REC Home*** Theological Forum Theological Forum Vol. XXIII, No. 4, December 1995
REFORMED THEOLOGY IN SCOTLAND * 1
T.A. Hart
"Theology is created in Germany, corrupted in America and corrected in Scotland." This oft-cited remark from one of Scotland's own greatest theological sons was doubtless uttered with tongue firmly in cheek when it was made in the early part of this century. Yet many part truths are spoken in jest, and it may well be that H.R. Mackintosh's discerning wit gave expression to some part truths which are equally applicable in our own day. It is probably the case, for example, that within the British Isles it is in Scotland that Faculties of Divinity are to be found in which currents of continental thought have had a more obvious and formative influence than the Anglo Saxon philosophical influences so evident elsewhere. One recent commentator suggests that the historical and ongoing close liaison between Kirk and university faculties, and the responsibilities placed upon the latter for training men and women for ordination, serves to ensure a theology rooted in the real pastoral and pedagogical concerns of church life, rather than one orientated wholly towards the "untramelled interest in pure thought" so characteristic of some purely academic approaches to the subject, and may lend to Scottish theology a recognisably "corrective and stabilizing" character by comparison with other types.1If such sweeping generalizations are in any way appropriate, however, it remains true that in Scotland today, as elsewhere, there is considerable diversity of substance and method in the theology of the Reformed tradition, some of which would certainly not recognise itself in any of the remarks made thus far. This article will be concerned with identifying some of the different trends in Reformed theology in Scotland, and placing them in an historical context. The first section will say something about the nature of Reformed theology and its concerns in the three hundred years following the Scottish Reformation itself, the second will discuss its development in the early part of this century, and the final section will attempt a brief survey of the contemporary scene.
1. FROM REFORMATION TO REVOLUTION (1560-1910)
The attempts made by the established Catholic Church to crush the earliest hints of Reformation in sixteenth century Scotland had two notable effects. First, the effective martyrdoms of such men as Patrick Hamilton (1528) and George Wishart (1546) served to stir up ever more public interest in the cause for which they were burned at the stake; and second, it drove others with significant Protestant sympathies to the continent of Europe where they established links with the Reformation churches, received theological education, and imbibed the direct influence of such characters as Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Beza and others. In fact it was the Swiss Reformers in particular who exercised a formative influence over the Scottish Reformation. Wishart, Knox and Melville all spent time in Switzerland, and the latter two returned to Scotland with the theology and civil structures of Calvin's Geneva firmly in mind as a model for the reformation of the Scottish Church.
When Reformation finally arrived in 1559, therefore, its theology was identifiably Calvinistic in tone. The Scots Confession, drafted by John Knox and other Protestant leaders of the day and presented to the Scottish Parliament in August 1560, reflects this influence quite clearly. It emphasizes the themes of election and divine promise to a human race in which the imago dei has been utterly effaced by the sin of Adam. The incarnation, in which a "wonderful union" was established between the Godhead and our humanity, and from which "all our salvation springs and depends" resides on an eternal and immutable decree of God, who chose us in his Son before the foundation of the world, and who appointed Christ to be our head and brother, joining him to us "body of our body, flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone." For this reason he is fitted to stand in our place and to bear the punishment for our sins, making the only sacrifice which avails salvation for us (the Roman Mass being an aberration, and blasphemy against this), to clothe and cover our nakedness with his own righteousness, and to overcome death for our sakes in his resurrection, purchasing for us life and victory over evil. Thus we are loved by the Father in the very person of the Son, who is the only true Mediator of God to man and man to God. While the Confession does endorse a clear differentiation between the elect and the reprobate (and at one point hints that what may be thought to be common to both groups is apparently limited to their relation to God as Creator rather than Redeemer - see Chapter 8), it contains no developed teaching concerning a limited atonement, and the notion of a covenant of works preceding the covenant of grace (characteristic of the later Federal scheme of theology) is altogether absent from it. Significantly the doctrine of the Sacraments espoused in this document is one which denounces any receptionist or anabaptist reductionism, insisting that while the Roman error must also be rejected, nonetheless Baptism and the Lord's Supper are effective signs and seals of the grace extended to men and women by God in Jesus Christ, and the means of sealing and participation of that mystical union with Christ which is the ground and source of the Christian's hope and salvation. In all this the theology of Calvin himself is clear for all to see, complete with its key themes and many of its characteristic unresolved tensions.
The theology of the Scots Confession, then, may properly be termed a primitive Calvinism. Together with the Book of Order and the First Book of Discipline it was to shape the thinking of Reformed Christians for the best part of a century, including those of a covenanting mentality and many of those committed to the Episcopal tradition which, despite having originally been dispensed with in 1559, reemerged and co-existed uneasily with Presbyterian government from time to time within the church from 1572 until 1690. Yet a more extreme and logically consistent version of Calvinist thinking was already present in the Scottish tradition, and found able exponents in such men as Andres Melville and especially Robert Rollock (1555-1599). Rollock's Treatise on God's Effectual Calling departs from the specific teaching and overall theological orientation of both the Genevan Reformer and the Scots Confession by introducing the thought of a second covenant between God and humans alongside the covenant of grace; namely the covenant of works. This covenant, unlike the former, is grounded not in the actions or person of an objective Mediator, but rather in nature. It rests on the capacity of unfallen Adam to recognise the demands of the divine law and to adhere to them. All humans are under its jurisdiction, and all have in fact failed to keep it. Thus the necessity of a covenant of grace arises for those whom God wills to redeem from sin and its inevitable consequence in death. Thus all humans are related to God by law, but only some by grace; sin is against law in the first instance, and not against a gracious God who creates for fellowship. Furthermore, notwithstanding the alleged freeness of the covenant of grace (wrought by Christ for the elect), it is clear enough in Rollock's teaching on the matter that the faith which apprehends Christ as its Saviour is properly to be viewed as a condition of belonging to this covenant. This way of speaking, taken together with the insistence that Christians are still bound by the covenant of works (albeit not for ultimate salvation) and might reasonable expect to find themselves (under the Spirit's compulsion) more and more able to adhere to its demands, led naturally enought to what we might call a subject-centred rather than an object-centred orientation in religion.
