Category: Scottish Christianity

Today I'm at a theological colloquium on Scotland's Future. A wide range of people interested in theological reflection on issues raised by nationalism, devolution, independence and indeed the theological significance of those political processes which underlie forms of government, and such concepts as self-determination, freedom and national and cultural identity. The National Conversation and The Calman Report, and a response from a working group from ACTS (the Scottish ecumenical body), have created opportunity and context for such theological reflection.

No idea how it will go, what will come out of it. But Christians should have some informed and responsible sense of how political processes of change impinge on the wider community life – and should have a view of what that will mean for Christians looking to follow faithfully after Christ in a less than straightforward world.

Might report on it eventually – but not over the next couple of days – Advent itself has rather much to say about power, politics, identity and our human future. Would be interesting if today's colloquium kicked off with a robust reading of the Magnificat, eh?

One of the most attractive figures in the history of the Scottish Church was Archbishop Robert Leighton. In an age of theological extremes, inter-communal violence and intransigent "Christian" hostilities, he was a man of peace, a conciliatory spirit, to his opponents a man of compromise, to his admirers a God-sent eirenicon. The life and work of Leighton, and in particular the contrasting pieties of such as Leighton and Rutherford, the eirenic spirit of the former and the passion for Gospel purity of the latter, suggest fundamental differences in faith that were ultimately irreconcilable. Both men embodied in such a collision of contrasts, something of the tragedy of recalcitrant religion, when personal spiritual experience and its doctrinal confession are of such intensity that they can neither be questioned by others nor left unspoken, whatever the cost. Even if that cost is bloody conflict.

In the history of Scottish Christian piety, doctrinal collisions, spiritual suspicion, political conflict, ecclesiatical self-interest, are all the stuff of tradition formation – like tectonic plates grating against each other, now and then colliding and recoiling, only coming to an accommodation when the contrary energies are absorbed by impact, so theological traditions are shaped. And people like Leighton are far too often overlooked when the time comes to identify 'the movers and the shakers', and 'the significant players', the ones later history writers place centre stage.

Leighton, and his student Henry Scougal, are two men of moderate spirit, whose spirituality of peaceableness remains one of the glories of the Scottish Episcopal tradition. Here is Leighton, relegating historical research to its proper place:

Scotland has produced many important biblical commentaries over the centuries, and some of those now called 'pre-critical', remain as important historical and theological depositories illustrating how texts were received, interpreted and brought to bear on life. Amongst the most celebrated was Leighton's 1 Peter, almost continually in print for over three centuries. As devotional commentaries go, and as an example of Puritan exposition, it remains a milestone of practical divinity spelt out in exhaustive detail by one whose gentleness of spirit made all his writing pastoral before polemical.

God is the only real centre, and separation from Him the only real schism.
Thomas Erskine

I desire to know more and more the importance of learning Christ, rather than Christianity; the living, loving, almighty Lord of our spirits, rather than the logic about him.
Thomas Erskine

We make far too little of the Incarnation; the Fathers knew much more of the incarnate God. Some of them were oftener at Bethlehem than at Calvary; they had too little of Calvary, but they knew Bethlehem well. They took up the Holy Babe in their arms; they loved Immanuel, God with us. We are not too often at the cross, but we are too seldom at the cradle; and we know too little of the Word made flesh, of the Holy Child Jesus.
Rev John Duncan (Rabbi Duncan)

Two 19th Century Scottish Christians who couldn’t be more different in theological style and substance – except their Christ-centredness which tends to make all the other differences sound a wee bit relative. Erskine was an adventurous and speculative theologian who pushed at the frontiers of the orthodoxy of his day arguing for a universal gospel. Duncan, one of the most gifted linguists and biblical scholars of the Free Kirk, a man of granite loyalty to the Calvinism of the Westminster Confession. And both, part of our Scottish Christian heritage, at times tense and suspicious of diversity and thrawn and independent in spirit. But the passionate loyalty to Christ is unmistakable.

