates . . . the need is to make contact with people . . . in places which are not on church premises or where religious meetings are held . . . to learn a language which communicates to contemporaries and to wrestle with their thought-forms so that it is possible for mind to meet mind because person meets person. (1969a: 60–1)

Bibliography Allan, Tom. Archive AA6, New College Library, University of Edinburgh. Allan, Tom (1950). The Secret of Life: Six Broadcast Talks. Glasgow: Henry Munro. Allan, Tom (1954a). The Agent of Mission: The Lay Group in Evangelism, Its Significance and Task. Glasgow: Tell Scotland Pamphlet. Allan, Tom (1954b). The Face of My Parish. London: SCM. Allan, Tom (1954c). The Tell Scotland Movement and Billy Graham. Glasgow: Tell Scotland Pamphlet.

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Allan, Tom (1955a). The Congregational Group in Action. Glasgow: Tell Scotland Pamphlet. Allan, Tom (ed.) (1955b). Crusade in Scotland . . . Billy Graham. London: Pickering & Inglis. Bardgett, Frank (2008). ‘The Tell Scotland Movement: Failure and Success’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society 38: 105–54. Bisset, Peter (1986). The Kirk and Her Scotland. Edinburgh: Handsel. Bisset, Peter (1989). ‘Kirk and Society in Modern Scotland’, in Paul Badhan (ed.), Religion, State and Society in Modern Britain, Texts and Studies in Religion. New York: Edwin Melten, 51–65. Blackie, Nansie (1995). In Love and Laughter: A Portrait of Robert Mackie. Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press. Bosch, David (1991). Transforming Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission. New York: Orbis. Brown, Callum G. (1990). ‘Each Take off Their Several Way? Protestant Churches and Working Classes in Scotland’, in Graham Walker and Tom Gallagher (eds.), Sermons and Battle Hymns: Protestant Popular Culture in Modern Scotland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 69–85. Brown, Callum G. (1997). Religion and Society in Scotland since 1707. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Brown, Callum G. (2001). The Death of Christian Britain: Christianity and Society in the Modern World. London: Routledge. Church of Scotland (1946). Into All the World: A Statement of Evangelism. Glasgow: McCorquodale & Company. Congar, Yves (1957). Lay People in the Church: A Study for a Theology of the Laity. London: Geoffrey Chapman. Ferguson, Ronald (1979). Geoff: The Life of Geoffrey M. Shaw. Gartocharn: Famedram. Ferguson, Ronald (1990). George MacLeod. London: William Collins. Forsyth, Alexander (2017). Mission by the People: Re-Discovering the Dynamic Missiology of Tom Allan and his Scottish Contemporaries. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications. Fraser, Ian M. (1969a). Let’s Get Moving: A Plea for Church Revolution in Scotland. Edinburgh: The Scottish Churches’ Council. Fraser, Ian M. (1969b). Scottish Churches’ House, Dunblane. Perth: George Outram. Godin, Henri G. and Yvan Daniel (1949). ‘France a Missionary Land?’ in Maisie Ward (ed.), France Pagan: The Mission of Abbé Godin, Part II. London: Sheed & Ward. Gorbals Group Ministry Archive, New College Library, University of Edinburgh. Harvey, John (1987). Bridging the Gap: Has the Church Failed the Poor? Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press.

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Harvey, John (2005). ‘Geoff Shaw’, in Nansie Blackie (ed.), A Time for Trumpets: Scottish Church Movers and Shakers of the Twentieth Century. Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 152–63. Henderson, Ian (1967). Power without Glory: A Study in Ecumenical Politics. London: Hutchinson. Highet, John (1950). The Churches in Scotland Today. Glasgow: Jackson. Highet, John (1958). ‘The Churches’, in J. Cunnison and J. B. S. Gilfillan (eds.), The Third Statistical Account of Scotland: Glasgow. Glasgow: Collins, 713–50. Highet, John (1960). The Scottish Churches. London: Skeffington. Kraemer, Hendrik (1958). A Theology of the Laity. London: Lutterworth. MacLeod, George (1946). We Shall Rebuild. Glasgow: The Iona Community. Morton, T. Ralph (1944). Missionary Principles for the Home Front. Glasgow: Iona Youth Trust. Morton, T. Ralph (1956). ‘The House Church: The Next Step or a First Step?’ The Coracle 28: 1–8. Shannon, Bill (2000). Tom Allan: In A Nutshell. Edinburgh: Handsel. Storrar, William F. (1994). ‘Liberating the Kirk: The Enduring Legacy of the Baillie Commission’, in A. R. Morton (ed.), God’s Will in a Time of Crisis: The Baillie Commission in the Church of Scotland. Edinburgh: CTPI, 60–72. Storrar, William F. (2001). ‘A Tale of Two Paradigms: Mission in Scotland from 1946’, in D. Searle (ed.), Death or Glory: Studies Honouring the Contribution of Dr Geoffrey Grogan to the Church/The Church’s Mission in Scotland’s Changing Society. Fearn: Christian Focus, 54–71. Templeton, Elizabeth (1991). God’s February: A Life of Archie Craig 1888–1985. London: BCC/CBBI. van den Heuvel, Albert (1967). The Humiliation of the Church. London: SCM. World Council of Churches (1957). Signs of Renewal: The Life of the Lay Institute in Europe. Geneva: WCC. World Council of Churches (1964). Centres of Renewal: For Study and Lay Training. Geneva: WCC.

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19 The Revival of Celtic Christianity Ian Bradley

The distinguished twentieth-century Scottish theologian, John Macquarrie, was arguably responsible for kick-starting the modern revival of interest in Celtic Christianity. In a much quoted and cited passage in his book Paths in Spirituality, written in 1972 when he was Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford, which contains the first modern use of the phrase ‘Celtic spirituality’ that I have been able to trace, he sought a counter model to the dominant culture of secular materialism in modern Western society: I choose as an illustration Celtic spirituality. Although it belongs to a culture that has almost vanished, it fulfils in many respects the conditions to which a contemporary spirituality would have to conform. At the very centre of this type of spirituality was an intense sense of presence. The Celt was very much a God-intoxicated man whose life was embraced on all sides by the divine Being. But this presence was always mediated through some finite this-world reality, so that it would be difficult to imagine a spirituality more down-to-earth than this one. The sense of God’s immanence in his creation was so strong in Celtic spirituality as to amount sometimes almost to a pantheism. Of course Celtic Christianity was continuous with the earlier Celtic paganism . . . It must also be made clear that their spirituality was in fact Christianized. It is strongly trinitarian, and transcendence is combined with immanence. (Macquarrie 1972: 122–3)

Macquarrie’s brief description encapsulated and embraced many of the key concepts which were to be associated with Celtic Christianity during the widespread revival of interest in the topic which began in earnest in the 1980s. For many of its enthusiastic devotees, as for him, a large part of its appeal lay in its sense of divine presence combined with an earthiness and homeliness, its closeness to pagan, pre-Christian and pantheist belief systems, and its strongly Trinitarian focus. Significantly, Macquarrie used the terms ‘Celtic Christianity’ and ‘Celtic spirituality’ interchangeably, underlying the broad, syncretistic nature of a perceived phenomenon which was to appeal as much if not more to those on the fringes of faith and associated with so-called ‘New Age’ movements as to devout and committed Christians.

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The Celtic Christian revival, which perhaps reached its height during the last decade of the twentieth century and extended throughout and beyond the British Isles, was largely a popular, non-academic project, fuelled largely by a plethora of paperback anthologies of Celtic prayers, many of them based on Alexander Carmichael’s Carmina Gadelica and popular books exploring the relevance of themes supposedly found in the early centuries of insular British Christianity and in subsequent Irish, Gaelic, and Welsh sources and traditions. The revival did, however, stimulate academic interest and activity within university departments of theology and religious studies. The first major department to take the lead in this area was the Faculty of Divinity at Edinburgh University where the initiative came from two Irish theologians, Noel Dermot O’Donoghue and James Mackey. It was as much as anything a personal quest which sent these two Irish-born Catholics back to their roots. Mackey, whose appointment in 1979 as the first Roman Catholic to hold a chair of theology at Edinburgh (as the Thomas Chalmers Professor of Systematic Theology) had provoked something of a furore among disgruntled Presbyterians, commented that he started exploring Celtic Christianity ‘when the years of feeding on largely teutonic philosophy and theology began at last to fail to refresh my spirit and was beginning to fail my Christian faith’ (Mackey 1989: 10). The first fruit of this initiative was the publication in 1989 of An introduction to Celtic Christianity. Conceived by O’Donoghue, a Carmelite friar who had come to Edinburgh in 1971 as lecturer in systematic theology, the first Roman Catholic priest to hold a position in a Scottish theological faculty since the Reformation, and edited by Mackey, its rather eclectic collection of essays aimed to provide ‘an introductory map for beginners’ (Mackey 1989: 1). Although published in Edinburgh by T&T Clark, its focus was almost entirely Irish. Of its fifteen contributors, thirteen were Irish and two Welsh. The only saint dealt with was Patrick, the one essay on Scotland, which dealt entirely with post-Protestant Highland culture, was written by an Irishman, and the modern figures taken to represent the continuing Celtic Christian tradition were James Joyce and Seán Ó Ríordáin. In his introductory essay Mackey posed the question ‘Is there a Celtic Christianity?’ The fact that he chose to use the present rather than the past tense was significant. Subsequent chapters focused as much on the continuing Celtic spiritual tradition, as shown in the evangelical revival in Wales and James Joyce’s Ulysses, as on the so-called ‘golden age’ of the sixth- and seventh-century saints in Scotland and elsewhere. Mackey’s introduction went on to endorse many prevalent myths found in more popular books which were later to be challenged by Celtic scholars. He noted that ‘the Celts seem to have taken quite quickly and early to Christianity’ and detected ‘the presence of unreconciled Celtic pagan culture within the Christian literature of the Celtic territories’ (Mackey 1989: 2). Emphasizing the extent to which Celtic Christianity embodied itself in local culture, he identified certain distinctive themes, notably, echoing John Macquarrie, ‘a

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pervasive sense of spiritual presence’, ‘the full and uninhibited acceptance of the natural world’, ‘the Celtic penchant for wandering around’, and ‘the Celtic way of adapting the natural religious (or so-called pagan) heritage’ (Mackey 1989: 12, 13, 19, 21). Overall, his introduction gave the clear impression that there was a distinct Celtic Christianity and that it offered some important pointers for contemporary Christians. He ended by expressing the hope that ‘further explorations’ would lead eventually ‘to discernment of a distinctively Celtic mentality still living perhaps in the depths of consciousness, a Celtic culture still flowering in hidden places, still waiting to be fully Christianized and to shape again a distinctive Christianity to all that is best in itself ’ (Mackey 1989: 6). In fact, Mackey wrote very little more of substance or significance on the subject of Celtic Christianity and it was O’Donoghue who pursued his mystical and romantic agenda in two books, The Mountain Behind the Mountain: Aspects of the Celtic Tradition (1993) and The Angels Keep Their Ancient Places: Reflections on Celtic Spirituality (2001). Written in a deeply mystical stream of consciousness style, and in many ways spiritual autobiographies, his books could be taken as pleas for the preservation of mystery at a time when Celtic Christianity was becoming the subject of academic study and postgraduates were queuing up to lay bare its meagre literary and archaeological remains. ‘The word Celtic can take us anywhere’, he reflected in the Mountain Behind the Mountain, ‘on to Hy-Brasil, the Isle of the Blest, or on to the rocks of hard scholarship and the shattering of the fragile craft of imagination’ (O’Donoghue 1993: 70). He argued that the key which would unlock the treasures of Celtic spirituality were a perception close to imagination and intertwined with belief, but defying definition. He distinguished four regions of what he called the ‘imaginal reality’ in the Celtic tradition: the world of fairies; the world of elemental presences; the world of the living dead; and the world of angels. Spirituality of place was all-important, as it was to the English Roman Catholic (later Anglican) theologian Philip Sheldrake who wrote about it in his Living Between Worlds: Place and Journey in Celtic Spirituality (1995). Despite these strictures against too much academic analysis, echoing George MacLeod’s plea in one of his Iona prayers to believe that ‘turn but a stone and an angel moves’ and not to make such matters ‘fit subjects for the analyst’s table’ (MacLeod 2007: 24–5), New College, Edinburgh under Mackey and O’Donoghue became the main centre for research into Celtic Christianity during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Several notable theses were undertaken under their supervision and at least two found their way into book form, perhaps the two most notable being Mary Low’s Celtic Christianity and Nature: The Early Irish and Hebridean Traditions (1996) and Karen Ralls-MacLeod’s Music and the Celtic Otherworld (2000). Both of these monographs continued the essentially romantic and mystical agenda set by Mackey and O’Donoghue. Low’s book, which despite its title focused largely on early Irish sources such as ‘The Voyage of Saint Brendan’ and Saint Patrick’s ‘Confessions’ and contained little from the Hebridean or

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Scottish traditions, explored the importance of the land, hills and mountains, water, trees, fire, sun, and other elements in early Christian and biblical imagery, and showed how medieval writers were aware of parallels between biblical and pagan texts which are often overlooked today. There was much about the relationship between Christianity and the primal religions. Ralls-MacLeod similarly emphasized the parallels between pre- and post-Christian culture in terms of attitudes towards the supernatural powers of music. Edinburgh was not the only Scottish university divinity school to respond to the growing interest in Celtic Christianity at this time. At Aberdeen between 1992 and 1998 the author of this chapter taught undergraduate and evening classes on the topic, based in part on my book The Celtic Way, first published in 1993 by Darton, Longman & Todd and subsequently reprinted numerous times with a new edition appearing in 2003. My Columba—Pilgrim and Penitent, a study of the life, character, and achievements of the founder of the monastic community of Iona, was published by Wild Goose Publications in 1997, having been commissioned by the Iona Community to mark the 1400th anniversary of his death. It was curious, in a way, that it was two East Coast universities that showed most interest in Celtic Christianity. Both had Celtic departments, several of whose members, notably William Gillies at Edinburgh and Donald Meek and Colm O’Boyle at Aberdeen, were also very interested in the revival, although from a much more critical perspective. There was little or no interest in the phenomenon of Celtic Christianity during this period at Glasgow University. While what was coming out of university divinity departments was predominantly romantic, mystical, and in many ways in keeping with the general mood of popular Celtic Christian revivalism—with much emphasis on the syncretistic, ecofriendly aspects of Celtic Christianity and its closeness to pagan belief systems and feminist themes—a much more scholarly and sceptical note was being sounded from Celtic Studies departments. Here a much closer textual focus on the actual sources resulted in a radically different interpretation of their theological message and theme. In 1995 Edinburgh University Press published, under the title Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery, a collection of early prayers and poems from seventh- and eighth-century Iona edited by Thomas Owen Clancy, a research fellow in the Department of Celtic at Edinburgh, and Gilbert Markus, a Dominican friar and scholar based in Edinburgh. The tone of their commentaries was revisionist and in many ways debunking of the ideas put about by O’Donoghue and Mackey. In particular they took issue with a point made particularly strongly by Mackey that Pelagius could be taken in some senses as the representative theologian of Celtic Christianity which had a greater sense of human goodness and less emphasis on original sin than other more Augustine-influenced continental inculturations of Christianity at the time. Mackey had written with particular passion about this in his preface to An Introduction to Celtic Christianity:

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Where was the original sin and the alleged corruption of nature? Where the need for a redeemer? Our long theological tutelage to that dark North African, Augustine, must no longer tempt us to overlook the correct Celtic answer to these questions. This natural world, this human nature, is good through and through as the Genesis refrain insists. That is the truth of the matter and no amount of solemn dogma in the shadow of Augustine will ever alter it . . . The Christ of traditional Celtic imagery comes not to confront the corruption of nature, but to release a beautiful and holy world from its bondage. Which brings us to Pelagius . . . What is at issue [with him] is not the rehabilitation of a ‘heretic’ but the very real possibility that there is a characteristically Celtic theology of nature, sin and redemption which could be quite orthodox, or at least avoid the clear excesses and failures of its Augustinian counterpart. (Mackey 1989: 16–17)

Clancy and Markus were very dismissive of this kind of analysis of a distinctively ‘Pelagian’ and anti-Augustinian influence on Celtic Christianity: Far from the Pelagian view of each man and woman as a self-sufficient, selfcontained, autonomous individual capable of working out his or her own salvation by carefully observing God’s law and following Christ’s example, Irish Christians, like Christians throughout the medieval world, saw themselves as dependent on God’s mercy for their salvation, on God’s grace for the performance of their good deeds, and on the continuing prayerful support of their fellow Christians, living and dead. There is no support in Irish monastic literature for the claim that there is a uniquely ‘Celtic’ theology of grace which is unlike that of the rest of Latin Christendom. (Clancy and Markus 1995: 80)

The most devastating critique of the whole Celtic Christian revival, and indeed the whole concept of Celtic Christianity, came from Donald Meek, lecturer, senior lecturer, and reader in Celtic at Edinburgh University from 1979 to 1992, Professor of Celtic at Aberdeen University from 1993 to 2001, and subsequently Professor of Scottish and Gaelic Studies at Edinburgh University from 2002 to 2008. It was at Edinburgh while Mackey and O’Donoghue were at the high point of their enthusiasm for Celtic Christianity that Meek first developed his strong critique of it. His first sally was in a substantial review of Mackey’s Introduction, entitled ‘Celtic Christianity: What Is It and When Was It?’ published in the spring 1991 edition of the Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology. Like Clancy and Markus, he criticized Mackey’s enthusiasm for Pelagius and went on to make a point to which he would come back again and again: ‘There is a very real danger that pilgrims on this re-discovered Celtic way will see in “Celtic Christianity” a mirror image of their own desires for a meaningful encounter with “spirituality”,

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with “wholeness”, with “being” ’ (Meek 1991: 14). A more sustained assault followed in ‘Modern Celtic Christianity: The Contemporary “Revival” and Its Roots’, originally given as a talk to the Church of Scotland Society at the University of Edinburgh in October 1991 and published in the Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology the following year. He noted that the contemporary Celtic religious revival ‘has a distinctive ambience, with a touch of class: it flourishes across the social divides, goes well up the social ladder, links Protestant and Catholic, and has a faint whiff of incense around its outer edges. It seems to have something for everyone, from the Buddhist to the Baptist’ (Meek 1992: 8). From his own evangelical Baptist perspective, however, Meek felt deeply uneasy about the theological agenda of those behind what he characterized as ‘outbreaks of spiritual Celtomania’, stating that ‘Evangelical scholars will note that a theology of redemption through the atonement is not prominent; Pelagius is preferred to Augustine; and Celtic understanding and expression appear to have higher authority than the Scriptures’ (Meek 1992: 30). He characterized what he called ‘the new Celtic religious movement’ as largely bookish, comfortable, and undemanding in its approach, with an unscholarly emphasis on such themes as closeness to nature, gentleness, and primitive simplicity at the expense of the more brutal, austere, and severe elements undoubtedly present in the early Christianity of the British Isles. ‘Few of the movement’s advocates’, he wrote, ‘have yet taken to living on Rockall or the Old Man of Hoy, although such eremitic sites offer stacks of potential, in keeping with the aspirations of several Celtic saints’ (Meek 1992: 9). For him, what was being described as ‘Celtic Christianity’ was not the same entity as ‘Christianity in the British Isles in the period c.400–1100  . . . It is a re-creation’ (Meek 1996: 143–4). Meek continued his spirited crusade against the Celtic revivalists during his time at Aberdeen, not least in lively debate with the present author. His thesis, as someone who had himself been brought up in the evangelical Christian faith of the Gaelic-speaking Inner Hebrides (his father having been the Baptist minister on Tiree), was essentially that what was being passed off as Celtic Christianity— theologically liberal, creation centred, Pelagian, and in tune with much modern thinking—was a romantic fiction, the creation of Anglophones who came from outside the Celtic and Gaelic world and had no real understanding of it. As a Celtic scholar, he criticized the modern enthusiasts for Celtic Christianity for not reading the sources in their original languages. He also felt that they were not representing the faithful and deeply conservative evangelicalism of the Highlands and the Hebrides. I engaged with him in good-natured if passionate debate, suggesting that much of the conservative evangelical Baptist theology that he espoused had, in fact, come into Scotland from English Puritan missionaries and influences in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and there was nothing necessarily native or ‘Celtic’ about it.

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Meek’s critique reached its fullest expression in his book: The Quest for Celtic Christianity (2000). Noting that ‘ “Celtic Christianity” tends to flourish in proportion to its distance from the real Celtic sources’, he restated his central thesis that ‘at the heart of “Celtic Christianity”, as popular constructed, lies a highly creative approach to the reconstruction of the past’ (Meek 2000: 16, 2). His book chronicled what he saw as ‘the creation of a romantic spirituality’ influenced by modern liberal theology and a desire to be closer to nature where generalization, wishful thinking, and fundamentally poor scholarship had distorted an inculturation of Christianity which was, in reality, theologically conservative, highly biblical, and not in the least friendly towards paganism. Meek was not the only evangelical scholar pouring cold water on the Celtic Christian revival. Donald MacLeod, Professor of Systematic Theology at the Free Church College in Edinburgh from 1978 to 2011, was equally scathing in his comments, writing in an article in the West Highland Free Press on 7 March 1997: Everyone from Free Presbyterian to Roman Catholic to Baptist to Robbie the Pict is suddenly discovering that he is a direct descendant of Colum Cille; and also that his own particular way of spending weekends (whether in church, temple, chapel or mountainside) is the only religion in harmony with the Highland habitat. I am more and more inclined to think that the whole business is a lot of nonsense . . . Celtic spirituality? Or New Age under another name? (Bradley 1999: 229)

Nor was it just those of a conservative evangelical persuasion who expressed unease at the assertions being made by the modern enthusiasts for Celtic Christianity. The Roman Catholic scholar Gilbert Markus was especially active through the late 1990s in demolishing cherished shibboleths. His suggestion in an article in the journal Spirituality in 1997 entitled ‘Columba, Monk, Missionary and Hi-Jack Victim’ that Columba’s dealings with birds and animals as recorded in Adomnán’s Vita were entirely a matter of political symbolism challenged the widely propagated notion that the Celtic saints had a particularly close relationship with the animal world. Indeed, he described Columba as a hijack victim and demonstrated how hagiographers and spin doctors from Adomnán onwards had created a wholly distorted and unhistorical picture of him as ‘missionary, eco-patron and pastoral agent’ (Bradley 1999: 228). In an article for the Epworth Review in 1997 provocatively entitled ‘The End of Celtic Christianity’ he adduced evidence to suggest that far from being egalitarian, anti-Roman, feminine friendly, and Pelagian, Celtic Christianity was, in fact, hierarchical, subordinate to and in close conformity with Rome, markedly chauvinistic, and distinguished by an exceptionally strong attachment to the doctrines of the Fall and the reality of Hell. He argued that the excessive romanticism of the modern revival would puncture the myth of Celtic Christianity for good: ‘It doesn’t actually preserve anything or

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introduce us to our Christian fathers and mothers, but is simply the last nail in the coffin of the Celtic Christian past’ (Markus 1997: 54). These criticisms of those involved in the Celtic Christian revival had a significant effect, not least on the present author. Meek’s strictures certainly strongly influenced my own strongly revisionist academic study, Celtic Christianity: Making Myths and Chasing Dreams (1999) which looked at the way that the concept of Celtic Christianity has been reconstructed and reinvented over the last 1,300 years and has been a vehicle through which successive generations of Christians have lived out their dreams of a purer and more appealing church and belief system than those prevailing in their own times. ‘In the context of the current revival’, I observed in the Introduction, ‘it is tempting to suggest that Celtic Christianity is less an actual phenomenon defined in historical and geographical terms than an artificial construct created out of wishful thinking, romantic nostalgia and the projection of all kinds of dreams about what should and might be’ (Bradley 1999: vi). I identified six distinct movements of Celtic Christian revivalism, including the most recent one, starting as long ago as the eighth and ninth centuries when hagiographers first created idealized portraits of the Celtic saints and Bede compared the purity of the golden age of Cuthbert and Aidan with the corruption of his own day. Although I wrote Celtic Christianity while lecturing in church history at Aberdeen University, by the time it was published I had moved to St Andrews University as a lecturer in practical theology. I did teach undergraduate modules in Celtic Christianity in my early years at St Andrews, and wrote my fourth book on the subject, Colonies of Heaven: Celtic Models for Today’s Church (2000) there, but after a few years I stopped teaching in this area and resisted the many requests from potential doctoral students to work on it. This was partly because of a recognition of the paucity of sources, especially in a university without a Celtic department, partly under the continuing the influence of the critiques by Donald Meek and others, and also out of a growing unease with what more could really be written and researched, certainly in the area of theology. Those seeking to pursue academic studies with me were imbued with essentially romantic notions and wanting to work on those concepts which Macquarrie had first written about thirty years earlier—the Celtic sense of divine presence, closeness to nature, and the balance of immanence and transcendence. The fact was that I had come to the conclusion that the paltry sources available could not sustain the production of theses on these kinds of topics. I moved more into the areas of Scottish spirituality and pilgrimage—broader subjects where there was certainly room for a consideration of themes from the so-called ‘golden age’ of Celtic Christianity, or more precisely of what was increasingly coming to be called Irish, indigenous or insular Christianity in the British Isles, between the fifth and ninth centuries but with a less romantic and more nuanced and contextualized approach than I had hitherto adopted.

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By now, Edinburgh had ceased to be the main academic centre for studying Celtic Christianity. O’Donoghue had retired in 1988 and Mackey in 1999. In retirement in Ireland, where he maintained a base at Trinity College, Dublin, Mackey wrote what he described as his ‘theological endgame’ seeking to construct a systematic theology around the theme of creation. Christianity and Creation: The Essence of the Christian Faith and Its Future Among Religions (2006) had relatively little about Celtic Christianity although it did acknowledge the significant contribution of the ninth-century Irish theologian, John Scotus Eriugena, whom Mackey hailed as an important forerunner in the enterprise of presenting a complete Christian theology in terms of creation and natural theology. His book, which made much of the notion of emanationism and suggested that only in the continuous act of creating does God come to self-expression, did pay brief homage to Pelagius as well as to Eriugena and also drew on pre-Christian Irish religious beliefs. From the mid-1990s the initiative in the academic study of Celtic Christianity passed to Lampeter University (subsequently merged with Trinity College, Carmarthen to form the University of Wales Trinity Saint David). Thanks largely to the enthusiasm of Oliver Davies with the strong support of Tom O’Loughlin, Jonathan Wooding, and others, an MA course in Celtic Christian studies, the only one of its kind in the country, began there in 1995. The course brochure nailed its colours firmly to the mast by stating that its purpose ‘is to introduce students to the concept of a distinctive type of Christianity in the Celtic countries during the middle ages which results from the fusion of pre-Christian Celtic religion with Christianity’. Davies and his Lampeter colleagues shared much of the agenda of O’Donoghue and Mackey, arguing that Celtic Christianity was a living rather than a dead tradition, with a particularly strong emphasis on the mystical and the imaginary and also a distinctive fusion of the pagan and Christian. If anything even more than at Edinburgh, the ethos of the Lampeter course, which was pursued on a part-time basis by a good number of clergy, was very much in sympathy with the spirit of the popular revival so castigated by Meek. It was from Lampeter rather than Edinburgh that the most substantial work yet to appear on the theology of Celtic Christianity came, notably in Oliver Davies’ Celtic Christianity in Early Medieval Wales (1995) and Celtic Christian Spirituality: An Anthology of Medieval and Modern Sources (1995) and in Thomas O’Loughlin’s Journeys on the Edges: The Celtic Tradition (2000) and Celtic Theology: Humanity, World, and God in Early Irish Writings (2000), the only academic study of Celtic Christian theology to have been published in Britain. This last book largely stuck to Irish sources, although O’Loughlin did include a chapter on Adomnán entitled ‘A Theologian at Work’ and covering The Law of the Innocents, Canones Adomnani, De Locis Sanctis, and Vita Columbae. Although it is far from over, the current Celtic Christian revival has undoubtedly peaked and neither at the academic nor popular level has there been as much

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interest in the first two decades of the twenty-first century as in the heady days of the 1980s and 1990s. There has been important recent academic work on the Scottish saints but it has been done much more from a historical and linguistic perspective than a theological one. Glasgow University is at the forefront in this area with Thomas Clancy, appointed Professor of Celtic there in 2005, and Gilbert Markus, affiliate researcher in Celtic and Gaelic, continuing to write significant studies on Columba and other Scottish saints and on early poems and prayers. Alan Macquarrie, son of John Macquarrie and honorary research fellow in the School of History at Glasgow University, has also researched and published extensively on Scottish saints, notably in The Saints of Scotland: Essays on Scottish Church History  450–1093 (1997) and has edited a superb edition of the readings, hymns, and prayers for the commemoration of Scottish saints in the Aberdeen Breviary (2012). It is perhaps worth noting that this last book had an Irish publisher, Four Courts Press, possibly suggesting that Celtic saints are still seen, perhaps rightly, as more of an Irish than a Scottish subject. The recent academic focus in this area has thus been much more historical, linguistic, and cultural than theological. There has been notable work on the Celtic sense of place and the interaction between Hebridean spirituality and social and political activism from the independent scholar Alistair McIntosh, former director of the Centre for Human Ecology, whose academic links include being an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow and a Research Fellow at the School of Divinity in the University of Edinburgh. I have recently written a detailed study of the spiritual landscape of Argyll, Argyll: The Making of a Spiritual Landscape (2015), which contains substantial material on Kilmartin valley, Columba, Argyll’s Celtic saints and the extent to which continuing themes in Argyll’s medieval and post-Reformation spiritual development reflect ‘Celtic’ Christian themes. The modern Iona Community and the extent of its indebtedness to Celtic Christianity remains a popular subject for both undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations, although much of the work in this area and in the broader area of contemporary Celtic spirituality tends to be done in religious studies rather than theology departments and to be undertaken by those with wider interests in New Age and alternative spiritualities and neo-paganism. The Celtic Christian revival has had a significant effect on worship and popular spirituality in Scotland. It was a clear influence behind the fourth morning service in the Church of Scotland’s 1994 Book of Common Order and prayers in a recognizably Celtic tradition, often culled from or based on those in the Carmina Gadelica, have found their way into liturgies and services in all the mainstream Scottish churches. The hugely popular songs of John Bell, Graham Maule, and others involved in the Iona Community’s Wild Goose Worship Group are less consciously inspired by Celtic Christianity but have undoubtedly benefited from their perceived association with it. This is also true of the worship books and other

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liturgical material produced by the Iona Community. Among popular writers on spirituality, John Philip Newell, a Canadian born Church of Scotland minister who was warden of Iona Abbey from 1988 to 1992 and is now based in Edinburgh, has been especially influential. He has authored several collections of Celtic prayers and meditations and two major books, Listening for the Heartbeat of God: A Celtic Spirituality (1997) and Christ of the Celts: The Healing of Creation (2008), which present a romantic and unreconstructed portrayal of Celtic Christianity as Pelagian, creation-centred and emphasizing original blessing rather than original sin. Newell is much in demand as a spiritual director and retreat leader on both sides of the Atlantic. His continuing popularity, and the fact that themed weeks run by the Iona Community on Celtic Christianity sell out more quickly than those on any other topic, point to the subject’s continuing appeal. Numerous pilgrims, including clergy and academics from North America, Australasia, and continental Europe, come to Scotland primarily to visit sites associated with the Celtic saints, notably Iona, and there is still a considerable take-up for workshops and retreats on Celtic spirituality. Such academic work as is now being done in the area of Celtic Christianity is largely focused in the United States where the level of interest in this subject remains perhaps stronger than on this side of the Atlantic. Eriugena, for example, has been the subject of significant recent scholarly treatment in A Celtic Christology: The Incarnation According to John Scottus Eriugena by John F. Gavin, SJ, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies of the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts (2014). Again, here the emphasis is primarily on the mystical aspects. To some extent, even academic studies have remained wedded to the parameters and themes outlined by Macquarrie in 1972 and by Mackey and O’Donoghue in 1989. Despite the best endeavours of Donald Meek and other critical and sceptical scoffers, Celtic Christianity has never quite lost its romantic appeal and mystical aura, even in the Calvinist confines and postEnlightenment rationalism of the Scottish Divinity halls—or maybe, indeed, because of them.

Bibliography Bradley, Ian (1993). The Celtic Way. London: Darton, Longman & Todd. Bradley, Ian (1996). Columba—Pilgrim and Penitent. Glasgow: Wild Goose Publications. Bradley, Ian (1999). Celtic Christianity: Making Myths and Chasing Dreams. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bradley, Ian (2000). Colonies of Heaven: Celtic Models for Today’s Church. London: Darton, Longman & Todd. Bradley, Ian (2015). Argyll: The Making of a Spiritual Landscape. Edinburgh: Saint Andrews Press.

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Bradley, Ian (2018). Following the Celtic Way. London: Darton, Longman & Todd. Brown, Terence (ed.) (1996). Celticism. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Clancy, Thomas and Gilbert Markus (eds.) (1995). Iona: The Earliest Poetry of a Celtic Monastery. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mackey, James (ed.) (1989). An Introduction to Celtic Christianity. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Mackey, James (2006). Christianity and Creation: The Essence of the Christian Faith and Its Future Among Religions. Edinburgh: Continuum. MacLeod, George (2007). The Whole Earth Shall Cry Glory: Iona Prayers. Glasgow: Wild Goose Publications. Macquarrie, John (1972). Paths in Spirituality. Edinburgh: SCM. Markus, Gilbert (1997). ‘The End of Celtic Christianity’, Epworth Review 24/3 (July): 45–55. Meek, Donald (1991). ‘Celtic Christianity: What Is It and When Was It?’ Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 9/1: 13–21. Meek, Donald (1992). ‘Modern Celtic Christianity: The Contemporary “Revival” and Its Roots’, Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 10/1: 6–31. Meek, Donald (1996). ‘Modern Celtic Christianity’, in Terence Brown (ed.), Celticism. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 143–58. Meek, Donald (2000). The Quest for Celtic Christianity. Edinburgh: Handsel Press. O’ Donoghue Noel Dermot (1993). The Mountain Behind the Mountain: Aspects of the Celtic Tradition. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. O’ Donoghue Noel Dermot (2001). The Angels Keep Their Ancient Places: Reflections on Celtic Spirituality. Edinburgh: T&T Clark.

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20 Catholic and Protestant Sensibilities in Scottish Literature Stevenson to Spark Linden Bicket

Calvinism has long been seen as a defining (though not wholly positive) influence on the modern Scottish author. Almost unanimously denigrated by writers and artists of the early twentieth century, for the poet and critic Tom Scott, the iconoclastic Protestant Reformation dealt the nation’s poetic output ‘a severe if not mortal blow’ (1970: 39). However, in recent decades, the impact of Calvinism on Scottish cultural production has been subject to new critical consideration.¹ Rather than a puritanical restraint on the Scottish literary imagination, the influence of Calvinism has been considered a catalyst for creative engagement with Scottish ecclesiastical history, community, and worship. Scottish Catholic fiction, by contrast, is much less critically discussed. Nonetheless, a sizeable body of Scottish Catholic literary works exists, and not as the Reformed tradition’s hostile antagonist, but as another luminous thread in the tapestry of Scotland’s richly imaginative, theologically inflected literature. This chapter will focus on four of Scotland’s most canonical modern authors— Robert Louis Stevenson, Robin Jenkins, George Mackay Brown, and Muriel Spark—in order to discuss the reciprocally enriching emphases of these two Christian traditions within Scottish writing. A shared stock of religious themes and subjects will loom large in this discussion, from spiritual conflict to the folk supernatural, and from ‘a particularly Scottish sense of evil’ to the literature of praise (Warner 1969: 337).