Rollock's version of the Calvinist scheme, reminiscent as it is of Beza's, represents that general movement in Reformed theology at the time which saw the gradual petrification of Calvin's theology into a logically virtually flawless system, constructed with the doctrine of an eternal double predestination of the elect and the reprobate at its apex, and with the intellectual scaffolding provided by Aristotelian logic undergirding it. The result, as found for example in the renowned five points of the Synod of Dort (1618), is impressive in its formal structure, having all the mechanical precision of a baroque fugue, yet noticeably lacking in the warm evangelical and pastoral spirit that so pervades Calvin's own works. The rise of Federal theology within the explosive political setting of the seventeenth century generally, and in Scotland in particular, has been carefully catalogued and evaluated by James Torrance.2
Torrance suggests that the Federal scheme (which was in many ways precisely a `political theology') made a fundamental category mistake due in part to the popularity of the notion of foedus in contemporary political thinking to describe what were essentially contractual and bilateral agreements between individuals and groups in society. Thus, rather than the theological theme of covenant directing us to a unilateral and prevenient saving act on the part of God, it came to be thought of as a relationship which was conditioned on both sides. In the Federalism of Samuel Rutherford and David Dickson there are three such foedi to be discerned in the Ordo Salutis; the Covenant of Works between God and all human beings (Adam) whereby if a person keeps the law she may be granted eternal life by her Creator; the Covenant of Redemption made between the Father and the Son, whereby if the Son as a man fulfils the conditions of the Covenant of Works on behalf of the elect, then God will be gracious to them; and finally the Covenant of Grace whereby the elect are granted forgiveness, justification and sanctification on the condition of faith and repentance. In all three cases the model of foedus operating is clearly contractual, benefits following on from the fulfilment of conditions in each instance. This conditional logic is helpfully articulated in The Sum of Saving Knowledge, a small but significant document (penned it is usually thought by David Dickson and/or James Durham) which was habitually bound into early Scots copies of the Westminster Confession of 1647, the document which was formally adopted by the Kirk in 1648 as its "principal subordinate standard". The Confession itself is also Federalistic in its substance. While, however, it clearly employs a conditional notion of covenant at certain points, it also carefully avoids the suggestion that the Covenant of Grace itself is conditional upon our faith or repentance, speaking of these simply as necessary for all believers, but not the cause of forgiveness, which is to be located rather in God's free decision to be gracious. This is a view altogether more in line with the tenor of Calvin's thinking (see e.g. Institute III.1-2 on the relationship between repentance and faith) in which forgiveness is logically prior to faith, and faith to repentance.
The issues provoked by the conditional and legal emphases of Federal theology in Scotland came to a head in the early part of the eighteenth century with the so-called Marrow Controversy. The republication in Scotland of The Marrow of Modern Divinity by Englishman Edward Fisher,3
and the championing of its theological emphases by figures such as Thomas Boston of Ettrick, James Hog of Carnock and others, sparked a doctrinal crisis in Scottish theology. Fisher's book espoused the doctrines of the unconditional freeness of the gospel message, the universal scope of Christ's atoning work, and assurance as being of the essence of saving faith. These were doctrines all finding support in Calvin's teaching, and all defensible within the terms of Westminster theology; yet they were significantly at odds with the true heart of the Federal theology represented by Rollock, Rutherford, Dickson and others, and a row soon broke out which led to considerable division within the Kirk, the condemnation by the General Assembly of the theology of the Marrow in 1720 and 1722, and the eventual departure of many of its supporters at the Secession of 1733. Remarkably, the Church of Scotland had committed itself to the inherently unreformed view that the forgiving and justifying grace of God was conditioned by the human response of faith and repentance. A concern to clarify the boundaries of the community of the redeemed, and a fear of rampant antinomianism, had here led to a thoroughly subject-centered religiosity in Scottish Reformed theology, an emphasis which was ironically altogether at odds with the basic concerns of the Reformers themselves to root religion wholly in the objective grace of God in Jesus Christ.
Professor A.C. Cheyne has suggested that Scottish theology since the seventeenth century has been basically eliptical in orientation, the two foci of the elipse being the Scriptures of the Church and the framework for interpreting them provided by the Westminster Confession.4
It is certainly the case that the development of the Reformed theological tradition between the early eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries can be viewed as the story of a gradual assault upon Westminster theology, and more particularly the Federal Calvinist tradition which it represented, by intellectual and moral currents issuing directly out of or stimulated by the European Enlightenment. The formula of subscription drafted in 1711 required every Church of Scotland minister to declare allegiance to the theology of the Confession, a situation which remained unchanged until 1910 when a "conscience clause" was finally introduced. The intervening centuries were to see the Kirk's theology bend and buckle several times under the strain of fundamental doctrinal dissent.