Came across this remarkable extract of Samuel Rutherford in full flow about the loveliness of Christ. In his book on Trinitarian Spirituality and John Owen Brian Kay points out that ‘the loveliness of Christ’ is a Puritan cliche – and certainly Rutherford reckoned exaggeration was impossible in eulogising the ‘Altogether Lovely One’:

I dare say that angels’
pens, angel’s tongues, nay, as many worlds of angels as there are drops of
water in all the seas and fountains, and rivers of the earth cannot paint Him
out to you. I think His sweetness has swelled upon me to the greatness of two heavens.
O for a soul as wide as the utmost circle of the highest heaven to contain His
love! And yet I could hold but little of it. O what a sight, to be up in
heaven, in that fair orchard of the New Paradise, and to see, and smell, and
touch, and kiss that fair field-flower, that evergreen tree of life! His bare
shadow would be enough for me; a sight of Him would be the guarantee of heaven
to me."If there were ten thousand thousand millions of worlds, and as many
heavens, full of men and angels, Christ would not be pinched to supply all our
wants, and to fill us all. Christ is a well of life; but who knows how deep it
is to the bottom? Put the beauty of ten thousand thousand worlds of paradises,
like the Garden of Eden, in one; put all trees, all flowers, all smells, all
colours, all tastes, all joys, all loveliness, all sweetness in one. O what a
fair and excellent thing would that be? And yet it would be less to that fair
and dearest well-beloved Christ than one drop of rain to the whole seas,
rivers, lakes, and fountains of ten thousand earths.

Just now and then it’s good to be ambushed by unadulterated spiritual fervour, to encounter an ardent soul in full rapturous flow. The contrast between such spiritually triggered rhetoric and our own contemporary uncertainty about religious affections and emotional experience can be a telling critique of modern forms of Christian spirituality, focused more on personal fulfilment than that praise of Christ that takes us out of ourselves. Rutherford was a man of extremes – ferociously polemical and pastorally intense; a man of contrasts in an age of conflict, whose inner tensions of spiritual theology and political vision remained unreconciled. It is from such flawed human  personality that some of the best Christian writing has been distilled – Rutherford, Richard Rolle, Bernard of Clairvaux, Augustine, Jonathan Edwards, Kierkegaard.

Jason picked up from the New College website the sad news that the Rev Professor David F Wright has died. In leaving a comment on Jason’s blog, I found myself writing an appreciation of this good, wise and humbly faithful man, whose intellectual gifts were consecrated to the service of Christ and His church. I simply repeat here what I wrote there.

David Wright was one of Scottish Evangelicalism’s leading lights. Professor Wright was a remarkably gifted church historian and theologian, whose expertise in Patristics as in Reformation studies was encyclopedic in scope and profound in the depth of his thought. Few scholars successfully become a recognised authority in two major periods of Church History – but David did this while also ranging throughout the wider disciplines of Christian scholarship with a most enviable facility.

But as with a number of his generation it was his scholarly humility, his generous encouragement of others, his lifelong commitment to theological education as itself both spiritual discipline and intellectual vocation, his genuine enthusiasm for learning, that made him such a respected and loved teacher. He was one of a cluster of luminaries which included the late Tom Torrance, Alec Cheyne, John McIntyre – each of them scholar pastors whose learning was devoted to the service of Christ.

Like Jason, I value the Dictionary of Scottish Church History and Theology – there isn’t a book like it, and it is only one of the legacies David leaves. British Evangelicalism in general, and the Scottish church in particular, have lost the presence and gifts of a Christian thinker steeped in the traditions of our faith, a man of measured, generous judgement, and an example to those of us who aspire to be scholars in the school of Christ.

May the peace of Christ enfold him, and Anne-Marie and his family, while we in mourning his loss, give thanks for his life – and the way that life enriched ours.