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) Stevenson’s most famous work of fiction, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), has sealed his reputation as the most internationally renowned

¹ See, for example, Gribben and Mullan (2009) and Jack (2009).

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Scottish author since Sir Walter Scott. With its Darwinian anxiety over the ‘apelike fury’ of the antagonist, Hyde, and its murky streets, ‘all lighted up as if for a procession and all as empty as a church’, The Strange Case is often presented as a classic exemplar of the late Victorian loss of faith (Stevenson 2002 [1886]: 22, 7). However, this novella’s theological richness is discussed by Alison Jack, who notes its subtle reworking of the Jacob, Isaac, and Esau story in Genesis (2012: 97), and by Larry Kreitzer (1992), who analyses the text’s depiction of the wrestling with sin seen in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans 7:14–25. Similarly, Kevin Mills identifies the tale’s ‘Pauline perception of internal disharmony’ and traces its multiplicity of identity to ‘Saul/Paul, the patron saint of the divided self ’ (2004: 347, 346). Thus, contemporary critics increasingly recognize Stevenson’s ‘skilful mapping of . . . older theological concerns onto a range of contemporary cultural discourses’ in his novella (Arata 2010: 64). Less famous, though written synchronously with The Strange Case and just as influenced by theological thought, is Stevenson’s short story ‘Olalla’ (1885). Set in Spain during the Peninsular War (Middleton 1999: xvi), this story could not be more different in climate and topography to the oppressive gloom of Soho in The Strange Case, and yet both texts share a narrator of Calvinist persuasion, and reflect Stevenson’s attraction to the nightmarish qualities of the Gothic. ‘I would not romance, if I were you,’ warns a doctor to the convalescent narrator of ‘Olalla’, before sending him to a residencia, high in the mountains of Spain, to recuperate from an unnamed malaise (Stevenson 2002 [1885]: 97). But ensconced in the care of a once-noble family, in a grand home full of books ‘in the Latin tongue’, ancestral memories of ‘Scottish superstition and the river Kelpie’ haunt the narrator, and his thoughts become gradually more hallucinatory as he falls under the spell of the family’s intoxicatingly beautiful daughter, Olalla (Stevenson 2002 [1885]: 113, 99). Ollala appears late in the tale, but she is anticipated early on, when the narrator gazes upon the portrait of a family ancestor whose ‘cruel, sullen, and sensual expression’ sparks his obsession: She came to be the heroine of many day-dreams, in which her eyes led on to, and sufficiently rewarded, crimes. She cast a dark shadow on my fancy; and when I was out in the free air of heaven, taking vigorous exercise and healthily renewing the current of my blood, it was often a glad thought to me that my enchantress was safe in the grave, her wand of beauty broken, her lips closed in silence, her philtre spilt. And yet I had a half-lingering terror that she might not be dead after all, but re-arisen in the body of some descendant. (Stevenson 2002 [1885]: 101, 102)

These increasingly fevered reflections are ironized dramatically at the mid-point of ‘Olalla’, when it is revealed that the family matriarch is a vampire, who lusts after the narrator’s newly refreshed current of blood. She and her daughter Olalla

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bear a striking resemblance to their sensual predecessor, a kind of ghostly succubus who possesses the bodies of her female descendants and who (in a wry reversal of the usual Gothic convention) threatens the sexual purity of the male protagonist. Stevenson delves deep into Gothic literature’s fascination with the dark allure of Catholic rite, ritual, and iconography, so that his beloved is described in devotional terms. While the matriarch of the family daunts the Presbyterian narrator with her ‘idol-like impassivity’, her daughter becomes a ‘saintly poetess’ and the ‘pale saint of [his] dreams’ who prays fervently for hours and devoutly makes the sign of the cross (Stevenson 2002 [1885]: 106, 115, 116). Indeed, so polarized are the images of predatory succubus and saintly beloved that in contrast to the ‘savage and bestial’ female vampire, the young daughter takes on the qualities of the beloved of courtly love poetry (Stevenson 2002 [1885]: 124). The scrupulous Scots narrator is in turn transformed into a swooning Spanish troubadour, yearning chastely after Ollala, and declaring the ‘holiness’ of his love in Catholic Spain (Stevenson 2002 [1885]: 124). By the tale’s conclusion, the terrified narrator has fled the scene of his seduction, and Olalla visits him for a final time. She kneels beside a roadside crucifix to pray, while her Presbyterian observer, ‘no friend to images’, takes in ‘the ghastly, daubed countenance’ and ‘the painted wounds’ of Christ (Stevenson 2002 [1885]: 134, 133). Olalla points to the agony on the cross and offers the narrator a short homily: ‘behold the face of the Man of Sorrows. We are all such as He was—the inheritors of sin; we must all bear and expiate a past which was not ours; there is in all of us—ay, even in me—a sparkle of the divine’ (Stevenson 2002 [1885]: 134). Stevenson’s handling of Catholic iconography in this story is thus more than exotic, Gothic decoration: it delineates the cultural and religious difference between the hasty, enraptured lover and the devout beloved. Olalla recognizes that there is goodness within her, but if this is to be preserved, there must be sacrifice. Sin requires penance, something that the narrator, ‘a foreigner [and] a heretic’ reluctantly accepts (Stevenson 2002 [1885]: 114). While Catholicism provides the richly sensual backdrop to this Gothic tale of terror, it is the Calvinism of his youth which significantly informs and shapes Stevenson’s earlier ‘Thrawn Janet’ (1881). This is another chilling short story, set in 1712, in which the lustful female is pitted against a dour Scots protagonist. There is no female vampire in this tale, but, instead, a witch. And this story is narrated not by the protagonist, the Reverend Murdoch Soulis, but by a gossipy Scots voice from his congregation in the gloomy-sounding ‘parish of Balweary, in the vale of Dule’ (Stevenson 1995 [1881]: 110). ‘Thrawn Janet’ surely owes much to Stevenson’s childhood—one steeped in ‘guilt, fear and glory’ (Norquay 2007: 32), particularly due to the ‘scarifying Calvinist instruction’ (Arata 2010: 59) delivered by his parents, and, famously, by his nursemaid, Alison Cunningham (‘Cummy’). Cummy’s ‘overflowing treasury of ghost, goblin, witch, warlock, spunky, and fairy stories’ (Steuart, in Parsons

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1946: 569) are certainly one textual undercurrent in Stevenson’s story of a woman possessed by the devil, leading Fred B. Warner Jr. to diagnose ‘a peculiarly Scottish sense of evil’ in the text (1969: 337). Jenni Calder has also noted that this is ‘a story that uses the fears and prejudices of a devil-conscious national imagination with great effect’ (1980: 165). The small Presbyterian community’s distrust of Janet, an ‘auld limmer’ (or disreputable woman) certainly supports this idea (Stevenson 1995 [1881]: 111). Clearly, Stevenson is alert to the association between witchcraft, lust, and the demonic pact that was a feature of the European witch-hunt in the age of Reformations. Presbyterian fearfulness is signalled in the tale’s lengthy framing narrative, which is delivered in Standard English, and describes the ‘wild, scared and uncertain’ cast of the Reverend Soulis’ eye in his old age (Stevenson 1995 [1881]: 110).² The ever-increasing terror in this tale is ratcheted up to pure Gothic horror by the conclusion, in which the pursued minister battles the possessed body (‘the auld, deid, desecrated corp’) of Janet, the ‘witch-wife’ (Stevenson 1995 [1881]: 117). But this is not only a tale of the Scots folk supernatural. Stevenson skilfully inserts layers of Scottish religious history and scriptural echo into his short story. Soulis, our narrator confides, was ‘fu’ o’ book-learnin’ and grand at the exposition’ as a young man—though thankfully not to the extent that ‘he wad read his sermons’ (Stevenson 1995 [1881]: 111). His parish community agrees ruefully that his university education would have been greatly enhanced by ‘sittin’ in a peat-bog, like their forebears o’ the persecution, wi’ a Bible under [his] oxter an’ a speerit o prayer in [his] heart’ (Stevenson 1995 [1881]: 111). The parishioners, then, romanticize Scottish Presbyterian history and the heroism of the Covenanters in much the same way that Stevenson’s literary forebears did.³ But evidence of Balweary’s ecclesiastical history is also to be found in its kirkyard, ‘consecrated by the Papists before the blessed licht shone upon the kingdom’ (Stevenson 1995 [1881]: 113). It is in this Gothic space, one haunted by remnants of Scotland’s Catholic past, that the minister spies ‘seeven corbie craws’ and a devilish man ‘of a great stature, an’ black as hell’, in a moment plucked straight from Scottish ballad and folk tale (Stevenson 1995 [1881]: 113). The sight of crows and the black devil sets a chain of demonic activity in motion and Soulis must do battle with the forces of Satan in the form of his servant, Janet. Soulis triumphs, but is left ‘a severe, bleak-faced old man’, whose hellfire sermons now focus on ‘the terrors of eternity’, and especially on ‘1st Peter v. and 8th, “The devil as a roaring lion” ’ (Stevenson 1995 [1881]: 110).

² Cairns Craig explores ideas of Calvinism and fearfulness extensively in The Modern Scottish Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination (1999). ³ Gribben identifies ‘the Romantic mythologising of Scottish Presbyterian history’, claiming, ‘the impact of religion on Scottish Romanticism was perhaps most obvious in literary depictions of the Covenanters’ (2011: 121).

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Stevenson’s skill in welding together religious history, biblical allusion, folkloric resonance, and horrifying evil in this tale are matchless and have been tremendously influential on Scottish writing ever since. His theological perspective is seen most clearly in stories like ‘Thrawn Janet’, in which the twisted body of the soonto-be possessed woman prefigures (and indeed predestines) her demonic transfiguration and final, hellish destination. In a similar way, the total depravity of the degenerate but alluring female family line in ‘Olalla’ hints that the duplicitous things of the world are not to be trusted—particularly ‘a feck o’ books’ and stories—and that the only faithful text is the Bible (Stevenson 1995 [1881]: 111).

Robin Jenkins (1912–2005) Stevenson was a foundational influence on the later novelist Robin Jenkins. Like the cosmopolitan Stevenson, Jenkins travelled widely, and set his novels in the industrial central belt of Scotland, the Highlands, Afghanistan, Spain, and Sabah (then North Borneo), where he lived and taught for different periods of his life. Glenda Norquay acknowledges that ‘these two writers share the absolutism of their moral outlooks, linked by concerns which can be seen as reflecting a Calvinist cast of mind’ (1985: 205). Meanwhile, Francis Russell Hart highlights the ambivalence Jenkins feels towards the ‘Calvinist cast of mind’ where he notes that Jenkins’ ‘negative side’ can be seen in his ‘bitter attack[s] on puritanical mortality and Calvinist theology’ (1978: 285). These attacks, and their intertextual links to other writing in the Scottish literary tradition, will form the nucleus of the current chapter’s discussion of Jenkins. Characters of Calvinist formation abound in Jenkins’ fiction. This is seen most obviously in his ministers, who live through seminal moments in Scottish religious history. Jenkins’ clergymen are often objectionable, but the minister of Matthew and Sheila (1998) is the most bombastically unpleasant of all. The opening of this novel, typically for Jenkins, contrasts the beauty of Hebridean land and sea with the squalor of fallen humanity in all its faulty beliefs and transgressions. In this setting, a nine-year-old boy, Matthew Sowglass, decides that he is ‘one of the Chosen, those favourites who could do no wrong’, as he sits next to his grandfather, a minister: Appropriately it happened in a place so peaceful, spacious, and fragrant as to deserve the name heaven on earth: a machair or sea-meadow in the Western Isles, in summer. The fragrance rose from the myriad of tiny wild flowers. Small butterflies with wings as blue as the immense sky were also abundant: as were the bumble bees humming happily among the bedstraw and the larks ascendant singing for pure joy . . . . Grandfather was in his usual black, from hat to boots. A zealous little boy, Matthew, eager to learn, listened gravely as his grandfather

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complained aloud, in anguished mutters in Gaelic and English, that God had not been fair to him. A lifetime of preserving himself, his family, and his congregation from sinful world pleasures had not been rewarded as it should . . . . ‘Miserable, unfortunate boy,’ he mumbled. ‘Do you not know that you are accursed? That the brand of the outcast is on your brow?’ (Jenkins 1998: 3–5)

Jenkins’ depiction of Matthew’s Highland grandfather is almost cartoonish in its caricature of the conservative denominations of the Reformed tradition in Scotland. Clad in black, ‘his sermons lasted over an hour and were tedious’ (Jenkins 1998: 7). Instead of showing his small grandson tenderness and empathy in the face of his mother’s illness, Matthew’s grandfather fixes his eyes on a ‘big black Bible’ and tells tales of a black devil, with ‘horns and a long tail’ (Jenkins 1998: 11, 64). The literary lineage of this character is clear: he is a recognizable ‘justified sinner’ in the vein of James Hogg’s original, Robert Wringhim, who also has a predilection for a ‘black coat and cocked hat’ (Hogg 2006 [1824]: 177). There is also something of Stevenson’s Reverend Murdoch Soulis, the ‘severe, bleakfaced old man, dreadful to his hearers’, in Matthew’s grandfather (Stevenson 1995 [1881]: 110). However, Stevenson’s sympathy for the once-compassionate Soulis is missing from Jenkins’ damning depiction. Even his most empathetic character, the housekeeper Mrs Macdonald, views his minister-villain with disdain: ‘She had lived in Scotland all her life. She had heard about the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. John Knox had believed in it, but surely nobody did today, except a few crazy bigots, like that old man in the Outer Hebrides’ (Jenkins 1998: 35). Matthew’s grandfather, then, has much in common with many of Jenkins’ other justified sinners whose delusion and cruelty are explored, along with election to salvation, as a central—through ridiculed—theme. In fact, the doctrine of predestination is totally rejected by Jenkins in Matthew and Sheila and is presented as an anguished child’s coping mechanism in the midst of profound grief. The novel suggests that Matthew’s belief in his own salvation (and indeed the theology of Calvin) is simply cold, childish comfort. Yet, contrary to the rationalist, atheist stance that Jenkins typically assumes, the novel hints paradoxically that Calvinist thought should be taken seriously. Despite the rather exaggerated and even distorting portrayal of those of severe, Calvinist faith in the text, there is a deep vein of religious imagery and biblical echo at work throughout. At times, the novel even supports the theological mind-set (or ‘devilconscious national imagination’) that it seeks to critique (Calder 1980: 165). For example, Matthew’s fiendish classmate, Sheila, first appears to tempt him to do evil around the time of his election. Sheila is a modern echo of Stevenson’s ‘auld Janet’—an idea signalled to the reader by Matthew’s reflection that: ‘If she was in the Devil’s power, if she had to do whatever the Devil ordered her to do, should she not be pitied, and not condemned? The Devil, his grandfather had told him, could assume any appearance he wished . . . . In what body was he hiding?’

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(Jenkins 1998: 62). It is never made clear that Sheila is innocent of the devilish carnage she claims to have caused, though she, like Matthew, is another child whose parent has died, and she suffers intensely as a result. Like Stevenson, Jenkins appears to encourage a supernatural reading of his Satanic-sounding female protagonist, though he tempers this with the suggestion that grief, improperly resolved, can be hijacked by the savage and uncaring religious creed of ‘divine indemnity’ (Jenkins 1998: 4). More generally, Matthew and Sheila repeats the narrative template of the most famous poetic exposition and expansion of the Fall in Genesis—Paradise Lost. In chapter three, Matthew challenges his grandfather’s authority, and is berated for his ‘diabolical insolence’ (Jenkins 1998: 12). In his rebellion against the powerful family patriarch, the ‘outcast’ Matthew becomes the fallen angel Satan, defying a hypocritical and tyrannical God. He is then cast out of the heavenly Hebridean setting and experiences the grief of loss in his hometown of Lunderston. But later in the novel, as Matthew becomes ever-more enmeshed in his fellow fallen angel Sheila’s murderous plans, the picture of Matthew’s grandfather becomes much more complicated and ambiguous. A slightly older Matthew is surprised to find the dying patriarch shrunken, ‘like a child with a white beard’ (Jenkins 1998: 117), leaving the reader to question and revise their understanding of the old man in the novel’s opening pages. Typical of Jenkins’ oeuvre but under-explored within criticism of his work, Matthew and Sheila is a novel that wears its knowledge of previous Scottish fiction very much on its sleeve. Wallace and Gifford rightly note that Jenkins’ works ‘re-present and satirise the unhappy doctrine of the Elect’, particularly in the ‘justified sinner’ type, ‘but he secularises and complexifies this figure, allowing deeper insight and forgiveness for his self-justifying extremists, so that the reader eventually sees them, not as sinners, but as exemplars, of an essentially flawed humanity’ (Wallace and Gifford 2017: 20). Thus, Jenkins’ novel may initially seem naïve—even unsophisticated—but in his fusion of older supernatural motifs, probing ethical questions, and evolving characterization, Jenkins the Presbyterian atheist encourages a more multi-layered and sympathetic engagement with his protagonists than we might initially expect.

George Mackay Brown (1921–96) The life and work of the Orcadian writer George Mackay Brown is strikingly different to the work of both Stevenson and Jenkins. While Stevenson is described by Roger Luckhurst as ‘an atheist obsessed with religious questions’ (in Stevenson 2008: vii), Jenkins identified himself as an atheist of Protestant formation. He noted his ‘dour Presbyterian realism’ (Jenkins in Norquay 1985: 439) and critics often stress that ‘moral values and ethical issues are . . . central to his narratives’ (Ágústsdóttir 2006: 96). Brown, on the other hand, was a convert to Catholicism.

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Unlike Stevenson and Jenkins, whose international travel is reflected in their overseas settings, Brown rarely left Orkney. Nearly all of Brown’s work is set on his native islands and incorporates Orkney’s rich history and lore in its depiction of a Catholic sacramental cosmos. Brown saw his creative gift as intricately linked with the divine, noting that ‘Without the creator, the lesser creations of poet, artist, musician could not be’ (Brown 1997: 154). In his writing Brown draws deeply on the work of other Catholic artists, including the Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poetry inspired him in its depiction of the ‘rich swarming neverexhausted beauty of the world’ (Brown 1997: 155). Despite the affirmative depiction of divine presence in lines like these, Brown’s work was not entirely positive in its reflections on Orcadian religious history. In common with his Orcadian predecessor and one-time teacher Edwin Muir (1887–1959), Brown saw the Reformation as a spiritual calamity. In An Orkney Tapestry (1969), he depicts the iconoclasm of the Reformers in the Orcadian valley of Rackwick, lamenting a barren chapel, ‘starker than any stable’ after the desecration of images. The sacramental treasures of ‘Altar, tabernacle, crucifix, the statue of Saint Magnus, [and] the Stations of the Cross’ are lost from sixteenthcentury Orkney, a society whose ‘green peace was broken’. Consequently, writes Brown, ‘Everywhere was pointing of fingers. Words were uttered that they could not understand – for example, Witch’ (Brown 1969: 43). Brown refers here to the ferocity of Orkney’s witchcraft trials in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. His short story, ‘Witch’, makes for a fascinating comparison with ‘Thrawn Janet’ by Stevenson, but also highlights the differences between his religious outlook and that of his contemporary, Jenkins. Brown makes a strong association between the fierceness (as he sees it) of the Reformation and charges of witchcraft in a disenchanted early modern Orkney. He draws on the work of his friend, the historian Ernest Walker Marwick, who wrote that ‘it would be fair to say that a perverted theology, laws framed to fit it, and a murky residuum of folk belief, produced the witches’ (Marwick 1991: 345). Like ‘Thrawn Janet’, ‘Witch’ is narrated by a historical Scots voice. However, while Stevenson’s gossipy Calvinist narrator never doubts for a moment that witchcraft is a real and present danger, Brown’s narrator dispassionately reveals the falsity of the charges brought against Marian Isbister. Like Janet, the ‘auld limmer’, Marian is accused of sexual deviancy, of ‘intercourse with devil and trow, enchanting men’ and ‘of intercourse with fairies’ (Brown 1967: 112, 107). One of the nastiest and most disturbing acts of physical cruelty levelled against her during her inquisition is that of pricking, but her torturers also shave her head, and remove her toenails and fingernails—acts designed to defeminize and humiliate her. During her trial, Marian is also subjected to the sheriff ’s thunderous spiritual condemnation: We say this of a witch, that she is a thousand times worse than those others. She is pure evil, utter and absolute darkness, an assigned agent of hell. Of her Scripture says, Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.

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Regarding the apparent lightness of her misdemeanours, marvel not at that. The Prince of Darkness is not always a roaring lion, an augustitude, a harrower of the souls of men; but frequently he seeks to lure and destroy with ridiculous playful actions, like the clown or the fool at a country fair; and then, when we are convulsed with that folly, off comes the disguise, and the horn, the tail, the cloven goat hoof, the unspeakable reek of damnation, are thrust into our faces. (Brown 1967: 118)

The sheriff acts doubly as agent of legal and religious condemnation in this passage, and it is notable that he chooses as his text 1 Peter 5:8, as does Stevenson’s Rev. Murdoch Soulis, in his hellish warning against the deceptive guises of the devil. Alongside the reference to Exodus 22:18 in this sentence-sermon, there are a number of other instances where Scripture is used for violent ends in ‘Witch’. The chaplain and the parish minister, unsympathetic to the tortured girl, ‘read to her from the beginning of the Book’ and also ‘the ending of the Book, Revelation’ on the night before Marian’s execution. This is not to console or spiritually prepare the girl, but rather to berate her (Brown 1967: 120–1). Later, as Marian makes her way through the streets, ‘the holy words of Master Andrew Monteith could scarcely be heard’ (Brown 1967: 121). The word of God is almost completely silenced by a bloodthirsty crowd, who celebrate Marian’s gory scapegoating with drink, dancing, and jeers. Marian’s one comforter, an older woman called Janet (perhaps in tribute to Stevenson’s original witchcraft tale?) tells her that, in life, ‘There is much grief at every milestone’. This becomes painfully clear in the description of Marian’s final steps towards the hangman: ‘As she hobbled through the Laverock with her fingers like a tangle of red roots at the end of her long white arms, and her head like an egg, some had pity for her but the voices of others fell on her in a confusion of cursing and ribaldry and mockery’ (Brown 1967: 111, 121). Marian’s walk through the town becomes a re-enactment of the Stations of the Cross, and Brown renders her a type of female Christ, who forgives her executioner before death. The sacrificial nature of Marian’s death is reinforced by the story’s coda, in which we find that James VI of Scotland has ordered an investigation into the misdeeds of his cousin Earl Patrick Stewart—the nobleman who oversaw the real execution of a woman (Alison Balfour) for witchcraft in Orkney. Marian’s death can be read as somehow redemptive, as it draws attention to the misrule of Orkney and its need for kingly intervention and good governance. It can also be read as a travesty of justice, a symptom of Scotland’s particularly ferocious Reformation, its timing profoundly tragic. Brown’s fury over the misapplication of Scripture and the bloodthirsty zeal of the Protestant inquisitors is not to be found in all of his works. There are many characters of gentle, reformed Christian faith in Brown’s writing. For example, in ‘Sealskin’ (a story that rehearses Orkney’s selkie mythology), an old crofter trusts

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deeply in Scripture, and it rewards him with consolation. Brown writes: ‘He had always been a truly religious man. He loved his nightly readings of the Bible. Even in the days of his strength the words of Ecclesiastes had comforted him’ (Brown 1974: 119).⁴ Similarly, in Greenvoe (1972), the apostolic-sounding fisherman Samuel Whaness and his wife, Rachel, live a life of prayerful, faithful simplicity. They thank the Lord for his goodness and protection at the beginning of the novel, ‘their necks intersecting, a Hebraic farewell’, before Samuel goes to fish (Brown 1972: 9). Rachel gives generously to the needy, and like her biblical namesake, she longs for a child. Together, she and Samuel read a plethora of Puritan works—texts which inform not only the King James-inflected cadences of their speech, but their faith in divine providence (Brown 1972: 57). Richard Rankin Russell also observes the ‘communal, caring attitude of the Whanesses’ and writes: We are told, for example, after Samuel’s first narrow escape from the sea in the novel, that the Whanesses read together nightly, “a chapter from one of the books in the window’s ledge: Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, Grace Abiding, Meditations among the Tombs, The Pilgrim’s Progress” (49). All of these books, of course, have been favorites, first among Puritans, and later among Presbyterians. (Russell 2016: 90–1)

In ghost stories like ‘The Drowned Rose’, it is the Church of Scotland minister, the Rev. Donald Barr, who delivers a gentle homily on the spiritual journey of the reluctant soul—one which explains the tale’s mysterious, supernatural dimensions: ‘The earth-bound soul refuses to acknowledge its death,’ said Donald. ‘It is desperately in love with the things of this world – possessions, fame, lust. How, once it has tasted them, can it ever exist without them? . . . It will not acknowledge that all this loveliness of sea and sky and islands, and all the rare things that happen among them, are merely shadows of a greater reality . . . . Reluctantly it stoops under the dark lintel. All loves are forgotten then. It sets out on the quest for Love itself. For this it was created in the beginning.’ (Brown 1974: 158)

A world apart from the hellfire preaching of ‘Witch’, this passage points to the message that became increasingly prominent in Brown’s writing as his career progressed—that God’s goodness transcends denomination, that human frailty

⁴ References to the consolation provided by Ecclesiastes abound in Brown’s fiction. The gospels are also alluded to frequently. In the autobiographically-based ‘The Tarn and the Rosary’, a convert-writer, Colm, declares that he believes in the life of Christ, writing: ‘my imagination tells me that it is probably so, for the reason that the incarnation is so beautiful’ (Brown 1974: 189).

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and weakness can be forgiven, and that all things seek, and strive towards, the divine. The religious impetus of Brown’s work is then not simply reactionary. In common with his early poetic hero Hopkins ‘and his shouts of joy’ (Brown 1997: 152), Brown’s work reveals his positive and life-affirming sacramental world-view. In his exceptional novel about Orkney’s medieval patron saint, Magnus (1973), Brown writes: Sacramentally seen, the poorest beggar is a prince, every peasant is a lord, and the croft wife at her turning wheels of stone and wood is a ‘ladye gay’. From the Christening water to the last oil those immortal creatures move about in a world unimaginably rich; and the most precious times of the turning year are the feast days when these peasants with the stigmata of labour on their bodies enter as noblemen into ‘the kingdom of the ear of corn’: that is, when they experience with their actual senses the true dignity of the work they do, kneeling and receiving their own bread, made divine, into their mouths. (Brown 1973: 140)

Here, Brown signals the importance of the Eucharist, which elevates humanity to noble status by the divine gift of Christ’s body and blood. This is a key theme of Brown’s, especially in poems like ‘Beachcomber’ (originally included in An Orkney Tapestry), in which seven stanzas graft the story of creation in Genesis onto an Orkney setting. The poem’s narrator is a scavenger who scours the shore for bounty. He lists days of reward (‘a spar of timber worth thirty bob’) and scarcity (‘Thursday I got nothing’) (Brown 1969: 51). The speaker drinks a washed-up bottle of spirits, and this intoxicating Eucharistic proxy enchants the shoreline (in later versions of the poem) with ‘mermaids and angels’ (Brown 2005: 123). On Friday, the forager inspects sand spilling from a skull he holds aloft, transforming him momentarily into Shakespeare’s noble Prince of Denmark, contemplating his own mortality. On Sunday, his day of rest, the speaker confides that ‘for fear of the elders’ he does nothing, but dreams of heaven, ‘A sea chest with a thousand gold coins’ (Brown 1969: 51). Affectionate and comic, this short poem transfigures the life of a lowly character so that he becomes a radiant example of the divine within the everyday. Thus, though he shared a dislike of puritanical moralizing with Jenkins, and there is certainly an anti-Calvinist streak throughout much of his work, Brown ultimately sings the praise of his creator, and finds deep sacramental worth in Orkney’s land and seas.

Muriel Spark (1918–2006) Like Brown, Spark was a convert to Catholicism, and like Stevenson and Jenkins she lived in international locations throughout her life—residing permanently in

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Italy from 1966 until her death. As a fellow Catholic convert, her work might be expected to sound rather like Brown’s. However, Spark’s authorial voice is markedly different to his. Unlike Brown, she was uninterested in interrogating Scottish religious history and depicting the spiritual life of small Scottish communities. Jenny Turner praises her ‘special narrative voice’, noting ‘its waspishness, its spirit, its curiously posh Scottish-camp’ (Turner 2006), while one of her most astute critics, Ruth Whittaker, sums up Spark’s unique style and perspective on faith this way: Even her early, most religious novels give the impression that she is closely and critically scrutinising her faith before rejoicing in it, and her later novels scarcely mention Catholicism . . . . Mrs Spark’s exposition of her faith is for the most part bleak, beset with weary frustration at complying with its rules, and intense irritation with fellow-Catholics. (1982: 38)

While her ‘bleak’ exposition of faith is open to question, it is undoubtedly the case that Spark’s works display a close and critical scrutiny of Catholicism and its demands on the faithful. Her Catholic characters are by no means the most virtuous. From the evidence of characters like Sandy Stranger—the ex-pupil turned nun of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), and the rather grotesque Mrs Hogg of The Comforters (1957)—Spark’s Catholics are often motivated by desire for vengeance and are even ‘somewhat demonic’ in their characterization (Carruthers 2010: 78). Angels and demons abound in Spark’s fiction, albeit within unlikely places and spaces. In The Ballad of Peckham Rye (1960), the Scot Dougal Douglas subtly exhibits his demonic attributes as he goes about his ‘human research’ into ‘the spiritual well-spring, [and] the glorious history’ of Peckham (Spark 2017 [1960]: 11). Like the slippery, shape-shifting devil-figure of Hogg’s Justified Sinner, the havoc-inducing Dougal displays many different faces to the people of Peckham, and assumes a number of forms, from the ordinary to the glamorous. During his interview with a nylon textile manufacturer, Dougal ‘changed his shape and became a professor’, ‘leaned forward and became a television interviewer’, and ‘was now a man of vision with a deformed shoulder’ (Spark 2017 [1960]: 10–11). It is never entirely clear whether Dougal is a real demon or simply a charismatic agent of chaos. But in the midst of drab 1960s Peckham, his invitations to others to feel the bumps on his head (horns?) and declaration that he is ‘one of the wicked spirits that wander through the world for the ruin of souls’ suggest, at least, that he self-consciously adopts a rather Byronic, devilish glamour (Spark 2017 [1960]: 72). The novel’s title also adds to Dougal’s ambivalent status as demonic hero: is this a ‘ballad’ in the great tradition of the border ballads, where the devil seduces, tempts, and pursues, or is it simply a story of the lives of ordinary folk? The novel’s ending suggests that the lineaments of heaven and earth are porous

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where it observes ‘the Rye for an instant looking like a cloud of green and gold, the people seeming to ride upon it, as you might say there was another world than this’ (Spark 2017 [1960]: 140).⁵ Like the moment in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie where Miss Brodie and Sandy view ‘a wonderful sunset across the distant sky, reflected in the sea, streaked with blood and puffed with avenging purple and gold as if the end of the world had come without intruding on everyday life’, Spark signals the supernatural dimension of the everyday to her reader, and warns against ignoring the action of God—or grace—within the contours of our world (Spark 2018 [1961]: 95). The permeability of this world and the workings of the divine are a theme that Whittaker also notes, in diagnosing ‘the “poetic” or metaphoric vision of the world’ in Spark’s corpus. Whittaker writes that Spark sees the external visible world not as distinct from the spiritual world, but as a sacramental manifestation of it . . . . [S]he describes this as ‘the idea that the visible world is an active economy of outward signs embodying each an inward grace.’ (1982: 45)

This slippage between the spiritually visible and invisible is the theme of one of Spark’s best short stories, ‘The Seraph and the Zambesi’—another tale of angels and demons. Set in Africa at Christmastime, the story relates an incident where an angel appears to a group of European expatriates during a nativity play. The narrator wryly signals the seasonal setting of the tale, and the contemporary conflict between the miraculous and the mundane, when she lodges in the house of a poet-journalist, ‘because there was no room at the hotel’, while at the same time describing this man ‘trying the starter of a large, lumpy Mercedes’ (Spark 2001 [1951]: 71). The narrator makes her way to the Christmas masque, noting the ‘angels assembled in ballet dresses, with wings of crinkled paper’ (Spark 2001 [1951]: 77). It soon emerges that these human angels, approximations of the celestial beings of the Nativity account of Luke 2:8–20, are the only angels that the earth-bound expatriates are willing, or able, to recognize. As the narrator crosses the stage, she becomes aware of intense heat, and of her host, Cramer, arguing with someone: This was a living body. The most noticeable thing was its constancy; it seemed not to conform to the law of perspective, but remained the same size when I approached as when I withdrew. And altogether unlike other forms of life, it had a completed look. No part was undergoing a process; the outline lacked the

⁵ Gerard Carruthers also notes Spark’s depiction of the slippage between earthly and heavenly realms in The Ballad of Peckham Rye in ‘The Devil in Scotland’. This article discusses ‘canonical moments in Scottish literature when the devil features’ (2008: 1).

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signs of confusion and ferment which are commonly the signs of living things, and this was also the principle of its beauty. The eyes took up nearly the whole of the head, extending far over the cheekbones. From the back of the head came two muscular wings which from time to time folded themselves over the eyes, making a draught of scorching air. (Spark 2001 [1951]: 79)

The seraph calmly refutes the accusations of ‘abnormality’ levelled by a furious Cramer, whose only desire is to stage his Christmas play and rid himself of the otherworldly winged creature. By the tale’s conclusion, the stage is aflame, and the expatriates watch as the seraph—a miracle and gift of grace ignored and rejected by his trivial colonial observers—rides away on the Zambesi river. Spark’s early short story (which pre-dates her conversion by three years) nicely sums up many of the features of her work. It points to insufficient, or incomplete human knowledge in the presence of the divine, allows the miraculous to intrude, unobserved or spurned, into the somewhat shabby lives of ordinary people, and the tale is related in a wry, knowing voice, which might seem cold in its unemotional, candid style. Nevertheless, the narrator of ‘The Seraph and the Zambesi’ does recognize the seraph’s celestial beauty. Like Charmian of Spark’s Memento Mori (1959), who calmly accepts the telephone message of a divine emissary reminding her that she will die, and like Brown’s minister in ‘The Drowned Rose’, this narrator is more spiritually and imaginatively alive than her fellow characters. Indeed, Spark and Brown suggest that the link between imagination and belief is no accident. Their most clear-sighted, imaginative characters are those who are able to perceive and receive the supernatural gift of divine grace, and to recognize their own status as beloved children of God. This survey of four canonical Scottish authors of Protestant and Catholic denominations has necessarily been selective and unavoidably narrow in focus. The temptation to gather these writers together under the heading ‘Christian writers’ has been avoided, as the imaginations of Stevenson, Jenkins, Brown, and Spark are nuanced and inflected to a significant degree by their rather different historical circumstances, intertextual influences, and theological traditions. However, this chapter does not contend that Scottish Protestant and Catholic imaginaries are so different as to be entirely separate entities. On the contrary, these four writers all delve (to differing extents) into Scottish folkloric sources, historical events, and prior literary traditions; for example, the influence of James Hogg is traceable in many of these works. There is good evidence to support George Orwell’s famous dictum that the novel is ‘practically a Protestant form of art’ (Orwell in Mackay 2002: 224), as it is born in an age of individualism and not one of lore and romance. However, writing of the Scottish literary tradition complicates this notion. The ‘devil-conscious national imagination’ (Calder 1980: 165) of the great medieval ballads existed long before the Reformation, and this—alongside a stock of supernatural tales and a dramatic religious

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history—has inflected Scottish writing to an enormous degree. The religious imaginations of Stevenson, Jenkins, Brown, and Spark are at times cynical, critical, devotional, and prayerful, but all are mutually enriching, alive to the idea of the divine, and share much in their appreciation of another world than this.