The Marrow controversy proved to be a mild anticipatory salvo to a wholesale breach of the inner defences of Federal Calvinism in the writings of several major theologians within the Church of Scotland in the first half of the nineteenth centuries. Thomas Erskine, a layman, was perhaps the first to register in print his strong disagreements with the "orthodox" line. In a series of now sadly neglected writings he laid his axe firmly to the root of such doctrinal trees as limited atonement, double predestination, the conditional nature of faith, and to the whole intellectualist tendency of a certain brand of Scottish Calvinism with its stress, for example, on the "need to believe certain doctrines" in order to be saved. As a layman Erskine faced no challenge to his works from either Presbytery or the General Assembly. In the cases of John McLeod Campbell and Edward Irving, however, the Kirk was swift to exact disciplinary and punitive measures when they dared to challenge the established orthodoxy, and both were deposed from their charges. The formula of subscription, it was clear, could not be treated lightly. What is ironic is the fact, so clear with the advantage of hindsight, that all three men were concerned with reforming the Calvinist heritage rather than abandoning it in favour of the sort of theological liberalism that was already making comfortable headway on the continent. All three rooted their theology firmly in the teaching of the Scriptures, and none made any appeal to the autonomous authority of human reason and conscience as arbiters of theological truth. They believed Federal theology to be a betrayal of the gospel of Jesus Christ at several key points, and to contain elements that were rationally and morally incompatible not so much with a post Enlightenment worldview as with the logic of biblical theology. This is clear from the following words of McLeod Campbell concerning the inflexibility of the Kirk in his own case, and its arrogation to itself of an almost Papal authority: "When the Church says to both ministers and people, 'This is my Confession of Faith: if anything in it appear to you inconsistent with the Word of God, I am prepared to go with you to the Word of God to settle the matter,' then does the Church speak according to her place. But if instead of this she says, 'This I have fixed to be the meaning of the Word of God and you cannot take any other meaning without being excluded from my communion; and to entitle me so to exclude you I do not need to prove to you that what you hold and teach is contrary to the Scriptures, it is quite enough that it is contrary to my Confession of faith;' I say, if the Church of Christ use this language she no longer remembers her place as a Church."5
Whether these men were correct in their criticisms of the tradition or not is not at issue here. The fact is that they presented a more moderate theological alternative to Westminster Calvinism at a time when more and more minds were evidently becoming uncomfortable with its teachings. In excising them from its midst the Kirk rid itself not only of some of its greatest theological minds, but also of an opportunity to bend slightly in the wind of change. Its refusal to do so could only leave it all the more susceptible in due course to more radical theological influences which later seemed to present the only theological alternative to an outdated seventeenth century system of belief. During the period 1860-1910 the three main Reformed denominations in Scotland (the United Presbyterian Church, the Free Church and the Church of Scotland) all found themselves struggling to come to terms with their relationship to the inheritance of Westminster Calvinism. By 1910 all had introduced significant measures to allow those who found themselves compelled to challenge or differ with the specifics of it to remain nonetheless within the active ministry of the Church. There would be no more witch hunts or trials for heresy such as those which littered the nineteenth century. "As a result," writes Cheyne, "none of the major Presbyterian bodies in Scotland was any longer bound with the former stringency to the utterances of Westminster. The old exclusiveness ... of Reformed theology was at an end, and the confessional revolution had reached its goal."6
2. THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
The change in intellectual climate which resulted from the scientific, historical and philosophical advances of the nineteenth century was one which left orthodox Christian belief in Scotland, as elsewhere, in a decidedly defensive mood. There was, as David S. Cairns put it, an "anarchy of belief"7
in which traditional certainties and hitherto unquestioned foundations were forced into the open and scrutinized with the recently fashioned tools of the various human sciences. If this was not done by the adherents of Christianity, it would certainly be done by its critics, and with far more negative and damaging results. The preoccupation with "modernity" is indicated by the titles of books published immediately after the turn of the century; Cairns' Christianity in the Modern World (1906), Denney's The Atonement and the Modern Mind (1903), and Orr's The Faith of a Modern Christian (1910) to mention just a few. This said, however, the nature of the response of Scotland's most significant theological minds to the challenge was enormously varied.
It has been observed that theology in Scotland has habitually been more receptive to influences from the Protestant voices of the European continent than those from south of the border and elsewhere.8
Certainly it is possible to analyse theological developments in Scotland in this period in terms of their ultimate roots in the theological faculties of Germany and Switzerland. Many occupants of theological chairs had learned their craft at the feet of Ritschl, Harnack and Hermann (whether literally as in Cairns' case, or, in others, through a thorough familiarity with their writings in the original German), and while there are few to whom one would be willing to refer as convinced Ritschlians, the pervasive formative influence of the Marburg school is evident enough both positively and negatively. After the First World War another major continental influence was to emerge, this time from Switzerland and the impassioned critique of the liberal tradition embodied by Karl Barth. Whereas Protestant theology in England continued (and it might be argued in many cases continues today) blissfully unaffected by the now renowned "bombshell on the playground of the theologians"9
and its long term fall-out in the developed theology of the Barth of the Church Dogmatics, it was not so in Scotland. There is no coincidence in the fact that it was a Scots publisher and Scots editors who, later in the century, finally saw the English translation of Barth's magnum opus through its period of gestation. Barth, and the direction in theology to which he pointed and in which he led the way, was both read and reacted to in the Scots faculties and colleges; so much so that Cheyne even goes so far as to categorize Scottish theologians in the first half of the century in terms of the nature of his influence and impact upon them!10
The validity of such a taxonomy would doubtless be called into question by some; what is certainly true, however, is that the major figures in Scottish theology can be placed according to their attitude and approach to the key issues addressed by Barth's critique of Liberal Protestantism; namely, the possibility and nature of human knowledge of God, the relationship between reason and faith, nature and grace, and hence the very nature of the theological task itself. It is too simplistic to speak of two theological camps; but if a linear scale is imagined between an unashamedly apologetic attempt to demonstrate the inherent reasonableness of Christian faith and discipleship in the modern world on the one hand, and an unapologetic dogmatic (in the proper sense of the word) approach in which the inherent scandalousness of Christian belief is asserted, rooted as it is purely in the given self-revelation of a God who is wholly other, and who calls the precepts of human reason into question on the other hand, then it may be possible to locate various key figures on that scale. In the space available we can consider only a handful of the most significant and representative examples.
We have already mentioned David S. Cairns (1862-1946), Professor of Apologetics and Systematic Theology in the United Free College in Aberdeen (Christ's College after the 1929 merger between the Auld Kirk and the United Free Church) from 1907 until 1937. Cairns had spent a semester in Marburg in the late 1880s, and, through the impassioned genius of Wilhelm Herrmann, received a very positive impression of the Ritschlian theology of which he speaks warmly, albeit critically, in his autobiography.11
If this experience had any lasting influence on his thought, then it is most probably to be identified in his basic conviction that Christianity is a religion that can and should be commended to modern men and women in terms consonant with the genuine insights of the modern natural, social and human sciences. In personal terms this was a position forged in response to a period of acute doubt concerning the truth of Christian religion through which Cairns had passed as an undergraduate student.12
In theological terms it represented a very positive evaluation of the significance for Christian belief of the whole movement of human thought from the Enlightenment through the stormy intellectual debates of the nineteenth century. Christianity and the Modern World, Cairns' first major publication, protests at the tendency among Christians simply to view modernism as something to be revoked or undone, and as having an inevitably negative impact upon faith. On the contrary, Cairns urges, we can and should view the developments of the previous century as in some sense part of God's providential purpose in ensuring "the slow coming to life of a new and nobler world,"13
and should see some of its chief results as furnishing a modern day preparatio evangelica. Thus, for example, the preoccupation of the new historical science with establishing the facts about the so-called "Jesus of History" could be seen to have resulted in a widespread respect for an interest in the historical personality of Jesus on the part of many who would otherwise have had no avenue of approach to him. To be sure, Cairns concedes, such interest is not in itself faith; but "it is the temper out of which faith may be born anew."14
The church could either refuse to have anything to do with it, or else recognize it as a supreme opportunity for meeting unbelief on mutually acceptable ground.