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Jack, Alison (2009). ‘ “Let us worship God!” Worship in Scottish Literature from Robert Burns to James Robertson’, in Duncan B. Forrester and Doug Gay (eds.), Worship and Liturgy in Context: Studies and Case Studies in Theology and Practice. London: SCM, 50–66. Jack, Alison (2012). The Bible and Literature. London: SCM. Jenkins, Robin (1998). Matthew and Sheila. Edinburgh: Polygon. Kreitzer, Larry (1992). ‘R. L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Romans 7: 14–25: Images of the Moral Duality of Human Nature’, Journal of Literature & Theology 6/2: 125–44. Mackay, Marina (2002). ‘Catholicism, Character, and the Invention of the Liberal Novel Tradition’, Twentieth Century Literature 48/2: 215–38. Marwick, Ernest Walker (1991). An Orkney Anthology: The Selected Works of Ernest Walker Marwick, ed.John D. M. Robertson. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press. Middleton, Tim (1999). ‘Introduction’, in R. L. Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, vii–xx. Mills, Kevin (2004). ‘The Stain on the Mirror: Pauline Reflections in “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” ’, Christianity and Literature 53/3: 337–48. Norquay, Glenda (1985). ‘Moral Absolutism in the Novels of Robert Louis Stevenson, Robin Jenkins and Muriel Spark: Challenges to Realism’. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh. Norquay, Glenda (2007). Robert Louis Stevenson and Theories of Reading: The Reader as Vagabond. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Parsons, Coleman O. (1946). ‘Stevenson’s Use of Witchcraft in “Thrawn Janet” ’, Studies in Philology 43/3: 551–71. Russell, Richard Rankin (2016). ‘Recovering the Reformation Heritage in George Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe’, Studies in Scottish Literature 42/1: 81–97. Scott, Tom (1970). ‘Introduction’, in Tom Scott (ed.), The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse. London: Penguin, 27–56. Spark, Muriel (2001 [1951]). ‘The Seraph and the Zambesi’, in Selected Stories: Muriel Spark. Edinburgh: Canongate Pocket Classics. Spark, Muriel (2017 [1960]). The Ballad of Peckham Rye. Edinburgh: Polygon. Spark, Muriel (2018 [1961]). The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Edinburgh: Polygon. Stevenson, Robert Louis (1995 [1881]). ‘Thrawn Janet’, in Douglas Dunn (ed.), The Oxford Book of Scottish Short Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stevenson, Robert Louis (2002). The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror, ed. Robert Mighall. London: Penguin. Stevenson, Robert Louis (2008). Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales, ed. Roger Luckhurst. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turner, Jenny (2006). ‘Dame Muriel Spark’, The Guardian, 17 April. https://www. theguardian.com/news/2006/apr/17/guardianobituaries.booksobituaries, accessed 17 July 2018.

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Wallace, Gavin and Douglas Gifford (2017). ‘The Range and Achievement of Robin Jenkins: An Introductory Overview’, in Douglas Gifford and Linden Bicket (eds.), The Fiction of Robin Jenkins: Some Kind of Grace. Leiden: Brill, 1–21. Warner, Fred (1969). ‘Stevenson’s First Scottish Story’, Nineteenth Century Fiction 24/3: 334–44. Whittaker, Ruth (1982). The Faith and Fiction of Muriel Spark. London: Macmillan.

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21 Theological Constructions of Scottish National Identity Doug Gay

Theological constructions of national identity are not always developed by theologians, and are not all equally reflective of good and healthy theological reasoning. Theology since 1945, both in Scotland and globally, has been overwhelmingly suspicious of the language of nationalism, reflecting the formative influence of two Eurocentric world wars on the international theological community. Writing in 1942 as convener of a Church of Scotland commission charged with responding to ‘this present crisis’, Professor John Baillie of New College reflected ‘We must take deeply to heart the fact that it is what is called Christendom that is now in flames, that the evils from which the world is suffering were generated in the heart of societies which passed as Christian.’¹ The prominence of Barth, Bonhoeffer, Tillich, and Bultmann in post-war Anglophone theological debates reinforced the sense that the Second World War and the rise of National Socialism/fascism, provided the key hermeneutical lenses through which ‘nationalism’ must thereafter be viewed. This functioned, overwhelmingly, to associate nationalism with idolatry, ethnocentrism, and murderous/genocidal self-interest, and to mark it as needing swift and uncompromising censure from theological ethics. There was, however, a lack of critical self-awareness (in Practical Theology terms ‘reflexivity’) about much of this theological discourse and the liberal political discourse which it paralleled and echoed in Western countries. In particular, it often lacked self-awareness about its own ongoing participation in what political scientist Michael Billig has dubbed ‘banal nationalism’ (Billig 1995). This lack of critical awareness fed a ‘mote and beam’ analysis of nationalism, in which a commentator’s own (banal) claims, feelings, and allegiances about national identity could be regarded as benign, while those of ‘others’ were ethically suspect. The intellectual shorthand through which this was most often accomplished was to represent one’s own position in terms of a healthy patriotism as opposed to the toxic nationalism of the other.²

¹ RGA 1942, 544. ² Gay (2012); the ‘nationalism bad, patriotism good’ camp includes Biggar (2015); Bretherton (2010: 134); Bradley (2012); and Lyall and McCulloch (2011).

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The enormous wave of interest, commentary, and critique which accompanied the referendum of September 2014 on Scottish independence offered a significant opportunity across Scottish media, civil society, the academy, and the churches to reconsider the ethical status of nationalism. While not without its notable excesses and wilder fringes, throughout the twentieth century the mainstream of Scottish nationalism had increasingly laid claim to a liberal, civic, and ‘progressive’ political identity, wholly at odds with the neo-fascist constructions churches and theologians were used to deploring. The most famous Scottish poet of the twentieth century, Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978), embodied some of the contradictions inherent in the making of a distinctive strain of twentieth-century nationalism in Scotland. A founding member of the National Party of Scotland (NPS) in 1928, he was thrown out of the NPS for being a communist and expelled from the Communist Party for being a nationalist (Lyall and McCulloch 2011). This combination of nationalism, internationalism, and communism or socialism would be shared by many who were influenced and inspired by the so-called Scottish Literary Renaissance³ of the 1920s and 1930s. Home Rule for Scotland was a cause native to the Liberal Party in the pre-First World War period, later owned and then neglected by the Independent Labour Party and Labour Party in the inter-war period. The National Party of Scotland was founded in April 1928 (Finlay 1994: 19–22) and went on to unite with the short-lived, right wing Scottish Party (founded in 1932) to form the SNP in 1934. Some of the later struggles of the SNP to establish its political identity and the pointed critiques of its political opponents have their roots in the mixed ideological bag of its founding members.⁴ In recent decades, the claims and aspirations of the SNP were increasingly oriented to their identity as liberal, civic nationalists and social democrats. These ideological trajectories were shaped by two major twentieth-century developments, which impacted the ethical status of nationalism. The first of these was the rising association of nationalism with anticolonialism and decolonization in the global South. Although US President Woodrow Wilson failed to get ‘self-determination’ enshrined in the 1920 Covenant of the League of Nations, it was recognized in the 1945 Charter of the United Nations, presaging a coming wave of independence declarations, as old colonial empires were dismantled. Between the 1950s and 1970s, conversations within theological ethics, missiology, and ‘political theology’ tended to construct discourses about decolonization (good) and nationalism (bad) along parallel lines, with little conceptual integration. The second major historical development was the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. This led

³ Nowadays read as part of the international movement of literary modernism; see Lyall and McCulloch (2011: 1). 1. ⁴ ‘The newly created SNP encompassed elements from all shades of political opinion’ (Finlay 1994: 252).

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directly to the breakup of a number of composite states in response to internal movements for ‘national’ self-determination. Once again, nationalism was a focus for resistance to ‘empire’ and freedom from totalitarian rule and, here too, most churches and theologians, from the Vatican to the World Council of Churches welcomed and supported the aspirations for change, even while condemning the ethnic tensions, wars, and atrocities which resulted in some contexts. By the end of the twentieth century, the movements to secure decolonization and bring about the end of Soviet domination in Central and Eastern Europe could be seen to underwrite a new narrative about nationalism as a vehicle for seeking and securing self-determination. This set the stage for a more nuanced conversation about the assessment of nationalism within political theory and theological ethics.

What has Geneva to do with Arbroath? There are many potential stopping points in a historical survey of theological constructions of Scottish national identity. Only a few can be noted here, beginning with the question of origins, noting that ‘Scotland’ was rendered as Scotia in Latin and Alba in Gaelic. In a brief 1996 article in History Today, responding to a Patrick Wormald article on the origins of England, Dauvit Broun addressed the question ‘When did Scotland become Scotland?’ Broun notes that ‘the Gaelic title of the kings of Scots, ri Alban, which eventually meant “king of Scotland”, was first found in 900’, that the kingdom of Strathclyde was only finally incorporated within the realm in the early eleventh century and that Scottish control over Northumbria north of the Tweed was vindicated in 1018 (Broun 1996). Successive kings of the Scots continued to consolidate and expand the realm in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries by conquest. Broun rejects the cherished romantic notion that ‘the Scots people’ had been in existence since the fifth century, arguing that those who settled Scotland and conquered the Picts from their early base in Argyll thought of themselves as Gaels (Gaedil) or ‘Irish’. Later confusions, he suggests, (or elaborations/projections) stem from the rendering into Latin of Gaedil as Scoti. He therefore points to a striking contrast with England in that ‘the idea of `the Scottish people’ did not precede the expansion of royal control—as the idea of the English people’ (pace Bede in 731) was able to underpin the creation of an English state. An equivalent notion of Scottish ethnicity only emerged rather late in the day—probably as late as c.1300, ‘by which time Edward I had already conquered and lost most of Scotland for the first time’ (Broun 1996). Even with the decline of Gaelic, new Latin accounts of Scottish origins adhered to Irish origins, so that early theological constructions named Ireland as ‘the divinely ordained land of the Scoti’ and ‘their sure and perpetual home’. The Declaration of Arbroath in 1320

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was the first account of Scottish origins not to mention Ireland. Broun settles on the mid-thirteenth century as the earliest date in which we can speak of Scotland as ‘an independent and consolidated kingdom’. One theological articulation of Scottish identity with lasting effects was the ecclesiastical division of the land into parishes and dioceses, the latter gradually displaced by synods and presbyteries after the Reformation. As well as their administrative functions, these divisions functioned theologically to represent the whole of Scotland as under the care (and authority) of the Church and as the object of its disciplinary and missional concern. This claiming of Scotland reflected economic realities (with estimates showing the pre-Reformation Church owning up to one half of the land, half of that owned by the monasteries) (Lyall 2016: 5) while parishes were also recognized as legal and civil entities. In terms of theological mythology, Scotland had, by the thirteenth century gained its own distinctive coterie of saints, Ninian and Columba, Mungo and Margaret taking their place behind Andrew, whose apostolic claims trumped the local connections of the others. For as long as Scotland has been recognized as an independent kingdom, its identity has been negotiated in relationship with the identity of its larger, more populous and more powerful southern neighbour, England. The negotiation of that relationship has involved regular and highly intentional resort to theological constructions of both identities and of the relationship between The Thrissil and the Rois. A letter from King Robert (Bruce) to King Edward II, written in 1310 in the face of English plans for military invasion, asserts the overarching sovereignty of the King of Kings over both (English and Scottish) thrones and invokes a (catholic) ecclesial argument for the sweetness of peace, as conducive to the life of the faithful, to the promotion of good Christian conduct and adorning the whole of Holy Mother Church.⁵ In 1320, the barons and ‘the whole community of Scotland’ wrote to the Pope asking him to recognize Scotland’s independence and to acknowledge Robert the Bruce as the lawful king. This letter, known as The Declaration of Arbroath, was drawn up by Bernard, Abbot of Arbroath (Cowan 2002). Omitting any mention of Ireland, the document invokes a mythical past in which a primal Scottish ‘nation’ made an epic journey from Greater Scythia, via Spain, to its home in Scotland; driving out Britons, destroying Picts and repelling Norwegians, Danes, and English to possess the land as free people. It invokes a ‘pure’ royal blood line, unsullied by foreigners. The Declaration claims the Scots have a unique calling from Christ, aided by their patron saint, Andrew. It appeals to the Pope for help in the face of Edward’s aggression and English atrocities, while attributing the ⁵ http://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2013/06/robert-the-bruce-letter-found-at-british-library. html, accessed 9 January 2018.

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freedom enjoyed by the people to the work of God through King Robert (another Maccabeus or Joshua!). Robert has been made king through a combination of divine providence and popular assent. Yet, even he may be driven out and replaced, the Declaration asserts, in a striking early qualification of both divine right and non-resistance, if he surrenders to the English, since the people are fighting ‘for freedom alone’ and will never be subject to ‘the Lordship of the English’. The Declaration adapts Galatians 3:28 to assert no difference between Jew or Greek, Scotsman or Englishman, appealing to the Pope for even-handed support against English aggression and expansionism and for the rights of ‘poor little Scotland’ to live in peace. The letter closes by committing the maintenance of Scotland’s cause to God as supreme King and Judge.⁶ Theologically, despite its colourful excesses, it is an interesting document, in which a strong sense of divine providence and sovereignty is set alongside an assertive vision of popular assent and national freedom. This is seen to form a core ‘political theology’, which can be mobilized if necessary, both to justify replacing an unfit king and to warn an unsupportive Pope, if they fail to defend the peace and freedom of Scotland. The invocation of Galatians 3:28, rather than effacing or erasing the differences between Scotland and England, is used to assert that they are equally valuable and that Scotland should not be discriminated against. This medieval Roman Catholic construction of Scottish identity was to undergo significant development in the course of the Scottish Reformation. The Scots Confession (1560) introduced itself as ‘The Confession of Faith professed and believed by the Protestants within the realm of Scotland’ (Henderson and Bulloch 1960). There are no other contemporary historical or geographical references until Chapter 18 on ecclesiology, where ‘we the inhabitants of the realm of Scotland confessing Christ Jesus’, in addition to membership of the universal Kirk, claim to have ‘particular kirks’ in our cities, towns, and reformed districts, which exhibit the marks of the true Kirk. Chapter 24 on ‘The Civil Magistrate’ adds a confession and acknowledgement that ‘empires, kingdoms, dominions, and cities are appointed and ordained by God’, along with those who hold civil power within them. In The Scots Confession, therefore, we see a novel theological construction of Scotland as a ‘confessing realm’, along with a radical identification of the true, confessing Kirk with ‘the Protestants within the realm of Scotland’. There is a recapitulation of an older tradition affirming divine appointment of those in authority and acknowledging that they might try to act beyond their proper ⁶ Translated text taken from National Records of Scotland site; revised version compiled by Alan Borthwick (2005) based on Sir James Fergusson, The Declaration of Arbroath, 1320 (1970), pp. 5–11, with reference to A. A. M. Duncan (Henderson and Bulloch 1960), The Nation of Scots and the Declaration of Arbroath (Historical Association pamphlet, 1970), 34–7 and D. E. R. Watt (ed.), Scotichronicon, vol. 7 (1996), 4–9.

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sphere and mandate. We also find here a key example of what became the classic Reformed account of the mutual duties of Church and ‘State’: the Church must respect and obey the civil government when it is acting in its own sphere; the ‘State’ from its side, must maintain true religion and suppress false religion. It is also notable that we are here moving beyond Erastian establishment into a new key, with the Church making its Confession and Parliament ratifying and approving it. Both Church and State have a relative priority within their own spheres which the other must recognize. In these pre-ecumenical times, there is a zerosum imagining and claiming of what counts as true religion. Just as Roman Catholic authorities have suppressed Protestantism, so now Protestant authorities will suppress Roman Catholicism, an intent given legislative force by the Papal Jurisdiction Act (1560) as well as the Church Act (1567) and the Coronation Oath Act (1567) of the Scottish Parliament (Lyall 2016). Alongside the Confession, The First Book of Discipline (1560) developed a social, cultural, and institutional vision of reform, which was envisioned theologically in terms of radical renewal of a realm in which religion had until now been ‘utterly corrupted’ (Cameron 1972). To understand the book’s scope, vision, and intent, we have to step back from the more recent semantic range of the word ‘discipline’ and entertain a more dynamic and expansive sense of it as a portfolio concept, encompassing law, policy, constitution, manifesto, charter, and national plan. The reach of reform was to be significant, including a stringent reshaping of the calendar, the daily, weekly, yearly, and seasonal rituals of everyday life to which had been attached so much else which was social, commercial, artistic, and psychological. This was nothing less than a vision of reconstructing the everyday habitus of mid-sixteenth-century Scotland, a drastic cultural spring cleaning imagined by its sponsors as spiritual gain. It was the beginning of reimagining Scotland, from top to bottom, from coast to coast, as a Protestant nation; but at this point in history, who knew what that meant? There were few models and although Geneva and Strasbourg were clearly crucial exemplars, Scotland was a country, not a city. This visionary project was in many ways unprecedented; what it meant for the people of Scotland would have to be worked out in the living of it. This new theological construction of Scottish identity would have to be incarnated as a social construction and experiment, working with a whole range of new permissions and prohibitions. The social vision advanced here, included a new drive to provide for the welfare of the (deserving and vulnerable) poor and to expand and invigorate public education, with schooling in every parish and colleges in every town teaching ‘the arts’ along with ‘the tongues’. The children of the rich must be brought up to virtue and the children of the poor must be given opportunity to contribute to the commonwealth. Universities must be supported and reformed. There was to be a new era of social peace and discipline as well, working against fornication, drunkenness, fighting, common swearing and cursing by new social

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and ecclesiastical mechanisms of reproof and accountability.⁷ In the new Scotland, this new ethical-spiritual discipline was to be extended to all persons and all estates within the realm, regardless of rank or wealth, including ministers, readers, elders, and deacons.⁸ Andrew Melville’s Second Book of Discipline (1578) prepared half a generation later, reflected a good deal of processing in the interim (Kirk 1980). There was a new articulation of the office of the eldership, a spiritual office, to which men only were to be ordained for life. The Second Book reflected a new awareness of what remained unreformed and unchanged; hence its concern with pressing on to reform ecclesiastical jurisdiction and to gut the power of bishops. The First and Second Book of Discipline were striking and intriguing manifestos for the reconstruction of Church and nation in Scotland. It is this sense of ‘discipline’ which has been powerfully expounded by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, where he speaks of the rise of the disciplinary society. Taylor tells a story in which the influences of nominalism, neo-Stoicism, and Calvinism are brought together in a moment of cultural bravura, fuelling an extraordinary self-confidence about the capacity to remodel society (Taylor 2007: 121). While Arbroath had invested heavily in its own construction of divine providence, those who imported and promoted the influence of Geneva were equally keen on invoking God’s plan and design in support and defence of a Reformed and Presbyterian ascendancy. Theological constructions of Scottish identity became essential accompaniments both to claims to the throne and to challenges to such claims. The Union of the Crowns (1603) was hailed as a work of providence, accompanied by hopes that a king raised and educated by the Kirk might advance true religion as well as secure a lasting peace. This began a powerful tradition of theological construction which attributed union between England (Wales and Ireland) and Scotland to the work of providence, in ways which qualified, though never effaced, Scotland’s status as an independent nation (Colley 2003). With the influence of Geneva came a new stress on the theology of covenant, bearing a potential for deep resonances with the older Scottish traditions of ‘banding’ and ‘manrent’ (Mason 1983: 99–100). Despite Calvin’s extreme reluctance, in the light of Romans 13, to countenance rebellion against those God had set in authority, theologies of covenant from Knox to Rutherford proved able to take on elements of conditionality, invoking both a plural understanding of the authorities in Romans 13:1 and the Old Testament memory of unfaithful kings, whose disobedience to the Lex of the divine Rex led to their rejection by God as covenant breakers.

⁷ First Book of Discipline (1560), The Seventh Head; see also Todd (2002: 403, 406–9). ⁸ First Book of Discipline (1560), The Third and Seventh Heads.

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Reformed theological constructions of how divine ordering and governance impacted on Scottish identity reached beyond the monarchy, on and out into the wider fabric of Scottish society. Margo Todd emphasizes the key role played by Kirk Sessions, arguing that ‘distinctive features of Scots land tenure, law and politics . . . created both a need for and a receptivity to the new institution of sessions’ and stressing that ‘At the centre of the National Covenant was the Scottishness of a now established puritan culture, a culture that embraced the nation in its network of sessions and presbyteries, that imposed a remarkably uniform discipline on the visibly ungodly, that had come, over time, to define Scotland’ (Todd 2002: 411). If the bloody conflicts, fierce heresy trials, liturgical battles, and alternating persecutions of the seventeenth century marked it as a particularly turbulent and contested period for theological constructions of national identity, some key theological artefacts survived with enduring power and capacity to shape Scottish society and culture. To the institutions of sessions and presbyteries we can add the idea of covenant as a mode of what Jonathan Hearn calls ‘claiming Scotland’ (Hearn 2000), and to Todd’s reported puritanism, we can add the articulation of reformed theology and identity offered by the mid-century Westminster Standards, in particular the Confession (1647), the Directory (1644), and the Catechisms (1648). The pivotal decades at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century saw the earlier construction of monarchic union as the fruit of divine providence, reaffirmed in the wake of a new Claim of Right. James II was held to have forfeited the crown on grounds of altering the constitution and failing to take the oath in favour of maintaining the Protestant religion. The reaffirmation of providence in relation to monarchical union opened the way to a new theological construction of parliamentary union as an extension of that same providential working of God in respect of Scotland’s relationship with England (and Wales). This new theo-political construction was intriguingly complex in some respects and beguilingly or even brutally simple in others. It was complex insofar as it created a union which preserved (inter-)national diversity in the key identity forming and culture-bearing areas of religion, law, and education. It was simple in its construction of a single army, navy, and (Westminster) parliament under a single monarch. After 1707, theological constructions of Scottish national identity become entangled with theological constructions of British ‘national’ identity and of the identity of the successive Union states: first, from 1801, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and, from 1922, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Linda Colley reflected in her 1992 book Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 on the uses made of ‘protestant identity’ in constructing ‘British identity’ (Colley 2003). Scottish identity was influenced by that process and Scottish institutions were active within it.

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The construction of Scottish identity developed a number of narrative layers around ‘providence’. From the sixteenth century came the project of remaking and re-narrating Scotland as a Protestant, reformed nation. Knox was bitterly disappointed that the proposals of 1560, while ‘approved’, were never set forth ‘by an Act and public Law’ and included the full text of the First Book in his Historie to show what the Kirk had intended and the parliament and regents failed to carry through.⁹ In 1603, a further layer was added, reflecting the ways in which the union of crowns was seen and represented as having a sacral character, in keeping with cross-confessional conceptions of monarchs as God’s anointed. Scotland’s monarchy was now providentially united with England’s. The National Covenant of 1638 gave this federal motif a key role in expressing the operation of divine providence. From 1690, the providential narrative parsed reformed identity more specifically as presbyterian and this was confirmed in the 1707 Treaty of Union, which claimed to lock in ‘Protestant religion and Presbyterian Church Government’ to Scotland’s constitutional settlement for all time to come. The last major supplement to the pre-twentieth-century providential construction of Scottish identity is announced in the title of Stewart J. Brown’s 2008 volume Providence and Empire (Brown 2008). From the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, Scotland shared in the theological construction of British imperial and colonial power as the work of God to civilize and evangelize the entire world, from Malawi to Manchuria. The British and Scottish missionary movement continually stressed this privilege and responsibility, which God had bestowed upon the people of Scotland.

Theological Disruptions of National Identity Even as the imperial dimensions of Scotland’s ‘British’ identity were being expanded and deepened, new cracks began to appear in its national identity at home. The first challenges to a singular presbyterian hegemony came hard on the heels of the Union. The 1712 Act extending toleration to Episcopalians was followed twenty years later by the first presbyterian secessions and eighty years later by the beginnings of Catholic emancipation. If the Scottish Enlightenment could be placed by some within a providential account, for others it represented the onset of a sceptical, ‘secular’ mind-set which threatened the religious purity of the covenanted nation. Despite these cracks and the alarm with which they were viewed by some in the Auld Kirk (Davie 1961), presbyterian dominance was still overwhelming until it was challenged by two mid-nineteenth-century disruptions. The first, the Disruption of 1843, was preceded by a second Claim of Right for

⁹ Knox’s History, I.373; Knox’s Works 2.181 quoted in Cameron (1972: 14).

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Scotland in 1842, to which the Westminster parliament proved unable or unwilling to respond. Given the importance of the nineteenth century for the development of European nationalisms, the Disruption has drawn commentators such as George Davie and Tom Nairn, questioning why nationalism failed to develop within nineteenth-century Scotland (Davie 1961). The explanations offered, alongside reckonings of Scotland’s economic stake in both Union and Empire, read the Disruption and its aftermath, as a (for Davie and Nairn disastrous!) sublimation of cultural and political energies into a doctrinal and confessional fever. This drove an expensive and absorbing social contest to build a rival religious establishment across Scotland (and on into the Scottish imperial diaspora). Talk of a second ‘establishment’ reflects Thomas Chalmers’ insistence that the Free Church quit ‘a vitiated establishment’ but went out ‘on the establishment principle’. It also reflects the judgement of Francis Lyall, that despite the Kirk in its post-1921 existence swearing off the term, the combination of the 1567 Act and the 1707 Act of Union means that it was (and is) established (Lyall 2016: 9–11, 225). The second disruptive factor was external to Presbyterianism and, initially to Scotland, in the shape of increasing immigration of Roman Catholics from Ireland, with numbers peaking during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. An increasing pluralization of Presbyterian/Protestant identity between 1732 and 1843 began to reverse from 1847 with the formation of the United Presbyterian Church and was given a major impetus in 1900 when a majority of the UP Church united with the majority of the Free Church to form the United Free Church (UF). This paved the way for the ‘Glorious Union’ of 1929, in which the majority of the UF Church reunited with the Auld Kirk in a symbolic healing of the wound of the Disruption. In some respects, and to some parties, this renewed a providential account of Scotland as a reformed, covenanted, and presbyterian nation. The Articles Declaratory of the Church of Scotland, agreed in 1921 and recognized by Act of Parliament, enshrined the crucial formula which would allow for the UF to enter the Union of 1929. The third article described the Church of Scotland (and prospectively the united church) as ‘a national Church representative of the Christian Faith of the Scottish people’ going on to speak of ‘its distinctive call and duty to bring the ordinances of religion to the people in every parish of Scotland through a territorial ministry’. This formula, still current in 2018, eschewed the language of establishment in deference to UP sensibilities, but did significant new work of theological construction around the term ‘national’. While Douglas Murray produced the authoritative work on the Articles (Murray 1993), Stewart J. Brown’s work on the Kirk in the 1920s has exposed disruptive tensions and influences in respect of claiming the Kirk as ‘national’ (Brown 1991). The 1918 Education Act brought Roman Catholic schools into the publicly funded state sector and a Protestant backlash against ‘Rome on the rates’ was one factor fuelling racist and sectarian reactions from sections of the Kirk.

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Brown’s work on this period has been widely cited by other historians and the scapegoating of an Irish Catholic other sets the 1921/9 ‘national church’ formula in a troubling light. While some wounds were healed by the 1929 Union, others were reopened. It was no longer possible, or desirable, to speak straightforwardly about ‘presbyterian Scotland’, even after a significant depluralization of presbyterian identities. To the right of the Auld Kirk lay the fierce, hard-Calvinist platoons of the smaller conservative presbyterian denominations; to the left, a slim but socially self-confident Scottish Episcopal presence and a growing, assertive Roman Catholic presence. Already in 1929, to assert that the Kirk represented the Christian faith of the Scottish people, even if only as a and not the national church, was to strain both credibility and nascent ecumenical sensibilities. We have come full circle to John Baillie’s lament over Christendom in flames and need to register the influence of war on theologies of national identity. As with other UK churches, many Scottish churches seemed to enter the First World War in a spirit of theological hubris. Not only would it all be over by Christmas, but God was on ‘our’ side (Devine 1999: chapters 13 and 19) The jingoism thinned as casualties mounted and the war extended. The 1920s and 1930s saw multiple theological currents running, as churches and theologians came to terms with the horror of mass warfare and the great new fact of Soviet Russia advertising an international communist alternative to Western capitalism. The descent into a second world war in 1939 happened amid complex, competing challenges for theological reflection. Various themes had to be held in tension: an idealistic post-war internationalism aimed to locate ‘our’ nation within a ‘league’ of nations, as churches and theologians also embraced new commitments to ecumenism and catholicity. Concern over the rise of fascism in Italy, Germany, and Spain generated some theological critique of nationalism even as preparation for war against fascism called those in Great Britain and Northern Ireland to rally to the flag and fight for their country. Just as Scotland’s churches had been aligned with the rest of the UK in their support for the First World War, there was a similar broad alignment in reaching a majority view, though one less jingoistic and naïve than in 1914, that there was no alternative to war in 1939. In that sense, both wars bound Scots into the Union state, although by 1939 it was a crucially different state, following the partition of Ireland in 1921 and the creation of the Irish Free State in 1922. The experience of fighting fascism generated a theological critique of nationalism which endures to this day, albeit a conflicted one since the nationalisms of the Allies served to mobilize troops to fight for them against the Axis powers. In 1945, the only realistic way to construct an international organization was as a gathering of United Nations and it was already clear that this would have a growing membership as decolonization unpicked empires into ever more self-determining states.

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In Scotland, the cultural renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s witnessed new signs of support for Scottish nationalism and independence, along with bold attempts to assert support for both nationalism and internationalism, but theology was quiet in this movement. In 1949, a self-styled ‘National Covenant’, calling for constitutional reform under the monarchy and within the UK, attracted two million signatures and some prominent supporters from within the churches, but its influence was fleeting. The new peacetime projects of the Union state, nationalizing heavy industries, creating the National Health Service and devising a cradle to grave welfare state once again bound Scots into the Union. Scotland’s residual institutions of difference in Kirk, Law, and Education continued to resource a distinctive cultural identity. Ecumenical conversations between the Church of Scotland and the Church of England in the 1950s led to the so-called ‘Bishops Report’ being tabled at the Kirk’s General Assembly. Leading theologians clashed over its proposals, in a debate which invoked the distinctiveness of Scottish presbyterian polity and witnessed the Scottish Daily Express mount a vigorous public campaign against the proposals. The proposals for ‘bishops in presbytery’ were rejected by the General Assembly in 1959, by a church whose sense of distinctiveness seemed heightened by the approaching 400th anniversary of the Reformation in 1960. After this there was little sign of work on new theological constructions of Scottish national identity until the political earthquake of the SNP’s Hamilton by-election victory in 1967. An early theological voice, distinctive because of Scottish Roman Catholic traditions of solid support for Labour, was that of the Dominican priest Anthony Ross. Kirk representatives gave evidence to the 1969 Crowther/Kibrandon Commission on the Constitution. Ross’ work from the late 1960s was then joined by that of two other key figures, presbyterian minister Will Storrar and episcopal priest Kenyon Wright, as well as the Gaelic poet Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh.¹⁰ Following the unsuccessful devolution referendum of 1979, the work of the Campaign for a Scottish Assembly from 1980 led in turn to the Scottish Constitutional Convention in 1989, chaired by Kenyon Wright, with participation from all the Scottish churches. Storrar’s 1990 book Scottish Identity: A Christian Vision marked the first sustained attempt within academic theology in Scotland to reflect on questions of independence, nationalism, and national identity. Kathy Galloway and Lesley Orr were key theological voices in the 1991 Women’s Claim of Right for Scotland. Storrar’s work within the Kirk’s Church and Nation committee was influential, seeking to go beyond the presumptions in the 1979 report to ‘represent’ Scotland

¹⁰ MacFhionnlaigh’s epic poem The Midge, published in English translation in the periodical Cencrastus 10 (1982: 28–33), is a remarkably rich theological treatment of theological constructions of Scottish identity; his work is too little known in theological circles. Leading Gaelic scholar Ruaraidh MacThòmais described The Midge as the ‘finest long poem published in Gaelic in the 20th century’.

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and offer ‘explicitly theological’ arguments in the 1989 report (although this explicitness famously raised the Barthian hackles of T. F. Torrance) (Storrar 2003: 12–14; Storrar 2004: 420–2). After the return of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, while both theology and church normalized around the new constitutional status quo, there was little distinct theological reflection around national identity, until the SNP won an outright majority of seats in the 2011 Holyrood election and implemented a manifesto commitment to hold a referendum on independence. The three-year period 2011 to 2014 saw intense debate on the independence question across all sectors of Scottish society, including within the churches. Despite the history of General Assembly support for devolution, the Kirk opted to remain neutral on independence. Notable pro-Union voices within academic theology included Ian Bradley and Nigel Biggar, both arguing that the Union and existing constitutional settlement were fit for purpose. Doug Gay’s 2013 book, Honey from the Lion, advocated for independence within the UK (recast as a revised ‘social union’ retaining a shared monarchy) and within the EU. Gay followed Jonathan Hearn in arguing that nationalism was not intrinsically evil, but represented a series of claims which needed to be critically assessed and that national identity should be discipled within a broader framework of theological ethics (Hearn 2000, 2006; Gay 2013). While eligible voters, including EU citizens resident in Scotland, voted NO in the 2014 referendum by a margin of 55 per cent to 45 per cent, it seems likely that the issue will return in future and a second referendum may have to be held. Although undoubtedly divisive, the campaign was peaceful and arguably had an invigorating effect on participatory democracy in Scotland. Although theologians and church members supported different sides, there was evidence of common ground across their theological constructions of Scottish national identity, all of which exhibited a chastened, post-Barmen concern to resist idolatry, racism, and ethnic essentialism.

Bibliography Biggar, Nigel (2015). Between Kin and Cosmopolis: An Ethic of the Nation. London: James Clarke & Co. Billig, Michael (1995). Banal Nationalism. New York: Sage. Bradley, Ian (2012). God Save the Queen: The Spiritual Heart of the Monarchy. London: Continuum. Bretherton, Luke (2010). Christianity and Contemporary Politics. Oxford: WileyBlackwell. Broun, Dauvit (1996). ‘When did Scotland become Scotland?’ History Today 46 (October): 10.

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Brown, Stewart J. (1991). “ ‘Outside the Covenant’: The Scottish Presbyterian Churches and the Irish Catholic Community in Scotland, 1922–1937’, The Innes Review 42/1: 19–45. Brown, Stewart J. (2008). Providence and Empire. Harlow: Pearson Education. Cameron, James K. (1972). The First Book of Discipline with Introduction and Commentary. Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press. Colley, Linda B. (2003). Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. London: Pimlico/Yale University Press. Cowan, Edward J. (2002). For Freedom Alone: The Declaration of Abroath 1320. East Linton: Birlinn Books. Craig, Cairns (2009). Intending Scotland: Explorations in Scottish Culture since the Enlightenment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Davie, George E. (1961). The Democratic Intellect. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Devine, T. M. (1999). The Scottish Nation 1700–2000. London: Penguin. Finlay, R. J. (1994). Independent and Free: Scottish Politics and the Origins of the SNP 1918–1945. Edinburgh: John Donald. Gay, Doug (2012). ‘Patriotism Good, Nationalism Bad? The News from Scotland’, Modern Believing 53/4: 419–25. Gay, Doug (2013). Honey from the Lion: Christianity and the Ethics of Nationalism. London: SCM. Hearn, Jonathan (2000). Claiming Scotland: National Identity and Liberal Culture. Edinburgh: Polygon. Hearn, Jonathan (2006). Rethinking Nationalism: A Critical Introduction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Henderson, G. D. and James Bulloch (1960). The Scots Confession, 1560. Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press. Kirk, James (1980). The Second Book of Discipline with Introduction and Commentary by James Kirk. Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press. Lyall, Francis (2016). Church and State in Scotland: Developing Law. Abingdon: Routledge. Lyall, Scott and Marjory Palmer McCulloch (eds.) (2011). The Edinburgh Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Mason, Roger (1983). ‘Covenant and Commonweal: The Language of Politics in Reformation Scotland’, in N. Macdougall (ed.), Church, Politics and Society: Scotland, 1408–1929. Edinburgh: John Donald, 97–126. Murray, Douglas (1993). Freedom to Reform: The ‘Articles Declaratory’ of the Church of Scotland, 1921. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Storrar, William F. (1990). Scottish Identity: A Christian Vision. Edinburgh: Handsel Press.

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Storrar, William F. (2003). ‘Democracy and Mission’, in W. F. Storrar and P. Donald (eds.), God in Society: Doing Social Theology in Scotland Today. Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press, 10–34. Storrar, William F. (2004). ‘Where the Local and Global Meet: Duncan Forrester’s Glocal Public Theology and Scottish Political Context’, in. F. Storrar and A. R. Morton (eds.), Public Theology for the 21st Century. London: T&T Clark, 405–30. Taylor, Charles (2007). A Secular Age. New Haven, CT: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Todd, Margo (2002). The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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22 Catholic Theology since Vatican II William McFadden

It is undeniable that the Second Vatican Council was the most significant event in centuries for the worldwide Roman Catholic community: the impact of the sixteen documents was both immediate and prolonged. To quote Mark Dilworth, the eighth and final Abbot of Fort Augustus Abbey: ‘Vatican II was to find in Scotland considerable potential for development’ (Dilworth 1996: 144). This meant that the laity, with a theological pre-understanding of itself as the mystical body joining in the dialogue of responses in Latin, was ready for the vernacular liturgy when it arrived in the wake of the Council.

The Magisterium of the Theologian Roman Catholic theology has traditionally recognized the dual magisterium of the bishop and the theologian, the ordained minister commissioned to be an authoritative teacher of the faith, and the scholar whose concern is theological competence. In Scotland, the role of the academic theologian has often been taken by members of the Religious Orders, and it is a member of the Dominican Order who has been perhaps the most significant and influential Scottish theologian of this period, namely Fergus Kerr OP. Kerr (b. 1931) has contributed specifically to the questions raised by the relationship between theology and philosophy, and his expertise has been recognized in his many works on Thomism and on twentiethcentury Catholic thought (Kerr 1997, 2002, 2006). A collection of essays in his honour helps to illustrate his wide range of subject matter by acknowledging his contribution to epistemology, emotion theory, literary theory, imagination, and the proper construal of Thomas, Wittgenstein, and Newman (Oliver et al. 2013). In a measured contribution, Kerr wonders whether a ‘dialogical’ account of the Mass requires the priest to face the people (2006: 214). He also plays down ‘face to face’ nuptiality between God and people, i.e. that marriage is much more than a metaphor (2006: 200). Kerr would qualify this by a re-emphasis on biblical Thomism, as per Exodus 3:14. ‘Metaphors, however rich and imaginative . . . need to be subjected to the ontological interpretation of the divine names in age-old Catholic tradition’—this against a new direction inspired by Karl Barth and found strongly emphasized in John Paul II, although hardly at all in Cardinal Ratzinger or in the 1992 Catechism.

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With his balanced approach and ability to observe from various perspectives, Kerr has managed to critique the neo-scholasticism that had been prevalent in the Church. While it was necessary in its day, such an approach is no longer adequate. Specifically, it fails to do justice to the personalist, symbolic, and mystical dimensions promoted by the Council. This relationship of philosophy and theology has also been creatively addressed by Patrick Burke (Burke 2002). His study examines the structure of dialectical analogy as it appears in each of the major themes of Karl Rahner’s theology, and he sees this as an indispensable key to the correct interpretation of Rahner’s thought. (Rahner was arguably the theologian of Vatican II.) Burke, formerly editor of Faith magazine, before working in Rome for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, would later become Vicar General of the Archdiocese of St Andrews & Edinburgh in 2014. He argues that the clarity of conceptual distinction (e.g. between grace and nature) must be maintained against a movement to see both Rahner and Vatican II as epitomizing fluidity or ‘dynamism’ without remainder (Burke 2002). For Rahner insisted on (e.g.) the church as ‘sacrament of sacraments’. But he also affirmed the need for subjectivity to affirm an objectivity whence it arises, allowing for a spiritualizing of reality, so as to know things to be situated in an ‘esse’ between nothingness and infinity. This esse or existence lies behind all individual things and determines human intellectuality or reason by pressing through it in human striving towards being. God can be reached through grasping knowledge of other things, which involves conceptualization: therefore doctrine matters, or even more so, knowing the triune God in the receiving of grace is essential. There is a limit to doctrinal development, which is more about explanation and simplification than about ‘progress’. The contributions of Kerr and Burke can be placed alongside other theologians who have offered their theological input from the Scottish perspective. James MacNeil, a priest from the Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, taught at Glasgow University in the late 1990s, and he has made a significant contribution to Scottish Catholic scholarship with his exploration of Gaudium et Spes (MacNeil 1997). A considerable role was played by Dr John Durkan (d. 2006) during his many years at the University of Glasgow. Dr Durkan promoted greater lay participation as envisaged by Vatican II. His legacy remains in the many articles published in The Innes Review, the journal promoting the study of the history of Catholic Scotland. Beginning in 1950, it offers a huge contribution to the understanding of culture and religion: historical theology is there too. There is no Scottish Catholic journal for modern theology, a fact that perhaps betokens the ecumenical nature of theology today, but arguably also indicates a focus on the past as a key pillar of identity, as outlined in John Watts’ work on the first seminary at Scalan (Watts 1999), and in the significance of the move of the Scottish Catholic Archive to Aberdeen University in 2014.

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The other Scottish universities have also made an impact on the theological education of the Catholic community of Scotland. Appointed to the University of Edinburgh in 1971, Noel O’Donoghue was the first Roman Catholic theologian to be appointed to a full-time teaching position since the Reformation, and James Mackey’s appointment to the Thomas Chalmers Chair of Systematic Theology at New College was of particular significance. The controversy around his nomination is well recorded by Stewart J. Brown (Brown 2000). Both scholars, together with Gilbert Markus, have also been instrumental in raising the profile of Celtic theology as a theological discipline, with O’Donoghue paying attention to a Neoplatonic strand as found in John Scottus Eriugena. The publication edited by Mackey provides an overview on this subject with a valuable series of essays (Mackey 1989). Mackey’s ‘spiritual’ Christology spoke of the risen Christ as power more than as elevated humanity. His later work seeks to articulate an entire system of doctrine on the basis of a theology of creation that has explicit Neoplatonic and Hegelian leanings (Mackey 2006). The dramatic progress made in ecumenism over the years has made it far easier for Roman Catholic scholars to engage with Scottish academic life. An illustration of this was Michael Purcell, a senior lecturer at New College and a major contributor to understanding the work of Emmanuel Levinas, and the wider ‘continental’ philosophical tradition. His work is recognized as a valuable source for the study of the Husserlian phenomenological tradition, with its emphasis on wonder and the intentionality of consciousness becoming conscience, and the ways in which phenomenology might be deployed in fundamental and practical theology (Purcell 2006). One could read the Bible for a phenomenology of events and law. Ethics, as ‘that which is undergone’, meant that practice was a way to new knowing, since it interrupts ontology (Purcell 2006: 162). An excessive, ‘liturgical’ movement from ‘outside-in’ is intended for self-sacrificing justice, with the security of messianic peace. There is no place for theology as abstraction, nor for a God who will absolve us from going to him through the other human. He withdraws in order to allow people to become mature agents. Responsibility for the other is not limitless, but is bound by the presence of a third party, which can properly be the state if not a religious authority, but theoretically the ‘yes’ towards the other is unlimited. There is a critique here of the (complacent and complicit) ‘facticity’ of Heidegger’s thought. Likewise, the catholic principle means there need to be hearers of the Word for there to be Revelation. Purcell stood in the ‘Scottish’ Celtic tradition which Noel O’Donoghue had (re-) started, and he brought catholic theological categories (nature-grace, Incarnation, etc.) into dialogue with Levinas. Significantly, in chapter 5 he introduces Irenaeus: ‘the glory of God is a living human, but the life of the human is the vision of God’. There is also ‘graced existence otherwise than being’, where grace comes to meet and enable the natural but impossible desire for God. This capacity for grace is natural

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and responds to the object of Revelation. For De Lubac the desire must be both supernatural and natural, already residing in human nature, which makes it somewhat exacted (or God is ‘obligated’) on Rahner’s understanding, which De Lubac denies, for desire is fulfilled only infinitely, unlike need. It may be argued that among the theological disciplines it is the study of moral theology that has seen the most significant changes as a result of the Council. Rooted in the vision and teaching of Gaudium et Spes, the development from manual based teaching has seen a progression to a more empirical framework with a new language reflecting a more personalist approach. To appreciate this movement the work of the Scottish Jesuit Jack Mahoney, The Making of Moral Theology is recognized as a landmark publication (Mahoney 1987). He taught applied ethics in London, holding the F. D. Maurice Chair of Moral and Social Theology at King’s College, and founded the Lauriston Centre for Contemporary Belief and Action in Edinburgh. His persuasive critique of moral theology offered insights into the magisterium and authority, natural law, the need to reintegrate the ascetical or spiritual with the moral, and the primacy of conscience. For Mahoney a proper Thomism (in the terms of Aquinas himself) sees Revelation as remedial, which then allows natural law to flourish, in such a way that ‘justice’ is only part of the moral story. As for ethical theory, Mahoney dislikes ‘probabiliorism’, where one must choose the advice more likely to be God’s will, on the grounds that it ‘presents a view of morality characterized by conflict and antagonism between wills’ (1987: 243). ‘Conscience thus becomes the cockpit where one’s freedom and another’s law face each other as antagonists, and where it is the individual who judges whether or not his freedom must yield to law’ (1987: 229). Mahoney preferred probabilism, as allowing a diversity of opinions: each opinion can be valid if it is backed by some reputable moral theologian, and even if it is one of say ten opinions, it makes the act licit—e.g. stealing in instalments for a great need is not a mortal sin according to a handful of moral theologians. Mahoney himself gives clear signs that his preference is ‘more Johannine than Matthaean’ in his view of New Testament ethics. Thus, the Church should look to the Spirit as internal teacher of all the faithful and she should countenance new opinions in new ages (Mahoney 1987: 222). Even Humanae Vitae (1967) mentioned the need for the spirit working on each heart to give assent to Humanae Vitae, for there is a certain authority of personal Christian experience, one which ranges widely. For Mahoney the idea of epicheia, namely, ‘what would the legislator think of the situation he didn’t foresee?’ combines with a mystical or at least spiritual view of ethics as inadequately bound by past laws. According to Albert the Great ‘one must respect the variability of the real . . . it is the rule which must be adapted to the real’ (Mahoney 1987: 54). The moral law has the quality of reason. Mahoney’s later work has also boldly tackled the problems for traditional accounts of original sin and the atonement by modern evolutionary biology (Mahoney 2011).

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The University of Aberdeen has also supported the study of Roman Catholic theology. Francesca Murphy was the first Catholic woman to be appointed to a teaching post in theology at that institution, later moving to a chair at the University of Notre Dame. Among her publications, she presented a dramatic account of the history of Revelation, while also maintaining a strong metaphysical and spiritual foundation for the reality of God, creation, and redemption (Murphy 2000).

The Magisterium of the Bishop If Gaudium et Spes presented themes which were to prove fruitful principally in moral theology, Lumen Gentium offered both challenges and opportunities from the perspective of ecclesiology and presented a specific context for reflecting upon the teaching authority of the bishops. This document, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, highlighted the need for a theology both of the institutional or hierarchical and of the charismatic: alongside authority and ordination, official roles and responsibility, there was to be co-responsibility, cooperation, and shared exploration and consensus. In particular, it emphasized that a renewed awareness of collegiality was to be central to the life and ministry of the Church. Catholic social teaching had been developing significantly before the Council with the magisterial encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII and John XXIII, and after the Council with those of Paul VI and John Paul II. On the specific question of nuclear disarmament, there was a clear yet nuanced corpus reflecting on the role of nuclear arms and the just war theory. With the Craighead Statement (1982), the Bishops’ Conference of Scotland was to add a particular dimension. Instead of simply calling for a commitment not to use nuclear weapons in the event of any war, they stated: ‘We are convinced, however, that if it is immoral to use these weapons it is also immoral to threaten their use.’ The questions concerning the morality or immorality of nuclear weapons, the arguments for deterrence or disarmament, and the challenges of building a just peace were to be integral to Catholic social teaching as the twentieth century moved into the twenty-first. It is commendable that the Scottish bishops took such a prophetic position, but somewhat disheartening that this 1982 statement remains the most important theological contribution of the Scottish Bishops’ Conference. However, it was just as important that the Craighead Statement signalled a collegial ecclesiology. A particular fruit of this focus on collegiality in the years immediately after the Council is to be seen in the flourishing of regional and national Conferences of Bishops. These bodies were to be privileged places for collegiality, where this expression of the Church was to be practised and experienced.

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The restored central role given to the Scriptures by Vatican II can be seen in the theological teaching document published by the Bishops’ Conference of Scotland which was a collaborative production with the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales. The Gift of Scripture (2005) marked the fortieth anniversary of the Vatican II document Dei Verbum. This was the landmark document which updated the Catholic theological position on the relationship of Scripture and Tradition, as well as integrating the Scriptures within the spiritual and pastoral priorities of the Catholic community. It is helpful that it promotes the use of Scripture in all areas of Church life and recognizes its role at the heart of the tradition of Catholic faith. It affirms the teaching of Dei Verbum by setting out in five sections the place of Scripture in God’s self-communication, how this Word is and should be received, highlights the themes of the various books of the Bible, and offers practical guidance to ensure the centrality of the Scriptures in Christian life. A further focus on liturgical theology was the collaborative effort of the Bishops’ Conference of Scotland involving this time the bishops of England and Wales, and of Ireland. One Bread, One Body (1998) was presented as a ‘teaching document on the Eucharist in the life of the Church, and the establishment of general norms on sacramental sharing’. The strength of the document is that it initially emphasizes the doctrine of the Church, presenting traditional Eucharistic theology and the unity shared by all Christians. However, its ecumenical impact is judged more negatively when the question of sharing Holy Communion is examined. It offers a more restrictive interpretation than the 1993 Directory for the Application of Principles and Norms on Ecumenism published by the Pontifical Council for the Promotion of Christian Unity. The bishops restrict to ‘unique occasions’ the admission to communion of Christians of different denominations, whereas beyond the United Kingdom and Ireland other bishops and episcopal conferences had envisaged the possibility of more frequent Eucharistic sharing, particularly for inter-church couples. Yet, while One Bread, One Body may be judged ‘restrictive’, the dramatic growth in the engagement of the Catholic Church in Scotland with the ecumenical movement tells a far more positive story. This is demonstrated in the theological work promoted by the Scottish bishops of the Joint Commission on Doctrine of the Church of Scotland and the Roman Catholic Church. This body, originally constituted in the 1970s to look at the theological issues concerning marriage, fell into abeyance, but was reconstituted in 2002 and has succeeded in making a valuable contribution to the ecumenical theological debate, leading to a booklet on our common baptism, Baptism, Catholic and Reformed (2007). A liturgy for the Reaffirmation of Baptismal Vows was followed by a number of conferences on ecumenical themes. Having now considered the place of the Catholic university theologian and the bishop(s) as theologian, one faces the question: what amount of dialogue has

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existed between them? The Magisterium of the bishops has undeniably been a component in Scottish theological life since the 1960s, yet a critical appraisal of their contribution would ask some challenging questions. For example, how serious is the dialogue between the bishops and the theologians who contribute to the teaching of the Church through their academic competence and by raising legitimate questions about the current non-infallible teachings? What measures have been taken to ensure that the ecclesial character of academic theologians is acknowledged and encouraged? Perhaps an emphasis on the legal-canonical has fostered undue caution, anti-intellectualism. and at times a closed mentality in face of the fundamental reform called for by the Vatican Council teachings.

Pastoral and Practical Theology Theology is determined by the lived and reflected historical expressions of the faith of the people, and in Scotland the theology of the four major documents of the Council, Gaudium et Spes, Lumen Gentium, Dei Verbum, and Sacrosanctum Concilium, have critically influenced pastoral practice as well as theoretical understanding. In particular, a renewed appreciation for a theology which focuses on the universal call to holiness and the dignity shared by all the baptized has become dominant. The widespread promotion of Holy Communion under both kinds has encouraged a timely development in both the understanding and the practice of the Mass. These liturgical changes followed the introduction of English (and Gaelic) in place of Latin at Mass and the restoration of the primitive custom of the presiding priest facing the congregation rather than with his back to them. The theology of Vatican II which returned importance to the Liturgy of the Word was a definite stimulus for the renewal brought about in the years prior to the new millennium. In Scotland a decisive contribution was made by John H. Fitzsimons (1939–2008) who skilfully outlined the principles contained in the new three-year cycle of the lectionary and offered a comprehensive synopsis from both a scriptural and a theological perspective (Fitzsimons 1981). Forrester et al. stressed a transcendentalist approach to worship, in which the worshipper (homo liturgicus) responds ‘upwards’ to God’s descending initiative in and through material symbols, ‘a personal meeting under the veil of signs (Forrester et al. 1996: 48). The Church is to be the earthly sacrament. The 1998 ICEL translation of the Roman Missal presided over by Maurice Taylor who had been rector of the Scots College, Valladolid, then Bishop of Galloway (1981–2004) was rejected by the Vatican and replaced by the Roman 2010 English translation, which ‘signalled a move from transparency and exteriority to mystery and sobriety and interiority and from a liturgical diversity that the vernacular can encourage to a uniformity’ (Taylor 2009).

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Hugh Gilbert (b. 1952), Abbot of Pluscarden from 1992, published a collection of addresses from his time before becoming Bishop of Aberdeen in 2011. Here, he ranges across subjects from Mary’s ‘yes’ as crucial for the historical redemption and the form for the Church’s baptism, to Jesus as the object of worshipping faith, an object who takes hold of the worshipper, a personal reality on the basis of his closeness as divine Son to the Father—living for another he introduces us to the Father. The life of Jesus mediated through the sacraments forms the mystical body of Christ. Drawing on the resources of the faith is encouraged, as is contemplation before action, communion before mission—we are made to surrender in love. The gift of fortitude perfects the virtue of fortitude, just as the courageous Christ was strengthened in the Garden. Prayer and community are more fundamental than even friendship. The fear of death in mid-life requires acceptance and being re-made. Political peace is based on theological and spiritual peace, and in knowing how to handle power in all its forms (Guardini). A graced spiritual sense helps one see through and beyond immediate objects, with sensitivity to the cry of the poor, and consolation through fellowship, hope, and Scripture. ‘The living Christ makes present in sacramental signs the sacrifice he once offered to the Father on the cross.’ The Eucharist as Christ’s action involves ‘the sacramental representation of the sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifice of the Church herself ’ (Gilbert 2008: 96–7) and points to the importance of brotherhood and sisterhood for true ecumenism, interfaith solidarity, and care for the poor. Also in Aberdeen, Stuart Chalmers, coming from a pastoral perspective, wrote a doctoral work that stressed the need for conscience to be informed, not least by the moral quality of the action. Virtue can be gained as conscience is strengthened ‘in the context of hope in God’s love, mercy and providence’ (Chalmers 2013: 4). The concept of synderesis as an inclination to the good in the Franciscan tradition, or as a supply of natural moral laws, which may or may not rule conscience in its deliberations, is key. One gets ‘the major premise from synderesis, the minor premise from reasoning, and the conclusion from conscience’ (Chalmers 2013: 171). Access to synderesis is not immediate and so moral precepts can be included in it. Incorrect conscience binds conditionally as long as the perception lasts— even where what is willed is evil through ignorance of the law, the act is in a sense good. One may resist a doubtful obligation. He tackles Charles Curran’s essay ‘Conscience in the Catholic Moral Tradition’ and its criteria of ‘reason, grace, emotions and intuition’, and the ‘importance of natural inclinations in discerning the good’ (Chalmers 2013: 185, quoted). But that is not enough, thinks Chalmers, for synderesis also has to reshape those misshaped inclinations, drawing them out, making them present to will, so that they become second nature, which is something lying ahead of us, as we share in wisdom with charity in apprehension and action. Gaudium et Spes }16 is criticized for being ‘incomplete’ on ‘conscience’. If ‘discernment’ is to be employed, who better than Ignatius, one who

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would never advocate rejecting Church teaching, and John Paul II’s Veritatis Splendor. Synderesis provides the moral interpretation of the fundamental moral matter to grasp inherent fundamental principles: it is not merely a formal principle (Chalmers 2013: 271). Now this could be overly optimistic; hence the basic, natural anamnesis has to be kept on track by the Magisterium’s encouraging an anamnesis of faith. Certain virtues are required to be worked for rather than ‘given’, and prudence affects both the judgement of conscience and the free moral decision itself, linking those two ‘moments’. Con-science implies sentire cum ecclesia—with ascesis meaning ‘asking for grace to change’. Further pastoral and practical theological engagement is evident in the work of the Scottish Catholic Education Service, which has produced valuable materials for schools, parents, and teachers. These resources seek to reflect the theological insights of Vatican II and the developing nature of catechesis in the decades at the close of the twentieth century and the dawn of the twenty-first. Among the publications of SCES is This is our Faith (2011), which is a comprehensive overview on the Catholic Faith for use in religious education; the documents Called to Love (2006) and God’s Loving Plan (2014) which promote Catholic moral teaching in a positive way that affirms human life as precious and worthy of development to its full potential; and the Charter for Catholic Schools in Scotland. However, it could be observed that fidelity to the Church’s theological and doctrinal heritage demands more than the repetition of doctrinal formulae and requires not merely a rational argumentation about God. Indeed, what is called for in post-Vatican II religious education is a teaching that highlights the personal responsibility and freedom of the individual, and one that supports and encourages a genuine experience of God, a sense of the mystical and a theology to enthuse and challenge in equal measure. In addition to the initiatives mentioned above, the years following Vatican II have seen the Catholic Church in Scotland engage creatively in other ways in order to implement the pastoral theological vision of the Council. In the field of catechetics, this has been realized most directly in the way in which the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA), published in 1972 by the Congregation for Divine Worship and mandated for use in an English translation by the Bishops of Scotland in 1988, has impacted on parishes. The vision and theology of the RCIA is that Christian initiation is initiation into community, and so it is the responsibility of the community to be involved in the journey of initiation of those seeking the sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist. This journey is also recognized as a process, and so the steps and stages along the way need to be acknowledged and celebrated. This theological catechesis rooted in the vision contained in both the documents of Vatican II and in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults is to be clearly found in the work of Colin Stewart (Stewart 1990).

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In acknowledging the Scottish Jesuits, the contribution in pastoral and practical theology through the work in spirituality and spiritual theology of Fr Gerard Hughes SJ, chaplain at Glasgow University from 1967 to 1975, should not be underestimated. His seminal work, God of Surprises, with its title taken from Rahner, was written in Portree in the 1980s and reprinted often. Rather than ‘the doctrine of God’, it stresses the importance of the inner life and is an exposition of main themes of the Ignatian Exercises with more emphasis on divine love and repentance towards awakening from a dream to a reality, a change of outlook, a recovery of wonder, and a looking at Christ’s humanity that reflects our own to us (Hughes 1985: 70, 126). The work of Edinburgh priest Fr Jock Dalrymple on the spiritual life also deserves recognition. His work drew together the vast amount of wisdom gained in his years of listening to and working with individuals journeying in faith. His deep commitment to prayer and knowledge of the human condition are clearly shown in his writing, with a strong influence of St John of the Cross and the need for gaining a dependent spirit in relation to God (Dalrymple 1984). Responding to the crisis of authority in the late 1960s, and with obvious influence from the Catholic charismatic renewal movement he treads the line so ably trodden by Rahner in maintaining the Church as both hierarchical and charismatic— involving obedience and dissent in charity. Turmoil is a ‘growing pain’, involving the purifying of motives (Dalrymple 1968). The developing bond between the Catholic community and the wider Scottish society encouraged by the practical theology of Vatican II can also be seen in the flourishing relationship with the arts. In this field the name of the Cumnock-born composer James McMillan looms large. His Catholic faith has influenced his compositions in works such as ‘The Confession of Isobel Gowdie’, and he has been inspirational in seeking to restore traditional sacred music to the liturgy following the reforms of Vatican II. He supported the creation of Musica Sacra Scotland, an inter-diocesan body formed for this purpose. A final example of the way in which the Catholic Church in Scotland sought to implement the pastoral and practical theology of Vatican II is in the field of social communications. The Council document looking at this subject, Inter Mirifica, called for engagement and dialogue with the modern means of communication. In the work of Canon Bill Anderson, former Spiritual Director at the Scots College in Rome, chaplain at Aberdeen University, and Times preacher of the year in 1996, we find a combination of literary, theological, and pastoral experience in one admirable composition (Anderson 2010). The initiative of Open House, a current affairs magazine which aims to promote debate on faith issues in Scotland, was started by laypeople in 1990 and has been sustained by their resourcefulness and inventiveness. It has given a voice to the theological ideas that Vatican II inspired and encouraged.

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Theology, the Seminary, and the Ordained Ministry The promotion of religious education, and in particular lay adult theological education, is a central feature of the post Vatican II Church. At the time of the Council though, theological studies had remained almost solely the prerogative of the seminarian or the cleric. This was done mostly in home based seminaries: the National Junior Seminaries in Langbank and in Blairs; the St Andrews and Edinburgh Archdiocesan Seminary in Drygrange in the Borders which then transferred to Gillis College in Edinburgh; and the Archdiocese of Glasgow Diocesan Seminary in Cardross which then transferred to Newlands in the south side of Glasgow and then on to Chesters College in Bearsden. These were the institutions where philosophy and theology were taught to prospective priests, mostly by Roman trained Scottish priests who had returned home, having been educated with the new teachings presented by the documents of the Council. The spectacular fall in the number of young men entering seminary and the realization that it was not best practice to remove adolescents and teenagers from their family environment into a quasi-monastic structure saw the junior seminaries being gradually shut down and the senior seminaries amalgamating till there was only one seminary left in Scotland, Scotus College, the National Seminary which opened in 1993. This establishment was itself to close down in 2008, with the result that from this date the only remaining seminaries dedicated to the training of Scottish priests were the Royal Scots College in Salamanca in Spain, which moved there from Valladolid in 1988, and the Pontifical Scots College in Rome. As numbers of seminarians continued to decline, the decision was made to retain Rome as the only venue specifically designated for Scottish students for the priesthood. The story behind the decline of the Scottish seminaries from the 1960s to a situation where there is now no home seminary at all is a study which remains to be done. Yet the fact that there is no longer a locus for Scottish priests to engage in the teaching of philosophy or theology, or the specific need for them to be trained to a level to become lecturers and teachers in these subjects, is without doubt a matter of regret. The theological base of the Catholic Church in Scotland is certainly much the weaker for it. Just as the number of prospective priests was in decline, there was the beginning of a new form of ordained ministerial service, the permanent diaconate. This ministry, reintroduced as a direct result of the teachings found in Lumen Gentium paragraph 29, formally recognizes the ordination of married men to this ancient order; and in so doing it gives recognition to the contribution of family life to church governance and ministry. The theology of the diaconate remains a work in progress. It is clear that the ministry of the deacon is directly related to the person of the bishop: the deacon functions precisely as the representative of the bishop. He is ordained rather than

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commissioned, and it is his role to be a promoter of the laity rather than to take on their ministries and responsibilities to himself. Although it is clear that there ought to be no confusion between the ministry of the deacon and that of the priest, the observable decrease in the number of men being ordained as priests in Scotland has meant that in effect some deacons have taken on the practical realities of parish administration and have developed a ministry often with a very strong liturgical focus. A clarification of this possible confusion of roles is necessary in order to safeguard the unique vocation of a man to the diaconate and to offer a coherent theology for ordination.

Conclusion In summary then, the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland has involved herself in a serious way with the agenda set by the documents produced by the Council Fathers during those exceptional days in Rome between 1962 and 1965. Theological scholarship, whether in the university, the parish, or the seminary, has raised consciousness and presented challenge and opportunity. From being stirred by the vision of collegiality to encouraging lay theological expertise and lay leadership and responsibility; from promoting full, conscious, and active participation in the liturgy to advocating a greater commitment and duty towards the ecumenical movement; from producing and generating catechetical materials that seek to engender faith and not simply shore up commonly held opinions of religion; to exposing shared theological views to scholarly critique—there has been a genuine attempt to transform the Council teachings into a lived and practical experience and so to enable women and men of faith to be committed and effective members of the Church in an ever changing and developing world. The documents of Vatican II are a privileged record of Roman Catholic teaching: they remain fundamental and central both for understanding and for providing an ongoing challenge to the Catholic Church in Scotland.

Bibliography Anderson, Bill (2010). Words and the Word. Leominster: Gracewing. Brown, Stewart J. (2000). ‘Presbyterians and Catholics in Twentieth-Century Scotland’, in Stewart J. Brown and George Newlands (eds.), Scottish Christianity in the Modern World. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 255–82. Burke, Patrick (2002). Reinterpreting Rahner: A Critical Study of His Major Themes. New York: Fordham University Press.

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Chalmers, Stuart (2013). Conscience in Context: Historical and Existential Perspectives. Bern: Peter Lang. Dalrymple, John (1968). ‘The Holy Spirit and Personal Responsibility’, in Authority in a Changing Church. London and Sydney: Sheed &Ward, 203–31. Dalrymple, John (1984). Simple Prayer. London: Darton, Longman & Todd. Dilworth, Mark (1996). ‘Roman Catholic Worship’, in Duncan Forrester and Douglas Murray (eds.), Studies in the History of Worship in Scotland. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 127–48. Fitzsimmons, John H. (1981). Guide to the Lectionary. London: MayhewMcCrimmon. Forrester, Duncan B., J. Ian H. McDonald, and Gian Tellini (1996). Encounter with God: An Introduction to Christian Worship and Practice, 2nd edition. London: T&T Clark. The Gift of Scripture (2005). Catholic Bishops’ Conferences of England and Wales, and of Scotland. London: Catholic Truth Society. Gilbert, Hugh (2008). Living the Mystery. Leominster: Gracewing. Hughes, Gerard (1985). God of Surprises. London: Darton, Longman & Todd. Kerr, Fergus (1997). Theology after Wittgenstein, 2nd revised edition. London: SPCK. Kerr, Fergus (2002). Aquinas: Versions of Thomism. Malden and Oxford: Wiley. Kerr, Fergus (2006). Twentieth Century Catholic Theologians. Malden and Oxford: Wiley. Mackey, James P. (1979). Jesus: The Man & the Myth. London: SCM. Mackey, James P. (ed.) (1989). An Introduction to Celtic Christianity. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Mackey, James P. (2006). Christianity and Creation: The Essence of the Christian Faith and Its Future among Religions. London: Continuum. MacNeil, James (1997). A Study of Gaudium et Spes 19–22, the Second Vatican Council Response to Contemporary Atheism. New York: Edwin Mellen Press. Mahoney, Jack (1987). The Making of Moral Theology: A Study of the Roman Catholic Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mahoney, Jack (2011). Christianity in Evolution: An Exploration. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. Murphy, Francesca (2000). The Comedy of Revelation: Paradise Lost and Regained in Biblical Narrative. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Oliver, Simon, Karen Kilby, and Thomas O’Loughlin (eds.) (2013). Faithful Reading: New Essays in Theology in Honour of Fergus Kerr, OP. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. One Bread, One Body (1998). Catholic Bishops’ Conferences of England and Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. London: Catholic Truth Society. Purcell, Michael (2006). Levinas and Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Russell, William (1995). Contextualization: Origins, Meaning and Implications. Rome: Pontificia Studiorum Universitas. Stewart, Colin M. (1990). On the Brink: Catholicism for the Questioning Adult. Bury St Edmunds: Kevin Mayhew. Taylor, Maurice (2009). It’s the Eucharist, Thank God. Brandon: Decani Publications. Watts, J. (1999). Scalan: The Forbidden College, 1716–1769. East Linton: Tuckwell.