This striking anticipation of what has since come to be dubbed an approach to christology "from below" is just one example of the way in which Cairns assumed a basically positive relationship between "natural" categories and those rooted directly and obviously in the Christian testimony of God's self revealing economy, and saw the former as providing solid and secure foundations for the Church's proclamation of the latter. The truth was, for him, that God's hand was to be discerned at work in all the great movements of human thought and discovery, just as surely as it was in the supreme preparatio evangelica in the history of the nation of Israel. The question which his approach posed to other trends in the early twentieth century was: "Can any true and final revelation be recognised as such that does not corroborate something that is there before? ... If we have no glimmerings within us of the knowledge of God, how can we recognise His Son as the fulness of His glory?"15
Within the bounds of the Liberal Evangelical tradition of his day, therefore, Cairns stood unashamedly (though certainly not in any overconfident or uncritical manner) for the validity and the necessity of an apologetic approach to Christian theology. To turn one's back on this task, and to insist on a simple reiteration of the old ways of seeing and saying things was, he contended, to refuse to take seriously the state of the modern mind and to fail to discern anything God given within it. To adopt such a course was to refuse to communicate with modernity, and to consign oneself, therefore, to obscurantism and irrelevance. While he belonged to an earlier generation altogether, Cairns thus proved to be one of the most severe, the most eloquent and the most compelling among Scots critics of the early theology of Karl Barth, who gave such radically different answers to the questions indicated above. He demonstrated that there was more than one positive Christian response to be given to the challenge of post Enlightenment understanding and its concomitant unbelief.
A quite distinct strand of Scottish theology is to be discerned in the writings of H.R. Mackintosh (1870-1936), who, after a distinguished philosophical training in Edinburgh and Marburg followed by a period in parish ministry, was appointed to the Chair of Systematic Theology at New College, Edinburgh in 1904, a post which he held until his death in June 1936. Like Cairns, Mackintosh was broadly sympathetic to what he discerned to be strengths in German Liberal Protestantism and undertook to introduce its theology to Scottish readers and students. His chief achievement in this respect, apart from his own writings, was the translation and publication of two volumes of Ritschl's massive and influential Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung (published by T. and T. Clark in 1900, and edited by Mackintosh together with A.B. Macaulay while still in the parish ministry), and Schleiermacher's Der christliche Glaube (with J.S. Stewart, published by T. and T. Clark, 1928). In introducing British readers to these two seminal texts Mackintosh helped to open up a treasure trove of theology for those lacking the linguistic capabilities necessary to tackle the originals for themselves.
While Mackintosh was supremely a philosopher by training, his own writings focus more on the central doctrines of the faith than on apologetic forays into the territory of modernism. The shape of his thought in discussing christology and soteriology indicates both the profound influence of Ritschl, Herrmann and others in the German Liberal tradition, but also a capacity to move beyond their limitations, and a fusion of their genuine strengths with the orthodox categories and insights of his own upbringing within the United Free Church. Thus, for example, in The Person of Jesus Christ (1912) he manifestly shares Ritschl's concern for the place of the historical on the one hand, and of personal experience on the other, in the formulation of christological doctrine. And yet his own commitment to such central christological elements of credal confession as the full divinity and pre-existence of Christ and the bodily resurrection shows how differently he himself applied these in practice. To be sure, he argues, the path of historical study can carry us only so far towards an authentic view of the Saviour's person; but Ritschl's insistence that traditional christological doctrine has no direct bearing on human experience, and his replacement of its ontological claims with statements of value judgment (Werthurteile) reflects "a mistaken philosophical positivism" and, Mackintosh complains, renders itself in the final analysis "blind to the infinite self-surrender of God in becoming man for our redemption."16
His own position rests on a christological realism rooted in the reality of the risen Lord who is present to his Church in the Spirit. Likewise, while he is certainly critical of some traditional metaphysical approaches to christology, rightly seeing in them a neglect of ethical and existential categories, Mackintosh does not fall into the fallacy of believing himself to be altogether free from metaphysics. "There will always be metaphysic in theology,"17
he writes, and while he often emphasized the importance of the ethical relation of the human Son of God to his Father, he also insisted that "such an ethical relation is itself the highest metaphysical reality, as being the living presence and redeeming action of God in him."18
The Christian Experience of Forgiveness (1927) is a book the very title of which speaks of the positive influence of the Ritschlian theology upon Mackintosh. Forgiveness is not something that can simply be theorized about or systematically defined in a rationalistic or intellectualist manner, rather it must be encountered in personal experience as the individual discovers both the divine penalty upon sin and the assurance of pardon in the person of Jesus as God's saving presence in our midst. Yet here too we find a sharp critique of many of the distinctively Ritschlian themes: sin is not purely ignorance, Mackintosh insists, but wilful disobedience;19
and the divine wrath upon sin is a present reality which must not be set over against God's love (and then dismissed) as if it were its logical opposite.20
Significantly, Mackintosh criticizes both these points on the basis of Christian experience: we know, if we are honest, that our sin is more than ignorance; we know, too, the reality of God's anger in the face of our sin. Thus an attempt is made to hoist Ritschl on his own petard.