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23 Late Twentieth-Century Controversies in Sexual Ethics, Gender, and Ordination Lesley Orr

Introduction On Wednesday 24 May 1967, crisis in the Middle East loomed large, Celtic FC’s Lisbon Lions were preparing for the European Cup Final, and the Tremeloes were at number one in the charts, singing ‘Silence is Golden’. But there was little silence in the Church of Scotland Assembly Hall, golden or otherwise. Indeed, the report of the Kirk’s Moral Welfare Committee (MWC) left some of the commissioners in a purple haze of righteous condemnation. Introducing ‘Christian Morality in an Age of Change’ convener Rev. John Peat noted it had been a year of ‘many large, difficult, delicate, complex and perplexing matters’. Referring to Sex and Morality, a controversial British Council of Churches report which had provoked much Christian opposition and outrage for not unequivocally condemning sex outside marriage, Peat argued that it was trying to do justice to the real nature of human relations, and to show understanding and compassion. ‘Let us quite clearly and fearlessly proclaim that sex is God’s good gift, to be treated not with furtive embarrassment but frankly and joyously, though always with reverence and responsibility.’ He criticized the limited concepts and moral blind spots of earlier days, urging the need to remain open to new insights and study enlightened approaches to controversial moral issues (Glasgow Herald [GH], 25 May 1967). The Committee claimed that its remit, and the Church’s, was ‘to interpret, proclaim and apply, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the mind of Christ for this generation of change’ (Church of Scotland General Assembly Reports (COSGAR) 1967: 502). There followed a fiery debate concerning the ‘permissive society’—that shift in attitudes and behaviours which presented a radical challenge to the hegemony of traditional Christian teaching about sex, and the status of the Church as guardian of the nation’s moral compass. The Committee had wrestled with proposals to amend legislation dealing with abortion, homosexual practice, and grounds for divorce. But the theological approach and competence of the report were bitterly criticized by many commissioners. Rev. Dr John R. Gray called Sex and Morality a wretched and wicked document, asserting that young people were actually looking to the Church to give them rules. The

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Committee’s recommendation that the Church should support decriminalization of homosexual acts between consenting adults was rejected in no uncertain terms; instead the Assembly overwhelmingly agreed with Dr William MacNicol that the Kirk should make it clear where it stood on the grave evil of ‘filthy and degrading practices’, or it would incur God’s wrath. Seconding Dr MacNicol’s countermotion, Rev. J. Stott proclaimed ‘let us not be afraid to say “Thou shalt not!” ’ (GH, 25 May 1967). On the previous day, during the debate of the Panel of Doctrine Report on the Place of Women in the Church, the Fathers and Brethren (joined for the first time in their history by a handful of women, newly ordained as elders) had heard an urgent plea to break a decades-long impasse and take decisive action to admit women to Ministry of Word and Sacrament on equal terms with men. Rev. W. Grahame (Raymond) Bailey characterized the situation as absurd and ridiculous: ‘No more exegesis, no more argument, no more discussion . . . unless we hurry, the Church of England will beat us to it!’ (GH, 24 May 1967). On this issue, notwithstanding warnings from representatives of the Kirk’s conservative evangelical wing, the Assembly agreed that a decision one way or another was required and voted to send an enabling overture to Presbyteries under the Barrier Act. In 1968, women were finally granted right of access to ordained ministry. The 1967 debates highlight some of the Kirk’s recurring theological controversies and divisions around sex, gender, and morality throughout the second half of the twentieth century. It was not alone—all forms of institutional Christianity in Scotland (and elsewhere, including the Second Vatican Council) had to reckon with major upheavals which reshaped laws, attitudes, patterns of power, and practices governing gender relations and sexual morality. The impact on public theology and ethics is epitomized by the Honest to God debate (Robinson 1963). Bishop Robinson’s popularization of ‘secular theology’ and rejection of absolutist rules in favour of situational ethics based on principles of Christian love caught the spirit of the age and exposed to a mass audience the fault line between liberal and conservative modes of theological engagement, running through all the issues here discussed. The Kirk’s attempts to engage with mid-to-late twentieth-century controversies concerning human sexuality, marriage and divorce, and women’s ordination moved from efforts to reassert post-war authority and conformity, through increasing internal tensions, to radical decentring and fragmentation of the Church’s societal influence. Its theological agenda from the 1950s onwards was often reactive; substantially shaped in response to major upheavals in attitudes, behaviour, and social norms which disturbed the dominant Christian moral consensus and patriarchal gender order. The Churches and their theologians had little choice but to attend to a range of issues which centred on the body, on human sexuality, on the purpose and structuring of human relationships and communities, on the implications for church order and ministry, on fundamental

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questions about knowledge, authority, and gender, and concerning the significance of change—ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda—as both process and theological category. This generated profound differences of opinion and standpoint, and attendant power struggles which had the continuing capacity to capture wider media and public attention to the end of the twentieth century and beyond. There follows a brief overview of each issue and discussion of some important themes, including the emergence and impact of alternative discursive theological voices in diverse locations, among and beyond those officially authorized by church and academy.

Divorce and Remarriage The thorny issue of divorce and remarriage, on the agenda of the Church and Nation Committee (CNC) from 1946 to 1959, presaged turbulent times ahead. In Scots law, the sole ground for divorce was breaking of the marriage contract by adultery or malicious desertion. It had been shaped by the post-Reformation understanding of marriage as a divine act and orderly social institution as enshrined in the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647). The 1938 Divorce Act (Scotland) introduced new grounds, leading to a marked wartime increase in the rates of divorce and separation. This alarmed the CNC, which established a Special Committee to review the situation, particularly to clarify the duty of ministers concerning the remarriage of divorced persons. In the light of extended grounds, the committee tried and failed to persuade the Church to adopt a caseby-case approach which would require assessment of ‘sincere repentance’. From 1952, the enlarged committee was tasked with further theological study of the doctrine of marriage. Its 1957 report reviewed the understanding and practice of marriage through Church history, noting the Scottish reformers’ Calvinist emphasis on divine decree and action binding husband and wife together as one flesh. Significant societal changes are noted—especially in the position of women—as are intellectual developments in social sciences and new approaches to biblical interpretation. However, the ‘restatement of Christian doctrine’ offers little theological reflection on these contemporary and relational features of the human institution, focusing rather on an ontological interpretation of Gen. 2:24, which emphasizes the fundamental character of marriage as an act of God which can be destroyed by human sin such that the bond is broken. The report’s primary concern is divorce as a matter of Church discipline, which seeks to differentiate Christian marriage from ‘living in sin’. Its key conclusions are that the Church must act to give effective witness to the permanence of marriage; and that where there is a decree of divorce, ministers must discern whether the circumstances are such that God is prepared to be merciful to repentant offenders and to bless the formation of a new union (COSGA Reports 1957: 834–8). From 1959, ministers

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could conduct such marriages in church, though the concept of matrimonial offence still prevailed. Within a decade, this traditional pillar in the Kirk’s doctrinal edifice was looking decidedly shaky. An MWC working group agreed with the Scottish Law Commission that divorce should not be regarded as punitive, but as legal recognition of irretrievable breakdown. This group’s remit was concerned less with Church discipline than the demands of ‘Christian compassion . . . for remedy and alleviation of human suffering’. This was a different ethical and theological perspective, as reflected in its argument that the legal grounds for divorce were mostly results rather than causes of marital breakdown, and that categories of guilt and innocence failed to comprehend ‘the complex moral realities of the situation’. The 1969 Assembly accepted the MWC’s report on Divorce Law Reform. Its radical proposals would by implication remove any external scrutiny of behaviour within a marriage and make it much less straightforward for ministers seeking to fulfil their disciplinary obligations in relation to requests for Church remarriages. In the space of a decade, the theological compass seemed to have swung from emphasizing divine action and human repentance, towards pastoral concern in response to complex human realities.

Homosexuality The Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution was convened in 1954 and reported in 1957. The inquiry was the product of moral panic in England (particularly London) where there had been a steep rise in convictions for homosexual offences in the early 1950s. The Church of England produced a report in 1954 advocating both the decriminalization of homosexual acts in private and the creation of a government commission. The landmark Wolfenden Report drew a line between private and public morality—between sin and crime— and became a touchstone for subsequent legal and social developments in Britain. There was no equivalent public debate about homosexuality in Scotland, where prosecutions had actually declined to a low of seventy-one in 1956. Indeed, scholars have suggested that the combination of a different legal system and the cultural dominance of strict Presbyterian reticence about matters sexual created an environment of concern that anything which publicized homosexuality would be morally dangerous (Meek 2015). Nevertheless, the CNC established a working group and in 1958 called the publication of the Wolfenden Report an event of ‘urgent importance’ to the Church of Scotland. While the group concluded that the criminalization of consenting adult homosexual acts did more harm than good, and supported the Wolfenden recommendations, sharp divisions in Christian opinion were evident, and the CNC rejected the proposed changes. It supported James Adair, procurator fiscal and Church of Scotland elder, the sole

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dissenting voice on the Wolfenden Committee. He forcefully opposed legal toleration, arguing that it would give the impression that perversion and licentiousness were condoned. The CNC concurred: ‘In a Christian country the law should reflect, as far as possible, the generally accepted standards and principles of Christian ethics . . . In our opinion, certain forms of behaviour are so contrary to Christian moral principles and so repugnant to the consensus of the nation that, even if private and personal, they should be regarded as morally wrong and legally punishable’ (COSGAR 1958: 418). The language, tone, and content of the CNC report are heteronormative, accepting as self-evident that homosexual practices are unnatural and sinful. Everything must be done to redeem such men (for there is no mention of lesbian women) from vicious desires, while sympathy and charity must be extended because they are afflicted, abnormal, tragic. CNC convener Rev. Dr Nevile Davidson claimed the due authority of the Church to challenge the blurring of right and wrong and assert traditional moral standards—not least to protect the welfare of the community at large. There is little theological content in the report, but discursive framing of the discussion is rooted in an ecclesiology which asserts the function and duty of the Church of Scotland: as voice and conscience of the nation; as arbiter and guardian of public as well as private morality. During the 1958 Assembly debate, Adair claimed that new legislation would give the right for ‘perverts to practice sinning for the sake of sinning’ (GH, 26 May 1958). But internal dissent was stirring, as exemplified by Rev. G. T. H. Reid, whose amendment in support of Wolfenden criticized the CNC report for its ‘fussy preoccupation with homosexual sin and complete disregard for the simple principle of justice’ (GH, 27 May 1958). Following the Wolfenden recommendation that homosexual acts in private and between consenting adults over twenty-one should be decriminalized, by the mid1960s legal reform was on the cards, and in 1966 a working party was established to reconsider the question. Its findings were included in the 1967 MWC report, a brief document reflecting a marked change in standpoint, in keeping with its work on divorce. Less concerned with the Kirk’s claims to guardianship of the nation’s social and moral order than with understanding and considering what it might offer ‘in helping those people’, the report is rooted in the Christian doctrines of forgiveness and redemption. It expresses concern about the burdens of isolation, hypocrisy, and fear laid on homosexuals by social norms and the shadow of illegality, arguing that decriminalization would ‘make it easier for the Church to approach and redeem them from their wrong desires’ (COSGAR 1967: 514–15). While homosexual acts are still characterized as unequivocally wrong, and the tone is one of compassionate paternalism rather than solidarity, this report does at least engage in consideration of New Testament texts and adopts a hermeneutic which challenges the conflation of specific sexual acts with a general homosexual disposition. It comments, ‘Jesus’ condemnation was not so much for Sodom and

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its sin as for the self-righteousness and self-satisfaction of the people of Capernaum’ (COSGAR 1967: 513). This suggestion, that Scripture destabilizes any facile assumption of where sin lies, sounds a note of self-criticism. But is it directed at the Church as a whole, or more particularly at those who assumed their moral rectitude to stand in judgement and condemnation? It may surely be read as a foray in the ‘war of position’ between the Kirk’s liberal and conservative wings during a period when the MWC often adopted relatively permissive attitudes on a range of sexual and ethical issues. Traditionalist hackles roused some outraged commissioners to challenge the report and recommendations with all the heated rhetoric they could muster. Rev. Dr Frank Gibson and his allies overwhelmingly carried the day with a series of counter-motions deploring the prevalence of homosexual practices as a source of uncleanness and character deterioration, and of weakness and decadence in the nation’s life; warning of God’s impending dreadful judgement and calling for a ‘clear statement of Christian principles in the face of this grave and growing evil’ (COSGAR 1967: 524–5). Wider public debate echoed these divisions, but the most powerful Scottish voices in media, the Labour movement, and both Houses of Parliament articulated strongly anti-homosexual views and hostility to legal reform—attitudes which were widely ascribed to the Calvinist approach to life found in Scotland. Political sensitivity to the Church of Scotland was a factor in delaying the passage of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act and contributed (along with legal arguments) to the exclusion of Scotland from its provisions (Meek 2015; Davidson and Davis 2012). But the passing of that Act did strengthen the position of the MWC, which successfully brought the defeated deliverance back to the 1968 Assembly, arguing that the hard-line approach of 1967 had destroyed any possibility of gay men approaching Church agencies for counselling. The brief 1968 report, ambivalent in tone, reflects the influence of a wider therapeutic turn from a hermeneutic of sin to that of pathology, describing homosexuality as a ‘sickness’ for which a ‘cure’ has yet to be found. Arguably, the influence of the Church as an arm of the establishment was in some respects exercised for social change, even as rifts between oppositional traditionalist and revisionist factions opened up, with the gradual disintegration of consensus concerning sexual morality. Through the 1970s, the Kirk adopted a generally more liberal approach on a range of moral and social issues, as part of a wider reshaping initiated by reforming commissions which produced a series of critical and challenging reports, seeking to discern God’s purpose in a changed and changing situation (Macdonald 2004: 22–6). In the wake of Scottish decriminalization (1980) and changing social attitudes, in 1981 the Board of Social Responsibility set up a study group to re-examine the issue of homosexuality. The grounding for its 1983 report is presented as ‘the Biblical attitude’, drawing heavily on Old Testament texts on ‘more or less . . . a proof-text basis’ (Shanks 1995: 80). It reaffirms the Kirk’s position that ‘the practice of homosexual acts is not the way God would have his people live’ but for

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the first time also concedes that some Christian homosexuals would not regard an active loving partnership as contrary to Christ’s life and witness’ (COSGAR 1983). The report nevertheless maintains the traditional positioning of homosexual people as ‘them’—an unfortunate and stigmatized group with a particular claim upon the concern of the Church—and fails to address the implicit internal divisions which would come to a head a decade later.

Gender and Sexuality In 1993, Rev. Margaret Forrester blessed the lesbian relationship of two women in her Edinburgh parish—an act which symbolized a watershed in some Christian responses to homosexuality, not least within the Kirk, as part of a general shift in Western liberal Protestantism. In Scotland, the decriminalization of homosexual practice was one of many factors facilitating a marked alteration in social attitudes and public discourse about human sexuality more generally. By the 1990s, customary Scottish restraint had been overcome by a dramatic increase in media coverage concerning every aspect of sexual identity and behaviour. Public and policy discussions were much more wide ranging, incorporating a spectrum of voices and views (Davidson and Davis 2012: 299). Churches were rapidly losing any vestige of privilege in framing the terms of ethical debate. Concepts rooted in Christian theology, such as ‘living in sin’, no longer had socially relevant traction. The increasingly frayed fabric of ecclesiastical consensus on the theology and ethics of human sexuality was ripping apart, thrusting the Kirk’s debate into the glare of public notice. It is not coincidental that the controversial 1993 blessing was conducted by a pioneering ordained woman (Margaret Forrester) whose own outlook and ministry were influenced by the global ecumenical movement and the radical hermeneutics of feminist and sexual theologies which were gaining a foothold in the academy, connected with faith communities of alternative praxes. These trends, emerging from 1970s women’s and gay liberation movements, were irritants at the very margins of mainstream church life, power, and polity, but presaged novel terms of theological engagement: of standpoint and critique, language and methodology. The traditional claims and authority of a privileged professional cadre of male heteronormative theologians were confronted by Christian women and men with very different experiences and concerns. These theological challenges first came to the attention of the General Assembly in the late 1970s, prompted by the United Nations International Women’s Year 1975, and the ‘Sexism’ report from the WCC Fifth Assembly. Woman’s Guild National President Maidie Hart, along with Rev. Dr Bill Johnston (both delegates in Nairobi) convened the Special Committee on the Role of Men and Women in Church and Society (SCRMWCS) 1976–80. It issued an urgent call for the Church

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to listen to what the world (particularly the secular women’s movement) was saying, argued the need for change, and mapped out a bold prospectus for the task of theologizing new developments. The group’s reports critique ‘male-shaped theology’ suggesting that men qua men need to wrestle with their own assumptions and thinking. The tendency of the Church to issue moralistic judgements is noted, and a ‘black and white’ understanding of sexual ethics which obscures the fragility and sinfulness in all human relations, failing to recognize that there may be real value in ‘unorthodox’ relations of intimacy. There is discussion concerning the validity of the emerging feminist theology, and a call to engage afresh with new ways to discover the Gospel’s relevance as a source of liberation, wholeness, and mutuality for women and men in community. The group identifies themes for renewed exploration—Christology, the doctrine of humanity, the Trinity, the work of the Holy Spirit, community and mission. Calling (unsuccessfully) for the Panel on Doctrine to be tasked with developing a theology of sexuality, it observes: Questions of sex relations have almost invariably been treated by the Church as questions of ethics, for the simple reason that it has been assumed that the theological principles of male/female relationships had long been settled. This view can no longer be held. The traditional view, for example, that woman in her sexuality was responsible for the Fall, is now rightly questioned. (COSGAR 1978, 523–32)

The new theologies, as the Special Committee observed, troubled assumptions about binary gender complementarity, sexuality, and the traditional doctrine of creation. Feminists challenged androcentric hermeneutics and the Imago Dei as ‘a stern patriarch demanding sacrifice and fear’ (COSGAR 1979: 543). They were interrogating norms of power and authority, questioning conventional gender roles, and the ‘deep seated reluctance of the church to move towards equality and mutuality’. The Kirk did its best to ignore the polite messengers of the Special Committee. But in 1982, when Anne Hepburn (who succeeded Mrs Hart as Woman’s Guild National President) opened the Annual Meeting with a prayer to ‘Dear Mother God’, there was a sharp intake of breath followed by the mother of all rows. In response to apparent disquiet, it was proposed at the General Assembly that the Guild should convene a Study Group to consult with the Panel on Doctrine on the theological implications of the Motherhood of God. A group comprising six women from the Guild and four members of the Panel met eight times. There was internal dissent, but the final report, drafted by Panel secretary Rev. Dr Alan Lewis, was brought to the 1984 Assembly and published as The Motherhood of God. ‘Over the two years controversy raged and hostility mounted “from rumblings to volcanic eruptions” ’ (Hepburn 2011: 69). Like her predecessor, Hepburn was involved in WCC anti-sexism initiatives, and was a strong advocate

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for feminist theology, giving talks and workshops which explored the meaning and liturgical implications of the belief that women are created equal in God’s image. To put it mildly, her efforts were resisted by many Guild members, one of whom wrote ‘Many of us feel that “sexism” has really gone too far, when the gender of the Almighty is being questioned!’ (Ursic 2014: 110). The tone and level of the wider debate exposed a deep seam of visceral misogyny, far removed from measured theological discussion of a scripturally attested concept. The editor of Life and Work chose to publish a poem entitled ‘Womanhood and the Devil’ in a box headed ‘deadlier than the male’, bearing witness to the persistence of precisely the atavistic anti-woman views highlighted by the SCRMWCS (Life and Work, Oct. 1982). The report itself (unread by many of its fiercest critics) is a moderate consideration, based on scriptural sources, of whether God may be spoken of and addressed in terms pertaining to motherhood. This is essentially a theological question about the nature of God, but the Kirk in its collective wisdom was in no mind for constructive engagement. The Assembly voted to ‘depart from the matter’. Was the issue too trivial to merit discussion, or was it such a threatening disruption of the patriarchal status quo that debate (and any use of feminine imagery for God in prayer or hymns) had to be silenced? Under TV lights and media scrutiny, the Assembly appeared disrespectful, arrogant, and sexist, though Anne Hepburn recalled many in Scotland and the world church who appreciated and used the report (Hepburn 2011: 70). Her public performance of assertive feminist Christianity brought largely unexamined questions—and fears—about gender, sexuality, and power erupting to the surface. Elizabeth Ursic contends this was part of a broader ‘culture clash [that] disrupted the fragile fabric of a national church that was appointing women to ordained leadership in some churches while resisting it in others’ (Ursic 2014: 120). The culture clash erupted again in 1994. Various controversies were causing turbulence, not least Margaret Forrester’s lesbian blessing. It alarmed those who believed that the Church should hold firm to its stated position that intimate same-sex relationships were beyond the boundary of acceptable Christian behaviour. A motion to the 1993 Assembly sought an instruction to ministers not to perform such services. The Deputy Clerk ‘argued that the Church had a long tradition of trusting its ministers to make appropriate judgements in pastoral situations and that we should not be making ad hoc exceptions without some kind of considered process’ (Macdonald 2004: 147) and the motion was defeated 338 to 534. A commentator predicted stormy times ahead: ‘This may well be the issue on which the conservative evangelicals show the strength they have been amassing within the ministry in recent years’ (GH, 10 Sept. 1993). The Kirk was again considering homosexuality, but now in the broader context of human sexuality (Board of Social Responsibility (BSR)) and theology of marriage (Panel on Doctrine (PD)). Stormy times duly arrived in 1994 when both groups reported to the General Assembly.

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In 1992, the BSR was asked to develop its work on ‘Family Matters’ taking more account of contemporary issues and debates concerning human sexuality. A study group (comprising seven men, three women, six ordained and four lay members) took evidence and consulted widely. The fact that its 1994 draft report was unanimously accepted by the group was described by one member as a remarkable achievement (Shanks 1995). Its tone was exploratory and discursive rather than didactic, acknowledging that divergent positions within the group (including on the authority and interpretations of Scripture) reflected the Church at large. This was elaborated in relation to homosexuality, noting that alongside traditional readings of key texts which underpin the view that such practices can only be sinful, there are those who contend that the core gospel principle for relationships is that they be faithful, mutual, and loving, regardless of sexual orientation. The report asked whether the Church might be a space where such divergent views could coexist in constructive conversation, and called for sensitive further consideration, seeking mutual understanding and tolerance. Shanks presents an insider account of the difficult debate within the Board (which, he notes, had a reputation for conservatism in theology and ethics) resulting in significant amendments to the report as submitted to the General Assembly. In particular, it noted the presence of differing views, but saw no reason to alter the Kirk’s position that homosexual acts were contrary to God’s will for humankind. Shanks argues that there were signs of an orchestrated campaign by the conservative evangelicals of the ‘Crieff Fellowship’ and Rutherford House to contest any reconsideration of the Church’s position that lifelong marriage between a man and a woman was the only legitimate Christian context for sexual relations (Shanks 1995). The traditionalist challenge was mounted within the BSR, and more dramatically in relation to the Panel on Doctrine working party on the theology of marriage, convened by lay theologian Elizabeth Templeton. The Panel had been asked to respond to a document outlining the Roman Catholic theology and practice of marriage. Two substantial papers were published and accepted within the 1993 report—by Dr Ian Hazlett on Marriage and Heterosexuality in History and Christian Tradition, and Prof. David Fergusson on A Reformed Theology of Marriage, which attended particularly to Karl Barth’s influential treatment. Building on this work, the 1994 Report affirms marriage as gift of God and normative context for lifelong relationship between (and only between) man and woman. The doctrine of Christian marriage is not immobile, should now incorporate modern expectations of equality and mutual personal fulfilment (to which Scripture bears testimony) and recognize the honest remedy of divorce, as in the 1957 Report. Thus far, the report is clearly in continuity with Reformed Christian tradition. However, it reflects a world-view and hermeneutical principles which depart significantly from the weight of tradition and are clearly influenced by some of the late twentieth-century social and theological developments noted above. The discussion is framed by the conviction that

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ferment and wrestling about human sexuality—within and beyond the Church— is of God, to be accepted not as problem but as gift. It presents a contextual analysis of marriage and other patterns of sexually intimate relationship, recognizes the end of any community consensus that marriage is the only legitimate context for sex, and contends that Christians may, and in fact do, choose alternative patterns, including same-sex partnerships, in good faith. The report problematizes the patriarchal societal structuring which has traditionally shaped unequal gender relations and argues that the contemporary crisis in marriage is a function of structural, economic, and cultural at least as much as individual failings. The Christian value and privileged standing of the institution should be regarded as conditional on the goods and qualities of the relationship, not its legal status. Indeed, the report urges consideration of the possibility that other faithful, mutual, and committed relationships, including those of homosexuals, may be paradigmatic of God’s generous love (COSGAR 1994). The report’s tone, perspective, and counsel are as notable as its line of argument. It adopts a questioning style, inviting sustained listening, self-examination, and critique by the Church, which has no monopoly of wisdom. The Church is called to inclusive conversation, to live with diversity, and to choose modelling, not self-righteous pronouncement, as the appropriate Christian witness. And for the first time ever, contributions by two overtly homosexual writers (from theologically traditionalist and revisionist standpoints) are included as appendices in an Assembly report. A nine-point statement of dissent by six Panel members is also included. Reasons for objection include the report’s failure adequately to represent, and its excessive criticism of, the traditional view; that it drains authority away from Scripture, is too influenced by contemporary trends and fashion, and that it ignores the primal significance of male and female differentiation in the divine structure and purpose of Creation. It is an admirably clear and concise articulation of strong objections from an evangelical-biblicist perspective, and certainly more temperate than the dissenters’ pamphlet which was published in advance of the Assembly, along with a newspaper article claiming that the report was a dismal, slippery, and dangerous ‘Trojan Horse to breach our moral defences’, a potential charter for adulterers and paedophiles (Herald, 18 May 1994). The ensuing Assembly debate (which combined discussion of the two reports) was heated, unedifying, and with no clear outcome. Liam Fraser reads the controversy over homosexuality as a product of two increasingly polarized church cultures—traditionalist and revisionist—with divergent theological and philosophical presuppositions related to hermeneutical ambiguity concerning the Reformed principle of sola scriptura. He suggests that a broadly consensual liberal evangelical then Barthian moral outlook fractured under late twentieth-century pressures, demanding either accommodation with or entrenched resistance to changing sexual ethics (Fraser 2016).

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This tension is implicit in the theological anthropology of gender underpinning the dominant history of Christian exegesis, institutions, and practices. As affirmed by the 1994 dissenters, an essentialist binary complementarity of humankind as male and female with differentiated status, roles, and functions was deeply embedded in Christian thinking: in the Divine order of creation, Eve was created after, from, and for Adam, as helpmeet. From the nineteenth century, under pressure from women’s reformist claims for rights, religious authorities habitually juxtaposed the ontological notion of ‘spiritual equality’ alongside promotion and policing of gendered separate spheres, which meant practical subordination and exclusion of women from access to fully equal opportunities. In ecclesiastical history, women had overwhelmingly been constructed and problematized as the ‘other’ within institutions. As the PD report observed (while claiming theological resources for revisioning), Christian traditions of marriage had assumed and legitimized patriarchal order and gender inequality. Well into the twentieth century, this included the notion that women’s true and primary vocation was as wife and mother.

Ordination of Women The enduring power of this way of thinking is evident in Church of Scotland controversies concerning sexuality, marriage and divorce, and feminine God language. It links these debates into the trajectory of ‘the church’ (qua exclusively male authority structures) preoccupation with ‘the place of women’, particularly as it played out concerning women’s ministry and ordination. Adequate consideration of the Scottish dimension of this complex issue is well beyond the scope of this chapter, and merits more scholarly attention than it has thus far received (Levison 1992; Orr Macdonald 2000; Logan 2009; Orr 2009). The issue of women’s ordination generated one of the major ecclesiological debates of the modern era. It raised first- and second-order questions about the doing of theology, and how that relates to gendered embodied practice, which were pertinent to other disputes. However, in periodization and contextual embedding, it is also distinctive in important ways—discussions about the place and role of women in the Church were going on for a century before the General Assembly decisions in 1966 and 1968 to admit women to eldership and ministry, and as noted here continued into the 1970s and beyond. The Christian work of Presbyterian women had been institutionalized in forms and organizations—such as the Woman’s Guild and Order of Deaconesses, established in 1888—which emphasized their supposedly distinctive and officially subordinate ministry. Scottish consideration of women’s ordination began in the 1920s, and by 1930, the Congregational Union (1928) and the United Free Church Continuing (1929) had accepted the principle. In 1931 the Countess of Aberdeen appeared at the bar

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of the General Assembly of the reunited Church of Scotland on behalf of 335 petitioners. They called for ‘the barriers which prevent women from ordination to ministry, eldership and diaconate to be removed, so that the principle of spiritual equality for which the Church stands, be embodied in its constitution’ (COSGAR 1931). The tension between that principle and the complementarian theology which glossed it as entailing women’s subordination was acutely felt by some Christian women’s leaders who were active in civic feminism: ‘The Church’s view of women affects the whole social fabric. It is difficult for an ordinary person to understand what spiritual equality means when for man it means determining women’s contribution and for women it means conformity or repression. Spiritual equality involves equal opportunity’ (McKerrow n.d.). The Fellowship of Equal Service in the Church was established in 1933 to advocate accordingly. Between 1931 and 1968, a succession of commissions, committees, and reports purported to deal with the place and ministry of women in the Church of Scotland. Scriptural and doctrinal arguments for and against ordination were iterated and periodically rehashed, but resistance often clustered around subtheological anxieties about threatened masculine status and supposed feminine incompatibility for the role—especially if wives and mothers. The bar to women’s eldership was lifted in 1966 and the formal question of equal ministry was finally resolved between 1963 and 1968. When the Panel on Doctrine reported in 1962 that it did not expect to take up its remit to consider women in the ministry for some time, Mary Lusk MA BD DCS decided to act. In 1963 she was working as associate chaplain at Edinburgh University—a position for which the holder would normally expect to be ordained. Lusk petitioned the General Assembly to have her call tested and, if recognized, to proceed to her ordination. Sure of her vocation, and already licensed to preach the Word, she believed the onus was on the Church to say why she was not fit to exercise a ministry of sacrament. At the bar, she adopted a confident tone, and appealing to shared Reformation heritage, effectively deployed a range of theological and discursive strategies, locating her claim in appeals to modernity and biblical scholarship. ‘It can now be seen that the New Testament teaches the equality of men and women in Christ, which makes untenable the continued exclusion of women from the ministry’. She rhetorically undermined the practice of the Church by characterizing it as ‘curious’ and made her case as a ‘person’ not raising a ‘woman’s question’. In her speech she utilized arguments drawn from liberal equal rights tradition and essentialist feminisms of difference, while simultaneously disclaiming any feminist motivation. (Scotsman, 22 May 1963). The Panel on Doctrine returned the following year with a report bearing the imprint of Thomas Torrance, New College Professor of Christian Dogmatics, whose ‘seven theses on complementarian ministries’ had been published in the Manse Mail, February 1964. Lusk was infuriated at the panel’s failure to engage in meaningful consultation with her and dismantled what she called its ‘highly

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eccentric’ theology (Levison 1992). The report presented as ‘one view’, that man and woman together constitute the basic human unit, created in the image of God, with differentiation of function structured into the order of Creation and Redemption, as in the doctrine of marriage. Eccentric this may be, but its debt to Barth’s hard-line asymmetric complementarity is evident, and the profound influence of theologians who were notoriously critical of the ‘rush to equality’ was surely a factor in this controversy. In 1967, the Panel produced another cautious report which again simply presented opposing theological positions and failed to recommend any action. An impressive group of six New College alumnae, including Dr Elizabeth Hewat, Mary Lusk (now Levison), and Margaret Forrester, wrote an open letter to the Assembly stating their belief that there was no valid theological reason to oppose admission of women, and urging a decision: ‘If we are in error, show us our error, but if our belief is sound, we ask that the Church should take immediate steps to remove the barrier, in order that the call may be tested of any women who present themselves as candidates.’ At their press conference, Levison commented scathingly ‘The continual state of dither . . . is very unsatisfactory’ (GH, 16 May 1967). After a seventy-five minute debate, W. G. Bailey’s motion to remove the barriers was approved, and the final vote to admit women to ordained ministry was passed on 24 May 1968.

Reconfiguring the Church? In the 1960s the women’s ordination question intersected with the emergence of thinking which destabilized gendered norms governing ideas of ‘ministry’ and ‘Church’, at a key period of weakening institutional hegemony. One speaker during the 1963 debate spoke of a ‘very fluid situation’, and signs of potential paradigm shifts are evident in some of the responses solicited by the Panel on Doctrine working party, and the reports of ecumenical consultations held at Scottish Churches House (SCH) in 1963 and 1967. In the context of growing theological interest in laity and community, they critique existing patterns and perceptions of ordained ministry. The SCH report speaks of a time of change and rediscovery in patterns of leadership, suggesting that new times call for congregational guidance which is ‘humble and enabling . . . [which] draws out the gifts of others and encourages their contribution’ to nourish and build up the Church. This language reframes ministry in ‘feminine’ terms, making it more compatible with stereotypical expectations about the attributes of women. The Iona Community calls for clarification about the ‘twofoldedness of the sexes’ and suggests that the question of the place of women in the Church cannot be dealt with separately from the more fundamental problems of the institutional Church, which is too clerical, formal, hierarchical, detached, divided, and irrelevant. It argues that the

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primary question should concern what it means to be members of Christ’s body, working together, creating growth and hope, sharing leadership—and that it is impossible to separate the contributions of men and women (Iona Community response to PD working party, c.1964). In the second half of the twentieth century, as the Kirk’s power and influence were being decentred, new thinking was emerging for possible reconfiguration of the Church’s embodiment and witness. Unprecedented challenges to traditional theological authority and methodology were articulated, from or on behalf of Christians (women, laypeople, homosexuals . . . ) whose voices and experiences had previously been unrecognized, ignored, or excluded. They began to breach the official edifice of the Church’s theological enterprise, and some engaged ecumenically in other kinds of discursive space—on thresholds, as Elizabeth Templeton might have said—but their substantive institutional impact remained marginal. Diverse responses to the contentious issues of the day generated conflict and considerable theological effort—the weight of which remained well within the mainstream of Reformed tradition and the path of cautious change, although heightened moments of controversy brought unresolved fundamental divisions to the surface without causing institutional rupture or schism. Were the controversies simply set pieces for the playing out of sterile clashes between the polarities of conservative and liberal camps, as the good ship Church of Scotland was sinking gently; or did this turbulent period generate innovative, productive theological engagement to enliven a Christian community fit for the twenty-first century? The debate continues.

Bibliography Church of Scotland Reports to the General Assembly (1946–95). Davidson, Roger and Gayle Davis (2012). ‘The Sexual State’: Sexuality and Scottish Governance, 1950–1980. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fraser, Liam (2016). ‘A Tradition in Crisis: Understanding and Repairing the Division over Homosexuality in the Church of Scotland’, Scottish Journal of Theology 69/2: 155–70. Hepburn, Anne (2011). Memories of Malawi and Scotland. Edinburgh: privately published. Levison, Mary (1992). Wrestling with the Church: One Woman’s Experience. London: Arthur James. Logan, Anne (2009). ‘ “Doing it Differently?” Forty Years of Women’s Ordained Ministry in the Church of Scotland’, Practical Theology 2/1: 27–44. Macdonald, Finlay A. J. (2004). Confidence in a Changing Church. Edinburgh: Saint Andrew Press.

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McKerrow, Mrs W. R. (Elizabeth) (n.d.). Perfect Love Casteth Out Fear. Pamphlet published by the Fellowship of Equal Service, Church of Scotland. Meek, Jeff (2015). ‘Scottish Churches, Morality, and Homosexual Law Reform, 1957 to 1980’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 66/3: 596–613. Orr, Lesley (2009). ‘ “Impudent and Mannish Grown”: “Women’s Ministry” in the Church of Scotland’, Practical Theology 2/1: 7–25. Orr Macdonald, Lesley (2000). ‘A Unique and Glorious Mission’: Women and Presbyterianism in Scotland 1830–1930. Edinburgh: John Donald. Robinson, John A. T. (1963). Honest to God. London: SCM. Shanks, Norman (1995). ‘Imprisoned by Fear? The Church of Scotland Debate about Human Sexuality’, Theology and Sexuality 3/1: 77–97. Ursic, Elizabeth (2014). Women, Ritual and Power: Placing Female Imagery of God in Christian Worship. Albany: SUNY Press.