Like all theologians, Mackintosh's thought constitutes no static and uniform entity, but rather developed and matured through his teaching and writing career. Scholarly concensus seems to detect a gradual distancing of his thought from its youthful enthusiasm for Ritschl and Herrmann, and an eventual endorsement of the general direction of Barth's response to the same. Certainly he had been impressed by Herrmann's determination "to know nothing, as a pathway to God, but the Person of Jesus."21
it seems likely, however, that he recognised in Barth the same determination (rooted without doubt in Herrmann's influence as a teacher) but in a form with which Mackintosh was more comfortable. Thus, while he was by no means as overtly antagonistic to "natural theological" approaches as the early Barth, it is to the actual self-revealing activity of God in Jesus Christ, and the biblical witness to the same, that Mackintosh directs his reader again and again as the sole reliable basis for Christian theology and knowledge of God. God can be known by humans only as God wills and acts to make himself known. To suggest otherwise is to hold to an "incredible" position.22
To view Mackintosh as an early Barthian convert23
is both to exaggerate the degree to which his position approximates that of the Swiss theologian, and to overlook his own seniority and the way in which his own theology manifests a logical development. He underwent no radical changes of direction, and might be said, therefore, to have anticipated the bombshell of the 1920s in some respects. Yet his apparent enthusiasm at what he found in Barth's theology should neither be overlooked nor underestimated,24
and he is the one major Scottish theologian of his generation who saw Barth's theological enterprise as a genuine sign of hope for the future of the discipline, rather than viewing it with dismay or disbelief.
Brief mention must be made of two names representing an altogether more philosophical strain in early twentieth century Scottish theology. Principal George Galloway of St. Andrews evinces an approach to Christian belief from the perspective afforded by the philosophy of religion. The titles of his major works, The Philosophy of Religion (1914), Religion and Modern Thought (1922) and Faith and Reason in Religion (1927) indicate the heart of his interest as being similar to that of Cairns, although his method of approach to it puts him in an altogether different category. He was less concerned with providing an apologetic for Christian belief in its traditional dogmatic form that with providing a critique of it, sometimes along similar lines to those followed by the Ritschlians in Germany. Thus, for example, he manifests a profound dissatisfaction with metaphysics, and hence with the traditional dogmas of the person of Christ and the Trinity which he took to be the fruits of the same, and writes warmly of the efforts of the Ritschlian school "to liberate theology from a dead weight of dogma and to bring it into a living relation with religious experience."25
This suspicion of dogmatic theology and preference for a philosophical approach rooted in religious experience is accompanied by an optimistic estimate of the human person as religious and moral agent, and an inherent dislike, therefore, of anything suggestive of divine grace as calling human capacities into question or subverting the natural order. "To distrust the working of my moral consciousness," he writes, "is as subversive as to distrust the working of my intellect: in the end it leads to sheer scepticism."26
While W.P. Paterson (Professor of Divinity in New College, Edinburgh from 1903 to 1934) takes a far more moderate line than Galloway and affords a central place to Christian dogmatics within the life of the Church, he too reflects a congenial attitude towards Ritschlianism, seeing in it a version of Christianity "adequate to enable the Christian religion to do a considerable part of its work among men of a particular grade of culture and experience."27
While he rejected rationalism as a "pathological development" within Protestantism,28
Paterson was nonetheless equally antagonistic to any suggestion that the divine image in humanity (typically associated with reason and conscience) had been utterly effaced by sin, and his Gifford Lectures of 1924-5 (published as The Nature of Religion) testify in their opening comments to the insistence within the Reformed tradition on the fact that "the light of nature guarantees a knowledge of the fundamental truths of religion and morality."29
If Galloway and Paterson represent in some respects a swing of the pendulum away from Mackintosh's biblical and dogmatic focus, and his qualified sympathy for the "Barthian" theology, Mackintosh's one- time pupil and eventual colleague at New College (where he succeeded Paterson in 1934), John Baillie (1886-1960), can be seen to occupy a mediating position more akin to that of Cairns, and closer to Paterson than to Galloway. Baillie is arguably the single most influential and significant figure in Scottish theology in the twentieth century.30
Born the son of a Highland Free Church manse and raised within the strict Calvinist religion of his parents, he studied philosophy under Pringle-Pattison at Edinburgh University, and then proceeded to New College to pursue theological studies. Summers spent at German universities (including Marburg) broadened his outlook, and did much to shape his understanding of the nature of the theological task in the modern world. Teaching posts in North America in the 'twenties' and 'thirties' fitted him ably for the Chair of Divinity at New College, which he held until his retirement in 1956.
Baillie's fundamental theological orientation was, like Cairns' before him, apologetic; a desire to take absolutely seriously the genuine doubt and unbelief of many men and women in his day, and to find ways of setting forth the reasonableness of Christianity so as at least to secure a fair hearing for its claims and demands. He had little time for any who would seem to brush the heartfelt objections to Christianity of others lightly aside as evidence of human intransigence in the face of divine revelation, or whose theological strategies refused to dialogue with unbelief on terms which it could accept or understand. In Baillie's own personal pilgrimage of faith the seventeenth century Calvinist system inherited from his parents had undergone considerable (and, we need not doubt, painful) rethinking and restructuring in the light of encounter with modern understanding, and under the particular influence of the Liberal Evangelical tradition of his New College teachers. This adjustment of the Christianity of the past to meet the genuine insights of the present was something which Baillie saw to be necessary for all who would believe and profess it with integrity, and his life's work was in many ways a programme intended to assist others to make this same adjustment for themselves. He addressed himself both to those already within the Church's boundaries who nonetheless either found themselves troubled by doubts or else found it difficult to integrate their religious faith into their larger worldview, and those who found themselves kept on the outside by intellectual and moral scruples. His supreme concern was to demonstrate that there was no more reasonable or moral point of view than that informed by Christian faith.
From the earliest to the latest of his writings Baillie insists upon the intrinsic connection between Christian faith and human morality. In part this is certainly due to apologetic considerations. Like Kant he argues that knowledge of the fundamental moral duties of human existence are in some way "given" in our very nature as human persons. "It is simply the truth", he writes, "that there is nothing of which man is more certain than of his primary moral values."31
No unanswerable logical case for their necessity can be provided, nor is any required; we simply know it to be true (for example) that selfishness is wrong. And while he is cautious concerning the usefulness of the so-called "moral proof" for God's existence,32
Baillie does nonetheless consider that there is in all humans a capacity for recognizing the moral structure of ultimate reality, and hence a given point of contact for the germination and nurture of religious faith, since faith is precisely in part a "moral trust in the ultimate Source of power, a confident reference of our values to the real order of things."33
"Here then is firm standing ground on which the man of faith may build his soul's house and the theologian his system. If only the foundational affirmations of religion can be made as certain as are our basic moral values, there will be few indeed who will ask for more."34
If the step from mere morality to religious faith is neither a necessary nor an inevitable one, it is, according to Baillie, nevertheless a straightforward and direct one, and thus the gateway to faith stands open for all who may be directed towards it, or who may have it pointed out to them that, insofar as they are moral beings, they are already firmly on the pathway which leads naturally to it.
Another factor lying behind Baillie's emphasis on the place of moral categories in the religious sphere is his personal antagonism towards the rationalism which so often predominates there. "The assurance of Divine Companionship," he writes, "has in every age been promised not alone to the learned thinker, nor to him in any wise pre- eminently, but to all those who have sought it with a true and humble heart."35
His concern in this is not anti-intellectualist, but simply to wrest the Christian faith from the hands of biblical scholars and speculative theologians, and to hand it back to those whose approach to God resembles more the simple and childlike trust spoken of by Christ. What is blameworthy before God, he insists, is not unbelief (in the sense of failure to understand or to endorse confessional articles), but rather lovelessness and sin.
Yet Baillie's own theology nonetheless contains a relatively positive account of human rationality in its significance for the theologian and preacher. If faith is fundamentally a moral and relational rather than a cognitive thing, it yet remains true that it embraces the intellect, and makes positive use of it. In Our Knowledge of God, Baillie pursues the twin suggestions that "there is no reality by which we are more directly confronted than we are by the Living God,"36
and that, on the other hand, in a variety of different ways and to differing degrees, "all men believe in God."37
This represents a popular development of a theme articulated earlier and in a more technical vein according to which religion may be viewed as a bilateral relationship, involving revelation on God's part, and "progressive discovery" on humankind's.38
The characteristic note in Baillie's treatment of the matter is his insistence that it is a relation for which humans are by nature well equipped by virtue of their creation in the divine image (which he interprets in intellectual and moral terms). He cites with disapproval Barth's suggestion that all humans are mente alienati (apparently failing to recognise in it a latin rendering39
of Paul's echthrous te dianoia in Colossians 1.21) and prefers that of Père Grou who writes that "Everything that leaves us the free use of our reasons leaves God the free use of his grace."40
In this respect Baillie may be said to have assumed the mantle of Cairns, and to have become the predominant and most distinguished critical voice responding to Barth from Scotland in the first half of the twentieth century. In the end of the day the difference between them lies in the relative significance which each accords to the doctrines of creation and fall as dogmatic contexts for understanding the incarnation and atonement. If Barth may be said to have inherited from Herrmann and the Liberal tradition a thoroughly Christocentric emphasis in every aspect of theology41
and to have developed a critique of nature and culture on this basis, Baillie himself inherited their essentially positive (albeit in his case critical) evaluation of the modernist outlook as a framework for propounding the gospel message, and their qualified sense of human degeneracy.
A quite different note is struck by a book published by a young Scots theologian in 1937. G.S. Hendry's God the Creator represents a piece of polemical theology which is passionate in its advocacy of views, that even the most casual observer of modern theology would recognize as indebted to Barth's influence. At the centre of his thesis lies the irreducible conviction of the "Barthian" approach to theological method, that "philosophic thought necessarily leads to a conception of God which is radically incompatible with the knowledge of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ."42
The radical difference in direction between this strand of thought and that represented by Cairns and Baillie, in which the best in human philosophizing and moralizing could be endorsed and embraced as a convenient (even a God-given) preparatio evangelica, could hardly be more emphatic. "The theological movement which is associated with the name of Karl Barth," Hendry writes, "marks the end of the age-old acquiescence of theology in its Babylonian captivity to modern thought and the beginning of a new apprehension of the Godhead of God."43
Here, then, was an openness to the "new orthodoxy" of the continent which transcended the qualified appreciation of the elder Mackintosh, and (in Cheyne's words) "announced to the world that Barthianism had at last established a firm bridgehead north of the Tweed".44
It was a bridgehead which, once established, and even after the departure of Hendry himself to North America, was to be reinforced through the interests and energies of a new generation of Scots theological students who would become in due course some of the teachers of the next half-century.
3. THE CONTEMPORARY SCENE
In the preceding sections of this paper we have seen how Westminster Calvinism was established as the theological orthodoxy of the Reformed tradition in Scotland, and retained a fairly firm hold until the middle of the last century, when dissenting voices became more numerous and more significant. The eventual forced relaxation of the formula of subscription in the now various denominations at the turn of the century saw the virtual disappearance of the seventeenth century system among professional theologians, and the emergence in its place of two main responses to the challenge of modernism to Christianity in Scotland. On the one hand an apologetic and synthetic approach, and on the other an unapologetic and dogmatic challenge to modernism's central precepts.
The contemporary Reformed theological scene in Scotland can only be understood and appreciated when viewed against this background. In this final section we shall attempt briefly to outline just some of the more significant trends and figures in the current theological landscape. Three quite distinct traditions suggest themselves: a reemergent theological Conservatism; what Cheyne dubs a "neo-liberal" school drawing more from the continental influence of Bultmann than that of Barth; and the continuing influence of Barth himself.
The virtual disappearance from the theological scene of Westminster Calvinist orthodoxy at the turn of the century was probably a fair reflection of attitudes towards it in the Scottish churches at that time. Doubtless there were some who continued faithfully to proclaim it from their pulpits; but its influence among people in the Kirk at large was minimal by comparison with the situation just a matter of decades before. Since the middle of the century, however, the "Conservative Evangelical" wing of the church has experienced something of a revival, and for historical reasons which will be apparent, this has resulted in practice in an attempt on the part of some to rejuvenate the old theological schemes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thus the doctrines of double predestination, limited atonement, eternal retribution and others are enjoying something of a comeback at the "popular" level, and are being presented as equally significant marks of theological orthodoxy as those, for example, of trinity, incarnation and justification by faith. This is accompanied and aided by an approach to the authority of Christian Scripture which is insistently literalistic and rationalistic in its mode of interpretation, and which thus ironically owes rather more to the very renaissance and enlightenment canons of meaning and truth which it ostensibly rejects than it would ever care to recognize or admit. The most respected figures of the broader Evangelical movement in Scotland are, however, eminent pastors and preachers, and, notwithstanding the existence of a respected Evangelical Bible College,45 and the establishment of a research centre with hitherto admirable academic credentials,46 it remains the case that Evangelicalism has yet to produce a professional theologian of any considerable import and influence within the academic field.