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24 Episcopalian Theology in the Twentieth Century Alison Peden

Introduction The Scottish Episcopal Church (SEC) grew out of the Scottish Reformation, and now forms a Province of the Anglican Communion. Its twentieth-century theologians have written from the perspective of ethics, liturgy, priesthood, art, literature, and science, as well as Church history and ecclesiology. The three theologians chosen here represent the high quality and creative thought of Scottish Episcopalian scholarship. Bertrand Brasnett’s doctrine of God was innovative and bold; Donald MacKinnon’s rigorous but restless philosophical theology pushed many boundaries; John Riches’ biblical theology opened up new ways to understand the transformative truth of Scripture. The connecting threads between them are intellectual rather than denominational, and while it is possible to discern some Anglican themes in their thought, they were equally conversant with continental theology and indeed had some impact upon it.

Bertrand Brasnett (1893–1988) Bertrand Brasnett is now little known, but he made a significant contribution to the theological debates that arose after the First World War, writing in a down-toearth style that draws the reader into his thought processes with an infectious passion and a desire to persuade. Brasnett came to Scotland in 1925 from Bishop’s College, Cheshunt, an Anglican theological college, succeeding his brother as Vice-Principal of the SEC’s Edinburgh Theological College and then becoming Principal from 1930 to 1942 (Luscombe 1994: 18–20). His most influential work was The Suffering of the Impassible God (1928). Brasnett wrote in the tradition of late nineteenth-century British passibilist theology, which the pastoral challenges of the First World War (encountered by Brasnett when he served with the YMCA in France from 1917) had made more urgent. Divine passibilism, the doctrine that God can experience pain or pleasure from the actions of another being, was a radical-enough theological movement at the time for the Church of England to

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commission a survey of the doctrine in 1924, though eventually passibilism was to become widely accepted (Mozely 1926). The wider framework of Brasnett’s theology was shaped by the Lux Mundi group of Anglican theologians who embraced newly-emerging disciplines such as Freudian psychology, evolutionary science, and the analytical philosophy of religion. Brasnett himself had been ordained by Charles Gore, one of the founders of the group. His theology of a suffering God led Brasnett to explore subsequently the implications of kenosis in his The Infinity of God (1933) and then whether such a kenotic God satisfied the religious needs of humanity in God the Worshipful (1935). He described speculative theology as ‘this restless intellectual urge to know the uttermost mysteries of deity’ (Brasnett 1933:16), and his books embody just that, in their relentless wrestling with every aspect of an issue. Brasnett found the classical understanding of God as impassible—beyond change and external impact—unacceptable because, he argued, man seeks a God who chooses to suffer with his creation whilst never being swayed from his purposes. Brasnett found support in contemporary psychology for the value and importance of ascribing emotions such as suffering to God. He observed (criticizing von Hügel) that if God knew only sympathy, rather than real suffering, he would not command human loyalty: ‘we cannot regard a God as moral who stands aside and refuses to share in the pain of the world that he created’ (Brasnett 1928: 131). Brasnett was clear that God’s will to suffer and to be sensitive to human need is voluntary, an act of divine asceticism by which he aims to conquer human sin by self-sacrifice, ‘the last hope of a bankrupt humanity; if that fails, humanity is lost, finally, irretrievably lost’ (Brasnett 1928: 77–8). God pursues this cause with the only impassible divine element: his will and purpose. Brasnett explored the cause and nature of the incarnation. God’s will to suffer, he wrote, belongs to his eternal nature, and so the wounds and scars of human sin remain in God’s heart. In fact, God in heaven suffers more than Christ on earth because his capacity for feeling is not limited by humanness. The suffering of the incarnate Logos, Christ, is a revelation in time of this suffering ‘which is now seen to be an integral part of the normal life of God’ (Brasnett 1928: 40). Brasnett was aware that he was overturning the Patristic Christology of Christ’s parallel natures, ‘passible in the flesh and impassible in Deity’ but engaged vigorously with the consequences. He acknowledged that the Son’s ‘being’ in the Trinity had changed through the incarnation, for God (though not his will and purpose) is changed by functioning in time, and in effect became limited in the humanity of Christ. But Brasnett used contemporary psychology and the insights on divine personality of his mentor, the philosopher of religion Clement Webb, to assert a unified ego of the Son of God which was sensitive to the full limits of a perfect human existence but who also knew he was divine (Webb 1919, 1920). He located this divine element—the Logos—in a Kantian ‘noumenal’ self, the basic core and centre of Jesus’ being, which had a unique relationship with the Father. Could Jesus know

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his divine identity as Logos at his human, psychological level? Although Brasnett initially thought that he did even as a boy, he later concluded that only at the Ascension did Jesus discover his eternal noumenal self. His humanity was not then laid aside, as if the incarnation had been but an episode in the life of God, but was on the contrary glorified in heaven (Brasnett 1928: 42–4; 1933: 27–31; 1935: 176–7). God’s eternal suffering because of sin means that the Cross was not, in Brasnett’s view, the unique moment of redemptive passibility. He argued that the Passion was a perfect self-revelation of God’s readiness to suffer in order to move sinful humanity to repent and the perfect example of a moral response to evil. He did not specifically reject an objective view of the atonement whereby the Cross was constitutive of redemption, but left it an open question. But if the Cross was the exemplar of perfect self-sacrificing love to stimulate repentance, and if repentance is essential to atonement, then the ultimate and impassible will of God to save humanity may not in the end triumph, for not all may repent. This is the stark reality which Brasnett faced as the consequence of his theology. God may well suffer through all eternity because of sin, never knowing complete bliss; heaven is a joyous unity of will between God and man, rather than an absence of pain. Brasnett stresses time and again the bracing quality of Christian faith this perspective must inspire amongst ‘men who will follow their leader to the glory of defeat and count it their honour and their heaven that in their human measure they share a great God’s pain’ (Brasnett 1928: 79). Brasnett acknowledged that some might find his an unattractively ‘gloomy’ creed, and in some ways The Infinity of God and God the Worshipful try to answer such an objection. Is the passible God whom he described adequate and attractive enough for man’s need for a Saviour whom he can worship? Brasnett offered a complex analysis of infinity, distinguishing its sense as ‘self-subsisting’ from ‘unbounded’ or ‘perfect’, and exploring its physical, moral, and intellectual dimensions in God and the incarnate Christ. He found God omniscient but not omnipotent, because of his probable failure to save the ‘finally impenitent’. The union of finite and infinite in the Logos enables the redemption of sin committed by finite man against the infinite God. Brasnett called this kenotic union in Christ ‘the crowning act of love’ and it is ultimately the infinite love of God, outlasting any limitation in power, that draws men to worship him. Brasnett had already identified the qualities needed for a God to be ‘worshipful’: life, morality, goodness, power, a mysteriousness that was nonetheless rational, and holiness. His subsequent analysis of them in God the Worshipful took account of the broader study of religions undertaken by Rudolf Otto but focused again on the incarnation since this revealed God in space and time. Brasnett returned to what kenosis meant for the eternal Logos, in terms of the limitations of his consciousness of his noumenal self, his pain and the loneliness of perfect goodness. From this analysis he reiterated the ultimately attractive quality of the worshipful God: self-sacrificing love, manifest as the single principle of the life of Jesus.

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Brasnett contributed to Modernist attempts to reconcile the findings of historical criticism about the person of Jesus with the divinity of the Logos. He respected Chalcedon as ‘a kind of [plummet line] whereby we may test the accuracy of later Christological speculations’ but was determined to present an incarnate God who would call forth a response from the contemporary world (Brasnett 1935: 160). Brasnett was also responding to criticisms of the Anglican kenoticism of Gore and his followers, as found in William Temple’s Christus Veritas (1924). For example, he defended his position that even as a human baby, Jesus still eternally fulfilled his functions in the transcendent sphere’ and denied that the divine kenosis was temporary (Brasnett 1933: 27). Like P. T. Forsyth, he was trying to break out of the constraints of previous kenotic theology by using personalistic and moral concepts. But Brasnett would not have been immune from Michael Ramsey’s three main charges against the Lux Mundi tradition (1960): he did focus strongly on kenoticism, he did blur the edges between divine revelation and human knowledge, and to some extent he did play down the Cross, by making it more exemplary than constitutive of redemption. Moreover, despite all the horror that Brasnett must have experienced in war, he did not protest about its suffering as some later passibilist theologians did, but accepted, in an Augustinian way, that suffering and pain are inevitable in a fallen, sinful world. European passibilist theology developed after the Second World War largely independently of the British tradition. But Brasnett was used by at least two continental theologians. In his study of the Trinity, Jürgen Moltmann characterized Brasnett’s The Suffering of the Impassible God on the paradox of God’s suffering as ‘the last great treatment of the subject’ (Moltmann 1981: 226 n. 5; cf. 231). Later, Hans Urs von Balthasar identified Brasnett’s passibilism as an example of a theology of the mutual response of Creator and created. As Balthasar remarks, if Brasnett is right that God has ‘handed himself over to the work of his hands’, then suffering has become ‘an inner feature of God’s “essence” ’, and his followers will have to revise their notions of the divine eternal blessedness in which they hope to share (Balthasar 1998: 234–6). Thus, Balthasar recognized that Brasnett was anticipating the developed kenoticism that is received as revelation of God’s nature rather than a tool of understanding the incarnation. Sadly, Brasnett did not continue his theological writing. He resigned his post as Principal in 1942 under pressure from those who sought a new kind of leadership and lived in private retirement in Oxford until his death in 1988.

Donald MacKinnon (1913–94) Brasnett’s books were written within the space of seven years, but Donald MacKinnon’s prolific work spanned half a century. MacKinnon was a philosopher as well as a theologian and remained a lay Scottish Episcopalian. It would be

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satisfying to be able to chart the path to MacKinnon’s developed theology, but his quest was for ever-deepening questions rather than achieved answers. MacKinnon characteristically wrote articles rather than monographs, in which he returned to similar themes at new levels and embedded in new contexts. It is possible to discern three phases in MacKinnon’s theological journey, visible through the lens of one or two representative works from the period. MacKinnon’s initial university life was at Oxford, where he was Fellow of Keble College 1937–47. At this early stage, MacKinnon distanced himself from the Anglican Lux Mundi optimists, who had already been criticized for their complacency about theological truth and the role of the Church (Ramsey 1936). MacKinnon always insisted on the particular and the concrete as a matrix for theology, and it was the Second World War—when ‘war is a duty and the methods of war are a crime’—that challenged him with the questions and tensions that would preoccupy him for most of his life. He confronted war’s dehumanization and questioned whether the Church could be humanity’s guardian, calling conflict-damaged souls back to their integrity in Christ so that they might rebuild civilization. Sacramental liturgy could remind men that they were citizens of heaven, alongside the dilemma of having to pray publicly—if also penitentially— for victory (1941). But can the Church, against all the destructive pressures of a society at war, make statements about God that are accepted as valid and cogent? MacKinnon explored the possibilities of a correspondence theory of truth at this point with all his expertise in philosophical metaphysics (MacKinnon 1948) but insisted on incorporating the salvific experience of the believer in his wrestling with faith. Truth is determined not just by correspondence but by ontology, in that it is known as part of the believer’s lived experience of redemptive transformation. But the ‘validity’ of Christian speaking about God is something ‘hardly won’ and perhaps only eschatologically achieved after a very human agony, which MacKinnon recognized as also his own personal experience. The other dimension of MacKinnon’s truth-seeking was his attention to the particular, taking a stance against idealism along the lines that Barth and Forsyth had set out. MacKinnon insisted on the Church’s role to make history ‘intelligible through being made unendurable’. That is, it must point to the ‘harsh peculiarities of an individual human existence’, namely that of Christ incarnate. Only in the hidden meaning of that particular life can the contemporary ‘desert of [God’s] wrath and pardon’ be revealed, and the Church’s ‘willing endurance of [Christ’s] nothingness’ be undertaken (MacKinnon 1941: 152–3, 160). There was a moral purpose to MacKinnon’s realism, which directed theology to the actualities of war and its consequences and bore fruit in the ethical theory he developed after taking up the chair of Moral Philosophy in Aberdeen 1947–60. But the influence of Kant is still evident in his A Study in Ethical Theory (1957): morality has to relate to what is good in itself, though it is not disconnected from actual social conditions and the empirical world.

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If the Second World War called for something like a crisis of theology, the 1960s removed any illusions that the Church could have a guaranteed voice in the public square. This constituted a second phase for MacKinnon, as Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity at Cambridge from 1960 to 1978. The question now was not whether correspondence could be found between statement and truth, but whether there was any way at all for the Christian to speak to an unbelieving world. MacKinnon excoriated the ‘theological shallowness of the official Christian mind, preoccupied always with the needs to make parrot-like repetitions of its sterile Credo, and hardly ever with the deeper questions of the manner of Christian presence to the world’ (MacKinnon 1968: 32). Confronted with a dominant logical positivism in philosophy, increasingly radical biblical criticism and a mood of existential self-reference—the zeitgeist of John Robinson’s Honest to God in 1963—MacKinnon looked to the Church to find a convincing response and found it wanting. The confidence of Christian philosophers such as Austin Farrer and Eric Mascall that reason and faith could harmonize did not survive the post-war world, and MacKinnon claimed that the Church—in England at any rate—no longer could be identified as an ‘extension of the Incarnation’ as AngloCatholics of the first half of the century had proclaimed. MacKinnon’s Borderlands of Theology expresses in its title the precarious and liminal spaces he preferred to inhabit. Again, he wrestled with metaphysical epistemology, exploring how the irreducibility of historical fact related to doctrine. MacKinnon asserted that knowledge arose from conceptual activity about senseexperience. He recognized that the gospels contain both factual record and interpretation, ‘incommensurable with ordinary human experience but at one with the particularities of a stretch of human history’, countering the Bultmann school which he charged with making Jesus ‘inaccessible historically’. The gospels, as a response to the ‘overwhelming fact of the ministry, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus’, are analogous for MacKinnon to the Church’s Eucharistic liturgy which ‘also bore witness in the effectual remembrancing of the Christ’ (MacKinnon 1968: 64). The urgency of establishing a firm ground for realist belief was not just a philosophical quest but an ethical one, because he feared that the Church had lost its authority to call society to the Christian moral life. With the detachment of both a layperson and his Scottish Episcopalianism in an English context, MacKinnon warned of the increasing irrelevance of the established Church of England in a post-Constantinian, or even post-Christian society. Worse still was the inadequacy of the Church’s official response to nuclear weapons and the threat of atomic war. With a renewal of the foundations of belief could come a form of Christian life that expressed that belief, which MacKinnon thought would properly involve protest and the holding of the Establishment to account, as well as liturgy enacted as an identification with Christ in his stance against the powersthat-be. MacKinnon went much further in charging the Church with apostasy in

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his Gore Memorial Lecture (1969). He claimed that the reconstruction of belief should lead to a reconstruction of Church order. A sound Christology would extend kenosis to the Church itself, perhaps by disestablishment, quite possibly to a ghetto. It would be vulnerable, insecure, and even silent in witness to the divine mystery. MacKinnon’s radical and subversive view of what the Church should be grew out of his developing kenotic Christology (Connor 2011). But whilst the Church finds its being in the eternal Christ, it must not translate this into any fixed order or even set of values. MacKinnon calls for Christianity to recover a way, renewed at every moment by engaging with the actual circumstances of the time. He offers a hugely liberating and important vision of the Church and its receptiveness to what is ‘other’ around it. Brasnett’s passibilist and kenotic theology had grown in the crucible of wartime experience, and MacKinnon continued in this tradition, influenced by the theology of the Cross developed by Barth, but also by British theologians such as Forsyth and Hoskyns. MacKinnon’s middle and later theology was dominated by his deep inhabiting of the Passion narrative. He was aware of the debates about whether or not God could suffer. The kenosis of Jesus’ particular, contingent life could be held together with the changeless loving nature of God, he argued. As we saw above, MacKinnon claimed that theological truth had to touch both what was contingent and the perceiving believer; thus the incarnate Christ knew his lifework as a kenotic self-emptying culminating in the Cross, and thus St Paul knew his mission as ‘the refraction of that mystery [of the Cross] in the arcana of his own spiritual life and suffering’. MacKinnon placed himself too in this line, as one trying to speak theologically through entering into Christ’s Passion: ‘as I explore the elusive frontiers between reason and emotion, where lurk the ultimate grounds of adherence, I come back repeatedly to the narrative of Gesthemane . . . ’ (MacKinnnon 1968: 80, 92). For MacKinnon, all theological questions were basically Christological. The essential love of God was revealed in the way that Christ identified with and endured the very depths of human existence, with all the failure, uncertainty, and pain that was expressed in his cry of dereliction from the Cross. Although Christ thereby won atonement and the reconciliation of the world, it was not a victory so much as the Father’s vindication of the Passion. MacKinnon was clear that the Resurrection was not a dramatic ‘happy ending’, and—like Brasnett—did not consider that it removed suffering from God’s life. Optimism about the post-Resurrection world was an evasion of the problem of intractable evil and the tragedy of the inevitable guilt of those involved in the Crucifixion of the innocent Christ. The ‘abiding purpose of God’s love there fulfilled’ (MacKinnon 1968: 118) came at a cost, shamefully compounded by long centuries of anti-Semitism arising from ‘the schism created on the first Good Friday, the first and perhaps the most horrible rent in Christ’s body’ (MacKinnon 1969: 33).

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The tragic takes centre-stage in the third phase of MacKinnon’s writing, which emerged with his Gifford Lectures published in 1974 as The Problem of Metaphysics. He claimed that humans all too often seek to create (inadequate) explanations of evil and suffering, but truthful speech accepts the irreducibility of tragedy and the mystery of the transcendent. Amongst theologians, he found Balthasar one of the few who faced the reality of evil seriously in his theology, while not refusing faith in redemption. Though fraught with uncertainty, paradox, and tension, MacKinnon’s later thought still held on to faith and hope in the face of tragedy. For him, the mysterious transcendent was the only answer worth pointing to. It was perhaps this later phase of his thought, which drew so deeply on drama and literature as well as parable and Passion narrative, that attracted his pupil Rowan Williams, who wrote that ‘MacKinnon’s relentless insistence on attention to the costliness of historical action and the unconsoled nature of historical pain remains the most disturbing and important lesson he has to teach’ (Williams 1989: 88). Like Brasnett, MacKinnon looked with eyes wide open on a world he found bleak and tragic, and sought a God whom he knew has suffered and will suffer perhaps for ever out of a self-sacrificing love that is God’s very nature. Although MacKinnon called for protest against evil, he spoke little about how Christian action might lead to transformation, nor indeed why his form of truthful speech about God might be heard in a way that drew people to such a God. His concern was not so much with mission as with Christian integrity and the honest response to Christ’s question, which he heard both in the academy and in the liturgy, ‘Who do you say I am?’

John Riches (1939–) John Riches studied with Donald MacKinnon at Cambridge, and after study in Germany and ordination as an Anglican priest, he taught theology at Glasgow University, holding the Chair of Divinity and Biblical Criticism from 1991 to 2002. Concerned, like MacKinnon, to explore what is meant by ‘truth’ in the biblical tradition, he focused on the relationship between texts, their reception and lived experience. While modelling close attention to the integrity of the biblical text, much of his scholarship explores how it continues to generate meaning and truth for communities, not least amongst those in Africa with whom he has engaged so deeply (Eldridge 2009: xiii–xvi). Riches described his context in post-war New Testament study as characterized by more openness to cultural diversity than the colonial era, and greater willingness to use sociology, linguistics, economics, and political thought to illuminate Scripture (Riches 1993: 94–105). In Jesus and the Transformation of Judaism (1980), he had investigated how Jesus effected a religious change in Judaism,

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transformative for the communities that received his teaching. This book set the agenda for Riches’ future work: to reveal how contextual understanding of Scripture can reveal new dimensions of Jesus’ vision, and how confidence in the text’s power to transform can allow its readers to live with its apparent tensions and opposing forces. Riches challenged the way in which Jesus’ message was too easily read genealogically, as simply derived from a set of inherited beliefs, rather than expressed in language which could be reworked to express new concepts and ideas. Working closely with the philosopher of religion Alan Millar (himself a pupil of Donald MacKinnon), he argued that words cannot be read outside their context in a natural language with its conventions which are subject to steady change. Words gain their meaning through the complex and constantly changing network of sentences and expectations with which they are conventionally linked in a given language at a given time. Creative thinkers can radically change these linkages, thus effecting conceptual change. For example, the word ‘black’ was given new meaning in the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa by figures like Steve Biko, whom Riches had met when teaching in the Transkei in the 1970s. Riches sought to give an account, not just of religious beliefs contemporary with Jesus, but rather of contemporary linguistic usage in first-century Palestine. He demonstrated how Jesus modified first-century Palestinian usage and thereby introduced a new understanding of phrases like the ‘Kingdom of God’ and ‘purity’, and in consequence, of the nature of God’s action. Riches showed that whereas Wisdom thinkers, apocalyptic prophets and Essenes envisaged the establishment of God’s rule condemning evildoers to be cast outside the community of the chosen pure, in a social and political protest against Hellenistic rule, Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom in healing and fellowship meals, not in armed conflict; his characterization of purity and holiness was the child’s humble openness to God, not the strict code of the Law. Riches found in Jesus’ radical reworking of Jewish idiom a theology of grace, where God was not concerned with reward and punishment but with forgiveness, grace, and abiding presence. These were the weapons with which to confront evil and those under Satan’s sway. For Riches, Jesus was not merely a teacher of this radical theology of God, but ‘embodied the assumptions and apprehensions of the love and power which he proclaimed’. His kenotic identification with the poor and marginalized, with sinners and the outcast, was the way of redemption for Israel and made him ‘not just an example for men to follow . . . but . . . the very point at which God meets them’ (Riches 1980: 186–8). But God’s power embodied in Christ would be perceived and realized in different ways in future contexts. That there were interpretative tensions as early as the Synoptics was made clear in Riches’ study of Matthew and Mark, Conflicting Mythologies (2000). He revealed how these gospels depict Christ as both the one who duels with Satan himself and the one who teaches his followers how to overcome evil. Riches aligned this with de Boer’s identification of Second Temple Judaism’s two contrasting views of the presence

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of evil in the world: on the one hand, a cosmic dualism which saw the forces of good and evil contending, where discipleship is a radical conversion from darkness to light—a ‘revolutionist’ event; on the other, a location of evil within the human heart, which found its remedy in the faithful and sacrificial service of God—a ‘reformist’ process. Riches argued that Mark and Matthew were mediating these two conflicting mythologies in such a way as to generate a new identity for the followers of Christ. Each reworked (in differing proportions) both the revolutionist and the reformist view to create what the anthropologist Lévi-Strauss termed a ‘bricolage’ of new identity, drawing on what was already given in the tradition in an innovative and subversive way. Tension and paradox remain, but Riches showed how one can see Mark universalizing a traditional ethnic identity, and Matthew opening up the Law to a mission to all nations. Riches not only provided sophisticated exegesis, but also developed a theology of identity. In Conflicting Mythologies, he looked at how the use of a sacred text can illuminate the contemporary ‘project of the self ’, which tends towards the selfreferential and rejects tradition. Riches argued that Mark and Matthew created a new identity for the fictive kinship of the Christian community that still remained within the transcendent framework of Scripture, while being ‘world-building’ in a dynamic way. Thus, identity is not purely ‘chosen’ by the self or the community but emerges from the interplay of the revealed Word of God and the reader’s response to it. Moreover, it is a response made in community and through community, further distancing it from individualistic relativism. Finally, this ‘world-building’ response does not generate a closed or final identity, but remains open to the Spirit’s new promptings in different settings and cultures (Riches 2000: 297–327). Riches tested this theology of identity in his magisterial study, Galatians through the Centuries (2008). He examined the complexities of Paul’s text, showing how the conflicting mythologies he had found in the Synoptics were also pulling Paul in different directions in Galatians. As Riches noted later, theology will always be dialectical because of ‘this inability of human language and concepts to do justice to the nature of the human predicament and of God’s dealing with it’ (Riches 2016: 161). Thus, while Galatians was transformative for the community that initially read it, it left open the possibility of other communities also finding a new identity in their own context through dialogue with the text and its interpreters, and beyond the text to the scriptural traditions that Paul drew upon. Thus, Riches demonstrated how Galatians did not simply generate self-understanding amongst its readers but also helped to shape their social order, in a way that held together the Christian tradition and the realities of their community. Where does ‘truth’ stand in this endless creativity of the text and its readers? And in what way can humans grasp the divine reality mediated by the Word? Such epistemological and ontological questions are at the core of the many volumes of Balthasar’s theology, which Riches variously translated, edited, and expounded.

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Balthasar rejected a simple view of knowledge as the mind’s evaluation of experiences, asserting that knowledge of truth is akin to aesthetic judgements, which have an authority that goes beyond the purely rational. Faith, Balthasar argued, has its own kind of knowledge that arises from contemplation of divine mysteries and is mediated through the grace in that encounter with God (Riches 1986). For Balthasar, the core mystery is the dramatic kenosis of the crucified Christ and his descent to Hell. Through contemplating its scriptural account the believer would discover the truth mediated by the divine glory, in its inexhaustible variety. But for Riches, Balthasar’s subtle prescribing of his own theology as an almost canonical measure of interpretation in effect closed off the endless fecundity of the scriptural text (Riches 1998: 42–4). This could never be acceptable to Riches, for whom freely holding open the text to all who engaged with it arose from the heart of his faith. John Riches’ wide-ranging biblical exegesis and interpretation have generated significant theological questions. His exploration of the New Testament and its first-century context constituted a Christology of Jesus’ identity, message, and authority: it was Jesus’ transformational identification with the poor and outcast, embodied in the way of suffering, that constituted the truth of his teaching. Riches’ examination of the communities that received this teaching led him to propose a theology of identity that honoured both the given Christian tradition and the creative power of a community. Finally, Riches’ critique of Balthasar questioned the nature of the ultimate truth that we can recognize in the scriptural text. He sought to recognize both the inadequacy of human thought and language to grasp the divine reality to which Scripture seeks to witness, and also the power of the human response to Scripture to transform individuals and communities through grace. This combination of humility and confidence enabled Riches to lead a truly significant project of Contextual Bible Study, where his theology was translated into action (Riches 2010). As deprived and constrained communities in particular engaged with this method of study, the wisdom generated and the vision inspired by the biblical text bore witness to the inexhaustible power of the Word to bring new life and new hope. For Riches, this was making Jesus present again as the voice of the voiceless and the victim.

Conclusion The three Scottish Episcopal theologians presented here not only faced squarely the evil, suffering, and oppression of the human condition, but also articulated bold theologies of God’s response to it, challenging, respectively, norms about God’s invulnerability, the role of the Church, and the hegemony of academic biblical interpretation. They tended more to realism than idealism, giving the particular and the contingent a central role. Each was seeking the way in which

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faith could speak with truthful knowledge, given a necessary interplay of scriptural tradition, reason, and lived experience. They drew confidently on the tools of other disciplines—often those still in their infancy. Evolutionary science and anthropology, psychology and sociology, linguistics and political theory all contributed to the groundedness of this Scottish Episcopalian theology. The core and measure of the truthful knowledge of God that Brasnett, MacKinnon, and Riches sought was the kenotic Christ incarnating his moral teaching and vision in a self-emptying victory over sin and death. Whilst kenotic theology was very Anglican, it also connected each of them with von Balthasar and his stance against modernity’s reductionism through reconnecting faithful contemplation with scriptural knowledge. Moreover, theirs was a social theology reaching out variously to those struggling to cope with the demoralization of the First World War, or alarmed by the nuclear threat, or feeling abandoned in deprived communities and prisons. Brasnett, MacKinnon, and Riches were all trying to engage with the world for the sake of God’s transformation of it. Their theology was founded on strenuous scholarship, but they each sought ways to make its message accessible and engaging, a stimulus to action and discipleship.

Bibliography Brasnett, Bertrand R. (1928). The Suffering of the Impassible God. London: SPCK. Brasnett, Bertrand R. (1933). The Infinity of God. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Brasnett, Bertrand R. (1935). God the Worshipful. London: Longmans, Green and Co. Brierley, Michael W. (2017). ‘ “There Ain’t No Throne”: Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy and the Doctrine of God’, in Michael Brierley and Georgina Byrne (eds.), Life after Tragedy: Essays on Faith and the First World War Evoked by Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 75–96. Chapman, Mark (2017). ‘The Evolution of Anglican theology 1910–2000’, in Jeremy Morris (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism, vol. IV. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 25–49. Connor, Timothy G. (2011). The Kenotic Trajectory of the Church in Donald MacKinnon’s Theology: From Galilee to Jerusalem to Galilee. London: T&T Clark. Eldridge, John (2009). ‘John Riches—An Appreciation’, in Paul Middleton, Angus Paddison and Karen Wenell (eds.), Paul, Grace and Freedom. London: T&T Clark, xiii–xvii. Luscombe, Edward (1994). Edinburgh Theological College 1810–1994. Edinburgh: General Synod Office. MacKinnon, D. M. (1941). ‘Revelation and Social Justice’. Reprinted in Philosophy and the Burden of Theological Honesty: A Donald MacKinnon Reader, ed. John McDowell. London: T&T Clark International, 2011, 137–60.

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MacKinnon, D. M. (1948). ‘The Christian Understanding of Truth’, Scottish Journal of Theology 1: 19–29. MacKinnon, D. M. (1957). A Study in Ethical Theory. London: A. & C. Black. MacKinnon, D. M. (1968). Borderlands of Theology and Other Essays, ed. George Roberts and Donovan Smucker. London: Lutterworth Press. MacKinnon, D. M. (1969). The Stripping of the Altars: The Gore Memorial Lecture 1968. London: Collins Fontana Library. MacKinnon, D. M. (1974). The Problem of Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moltmann, Jürgen (1981). The Trinity and the Kingdom of God: The Doctrine of God, trans. Margaret Kohl. London: SCM. Mozley, J. K. (1926). The Impassibility of God: A Survey of Christian Thought. London: Cambridge University Press. Muller, A. (2010). ‘Donald M. MacKinnon: The True Service of the Particular, 1913–1959’. PhD thesis, University of Otago. Ramsey, Michael (1936). The Gospel and the Catholic Church. London: Longmans, Green. Ramsey, Michael (1960). From Gore to Temple: The Development of Anglican Theology between Lux Mundi and the Second World War 1889–1939. London: Longmans. Riches, John (1980). Jesus and the Transformation of Judaism. London: Darton, Longman & Todd. Riches, John (1986). ‘Balthasar and the Analysis of Faith’, in John Riches (ed.), The Analogy of Beauty: The Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 35–59. Riches, John (1993). A Century of New Testament Study. Cambridge: Lutterworth Press. Riches, John (1998). ‘Von Balthasar as Biblical Theologian and Exegete’, New Blackfriars 79/923: 38–45. Riches, John (2000). Conflicting Mythologies: Identity Formation in the Gospels of Mark and Matthew. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Riches, John (2008). Galatians through the Centuries. Oxford: Blackwell. Riches, John (2010). What is Contextual Bible Study? A Practical Guide with Group Studies for Advent and Lent. London: SPCK. Riches, John (2016). ‘Galatians and Christian Theology’, Expository Times 127/4: 157–65. von Balthasar, Hans Urs (1998). Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, Volume V: The Last Act, trans. Graham Harrison. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Webb, C. C. J. (1919). God and Personality. The Gifford Lectures 1918 & 1919, First Course. Aberdeen: The University.

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Webb, C. C. J. (1920). Divine Personality and Human Life. The Gifford Lectures 1918 & 1919, Second Course. London: Allen & Unwin. Williams, Rowan (1989). ‘Trinity and Ontology’, in Kenneth Surin (ed.), Christ, Ethics and Tragedy: Essays in Honour of Donald MacKinnon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 71–92.

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25 Reformed Theology in the Later Twentieth Century Gary D. Badcock

Torrance and the Wider Scottish Context It might seem inevitable that any account of the Scottish theological tradition in the later twentieth century should be dominated by the name of Thomas F. Torrance. Torrance, who for most of his academic career held the Chair in Christian Dogmatics at the University of Edinburgh (1952–79), was by a considerable margin the most prolific among the Scottish theologians of his generation, and by way of international reputation, his name to this day characteristically looms over the rest. Torrance’s work in mediating Karl Barth’s massive Kirchliche Dogmatik to the English-speaking world, coupled with his commentary on Barth’s work, would have been enough to secure him a modestly important place in this history. Torrance, however, went far beyond this, doing fundamental work in constructive Christology and Trinitarian theology, in patristics, in ecumenical theology, and—a signature theme—on the relationship between science and theology. To these can be added his far from casual interests in the older Scottish theological tradition, the biblical theology movement, and theological epistemology. While the quality of some of his massive output is debated, the sheer range of his scholarly work is extraordinary. Judged from the standpoint of the Scottish theological tradition itself, however, Torrance’s central place seems much less certain. For Torrance was always admired more from afar than at home. Even in his heyday, it is not obvious that Torrance enjoyed any disproportionate following among Scottish ministers, and certainly today one would have to traverse much land, if not sea as well, to hear his characteristic themes sounded in their preaching. Within the Scottish universities, furthermore, Torrance’s theology was something over which people tended to stumble, and never served as a general rallying point. Glasgow above all, and also, more modestly, St Andrews, maintained their own distinct traditions, while even in Edinburgh, Torrance was a divisive figure. Only in Aberdeen were there obvious sympathies with the Torrance cause, seen particularly in the appointment of his early collaborator J. K. S. Reid and later, Tom’s brother James B. Torrance, who held the Chair in Systematic Theology

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there from 1961 and 1977 respectively. The more substantial theologian of the two was Reid, but it should be said that even he pursues his own course. To begin with, Reid had not only studied with Barth, but also with Bultmann, and this is frequently reflected in his work (e.g. Reid 1963: 60ff., 75ff.). His writing is also more pious in character and ecclesial in its orientation, so that he often reminds the reader of the prose of John Baillie. Though perhaps best known for his work on the authority of Scripture (Reid 1957), towards the end of his career Reid would even publish an interpretation of apologetics (Reid 1969). Though Torrance’s theology continues to be curated and advanced by a small number at home and a range of followers abroad, therefore, we must reckon with the fact that there is much more to Scottish theology in the second half of the twentieth century than Torrance alone, and to give an adequate account of it requires that we pay attention to the wider context. Limits are needed in this account, however, and though somewhat arbitrarily chosen, the period considered here will be the years 1950–86. The first year serves not only as the mid-point of the century, but also as the year that Torrance was appointed to the Chair in Ecclesiastical History at Edinburgh (moving in 1952 to the Chair in Dogmatics); the second is the year that his Edinburgh colleague John McIntyre, to whom we will turn towards the end of this chapter, formally retired from the Chair of Divinity. During this period, a series of remarkable theologians appear on the Scottish scene. Through the first decade, John Baillie was still alive, doing important work right up until his death in 1960. To the west, Ian Henderson held the Chair of Systematic Theology at Glasgow for more than half our period (1948–69), where, amid his own work on existentialism and ecumenism, he supervised a doctoral thesis by a young Bultmann scholar, John Macquarrie, who would go on to serve as a member of the Glasgow Divinity Faculty (1953–62). It was also in Glasgow that a man who represents the dominant outlook of the Church of Scotland in the later twentieth century more than is commonly recognized, the radical theologian Ronald Gregor Smith, likewise served as Professor of Divinity (1956–68). These Glasgow theologians had an immense influence, both at home and abroad. None other than the American radical William Hamilton claimed in 1975 that ‘a solid historical case’ could be made for the claim that Gregor Smith, for example, was ‘the genuine initiator of those later movements that led to [John Robinson’s] Honest to God, [Harvey Cox’s] The Secular City, and the radical [death of God] theologies’ (Hamilton 1975: 623). During these years, younger scholars also naturally appeared. D. W. D. Shaw, for instance, taught in Edinburgh from the mid-1960s and, from 1979, in St Andrews as Professor of Divinity, working there in the broad tradition of the Baillies until the end of our period (retiring in the 1990s). Meanwhile, in dogmatic theology, Alasdair Heron worked through most of the 1970s in Scotland, before his move to Erlangen in 1981. None of these just mentioned are insubstantial theologians, some are very substantial figures indeed,

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yet only one of them, Heron, could be said in any sense to belong within the Torrance fold.