In the 1950s and 1960s the new trends in continental theology were firmly and clearly established, and while the influence of Barth was growing ever stronger in Scotland, the alternative response to the older liberalism provided by Bultmann was also making significant inroads into Scottish university teaching. This was especially true in Glasgow where a "school" of Bultmann interpretation emerged in John Macquarrie, Ian Henderson and Ronald Gregor Smith, and exercised a positive influence on the fortunes of Bultmann's theology beyond Scotland as well as within its boundaries. Macquarrie, like so many other prominent Scots theologians in the modern period, eventually left to take a chair abroad, but he might still reasonably be claimed by Scottish theology, not least because his more recent and most important contributions stem from work associated with his Gifford Lectures delivered in the University of St. Andrews in the early 1980s.47
Macquarrie's treatment of Bultmann has always been critical as well as appreciative, but his recent work in christology shows that the categories of existentialist philosophy are ones which he himself feels comfortable with as tools for articulating a contemporary theology. His interpretation of the traditional doctrine of the deity of Christ, while seeking to hold on to the respectability of the epithet "divine" as applied to Jesus, nonetheless produces a version of the doctrine in which, beginning "from below," the difference between Jesus and other human beings is ultimately to be perceived as one of degree rather than kind. These days this is hardly radical theology; yet it places Macquarrie a very long way from Barth's confident championing of the traditional two natures doctrine, and shows that more radical influences have, in recent decades, infiltrated what must be admitted to have been hitherto a relatively conservative and orthodox theological tradition in Scotland.
More radical still is the recent contribution to christology made by Ruth Page, Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology in New College, Edinburgh. In The Incarnation of Freedom and Love, Page articulates a christological model which attempts "to arouse the imagination ... to see the concurrence of divine and human in Jesus Christ."48
Yet the determinative framework of divine-human relations as conceived in the book issues in a christology in which the language of incarnation is retained, yet the heart of its meaning is eroded, Jesus being viewed as in the old liberal theologies of Ritschl and Harnack as one who "enacted the divine role"49 rather than one who was in any ultimate sense identical with God himself. The title of Page's book is informative; it is precisely freedom and love that are incarnate in Jesus Christ, and not, as Christian theology has traditionally insisted, God himself. Inasmuch as the retention of classical terminology tends in practice to obscure the fundamental difference between this understanding of the claim that "God was in Christ" and incarnational theology proper, it would be much better abandoned along with its true meaning. The book has little to say of the category of atonement in soteriology, reducing talk of salvation effectively to that of the realization of the values of the Kingdom of God among human persons. Accordingly the estimate of human potentialities and capacities is a highly optimistic one which makes even Cairns and Baillie appear Barthian by contrast! Here, if anywhere, is evidence that the older Liberal Protestantism has life in it yet.
Between the old orthodoxy and more liberal approaches there continues in Scotland a strand of Reformed theology which is worked out consciously in the shadow of Barth. To call it "Barthian" would be too simple, since it is often critical of Barth himself, and has certainly pushed his enterprise much further that he had opportunity to do himself. But it bears many of the hallmarks of his theological orientation and is openly appreciative of the theological revolution identified with his name. In 1948 the founding of the Scottish Journal of Theology under the editorship of J.K.S. Reid and T.F. Torrance in effect provided a medium for the promulgation of the new orthodoxy, and its editorial policy, while in no way exclusive of other views, has continued to provide a convenient outlet for it. Torrance himself is without doubt the most prolific and significant representative of this theological tradition in Scotland. Himself the author of two monographs on Barth's theology, his writings everywhere evince the influence of the Swiss theologian, although Torrance's own fascination with the interface between theology and science has led some to see in his work a new natural theology. His concern, however, has been to point to what he himself refers to as a "convergence in the frame of knowing," a de facto dovetailing of the insights of the new physics in particular and Christian theology. His concern is not with demonstrating the compatibility of theology with science, so much as vice versa. At the heart of both the philosophical and dogmatic elements of his theology lies the methodological conviction that in theology supremely (and incidentally in all good scientific procedure) it is the object that must determine the mode of knowing, and it is the inherent logic or ratio of the object as given that theological science (like all other) must seek to reflect faithfully. Quite apart from his methodological and inter-disciplinary work, therefore, Torrance has also been an avid defender of traditional christological and trinitarian doctrine in the face of reductionist liberal interpretations of the same, since it is in these terms that he believes the givenness of God's self-revealing activity in Jesus Christ to be referred to appropriately.
In dogmatic theology, however, it is James Torrance (Emeritus Professor of Systematic Theology in the University of Aberdeen) who has perhaps made the greater contribution. Like his elder brother he studied in Basel under Barth, and returned to Scotland eventually taking a teaching post in New College. His own particular focus has been in reestablishing the inter-connectedness, centrality and relevance of the doctrines of incarnation, trinity and atonement for several generations of students for whom they were in danger of becoming remote and archaic pieces of tradition. His stress on the vicarious humanity of Christ has offered a new understanding of the atonement in its prospective aspect, laying bare the dogmatic substructure which links together Christian worship and discipleship with the saving events of Christ's life, death and resurrection, and demonstrating that a soteriology which has its roots in incarnational christology, far from being simply a piece of esoteric spirituality concerned with the individual's moral standing before a divine Judge, has a profound social and political relevance for every human context. Christ assumed our humanity in order to redeem it and to offer if back to us that we might share in its redeemed state: participation in Christ must therefore involve an "evangelism" which seeks to offer to others their humanity in Christ, and which necessarily treats them as new creatures, and denounces injustice, racism and all other forms of inhumanity wherever it encounters it. James Torrance has also attracted a certain amount of criticism from the conservative tradition due to his writings on the development of Federal Calvinism in Scotland, and his positive evaluation of McLeod Campbell's theology.
There are many others deserving mention in a survey such as this; but the brief account given provides an outline of the major trends, and indicates some contemporary representatives of them. One name missing from the list is that of John McIntyre, Emeritus Professor of Systematic Theology in the University of Edinburgh. McIntyre certainly does not belong in any straightforward manner to the tradition of Barth; yet his theology is clearly influenced by Barth, and does not fit into the more liberal mould. Perhaps he might also be seen in part as the inheritor of the Cairns/Baillie tradition in which a "reasonable" approach to Christianity was seen as an apologetic necessity. Then again, perhaps all such attempts to classify must be seen to have their limits and their difficulties, and McIntyre's thought is difficult to define in these terms.
The face of theology in Scotland is ever changing. New appointments have recently been made to two of the four Chairs of Systematic Theology, with the result that two of the four are now occupied by non-Presbyterians.
Quite what the coming decades will hold theologically is difficult to predict. It is almost inevitable that the all absorbing debates over gender-specific language in theology in particular and the feminist agenda in general will assume greater prominence here than hitherto. It also seems likely that the revival of interest in things spiritual heralded by the so-called New Age philosophies and cults will present a significant challenge to the established churches. The current climate would suggest that a potential increase in tension between adherents of different religious traditions (especially Christians and Muslims) will also need to be addressed. How will Reformed theology in Scotland respond to these and other challenges? We cannot know. Yet it might reasonably be suggested that where it is rooted most securely in the life and concerns of the Church, and where it occupies the middle ground, rather than the extreme fringes, of theology, it will be best equipped to meet the challenge, and to forge a constructive and identifiably Christian theology for the new millenium.
1 Alasdair Heron, in Hart and Thimell (eds.), Christ in Our Place, (Paternoster Press, 1989) P. 5.
2 See J.B. Torrance, "Covenant or Contract? A Study of the Theological Background of Worship in Seventeenth Century Scotland," Scottish Journal of Theology, Vol. 23, No. 1, (1970) pp. 51-76; "The Covenant Concept in Scottish Theology and Politics and its Legacy," Scottish Journal of Theology, Vol. 34, No. 3, (1981) pp. 225-243.
3 First published in England in 1645.
4 A.C. Cheyne, The Transforming of the Kirk: Victorian Scotland's Religious Revolution, (St. Andrew Press, 1983) p. 4.
5 D. Campbell (ed.), Memorials of John McLeod Campbell, (London, 1877). Vol. 1, p. 85.
6 Cheyne, The Transforming of the Kirk, p. 85.
7 D.S. Cairns, Christianity in the Modern World, (London, 1906), p. xv.
8 See, e.g., G.S. Hendry in God the Creator, (London, 1937), p. viii: "I share the conviction with some others that Scottish theology has to find its true affinity with the theology of continental Protestantism rather than with that of England or America."
9 The metaphor belonged originally to the Catholic theologian Karl Adam, and is cited in John McConnachie, "The Teaching of Karl Barth: A New Positive Movement in German Theology," The Hibbert Journal 25 (April 1927) p. 385-86.
10 See Cheyne, The Transforming of the Kirk, p. 2071.
11 See David Cairns, An Autobiography, (London, 1950), p. 134.
12 Cf. the account given in D.M. Baillie's "Memoir" in David Cairns, An Autobiography, p. 10-11.
13 Cairns, Christianity and the Modern World, p. xv.
14 Cairns, Christianity and the Modern World, p. 18.
15 Cairns, The Riddle of the World, (London, 1937), p. 365-6.
16 H.R. Mackintosh, The Person of Jesus Christ, (Edinburgh, 1912), p. 281.
17 H.R. Mackintosh, The Person of Jesus Christ, p. viii.
18 Cited in R. Redman Jnr., "H.R. Mackintosh's Contribution to Christology and Soteriology in the Twentieth Century," Scottish Journal of Theology, Vol. 41, No. 4, (1988), p. 517.
19 Mackintosh, The Christian Experience of Forgiveness, (London, 1927), p. 57.
20 Mackintosh, The Christian Experience of Forgiveness, p. 160f.
21 Mackintosh, The Christian Experience of Forgiveness, p. 48-9.
22 See Mackintosh, The Christian Apprehension of God, (London, 1929), p. 65.
23 A view which, for example, J.W. Leitch tends towards in A Theology of Transition: H.R. Mackintosh as an approach to Barth, (London, 1952).
24 Cf. his comments in Types of Modern Theology, (London, 1937), p. 319.
25 Cited in J. K. Mozley, Some Tendencies in British Theology, (London, 1951), p. 137.
26 Cited in Mozley, Tendencies, p. 138.
27 W.P. Paterson, The Rule of Faith, (London, 1912), p. 388.
28 Paterson, The Rule of Faith, p. 390.
29 Cited in Mozley, Tendencies, p. 143.
30 For an excellent and full account of Baillie's life and work in which the following comments are indebted, see A.C. Cheyne, "The Baillies and Scottish Theology: Their Inheritance and Their Theology," in D.W.D. Shaw, In Divers Manners: A St. Mary's Miscellany, (St. Andrews, 1990), pp. 84-144.
31 John Baillie, The Interpretation of Religion, (Edinburgh, 1929), p. 342.
32 Baillie, Interpretation of Religion, p. 359f.
33 Baillie, Interpretation of Religion, p. 345.
34 Baillie, Interpretation of Religion, p. 345.
35 Baillie, Interpretation, p. 365.
36 Baillie, Our Knowledge of God, (London, 1939), p. 166.
37 Baillie, Knowledge of God, p. 75.
38 See Baillie's The Interpretation of Religion, p. 448.
39 Cf. the Vulgate's "alienati et inimici sensu."
40 Cited in Baillie, Our Knowledge of God, p. 26.
41 Cf. Baillie's observation in this regard in Our Knowledge of God, p. 17.
42 Hendry, cited in Mozley, Some Tendencies in British Theology, p. 155.
43 Hendry, God the Creator, p. 154-5.
44 Cheyne, The Transforming of the Kirk, p. 215-6.
45 The Bible Training Institute in Glasgow.
46 Rutherford House in Edinburgh was opened in the early 1980s and until recently was under the wardenship of Dr. Nigel Cameron.
47 Published as In Search of Deity, (London, 1984). This volume was preceded by its companion volume In Search of Deity, (London, 1982), and Jesus Christ in Modern Thought, (London, 1990) follows on from the groundwork completed in the Gifford lectures and constitutes an historical and constructive systematic treatment of christological doctrine.
48 R. Page, The Incarnation of Freedom and Love, (London, 1991), p. viii.