Edinburgh and Glasgow Seen from within, therefore, much of the history of Scottish theology in the later twentieth century is a story of conflicted relationships and loyalties. These found most obvious expression in the tensions between the Divinity Faculties of Edinburgh and Glasgow, but these in fact worked their way through the whole of Scottish theology. The broad traditions of the two were opposed, with Edinburgh standing at the epicentre of the Barthian movement in the English-speaking world, and Glasgow similarly representing the Bultmannian standpoint. The two academic centres mediated their respective positions not only to Scotland, but to the world of Anglo-American Protestant theology in general. This was achieved not least through the large cohorts of international research students they attracted, but mainly through translation efforts and an impressive range of constructive theological publications. It is arguable that nowhere else in the later twentieth century, not even in Germany, was the Barth–Bultmann debate so deeply embedded as it was in Scottish theology. It continued to be a fact of life well into the 1980s, when I was an Edinburgh student. The division is nicely reflected in a personal letter from Ronald Gregor Smith to Rudolf Bultmann, dated 4 February 1965, and preserved in the Glasgow University Library. Gregor Smith had just returned from Chicago, where he had encountered for the first time the new ‘death of God’ theology, the claims of which he thought exaggerated, since his goal was not to do away with God, but to develop some new means of speaking of ‘the experience of God’ in a secular world. There was, however, no point in simply attempting to reassert the traditional theological standpoint. Reflecting on this last point, he reported to Bultmann that he was again ‘trying to read Barth’, but complained of Barth’s forbidding German as evidence of ‘bad theology’. More damningly, he argued that ‘the immense positivism and assurance of writers who tell us everything about God’ amounts merely to an ‘esoteric language’ that they may cheerfully speak among themselves, but that otherwise simply fails to communicate. The major protagonists in this debate are, however, examined in more detail elsewhere in this volume, and we need not labour over their theologies unduly. What the present discussion affords is an opportunity to reflect more generally on their work. We may begin with the personal dimension, for in all these cases, we are speaking about people who knew each other, and questions of personal allegiance have to be factored into our understanding of the matter. Both Henderson and Gregor Smith, for instance, had been BD students in Edinburgh alongside Torrance in the 1930s. While it has to be said that all our sources are

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scrupulous about not naming names when critiquing their neighbours’ positions, therefore, it is not a stretch to imagine that one of those whom Gregor Smith might have named when complaining in 1965 about those who ‘tell us everything about God’ was a certain student colleague from his New College days. The Barth–Bultmann debate of the 1950s and 1960s was, furthermore, preceded by and in certain respects recapitulated an analogous debate that had shaped the previous generation of Scottish theological students: the famous confrontation between Karl Barth and Emil Brunner over the question of natural theology. Brunner’s pamphlet, Natur und Gnade, and Barth’s Nein! Antwort an Emil Brunner, were published in 1934, with a further riposte from Brunner in 1935. Amid the upheavals of the 1930s, this exchange mattered to keen New College students. It also mattered to John Baillie, among others teaching theology to such students. The sources were not published in English translation until 1946, but they were certainly taught in Scotland much earlier, and in any case, were accessible in German to many engaged Scottish Divinity students in the 1930s. Clear evidence of how they were handled by some of those teaching in Edinburgh, furthermore, is present in the 1946 edition, which included a critical introduction by none other than Baillie, who as ever comes down clearly for Brunner (Brunner and Barth 1946). Torrance, of course, had gone on after his BD to study with Barth in 1937–8, and he would maintain the Barthian line in the matter for decades. Henderson studied with Brunner in Zürich and Barth in Basel for slightly longer, 1936–8, while Gregor Smith, for his part, went to Copenhagen to work on Kierkegaard in 1938–9, being a little younger. He would, however, make a point of visiting Marburg from his base in Denmark just before the war, in order to hear Bultmann lecture, and while serving with the Army in Bonn in 1946–7, he visited and came to know Bultmann better (Clements 1986: 22, 47). By 1963, he would hold an honorary doctorate from the University of Marburg for his services to Anglo-German understanding (Clements 1986: 71). Such commitments inevitably involved taking a stance in relation to the older establishment Scottish theology, as well as to contemporaries in the field. This was not lost on others, and helps to explain the increasing hostility of both John Baillie and his brother Donald to Torrance in the early 1950s. Donald, for his part, stated in 1952 how much he regretted Torrance’s move to the Dogmatics Chair at New College, owing to the shift to hard-line Barthianism thus signalled (Newlands 2002: 182). John Baillie, though interested in Barth’s theology in the 1930s, was also somewhat bemused by it, and in later years, grew increasingly hostile to Torrance’s particular adaptation of it. As we are working here within the timeline of living history, I can perhaps report how the urbane John—a consummately ‘proper’ academic clergyman given to insisting on student niceties such as correct pronunciation of Kierkegaard’s Danish—made his private views plain to his final class of students. Baillie was reputed by Andrew Ross (later a Church historian at Edinburgh) to have told his junior class in Divinity upon retirement in 1956 that

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whereas all three of them had once known, now only God and he (Baillie) knew what his colleague Professor Torrance was saying. He thereby committed his students to Torrance in year two for their first compulsory course in Dogmatics in the room upstairs, picked up his notes, and walked out, leaving his students with mouths agape. While the mists of time and memory make this anecdote a less than wholly reliable statement of fact, I will confess to believing it myself, even allowing for narrative exaggeration. A second general comment is that such personal factors notwithstanding, the fact is that the debate in view here belongs to a single historical tradition. The theologians in question were products of the same experiences and, in most cases, of the academic institutions. To take Torrance and Gregor Smith again as exemplars, they were of an age, they were both graduates of Edinburgh (MA, then BD), and they both were heavily influenced by leading continental theological sources (themselves not unrelated theologically). In their professional lives, they were both for a time Church of Scotland ministers, they both served as military chaplains during the war, and both became leading Professors in the Scottish Divinity Faculties. In a range of key respects, it is hard to tell them apart. Then again, we may remember the fact that in both theologies represented by the cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow, there is a foundational opposition to the deliverances of the older natural theology, which conceives of God as the subject of all the highest metaphysical attributes, and which antithesizes the being of this God with that of the world. None of our representative theologians believed in such a God, since they were all alike opposed to classical metaphysical dualism. The view taken by all was that God is to be found in the event by which he is made known in the world, in the event of revelation. Where they differed was in regard to how the event of revelation is to be conceived, and exactly what it conveys. Hostility to older theological metaphysics in itself, of course, was not something new in Scottish theology at the time. The philosophy of Kant had long driven mainstream Protestant theology to look to the sphere of ethics rather than metaphysics for sustenance. For our purposes, the representative reflection of this shared conviction is found in the work of H. R. Mackintosh, whose The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ (1912) served as a textbook for decades in each of the Scottish Divinity Faculties. All the major Scottish theologians in view in this chapter would have been required to read it as students. Mackintosh had judged the metaphysical categories of classical Christology to be profoundly suspect, since God is known from the Bible as a moral subject capable of loving, who for this reason alone is of religious interest. Mackintosh went so far as to complain that the classical concept of God as supreme substance is fundamentally unspiritual. On the Chalcedonian Definition, for instance, he observed that, ‘Christological relations which, in essence, are ethical and personal, have [here] been too much expressed in terms imbued with a certain mechanical and even material flavour. This is particularly true of the term “nature” (φύσις),

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which is not an ethical word at all’ (Mackintosh 1912: 214). The Christological question therefore needed to be reconceived, to allow escape from the weight of the ‘mechanical conceptions which served the Ancient Church’ (Mackintosh 1912: 472). What is new in the theology of our period is the peculiar understanding developed of revelation. In an early essay, ‘Down to Bedrock’, written in the immediate aftermath of the war, Torrance made the typically combative point that, ‘Christianity means Christ himself and nothing else but Christ; and that means that the Person of Christ displaces and banishes all vague natural religion with only “God” in it’ (quoted in Morgan 2010: 221). This would, of course, be carried through the whole fabric of his theology. In Torrance’s theology, theology is Christological through and through, and though necessary reference is made to the Trinitarian basis and context of the event in which God is made known in the incarnation, the Trinitarian question is ultimately approached through the person and work of Christ, and defined in relation to it, so much so that there is relatively little reference, for example, to God the Father. Christology is the absolute core of Torrance’s theology. There is, as he was fond of saying both in person and in print, no ‘God’ hiding behind the back of the God revealed in Jesus Christ, no ‘God’ whose character remains mysterious and who is finally unknown and therefore untrustworthy (cf. McGrath 2006: 73–6). In Glasgow theologians of the 1950s like Henderson or Macquarrie, equally, God cannot properly be understood in terms of the metaphysics of being, since this involves treating God as if he were an object to be known and therefore controlled, domesticated, and classified. God is instead personal in quality, and is therefore encountered in an I-Thou relationship through the proclamation of the Gospel, by which we are summoned to the decision of faith. Theology must thus be reconceived. What is commonly called ‘ontotheology’ is a bad thing, and this is something that, in no small measure, theology in the English-speaking world absorbed from these Scots. There are obvious echoes here of the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics on which Henderson, Macquarrie, and the Glasgow theology in general drew (‘ontotheology’ in this usage being a Heideggerian term), and equally, of Heidegger’s peculiar concept of our being-in-the-world as a Lichtung or ‘clearing’ in which the question of Being as an existential concern also arises (e.g. Henderson 1952: 21–38). Gregor Smith had a good term for what this entails theologically: ‘anthropotheology’ (Gregor Smith 1969: 97). However, there is also in this theology a further and rather more direct reference to the witness of the Bible, for in the Glasgow theology, speaking of God requires that we attend to the happening in which, through the Word of proclamation, we are called to this decision. Bringing this summons to light and life for our time requires existential analysis, and with it, an exercise in demythologization, and it is at this point that Bultmann’s appeal to the Glasgow tradition is most evident.

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There is insufficient scope here to develop these ideas at any length, but again, what is possible is a more general consideration of what the two theologies set out to achieve, and what they had in common by way of central goals. Clearly, in both cases there was a desire to move beyond classical Confessional orthodoxy, certainly in the immediate Scottish context in which fidelity to the Westminster Confession was still formally obligatory for Church of Scotland ministers, and in the context of modern Protestantism generally. Both theologies accordingly evoked the hostility of traditionalist Calvinists, though perhaps for different reasons in the two cases. Nevertheless, Westminster Calvinism itself was firmly rejected by both sides, on much the same logic, and this is telling. Neither side was prepared to endorse the older ‘dualistic’ conception, and although there were obvious differences in how related matters were handled (e.g. atonement), hostility to the classical conception of God is something that holds the two sides together. As we shall see, this is an important point, and we shall have cause to return to it shortly. Liberal evangelicalism as represented by the moralism of H. R. Mackintosh was also abandoned, though this is scarcely surprising, since Barth and Bultmann had both alike done the same in relation to Wilhelm Hermann, whose theology Mackintosh in many respects followed. Attitudes to John Baillie, the great name in Scottish theology during the years 1934–56, are on both sides more difficult to assess. Baillie’s influence, especially as reflected in his interests in Buber and Kierkegaard, is clearly reflected in the Glasgow theology. Yet Baillie was no demythologizer, and there is more suggestion of the Common Sense philosophy in his final great work, The Sense of the Presence of God (1962), than there is of existentialist theory. Torrance, for his part, rejected Baillie’s theology on a theoretical level to the end because of the perceived compromise made in it with natural theology. At the same time, it has to be acknowledged that—rather like Barth on Schleiermacher—he wrote a remarkably conciliatory essay towards the end of his life in which he remembered Baillie as an exemplary Christian (Torrance 1993). In retrospect, therefore, we may have cause to wonder whether there ever was such a great gulf fixed between the theologies of Glasgow and Edinburgh—one, as it were, the city of this world, and the other the city of God, around which the angels play. For the leading representatives of both schools shared not only much the same education and experience, and assumed terms of debate provided by relatively limited theological movements of the twentieth century, but the two sides shared many of the same objectives. Of particular importance in this last respect is the fact that the two theologies thought it necessary to reconceive at a fundamental level what it means to speak of God. For they believed that the idea of God maintained in their own older theological tradition was profoundly defective, and, when all is said and done, this shared conviction that past understandings needed to be abandoned means that they had a great deal that is of theological importance in common.

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A general point that it is possible to make at this point is that both theologies are so heavily committed to mediation that one wonders (to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan) whether mediation is not itself the entire message. In Edinburgh Barthianism, the message was Christological through and through. ‘Christianity means Christ himself and nothing else but Christ’, to quote the early Torrance once more. In Glasgow, by contrast, all the great theological claims are associated with what we can only call Pneumatology, as a searchlight is turned on the human decision of faith (e.g. Henderson 1952: 23). Thus we find transcendence, not in some otherworldly ens realissimum, but where it actually occurs, in the midst of human life. An especially revealing summary is formulated by Gregor Smith: ‘The eternal is in time, heaven is through earth, the supernatural not other than the natural, the spiritual not more than the wholly human’ (Gregor Smith 1969: 111). God is therefore to be understood as the ‘hinterland behind every truly human interrelation’, so that what faith recognizes and affirms is a here and now transcendence arising in the experience of genuine co-humanity (Gregor Smith 1969: 154). There are obvious questions of theological principle arising here, but the central issue at stake was elegantly specified by John McIntyre in The Shape of Christology (1966: 171; 1998: 173). Though he made the case only with reference to the Barthian position (the revelation ‘model’), it applies in my judgement also to the Bultmannian argument. According to McIntyre, unless the word ‘God’ already has a meaning outside the context of the revelatory event as such, the statement made to an unbeliever that ‘God is revealed in Jesus Christ’ can only be meaningless, and the theology fails. We might as well say that revelation is revealed in Jesus Christ—a tautology that tells us nothing—or some other unknown, an ‘x I know not what’. But this could only mean that nothing is successfully revealed, that no ‘thing’ has been mediated. In short, we are then concerned with something identified as revelation, but that is not obviously a revelation of God. In the case of the Glasgow theology, however, the same logic applies. For if what really matters is the horizontal I-Thou relationship in which humans encounter a this-worldly transcendence, or make an authentic decision for faith, do we need any lingering talk about God at all? Is not the human experience of revelation that is in view enough to fill out the whole picture presented of what is theologically possible? The theological question that arises, in short, is whether the stereotypical Edinburgh and Glasgow theologies of the period were not somehow parasitic on the culture of churchgoing and of general religious conviction that they each inherited and in turn rejected. This culture had put the concept of ‘God’ into people’s heads, so that it was present for the two theologies to work with it critically. However, given the extent to which this religious culture has disintegrated in more recent decades, we have to ask today about the continuing viability of such reactive approaches. They may once have said something needful in their rejection of the older moralistic theism, but today, does something else not need to

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be put in place, to defend the possibility and dignity of the Christian confession in a society that has for the most part forgotten what faith in God means? I would suggest that it does.

A Dissident Voice: John McIntyre John McIntyre, who succeeded John Baillie in the Edinburgh Chair of Divinity in 1956, for many years taught the proofs for the existence of God in his Edinburgh Divinity classes (later Systematic Theology, on the union of the Divinity and Dogmatics Departments). This was partly, no doubt, for the sake of students’ general education in the discipline, but it was also done as antidote to what he frankly saw as the incoherence of the prevailing outlook. He had, of course, published St. Anselm and His Critics in 1954, so that the ontological argument at least fell within his research expertise, and teaching in Edinburgh Divinity has long been research-led. His interest, however, went well beyond this. Agreement on the proofs was not, of course, in any way treated as logically prior to the doing of theology, or indeed, to the preaching of the Gospel, since on that basis it would be a substitute for faith. What the proofs did establish for McIntyre, rather, is that the term ‘God’ has an established semantic range outside the field of revelation per se. That is to say, there is something, quod omnes dicunt Deum, to which neither the theologian nor the preacher can be afford to be indifferent. McIntyre does not himself, of course, provide us with a complete theological vision, nor did it appeal in a way that could compete successfully with the Barthians and Bultmannians. His theology overall is largely analytical, and therefore fragmentary and exploratory in character. Nevertheless, he is interesting for a number of reasons in the present context. He was arguably the most careful Scottish theologian of his generation, and insisted on the necessity of clarity in others, including preachers. His retirement sermon at the closing communion at New College in the academic year 1985–6—his final word, as it were, to the Divinity students of the day—was actually preached on the text, ‘In the church, I would rather speak five intelligible words, so as to instruct others, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue’. Competent in both philosophical and dogmatic theology, and with an independence of mind that was refreshing to younger colleagues like James Mackey, he was also an unfashionable figure, refusing to identify with any of the standard scholarly tribes. He was unique among the major Scottish theologians of his generation for not having studied on the continent. McIntyre was, however, certainly conversant with existentialist philosophy and with its main theological adaptations. Kierkegaard, for instance, features regularly in his writings. At the same time, he apparently did not believe a word of the existentialist pitch, which was something of a courageous stance for a theologian to take in the 1950s and 1960s. He was sympathetic to some central

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Barthian ideas (e.g. McIntyre 1987: 41–9), but was no Barthian. Always something of an outlier, McIntyre used varieties of analytic philosophy rather more freely than he did anything else, yet he scarcely mentions Wittgenstein, early or late. Though deeply interested in the philosophy of science, and committed to empiricism generally, he was by no means a slavish positivist. Those who knew McIntyre will be aware that he long had ambitions to write a book on the analytic philosophy of history, supplemental to his first major book from the Edinburgh period, The Christian Doctrine of History (1957). These ambitions were never realized, but the goal was to examine the foundations of historical knowledge with reference to theology, since he was convinced that much of what is so confidently said about history and historiography in theological circles is half-baked. His lecture notes on the subject are extant among his papers. Bultmann, he said to me in 1996, though admittedly in a private conversation, was an historiographical ‘idiot’ because of the relative unsophistication of his view of history as a story of linear facts—a surprising remark that one could argue distances him farther even than Torrance from his Glasgow contemporaries. He wrote a very readable book on divine love (McIntyre 1962), but is otherwise rather difficult stylistically. He was especially productive in retirement, having spent much of his Edinburgh career bearing heavy administrative loads, which included, for instance, liaison with the Scottish Office on Religious Education in the schools system. The consequent need for curricular resources on comparative religion in the universities was a real concern, though his commitment to a wholly theological theology alongside it never wavered (contra McGrath 2006: 104). The several works from the post-retirement period include his signature study of the theology of imagination (McIntyre 1987), something for which he will no doubt be especially remembered, together with substantial works in dogmatic theology, on soteriology (McIntyre 1992), and on pneumatology (McIntyre 1997a). One of the more stimulating things written about the theology of our period was by John McIntyre. Unfortunately, it has never been published. When working on the little volume that I edited from his papers during his old age (McIntyre 1997b), I made the case to him that the piece, which can be found in the McIntyre collections in the New College Library, should be brought into the volume, to signal that Scottish theology in the 1960s involved more than the stock arguments of the day. McIntyre refused, citing his desire not to damage relations with Torrance, but adding that he would be happy for it to be published once they were both dead. This chapter obviously falls short of that goal, but the document in question is the manuscript of a formal lecture delivered in Cambridge at the Westminster College Commemoration on 8 June 1967. His title was, ‘Theology After the Storm’, which provided the title for that edited collection. The lecture concerned what we have inherited from the giants of twentieth-century theology, whose deaths by that time had taken place or were pending. Arguing a typically relentless

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analytical case, McIntyre moves towards a startling conclusion. Theology in his lifetime had been largely preoccupied with a set of questions that had proven already by 1967 to be dead ends. It had now to turn on its axis or face responsibility for hastening the ruin of the Church. Among the things most needed was a clear definition of terms such as ‘God’, ‘revelation’, and ‘history’. Above all, however, he argued that the massive energy spent on the stock theological debates inherited from Barth, Bultmann, and Tillich, debates that he thought to rest on slender analytical foundations, had left the Church without the resources to speak intelligently to the world. In particular, he suggested that the Church was imperilled because of decades of denigrating the dignity of reason and the life of the mind. This last point, of course, locates McIntyre solidly alongside his old teacher and predecessor John Baillie (McIntyre did his BD in Edinburgh in 1938–41), who similarly resisted the deprecation of human reason as a dishonouring of the God who created it. Certainly there was no wooden reliance on reason in Baillie’s theology, but neither could it be by-passed, for the way in which God is made known in Baillie’s ‘mediated immediacy’ is ‘in, with, and under’ the ordinary structures of human life. The latter implies several things (e.g. the I-Thou of human sociality), but one of them is that reason’s role is essential to the business (Baillie 1939). This is a lesson that the Church, which in Scotland as well as other jurisdictions is presently resiling from its historic commitment to a universitybased theological education, could well afford to learn again.

Scottish Theology and the Future By way of conclusion, Scottish theology clearly has a glorious past, one explored handsomely in these volumes. We might, however, need at last to ask the question whether it now has a future. In Scotland today, millions of people have apparently decided that there is little or no point in Sunday worship, the daily disciplines of Christian life, or even formal Church membership—wagering, in effect, that there is no need for the Gospel, since it is not speaking of anything of importance that is not available to them from other sources. A variety of sociological factors explain this catastrophe, no doubt, but one of the reasons is surely that Scottish academic theology and its reflection in the life of the Church have seemed less than compelling to ordinary people. Looking to the future, however, it is difficult to see how a Christian theology can thrive without a healthy Church. Accordingly, it might be well for us to ponder McIntyre’s diagnosis of the theological situation, and to ask whether the appropriate response to the theological storm of which he spoke has yet been given. Could it, after all, be in great measure the fault of the dominant theology of the later twentieth century that the Church has proven so ineffectual in proclaiming the Gospel in recent decades?

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One of the advantages of studying the Scottish theological tradition is that it tends to reflect wider issues in Christian thought, and bring them to some manageable distillation. Historically, this has been so much a feature of the Scottish tradition that one could almost speak of it as its distinctive charism, its service to the wider Christian (especially Reformed) world. The great names consistently attest to this role. This is important for understanding the Scottish tradition itself as one that refuses to be insular, but it can also be useful for those working at a greater distance from the Scottish tradition. For Scottish theology can be read as a microcosm in which key theological themes are concretized. Could it be, therefore, that the theological tensions in Scottish theology during the later twentieth century can help us to understand something crucial about the more general limitations of modern theology and Church alike? Can modern Scottish theology assist in diagnosing and escaping the ills of the wider theological context? The truth is that all of us face an uncertain prospect as Christian theologians in the modern West. There can be little doubt, however, that were Scottish theology to resolve its own current inability to communicate the Gospel meaningfully to the world, the rest of us would take notice. Attending far more closely to our obligation to the faith of ordinary people; having done with the kind of scholasticism in which scholar speaks primarily to scholar rather than to the world; and refusing the silo mentality that has characterized an overly fragmented theology for the past half-century—these would at any rate be good places to begin. If the richer proclamation now needed in the Church’s ministry is to develop, in short, then it will first need to be modelled by the Church’s theologians, who will need to revive such an engaged approach. This may be a tall order for the academy, but it would be a service worth shouldering by Scottish theologians present and future who have learned from the best of their past. What might then again enlighten Scottish theology and the Church would surely also again enliven the Christian world.

Bibliography Baillie, John (1939). Our Knowledge of God. London: Oxford University Press. Baillie, John (1962). The Sense of the Presence of God. London: Oxford University Press. Brunner, Emil and Karl Barth (1946). Natural Theology: Comprising ‘Nature and Grace’ by Emil Brunner and the Reply ‘No!’ by Karl Barth, trans. Peter Fraenkel. London: Centenary Press. Clements, Keith W. (1986). The Theology of Ronald Gregor Smith. Leiden: Brill. Gregor Smith, Ronald. Papers, Glasgow University Library. Gregor Smith, Ronald (1969). The Free Man. London: Collins.

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Hamilton, William (1975). ‘Review: God, Secularization, and History: Essays in Memory of Ronald Gregor Smith, edited by Eugene Thomas Long. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1974’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 43/3: 623–4. Henderson, Ian (1952). Myth in the New Testament. London: SCM. McGrath, Alister E. (2006). T. F. Torrance. London and New York: T&T Clark. McIntyre, John. Papers, New College Library, University of Edinburgh. McIntyre, John (1954). St. Anselm and His Critics. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd. McIntyre, John (1957). The Christian Doctrine of History. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd. McIntyre, John (1962). On the Love of God. London: Collins. McIntyre, John (1966). The Shape of Christology. London: SCM. McIntyre, John (1987). Faith, Theology and Imagination. Edinburgh: Handsel Press. McIntyre, John (1992). The Shape of Soteriology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. McIntyre, John (1997a). The Shape of Pneumatology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. McIntyre, John (1997b). Theology after the Storm, ed. Gary D. Badcock. Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge: Eerdmans. McIntyre, John (1998). The Shape of Christology, 2nd edition. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Mackintosh, H. R. (1912). The Doctrine of the Person of Jesus Christ. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. Morgan, D. Densil (2010). Barth Reception in Britain. London and New York: T&T Clark. Newlands, George (2002). John and Donald Baillie: Transatlantic Theology. Oxford and New York: Peter Lang. Reid, John Kelman Sutherland (1957). The Authority of Scripture: A Study of the Reformation and Post-Reformation Understanding of the Bible. London: Methuen. Reid, John Kelman Sutherland (1963). Our Life in Christ. London: SCM. Reid, John Kelman Sutherland (1969). Christian Apologetics. London: Hodder & Stoughton. Torrance, Thomas F. (1993). ‘John Baillie at Prayer’, in David Fergusson (ed.), Christ, Church and Society: Essays on John Baillie and Donald Baillie. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 253–61.

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Index of Names Abelard 44–5 Aberdeen, Countess of 328 Adair, James 320, 321 Adomnán 267 Ágústsdóttir, Ingibjörg 277 Aidan, St 266 Albert the Great 306 Alexander, Archibald 190 Alexander, L. W. G. 54 Alison, Archibald 134–5 Allan, Tom 243, 245–50, 253, 254, 255 Allison, Anthony 131n Anderson, Bill 312 Anderson, John 211 Aner, Karl 182, 183 Angus, Samuel 210–11 Anselm of Canterbury 40, 44, 45, 155, 211, 232, 355 Aquinas, Thomas 45, 155, 218, 222, 306 Arata, Stephen 272, 273 Arius 228 Arnold, Matthew 4, 209 Arthur, John W. 56 Athanasius 44, 156, 157, 229, 238 Augustine, St 155, 176, 218, 262, 263, 264 Aves, John 90 Badger, C. R. 208n Bailey, W. Grahame (Raymond) 318, 330 Baillie, Donald 28, 119, 123–31, 161, 162, 163, 165–70, 173, 211 Baillie, Florence Jewel 120, 121 Baillie, Ian Fowler 121 Baillie, John 75–6, 115–7, 119–31, 151, 158, 178, 186–7, 211, 215, 288, 298, 348, 350–1, 353, 355, 357 Baird, William 135 Balcou, Jean 14 Balmer, Robert 64 von Balthasar, Hans Urs 179–80, 187, 188, 336, 340, 342–4 Bannerman, Jane 204 Barclay, John 180, 181 Barclay, William 211 Barker, Nicholas 138n Barkley, John M. 14

Barrie, J. M. 209 Bárth, Dániel 4n Barth, Karl 61, 120, 126–8, 142, 146–58, 161, 168, 178, 180, 184, 186–8, 211, 214, 215, 227, 229, 231, 232–3, 238, 239, 242, 288, 303, 326, 330, 337, 339, 347, 348, 349, 350, 353, 357 see also Barthianism Bates, J. M. 211 Baur, F. C. 184 Baxter, James K. 203 Beavan, James 191 Bede, the Venerable 266, 290 Begbie, Jeremy 139n Bell, Bill 175 Bell, John 212, 268 Bellany, John 143 Benedetto, Robert 35n Bernard, Abbot of Arbroath 291 Berton, Pierre 191 Beveridge, Craig 90 Biggar, Nigel 288n, 300 Biko, Steve 341 Billig, Michael 288 Bisset, Peter 248, 256 Black, Ronald 3, 11 Blackie, Nansie 70 Blaikie, Walter Biggar 13 Blair, Kirstie 14 Blake, William 216 Blanshard, Brand 155 Bogue, David 52 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 120, 121, 214, 215, 216, 220, 223, 225, 242, 288 Borthwick, Alan 292n Bosch, David 243, 255 Bovell, James 191 O’Boyle, Colm 262 Boyle, Robert 98 Bradley, Ian 265, 266, 268, 288n, 300 Bradley, William L. 35n Brandreth, H. R. T. 66, 67 Brasnett, Bertrand 334–6, 339, 340, 344 Brenz, Johannes 20 Bretherton, Luke 288n Brewster, Patrick 106, 113 Bromiley, Geoffrey W. 155, 156, 178

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Broun, Dauvit 290, 291 Brown, Callum 255 Brown, David 138n, 141n, 142 Brown, George Mackay 272, 277–81, 282, 284, 285 Brown, Mary Carmichael 36 Brown, Stewart J. 5, 14, 296, 297–8, 305 Brown, Thomas 201 Browning, Robert 139, 209 Bruce, Alexander Balmain 20, 22–7, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 36, 68–70 Bruce, King Robert 291 Brunner, Emil 186, 211, 350 Bryce, James 58 Bryden, Walter Williamson 190, 200–1 Buber, Martin 186, 214–6, 219–23, 353 Buchanan, Robert 107 Bulloch, James 292 Bultmann, Rudolf 125, 126–7, 130, 162, 169, 171, 211, 214, 215, 216, 224, 234, 242, 288, 338, 348, 349, 350, 352–7 Burke, Patrick 304 Burns, Dr Robert (Free Church minister in Canada) 193 Burns, Robert (poet) 137, 206 Burns, Robert (theologian and minister) 106, 107 Burns, Thomas 204 Busch, Eberhard 161 Bushnell, Horace 45 Buxton, Sir Thomas Foxwell 60 Caird, Edward 42, 81, 139, 195–6, 197 Caird, John 28, 79–82, 91, 208 Cairns, David S. 52, 56, 57, 61, 71–7, 128, 212 Calder, James M. 53 Calder, Jenni 274, 276, 284 Calvin, John or Jean 19, 39, 46, 56, 58, 132, 150, 155, 157, 176, 186, 205, 229, 230, 231n, 236, 238, 276 see also Calvinism Cameron, Ewen A. 9 Cameron, James K. 293, 296n Cameron, Nigel M. de S. 66, 67, 71 Cameron, Sir David Young 136 Campbell, James Archibald of Barbreck 12 Campbell, John Francis 4 Campbell, John Gregorson 10–11 Campbell, John McLeod 31, 45, 161, 164, 186, 207, 209, 230 Candlish, J. S. 36 Candlish, Robert 64 Caputo, John D. 223n Carlyle, Thomas 79, 209 Carmichael, Alexander 2–15, 260 Carmichael, Ella 11–12

Carmichael, Mary Frances see MacBean, Mary Frances Carnie, Robert Hay 5 Carruthers, Gerard 282, 283 Carver, Robert 132 Casper, Bernhard 222 Cavalcanti, Guido 224 Caven, William 200 Chalmers, Stuart 310, 311 Chalmers, Thomas 52, 58, 59, 64, 65, 76, 205, 206, 247, 260, 297, 305 Chemnitz, Martin 20, 27 Cheyne, A. C. 13, 79, 80, 108, 115, 123, 206 Chisholm, James 209 Clancy, Thomas Owen 262, 263, 268 Clark, Thomas 175–6 Clark, Sir Thomas (1st Baronet) 176–7, 178, 182, 184, 186 Clark, Sir John Maurice (2nd Baronet) 177–8, 186 Clark, Sir Thomas (3rd Baronet) 178, 186–7 Clark, Thomas George Snr 177–8 Clark, Thomas George Jr 178 Clark, Thomas George Ramsay Davidson Snr 177 Clark, Thomas George Ramsay Davidson Jr 178, 179 Clements, Keith W. 350 Clow, William 111, 112, 113 Coffin, Henry Sloane 120, 121 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 79, 101 209 Coley, Nathan 143 Coll, Niall 172 Colley, Linda B. 294, 295 Columba, St 3, 11, 262, 265, 267, 268, 291 Ó Conchubhair, Brian 12n Congar, Yves 231, 243 Connor, Timothy G. 339 Cooper, James 66–7 Cosh, Mary 139n Costello, John E. 87n Cousin, Victor 195 Cowan, Edward J. 291 Cowie, George 53 Cox, Harvey 348 Cox, James Leland 61 Craig, Archie 253–4 Craig, Cairns 274n Cranfield, C. A. 178 Crawford, Thomas J. 14 Cumming, Elizabeth 11 Cunningham, Allan 137 Cunningham, Tom 56, 59 Cunningham, William 205

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   Curran, Charles 310 Cyprian of Carthage 116 Daiches, David 216, 224 Dalrymple, Jock 312 Daniel, Yvan 245 Dante 224 Darlow, T. H. 46n Davidson, Nevile 126, 321 Davidson, Randall 72 Davidson, Roger 334, 335 Davidson, William L. 96, 97 Davie, Alan 142 Davie, George 296, 297 Davie, George Elder 101, 297 Davies, Oliver 267 Davis, Gayle 334, 335 Dawson, John William 194–5 de Lubac, Henri 306 Dean, Joanna 197–8 Deissmann, Gustav A. 210 Dempster, John A. H. 175n, 177, 178, 182, 185 Denney, James 35–47, 60, 184, 210 Devine, T. M. 110, 298 Dick, Thomas 59 Dickie, John 210 Dickie, William 111 Dickson, Nicholas 205 Dilworth, Mark 303 Dodd, C. H. 167, 170 Dods, Marcus 185 Donne, John 216 O’Donoghue, Noel Dermot 260, 261, 263, 267, 269, 305 Dorner, Isaak August 21, 25, 28, 29, 40 Dougall, John 193–4 Dougall, Lily 71, 197–9 Dow, John 130 Drummond, Henry 67 Drummond, Robert 112, 113 Duff, Alexander of Calcutta 51, 55, 58, 59 Dulles, John Foster 120 Duncan, A. A. M. 292n Dunn, James 171 Duns Scotus 236 Durkan, John 304 Van Dusen, Pitney 121, 127 Dyce, William 138 Earp, Sophie 198, 199 Ebeling, Gerhard 214, 220 Ebrard, August 21, 24, 26–7 Edward II, King (of England) 291 Edward VII, King 111

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Edwards, Jonathan 57 Eichrodt, Walter 214 Einstein, Albert 156 Eldridge, John 340 Eliot, T. S. 120, 122, 216, 224 Ellul, Jacques 242 Emerson, Ralph 135n, 209 Emerton, J. A. 178 Emilsen, Susan E. 211 Engberg-Pedersen, Troels 180 Eriugena, John Scot(t)us 267, 269, 305 Ernesti, J. A. 176, 182, 183 Errington, Lindsay 138 Escott, Harry 53 Evans, Arthur 12 Fairbairn, A. M. 54 Farmer, H. H. 122 Farquhar, John Nicol 51, 52n, 54, 56, 60 Farrer, Austin 338 Farrow, Douglas 239 Fenn, Eric 122 Ferguson, Adam 59, 101 Ferguson, Megan 11, 12 Ferguson, Ronald 252 Fergusson, David 76, 79, 81, 82, 91, 169, 326 Fergusson, J. D. 142 Fergusson, Sir James 292n Fessio, Joseph 179 Finke, Anne-Kathrin 146, 147, 156, 157 Finkelstein, David 175 Finlay, R. J. 289 Fitzsimons, John H. 309 Flint, Robert 68–9, 73, 106–8, 113, 116, 117 Forbes, Alexander Penrose 5, 6 Forbes, George Hay 5, 6, 10 Forrest, David W. 28–9, 32 Forrester, Duncan 59, 71, 116, 117, 120, 212, 309 Forrester, Isabel 120 Forrester, Margaret 323, 325, 330 Forsyth, P. T. 29–30, 32, 35–47, 133, 139, 140, 141, 142, 154, 165, 336, 337, 339 Foster, Roy 10n Fowler, Florence Jewel see Baillie, Florence Jewel Frank, Franz Hermann Reinhold 21, 125 Franz, Adolph 4 Fraser, Ian M. 254, 256 Fraser, Liam 327 Fuller, Peter 139 Fyfe, Elizabeth 251 Fyfe, Walter 251 Gairdner, William Temple of Cairo 51, 52n Galloway, Kathy 299

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Garvie, Alfred E. 184 Gavin, John F. 269 Gay, Doug 300 Geddes, Patrick 11, 12, 13 George V, King 111 George, David Lloyd 111 Geß, Wolfgang Friedrich 21, 24, 25–6, 32 Gibb, James 209 Gibbon, Edward 207 Gibson, Frank 322 Gifford, Douglas 277 Gifford, Lord Adam 94–103 Gilbert, Hugh 310 Gillies, Hugh Cameron 3 Gillies, William 262 Godet, Frédéric 28 Godin, Henri 245 Gogarten, Friedrich 186, 218 Gollock, Georgina 74 Gordon, Douglas 143 Gordon, James M. 36n, 45 Gore, Charles 28, 72, 334, 336 Graham, Billy 242, 248 Graham, Lillias 252 Green, Geoffrey 179–81, 187 Gregor Smith, Ronald see Smith, Ronald Gregor Gribben, Crawford 271n, 274 Gummer, Selwyn 47n Gunn, Neil M. 224 Gunton, Colin 46n, 238 Haakon VI, King of Norway 120 Haldane, James 53, 54 Haldane, John 96n Haldane, Robert 53 Hamann, J. G. 214 Hamilton, Sir William 190, 191, 195 Hamilton, William (radical theologian) 348 Handy, Robert T. 193 Harnack, Adolf 71, 209, 210 Hart, Francis Russell 275 Hart, Maidie 323, 324 Hart, Trevor 142 Harvey, James 175n Harvey, John 250–2 Harvey, Molly 251 Hastings, James 177, 184, 186 Hay, Jane 12 Hazlett, Ian 326 Hearn, Jonathan 295, 300 Hegel, G. W. F. 27, 39, 46, 79, 81, 198, 221 see also Hegelianism Heidegger, Martin 161, 162, 222, 223, 224, 305, 352 Heim, Karl 214

Henderson, G. D. 292 Henderson, George 10, 11 Henderson, Hamish 224 Henderson, Ian 155, 162, 253, 348 Hendry, George S. 151 Hengel, Martin 180 Hengstenberg, Ernst Wilhelm 183 Hepburn, Anne 324, 325 Hermelink, Heinrich 125 Heron, Alasdair 20, 348–9 Herrmann, Wilhelm 31, 61, 147, 149, 150, 153, 161, 163, 166 van den Heuvel, Albert 249 Hewat, Elizabeth 330 Hick, John 84n, 168 Highet, John 244, 245, 248n, 249 Hill, George 58, 59 Hirsch, Emanuel 27 Hodge, Charles 206 Hodges, H. A. 122 Hodgson, Leonard 127 von Hofmann, Johann Christian Konrad 21 Hogg, Alfred George 51, 60, 61 Hogg, James 276, 284 Holbein, Hans the Younger 143 Holloway, Richard 252 Holyoake, G. J. 219 Home, Henry, Lord Kames 133 Hood, Adam 89 Hopkins, C. Howard 67, 70 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 278, 281 Horton, Douglas 147 Hoskyns, Edwyn 61, 151, 339 Howson, Peter 143 Huebner, Hans 180 von Hügel, Baron Friedrich 74, 185, 334 Hughes, Gerard 312 Hulbert, Alastair 213 Hume, David 98, 101, 133, 207 Humphrey, Christopher 197 Hunsinger, George 229, 239 Hunt, Holman 141 Hunter, Archibald M. 37 Hutcheson, Francis 133, 135n Hutchinson, Roger 11 Hyde, Douglas 4n Ignatius of Antioch 310 Inge, W. R. 210 Inglis, John 58 Irenaeus 228, 229, 305 Jack, Alison 271n, 272 Jack, Isla 11

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   Jaki, Stanley 90, 94, 96–8, 100, 104 James II, King 295 James, William 95, 103 Jaspers, Karl 214, 224 Jefferies, Richard 216 Jenkins, Robert 271, 275–8, 281, 284–5 John of the Cross, St 312 John Paul II, Pope 303, 307, 311 John XXIII, Pope 307 Johnston, Bill 323 Johnston, John 205 Jolly, William 2 Jones, Bernard E. 96 Jones, Burne 141 Jones, Sir Henry 98, 99, 139 Joyce, James 260 Kafka, Franz 224 Kaftan, Julius 42, 61, 153 Kalley, Robert Reid 52, 53 Kalogera, Lucy Shephard 10n Kant, Immanuel 184, 195, 337, 351 Karlstadt, Andreas 132 Keddie, John 206 Keller, Adolf 147 Kerr, Fergus 303, 304 Ketcham, Charles B. 129, 130n Kierkegaard, Søren 150, 155, 168, 214, 215, 216, 219, 222, 224, 350, 353, 355 Kilpatrick, T. B. 200 Klempa, William 191 Klinefelter, David S. 238 Knox, John 132, 136, 205, 206, 229, 276, 294, 296 Kraemer, Hendrick 243 Kreitzer, Larry 272 Küng, Hans 255 Lachman, David C. 181 Lamont, Daniel 227 Lang, Andrew 97 Lang, John Marshall 108, 109, 110, 113 Lauder, Robert Scott 138 Lawrence, D. H. 120 Laws, Robert 52 Leerssen, Joep 14 Legge, James 51, 52n, 53, 59 Lehman, Paul 120 Leo XIII, Pope 307 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 183 Levinas, Emmanuel 305 Levison, Mary 328, 329, 330 Lewis, Alan 324 Lewis, C. Day 224 Lewis, John Wren 234

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Liebner, Theodor Albert 21 Lieu, Judith 180 Lindsay, Lord Alexander 120, 138 Lindsay, T. M. 36 Livingstone, Agnes 53 Livingstone, David 52, 53, 57, 59, 60 Livingstone, Neil 53 Locke, John 84, 133 Logan, Anne 328 O’Loughlin, Tom 267 Love, John 52, 53 Lovegrove, Deryck W. 55 Low, Mary 261 Luckhurst, Roger 277 Luecke, Gottfried Christian Friedrich 183 Luscombe, Edward 333 Lusk, Mary see Levison, Mary Luther, Martin 19, 124, 132, 150, 155, 186, 218 see also Lutheranism Lyall, Francis 288n, 289, 291, 293, 297 Lyell, Charles 194 Macaulay, A. B. 150 Macbain, Alexander 8 MacBean, Mary Frances 4–7 McCaig, Norman 224 McCleery, Alistair 175 MacColl, Allan W. 9 McConnachie, John 146–50, 151, 153, 158 McCord, James 127 McCormack, Bruce L. 165n, 232 McCosh, James 190–1 McCulloch, Horatio 136 McCulloch, Marjory Palmer 289 McCulloch, Thomas 192, 194 McCurdy, Leslie 35n MacDiarmid, Hugh 289 McDonald, Allan 10–12 Macdonald, Finlay A. J. 322, 325, 328 Macdonald, Murdo 11, 12, 13, 142 McEldowney, Dennis 213 McEnhill, Peter 169 MacFhionnlaigh, Fearghas 299 MacGilleMhìcheil, Alasdair see Carmichael, Alexander McGrath, Alister E. 151, 153–7, 228, 231, 232, 239, 352, 356 MacGregor, James 206, 207 McIntosh, Alistair 268 McIntosh, Esther 87n, 89, 90 MacIntyre, Alasdair 103, 142, 143 McIntyre, John 161, 166, 168, 187, 211, 348, 354, 355–7 Mackay, Alexander 52, 54

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Mackay, J. W. H. 54 Mackay, John Alexander 52 McKay, Johnston 69 Mackay, Marina 284 McKenna, Scott S. 79n Mackenzie, John 52 McKerrow, W. R. (Elizabeth) 341 Mackey, James 260–3, 267, 269, 305, 355 Mackie, Robert 253–4 McKillop, A. B. 190 MacKinnon, Donald 9, 39, 47, 122, 168, 179, 333, 336–44 Mackinnon, Sir William 60 Mackintosh, H. R. 28, 30–3, 37, 81, 82, 119, 121, 146, 150–3, 154, 156, 158, 161, 162–6, 167, 169, 170, 173, 183, 184, 186, 210, 227, 228, 351–2, 353 Mackintosh, Robert 37 McLaren, James 205 MacLaren, William 200 Macleod, Donald (Glasgow minister) 108–10 Macleod, Donald (theologian) 265 MacLeod, George 71, 211, 245, 248, 261 MacLeod, James Lachlan 13 Macleod, Norman 106, 107, 206 Macmillan, Duncan 135, 136, 138 McMillan, James 312 Macmurray, John 79, 86–91, 103 Macnab, Francis 212 MacNairn, A. Stuart 52, 54 MacNeil, James 304 MacNicol, Nicol 51, 60 MacNicol, William 318 McPake, J. L. 146, 149, 150, 151, 153, 155, 156 MacPhail, J. R. N. 4 Macquarrie, Alan 268 Macquarrie, John 71, 161, 162, 165, 169–73, 223, 259, 260, 266, 268, 269, 348, 352 McTaggart, William 136 Mahoney, Jack 306 Malthus, Thomas 59 Mander, W. G. 80, 81, 91 Mann, Thomas 216 Mannheim, Karl 122 Manson, T. W. 211 Manson, William 211 Marcus, Joel 180 Margaret, St 291 Markus, Gilbert 262–3, 265, 268, 305 Marshall, I. Howard 41 Martensen, Hans Lassen 21, 23, 24, 27, 183 Martyn, J. Louis 180 Marwick, Ernest Walker 278 Mascall, Eric 338

Mason, Roger Matheson, Alexander Scott 111, 112, 113 Matheson, Peter 204, 207, 213 Maule, Graham 268 Maxwell, Ian D. 58 Meek, Donald 2n, 181, 262–7, 269 Meek, Jeff 320, 322 Melville, Andrew 294 Meyer, H. A. W. 176 Michalski, S. 132n Michelangelo 138, 140, 141 Michonneau, Georges 250 Middleton, Tim 272 Miller, Hugh 193, 205 Miller, William of Madras 51, 59 Milligan, William 66, 70 Mills, Kevin 272 Milne, William 52, 53 Mitton, C. L. 181 Moberly, R. C. 40 Moberly, Walter 122 Moffat, Robert of Kuruman 52, 53 Moffatt, James 36, 37 Molnar, Paul D. 228, 233, 235, 238, 239 Moltmann, Jürgen 336 Moody, D. L. 67, 70, 132n Morgan, D. Densil 61, 146–51, 153–5, 352 Morgan, Edwin 224 Morgan, Robert 171, 172 Morison, James 54 Morley, Georgina 171 Morrison, Ewan 143n Morton, Ralph 245, 248, 251 Mott, John R. 70, 71, 73 Mozley, John K. 37 Mueller, Julius 183 Muir, Edwin 216, 224, 278 Mullan, David George 271n Muller, Max 97 Mumm, Susan 6 Mungo, St 291 Murdoch, Rupert 179 Murison, Barbara C. 193 Murphy, Francesca 307 Murray, Douglas 14, 297 Murray, John Clark 195–6 Murray, Les 203 Murry, John Middleton 122 Nairn, Tom 297 Napier, Lord 8–10 Natorp, Paul Gerhard 125 Newbigin, J. E. L. 90 Newby, Andrew G. 9

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   Newell, John Philip 269 Newlands, George 130, 168, 350 Newman, John Henry 45, 130, 303 Newton, Sir Isaac 98 Nichol, Frank 211 Nicoll, W. Robertson 44 Niebuhr, Reinhold 120, 121, 125, 211 Niemoeller, Martin 120, 126 Nietzsche, Friedrich 221 Ninian, St 291 Nitsch, C. J. 183 Nockles, Peter B. 5, 6 Norquay, Glenda 273, 275, 277 Oldham, Joseph Houldsworth 52, 71–2, 73, 74, 76, 122 Oliver, Simon 303 Oman, John 79, 82–6, 91 Orr Macdonald, Lesley 340 Orr, James 60, 184 Orr, Lesley 299, 328 Orwell, George 284 Osiander, C. F. 45 Otto, Rudolf 335 Owen, Alex 10 Owen, John 176 Owen, Wilfred 47 Page, Ruth 212 Paolozzi, Sir Eduardo 143 Parsons, Coleman O. 273 Paterson, William P. 28, 76, 107–8 Paul VI, Pope 307 Paul, St 31, 41, 43, 112, 150, 171, 180, 211, 272, 339, 342 Peat, John 317 Pelagius 262–4, 267 Perry, William 5, 6 Pfister, Lauren F. 59 Philip, John 52, 53, 59, 60 Piggin, Stuart 52, 57, 59 Pittock, Murray 11 Plantinga, Alvin 103 Pócs, Éva 4n Pointon, Marcia 138 Polanyi, Michael 156 Porter, Andrew N. 59 Porter, Noah 191 Poussin, Nicholas 137 Primrose, J. B. 5 Pringle-Pattison, Andrew Seth 61, 98, 99, 103, 199 Purcell, Michael 305 Purdy, Vernon L. 172 Purves, Andrew 164

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Pusey, Edward Bouverie 176 Raeburn, Henry 135 Rahner, Karl 70, 127, 222, 231, 304, 306, 312 Rainy, Robert 197, 208 Räisänen, Heikki 180 Ralls-MacLeod, Karen 261–2 Ramsey, Michael 336 Ranken, Arthur 5, 6 Rashdall, Hastings 44 Ratzinger, Joseph 179, 303 Reardon, Bernard M. G. 69 Redman, Robert R. 153, 165 Rees, Brian A. 14 Reid, G. T. H. 321 Reid, J. K. S. 155, 180, 347 Reid, Thomas 59, 102, 133, 134, 135, 190, 191, 195, 207 Renan, Ernest 4, 14 Renwick, Chris 12 Ricardo, David 59 Richard of St Victor 236 Riches, John 179, 333, 340–3, 344 Rickards, Edith C. 6 Ó Ríordáin, Seán 260 Ritschl, Albrecht 28, 29, 35, 41, 61, 68, 69 see also Ritschlianism Roberts, Alasdair 11 Roberts, David 137, 141 Roberts, R. H. 146, 150, 151, 157 Robertson, Frederick Lockhart 109, 110 Robinson, John A. T. 234, 318, 338, 348 Roby, William 53 Rodd, Cyril 181 Ross, Andrew 54, 60, 350 Ross, Anthony 299 Ross, John 52 Ross, Kenneth R. 13, 57 Rothe, Richard 183 Rouse, Ruth 66, 67, 74 Roxborogh, John W. 210 Rubens, Peter Paul 136–7, 140 Ruskin, John 139 Russell, Bertrand 123 Russell, Richard Rankin 280 Rutherford, Samuel 206, 294 Salmond, William 207, 209 Sanders, Andrew 6 Schäfer, Rolf 184, 186 Schleiermacher, F. D. E. 27, 31, 123, 150, 153, 163, 164, 170, 183, 184, 186, 187, 209, 227, 234, 353 Schlink, Edmund 127 Schmidt, Martin 27

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Schürer, Emil 188 Scott, E. F. 163, 170 Scott, Sir Walter 272 Scott, Tom 271 Searle, G. R. 111 Seddon, Thomas 141 Sell, Alan P. F. 41, 150 Shanks, Norman 322, 326 Sharpe, Eric J. 54, 61 Shaw, D. W. D. 348 Shaw, Geoff 251, 252 Shaw, Michael 11 Sheldrake, Philip 261 Sim, David 180 Simpson, James Young 120 Simpson, Patrick Carnegie 208 Skene, Felicia Mary Frances 5, 6, 8 Skene, Sir George of Fintray 133 Skene, William Forbes 6, 8 Slessor, Mary 52, 56 Sloan, Douglas 101n Small, Annie Hunter 52 Smith, Adam 59, 101 Smith, Donald 107, 114 Smith, George Adam 60, 209 Smith, Ronald Gregor 155, 186, 214–25, 242, 348–52, 354 Smith, W. Robertson 82, 197, 209 Snow, Charles Percy 104, 105 von Soden, Hermann 125 Sonderegger, Katherine 82 Spark, Muriel 281–5 Spear, Margaret Edith 232 Speer, Robert E. 73 Spencer, Herbert 12 Spurgeon, C. H. 36 Stamp, Gavin 139 Stanley, A. P. 207 Stanley, Brian 58, 59, 61, 70, 73 Stanley, Timothy 232 Steegman, John 138n Stephan, Horst 27 Stephen, Sir George 191 Stevenson, R. L. 224, 271–9, 281, 284–5 Stewart, Alexander 7 Stewart, Colin 311 Stewart, Dugald 135 Stewart, J. S. 150 Stewart, James 52 Stiùbhart, Domhnall Uilleam 3, 4, 8 Stokes, George 97 Storrar, William F. 212, 244, 255, 299–300 Strauss, David Friedrich 20, 21, 209 Streeter, B. H. 199

Strong, Charles 207–8 Strong, Rowan 5 Stumpf, Carl 35 Sykes, Stephen W. 46n, 147, 150, 151, 156, 158 Taylor, Charles 103, 294 Taylor, John Randolph 42, 46 Taylor, Maurice 309 Temple, William 336 Templeton, Elizabeth 212, 254, 326, 331 Tennyson, Alfred 139, 209 Terry, Justyn 46n Tertullian 44 Theunissen, Michael 222 Thiemann, Ronald 238 Tholuck, August 183 Thomasius, Gottfried 21, 24, 25, 26, 29, 31, 32 Thomson, Alexander “Greek” 138–9 Thomson, D. P. 247 Thomson, G. T. 151, 186–7 Thomson, James (Diego) 52, 54 Thomson, John of Duddingston 135–8 van Til, Cornelius 155 Tillich, Paul 126, 211, 215, 218–9, 234, 288, 357 Titius, Arthur 61 Todd, Margo 133, 294n, 295 Torrance, Iain 228 Torrance, James B. 347 Torrance, Thomas F. 61, 146, 150, 151, 153, 154–8, 178, 180, 186, 215, 227–39, 242, 300, 329, 347–54, 356 Traherne, Thomas 216 Traub, Friedrich 183 Trethowan, I. 90 Turnbull, George 134 Turnbull, Ronald 90 Turner, Jenny 282 Tylor, E. B. 97 Uro, Risto 180 Ursic, Elizabeth 325 Veitch, John 191 Verter, Bradford J. M. 10 Victoria, Queen 207 Vidler, Alec 122 Visser ‘t Hooft, W. A. 214 Visser, John 200 Waddell, Rutherford 209 Wallace, Gavin 277 Wallace, William (translator) 198 Walls, Andrew F. 53, 55, 56, 62 Walters, Jennifer 10

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   Warfield, B. B. 165 Warner, Fred B. 271, 274 Watson, David 106, 107, 110, 112, 113, 114 Watson, John 196–7, 199, 200 Watt, Alison 143 Watt, D. E. R. 292n Watts, John 304 Waugh, Alexander 53 Webb, Clement C. J. 334 Webber, Bill 251 Weiss, Bernhard 185 Wendt, Hans Hinrich 185–6 Westcott, B. F. 41–2 Westerholm, Martin 232n White, John 114, 115, 247 Whittaker, Ruth 282, 283 Wilkie, David 136–8 Williams, Rowan 340 Wilson, J. M. 41–2

Wilson, John of Bombay 51, 52n, 53 Wilson, Woodrow 289 Witherspoon, John 190 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 303, 356 Wittlake, Käthe 215 Wood, Ralph C. 139n Wooding, Jonathan 267 Wordsworth, William 136, 139, 216 Wormald, Patrick 290 Wright, David F. 181 Wright, Kenyon 299 Wright, N. T. 171 Wu, Albert Monshan 62 Yates, Nigel 138n Yeats, W. B. 10n, 224 Young, Andrew 224 Zwingli, Huldrych or Ulrich 19–20, 132

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Index of Subjects abortion 317 angels: in Celtic spirituality 261 in literature 2, 261, 281, 282, 283 anti-Catholicism 244, 265 see also Catholicism, Roman apologetics 69, 91, 158, 348 Arbuthnott Missal 5 architecture 132, 139, 140 art: as reflective activity 88 Celtic 12 in idealist thought 81 in Scottish religious life 132–43 its place in history 108 theological reflections on 133–4, 199, 225 atheism 139, 207, 234, 244, 276, 277 atonement: doctrine of 31–2, 37, 38–47, 127–8, 161, 163–4, 170, 206, 207, 208–9, 230, 233, 237–8, 239, 264, 306, 335, 339, 353 extent of 54, 155, 207 Australasia 180, 181, 203–13, 269 Baillie Commission 115–17, 244 Baptist Union of Scotland 253 Baptists 54, 57, 264, 265 see also Baptist Union of Scotland Barthianism 119, 122, 149, 151, 153, 155–7, 187, 238, 300, 327, 349, 350, 354, 355 see also Barth, Karl Bible see Scripture; Bible translation Bible translation 52 biblical criticism 13, 60, 61, 67, 68, 69, 71, 79, 80, 162, 206, 207, 208, 209, 338, 340 biblical theology 69, 128, 175, 184, 333, 347 bishops: possible inclusion in the Kirk 299 Roman Catholic 307–9 Calvinism: and sexual morality 319, 322 “folk Calvinism” 205, 213 hyper-Calvinism 230, 237, 238 in rational form 58 influence on literature 271–6, 281

its different strands 200 its distinctives 65 its place in Scottish religious life 186 ongoing influence on individuals 54, 57, 139, 298, 353 rejection of 121, 129, 137, 142, 210, 227, 281 Canada 70, 119, 120, 121, 190–201 Carmina Gadelica 1–5, 7, 10–15, 260, 268 Catholic theology 303–14 see also Catholicism, Roman Catholicism, Roman 3, 6, 8, 32, 42, 55, 65, 68, 71, 73, 74, 102, 136, 142, 179, 180, 184, 187, 192, 193, 204, 205, 218, 230, 231, 242, 243, 244, 253, 254, 260, 261, 264, 265, 271, 273, 274, 277–8, 281–2, 284, 292, 293, 296, 297, 298, 299, 326 see also anti-Catholicism; Catholic theology Celtic Revival movement 2, 3, 4, 10–15, 212, 250, 259–69, 305 Celtic Scotland (Carmichael) 8 charismatic renewal 312 charms 1, 2, 6, 7, 8, 12, 15 Christology: Chalcedonian 20, 25, 29, 30, 32, 39, 71, 128, 161, 162, 163, 165–7, 169–73, 239, 336, 351 kenotic 19–33, 39, 127, 162, 165, 167, 169, 334–6, 339, 341, 343, 344 Church of England 55, 61, 122, 134, 136, 192, 230, 299, 318, 320, 333, 338 Church of Scotland: its Articles Declaratory 297 its Book of Common Order 212, 268 its decline 331 its dominant theological outlook 348 its missionary efforts 53, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61 its peak in membership 248n its (former) social pre-eminence 102 as voice and conscience of the nation 321 ecumenical conversations with the Church of England 299 influence of Barth upon 158 see also Barthianism; Barth, Karl ordination of women in see women, ordination of relations with the Roman Catholic Church 231, 309

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   Scoto-Catholic reform movement in 14 see also Scoto-Catholics Broad Church party 66, 208 High Church party 66 moderate party 58, 205, 208 Church Service Society 14, 66 Churches of Christ 253 Congregationalism 35, 53, 139, 253 Croall Lectures 66, 70, 96, 97, 151 Declaration of Arbroath (1320) 290–2 Devil, the 40, 274, 278, 279, 282, 283n diaspora, Scottish 120, 190–213 Disruption, the (1843) 13, 14, 64, 102, 182, 193, 203, 204, 205, 207, 209, 297 divorce 317–21, 326, 328 ecumenical movement see ecumenism ecumenism 53, 55, 61, 64–77, 119, 122, 129, 155, 211, 212, 230–2, 242, 243, 244, 246, 247, 253–4, 256, 293, 298, 299, 304, 205, 308, 310, 314, 323, 330, 347, 348 education: encouraged by churches 107, 109, 112, 176, 204, 207, 209, 293, 299 in the overseas missionary movement 57–60 moral 100–4 England, relationship with 57, 61, 119, 138–9, 142, 192, 204, 291, 292, 294–6 see also Church of England; independence (political) Enlightenment 23, 51, 59, 60, 81, 101, 133, 176, 186, 218, 269, 296 episcopalianism see Scottish Episcopal Church eucharistic theology 19–21, 129, 231, 281, 308, 310, 311, 338 Evangelical Alliance 65 evangelicalism 4, 14, 52, 55, 87, 193, 209, 264 see also liberal evangelicalism Expository Times 155, 177, 181, 184 faith, nature of 84–5 feminist theology 323–5 filioque 26, 157, 228 First World War or Great War 71, 74, 87, 95, 100, 114, 121, 177, 186, 199, 200, 209, 210, 289, 298, 333, 344 “folk Calvinism” see Calvinism forgiveness 31, 38, 45, 88, 89, 127, 128, 140, 222, 234n, 321, 341 see also atonement, doctrine of Free Church of Scotland 9, 13, 14, 15, 22, 28, 30, 31, 36, 52, 54, 55, 58, 61, 64, 69, 111, 176, 179, 182, 190, 265, 297 Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland 13, 54

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freedom (human moral) 79, 82, 84–8, 91 fundamentalism 61, 123, 154, 210, 227 Gaelic language 1, 3, 6, 9, 11, 12n, 13, 14, 30, 206, 260, 263, 264, 268, 276, 290, 299, 309 Gaelic Tract Society 5 gender 235, 317–19, 323–8 see also women German theology 60, 61, 76, 184 Gifford Lectures 87, 94–105, 122, 151, 154, 187, 197, 340 Glasgow University 36, 95, 97, 102, 103, 108, 210, 212, 216, 262, 268, 304, 312, 340, 349 God: doctrine of 93, 157, 173, 216, 217, 223, 229, 230, 312, 333 as Trinity 66, 127, 129, 168–9, 210, 211, 228, 229, 231, 235, 236, 237, 239n, 324, 334, 336 his attributes (in general) 20, 21, 24–9, 32, 39, 97, 134, 351 see also God: his holiness; God: his love; God: his sovereignty; God: his omnipotence his holiness 24, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43 his love 24, 25, 26, 27, 29–30, 32, 36, 38, 41–5, 56, 85, 89, 123, 127, 227–8, 229, 230, 235, 236, 237–8, 310, 312, 327, 335, 339, 340, 356 his omnipotence 20, 24, 26, 28, 30, 39, 335 his sovereignty 163, 292 as suffering see passibilism (divine) Gorbals Group 251–2, 257 grace 36, 40, 44, 47, 65, 84, 85, 89, 122, 127, 129, 147, 167–8, 169, 172, 220, 221, 227n, 228–30, 233, 236, 237, 238–9, 263, 283, 284, 304, 305, 341, 343 Hegelianism 139, 184 see also Hegel, G. W. F. higher criticism see biblical criticism historical criticism see biblical criticism historical Jesus research 19, 21, 167 see also Jesus Christ: his humanity Holy Spirit 30, 46, 148, 156, 229, 231n, 232, 235, 237, 317, 324 see also pneumatology homosexuality 320–7 hymnody 1, 2, 7, 9, 10, 14, 207, 212, 268, 325 iconography 273 idealism (philosophical) 42, 79, 91, 196, 199, 207, 337, 343 see also Hegelianism independence (Scottish political) 289–91, 294, 299–300 see also nationalism Iona Community 71, 211, 212, 245, 248, 250–1, 261–2, 268–9, 330–1 Ireland 5, 133n, 137, 267, 290–1, 294, 295, 298, 308

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372

  

Jesuits 278, 306, 312 Jesus Christ: his crucifixion 45, 47, 143, 171, 231, 338, 339, 343 see also atonement, doctrine of his divinity 163 see also Christology his humanity 25, 162, 163, 166, 167, 170, 234, 334 see also Christology his person 31, 127, 162, 164, 167, 352 see also Christology his resurrection 20, 25, 47, 163, 164, 168, 171, 226, 230, 232, 234, 236, 255, 339 his self-awareness 334–5 kenotic theology see Christology: kenotic King’s College, Aberdeen 100n Kingdom of God 45, 56, 67, 68, 69, 71, 75, 106–7, 110–13, 115–6, 148, 184, 186, 341 Lausanne Movement 254 liberal evangelicalism 200, 208, 327, 353 liberalism (theological) 14, 122, 142, 162, 187, 207, 211, 227 Life and Work (magazine) 325 Life and Work movement 76, 112 literature 12n, 198, 206, 216, 218, 224, 225, 260, 263, 271–85, 333, 340 see also novels; poetry Lord’s Supper see eucharistic theology Lutheranism 19–22, 24, 186 Lux Mundi 334, 336–7 marriage, theology of 303, 309, 317–20, 325–8, 320 means of grace 204 see also grace metaphysics 27, 42, 44, 81, 90, 97, 104, 105, 158, 162, 165, 197, 221, 222, 223, 337, 351, 352 mission: and other religions 56 in Scotland 242–56 missio Dei 55, 244, 255 role of missionary societies 52, 55, 56, 73 theology of 56–62 modernity 37, 161, 217, 219, 221, 329, 344 Motherhood of God 324 music 132, 140, 212, 261, 262, 312 national identity 288–300 nationalism 224, 288–90, 297–300 see also patriotism; independence (Scottish political) natural science see science, natural natural theology 68, 90, 94, 95, 97, 99, 100, 102, 104, 149, 152, 156, 158, 191, 238, 239, 267, 350, 351, 353

New College, Edinburgh 13, 31, 59, 61, 122, 150, 151, 161, 179, 181, 186, 206, 209, 210, 212, 215, 227, 242, 261, 288, 305, 329, 330, 350, 355, 356 novels 6, 8, 143n, 198, 209, 272, 274n, 275–7, 280–2, 284 see also literature Oxford Movement 5, 6, 66 passibilism (divine) 333–4, 336 patriotism 288 see also nationalism philosophy see Scottish Common Sense Realism; idealism; realism Pitsligo Press 5 pneumatology 157, 354, 356 see also Holy Spirit poetry 14, 121, 140, 206, 216, 218, 224, 262, 273, 278 see also literature postmodernity 217, 255 poverty 110, 111, 113, 252 preaching 35, 36, 52, 58, 107, 148, 149, 152, 246, 248, 249, 255, 280, 347 predestination, doctrine of 227, 230, 233, 238, 276 progress, belief in 80 providence 57, 58, 80, 133, 280, 292, 294–6, 310 see also God: his sovereignty publishing see T&T Clark; Pitsligo Press rationalism 182, 194, 269 realism (in art) 141 realism (philosophical) 227, 233, 277, 337, 338, 343 reason 68, 80, 91, 124, 227, 238, 304, 306, 310, 338, 339, 344, 357 religions, other 51, 52, 73, 74, 81, 89, 123, 170, 196, 201, 262, 267, 335 revelation, doctrine of 24, 27, 41, 45, 75, 80–2, 84, 91, 147–9, 151–3, 155–6, 158, 164, 168, 199, 200, 201, 207, 222–3, 231, 232, 235, 238, 239, 305, 306, 307, 335, 336, 351, 352, 354, 355, 357 revival, Celtic see Celtic revival revivalism 209, 242, 244 see also revivals, religious revivals, religious 13, 111, 116 see also revivalism Ritschlianism 42, 44, 61, 71, 149, 150, 153, 162, 167, 184 sacraments 20, 128–9, 229, 254, 278, 310, 311, 318, 329, 337 see also eucharistic theology science (natural) 82, 84, 99, 239 Scoto-Catholics 14, 66, 138 see also Church of Scotland: High Church party

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   Scots Confession (1560) 66, 292 Scottish Church Society 66 Scottish Common Sense Realism 190–1, 195–6, 200, 207, 353 Scottish Episcopal Church 253, 333 Scottish Journal of Theology 154, 180, 236 Scottish National Party (SNP) 289, 299–301 Scottish Periodical 216, 217, 224–5 Scripture: criticism of see biblical criticism infallibility of 13, 206 inspiration of 69, 80, 183, 208 Second Vatican Council see Vatican II Second World War 47, 242, 243, 245, 256, 288, 298, 336, 337, 338 secularism 90, 219, 221, 247 see also secularization secularization 234, 248, 255 see also secularism seminaries, Roman Catholic 313–4 sermons see preaching sex 317–8, 324–5, 327 see also divorce; homosexuality; marriage social theology 68, 106–17, 306, 344 Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) 58 St Mary’s College, St Andrews 130 Student Christian Movement (SCM) 67, 211, 216 T&T Clark 22, 175–88, 260 “Tell Scotland” movement 245, 247–9, 253–4, 256 Templeton Foundation 95, 228

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theologies of the cross see atonement, doctrine of theology of identity 342–3 ubiquity 120 see also eucharistic theology unification (1929) 77 United Free Church of Scotland 28, 297 United Original Secession Church 253 United Presbyterian Church 28, 52, 54, 56, 61, 82, 111, 138, 208, 209, 297 United Reformed Church 11 United States of America 55, 78, 95, 119, 121, 147, 177, 190, 269 Vatican II 180, 231, 242, 254, 290, 303, 304, 308, 309, 311, 312, 313, 314, 318 voluntary movements 67–8 Westminster Confession of Faith see Westminster Standards Westminster Standards 13, 65, 79, 206, 207, 208, 209, 230, 295, 319, 353 women: equality in society 116, 324 ordination of 324, 326, 328–30 World Communion of Reformed Churches 254 World Council of Churches (WCC) 54, 64, 71, 76, 120, 122, 211, 212, 242, 243, 245, 254, 290, 323, 324 World Missionary Conference (1910) 52 Young Men’s and Women’s Christian Associations (YMCA and YWCA) see voluntary movements